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FLESH FEAST: THE HUMAN BRAIN by socrates adams florou mad me happier than the movie LITTLE GIANTS with RICK MORANIS

socrates adams florou sent me his chapbook FLESH FEAST: THE HUMAN BRAIN a couple days ago. after reading it left to right and assembling the relative meanings of each of the words both singly and in conjunction with each other, i found myself pleased. socrates is a strange man and i think if he were to be in the same room as me i would call him a “vato loco.” the chapbook is in short chapters. it is about a man who lives in a flat. an old man moves in above him. i won’t say too much but the younger man becomes paranoid about the older man wanting to eat him and the younger man stays inside for long periods of time. my favorite line is about the younger man staring at the tv and trying to control it with a nintendo controller after having not left his flat for weeks. the chapbook is cleanly written and it made me feel uncomfortable. if you email him he will send an electronic copy to you.

socratesadams@googlemail.com

there are no more print copies.

that last line seems too severe to end with so:

i like you all a lot.

Author News / 37 Comments
December 27th, 2008 / 2:10 pm

Justin Taylor

O Captain, My Captain: Lish Power Quote #3

Work on your blanks.

– Arcade, p. 172

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 2 Comments
December 27th, 2008 / 12:17 pm

Blake Butler

The Believer interviews Doseone

p_doseone17 Doseone is a true original among the rap shits. Pretty much any record he touches (from cLOUDDEAD to his solo discography to 6-piece band Subtle), dude is going to be doing new things not only with the music he is rapping (or singing) over, but with the words he puts on top of it. Where a lot of rap is made of repetitions and nonsense, Doseone invents science and languageisms that are often just as new as the words coming out on Diagram or Fence or wherever you wanna talk about.

I tried to do this interview for the Believer but couldn’t get a hold of my man. Anyway, you can read the interview now fully online, and it is a fun weird one, as would be expected of a man who wears suits made out of plastic spoons and writes huge poetry manuals to accompany his most recent project’s trilogy of albums (all of which are really good and worth checking out, if you like experimental but still catchy music):

antonio negri reviewed at 3 a.m.

3 a.m. magazine reviewed antonio negri’s book GOODBYE MR SOCIALISM. i haven’t read this particular work but i have read EMPIRE and MULTITUDE, both co-authored by negri. i think those two books are really good political books that don’t make you think a pube-bearded che guevera shirt wearing motherfucker wrote them. check it out.

Uncategorized / 1 Comment
December 26th, 2008 / 2:55 pm

Matthew Simmons

Harold Pinter, RIP

pinter

Harold Pinter, who used his Nobel Prize win lecture to really give it to U.S. foreign policy, has died.

A few minutes from The Birthday Party:

Author News / 2 Comments
December 26th, 2008 / 2:32 pm

Letter From Austria: Peter Handke’s Sorrow and My Own

(The New York Review of Books publishes books that belong in print, but have fallen out of it. Yes, this is a highbrow small press, but they are doing excellent things. Check them out. Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams was first published in translation in 1974 by FSG.)

I am deep in the Austrian Alps of Carinthia, near the borders of Italy and Slovenia, in a province largely full of people who never leave it, a six hour train ride from Vienna, staring out my hotel window to enormous mountains and yards and yards of snow, pine trees, and quaint houses that have not changed in structure for hundreds of years. Handke is from Carinthia, from a town not far from here. My parents and I see each other once a year because they live in Vienna and we live in New York. Once, I looked out at all the beauty and thought; “All this beauty. Too bad it is full of Austrians.” Other times I look out and try to be happy and grateful. (There are things I like about Austria. I like the food, the Frittatensuppe, the Topfen, the Semmeln, the delicious Austrian pastries, as good as any Italian pastry. I have a weird fetish for the traditional clothes, the Dirndls, the Lederhosen, the felted wool in general. (I grew up wearing that stuff.))

Peter Handke’s mother killed herself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of fifty-one. He writes:

My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide.

Secret Santa Results and Thank You

picadilly-circus-santas

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s Secret Santa Gift Exchange for Indie Lit. One hundred and forty people took part in the exchange, and if everyone followed our suggested $15-$25 gift range, I feel like saying that we exchanged around somewhere between $2,100 and $3,500 worth of gifts – so that is exciting, I think, for everyone. Also, several participants kindly donated their own work to others, as did editors of various presses, which is another fine way to spread word about new writing.

Below I’ve posted the Santa pairs and the gifts that I know were sent, and as far as I can tell, everyone played fair – for those who haven’t emailed me what you purchased, please let us know what you sent/received in the comments. Please email me if you have had any trouble with the exchange, but keep in mind that some gifts may arrive after today, some are subscriptions that will also take time to kick in, etc. Pretty soon we’ll have an HTMLGIANT sort of marketplace to trade gifts around if you’d like.

Also, if you still haven’t received your gift and don’t want to know because you’re waiting for the surprise, be aware that spoilers come after the break.

Thanks again to everyone who participated; I think this was good fun.

Merry Xmas from HTMLGiant & John Donne!

Nativity

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-belov’d imprisonment,
There He hath made Himself to His intent
Weak enough, now into the world to come;
But O, for thee, for Him, hath the inn no room?
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars and wise men will travel to prevent
The effect of Herod’s jealous general doom.
Seest thou, my soul, with thy faith’s eyes, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.

More English Renaissance Christmas poetry at the Shakespeare Authorship page.

Author Spotlight / 6 Comments
December 25th, 2008 / 12:55 am

Ryan Call

Word Spaces(3): Jason Ockert

Jason Ockert is the author of Rabbit Punches, a collection of stories from Low Fidelity Press. Jason Ockert also edits the fiction at Waccamaw. I met him this past summer at Sewanee and he was awesome enough to share with us his word space.

my1

And here’s what he had to say about it:

Just a map of the world. Outside, trees. That phone never rings. I got that chair at a garage sale in Syracuse and am under the impression it is worth something because after I bought it for twenty bucks the lady reconsidered and then tried to buy it back from me.

(A word about the new desk: The old desk, which had no nails and you put together like Lincoln Logs, collapsed. My knees often got caught up in the bastard. So, Staples.)

The computer is all stripped down. No internet. Not even solitare. If I can be I will be, distracted. I stare at the wall. Trees. I can find countries, man.

Thanks Jason, for the pic and paragraphs.

Word Spaces / 10 Comments
December 24th, 2008 / 2:27 pm