I am working with Derek now from Nairobi making edits on my 'Ever' manuscript.
It is funny, making final words. With proofs from magazines I mostly always feel some kind of thing running in nodules on my back. Something final with them, but final only for a second. These edits here are 'final' final.
In the early stages now I feel very good, though, about the way things are going. Derek is making images and developing page layouts for the text that make me feel excited and ready to nail this thing into what it exactly wants to be.
The structure of the text is strange, slightly less usual than most other books. I'd used a numbering system on the lines while I was making them so I could keep the thoughts in strands, kind of layered, but as it is being put to the page the numbers are less vital, and there are other ways to guide the text. Reading the book I think in the end will be more an experience than a read, at least that is what I am hoping, and from what Derek has done so far, it feels true to think that.
People are funny about letting others edit their work. I think I like it, the interchange at least, especially when the editor is someone I trust a lot. It is like switching another tint in pane of glass at a window to see what the yard looks like that way. Something.
There are lots of little things wedged hidden in the lines that I am remembering only as I read them, I don't really remember writing most of this thing I'm finding, it's almost like editing someone else's work, which is nice.
In my room at night now there is no way to get out all the light.
Someone has been letting themselves into our apartment supposedly for upkeep reasons such as changing the blinds. When we got home from NYC there were mud prints all over the floor. They had not removed the trash outside and the trash bag was covered in huge maggots looking for a way in.
Yesterday I spent many hours line editing and moving through Derek's notes then came home and we cleaned up the house trying to make it ours again.
I tried to find a youtube clip of my favorite scene in Lost Highway, it's not even a scene really, just the parts where Bill Pullman's character is walking through the house in the dark, looking for his wife, and there are parts of the house that seem to stretch forever into darkness and he just walks into them and is gone, then reappears somewhere else.
I just now remembered that I'd said before how I felt like the 10 day novel I wrote was set in that house in Lost Highway, which is actually David Lynch's house, and I also feel this novella is set in that house, if another part of it entirely.
My friend just called to let me know he got in trouble for having printed out a mail in his Gmail browser to hand in to a professor at his school, which happened to have his Gmail chat buddy list on the page with it, including my current away message 'MY PUSSY IS COLLAPSING.' The teacher was not amused.
If someone gave me $10,000 I feel like I could change my life and possibly several other people's lives, $10,000 is not a lot of money to a lot of people, it could probably even be a lot less than that, maybe just like $6 or $7 thousand, I would not use it on my self but on making things, I read somewhere today that the average CEO makes in 3 hours what an average blue collar low pay worker makes in a year. Those people should be required to give one half-hour of their pay each month to an artist to make art. Or probably to hungry people first, but I think more importantly to make art. Is that more important than eating? Let's not have anyone complain about me saying that, or how it would be bullshit if those rich people were required to give $$ away and no one else was, who gives a fuck.
I am tired of hearing about the election. The same thing is going to happen no matter what. Nothing is going to change except for what would change by the year anyway, I think, it's like flushing the toilet. The 2nd time I saw Don Caballero right before they broke up and Damon Che was pissed about the drum sound, about the way the drums had been mic'd, he got on a mic and asked if anyone in the audience had a paper chef's hat, he said 'We desperately need a paper chef's hat to come up and mic the drums.' It was funny. It's sort of like that.
Poets and Writers talked about Calamari Press kindly, I agree with the word 'punk' Peter Markus used in relation to their ethic, 'punk' has become a misplaced word, maligned, when people say 'punk' now they are often referring to shit like NOFX or Warped Tour or some other bullshit that is basically a commodification of indie beer sold to you by men whose Vans are suits, I think Calamari is more indicative of the real meaning of the word 'punk,' the meaning exhibited in the creation of work like The Clash's SANDINISTA! or the Eno records by Talking Heads, and less in the beat-yourself-in-the-head-while-puking-PBR idea that it's been torn into.
Noy Holland is punk.
New York Tyrant is punk.
Ellipsis Press is punk.
Gaspar Noe is punk.
Chris Higgs is punk.
Tao Lin is punk.
Sam Pink is punk.
Brian Evenson is punk.
Gordon Lish is punk.
DIAGRAM is punk.
Gene Morgan is very punk.
I would try to name a recent band now that's punk, real punk, but that's not really possible anymore, try to argue with me.
My friend said he'd buy my book if it has the word 'titties' in it, I am going to go find a way to get 'titties' in it, if it's not there already, it might be.
Titties are punk, sometimes, though if often not at all.
Showing posts with label calamari press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label calamari press. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Friday, August 1, 2008
EVER
I've been waiting a long time to write this post and now I don't know really what to say.
Short word: looks like Calamari Press will be releasing my novella, EVER, sometime in the foreseeable future.
Those who happened to be among the gajillion commenters/perusers in the last few days re: my last post might have seen this buried in the comments, as EVER, I think most likely, became the first manuscript ever officially accepted via blog comment.
No clear plans as of yet as to when, etc., as Calamari father Derek White is as we speak perhaps still in the air in midst of his departure from America to live in the fairer climes of Kenya, of which I can only wish to one day follow. (I hope Derek doesn't get eaten by a wild goat: I will find the goat and eat it and vomit Derek back up and paste him back together.)
Save it to say I am beyond excited and honored to have my first full-on book with a press I could not admire more.
Thanks to Derek for this moment even in the midst of his own moment of such huge transition. And thanks to Peter Markus, the other new Calamari captain, for reading and believing in the book, and to Robert Lopez for just being a Calamari brother. It's no stretch to call these guys inspirations to me.
I'm blabbering a little, sorry.
EVER was written over several months during the period between the last story in Scorch Atlas and when I began the 10 day novel. I spent a lot of time staring at nothing between each sentence.
If you are interested in peeking at what EVER is like (I like to think of it as somewhat of a reversioning of Markson's WITTGENSTEIN'S MISTRESS fed through a Ben Marcus shredder and doused with maybe melted WHY DID I EVER and the spit of who I become only during sleeping), the only part of it that has been published to date is on the Unsaid website: 13 Plastic Doors.
Funny, also, and yet not cosmically surprising, that other brother Sam Pink almost simultaneously placed his mindfuck of a collection I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT with the brand new Paper Hero Press. Fuckmaster bananafuck. I am going to mail myself to Sam tomorrow so we can walk into the street and take turns taking wide bites out of small cars while our ears spurt black blood.
I guess I have to get a tattoo, now: I always said I would.
Short word: looks like Calamari Press will be releasing my novella, EVER, sometime in the foreseeable future.
Those who happened to be among the gajillion commenters/perusers in the last few days re: my last post might have seen this buried in the comments, as EVER, I think most likely, became the first manuscript ever officially accepted via blog comment.
No clear plans as of yet as to when, etc., as Calamari father Derek White is as we speak perhaps still in the air in midst of his departure from America to live in the fairer climes of Kenya, of which I can only wish to one day follow. (I hope Derek doesn't get eaten by a wild goat: I will find the goat and eat it and vomit Derek back up and paste him back together.)
Save it to say I am beyond excited and honored to have my first full-on book with a press I could not admire more.
Thanks to Derek for this moment even in the midst of his own moment of such huge transition. And thanks to Peter Markus, the other new Calamari captain, for reading and believing in the book, and to Robert Lopez for just being a Calamari brother. It's no stretch to call these guys inspirations to me.
I'm blabbering a little, sorry.
EVER was written over several months during the period between the last story in Scorch Atlas and when I began the 10 day novel. I spent a lot of time staring at nothing between each sentence.
If you are interested in peeking at what EVER is like (I like to think of it as somewhat of a reversioning of Markson's WITTGENSTEIN'S MISTRESS fed through a Ben Marcus shredder and doused with maybe melted WHY DID I EVER and the spit of who I become only during sleeping), the only part of it that has been published to date is on the Unsaid website: 13 Plastic Doors.
Funny, also, and yet not cosmically surprising, that other brother Sam Pink almost simultaneously placed his mindfuck of a collection I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT with the brand new Paper Hero Press. Fuckmaster bananafuck. I am going to mail myself to Sam tomorrow so we can walk into the street and take turns taking wide bites out of small cars while our ears spurt black blood.
I guess I have to get a tattoo, now: I always said I would.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Derek White's MARSUPIAL
Calamari Press has now released Derek White's new novel MARSUPIAL, wherein the term 'new' is both germane and not germane in several ways, as foretold by the note in copyright page at the beginning, stating it was written from 1997-2008. From what I understand of the story and in following Derek's blog, it is based at least in part on a remasked novel, the first version of which he wrote those almost 10 years ago and toyed with after, a novel began during which he was employed as an extra or body double during the filming of a film by bizarre Quentin Tarantino once-collaborator, Roger Avery (for more on that backstory, read Derek's post re: the novel germination here).
This book excited me from the get-go not only because I love Derek's collection POSTE RESTANTE, but also because you can't help not getting excited about a book with as beautiful and provocative a cover as MARSUPIAL's:
In this case, the cover does speak to the book as a whole itself: in that, it is stark, cryptic, and gritty, and yet in all the same ways it is pristine. MARSUPIAL for the most part is a wide collage of disparate but all related elements. There are prose vignettes, there are bits from film scripts, there are the strange collagist images Derek has impressed into most of the Calamari releases, there are news clippings and other official documents, dream sequences, definitions, and on and on, and tying all of these together, there is the first person narration of Stu, a character who over the course of the novel continues to shift identities and meld with other characters to the point of a kind of laden, historical blur.
With all of these elements embedded, it would be easy for a text like this to get derailed to go so off course. In fact, the story itself, even in its most linear sequences has a tendency to skew everything to bits. In the mind of INLAND EMPIRE it follows the production of a film subject to all kinds of strange interruption. The narrator often finds himself out of body, referring to himself in quotes. As early as page 9, his head comes off his shoulders as he holds in a sneeze. As things continue, the narrator, worried he is being surveilled, obsessed with his brother's broken-english speaking girlfriend, acting as his brother's stunt double in a film that continues to become more and more flush and fractalled with the reality in which it is being filmed: all of this could make for easy, lazy 'surrealism' (in fact there is a quote somewhere embedded regarding this effect, the way laziness in art can often be passed off as intentional in the name of the surreal).
I for one have never been at peace with the 'surrealist school.' I've always tended toward bizarre images, and juxtapositions of weird dream logics, etc., but I've often felt coming up dry in the ways of the actual produce of these effects. Breton's NADJA, for instance, bored the shit out of me, and seemed passed off, sold as an idea, in the way that Bolano's THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES seemed to be trying to sell me a new leg of poetics. Surrealism, to me, should not be political, and this is where so much of the genre has gone wrong. Politics? In art? Aren't their politics enough all everywhere else? Can't we have one fucking awake state that feels as good as sleeping? Isn't that the point?
White's MARSUPIAL, though, if anything, bends surrealism into the kind of effects I've always wished to see rendered literarily. I've talked a lot on here about trying to write the David Lynch novel. Derek White, the motherfucker, may have beaten me to it, at least in a way. There are definitely Lynch-isms loaded here, the mother is referred to as 'Mary X. White,' a name fans of ERASERHEAD will immediately recognize. A lot of the meta-work and the way White manages to breed a certain feel of noir schlock and confusion humor (the screenwriter's drug use, the weird sex jokes, the studio's talkie-talkies, which translate the French film crew's directions into mangled English, 'pornography hero,' etc) with another kind of anytime-metamorphing energy, in which you literally could see the roof fly off a building overflowed with circus peanuts with little faces and feel completely okay about, not wonder what the fuck is wrong with the author. And so much of the narrative terrain moves in the way I love so much about the spatial orientations of INLAND EMPIRE and etc. It moves not as a logic earth, but as rooms connected associatively, by cosmic necessity, rather than some map sketched and pored over on the author's desk.
Somewhere near the beginning of the book the narrator's brother John says, "Personally, I think it's more interesting to write about what you don't know." This has always been, in my mind, one of the most important things to grasp in new writers, those getting told 'write what you know,' who will by and large go onto to say nothing that will ever stir anything that could not have been said by 1200 other MFA grads.
Literature for me has always felt crushed a little by realism, by BEST AMERICAN aspirations, with the need of setting place and time, getting cornered by what should or should not happen, how the characters 'feel' about it, how they assess/parse/deal with it, what's going on, even within a certain confine. The tendency to have resolution and the need for repeating images has always bothered me, and yet when there is just empty noodling, I get the same feel. It takes a deft hand to manage the surreal in a way that feels like it is doing what it should, that it has a reason to exist in the same way that Steve Vai sounds like a dickface for being all around and yet nowhere at once.
Which leads me to one of the most impressive things about MARSUPIAL, one of the things that I think I am most awed by in this weird, corrosive, and yet immensely refined book: the way White is able to take his imagery, take the sometimes intentionally obfuscated (but in a playful way) story of a man filming a film that melds with his life, his mind, his mother, his everything at once, and manages to stir it all together, with all of these disparate elements, into a thing that comes together not in a forced way, not in a 'here is why you're reading way,' not in a way that makes me angry for how it took the moody energy and explained it all to bits, but in a way that instead somehow marries these things into a non-resolutional ending, a way to leave the book, that both leaves most questions unanswered, and yet fills my stomach.
To be true, the last 20 pages of it, the climaxed chord of all these threads speaking together for a moment, in their clearly semi-en-route-discovered understandings, and their simultaneously clearly long-boiled (nine years!) effects, in what they leave out and leave for my brain to try to cut through, the embossed energy of association!!!!!!!, it left me reeling a little, somewhat in the same way I felt after having watched MULHOLLAND DRIVE for the first time, like I'd been led among a series of rooms by someone who'd designed them to unravel and reravel for us both at once.
If literature is not about discovery, a method often just as accidental as it is deigned for, then I can't feel like I'm inside it. And yet this pushing for discovery, so often it is what pushes me away. I want to be inside it, and I want it to be inside me, I don't want to feel it soldering me back closed before its over. I want to be ripped open a little. I want to see thing going on, and be awed at its creation. MARSUPIAL manages to do all of this, and yet it does not feel like work. In an age where the book is already so maligned, it is refreshing to see such a new and challenging narrative be delivered so pleasantly, with such focus, and yet with such utter disregard for the implications of straight storytelling.
MARSUPIAL is something new.
MARSUPIAL is a book that will continue to strum the mind long after it is silent, that has so many layers it can't help but seem to explode, that like INLAND EMPIRE and other open texts, will remain basting the brain long after with its cold juices, that even as I type this now with the book still inside my mind and around me I feel the same way I did the years when I was 12 and could not move inside my bed, stuck again in the recurring dream of a boulder rolling in slow motion down out of the ceiling each night to crush my face, and yet I couldn't wait.
You will buy this book.
This book excited me from the get-go not only because I love Derek's collection POSTE RESTANTE, but also because you can't help not getting excited about a book with as beautiful and provocative a cover as MARSUPIAL's:
In this case, the cover does speak to the book as a whole itself: in that, it is stark, cryptic, and gritty, and yet in all the same ways it is pristine. MARSUPIAL for the most part is a wide collage of disparate but all related elements. There are prose vignettes, there are bits from film scripts, there are the strange collagist images Derek has impressed into most of the Calamari releases, there are news clippings and other official documents, dream sequences, definitions, and on and on, and tying all of these together, there is the first person narration of Stu, a character who over the course of the novel continues to shift identities and meld with other characters to the point of a kind of laden, historical blur.
With all of these elements embedded, it would be easy for a text like this to get derailed to go so off course. In fact, the story itself, even in its most linear sequences has a tendency to skew everything to bits. In the mind of INLAND EMPIRE it follows the production of a film subject to all kinds of strange interruption. The narrator often finds himself out of body, referring to himself in quotes. As early as page 9, his head comes off his shoulders as he holds in a sneeze. As things continue, the narrator, worried he is being surveilled, obsessed with his brother's broken-english speaking girlfriend, acting as his brother's stunt double in a film that continues to become more and more flush and fractalled with the reality in which it is being filmed: all of this could make for easy, lazy 'surrealism' (in fact there is a quote somewhere embedded regarding this effect, the way laziness in art can often be passed off as intentional in the name of the surreal).
I for one have never been at peace with the 'surrealist school.' I've always tended toward bizarre images, and juxtapositions of weird dream logics, etc., but I've often felt coming up dry in the ways of the actual produce of these effects. Breton's NADJA, for instance, bored the shit out of me, and seemed passed off, sold as an idea, in the way that Bolano's THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES seemed to be trying to sell me a new leg of poetics. Surrealism, to me, should not be political, and this is where so much of the genre has gone wrong. Politics? In art? Aren't their politics enough all everywhere else? Can't we have one fucking awake state that feels as good as sleeping? Isn't that the point?
White's MARSUPIAL, though, if anything, bends surrealism into the kind of effects I've always wished to see rendered literarily. I've talked a lot on here about trying to write the David Lynch novel. Derek White, the motherfucker, may have beaten me to it, at least in a way. There are definitely Lynch-isms loaded here, the mother is referred to as 'Mary X. White,' a name fans of ERASERHEAD will immediately recognize. A lot of the meta-work and the way White manages to breed a certain feel of noir schlock and confusion humor (the screenwriter's drug use, the weird sex jokes, the studio's talkie-talkies, which translate the French film crew's directions into mangled English, 'pornography hero,' etc) with another kind of anytime-metamorphing energy, in which you literally could see the roof fly off a building overflowed with circus peanuts with little faces and feel completely okay about, not wonder what the fuck is wrong with the author. And so much of the narrative terrain moves in the way I love so much about the spatial orientations of INLAND EMPIRE and etc. It moves not as a logic earth, but as rooms connected associatively, by cosmic necessity, rather than some map sketched and pored over on the author's desk.
Somewhere near the beginning of the book the narrator's brother John says, "Personally, I think it's more interesting to write about what you don't know." This has always been, in my mind, one of the most important things to grasp in new writers, those getting told 'write what you know,' who will by and large go onto to say nothing that will ever stir anything that could not have been said by 1200 other MFA grads.
Literature for me has always felt crushed a little by realism, by BEST AMERICAN aspirations, with the need of setting place and time, getting cornered by what should or should not happen, how the characters 'feel' about it, how they assess/parse/deal with it, what's going on, even within a certain confine. The tendency to have resolution and the need for repeating images has always bothered me, and yet when there is just empty noodling, I get the same feel. It takes a deft hand to manage the surreal in a way that feels like it is doing what it should, that it has a reason to exist in the same way that Steve Vai sounds like a dickface for being all around and yet nowhere at once.
Which leads me to one of the most impressive things about MARSUPIAL, one of the things that I think I am most awed by in this weird, corrosive, and yet immensely refined book: the way White is able to take his imagery, take the sometimes intentionally obfuscated (but in a playful way) story of a man filming a film that melds with his life, his mind, his mother, his everything at once, and manages to stir it all together, with all of these disparate elements, into a thing that comes together not in a forced way, not in a 'here is why you're reading way,' not in a way that makes me angry for how it took the moody energy and explained it all to bits, but in a way that instead somehow marries these things into a non-resolutional ending, a way to leave the book, that both leaves most questions unanswered, and yet fills my stomach.
To be true, the last 20 pages of it, the climaxed chord of all these threads speaking together for a moment, in their clearly semi-en-route-discovered understandings, and their simultaneously clearly long-boiled (nine years!) effects, in what they leave out and leave for my brain to try to cut through, the embossed energy of association!!!!!!!, it left me reeling a little, somewhat in the same way I felt after having watched MULHOLLAND DRIVE for the first time, like I'd been led among a series of rooms by someone who'd designed them to unravel and reravel for us both at once.
If literature is not about discovery, a method often just as accidental as it is deigned for, then I can't feel like I'm inside it. And yet this pushing for discovery, so often it is what pushes me away. I want to be inside it, and I want it to be inside me, I don't want to feel it soldering me back closed before its over. I want to be ripped open a little. I want to see thing going on, and be awed at its creation. MARSUPIAL manages to do all of this, and yet it does not feel like work. In an age where the book is already so maligned, it is refreshing to see such a new and challenging narrative be delivered so pleasantly, with such focus, and yet with such utter disregard for the implications of straight storytelling.
MARSUPIAL is something new.
MARSUPIAL is a book that will continue to strum the mind long after it is silent, that has so many layers it can't help but seem to explode, that like INLAND EMPIRE and other open texts, will remain basting the brain long after with its cold juices, that even as I type this now with the book still inside my mind and around me I feel the same way I did the years when I was 12 and could not move inside my bed, stuck again in the recurring dream of a boulder rolling in slow motion down out of the ceiling each night to crush my face, and yet I couldn't wait.
You will buy this book.
Monday, June 30, 2008
PIATBVL Review, MARSUPIAL, etc.
The stellar Kathryn Regina and the other lovely ladies of Venom Literati read & reviewed PIATBVL. That made me feel honored and happy.
They were eating chocolate covered potato chips, which I can't remember ever trying and now I want.
I like & agree with this blog post by Shane Jones.
I got Derek White's new novel MARSUPIAL in the mail today and it may be one of the most beautiful looking book objects I've seen in a long while. BUY IT. It has moved to the top of my reading pile, ever growing. Here's like 1/3 of it, though next I think I want to reread Faulkner.
Also, if you haven't yet, check out MICHAEL KIMBALL WRITES YOUR LIFE STORY ON A POSTCARD, it's pretty insane.
Did anyone in NYC go to the NEW YORK TYRANT 4 release party? I want it.
They were eating chocolate covered potato chips, which I can't remember ever trying and now I want.
I like & agree with this blog post by Shane Jones.
I got Derek White's new novel MARSUPIAL in the mail today and it may be one of the most beautiful looking book objects I've seen in a long while. BUY IT. It has moved to the top of my reading pile, ever growing. Here's like 1/3 of it, though next I think I want to reread Faulkner.
Also, if you haven't yet, check out MICHAEL KIMBALL WRITES YOUR LIFE STORY ON A POSTCARD, it's pretty insane.
Did anyone in NYC go to the NEW YORK TYRANT 4 release party? I want it.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Things if you haven't had or have had if you had had he had who had or who huh wha
1. HOTBOOKS review of Tao Lin's COGNITIVE-BEHAVORIAL THERAPY
2. Calamari Press just released Derek White's new novel MARSUPIAL and is also now the proprietor of all 3rd Bed released, including 10 of their 11 issues all their 3 book releases by Gary Lutz, David Ohle & James Wagner.
3. Lamination Colony nominated Josh Maday's Distractus Refractus Ontologicus: The Dissemination of Michael Martone for Best Creative Nonfiction 2008. Get that motherfucker, Josh.
4. An easy way to hallucinate is to not sleep for 2 weeks, drink too much coffee and then immediately go running. This is also a good way to faint into the street and get hit by a car, which I did not do, but could have. This weekend I am getting Lunesta pills. Praise.
5. God damn it I need to remember to go to some local comedy shows, get drunk and heckle the local dads. This guy is major:
Sitting in the front row with my ass hanging out shouting Tupac lyrics and hacking snot bubbles would be king of evening.
2. Calamari Press just released Derek White's new novel MARSUPIAL and is also now the proprietor of all 3rd Bed released, including 10 of their 11 issues all their 3 book releases by Gary Lutz, David Ohle & James Wagner.
3. Lamination Colony nominated Josh Maday's Distractus Refractus Ontologicus: The Dissemination of Michael Martone for Best Creative Nonfiction 2008. Get that motherfucker, Josh.
4. An easy way to hallucinate is to not sleep for 2 weeks, drink too much coffee and then immediately go running. This is also a good way to faint into the street and get hit by a car, which I did not do, but could have. This weekend I am getting Lunesta pills. Praise.
5. God damn it I need to remember to go to some local comedy shows, get drunk and heckle the local dads. This guy is major:
Sitting in the front row with my ass hanging out shouting Tupac lyrics and hacking snot bubbles would be king of evening.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Final: 10 days 39k+ words
Day 10 @ 9:38 pm finished draft 1 of book. There are 39281 words. There will likely be another 500-800 in an appendix that I will create in the next week, and maybe also a second appendix that I have not fully gotten a hold of yet. I still have about a page of notes to apply and things to add or rearrange and edit.
I feel 'cleared' somewhat. I feel a lot better than I did 10 days ago when I started the book. I think I worked 8-10 hours a day nonstop at desk for 8 out of the 10 days and 5 hours on the other two. I feel exhausted but good.
Now I have to figure out what I want to 'do' with it.
I will think about this later.
Here is a pretty awesome article on the house in LOST HIGHWAY and Euripedes 'Medea', which actually jarred a lot of my thinking during the middle part of the novel, and is also where I stole the title I am still trying to convince myself to run with: THE ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT IS COMPLETELY UNABLE TO BE COMMUNICATED.
I will probably, though, use: WHERE AM I WHERE HAVE I BEEN WHERE ARE YOU
I am going to find a way to get David Lynch to blurb this book.
I will do it.
I will do it.
I will corner the David Lynch literary market.
Big fuckin titties.
I am going to stop talking about that man.
I also just wrapped up an interview with J'Lyn Chapman, who, damn, is interesting and know how to talk about her work. That will be forthcoming soon. I'm digging for new venues that do good literary interviews. It seems like so few people do those anymore. Any suggestions?
I feel 'cleared' somewhat. I feel a lot better than I did 10 days ago when I started the book. I think I worked 8-10 hours a day nonstop at desk for 8 out of the 10 days and 5 hours on the other two. I feel exhausted but good.
Now I have to figure out what I want to 'do' with it.
I will think about this later.
Here is a pretty awesome article on the house in LOST HIGHWAY and Euripedes 'Medea', which actually jarred a lot of my thinking during the middle part of the novel, and is also where I stole the title I am still trying to convince myself to run with: THE ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT IS COMPLETELY UNABLE TO BE COMMUNICATED.
I will probably, though, use: WHERE AM I WHERE HAVE I BEEN WHERE ARE YOU
I am going to find a way to get David Lynch to blurb this book.
I will do it.
I will do it.
I will corner the David Lynch literary market.
Big fuckin titties.
I am going to stop talking about that man.
I also just wrapped up an interview with J'Lyn Chapman, who, damn, is interesting and know how to talk about her work. That will be forthcoming soon. I'm digging for new venues that do good literary interviews. It seems like so few people do those anymore. Any suggestions?
Monday, February 18, 2008
EAT WHEN YOU FEEL SAD
If you have not yet done so already, read Zachary German's new Bear Parade book EAT WHEN YOU FEEL SAD. It contains some of the most direct narration possible.
While in New York, Zachary and I stayed up after others went to sleep and shared a forty while discussing Lil Wayne.
Also, the Calamari book I mentioned last week, TORTOISE by James Lewelling, is now for sale.
This week needs to glow.
While in New York, Zachary and I stayed up after others went to sleep and shared a forty while discussing Lil Wayne.
Also, the Calamari book I mentioned last week, TORTOISE by James Lewelling, is now for sale.
This week needs to glow.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
TORTOISE by James Lewelling
I just finished reading TORTOISE by James Lewelling (Calamari Press 2008). It was a very strange book. I read it mostly on the bed or in the bathtub today. Saturday night. It was an appropriate book to read alone on a Saturday night. If someone told me that TORTOISE by James Lewelling was really written by another author under a fake name I would think maybe it was written by Gordon Lish. TORTOISE has a lot of short, looping sentences. Fragments from some sentences show up in other sentences as a continuation of the same thought refracted. The sentences are often short and very logical and convey a specific meaning, even in settings where the 'real' is subdued. As in: there is very much an absurdist undercurrent to this book. Things happen that can not happen, but all delivered in a very even, clear voice, which makes it very pleasant to read.
I read TORTOISE with a little slip of paper as a bookmark so that I could note sentences or sections that I like. Usually I just write straight in a book, but Calamari's books are so beautifully made that I can't bring myself to do that to them. So the bookmark: instead of taking notes the way I usually do (which varies, but often I write out things I would say if I were going to review the book, 'snippets' or something, because usually the only reason I take notes is to review) for TORTOISE I found myself writing down 'ideas'. The main trajectory of this book is about a man who gets on a plane to go visit a man and woman in an unnamed country. He sits in places and thinks about things. Each place he is in triggers things he remembers, which range from very common to very weird. There is a lot of thinking in this book. Here are some of the things I noted that were 'thought' about, as listed on my bookmark:
insomnia pp 54-55 (I started my notes late, I had no pen)
sick babies 60-61
age and sanity 93
pissing money 95 ("You work all day and piss your money away at night and then get up in the morning and make some more.")
two people in one 99
father's head 102
doppelganger 106-107
The book ended on page 124. The ending was very strange and somehow soothing. I don't want to talk about it.
As you can sort of tell, this book is about death. Every book is about death in a way but this book seems about being alone and confused in a small claustrophobic space while dying without knowing you are dying. This book is clean and nice to read.
It being Saturday night, almost midnight, and with TORTOISE on the desk next to me, with the weird orange and blue cover and the little box that you don't always notice is there, I feel very contained by the lines of the room. I feel like the room is buzzing a little and my body is not buzzing. There is a desk calendar on the desk and I can't believe what day it is. In the middle of reading TORTOISE I sat down and tried to write something short and abstract about becoming someone else and when I was finished I deleted it without reading it again even though I felt like what I had written was true. You need to do that sometimes, maybe, I think.
You should buy this book.
I read TORTOISE with a little slip of paper as a bookmark so that I could note sentences or sections that I like. Usually I just write straight in a book, but Calamari's books are so beautifully made that I can't bring myself to do that to them. So the bookmark: instead of taking notes the way I usually do (which varies, but often I write out things I would say if I were going to review the book, 'snippets' or something, because usually the only reason I take notes is to review) for TORTOISE I found myself writing down 'ideas'. The main trajectory of this book is about a man who gets on a plane to go visit a man and woman in an unnamed country. He sits in places and thinks about things. Each place he is in triggers things he remembers, which range from very common to very weird. There is a lot of thinking in this book. Here are some of the things I noted that were 'thought' about, as listed on my bookmark:
insomnia pp 54-55 (I started my notes late, I had no pen)
sick babies 60-61
age and sanity 93
pissing money 95 ("You work all day and piss your money away at night and then get up in the morning and make some more.")
two people in one 99
father's head 102
doppelganger 106-107
The book ended on page 124. The ending was very strange and somehow soothing. I don't want to talk about it.
As you can sort of tell, this book is about death. Every book is about death in a way but this book seems about being alone and confused in a small claustrophobic space while dying without knowing you are dying. This book is clean and nice to read.
It being Saturday night, almost midnight, and with TORTOISE on the desk next to me, with the weird orange and blue cover and the little box that you don't always notice is there, I feel very contained by the lines of the room. I feel like the room is buzzing a little and my body is not buzzing. There is a desk calendar on the desk and I can't believe what day it is. In the middle of reading TORTOISE I sat down and tried to write something short and abstract about becoming someone else and when I was finished I deleted it without reading it again even though I felt like what I had written was true. You need to do that sometimes, maybe, I think.
You should buy this book.
Monday, October 22, 2007
The Hour Sets by Michael Boyko
Got a copy of Michael Boyko's The Hour Sets in the mail today. Like everything else Calamari Press has released, it looks beautiful and I am excited to read it. Review forthcoming. In the meantime, check it out. Calamari continues to be one of the most exciting and high-water marked venues for innovative text.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Bleed Magazine & feces
A couple of my friends in Atlanta are starting a new art/literary magazine and are looking for submissions of all kinds of stuff. You should send them something. Check it out here. They are trying to get things together by the end of the month but there's still a lot they are looking for, so it'd be a good chance to see print without having to fellate or massage or stroke anyone or anything, know what I mean?
Today I got an email from the web journal Exquisite Corpse about a short thing I sent them in January 2006. I ended up withdrawing it a couple weeks later as it was published here. Here is what their 21 month-long reply said: Corpse is against feces. Sorry, eds
Cute, dudes.
I sent them back a brief rejection letter rejection letter: Blake is against responses for submissions sent more than 21 months ago and already withdrawn. Sorry, b
There is a new release from Calamari Press available now and it looks pretty cool.
I found I have an extra copy of Gordon Lish's PERU. If anyone wants to trade for it or just wants it for free, let me know.
Today I got an email from the web journal Exquisite Corpse about a short thing I sent them in January 2006. I ended up withdrawing it a couple weeks later as it was published here. Here is what their 21 month-long reply said: Corpse is against feces. Sorry, eds
Cute, dudes.
I sent them back a brief rejection letter rejection letter: Blake is against responses for submissions sent more than 21 months ago and already withdrawn. Sorry, b
There is a new release from Calamari Press available now and it looks pretty cool.
I found I have an extra copy of Gordon Lish's PERU. If anyone wants to trade for it or just wants it for free, let me know.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Robert Lopez interview
A couple weeks ago I interviewed Robert Lopez about his novel PART OF THE WORLD. You can read it now at Word Riot.
If you haven't yet picked up a copy of his book, you really should. It has short nice sentences and is funny and strange and you pretty much have no choice but to read straight through it. My full review will be coming soon in Rain Taxi.
You can find out more about the novel from at its publisher's page: Calamari Press, who I think is by far publishing more great work than any other small press around right now.
If you haven't yet picked up a copy of his book, you really should. It has short nice sentences and is funny and strange and you pretty much have no choice but to read straight through it. My full review will be coming soon in Rain Taxi.
You can find out more about the novel from at its publisher's page: Calamari Press, who I think is by far publishing more great work than any other small press around right now.
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