May 2009

Lots of Stuff to do This Weekend if You Happen to Live at the NYCenter of the Universe.

Okay, two small press events and one massive-ass festival.

1)  Noemi Press reading at Stain barfeaturing  Claire Hero, Shya Scanlon, Mark Tursi, and Lila Zemborain. >>Join us at 7 PM on 2 May 2009 for a Noemi Press reading at Stain Bar, 766 Grand Street, Brooklyn NY, 11211 (L to Grand, 1 block west) <<

2) Book Party & Reading for Eric Baus’ Tuned Droves, the new title from Octopus Books. Eric Baus, Cathy Park Hong, Karla Kelsey, & Keith Newton will read. Music from Snowblink. FREE WINE. Sunday May 3, 5:30-8pm. location: 267 douglass st, brooklyn, ny: from Union St (R / M trains): walk north three blocks on 4th Ave & turn left on Douglass. From Atlantic / Pacific: walk south on 4th Ave for seven blocks & turn right on Douglass.

3) This is also the week of the PEN World Voices festival, which has like a million events happening all over NYC and Brooklyn, throughout the day and evening. Complete festival schedule is here. I’m going to be at “The Language of Fear” event at the CUNY grad center tonight, and at the “Faith and Fiction” event at the powerHouse arena on Sunday afternoon (then heading Bausward after that).

Uncategorized / 6 Comments
May 1st, 2009 / 12:29 pm

Gene Morgan’s Twitter Feed Press

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Technology & Web Hype / 50 Comments
May 1st, 2009 / 11:04 am

Same Shit, Different Day– Edgar Allan Poe edition

This was in last week’s New Yorker but I just got around to reading it this week. It’s a long piece by Jill Lepore called “The Humbug: Edgar Allan Poe and the economy of horror.” This year is the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth, and so there are a few new editions of his work out, as well as a biography, all of which seem only of passing interest to Lepore. Her real interest is in Poe himself, and his efforts to survive by his pen in an era of constant economic flux, where the literary market was always especially grim. When Poe wanted to bring his first book of poems out, his publisher demanded a guarantee against losses. Magazines and journals stopped paying their contributors. In short, the picture of the literary world that Lepore paints seems–to me anyway–more the same than different, compared to our own. I thought that readers here–irrespective of your particular interest in Poe–might find something heartening in that knowledge, or at least take some cold comfort in trans-generational commiseration. 

“My whole existence has been the merest Romance,” Poe wrote, the year before his death, “in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.” This is Byronic bunk. Poe’s life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. Poe’s world was Andrew Jackson’s America, a world of banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry, where Poe sought a perch. His biography really is a series of unfortunate events. But two of those events were transatlantic financial crises: the Panic of 1819 and the Panic of 1837, the pit and the pendulum of the antebellum economy. Poe died at the end of a decade known, in Europe, as “the Hungry Forties,” and he wasn’t the only American to fall face down in the gutter during a seven-year-long depression brought on by a credit collapse. 

Author Spotlight / 9 Comments
May 1st, 2009 / 10:08 am

Brandon Gorrell is holding an embarrassing contest at his blog.

22_various_nine_cameron_smith_youth

from brandon’s blog

here are the contest guidelines:
work must be fiction, 300 – 5000 words
entry deadline is friday may 15, 2009
submit in the body of an email to brandongorrell[at]gmail.com with ‘contest’ in the subject heading
paypal your entry fee/ agree to mail cash or check to mailing address provided at the same time as submitting your story. stories without entry fees will not be considered

I think it’s sort of tacky that Brandon is doing this. I know he just lost his job at the BBQ Café and probably needs money. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like a worthwhile investment for anybody. Aren’t there are other more concrete things to do with your money? And if you win you get a copy of Brandon’s book? It reminds me of the bratty girls in elementary school who would tell me I could come over to their house after school if I did their homework for them. Like, cool, great, thank you. Do you also want seven dollars?

Contests / 225 Comments
May 1st, 2009 / 2:38 am