Seems like you should ‘read more’
i read canonical literature with my family when i was twenty-five
when i was twenty-five
i read canonical literature with my family
my dad read lolita
my mom read the bell jar
my brother read portnoy’s complaint
i read infinite jest
that night we read nabokov
the next night we read plath
the next night we read roth
the next night we read wallace
Expanded Literature Part 1: Internet Literature
While eating breakfast the other day, I thought it might be funny to go to ask.com and pose the question, “What is internet literature?” I thought it’d cause a few giggles, and I thought that perhaps it would result in something I could screen-cap to submit for Internet Poetry. I mean, the fact that I typed “askjeeves.com” into my browser alone I found to be ironic, because when I think of AskJeeves, I think of 2002.
Well, AskJeeves is now just Ask.com, I guess, and it turns out that the first search result actually proved relevant. The page is from February 18th, 2004–by now this should read as antiquated, right? The speed of technology arguably renders us far further into the future; between 2004 and now–than any time before. But despite a few caveats, the definition here seems to me far more interesting in consideration of capabilities than anything that would seem to actually define “internet literature.”
The page suggests the following list as a definition of hypertext literature:
Forthcoming from Future Tense: Legs Get Led Astray by Chloe Caldwell
Future Tense has announced their first title for 2012—Legs Get Led Astray by Chloe Caldwell.
Legs Get Led Astray is a full-length collection of creative non-fiction. The connective threads throughout the book are love, relationships, obsession. The title alludes to getting lost looking for something that doesn’t exist: the perfect place to live, the perfect desk to write at, the perfect person to love, the perfect person to sleep with. There is no perfect anything and this compilation is about Caldwell coming to these realizations.
Pre-orders start at the end of the year but it is never too early to get excited about an interesting young writer. A couple excerpts from the book are below and you might also enjoy Chloe’s essay, at The Rumpus, a really moving piece about where she writes.
The Milan Review
This mag looks gorgeous. The Milan Review is new and the first issue is packing: stories by Dave Cull, Jonathan Dixon, Glen Hirschberg, Noy Holland, Jonathon Keats, Tao Lin, Clancy Martin, E.C. Osondu, Dawn Raffel, Nelly Reifler, Rebecca Rosenblum, Deb Olin Unferth, Corinna Vallianatos and Brent Van Horne and illustrations by Matt Furie and Maison Du Crac. Click through for more pictures and order info. Italy makes fetishworthy objects.
Excerpt Hover, Htmlgiant (2011)
It’s funny how much shadows are glorified under hovering windows, the subtle gradation from dark to light, as if we were the sun casting these shadows from God’s eye view. Rembrandt and Caravaggio spent a lot of time with chiaroscuro, moving across their subject’s face from dark to light. An imaginary sphere will always be rendered in pencil with its shadow, for the surface upon which light falls is the same tone as the the paper, an argument that light is white despite the jaundiced yellow of the sun. I always found the future really sad in Back to the Future II, like I would be fine if I fell out of a tree and into a girl’s room, just stayed in the 80s, when Huey Lewis was still news, and nothing except the air guitar move where you jump floated.
Forthcoming from Featherproof: Tim Kinsella
If you were in your teens or twenties in the 00s and like weirdy pop music, you probably will at least be like, whoa, what? to the announcement of Featherproof’s next forthcoming title: Tim Kinsella’s The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense
From what I’ve heard, this thing is as nuts as you’d expect.
Dennis Cooper says, “For all this novel’s depth of story, and that story’s grip and wealthy undercurrents, Tim Kinsella’s rushing, trippily meticulous prose is so exciting to follow that the story seems as much the novel’s soundtrack and topography as it is the point. A thorough and wildly distinctive read.”
I’m ready.
Available for preorder now.
Twitter MFA
In which we do a close-reading of a Tweeter’s Tweet draft and assess its tone, theme, synecdoche and narrative arc, among other things. Today’s Tweet draft was written by Colson Whitehead. Join us in two weeks for a discussion of a Tweet draft written by Drew Kalbach.
The Tweet draft:
This is one in a series of linked tweets about a small West Virginia mining town. Revolving narrators, characters in common, bittersweet.
It is not this Tweet draft alone that awes us, but the notion that Whitehead is mining the depths of his past in order to present to us a courageous work of Tweet. Whitehead, who hails from the small town of Manhattan, West Virginia, located in the Eastern Panhandle, is a Tweeter most capable of pulling off such a masterful rendition of the linked genre: the story-in-Tweets, an updating of the classic novel-in-stories genre we have seen so successfully employed by writers since Sherwood Anderson. Of Whitehead’s ambitious project, Hart Crane, who also has a highly visible social media presence, recently Tweeted: “@America should read @colsonwhitehead’s Tweets on her knees. They are an important update in the feed of her consciousness.” (Of course, it should be noted that this is Crane’s transparent ploy to get retweets from both Whitehead and America.)
Boyfriend pillow
Be careful in the cache of artistic enterprise, you just might trip over something, which is not what artist Robert Gober, his surrogate-phallic foot pictured left, was thinking, or maybe it was, or maybe thinking is our way of running away from the void, which, in better days, was known as truth, before the post-fuckturalists got to it; or maybe we’re near the end of something, the one unknowable something that we know currently, the one where a search query for boyfriend pillow yields a pillow with a bisected fisting hole, because falling asleep alone or beside someone has never been so complicated, with our television-seared synapses and tiny odes to nature in loops of waterfalls and forest rain inside white noise sleep machines plugged into a wall with an alien black cord to teach us the forgotten narrative of who we were. SkyMall is mankind’s way of saying we’d rather look at shit conceived by schizophrenics than learn, via a group of racially diverse cartoons calmly dying, how to stay alive a little longer before the plane crashes. And of course you can’t say “plane crashes” in today’s cultural environment without invoking that historical moment comprised of a hundred frozen moments from different angles whose aggregate faux 360º view is stricken in the minds of all, the number of the perished paltry compared to what god did on his better days.
Flag Burn Attempt I Suppose I Guess
I read this article and watched this video and oddly did not think of the flag as symbol vs. flag as sacred, or really the entire flag desecration debate, or even a debate on the words, “Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.” No, none of that was really running through my head. Why did I re-watch? Why did I find it intriguing?
May 13th, 2011 / 8:39 am