Blake Butler—
Awesome interview with awesome Joyelle McSweeney @ Rob Mclennan’s blog | “What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?” Lack of imagination.
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GIANT Excerpt: from The Dance of No Hard Feelings by Mark Bibbins (#4)
We are not kissing and the river
tricks the boat. Even at night,
colors freeze when they would
rather bleed. He likes delay,
He says, the long ascent to sex.
[first his finger to his lips]
He of the somewhere-wadded-up
mainsail, half hard and too tired
[to the knuckle now] to try–
when in doubt he demurs
then dissolves, spooked
as I and twice as strange.
The glass we handed back
and forth sits on the sill:
mouth- and fingerprints
overlap, more reasonable
as a form of mimesis [out now
and glistening] than simple
trajectory–and what about
the bridge, under which
the boat [back in, slowly,
slowly] has slipped, its
chain of lights, distorted
by the edge of the glass,
just now turned out?
All this week, HTMLGiant will be posting poems from The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon) Mark Bibbins’s eagerly and long-awaited followup collection to 2003’s Sky Lounge. Day #1 is here. Day #2 is here. Day #3 is here. Check back daily for fresh doses.
What’s Up, Rumpus?
Random snag from the website of Ian Huebert, genius.
Last night I was introduced to Ivy Pochoda at a bar. Very, very smart, that one is. She spoke of the difficulties of translating Egyptian hieroglyphs (tell me about it!) and knows quite a bit about James Merrill beside. Maybe it’s because she was a James Merrill House fellow last spring? Maybe… Anyway, this morning, the Rumpus greeted me with Kate Munning’s glowing review of Pochoda’s debut novel, The Art of Disappearing, which is just out from St. Martin’s Press. Cheers, Ivy!
Elsewhere at the Rumpus, Rozi Jovanovic runs down the Brooklyn Book Fair.
Porter Shreve interviews Donald Ray Pollock (Knockemstiff).
And there’s a new installment of Ian Huebert’s rad comic, Pornographic Barn Owl.
Special Ian Huebert Bonus: visit his site: The Milk Machine.
Bat Segundo interview of Brian Evenson
Ed Champion of Ed Rants/ The Bat Segundo Show has posted an interview with Brian Evenson. If you’ve never listened to the Bat Segundo show then it might be worth checking out the archives. Bat (an alter ego of Ed Champion) has interviewed tons of people, from David Lynch to Nick Antosca to Oliver Sacks to Amy Sedaris to 306 other people.
Click the picture to listen to Brian and Bat.
Can’t Wait Until I Can Buy Moby Dick at McDonald’s
[Via Gizmodo]
Uncategorized / 6 Comments
September 24th, 2009 / 7:43 am
September 24th, 2009 / 7:43 am
Blake Butler—
What do you think about Goodreads? What do you think about rating books based on stars? What do you use Goodreads for, if you use it? How do you rate books in this kind of forum? Is it wrong to give a bad rating to a book without saying why? Is their ‘three star’ rating equating to ‘liked it’ apt? Is it scary that the Book of Mormon is #3 on their user-populated list of Best Books Ever? What else?
We want your long codes.
NO COLONY is open for submissions. Details can be found at the source. (Hint: see above)
Uncategorized / 63 Comments
September 23rd, 2009 / 6:45 pm
September 23rd, 2009 / 6:45 pm
Justin Taylor—
Lincoln Michel of The Faster Times and Gigantic tipped me off to two interviews of probable high-interest to Giant readers, one from each publication. Over at FT, they’ve reprinted Michael Kimball’s conversation with Blake Butler from Unsaid #4. And over at the newly re-designed Gigantic website, Lincoln himself has interviewed Clancy Martin. That second one gets pretty epic, so make sure your boss isn’t around and then get ready to dig your heels in.
a paragraph i’d kill to have written
He woke with the undersides of his eyelids inflamed by the high sun’s hammering, looked up to a bland and chinablue sky traversed by lightwires. A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished headfirst in the earth without a sound. Suttree lay with his hands palm up at his sides in an attitude of frailty beheld and the stink that fouled the air was he himself. He closed his eyes and moaned. A hot breeze was coming across the barren waste of burnt weeds and rubble like a whiff of battlesmoke. Some starlings had alighted on a wire overhead in perfect progression like a piece of knotted string fallen slantwise. Crooning, hooked wings. Foul yellow mutes came squeezing from under their faned tails. He sat up slowly, putting a hand over his eyes. The birds flew. His clothes cracked with a thin dry sound and shreds of baked vomit fell from him.
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy