PW’s Top 50 Whoompers Programs for 2011
Get out your diapers, sluts! PW weighs in with the top 50 MFA programs. My dad says this is totally out of whack with the actual parameters of what young thugs want in language learning these days. What are you to think? (click img for larger versions)
Behind the Scenes at the “Word Made Flesh” Book Trailer Shoot
On Sunday, August 15, 2010 Eva Talmadge and I shot a book trailer for our forthcoming photo-anthology, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. First we spent a couple of hours with our videographer, Dev, at Eva’s apartment. We answered some questions, tried not to cut each other off too much, and did an impromptu scrounge of Eva’s library for books that inspired tattoos included in our book. I guess we found about two dozen. Then it was off to the legendary Fineline Tattoo on 1st Street and 1st Avenue. Fineline is the longest continually running tattoo shop in New York City, with a history that goes back into the underground days when tattooing was still illegal in Manhattan. Eva and our agent, Brandi Bowles, got themselves some literary tattoos from Mehai Bakaty, the son of Fineline founder Mike Bakaty and a worldclass tattooist in his own right. (I had initially promised to get inked, too. Needless to say, I bailed.) The trailer itself should be available sometime in the next couple weeks, but in the meantime I offer the following photo gallery- a preview of the preview, if you will (please do).
Online Jerks
Are there people you see writing/publishing/commenting online that you feel like you don’t like, even though you’ve never met them? I’ve been thinking about the way persona comes out of no tone mostly online and how people can seem unlikeable and some people even become so angry as to physically hate the person, based mostly on an exchanging of ideas (even if the idea are, you know, bitchy). I often feel I personally have come off like an ass in situations where if it were bodies talking I wouldn’t have been perceived the same way, and yet I also feel I am better at expressing my opinions in text than I am in speaking. It’s a strange duality. I wonder who people hate and what it is that might make someone dislikable someone based on their online appearance? Is it more childish to judge someone based on their online action or to be childish online in the first place? Have you ever felt you didn’t like someone online and then met them in person and felt differently, or vice versa? I know this shit doesn’t matter really, but I wonder.
“My heart is like a silken sponge that calls saliva love,” or, God still appears to hate us.
Let us now acknowledge the passing of Ralph Records, home of The Residents who, in secret, have been the greatest band on the planet(tm).
Someone break out the Duck Stab. And the Eskimo. And Songs for Swinging Larvae. And Amerikka Stands Tall. And some Snakefinger. Scour the rekkid stores. BUY OR DIE!
$20,333.08
$20,333.08. That’s how much money I’ve spent on Publishing Genius since January 17, 2008. This includes printing books, marketing, shipping, and numerous miscellaneous fees. (To give an idea of operating costs, deduct the cost of printing from that number. Printing spend is $12,916.51.)
$13,640.24. That’s how much I’ve taken in from direct sales, Amazon payments, bookstores, sale of rights and so on. Both of these numbers astound me.
$6692.84 is the difference.
For that much money, I could have made the movie “Clerks.” READ MORE >
96 Comments
August 17th, 2010 / 3:15 pm
August 17th, 2010 / 3:15 pm
Blake Butler—
All this time and then we find out Tao Lin has really just been Chris Burden (see object #1, Send Me Your Money). He might also be that dude in the question mark coat.
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Thief!
Alexandre Dumas said: The man of genius does not steal, he conquers.
And Robert Schumann said: Talent works, genius creates.
And Oscar Wilde said: Talent borrows; genius steals
And Pablo Picasso said: Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
Or maybe Pablo Picasso said: The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal.
And Igor Stravinsky said: Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.
And T.S. Eliot said: One of the surest tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
Some Thoughts On Book Reviews
Today I have been thinking about book reviews as tentacles of the book being reviewed, as an extension of the book, an addition to it. Like a book is a blog post and a review is the comment stream. Each blog post shares a symbiotic (parasitic?) relationship with its comment stream – unless, of course, you disable the comment stream, in which case you disallow the formation of direct extensions — of course someone could always do their own blog post linking to your post thereby forming an extension at their own site. In a way, thinking this way calls into question the notion of authorial sovereignty, which is to say: according to an older type of model, I write a book and therefore I am the author and I control the object — whereas in a newer type of model, if I write a book (or a blog post) the reviews (or the comment stream) can easily overtake the book (blog post) thereby pushing my role into the background and replacing it with whatever creation those extraneous appendages (comment streams) create, which is to say that my authority over the text gets taken out of my hands. But that’s not really where I want to go with this post. I don’t want to argue that a book review can somehow surpass the book being reviewed, because the whole reason I got on this mental pathway is because I have recently read a few book reviews that I thought were stand out pieces of literature in their own right – not better than the work being reviewed, but on par with it, as if the review was in some ways a productive extension of the book, a part of the book written by someone else…
77 Comments
August 6th, 2010 / 4:25 pm
August 6th, 2010 / 4:25 pm