Sommelier Says: “Dan”

SommelierIn a recent comment thread about anonymous comments, one “Dan” (his quotes) says, of HTMLGIANT:

Every one on this websites is assholes and gives Tao Lin handjobs and is “rich middle class kids” and doesnt now shit about good writing if it punched them.111 you guys also are incestuous and publish only your friends’ writing regardless of merit 11111!!11

Sommelier Says: We suspect either English is not Dan’s first language, or he was on the receiving end of some type of job while composing this comment. Coming off strong with “assholes,” one is reminded of the straight-forward Cabernet; soon he offers supple textures with a descriptive narrative of manual relief, followed by a cultural indictment of an abstract group of people (never mind the “rich middle-class” oxymoron). At first, I thought Dan meant that “a hundred and eleven” of us were incestuous (pretty ample gene pool, what you talking about?) but realized the “111” were simply rushed exclamation points sans the shift key — must be his quivering colon. Dan’s post-laxative rant reeks of prune juice as he makes a mad rush to the toilet. And you thought purple rain was an album.

Web Hype / 48 Comments
October 20th, 2009 / 6:35 pm
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The fucking word of the day is ‘milieu.’

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An overview of the Nook, a new e-reader from Barnes & Noble; oh, and there’s this:

And hey, great news for book cover designers… your craft will be preserved in the space of a postage stamp.

UPDATE: It’s here, and it features some good stuff: ‘Share favorite eBooks with your friends, family, or book club. Most eBooks can be lent for up to 14 days at a time. Just choose the book you want to share, then send it to your friend’s reader, cell phone, or computer.’  and  ‘Visit the store, turn on your nook, and see what pops up on your screen. It’s as simple as that. You will get exclusive content, special discounts and more. And soon, you will be able to read entire eBooks for free at your local Barnes & Noble.

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Literature’s Material Circumstances

lego_relativityBlake already posted about &Now, but I want to put up more about one panel titled “Writing’s Dirty Secret: An Investigation of Literature’s Material Circumstances.” This panel was run by Jeremy Davies and AD Jameson and was really interesting because it tried to get at some of the more process-based questions about writing habits. How do we write? What do we use to write? Time of day? And so on. Standard questions really, but questions that might not get the focused treatment they deserve.

The panel led to more discussion between Matt Kirkpatrick, Lily Hoang, and myself later that night. Lily echoed a remark that panelist Vanessa Place made: that to answer these kind of questions was somewhat frustrating because of how predictable our answers are, as the questions and our answers are so bound up in what we think a writer ought to say when asked “how do you write?” Place asked during the panel something like this: how many of our writing habits come not from what works best for us but what we think ought to work best for us based on some idealized notion we have about what it means to be a ‘writer’?

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Craft Notes / 22 Comments
October 20th, 2009 / 4:16 pm

Out Today

at Amazon.com

Author News / 13 Comments
October 20th, 2009 / 4:08 pm
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To continue the discussion of theory and creative writing, a little excerpt from a Lorrie Moore piece in NYRB about mid-century Latin American writer Clarice Lispector:

“In France she was viewed as a philosopher–and at times it does seem that calling her a novelist is a little like calling Plato a playwright–but when she attended a literary conference where her work was discussed in theoretical terms, Lispector left the panel early, saying later that not understanding a word that was being said about her own work made her so hungry that she had to go home and eat an entire chicken.”

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American Short Fiction put together a list of ‘spooky reads’ but I don’t know, seems lacking. What books truly scare you? [Bonus link: if you haven’t been keeping up with DC’s, he’s been making amazing Halloween-style posts all month.]

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Jamie Iredell’s Prose. Poems. A Novel.

Out today!

prose poems cover

In his debut collection, Jamie Iredell calls on a classic and reemerging literary form to tell a story of travel, adventure, boredom, and life in general. Prose. Poem. A Novel. is a precisely written series of poems that when collected tell an addictive story. However, don’t expect to see complex titles and strict structure; this after all is a novel. Iredell masterfully pushes the reader through every detail, but as each page is turned form and genre melt quickly into a vital story.

Prose. Poems. A Novel., the third release from Orange Alert Press, is filled with brilliant and thematic illustrations from Christy Call (Literary Dispatch, Publishing Genius, and Willows Wept Press). These illustrations are in full color and add an even more vibrant visual element to Iredell’s story.

Here is my blurb on the book: “If Mary Robison listened to more punk, grew up in Las Vegas in the 80s before the 80s sucked, did whippits while reading Ben Marcus and scrolling the alternative personals for golden lines to crib, she might have exploded into the post-post-Beat sentence index that is Atlanta. But she didn’t. Jamie Iredell did, and in reading this lean but dense meat-eater of a sui generis prose poem cycle, one realizes there might still be a way for chapbooks to compete with porn.”

“What in the hell are these things? Stories? Poems? Stoems? Whatever they are, they have (lucky for us) catapulted from the brain, indeed the life, of this epicurean-poet-goonmaniac from Atlanta-via-Reno-via-northern-California. This book (much like the speaker himself) moves with a moody cat, and resolves amidst (and beyond) the sometimes seedy underbelly of Atlanta with its cavernous tavern dives, its ungodly cockroaches, its lust for excess. When you put down this book, you might suffer a hangover. But these pieces simultaneously achieve a sense of bildungsroman (think Joyce, not Sherwood Anderson). The consistency of voice and style here is remarkable, as is Iredell’s knack for creative metaphors (think Richard Brautigan). James Iredell has the skillz to pay the billz. Wait, he’s a poet so he can’t pay his billz. What I mean to say is, he has the skills to throw out the mail and keep scribbling, which is something he is always doing, and doing well.” – Mike Dockins, author of Slouching in the Path of a Comet

Great book from a great guy. Buy.

Author Spotlight / 10 Comments
October 20th, 2009 / 2:29 pm
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Mine’s worth ’37.’ What’s yours?

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The question, then, is why novelists have ceded their ground to science. And from the writer’s perspective, if not from the reader’s, an allegorical interpretation of the neuronovel does seem possible. Is the interest in neurological anomaly not symptomatic of an anxiety about the role of novelists in this new medical-materialist world, which happens also to be a world of giant publishing conglomerates and falling reading rates? Are novelists now, in their own eyes and others’, only special cases, without specialized and credentialed knowledge, who may at best dispense accurate if secondhand medical (or historical or sociological) information in the form of an entertaining fictional narrative? And is the impulse to write not an inexplicable compulsion, a category of disorder outside the range of normal?

-from The Rise of the Neuronovel / n+1

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