Mean Thursday: #VALUE!
I don’t know if you’ve read about this anywhere, but via Galleycat a few weeks ago I clicked on a link to a downloadable story written in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s author, David Nygren, wrote a story and typed its various parts into columns.
Reactions on the internet have been, um, confusingly positive, based on my lazy web browsing. 10,000 people have downloaded the story. The comments section at his blog is full of praise. Other blogs and sites link to it. Even a blogger for The New Yorker picked it up, though she was deadpan in her post:
A writer has “built” a short story using an Excel spreadsheet divided into three columns: one for action, one for dialogue, and one for internal monologue.
I wonder how tempted she was to put those quotation marks around writer.
Sorry, David. I’m just teasin’ ya!
A Celebration of the Chapbook at the CUNY Grad Center in late April
For Immediate Release
We are excited to announce a wonderful event upcoming on April 23-25 in New York: A Celebration of the Chapbook, a three-day festival featuring panels, workshops and a bookfair. For a full schedule of events, visit http://centerforthehumanitiesgc.org/festival .
This festival celebrates the chapbook and highlights its rich history, as well as its essential place in poetry publishing today, as a vehicle for alternative poetry projects and for emerging authors and editors to gain entry into the literary marketplace. The festival hopes to forge a new platform for the study of the chapbook inside and outside the academy.
We invite you to visit the fair and attend the panels and workshops, all of which are free of charge. Please note that the workshops require registration, and will fill up fast, so reserve your seat now. Visit http://centerforthehumanitiesgc.org/festival for instructions on how to register.
NEW ISSUE OF DOGZPLOT MEANS READING EYEBALL SEEING HAVE GOOD FUN
there is a new issue of DOGZPLOT up. ELIZABETH ELLEN, BRAD GREEN, JA TYLER (he is now JA, not J.A., as in “jah” as in “jah calling”), VERLESS DORAN, HANNAH PASS, BRIAN ALLEN CARR, NATE TYREE and other people (i just lost the will to continue to copy and paste the names).
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April 8th, 2009 / 10:06 pm
April 8th, 2009 / 10:06 pm
The New Paris Review
- This is not Philip Gourevitch.
I bought the new Paris Revivew today. In it is a piece of fiction from the Paris Review’s editor, Philip Gourevitch. He is known primarily as a non-fiction writer, and a brilliant one at that. His book about the Rwandan genocide, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, is truly great and I read it alongside Hannah Arendt, a great biography of Pol Pot called Brother Number One as well as some other hardcore stuff on genocide and it completely held up to the company. But fiction? This is new to me. Also, it isn’t unheard of, but I do think it is rare, for The Paris Review to publish thier editors’ fiction, so I think this is a real treat. Here’s the first graph of the story called “Enough”:
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April 8th, 2009 / 2:27 pm
April 8th, 2009 / 2:27 pm
WHAT IS A SCENE?
people use the word scene for many things. like, music scene, there’s probably a rollerblading scene, and maybe a cooking scene. what is a scene and how does it apply to internet literature? and is blake butler racist?
HTMLGIANT Wants to Know (a contest):
Greetings dear readers of important literature,
I am trying to clean up my dirty frathouse look so that people can take me seriously.
What should I do with these hairs that are coming up out of my shirt?
Like, they aren’t quite chest hairs and they aren’t quite neck hairs? So do I shave them? Or clip them? Or pluck them? Something else? Another thing?
Turtlenecks are not an option, because I live in Houston, Texas, and summer is coming soon.
I am really serious about being taken seriously here. I need to be taken seriously so that I can one day get a job in the real world and make money for my family, because I’m going to have a family one day, and probably a mortgage :( so yeah.
So any grooming tips are welcome and encouraged. If you want, post in the comments section those grooming tips. Person who submits best grooming tip (funniest? most succesful? creativest? meanest? i dont konw) will receive a really old copy of Barry Yourgrau’s Wearing Dad’s Head and maybe some hair clippings or something. So be sure to include a real email so I can email you.
Okay, bye, thank you!
Now I’m going to go make a resume.
***UPDATE***
Wearing Dad’s Head goes to Joe Young, because he made me remember how much I loved watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as a kid. Thanks, Joe, for the memories.
Birkensnake!!!
Birkensnake, a primarily print journal out of Providence, has just released the contents of their now mostly sold out first issue to the WWW. Which means you can read new words by David Ohle, Joanna Howard, Tina Connolly, Matthew Pendelton, Sam Roberts, Aaaron Kovalchik, and Elizabeth Hall, which were previously only available in paper.
A little birdie also told me included in the full PDF version of the magazine is an introduction by one Bjorn Verenson, which might just be a close name alteration of one Brian Evenson.
Check it out! They are also currently looking for new work for the upcoming second issue.
I might mention here that both editors Joanna Ruocco and Brian Conn have their debut books coming out this year or next. Joanna’s ‘The Mothering Coven’ has been announced as one of the two next titles from the amazing Ellipsis Press (along with the equally amazing Norman Lock) for fall, and Brian will release his debut novel ‘The Fixed Stars’ in Spring 2010 with FC2! Talk about power. Massive wonder.
Now then, in the spirit of fun, let’s see this thread get as many comments based on the brilliant content of the Birkensnake issue as the silly riot-inducer on Toni a few below this. No? Ya’ll just love the drama, I swear. But this is where it’s at.
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April 8th, 2009 / 12:19 pm
April 8th, 2009 / 12:19 pm
Vicarious MFA: Extracurricular Activities
Can we handle it?
Last year I took a class from the illustrious Leslie Sharpe titled “Can The Truth Be Told?” Since then I’ve been thinking a lot about truth in creative writing. What is truth if it’s not fact? When does fact get in the way or truth and truth in the way of fact? Can creativity get along with factuality? What is emotional truth (other than a bomb shelter for the fake memoirists) and does it have a use in the “real” memoir. Can we even consider our memories as forms of truth?
As the panels editor for Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art I get a chance to wrangle together some people who are a lot smarter than me and ask them to think about these things and then have a public discussion about it. (Our very own Justin Taylor moderated the one we organized in the fall on Literary Dichotomies which featured Heidi Julavits, Nathaniel Rich, Shelley Jackson and Mark Grief.)
The spring panel is titled True Stories and it will take place on Friday April 17 at Housing Works Bookstore. It starts at 7 pm. Brenda Wineapple will be moderating and the panel will feature David Shields, Rachel Zucker and David Ebershoff. Bios after the jump… READ MORE >
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April 8th, 2009 / 12:12 pm
April 8th, 2009 / 12:12 pm
Power Quote: Harold Bloom Names Names Edition (with special “I don’t know how to control myself” bonus feature)
If you think of the major American writers, you are likely to remember Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, Cather, Dreiser, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald among the novelists. Nathaneal West, Ralph Ellison, Thomas Pynchon, Flannery O’Connor, and Philip Roth would be among those I would add. The poets who matter most begin with Whitman and Dickinson and include Frost, Stevens, Moore, Eliot, Crane, and perhaps Pound and William Carlos Williams. Of more recent figures I would list Robert Penn Warren, Theorodre Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, James Merrill, John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, May Swenson. The dramatists are less illustrious: Eugene O’Neill now makes for unsatisfactory reading, and perhaps only Tennessee Williams will gain by the passage of time. Our major essayists remain Emerson and Thoreau; no one has matched them since. Poe is too universally accepted around the world to be excluded, though his writing is almost invariably atrocious.
–“Walt Whiman as Center of the American Canon,” The Western Canon
I’ve been trying to figure this out all day…
Is there an Asian equivalent of Toni Morrison?
I really can’t think of any.
All I know is they made us read ‘Beloved’ in 10th grade. I did a real good job pretending I got past page 8. Our teacher was very pale and was trying very hard to grow a Stalin beard. He looked like winter.
There is the rumor that Toni Morrison is actually an elderly Indian man.
Could Toni Morrison also be A.M. Homes?
There’s a lot of noise today, and every record I’ve downloaded sucks.
Bye.