Ryan Call—
Really loved The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello.
(via io9)
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Ryan Call—
Laura van den Berg’s website has been hacked by AYS Federal Atack Team.
Update: it has been fixed.
Win Zak Smith’s Book of Illustrations of Gravity’s Rainbow
Scott Esposito of The Quarterly Conversation is giving away a copy of Zak Smith‘s Pictures Showing What Happens On Each Page Of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow.
If you want to win this book, all you need to do is be a member of our Facebook group and write on our wall telling us why you should get the book. Out of all the entrants, we’ll pick the winner the week of September 7.
Give TQC some of your time, everyone. There’s an interesting excerpt in the latest issue from Macedonia Fernández’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (forthcoming from Open Letter). The editors of TQC write:
Museum is a collection of prologues to a book that is not yet written, and, reminiscent of Viktor Shklovsky, part of Museum’s logic is to frustrate the readers’ expectations with continual digressions, as well as to challenge their attempts to predict what kind of a book will follow this series of prologues. That all is to say that Museum is one of those books that makes practically no sense at first and then slowly gets better and better as the reader acclimates to its sensibility.
I Caught A Little Cold
I have a little summer cold: sore throat, runny nose, stuffed up sinuses, medicine head, and so on. Unfortunately it came on at the silliest time: classes have just started and we’re moving into the new house this weekend. As I try to sleep each night, I think in my head how my cold is just a small thing in my life, and the pain of my sore throat will go away soon. This helps, I guess.
One book that I always think of when I get a sore throat is Boy by Roald Dahl. In the book, he describes having a doctor and parents trick him into a undergoing a tonsillectomy without anesthesia. Although I cannot remember the exact language of the scene, nor do I remember the details preceding the event, I vividly remember reading and imagining Dahl’s throat filling with blood as the doctor cut away his tonsils. This has stayed with me since I first read Boy as a boy, and, in addition to some other events of my childhood, might explain my fear of doctors, dentists, and other masked individuals.
What other books are out there that have unhealthy characters in them? What stories can I think of to soothe the annoying pain in my ears, nose, and throat?
Ryan Call—
Some sort of discussion about race, gender, economic class in indie lit ongoing at Pank.
Rate Your Writers’ Teaching Ability
Well my semester has just begun, which means I’m getting emails from students trying to add my class. Many of these students and others probably check out RateMyProfessors as they try to make decisions regarding in what section they’ll enroll.
We all know how RateMyProfessors works: students anonymously rate their university instructors on a five point scale, and then type up a few sentences of comments, which can often be unintentionally hilarious. Also, anonymous raters assign chili peppers to their instructors to denote ‘hotness,’ so there’s that weird physical evaluation too.
What we might not know is that some of the very authors we’ve read, such as Evenson, Lutz, and so on, appear on RateMyProfessors, having taught at one point or another in their ‘literary career.’ I’ve gathered a handful here (as many as I could think to look for) and inserted some smarmy comments; if you know of others to link to, do so in the thread and I’ll try to add them to the post.
(Is it ‘okay’ to post these? Am I breaking some code of conduct here? I have no idea. Apologies in advance.)
What I do know is I love to gossip.
Read and click through the excerpts/list after the break.
Ryan Call—
Gary Shteyngart reads/performs a bit from Gogol’s Dead Souls; he first reads in English and then in Russian. Really fascinating to hear it in Russian. The reading was part of 92Y Poetry Center’s celebration of Gogol’s 200th birthday on March 30th.