Thomas Bernhard for life
Q: Reading your books, one gets the impression that you see no hope whatsoever in this domain.
A: That’s a stupid question…
Q: What kind of intellectual aims do you…
A: These are all questions that can’t be answered because no one asks themselves that sort of thing. People don’t have aims. Young people, up to 23, they still fall for that. A person who has lived five decades has no aims, because there’s no goal.
[In an interview from 1986, the late Austrian author Thomas Bernhard discusses the musicality of language, the eroticism of old men and the incurability of stupidity. By Werner Wögerbauer]
Uncategorized / 21 Comments
July 22nd, 2009 / 1:59 pm
July 22nd, 2009 / 1:59 pm
Learn Valuable Lessons
Have you ever been experienced? Stephen Elliott has.
APB FOR NYC RESIDENTS: Perpetual friend-of-Giant and all-around badass Stephen Elliott is teaching a one-day wokshop on writing from experience in NYC on August 3rd. The cost is just a measly fifty-five bucks. No idea how many spots are left, but I’m assuming just a few. Here’s the course description. Click anywhere to get put through to the reserve-me-a-spot page.
Uncategorized / Comments Off on Learn Valuable Lessons
July 22nd, 2009 / 11:18 am
July 22nd, 2009 / 11:18 am
Justin Taylor—
Foreignpolicy.com has a piece on the 2009 Failed States Index. And while you’re over there, you should also check out this fascinating article by Noah Efron on secular/extremist tension in Jerusalem.
Comments Off on
Yann Martel and The Holocaust as genre
You may have heard that Life of Pi author Yann Martel was given a rather huge contract for his next book. And that the book is being described as an allegory about the Holocaust with animals.
Seattle writer Matt Briggs, in a post on his blog, reacted with this:
It disturbs me that the Holocaust is or has become a genre, just as there is a British tea cozy mystery. Is this an inevitable progression, that a collective trauma becomes shtick? Is the pot boiler Western the equivalent reduction of the genocide of Native Americans?…Three million dollars seems like a lot of money to pay for anything besides a bridge or highway or something.
Intrigued, I asked Briggs to elaborate.
Brian Evenson’s Baby Leg
Uh, oh. Get this while you can kids: Brian Evenson’s Baby Leg, from Tyrant Press, in a limited edition illustrated hardback of 400 signed with bloodprints. $30 may seem like a lot to the sensitive kids, but these are going to go fast and never again, and the price at time of release will raise up to $35. I’d pay $80. This is a rarefied, intricate and bloody object, and you need it. Believe that.
Believe me:
Review from Blake Butler
Via a series of sparely rendered dream loops, each wormed so deep into the other that it is no longer safe to say which might be which, Baby Leg extends the already wide mind-belt of Brian Evenson’s terror parade another mile, and well beyond. Those familiar with the Evensonian memory fractals, his freak-noir theaters, and his fetish for leagues of amputees, will find herein not only another puzzle box to nuzzle in its reader’s memory long after the book is closed, but as well enough blood and fearlight and paranoia to make Kafka or Hitchcock seem a foundling. “Who am I?” our narrator, Kraus asks, among Baby Leg’s endless questionings, its barrage. “Where am I?” “What is it?” “And now?” Thereafter, through the magicked wrath of Evenson’s dream speaking, from each of these questions birth more questions, and more questions, on and on, creating around the reader a glassy lockbox much like the one we find, we think, our Kraus, poor thing, inside.
Seriously, how could you start off the first release from a press arm of the already massive Tyrant than this?
You can’t.
Preorder now before you are shelling out for it like they did for The Brotherhood of Mutilation, et al.
Gene Morgan—
Dictionary illustrations from the 19th century in the Pictorial Webster’s.
Comments Off on
Best of the Web 2009 Invades HTMLGIANT: Guest Post by Jeff Parker
Please welcome guest poster Jeff Parker, author of Ovenman, to HTMLGIANT. The following is a short short essay of his (part of a Dzanc Books internet invasion to support the forthcoming Best of the Web 2009) that talks about the origins of his story “The Boy and the Colgante,” recently published in Waccamaw and now anthologized in BotW 2009.
When Jonathan Messinger slotted me for the Dollar Store Reading series, I was torqued. The premise is as follows: Jonathan goes to a dollar store. Jonathan spends a dollar on something there. Jonathan sends that something to you (me, in this case). You write a story about it. You come to Chicago and read that story. I did lots of time in dollar stores and was well prepared for some good no-name household cleaning product or maybe a crappy toy. What I received sank my heart. It appeared to be a CD with an American flag printed on one side, but on further inspection it was a CD not to be played but to be hung from the rear view mirror of one’s car. It was called a colgante. This thing flummoxed me. It was like it came from another world. I had no reference point for it whatsoever. A colgante could not simply be there, an incidental detail. It commanded a more focal point. I put off writing the story until about two days before my trip to Chicago. I had just met some draft dodgers at Grossman’s tavern in Toronto. I figured the alienation I felt having this colgante thing in my life must be at least mildly resonant with the alienation they feel every day. I went for it. The result is here. I don’t really know if the thing played or not, but then I think that it must have.
You can read more posts by BotW authors at several other sites. Check out EWN for details. Thanks to Jeff Parker for the post and to Dan Wickett for asking HTMLGIANT to host.