“The Wish to be a Red Indian”
by Franz Kafka
Trans. by Willa and Edwin MuirIf one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.
The top ten list just released [left] is almost identical as last year’s [right], except University of Massachusetts Amherst was dropped, replaced by Syracuse University. If you care about your future, the drive will take you approximately 4 hours and 23 minutes. If you have to cry in the car, please roll down the windows, as your tears will evaporate quicker. A good place to hide acid tabs should you be pulled over is under your eyelids. A good place to blow someone is America. The best way to get there:
Monday night, I did a reading to promote Dzanc’s Best of the Web 2010 collection. It was nice. Dave Rowley and Christine Hartzler read, too. It was sunny out, so not a lot of people were out to see the reading. That’s okay.
I read CAVES. Or, well, most of CAVES. See, something happened.
I was reading CAVES, and figured I had enough time to read the whole thing. And had intended to read the whole thing.
But then, I stopped. At section 16, I stopped reading and paused. READ MORE >
New online issues of Action Yes and Gigantic be rippin it like it s’posed to be ripped.
Get out your diapers, sluts! PW weighs in with the top 50 MFA programs. My dad says this is totally out of whack with the actual parameters of what young thugs want in language learning these days. What are you to think? (click img for larger versions)
Looks pleasing. (slightly NSFW?)
Check out this cool video for the novel Bad Bad Bad by GIANT Commenteriat regular Jesus Angel Garcia. The video’s all about asking people what they fear. My favorite is the lady who says “Falling off a cliff!” immediately and cheerfully. I also really like the indignant guy with a missing tooth. Some people seem to fear themselves or “actualizing” themselves, and I have no idea what that means but I think it has to do with facial hair. Me I’m afraid of major burns. And maybe that one kind of inverse amnesia where you wake up as the only person who remembers a certain thing, like the Chicago Blackhawks or Cheerios.
by natalie Dee
I live in Brooklyn which means I can’t even leave the house without twisting my ankle as I trip over an author, often one whose book is already on my shelf. Just yesterday this guy was asking me if I had any spare change and I said, “Wait isn’t this you?” and held up the book I was reading. He just blushed and ran away. They are a timid species.
This would be a happy problem if I had just remained a reader and writer, but I started reviewing books last year and recently I got an assignment from Time Out New York to review Tao Lin’s newest, Richard Yates. READ MORE >
14. Huxley on Huxley documentary. Too bad I live in Indiana and have a better chance of seeing a puma running a lemonade stand than seeing this film.
33. When you’re writing a kind of instinct comes into play. What you’re going to write is already out there in the darkness. It’s as if writing were something outside you, in a tangle of tenses: between writing and having written, having written and having to go on writing; between knowing and not knowing what it’s all about; starting from complete meaning, being submerged by it, and ending up meaninglessness. The image of a black block in the middle of the world isn’t far out.
7. Half the people I know I say “Indie” and they say “You mean vampire books?”
112. Anyway, Sabotage talks kill author #8.