Gordon Lish: Collected Fictions
For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.
(Via @orbooks | http://ORBooks.com)
NOON
A reading
For the first time in 19 or 20 years (as well as I can remember), I will be doing a reading: some poetry, some fiction, maybe even a look at the graphic novel, at South Texas College in McAllen, Texas, next Tuesday at 4 p.m. Y’all fly on down and join the crowd.
High Lonesome
Barry Hannah, the quintessentially Southern author of “Geronimo Rex” and “High Lonesome,” has died, The Associated Press reported. He was 67 and died on Monday at his home in Oxford, Miss. The Lafayette County coroner told The A.P. that Mr. Hannah died Monday afternoon of “natural causes,” but declined to elaborate until he had provided details to the author’s wife, Susan. The coroner said the death was not under investigation.
March elimae
Enjoy. (It’s free.)
My peculiar
fantasia on Philoctetes, Sophocles and translation (inspired by Fortunato Salazar’s kind invitation) is now published at Everyday Genius.
February elimae
is now posted.
Kim Chinquee
and Oh Baby get some attention.
Which alien would you like to have kill you?
For me? This one:
5. The Thing (The Thing, 1982)
Approved methods of killing: Waiting until the two of you are alone, then whipping tentacles into your eyes and orifices, and becoming you; biting off your arms inside a suddenly toothy abdomen.
Pros: As you are stationed in Antarctica, you no longer have to be cold, smelly and eating nothing but canned peas during the six month night.
Cons: Talk about identity theft. You just know the thing is going to run up your credit cards, and, like, buy Snuggies or something.
Chronicles of Seymour-Hoffman
Ned Hepburn, (the genius behind, erm, Boner Party) has also been posting tidbits from his forthcoming “book” ‘The Many Faces Of Seymour-Hoffman’
“During the filming of the 1999 drama ‘The Talented Mister Ripley’, Seymour-Hoffman developed an intense infatuation with American Girl dolls, the doll company that produces historically and factually based dolls based on young women of a certain era in American history.
Inbetween takes, Seymour-Hoffman would produce a doll and start to recite his own lines in the voice of Kitt Kettredge, an American Girl doll based on a girl who would have existed the Great Depression. During the scene of his own murder, he refused to act with anyone else but her, slowly disrobing her and holding back his own tears, feeding the lifeless doll fistfuls of M&M’s. This unnerved co-stars Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, who refused to be in the same room as him during this already emotional day of filming. Using an array of mirrors, the film appears to have Philip Seymour-Hoffman in the same room as Matt Damon, when infact Hoffman was forty feet away in his own trailer playing the same five Supertramp songs on repeat before every single take while requesting fresh M&M’s for Kitt. Consequentially, each take took an hour to film.
Coincidentally, during the scene in which Hoffman is strangled, Kitt Kettredge’s hands are used.”
Needless to say, this isn’t uh, factually based.
the first legal male prostitute
I think for a male, if you want to be successful in this type of venture, you’re not a prostitute. You’re a surrogate lover. You encompass everything that’s required of you—not only emotionally, physically—but psychologically. Because women are wired differently. They’re much more sensitive creatures. You actually have to enjoy what you do. You can’t necessarily say, “Oh, it’s just a job.” You actually have to say it’s a passion. I think it’s the same situation as with anything that happens when you break apart a social institution. There has to be some kind of change in terminology to describe persons like myself. And it’s more of a civil rights thing now. Basically this is the first time in the economy of the United States that a male has actually stood up and said, “I want to do this for a living.” And be protected under law to do it. It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front instead of the back. She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same. I’m actually standing up now, and hopefully I can be supported by the male community and be understood as a person. This actually isn’t about selling my body. This is about changing social norms.
Congratulations.
(via marginal revolution)
The Road is unrealistic
The Guardian’s John Grace puts the journey in perspective:
I’m bored, says Bob.
We haven’t gone anywhere yet.
Well, I’m still bored. Can I bring a friend?
You can’t. They’re all dead.
No they’re not. Donny was on Facebook half an hour ago.
I don’t care. This is a father-son bonding kind of thing.
Not another one. Is it going to last long?
Oh, fatherhood.
(via)
Wild animal!
A thing of arctic climes.
Neither feline nor canine. Nobody is really sure if it is any kind of ine at all.
And it’s not telling.
It keeps its own counsel. It has been seen nattering happily to itself.
And it does not answer to Kitty. No pussy, it.
And it knows things. Biblically.
It howls its knowledge into the night — and eats its friends.
Sleepingfish 8
Sleepingfish 8 is now available, featuring literary text objects by: Cooper Renner, Diane Williams, Dennis Cooper, Elliott Stevens, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Alec Niedenthal, Amelia Gray, Matt Bell, David Ohle, Evelyn Hampton, Émilie Notéris, Ottessa Moshfegh, Christine Schutt, M. T. Fallon, Daniel Grandbois, Julie Doxsee, Terese Svoboda, Blake Butler, Stephen Gropp-Hess, Ali Aktan Aşkın, Ryan Call, Anna DeForest, Sasha Fletcher, Nina Shope, Rachel May, David McLendon, Eugene Lim, The Brothers Goat, Lito Elio Porto & Adam Weinstein & cover art by Eduardo Recife.
You can view a linear narrative formed from sentences from each author & a setlist of music from current & past sleepingfish contributors online: http://sleepingfish.net/8/line.htm
January elimae
is now posted for your viewing enjoyment.
Happy new year to you all!
Long Horn Meat
Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas
I just now got around to reading Blake Butler’s smashing book Scorch Atlas. This is so good. I love Blake’s wild style, everything he’s doing with language and imagery here. I highly recommend going over to Featherproof and buying a copy.
Buy Scorch Atlas here.
Christmas Letter
Well, a blizzard has stranded us in a motel in Big Spring for Christmas Eve–but we have a stock of libations that should help. Here is this year’s contrived Christmas letter; some of you will recognize the main characters from previous letters. We hope all clusterflockers are warm and happy, wherever you are!
Christmas letter from Russell Sandene since Aunt Winnie was going to write but passed away,
Don’t you all worry—I’m here at the apartment hotel complex Aunt Winnie owned, watching over everything what with her not having a will like everybody thought she did. Poor thing was so good to me during my illegal incarcerations. She sent me letters about how to make money even in jail. If you all are trying to remember me from any of the family reunions in the past, don’t—I was there in my heart but people will turn on you if the law has made mistakes and they know where your going to be.
Aunt Winnie has all these Chiwowwows you could sure help me out with if you have kids you want chewed down to size. I put them under the house but they ate back up threw the floor at the vents. Haven’t had much trouble with them today since I fed them all that gravy and bisket dow.
Read more
Pear Wine on Stanton Street
Papa said the drunk locked his friend out of the trailer on a January night, woke in the morning to find him frozen on the porch–and set fire to the trailer as he sat on a couch inside.
I don’t know why things can’t happen faster. What steps cancel out, early on? The child’s one meal; the mother giving it; the father going for the doctor.
The stars are mostly like they were. Which means I just left the party yesterday, maybe. Cold makes light and breath precise, but questions cast about for purchase.
I gave him a coat, Papa said. But that was a long time ago.
an interview with Thomas Bernhard
In an interview from 1986, the late Austrian author Thomas Bernhard discusses the musicality of language, the eroticism of old men and the incurability of stupidity.
It’s hard to recommend Bernhard because of readers’ expectations, but to my mind, there are few better.
(via marginal revolution)
An interview with Cooper Renner
at The Collagist:
“Running Night” is part of a short collection which is substantially finished, but it falls within a larger grouping of Malta-related lycanthropic work which is ongoing. The first entry, in terms of being written, is the novel A Death by the Sea, which I drafted during NaNoWriMo in 2008. Four sections of it have been published (New York Tyrant, Keyhole, Anemone Sidecar, Unscroll), and I’d love to find a publisher for the whole thing. Anyway, that started the Malta ball rolling for me. Once I got my mind really wrapped up in this world, ideas kept coming. The framework for the story collection, which I’m calling Dr Fenech’s Guide to Lycanthropy in Malta (1913), is that the doctor is collecting old tales from older men and women on Malta and Gozo and hoping to publish them in England.
December elimae
is now posted. I hope you will find something to enjoy.
J.D. Salinger’s uncollected stories
Wow. They are all here. The formatting needs to be, um, reconsidered. But what a great resource.
(via kottke)
Kim Chinquee
On November 30, Kim Chinquee — writer, teacher and co-editor with Doug Martin of the upcoming Online Writing: the Best of the First Ten Years — will become editor for fiction and creative nonfiction at elimae. (I will continue editing poetry, literary essays and reviews, and interviews.) I am preparing the December issue right now, and Kim’s hand will first be seen in the January 2010 issue. I am quite pleased to begin this new partnership.
The Towers of Trebizond
We set off presently up the road that climbed up into the hills, but the camel took camel paths and scampered up them at a great pace, roaring, and aunt Dot thought it might be in love, though out of season. When we stopped for lunch, Halide, who has done quite a lot of work among mental cases, looked at the camel closely, and into its eyes, and watched the way its mouth worked while it chewed, and said, “Has it had mental trouble before? For I think that it now has.”