New lost Stephen Dixon novel emerges
Early novel by Stephen Dixon rejected widely for being experimental has just been published by Fugue State Press. The excerpt seems awesome, obviously. $15 includes U.S. shipping.
Stephen Dixon: “SOASAOS:AN is a novel I wrote 40 years ago, tried to get it published for a couple of years, got some unflattering rejections for a change–before they were always gracious and ‘not right for us’ and ‘wouldn’t know how to market this’ and ‘hope you have better luck with it with another publisher…’ If accepted, it would have been my first published book.”
Interview: Reader Who Recently Finished The Savage Detectives
1. So how long did it take you to read the book?
I didn’t actually finish the book. So when people talk about the ending (this happened the other day in the lime aisle) I have to front like I know what they are saying. Like yesterday, in the lime aisle, this elderly woman saw me with the book and said, “That’s a funny book. I like the monologue by the guy who draws the dwarves with giant penises. That’s the best monologue I’ve read from a mentally defective character since Faulkner.” And I just had to shake my head and smile and fake it. So.
2. Did you ever read the book in public places or leave the book out purposefully when visitors were over?
Ha Ha. Well, yes, as I mentioned the grocery store. I mean I know there’s like this Bolano surge right now and so then a backlash (Newtonian law there) and a lot of my friends (so-called) sort of rolled their eyes over me reading Bolano but fuck them. I walk alone, you know? I’m not going to have others deciding what I want to read. I mean that would be almost anti-literature. I couldn’t read something just to say I’ve read it. That would be like picking your college major because your parents want you to be like a landscape architect or something. I mean only about 20% or something of people even have a college degree. The entire point is to select your occupation, to attempt to create your destiny, and you’re just going to toss it away? You’re just going to abdicate free will? Fuck that. I’m not reading a damn thing for others. That would be death.
3. How did you deal with the footnotes, I mean logistically? I know some people like to use two bookmarks.
What in the fuck are you talking about?
4. Have you read other Bolano? How did this book compare?
I read The Third Reich. It was serialized in The Paris Review. I felt like Charles Dickens and shit reading a serialized novel. It was a strong book, very, very technical (something Bolano prided himself on, when he wanted to write a technical book) and with this ominous undertone, the constant state of threat, a character who really NEEDS TO HELP HIMSELF and knows it, but just can’t. You ever felt that way? I have. I could relate. You ever stuck a cattle prod down your throat but LIKED THE TASTE? (That’s a metaphor, BTW) I also read that short story collection where every story (IMO) is really about writing. Craft, how to write, etc. It might look like the stories are about something else, but you’re wrong. It’s called something last evenings? I don’t remember. But Bolano, in his essence, is always writing about writing. That’s what he gives a shit about, period
5. Did you ever read the book while on drugs or alcohol?
Multiple Chances to Renew The New Yorker
It is odd how a magazine that entrusts their readership with the most reputable of writing can simultaneously treat them so obtusely as to give them 8 links to the same subscription page in one notice, as if they needed such excessiveness to either help with a decision or to find the link. Obviously, the editorial and subscription departments are two separate beasts, the latter’s sense of rhetoric as blunt as a teenager with a hard on, dry humping the nearest throw pillow. I can live with the (3) “save 75%” and (7) “renew now” capitalisty buttons, and there’s something almost endearing about their final (8) footnote-ish “subtle” oh-in-case-you-missed-it-the-first-seven-times hyperlink, but (5) that Eustice Tilley has been reduced to a roll over link, the symbolic object of his lepidopterous preoccupation now cropped, is something sad. To say he is blinded by commerce would be too easy, thus their editors are free to call me. The race for high brow has gotten so high, over the scalp, the best hairlines are found at the ass. For the past year, I flip through the cartoons during dinner, finding it all kind of funny.
The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. 1
The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. 1
by Scott McClanahan
Lazy Fascist Press, 2012
132 pages / $10.95 buy from Amazon
Rating: 8.7
Scott McClanahan wonders about doing the right thing. Does he do the right thing? Is the right thing even important, with everything all twisted and evil? There are no great epiphanies in these stories. What you see are only glimpses. Traces of humanity in the smallest of details: being able to tell time, finding salvation in a gas station toilet, hating bologna sandwiches. Any attempt at rationalizing the entire universe is avoided. Rather, McClanahan does what any good writer should: he writes about what he knows. And he writes in a way that is so thoroughly enjoyable. I feel after reading this book I know McClanahan just a little bit better.
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August 14th, 2012 / 12:09 pm
August 14th, 2012 / 12:09 pm
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF TWEETS – vol 2
Another “journal” dedicated to the criticism (not really) and recognition of excellence in tweeting.
TWEETUS ILLUMINATIO MEA, TWEETAMS EST LITTERAE
*
@georgelazenby by name
Genre: ol’ man meta
The collection of tweets published by ‘name’ stands more as a philosophy of existence in an absurd world than as literature. According to name, “self-confidence is at best choosing not to look at the fact that people are idiots for believing in you” – a theory that may or may not be reflected by his 120/10,0000+ ratio. What’s more, name appears to possess a certain admiration of those mired in the pedestrian. “finally envy people who care about drapes” he tweets. “watch paris texas in an industrial freezer,” he advises, as though urging oneself to make meaning via pop cultural moors can spontaneously ground a man in the here and now. Considering the plight of Sisyphus, it would be easy for a tweeter with name’s wisdom to write off existence as wholly absurd and without hope. Alternately, name puts up a brave front in the face of the existential. “Who the fuck are you to know what you are?” he asks. “get a laser pointer—we gonna go back to fuck with emily dickinson” he encourages. Still, given the fact that death is inevitable (and that unless you are DJ AM or tree_bro, one’s followers will inevitably unfollow) we sense a deep anxiety.
@nytyrant by New York Tyrant
Genre: magical fatism
Hitching your whole star to an entity as fleeting as a tweet is a bad idea. The Tyrant embodies this knowledge, appearing confident enough in his own voice to experiment with a range of tonal modes. He explores the romantic (“I’d understand if I saw someone at the races, jacking it to death almost, since the energy and horsemuscles and speed are essentially porn.”), the literary (“Because I could not stop for Hardee’s The drive thru was for me The Mustang held but just ourselves and a quarter bag of weed.”), ardent fatmiration, and even an occasional promotional (“@lesmistons @nytimes @newyorker @nypost @Nymag OUR FONT IS EMOJI SYRINGES AND GUNS”). When one visualizes The Tyrant on deck, one sees the sillhouette of a man flicking tweets off his fingers like Nerds candy into a night sky. Suddenly, with a start, our man grows bored and goes on to do something else entirely, like snort Pop Rocks, without worrying about retweets, faves, unfollows. Perhaps it is naïve of the editors to believe a human so impervious to judgment exists (we do know The Tyrant weighs twitter with a certain degree of gravitas, as he has been known to tell writers [paraphrase] “love the tweets but your work is shit”). Still, let’s choose to believe in something. Everybody needs a hero.
Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless
Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless
by Matt Hart
Typecast Publishing, 2012
102 pages / $16.95 Buy from Typecast or Amazon
Many have experienced poetic punk rock fall out, but few have written it as a bomb in and of itself. In Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless, Matt Hart’s got an unabashed grandiose vision, a hard low end, a slew of unlikely ancestors to consume from white holes in the backs of hands, and Rimbaud’s Ethiopia in his acid-washed jeans pockets. He rewrites Ohio snowscapes, leaving a trail of teeth lost on tours, and calls them constellations. This is important cartography. A legacy the lot of us aging counterculture intellectuals need, since we burnt most of our maps and can’t read the stars for the chem trails. How do we live the moments after the X-Ray Spex and between Coleridge, Corso, and taking the dog for a walk after dinner? How are words our revolution now? If Hart’s right and “A universe is born every second when you scream it,” what do we scream back and how do we get there? The answer in Sermons and Lectures is so perplexing it must be honest: “Always do the opposite of anything I tell you/I’ll do it too Whatever you say.” This is a line that you can smash and it still says the same damn thing. Physicists and mystics have been trying to convince us that this is the only truth.
As Hart wails, “I want as much as possible for the carnival of what is,” we can hear him stomp into the white space in Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, spitting some hair from his daughter’s head into Johnny Rotten’s mouth. Whether Hart wants to own it or not, Sermons and Lectures falls keenly into the bruise and shriek glory of the great lineage of Marcus’s heretic avant-garde saints that took up the right to name, smash, and invent new tongues after burning their old ones back at the beginning of the end of the world in 1917 Zurich, Switzerland. Someone did and did not name it DADA Someone boiled it down to Situationist International slogans in ’68. Someone screamed “Let’s go!” filling it with dollars and power chords in the 1980s. That’s when most of us caught it on the tips of our tongues when the itch of there’s something not quite right here, why do I want to shout until my ears bleed hit us in adolescence.
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August 13th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
August 13th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
Brooks Sterritt—
Do you want literature? Are you interested in liturgical vestments? Ever experience hemotoxicity? Want to stroke maple musical instruments? Did you know that ‘zero’ is in? |||||| NNATAN 0 / THE FIDDLEBACK 2.4 ||||||
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I want to tell you about the latest and possibly last issue of American Short Fiction (a guest post)
The following was sent to me by someone who must remain anonymous. As a fan of ASF, I’m happy to pass it along, although saddened to hear about their current plight. —Adam
I want to tell you about the latest issue of American Short Fiction.
I want to tell you that it might be the last issue of American Short Fiction.
I want to tell you that even if it might not be the last issue of American Short Fiction, it is the last issue edited by Jill Meyers and Callie Collins.
The International Brooklyn Luxury Market
There’s this hot little new essay in Williamsburg off the L. Rustic, natural, American: you’re going to love it!
The Brooklynification of luxury goods and services is an international trend that has been covered in such lit zines/blogs as the New York Times
Everyone is happy that people in Paris (Russian tourists) can finally get the kind of food cool Americans (Williamsburg residents) have been enjoying forever (~5 years). You don’t need to ask why, of course. But I kind of get a kick out of it, so here goes…
Also, I’ve perviously written about Williamsburg culture for The Atlantic, and as a kind of extension I feel I can comment on the exportation of “Brooklyn™” as a premium brand. Let me begin.