The Grateful Dead…
Donna Jean & Jerry onstage at the Winterland Ballroom
…are on the top of the New York Times website right now. It makes me love life. Ben Ratliff provides a concise introduction to GD/taper culture and engages in the fine art of arguing about what the best Dead show/tour/era of all time is/was. The hook for all this is that the surviving band (now known simply as The Dead) is touring again, and Grateful Dead Productions has just released To Terrapin: Hartford ’77 (which I am listening to right now- there’s a 19 minute version of “Sugaree!” On disc ONE!!). 5/28/77 is a fascinating choice because it was a mere 20 days after 5/8/77 at Cornell, a show which is historically regarded by most hardcore fans as THE BEST Grateful Dead show and which has never seen an official release. (Personally, I think there’s a good argument to be made for 12/31/78, The Closing of Winterland, which is where the photo above was taken.)
Deadheads have often been polled about their favorite show, through fanzines and Web sites. The answers have stayed fairly consistent. May 8, 1977, at Barton Hall, Cornell University. The pairing of Feb. 13 and 14, 1970, at the Fillmore East in New York — perhaps the first widely traded shows. The Veneta and Binghamton shows. You’d think the canon would have been displaced as more and more information came along, but it hasn’t, really; it has only widened. I have spoken to young Deadheads who, surprisingly, respect the ancient judgments. “I’ll stick with May 8 because of its historical importance,” said Yona Koch-Feinberg, an 18-year-old from Manhattan. “That’s almost as important as the musical ability of the evening.”
The article is accompanied by a gallery of user-contributed photos from all eras of the band’s career. Awesome awesome. But, uh, books? Books. Yes, right. Okay. Well, my favorite book about The Grateful Dead is Carol Brightman’s Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure. I also really enjoyed Phil Lesh’s autobiography, Searching for the Sound. And of course, you need a copy of David Dodd’s Complete Annotated Grateful Dead lyrics, which overlaps quite a bit with but is not to be mistaken for or in any way replace Robert Hunter’s A Box of Rain: Collected Lyrics 1965-1993.
Shya Scanlon and elimae want you!
From the elimae announcements page:
Shya Scanlon is organizing a marathon reading of elimae contributors in NYC. Each reader will perform one or two short pieces, totaling no more than 3 minutes. If you live in the area and would like to participate, contact him at shya(dot)scanlon (at)gmail(dot)com.
Shya, a buddy of mine and a buddy to literature, is a nearly absolute good. Elimae is an absolute good. Be a part of this.
Do it.
FROM SHYA:
“No bios, no introductions, just a continual series of readers reading really brief pieces. It’s going to be like streaming elimae content, live and in the flesh.”
***
Unrelated announcement:
I would like to revive the long-suppressed* Giant Blind Items feature. This is the definition of a “blind item.”
You can send blind items to giantblinditems at gmail dot com.
* suppressed by me because I think it is a really, really bad idea.
‘A story about reluctant vikings’
Wells Tower reads “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” for The Guardian Books Podcast thingy they have going on at their thing.
(via Anthony Luebbert’s twitter thingy)
Good Friday, Femme Friday
Action Yes is open & eating
From Action Yes editors:
For the rest of the month of April, Action,Yes is open to submissions. So please send your art, sounds, words and ideas to submissions@actionyes.org. Include the word ‘Submission’ in the subject line.
This is our first open submissions period. We apologize to those of you who’ve sent us work in the past who we’ve not been able to respond too. It doesn’t mean we weren’t impressed with your work; it just means that we didn’t know how pick through the prodigious spam of our (old) inboxes to find it. So please send again.
Looking forward to seeing your work.
Meanwhile, if you have not yet dug into the new issue, holy shit. Probably one of my favorite all-time issues of a magazine, only or no. Too much good from 2x the freaks, including Dodie Bellamy, Lily Hoang, Angela Genusa, Elizabeth Ellen, Aaron Kunin, Lara Glenum, FLUXCONCERT, Matt Kirkpatrick, Rauan Klassnik, Mark Leidner, Sabrina Oren Mark, Christian Peet, Evan Willner, Girjia Tropp, a whole lot of other madness.
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April 10th, 2009 / 12:09 pm
April 10th, 2009 / 12:09 pm
Somali pirates can’t hold the jock of space pirates
Back in ’93, a younger, debatably handsomer Drew Toal used to, before school, watch a pair of largely forgotten cartoons—Conan the Adventurer, as well as the poorly animated, yet colon-cleansingly awesome space drama, Exosquad. The latter, in particular, was—in the parlance of our times, “the tits.” It’s set in the future, as all worthwhile stories are, and chronicles the goings on of a group of soldiers in the Exofleet, as they battle the evil space pirates of Jonas Simbacca, and later join forces with him to fight a greater foe, the Neosapian menace (Perhaps one day we will have to strike an uneasy alliance with the Somali buccaneers against a resurgent Mongolian military? Time will tell). Now, the animation looks like it was done by a not-particularly-gifted two year old (creater Will Meugniot also made this terrible DragonLance cartoon adaptation awhile back), and the show was canceled before the story could be totally resolved, but man, what a story. So, yeah, I’ve been waiting patiently for about a decade for this business to come to DVD, and on April 14, my long wait appears to be at an end. Stop laughing at me.
Adam Peterson’s Untimely Death
Adam Peterson, coeditor of The Cupboard and author of My Untimely Death, visited Houston today. He flew into Houston this morning. He walked into my office around, like, 1:30pm or something. We talked about stuff. Then I went to teach my intro lit class, and he checked into his hotel room. Then we met up again after my class and drove to The Menil to look at art. Then we met Gene Morgan for burgers. Then we drove with Gene Morgan to Poison Girl for a few drinks and met up with Brian Rod of The Joanna Gallery. Then I drove Gene Morgan home, and then I dropped Adam Peterson off at his hotel, and I drove myself home.
This is a quick review of Adam Peterson’s chapbook My Untimely Death from Subito Press. Thank you for reading this post.
Adam Peterson’s My Untimely Death is a small, perfect-bound chapbook of 43 pages. The cover design is minimal, simple, and exciting: a block of something (lead?) crashes downward across the front page, smoke and fire billowing behind it, to strike Adam Peterson on the face, if he were standing just off the page.
The fifteen texts in the chapbook tell of various ways that the narrator has arrived at an untimely death: death by block of lead falling from the sky, death by long fall, death by bubble bath, death by malfunction, death by roo-roo.
Death by ex-lovers.
10 Comments
April 10th, 2009 / 2:02 am
April 10th, 2009 / 2:02 am
One Story Introduces Introductions
I just got this in the email like a second ago. So it’s just a press release, but I figure who wouldn’t want to know about this? Goons, is who. So all you non-goons, read on:
One Story would like to take a moment to announce the publication of our next issue, “Hurt People.” This story is by Cote Smith, a previously unpublished author.
At One Story, we are committed to discovering new talent and showcasing original voices. For this reason, One Story will never publish an author more than once. We are proud to say that 10% of our writers are published for the first time in our pages.
This issue marks the launch of our “Introducing New Writers” series. “Hurt People” will arrive in a custom envelope, marking it as a fiction debut and inviting subscribers to congratulate the author on our blog.
We will host a reading in Lawrence, Kansas–where Cote Smith is finishing his MFA in fiction writing–in May. As part of this series, we will be hosting hometown readings for writers who publish for the first time in One Story in 2009. This is made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
We hope you enjoy “Hurt People” and the introduction of a bright new literary voice.
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April 9th, 2009 / 5:20 pm
April 9th, 2009 / 5:20 pm
Power Quote from Annie Proulx
Interviewer: You were in your forties when you wrote the first of the stories from Heart Songs. Do you think you had a late start when it comes to writing fiction?
Proulx: Well, I did yeah. But so what? Why should it bother anybody when somebody starts to write?
Interviewer: It’s fewer years writing the stories that you seem to enjoy writing.
Proulx: Oh, yeah, I suppose, but that’s OK too. The world is spared lots of crap.
Cover to Cover: NOON, Part 2
(Did you miss Part 1?) Yesterday I taught Ernest Hemingway’s very short story “A Very Short Story” to my English 101 class. It was a pretty successful venture, I think. After teaching the story twice in as many hours, I got on the 4:26 New Brunswick->Penn Station train, and read “Pet” by Deb Olin Unferth.
There may not be quite a PhD dissertation to be written on similarities between Hemingway’s and Unferth’s work, but all the same, I found myself dwelling on how my two tours through “A Very Short Story” seemed to have primed me for “Pet,” which I heard Unferth read once but hadn’t yet myself read on the page.
20 Comments
April 9th, 2009 / 11:54 am
April 9th, 2009 / 11:54 am