sometimes there is a mustache and sometimes it's just the room

Saturday 22 May 2010

Check out the newest Orange Alert Podcast, the Disco Edition, for my strange voice reading a story called "No Such Thing As a Wild Horse," which previously appeared in Juked under a different title. Other bands and readers in the podcast are Jungol, Kathryn Regina (winner of a Moby for best low budget book trailer!), and A Lull (their song is awesome), David Oprava, Rob Swift, Ben Segal (reading from his forthcoming chapbook 'Science Fiction Pornography' from Publishing Genius), YAWN, and CT Ballentine. Many thanks to Jason Behrends for having me.

"No Such Thing As a Wild Horse" features cardboard banditos, Nashville, and the word "rinkydink." It will appear in Look! Look! Feathers. The clever and chivalrous Bryan Coffelt has been working on a cover for LLF that features creepy, surprising toys. Stoked to show it off sometime soon. Until then: horses.

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thom jones VS tom jones

Thursday 13 May 2010

Tough call, I know. Perhaps you might be persuaded by a write-up I did for the American Short Fiction blog concerning Thom (with an H) Jones's brilliant story "I Want To Live!" Thanks to the chipper and awesome Stacy Muszynski for asking me to write for ASF about a story I like. Hey, it's Short Story Month! And who woulda thunk it: my friend Rachel B Glaser's story collection Pee On Water is right on time for pre-ordering. Here's where I end the post with a clever reference to a Tom Jones song.

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anti-seafood fiction

Monday 10 May 2010

Sometimes Barack Obama, huckleberries, rocket launchers, and neck melting all show up together. For me they have shown up together in a story about media and pretending called "The Ocean on Television," which you can read at the May issue of GIGANTIC. It's there among fine work from Leni Zumas, Luca DiPierro, Erik Morsink, and M. Callen, as well as a talk between Joe Wenderoth and Gibby Haynes.

Thanks to Sasha Fletcher,  Rozalia Jovanovic, and Lincoln Michel. The yeti to the right is made of aluminum. The yeti in my story is made of hair.

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i lost my voice at AWP and then kevin sampsell found Wilt Chamberlain's autobiography and we made videos and i was "blessed enough" to be given the opportunity to read the very beginning of the book

Saturday 8 May 2010

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clarification opportunity for those of you who have wondered if cars are fireflies

Friday 7 May 2010

I have two new poems at the La Fovea project, where new people are added by invitation of previous people, leading to this amazing nerve map of poets and poetry. Gracias to Daniel Bailey for inviting me and for inviting the rodeo woodchipping stunfest of Bryan Coffelt. One of my poems is dedicated to Daniel, and the other is for my favorite girl. If you are interested in how the world was invented one cliff swallow at a time, or in families of tiny arsonists, or in what happens when you chew the top off a lightbulb, I have written these poems to help you.

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no, the bridge lived under me

Thursday 6 May 2010

Back from the Chapbook Festival. Awesome time. Deep thanks to Ana Božičević for all her work. Met some lovely folks, peddled some handmade books. On the bus back, I read Charles Portis's Norwood. What a gut stun. Hilarious, sharp. Pre-cursor to the Coen brothers. Somebody once called Portis "Cormac McCarthy with a sense of humor" which isn't fair to Cormac McCarthy but which makes for a nice segue into this link to a sentence I wrote for Big Other about a sentence in McCarthy's majorfest Suttree. Want to read everything by Portis now. More thoughts soon.

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just cuz everybody's got a baby doesn't make it night

Saturday 1 May 2010

Shome Dasgupta has been putting together an excellent series at the blog The Laughing Yeti called "On Reading," in which writers offer pithy 'graphs of thoughts on reading/on why we read/how to read/what reading is/what it's good for/what's its goof score/etc. I contributed. My entry is up for May Day on The Laughing Yeti, and you should definitely visit the blog to read other thoughts from Roxane Gay, Caleb J. Ross, Stephen Elliot, Mel Bosworth, William Walsh, Jac Jemc, J.A. Tyler, Molly Gaudry, and soon more. Plus Shome uses {}'s in an interesting way. Here are my yellow thoughts on reading:

"Reading is over there in a here house. Reading is fruitful psychotic installation art. When I'm reading, I like to forget I'm reading, but I like to remember that I'm forgetting. It is most fun, for me, to imagine vocality as the genesis of language. Sure, semiotics, but there's a team in your brain that doesn't know the difference between the sentence "He walked into the room" and someone actually walking into a room. That team is driving. Also there are mirror neurons that make you wince when the quarterback goes down. Sometimes, if I don't like the chips I'm eating, I read the ad copy, and then they really do taste bolder, I swear. Like boulders. The ability to read is a privilege; the ability to read well is a sleep killer. If you just accidentally thought of dead sheep, you're my kind of reader. When I visit, I try to act kind--so goes the read act. No one ever wishes me good luck when I tell them I'm going to read, but I wish a lot of things I never tell, and I wonder about the wishing of others, which is why somebody put two eyes in the middle of the word look."

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