Michael Kimball Interviewed on NPR

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Unless you’re weird, you probably already listened to Giant amigo Michael Kimball’s interview on NPR. It’s about his project, Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (On a Postcard), which, unless you’re weird, you’re probably already hip to, too.

I thought the interview was great, that what he said was about more than his project, and more than a criticism of Facebook culture — that we’re all promoting ourselves but no one cares — but it was about a profound sort of other-centeredness, about Story and the importance of getting to know the story of other people’s lives.

I’d say more but I gotta go read some Levinas. What did you think of the interview?

Oh, and check out this video of Blaster Al Ackerman reading for the 60 Writers movie Michael’s making with Luca Dipierro (I know, Sam linked to one yesterday but what the heck, my man was just interviewed on NPR).

Author News & Author Spotlight / 4 Comments
July 31st, 2009 / 9:35 am

Martha Stewart’s Oral History

martha-500x942.jpgCourtesy of Bike Snob NYC, in an article in Martha Stewart’s Living about Maine’s Acadia National Park, the eponymous woman was quoted saying “Great Head takes about an hour and a half to complete.” She was referring to the trail Great Head, but what both concerns and elates me is how none of the editors caught it.

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Or maybe the editors did catch it, taking extreme liberty in interpreting the trail path. It seemed too good to be true, and I just had to Google map the actual “Great Head” trail to see if it was indeed cock n’ ball shaped. It kinda is, though my bets are on the graphic topographer who took an opportunity to render the path more suggestively. Perhaps a shafted disgruntled employee? (See related Little Mermaid Phallus.) A forever fiend of choad? Or maybe just a guy with a sense of humor.

Google map version

Google map version

Speaking of guys with a sense of humor, I think God himself always has the last laugh. And for an atheist, that’s a huge compliment. In the photo essay, we see Martha and Co. walking around, walking around, smiling for the camera — until that one photo where there in the distance — wtf are those balls? I’ve been saying a post-Nietzschean “Gay is gay” since circa 1987 people. Someone call me prophetic.

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Uncategorized / 8 Comments
July 31st, 2009 / 12:18 am
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ALICE BLUE NINE

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BAD ASS SHIT

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A brief review of a book for dour, depressed kids

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For a short time I worked in the Kids Books section of my bookstore, and I found a few favorites.

If you, like me, have a young relative moving through the picture books stage of their lives, I’d like to suggest you get them a copy of Shaun Tan’s book The Red Tree. I’ve never really seen a picture book like it.

The illustrations (like the one above) are quite beautiful. That’s not unique, though. The images are surreal and well-crafted. Nothing unique there. The text is simple and direct. Again, lots of books like that for young people.

What makes the book stand out is that it suggests something you rarely see a book for kids suggest. It suggests that life is hard, and sometimes very dark, and sometimes you—young reader—are going to feel bad. You are going to get depressed. You are going to have a hard time getting over some things. And this, too is not unfamiliar.

But this is what it says about being sad: it’s okay. It’s okay to feel bad.

Not tomorrow will be a better day. There is always hope. Every cloud has a silver lining. Not it’s always darkest just before the dawn.

Just, sometimes its dark. You are allowed to notice that it is dark.

You have no idea how long it took me to learn that. Years. Years and years. That someone was brave enough to put that message in a picture book makes me very happy.

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July 30th, 2009 / 7:10 pm
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I have heard this sentiment used a bunch of times (not necessarily about me).  Something like, “you can tell a young person wrote this” or “this was handled in a young way” or “this is the type of thing a young person would write.”  What is meant by this? I don’t mean young topics or stories about young people, I mean stylistically or tonally or whatever, what makes something young?  Is it bad?  Wtf urrybody?

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So, you sit down and you write something. And you write for a while. And you get to a certain point and you think you’re done because you have finished a “story.” How do you know? (You, readers/writers.) What’s a story?

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Best American Poetry blog has recently been having authors share their favorite book covers, so far including Nick Flynn and Don Share, today is Jesse Ball.

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Thomas Pynchon’s LA is growing as people contribute their own annotations — and while I’m on the subject of him, you think “Smells Like Teen Spirit” got its hook from a Pynchon song? And is this funny or cruel?

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Story by Story: Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (14) ‘Helpful’

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Fourteenth in the order of stories in Brian Evenson’s Fugue State (out now from Coffee House Press) is ‘Helpful,’ which originally appeared in Bombay Gin.

At this point in the collection, we have looped through loops of cold expanse and careful molding, each rendered in Evenson’s clean, calm and deadly sentences, most as blank as any stroke of light in a Kenneth Anger film, any globe of far off light.

Here, having crossed over the threshold of those gone rooms, and entered the center of the void via Evenson’s masterful arrangement of the stories so far, the frame of the lenses, like in Anger’s opus Invocation of My Demon Brother, begins to split.

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Uncategorized / 2 Comments
July 30th, 2009 / 12:41 pm