Fence Holiday Subscription Deals
In my email from Fence:
Dear Friend,
This year, give the gift of Fence.
Subscribe a friend (http://www.fence.fenceportal.org/subscribe.html) and we’ll send a gift-wrapped issue with a card indicating this is a present from you. We’ll even use your return address so they’ll never guess what’s in the package.
$17 = one year
$30 = two years
$300 = a lifetime of FenceMake sure to write “gift” in the “Special Instructions” field of our merchant interface, in the Shipping Address section.
It’s fast, easy, and cheap, and we promise to get it there in time, if you subscribe by 5 pm on December 17th. (http://www.fence.fenceportal.org/subscribe.html)
Secret Santas, do work.
Uncategorized / 56 Comments
December 15th, 2008 / 5:33 pm
December 15th, 2008 / 5:33 pm
Rain Taxi Benefit Auction
from Rain Taxi:
RAIN TAXI BENEFIT AUCTION!
Our benefit auction has returned, and this year it’s enormous! Held on eBay, the auction lets you support Rain Taxi while getting cool literary stuff. Most items were donated by authors or publishers to help Rain Taxi stay in gear: You’ll find signed first editions, gorgeous broadsides, rare chapbooks, seminal graphic novels, quirky collectible books, handcrafted items, and more! M.T. ANDERSON, John ASHBERY, Paul AUSTER, Charles BERNSTEIN, Robert BLY, Paul BOWLES, Stephen COLBERT, Samuel R. DELANY, Neil GAIMAN, Patricia HAMPL, Richard HELL, Jaime HERNANDEZ, Garrison KEILLOR, Jonathan LETHEM, David MARKSON, Henry MILLER, Rick MOODY, Barack OBAMA, Ron PADGETT, Jerome ROTHENBERG, Joe SACCO, Arthur SZE, Jeff VANDERMEER, Anne WALDMAN, Keith and Rosmarie WALDROP, and Marjorie WELISH are just some of the authors whose works you’ll find. To see the full listings, go to our online benefit auction now!
Top 5 WILFs
A WILF is a ‘writer I’d like to fuck,’ our new enterprise conceived by contributor pr. Since I really like the idea of hypothetical fucking, I cannot contain myself and have posted a top 5 list:
1. VIRGINIA WOOLF
That Virginia Woolf was a lesbian may explain the impractical choices in women I still have which sustained my virginity to an embarrassing point which shall not be disclosed at this juncture. That she has been dead for seventy-some years does not implicate any penchant for necrophilia — for I don’t literally want to ‘fuck’ Virginia Woolf at this point in her decomposition — I simply would have wanted to, had I been more of a man in England at the break of the twentieth century; she at the ripe age of eighteen.
2. PAUL AUSTER
That Paul Auster is a man may explain the impractical choices in women which let to the aforementioned exasperated virginity. I’m straight, but fuck that guy is gorgeous. When I think of his New York Trilogy, I think of his dong and ballsack. I went to his reading once and every woman almost had an orgasm when he spoke. I quivered a little myself, though it was probably just gas from my burrito.
We are all winners
Results of the Blake Butler “Ever” mean giveaway are in. (Actually they have been in since Friday. Apathy is a motherfucker.)
Blake picked Ryan Bradley. It was a toss up between Barry and Darby for me. Barry was slightly meaner.
Barry and Ryan email me your addresses. I need to put the order in before I forget.
*No retards have been depicted in this post.
Eugene Lim’s Reading Diary
For those who often feel they’re having trouble figuring out what to read next, if you have any proclivity for experimentally-based fiction and so forth, the reading diary of Eugene Lim, editor of Ellipsis Press, is a really great database of some obscure to semi-obscure works that all seem worthy of greater attention.
Lim’s reviews are short and smart and to the point, and don’t spend more than enough time talking than to get you excited on the concept and execution of the book. Whereas other review sites can be burdensome or have too much to say, these are snippets, wise-minded ones, and there is quite a trove already online.
Recently posts by Lim include: The Changeling by Joy Williams, The Easy Chain by Evan Dara, Main Brides by Gail Scott, Liquidation by Irme Kirtesz, Marsupial by Derek White, and months and months more. A quick fix for your ‘what next’ troubles, for sure, and some great musings for books you might have already read.
And if you haven’t yet already, Lim’s own Fog and Car should be right at the top of your list. Here’s my prior post on that novel. Do a buy.
Matt Bell Interviews JW Wang of Juked
Matt Bell, who has a solid presence online and often points up cool things around the place, has an interview up with Juked founder JW Wang. It’s a pretty extensive interview and I haven’t yet read all of it, but I’ve learned a few things already, such as the fact that Juked started out as just an idea scribbled out on a napkin.
Other things that first began as something scribbled on a napkin? The Dick Rutan Voyager. The seat-belt adjuster for short people. Southwest Airlines. Etc.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview. JW Wang says:
When we started it wasn’t meant to be anything more than a hobby. I just figured I’d get a bunch of fun people together and we’d write for each other. So we started with a bunch of real-life friends, people who were spending a lot of time online and whom I thought were interesting and had fun things to say. Four of them went to my high school; a couple were friends of these friends. Very creative people. One of them works with film, now, one works for American Idol(haha), one wrote TV episodes for Dawson’s Creek and The Guardian. One’s a doctor, I think, one a university admin of some kind, a couple of them are designers (web, graphic). And then there’s me; I went from marketing to writing. No, my parents are still not happy with the decision.
Oh, here’s a little trivia: one of the people originally involved in that student start-up left the company and formed Rotten Tomatoes. Now he’s sitting on an island somewhere, under palm fronds, sipping mai tais.
Enjoy.
Uncategorized / 5 Comments
December 14th, 2008 / 5:06 pm
December 14th, 2008 / 5:06 pm
Tony O’Neill is a Writer I’d Like to Fuck
Sometimes, when I read a man’s book, it makes me have sexual fantasies about him. Now, Bukowski had full-on groupies, as did Mailer and -well, countless others — so I know I am not alone with these feelings. The most recent man who inspired “I want to fuck you” in me, was Tony O’Neill. Tony O’Neill has written two novels, Digging The Vein, which I mentioned in my Contemporary Press post, and the recently released, Down And Out On Murder Mile. Digging the Vein is about being a junkie in Los Angeles and Down and Out On Murder Mile is about being a junkie in London. Both books are extremely unsentimental accounts of Tony’s love affair with smack and love moments with cocaine. They are terrific reads. He also has poetry scattered throughout the internet that I like and has published a book of them with Social Disease Books. He just has this wonderful no bullshit quality to his writing that makes me think I’d like to get drunk with him and then fuck.
i really super-like MARTIN HEIDEGGER a lot
the book BEING AND TIME (SEIN UND ZEIT) is the most important book i have read. i feel confident saying that because i have thought “this is the most important book i have read” numerous times in the past and it keeps happening. i am pleased even when i just pass by the book in my room, and look at it. it is the only book of philosophy, along with the TRACTATUS, that i felt an immediate change in my life, not just like, “i am somewhat impressed by this” but a condition in which i keep thinking about the application of the book to basically everything that happens to me. when i think about the chapter that discusses something called the THEY-SELF, i feel terrified. sometimes i just look at the name MARTIN HEIDEGGER and start singing the theme song from MARTIN (the television show with MARTIN LAWRENCE), but i picture MARTIN HEIDEGGER walking into a room with a laughing audience.
Dan Wickett Previews 2009
I used to think Dan Wickett was an auto mechanic. I think I thought that for several months when I first heard about the Emerging Writers Network.
Anyhow, here’s his massive preview of 2009:
I know, I know. 2009? What about reviewing a few more 2008 titles? I hear you and, at least in my own mind, have that all under control. You’ll see more of those soon, as well as varying lists of my favorite books, novels, story collections, poetry collections, non-fiction titles – well, you know the deal.
In the mean time, I’ve been looking at catalogs and getting emails from authors and am already a little terrified that there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to read every title published in 2009 that I already know I want to read. One interesting thing to note – some of these were submitted to Dzanc Books and, well, since I’m not going to include the Dzanc titles publishing in 2009 in this post, obviously were not accepted by Dzanc Books. However, it is absolutely possible to find yourself both receiving a no thank you note from myself in regards to your book, and then finding out I am anxiously looking forward to it when published elsewhere.
You can see the entire list here: What Books I’m Looking Forward to in 2009.
I like Rick Moody a lot, wanna fight?
Rick Moody, along with David Foster Wallace, was one of the big reasons I started writing fiction. The first book of his that I read was ‘Purple America.’ The opening pages of ‘Purple America’ are a man describing his mother’s failing body and the methods he employs to care for it in mostly one long run on sentence, post-Ginsberg ‘Kaddish’ style, and it is among the most beautiful openings of a book I can remember. This is an excerpt of the sentence:
“whosoever slips his mother’s panties up her legs and checks the dainty hairless passage into her vulva one more time, because he can’t resist the opportunity here for knowledge, whosoever gags briefly at his own forwardness, whosoever straps his mother’s bra onto her, though the value of a bra for her is negligible, whosoever slips a housedress over her head, getting first one arm and then the other tangled in the neck hole,”
etc etc. I realize more and more looking back how much I learned from Moody’s poetic listmaking devices and explorative thinking set in prose in the same way that I learned from DFW, but differently. Moody is a different beast, more florid in a certain way and more in a poetic mode, but the way he constructs these monsters of increasing awareness and tenor, I don’t know, they definitely have been important to me.