Jimmy Chen—
Mud Luscious to print first year anthology {MLP: FIRST YEAR} featuring shane jones, brandi wells, nick antosca, james chapman, colin bassett, michael kimball, jac jemc, kim chinquee, kim parko, norman lock, randall brown, brian evenson, michael stewart, peter markus, ken sparling, aaron burch, david ohle, matthew savoca, p. h. madore, johannes göransson, charles lennox, elizabeth ellen, molly gaudry, kevin wilson, mary hamilton, craig davis, kendra grant malone, lavie tidhar, lily hoang, mark baumer, ben tanzer, krammer abrahams, joshua cohen, eugene lim, c. l. bledsoe, joanna ruocco, josh maday, michael martone, and a handful of htmlgiant contributors.
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Jimmy Chen—
Fictionaut is officially launched. Feels like the facebook of lit: everything hyper-linking to another thing, each page view, each comment, each user, each group. You can share it, pdf it, fav it. I don’t mean to sound critical — I mean, we at htmlgiant thrive off the inertia of our comments and the other viral aspects of the web — it’s just that, well, I think we’re getting a little widget crazy. Each wonderful story feels inundated with a viral capacity that distracts me from the story. Sorry to be a drag, and much respect to all the users/contributors, I just feel weird.
Roundup
Has anyone else been checking out “The best Books of the Millenium (So Far) at The Millions? Plenty to fight about there!
Last week I posted a poem Mark Bibbins wrote with D.A. Powell. Today I have an interview that Travis Nichols conducted with D.A. Powell.
Dan Nester wrote a fascinating essay about the New York poetry scene, and his disenchantment with same. If this is a taste of his forthcoming book, How to be Inappropriate, then I’m hereby predicting great things.
At The Rumpus, Rozi Jovanovic has a long interview with Tao Lin.
Also, in case you missed it when it was new last week, Dennis Cooper posted 15 stories and poems by Joe Brainard.
Blake Butler—
“A dream question (Hebrew: ‘She’elat Halom’) is a practice of divination whereby a person attains a prophetic state while dreaming, receiving a divine answer to a question meditated on before sleep. The early medieval master Hai Gaon notes a method for attaining a dream question involving fasting, purification, and meditation on a text. Based on comments by Abraham ibn Ezra and others, scholar Moshe Idel has identified this text with Exodus 14:19-21, each verse of which contains 72 consonants alluding to a mystical series of Hebrew letters said to represent the true name of God. In their autobiographical writings from the early 17th century, both mystic Hayyim Vital and rabbi Leon of Modena claim matter-of-factly to have asked a dream question.”
Starcherone Subscription Sale!!!
Receive a full year of the choicest Starcherone new releases (four titles per year, a $96 value), delivered. Our current subscription includes: You Are Here by Donald Breckenridge, The Creepy Girl and other stories by Janet Mitchell, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows by Leslie Scalapino (Spring 2010), & Shhh: The Story of a Childhood by Raymond Federman (Spring 2010). Substitutions permitted – note preferred titles on your order.*
*including Johannes Goransson’s Dear Ra (a story in flinches), Joshua Cohen’s A Heaven of Others, Sara Greenslit’s The Blue of Her Body, winner of the 3rd Starcherone Fiction Prize, judged by Brian Evenson, and many others…
Ryan Call—
Kim Chinquee will edit the upcoming issue of the Mississippi Review Online and will judge the Flash Fiction Contest at The Collagist.
Blake Butler—
Guernica is in the process of serializing a novella by Jesse Ball titled Pieter Emily, part 1 is live now. A sentence: “If I were to go first into a house of stone, and then into a house of wood, and then into a house of straw, and then into a bare roof set upon poles, and then to lie upon the empty ground beneath the sky with a blanket, and then even to cast the blanket aside and lie in the cold on the open ground, would you not think that I was making a grave for myself?”
Tao Lin Reading + Q&A + Minireview
Tao Lin reads from the first section of Shoplifting from American Apparel, then answers questions about writing process, influence, shoplifting, etc.
I read and greatly enjoyed this novella a couple weeks ago. It makes some interesting use of what people who want to put tags on things could call verbal minimalism inherting cinéma vérité, as well as a mash of Andys (Warhol and Kaufman), new uses of internet language in print, and a linear-alinear timeline modeling that more correctly models everyday life than most textual attempts at representing everyday life. That’s if you want to put tags on things.
I’d prefer to just say that I laughed more at parts of this book than I’ve laughed in a long time, and I think those who see this book as ‘incomplete’ might be missing part of the point here, which is not to exploit the expectations of Tao Lin’s previous work while also not exploit some kind of forced shifting of an artist’s tone. Like many artists who are ahead of the curve, this book is ahead of a curve that you might not yet see curving, particularly because it most succeeds on the level of entertaining the reader while being ahead of the curve, which then most easily becomes mistaken as unfocused, when in fact it is the extreme opposite: focused beyond focus.
I really enjoyed this book.
You can buy it here.
Bolaño fans will be interested to see this interview with translator Natasha Wimmer over at the blog of the Center for the Art of Translation.
Scott Esposito: First I wanted to ask you about these new Bolaño texts they’re digging up, particularly El Tercer Reich (”The Third Reich”) and the supposed sixth book of 2666.
Natasha Wimmer: I’ve read “The Third Reich” (and in fact, it looks like I’ll be translating it, though I have yet to sign on the dotted line). It’s about an elaborate board game called “The Third Reich” (Bolaño was a great fan of war games), it takes place on the Costa Brava, and it pits a German tourist against an enigmatic South American who rents paddle boats on the beach. I loved it.
I haven’t read the purported sixth section of 2666, or even really heard much about it. Maybe it will remain forever ghostly—the spectral answer to all our 2666 questions.
Breaking stuff.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqxwXopbdRg
Blake’s remix contest—which celebrates the beauty of taking something nice and fucking it up—results are in. The winner of the contest was Krammer Abrahams.
Couple of Giants made it in, too. Chris Higgs did a erasure of the whole book, which I skimmed through and loved the results of. Catherine is in there, too. I have a little thing—anagrams of the first few paragraphs of the story in question, “Tour of a Drowned Neighborhood”—also.
Lots of other friends, commentators, and relations. Two pieces by Brian Evenson, too! It’s Scrotal Cash. Download it here.