Daniel Bailey’s EAST CENTRAL INDIANA

Daniel Bailey has just released an ebook EAST CENTRAL INDIANA, which is a slick sick puppy of the gray variety and contains a nice contained set of poems creeped with inner-absurdity, meth smoke, & the bizarre made back-porch familiar.

Here are a few examples lines:

i’ve tried selling all of my belongings: my flame pants,

my fire couch, my incineration chamber,

but everything is obsolete here, even the expression

you used to show enjoyment when you ignited bats

Daniel does a certain mode of poetry I think more innovatively and with a stranger cull of images and lines than others that could be associated. This is a great read, and BEAR CREEK FEED is a great new source of ebooks.

Author News / 2 Comments
November 3rd, 2008 / 2:42 pm

The Home Video Review of Books

Ever wanted to shop for books based on short video clips that may or may not describe the interior of the book based on associate video images? Me neither. But now that I think about it, maybe it would work out? Or at least be like sticking your hand in a bag of chalk (I don’t know what that means).

The Home Video Review of Books is now kicking out video review of ‘poetry and lyric prose,’ putting random video in the house. It is edited by Mathias Svalina and Julia Cohen, and has a random cross sampling of thangs.

If nothing else, I like their selection of titles to peek at in the first update:

Kristi Maxwell’s Realm Sixty-Four
Eugene Ostashevsky’s The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza
Alex Lemon’s Hallelujah Blackout
Abraham Smith’s Whim Man Mammon
Anselm Berrigan’s Have a Good One
Selah Saterstrom’s The Meat and Spirit Plan
Jay Wright’s Polynomials and Pollen
Danielle Pafunda’s My Zorba
Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence
K. Silem Mohammad’s Breathalyzer
Jasper Bernes’ Starsdown
Rauan Klassnik’s Holy Land

Check it out n shit. HOLY LAND is awesome + the review here is pretty funny.

Uncategorized / 2 Comments
November 2nd, 2008 / 7:15 pm

Starcherone Contest?

Maybe not a useful post, but if anything it reminded me that I have a few books that I must still purchase.

Starcherone Books has announced contest guidelines for its annual Innovative Fiction Contest.

The 2009-10 contest, offering $1000 and publication with Starcherone Books, is now accepting entries. Contest is open to story collections, novels, or indeterminate prose works up to 400 pages. Manuscripts will be blind-judged; the author’s name should appear on the first of two title pages and nowhere else in the manuscript. There is an administrative fee of $30. Please do not send cash. The postmark deadline is February 15, 2009. The winner will be announced in August 2009. All finalists will be considered for publication with Starcherone Books. See our ad in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers.

Also, they have a special offer going for those who want to submit. If you add an additional $10 to your entry fee, they’ll throw in a copy of The Lost Books of the Odyssey for your trouble.

Ben Marcus is the final judge.

Contests / Comments Off on Starcherone Contest?
November 2nd, 2008 / 3:31 am

Matthew Simmons interviews Brian Evenson

A great interview with Brian Evenson on his forthcoming book LAST DAYS is now available to be read at the Underland Press website. Simmons does a great job discussing Evenson’s masterful ability to impart extremely brutal or heavy circumstances in an even tone. Here’s a quote from Evenson regarding his restraint:

There’s an ethical openness there, a refusal to tell readers what they should think about what they’re perceiving. At its best it can create a tension between the reader and the characters, one in which they start to project their responses into the hole left by the flatness of the response. I try to be very precise, to give the readers just enough to let their imaginations do the work: the words are a catalyst to get their imaginations to take a dark inward turn.

Check out the rest of the interview and keep tabs for more new web only content from Underland, it is a press to watch for sure.

Presses & Random / Comments Off on Matthew Simmons interviews Brian Evenson
November 2nd, 2008 / 1:02 am

NaNoWriMo – 101 Reasons to Stop Writing

Today, people all across everywhere have typed the first word on their way to writing 50k words that should resemble in some way a ‘novel.’

I am not a ‘fan’ of NaNoWriMo. There is something corporate and mindless about it, to me anyhow. Even the website looks corporate and mindless. Not that corporations are bad. I just have a hard time thinking about writing that way – have you seen these romance novels that you can insert your name into and the name(s) of your lover(s)? That is corporate to me.

But I know many people who are fans of NaNoWriMo and who participate in it, and they are all good people (I think). So that makes me think that maybe there is something I don’t get about NaNoWriMo. That maybe I am the moron. That maybe while I complain about NaNoWriMo, all these other people are actually getting some writing done.

I once took a class that forced me to write a 40k word novel in a semester. The experience was painful. My writing was pretty awful. I felt like a kid throwing a temper tantrum. I purchased Chris Baty’s book No Plot, No Problem (NoPloNoPro, as I like to call it). In it, a man who has maybe three or four unpublished manuscripts sitting in his desk gave me advice about how to write a novel. Thanks Chris.

In good news, that class led to some stories that were later published.

But not a novel.

If the number of participants in NaNoWriMo each year equals the number of people who have purchased his self-help book novel book, then Chris Baty is making good money.

What is good about NaNoWriMo? I’m sure there are good things about it, but I am stubborn and like to only think about things in my brain using very simple language, such as ‘bad’ and ‘good’ and ‘sleepy,’ etc.

I am sitting in the Las Vegas airport and I am waiting to board my airplane to Houston. If the plane crashes, then this will be the last thing I ever wrote in my life:

A shitty post on NaNaWriMo.

 

Okay, we’re boarding. Wish me luck and then go visit this site – 101 Reasons to Stop Writing. I laughed a little bit: “Express yourself all you want. Just don’t keep submitting it for publication. You’re filling the world with shit.”

Random / 54 Comments
November 1st, 2008 / 7:03 pm

Black Kids in Lemon Trees

I will write something about the other two ML Press books soon. I received them yesterday—simple design, simply made, good job J.A.—and enjoyed all three.

I’ll start with Black Kids in Lemon Trees by HTMLGiant’s Shane Jones.  I’m a big fan of Shane’s writing. I am happy to cop to that. Shane is one of only two people I have let take over The Man Who Couldn’t Blog when I asked him if I could put an excerpt from his book Light Boxes on the site. So there’s that.

This almost seems unfair. It’s apparently already sold out. So you, dear reader, can’t go get a copy for yourself. But I want you to. That’s what I am here to say. It’s very, very good.

In 25 little sections, BKILT follows this wonderful thread of dream logic. Shane does surrealism about as well as one can and still make a readable story on a page. Police in the clouds, cop eyes, shooting at the sun, kids in dayglo shorts throwing lemons at the clouds—the images are so strong, so neatly and quickly rendered. And they all gather together well like cogs in a watch. Or, not a watch. Some sort of mechanism. The function of the mechanism may not make perfect sense, but the gears fit against one another, and the machine has an internal integrity.

There was a nice Believer article about how to read a Russell Edson poem. You can read it all here. That article has been very helpful for me when approaching work like Shane’s.

Nice job, Shane. Sorry, people who don’t have a copy on the way or in their hands.

Author Spotlight & Presses / 9 Comments
October 31st, 2008 / 8:43 pm

BOOBS FRIDAY; Kendra is going as full erections across America

Boo!

bs

Uncategorized / 7 Comments
October 31st, 2008 / 5:45 pm

Boob Friday Halloween Special Haiku Contest

Get published instantly at HTMLGIANT. In the comment section, contribute a haiku. Guidelines: it must involve halloween and boobs, and conform to 5-7-5 syllable count, to deter you asswipes from ‘going off.’

For example(s):

i suck, and i wish

i sucked more often–that is

tits painted orange

—

every woman has

two soft moons under her shirt

me: pagan spaceboy

Note, no doing this: ( . ) ( . )

I will judge the comment haikus. Winner will receive ‘hidden’ url link, specially designed for them, to my website that he/she can link to.

Uncategorized / 81 Comments
October 31st, 2008 / 2:25 pm

elimae’s Reading List in Archives

Randomly stumbled on an old list of Recommended Reading from the elimae archives, including lists of recommendation by Deron Bauman, Brian Evenson, Michael Kimball, Norman Lock, Dawn Raffel, B. Renner, M Sarki, and several excellent others. The lists form a pretty wonderful net of texts many of which I have loved, and many others I’ve never heard of or have meant to read. I added I think 5 things to my Amazon wishlist off of it. Worth exploring.

A preponderance of Cormac McCarthy reemphasizes the fact that if you haven’t read BLOOD MERIDIAN and SUTTREE by now, well, fuck, get to work.

Deron Baumann, oddly, refers to BLOOD MERIDIAN though specifically only wants pages 5-165, which is about as far as I got the first time I tried to read it. It’s a dense mother. But now that I’ve read it twice and change, and still not quite having absorbed a lot, I have to say, the images near the end with the child in the desert hiding from the Judge as he passes back and forth into the sand are one of the images that has haunted me most in all my reading ever.

Other names that appear on the lists rather frequently: Gordon Lish, Samuel Beckett, Amos Tutuola, Italo Calvino, Diane Williams. Though there is also a lot of hidden nuggetry and apocrypha.

This is a good puzzle, in a way, I love these kinds of lists. I want more.

So, not sure what to read next? You probably can’t go wrong with most of what’s on here.

Old elimae is like scrolls: if you’ve never dug from the early years, jeez. Go.

Random / 10 Comments
October 31st, 2008 / 2:00 pm

Caketrain 6 for presale

Anytime there’s a new issue of Caketrain, I immediately place an order. If you ask me, Caketrain has taken up the space left by the void of 3rd BED, as each issue is packed with new words, weird words, innovation of form and content and etc. They take care to make the words look their best on clean, nice heavy paper with lots of white space and good images. You know when you buy Caketrain you will be able to read it pretty much from cover to cover. That’s often a rare find.

CAKETRAIN 6 is now available for preorder, to be shipped in December. It’s only $8 including shipping, which, shit, how can you beat that.

There’s a full list of the site of who’s got what inside but this issue seems to contain a bunch, including Michael Kimball, Norman Lock, Kim Chinquee, Shane Jones, Ryan Call, Brian Foley, Joshua Ware, Sara Levine, Jac Jemc, Forrest Roth, Kate Hill Cantrill, and etc.

Get this. Get the back issues if you don’t have them. They are all issues I go back and read over and over again, and that’s not a stretch.

Uncategorized / 8 Comments
October 31st, 2008 / 11:15 am