To start, we have two simmering, searing proclamations: In A Temple of Texts, William Gass quoted Arnold Bennett’s book, Literary Taste: …your taste has to pass before the bar of the classics. That is the point, if you differ with a classic, it is you who are wrong, and not the book. (6) In the [...]
Archive for March, 2011
Reader Rage, Henry James Hate
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged A Temple of Texts, Anger, Arnold Bennett, Bill, Canal Street, Charles-Adam Foster-Simard, Edith Wharton, Hate, Henry James, Henry James and the Joys of Binge Reading, How to Make Sense, Literary Taste, People who hate Henry James, Philip Larkin, Quoting Philip Larkin's poem "This be the Verse" without giving him credit, Rage, Rudolf Flesch, The Believer, The Millions, Virgina Woolf, Ward, William Faulkner, William Gass on March 31, 2011 | 17 Comments »
“Is Your Villain Appropriate?”—Examining Character Construction in Different Media
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Alice Krige, character, Charlie Chaplin, City Lights, Darth Vader, Don Quixote, F.W. Murnau, Hamlet, Humbert Humbert, Inception, Jacques Tati, John Gielgud, Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot, Lolita, Lost, Mad Men, Magic: The Gathering, Mark Rosewater, Phyrexian, Richard Burton, Salman Rushdie, Samuel Beckett, Sancho Panza, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Wars, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, The Borg, The Office, The Unnamable, The Wire, Vladimir Nabokov, William Gass on March 30, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Every Monday, I read Mark Rosewater’s weekly column “Making Magic,” partly because I have a casual interest in the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering (I once played it, and some of my friends still play it), but mainly because Rosewater routinely offers great insights into aesthetics and game design. (He’s also a strong writer [...]
Hey Small Press!
Posted in Uncategorized on March 30, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Hey Small Press! was founded in 2011 by current and former public library employees to promote independent publishers to public libraries. HSP! provides a curated monthly list of upcoming fiction and poetry releases from small presses all over the world for librarians and readers. With our list, librarians can find great books to order for [...]
Are Books a Kind of Architecture?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Jo Steffens, Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting, Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books, Walter Benjamin on March 29, 2011 | 12 Comments »
Kiarostami, Certified Copy, Kiarostamimania
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Abbas Kiarostami, ABC Africa, Certified Copy, Juliette Binoche, Ten, The Wind Will Carry Us, Under the Olive Trees, Variety, William Schimmel on March 29, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Hot Metal Bridge is Contesting
Posted in Uncategorized on March 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Seriously… What About this Book Gives Us the Impression It Has Anything to do With Boredom?????
Posted in Uncategorized on March 28, 2011 | 9 Comments »
In Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, film is not an escape from the boredom of small-town life. Or it is not SOLELY that. It is a mechanism for coping with patriarchal and heterosexist violence and trauma. I have been trying to prepare a more thorough post about my reaction(s) to the text and have unfortunately been [...]
Imagining an interview with Manuel Puig upon reading Betrayed By Rita Hayworth
Posted in Uncategorized on March 28, 2011 | 4 Comments »
– Manuel Puig, thank you for agreeing to talk to me. – – Of course. What I do want to talk about is your first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. – – It was your first novel?
I am not a camera
Posted in Uncategorized on March 28, 2011 | 4 Comments »
I hate having my photograph taken. If I am in a group I am not one of those who pushes their way to the front. If I am in bar, I usually raise my glass towards the camera. The appearance is of saluting the photographer, the intent is to (at least partially) obscure my face. [...]
Experimental Thread #3
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged animated gifs on March 28, 2011 | 4 Comments »
I’ll Leave My Heart at the Last Bookstore
Posted in Uncategorized on March 25, 2011 | 8 Comments »
This article in the Millions got me thinking about not just Borders’ closing stores all over the country, but Barnes and Noble searching for and not finding a buyer, and all the wonderful independent bookstores closing their doors for good. Anyone who sells physical books is in trouble these days. We all know that. Yet [...]
Between Page and Screen
Posted in Uncategorized on March 25, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Wowsers and sainted oily fish, this project fills me with excitement: A digitally-augmented chapbook, printed with barcode-like images readable by a computer’s camera that trigger text animations on the screen. I want one! I would love to see this in novels and textbooks, too: extra info or supporting bits of narrative available when you scan [...]
Madeline P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize: April 1 postmark deadline. Win $10K, first book publication, residency. No fee!
Posted in Uncategorized on March 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Each spring, Lake Forest College, in conjunction with the &NOW Festival, sponsors emerging writers under forty years old—with no major book publication—to spend two months in residence at our campus in Chicago’s northern suburbs on the shore of Lake Michigan. There are no formal teaching duties attached to the residency. Time is to be spent [...]
For Your Consideration, Part II
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Fiction and the Figures of Life, The Medium of Fiction, William Gass on March 24, 2011 | 5 Comments »
From the essay “The Medium of Fiction” The purpose of a literary work is the capture of consciousness, and the consequent creation, in you, of an imagined sensibility, so that while you read you are the patient pool or cataract of concepts which the author has constructed; and though at first it might seem as [...]
I’ve got a composition primer for you!
Posted in Uncategorized on March 22, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Three years ago the final issue of Todd Hignite’s COMIC ART Magazine, was published and shrink-wrapped along with it was a little book called Cartooning:Philosophy and Practice, by the venerable Ivan Brunetti. This book, a result of Brunetti’s own destruction and rebuilding of his life’s work and working method, is a deconstructive masterpiece of a [...]
You Can Judge This Book by Its Cover: Trees of the Twentieth Century by Stephen Sturgeon
Posted in Uncategorized on March 21, 2011 | 5 Comments »
I confess: I bought Stephen Sturgeon’s debut poetry collection, Trees of the Twentieth Century, published by Dark Sky Press – entirely because of the cover. The design, by Boo Gilder and Adrienne Antonson, is sleek and modern and well, entirely to my liking. And it just so happens that with books, and especially with poetry, [...]
Every tour needs groupies. Be one and get pictures of sexual diseases.
Posted in Uncategorized on March 21, 2011 | 87 Comments »
This is a guest post by Caleb J Ross as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. His goal is to post at a different blog every few days beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to [...]
Contemporary Verse Novels: Robert Walser’s SPEAKING TO THE ROSE and Harry Mathews’s 20 LINES A DAY
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 20 lines a day, China, Cigarettes, Contemporary Verse Novels, Dream, flash fiction, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, Marie Chaix, Prose Poems, Prose Poetry, Robert Walser, Speaking to the Rose, The Economist on March 19, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Contemporary Verse Novels continued . . . Okay, so, this is important (and many thanks to A. D. Jameson for pointing this out in my previous post’s comments): A book should probably not be called a Contemporary Verse Novel if it is not written in verse, which is to say, if it is neither lineated [...]
An Interview with Yuriy Tarnawsky, Part 2
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 6x0, Afternoons in Poughkeepsie (Popoludni v Pokipsi), An Idealized Biography (Idealizovana biohrafija), André Breton, Apollonian, Artificial Intelligence, Blood of a Poet, Bourbaki, César Vallejo, computers, Dionysian, dreams, Eero Saarinen, electrical engineering, Eugene Jolas, FC2, Federico García Lorca, Fiction Collective, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Georges Perec, I Don't Know (Ne znaju), IBM, Jacques Roubeau, Jean Cocteau, Life in the City, Life: A User’s Manual, linguistics, machine translation, Marcel Benabou, Memories (Spomyny), Meningitis, morphology, New York University, Nikolai Gogol, Orphée, Oulipo, Pablo Neruda, Poems About Nothing and Other Poems on the Same Subject (Poeziji pro nishcho i inshi poeziji na cju samu temu), Rafael Alberti, Roads (Shljaxy), Ron Sukenick, running, Russian, Salvador Dalí, Suchasnist Publishers, Surrealism, syntax, The Possessed (Besy), They Don't Exist (Jix nemaje), This Is How I Get Well (Oto jak zdrowjeje), Three Blondes and Death, U ra na, Ukraine, Vicente Aleixandre, Vicente Huidobro, Without Anything (Bez nichoho), Yuriy Tarnawsky on March 19, 2011 | 11 Comments »
Part 1 Let’s back up a bit. When did you move to the US? I came to this country in 1952, having left Germany at age 17. My 18th birthday I celebrated on the boat a week before landing in New York. I had just graduated from High School. This was in February, and in [...]
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John Madera
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John Dermot Woods
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Ryan W. Bradley
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Michael Leong
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Greg Gerke
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A D Jameson
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Tim Jones-Yelvington
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Rachel Swirsky
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Edward Mullany
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Aya Karpinska
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Paul Kincaid
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davis schneiderman
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Amber Sparks
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Tim Horvath
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John Domini
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Elaine Castillo
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Curtis White
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Paula Bomer
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Andrew Taggart
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James Tadd Adcox
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Nick Francis Potter
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Brian Kubarycz
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Gabriel Blackwell
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Janey Smith
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Matty Byloos
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J/J Hastain
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Greg Hunter
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