RIP Captain Beefheart
Adding to the list of legends taken in 2010, Don Van Vliet dies at 69.
Damn, yeah!
Joseph Young’s Easter Rabbit is re-released with a beautiful new cover. (Just a bit of it above. Link on through for the whole pretty thing.)
Higgs reviewed it here. If you missed it on the first go round, hop on for the new one, you. There’s some new goodness.
Dean Young’s Heart Transplant Fund
From a letter by Tony Hoagland at the National Foundation for Transplants
Dear Friends,
If you are reading this, you are probably a friend of Dean Young and/or a friend of poetry. And you may have heard that our friend is in a precarious position. Dean needs a heart transplant now. He also needs your assistance now.
Over the past 10 or 15 years, Dean has lived with a degenerative heart condition–congestive heart failure due to idiopathic hypotropic cardiomyopathy. After periods of more-or-less remission, in which his heart was stabilized and improved with the help of medications, the function of his heart has worsened. Now, radically.
Donations can be made here (be sure to make the gift in honor of Dean Young), or via an address at the bottom of the link above.
Jonathan Safran Foer Police Report
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Jonathan Safran Foer, police photo
An Excerpt from Johannes Göransson’s Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate
An excerpt from Johannes Göransson’s forthcoming new book Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate is live at Tarpaulin Sky’s Chronic Content feature. I’ve read this book a few times this year already; it is insane sickly gorgeous power. It is a big thing. Preorder here.
Cohen, Julia. Triggermoon, Triggermoon. [2010]
“Julia Cohen’s poems will knock you out with their fresh logics like some moon-governed dream… this collection is half in the world and half in the ‘non-world’ that ‘occasionally rolls over you,’ utterly grounded in the domestic and wildly transformative.” —Elizabeth Willis
“The poetics enacted in Triggermoon Triggermoon is rare in its exuberance and delicate humanity, its wistful acceptance of imperfection as the human condition, imperfection as a kind of pet we grow to love and depend upon. I have grown to love and depend upon this book.”—Bin Ramke
Congratulations Patti Smith
Patti Smith won the National Book Award. You know what this means right.
Probably it takes so long for the language of life to pry its way into literature because most writers are too busy doing that to live it. In Patti’s case of course writing was music most of the time and she was living and doing. She was a poet before she was a rock star. The same thing I think. Just different ways of doing.
My friend read the book and she thought it was great. I recommended she go to the library for some Eileen Myles. I think it will take a while to get Just Kids from the library.
Oh yeah and umm. The fuck is this?
So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You
Friends,
It is with a heavy yet satisfied heart that I announce my resignation from HTMLGiant. I have enjoyed just over two wonderful years (roughly equivalent, in internet time, to a decade and a half) as a contributor to this blog. It has been a privilege and a thrill to be part of this site since its inception. Endless thanks are due to Blake Butler and Gene Morgan, for inviting me to join up in the first place, and for all the good times since. A hearty cheers as well to the other contributors here (past and present) and to our legion of commenters and readers. It has been a lot of fun to talk and debate with you (most of you, at any rate) and I’m sure we’ll still be seeing plenty of one another around the web, and maybe in meatspace too. Now, before things get too sentimental, here’s Woody Guthrie to play us out.
Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
The author of more than 30 novels, plays and works of nonfiction, he is known for his expansive language, his alertness to the profound and the profane, and his fierce and dark disdain for tyranny. His books are not without magical touches, but he is more grounded, more a “realist” than fellow Nobel laureate and South American Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Mario Vargas Llosa wins 2010’s Nobel Prize. Thoughts?
PEN Literary Awards Winners
A few of the big winners: DeLillo takes the Saul Bellow award for Achievement in American Fiction. Anne Carson wins for Poetry in Translation for An Oresteia from the Greek, and, in a separate translation prize, Michael Henry Heim wins for Wonder by Hugo Claus, from the Dutch. This caught my eye because Heim’s translation of Mann’s Death in Venice pretty much made my summer. I feel like I’ll read anything that guy turns English. Anyway, full list below the fold.