Next Thursday, May 27, Live Giants 5 w/ Sam Lipsyte
Mark your thing or whatever, as we’re superstoked to be hosting Live Giants 5 with the magnificent Sam Lipsyte, who will read from his home (or perhaps some surprise location) on May 27 at 9 PM Eastern, for his latest novel, The Ask. As usual, the live stream will be right here and free for all, with chatroom and q/a opened up to those who hang. See you there!
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May 17th, 2010 / 12:35 pm
May 17th, 2010 / 12:35 pm
2 doads riverged and some bluebirds etc
This photo and caption were inside the elevator of my hotel. Affixed to the actual door. This was Dry Ridge, Kentucky. Dry Ridge sucks. Why? Because it’s dry. Why would a state officially blooomed for bourbon want to populate itself with dry counties? It’s like entering a college coffee shop without hearing some kid discussing free speech or Eric B and Rakim. Like logging onto HTML and not finding flames, hijacked theory, gelatinous shreds of Tao Lin…but I do digress.
I’m all for inscrutability but WTF on this ad? “the path less traveled” (no caps–very hip) is two girls in fake wings walking?
The real concern isn’t the advert. (Is it even? What exactly is it selling? Why is it on the elevator door?) The real botheration is the source material. That fucking poem.
Let’s trod on:
2 from Octopus Books
When I showed you about the best chapbooks I bought in Denver I wanted to show you HOW, but couldn’t.
Now I can.
How by Emily Pettit
Staple-bound
Edition of 200
26 pages
$8 (includes shipping)
Adam Robinson—
Thanks, Ken, for posting about Matt Bell’s live writing sessions. The first paragraph of his story, one that never made it off the ground, has been posted at Everyday Genius, where there is also a schedule and a link to the MeetingWords site where it’s all going to happen. Tune in today at noon and again at five to see how Matt Bell writes a story, letter by letter.
8
Ken Baumann—
Matt Bell is going to write a story live. We can watch him write. Then, later this week, we can rewrite the story. Then Michael Kimball & Lily Hoang will rewrite the rewritten story, and we can watch. And then we can watch Matt rewrite the revised rewritten story. Good luck to us all.
Do You Want To Help An Independent Author Get Fancy Drunk?
Sasha Fletcher reports via GMail chat on how we can turn indie lit commerce into alcoholic camaraderie:
so there’s like 20 copies left
and if we sell out today, ja will paypal me money to get drunk on fancy beers
What’s he talking about? He’s talking about his novella When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill the Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs in the Clouds, which you can pre-order from MLP. It’s a fine adventure, strange and hellbent on sweetness. Not only will Fletcher get drunk if you pre-order fast enough, but you will get some swag, including an exclusive PDF chapbook with bonus chapters and art from Zach Dodson, who is responsible for the fine picture to the left. If your sky has ever looked like the sky in that picture, maybe now’s the time to act.
Blake Butler—
“The entire system of the novel in the last century, with its cumbersome machinery of continuity, linear chronology, causality, noncontradiction, was actually a last-ditch attempt to forget the disintegrated state we were left in when God withdrew from our souls, an attempt at least to keep up appearances by replacing the incomprehensible explosion of atoms, of black holes and impasses, with a reassuring, clear, unequivocal constellation woven so closely that we’d no longer hear death howling between the stitches, amidst broken threads hastily reknotted. No objection to this grandiose, unnatural project? . . . No objection, really?”
Alain Robbe-Grillet, from Ghosts in the Mirror
Mike Young—
I know we already linked to it, but Mark Baumer’s walk-across-America trekblog is awesome.
THE VISIBLE THE UNTRUE (to E.O.) – an unfinished poem by HART CRANE
Yes, I being
the terrible puppet of my dreams, shall
lavish this on you–
the dense mine of the orchid, split in two.
And the fingernails that cinch such
environs?
And what about the staunch neighbor tabulations
with all their zest and doom?
.
I’m wearing badges
that cancel all your kindness. Forthright
I watch the silver Zeppelin
destroy the sky. To
stir your confidence?
To rouse what sanctions–? toothaches?
.
The silver strophe . . . the canto
bright with myth . . . Such
distances leap landward without
evil smile. And, as for me . . .
.
The window weight throbs in its blind
partition. To extinguish what I have of faith.
Yes, light. And it is always
always, always the eternal rainbow
And it is always the day, the farewell day unkind.
+
from The Complete Poems of Hart Crane, centennial edition, ed. Marc Simon, introduced by Harold Bloom. New Yorkers, you can have one for seven dollars at The Strand.