Happy Belated Birthday, Beckett
if all that all that yes if all that is not how shall I say no answer if all that is not false yes
all these calculations yes explanations yes the whole story from beginning to end yes completely false yes
-from How It Is
Yesterday was Beckett’s birthday (he’d have been 104).
To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.
-from Watt
Last semester, while I was studying theories of modernism with S. E. Gontarski, I got the opportunity to copy edit Jean-Michel Rabaté’s contribution to the just-released collection of original essays by leading Beckett scholars and biographers, A Companion to Samuel Beckett.
Rabaté’s essay is called “Philosophizing with Beckett: Adorno and Badiou.” It’s pretty interesting. Here’s a taste:
Blake Butler—
29 Mini Essays by Joe Brainard [Thanks to Mike Topp for the heads up]
GIRL SCOUTS
Girl Scouts is more than selling cookies.
23
Dead/Dying Authors Rejoice
Nadine Jarvis has designed a pencil ‘made from the carbon of human remains.’
240 pencils can be made from an average body of ash – a lifetime supply of pencils for those left behind. Each pencil is foil stamped with the name of the person. Only one pencil can be removed at a time, it is then sharpened back into the box causing the sharpenings to occupy the space of the used pencils. Over time the pencil box fills with sharpenings – a new ash, transforming it into an urn. The window acts as a timeline, showing you the amount of pencils left as time goes by.
For more information about The Postmortem Project, please go here.
Blake Butler—
Brian Oliu liveblogged AWP. It’s pretty sexy. Here’s how he breaks down the color coding of the ID lanyards:
Green: you & me
Red: the hierarchy
Blue: the Gestapo
Gold: the 1993 Denver Nuggets minus LaPhonso Ellis
Black: kittens
Purple: Colorado-based piano rock group The Fray
Leopard Print: People who have seen the movie ‘Cop and a Half’
Writing Prompt: Holy Shit! CHUD Penguins!
Graham Racher
Nicholson Baker wrote a horror story about potatoes. Penguins live in the sewers of Cape Town, South Africa.
Potatoes are a part of the family of plants sometimes called the nightshades. People refer to penguins as “nature’s clowns.”
READ MORE >
HELP US PENETRATE THE ORIGAMI FORTRESS
It has come to our attention that Karl “King” Wenclas (disambiguation here) has written a post (essay?) about HTMLGiant on something he (charmingly?) refers to as his “premium” blog. What this means is that we can’t read it, but he has announced (let slip?) that it is called “Paper Tiger.” Does anyone out there have access to this thing (?) and if so please pass it along to us because we are just dying to read it (possibly out loud to each other while we eat caviar and rub each others’ feet (with caviar)). Also, though I’m writing in advance of having read the doubtless thorough (and sweeping?) insights in the “King”‘s presumably awesome^3 post, and therefore in a state of complete ignorance, I would like to suggest that the “King”‘s thesis is incorrect. HTMLGiant is not a paper tiger. We are a lego dinosaur.
Why More People Don’t Read, or Why They Might Soon
Crotches covered in what closely resembles a field of white mites? I’m sensing a sudden boom of interest in reading Pynchon.
[via Gawker]
Playing connect-the-dots with two dots just gets you a straight line
(1)
Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.
(2)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs
Book Giveaway: Ric Royer’s She Saw Ghosts He Saw Bodies
We were sitting around a campfire, trying with our hearts to tell ghost stories. Someone kept rambling on and on. I did the one about the guy with the bloody finger. The best one was when someone said, “Once there BOO” which, awesome, was short.
No one can tell ghost stories anymore. Can you?
My labelmate, Ric Royer, can. Dude’s a trip. His new book She Saw Ghosts He Saw Bodies, just out from Narrow House, is an eerie thing, a creepy, eerie thing. And each copy has a hand-drawn cover by Jackie Milad.
So here’s their giveaway part: whoever comments HERE with the shortest and scariest story will win a copy of not just creepy, eerie, hand-drawn She Saw Ghosts He Saw Bodies, but also Ric’s other book things, including Time Machine and There Were One and It Was Two and the weather not the weather. Also, apparently, some other stuff. Freaky. Go here to enter.
I want to see some scary. I thought the movie The Ring was scary.
Adam Robinson—
Nina Bourne has died at age 93. She was a great book promoter, did it up for Catch 22. Without her, you probably would never have read it. The NYTimes obit is worth a read, if you’re into that sort of thing.
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