Muumuu House ‘Care’ Package and a Contest

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not ryan call

I received today in the mail a ‘care’ package from Muumuu House and in that package were several books: you are a little bit happier than i am by Tao Lin and Distortions by Ann Beattie and three copies of Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy. Thank you, Muumuu House, for the ‘care’ package.

And last night a friend and I found a bar in Houston that has ping-pong tables, and we played ping-pong for three or four hours, and I defeated him twice. He did not defeat me. The rest of the time we just hit the ball back and forth and impressed ourselves with our amazing skills. I think I am very good at ping-pong. I think it is the one thing I’m allowed to be good at, maybe. That and washing dishes. I think there is something very satisfying about hitting a ping-pong ball just so, having it do exactly what you want it to do.

To celebrate our finding this bar with ping-pong tables, I would like to offer two copies of Sometimes My Heart Pushes Against My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy, which, sadly, has no poems/stories in it about ping-pong.

Please post your poems/stories about ping-pong in the comments section to be eligible for a copy of Sometimes My Heart Pushes Against My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy. Be sure to include a real email address in the field where it asks for an email address, so I can email you if your poem/story wins. If you are shy, you may also email a poem/story about ping-pong to htmlgiant [at] gmail [dot] com, but if I select your poem/story, then I will post it for everyone to see. This contest is open until 2:00pm CST, Saturday the 7th.

Good work, Muumuu House and Ellen Kennedy, on your first book. I enjoyed reading it.

UPDATE: Winners of the two Muumuu House books are Miles and Darby Larson. Miles and Darby please email your mailing addresses to HTMLGIANT so I can send you your prize.

Thank you to everyone who emailed and posted ping-pong stories/poems.

Contests & Presses / 147 Comments
March 6th, 2009 / 7:23 pm

Butler takes Greenpoint: a photo diary

WHAT: Blake Butler, Gary Lutz & Robert Lopez read at WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn on Thursday, 3/5/09.

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Sorry, I didn’t get pictures of the other two. I don’t think Gary likes to have his picture taken, actually, and I didn’t want to spook Robert by shooting with a flash without warning first. As you can see, I didn’t give a damn about spooking Blake. He’s staying on my couch while he’s in town. Camera with flash is the least of his worries.

AFTER THE READING WE WENT TO THE PENCIL FACTORY

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Author Spotlight & Random / 28 Comments
March 6th, 2009 / 6:45 pm

PR IS: NSFW

This post starts after the jump. READ MORE >

Author Spotlight / 45 Comments
March 6th, 2009 / 5:17 pm

Your Taste: A Review

I searched “my books” and “my bookshelf” on flickr and reviewed stranger’s tastes in literature.

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Did you read Everything is Illuminated twice? I read the first 5 pages once, then felt irritated and put it down. Kudos on Lolita though, it really is an awesome book, and answers in full ‘why men love bitches,’ so I don’t see the point on reading an entire book on that. They made a movie out of The Namesake with Kumar. It was like Joy Luck Club except with Indians. I teared the entire movie, though I think it was the curry. As for ‘how to save your own life,’ don’t fly if you’re scared of it. Just fly a kite.

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Haut or not / 63 Comments
March 6th, 2009 / 3:27 pm

How to Irritate and Confuse People: A Case Study

I don’t know what it is about the internet that causes people to forget what it means to be a human being. Look at the speed at which comments threads degenerate into hateful, vitriolic invective–people spew things out via their fingertips that they wouldn’t say out loud to someone who was mugging or divorcing them. But it’s a two-way street, and to me, what’s perhaps more interesting than moments when somebody forgets that s/he is talking to a REAL PERSON, are moments when the writer seems to forget that s/he him/herself is  a REAL PERSON. I’m not asking for Victorian etiquette here. I’m just saying that when you pop into a stranger’s inbox, unannounced, in a message with no subject-line, from a personal email address with a joke-name (“redhotstudonearth”–seriously) asking that stranger to give you things without explaining who you are, what exactly you’re asking for, what you hope to do with it, or why you deserve it… I mean what do you expect is going to happen?

After the jump, the transcript of an utterly surreal email exchange I had yesterday, with annotations.

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Mean & Random & Web Hype / 170 Comments
March 6th, 2009 / 10:55 am

Another Post With a Different Alice: DIAGRAM 9.1 is live

Holy monkey skank, the new DIAGRAM is good. Gawk this list of contributors, and then a splendid poem by Alice George after the break:

Jason Anthony
Geoffrey Babbitt
Sarah Bartlett
Heidi Bell
Scott Butterfield
Adam Clay
Nik De Dominic
Shira Dentz
Kristen Eliason
Adam Fell
Deborah Flanagan
Alice George
Matthew Glenwood
Ellie Horowitz
Daniel Hudon
Donna Hunt
Michael Jauchen
Krystal Languell
John Joynt
Tim Lantz
Amanda Maule
JoAnna Novak
Erick Piller
Anne Shaw
Peter Jay Shippy
Dolsy Smith
Laurie E. White

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Web Hype / 10 Comments
March 6th, 2009 / 1:21 am

Also…

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Justin, get your ass back to HTMLGiant and get to work.


(Our own Justin Taylor has a post up at Dennis Cooper’s blog, The Weaklings, about X-ing Books.)

(A prize package to anyone who can correctly guess the significance of the image on top of this post. Books and stuff.)

Author News / 8 Comments
March 5th, 2009 / 8:41 pm

Rimbaud vlog

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From the Poetry Foundation blog, harriet, the Rimbaud Vlog.

The man behind the mask is Travis Nichols, whose Weird Deer blog took a short hiatus so he could concentrate on getting Obama elected. (See, poets? See what you can do if you get off the computer for a little while. Obama WAS elected. And Travis Nichols was, I’m betting, was instrumental in that election.)

The blog is slowly returning. Maybe if we all go look at it, he will feel pressured to keep the Weird Deer Hotline series going. Details in the blogs upper right hand corner.

Travis is a fellow Seattle-ite and a pretty nice guy. He has a novel called Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder in the works at Coffee House Press. And writing online.

He does not like applejuice. That is another Travis Nichols.

Author Spotlight / Comments Off on Rimbaud vlog
March 5th, 2009 / 8:19 pm

I DON’T UNDERSTAND THE IDEA “EXPERIMENTAL WRITING”

usually when someone says experimental writing s/he seems to be referring to something odd. like, if i wrote a story where hitler was playing scrabble against a werewolf, then that would be experimental. or, odd meaning the way it is written. like i could write a story about a person cleaning his or her house and use strange punctuation and syntax and then it would be experimental. no one has ever provided a clear definition of experimental writing to me. READ MORE >

Uncategorized / 64 Comments
March 5th, 2009 / 6:55 pm

The Vicarious MFA: Let’s Talk About Carl Wilson

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Carl Wilson is an adorably nervous Canadian music critic who lives in Toronto and he came to do a little Q & A with some students here yesterday. Carl wrote a great book in the 33 1/3 series about Celine Dion and we read it in Jonathan Lethem’s masterclass a few weeks ago. That would have been the end of the story if it hadn’t been for James Franco mentioning the book while at the Oscars and a bunch of blogs (Pitchfork, Idolator, The Village Voice, etc.) making a ruckus about it. Then he got invited to be on The Colbert Report, thus leading him to Columbia’s Writing department to say hello and presumably thank James for the name dropping.

Discussed:

-Aesthetic relativism

-Autobiographies of taste

-Remembering that Celine Dion is a human being

More notes after the jump…

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Vicarious MFA / 12 Comments
March 5th, 2009 / 6:36 pm