CASH MONEY CONTENT
“We think we can do more, market books in a new way,” said Bryan “Birdman” Williams, the younger of the brothers, who is also a rap artist on their independent music label. “We want to put out five or six books a year.”
Blurb watching
An initial cover version of Freedom showed an orange sky, evocative of sunrise or sunset; the “final” version has a cooling blue swath in the sky (and its lake reflection) which broadens the time-line to a more general dusk or dawn. It’s as if the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, whose air-conditioned offices are a balm for those successful enough to work there, weary of the humid “southern” light, wanted to Yankee it up and “cool it down.” The blue, visually, plays off the bird; and painterly, is the compliment of the orange. As a rule, I don’t like birds, nature, or rasterized font in perspective on covers, but I actually like this cover (I guess three wrongs make a right). The pictured lake is undoubtedly the Minnesotan lake at which the novel’s most manic drama occurs, and I’m transported there, the vector of my sad literary Updikian erection pointed at an awesome fuck scene, careful not to get any paper cuts.
Blake Butler—
What writers do you think have the most entertaining or thought provoking Twitter feeds?
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I asked Brandon Stosuy about black metal.
As I am lately wont to do, I was thinking about black metal. Specifically I was thinking about my difficult relationship with the less savory elements of the philosophies of some of my favorite black metal artists. As I have been wont to do since the column started, I was read Haunting the Chapel by Brandon Stosuy and noticed that the same issue had come up for him recently. I like to listen to synchronicity. (And I used to like to listen to Synchronicity—weird, huh?) So, I dropped Mr. Stosuy an email with a couple of questions on the subject. Here are his answers:
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{LMC} Chat with Giancarlo Ditrapano, Thursday, 11/4, 8 PM EST
Have you ever wanted to pick an editor’s brain about the how, why, and what of a given issue?
Tomorrow you will have that chance when the Literary Magazine Club talks with Giancarlo Ditrapano, editor of NY Tyrant, right here, on this very website. The time? 8 PM EST. Come with questions and we’ll have a grand old time. You simply need to show up. Around 8 PM, a post with a chat forum will appear like magic.
Any questions, or want to know more about the Literary Magazine Club? Get in touch.
So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You
Friends,
It is with a heavy yet satisfied heart that I announce my resignation from HTMLGiant. I have enjoyed just over two wonderful years (roughly equivalent, in internet time, to a decade and a half) as a contributor to this blog. It has been a privilege and a thrill to be part of this site since its inception. Endless thanks are due to Blake Butler and Gene Morgan, for inviting me to join up in the first place, and for all the good times since. A hearty cheers as well to the other contributors here (past and present) and to our legion of commenters and readers. It has been a lot of fun to talk and debate with you (most of you, at any rate) and I’m sure we’ll still be seeing plenty of one another around the web, and maybe in meatspace too. Now, before things get too sentimental, here’s Woody Guthrie to play us out.
Four! Mark Neely Interview.
Lately chapbooks design/appear more glow than many book-books. Example winner of Concrete Wolf contest. Interview below:
The Food Network has perfected the cooking show by turning it into soft porn. The hosts actually moan when they taste what they have made. And although the chefs on the show are grating their own horseradish and making their own sausage, most of the commercials are for American cheese slices and frozen dinners. That doesn’t seem common to me. It seems insane.
No matter how hard humans try and wall ourselves off from the natural world, we still have mites living in our eyebrows.
Online publishing is young. Like a young person it is energetic, cocky, innovative, various, unstable, and full of shit. I’m excited to be around to watch it grow up.
The new newest edition of H_NM_N bursts with booty: doubloons, medallions, other metaphorical treasures, etc.
Including stellar stuff from the home team: Amy McDaniel and Alexis Orgera, plus some wildness from William Walsh, some wtf goodness from a new-to-me writer named Sutherland Douglass who I am now putting on my “watch for stuff from this writer” list, and also being added to that list is another new-to-me writer named Kirsty Singer whose poems I found tremendous.
There’s heaps of other good stuff, too. You should check it out.
“Rousseau was categorically convinced of the existence of vampires.” –David Markson
Henri Rousseau, "War"
So I’ve been thinking a lot on naive art, a term people don’t use no more, and how it relates to writing. Rousseau is talked at a lot in Markson’s This is not a novel, the main character of which is named Writer. It’s hard to tell though, which one he’s talking about — Henri or Jean-Jacques — unless of course you know who Le Douanier was. It’s interesting too to think on the distinction(s) between folk art, outsider art, primitive art, and the art of children or the mentally ill. Because there is a difference apparently according to Anatole Jakovsky and other people at least there was, the differences some of them anyway being that naive artists produce a color palette which is harmonious if different from that of the usual whatever. The compositions are balanced and interesting, even inspired, but not executed as people are taught in art school. I don’t buy this.