Dock Ellis’s No Hitter on LSD
via Ken’s Twitter feed
Second Annual Indie Lit Secret Santa Signup Open
From now till December 15, sign up to play Secret Santa at HTMLGiant. It’s easy! On the sign-deadline, you will find out your recipient and her or his address, and by Christmas (it’s December 25, this year, I think), send them a book from an indie press or a subscription to an indie mag. And you get one too! Sounds like it was a great success last year, and it’s sure to be this year, too.
Also, let us know if you’d like to donate a discount or an inscription or anything else that’ll sweeten the deal. The point, after all, is to support independent literature, so let’s help ourselves help ourselves!
More details can be found on the post from last year, here. It’s really all pretty simple. Spend $10-$20. SIGN UP HERE TO PLAY! ****UPDATE: IMPORTANT NOTE: WHEN YOU SIGN UP, YOU WON”T AUTOMATICALLY BE ASKED FOR YOUR MAILING ADDRESS, WHICH ADDRESS IS ESSENTIAL IF YOU WANT TO RECEIVE A GIFT. AFTER SIGNING UP, CLICK ON THE “YOU” TAB, THEN CLICK ON “UPDATE YOUR PROFILE,” AND THEN ENTER AND SAVE YOUR ADDRESS.****
Back from Turkeyland w/ F for Fake
Hope everybody is fatter now. Crawling back into the void this week, last night rewatched most of Orson Welles’s last completed feature film, F for Fake, a documentary about fakes and fakers, which in itself does a little trickery and deceit, making a nice little cakebox of weird. Criterion put it out a couple years ago, but it’s also now on YouTube in a few pieces. Here’s part one, then follow the links…
Weekend Reading
Gawker went to the National Book Awards and got a whole bunch of big lit-names to sign a copy of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, which they are now auctioning off for charity. It seems to be part of a campaign to get the book short-listed for the 2010 fiction award. That’s this year’s fiction winner, Colum McCann, in the picture.
I always forget The Atlantic exists. But then they’ll bring out Christopher Hitchens to talk about Arthur Koestler, and it’s like, oh yeah, those guys. Though to be fair, if it wasn’t for Arts & Letters Daily, I’d have never known.
Julia Cohen’s got a video of Seth Landman (ed. Invisible Ear) doing something I don’t understand.
She also mentions that Mathias Svalina’s debut full length, Destruction Myth, is now officially out. Expect to hear rather a bit more about that book in this space in the near future.
Joshua Cohen’s memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Fall 2009 online issue of Rain Taxi, including a review of Evenson’s Fugue State and a look at Zizek & Milbank’s The Monstrosity of Christ.
Also, Glenn Beck is in a fight with the Anti-Defamation League because they called him “fearmonger in chief” in their new special report, “Rage Grows In America: Anti-Government Conspiracies.” Basically, the report is exactly what you think it is, only longer. If you go to Crooks & Liars, you can hear Beck on his radio show, flipping out and daring the ADL to name anyone who has been a better friend of Israel than he has. Not sure what that has to do with domestic American politics, but–oh wait, yes I am. Dear ADL, maybe if you supported something like an even remotely sane Israel policy, instead of taking all your talking points from the pro-violence right (the Kissinger/Lieberman/Dershowitz school) you wouldn’t find yourself in bed with fucktards like Beck in the first place. Well good for them for putting the report out, at any rate, when its come down to siding with Abraham Foxman or Glenn Beck, it’s dark days all over the land.
On Violence
Dostoyevski, Orwell, Žižek n’ crew have written far more compelling meditations on violence, but I figure I’d have a go at it (being an asian-canadian near-sighted pacifist and all), and this all in time for Thanksgiving.
To draw parallel’s between our Father’s pilgrimage and their genocide of Native Americans would be didactic and predictable. Any person, as I do, who enjoys the opulent grounds of American soil best not critique the ways in which such grounds were brought forth. War equals land, and we have landed. If the Native Americans had their way, we’d all be in England right now; I hear the gin is okay, but that Queen is a bitch. So, we won’t talk about war.
Slayer / Htmlgiant
I’ve always liked it when fans cut SLAYER into their bodies (nobody does this with country or jazz; satan rulz). I like htmlgiant a lot, but not enough to cut it into my body. Instead, I asked my wife (got married, fyi) to write HTMLGIANT with Sriracha hot sauce in her best “slayer font,” and in case you think I’m a wus, it totally burned. Satanic music jeopardized my relationship with my mom, as she forbid me to listen to it. Htmlgiant has at times jeopardized my relationship with my wife, as I’m always on it and sort of ignoring her. She’s all “can you heat up the peas?” and I’m like “comment shit-storm babe, really emo now.” So this is an open thank you to a) Slayer: for shredding, b) htmlgiant: for being a bunch of racist fags¹, c) my mom: for eventually letting me be satanic, and d) my wife: for heating up the god damn peas herself.
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1. Don’t start.
Sommelier Says: Reynard Seifert
In a recent tussle betwixt Jereme Dean, in which Reynard passive aggressively “bracket-belches” (i.e. [belch]) in response to the prospects of the former commenting more, Jereme, in his response to that, unfortunately misuses the apostrophe in “belch’s,” leading Reynard to say:
& an apostrophe does not denote the plural
Sommelier Says: It’s wonderful how the ampersand resembles, and operates as, the treble clef — cuing the melodic brassy notes to come. (One imagines a rusty trombone.) Seifert’s eloquent bouquet of alliterated “o”s in “does not denote” opens an olfactory opulence for, oh, I don’t know. The quick jab at someone’s grammar to demonstrate one’s superior education and/or anal retentiveness has prominent notes of douchebag and raspberry. Such syntactical severity gets better with age, so just keep him in a dark cellar for five years, and those who believe “nutty flavors” involve teabags will wish to try it out on Mr. Seifert the next time he opens his mouth.