1. Crowded room. 2. Colum McCann + gesturing fan.
Colum McCann is gone by now. At his Selected Shorts event at Symphony Space last night, the man swore that this was his last public appearance before he burrowed deep into an unsocial part of the world. So, bad news is you won’t be hearing that terrific Irish accent around town. Good news is he’s burrowing to write, and all parts of the world will benefit from more published Colum McCann.
R.I.P. HTMLGiant Unicorn 2008 – 2010
You might know Ryan Call from his role as guest curator of the “Watching Ice Melt” edition of the More Interesting Than a Lit Blog Fight? series on We Who Are About to Die. “Watching Ice Melt” rapidly surpassed such critics’ darlings as “Grass Growing” and “Leaky Faucet” to achieve cult status in the annals of indie lit blog history. As managing editor of HTMLGIANT, Ryan knows his way around an internet tussle.
Ryan and I, Melissa Broder–editor emeritus of We Who Are About to Die (WWAATD)–recently explored lit blog culture and lit blog comment culture through the dual lenses of obsession and revulsion. Knowing that our dialogue would end up on a lit blog somewhere (we wanted it to) (in spite of ourselves), we edited it no less than 30 times.
Here is what remains.
Melissa Broder: So. Are HTMLGIANT bloggers getting more booty than ever before?
Ryan Call: According to Google Analytics, no.
MB: What happened to the former mascot–the unicorn?
RC: When Gene Morgan redesigned the site, he asked Jimmy Chen to design a new 404 Page Not Found image. He sent back this really cute picture of a stuffed animal. A sloth or something. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I hope it makes everyone really happy. It’s just kidding about their mothers.
MB: I miss the unicorn. But I’m slowly warming to the sloth. It has soulful eyes. Soulful plastic eyes. Perhaps you are trying to lure a younger readership?
RC: We will do whatever it takes to get to the younger readers before the other lit blogs get to them.
MB: What advice would you give to children looking to get involved in the lit blog biz?
1. Book ladies! Marion Wyce, who is a contriutor to the Books section of TLR; Jena Salon, the Books editor; & Cassie Hay, also a contributor to the Books section. 2. Anna Utevsky, an editorial assistant for TLR, & Dominique Andrews, a food writer.
Over 30 of you entered succinct yet terrible weather accounts, making the Shya’s pick, in his words, “tough.”
WINNER: Jim Hanas! Weather: “All night, mysterious creaks of trees splitting. Everyone wakes, stunned, and walks through Memphis, now an icy southern star.”
Runners-up:
“Lightning struck the earth 20 yards from where I stood. It turned my eyelashes white, and my fingernails black.” adamthehousecat
“I was in a plane that dropped 100 feet suddenly. My drink lifted out of my cup, then fell right back in.” MAKARMUSIC
“I woke up one night during a flood to find my bed had made it outside and was out front of 7-11.” giganticanovel
“Stranded at the base of a mountain, snow knee deep, cooking on wood stove, melting snow for water. 3 kids under 6.” cassandraneace
Here we have Shya Scanlon’s debut novel, Forecast: “The year is 2212, the weather is out of control, and Seattle is being rebuilt with electricity generated from negative human emotion. In a strange and turbulent world fueled by secrecy and voyeurism, a bored housewife named Helen vanishes, and Citizen Surveillant Maxwell Point, the man whose job it’s been to watch her, must recount the years leading up to her disappearance.”
How about a FREE COPY? We’ve got one. Along with some sweet Tom Selleck postcards, all from Flatmancrooked. WIN THESE THINGS!
Ways to enter the contest: Write 140 characters about the worst weather you’ve ever weathered:
(1) On twitter, using #weather2212 hashtag
(2) In the comments section below
Winner to be announced by Friday, Dec. 10th.
Editor’s Note: Part 1 of this essay appears here.
Titled, with typical offhandedness, Working the Room, Geoff Dyer’s latest collection of non-fiction includes the same kind of miscellany as his first collection, Anglo-English Attitudes: essays on contemporary art and photography, literary journalism, meandering thoughts on jazz, sports and fashion, and a handful of singularly offbeat autobiographical musings.
Of these, the least engaging are the essays on art and photography, which betray the heavy influence of Dyer’s friend and mentor, John Berger. As skillful as they are, there is nothing as dampening to a reader’s interest as overhearing one writer speak in another writer’s voice. Anglo-English Attitudes contained an essay “Ecce Homo”, which juxtaposed a photograph of an exhausted prizefighter with a Bellini crucifixion, imitating Berger, who famously compared a foreshortened snapshot of the dead Che Guevara to Mantegna’s foreshortened Christ. Although there are no echoes in this volume as blatant as that, there are still a distressing number of borrowings from Berger’s bag of tricks here; Like Berger, Dyer is of fond of the baldly asked rhetorical question, the combination of the stridently political and the vaguely mystical, the habit of deflating the pronouncements of the Western imperium by quoting Third World poets, and the discovery in art of the remote past the outlines of our current predicament.
The French use the word flaneur to describe a certain kind of strolling writerly consciousness. A flaneur is an ambler and an idler—an observant loafer. “A Columbus of those near-at-hand,” is how Saul Bellow’s Augie March portrays himself, and this phrase perhaps explains the paradoxical focus of the typical flaneur project. Take Xavier de Maistre’s book -length essay Voyage Around My Room, which is just what sounds like: a sedentary stroll, a series of imaginative reflections inspired by the objects in his room (Two centuries later, Nicholson Baker would repeat de Maistre’s voyage on a microscopic level). Making the familiar strange, conjecture, free association, “this reminds me of the time when …,” and what Harold Rosenberg called “loitering in the neighborhood of a problem”– these are the techniques of the flaneur.
Friday saw the release of the 55th issue of Conjunctions, Bard College’s literary journal. With the release came a reading at Brooklyn’s Book Court. This new issue, entitled “Urban Arias,” focuses on the “bond between city dwellers and their metropolitan milieus” and “investigate(s) the very rich gamut of what constitutes one of the oldest experiments in human habitation.” The event was emceed by Brian Evenson, who is one of Conjunctions senior editors, as well as an “Urban Arias” contributor.
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1. CAMP. 2. Bookstores: Who Needs ‘Em
You’ve never seen so many iPhones in one place. At this afternoon’s Book Camp NY, “an Unconference to Discuss Books and Publishing,” name tags featured titles and twitter handles, and the #bcnyc hashtag was presented to the crowd along with the opening remarks. In one panel, an audience member went to the white board to make sure everyone knew the discussion leaders’ handles (in this instance Lauren Cerand and Richard Nash, a.k.a, @luxlotus and @r_nash, respectively). Instead of nodding heads, good points were indicated by the number of smartphones that emerged to tweet in agreement (caught redhanded, that’s me, @benasam, tweeting: http://twitpic.com/3cxuf3).
–Matt Mullins’ three-year old daughter just walked into the room wearing wire and nylon angel wings and told him to try harder. At what, she didn’t say. Matt lives in Muncie, Indiana, where he writes poetry, fiction, screenplays, makes experimental films, and builds interactive interfaces for his stories and poems. His writing has recently appeared in Pleiades, Hunger Mountain, Harpur Palate, Hobart, decomP, and kill author. He writes in what is essentially an attic with a single, cracked octagonal window through which he sees the world. He also reads too much into pointed yet ambiguous things said by children wearing wire and nylon angel wings. You can find pieces of him at mullmullingitover.blogspot.com.
–Michael Pounds holds degrees in composition from Ball State University, the University of Birmingham (England), and the University of Illinois. His awards include the ASCAP/SEAMUS Student Commission Award, a Residence Prize at the Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and I-Park. His music has been performed throughout the US and abroad. He was a co-host of the 2005 SEAMUS national conference. Michael is the Assistant Director of the Music Technology program at Ball State University.
My literary career is young but it’s never too early to begin packing gauze into the abscess of posterity. For the benefit of scholars and fans alike, I will use this space on The Outlet, on a semi-regular basis, to release a selection of my correspondence and other papers. Enjoy. (Universities interested in acquiring the complete Judson Merrill archive should contact me through my web site.)
Judson Merrill studied fiction at Iowa with Kurt Vonnegut. This is his first published story. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their daughter Bianca.
Judson Merrill’s work has also recently appeared in Rabbit Punch. He is enjoying having the last laugh over all the magazines that have rejected him over the years. Those editors who passed on his work are free to reconsider and contact him through his website. They should be warned, however, that he is a principled man and has trouble doing business with people who have betrayed him in the past.
Judson Merrill has attended writer’s conferences at Haystack, Breadloaf and several other summer retreats. He’s got great new stories available to the highest bidder.
It has been three long years since Judson Merrill’s debut in Rabbit Punch. He apologizes whole-heartedly to any magazines or editors he may have offended in previous bios. He totally wants to make it up to you. Please email him. Judson lives in Brooklyn with his wife, their daughter Bianca, and the crushing burden of Bianca’s outlandish kindergarten tuition.
Judson Merrill’s work has been considered by dozens of magazines, including the New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, and Ploughshares. He firmly believes his attendance at Breadloaf advanced him as a writer and was not a “flight of vanity” or a “senseless drain” on his family’s finances. Judson’s new memoir about breaking into the publishing world, Rabbit Season, is available through his website.