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This semester I’m taking a class on embodiment. You have a number of options for a final project. One of them is: “The construction of an original piece (or pieces) of art and a 7 page discussion of the impact of one or more of the theoretical works on its production.” How cool is that? What are some good works that deal creatively with the body, or with the collapsing of mind and body? What’s compelling or unique about the work’s approach?

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EPidemIC Poetry, a modified Exquisite Corpse

Take a poem or very short prose piece you really like and send it to a small number of poet/prose writing friends. Let’s say five. Send along this message:

“This is the spreading of an infection. Read this piece of writing. Become infected by it. Respond to it with a piece of writing that includes a line or a phrase from it. Send the results to the author of this piece of writing. (If you do not have time to do so, you have resisted the infection. Thank your immune system.) Also, send the results to five more people and infect them. Send this message along with it. When you receive the results, return them all to the person who started the infection.

“This infection began with _____.” (Fill this in only if you are the first person to start the infection.

Collect the results. See how the infection has spread. See how the virus has mutated.

At some point, tell us how it went.

Craft Notes / 2 Comments
January 27th, 2010 / 6:44 pm
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(1) Ross Simonini discusses nonsense and Carl Sandburg at Poetry Foundation.
(2) Johannes Göransson looks at “fashion” and its context on writing at Exoskeleton.
(3) Michael Kimball interviews Padgett Powell at The Faster Times.

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TONIGHT IN BROOKLYN: Melville House hosts ‘Publishing In The Age of Blah Blah Blah.’

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ONE DAY ONLY: In conjunction with Obama’s State of the Union Address tonight (9 pm EST), Wave Books is offering a supreme discount on the REAL address: STATE OF THE UNION: 50 POLITICAL POEMS, featuring poems by 50 contemporary poets (John Ashbery, Anselm Berrigan, Lucille Clifton, CAConrad, Peter Gizzi, Albert Goldbarth, Terrance Hayes, Fanny Howe, Tao Lin, Eileen Myles, Michael Palmer, Wang Ping, Richard Siken, Juliana Spahr, James Tate, Catherine Wagner, Joe Wenderoth, Dara Wier, Rebecca Wolff, John Yau and many more). $5 for a softcover edition, available only through the Wave website here.

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Bio envy

Self Portrait, William Gaddis

If you’re going to write a book, who asked you to? It is, in fact, quite an act of ego to sit down in a room, while others are getting on trains and subways, and put one’s vision on paper, and then ask others to pay to read it. Not only to pay but say, “Isn’t he brilliant.”

— William Gaddis (1980)

Seems hypocritical since, um, he wrote a bunch of books, and thick as hell I might add. It is interesting that he evokes transportation to work (trains, subways, etc.), as he struggled at a full-time job (he was a clerk at a law firm) during his early career. A little resentment goes a long way, as if Gaddis is solemnly nodding to his past approvingly, almost preferring his indignation.

In author bios, you never read “[So and so] works at [company name] as a [profession],” apprehensive about the “reality” of one’s day job, as (unless you’re successful or broke) most of us have. Good for the adjunct, lecturer, or professor who teaches writing, seriously, I mean that. But the unspoken thing is most of us have unrelated day jobs, which is never mentioned, ignored like Down syndrome.

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Web Hype / 100 Comments
January 27th, 2010 / 1:59 pm

Webaround

http://media.us.macmillan.com/jackets/258H/9780805006285.jpgDennis Cooper’s blog today: “Four Books I’ve Loved Recently: The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, Marsupial by Derek White, A Common Pornography by Kevin Sampsell, and Stories II by Scott McClanahan.” Also, don’t miss yesterday’s “17 examples of how musicians conflate the terms ‘mawkish’ and ‘arch’ with varying degrees of success.”

From Salon, an article on Bloomsbury’s newest case of the white-outs. “Publishers whitens another heroine of color.” (You might remember that we bugged out about this the last time it happened too.)

Here’s an introduction to “The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary.”

From Jeremy Schmall- Rick Steves on Haiti.

Check out this rad new feature/series at Portland-based Wieden+Kennedy called Story Time, which produces “recorded readings of short stories by published young authors set to soundscapes.” Trinie Dalton is episode #1, Kevin Sampsell’s #2, and that’s all that there is so far, but we’ll be (duh) keeping an eye on these guys, and one hardly doubts that there’s more great stuff ahead.  And what is Wieden+Kennedy exactly? They say: “We are an arts and culture digital content delivery platform, a subsidiary of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. Our goal is to renegotiate the relationship between art, media, advertising and the consumer.” Ahh, okay then. To help further advance negotiations, you might also check out their other series, Don’t Move Here: Inside Portland’s Music Scene.

Random / 1 Comment
January 27th, 2010 / 11:36 am

Droll Joc Tom Rail

The sky is cold/clod in Indiana. I feel low 3-cornered like the sky. I want a funny book. My kidney stones to rattle. I want to blow Pepto Bismol out my nose.

Tell me a funny book. Blue, black, red, anecdotal, satire, wet, dry, corn cob, slapstick, repartee, funny-but-not-ha-ha funny, hyperbolic, galactic, etc.–just give me humor.

Here is one for you: Iceland by Jim Krusoe. It is smart funny, scaffold funny, full of absurd twists. Characters will appear as Main, then dropped into volcanoes and we yawn on. It has funny SCUBA sex (one of the best varieties). It has pacing like 50 pages for an afternoon, whoops 10 years just gassed in a paragraph. One day you repair typewriters. The next you rob gas stations for your drug-addicted lady. Or maybe a parrot. Like that.

You people read loops around my House of Know-How, so please list here funny books:

Random / 72 Comments
January 27th, 2010 / 11:27 am
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Salt labyrinths by Motoi Yamamoto.

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The very generous Brad Green has offered to award a copy of Molly Gaudry’s We Take Me Apart to an HTML Giant reader of choice. Because the book is so persuasive in the way it links childhood space with food and movement of time, comment with a food that evokes some long memory of yours. A selected winner gets the book late tomorrow evening.

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