“The Balloon” by Donald Barthelme
In college I went through a stage of searching for and printing off as many David Foster Wallace interviews as I could find. I remember printing of the interview he gave to Larry McCaffery and reading it and stumbling into the passage wherein he speaks of ‘the click.’
At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click in literature, too. It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I finished it. I don’t know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, but I know I can hear the click, when there is a click.
Of course, I had to go find a copy of “The Balloon.” I had never read and Barthelme, had only vaguely heard of him and for some reason thought he was an author writing in the 1800s.
A Random List of Things
Annalemma is holding a subscription drive and they need 36 more subscriptions in the next 20 days so they can print Issue Eight. Annalemma is a great magazine that is gorgeously produced–full color throughout, lovely writing and they actually pay writers. You can find more information about the subscription drive, here, and you can actually subscribe here for $25.
I recently learned of the photography of Vivian Maier. It is stunning.
The great blog Ward 6 is shutting down and it is a shame.
Penguin has launched Book Country, a site for writers and fans of genre fiction. Writers can upload work, participate in discussions, and read articles about the publishing industry. It looks pretty interesting.
Things are not looking good for Detroit libraries.
The editor of the NYTBR explains why it is difficult to vet memoirs.
The Atlantic has a special feature on how genius works.
At The Smart Set, Jessa Crispin writes on The Female Body.
A poet inserted poetry into genetic code.
There is no explicit meaning
From the NYT obituary of Osama bin Laden:
Yet it was the United States, Bin Laden insisted, that was guilty of a double standard.
“It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us and then wants us to agree to all this,” he told CNN in the 1997 interview. “If we refuse to do so, it says we are terrorists. When Palestinian children throw stones against the Israeli occupation, the U.S. says they are terrorists. Whereas when Israel bombed the United Nations building in Lebanon while it was full of children and women, the U.S. stopped any plan to condemn Israel. At the same time that they condemn any Muslim who calls for his rights, they receive the top official of the Irish Republican Army at the White House as a political leader. Wherever we look, we find the U.S. as the leader of terrorism and crime in the world.”
Words will always be words. I can call something whatever I want and it doesn’t mean a thing until it is validated by power (in whatever form) and then by people because of power. Everyone keeps “rejoicing” and the only people I see or hear questioning that celebration is the people. I’m sure it’s coming in small ways from the left but the President has not denounced it, let alone spoken to it so far as I have heard. If I remember correctly, people were pretty upset about this:
On journaling, ego, and Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine
Back in the day when I started to write fiction, I took a class called Gender & Writing. I must’ve been 21 or so. We read a lot of things, but what’s pertinent to this post is Virginia Woolf. The professor told us about her journals. We read some excerpts. They blew me away. And instantly, because of the egoist in me, I started to worry about people finding my old journals, how stupid I would seem, banal and delusional. Then, I felt moronic and delusional (again) for thinking I’d be so important that future scholars would be rifling through my old journals. Regardless, I stopped journaling by hand, not that I did much of it anyway, but reading through those journals today, I cringe at my youth and the way I made melodramas out of nothing.
Obviously, no one has bothered going through my journals, but my greatest fear manifested when I started reading Paul Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine. Part journal, part delusional dream, Scheerbart’s beautiful little book narrates his toiled process of inventing the world’s first perpetual motion machine.
Let me back up, if you don’t know the name Paul Scheerbart, that’s ok. I didn’t either, but he was a proto-Dadaist, a novelist, playwright, poet, and his discussions of glass architecture played a role in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. But back in January 1908, he was poor writer dreaming of money, fame, and glory. In many ways, I applaud how he understood that he would not attain these goals through his writing, so he found another way: invention!
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May 5th, 2011 / 10:49 am
May 5th, 2011 / 10:49 am
Giving Away the Freaks
Jamie Iredell is giving away his killer new book, the weird faux-encyclopedia of trash talk and straight talk: The Book of Freaks. Here follows the scheme from Jamie himself — MY
“I want to give away some copies of The Book of Freaks.
I’m thinking that the most entertaining way I might achieve this is to have other people write their own entries to The Book of Freaks.
For examples, some of the entries that I wrote can be found
at Hobart
at the2ndhand
at PANK
at Robot Melon (x2)
at Mad Hatter’s Review
at Servinghouse
Write your freakish entry. It can be about anything you damn well please. Post your entry in the comments here. Entries will be judged by Roxane Gay and Mike Young. Three winners and a runner-up will be selected to receive a signed copy of the book and some other junk that I decide to send your way.” Post your comment entries by Thursday May 12th.
Bill Knott Week: An Essay by Peter Jurmu
Some notes on Knott from Peter Jurmu:
When What You Really Really Want Is To Cover Territory
Sex on Quicksand: Collected Short Poems 1960-2009, like Breccia (or An Incomplete Inventory of Dorian Gray’s Closet—cover pictured above—that phone number is the request line for a Boston-area oldies station, WODS— READ MORE >
Ken Baumann—
Two essays on Osama Bin Laden’s assassination that got me thinking. First is from Ken Chen at Montevidayo, and the second is from Noah Cicero.
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Help Tuscaloosa: Brief Essays from Michael Martone and Wendy Rawlings
One week ago, a massive tornado tore through Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of a vibrant writing community associated with the U of A’s esteemed MFA program. Brevity has been gifted with stellar essays from Tuscaloosa students and alums over the years, and their next issue will feature essays from Michael Martone and Wendy Rawlings.
Martone’s essay was written just days after the deadly tornado touched down, killing at least 40 individuals and leaving many, town and gown alike, homeless; Rawlings’ poignant look at her Tuscaloosa neighborhood was written before the storm, and sat in our submissions queue on the evening the tornado turned the city’s neighborhoods inside out.
Brevity has decided to extend the reach of their Tuscaloosa benefit by releasing these two essays one week early: MARTONE ESSAYand RAWLINGS ESSAY. Please spread the word via Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, or whatever method you choose. These beautiful essays deserve as wide a readership as possible, and the editors of Brevity hope that after reading them, you will make a donation to Give Tuscaloosa tornado relief or to the West Alabama Food Bank.
“The World Doesn’t Smell Like You,” from LOOK! LOOK! Feathers by Mike Young
This post, part of a series of short reactions to the stories from Mike Young’s really remarkable collection LOOK! LOOK! FEATHERS was written by Gabe Durham, who picked the story for Keyhole #10.—MS
“The World Doesn’t Smell Like You,” from Mike Young’s story collection LOOK! LOOK! FEATHERS, is a quest narrative about these high school dumbasses who need to know whether the rumor’s true that their gym teacher, Coach Schiel, has only got one ball.
It’s one of the L!L!F stories I got to read an early draft of, it’s the story I got to publish in Keyhole 10, and when in a certain mood, it’s my favorite story in the collection. Other favorites are “Susan White,” “Snow You Know,” “The Same Heart,” and “Burk’s Nub,” the latter a band-nerd companion to “The World” that underscores each high school clique’s unique potential for cruelty. READ MORE >