NewVillager: “RichDoors”
Some of you might know Ross Simonini from his work at The Believer (and elsewhere), but he’s also an incredible musician, and his band NewVillager just signed with IAMSOUND, to release their debut full length early this year. I can’t stop listening to it. Below is the magical stutter-video for their first single “RichDoors”; the rest of the album is just as addictive and inventive, and beautiful.
I Like What The Hell Is Going On Around Here
Ryan Ormonde (zillakiller) writes a blog called Text Messengers that I found randomly. He has discussed, in a heavily stylized form, the work of Leslie Scalapino, Ulises Carrión, Juliana Spahr, Craig Dworkin, Danielle Collobert, Jackson Mac Low, Rosmarie Waldrop, Stéphane Mallarmé, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett.
I like Crispin Best’s week of NOÖ.
I like tabs a lot a lot.
I like the idea that I am floating on a bunch of other people’s ideas and the idea that I am one of them. I like the idea that we pass these things from one to another like money from a country that doesn’t exist and has no name, or like gigantic translucent rings that arch into the sky. I like thinking that people care about other people, that’s cute. It’s cute to care and caring is sharing ideas.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK, God Without the Sacred: The Book of Job, The First Critique of Ideology
The latest installment in the New York Public Library’s Three Faiths Exhibition (some of which is available online here) is a 106 minute lecture by Slavoj Zizek which is among the most plainspoken and accessible Slavoj Zizek lectures I’ve ever heard (click here for the lecture).
The St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in New York maintains (or at least used to maintain) the custom of inviting a stranger, often a non-Christian one, to deliver a sermon once each year. (The most famous of these sermons became the centerpiece of Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday.) READ MORE >
Are Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez really brothers?
I woke up this morning and sat on a stool in the kitchen and watched a cat named Jim watch a squirrel. I did not know the squirrel’s name. It was on a fence post.
Last night, I went to a party. Joanna Ruocco was there. I started talking to her and told her I really liked her books and she said, “Publishing on a small press is like being the best at something that no one else has ever bothered to think of doing. In my head, I picture thousands of people doing really unique things that no one has ever done or will ever do again.” I laughed. When I stopped laughing I realized the person I was talking to wasn’t Joanna Ruocco. I didn’t know who it was. I didn’t see Joanna Ruocco the rest of the night.
“N word” removed from Huck Finn
A new edition of Huckleberry Finn will be released next month from NewSouth where all 219 instances of Twain’s use of the word “nigger” have been removed. “We recognized that some people would say that this was censorship of a kind,” says the publisher, “but our feeling is that there are plenty of other books out there—all of them, in fact—that faithfully replicate the text, and that this was simply an option for those who were increasingly uncomfortable, as he put it, insisting students read a text which was so incredibly hurtful.” Ugh. Really? Is this the beginning of a national clean-me-so-we-feel-better literature trend?
Blake Butler—
An exciting new monthly online journal of poetics founded by Joshua Marie Wilkinson: Evening Will Come. Debut month features an excellent long new work by C.D. Wright.
“Internacionalista”
The Believer is running an excerpt from Deb Olin Unferth’s forthcoming Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War. An excerpt from the excerpt:
George and I had gotten nowhere with joining any revolution. It was August. We’d been fired from one job and hadn’t found another. We’d managed to throw up a wall between us, or at least some small obfuscating stones (a dot of diamond, two glints of red). And now we had to get out of El Salvador. Our visas were running out. We couldn’t wait around for people to figure out what they were going to do about the bridges that had been exploded on the road to the border—put them back up, explode somebody back, chart a little path through the river—no time for any of that, George said, because to be stuck in El Salvador with an expired visa was no joke. So we set out. The truck drove in loops, searching for bridges still standing. A few kilometers from the border, some guys with black-market gym shoes threw their duffel bags off the truck and jumped out, ran into the trees.
“Kill me outright with looks” : 139 Books I Read in 2010
MacGyver, that sexy-bellied genie show, and the show about California highway cops with the weirdly lowercase i—all of these television shows ran 139 episodes. In 2010, I read 139 books. I mean, I think I did. Most chapbooks I didn’t include in this list, even really good ones, so there’s that. Also there’s always an also, so who knows? Here are 139 books I probably read this year and what I spontaneously remember of them. As a bonus, I am sometimes unexpectedly or tangentially “mean-ish” in my notes, so if you have an idea of me as being “unable to be mean,” maybe this will change your mind (probably not): READ MORE >
The Good Men Fiction Project
The Good Men Project Magazine launched Weekend Fiction on January 1, 2011. Every Saturday, this section will feature original short fiction that speaks to the male experience, from award-winning, along with new and emerging, authors.
The debut features a new short story, “Yosemite,” from James Franco. Also featured in the debut is “Saint Roger of Fox Chase,” by Sean Ennis of Gotham Writer’s Workshop.
Weekend Fiction will be edited by Good Men Project Magazine contributor Matthew Salesses, author of Our Island of Epidemics. Future issues will include stories by accomplished authors George Singleton, Ben Greenman, Kim Chinquee, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Alexander Chee, Ryan Call, and others.
Submissions are welcome. They are looking for fiction in the range of 1200-10,000 words in some way touching on the “male experience.” Go here for guidelines and to submit.