“Yar yar yar.”: 45 minutes of Fugazi stage banter. If someone crowd surfed at your reading, would you be angry, proud, or confused?
I like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz so much that every day this week, I’ll be posting excerpts from a really long interview between Cristin and I about writing, New York and her forthcoming book Everything is Everything which will be released in January 2010 by Write Bloody Press.
Amelia Gray makes sense out of the Publishers Weekly and WILLA kerfuffle at the Huffington Post: “To vastly extrapolate, assuming that the number of top-quality male and female writers is equally distributed, most journals would publish more men than women, without even considering bias.”
As well, a couple book-related holiday sales ending today: Powell’s offers free shipping (their used stacks in particular are worth exploring, plus nice discount on NYRB classics) & Keyhole‘s discounts on all of their titles & (beyond today, but still) Dzanc offering up to 50% on all of their backlist. Foom.
24 hours left to submit to No Colony, then close. You want to be in this issue, I promise.
Hope everybody is fatter now. Crawling back into the void this week, last night rewatched most of Orson Welles’s last completed feature film, F for Fake, a documentary about fakes and fakers, which in itself does a little trickery and deceit, making a nice little cakebox of weird. Criterion put it out a couple years ago, but it’s also now on YouTube in a few pieces. Here’s part one, then follow the links…
There are a handful of presses it would be nice to own every single title they’ve ever released. Exact Change easily makes that list. Xmas party.
Portland novelist Katherine Dunn (Geek Love) fights off a would-be purse-snatcher. She is a boxer. And I am in love. That is all.
How about next time instead of National Novel Writing Month it’s National Single Sentence Writing Month? Or National Staring Month? NaSiSeWriMo? NaEaADiMoAnStoEaAllOuLiMo?
Gawker went to the National Book Awards and got a whole bunch of big lit-names to sign a copy of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, which they are now auctioning off for charity. It seems to be part of a campaign to get the book short-listed for the 2010 fiction award. That’s this year’s fiction winner, Colum McCann, in the picture.
I always forget The Atlantic exists. But then they’ll bring out Christopher Hitchens to talk about Arthur Koestler, and it’s like, oh yeah, those guys. Though to be fair, if it wasn’t for Arts & Letters Daily, I’d have never known.
Julia Cohen’s got a video of Seth Landman (ed. Invisible Ear) doing something I don’t understand.
She also mentions that Mathias Svalina’s debut full length, Destruction Myth, is now officially out. Expect to hear rather a bit more about that book in this space in the near future.
Joshua Cohen’s memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Fall 2009 online issue of Rain Taxi, including a review of Evenson’s Fugue State and a look at Zizek & Milbank’s The Monstrosity of Christ.
Also, Glenn Beck is in a fight with the Anti-Defamation League because they called him “fearmonger in chief” in their new special report, “Rage Grows In America: Anti-Government Conspiracies.” Basically, the report is exactly what you think it is, only longer. If you go to Crooks & Liars, you can hear Beck on his radio show, flipping out and daring the ADL to name anyone who has been a better friend of Israel than he has. Not sure what that has to do with domestic American politics, but–oh wait, yes I am. Dear ADL, maybe if you supported something like an even remotely sane Israel policy, instead of taking all your talking points from the pro-violence right (the Kissinger/Lieberman/Dershowitz school) you wouldn’t find yourself in bed with fucktards like Beck in the first place. Well good for them for putting the report out, at any rate, when its come down to siding with Abraham Foxman or Glenn Beck, it’s dark days all over the land.