Blogger of the Weekend Award
Leigh Stein posted some hysterically great stuff this weekend, and so I am giving her the “First Semi-Annual HTMLgiant Blogger of the Weekend Award.”
Check out this video of a sock puppet reciting a poem of hers, and also this excerpt from a Will Eno play. Additionally, all the posts she puts up about the kids in her musical theater class are awesome, so put her on your Google Reader. Enjoy.
$5 For You!
So, I’ve got here in my wallet a gift card to Powell’s Books, a gift card that I did not realize I had. It has $5 dollars on it. I would like to mail it to someone as a giveaway, but that someone has to earn it. Basically, what I’m interested in hearing is a story about someone’s experience at a bookstore, any bookstore, good or bad experience, and so on. I will judge what story I like the best and then get that person’s mailing address somehow. I will announce whose story I liked on Wednesday morning, and then whoever told that story will be the winner, if that makes sense.
Okay, my lame story is this: I first went to Powell’s a few years ago while I was at the Tin House conference. A bunch of us took the bus into town, missed our stop, and then had to walk a lot of blocks back over some bridge to the store. In Powell’s, I felt overwhelmed. The shelves were very very tall. I could not reach certain shelves. I walked back and forth through the shelves and gawked at the amount of books that were on the shelves. I am someone who is only familiar with Barnes & Nobles, so yeah. Then, maybe about ten minutes before we were to leave, I found the ‘independent’ shelves. These shelves were on a back wall and next to them I found the ‘literary journals.’ On the literary journal shelves I found the 2005 and 2006 issues of NOON and Pindeldyboz #3. I bought the two issues of NOON but left the Pboz. I regret that decision. I think about it all the time. I regret it. I should have bought all three. Somewhere out there is a Pboz #3 that I did not purchase. I suppose I could go to the website and order one of the five issues that are left, but I sometimes think I’d rather just whine about the whole thing instead.
Anyhow, post your bookstore stories in the comments section, if you’d like. Or, if you want, you may email them to our HTMLGIANT email address.
EVER: A Review
The narrative constraints of Ever – presumably a woman inside a room; that’s it – is a precarious way to write a novella. Without characters, plot arcs, locations, etc., language itself is summoned as a surrogate protagonist. The writer – thus reader – are both stripped of the typical arsenal of fiction; what is left is simply language’s ability to summon or evoke the most intrinsic visceral ‘truths’ of being alive, a collection of nerves funneled into a consciousness.
And that is, at heart, what Blake Butler’s Ever is about, a kind of timeless consciousness that is, remarkably and/or ironically, very relevant to a particular time: now – dispersed with cryptic evocations of some post-apocalyptic world, as in “[…] not that we knew the moon here anymore […]” Notice that Butler chooses the word ‘knew’ instead of the more likely ‘saw’ or ‘had.’ This suggests either a cognizant or intuitive decision to focus more on perception than facts.
What to Wear During an Orange Alert?
One of my long-time favorite media-blogs Orange Alert has just relaunched with a new full on website, which makes me happy in the way of reading pleasure.
Orange Alert is unique in that they focus heavily not only on independent lit (with a weekley ‘Reader Meet Author’ feature that focuses specifically on small press peeps, including Giant folks like Sam Pink, Conor Madigan, Amelia Gray, Brandon Gorrell, and tons more), as well as weekly features on independent musicians, artists, and everything else all in one place. It’s a wonderful daily mishmash of new media, and in particular their ‘Watch List’ of things reading, watching, wanting, etc., is a good way to keep up with their favorite stories from online journals and new releases from small presses. It’s one of the things I look forward to reading each week.
“The Heart Is Deceitful” Perfume
Smell like a male teenage prostitute!
I own this perfume. I bought it back when J.T. Leroy was in Vanity Fair Magazine, singing in a band, and havng the likes of Tom Waits gush praises all over his ass. Now, I bought the perfume because the fact that there was a perfume cracked me up to no end. Also, I have a lot of perfume. And face creams. And so forth. I did read the infamous story collection and I read the whole thing. And to be frank, I didn’t think it was so great. I thought it felt contrived, but I didn’t hate it. I remember reading this one short story in Zoetrope by Mr. J.T. and laughing and I wasn’t supposed to laugh. I was supposed to go “Oh, man, that is deep and painful.” I thought today I would check to see if this perfume still existed. It does. Now, we all know the J.T. LeRoy scandal has been beaten to death with a million sticks, but did you know there was a perfume made in honor of Yosh’s “friend”, J.T. Leroy? No, you did not. You learned something today! And it relates to the history of literature! Any other perfumes of products named after books? Le’ts hear it.
Power Quote: Gordon Lish
God, the only thing to do is to have a good laugh at the joke. Ha ha ha. You hear me laughing at the joke? I am laughing at the joke. Ha ha ha. I am having a good laugh at it. Ha ha ha. “This is me.” “This is you.” Ha ha ha.
–Zimzum
Barry, Jereme and pr at the AWP: An Htmlgiant Original
"I love you, Jereme."
The day of trolling tables and tables in a convention center is over. It was fun, but now the real fun begins. We started drinking at dinner. Now, it is late. Like, two in the morning. We are all in a suite, in Blake Butler’s suite. Blake has a suite because he is famous. The light is dim and yellowish. Sounds of delicate laughter and glasses tinkling with booze abound. I am sitting on a couch, the windows behind me, but I can feel Chicago glittering below. Jereme is next to me. Sitting there on the couch, next to each other, it no longer matters that I have an Amazonian, East German discus thrower vibe to me, because when I am sitting, it hides that aspect of me (as opposed to standing). Being next to Jereme is like being next to warmth. Being next to Jereme is like wanting to hold a baby bird in my hands and I’m afraid I won’t do it right, because it is so delicate. But I want to, I want to do it right, I feel I’ve never wanted anything so badly in all my life. I also am afraid he might get angry at me and that would crush me. But everything is good. He is not angry. He has beautiful eyes. We are nicely drunk, not yet shit-faced and I haven’t blacked out yet. My right shoulder is touching Jereme’s left shoulder. I can smell him. He smells like cigars and whiskey and a man’s warmed skin. I have all this love flowing from me, from my chest, from where my heart is, toward Jereme. He lets me touch his beard. It is soft, the way longish beards are, not scratchy. It is thick and comforting. I stroke it with my hand. Then I lean in, and rub my cheek on his beard. This is what I am doing when Barry walks up to us, towering above us, interrupting our soft, kind moment.
“pr.”
“Yes?”
“That’s enough.”
Brian Evenson’s LAST DAYS: a long review
I can still remember with odd clarity the first time I read the words of Brian Evenson: I ordered ‘The Din of Celestial Birds’ after running into it somewhere on the internet in my earliest explorations of independent lit, and as I can’t remember fully how I found the book, I must more imagine it found me. Almost as vividly as I remember reading each of the series of progressively insidious and truly haunting stories, I equally remember the aura of the book as object, the way I sat it on my bed in weird light and stared at the psychedelic cover full of stories that I still have not found a way to shake, staring at it as if at any moment it might come alive, much in the same way that as a child I stared for hours at the cover to my first dungeon master’s guide, full of incantation and instruction, or the reams of comic books that for years lived in my blood.
Uncategorized / 29 Comments
February 6th, 2009 / 1:19 am
February 6th, 2009 / 1:19 am
Lily Hoang’s CHANGING
In the third fantastic release from the already massive-powered Fairy Tale Review Press (whose first two releases, PILOT by Johannes Goransson and THE CHANGELING by Joy Williams are both brain eating monsters of true glee), the brand new and clean white book object CHANGING by Lily Hoang has now hit and awaits your head.
At once a fairy tale, a fortune, and a translation told through the I Ching, Vietnamese-American author Lily Hoang’s CHANGING is a ghostly and miniature novel. Both mysterious and lucid at once, the book follows Little Girl down a century-old path into her family’s story. Changing is Little Girl’s fate, and in CHANGING she finds an unsettling, beautiful home. Like a topsy-turvy horoscope writer, Hoang weaves a modern novella into the classical form of the I Ching. In glassine sentences, fragmented and new, Jack and Jill fall down the hill over and over again in intricate and ancient patterns. Here is a wonder story for 21st century America. Here is a calligraphic patchwork of sadness.
“This is an impossible thing, a dream object”–Joyelle McSweeney, author of FLET.
That the book is based on the I-Ching plays no small part in the making of the book’s power: consisting of a series of form-shaped prose sections that mimic the structure of the holy book, CHANGING begins to take on this weird, recursive power. Lily Hoang has a way of roping the big mythic energy of tableau and mysticism down out of the nowhere and branding it with her own peculiarities of everyday upbringing. The result is kind of a maze of hypnotic language and cultural mishmash, which truly operates in resonance unlike any other book I can remember.