FRIGG n’ Microfiction

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Frigg Magazine’s All Microfiction Issue is out, featuring Kim Chinquee, Lydia Copeland, Kathy Fish, Scott Garson, Barry Graham, Tiff Holland, Mary Miller, Kim Parko, Jennifer Pieroni, Meg Pokrass, Joseph Young, and Randall Brown — the latter two whom debate on “What is microfiction?” (Why argue? The purple-quilled ladies of Fiction Factor provide the answer here.)

I always like how each writer is given their own front page e-bookish thing. My only commentary is I don’t like the parenthetical word counts which precede each piece, kinda distracting. I also don’t like it when editors ask for word counts. It’s like — look. Just look at the story. Is it long or short? Do your eyes feel okay? What did you have for breakfast? Can you not do us the favor of doing a ‘word count’ in ‘tools’ in your ‘word document’ since you have ‘fingers’ and ‘volition’ and since you’re such a curious person.

Sorry about that. Here’s my point: read the new issue of Frigg, and good job everyone.

Uncategorized / 12 Comments
April 16th, 2009 / 7:40 pm

Wow: The Espresso Book Machine

Literature Terminator.

Literature Terminator.

From the press release:

Blackwell, the UK’s leading academic bookseller, has unveiled the launch of the 2.0 Espresso Book Machine (EBM) at its flagship store, 100 Charing Cross London. It is the first bookshop installation of its kind within the UK, allowing any book to be selected from an inexhaustible network of titles and prints on demand in just 3 minutes from a digital file onsite, online at www.blackwell.co.uk, or uploaded in person from CDs or flash drives.

This bad boy whips up a book in three minutes.   Go on to read more about the implications of such a device.

My take:  This is definitely a much more ecologically sustainable process than the standard model of book production, which is exciting.  It also completely removes the barrier of entry to producing a book, which, I’d argue, is a very ‘good’ thing; the more art the better.  It’s happening all around us; the availability of cheap means of production means that anyone with a computer and a camera can make a movie, anyone with a computer near this behemoth or Lulu.com can make a book, anyone with a computer and Garageband/Audible can make music, etc.  Distribution will be the sticking point in media for awhile, and it’s going to get messy.  I look forward to help making the mess.

What do you think?

EDIT: Also, a thin treatise on paperback vs. hardback after the jump…

READ MORE >

Random & Technology / 16 Comments
April 16th, 2009 / 6:15 pm

Similes, Metaphor, a Pushcart Prize Winning Poem and Mary Gaitskill

And shes hot!

And she's hot!

It’s raining in Monte Carlo and so my plans to watch taped tennis all afternoon are shattered, shattered like the broken heart I have today to begin with. (It will be mended as soon as my husband comes home this evening and says, “everthing will be fine”.) The discussion on how many adverbs or similes or anything a writer should use made me think of this poem. Now, I do understand that fiction is not poetry (sorry Blake, that’s my opinion) and I understand that the agent who was sharing these rules did so out of a sort of kindness toward writers. That said, I love similes- even awkward ones, maybe especially awkward ones, like in the poem “Love In The Orangery” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (who you can find out more about linked here). I also love the miracles that happen in The End of the Affair and cancer stories. READ MORE >

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 21 Comments
April 16th, 2009 / 4:01 pm

Youtube teaches me something about America

I came to this video in the related videos YouTube attached to the one in Matthew’s post yesterday on tone and Diff’rent Strokes, and originally was interested in watching it mainly for the choice rap performance from Gary Coleman and his self-proclaimed “very different from Michael Jackson” buddy laying a hip-hop smackdown on the Will Shriner show. Dang.

It was in the interview after the performance, though, that the thing that really stood out about the video for me hit. Scroll to 5:08, right near the end, and observe the crowd and host’s reaction when the child star expresses his interest in becoming a short story writer.

He wants to write stories??? How funny! How absurd!

Will’s cheese-eating giggle quip, “Now Gary, all you gotta do is write a story…,” shaking his little hand like he’s got a pen.

Good job, America. Instead he turned into a crackhead or something, right?

Really, though, I can understand the punchline. Fucking writers. I’d laugh at a child too.

Gary, if you’re out there man, our submissions are closed right now, but you can consider yourself ‘solicited’ any day of any week.

Web Hype / 35 Comments
April 16th, 2009 / 3:14 pm

Of Etymology

*UPDATE* 1) I’m a moron, it already happened, and 2) [courtesy of Mark Baumer] “Going nuts” for Tea Bagging and “Teabag mouthpieces” on Fox News — with either a straight face or pun-laced implicit irony (I really can’t tell), both of which would be brilliant.

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McSweeney’s (or is it McSweeney’s’s?) The Future Dictionary of America (2004) did it’s own wonderful thing, but what I really want to see is someone publish the ENTIRE Urban Dictionary, which is less self-conscious as being a cultural artifact and probably has more ‘street cred,’ because contributors are, um, completely teen ghetto. I’m always delighted, and in awe, of the creativity and organic etymology of the words. It’s a great resource for people concerned with ‘contemporary culture.’ Some examples after the break.

READ MORE >

Web Hype / 9 Comments
April 16th, 2009 / 2:29 pm

Influences: Ken Baumann

catscradle19631

Here’s the way we will be following up on my earlier “Name a piece of art that changed the way you thought about art” post here. If you responded, I will try to contact you about you choices with a mini interview.

First up, our friend and colleague Ken Baumann.

Here are the questions:

1) Pick one of the pieces you chose and describe the thing about it that seems particularly innovative about it.

2) Tell me what changed about your writing because of that innovation.

Here are Ken’s answers. Ken chose to talk about both his selections.

What seems innovative about 2001? Incredible technical achievement aside, 2001: A Space Odyssey is, to me, the perfect example of the power of cinema, especially that of primarily non-verbal storytelling. I’d say my experience with that movie fundamentally changed the way I viewed storytelling, and has informed my taste and practice in all realms of art.

What seems innovative about Cat’s Cradle? That was the first book I read that affected and strongly shaped my belief system. I hope the book is eternally regarded as innovative, in that it, to me, captured perfectly the sorrow and longing and absurdity and fractured nature of human experience.

Author Spotlight / 12 Comments
April 16th, 2009 / 1:45 pm

Google Searches & Maurice Blanchot

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At his blog, Mathias Svalina’s many screen-captures offer a better argument for Flarf than it ever dreamed of making for itself.

And over at his blog, today Dennis Cooper is all about the amazing Maurice Blanchot.

My speech is a warning that at this very moment death is loose in the world, that it has suddenly appeared between me, as I speak, and the being I address: it is there between us as the distance that separates us, but this distance is also what prevents us from being separated, because it contains the condition for all understanding. Death alone allows me to grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words as the only way they can have meaning. Without death, everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness. (Blanchot, The Work of Fire, 323-24)

Web Hype / 24 Comments
April 16th, 2009 / 9:57 am

Time Out New York and Poets&Writers say kind things about things

vurtego-pogo-stick-1Michael Miller wrote a nice article in the latest issue of Time Out New York praising three fine journals: The New York Tyrant, Agriculture Reader, and NOON. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s an excerpt or two:

Started in 2007, The New York Tyrant is the brainchild of GianCarlo DiTrapano, a former intern at FSG who decided to sell his house in New Orleans to start a literary mag, which he now produces in his studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. “I look for writing where it’s evident the authors have sweat over it,” he recently told TONY over drinks in midtown. “I respect writing where the authors expose the shit out of themselves and take risks.”

And this:

Agriculture Reader is so DIY that the first issue was entirely handmade. This is no small feat: According to Jeremy Schmall, who edits the publication with Justin Taylor, each cover had to be hand-painted and hand-cut. Now in its third installment, the zine-ish publication leans more toward poetry than the Tyrant does, but it shares a commitment to publishing bold voices and finding an audience.“Publishing is a conversation, and we don’t want to only be talking to our own little clique,” says Taylor. “I wouldn’t say that we have any particular aesthetic criteria, other than that the work has to thrill us in some way.”

READ MORE >

Web Hype / 8 Comments
April 16th, 2009 / 9:52 am

I wish I could say that I was tired of this news cycle

sid_bream_autographIf Justin Taylor has taught me anything, it that we won’t be able to beat the pirates until we understand the pirates. I’ve put together a quick primer for budding armchair piracy experts:

1) Seven Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds, by James Hamilton-Paterson. The ocean is vast. Real vast. Supports much life (including buccaneer life). Says Hamilton-Paterson:

It is well known in these parts that fish choose not to speak in order to risk nothing worse at men’s hands. Being wrenched from the depths into thin and bitter light to drown slowly in is bad, but not bad enough to merit speech.

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Author News & Power Quote / 13 Comments
April 16th, 2009 / 7:56 am

Contest Insanity

480skitoiletAside from the Keyhole bidding war ($405 at the time of this post) that has broken out recently, there are other insane contests around the internet that I wanted to link to.

First, I present to you a number of spambot contests running over at PH Madore’s blog and at Blake Butler’s blog. These two contests involve spreading word of the contest in as many other places as possible and then commenting in the respective blogs comment sections to link to where entrants have spread word of the contests. Jason Jordan is another blogger in the habit of running these sorts of contests over at his blog, which require entrants to comment on the post as much as possible in order to win free stuff, like issues of Ninth Letter and Annalemma. So keep an eye on him.

Tim Jones-Yelvington, frequent HTMLGIANT reader, is running a contest at his blog that asks entrants to describe in <1,000 words what their dinner with Lydia Davis might be like. Winner of the “My Dinner with Lydia Davis” contest will receive a one-year subscription to the lit journal of their choice. Wasn’t Lydia Davis married to Paul Auster at some point?

READ MORE >

Contests / 35 Comments
April 16th, 2009 / 1:15 am