Blake Butler—
All you sentence-heads, Snooki’s on the sentence tip too: “Any juicehead will get some nut shrinkage. And bacne. They fly into a ‘roid rage, it is a ‘road’ ‘roid rage.” I mean, sound is sound: Knopf by way of the club. I’ve read worse; hell, frequently.
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“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” – John Cage
Ken Baumann—
What do you expect to pay for a paperback book? What if it’s 700+ pages? Books are really cheap entertainment. Do you think they should cost more?
Ken Baumann—
Gossip until it’s not, but anyway: James Franco to write/adapt & direct As I Lay Dying and Blood Meridian.
Misremembering the ending
A childhood trauma:
I am five or six and I am watching the animated version of Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child. At the end of this film, the mouse—a windup toy—and his child—same—find themselves at the bottom of a lake, and find themselves staring at a can of dog food. On the can of dog food is a recursive image: a dog standing next to a can of dog food with a label that features that dog standing next to a can of dog food with a label that features…
The toy mice are stuck at the bottom of the lake, peering into the label, the child tasked with counting the number of dogs. And so the child does forever and ever and ever, and the film ends, and I am sent to bed, and I spend the subsequent decades sometimes pondering the concept of eternity until I am filled with anxiety and my neck begins to sweat. One dog, two dogs, three dogs, four…
After the cut is the animated version of The Mouse and His Child. Skip ahead 50 or so minutes to watch the scene in question.
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The Rolls Should Be Warm: An Interview w/ Michael Earl Craig
Michael Earl Craig’s third book, Thin Kimono, was recently published by Wave Books. He is one of my favorite poets. I asked him some questions when he was traveling in Michigan, but normally he is in Montana. -ZS
ZS: What brings you to Michigan? And what do you think about Michigan’s fudge?
MEC: The Michigan trip is for my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. We’re in Leland, Michigan. In addition to my parents, my brother and his wife and their daughter are here, as well as my sister, her husband, and their three kids. Susan and I brought our Chia Pet, Nancy. When we were kids we’d vacation for a week (sometimes two) in this part of Michigan, so we have a lot of family history here.
And the fudge is big time in Michigan. My favorite is Murdick’s Fudge—the store in Traverse City, specifically. There are a few other Murdick’s stores but the Traverse City one is the best. I normally don’t eat fudge. Fudge is usually gritty and makes me want to knock my front teeth out on a banister. But this fudge is different. It’s creamy. It melts in your mouth (or wherever you put it). My favorite flavor is Black Cherry. Also Vanilla Chocolate Chip. And the Maple is very good. And the Chocolate/Peanut Butter. I know I sound like some sort of candy hillbilly here but it’s all true. When you eat this fudge it changes you.
ZS: What else do you eat that changes you?
MEC: Fudge is the only thing.
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January 3rd, 2011 / 1:59 pm
January 3rd, 2011 / 1:59 pm
Matthew Simmons—
All the books I read in 2011: go to your local independent bookseller—if such a thing exists in your town—and reserve a copy of Patrick deWitt’s dark, deep, and deadly funny upcoming novel The Sisters Brothers. It’s a western. It’s spare and has existential undercurrents. The narrator is a husky-bodied, quiet-talking killer. It’ll be out in May.
Madras Press: New Ben Marcus, Kalfus, Kaufman, Barthelme
Madras Press has announced the release of four new titles, each in short run, short sized book copies, sold with all proceeds going to the charity of the author’s choice.
Among these is the first new standalone work by Ben Marcus in a long while, a 72 page book called The Moors:
The Moors is the story of a man, Thomas, whose understanding of reality leaves him at the prospect of encountering an attractive colleague while refilling his coffee at work; more so of the contents of his mind over the course of those feet from his desk, and the ensuing minutes. Along the way, shadows loom and bend, backs are turned, walls seem to move, and the passage of time is marked by the sounds of living objects colliding just beyond the sight of those who are listening. A breathtaking and claustrophilic story by Ben Marcus, written at a terrifyingly close point of view.
Also available is A Manual for Sons, an excerpt from Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father; a volume of three new stories by Ken Kalfus; and The Tiny Wife by Andrew Kaufman. I have the first series of releases from Madras and they are beautiful little objects, and each toward a great cause.
14 holding backs of diatribes on the 2011 radio
3. Mud Luscious Press goes all web update, all Heidi Blair Montag with a touch of Birdman. It detaches the retina in a kind way. Go look.
3. A get-off-my-plot-of-lawn-quote:
55. Harmony Neal uses repetition at January 2011 Hobart. You know, repetition, like this, via BHR:
3. The Girard Perregaux 925 Silver / Celluloid “Tourbillon” Fountain Pen goes for $1785.
14. Off The Internets for 8 days and what does that do? Doesn’t make you write, I say. I didn’t, sans two checks and an entry in a running journal. But it do refill the synaptic bathtub, me thinks, possibly with bubbles. Things brighten, shard, slow. I would like to write today, I’m saying. So. I ponder what happens when you leave The Internets?
Thoughts about a Televised Performance of John Cage’s 4’33”
If I were a person who coughed at such a performance, or held a screaming baby, or whose cell phone rang, or who owned the corporation that operated the train which whistled as it went past the concert hall, I’d probably be embarrassed. I noticed that between the movements, people coughed more than the whole room of people had probably coughed in the entire day, probably because all of them had been so intent on holding their bodies still and holding their coughs during the movements. But the coughs they coughed between movements and the laughter they laughed after they coughed certainly represented the most enjoyable part of the performance, other than perhaps the conductor’s ad lib between movements, when he theatrically took a rag and wiped his forehead as though he had been working up a sweat with his conducting. (Maybe he had, but not because of exertion, but rather because of the tension that attaches to publicly not doing anything, and that was part of the gag, too, when he wiped his forehead with the rag.) READ MORE >