Nick Antosca—
Katherine Dunn hasn’t published a novel in the 21 years since Geek Love. But she’s been working on one, and an excerpt is coming out in the Paris Review soon, thanks to an entreaty from editor Caitlin Roper. Also, remember that time last winter when she showed a mugger what’s up?
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Blake Butler—
1. On Kickstarter, Astrophil Press is raising money to rerelase Brian Evenson’s Contagion. The video contains an interview he did on TV in France. I like how she says ‘pee-doh-file’.
2. At Transductions, David Rylance considers David Lipsky’s David Foster Wallace book. Triple D.
Dead in the Water
Image by Nik McCue, via ESPN
On Tuesday, I took a walk along the beach in Perdido Key, Florida, where my parents have a condo. It is my favorite place. The sand is white and cool even in summer; the water is clear and, since the Gulf is shallow, it gets warm enough to swim comfortably by late spring. The condo itself, six stories up, wrapped with balconies and floor-to-ceiling windows, is consolation for my parents’ selling the much-beloved house I grew up in (for far more than they paid sixteen years earlier, to people who razed it except for the chimney and put a McMansion in its place).
This is the part of Florida known as the Redneck Riviera. A mile down the road from us is the Flora-Bama Lounge, where donated bras crowd clotheslines across the ceiling and where you can play the LobsterZone (like those games where you grab for a plush toy with a metal claw, except instead of toys there are live lobsters). On nights when we don’t feel like cooking, we choose between the Crab Trap and the Shrimp Bucket. I usually opt for some kind of fried seafood–gulf shrimp, gulf oysters–with an appetizer of fried (blue) crab claws, a dish that I’ve never seen outside of the Florida/Alabama gulf area. Much more so than in Atlanta, where I’m from, there is truly a local cuisine in those environs. Smoked tuna dip. And the famed Royal Red shrimp — a lobster-like variety that swim through our waters for only a very short period during the year. Add some slaw and hushpuppies, plenty of tartar and cocktail sauce, maybe some new potatoes or sweet corn, and you’ve got a proper panhandle supper.
So I was on this walk. Nothing was different yet. A hermit crab grumped along the edge of the water in his chickpea-sized trumpet shell of a home. Gulls did their dive-bombing and toddler-with-food stalking. A great blue heron strutted around looking typically elegant and above it all. A (human) couple waded to hip-depth and canoodled, aware that being in water is the international PDA carte blanche. READ MORE >
A Few Tidbits on That Whole Over/Under 40 Fancy Writer Genius Thing
Music is great and people like to listen to it.
1. Here at Stereogum, a bunch of musicians phone in their tributes to the record Meat is Murder, and then Drew Daniel from Matmos schools the rest of them with a really fascinating, considered, kind of beautiful tribute to the record Meat is Murder.
2. Blake’s favorite band, Wavves, have a new record, and it’s not as fucked up and distorted as the last one. So someone fucked up and distorted the first single:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKJkE1l5pH0&feature=player_embedded
Mini editing prompt: take something you just wrote, compare it to one of your first published pieces, and then try to rewrite the new thing as if you were still the writer you were when you first started writing in earnest.
3. Last night, Aaron Burch drunkenly decided to have a summer West Coast tour. I propose we all send him mixed tapes. Or mixed CDs. Or whatever the hell kids do these days.
Alec Niedenthal—
How important is the presence of specific clothing/architecture to your writing? Do you write about them well? Do you ignore them to some extent? Are you scared of them, like I am?
Psychedelic Hoo-haha
Like my obsession with Brian Eno, some things never change.
Adam Robinson—
How do you think the means of publication for poetry and poetry itself are related?
-Amy King, at the Huffington Post.
Klaus Kinski on Writing
“Fun? There is no fun.”
“Put a bird cage near the window so that the bird can see the sky? It’s much better to look than not to, even if it hurts.”
“You don’t need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.”
“I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even, and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years.”
“Through the years it became clearer and clearer, this thing. When I had to concentrate on a person I had to become, this thing became stronger and took more of me.”
“It is true what Rimbaud said; If you think a book is strong enough, try it at the ocean, in the wind, at the waves. If the book can resist the ocean, then it exists. Otherwise, throw it away.”
“It is like those vines called lianas, those tropical creepers that grow around you and strangle you. You cut off one branch, but there is another that grows.”
“People who do not see the terrible things therefore do not see the beautiful things, either.”
“I was walking through the streets of Paris. I started crying, because I could look at a man, a woman, a dog, anything, and receive it-there was no difference between physical and psychological.”
“In a way, everything concerning a movie leaves me cold.”
“They think you can dump all this and be an actor. Then they say, Good job. Do you say, Good job to an earthquake?”
“Those assholes! Do you ask a car crash for another take? Do you ask a volcano for another take? Do you ask the storm for another take?”
“I didn’t think anything. I just was Aguirre. You remember yourself in the 16th Century.”
“Why do I continue making movies? Making movies is better than cleaning toilets.”
“The ultimate acting is to destroy yourself.”
“There can be no word to express this secret. Because this secret is very simple, but it includes almost everything.”
“Don’t be sorry, OK?”
“You can call it my consciousness of using my talent like a whore uses her body: to pay the price.”
“Being conscious of all this means changing everything, like in nature; never-ending movement.”
“This is a consolation for cripples.”
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
She claimed he was my type, which I took to mean a little bit twisted.
A massive hollow swallowed.
Too drunk to stop.
I’m nihilistic, antagonistic, violent, horrible – but not obliterated, yet.
Room 453 smelled of beer, barbecue, and old leather.
The party was a bust, full of Valley chicks, jocks, and rockabillies.
Pig Mountain Valley in the middle of the South.
I prepared by swallowing a couple of quaaludes washed down with Jack Daniels.
Stirring the fiery liquid.
One drink away.
Light leeches out.