Web Hype

New from Caketrain

Read excerpts and order here.

Web Hype / 8 Comments
January 20th, 2010 / 11:07 am

Things You Can Buy and Not Buy (For Now)

I missed the Brandon Scott Gorrell sale. Two days and the inventory already sunder and yank. Fucking internet. A few hours pass and you might as well be telling people about disco.

Heroin Hostess prints you can buy. But will the customs fees go ouch?

But you can’t get all the back issues of Nude Magazine. Unless you live in Europe. They are cheaply priced and look amazing. Black velvet painting, Terry Southern, Jaime Hernandez–that’s one issue!

You can buy absinthe online but must pretend it’s for the bottle not the juice.

The value of the item is in the collectible container, not its contents.

The container has not been opened and any incidental contents are not intended for consumption.

Right…

You can buy first edition Edgar Allan Poe for $662,500. (But that was months ago–Bee Gees and Banana-seat bikes.)

You can buy first edition Light Boxes by Shane Jones for $199.95 new and $250 used. I am fuddled, I’ll admit.

Tao Lin has 40% of the drafts of a short story folded into a “religious tolerance” holding envelope/carrying case. It is for sale, but you knew that already.

Web Hype / 4 Comments
January 19th, 2010 / 5:27 pm

Where the critics at?

John Domini has an interesting (and, I think, provocative) essay in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation called “Against the “Impossible to Explain”: The Postmodern Novel and Society,” in which he discusses Aureole by Carole Maso, Zeroville by Steve Erickson, and Michael Martone by Michael Martone by Michael Martone. It begins:

Here’s the problem. You decide to try some reading outside the ordinary, a novel that doesn’t have the usual earmarks, and it proves interesting, satisfying, but you don’t entirely understand why, and when you look for help, an illuminating review or something, you can’t find any.

Web Hype / 40 Comments
January 18th, 2010 / 10:04 pm

Wave Books 2010 Subscriptions


Great deal running over at Wave Books for subscriptions to their 2010 releases, $75 including shipping for everything they are putting out this year, which is a lot. Do see:

The Wave Books 2010 softcover series is now available for glorious pre-order. The year’s series includes new full-length collections of poetry by Michael Earl Craig, Timothy Donnelly, Dorothea Lasky, Geoffrey Nutter and Mary Ruefle (her anticipated retrospective Selected Poems); a limited edition hand-sewn book of prose by Caroline Knox; bibliographic pamphlets by Garrett Caples (on minor Symbolist poetry) and Noelle Kocot (a personal discography of seminal music); and other publications and ephemera to be revealed. The 2010 series presents the most expansive annual catalog yet of Wave Books publications, and is readily available here: http://www.wavepoetry.com/catalog/82. The first volumes, Lasky’s Black Life and Nutter’s Christopher Sunset, will light upon your hands in Spring.

A steady stream of new languages to my door, yes please.

BONUS: Here is Ms. Lasky reading a poem on Weird Deer.

Presses & Web Hype / 6 Comments
January 18th, 2010 / 2:57 pm

NYC Area Alert: Giant Rumpus on Thursday!!!

It’s actually probably more like Rumpus/Giant, but that doesn’t make a coherent sentence. Anyway, as you may or may not already know, we are co-sponsoring The Rumpus 1 Year Anniversary Party, which will be held at Broadway East on Thursday. There will be readings: Deb Olin Unferth, Tao Lin, Rivka Galchen, Stephen Elliott, and that guy Justin Taylor who wrote that book of stories with the long, silly title that nobody can remember. Not that they’d want to. (Though I hear he’ll be reading from it for the first time–which *could* be interesting. I mean, theoretically.) Also, the great Jeffrey Lewis, Alina Simone, and Diane Louvel will make music. Gigantic-editor/NOON-contributor Lincoln Michel will DJ, and just to be on the safe side, Khaela Maricich from The Blow will also DJ. Video art. What else? Girls, probably. I mean at least two of the people I’ve already named are girls, and I didn’t even mention Rumpus-regular Rozalia Jovanovich yet; she will be hosting the festivities. So there you go–we’re talking at least three girls.

Web Hype / 20 Comments
January 18th, 2010 / 11:30 am

Economist on anonymous

Many hands write The Economist, but it speaks with a collective voice. […] And some articles are heavily edited. The main reason for anonymity, however, is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it. As Geoffrey Crowther, editor from 1938 to 1956, put it, anonymity keeps the editor “not the master but the servant of something far greater than himself. You can call that ancestor-worship if you wish, but it gives to the paper an astonishing momentum of thought and principle.”

READ MORE >

Web Hype / 2 Comments
January 17th, 2010 / 4:25 pm

Reviews & Web Hype

Around the Web

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mDbNYqio1g&

There’s a new issue of the Home Video Review of Books. The above clip is the middle installment of the HVRB’s three-part review of We Take Me Apart by Molly Gaudry. Also reviewed in this issue: Graham Foust, Angela Veronica Wong, Brenda Ijima, and more.

Don’t forget The Rumpus Sunday Books Supplement. Direct your attention especially to Elissa Bassist’s Imaginary Interview With Elaine Showalter.

Jezebel takes a look at Best Sex Writing 2010, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel.

Another standout is Betty Dodson’s “Sexual Outlaw,” about her post-menopausal discovery of a lesbian S/M support group: it’s both a powerful refutation of the notion that women over 50 aren’t sexy, and a sexy exploration of the idea that fucking is all about power. And Janet Hardy’s “The Portal,” about fisting, fingering, and general vagina appreciation, is dirty fun (example: “I do, however, like men. And since they don’t have cunts, we use mine.”).

Slate’s Troy Patterson says “Conan should have seen it coming.” Patterson also offers a Top 10 list of “fun facts” about the history of the Late Night wars.

4. When it seemed possible that Letterman might unseat Leno from Tonight, Leno consciously used monologue jokes about his relationship with NBC as part of a PR campaign, painting himself as a victim. Last week, when he joked, “What does NBC stand for? Never Believe Your Contract,” he was actually stealing 17-year-old material from himself.

There’s a new issue of Diode!

Over at the NYTBR, meanwhile, Ned Vizzini reviews a YA novel, Walter Kirn something something Sam Shepard, and Edmund White really likes Frank Kermode’s new book about E.M. Forster. Also, our buddy Stephen Elliott has an essay at the Times about The D.I.Y. Book Tour. After the dismissive in-brief review his book got a few weeks ago, this might at first seem schizophrenic on the Times’s part, but I think the correct way to read this is as a sign of health: that one critic’s opinion doesn’t sour the whole institution’s relationship with a given author. The Times is commended for their multiplicity of views, and encouraged to maintain this position w/r/t reviewing my book, in light (or, hopefully, not in light) of what I said about their other critic yesterday. Also, since turnabout is apparently fair play over there, when’s the Dennis Cooper op-ed coming? I’ll hold my breath if you hold yours. Whoever passes out first gets their picture taken.

Oh, and Jeremy Schmall passed this along to me. “Lit 101 Classes in Three Lines or Less.” He said his favorite is the Paradise Lost one. I personally prefer the one for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

3 Comments
January 17th, 2010 / 1:24 pm

Take a Saturday evening—or make a bookmark for tomorrow’s hangover—to read the new Collagist, featuring the Gabriels Blackwell and Durham; the four names of Mary Jo Firth Gillett; the three names of Tina May Hall, Emily Kendal Frey, Reginald Dwayne Betts, and Alan Michael Parker; another Parker named Jeff, who’s called in to introduce that classic double punch of P’s, Mister Padgett Powell; and a bunch of other people who don’t fit into the moronic cleverness of the earlier clauses, including: Doug Ramspeck, Jennifer S. Cheng, Anna Clark, John Madera, Stacy Muszynski, and Angela Stubbs. Good stuff. Kudos to Matt Bell for another great issue!

Friday Fuck Books, Let’s Take Us Some Teeth

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6bK5EPdQ1g

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toSWqyvpkYo

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY1lHDXw6GM

Isaiah Toothtaker‘s record is free HERE. The first track samples Werner Herzog.

Random & Web Hype / 10 Comments
January 15th, 2010 / 4:58 pm

Firmuhment

According to Firmuhment’s list of websites described as food, we are: “Good pea soup that the cooks took turns spitting in, garnished with dead flies.” I like. (Lots of other interesting erasures, destructors on here, including blackouts of Tara Reid, blurring of Gertrude Stein, so on.) (Thanks M. Rascher.)

Web Hype / 12 Comments
January 14th, 2010 / 3:53 pm