Agriculture Reader #3, edited by Htmlgiant’s own Justin Taylor and Jeremy Small, is out and full of amazing work, not to mention that this annual journal of the arts is artfuly made itself by the amazing design firm, X-ing Books. Click here to order your copy. Here’s the full list of mindblowingly great contributors, including Diane Wiliams, Eileen Myles and Matthew Zapruder: READ MORE >
Is Cake Wrecks the Literary Rejections on Display of food blogs?
“Both writers were inimitable even as they were widely imitated. Carver, younger, less productive, a practitioner of a spare gritty realism often called minimalism, was the junior executive. Donald Barthelme—sparkling fabulist and idiosyncratic reinventor of the genre, practitioner of swift verbal collages, also sometimes dubbed minimalism—was commander in chief. Barthelme’s particular brilliance was so original, so sui generis, despite its tutelage at the feet of pages by Joyce, Beckett, and Stein, that even his own brothers Frederick and Steven, also fiction writers of intelligence and style, wrote more like Carver.”
—Lorrie Moore, “How He Wrote His Songs“
BOOKMUNCH is a website that reviews books and interviews authors. i recently interviewed NATE TYREE, a contributor for the site.
(interview after jump)
This is my office where I work about six months of the year. I was just there this weekend and I took some pictures to share with you all. I am a slob. I roll around in a pile of dust and books. Make fun of me. Talk about how happy you are that you don’t really know me. I am going to explain stuff and post some nice close-ups after the jump:
For years I just used TextEdit. It’s free, simple, and takes a second to load on even the slowest computer. I own Word, but Word takes like five minutes to load on my three-year old computer, and is sans Clippy these days, which was one of my only reasons for opening Word. I’ve tried various ‘serious MFA literature’ text editors, stuff like Ulysses and WriteRoom, but beyond their really great full screen modes, they didn’t really give me positive emotions.
I started using Pages this year, and I have been pretty happy. It has full screen mode, and I got turned-on to the typeface BiauKai, which doesn’t have bold or italic versions, but I use on everything I write anyway because I don’t like bolds or italics. Also, I’m hoping to make a sweet family newsletter sometime in the near future, and Pages looks like a real winner for that kind of thing. *fingers crossed*
I Have Some FUNNY Ideas!
About fifteen years ago, or something like that, I read The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones. I liked it very much. I also thought it was funny how he chews over the same stuff in most of the stories. More than once, some character of his talks about Schopenhauer. I had read some Schopenhauer in college, but after reading The Pugilist at Rest, I decided to read some more. I liked him very much, more than any other philosopher at that time in my life. (I read very little philosophy, so that is not saying much.) So, today, when I fell over a pile of books that are laying on the floor in my office, I fell over Schopenhauer. And I found something really funny. Now, I am posting this excerpt, but this is not to say he didn’t say lots of cool stuff, too. Anyway, here it is:
HTMLGIANT hereby institutes Haut or Not, where we rate your bookshelves. This was initiated and corroborated by J. Taylor and B. Bulter, respectively, and inspired by this recent post and the unfortunate yet captivating Hot or Not series.
Just email htmlgiant@gmail.com a picture of your bookshelf (or stack of books w/ spines showing) and one us will either rate it ‘haut’ (haute, formal) or ‘not.’ You may also email individual contributors at their personal addresses if you specifically want them to rate you, acknowledging that our tastes vary drastically.
Here are the parameters:
Subject heading: Haut or not
pics: 500 pixel-wide jpeg, ~200kb.
Disclaimer: we are also free to rate, or make commentary on, all implicated vicinity of the photo. For example, if in the far distance we see an out-of-focus neon thing that resembles a dildo, we will assume it’s a dildo. You may insist it’s a $275 Roche-Bobois lamp, but we will ignore you. So please, be careful. If you are not prepared to be made fun of, this is not the venture for you.
not ryan call
I received today in the mail a ‘care’ package from Muumuu House and in that package were several books: you are a little bit happier than i am by Tao Lin and Distortions by Ann Beattie and three copies of Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy. Thank you, Muumuu House, for the ‘care’ package.
And last night a friend and I found a bar in Houston that has ping-pong tables, and we played ping-pong for three or four hours, and I defeated him twice. He did not defeat me. The rest of the time we just hit the ball back and forth and impressed ourselves with our amazing skills. I think I am very good at ping-pong. I think it is the one thing I’m allowed to be good at, maybe. That and washing dishes. I think there is something very satisfying about hitting a ping-pong ball just so, having it do exactly what you want it to do.
To celebrate our finding this bar with ping-pong tables, I would like to offer two copies of Sometimes My Heart Pushes Against My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy, which, sadly, has no poems/stories in it about ping-pong.
Please post your poems/stories about ping-pong in the comments section to be eligible for a copy of Sometimes My Heart Pushes Against My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy. Be sure to include a real email address in the field where it asks for an email address, so I can email you if your poem/story wins. If you are shy, you may also email a poem/story about ping-pong to htmlgiant [at] gmail [dot] com, but if I select your poem/story, then I will post it for everyone to see. This contest is open until 2:00pm CST, Saturday the 7th.
Good work, Muumuu House and Ellen Kennedy, on your first book. I enjoyed reading it.
UPDATE: Winners of the two Muumuu House books are Miles and Darby Larson. Miles and Darby please email your mailing addresses to HTMLGIANT so I can send you your prize.
Thank you to everyone who emailed and posted ping-pong stories/poems.
