Gucci Slope Revolution Ding Divide People
Flex Sex Drugs Money Cars Clothes Plenty of Women & Ice Cream
1. The 47th issue of Slope is up and live and overflowing with yes.
2. For NYers, on Feb 2, hit up the release party for Deb Olin Unferth’s new memoir, REVOLUTION: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, co-hosted by the Believer. She’ll be discussing the book with Believer co-editor Heidi Julavits. 7–9pm at Powerhouse Arena.
3. Luca Dipierro has released an object made of paper full of drawing called DAS DING.
4. Redivider is running their first annual fiction contest, open until March 1
5. At Thought Catalog, The Different Types of People There are on the Internet.
A Few Items of Interest
There’s a writing contest with a $149 fee, no guarantee of publication, and whose administrators claim all rights to your writing if you enter the contest. That sounds pretty fantastic. John Scalzi breaks down all the ways in which this contest is vile.
Seth Fischer has a new project where you can write over the Internet. He is looking for submissions.
Anis Shivani has come up with some new rules for writers and continues to show his contempt for the academy and other things. I definitely understand the position Shivani is advocating but what he’s saying is not really new. I am a bit old school in this thinking, perhaps, but rather than worrying about rules as a writer, I largely prefer writing. Shivani baffles me.
Andrew Shaffer has a response for Shivani’s “rules.” I love what he has to say.
The Collagist is having a chapbook contest with the winner to be published this fall by Dzanc.
Rose Metal Press has announced the winner (Tiff Holland’s Betty Superman) of their annual chapbook contest. The book will be released in July 2011.
Bullett Magazine seems pretty sexy.
Laura Ellen Scott’s Curio is being published one story at a time over at Uncanny Valley. It’s worth a look.
the taking and passing along 11
11. For all you punk-asses that need writing prompts, there is a weird little flash contest coming up over at Flash Fiction Chronicles.
5. Oh, flash fiction is:
“…a place for writers to talk ABOUT fiction, and its feats in that weird mysterious way that fiction talks beyond the story on the page.”
Deb Olin Unferth
Take that, you flash-bastards. You’re the same people that don’t like olives, microchips, inward blushes, hall mirrors, and other small things.
1. Rock and Roll is finally dead.
99.
7. Back when a professor visited my MFA university and taught one class, a class about HER. She made us buy and read all of HER books. WTF? I thought divas were for music and acting. Memo to writers: No one gives a damn. Well…Nother time a reader visited and insisted we bring her ribs. She was all, “I’m in Alabama, you WILL feed me ribs.” A graduate student had to drive his turd-colored Ford Escort all night. There’s no rib place open way late in sleep-ass little Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Ends up they gave her Chili’s ribs, not ribs at all, unless you enjoy pale under-belly of cardboard. Diva behavior from writers? From writers! Do tell:
A List of Things (pt. 1)
1. There is a new issue of Bookslut. In it there is a a really great interview of Kendra Grant Malone by Noah Cicero. Also, some stupid idiot interviewed Michael Earl Craig (again). It’s ok though because Michael Earl Craig is good.
2. I don’t know if people know this, but the NYU creative writing program archives all of its events in podcast form. I listen to this a lot. I’ve listened to that Matthew Zapruder one probably 5 times. There also is an Agriculture Reader reading from the fall of 2009 that I’ve listened to several times.
3. My friend Harriet runs this really nice (print+online) journal called “Her Royal Majesty.” They are now accepting submissions for the next issue.
4. Mike’s (Young’s) book of short stories is now available. Short stories are usually a little bit longer than poems are.
5. I went to this Publishing Genius book tour thing two nights ago in Chicago. It was fun as hell. If you’re in Minneapolis you can go too. (Hurry.)
6. There is a MuuMuu House DVD available. It’s a DVD of a MuuMuu House reading in Ohio (and other things) — featuring Tan Lin, Susan Boyle, Michael Jordan, Marcus Cicero, and Mallory Whitten.
7. After the jump is a semi-NSFW youtube vid. It’s more weird than anything. If you can make it past the first 10 seconds it’s pretty rewarding.
2010 in Books (+1 album, TV show, movie)
I read a little more than half a Louisville Slugger’s worth. Not included: the books I started and didn’t finish. Included below but not pictured: books I’ve given to friends. It was a great year, though, in that I read more books that I know I’ll reread than in any other. In mostly scattered order:
14 holding backs of diatribes on the 2011 radio
3. Mud Luscious Press goes all web update, all Heidi Blair Montag with a touch of Birdman. It detaches the retina in a kind way. Go look.
3. A get-off-my-plot-of-lawn-quote:
55. Harmony Neal uses repetition at January 2011 Hobart. You know, repetition, like this, via BHR:
3. The Girard Perregaux 925 Silver / Celluloid “Tourbillon” Fountain Pen goes for $1785.
14. Off The Internets for 8 days and what does that do? Doesn’t make you write, I say. I didn’t, sans two checks and an entry in a running journal. But it do refill the synaptic bathtub, me thinks, possibly with bubbles. Things brighten, shard, slow. I would like to write today, I’m saying. So. I ponder what happens when you leave The Internets?
“Kill me outright with looks” : 139 Books I Read in 2010
MacGyver, that sexy-bellied genie show, and the show about California highway cops with the weirdly lowercase i—all of these television shows ran 139 episodes. In 2010, I read 139 books. I mean, I think I did. Most chapbooks I didn’t include in this list, even really good ones, so there’s that. Also there’s always an also, so who knows? Here are 139 books I probably read this year and what I spontaneously remember of them. As a bonus, I am sometimes unexpectedly or tangentially “mean-ish” in my notes, so if you have an idea of me as being “unable to be mean,” maybe this will change your mind (probably not): READ MORE >
combine your abilities on the fly!
11.
well I sincerely cannot think of a way that the holidays, as we know them, have anything to do with art. except for the ways we are tested.
Lucy Corin
78. Soth takes photos worth eye-meat.
14. Christmas Eve flash (scroll down–it involves a ham) by Pamela Painter.
22. Hey, pick me up that Thomas Pynchon first edition for $51,000.
00. What are the best books that fit in a stocking? I’m going Big World, but you?
Typo Antoine Argos Film Parrhesia
1. Of all the online issues of magazines I’ve read and stared at, this is probably still the one I still open and stare and feel motivated by getting peeks of: Johannes Göransson’s guest edited all modern Swedish poetry issue of Typo.
2. At Vice, excellent interview with photographer Antonie D’Agata: “In this process of fictionalising an unreachable truth, it’s up to them to impose their doubts about any photographic truth, or accept being impotent pawns in the mediatic game.”
3. Argos Books is a press new to me who is having a year end sale on some beautiful handmade book objects.
4. At Ubu, Samuel Beckett’s “Film” starring Buster Keaton from 1965. 24 minutes of almost total silence.
5. Free download of Foucault’s Fearless Speech (2001), a series of 6 lectures he delivered just before his death, re: “Parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth through frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.”
Facelist Altar Bureau Blood Mercury Swan
I have no idea what's up here but I like it
1. Facebook extends my Xmas list each time I look at it, today: Skull with skull case [via Lincoln M.] & the Nieves catalog [via Molly B.].
2. The 8th issue of Harp & Altar is out.
3. Jon Cotner & Andy Fitch + Grace Krilanovich reading in LA at The Poetic Research Bureau this Saturday, December 11 @ 951 Chung King Rd in Chinatown!
4. 1993 Paris Review Interview w/ Fran Lebowitz: “I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself.”
5. Exciting news from Fence:
Fence Books is now a record label. We’re at work on audio-releases from Douglas Kearney, reading thrillingly from his book The Black Automaton, and Ariana Reines, with a guest-starring Lili Taylor performing Reines’ poem “Save the World,” plus a mysterious B-side, in anticipation of the 2011 publication of her book Mercury. Look for these in early 2011. And if you’re in NYC, don’t miss Ariana’s upcoming appearances.
6. Anyone see Black Swan? OK?