HTMLGIANT | the internet literature magazine blog of the future | Page 750

When the Establishment is Infinitely more Avant-Garde than the Avant-Garde, is it not time to Reconsider Our Notion of the Avant-Garde?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOsgqG5OOlM&

This might be a good time for us to re-visit Chris Bachelder’s 2004 essay, “A Soldier Upon a Hard Campaign,” which was written about the problems of integrating satire and politics into one’s writing, without continually being upstaged by the world.

I found it poignant that Animal Face-Off was airing just as Bear v. Shark was sliding quietly out of print. It seemed to mean something, but I wasn’t sure what. I suppose I couldn’t figure out if the TV show made the book more or less urgent and necessary. Probably less, I decided. The lag time between absurdist, futuristic satire and American reality was something like two years in this case.

The essay also contains the following maxim about the nature of art which has stuck with me ever since I first read it. I was just thinking about it the other day, in fact. It goes: “Beauty without Conviction is a beer commercial; Conviction without Beauty is a pamphlet.”

So, if this was my Expository Writing class, the essay question would be something like: Using the Norton anti-virus commercial and Bachelder’s discussion of satire as our critical sources, let us work outward toward a more general discussion of the nature of the avant-garde in literature. When randomness, absurdity, and anti-narrative are the standards of the mainstream (and what is advertising if not mainstream desires and values served back to the mainstream in their purest forms?) what does the cutting edge look like? Can the avant-garde seek to invert those values by embracing “classical” values and forms such as linear storytelling in a realist mode, or should we seek to break out of the dialectic entirely? What might that breaking-out look like?

5 pages, double-spaced. Rough draft due Tuesday; final draft due a week from Tuesday. Or whatever’s on your mind right now, left in the comments here. Whichever.

Random / 127 Comments
September 27th, 2009 / 12:43 pm

Christopher Higgs

The ghostly cu-cu

Kristin Naca’s first poetry collection Bird Eating Bird, winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series mtvU prize as chosen by Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa, is now available!

Here is a sample, from part of a part of a poem called “House,” which appears in Octopus 11:

“Suppose there is a bubble that flutters inside you. Or suppose it builds in the plastic air. Or the plastic that is liquid and luminous yet air. Or suppose in reverse the air plastic. And in its sloshing to-and-fro forms teacups of air unsettling its layers. In the teacups is air air not plastic. And teacups are cool and porcelain as anything that’s cool and porcelain.”

Author Spotlight / 12 Comments
September 26th, 2009 / 4:17 pm

Ryan Call

Call for Writers: Want to Buy a Pushcart Nomination?

MANPUSHCART-02 So Shya’s comment on the No Colony post got me thinking. Shya said:

I want to get 65 people together, each write 150 words of a cooperative 10k word story, each pay $10, have it published in No Colony, and each get to claim the Pushcart nom. Who’s with me?

At Shya’s encouragement, I’m posting this call for authors.

(For those unfamiliar with No Colony‘s submission guidelines, the editors of No Colony, Blake Butler and Ken Baumann, have offered automatic publication in the magazine and a Pushcart nomination to whomever pays the $650 fee. And we’d like to call their bluff (note: I am not good at poker, and I’ve heard Blake is very good, so take that into consideration before you hitch your wagon to our train))

What we’ll do is this: the first 63 people (Shya is #1 and I’m #65) to sign up in the comments section can take part, as long as they agree to pay $10 towards buying our 10k word story into No Colony plus the Pushcart nomination from No Colony (bonus: nude photos of someone’s mother, which we’ll have to share), and then each write 150word bricks with which to build the story. Each author will write his or her 150words on deadline in the order in which he or she signed up, and we’ll pass the story around so that it grows as each author writes on it. We have to get this done as quickly as possible so we can get into the long story issue. I will cut off signups if we reach the limit or if interest dwindles so that Shya and I can then seek out other authors.

Sign up in the comments section, and be sure to put a working email address in the email address field so that I can contact you with further instructions. If your email address bounces, I’ll move to the next person in line. Remember, the first 63 to sign up will be invited to take part in this project, which, no doubt, will cause all of us a small amount of indigestion.

If it works, it will be fun, and if it doesn’t work and no one cares or is interested, then no worries.

UPDATE: This project is now full. Anyone interested should still comment if you’d like to be in; I can keep you on a list in case someone else drops out.

Uncategorized / 265 Comments
September 26th, 2009 / 11:27 am

Blake Butler

We Turn One

thugs

Today is the official 1 year anniversary of HTML Giant.

Thanks to everyone, contributors (past and present), commenters, lurkers, snarkies, all: together who have made it even better than we imagined. For me it’s been fun, inspiring, and a pleasure to be a part of. I hope so for you too.

Let’s make some more.

Web Hype / 57 Comments
September 26th, 2009 / 1:39 am

Justin Taylor

Creative Writing 101

[ WORK DISCUSSED: Tuesday (9/22) – Adrienne Rich, five poems and an essay. Thursday (9/24) – “New York” by Tony Towle; “Texas” by Padgett Powell; “Babalu-Aye” by Eva Talmadge;” writing exercise.]

I never know how to start the class off. Or anyway that’s how it feels. I usually arrive in the room a few minutes early, and start chatting with whoever else is already there. If there’s a conversation already in progress I’ll try to join it, and if they’re all just sitting around quietly I’ll pick someone and ask how his or her day is going, or how the weekend was. If they throw the question back at me (“and how about you?”) I’ll tell them. I try to take attendance right at the official start time, not so much to punish the stragglers as to reward those who got there early. I want them to see me seeing the effort they’ve made. So we do that, and it’s like–now what? “Okay,” I often find myself saying, “what did we read for today?” It’s not that I can’t remember what we read. It’s just that I think there’s something useful about saying it out loud. I asked the class if they preferred to talk about the poems or the essay first. A few people kind of said “poems,” so I said okay, but then there was another choice to be made–which poem? One of the pitfalls of my teaching style (which strives to be dynamic, responsive, and rigorously un-structured) is that it’s hard to get off the ground. It’s like an old prop plane, where you need to start the propellers spinning by hand and then sort of guide it down the runway and hope everything is timed just right and take-off actually happens. Sometimes this takes a few tries. Nobody seemed to care where we started, and consequently we weren’t starting at all.

friday fuck books

Random / 10 Comments
September 25th, 2009 / 4:32 pm

Ryan Call

Favorite Words

196495419_335af2decd In past conversations, Blake and I have talked about the kinds of words we most often rely upon in our writing, and whether or not we should break from them or embrace them, or both. For example, I noticed Blake seems to like rhythmic -ed words, like ‘befucked’ and ‘squidged’ and so on, and he uses them quite a lot in his writing.

Then, while reviewing SAT words with a high school student the other day, I thought of how I should make a list of words I like to use when I write, or a list of words I would like to use in another story. I went through a bunch of my past stories and reread them for words I remember liking as I wrote them into the text. I’ve listed them here with a few sentences of explanation.

What words do you like? Do you have words you use too much? Words you want to use more? Do you maintain lists of these words? Is it possible to talk about words this way? I think much of this depends on context and how the word is used, so know that I’m speaking directly from how I use these words when I write.

IT DID SMASH ME

I Will Smash You flyer3 copy I went to the New York screening of Michael Kimball and Luca Dipierro‘s film I WILL SMASH YOU (caps are obligatory) and I can now confidently say that you will want to see it also.

The premise is this: Michael sent out a call last year for people who wanted to smash something that carried a meaning or burden they wanted to rid themselves of. The people came to Michael’s house in Baltimore where he had a smorgasbord of smashing implements laid out on a table in his backyard. Michael interviewed them a little about why they were destroying what they were destroying and then they dismantled the object using an ax, sledgehammer, crowbar, chunk of concrete, etc.
By now I think everyone has seen the trailer featuring our man, Adam Robinson, in which he metaphysically destroys the hymn, It Is Well With My Soul. (If you haven’t, please, for the love of no God, click here.) This was one of my favorite parts of the movie because there are a number of Hymns I would like to destroy also, but I was also surprised and delighted by how much of an impact that the other performances and stories had. Michael and Luca did a phenomenal job in selecting the right quotes and facial expressions and gestures to reveal something really intimate about each person.

Not one but two computer monitors are savagely axed; a teenager mutilates a blood-filled pinata of her teacher’s head; a be-scarfed man destroys ‘procrastination‘; and a woman in high heels and a velvet dress destroys a car she believes is cursed, axing every window and even ripping out the steering wheel.

I hear that Ken Baumann is putting together a screening in LA, and the good folks of Detroit and Toronto will also soon get a chance to see it. Contact Michael or Luca to arrange a screening in your town. You need to be smashed.

Web Hype / 10 Comments
September 25th, 2009 / 2:30 pm