EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#4)
I Like Every Time We Have Sex
“I want to have sex with you.”
“Thank you. I want to have sex with you also.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“When I say I want to have sex with you I mean really.”
“So do I.”
“I mean really, I don’t just say that as a feeling. Do you understand? Did you really mean that you wanted to have sex with me when we were waiting on line at the movie theater before or did you just mean that as a feeling?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry”
AN INTERVIEW WITH AUDREY ALLENDALE FROM MUUMUU HOUSE
this person from muumuu house emailed me today and asked to be interviewed. her name is audrey allendale. here are the answers she gave to my questions:
Booklyfe X, Return of the Booklyfe, Booklyfe Must Die
Really disturbing.
So much internet today. I don’t even know how to start. Let me say, though: There’s too much to here for me to distill & tease with quotes from the individual articles, so please have faith and click through to the pieces. It’s all very good. Let’s jump in:
Over at The Millions, the venerable Garth Risk Hallberg has posted the first installment of a three part series talking about the future of literary journalism, i.e. book coverage, titled Part I: R.I.P., NYT? This is a really smart piece of criticism; it defines ‘the problem’/offers solutions/peers into the future. I look forward to the rest. Plus, it includes shoutouts for The Rumpus and The Quarterly Conversation, two of my favorite sites, so, Word.
And here’s an interview with N Frank Daniels at Dogmatika. Really interesting interview. Daniels originally self-published his first novel, and marketed it creatively, and then was signed a two book deal with Harper Perennial. And I have to say: Dogmatika is housing some of the best author interviews I’ve read. Great job, folks.
More after the jump.
HYO JUNG
hello hyo jung. i want to interview you for this site. this will allow you to say what you want to say. email me. i can’t find your email address. thanks. sampinkisalive@gmail.com
Sample THE FUTURE with Barrelhouse
The editors of Barrelhouse have a PDF sampler online of their latest issue, #7: THE FUTURE. The sampler contains, among other things, Alex Irvine’s “The Truth About Ninjas,” an annotated version of Michael Czyzniejewski’s “The Atheist Reconsiders,” and a remixed version of Blake Butler’s “The Ruined Child,” now called “The Passionate Male Prostitute.”
Here’s one of Czyzniejewski’s notes on the phrase ‘crucifix-bearing alien’:
I also still love the idea that these aliens would be as in love with symbols and trinkets as we are. I just like the notion that they wear normal clothes – in movies and comics, aliens are either dressed like astronauts, all in silver space suits, or they’re naked. Why wouldn’t the clothing industry take off with other intelligent beings? I like the image of an alien wearing a suit, or kicking back in sweat pants and white socks. If God made them and gave them Jesus, why wouldn’t God give them shame? And soon after civilization started wearing clothes, there’d be fashion faux pas. And slobs. I just wish I’d worked in an alien rosary, to throw in the Mary angle as well. This story is part of a new manuscript, my second collection, and to be sure, I will throw an alien rosary somewhere – more than a crucifix, I think a rosary is what really separates Catholics from other faiths. Even thinking alien virgin and alien manger and alien little drummer boy makes me smile.
You have to read the piece, really. So go over to the Barrelhouse website, take a look at the sampler, and then buy the issue.
Czyzniejewski’s first collection can be ordered from Dzanc Books.
Uncategorized / 10 Comments
April 22nd, 2009 / 6:00 pm
April 22nd, 2009 / 6:00 pm
“Glad enough to play a very cliched and overplayed song that you would hate to hear if I wasn’t singing along to it”
- Radio that matters
“I am in the air right now”: A Review
Kathryn Regina’s I am in the air right now (see publisher details page, which includes a brilliant promo clip by the great Greg Lytle) concerns, for me, weightlessness induced by the heavy feelings we carry. This paradox Regina sets up is a great formal device. Through the collection of poems, we come to learn of the narrator and her ‘fall out’ (that’s my pun) with a boy named Pedro while in a hot air balloon.
Giardiasis: Science Writing Can Be Fun
My husband got these little critters in Russia
Ryan is going to Russia. Which made me think of Giardiasis. Some Dutch dude wrote this about the parasite now known as Giardiasis (thanks Wikipedia). I think it is a beautiful description of the inside of certain kinds of shit and a wonderful example of how science writing, as Nabakov, Adrian (not to mention science fiction writers) and many others knew and know, can be great:
Antony van Leeuwenhoek of Delft, Netherlands, described such microorganisms he observed in the stool: “I have sometimes also seen tiny creatures moving very prettily; some of them a bit bigger, others a bit less, than a blood-globule but all of one and the same make. Their bodies were somewhat longer than broad, and their belly, which was flattish, furnished with sundry little paws, wherewith they made such a stir in the clear medium and among the globules, that you might even fancy you saw a woodlouse running up against a wall; and albeit they made a quick motion with their paws, yet for all that they made but slow progress.”
I like Harper’s a lot
Harper’s is my favorite magazine, primarily because of their ‘index,’ ‘findings,’ and ‘readings’ sections. The editing is rather conceptual — in the way ‘objective’ journalistic facts are asserted rhetorically (even humorously) through their juxtaposition. It’s a weird mash of heady inquiry and stuffy sarcasm, and I often find myself laughing out loud.
In ‘findings,’ always the last page, new discoveries are presented and written with an aesthetic glint for the absurd evocative of the best surrealism. For example:
A Viennese chemist concluded that bellybutton fluff is a combination of clothing fibers, sweat, dust, and fat wicked into the navel by body hairs […]; Placentas were appearing in the sewers of Illinois […]; In Hawaii, a woman found a $5 bill inside a coconut […]; Americans were losing their religion.
I kind of screwed that up by picking out my favorite lines — which inadvertently implicates my point that the editing is awesome. If non-fiction is the launching pad for fiction, this is where it’s at.
EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#3)
Orange
I wish my life consisted only of
riding my bike with you
down a giant hill that never stopped
while listening to music
with no one else around
in the middle of nothing,
except a few shiny and relaxing lights above in the sky
like stars but a little brighter
and more orange
Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.
Ellen Kennedy’s blog.