MEN: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE WRITERS OF “MEN”
it’s what we all look for on the internet: MEN. every day, i open the internet browser and search for men. i don’t always like what i find, but i did like this. it’s a new chapbook from those boys from manchester, socrates adams florou, crispin best and spiros florou. here is the first paragraph, with an interview after the break:
I want to scare children all the time.
When I walk past a school, I press my
face through the railings and stand there,
looking at the children. I wait for them to
be afraid. The children are in their school’s
playground. They feel safe. They are
having fun. I press my face through and
stand there and look at the children.
Happy Cobra Books
Our own Matthew Simmons’ Happy Cobra Books has just released their new website, featuring Matthew Savoca’s e-book TOUGH!!! with his poems accompanied by illustrations by Tao Lin, Greg Lytle, Mike Bushnell, Tracy Brannstrom, Gene Morgan, Chelsea Martin, among many others.
Editor’s note:
TOUGH! is a book of brief pieces, haiku of the apotheosis of rural American maledom. Very funny. Wonderful illustrations, too.
Downloadable pdfs featuring Chelsea Martin, Catherine Lacey, Ellen Kennedy, Justin Dobbs and Blake Butler coming soon.
March 11th, 2009 / 1:12 pm
This Post Should Be Meaner: Authors BookShop
One time I asked this musician named Joe Nolan — who is cool, who is awesome, who knows what he’s doing, here’s a song — how come he didn’t hook up with some indie label, and he said an indie label was just a kid with a book of stamps.
You can self-publish your fuckin’ CD, but not your stupid book.
To see what the people who self-publish their books are doing, check out the Authors BookShop.
Especially check out the list of publishers — how many do you recognize? For me, not a lot (though there a good few, for sure). I did a few clicks and it seems like many of these are them least-fancy self-publishing services. Oh man, they’re lousy.
But the Authors BookShop is okay. ABS is providing a necessary service at a far better deal than Amazon. It has a bad name and most of the publishers who use the service are, to put it nicely, different than what most HTML Giant readers care about — but Brad Grochowski (President, Founder and author of The Secret Weakness of Dragons) is doing something that should be done, can be done, and — he’s opened it up to everyone.
Here’s why Grochowski started the thing: READ MORE >
Anthropology Lessons from Metal Magazines: A Variation in a Series
This Guy is Metal, but not from Wino.
Perusing Metal Maniacs, I happened upon the band Wino’s new release, Punctuated Equilibrium (check them out on myspace)! My minor in college was in anthropology and it really should have been my major, but I was too lazy and cheap to go back and take all the pre-requisite stuff. In my evolutionary theory class, punctuated equilibrium was well discussed. Stephen Jay Gould and the lesser known Niles Eldredge (good link to Gould’s work here), beyond coining the phrase, developed largely the most radical variation on Darwin’s theory of natural selection and specifically, the idea of gradualism (although since then, I think other stuff has come about in the field. I was in college, um, 20 years ago). I read so many xeroxed papers that Gould wrote in obscure academic anthropology journals! He was supposed to come speak once to our class- he didn’t, though. I thought he was rad. And I think Wino is rad. Here’s a brief description of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, taken from Wikipedia, but it explains the theory well enough: READ MORE >
Literary Doppelgangers
I’ve always thought J.D. Salinger looked like the young Al Pacino in The Godfather, so much so that when reading the former, I would hear ‘HOO-AH!’ sporadically inserted throughout the text. The Glass and Corleone families are very similar; both represent brilliant families slowly falling towards their demise.
And then there’s Leonard Cohen, circa his breathtaking Songs From A Room period. He is said to have written those songs in Hydra, a (then) primarily uninhabited Greek island without electricity.
This got me thinking about doppelgangers, which despite sounding like a kind of gang-bang, is strange since our visual notion of these men are through a stagnant set of photos. We share a collective ‘memory’ of famous people, and I thought it might be fun to talk more about folks who are doppelgangers.
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Haut or Not: Matt Cozart
Melville’s dick on Sister Carrie — that’s all I can think about, and what looks to be a bunch of children’s books on top of Kenneth Koch and William Carlos Williams. Now we know where Matt’s priorities lie: so much depends upon/ a red wheelbarrow / and whether or not it’s nap-time. Such blasphemy doesn’t even compare with John Irving being 3 tiers above D.F. Wallace. [Brief interview with a hideous man: Q) You ever wish your last name began with M?, A) Yes, all the time.] As for O. Henry and O’Hara: O’MyGod
Rating: Not.
Introducing the Underground Library Writers Project
Shortly after I posted about the Underground Library on HTMLGIANT, Ravi Mangla emailed PH Madore and me with an idea to set up a writer ‘buddy system’ of some sort. His idea, as I understood it, was to encourage more personal interaction between those who might not have originally sought each other out. I liked this idea, and will be helping Ravi Mangla put this together.
Ravi Mangla has written up specifics after the break.
Poe sorry for his drinking. Butler, not.
Here:
“Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behaviour while in N-York?,” Poe asks New York publishers J. and Henry G. Langley. “You must have conceived a queer idea of me — but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.”
Compare, contrast to this in the comments.
Best compare/contrast wins a prize. Or two. I have lots of galleys and am cleaning house. Prize packages tailored to the tastes of the winner.
UPDATE:
Apologies for vagueness. In the comments, write a short essay (Oh, even just a paragraph long) comparing and contrasting Poe’s apology for his drunken behavior in New York to the video of our fearless leader screeching drunkenly about smoothies when he visited New York a couple of years ago. The video is linked to the word “this” because I was unable to embed it.
Richard Nash Leaves Soft Skull
Some old news was posted at Soft Skull in February, but thought I’d mention it today to officially mark Richard Nash’s leaving Soft Skull Press.
He writes:
Thanks for everyone out there for making Soft Skull what it is, above all the readers and writers whom we exist to serve and connect, along with my colleagues, paid and unpaid (!), who’ve put in vast amounts of hours, creativity, and intensity in order to bring those writers and readers together to create this thing we call culture.
Follow Nash online on his blog for post-Soft Skull activities.