What year was it when we still had to go away

Tonight in Atlanta we are launching the first reading of Solar Anus reading series, flagstone spoken into by the magnificent JOHANNES GORANSSON and local novelist CHRIS BUNDY, the event is an early one 6 PM at Beep Beep Gallery off Ponce, this will be a monthly thing from here on out though future extension will be likely at a later time and at a more regular venue. If you ever want to come to Atlanta or are coming to Atlanta and want to read, we'd likely love to have you.






The trains outside my apartment today are really loud, it sounds like something metal is being ripped to shreds.

After I typed that the sound stopped.





All I have been able to think about lately is Ricky's Anus. The book is at 31k words now, I think the current section I am writing, Ricky's Blood, is going to be one very long unbroken graph that will maybe last 1/3rd of the book, this book is going to be long, I am sorry I mentioned I was thinking about deleting it, that probably wouldn't happen, I am not massive in that sense, I am done thinking about it outside the moment. I feel really strangely electric and I am not sure why and I will keep it that way by shutting my mouth quick.









I randomly happened on rereading William Gass's afterward to one of my favorite books OMENSETTER'S LUCK, I had forgotten there was an afterword, in it Gass discusses how he had written a different version of the book which had been stolen, and so he proceeded in despair to reconstruct and rewrite: the afterword also contains meditations on his 8 years of rejection before publication arose, grappling with a text's destruction, the feeling of 'why the hell am I going through all the trouble for this?,' and a lot of other things that have seemed central to my mind lately. It is a fantastic little essay.

Here is a section on his rewriting the book:

During the months that followed, I rewrote Omensetter's Luck as if in a series of trances which I almost systematically entered. I sometimes felt I was recovering the lost text exactly, not by trying to remember what it had been originally or how I'd written it, but by becoming weary--weary and unthinking, weary and unfeeling too--eventually so deep in the mine of my past work that the mine worked me.

Wearing, unthinking, unfeeling: it's funny, why does that seem to be a fruitful state? I am deep in something, I'm not sure

You can read the brief Afterword in whole here on Google, and I recommend OMENSETTER'S LUCK as highly as I can recommend something.








I am reading THE LONG TRIAL OF NOLAN DUGATTI by Stephen Graham Jones, according to the acknowledgments I think he wrote the book in 72 hours, it is about a man who works at a helpline for a video game no one ever plays and whose father wrote him a series of suicide notes, failed, I should go finish the book, next I am reading Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR which I am excited about after WASTE and having read the first few setions of FOG & CAR in anticipation.









Interior layout on EVER is in study-mode, we are reaching finalization periods, I hope to spend the rest of the weekend proofing and proofing and proofing, there is something about the final stamp of what words a book will be made of that makes me both anxious and excited and maybe nervous some, like I am going to miss something that I will see the first time I read the book in print that will make me cringe, it seems no matter how many times you look at something over and over and over something new wrong grabs you, I don't want to feel that, I will keep working.













i had a dream about babies being destroyed the past two nights
i should stop talking shit about babies when i am awake

* Gttd Tgtr Mk Oh *

Thank you Tom Bissell et al

Thank you Harper's







:mind switch:





Nicholas Ripatrazone wrote a flattering review of my story THE DISAPPEARED for Luna Park Review, comparing it to Gass's THE PEDERSEN KID, which is one of my favorite stories. Thank you Nicholas.

You can still read THE DISAPPEARED in /nor or featured on the site here












There is a new ACTION YES, including strong work by Josh Maday, Noah Eli Gordon, others

It has two deleted sections from my SCORCH ATLAS: Year of Weird Light & Gristle

Thank you John & Johannes.






and and and and








I feel ridiculous, I can't quite








It's kind of like

I just thought for a long time about whether to capitalize the 's' in the last sentence of this post

I should probably be in a good mood but I'm still not.

A really good thing is happening, it seems. I'm not going to talk about it specifically for a while.

It concerns things that will manifest themselves almost one full year from now. It concerns words and time with words and like that.









I don't know, I wonder if I will get to a point that I do enough or have done enough on any given day that I feel satisfied or relaxed. I don't even know what I am looking for, I have found threads of it, and yet the more I do my nature seems to stay in one point, when it comes to certain things.

That is very vague.

All of this blather is vague-ish, I should probably delete it.











Things right now are very good.

I should feel gracious.

I really do, it is only in myself that I feel misaiming, or like every day is so short, or that I haven't found the button that slows the slur speed or something.











Today I reread a lot of Gary Lutz's STORIES IN THE WORST WAY. It'd been too long. On a sentence by sentence level it is probably one of the most pristine and wise books ever written. You could really take almost every single line and put it on a page by itself and show it to someone and have them be taken aback a little, or at least look and remember the words a while after, even out of context, more so than other words.

If you haven't read it, read it, move it to the top of your list. If you've read it, read it again. That's good advice.

I am a purple colored cistern.










I don't know what to do when I realize certain things.










Nice boy good boy.

There is a new issue of DIAGRAM up, I always get a little giddy when they put up a new one, I read it all, I usually click through and find the fiction or things shaped like fiction then I read the contributor notes then I read the poems, I like the author notes they let authors supply that illuminate or deviate from the text.

This issue has the fabulous Kathy Regina and Atlanta brethren Benjamin Solomon, both of those pieces are really strong and make me want to write.

Diagram, maybe that's the best thing about them: they make me want to write.

Sometimes I will keep certain texts on Diagram open on my browser behind the MS Word while I am writing and peek back and forth at them, I like the shapes of the texts.










I like the show I LOVE MONEY, I can't help it, I have watched every episode, some several times, when I miss one I feel anxious, I look for it to appear on ON DEMAND, I check sometimes often to see if they will update and put the new one on there, I can't help it.

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? has a new format, they tell you the categories of the questions now all in advance, and the contestants now have limited amounts of time to answer, it makes me sad.

I really don't watch that much TV, except when I feel bloated or it is very late and I have written all day.











I had a sentence in my head in the car today and I forgot it, that sentence was going to be a book

Every day I could probably make several sentences that would become a book, it's not an issue

I feel haphazard and giddy

I forget everything unless I write it down or don't forget it

Each snardvunt is a palimpeses in my gunt.











I am writing another book now, I can only do a couple lines a day on it, the lines are very broken up on the page, it about a woman who works in a grocery store, I think I am ripping off David Markson again, I don't care, it is going to take me a long time to write it I think, I want the book one day to be 450-550 pages of mostly single sentences or small sentence clusters making up each paragraph, I like reading books like that, I want it to be my semi-minimalist version of THE TUNNEL

THE TUNNEL is the greatest accomplishment in literature, as is also INFINITE JEST

suck my dick

Rejection + THE TUNNEL

Today I got a personal rejection from John D'Agata, the lyric essay editor at the Seneca Review, whose book of essays HALLS OF FAME I absolutely adore, and who also edited THE NEXT AMERICAN ESSAY, which is by far to me the criterion of excellence in creative nonfiction. I felt really happy to see he'd taken the time to comment on two lists I'd sent him, asked to see more in the future, and signed his name. A good rejection can make you feel just as good as an acceptance, at times.

NOTE: The December web update of Hobart features an interview with Jesse Ball by Shane Jones, as well as an excerpt from one of several new books by him, as well as also a story THE PEACHES ARE CHEAP by Mike Young, which I'd read before in its publication in MONDAY NIGHT LIT. It is a great story.

Anyhow, now, this week I've been slightly reobsessed with THE TUNNEL by William H. Gass.



THE TUNNEL is a 651 page novel released by Dalkey Archive Press. Gass spent more than 30 years writing it. It was his second book. I read this book for the first time about 4 years ago, days which I spent endless hours on my bed in a basement bedroom with no windows, reading until I felt ill. The book is about a man writing about the Holocaust, during which he begins digging a tunnel in his basement pretty much for no reason. But the subject of the book becomes irrelevant: this is an encyclopedic novel of the widest breadth. Virtually any subject you can imagine arises.

If there's ever been an accomplishment of language play in literature, this is the high water mark. Looking at prose poetry, which has become popular among excellent poets like Ben Lerner, Noah Eli Gordon, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Tony Tost, and so on, THE TUNNEL seems to predicate it all. It is a prose poem that goes on for 651 pages and almost never loses its intensity. It is word play to the extreme. You can open this book to any page almost and be hit with a sentence that is so adept in craft it makes you quease a little. At least, it does me. It is a very difficult read, but an experience unto itself.

Here is a .jpg excerpt, chosen mostly at random via Amazon book search. Click on the image and you can read it:



The type of this book is also very unusual. There are lots of inserted photos and weird fonts and printing that makes the book look warped.

One of the facets of the book is the creation of a group called the PDP, or THE PARTY OF DISAPPOINTED PEOPLE, which I think about sometimes in the evening.

I found another text by Gass online, in which he wrote up preparations for the person that would work on designing THE TUNNEL as a book, which is incredible in and of itself, even if you haven't read the actual book: Designing the Tunnel.

If you are interested in Gass, but not quite ready for perhaps the most demanding book of all time, I'd recommend starting with OMENSETTER'S LUCK, which about 1/3rd as long, and has a more concrete story, and is kind of Cormac McCarthy on LSD. There's an image in that book where a man is hanging in the top of a very high tree in the middle of a forest that I will never be able to get out of my mind.