Visit terrafugia.com for more information on this experimental carplane.
I am buying one of these with my six figure advance
Has anyone read this?
Has anyone read this book? It comes recommended by Stanley Crawford. I’m hoping to cull a concise summary from someone here so I can avoid buying it. Ahh, the irony.
Also: You can look forward to an HTMLGiant contest/giveaway. Big and soon.
Novella Compendium
Clusterfuck!
A few weeks ago I got an email from John Madera asking me to come up with a list of novellas that I like and some explanations about why I like them. John said he had asked “a bunch of writers” what their favorite novellas are and had gotten a “good” response back. I was thinking it would be something like ten people, fifteen max. Actually, this novella compendium includes entries and lists from every writer with a modicum of web presence.
A few: Nick Antosca, Ken Baumann, Blake Butler, Brian Evenson, Shane Jones, Sean Kilpatrick, Carole Maso, Christine Schutt, Matthew Simmons, Justin Taylor, William Walsh, John Dermot Woods, Steve Almond, Christopher Higgs, Lily Hoang, Michael Joyce, Michael Kimball, Gary Lutz, AND! David Shields AND! many, many others.
New Used Bookstore on Smith Street
I walked into this new used bookstore on Smith Street in Brooklyn after carbo-loading last night for a 10k race I was supposed to run right now in Central Park that I am skipping- last minute skipping- because it’s raining and freezing out and getting pneumonia is not worth it! As you can imagine, I am a bit disappointed and thinking things like, what if it stops raining??!! Anyway, I spent 25 dollars last night and bought a bunch of books. Here are the titles:
Wordhustler is your pimp
“Submit to Over 4,000 Literary Markets Without Leaving Your Desk” is WordHustler‘s tag-line. Basically, from what I can gather without actually signing up for an account (scary!), this is the match.com of the literary world: you make yourself seem as unrealistically attractive as possible for daunting goals, give them your credit card number, and wait in desperation.
Hey I’m just a joker with a day-job, check out what the writer of freakin’ The Bourne Identity says:
“The only thing I don’t like about WordHustler is that it wasn’t around when I was getting started. I can only lament the countless hours I spent grappling with commerce when I could’ve been focusing on art.”
— William Blake Herron, Screenwriter of The Bourne Identity
Haha! You started saying one thing, but then switched it! That’s like when Jason Bourne says he’s going to Berlin but goes to Hamburg!
They also have this nifty diagram of a SASE citing attributes such as the stamps. Who is stupid? Us or them? Somebody is stupid and I demand to know who it is.
The Grateful Dead…
Donna Jean & Jerry onstage at the Winterland Ballroom
…are on the top of the New York Times website right now. It makes me love life. Ben Ratliff provides a concise introduction to GD/taper culture and engages in the fine art of arguing about what the best Dead show/tour/era of all time is/was. The hook for all this is that the surviving band (now known simply as The Dead) is touring again, and Grateful Dead Productions has just released To Terrapin: Hartford ’77 (which I am listening to right now- there’s a 19 minute version of “Sugaree!” On disc ONE!!). 5/28/77 is a fascinating choice because it was a mere 20 days after 5/8/77 at Cornell, a show which is historically regarded by most hardcore fans as THE BEST Grateful Dead show and which has never seen an official release. (Personally, I think there’s a good argument to be made for 12/31/78, The Closing of Winterland, which is where the photo above was taken.)
Deadheads have often been polled about their favorite show, through fanzines and Web sites. The answers have stayed fairly consistent. May 8, 1977, at Barton Hall, Cornell University. The pairing of Feb. 13 and 14, 1970, at the Fillmore East in New York — perhaps the first widely traded shows. The Veneta and Binghamton shows. You’d think the canon would have been displaced as more and more information came along, but it hasn’t, really; it has only widened. I have spoken to young Deadheads who, surprisingly, respect the ancient judgments. “I’ll stick with May 8 because of its historical importance,” said Yona Koch-Feinberg, an 18-year-old from Manhattan. “That’s almost as important as the musical ability of the evening.”
The article is accompanied by a gallery of user-contributed photos from all eras of the band’s career. Awesome awesome. But, uh, books? Books. Yes, right. Okay. Well, my favorite book about The Grateful Dead is Carol Brightman’s Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure. I also really enjoyed Phil Lesh’s autobiography, Searching for the Sound. And of course, you need a copy of David Dodd’s Complete Annotated Grateful Dead lyrics, which overlaps quite a bit with but is not to be mistaken for or in any way replace Robert Hunter’s A Box of Rain: Collected Lyrics 1965-1993.
Shya Scanlon and elimae want you!
From the elimae announcements page:
Shya Scanlon is organizing a marathon reading of elimae contributors in NYC. Each reader will perform one or two short pieces, totaling no more than 3 minutes. If you live in the area and would like to participate, contact him at shya(dot)scanlon (at)gmail(dot)com.
Shya, a buddy of mine and a buddy to literature, is a nearly absolute good. Elimae is an absolute good. Be a part of this.
Do it.
FROM SHYA:
“No bios, no introductions, just a continual series of readers reading really brief pieces. It’s going to be like streaming elimae content, live and in the flesh.”
***
Unrelated announcement:
I would like to revive the long-suppressed* Giant Blind Items feature. This is the definition of a “blind item.”
You can send blind items to giantblinditems at gmail dot com.
* suppressed by me because I think it is a really, really bad idea.
‘A story about reluctant vikings’
Wells Tower reads “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” for The Guardian Books Podcast thingy they have going on at their thing.
(via Anthony Luebbert’s twitter thingy)
