You are what you read from
Your novel in commercial form, taken from the stack of books being sold at your reading. A certain lovely casual or incidental pretension to this. It’s like you walk into a bookstore with the most reasonable faith that your duly inventoried novel, of course, is replicated ~8-12 times in a stack (its “head” brandished vertically by either its own weight or a plastic contraption), on a table next to the mic’d podium, on which aristocratic miscellany (e.g. bouquet of flowers, a doily, English biscuits, a glass of water) rest. This is your reading, and the only preparation required is the lifetime of authorial sensibility whose matured peak may be found in the imminent vocal/verbal/mental evocations soon spoken from your mouth. The type of person who walks into their reading empty handed has faith in both commerce and the self-regenerating muse of whatever’s on his mind.
Your seemingly incidental smartphone. You are most likely still in college or just graduated. You communicate to the crowd “new media,” that unearned and premature skepticism towards tired print. You share the same smug “mellowness” of our recent author, simply finding some online content (gchats, emails, texts, your blog) to read from — as if you made such an ad hoc decision during your ornate introduction, when in fact you had decided days, maybe a week, before the reading to read from your smartphone as affected gesture of commonplace epiphany. The solipsist emphatic slouch of someone gazing into their smartphone is lost upon you, seeing that you cannot see yourself outside of yourself, as someone who looks like that. A bug.
Listening to the new Animal Collective album
I downloaded Animal Collective’s new album Centipede Hz
Painkiller post
When a man with a torn spleen and two broken ribs takes three days off from work, Netflix instant, Oxycodone, and his ability to shit again quickly turns into the center of his universe. When he is reduced by lack of selection to watching a romantic comedy whose target audience are creative menopausal upper-middle class spinsters, you know a blog post is brewing. Something’s Gotta Give (2003) is about Erica Barry (Diane Keaton), a successful playwright who, in the afterglow of coitus with Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson), tearfully says she had considered her body “closed for business,” a sentiment even this 36-year-old male can relate to. Oxycodone softens the edges around this world, the frayed bones directed at my lungs, the hazy glow of a movie I have no business watching, on my couch, grimacing in pain with every biochemically induced, or at least mediated, laugh. I may be high. It’s probably the drug, but slowly along the way the movie started to scare me. Perhaps it was the Kubrickian camera slowly going over each square inch of their Hampton summer house — the long contemplative and eery takes which seemed to impart meaning simply by existing in real time with the matter it was recording, as if our director Nancy Myers had just enough faith that this world was innately fucked up enough to scare the living shit (figuratively; your contributor is constipated) out of someone. Much has been written about the symbolism and space of The Shining (1980), whose quotidian grotesqueness is almost invisible, thus horrifying. To finally look yourself honestly in a mirror is to see murder.
DIED: An Ontario, California Rapper who called himself Inkyy or Jew’elz
A young, Southern California rapper who maybe went by the names Inkyy or Jew’Elz died in a car accident. According to the obituary in the UK’s Daily Mail (Online edition), Ervin McKinness (Inkyy/Jew’elz’s government name) had, moments before the car he was a passenger in ran into a wall after running a red light, tweeted the following:
It is not believed that Inkyy was driving the car 120 miles an hour or drifting corners, but that he and his friends were—as he self-reports—”drunk as fuck” when they hit the wall. Five people died. It was 1:20am. Another report said they were at Creekside Drive and Haven Avenue: here. This article has video from the scene. There is an iron fence south of the LDS church on the southwest corner. I’m fairly certain that’s the one shown in the video.
#FuckIt?
A question one can ask about Existentialism—whether it is life affirming or life denying—can, I think, also be asked about #YOLO (You Only Live Once). It depends, it seems, on who is hashtagging. There are certainly those who have embraced #YOLO as life affirming. As of Friday, September 14, 1885 people have RTed Inkyy’s unintentionally final words. Those folks seem to have embraced #YOLO as life denying.
Where will you stand? #FuckIt. I stand with life affirming.
Have a good weekend, everyone. If you’re drunk af, stay off the streets. Inkyy’s video “Dreams” after the cut. READ MORE >
New York Tyrant Vol. IV Num. I
Better get this now; they always sell out fast and this will be no exception. One of the few magazines I still read cover to cover, maybe the only one. This issue is special-edited by Luke Goebel.
PAULA BOMER, HOB BROUN, CARRIE COOPERIDER, PUEHLE DIEBSONOVICH, CATHERINE FOULKROD, SUSAN FRODERBERG, RACHEL B. GLASER, BRANDON HOBSON, NOY HOLLAND, MARK LEIDNER, TAO LIN, GORDON LISH, ROBERT LOPEZ, GARY LUTZ, DAVID McLENDON, PADGETT POWELL, COOPER RENNER, PAMELA RYDER, AMBER SPARKS, JOSIAH SUMMERVILLE, J.A. TYLER, SAM VIRZI, ZACK WENTZ, COREY ZELLER.
The Foppishness of Praise-By-Attack in Jonathan Franzen’s Farther Away
Farther Awayby Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux April 2012
336 pages / $26 Buy from Amazon
There’s a tendency in writing about fiction to praise one novel by attacking others, assuming that, if these other novels are bad, the novel under consideration must be good. This approach is seen with unsurprising frequency in Jonathan Franzen’s 2012 collection Farther Away. Assessing the stories and novels of Alice Munro, Paula Fox, Christina Stead, and James Purdy, Franzen is categorically unable to praise the writers he cherishes without insulting somebody else.
Eustace Chisholm and the Works, a novel by Purdy published in 1967, is, according to Franzen, “so good that almost any novel you read immediately after it will seem at least a little posturing, or dishonest, or self-admiring, in comparison.” Franzen goes on to say that Eustace Chisholm is better than the sentimental and rhetorically manipulative Catcher in the Rye, superior to the works of Richard Yates, which are haunted by self-pity, and more legit than Saul Bellow, who seems “wordy and academic and show-offy if you read him directly after Eustace Chisholm.” While dissing Purdy’s contemporaries might be fun, it doesn’t tell us much about Eustace Chisholm, nor does it let the novel succeed on its own merits.
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September 14th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
September 14th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
The octopus in the room, or, Help me name a phenomenon
“The Menace of the Hour” by George Luks (30 January 1899)
For a while now I’ve thought that there should be a name for the following phenomenon. You think of something. And then you immediately realize that someone else has to have already thought of that very thing.
For example. A friend asked me what my Halloween costume is going to be. And I jokingly said that I was going to go as the octopus that was deleted from The Goonies. And that alone might be an example of this phenomenon, although it’s not the best example. But my next thought was: I said, “No, I’ll dress up as a businessperson, but I’ll have eight arms, and I’ll wear a pin that says, ‘OCTOPI WALL STREET.'”
And I knew at once that somebody else has already thought of that (the pun, if not the precise realization). That had to. And…voila!
White Boy Drag: Jackie & Lily Talk, Episode 1
Not White Boy Drag, just a white boy
This is a conversation. It is 1:06am MST. We are both HTML Giant contributors. We are also both Asian. This is happening IRL.
Lily Hoang: So, imagine there’s someone sitting at a café, smoking a cigarette, drinking a fucking Americano, reading David Foster Wallace. What do you think?
Jackie Wang: Who is this wienerschnitzel? Lemme guess. A white boy with lots of feelings.
LH: Haha, no, it’s me: I’m in white boy drag!
JW: White boy drag?! That’s an interesting term. What exactly does that mean? You’re not going to kill yourself and make everyone else feel bad about it, are you? Cause that would be taking the performance a little too far!
LH: Well, it’s hard being a white boy, I gotta admit. Like you don’t know how hard it is. The guilt. The burden of genius. All the privileges. It’s hard to balance, keep the head sane, ya know?
JW: You know what I hate about white boys? They’re always complaining about how they can’t get laid, but it seems obvious to me – like – why they can’t get laid. Should someone tell them? Should I be the one to tell them?
Janice Lee—
What was the best book you read this summer? Maybe you want to write a review of it? Maybe you want to send the review to HTMLGIANT? Yeah. Do it.
(Send to Janice: janice@htmlgiant.com or anonymous reviews to Brooks: brooks@htmlgiant.com)
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Birds Blur Together
R.M. O’Brien and Lesser Gonzalez-Alvarez are two wicked awesome Baltimore multidisciplinary artists who recently collaborated on a quiet, handsome little book of poems called Birds Blur Together (buy it for $6 here). Look at that cover—tell me it doesn’t look like something missionaries would hand out in South America? R.M., who runs the great reading series WORMS, put the 25-poem book out on his own WORMS PRESS because he can do whatever the fuck he wants to do. Like, just check out this video of his old band Nuclear Power Pants. Bob gots the beard and the stabby back. READ MORE >