Writing Game #1: “25, Strange as You Can”
I like making up writing games.
Let’s start with a simple one: Write the strangest, grammatically correct 25-word-long sentence that you can.
If you want an additional challenge or jumping-off point, you can specify that one or more words must be included.
Using this random word generator, I came up with the word “abbeys.” So let’s try writing a few strange 25-word-long sentences with that word:
25 Points: Life of Pi
Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
Knopf Canada, 2001
336 pages / $15.95 buy from Powell’s
1. Here’s a secret: I didn’t know what to think after finishing Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.
2. …I still don’t.
3. And I was baffled when I read reviews (tons of them) saying things like “omg this book will make you believe in God,” and “after reading Life of Pi, you’ll definitely never want to eat another animal again.” What the fuck? I thought I was reading a book.
4. Anyway, I guess it doesn’t help either that Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) has actually (finally) turned the book into a film.
5. It’s one thing for reviewers and normal people to say things (like how I am supposed to feel about the book) but when the author actually says stuff like “Yeah, this is totally gonna change your life,” in all seriousness, I feel like doing bad things to that author.
6. But Martel doesn’t actually say anything like that and I don’t really feel like I want to actually do bad things to authors or artists—ever. Really, Martel says something more like, “This book will make you believe in God…” Something like that.
7. And who the fuck do you think you are, Yann Martel? Is this how one wins the Man Booker? Because, I don’t know.
8. Confidence is one thing but this—this is just bullshit.
9. Question though (and this is relevant, maybe): If I hate this book so much, then why am I bothering to even read it? Well, it’s pretty simple. Basically, like I said, it won the Man Booker, and unfortunately (for me,) this is/was my first Man Booker so, I sorta kinda wanted to see what all the fuss is/was about. (And also, just because I don’t like a book doesn’t mean I won’t read it!) (Let alone review it.) (Come on!). Plus, it’s being turned into a movie so… READ MORE >
17 Comments
November 6th, 2012 / 6:37 pm
November 6th, 2012 / 6:37 pm
Mike Meginnis—
When people use social media to promote their books, that is their way of saying that they can’t be bothered to figure out how to actually promote their books. When people tell you to use Facebook to promote your book, what they are doing is giving you a way to keep very busy while no one at all reads you.
12
On Immersion
I’M IN THIS screen. So who cares that’s easy. The average American spends more than half their waking hours looking at one of these. That’s the word, anyways. And so you figure our neurological roads lean hard toward our being mostly screen. Dude McLuhan said something about how the advent of television, in contrast to the film projector, threw light upon rather than in front of us and made us screens that way as well. Something about how this left a gap in which the act of viewing became participatory, created an organic circuit.
So I’m in this screen and I AM this screen. I’m also positioned in front of or outside the screen. That’s already a trianglejob, without even considering the other very hard.
Every mage of the ages melted down and flattened all their shewing stones and crystal balls to make the LCD we’re gazing hard and scrying in. Whether the display is a window, a mirror, or a screen proper, or if the difference between those is even worth speculating on, it doesn’t change our being here, suspended outside time and space in a locus we’ve taken mostly for granted. What a bunch of witchy fucking cyborgs we’ve become. I’m either psyched on or repulsed by that depending on the mood.
What the shit is nature..? If we’ve developed these powers of sight and being as we have because they were inevitable then there’s no hard line. READ MORE >
Dressing Appropriately for Hurricane Sandy
Hurricane Sandy was utterly unpleasant. She caused a lot of deaths, a ton of destruction, and a cancellation of a highly anticipated shopping excursion. There has been speculation that Sandy was once the pet rooster of second-wave feminist Betty Friedan. While these rumors have not been verified, there is no denying that Sandy was an angry animal. What Bertha did to Lord Rochester’s estate, Sandy did to the tri-state area. But you don’t have to descend to Sandy’s savage, dimwitted level. You can take the high road (though not to Brooklyn) by dressing yourself up in dignified outfits that are also appropriate for the ever-changing circumstances that Hurricane Sandy will throw your way.
Events & Massive People & Mean / Comments Off on Dressing Appropriately for Hurricane Sandy
November 6th, 2012 / 12:52 pm
November 6th, 2012 / 12:52 pm
The Zachary German Documentary, “Shitty Youth”
Zachary German’s web presence was one I once compulsively checked-on for updates, that I consistently enjoyed, intriguing and funny, and now his web presence is gone, mostly, because he wanted it to go away.
Adam Humphreys’s new documentary, Shitty Youth, which shares a name with German’s possibly defunct “radio show”/podcast, portrays German as a willfully difficult or potentially alienating person socially who is very attuned to style and taste, the author of one novel, Eat When You Feel Sad, which got good attention and praise, who has released almost no writing since, in part because much writing, including his own, is not up to his very high standards.
34 Comments
November 5th, 2012 / 5:54 pm
November 5th, 2012 / 5:54 pm
BOOK OF KNUT: A NOVEL BY KNUT KNUDSON
BOOK OF KNUT: A NOVEL BY KNUT KNUDSON
by Halvor Aakhus
Jaded Ibis Press, Forthcoming Fall 2012
270 pages / Buy BW Version ($10-12) or Color Version ($28-33) from Jaded Ibis Press
I recently inhaled Halvor Aakhus’s BOOK OF KNUT: A NOVEL BY KNUT KNUDSON, and admittedly—considering the galleys I received are technically in PDF form and I simply couldn’t help myself—I also began by listening to that DJ Exotic Sage Presents: Blood Orange Home Recordings Mixtape and watching Jiri Barta’s ‘The Club of the Laid Off,’ and interestingly enough had no real problem paying proper attention to the book; it’s that fucking hilarious.
I sat on my couch letting my focus shift more and more into the novel, letting each corresponding media fall ever quieter as I tore deeper into the strange tale of a mathematician reading through the aptly-named Book of her now-deceased former-lover (he left her for her mother, as I understood it) Knut Knudson; and with every passing page I’d belt out another howl of laughter at the sheer brilliance and magnitude of this absolutely fucking insane narrative.
The actual book—Book—for all its strangeness and insane devotion to detail, is equally as enticing and, I daresay sentimental involving characters like Johnny Potseed, a guy who’s walked around the town of Napoleon, Indiana for 10-plus years throwing potseeds “to no avail…thus far,” and a fired mathematician (representing the cuckolded daughter’s cuckolding mother) named Slob—Slobodon—who organizes a late-night Christmas Tree planting to spite the university from which he’s been fired. The entire scene essentially thriving on minute details in weather and each participant’s academic pursuits, and ever-present cans of Keystone. Other irreplaceable namesakes include Mop, and Wolfer. This dude (who, by the way, looks like a Norwegian metal head that just walked off the set of Deliverance) is definitely onto something.
READ MORE >
2 Comments
November 5th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
November 5th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
Shitty Youth has been released
Last night Adam Humphreys released Shitty Youth, a 36 minute film following Zachary German, who most of you are likely familiar with, on Vimeo through the film’s Facebook page. The film follows Zachary for two years following the release of his first novel Eat When You Feel Sad and features interviews with Tao Lin, Brandon Gorrell, Steve Roggenbuck and myself.
Now we can all die.
10 Books
a.k.a. “Playing catch up with the stacks [4].”
In this series, I share with you a stack of my recently acquired and most anticipated reading materials.
I did a version of this in August, and March, and also back in May of 2011.
Once again I have a heaping pile of awesome-looking unread materials just waiting to be experienced…
Some Notes on the First Two Poems in Saint Monica, by Mary Biddinger
Saint Monica begins with an entry from the online Patron Saints Index. It goes like so:
Memorial: 27 August
Mother of Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose writers about her are the primary source of our information. A Christian from birth, she was given in marriage to a bad-tempered adulterous pagan named Patricius. She prayed constantly for the conversion of her husband (who converted on his death bed), and of her son (who converted after a wild life). Spiritual student of St. Ambrose of Milan. Reformed alcoholic.
Born 322 at Tagaste (South Ahrus), Algeria.
Died 387 at Ostia, Italy
Patronage: abuse victims, alcoholics, alcoholism, difficult marriages, disappointing children, homemakers, housewives, married women, mothers, victims of adultery, victims of unfaithfulness, victims of verbal abuse, widows, wives.
Then we get a dedication: “For all the girls with names that begin with M.” The reader notices right away that the author’s first name begins with M.
Already, by the dedication, before the first poem begins, the reader is attuned to a strange quality that attaches to the cult of saints, which is that their personhood is inextricably mingled with the personhood of the latter-day people who revere them. Saint Monica, mother of St. Augustine, was born in Africa in the fourth century, and died in Italy sixty-some years later. What has that to do with American girls whose named begin with M., in the twenty- and twenty-first century? What is the relationship between the Saint Monica of help and reverence and the Saint Monica who gave birth to a son, took up and then gave up devotion to alcohol, and studied with St. Ambrose, more than 1700 years ago?
Time and tradition have warped a flesh-and-blood person into an abstraction READ MORE >