Richard Brautigan Day at Coop’s Place!
Utter delight. Thanks, Dennis! & kudos to his guest-poster, Winter Rates.
PS- if WR’s rad day isn’t quite enough Brautigan for you, you wish to check out this essay I wrote on In Watermelon Sugar for LOST Magazine a while back.
Matthew Simmons—
When people started binding books for the first time, do you think a bunch of people were really mad because they were just way into the way a scroll looks and feels? Did they tell people that scrolls were totally more authentic?
43
Sean Lovelace—
I would rather teach one T.C. Boyle story 50 times (i.e. this one) than read another two.
Blake Butler—
If one were going to have a ‘John Ashbery 101’ course, what would be the syllabus? I want to dig, and am not sure where to start, and don’t really just want to pick up the Selected. Flow Chart I recall being compelled by, as well as Three Poems (I believe it was in the McSweeney’s issue that Justin edited that someone talked about a writing assignment from Donald Barthelme being “get a bottle of wine, a copy of Three Poems, and write four pages in an evening.”). Anyway, help?
How It’s Made: Chains
This thing on chains is my favorite How It’s Made segment.
Morphs On…
The writer sitting in the department meeting is still a writer.
The pursuit of publication is a cowardly action.
A writer who has never been humiliated is a monster.
It is possible for the diary of a revolutionary to have a greater impact on society than the revolution itself.
Entertainment has already replaced art under the name of art; and soon information will replace entertainment under the name of entertainment.
The writer cannot afford to be isolated and trampled.
Accepted writers love to discuss rejection.
Maybe We’re Not Doing It Wrong
Every single writer and editor these days has some idea or theory about how to change publishing or save publishing because, haven’t you heard? Print is dying and people aren’t reading and the sky is falling and the literary world is coming to an end.
Criticism is leveled against big publishing and independent publishing and micropublishing and often times, that criticism is delivered with the rather self-righteous sentiment that everyone is doing it wrong. Often times, it seems that publishers spend more time detailing how they are innovating or how they will innovate rather than letting their actions speak for themselves. Some days, we’re talking about publishing more than putting out great books and magazines and just doing the work of publishing.
Uncategorized / 60 Comments
December 23rd, 2009 / 3:13 pm
December 23rd, 2009 / 3:13 pm
Blake Butler—
Robert Swartwood nicely calls out Narrative Magazine on twitter about their $20 submission fees and their $10K NEA grant FOR A WEBSITE [“helps (a little)”] and they, as usual, avoid giving a straight answer. Bring em coal, Santa!
Adam Robinson—
well i’m not going to pay $4.50 for shipping on a book from the publisher’s website
X-Mas Present: Everything You Always Wanted to Ask David Gates About Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories…
…and there were a lot of things you wanted to ask, because Gates’s intro is one of if not the best single essays ever written about DB’s work, so you figured he’d probably have done a pretty sweet job on the notes, too, but for some reason it wasn’t in the Gates-prefaced Penguin Classics Edition of Sixty Stories where it should have been, and you knew it was supposed to be posted somewhere on the Penguin website (it says so in the book) but then when you went to the website you couldn’t find it.
If this is you, friend, your troubles end today. Here. Now. I went to the Penguin site, and found the thing–years ago. It’s amazing and enlightening and it’s over 30 pages long. And I had forgotten about it until just now. Everyone should have access to these notes. Rather than try and re-figure out how I found them, I’m just going to post the .pdf myself: The David Gates footnotes to Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories. Merry Christmas, all.