Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Lamination Colony: Michael Kimball issue

The new issue of LAMINATION COLONY, guest edited by the magical Michael Kimball, is now live, featuring the largest update of new work we've ever presented.

Michael really outdid himself, collecting fiction, poetry, artwork, and other apocrypha from:


Krammer Abrahams
Blaster Al Ackerman
Stephanie Barber
Lauren Becker
Michael Bible
Darcelle Bleau
Robert Bradley
Kim Chinquee
Luca Dipierro
Shatera Davenport
M.T. Fallon
Jamie Gaughran-Perez
Adam Good
Jac Jemc
Jason Jones
Shane Jones
Aby Kaupang
Stacie Leatherman
Karen Lillis
Aimee Lynne-Hirschowitz
Josh Maday
Conor Madigan
Jen Michalski
Ben Mirov
Gena Mohwish
Catherine Moran
Amanda Raczkowski
Cooper Renner
Adam Robinson
Matthew Salesses
Jordan Sanderson
Justin Sirois
Robert Swartwood
JA Tyler
ds white
Rupert Wondolowski
Whitney Woolf
Joseph Young



It's a massive issue, with a lot of new and interesting words. Give it a looksee.

Best stick with Firefox or Safari, as other browsers might eat it alive.

If you are still using IE, you probably can't read anyway.

;)


Those who read the issue and comment on this thread about something about it will be put into a drawing for a free copy of the 001 issue of NO COLONY. If you already have 001 and win, I will send you a book or something.

Please check it out and share it up.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Dog Camp + Buttresses

I can not get this sick out of my body, but at least today I am drinking coffee. A friend suggested I try putting cinnamon into the grounds for brewing, to mask the mold taste. He does this frequently regardless. It is a fine thing to do. Today I am drinking coffee for the first time in a month or so.

I have slept more in the past week than I did for probably certain trios of weeks last year.




I found a file with like 3500 words in a similar voice to EVER and have been playing with it some today. I don't know how exactly it relates to the original: not a sequel or prequel or like that, but something. Maybe another person who lived in the same house before or after. Don't know if I'll keep working on it, but the playing is more interesting than anything I've tried to write in the last month. Lots of stops and starts, this voice feels better again, I don't know.




Still behind on a lot of things, trying to catch up.

Particularly behind on readings and reviews of a few things I've been dibbling in over the past few weeks, though planning to get to that this week and next.

Really excited, too, to receive Jeremy M. Davies's debut novel ROSE ALLEY from Counterpath Press today in the mail, Jeremy is too awesome and this book is gorgeous, and from the description + Harry Mathews blurb, this book has me mega excited. More on this soon.




Random excerpt from DECADE novel (the novel I pretty much wrote all in one long diatribe after reading Gert Jonke's GEOMETRIC REGIONAL NOVEL) is here @ Abjective: it is a text box from one page, kind of cribbed out of the middle of several other voices on the same page variously referring to one another, so I believe comes off rather cryptically here as an excerpt, though I enjoy it in that way. Haven't really done anything at all with that novel beyond revising it wholly twice through, and felt strong about it. Don't know where to send a hugely weird typographically fucked novel at this point, whichever.




Feeling slightly more positive today than last week, though still caught under yucktown, missed my Boston readings because of it, which made me sad. I hope a good time was had, and my apologies again to Adam and Jen from Quick Fiction for the missing out. Yarf.




Not having coffee for a month and now full bore again is coming on strong through my veins, maybe the lack of coffee is all that attributed to my rut, plus the sick. I am too quick to let myself join in in a fuckdown of self.




"This is a Formica table."

Friday, March 27, 2009

Nothing


Nights when I would come home from boy scouts in the year before the scouts asked me to leave I would come home and be afraid to go to the shed to put my bike away because it always seemed shaking or compulsed with something that knew how to lurch.

There was a light attached to the building that would come on by motion and there was another switch that made the pool light up neon blue but I would still run from the building as fast as I could.

Many nights after getting home there would be wrestling on TV and I would watch the wrestling and there would be a light on in the bathroom and you could hear other people in other rooms laugh.

I had a metal box full of perverse things I'd collected like the postcard with the woman in the shower that I bought in St. Augustine while on a trip with my family. I'd had to make a big deal to make it seem like I was going to a bookstore so that I could get away from them long enough to get the postcard, I can still see it if I close my eyes.

I had a polaroid I took of Pamela Anderson on Family Feud, she was wearing short shorts, the shot was blurry, I kept it.

I was making a scrapbook about Pamela Anderson then too, I still have it somewhere, I used the flip half of an older scrapbook that had been about the Atlanta Braves.

These are the shortest longest days ever. I wish I had not sold my Dragonlance books on eBay.

I feel a lot defeated, like something has gotten into me while I was/am still sick and has changed the way I think about everything that even a month ago I was obsessed with. Like someone turned a lock inside me to a room I'd been going to a lot and now even coffee and candy taste strange.

In the Boy Scouts there was one kid that had hurt legs and bad vision and the kids would make him play British Bulldog, a version of Smear the Queer, and he could never catch anybody so he stayed it the whole time of our recreation period every time. He never gave up.

The post I wrote about the Eagle scout who got a boner in the showers on one trip and watched everyone with it is one of the major traffic inducements for this site, I know right now he is at work at the Kroger down the street wearing the Eagle ring. I have considered getting in his line and trying to ask him about something unrelated to the ring or the boners but I think I wouldn't be able to move once I got back in my car if I did that.

If anyone has a great idea for a place to build a treehouse near me I'd like to know about it.

I wonder if I ever agree with anything that I say.

One of the days I can remember more than any other day is the day in gym we were in the smaller second building doing a bowling unit and I ended up positioned on a lane next to two of the 'rougher' kids in my class, one of them wore steel toe boots and was singing 'Polly' by Nirvana, though I didn't know it was Nirvana at the time, and he was talking about kicking another kid's head in and his friend wasn't really answering but was setting up the pins really straightly and correctly, and I remember a great sense of fear.

I hope I never get drunk again.

I hope I can lay down somewhere soon and feel alright about it.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Internet

Found this on my parents' fridge the other day:



Not sure what my sister and I are praying to, or what the pink bunny did to deserve to be sacrificed, but at least we let him dress up nice for the invocation.

One of the witnesses aligned on the left side of the shot is the baby doll I insisted on having for years.

Special evil children.








Haven't written, ran, or drank coffee in almost a week now. I am beginning to feel myself sink into glurr room.








Other things are happening inside me, I feel the synthesis of these three clips:



























Something just exploded in the shed.










Can I get a job burning shit for a living?








Let's stop talking about the making of the words, please?

"I'll stop if you will."






Shitcamp.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Passionfruit Eyelid

So I've got to admit, I was at least in part wrong in my earlier logic when I mentioned having found my sister reading TWILIGHT and taking it and throwing it in the trash. As much as I think that kind of 'book' can be damaging to a brain, in my sister's case it has opened her up already from a person who hardly ever read to one who has so far this year (as she excitedly reported to me) read 27 books. Sure, a good number of those related to TWILIGHT, but already she's moved on from there. She's read Miranda July and J. Safran Foer and Monica Drake's Clowngirl (which I gave her for Christmas assuming she would never touch it), and she recently asked if I would lend her one of Tao's books, and some other things.

Shit, at this rate, by the end of the year she'll be up in some Thomas Bernhard and Christian Bok. No doubt, believe dat.

So is reading crap fiction good? I guess if it leads to further reading, which can often be the case. Though if it never goes anywhere else, then I'd say just keep watching the TV.

I wonder if William Gay ever lays in bed steaming about how TWILIGHT blew up and fucked his own TWILIGHT title right in the b-hole. Such a fantastic book, that, though.

Oh, new William Gay soon...




Trying to feel better today than yesterday though it's not really working.

Trying today to get back on track working on the 'less manic' novel that I started late last year and abandoned, as I started to get bored. Taking a break turned out to be the best thing I could have done, as now coming back to it several months later I have whole new perspective and set of ideas for it.

I am confining myself (as much as possible) in this project to keep within a certain level of the realms of reality, to not fall into my previous methods, and instead write a solid, but unique, narrative (with digressions) novel. It's a nice challenge for me, a step outside the box by stepping back closer to the box.

Sometimes shaking up your world can be achieved by becoming more normal, especially when you've already written several hundred thousand words about destroying babies.





I am involved as a teaching volunteer at Dzanc's Creative Writing Sessions. A most wonderful program in the works, check it out...





NCAA tournament starts tonight, and for the first time since high school my boy Rick Pitino is poised to stomp it to the ground. Let's have at it.





I think I am going to reread Beckett's trilogy now...

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

sick

haven't been sick in a while i think but i am now
the new pitchfork site is taking a good regular crap on my eyes
jay leno just said 'barack obama' and then horns made sound
i appreciate people saying nice words about the copy family
i just found a word i left out in it, can you find it, is that a problem
i am tired
i just filled out a bio for an interview that asked me to say what i do in atlanta and i said the first thing that i thought which was i am tired
i am playing poker a lot again now on the internet
i am doing well for now
i hope me saying i am doing well does not affect me negatively
jay leno just made a joke about someone having to have been drunk to eat their friend
it made me feel more tired
i am sick
jay leno just made a joke about paris hilton
and then about president bush
and people clapped
what is saint patrick's day where did it come from
i accidentally had on a green shirt today
i started reading dennis cooper
in the bath
i like limping with suited connectors in early position and reraising when people raise, it works a lot
i don't really do that that often really
but it would be good to do more often maybe
a lot of time when i am playing poker i know that if i did a certain thing i would win by bluffing but usually i do not let my impulse take full hold
if i had more money i could be a better player
i wish i could find the videos of bill hicks talking shit about jay leno as a comedian about how he started off real and went to water
but i don't feel like looking on youtube
i used to have a lot of things to blog about but now i don't know
the woman on TV on jay leno is rearranging letters into something
what else is going to happen
my legs ache like something is eating at them
i ate cheesecake twice today it made me feel good
now there are guys on jay leno balancing green beer on their faces
beer
several people get paid to write down these ideas
i would like to join the team
today someone googled 'a girl putting a lock into her vegina vedio'
i want to say 'sorry' all the time to people
i am doing well inside my mind

Monday, March 16, 2009

The Copy Family

HarperPerennial recently launched 52 Stories, publishing one story a week all year. This week they are running my 'The Copy Family' which is an excerpt from the beginning of the novel I wrote in 10 days last year, WHERE AM I WHERE HAVE I BEEN WHERE ARE YOU. Check it out: The Copy Family.




Here is a wonderful behind the scenes short about Gaspar Noe's editing of IRREVERSIBLE, one of the most wonderful capturings of space and aura ever **violence warning** **I just said wonderful twice**:






I like coffee and poker.

I am about to reread Johannes Goransson's Aase Berg translation 'With Deer' out now from Black Ocean, which feels like standing in a flesh cabinet breathing dirty sugar.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

CCCCC CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC C C C CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC

just now i tried to write a post talking shit about writing
then i deleted it and instead decided to go running
i had planned to take today off running and instead walked
to the grocery to buy drano
but then when it got to 11:00pm i felt gross for not
so i went running in the dark
i was running past the edge of this woods past the middle school
and in the dark there was the sound of all these dogs
from inside of the woods and they sounded on fire
or like they all were having skin removed from off their heads
this forest has no houses in it or farms i think
its just a big empty deep forest
and the dogs were screaming, maybe 10 or 15 of them all at once
it made me run faster for a minute toward a little bridge
then the screaming stopped
the woods was still there
i kept on running instead of going home
while i was running i was thinking about my friend who is a satanic priest
who used to tell me about metaphysics
and how small signs could help direct your life
like noticing splotches in a pathway that suggest you one way
over another
and how that could greatly determine the way your energy might move
like leaving a pile of coins in an empty room in your house
and some days coming in to change their shape or pattern slightly
i explored these ideas for a while until i stopped
my friend one time met lavey in an airport i think he told me
which is how i think he was ordained
my friend also ate half a bike, a bible, a tee shirt
he could lift weights with his dick
one day more recently i watched videos of lavey
playing his organs on youtube for several hours
lavey looks like a dork
the sound of ripping dogs was less subtle than other studied signals
which made it less powerful in my mind somehow
but i could not stop thinking in the dark how i should go back
i went a while further anyway until i turned around earlier than usual
on the way back i turned and went through the parking lot of the middle school
there were many buses parked there
because of how the drivers have nowhere else to park them
on the pavement they made parallel lines
in the windows
as i passed each
i kept thinking i could see people in the buses briefly
and as i began to see this
i saw more people in each bus
looking at me run
the sensation of seeing the people
made my heart race inside my running
though i knew i was creating the sensation
there was another bus parked
further off from all the other buses
in the very corner of the lot
like as far away from all the rest as it could manage
that one seemed stuffed seam to seam with people
i was running
it was the school i used to go to
i went around behind the building
where one time before the buses left i saw a kid hit another kid with brass knuckles
in the face and there was blood
across the street from the middle school there is a high school
that i went to
in the middle of the parking lot was a huge pile of dirt or shit or something other
which had not been there before when i drove past earlier that night i feel sure
a very high pile
taller than i am
it would be the largest pile of shit i've seen

Thursday, March 12, 2009

999999 9999999 999 9 9 9 999 99 9 999 99999 99 9 99999999

I read a postcard from Christian Peet's BIG AMERICAN TRIP, from Shearsman Books:



Other people did this too, Sandy Florian, Amy King, etc, which you can see, and get more info about the book on, at Christian's blog.





Matthew Savoca's ebook TOUGH! is out from Happy Cobra Books, I drew the picture that is on page 5, there are lots of drawings and good funny poems about being tough. I like Matthew Savoca.






The Spring 2009 issue of Lake Effect is out, my story 'Damage Claim Questionnaire' from Scorch Atlas is in it, it also has brethren Keith Montesano, we are sharing the paper, it has Tony Hoagland, Michael Czyzniejewski, Joshua Ware, and a lot of other people.

The Scorch Atlas remix contest is rocking along, some really amazing entries so far, I have no idea how I will judge this, there is still a little more than a month to send entries.





I am about to gear up, I think, into sending books out, I have 3 novels, a collection of list essays, all just sitting around, maybe at a couple places each, collab filth book with Sean is almost done, I need to try to focus on sending them around and looking around, I have been lazy, I feel I am maybe going to enter into the production/submission mind I used in 2007, if I can rope it, I am trying to be ready.




I am so behind on some things, trying to catch up, if you are waiting on something from me, sorry, *way behind*




What on earth made me think that the Watchmen movie would be good? I mean really, most ill-conceived ending to a movie of all time? It was up there. The comic book adaptation craze really needs to die. Add that 300 director dude to the death march list with Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow. I knew that already. I have too much faith sometimes.





Oh, stoners.




If you are in Atlanta, come out tomorrow at 7:00 to see Rauan Klassnik and Justin Taylor read for Solar Anus! At Beep Beep Gallery on Ponce.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

White House

Sitting at an airport in Boston waiting to go home, have 2 hours until takeoff, there is some kid sitting across from me playing with an enormous Rubik's cube that lights up and squawks in this robot woman voice and counts and says incomprehensible shit, with his other hand he has a yo yo that he has let fly off his hand twice under my seat, sometimes he puts it down and swings this enormous stuffed bear around and shit, his lisp is killer, his brother just I think tattled on him because he was trying to get him to take a picture of his dick.

People have children everyday.

The parents of these two are dope, one is a dude who calls the kids 'dude' and has on a Godsmack tee shirt and is eating from under his nails and looks sort of like Henry Rollins but not well spoken.




If it were not for this $7.95 internet connection I would was would going to have to kill to kill a person, etc.




My last 5 days have been very long and very fun and very composed of things in thinging, I have thanks to Justin, Mike, Claire and Jeff who housed and transported me, and many others, I wish I could think better.



If this kid hits my laptop with his yo yo or his bear I am going to take his mother by the very large hunk of hair she has whooped up in a lock over her forehead, you will know that this has happened if this post ends somewhat abruptly, or maybe I will come back.




While I was in NY I read for Luca Dipierro and Michael Kimball's new 60 WRITERS 60 PLACES series, which is seeming amazing, Time Out NY wrote it up, here is a trailer:




Justin read in a pastry shop, it was fun. Justin also posted pictures from Thursday night here.

There were lots of readings.

Reading with Gary Lutz and Robert Lopez, Gary was very kind and quiet but funny when he talked, he had a turtle neck and stood up when he shook my hand, I wish Derek and Jess would return to America and live down the street, they are too good.



William Walsh is a very kind and quiet man, the Keyhole release was very nice, if already in my daze mind, I get tired in like 3 days of movement now, it is easy to feel erasers.







Here is another video from when I was in Balitmore, Adam is reading a very excellent drunken poem, which I defeat in power competition, this is before or after I poured water on him?, there was magic, Michael Kimball's filming and editing makes me peas and carrots in my hair:







In Amherst Mike Young did intros for people with a xylophone, it was in the fun room, I read from the gross book Sean and I are almost finished with, we read in a public deli and so it was rather awkward I think, * I pushed ahead * I said the naughties into the room and at first people were laughing a lot and by the end it was dead quiet, I think they started getting quiet during the part where the father is building the replica of the Holocaust in candy, all the readers were really good.

Bradley Sands is one of my favorite new people to listen to talk, I like the way he talks. Rachel Glaser is a good listener and funny, things are made of $$$$ in air

TTB and Mike Bushnell came through for a couple, Mike gave me a psychedelic portrait of Jesus, they disappeared quick.

Brian Foley is really funny and fun

I can't think anymore, i like all of all of so many people, I bought a ton a books n stuff, n stuff

tired




The kid is asking his mother about her blood, while rolling around in the floor with chocolate milk, 'how many windpipes do you have?': I am going to ask this kid to cowrite a book with me soon, I wonder if he has gmail.

Sorry, thanks to everyone who came out to things and talked about things to me and helped me, thanks to the kind nice peoples and to the mean peoples too, if there were some, I didn't find them.
holy shit i am all mentally destroyed

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

EVER NYC Release Party, etc.

Eugene Lim did the Ever speak: "...never predictable, and its stunningly-sculpted sentences shimmer and gloat like the surfaces of donald judd shapes in geometric progression."




Leaving tomorrow for a few reading dates in Brooklyn, Providence, Amherst, Providence, here is infos in order of appearance:

Thursday, March 5, 7:30 pm: EVER book release party at Word Bookstore
Indie Press Nights: Calamari Press. Readings by authors Blake Butler (Ever), Robert Lopez (Part of the World), and Gary Lutz (Stories in the Worst Way). // Derek White in the house //

then on Saturday, in Providence at Myopic Books, 7:00 for Keyhole Release:



then Sunday, in Amherst with many many




then Monday, back in Providence, at Ada Books with Mike Young and Claire Donato:




After this, I may no longer be able to speak for all the speaking, so get it while it lasts... I would love to see some folks(es) in the house(s). Come throw candy at me. Or throw glee. Or something.




Speaking of Keyhole, the new issue is out guest edited by William Walsh (whose novel in questions Questionstruck just came out, also from Keyhole, and is beautiful and unlike any other book ever, literally), and I must say, when I saw the handwriting issue I didn't think they could outdo in beauty, but this new one, 6, is so aesthetically pleasing I want to hump it (and do), Keyhole somehow just keeps getting better...

William could not have done a better job arraying some true magic loons for the one: me, Matt Bell, Sam Ligon, Amelia Gray, Cooper Esteban, Brooklyn Copeland, Kim Chinquee, Peter Conners, Renee D'Aoust, Tao Lin, Michael Martone, Steve Katz, Noam Mor, Jason Stumpf, Sherrie Flick, John Domini, Gillian Kiler, Paul Long, Davis Schneiderman, Samuel White, Darcie Dennigan, Margaret Funkhouser, all with bios in life story format by Michael Kimball, amazing.

My thing in it is another list, one of the few remaining from the first half of the set of 50, #14, INFESTATION LOOP, and of my old favorites of the series, which seemed to have trouble getting published for its grossness. Fun.

Also, on the web, they have included an additional list among a series of web features, #13, LIST DURING WHICH I AM FIRED FROM MY JOB AND FALL SICK INTO THE NEW YEAR, during the writing of which I really did get fired (mid-sentence, writing in my gmail browser instead of working) from the shitty job I had doing collections for a law office on people who couldn't pay their bills. Interesting to see that list again now, written at the end of 2007.

Still working on polishing finer points of the set as a whole as I begin to send it out to places to look at. We begin again.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Scorch Atlas Remix Contest

In gearing up for the release of my book SCORCH ATLAS from Featherproof on 09/09/09, we've drummed up a strange and I think awesome and fun promo: the Scorch Atlas remix contest. Basically, we're asking anyone and everyone to download a piece from the book, 'Tour of the Drowned Neighborhood,' in its .doc form, and do whatever you want to it. Scramble it, eat it death, insert a whole other line of story, insert pictures of your mother's anus, throw up into a file and mail it, insert characters, insert symbolist logic, insert fun, eat characters, insert sentences from anywhere, write a whole new story out of the title alone, or one sentence alone, or one word, make it into a nice calm piece about an expatriate who is obsessed with John Irving and loves backrubs, etc. Anything. All ideas are go.


Two winning entries, chosen by myself, will be published in SCORCH ATLAS Remixed, which will be published as an ebook and available on the Featherproof site. The stories will appear alongside some wild other contributions from some very exciting and powerful writers (who will remain a surprise for now, but if it works out as we're hoping, dang), so you will be in good company, etc.

The contest is free to enter, and the two winners will receive publication, plus copies of the actual SCORCH ATLAS. The first place winner will also receive a two year subscription to Paper Egg Books (which equates to four books over those 2 years = awesome).

You can enter as many remixes of 'Tour' as you like, under any title, any word length, etc. It is a fairly open and ambient story, so the gates are guns. Do some wildness. Have some fun. I'm really excited to see what mangling and electrifying can be made. Deadline is May 1.

For full info on the contest, plus where to send your entry electronically, and to download the file containing the text you are to rape, visit the Featherproof contest announcement.

Thank you for doing the listen to me.