Automotive Experience
The Impossible Global Freeway
Catch me showrooming a discontinued Saab in New Jersey – I would only buy online. I’m trolling the dealer, he’s thinking I can afford a new interior. I’ll end up with Ford, I’m sure. Or, catch me in Paris, loving the low-emission turbo diesel cab. See me climbing the North Cascade Highway in a borrowed Rav4 or my parent’s (now gone) Forest Green Toyota Sienna.
When I think about everything we’ll lose in the next century, the automobile comes into my mind. It roars in with the the force of the locomotive and the companionship of a horse. I’m reading Train Dreams now, and last week, I read High Life. It’s like, we’re all at a party, singing to the wind blowing by. We’re all smoking dinosaur bones in a back room of a bar at closing. This kind of thing can’t last. Eventually they ban cigarettes, even on city streets.
Here are the cars of my life. May there be many more.
1985 VW Scirocco – This was my mother’s car when she married my father. Silver with leather and it looked very fast. When I was 9, my parents escaped serious injury when it was rear-ended by a large white commercial truck. Totaled. They were driving back from a ski trip to Whistler BC, Canada. The driver was an epileptic who failed to take his medication. My parents chose not to file suit, partly because of the Canadian jurisdiction. I remember very little of my time with this car, though I would like to have it now. I also remember my father’s Yellow Nissan truck, from this period, though it was an ugly thing that he sold or gave to a relative.
Behind the Scenes & Technology / Comments Off on Automotive Experience
September 4th, 2012 / 9:01 pm
September 4th, 2012 / 9:01 pm
Dark Sky to Close, Barrelhouse picks up the slack
It’s always sad when a press goes out of business. Why’d it happen? What will happen to the books? Are they falling short of an implicit promise? Dark Sky just went belly up. Though I don’t think a formal announcement has been made, Gabe Durham (DSM editor) redirected all the content for the new issue over to Barrelhouse. You can read it here.
Barrelhouse, meanwhile, seems alive and well. They’ve just announced a new version of their “Conversations & Connections Conference” (always a good time) in Philadelphia. This time the event, which has loads of panels about writing and publishing, features a keynote with Stewart O’Nan. I caught the one in DC earlier this year. Sam Lipsyte gave a funny keynote about Zachary German giving him shit in a crowded bar for not writing better books. Barrelhouse is also starting a new reading series in DC, something that features actors performing stories from the latest issue of their magazine.
“That girl needs to be fucked”: language and responsibility
I thought, “That girl needs to be fucked.” I could feel the thought in my body. It fell like a heavy lack toward a corner of my back. My back–but it wasn’t mine anymore: the thought was using my spine to move me. “That girl needs to be fucked”–I was thinking it about myself as if I were somebody else. Who did I think I was?
I remembered a night–it was New Years Eve, about to be 2005. I remembered the hand that was on my back–I was lying face-down on a bed. The hand was on my back and there were two men on the bed with me. They were talking about somebody–I had made sure she wasn’t me–and one of them said, “That girl needs to be fucked.” I understood that he meant someone should have sex with her because she was a little too independent and because he liked to lose himself in sex (I had had sex with him); or just that she had done something that made him want to push her down a little, make her a little less noticeable to herself, a little less of a self. READ MORE >
Fall Semester Reading List: 21st Century Horror
For those of you who might be interested, click through for the reading list I’ve assigned the students taking my “Contemporary Literature: 21st Century Horror” course this fall.
Shitty Youth Update
As you may remember, Adam Humphreys, director of Franz Otto Ultimate Highballer and co-designer of these t-shirts, has been working on a documentary about elusive author Zachary German titled Shitty Youth (taken from German’s now-defunct weekly radio show).
I worked with him on the tail end of shooting earlier this summer and have seen some excellent prescreenings of the work.
I received an email from Adam this morning:
Thanks for your continued interest in this project.
Shitty Youth has been something I’ve been pursuing for a while off and on and it is nearing a place where it feels like I am unable to take it any farther and I want to get on with my life.
something something online release near future, more details forthcoming
In the meantime I highly recommend people check out Fi卐hkind, the band, especially the EP “Brooklyn” which was a band I conducted featuring Zachary, Erik Stinson, and you, wherein they can hear Zachary free associating some really brilliant shit.
“College”… is just… wow.
Here’s the logo for the movie [pictured above]. Link to the facebook page if people want to engage: facebook.com/killcops2
:)
Regards,
Adam
15 Books
a.k.a. “Playing catch up with the stacks [3]”. I did a version of this in March and also back in May of 2011.
Basically, there comes a point where I’m swamped by newly received reading materials.
Stacks on stacks on stacks, if you will. (Sorry, I live in the dirty south, the home of T-Pain, and so I hear that Young Chris song incessantly and always think “stacks” instead of “racks”.)
Since I love lists and since I’m always curious about what others are reading, I assume others might be interested in what I’m reading. So here, then, are fifteen things I’m currently in the midst of:
Jack Daniel’s is nice
If you haven’t heard about the recent cease-and-desist letter sent by Jack Daniel’s to indie press author Patrick Wensink, over his book’s cover’s use of a parody of the JD bottle label, which then caught fire in the press everywhere from beer magazines to the New York Times, and amazingly catapulted the book in question, Broken Piano for President, to the top 10 bestsellers on Amazon, right behind 50 Shades of Gray and all, well, it’s a pretty awesome thing.
Summer Semester Reading List: Gertrude Stein
For those of you who might be interested, click through for the reading list I’ve assigned the students taking my “Major Figures in American Literature: Gertrude Stein, The Mother of Invention” course this summer.
