mostly I liked the whistlers, singers, and shriekers: the ones that screamed

I have a new story up at Tin House for their Flash Fridays series. It is called "Red-Faced Whistler, Emerald Tower, Rabid Wolfpack Motherload" and starts:

I always cared about the explosions, but mostly I liked the whistlers, singers, and shriekers: the ones that screamed. Billy Acres and I bought a backpack-full from a fold-up table beneath the overpass. The old hippie had smuggled them up from South Carolina beneath a load of tie-dyed shirts. He said we had to buy a shirt to get the rockets and that there wasn’t a holiday that wasn’t improved with fire. I picked out one with a peace sign and he handed me a free box of snappers.

Check it out if you'd like!

reading about reading

Ryan Chang has a very nice write-up of the recent Volume 1 reading I was a part of at Electric Literature's Outlet blog. The readers were Matt Bell, Melissa Broder, Julia Jackson, Jacob Silverman, and myself. Is it totally gauche to quote part of the write-up? Because I love this quote: "Michel’s marriage of the deadpan and totally absurd is a perfect iteration of the Uncanny, and it rules."

Deadpan, absurd and uncanny is pretty much what I'm going for! Anyway, thanks to Ryan, Tobias and Jason at Volume 1, and the rest of the readers.

Adorkocalypse

            There had been a subatomic explosion in the Zooey Deschanel containment unit.

            I awoke, somehow, in a charred field. Gaseous clouds in the shape of Zooey Deschanel hovered overhead.

            My assistant was covered in blood beside me. When I rolled her over, what was left of her looked exactly like Zooey Deschanel. I wept and held this Zooey Deschanel in my arms as she expired. “My God,” I tried to say, “what have we done?” but the only words left in the world were “Zooey Deschanel.” Suddenly I could see everything—each thin blade of Zooey Deschanel blowing in the wind, each newborn Zooey Deschanel hatching into the world, every single Zooey Deschanel atom bouncing in her impossible orbit.

            Had the reaction altered the fundamental structure of the universe? Or had it merely torn the thin veil that seperated the visible world from the true, hidden world of Zooey Deschanel? The horrifying sounds of infinite Zooey Deschanels overwhelmed me. I grabbed the sharpest fragment of Zooey Deschanel I could find and slid her across my wrist, a beautiful red ribbon of Zooey Deschanel spurting forth.

            But just then, at the top of the hill, beneath the painful rays of the gigantic burning Zooey Deschanel in the sky, the dark, ominous figure of Justin Bieber appeared. 

Molten Mechanistic Hull by any other name

For no reason at all, here are my ten favorite anagrams of my (full) name:

Molten Mechanistic Hull

Ill Tom: Unethical Mensch 

Nonathletic Mulch Slime

Hmm, It Echos 'Till Unclean...

Chill Unethical Moments 

Hellish Laconic Mutt Men!

Lethal Omniscient Mulch

Macho Lunchtime Lentils 

The Technician Lulls Mom

A Chill, Luminescent Moth 

 My novel title is in there somewhere...

(runners up: Cinchilla, Unsettle Mom! / Metallic Lunchtime Nosh / Neolithic Helmsman Cult / Miniscule Hellcat Month)

Writing for the gladiators....

Think about those who haven’t long to live, who know that everything is over and done with, except the time in which the thought of their end unrolls. Deal with that time. Write for the gladiators. . . .

– E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

*

I've always loved this aphorism from the great pessimistic existential philosopher E. M. Cioran. There was even a brief time when I flirted with inking it into my skin before my friends' literary tattoo book came out. Writers are normally told to write for themselves, that the only thing that matters is that the work works for you. This is not true. Even when you are writing for yourself, you are conscious of the weight of the other's eyes. How will it sound to someone else who is not trapped in your head?

recent things, past things, future things

Recent things:

- "The Grandmaster Hoax" at The Paris Review Daily (an essay on chess, robots, and mysterious deaths)
- "Twosome" in NOON 2012 (a short story in one of my absolute favorite journals...not available online, but the issue should be in stores now)
- "A Note on the Type" in elimae (a short story about typefaces, jealousy, and intrigue)
- Art of the Sentence: Lincoln Michel in Tin House (a short essay on my favorite sentences by Franz Kafka)

Past things:

I've finally gotten around to creating a page to list (most) of my publications. I say most because I left off some of my early poems and stories that will hopefully be lost to history, and only listed select non-fiction pubs. Otherwise if, for some bizarre reason, you want to peruse my old stories and such you can.

Future things: 

Fiction forthcoming in Unsaid, The Fiddleback, and an anthology of presidential flash fiction. Some essays in the work as well as a killer comic collab with John Dermot Woods. More on those things at some future point.

uncanny mechanics

Over at The Paris Review Daily, I wrote about the 18th-century chess playing automaton known as The Turk:

The Turk became a spectacular attraction, thrilling, baffling, and terrifying viewers across Europe and America for decades. His victims included Benjamin Franklin, Catherine the Great, and Napoleon. In one account of that match, Napoleon, in perhaps telling fashion, moved first—despite the fact that the Turk was playing white—and then attempted illegal move after illegal move until the Turk, fed up with these shenanigans, swiped the pieces off the board with a stiff wooden arm.


Check it out!