5 awareness that the essential values through which one…lock cat
2. Washington Post with “Three Books on Hipsters.”
Their affinity for tight jeans, shaggy hair and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer is easily mocked, but the principal criticism is that they’re frauds.
11. Rose Metal Press is having a fund drive! For 5 years RMP has been putting heart-imploding hybrid/slash/flash into your taped coins/eyes/tattoo tails/synapses. You get stuff, too. Give.
14. Cult Pulp Fiction at Sabotage Times. Or:
Pretty soon, my feverish teenage brain was boiling over with descriptions of high-class orgies, anal penetration and amyl-nitrate-fuelled orgasms.
236. Did someone on this fucking site already link to this long un-cut interview of DFW from 1998? I don’t know. I don’t. If so, some HTML god will most likely remove it and you won’t even see these words. Fuck.
9. Did you hear Steve Martin was so blar they had to offer a refund? Why was he boring? He talked about art. Martin says:
“So the 92nd St. Y has determined that the course of its interviews should be dictated in real time by its audience’s emails. Artists beware.”
Get off my lawn! Yeh but Steve, you’re trying to sell a book. You are Steve Martin. You manipulated, man. But I like it. This goes under one of my favorite genres of public readings: You expected this, I’m going to give you that. Recently, I went to see a semi-famous memoir writer and she ignored all that and read a dry history of religion. you could hear the air crackle as expectations tumbled into walls. Hissing. Andy Kaufman reading Great Gatsby. Ever been to one of those readings? Like WTF? They glow.
An Interview with Zachary German
The first time I met Zachary German was at a restaurant where they had noodles and beer. Zach had thick glasses and would be quiet a long time and then suddenly start asking a lot of short questions. He has big eyes sometimes. Later, a bunch of people walked to an apartment and Zach smoked a pipe and when we got there he went and bought several 40s and we talked about rap.
This was right before Zach’s Bear Parade ebook version of Eat When You Feel Sad came out. Reading EWYFS in this form I remember feeling both confused and intrigued, the blankness of it, and the feeling behind the blankness that I couldn’t name, and why I wanted to keep looking at it. Zach’s is surely a voice unlike most any other for this way of its small, selected observations, the rendering of time and space in direct, neutral seconds, which somehow in cohesion form a center you could not have labeled in another way.
Last month Melville House Publishing released the full version of Eat When You Feel Sad, a novel, which takes off from the place the original excerpt began and develops that indirect interiority even beyond what I’d expected in the first taste. Herein, Zach offers an answer for one of the bitchiest matters in books: How to deliver presence or “heart” without sounding predictable or like a dolt. It’s truly a refreshing and oddly powerful collage of moments, music, staring, speaking, eating, boredom. This is a new thing, an odd object that somehow opens great feeling in its calm.
Over email I talked with Zach about the book’s creation, his manners of selection, minimalism, his humor influences, bedtime, revision, and so on.