The Storymatic
Writing is easy!
Writer & Marlboro writing professor Brian Mooney just launched this website where you can buy (or just learn about) his writing aid/ game/ teaching aid/ toy The Storymatic. Here’s how it works:
“The Storymatic consists of 250 ivory cards and 250 silver cards. Each ivory card contains a character trait or occupation. Each silver card contains a situation or object. Wild Cards contain instructions about where and when your story takes place, and how it must be told.
“…First, draw two ivory cards. Then combine the information on these two cards to create your main character. For example, if you draw “surgeon” and “amateur boxer,” your character is a surgeon who is also a boxer.
“Next, draw one or two silver cards. Let the information on the cards lead you into a story. If, for example, your cards say “box of teeth” and “pair of pants that don’t fit right,” then perhaps after a night in the ring Dr. Boxer always scans the floor of the ring for the teeth of his opponents, but maybe Dr. Boxer has put on some extra weight due to his long days at the hospital, causing him to slow down in the ring, and then…”
PETER CAVANAUGH IS A QUIET PERSON AND HE EDITS THE JOURNAL “TULIP”
this is peter staring at a 40 oz of king cobra across the room
peter cavanaugh edits TULIP, a journal recently retuning to print. i emailed him some questions and he told me that on wednesday he was planning on blacking out so he’d answer them then. here they are.
Duotrope Joins the Marketplace
Duotrope’s Digest has made a few changes. In addition to what the webmasters call a ‘fresh coat of paint’ for the site, Duotrope has opened an online store with Zazzle to sell a variety of writer-related things.
Here are a few pictures of what they’re selling.
(after the jump):
Haut or Not: An Assortment
David Hodges
Heller, Kafka, Orwell, Vonnegut — welcome to class kids. This semester Mr. Hodges will be teaching us how horrible society is and how to maintain a negative attitude. Then we’re gonna read A Confederacy of Dunces and all kill ourselves in hopes of also being posthumously published. And don’t forget, you can use Tom Wolfe’s book as an ottoman. Lastly, we’ll finish off with a biography of Clarence Thomas, cuz there’s nothing that says justice more than a pube on a can of Pepsi.
Rating: not.
Vicarious MFA: Jonathan Safran Foer & David Markson
The Vicarious MFA
Last Friday Jonathan Safran-Foer came to do a guest lecture titled “Intersections.” It was clear that he put a lot of work and thought into the lecture and I feel like I will do it a disservice by trying to describe his overall “point,” but I will say that he showed us this short video of a completely insane intersection in Hanoi. Please click on that. It is ridiculous. He also mentioned that one of the buildings on Columbia’s campus (one that is right by the Writing Department) used to be a part of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. He also mentioned Hiroshi Sugimoto, a photographer who Jonathan Safran-Foer wrote a fan letter to when he was in college and whom he later got to collaborate with on a project called “Joe.”
There was a point to Safran-Foer’s guest lecture and I felt smarter and more calm when I left, but I can’t quite say why. From what I have gathered in the past 3.5 semesters in an MFA program, this is what it feels like: I have learned something; I feel different/better; I can’t explain why/what happened. READ MORE >
MEN: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE WRITERS OF “MEN”
it’s what we all look for on the internet: MEN. every day, i open the internet browser and search for men. i don’t always like what i find, but i did like this. it’s a new chapbook from those boys from manchester, socrates adams florou, crispin best and spiros florou. here is the first paragraph, with an interview after the break:
I want to scare children all the time.
When I walk past a school, I press my
face through the railings and stand there,
looking at the children. I wait for them to
be afraid. The children are in their school’s
playground. They feel safe. They are
having fun. I press my face through and
stand there and look at the children.
Happy Cobra Books
Our own Matthew Simmons’ Happy Cobra Books has just released their new website, featuring Matthew Savoca’s e-book TOUGH!!! with his poems accompanied by illustrations by Tao Lin, Greg Lytle, Mike Bushnell, Tracy Brannstrom, Gene Morgan, Chelsea Martin, among many others.
Editor’s note:
TOUGH! is a book of brief pieces, haiku of the apotheosis of rural American maledom. Very funny. Wonderful illustrations, too.
Downloadable pdfs featuring Chelsea Martin, Catherine Lacey, Ellen Kennedy, Justin Dobbs and Blake Butler coming soon.
Uncategorized / 13 Comments
March 11th, 2009 / 1:12 pm
March 11th, 2009 / 1:12 pm
This Post Should Be Meaner: Authors BookShop
One time I asked this musician named Joe Nolan — who is cool, who is awesome, who knows what he’s doing, here’s a song — how come he didn’t hook up with some indie label, and he said an indie label was just a kid with a book of stamps.
You can self-publish your fuckin’ CD, but not your stupid book.
To see what the people who self-publish their books are doing, check out the Authors BookShop.
Especially check out the list of publishers — how many do you recognize? For me, not a lot (though there a good few, for sure). I did a few clicks and it seems like many of these are them least-fancy self-publishing services. Oh man, they’re lousy.
But the Authors BookShop is okay. ABS is providing a necessary service at a far better deal than Amazon. It has a bad name and most of the publishers who use the service are, to put it nicely, different than what most HTML Giant readers care about — but Brad Grochowski (President, Founder and author of The Secret Weakness of Dragons) is doing something that should be done, can be done, and — he’s opened it up to everyone.
Here’s why Grochowski started the thing: READ MORE >
Anthropology Lessons from Metal Magazines: A Variation in a Series
This Guy is Metal, but not from Wino.
Perusing Metal Maniacs, I happened upon the band Wino’s new release, Punctuated Equilibrium (check them out on myspace)! My minor in college was in anthropology and it really should have been my major, but I was too lazy and cheap to go back and take all the pre-requisite stuff. In my evolutionary theory class, punctuated equilibrium was well discussed. Stephen Jay Gould and the lesser known Niles Eldredge (good link to Gould’s work here), beyond coining the phrase, developed largely the most radical variation on Darwin’s theory of natural selection and specifically, the idea of gradualism (although since then, I think other stuff has come about in the field. I was in college, um, 20 years ago). I read so many xeroxed papers that Gould wrote in obscure academic anthropology journals! He was supposed to come speak once to our class- he didn’t, though. I thought he was rad. And I think Wino is rad. Here’s a brief description of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, taken from Wikipedia, but it explains the theory well enough: READ MORE >