Matt Bell is going to write a story live. We can watch him write. Then, later this week, we can rewrite the story. Then Michael Kimball & Lily Hoang will rewrite the rewritten story, and we can watch. And then we can watch Matt rewrite the revised rewritten story. Good luck to us all.

“The entire system of the novel in the last century, with its cumbersome machinery of continuity, linear chronology, causality, noncontradiction, was actually a last-ditch attempt to forget the disintegrated state we were left in when God withdrew from our souls, an attempt at least to keep up appearances by replacing the incomprehensible explosion of atoms, of black holes and impasses, with a reassuring, clear, unequivocal constellation woven so closely that we’d no longer hear death howling between the stitches, amidst broken threads hastily reknotted. No objection to this grandiose, unnatural project? . . . No objection, really?”

Alain Robbe-Grillet, from Ghosts in the Mirror

I know we already linked to it, but Mark Baumer’s walk-across-America trekblog is awesome.

The Moby Awards (Best Book Trailer) finalists are announced. Good on the lot of you! (Happy to see Kathryn Regina’s I’m In The Air Right Now on the list, as I suggested it. Happy to see the others, too. Also, though, self-attentive.)

How To Guarantee More Than 10,000 People Will Never Watch Your Movies, Again.

Monte Hellman, the brilliant director of Two-Lane Blacktop, has made a new movie. He says: “While I love making things as realistic as possible, I’m interested in stories that are a little more surreal. I’ve always been drawn to, say, what Alain Resnais did in ‘Last Year at Marienbad,’ where there’s a kind of puzzle going on. I love to play with the idea of complex reality and mixing memory with present time and the whole idea of reality versus fantasy. So this is a dream project for me.” If you haven’t seen Monte’s movies, do. And in the book world: Richard Nash, ex-kingpin of Soft Skull and current seer, gives some details on his new startup publishing community, Cursor. Read up on how he’s going to bust things up & build them better.

Friends, I am editing the upcoming month of Everyday Genius. The upcoming month is June. It’s going to be so hot, then. What the hell are we going to do? Anyway, please email me any submissions that you are submitting–gifts, I want gifts!–to my email, whatever that is. It’s alecniedenthal@gmail.com. Please email me viruses and sign me up for newsletters, too. All is a mess.

Mini mess: an interview with ‘MoMA’s Mystery Man’ & Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Collected Works as a free .pdf (via UbuWeb).

While I was just now reading a random small section of Cronopios and Famas from a copy I found left sitting in a small stack in a small room, a tiny hundred-leg bug suddenly scurried out from between two earlier pages and onto the white around the sentence I was reading. Close up, in my face, a little word. I screamed, threw the book down, killed the bug, looked at its smashed parts. Pretty shortly I came back to reading, suddenly creeped by the pages and nervous to go further on each word. Now suddenly it seems pointless to be writing anymore until I can figure out how to make that happen again, from the other end.

“Just trying to make some cool pancakes for my daughter.”