Laird Hunt, author of the incredible Indiana, Indiana, has been posting short synopses of the five books that influenced his upcoming novel Ray of the Star.
Book three has me curious about both Hunt’s book and this influence.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Some of the book is available here.
Anyone read this? Recommendations?
Via David Nygren, I read an article in Publishers Weekly that reported on Richard Nash and Dedi Felman’s panel at this year’s Book Expo. During the panel, titled “The Concierge and the Bouncer,” Nash and Felman describe their plans for a new publishing model/site, I suppose, that follows the metaphor of a round table, across which editors, readers, authors, business people, and others share their ideas about publishing and literature and so on (the traditional publishing metaphor being, perhaps, *a laundry chute?).
Nash and Felman outlined their push back against the outmoded idea of publisher as cultural gatekeeper. Nash didn’t realize until after he left Soft Skull, where he was “locked into this lefty, punky, quasi-anarchist, multi-interned model,” that it was the dreaded slush pile—not the publisher-author-reader hierarchy—that kept the business alive: “you have to keep accepting unsolicited submissions, because those people are our readers.” The key is a shift from a caretaker mentality to a service mentality, from a linear supply-chain model to the idea of a free-floating, non-hierarchical “ecosystem” of readers, writers and authors.
Felman outlined the concept in more detail: using a subscription system, Round Table will bring to the social networking platform not just finished content, but many aspects of the publishing process—including, for authors open to the idea, peer editing. The idea is that feedback and crowd-sourcing can dramatically enrich the editing, authoring and reading process for all involved—not to mention expose potential talent among members of the community (“In our formulation,” says Nash, “readers are writers”).
Over at his blog, Nash says that he’s been busily resarching and preparing for BEA, which is going on now, but plans to post during June some essays and so on that will hopefully explain in more detail this project.
*if you have a better metaphor for how traditional publishing works…
I googled "happy day" and this came up.
Jason Jordan has put up another stellar issue of DecomP. Here’s the lineup and a hello from him:
There should be no rules for this but it should be
simultaneous if at all.
Homosexuality is essentially being alone. Which is
a fight against the capitalist bosses who do not want
us to be alone. Alone we are dangerous.
Our dissatisfaction could ruin America. Our love
could ruin the universe if we let it.
If we let our love flower into the true revolution
we will be swamped with offers for beds.
– “Homosexuality and Marxism” (from Three Marxist Essays)
+
Several months ago Wesleyan University Press sent me My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer (Peter Gizzi & Kevin Killian, eds). I got side-tracked and hadn’t really looked at it, until the other day when I read Language, a collection from later in Spicer’s life (he died at age 40, in 1965). It right about knocked me on my ass, and you’ll be hearing more about Vocabulary in the weeks to come, but for right now, here’s some of Spicer’s work that’s available online courtesy of the Electronic Poetry Center. Also: audio at PennSound. Also, if you’re feeling like you need a proper introduction to JS, here again is Jared White’s fine long essay on Vocabulary, which I linked to in passing several months back.
I sent dj berndt some questions. He was really nice and cool and his answers saved the interview. He is the editor of the website PANGUR BAN PARTY. Please submit to the journal.
(interview after break)
Clearly self-serving, but it’s free (like self promoting contests should be), and there’s already a ton of prizes, so what the hay:
Lamination Colony is hosting a free writing contest, no entry fee, with prizes of publication, books (including html contributor Chelsea Martin’s everything was fine until whatever), handmade art, a picture of my ass, and a continuously increasing array of prizes donated from all around, including (so far):
* (1) copy of Shane Jones’s ‘Light Boxes‘ from Publishing Genius
* (1) copy of Molly Gaudry’s ‘We Take Me Apart’ forthcoming from ML Press
* the last hand edited manuscript of THE SELF ESTEEM HOLOCAUST COMES HOME and a printed copy of FROWNS NEED FRIENDS TOO (new two books from Sam Pink)
* a copy of William Walsh’s ‘Questionstruck,’ Thomas Cooper’s ‘Phantasmagoria’ and Issue 7 of Keyhole, all from Keyhole Press+ a ton more listed here
More prizes are being added by the hour (feel free to offer up your own), and again, it’s free.
This is a serious contest, there will be a winner, (at least 1-2) runner ups, everyone will get free shit, it will be free and people will read words maybe and talk about it not because there was a contest but because there are words.
For more info on what/how to enter, check the specs here. Thanks.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWxaGqjQKvE
It’s like Sir Mixalot meets Philip Larkin.
I’ve been meaning to write about Amy King’s poetry for some time now and plan on a longer post at a later date. (Click here to go to her blog.) As a non-poet, I find writing about poetry intimidating and as a reader of poetry, I use very loose guidelines in my judgement of poetry. Here are my reasonings, and an Amy King poem:
Worst book ever?
I have really enjoyed reading through the Rumpus list of writers talking about their favorite books. Sometimes surprising, occasionally illuminating and eminently useful. And you know, it has been said by some that if you don’t have something good to say, you shouldn’t say it at all. Maybe. My Manichean outlook, however, demands that likewise a list of the last books that attentive readers absolutely despised would be an equally fruitful enterprise. I know we’re all about positivity here, but I, for one, would appreciate some timely warnings of books that will, if I’m not careful, make me bleed out of my eyes and rend my bathroom slippers in agony. The three least awesome books I’ve read recently are these:
1) The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb: I’m still dealing with the aftermath of this nearly 1,000 page bucket of swill. The Oprah-adored author uses the Columbine massacre as a jumping off point for his emotionally manipulative, clichéd slop bucket of senseless tragedy.
2) The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littel: I guess I just have a problem with books that demand a lot of my time and page-turning energy and don’t give anything but poop in return. Littel’s controversial novel of a sadistic, intellectual S.S. officer making his way through the various theaters and meat grinders of World War 2 seems like the type of thing I’d be into. Not so! The flat and unlovely prose (maybe what you’d expect of a book written by a Nazi bureaucrat) is only to be outdone by the author’s obsession with feces.
3) Break It Down, by Lydia Davis: Blasphemy! I kind of liked The End of the Story, and, to a lesser extent, Varieties of Disturbance, but this one just didn’t do it for me. For every story I liked, there were three or four that made me want to quit reading forever.
What books do you hate?