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Get your soul portrait today! And while you’re over there checking out the goods, be sure to answer this call: “Attention Art Collectors Seeking Art Treasures.” No more shit-collecting for you! From here on out, it’s treasures only. (Thanks, Mathias!)

If you’re still feeling spiritual after your Soul Portrait, try “The Family Jewels” over at the Smart Set. David Farley takes a look at Christianity’s best relics. As expected, #1 is the Holy Foreskin–it’s like the “Thriller” video of relics–but some of the other entries are surprising, and it’s all good educational fun.

There’s nothing holier than anything about “Reading People’s Faces” at Reason, the crabby libertarian organ of record. Katherine Mangu-Ward considers Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate.

In Japan, members of the yakuza have long favored tattoos covering the entire upper body to signal their mafia status. They also amputate all or part of a pinky finger. One study estimated that between 40 percent and 70 percent of the yakuza had sacrificed a digit, generally making the cut themselves.

(thanks A&L Daily for those last two)

What else? Well, homeboy of record, Alec Niedenthal has a new story, called “Moon,” in the Catalonian Review, and at the Rumpus, Megan Casela Ross makes Dylan Landis’s Normal People Don’t Live Like This sound pretty damn interesting. Next time I hit the bookstore, I’ll be looking for it. Also at The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott posts installment #18 of his Notes From Book Tour, and this one is extra fascinating, as he lays down some hard numbers:

I read at or participated in 73 events in 33 cities in 95 days. I sold 700 copies of The Adderall Diaries which I bought wholesale, as well as 150 copies of Happy Baby and 80 copies of My Girlfriend Comes To The City and Beats Me Up. Roughly. But that doesn’t count all the books the bookstores sold. At maybe 20 events, or more, a bookstore was selling the books. It’s safe to say I hand-sold around a thousand copies of The Adderall Diaries. It’s safe to say I generated more sales than that indirectly from write-ups in local newspapers and blogs, interviews with small radio stations. 500 more. 300 more. 1,000 more? Hard to say. It depends what you mean.For why? For the same reason I wrote it.

2 Comments
December 22nd, 2009 / 2:26 pm

Brian Foley

Chapel Haunt

Brandon Stosuy – writer, compiler of the unflinching UP IS UP, BUT SO IS DOWN, and pious metalhead, has moved his SHOW NO MERCY column, which was the last morsel of interest in the bowl of corporate shit that is Pitchfork, over to Stereogum. The column is now called HAUNTING THE CHAPEL. READ MORE >

Web Hype / 40 Comments
December 22nd, 2009 / 12:40 pm

Matt Bell—

The Book Design Review blog has posted their Favorite Book Covers of 2009. Which others did they miss? What was your own favorite cover of the year?

Roxane Gay

Craft Fitness: On Writing Exercises

The first writing exercise I assign in any class is to have students write a brief (500 words) essay, reflection or story (depending on the course) in response to a specific prompt using only one syllable words. As I relay the assignment, students express a charming range of reactions from “this bitch is crazy” to “this is impossible and this bitch is crazy,” but off they go to their dorm rooms and apartments and two days later, they return to class having written something within the assignment’s constraints and having learned about the value of a thesaurus.

PHOTO: THE CREEPIEST NURSERY SCHOOL FACADE EVER

I swear to God, this is a real nursery school in Manhattan. I took the picture.

jhonen vasquez school for tots

Random / 10 Comments
December 21st, 2009 / 9:34 pm

Jimmy Chen

Get Down Moses

I. If you enjoy it when people come over and casually browse the spines of your bookshelf, you are a nerd.

II. When your literary journal is a wordpress/blogger subdomain using one of their templates, I imagine someone who felt they wanted to be an editor for 20 minutes, during which time they started said journal.

III. When your literary journal has per inch/pixel ‘wrap text’ margins (vs. defined paragraph width), despite how wide the browser is, such that a full paragraph reads as one single line the length of a child’s arm, I feel bad and don’t read the stories.

IV. When your blog’s color/font specs are antagonistically provocative (blaring colors, extremely small or large fonts) only crazy or bored people who think you’re charming will read your blog.

V. When your friend with the ’20 minute set-up’ blog template journal nominates you for a pushcart, it just means he/she put an envelope with some paper in it in the mail, sorta like sentimental recycling. You weren’t ‘realistically’ nominated.

VI. When you diss on someone more successful than you, you’re just being human. When diss on someone less successful than you, you’re just being a dick.

VII. When you dismiss people for either having or not having an MFA, for being or not being a particular gender or race, or for just liking a book, band, movie that you don’t like, you are being provincial.

VIII. When your third-person bio is longer than the flash fiction piece it’s accompanying, that’s fucking lame.

IX. If you are lucky enough to get ‘fan e-mail’ and you don’t respond (even if it’s just “thanks, I appreciate it”) because you are ‘busy,’ or in some sick way you think not responding to fans further legitimizes your fame, you are an asshole.

X. If you think I’m a dick, you should have a drink with my dad.

Mean / 46 Comments
December 21st, 2009 / 8:38 pm

Blake Butler—

Seriously fucking me up: pictures of animals inside the womb. Here’s a puppy:

Blake Butler

Alec Niedenthal interviews Rudy Wilson

[Please welcome once again the incredible Alec Niedenthal, our to-be next Giant, herein talking language in a quite incredible Facebook-based interview with Rudy Wilson. Enjoy. – BB]

I have Blake’s original post on the book, and Peter Markus’s write-up on the same, to thank for running me into Rudy Wilson’s masterful and wildly original The Red Truck. Or, I guess, for running The Red Truck into me. If I’m remembering right, after one or two editions on Knopf, The Red Truck stayed out of print until Ravenna Press reprinted it earlier this year alongside Wilson’s new collection, Sonja’s Blue. The Red Truck is Lish-edited. Lish cut about two-hundred pages out of the book and carve(re)d the sentences to his liking. Blah blah blah. The result–though I’m quite confident that the original manuscript has the same beating heart–is haunting, colorful, relentlessly strange; The Red Truck has a light and sinister southern music very much its own. This kind of writing, to me, counteracts the sordid history of the South; it is evil confronted by the sleeping noise of a brain-fucked boy (though a girl does eventually narrate, there is really no differentiation between voices), by the rhythm of his throat. Not dissimilar to Peter Markus’s boy-based songs, The Red Truck is the record of a boy shrouding violence in his sound.

Wood Not Waiting For Mean Week

Wow. In these days of all Nicey-Nice, I thought the truly scathing book review went the way of disco or actually meeting someone before you made them your “Friend.” I was wrong. Picked up a New Yorker (OK, it’s a month old, which is like a decade in Internet years, but bear with me) all crumpled/curled on my bedside table in Relaxed Rat position, and inside James Wood takes Paul Auster to the blender.

If you need a primer on evisceration via book review, here you go:

Reviews & Web Hype

stuff i saw and you can too