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Adam Robinson—

well i’m not going to pay $4.50 for shipping on a book from the publisher’s website

X-Mas Present: Everything You Always Wanted to Ask David Gates About Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories…

…and there were a lot of things you wanted to ask, because Gates’s intro is one of if not the best single essays ever written about DB’s work, so you figured he’d probably have done a pretty sweet job on the notes, too, but for some reason it wasn’t in the Gates-prefaced Penguin Classics Edition of Sixty Stories where it should have been, and you knew it was supposed to be posted somewhere on the Penguin website (it says so in the book) but then when you went to the website you couldn’t find it.

If this is you, friend, your troubles end today. Here. Now. I went to the Penguin site, and found the thing–years ago. It’s amazing and enlightening and it’s over 30 pages long. And I had forgotten about it until just now. Everyone should have access to these notes. Rather than try and re-figure out how I found them, I’m just going to post the .pdf myself: The David Gates footnotes to Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories. Merry Christmas, all.

Nick Antosca—

I made nine submissions to lit mags in 2009. (My lowest total ever since I started tracking. Got busy with longer pieces this year.) They were all in the last two months. One was rejected; the others are still outstanding. How was your year, submissions-wise? Did you send out more than ten? More than a hundred? Any acceptances/sales/publications you’re especially proud of?

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Lily Hoang—

how are your holidays going? tell me. tell me. i want to know.

Justin Taylor

These People Want to Kill You With Their Voodoo Powers, but Are Worried They’re Accidentally Killing Each Other–with their VOODOO POWERS

They’re like terrorists trying to build suicide bombs, but accidentally blowing their own fingers off. Or at least that’s what this one guy thought. This just went up on Gawker.

A panicked tea-bagger called up C-SPAN in tears today, worried that he accidentally killed Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe by praying for Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd to die. This is one of the saddest things ever to appear on C-SPAN.

There aren’t enough o’s in the word WOWOWOWOWOW to describe the way(s) this makes me feel. Guess we’d better go to the tape, Steve.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0uxURKIFqU&

Web Hype / 7 Comments
December 22nd, 2009 / 11:01 pm

Sam Pink

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS, LECTURE 1

This is the first post concerning the book HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS. The book contains twelve lectures, delivered at Harvard University by JL Austin on the nature of language. The importance of these lectures is, to me, the uncovering of language as a particular kind of instrument between people, and how literal meaning is not the only use of language.

Some Notes on Affect

A lot that’s happening on this site right now, in posts and in comments, has somehow coalesced around a few themes and texts that I first explored seriously in a college course I took, called Excess, that focused on, well, the literature of excess, or transgression: Sade, Bataille, Sacher-Masoch, and films like Irreversible. It was taught by Paul Mann, poet and author of Masocriticism, which, as its title suggests, radically exposes the viscera gaping from the act of reading and interpreting texts. He writes,

The text never recognizes us. It neither assents to nor dissents from our reading, our desire. Whatever validations we establish, it remains silent throughout our reading.

At the end of each reading, it returns as a Greek.

At the end of each masocritical scene, one is abandoned to the absolutely otherness of the other. One suffers an utter loss of agency, out of and against which a new scene or new reading must be projected.

This formulation of the text recalls Bataille’s vision of the sun burning itself up with no consideration for the life that its combustion nurtures, a concept that is central to much of Bataille’s work (including the essay whose title I stole for the reading series I run w/ Blake and Jamie Iredell in Atlanta, Solar Anus). The way Mann equates the sun with the text deepens this idea of reading as hyper-sensory experience. READ MORE >

Craft Notes & Random / 146 Comments
December 22nd, 2009 / 6:48 pm

Blake Butler

106.2 Books in 2009

I read 106 books this year. Actually, I read more because even in going through the list I am seeing things I remember reading, like John Dermot Woods’s collection, and Amina Cain’s, and Tim Horvath’s novella, and Justin Sirois’s and at least a handful of others, not to mention the various books I read in manuscript form for blurbing or review or feedback or whatever, and all the other writing in magazines and where else. Nor does it include chapbooks, which skips a lot, because there were a lot of good chapbooks this year. In the formal count pulled off the list of books I hold on my hard drive I read 106 books, and probably will 2 or 3 more between now and the year’s out. That doesn’t count, either, the books I started and gave up on: as such, the majority of the books on this list I enjoyed.

Anyway, this is what I wrote down that I read. Writing it down as you go, which I’ve been doing since 2001 now, helps me a lot to remember what and where and when about it. It also seems to help me move along. I limited myself to saying a single sentence about each, which was hard to keep to, and then hard to finish, because that’s a lot. Not as much, probably, as the number of books I bought this year or in years before still waiting for me on the piles around my loft, which together will one day become the bricks of my future home. So anyway, for the hell of it…

Nickname Contest

Nicknames are for athletes and the occasional movie star. I would argue the finest as “The Hammer,” aka Charlie Sheen, only because it was bestowed by teenage Las Vegas call girls. In athletics, I’ll go Owen “What the Heck” Beck (a not so zealous Jamaican boxer), Nicolai “Old One Leg” Andrianov (Russian gymnast), and “He Hate Me,” startling, odd, possibly existential, always fucking awesome, and worn proudly by XFL running back, Rod Smart.

And for writers? (We are not talking pseudonyms, another thing entirely.)