Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. He is the editor of The Apocalypse Reader, Come Back Donald Barthelme, and co-editor (with Eva Talmadge) of The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. With Jeremy Schmall he makes The Agriculture Reader, a limited-edition arts annual. He lives in Brooklyn.
Well, whatever you do, don’t be brown in Arizona. This is so massively fucked and evil. Happy Friday!
hotmanhokage i seen one before it was riding a bike disguised as a man and i saw his eyes.i think my cousin is a reptilian because her eyes look like it all that all the time
lescwilson I think u should consider that one of the qualities of these reptilians is known to be their cold hearted nature and that they’d kill u at the drop of a hat… for food…so don’t be so eager for their control lest u be farmed like veal or pork!
LadyWennor Draconians happen to be my favorite cataloged species. Don’t care about their plans of taking over earth if that is the case. I find Draconians hot but if you ask me I always fall for the extream.
“Wake Up!”: The Reptilian Shapeshifter Vidclip Festival is currently running at Coop’s place. Where else?
With a great hearty hat tip to Kate Ankofski- this interactive guide to finding your favorite Bob Dylan album.
At the Rumpus, Jami Attenberg interviews Teddy Wayne and David Goodwillie at the same time (!!!) about their new novels, terrorism, and the media.
And this one from the Almost Rhymes File: Christopher Hitchens on the Dark Side of Dickens.
Super Best Friends
Jewcy has an interview with Michael Muhammad Knight, author of Journey to the End of Islam. This one is a must-read.
Also in Islam-related news, the South Park guys finally got the death threat they’ve been gunning for, but it was kind of lame, and posted to a blog, and issued as a kind of speculation that Trey Parker and Matt Stone would “probably wind up like Theo van Gogh.” Also, it’s already been taken down from the site where it was posted. To learn less about this story than I’ve already told you, go to Gawker, where I got it from.
Slate’s got the latest installment of their title-like-a-Slate-parody-but-actually-pretty-fascinating series “Why I give my nine-year-old pot” (spoiler alert: he’s autistic and it helps him). In this latest episode, when Marie’s dealer goes out of town, she learns the hard way that not all strains of pot work the same. Her son J doesn’t respond to anything quite like he does to the White Russian that nobody in town seems to have in-stock!!!!
Speaking of great strains of pot, last night I got this email from Ronnie Scott of The Lifted Brow. Subj: “Too much bongs.” Text: “Whoops! I put about a fifth of our August issue online.” And it’s true, by God! Diane Williams, our own Jimmy Chen, Kim Chinquee and more!
Have you heard about Scott Baio’s twitter-based war with Jezebel.com? They’ve posted a handy complete timeline of their conflict with him. It gets really good when his wife Renee steps in, via facebook and calls the entire Jezebel staff “FAR LEFT lesbian shitasses!!!! No wonder you’re all lesbos because what man in his right mind could put up with your cuntness? Scott Baio has more class in his piss than all of you all!!!” Yes, because that’s how you prove classiness, with homophobic slurs and a piss joke. Big win for family values!
Speaking of family values, if you fell into a coma in 1995, and just woke up this morning, you may not want to read the rest of this sentence because it might make your heart and brain simultaneously crumple into powder under the crushing realization of just how much has changed. Okay, are you braced? Are you ready? Green Day’s Broadway musical is a smash hit, says Charles Isherwood in the New York Times. Also, this thing called 9/11 happened, but I’ll tell you about that later.
Do you people know about Significant Objects, the ebay-based web-journal that raises money for worthy causes by getting writers to write flash fiction about the random items they put up for auction? If not, why not? Blake told you about this a month ago! Anyway, at present SO is in a five-part partnership with The Believer, and yours truly is one of the writers who was asked to write an original piece of flash-fic re a SIGNIFICANT OBJECT, in this case a pair of metal flowers (see left). You can read my story, and bid on the FLOWERS OF INSPIRATION here. You can also see the complete history of the experiment, with tons of data, including sales rankings, here. I hope you will consider bidding on the metal flowers, to help raise money for GIRLS WRITE NOW, which is a very fantastic organization that does this:
Girls Write Now provide guidance, support, and opportunities for New York City’s underserved or at-risk high school girls, enabling them to develop their creative, independent voices, explore careers in professional writing, and learn how to make healthy choices in school, career, and life.
To potentially sweeten this deal, I’m offering the winning bidder a copy of my story collection. AND, if that bid is over $76 (the Doty-Lethem Threshold), I will go all-out CARE PACKAGE on you, and also include copies of The Agriculture Reader #3, the so-new-it’s-not-on-our-website-yet (though it might be by the time you win this auction) Agriculture Reader #4, plus something else that I don’t know what it is yet–maybe a McSweeney’s #24 if I have any of those left, or something else cool if I don’t. So okay, head on over there and raise these girls some money. And hey, while you’re at it, check out the incredible wealth of short-shorts in the SO archive. Start with Padgett Powell on a Mickey Mouse nametag, maybe; onward to Jenny Offill on a miniature turkey dinner; then how about Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet and her chili cat? The list is nearly endless, as is the joy.
There’s an article that goes with this graphic, but why would you want to read it?
If I don’t tell you about Molly Young writing about Charles Bukowski at the Poetry Foundation, the terrorists win.
You are also not going to believe that such a thing as not knowing about this great writer is something that happened to you in your life. – Giancarlo DiTrapano introduces a story by Harriette Simpson Arnow on the VICE blog. We probably linked this already, but I really like this sentence.
The Examiner has a list of fifty author-on-author put-downs. Here’s Byron on Keats in 1820- “Here are Johnny Keats’s p@# a-bed poetry…There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables, that I am ashamed to look at them.” And Katherine Mansfield on E.M. Forster’s Howards End in 1915- “And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.” Thanks for this one go to Elliott David.
VIA FACEBOOK: Sara Faye Lieber refers us to this helpful guide to the trustworthiness of beards. Alice Townes is interested in this Observer article about Simon Singh, chiropractors, and the net-based popular uprising against Britain’s insane libel laws. Is this because she is a 1L or because she is part-British? The world may never know. Yennie Cheung, proprietor of the Hipster Book Club, has charts and graphs detailing The Music Industry & Online Piracy by the Numbers. Speaking of the Hipster Book Club, did I ever link to their “Reliving Your First Time” feature? Well whether for the first or the second time, here’s that link now.
One of the best parts of experiencing a book for the first time is being thrilled, stunned, even moved to tears by its content. It’s easy to read the book again and try to recapture some of that magic, but nothing quite compares to the first time. With that thought in mind, the HBC asked a few writers what books they would like to read again for the first time.
There are ten contributors including Junot Diaz, Dan Chaon, Steve Almond, Julie Klausner–and yours truly. It was a very cool thing to be part of; hope you’ll give it a look.
via Gawker, who got it from the Rumpus!
Will Manley is a retired librarian. In 1992, while working for the Wilson Library Bulletin, he sent a survey to subscribers about sex. 5,000 librarians responded, but the prudish Library Bulletin wouldn’t publish the results. They’ve finally been released! […] 22% believed that libraries should have condom dispensers in their bathrooms. 20% had “done it” in the library. 91% had read “The Joy of Sex.”
Read the full results here.
And just to end up where we began–with terrorists–at Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin catches up with Trey Parker and Matt Stone to talk about the 200th episode of South Park and their ongoing battle with Comedy Central over whether they can depict the Prophet Mohammed on TV. Funny thing, the boys point out that SP actually did depict Mohammad in an episode called “Super Best Friends,” a pre-9/11 episode which has never been censored or pulled from re-runs.
Hey, it’s really nice outside so I want to go walk over the Williamsburg bridge, but I actually got an email inquiring about what happened to these little roundups, and directing my attention specifically to this review of the new Ander Monson by marketing guru David Shields. Shields is ecstatic about Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, and he left me intrigued, which is more than I can say that any of the seven hundred “think-piece”-reviews of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto did for my interest level in it–so, point for Monson, I guess. I have very good memories of Other Electricities, less good memories of Vacationland, and didn’t quite get around to reading Neck Deep, though I heard him read from / speak about that book once, and remember enjoying it–though not what I enjoyed exactly–so anyway it’s good to see something new from Monson, and maybe I’ll get around to this one. Okay, what else? Well, Walter Kirn’s got the cover story, with a take-down of the new Ian McEwan. Here’s the whole first paragraph.
According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad — so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed — that they’re actually rather good. “Solar,” the new novel by Ian McEwan, is just the opposite: a book so good — so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off — that it’s actually quite bad. Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it’s impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral. There’s so little wrong with it that there’s nothing particularly right about it, either. It’s impressive to behold but something of a virtuous pain to read.
It goes on from there for two pages. Joe Queenan has an essay about why he won’t read books that feature sports teams he hates. Elif Batuman reviews Those Who Wait, the new novel by Olga Grushin. Anne Lamott has written another book with the word “bird” in the title. And Joseph Salvatore looks at the new Adam Thirlwell, a novel about–among other things–a geriatric libertine. Good times at the Times! And now, if you’ll excuse me–THE BRIDGE.
Dennis Cooper’s blog focuses on Crispin Best’s for every year project, which I did not know about at all, much less that it includes contributions from some of our own contributors and/or fellow-travelers, including Jimmy Chen, Nicolle Elizabeth, Paula Bomer, and the great long-lost Ryan Manning. So that’s cool. Then, down in the comments thread, DC directs our attention to a piece by Weaklings-regular and general purveyor of greatness David Ehrenstein’s interview with Anna Karina in LA Weekly, “Sexual Politics: Godard and Me.” How’s that for Friday afternoon?
Title like that and ya’ll probably think this is going to be a joke-post, but people who know me know that I am an extreme Grateful Dead-partisan, so dispense with the notion that I am writing in anything but earnest, and turn your attention now to a website you probably haven’t visited lately, Dead.net, where the once-venerable and now Rhino Records-controlled GDP (that’s Grateful Dead Productions) is offering their latest in (what we can only hope is) an endless supply of live-releases from the legendary VAULT.
To give credit where it’s due, most of the vault releases over the past couple years have been fantastic. A lot of people despaired of the fate of vault-stewardship after the death of Dick Latvala (the band’s tape archivist whose eponymous Dick’s Picks series eventually ran 35 multi-disc volumes), but the Road Trips series has won over more than a few skeptics (yours truly included) who at first balked at the decision to move from Dick’s focus on individual shows to a model that sought to provide, over two or three discs, the “highlights” of a run or an entire tour. But nothing really comes close, imho, to the three big–as in nine discs apiece–box sets: Fillmore West 1969, Winterland 1973 and Winterland 1977. So why are the notoriously genial Deadheads so pissed off about Philly ’89?
