April 2009

EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#1)

sinkflorida

Florida

i had a dream last night about your parents and you

in your house in florida

your parents were dancing in the garage

and your mom was singing

and then the radio stopped for no reason

and she screamed ‘no’

and then walked away

your dad was pissed

then you went into your room and your computer had this program that you could make animations with

and you made like 5 videos of your dad

changing from a happy dad

to a pissed dad

then i woke up

your parents were dancing so hard

READ MORE >

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 67 Comments
April 20th, 2009 / 12:17 pm

2009 Triangle Award Nominees

I have been invited to the 2009 Triangle Awards, which will be held May 7 at The New School in New York City. I’m not sure exactly how I got on their send-this-guy-a-card-inviting-him-to-this-thing list, but maybe it’s because I’m a New School alum? (Also, I’m pretty sure it’s a public event, but I did get an actual card in the actual mail, so it’s still a little extra special.) Well whatever the reason, it’s always nice to be thought of, so I’m going to go ahead and put this one on the calendar. You can learn more about the Triangle Awards and view the complete list of this year’s awards categorees and nominees for same by clicking anywhere in this part of this sentence, but I’d like to take a moment here and quickly shout out a hearty CONGRATS to the folks on here whose names I recognize- Alistair McCartney’s The End of the World Book (University of Wisconsin) is nominated for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction; Blair Mastbaum’s Us Ones In Between (Running Press) is nominated for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. Cheers, gents!

Author News / 4 Comments
April 20th, 2009 / 11:13 am

DOES ANYONE EVER THINK “I AM THE SHIT” AFTER WRITING SOMETHING OR GETTING SOMETHING PUBLISHED?

golf_trophy

at the risk of eliciting the charge of “stupidest ever” from justin taylor, i realized today that i have never felt like i was the shit for having done anything. granted, i am assuredly a piece of shit, and not at all successful in some ways, but has anything you’ve done made you think, “i am the shit?” usually, if i get something published this is what happens: i go “hell yeah” in my head while nodding, and then i think “wait, am i really happy?” then the feeling is gone. is it good to think, “i am the shit?” or is it bad? does it help you or does it hurt you? i don’t mean these questions as hypotheticals, i mean, how do you the reader feel. if you don’t want to discuss that, then you can use the comments sections to demean me. oh wait, i remember this one time i was at a gym and i pointed to a garbage can and said to the person next to me, “check this out.” then i punted a football right into the garbage can. i definitely thought, “i am the shit” after that. do you feel more like the shit when you are in a print publication? is it the people also in the publication? is it the editor? the journal?

Random / 114 Comments
April 19th, 2009 / 5:40 pm

R.I.P. J.G. Ballard

The author JG Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died aged 78 after a long illness.

His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill “for several years” and had died on Sunday morning.

Despite being referred to as a science fiction writer, Jim Ballard said his books were instead “picturing the psychology of the future”.

The Ballard stories I always think of whenever I hear his name are “The Enormous Space,” “Report on an Unidentified Space Station,” and “War Fever,” all of which are included in the collection pictured above. The first two stories I studied as an undergraduate, not in a creative writing class but in a literature course called “Eccentric Spaces and Spacialities.” Not “space” as in “outer space,” but as in “the distance between here and there, or “the place I call home,” etc. We read Ballard alongside Gaston Bachelard (Poetics of Space), Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping), excerpts from Dante and Homer (descents into Hades), Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth) and plenty more that I’m forgetting just now. The third story, “War Fever,” was on my radar when I was editing The Apocalypse Reader, but my query about reprint rights wasn’t returned by FSG until well after the book had been finalized, and sent to press. But it’s a magnificent story–they all are.

Author News / 19 Comments
April 19th, 2009 / 5:03 pm

Three Mini-Chapbooks from Mud Luscious Press Arrive Today

Three mini-chapbooks from Mud Luscious Press arrived today (link here to JA Tyler’s ml press), consisting of “Isn’t This What You Were Looking For?” by Ken Sparling, “Molting” by Aaron Burch and “Those Bones” by David Ohle. Excerpts after the jump:

READ MORE >

Presses / 8 Comments
April 18th, 2009 / 3:32 pm

The classical education I never had: Hippolytos

paris-exposedHippolytos, the insufferable son of Theseus, was a celebutard of antiquity. In Euripides’ play, the dandy loves only two things: himself and the goddess Artemis. He’s even got an entourage to follow him around and tell him how great and pure he is. Yes, pure. He is untouched by woman, devoting himself exclusively to his chosen deity. The problem is, his chastity and vomit-inducing self-regard has pissed off Aphrodite, who takes his piss-poor attitude as an affront. Theseus is out of town, and Aphro believes the time of her revenge is at hand. Did I mention that Hippolytos’ stepmother is in forbidden love with her stepson? READ MORE >

Behind the Scenes & Technology / 2 Comments
April 18th, 2009 / 8:09 am

BetterWorld Books / Dogoodery

The hands are holding the planet in space.

The hands are holding the planet in space.

From BetterWorldBooks.com:

We’re breaking new ground in online bookselling. We believe that education and access to books are basic human rights. That’s why books sold on BetterWorldBooks.com help fund high-impact literacy projects in the United States and around the world.

All books are available with free shipping to any location within the United States (or $3.97 worldwide). And in case you’re concerned about your eco-footprint, every order is shipped carbon neutral with offsets from Carbonfund.org.

Here’s the best part: In addition to selling new titles, Better World Books supports book drives and collects used books and textbooks through a network of over 1,600 college campuses and partnerships with nearly 1,000 libraries nationwide. So far, the company has converted more than 11 million donated books into $4.5 million in funding for literacy and education. In the process, we’ve also diverted more than 6,000 tons of books from landfills.

That’s right.  Free US shipping, cheap international shipping, new & used books, ecologically-conscious shipping, $$$ to charity, and they work with schools/libraries.  Oh, and from a quick search of five books in my ToRead list, they have multiple copies of each.

Alright.  What’s to like about Amazon anymore?

Random / 2 Comments
April 18th, 2009 / 2:04 am

Bonnie Prince Billy Onion A/V Club Interview

AVC: Some of your earlier records don’t have a whole lot of information on them, so it was difficult for fans to find out who was actually making the music. And you haven’t been big on doing a lot of interviews until more recently.

WO: I guess I don’t know where any information other than what I choose to provide on the records is really anybody’s business. That’s kinda it. I understand that doing interviews… Look, the record labels like that to happen, and I understand on some level why they like that to happen, because it provides some sort of eye-catching thing. It’s like some kind of advertising, for a minimum expenditure of energy and money. But to me, the best purpose of an interview would be to illuminate some things about how somebody works for the benefit of somebody else who wants to do those things. And that’s not where most interviews go at all, so to me, they seem like strange exercises in small talk and wasted air.

And printing credits… I think for those of us who make records, it’s our business how we put it together. Same with a book. You know, the publishing industry has somehow avoided having a light shone on their process. In a book, you basically have the name of the publisher and the name of the writer, and you’re led to believe that those are the two things that created this book. And you and I both know that’s not the case. There’s an army of people involved with the production of each book, most essentially the editor or editors who work closely with the writer on shaping and forming and developing a piece of work, plus the writer’s agent, blah blah blah. And yet somehow it doesn’t matter to us that all of that information is never publicly, readily available. Yet we want that on our records.

Random / 8 Comments
April 17th, 2009 / 9:05 pm

Youtube teaches me something else about writing: The goomba’s point of view

Here’s a nice, radical shift in the perspective of a story. There’s a guy trying to save a princess. The princess was kidnapped by a tyrant as part of his scheme to control a kingdom. The tyrant has minions. The minions stand between the guy and the princess. The guy is the natural focus of the narrative.

But in this video, a relatively minor character in what we might call the ur-narrative is instead the focus.

Is it as exciting as the traditional, Mario-focused way of telling the story? No, probably not. But it still has a kind of driving tension. You can HEAR Mario’s approach. You know the two goomba’s are done for, which adds a tension to the subtext of their mundane March Back and Forth, Bounce Off the Pipes and Each Other existence. Something sort of interesting is going on here.

So, for homework, write a story from the perspective of someone relatively minor to the story’s ur-narrative.

TANGENT:

According to Urban Dictionary, “goomba” is a slang term for Italian Americans. Cher used to call Sonny Bono a goombah. Being that Mario is a self-identifying Italian American, and Mario spends most of his time stomping on goombas, can we read Super Mario Bros. et al as an allegory for assimilating into a mass culture? Mario must stomp on his personal “goombas” to fit in and get the girl?

Random / 24 Comments
April 17th, 2009 / 4:53 pm

the internet scanned sandwiches blog of the future

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scanwiches

I Like __ A Lot / 8 Comments
April 17th, 2009 / 4:22 pm