PIFFLE and WRITER’S BLOC
ani smith emailed me when i offered to do interviews. i conducted an interview with her and her team of writers, vaughan simons and ty bluesmith, that comprise PIFFLE and WRITER”S BLOC.
(INTERVIEW AFTER BREAK ( power rangers are mentioned))
Power Quote: Barry Hannah
“The only thing that keeps me going on my mission is the sacred inalienable right of the Confederacy to be the Confederacy, Christ Our Lord, and the memory of your hot hairy jumping nexus when I return.”
– “Knowing He Was Not My Kind Yet I Followed,” in Airships
Haut or Not: A couplet
Alicia Gifford
Folks, here’s sneak (albeit pixelated) look at what the fiction editor of Night Train reads. Tempted as I was to ask her to resend a higher resolution pic, I thought about the ‘visual vocabulary of spines,’ how we’ve come to recognize a book by its design — how the spine often acts as an abbreviated version of the cover, in terms of color, fonts, etc. The title’s legibility is often not as important as the spine’s thematic composition. Yes, you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can judge how sauve the publisher is; and the publisher hires the editor that judges the book — so in the end it’s related. Matthew Simmons, who works at a bookstore, has a knack for pointing out books. So, what do you see?
Bradley Sands’ Reading Notes
not bradley sands
Bradley Sands recently found notes he had written about a book on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. He has retyped these notes into a blog post. I am linking to them here because I thought his notes were funny.
My favorite note:
First quest for round table knights – happens during Arthur’s wedding feast. Deer runs in, followed by hunting dog and hounds. Dog knocks over knight. Knight grabs dog and rides away. Damsel shows up, says it’s her dog and she wants it back. Unfamiliar knight rides up and kidnaps her. Arthur assigns three knights to each find the deer, dog and knight, and damsel. Bring these things together. “This adventure was made for the feast.” I guess Merlin set it up with magic. Gawain and another knight (probably non-round table) fight over deer. I am confused.
Bradley Sands edits Bust Down The Door And Eat All The Chickens. He is in need of a one page story. Visit his blog to submit.
Uncategorized / 2 Comments
March 18th, 2009 / 12:49 am
March 18th, 2009 / 12:49 am
In Ten Senses
Next time you have an hour, go listen to poet (and officially recognized by a Seattle alt-weekly, genius) Heather McHugh deliver a lecture on art called “In Ten Senses: Some Sentences About Art’s Senses and Intents.”
Go out and look for her work, too. Don’t be fooled by McHugh’s obvious affection for the sounds of words and their multiple meanings. She is much more than merely clever. She has a dark, comic sensibility, too, but is not simply a creator of black comedy. McHugh’s got levels to her.
Harper Perennial and Congrats to DearLeader
Fifty-Two Stories with Cal Morgan is a ‘New Delivery Service’ from Harper Perennial intent on publishing a short story a week for an entire year. Of the site, Cal Morgan writes:
This year we’re celebrating the thriving art of the story by sharing a new one every week: most of them new, a few of them classics, from authors you know and some you don’t, each of them treasurable in its language or wit or human insight.
This week, Morgan has posted ‘The Copy Family’ by our own Blake Butler.
About the story, Morgan writes:
Here’s the first story we’ve selected from the wide array of submissions from our readers. Blake Butler writes to say that “The Copy Family” is from a book he’s just completed, not yet published. It reminded me of some of Poe’s comic stories, or of Tom Neely’s graphic novel “The Blot.” Could I describe exactly what it’s about? I’m not sure I could do this odd family story justice. But it will stay with me for a long time.
Click on over to have a read, everyone, and good work, Blake Butler.
Haut or Not: “Worst of” (w/ digression)
What I could see happening has happened: satirical Haut or Not entrees — and from whom other than ‘TTB’ aka ‘Two Tears Boye,’ from Jaguar Uprising Press. (Circa 07-08 TTB and his partner Golden Bear were lamented/admired for their satirical takes on Bear Parade titles.) TTB writes this:
Hi, My name is jimmy chen. I wuz wundering if u could review my current reads bookcase on yur super duper website thingy! THANKS A BUNDLE!! hehe lol.
Empathetic satire or pure derision? I’ll opt for the former. TTB’s jest was followed by no doubt a found picture of some girl’s stack o’ chick books. TTB’s derivative impulses are arguably haut, but this stack of books may be the worst stack of books I’ve ever seen in my life.
“Church and State” (guest posted by Rauan Klassnik)
or “Michael Schiavo’s Negative Review of Matthew Dickman’s All-American Poem” (“The Anti-Whitman or Out of Many, Me, Me, Me: Matthew Dickman’s All American Poem.”)
[A guest post (hopefully the first of many) by Rauan Klassnik -ed.]
Michael Schiavo has written a very passionate and very negative review of Matthew Dickman and his poetry.
In the aftermath of his review Michael Schiavo has stated that he doesn’t “plan on doing negative reviews, especially of this intensity, often. But (he) will do so when necessary. And this was necessary. Big picture.”
Michael has also since written that Dickman’s poetry is not even worthy of being called “shit.”
“To even describe these poems as shit is to assign value to them. Shit is the root of things, rids the body of toxins while building up the natural world that surrounds us. It’s part of nature, part of a process that has meaning and power behind it. It’s disconcerting to hold in your hand something that rightly shouldn’t exist.”
Uncategorized / 45 Comments
March 17th, 2009 / 12:13 pm
March 17th, 2009 / 12:13 pm
Literary Doppelgangers: Douglas Coupland/Norm MacDonald
Levi Asher, over at Literary Kicks, linked to Jimmy Chen’s post on literary doppelgangers, but seemed disappointed by Jimmy’s not having mentioned Douglas Coupland/Norm MacDonald.
Well, Levi, it took me a long time to find a suitable Douglas Coupland picture, so here you go.
I have never read any Douglas Coupland, though I have seen some Norm MacDonald. Men At Work is one of my favorites. Man, when they shoot that guy in the butt with an air rifle. And then they think they killed him. And so they stuff him in a trash can. Hilarious.
Today at Coop’s place: a post about wrecking your couch (also, Bookforum)
So I thought it was long past time we checked in with Dennis Cooper’s blog, and it just so happens that today there’s a guest-post by Steven Trull, who is also something of a somewhat regular reader/commenter on this blog. Trull presents “The Kill Your Couch for No Reason Post.” As you’ll notice when you get over there, the title is preceded by “Steven Trull presents (part one)” which seems to me to suggest that there will be more Trull posts coming, possibly on topics unrelated to couch-killing. But for now: COUCH-KILLING. Click on over and watch the YouTube-culled videos of couches being burnt, run over with a station wagon, and otherwise KILLED.
So that’s all well and good, but else has been going on at Coop’s?
Well yesterday we looked at Notable Male Escorts of the World for March 2009
And the day before that was a Varioso Day (#18), which contains–among other things–an animated adaptation of James Tate’s poem “The Search for Lost Lives.”
And this picture of a Tom Friedman piece:
And a link to this Mary Gaitskill interview in the new Bookforum. It’s a short interview, but a good one, and it contains the possibly news-to-you that MG has a new collection out (it was news to me). So once I had clicked over there I got to browsing, and have the following further Bookforum recommended readings: William T. Vollmann on the ethics of photography, David Gates reviews the new Antonya Nelson, David Haglund reviews Andrew Porter, Mark Sarvas on John Haskell, and Wendy Lesser takes on both the O’Connor bio AND the Library of America Collected O’Connor.