NY Event I Wish I Could Go To
Sometimes traveling sucks. By sometimes I mean it will suck on March 9th when this amazing event happens.
Tao Lin, Lore Segal and Melville House Editor, Kelly Burdick will be doing a panel discussion about the novella at The Center for Fiction in Manhattan, which is where I usually live when I am not having a what’s-going-on-with-my-life-thing somewhere else.
Kelly Burdick, if you’ve never had the pleasure of chatting with him at a Melville House event, is a really smart, cool editor; Lore Segal is a fantastic, old-school-New-York writer who says really interesting stuff and Tao Lin, as we all know, says crazy shit. On top of that, The Center for Fiction is an awesome venue. Sounds like a good panel to me.
So don’t make any plans on March 9th and tell everyone I said hello.
Alec Niedenthal—
“Historia in nuce [history in a nutshell]. Friend and Enemy. The friend is he who affirms and confirms me. The enemy is he who challenges me (Nuremberg 1947). Who can challenge me? Basically, only myself. The enemy is he who defines me. That means in concreto: only my brother can challenge me and only my brother can be my enemy.”– Carl Schmitt, while interned by American forces following World War II
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Writing Prompt: Atonality
(With this writing prompt, I have provided a badge. When you have completed the prompt, feel free to print out the badge and pin it to your jacket. Or maybe shrink it and turn it into a 1″ button to put on a sweater. Or maybe print it on that iron-on transfer paper and put it on a shirt. Because, good for you! You’ve done a thing someone on the internet told you to do. Good for you!)
I’ve been listening to this album by a local band called Friends & Family. It’s free to download. It features a guy singing, sometimes atonally, over samples of easy listening records. I like it.
Here’s what I want you to do: take a familiar story theme. Oh, maybe a love story. Oh, maybe a scary story. Oh, maybe a coming of age story. Oh, something.
Write a familiar kind of story. But write it in the wrong tone. Write a love story in a scary tone. Write a tragic coming of age story in a comedic tone. Write a story about an epic—and completely comic—series of coincidences, but write it in an academic tone.
Write something in the wrong tone, as if you are the sort of person who can’t make accurate judgments about appropriate tone.
And then print the badge.
Go.
Jimmy Chen—
Faith No More used to be “Faith No Man,” which was way more awesome; The Cure used to be “Easy Cure,” which was lame; Motörhead considered the name “Bastard,” which would have sucked; Oasis used to be “The Rain,” which was totally stupid; Pink Floyd used to be “Tea Set,” then “The Pink Floyd Sound,” then “The Pink Floyd,” until finally just Pink Floyd, which is understandable; Pixies used to be “Pixies In Panoply,” which sounds retarded; Queen used to be called “Smile,” which seems about the same level of okayness; Radiohead used to be “On a Friday,” which was really stupid; Van Halen used to be “Mammoth,” until David Lee Roth suggested the former, which is surprising because of their ego war.
Jimmy Chen—
Sorry but I wrote a haiku between Cornel West‘s front teeth, seemed like a good place for one.
Justin Taylor—
“The Beaten Canoneer”: Joshua Cohen on Seymour Krim at the Forward.
Seymour Krim was a book reviewer who wanted to be a literary critic, and then he was a critic who wanted to be “an essayist,” but instead of either, he became a beautifully wretched, snappy hack. He was the Kerouac of Jewish New York journalism, whose takes on literature and its strange gossip column practice — “the literary life” — would become founding documents for 1960s New Journalism; especially for the journalism of Krim’s nemesis, Norman Mailer.
And (via Rumpus) Violet Blue leaves the SFChronicle because of content-distortion and de-linking in their digital archives. Her full statement is up on her website (article is SFW but the ads running down both sides of the page are decidedly not).
Barry Hannah & Larry Brown Audio Reup
Again for those who missed it, or would like to hear again, an audio conversation between Barry Hannah and Larry Brown, available for download thanks to the quite kind Michael Bible. The outpouring of remembrances and love for this man in the past few days has been really powerful and great, I am thankful.
Alec Niedenthal—
My mom just called me to tell me that this interview with the late Barry Hannah is airing on NPR right now. It will also be online at 5 PM ET.
Blake Butler—
“For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.” Schopenhauer