Sean Lovelace—
Small Press Distribution 2009 best seller fiction list released. Why not use this as a reading list for 2010?
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Nick Antosca—
If you’re in New York: The Rubin Museum on 17th st. screens David Lynch’s Blue Velvet tomorrow night, Friday 1/15, at 9:30 to accompany their awesome, ending-soon exhibit of The Red Book by Jung. Info here. I’ll be briefly introducing the film. There’s a Q & A about it @ The L Magazine here.
Mike Young—
Terrific new Sixth Finch. Alabaster, abandoned Cadillacs, a big fat flying snooze, white as a long sleep, a horse snow-starred with blood, and that’s just the first few. Plus great visual art. Check it out!
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Milch vs. Iannucci in a big Thursday Fuck-Off!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2Q7YRDL90E
or
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T0Ofr6VYMI
Who wins? READ MORE >
Firmuhment
According to Firmuhment’s list of websites described as food, we are: “Good pea soup that the cooks took turns spitting in, garnished with dead flies.” I like. (Lots of other interesting erasures, destructors on here, including blackouts of Tara Reid, blurring of Gertrude Stein, so on.) (Thanks M. Rascher.)
Absolute LAST Call for Submissions to “The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide”
Alyssa Carver, "fragment from Faulkner" - Brooklyn, New York
From the very first day that Eva Talmadge and I announced that we were putting together a photo-anthology of literary tattoos–in a post I made from Hong Kong to this blog, on 7/24/09–we have been overwhelmed and elated by the response. Photos have come in from all over the world, from all different kinds of people, each with their own reason for having chosen their line or lines or illustrations that pay homage to everything from Twain to Twilight, from Shakespeare to King’s Dark Tower, Plath, Dickinson to Salinger, Shel Silverstein, Dostoevsky, John Berryman, J.K. Rowling, T.S. Eliot, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Foster Wallace, Moby-Dick–I could go on (which reminds me: several fine Becketts already, including at least two versions of the line alluded to here). And yet, despite the sheer volume of amazing work we’ve received–and the fact that we had declared 12/31/09 the submission deadline–we are still looking for more. We’d love to hear from you anytime between now and, say, Valentine’s Day. But don’t delay, because after that it really will be over. We will turn the book in to our editor at Harper Perennial very soon after that date, and it will be on shelves this coming fall. Detailed guidelines are posted on the original call for submissions, but here is the most important thing: Please send clear digital images of the highest print quality possible as an attached file in jpeg format to tattoolit@gmail.com. Pixel resolutions should be at least 1500 x 2000, or a minimum 300 dpi at 5 inches wide. I can’t tell you how many people have sent us excellent ink in unusable formats or at too-low-for-print quality levels–this close to the deadline, there simply may not be time to wait for re-sends, even if we love the work. A million thanks to everyone who has shared their work with us thus far, and to everyone else–hope to hear from you soon.
Alec Bryan, "Dore's Ezekiel with Melville Banner" - Ogden, Uta
Dan Slessor, "text from Neuromancer" - Brighton, England
Baby Hedgehogs and American Apparel Dogs: A Review
Baby Hedgehogs and American Apparel Dogs by David Fishkind is self-described as an “epic poetic narrative,” which is what it is — if one considers one’s life since conception (“I was nothing and then I was two and then I was one”) to the present to be “epic,” a word hopefully employed by the 19 year old with a little sarcasm. It’s easily readable and generous in its candidness. There is a trend of hyper-aware self-conscious writing among younger (I use this word as a description of age, not qualifier) writers which is either the last course of irony, or its propagation. There is a difference between the self-consciousness behind, say, Notes from the Underground and Fishkind’s, the former being a philosophical device, the latter more of a collection of tweets. I don’t say this in derision, only to suggest that our recent technologies (iPhone, myspace, youtube, etc.) have altered our orientation with “the self.” But that’s okay. Fishkind describes autobiographical prosaic experiences (getting erections, going to museums, being in love) with refreshing stoicism met with thoughtfulness:
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January 14th, 2010 / 2:23 pm
January 14th, 2010 / 2:23 pm
Justin Taylor—
As regular readers of this blog know, over the past year or so I’ve been reading a lot of Harold Bloom. I’ve blogged my favorite quotes from his books as I’ve come across them, read several books on the strength of his recommendation (Bleak House, Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad). But I don’t think I’ve said much about his body of work as a body of work, or articulated what it is about him that compels my sustained interest. And I’m still not going to do that–at least not today; first, because I’m not yet prepared to articulate that thought or those thoughts (blogs happen basically in real time, and my own work here is a present-tense record of my own ongoing education and expanding horizons, rather than any kind of attempted statement of intractable positions or beliefs); and second, even if I was prepared to attempt such an undertaking, I’ve got other things to do this afternoon. But, since the Viceland interview I linked to the other day seems to have been received well, I thought I would share another bit of Webvailable Bloomiana: this New York Times Review of Bloom’s Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?. The review is from October 2004, and is written by the great Melville scholar Andrew Delbanco. It offers a concise and articulate an introduction to Bloom’s virtues and talents–as well as a clear-eyed but vitriol-free acknowledgment of his limitations. I don’t know–or care, quite frankly–whether it will sell you on Bloom, but I think it will help make clear why I have become such a regular customer.
Theater of Cruelty to Myself
The French artist Orlan works in various mediums and has been prolific and provocative for years. Her most notorious work uses her body and surgery as an expression of art.
“I am the first,” Orlan claims, “to divert plastic surgery from its aim of improvement and rejuvenation.”
These are called “operation-performances.”
She took a digitized version of the “idealized feminine” face (her source material: Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Botticelli’s Venus, Francois Pascal Simon Gerard’s Psyche, Gustav Moreau’s Europa) and then surgically altered her own face to create this image.
Nine plastic surgeries. She considers her works “sacrificial.” These performances were painful and potentially fatal.
Orlan’s website.
A new essay from Unzipping of Images…Orlan’s Operative: Provocation, Performance, Personhood
The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret
New UK TV show pilot starring Will Arnett and David Cross [pt 1 of 3]