Impossible Mike—
“[…] The outcry was shrillest from those who confuse art, which exists to make people uncomfortable and to spur them to new thinking, with entertainment, which is meant to gratify, relax and confirm preconceptions of decorum, prettiness, or good citizenship. No art is great if it makes its consumers feel comfortable.”
–Richard Davenport-Hines, “Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin”
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Coco on Writing
“When I was around [Ice-T] for a couple weeks, I gathered all the facts of what he liked and what he didn’t like, and I just shape-shifted into that woman for him.”
“If you saw my boobs before I got them done, they were actually a nice size; nice and squishy, waterly [sic], flip em’ around, you know…”
“My hips were always a little bit bigger than the top half of me and I wanted to even it out.”
“It’s too time consuming, and honestly, people with lives don’t really have the time to make comments at all. I don’t even have the time to go on the Internet anymore. Who has the time to actually log in, put your email address in, put if you’re female or male and all of that good stuff, and then make a comment…” READ MORE >
What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Michael Martone} ***NOTE: final entry in the series***
Michael Martone‘s most recent books are Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover, Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories. Michael Martone, a memoir in contributor’s notes, Unconventions, Writing on Writing, and Rules of Thumb, edited with Susan Neville, were all published recently. He is also the author of The Blue Guide to Indiana, published by FC2. The University of Georgia Press published his book of essays, The Flatness and Other Landscapes, winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction, in 2000.
Nick Antosca—
The Millions most-anticipated list for the second half of the year attempts to rip its penis off.
Lily Hoang—
Carmen Gimenez Smith’s book BRING DOWN LITTLE BIRDS has just won an American Book Award. Huge huge huge congrats to her. And, she got the news while sitting in my house.
Sometimes People Put Writing on the Internet
I seem to remember there being a time when a whole bunch of writer types were really excited or really curious or really thinking deeply about using the internet to write stories, and because a page on the internet can be a place to place text and a place to place pictures and a place to embed music and a place to embed video and all that, it was going to be really exciting and revolutionary. And I seem to remember writer types in universities thinking maybe they had to jump on all this and think even more deeply about it and maybe thinking that they needed to start a whole side-discipline for hypertext.
I seem to remember all this, but it came and went so damn quickly, I can’t be 100% sure. And, frankly, I’m too tired to search it all out on the Internet Archive. Go for it, if you’re interested. If I made all of it up, give me hell in the comments section, maybe.
All that is just a prologue for two stories on the internet: OH NO EVERYTHING IS WET NOW, an ebook/web collage/thing/”pseudo small novella in verse” on our own Mike Young’s Magic Helicopter Press site, and “Neverland” by Gabriel Blackwell on the Uncanny Valley Press site. READ MORE >
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July 7th, 2011 / 12:30 pm
July 7th, 2011 / 12:30 pm
Fan Mail #3: Evan Lavender-Smith
Dear Evan Lavender-Smith,
I have read your two books. I have read and loved your two books. I couldn’t tell they were bred from the same body – yours – and your breadth alone amazes. Your breadth is the least of my compliments. From Old Notebooks: bursts of brilliance, ideas merely generated, without bodies with which to attach, organs without bodies. Avatar: a requiem, lodged between mourning and jubilance. The sadness I encountered with every string of words, I can’t describe it. The loneliness. Avatar felt like a return home, like you somehow understood me, like the book was composed for me alone, but it wasn’t.
Stephanie Barber works at a museum
Photo by Cara Ober
Poet and artist Stephanie Barber has installed herself in the Baltimore Museum of Art. She’s been there since June 25, and she’ll be there until August 7. And she brought along her studio.
This isn’t an endurance piece, like what Marina Abramović did so beautifully at MoMA. Stephanie, who is doing the performance/installation/video work in conjunction with the Sondheim Prize, is making videos as she normally would, but at a faster clip. She’s producing one a day. Her setup in the gallery is a sight to behold for the way it deconstructs the museum. When is the last time you’ve seen pictures from a magazine haphazardly tacked to a museum’s wall? Or the last time you watched a video with a soundtrack performed by museum patrons as they pass through? READ MORE >