33 pinches where the fat do grow

1. The IRS is accusing NANO fiction of being pornography (sort of a new take on the term flash).

5. This is the best fish/beer/existential ramblings blog I believe you will find. You’re welcome.

I’m probably going to people the world with robot birds.

4. Patrick Somerville & Lindsay Hunter converse with one another over at Hobart.

First thing: I am suspicious of all writers and human beings who are not sick of themselves.

33. Roy Kesey interview at Bookslut.

It would be great if having climbed a given mountain meant that climbing some other similar-shaped mountain would be easier, but I don’t think that’s quite the way it works — at least not for me.

4. Everyone needs discussions/lessons on plot. Here are some, couched in a review of Tana French at The Millions.

Lesson: What Gary Lutzcalls “page-hugging” prose isn’t necessarily anathema to plot.

yo, veridical dat.

Random / 1 Comment
August 2nd, 2011 / 9:35 am

The Humanity in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho

1. I avoided American Psycho for as long as possible before picking it up. I hadn’t even realized it’s about to celebrate its 20th birthday (jesus christ) until I was about halfway through my first and only read at last last week, which went down from cover to cover in two evenings. It’s the first time in I don’t know how long that I’ve been compelled to carry a book around with me and read it wherever I am, instead of doing other things, such as on a Friday night on my sofa in my underwear, wanting to stay inside it, even as in many ways the book keeps repeating itself, its elements; there felt something there.

2. I think I hadn’t read the book, and in fact talked shit about it not having read it, all this time because of a series of false expectations placed upon it. I’m certainly one of the last you’d call a squeamish reader, in fact often the more brutal the better, but something about the mythology of Ellis, and the weird taste I’d gotten in Less Than Zero, the only book of his I’d picked up until this year, which reflected to me at the time a kind of retarded field of vision I wasn’t really interested in: drugs, and fucking (which, I know, that’s supposed to be what you want, but that’s part of what made it not at all what I want: it seemed obvious). I chalked American Psycho, too, even among all its hype, to the same kind of thinking: that this couldn’t really be that big of a deal, that it was just some guy getting his balls off writing out some not even that hardcore (in language) action, and etc. etc.

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Author Spotlight / 74 Comments
August 1st, 2011 / 4:57 pm

“Our notions of experiment are pretty much stuck on the surface of the page”: An Interview with Kent Johnson

As an attempt to broaden the conversation I’ve been conducting on the topic of experimental literature, Kent Johnson graciously agreed to answer a few questions about the role of authorship and its connection to experimental literature. (If you’re unfamiliar with Johnson’s work, his complete bio follows after the interview, below.)

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Random / 27 Comments
August 1st, 2011 / 3:24 pm

HTMLGiant Reviews Section

Today is the launch day for our newly formatted reviews section at HTMLGiant, which you can see kicked off below with Maxi Kim’s review of Stewart Home & Matthew Timmons.

Every Monday and Friday of each week we’ll host long formal review of this nature, live at noon. This section will be edited by our new Formal Reviews editor, Janice Lee.

Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of each week we’ll be running a new review feature, with anonymously written, shorter reviews. This section will be edited by Anonymous Reviews editor, Brooks Sterritt.

Anyone interested in submitting reviews to either section is encouraged to do so, particularly the anonymous. Feel free as well to query if you would like to write but don’t yet have a book in mind.

Formal reviews should be 800-1500 words and up, and can be sent to Janice at janice [at] htmlgiant [dot] com.

Anonymous reviews should be 300-500 words, have a rating from 0.0-10.0, and can be sent to Brooks at brooks [at] htmlgiant [dot] com.

Obviously in submission your anonymity won’t be possible, unless you want to send from a strange address, but we promise not to tell. This also should not mean, though, that anonymous reviews are designed solely to tear shit up; we simply hope to bypass some of the insular review practices that happen in a community as frequently incestuous as lit. Review submissions are open as of today.

Presses or authors hoping to be reviewed here can send a query, not to the editors, but to reviews [at] htmlgiant [dot] com. Queries sent elsewhere will not be able to be responded to.

As well, all regular reviews will be archived for easy access here (also clickable at the top of this page). We hope in the midst of this to keep a dependable forum for new and old work alike.

Welcome to Janice and Brooks!

Behind the Scenes / 39 Comments
August 1st, 2011 / 12:22 pm

The Paris Review [review]

[That’s a clever title for this post, Sean. Thanks, mom. I told you to never read this site. Ever.]

Issue # 197. Summer 2011. (For the first time, you can get it digital) The cover is a drawing by Matteo Pericoli (sounds a little like a petri dish culture), who is a sprezzatura, a renaissance man of sorts. I get a little Al Hirschfeld, a little Michael Cutlip. The paper is thick and will absorb liquid stains. Snot, hot sauce, beer, etc. Fun fact: The Paris Review has had three editors in its lifetime.

The first story is “William Wei” by Amie Barrodale. It is a glow opening, since it is a story that says, ‘You are now reading a literary magazine.’ Detached narrator, drinking, telephone conversations, restaurants, people eating mushrooms embedded in little chocolates, sidewalks, anti-anxiety medications, that manner of thing. The New Yorker used to love these (example), but I’m not saying the New Yorker only publishes one type of story. That’s a damn lie. Barrodale does the style well. I left the story as if rising interrupted from a brief dream, my head a bit leppy.

[I will credit this photo later, maybe]

Frederick Seidel (sounds a bit like a poker player) writes a poem with this startling opening:

I move my body meat smell next to yours,/Your spice of Zanzibar. Mine rains, yours pours–/Sex tropics as a way not to be dead./I don’t know who we are except in bed.

Then it goes downhill, into a rhyming Barack Obama poem, sort of light verse, sort of nodding back to the earlier days of Paris Review, when many of the poems took this tone. (I’d like to bring syphilis and the word doggerel back into fashion; let’s do that, together. Shall we?)

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Author Spotlight & Random / 13 Comments
August 1st, 2011 / 12:01 pm

Reviews

AT LAST, SEXUAL SATISFACTION FOR CINDY SHERMAN WITH YOUR BIGGER AND NEWEST ATEMPORAL NETWORK CULTURE!

Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie
by Stewart Home
Book Works, 2010
120 pages / $19.99 Buy from Amazon

&

The New Poetics
by Mathew Timmons
Les Figues Press 2010
112 pages / $15.00 Buy from Les Figues

 

 

 

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably keen on the emergent discourse surrounding our current atemporal, altermodern new media status. Facebook, Flickr, Google, iPad, iPod, Myspace, Youtube, etc, etc: its all grist for contemporary philosophers, and writers too have attempted to capitalize on the ubiquity of Twitter feeds and Facebook updates – with mixed results. Zen literary terrorist Stewart Home and Los Angeles-based poet Mathew Timmons are both authors of recent books that are candidates for an emergent atemporal literature (for lack of a better term); what Home and Timmons have managed to do is to avoid the trap of the ever-expanding rotting mounds and heaps of aspiring internet-based fiction, and needless to say – that trap is the perennial lure of narrative storytelling.

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15 Comments
August 1st, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest

Music / 15 Comments
August 1st, 2011 / 1:14 am

Nue Descending a Staircase, No. 1

When photographer Michael Wolf, as part of his “Real Fake Art” (2006) series, asked our Chinese copy artist to pose next to his copy of Gerhard Richter’s “Ema (Nude on a Staircase)” while being on a staircase himself, we might wonder if accidents are wonderment. The original painting (1966), shown right, is “better” in its purposeful degradation of oil paint’s capacity, by way of demoting it to flaws of the photograph: the blurriness, the bleached colors, the overexposure from the camera’s unconscious flash. For Richter, paint was a dumb thing, like toothpaste, whose only remaining relevance could be to pay tribute to photography. Of course, when he was in the mood. And his moods often changed. Short of any more research, I wonder who Ema is — his wife perhaps. The staircase is institutional-like, i.e. not domestic, and, if wonderment is still this siren’s call, I wonder where the hell they are. As for Ching Chong, should that be his name, may his time spent with Ema be clouded with the toxic high of turpentine, alone in his no doubt ventless studio, turning fake into real, or the other way around, for commerce, the sad advanced stages of Warhol’s once silly threat. Dude needs to take a large fan brush and go back and forth over the canvas left to right, wax on wax off, obscuring Ema into flatness like the shallow lens of a disposable camera.

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Random / 4 Comments
July 31st, 2011 / 3:52 pm

Late Night Links

Anna Clark offers a reading list for narrative nonfiction. Along those lines, longform nonfiction might be enjoying a surge in popularity.

At The New Republic, Ruth Franklin talks about writing about captivity.

Did you know Colson Whitehead is writing about The World Series of Poker for Grantland?

The Atlantic’s Fiction 2011 issue is now online.

More reading: Sarah Malone at the Good Men Project and Gabe Durham at Route 9.

By the way, you can take a free online class in artificial intelligence at Stanford this fall.

Roundup / 9 Comments
July 31st, 2011 / 1:05 am

Dave Hill on Writing

[via le detroit]

Craft Notes / 3 Comments
July 30th, 2011 / 3:37 pm