Couldn’t locate a book today. That made me a tadpole late for class. But I required down sticky/icky low immersion, that Cormac thing, to show a student. Student penned a meth flophouse story. I needed to tell this student, “Get your story grittier. You went so far and you got squeamish. Go further. Get more squeamish. [Here I am making a squeezing hand motion, God knows why.] Boil your stomach in its own rank juices! No disgust in the writer, no disgust in the reader. Something…” Etc. I wanted to show him Suttree, of course, page where Harrogate gets a side job cleaning out a totaled car at a junkyard. Five “boys” were in the car when it was “Run head on by a semi.” Then this:

He propped his feet against one door and gave it a good kick and it fell open. Some kind of globular material hung down over the steering column. He climbed out of the car and bent down to find the heads of the bolts beneath the seats. The carpeting had been rained on and was lightly furred with pale blue mold. Something small and fat and wet with an umbilical looking tail lying there. A sort of slug. He picked it up. A human eye looked up at him from between his thumb and forefinger.”

But I couldn’t find Suttree, damnit. (In the end this was the fault of Matt Bell, Charles Bukowski, and Philip Young—their three books are the same cover hue [brown] as Suttree so I kept grabbing the wrong title.) I knew Suttree was there—I could smell the thing, all that leprous river mud and catfish whiskey breath. For not the first time I gazed googly-eyed at my tumuli of books and thought, “Do I need a system?” I see the practicality of a system, but also the danger. (Oh, all those failed systems) And I see book-piles as thickets and wonder-clumps, not some cultivated shrubbery/statue garden. I like heaps. Slippery heaps of books. But that isn’t going to work. Do you have a system? How do you find a written thing?

There is a part of me that thinks good things should go on indefinitely and there is another part that says for something to be really good, for it to gain some kind of worthy status in anyone’s memory, it has to die. When I think of SUPERMACHINE, I will think of the magazine that best represented  the writers and writing that I cared about during the duration of its life. R.I.P.

I am going to these final SUPERMACHINE events. You should too:

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today i was thinking, ‘why do i write things.’

i don’t know what the answer is. i mean, at least in general. i write things on this blog because i feel like it’s an outlet that forces me to concretize, to some extent, theoretical implications of things in life like experiences and books and movies instead of just letting the ideas float around in my head where they eventually either fizzle out or find their way on twitter or end up via some twinned form in poetry or fiction or whatever it is that i’m calling my own ‘writing’ at the moment. i could write things for my own personal blog but the fact that htmlgiant has a built-in audience (whereas any attempt at a personal blog i make doesn’t), sort of, i don’t know, provides the motivation to make myself deal with my own thoughts.

like does that make sense? i don’t get paid to write here, as far as i know none of the contributors do. i’ve basically stopped submitting stories and poems to journals in the last year, yet i still post here. i’m sort of wondering why that is. i mean, the idea of someone else reading your own words makes it feel like more of a utile activity, writing that is, i guess. it’s a particular kind of egotism, or narcissism. but really i often feel more of an obligation. i don’t mean to a public, or to an audience, rather, like i said above, the idea of ‘people’ actually reading my hazily constructed ideas on art and literature and whatever-the-fuck i end up posting about here, i think, makes me actually try to think harder about what it is that i’m writing. obligation in that sense. like: don’t be totally fucking stupid and absent here, otherwise someone will call you out on your bullshit.

the obtusity of that sentiment is bullshit in its own right; no one in the entire world is obligated to pay any attention to me or to call me out on my bullshit. i’m tired of ideas of fame because i don’t think they make any sense.
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Welcome to the fourth installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’m excited to report that I’ve got a bunch of great contributors lined up, and am myself working on a few entries. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but would like to participate, email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Peter Tieryas Liu…

100 Bullets are 100 issues packed with graphic brutality, tales of moral compunction, and the evolution of noir into a merging of both crime fiction and pseudo-history. Every gunshot exposes frailties in the cracks of a society pining for justice. The premise of the comic goes something like this. You’re the victim of an unforgivably heinous crime. Down on your luck, the mysterious Agent Graves informs you that the cause of all your suffering is Person X. He offers you an attaché case filled with a gun and 100 untraceable bullets that you can use in any way you want without legal repercussions. What would you do?

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