Diagram Summer All-Fiction Issue

94_tocIt’s one of the things I look forward to every year: Diagram’s badass and always mindbending gathering of finalists and winner of their annual $5 innovative fiction issue. The 2009 batch has just gone live, and this year marks another slew of things to stare at open in my web browser while I write my owns, including words by many new-to-me names: August Tarrier, Erica W. Adams, Michael Argest, Kristina Born, Micah Nathan, Lito Elio Porto, Nathania Rosenfeld, Rhodes Stevens, and Jenny Zhang.

Big highlight for me is a new long-ish text from heartthrob Kristina Born (yes, Shane Jones and I are releasing her debut book later this year, take a look!). Check out this sample graph from this fine show of freak:

The Gilmore Commission

Holograms can kill a man. Unlike linear images, which are easily sidestepped, literally. A threadlike sports car races by the locked glass doors. Since early childhood, Jack Twig, it has been your job to know the difference. (You said: the difference is it’s a psychological difference.) Mother and I have been losing our sight for quite some time. Even now, Teddy proposes a game of hangman and she declines, murmuring, patting her hands on her cheeks. Look at her. She is not afraid to die but of almost every other thing. Sometimes I wonder, Who can think without horror on death and the life beyond? and I know it is only my wife and only because her eyeballs are falling out. Sometimes I wonder, When comes the mutually assured destruction promised us by our greatest nations? Jack Twig, take a look for me: I think I still have some extremely deteriorated nerve agent buried in the yard.

I XOX her to death. Read the rest of this brilliant piece: Jack Twig is the Evil Pulse of Canada.

The rest is all as grand as well and a big gleam. Diagram continues to be, to me, one of, if not THE, best web journal around.

Uncategorized / 14 Comments
August 31st, 2009 / 12:57 pm

Massive People (12): Samuel Ligon

samuelligon-330-Resizeddsc_0128Samuel Ligon is most recently the author of the story collection Drift and Swerve, as well as the novel Safe In Heaven Dead. His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, New England Review, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, Post Road, Keyhole, Sleepingfish, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He is also the editor of the most excellent Willow Springs, and teaches at Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers, in Spokane, Washington.

Beyond all that, Sam is simultaneously one of the most laid back and yet enthusiastic editors I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. He is, above all else, an excellent person, while also managing to be a hell of a writer. He seems to me a model for what a person in the world of language should be: courageous and yet open minded, enthusiastic and yet no nonsense, giving, attentive, rad. Wise blood, as it were, and most certainly a massive person.

Over the past few weeks I had the pleasure of talking with Sam over email about his new collection, his inspiration, music, the influence of Willow Springs on his work, and much more.

READ MORE >

Massive People / 14 Comments
August 31st, 2009 / 12:00 pm

I’ve been obsessed with this song for like 3 weeks now and don’t see it letting up

Specifically, the version on Live Rust, but this version from Hamburg ’96 (~28 years later) is pretty great too.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdUC_GU4hYw

Random / 12 Comments
August 30th, 2009 / 11:13 pm

Paragraphs That Make Me Warm (6): William Gass

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Now the horse was quiet and we were breathing careful and if the wind had picked up we couldn’t hear it or any snow it drove. It was warmer in the barn and the little light there was was soft on hay and wood. We were safe from the sun and it felt good to use the eyes on quiet tools and leather. I leaned like Hans against the wall and put my gun in my belt. It felt good to have emptied that hand. My face burned and I was very drowsy. I could dig a hole in the hay. Even if there were rats, I would sleep with them in it. Everything was still in the barn. Tools and harness hung from the walls, and pails and bags and burlap rested on the floor. Nothing shifted in the straw or moved in hay. The horse stood easy. And Hans and I rested up against the wall, Hans sucking in his breath and holding it, and we waited for Pa, who didn’t make a sound. Only the line of sun that snuck under him and lay along the floor and came up white and dangerous to the pail seemed a living thing.

– from ‘The Pedersen Kid’ in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, pg. 60

Excerpts / 8 Comments
August 30th, 2009 / 9:32 pm
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a question: do you like to hang out with other “writer types/academic types/artist types” or do you prefer hanging out with people who aren’t those things, at least not professedly.  and why is that.  i am really interested in what people think about this.  also, to preempt, i mean “instead of being alone,” which is obviously preferable to both.

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In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” It is to turn the world into this world. (“This world”! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

– Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”

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3 Fall Books I Just Preordered, All by Debut Authors

How Some People Like Their Eggs by Sean Lovelace (Rose Metal Press, August 09)

lovelace

The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey (Magic Helicopter, October 09)

drunksonnets_promo

Prose: Poems, a Novel by Jamie Iredell (Orange Alert, fall 09)

iredell

Web Hype / 8 Comments
August 30th, 2009 / 3:49 pm
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Laura van den Berg’s website has been hacked by AYS Federal Atack Team.

Update: it has been fixed.

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Power Quote: William Hazlitt (for Blake)

dick-cheney

Nature seems (the more we look into it) made up of antipathies: without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men. The white streak in our own fortunes is brightened (or just rendered visible by making all around it as dark as possible; so the rainbow paints its form upon the cloud. Is it pride? Is it envy? Is it the force of contrast? Is it weakness or malice? But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after, evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, wants variety and spirit. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.

– “On the Pleasure of Hating”

Power Quote / 10 Comments
August 29th, 2009 / 6:33 pm
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It’s really not OK to like and support everything. It’s just not.

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