Happy Inside
Amy Lombard photographed awkward moments in IKEA stores, a book with her series is being published. She’s now raising funds with pre-orders. See more.
“Uncreative Writing”
Kenneth Goldsmith in The Chronicle Review:
For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.
Tat Musing
“O, lady on bus, I think one day you will regret your cupcake tattoo.”
My friend Alison. Musing en route home.
I told Alison I’d thought long and hard before I got my own tat back in the wayback days.
Read more
Post-Artifact Books and Publishing
Grantland
Bill Simmons welcomes people to Grantland, which launched today:
Life will deliver a few moments when something substantial is about to happen, when you know it’s substantial, when you’ve done everything you could to prepare for the moment, but still, you just don’t know. And it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. I felt that way when I was getting married, when both of my kids were being born, when I graduated college, and incredibly, when I was standing in front of that stupid Carl’s Jr. Oh my God. There is no stopping this now. Please tell me this will turn out all right. You take a leap of faith with life. You inhale and exhale. You hope.
A fine article by Neal Pollack on self publishing
…in today’s NYT:
In addition to a great many bad books lost to the sands of time, there’s also a long history of successful self-published authors getting big deals with major houses. Today, though, self-publication crackles with possibility as never before. Witness the March news that the thriller author Barry Eisler had backed out of a half-million-dollar deal with St. Martin’s Press, his new publisher. He’d decided that he could, over time, make more money publishing without their help. Conversely, young Amanda Hocking, she of the vast success generated from self-publishing nine e-books, accepted a seven-figure advance from St. Martin’s, the same publisher that had just lost Eisler. Hocking issued a sassy statement that she was tired of answering e-mails all the time and just wanted to write.
Your business card sucks
Don’t miss the rebuttal.
from the archives: April 10, 2008
That does it. This is it. 1979 marked some kind of something, the likes of which we may never again witness.
Published in 1979: India’s brilliant How to Care for a Guinea Pig.
I can never get enough of this.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before
This year’s Calamari “ePress” financial report features rants on eBooks, Facebook, distribution & other things useful or not to others crazy enough to have a small independent press.
Who needs a publisher?
Amanda Hocking certainly doesn’t:
Amanda Hocking is 26* years old. She has 9 self-published books to her name, and sells 100,000+ copies of those ebooks per month. She has never been traditionally published. This is her blog. And it’s no stretch to say – at $3 per book1/70% per sale for the Kindle store – that she makes a lot of money from her monthly book sales. (Perhaps more importantly: a publisher on the private Reading2.0 mailing list has said, to effect: there is no traditional publisher in the world right now that can offer Amanda Hocking terms that are better than what she’s currently getting, right now on the Kindle store, all on her own.)
Joan Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction — Recommended
The Art of series, published by Graywolf Press and edited by Charles Baxter, is a line of books aimed at “reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism” in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Each book is brief and concerns a particular aspect of craft, such as The Art of Description (Mark Doty), The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song (Ellen Bryant Voigt), The Art of Time in Memoir (Sven Birkerts), and so on.
The Art of Time in Fiction is certainly not a “how-to” book; Silber’s concern seems to be one of providing an overview of the way time works in particular kinds of fiction. After a fine introduction she presents chapters that deal with Classic Time, Long Time, Switchback Time, Fabulous Time, and Time as Subject. It’s her ability to point to revealing examples that really makes this approach work well. Her lovely sentences bring complex concepts to readers’ minds in a quiet and compelling way. I would like to see her write a longer book of this sort–one that gets down into the nuts and bolts a bit more–but this brief book is just the sort needed to push writers and readers of fiction to ask the right questions about the formative nature of time in such realms.
Andeeeeee monthly (wee hope) gazette | For Andrew
Andeeeeee monthly (wee hope) gazette: The journal of the Andy Warhol Fan Club of New York City, ca. 1965 / Andy Warhol Fan Club of New York City. Newsletter : 5 p. : ill. ; 36 x 22 cm. Leo Castelli Gallery records, circa 1957-1990. Archives of American Art.
Calamari stirrup bootstrapping methodology
Happy Birthday, QZAP!
So long as it is still November, I say it is still the seventh anniversary of the Queer Zine Archive Project.
QZAP has been online for seven years. What started as a way of sharing information from zines with radical queers at Queeruption has grown into a real living archive accessed by hundreds of people a day.
A wonderful living labor of love.
publishing history
John B. Thompson on the history and state of publishing:
The publishing industry is in trouble—but not just because of the digital revolution. The real trouble for the publishing industry, in my view, has more to do with the gradual unfolding of this economic transformation that led to this structure of publishing, where we now have five large corporate groups and a small number of retail chains dominating the industry. These corporations have to achieve growth year on year, and when that top line revenue begins to fall, as it did when the 2008 economic recession suddenly tipped the narrow profit margins into the red, it has devastating impact throughout and the only way that they can preserve the profit at the bottom line is to push people out, and to reduce their overheads and costs dramatically.
Richard Nash called it “the only history of publishing we’ll need.”
I don’t need your f***ing phonebooks, no no
This is exactly how I felt last week when I found a new phonebook on my porch.
It’s 2010, I don’t even have a phone, why are you sending me a giant awkward book of outdated information that doesn’t even cover the whole city, let alone anywhere else?
Ground Control to Major Tom
“Getty Images steals public domain NASA image and will ‘license’ it to you for money,” re-twitters archival colleague Kate Theimer, pointing to this HiLobrow post:
. . . images gathered in the course of NASA missions belong to the American people; they’re born in the public domain, part of our cultural commons. On what basis does Getty claim the image?
Media Cyborgs
A must read for media junkies:
It’s not just people with, you know, gun-legs; it’s anybody who uses a cell phone or wears contact lenses. It’s anybody who brings a tool really close in order to augment some capability.
Aren’t there people who have brought media that close? Aren’t there people who manipulate it, in all its forms, as naturally as another person might make a phone call, or speak, or breathe?
When you think of someone like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, you can’t think only of their brains and bodies. Lady Gaga in a simple dress on a tiny stage in a no-name club in Des Moines is—simply put—not Lady Gaga. Kanye West in jeans at a Starbucks is not Kanye West.
To understand people like that—and, increasingly, to understand people like us (eep!)—you’ve got to look instead at the sum of their brains, their bodies, the media they create, and the media created by others about them. All together, it constitutes a sort of fuzzy cloud that’s much, much bigger than a person.
The Iraq War: Wikipedia Historiography
James Bridle, a fascinating London-based publishing maker/impresario, has produced a twelve-volume edition of every edit made to the Wikipedia entry on “The Iraq War” from December 2004 to November 2009.
Latest Issue of New York Tyrant–Recommended
This issue includes work by several flockers (yours truly included) and friends of the flock. Cooper Renner and Brandon Hobson are in this one, along with a number of people who have had things appear in elimae and in Derek White’s SleepingFish magazine.
I just got a copy yesterday and have had a great morning reading it. There is a fine interview included: Jacob White has a conversation with Padgett Powell. The questions and responses are splendid. Here’s a sample:
JW: Barthelme often mentioned Beckett as a “problem” for him as a writer, due to the power of Beckett’s style, which Barthelme felt he had to free himself from, or somehow get around. Of course Barthelme was himself a powerful stylist, and I wonder what you, as a student of his, might say to writers who find your own style similarly powerful and therefore similarly worrisome.
PP: It’s the worrisome I would address. I read as a child certain writers with worry (Faulkner) and without worry but with great frequency (or volume) (Mailer). I got to where I read an author until I had the score: his tricks, his obsessions, his game. As I matured I got better at this and when I had the score I got impatient more quickly than I earlier had and repudiated them more thoroughly. Thus what I think I am saying is I think loving a guy is all right because at a point it will effect an allergy and you will reject the affection (and any inclination to mimic overtly) and keep whatever was truly useful to you (which ideally will be some covert thing). All these cases are different: with Faulkner I thought if I read another book (beyond about five) I would actually succumb to him as I think you can argue Cormac M did, so I stopped, and then I developed the allergy, and today I can’t read him without impatience at the hokeyness of it. Mailer I read as a teenager wanting to be Mailer; easy to quit that. Tennessee Williams somewhat the same, but since he lost his mind and kept writing you can actually keep reading him and liking him as he goes crazy and his tricks consume him. Similar case is Hemingway: he nuts up so bad at the end that you can see all over how and why he was good when he was good. Walker Percy got consumed by his tricks very steadily and predictably and dully. O’Connor was constant except for the immature thesis work.
The only trouble I suffered in reading to steal was Barthelme, whom I came to very late and whom I did not (have not) read that much of. There was the matter of his personal influence on me that complicated the allergy-making and I became some kind of illegitimate son, I’m afraid. But this did not come from reading and liking the reading or not liking it.
All this boils down to this: read, like it, reread it, worship it, mimic it, believe in it, live by it, whatever you want to do, and then you will quit all that and write something you are not impatient with until you begin to develop a vision of your own tricks and develop an allergy to yourself, which is another chapter….
what are bookfuturists?
Tim Carmody over at The Atlantic:
Bookfuturists refuse to endorse either fantasy of “the end of the book” – “the end as destruction” or “the end as telos or achievement” as Jacques Derrida would have it. We are trying to map an alternative position that is both more self-critical and more engaged with how technological change is actively affecting our culture.
We’re usually more interested in figuring out a piece of technology than either denouncing or promoting it. And we want to make every piece of tech work better. We’re tinkerers. We look to history for analogies and counter-analogies, but we know that analogies aren’t destiny. We try to look for the technological sophistication of traditional humanism and the humanist possibilities of new tech.
I am hardly the prolific or intelligent writer that Tim is on the subject, but I count myself among the bookfuturists’ ranks.
against hypertext
Short story on this brilliant, little essay: hypertext has little, if nothing to do with interactivity.
Whence hypertext? The hypertext novel as we know it today, the click-to-see-more-screen-text kind of hypertext, is unquestionably a content-based structure. A writer creates all of the copy, plugs in the links, and then the reader tunnels through all of the nooks and crannies. There is a kind of authorial vanity in the hypertext scheme. The implicit presumption: that the reader will actually take the time to explore every link and ponder its meticulously choreographed significance.
The act of reading hypertext: click…click…click. Robbed of contingent, dynamic consequence, the token interactivity of the hypertext novel is a thin veil over the deathly rigid structure. Hypertext “choice” is not meaningful, as it is in a game of Go or Zork. Instead, each click reinforces the rigid authority of the author, any sense of play reduced to acquiescence. The hypertext form is nonlinear, yes, but stillborn.
Square Magazine Issue 2
I was lucky enough to get some of my images published in this great on-line magazine which is dedicated to the square photographic image.
the world’s thirstiest gerbil
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
– Molly Ringle, winner of the latest Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Rest in Peace, Ben Sonnenberg
Ben Sonnenberg, whose whims and myriad enthusiasms made Grand Street, the quarterly he founded in 1981, one of the most revered literary magazines of the postwar era, died Thursday in Manhattan. He was 73.
