Nick Antosca—
I made nine submissions to lit mags in 2009. (My lowest total ever since I started tracking. Got busy with longer pieces this year.) They were all in the last two months. One was rejected; the others are still outstanding. How was your year, submissions-wise? Did you send out more than ten? More than a hundred? Any acceptances/sales/publications you’re especially proud of?
122
These People Want to Kill You With Their Voodoo Powers, but Are Worried They’re Accidentally Killing Each Other–with their VOODOO POWERS
They’re like terrorists trying to build suicide bombs, but accidentally blowing their own fingers off. Or at least that’s what this one guy thought. This just went up on Gawker.
There aren’t enough o’s in the word WOWOWOWOWOW to describe the way(s) this makes me feel. Guess we’d better go to the tape, Steve.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0uxURKIFqU&
HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS, LECTURE 1
This is the first post concerning the book HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS. The book contains twelve lectures, delivered at Harvard University by JL Austin on the nature of language. The importance of these lectures is, to me, the uncovering of language as a particular kind of instrument between people, and how literal meaning is not the only use of language.
Some Notes on Affect
A lot that’s happening on this site right now, in posts and in comments, has somehow coalesced around a few themes and texts that I first explored seriously in a college course I took, called Excess, that focused on, well, the literature of excess, or transgression: Sade, Bataille, Sacher-Masoch, and films like Irreversible. It was taught by Paul Mann, poet and author of Masocriticism, which, as its title suggests, radically exposes the viscera gaping from the act of reading and interpreting texts. He writes,
The text never recognizes us. It neither assents to nor dissents from our reading, our desire. Whatever validations we establish, it remains silent throughout our reading.
At the end of each reading, it returns as a Greek.
At the end of each masocritical scene, one is abandoned to the absolutely otherness of the other. One suffers an utter loss of agency, out of and against which a new scene or new reading must be projected.
This formulation of the text recalls Bataille’s vision of the sun burning itself up with no consideration for the life that its combustion nurtures, a concept that is central to much of Bataille’s work (including the essay whose title I stole for the reading series I run w/ Blake and Jamie Iredell in Atlanta, Solar Anus). The way Mann equates the sun with the text deepens this idea of reading as hyper-sensory experience. READ MORE >
106.2 Books in 2009
I read 106 books this year. Actually, I read more because even in going through the list I am seeing things I remember reading, like John Dermot Woods’s collection, and Amina Cain’s, and Tim Horvath’s novella, and Justin Sirois’s and at least a handful of others, not to mention the various books I read in manuscript form for blurbing or review or feedback or whatever, and all the other writing in magazines and where else. Nor does it include chapbooks, which skips a lot, because there were a lot of good chapbooks this year. In the formal count pulled off the list of books I hold on my hard drive I read 106 books, and probably will 2 or 3 more between now and the year’s out. That doesn’t count, either, the books I started and gave up on: as such, the majority of the books on this list I enjoyed.
Anyway, this is what I wrote down that I read. Writing it down as you go, which I’ve been doing since 2001 now, helps me a lot to remember what and where and when about it. It also seems to help me move along. I limited myself to saying a single sentence about each, which was hard to keep to, and then hard to finish, because that’s a lot. Not as much, probably, as the number of books I bought this year or in years before still waiting for me on the piles around my loft, which together will one day become the bricks of my future home. So anyway, for the hell of it…
Nickname Contest
Nicknames are for athletes and the occasional movie star. I would argue the finest as “The Hammer,” aka Charlie Sheen, only because it was bestowed by teenage Las Vegas call girls. In athletics, I’ll go Owen “What the Heck” Beck (a not so zealous Jamaican boxer), Nicolai “Old One Leg” Andrianov (Russian gymnast), and “He Hate Me,” startling, odd, possibly existential, always fucking awesome, and worn proudly by XFL running back, Rod Smart.
And for writers? (We are not talking pseudonyms, another thing entirely.)
Blake Butler—
The Tyrant has posted an uncollected Gary Lutz story ‘In Kind’ from their NYT issue 3 today at Vice. “I had no friends, just timid emergency contacts. I married the second woman to come along.” Also worth checking out, an excellent interview with the stoner-Manson-looking Alan Moore.
stuff i saw and you can too
Get your soul portrait today! And while you’re over there checking out the goods, be sure to answer this call: “Attention Art Collectors Seeking Art Treasures.” No more shit-collecting for you! From here on out, it’s treasures only. (Thanks, Mathias!)
If you’re still feeling spiritual after your Soul Portrait, try “The Family Jewels” over at the Smart Set. David Farley takes a look at Christianity’s best relics. As expected, #1 is the Holy Foreskin–it’s like the “Thriller” video of relics–but some of the other entries are surprising, and it’s all good educational fun.
There’s nothing holier than anything about “Reading People’s Faces” at Reason, the crabby libertarian organ of record. Katherine Mangu-Ward considers Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate.
In Japan, members of the yakuza have long favored tattoos covering the entire upper body to signal their mafia status. They also amputate all or part of a pinky finger. One study estimated that between 40 percent and 70 percent of the yakuza had sacrificed a digit, generally making the cut themselves.
(thanks A&L Daily for those last two)
What else? Well, homeboy of record, Alec Niedenthal has a new story, called “Moon,” in the Catalonian Review, and at the Rumpus, Megan Casela Ross makes Dylan Landis’s Normal People Don’t Live Like This sound pretty damn interesting. Next time I hit the bookstore, I’ll be looking for it. Also at The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott posts installment #18 of his Notes From Book Tour, and this one is extra fascinating, as he lays down some hard numbers:
I read at or participated in 73 events in 33 cities in 95 days. I sold 700 copies of The Adderall Diaries which I bought wholesale, as well as 150 copies of Happy Baby and 80 copies of My Girlfriend Comes To The City and Beats Me Up. Roughly. But that doesn’t count all the books the bookstores sold. At maybe 20 events, or more, a bookstore was selling the books. It’s safe to say I hand-sold around a thousand copies of The Adderall Diaries. It’s safe to say I generated more sales than that indirectly from write-ups in local newspapers and blogs, interviews with small radio stations. 500 more. 300 more. 1,000 more? Hard to say. It depends what you mean.For why? For the same reason I wrote it.
2 Comments
December 22nd, 2009 / 2:26 pm
December 22nd, 2009 / 2:26 pm
Chapel Haunt
Brandon Stosuy – writer, compiler of the unflinching UP IS UP, BUT SO IS DOWN, and pious metalhead, has moved his SHOW NO MERCY column, which was the last morsel of interest in the bowl of corporate shit that is Pitchfork, over to Stereogum. The column is now called HAUNTING THE CHAPEL. READ MORE >