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Ken Baumann—

Writing isn’t eating right.

Blake Butler—

What is the most played song in your iTunes, how many plays.

Samesies

Samesies finds photos taken by different people of the same thing. The collection is stunning, and reconfirms my faith that we are all sort of living the same lives. I think of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, an account of one beach scene told by multiple characters, told over and over again, segmented by decades. It’s told in that murky VW way — and I suppose arguments and interpretations are possible — but I think the point is time, despite its grave capacity to shepherd one towards death, does not exist. And light behaves without prejudice, which is a start.

Web Hype / 20 Comments
November 12th, 2009 / 2:35 pm

Blake Butler—

Nice William Burroughs interview with the Paris Review [via Josh Maday’s twitter feed, which is always linking great web things, follow him.]

INTERVIEWER: Is it true that you did a great deal of acting out to create your characters when you were finishing Naked Lunch?

BURROUGHS: Excuse me, there is no accurate description of the creation of a book, or an event.

Justin Taylor

Ariana Reines Week, Part 4: The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real

9781584350781

We began Ariana Reines week with AR’s original translation of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, published through her own press, Mal-o-Mar Editions. Now, after two days cavorting with Dan Hoy and Jon Leon, whose split book (The Hot Tub / Glory Hole) is also new from MoM, we return to Reines-as-translator, and consider a new book from Semiotext(e), The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore. Here (from the site) is the briefest of introductions to Real:

Hailed as a virtuoso writer and a “revolutionary whore,” Grisélidis Réal (1929–2005) chanced into prostitution at thirty-one after an upper-class upbringing in Switzerland. Serving clients from all walks of life, Réal applied the anarcho-Marxist dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” to her profession, charging sliding-scale fees determined by her client’s incomes and complexity of their sexual tastes. Réal went on to become a militant champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes’ rights. She has described prostitution as “an art, and a humanist science,” noting that “the only authentic prostitution is that mastered by great technical artists … who practice this form of native craft with intelligence, respect, imagination, heart…”

The main action of the Semiotext(e) volume is a series of lengthy interviews between Real and Jean-Luc Hennig (a professor at the University of Cairo) but the final section, a hearty selection of entries from the titular Little Black Book are not to be missed. They are the concise, practical, hilarious, and delightfully NSFW. Click through to read some of my favorites.

DIY Publishing

DIY_Toolbelt

In a recent blog post at PANK, a writer shared some very interesting thoughts about his experiences (both good and bad) with self-publishing his first novel. In the comments, another writer remarked that the DIY, self-publishing approach is quite celebrated in the independent music scene while self-publishing is rather maligned in the writing world. That was a really interesting observation and he’s right. Musicians will upload their music to the Internet and sell homemade CDs out of the trunk of their car and they become folk heroes for their efforts. When a writer stands up and says hey, I’ve got this book and I am my own publisher, he might as well run around the room shouting, “I am a leper.” We (generally speaking) judge people who self-publish.