Ken Baumann—
1. David Peak talks with Sam Pink. Another clarifying prism.
2. A Field Guide to Occurrences of Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa in Infinite Jest
3. I may have mentioned this already, but I’ll mention it again: Dear Everybody–a brutal and gorgeous book–is now available in paperback. Or buy it from Powell’s.
4
What We Talk About When We Try To Talk About What To Call The Stuff We Write: Notes Toward an Answer to Sam Pink’s Question from Yesterday
>>is there any definable characteristic that separates what is called “flash fiction” from what is called “short story” or “novella” or “novel.”<< (click thru for Sam’s whole post)
When I was younger I was obsessed with word-counts. I always wanted to know how long a book was “supposed” to be. No writer I have ever asked about this has ever wanted to give a straight answer to this question. I used to think it was because they were fussy and protective over their secrets, but now that I am older and wiser I understand that it is because they don’t actually know. Nobody does. When Amazon put in that feature with all the book stats, it was one of the happiest days of my life. I spent hours looking up every book I could think of, to see how long they all were. A few months ago, when I switched to a Mac, I was delighted to learn the Pages gives me a running word-count at the bottom of the work-window, and that if I highlight a section of text, I instantly get the word-count for that section. (This blog-window does the same thing, btw.)
But many years before the machines came to the rescue, there was one man who attempted to give me the answers I sought. READ MORE >
A New Twitter Feed Journal
Twitter666 is a journal of twitter feeds from the normally seen and not heard. It is edited by Sam Pink and Martin Wall. Contributors so far are Bradley Sands, Chris East, and Nathan Tyree.
I like the feed from ‘a big sandwich.’
Poor big sandwich.
You can pick whatever feeds you want to read from Twitter666 and just follow them. Other feeds include those of a press-on nail, Mike Tyson’s face tattoo, a three year old, and a creepy old guy at the park. Or you can email Sam Pink and Martin Wall if you want to take part, add a feed, etc. They might let you. They are nice people.
Uncategorized / 18 Comments
June 30th, 2009 / 3:03 pm
June 30th, 2009 / 3:03 pm
Sam Pink Interviews Barry Graham for Orange Alert
I love these guys
Winners of Sam Pink’s Book! And Everyone Who Entered Was Awesome!
And the winners are……………..Kendra Grant Malone, Brandi Wells, and Rob. We hope Rob is the same Rob who entered twice. Honestly? I wish Barry could send each and every one of you who entered a Sam Pink book because you are all great. Thank you Htmlgiant readers! We love you. Winners- send your address to peterrutt@live.com to get your copy of I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT by Sam Pink.
Win Sam Pink’s book, I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT!!!!
Htmlgiant and Paper Hero Press are sponsoring a contest to win Sam Pink’s I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT!!!!!!! We are giving away THREE COPIES to the best entries! Here is the contest, people: Give us your best description of a fight that made you physically ill in 50 words or less. Enter in the comments section,(you can enter more than once and you can make shit up). Barry Graham, the publisher of Paper Hero Press, Sam Pink himself, and yours truly are the judges. Barf vomit blood and tears people. We love you.
Sam contemplates death, bones, violence and blood often in his book. That said, here’s a quote from the book that isn’t like that:
When You Are Happy Do A Handstand
When you are happy do a handstand and step into the sky. Go knee-deep. And push your feet through the depths. Start thinking about where the bottom is and what it feels like and if you’re not too stupid or scared to touch it.
(Full disclosure: I offered to cuddle naked with Sam Pink at the AWP in Chicago a week or so ago (even though I wasn’t there), but he declined. Then, it turned out it wasn’t Sam Pink. It was Mary Gaitskill.I was wicked drunk.)
Travis Bickle tries his hand at Sam Pink’s blog
RIP YOUR PLACENTA WITH YOUR TEETH THEN EAT IT
i wiped off last night’s ejaculate and drove the taxi again. there was a pregnant woman screaming to get to the hospital. i told her i was in her womb at that moment and that i wanted to start chewing upwards from her spleen to her mouth. she was with her boyfriend who punched me in the neck. the bruise was shaped like africa and all the africans were crushed. he looked like harvey keitel and i realized he was her pimp because instead of origami the hundred dollar bills were flat. i dropped them off at the hospital and picked up this guy scorcese who wanted use a shotgun on a woman. i put my words and thoughts into a paper bag like the ones you give people with asthma and told him all words were shit and he could throw the shit bag at the person he wanted to murder instead. kill your enemies with thoughts of kindness then kill yourself. then i followed betsy around and her hair looked like the shed feathers of two dying swans lit by a day broke sun and my veins felt cut from inside by a thousand pieces of confetti for a celebration she and i will never have. back at the apartment i asked the mirror some rhetorical questions and burned myself with blue flames.
Thus spoke Pink, a review
When first encountering Sam Pink’s writing, one may be tempted to dismiss it, as I did, as adolescent misanthropy seasoned with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s hard to get past the graphic violence and misogyny. Though, if there is such a thing as an open mind, on a good day I think I have one, so I asked Sam to send me Yum Yum I Can’t Wait to Die, which he did.
I was immediately struck by how such dense ideas could be evoked/initiated by such simple and direct language. His writing is quite philosophical, yet not in some alienating solipsist way. I found myself re-reading sentences, trying to get my head around certain turns of phrases or concepts. He has a riddle-like way of saying things. Around the seventh page, I said to myself, “This is guy is fucking Nietzsche.” Both of them are able to get to truth while sounding like an asshole.
Yum Yum I Can’t Wait to Die is comprised of little aphorisms and modern pedestrian allegories, of a guy who is, well, completely fucked in the head. This may not be the most original motif, but Pink is less interested in his narrator, and more so on ideas. It’s a mixed bag of philosophy, hilarity, and rare moments of genuine sadness—made striking by Pink’s unlikely empathy. He speaks of a timeless omnipresent wind outlasting all of us; his dog protecting unbaptized babies in purgatory; leaves and twigs distorting the surface of a puddle, spraying the moon with blood, and so on. Each part is a violent haiku. And there are moments of stunning loneliness, marked by self-effacing irony:
Today a telemarketer called and I said, “Please don’t hang up on me. Please.”
Of course, before we start thinking this guy is Basho or Issa, he offers this:
I want to blow my head off with a shotgun, into the open birth canal of whatever pop star is currently cool, so she has to menstruate my splattered skull and brains.
Such hyperbolic violence is either rhetorical device, or Pink is truly a little insane. I doubt Sam Pink is actually his name. I imagine a guy whose snorted his own semen for material (pun intended). The object of his ‘ambivalent’ (to put it lightly) affection is an unnamed and vaguely implied girl, and one forgets the philosophy and realizes that this is just some lonely loser. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to jump into the narrator’s shoes. We’ve all been lonely, some of us still are. Pink’s words have a way to jumping inside you and moving organs around. To read him is to see things from a new inverted angle. He says, in my favorite line:
And when your mind is a field your tongue is a cloud.
Now my thoughts grow up-side-down towards a voiceless mouth. Thank you Sam Pink, you sick fuck.
i am a sucky piece of shit and i suck at writing
i feel perhaps my last post misrepresented my meanness. sure i hate everyone, but the person i really hate, and towards whom i am most unfair in my meanness, is myself. you see, i totally suck. and so here is some meanness directed towards the real piece of shit garbage asshole in the internet community, me:
you are an unhappy fuck who will never have kids or anyone to smile at without being accused of creepiness. you are an ugly man. you have never benefitted anyone’s life aside from leaving it alone. your best writing, if there is anything whatsover of any quality, is behind you. you are basically a sperm that flipped out of your dad’s underwear and grew legs after one of your dad’s wet dreams. you sleep on the floor of your apartment and sometimes you feel too destroyed to even drink water. you have lived in over eighteen homes so you cannot form a lasting relationship with anyone. you are a failure. you will probably live a long life but accomplish nothing. maybe you will be on tv once if you accidentally walk by where a reporter is filming. you feel terrible when you see other people smiling and you see no difference between a person and a sock except when you come in the person you know for a fact they are not happy, the sock maybe but you’re not really sure, i mean you know. you will be found in a closet somewhere surrounded by garbage and you will disappoint everyone you have ever known. plus you suck at all video games created after golden eye. you use slang that is just outside of cool, like “that’s the bomb yo” or “see you on the flipside, mac”. you are terrible, you terrible person you.