Post-Apocalyptic Grammy Awards

Another successful Grammy Awards went off without a hitch tonight. Here's a sneak peak at what future Grammy Awards might hold.

Grammys, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, Thom Yorke, Bjork

...

A chicken stuffed in a duck inside a turkey inside an ostrich inside an edible wax model dodo inside a fossilized pterodactyl hidden inside a statue of Horus in a secret room in the Temple of Edfu.

Comic #4: Bad Date

My fourth comic. This one is big, so it is all after the break. (Previous comics: #3, #2, #1.)

RIP Dorothea Tanning

Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning (1948)

"Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now."

-Dorothea Tanning

Dorothea Tanning, the oldest living Surrealist at the age of 101, passed away the other day. She published her first novel and books of poems in her 90s. She was married to Max Ernst from 1946 to his death in 1976. She spent the last few decades of her long life in New York.

She ruled.

A few of her works:

Ancient humor, dead animals, and Mitch Hedberg

Doing the normal internet procrastination rabbit hole thing, I came across an old article on ancient jokes. Apparently this is the oldest known joke (Sumerian, 1900 BC – 1600 BC):

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap

However, the one that caught my eye was from the Philogelos (oldest known joke book) 4th/5th century AD:

Wishing to teach his donkey not to eat, a pedant did not offer him any food. When the donkey died of hunger, he said "I've had a great loss. Just when he had learned not to eat, he died."

I think this is a pretty wicked little one-liner. The black humor and brevity even feels pretty modern. In fact, it instantly reminded me of one of my favorite jokes from one-liner king Mitch Hedberg (1968-2005).

I bought myself a parrot, but it did not say "I'm hungry", and so it died.

"the weird guy in the bear suit"

Great New York Times correction yesterday on an article about one of my favorite movies, The Shining:

Correction: January 29, 2012
 
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described imagery from “The Shining.” The gentleman seen with the weird guy in the bear suit is wearing a tuxedo, but not a top hat.

For Virginia Woolf's birthday

Some quotes:

"Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title."

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”

“I am rooted, but I flow.”

"It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses."

Renaissance Quiz (comic attempt #3)

This is based on some dumb tweet of mine from December. (Previous comics here, here, and here.)

pre-order me, baby

You can now pre-order Unsaid Six, which includes a story of mine called "Selections from a Sexual Survey." The new volume looks positively epic, featuring work from Brian Evenson, Diane Williams, Lorin Stein, Padgett Powell and many more. Very excited to be included.

In addition, I have two poems in the new PANK print issue, which should be shipping around now, as well as a story in the new NOON, which will be out in a few months. Great way to start 2k12.

Livin' Like a Bug Ain't Easy

I would easily listen to this Kafka rock opera record if it really existed. "Livin' Like a Bug Ain't Easy" (starting 1:14) is such a tear-jerker!



Living like a bug ain't easy
My old clothes don't seem to fit me
I got little tiny bug feet
I don't really know what bugs eat
Don't want no one stepping on me
Now I'm sympathizing with fleas
Living like a bug ain't easy

(This Japanese animated adaptation of "A Country Doctor" is great too.)

dripping dark so dense

When I was in middle school, I started listening to punk and hardcore. Easily the most important band for me at that age, and in high school, was the Dead Kennedys. The twisted collage art, the dark humor, Biafra's weird vocals, the surreal satire. An inordinate amount of my aesthetic can probably be traced back to this song in particular:

Now, I am become blog-Death, destroyer of words

I just deleted all of my 2005 blog posts and most of my 2006 ones. I'll probably thin out the early years more too. Google+ deleted all of my old images last year and it is too much work to replace them. Don't worry, there was nothing juicy deleted. It was mostly just links to random things. (Maybe I'm lying but now you'll never know!)

Anyone notice Ben Roethlisberger is a Dick Tracy villain?

Pirates and friendship

It's funny that pirates were always going around searching for treasure, and they never realized that the real treasure was the fond memories they were creating.

- Jack Handey

Comic attempt #2

Here is my second attempt at a comic strip (or third really, but the other needs some revision). Check out the first comic here. This one may be a little obvious with its meaning, but I think the message is an important one in these trying economic times.

ever-shifting and contradicting blobs of absurdity

The Collagist interviewed me today about about my story "Hike" that they published last October. Mostly we talked about forests and cramming dreadfulness into fiction.

I’ve always thought that escalation is essential in fiction, so I am glad you think it builds to something. Or maybe what I mean is acceleration. I like the effect of tumbling down the slope of the story, picking of speed, getting dirt on your clothes, and nicking your skin on exposed rocks, until you crash into whatever lies at the bottom. It doesn’t have to be something violent, of course. Perhaps you tumble out into a field of dandelions. 

Boring personal reading habits 2k11

Below are all of the 70 books that I completed in 2011. Only the books I finished, not all the ones I started or read most of. 70 is a pretty healthy number, except when I filter out the graphic novels and comic collections, I only completed 26 prose books. This is not to say that prose books are superior to graphic novels or anything like that (I read so many because I'm collaborating on one with the artist and writer John Dermot Woods) but I have to acknowledge that graphic novels take me almost no time to read. The shortest ones on my list were probably completed in twenty minutes and the longest ones were still likely quicker reads than the shortest novellas. So, I'm going to break things into two lists.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents

Although I get annoyed by people who blog/tweet/facebook about the food they cook, I wanted to share with you the fact that when I cracked open my egg this morning there was a grotesque, half-formed second egg inside of it!

ovum in ovo

I've decided to quit writing...

...for a career drawing body horror comic strips. Here is my first attempt at one:

the little boy that lives inside my mouth

I was asked by Vol. 1 Brooklyn to write about my favorite Stephen King adaptation and obviously picked The Shining. I wrote a few hundred words about Kubrick's use of Freud's concept of "The Uncanny" as well as his mastery of "terror" over "horror."

The creepiest and most haunting parts of The Shining are moments of pure Radcliffian “terror,” filled with ambiguity and tension. Danny flinching his finger and squeaking in the voice of Tony, “the little boy that lives inside my mouth.” Jack staring eerily into the model hedge maze and seeing, somehow, his wife and child. The ghost butler telling Jack in a slow and deliberate voice, “I corrected them, sir, and when my wife tried to prevent me from doing my duty, I corrected her.” And the final ambiguous shot of the film, a slow zoom into the image of Jack Torrance smiling in a photograph that was taken decades before he was born.

The ten greatest Stephen King adaptations

status of the year's statuses

According to some random application, the above represent the frequency of words in my Facebook status updates for 2k11. I suspect this is more of a random picking of words than a true weighted representation. I doubt I used the word "buffoon" as often as "the." Either way, the words I immediately see--crotchety, crushing, uncaring, existence, despair, surreal, etc.--speak for themselves.

When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you very much.

- Eric Cantona's entire press conference after jump kicking a fan

Game narratives

HTMLGIANT has, for a little while now, run a magazine club. Members read a lit mag together and discuss the various themes, stories, design, etc. I think this is a great idea. Far too often lit mags feel disposable. You can pick them up, read a few stories or poems you want to read, and ignore the rest. But the best magazines work more like books. They need to be read in their entirety. I think here of magazines like NOON or McSweeney's (and, hopefully, Gigantic).

The most recent lit mag club has been examining Beecher's #1. In addition to being an extremely beautifully (and minimally) designed magazine, and a brilliantly edited magazine, Beecher's includes a few stories of mine as well as stories by several close friends of mine like John Dermot Woods, Rozalia Jovanovic, Joshua Cohen, and James Yeh. The latest lit mag club entry, by Daniel B. Cecil, talks about interactive/game narratives and has some very nice comments about one of my stories:

Second person narration is used throughout the journal to back the reader into a corner as well. In Lincoln Michel’s “A Question of Commitment,” you are asked as a participant to imagine both a lover and murderer in the same story. The murder, however, isn’t clear, and that uncertainty, paired with the second person narration that draws you into the story, begs you to imagine two terrible possibilities. It is a horrifying take on the “choose your own adventure stories” we’re so familiar with from our childhood.

Anyway, check out lit mag club and check out Beecher's!

Some people have a way with words, and other people, uh... not have way.

— Steve Martin

PANK it, PANK it real good

You can order PANK #6 now, which includes two pieces from me (a poem and a prose poem) as well as work from John Warner, Sherman Alexie, Christopher Newgent, and others.

I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.

- Flannery O'Connor

stream of consciousness search engine optimization

I am not getting enough hits on this blog, so let me tell you about how Kris Humphries was attacked at occupy wall street by zombie corpse of Steve Jobs walking dead with Gaddafi and reciting 10 ways to get hot body this winter while Zooey Deschanel used people's microphone to give student loan reduction tips to Greek debt crises where economy collapsing like Rick Perry presidential campaign but with less drunk speeches, possibly high quality Breaking Bad methamphetamine, and Herman Cain delivered "artisinal" pizza to police brutality seeking wall street bankers short selling stocks of free pornography, iPhone 5 prototypes, fall fashion trends for Williamsburg singles, Groupon grey poupon coupons, organic gluten free vegan locavore head cheese home recipes, The-Dream new single wifi download hipsteraes a;dkfjdskf;jadsjfkad;skfjask;kjfads

There are ten thousand superfluous heads at work in the world. It's clear, clear as day. The generations of men are losing the joy of life with all their treatises and understandings and knowledge...I like running down stairs. What a lot of talk!

- Robert Walser

A NYC-area Halloween message from Dracula

I have a grave message for everybloody going out tonight. There is a spooky storm outside that will send shivers up your spine and make your cheeks turn blood red! Unless you are as hairy as my pal the wolfman, wrap yourself up as tight as my other friend, the mummy. Put on your BOO-ties before venturing through the cold, slimy sludge of the streets. If you don't, you may end up shivering and moaning like an undead ghoul! If you think my warning is chilling, go outside without a scarf. Your exposed neck may notice a real BITE to the air. MUH HA HA HA HA!

the usual

‎...intoxication, sexual license, absorption by the primal horde, in short, dissolution of the individual (occasionally, actual dismemberment) and re-immersion into a common organic whole.

- disembodied Wikipedia quote.

Triple Threat

I have a poem out in the newest issue of Harpur Palate, which also has work from Sherman Alexie, Tim Jones-Yelvington, and many others. The poem is titled "Drift Ice in the Foreground." Haven't seen a copy yet, but the line-up looks great!

Along with new stories in BOMB and The Collagist, that is three new pieces for me in October.

GIGANTIC BODIES

We have a new online issue up at Gigantic. The issue features new prose from Brian Kubarycz, Dan Bevacqua, Lynne Tillman, Lena Bartone, James McGirk, Matt Dennison, Daniel Borzutzky, Mitchell S. Jackson, and Anelise Chen; a conversation between Gary Lutz, Mary Caponegro, and Tim Horvath; and gorgeous artwork from Maria Kondratiev. Check it out, if you'd like.

October Twofer

The October issue of the always fantastic The Collagist is up and I'm very happy to say I have a new story titled "Hike" in it. The issue also has work from friends Blake Butler and Kate Lorenz, as well as plenty of other rad things.

My story in there pairs nicely, I think, with my short story in BOMB magazine that went up one day before.

Filling Pools at BOMB

Very excited to so say that I have a short story called "Filling Pools" up at BOMB Magazine. It is the second installment of their Page Break series "showcasing original works of fiction by emerging literary talents."

Opening lines:

People say I have a baby face. You can look at me and pretend I’m drowning; I do this watery thing with my eyes. How you work the face is important in this line of work.

.

‎"Reality is not always probable, or likely."
- Jorge Luis Borges

b/w

‎"Let us not mince words: the marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful."
- André Breton

Stanky old wizard eyes

This clip is the best explanation of my vision problem that I've seen.

Wu-Tang Somerset Maugham

File this under Amazon mishaps. I stumbled upon this Amazon page for W. Somerset Maugham which describes him as "the third studio album by the American hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan, released November 21, 2000 on Loud/Columbia Records."

Screenshot in case they fix it:

Harry Potter via Raymond Carver

Last night I was asked to read a two-minute "fan fiction" piece. Here it is:

Populus Mechanicus

Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the giant ogre-high window that faced the back of Hogwarts. Centaurs slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.

Voldemort was in the bedroom pushing dark robes into a suitcase when Harry came to the door.

I’m glad you’re leaving! I’m glad you’re leaving! Harry said. Do you hear?

Voldemort kept on putting his things into the suitcase.

Son of a bitch! I’m so glad you’re leaving! Harry began to cry. You can’t even look me in the face, can you?

Existentialist Goose

Another Animals in Midlife Crises from John and me.

Battleship the board game: the sci-fi film

I saw the first Battleship (the film!) trailer and it is predictably awful. It reminded me though that I had the idea to make an awful Battleship adaptation over two years ago!

Some Possible Sequels to Classic Novels

2 Naked 2 Dead
2 Savage 2 Detective
2 Moby 2 Dick
2 Wise 2 Blood
2 Pale 2 Fire
2 Wuthering 2 High
2 Crime 2 Punishment
2 Huck 2 Finn
2 Grape 2 Wrath
Nausea 2: Electric Boogaloo

The final countdown

New Animals in Midlife Crises strip up at The Rumpus. It is about lionesses and likely one of the final strips we do, at least for a while. So... check it out!

Summer Bummer Specials

Menu at a local taco joint. My friend's menu said Summer Special so this wasn't intentional.

So Google+, in a massive design flaw, has deleted every single photo I've ever uploaded to this blog. If you were curious about the many empty white squares now filling up this blog, there you go.

Will add some back slowly...

Boring personal reading habits 2k11 (halfway point edition)

A list of all the books that I've completed so far in 2k11. I've already read more books in the first half of 2011 than I read in all of 2010 (which was a real down year for me in this regard). However, I have to admit that much of my total comes from speeding through a lot of graphic novels and comic books during a two or three week period in June. This was research for a comic series John Woods and I will be working on soon.

These are only the books that I've finished. There are many others that I've started (2666, The Hundred Brothers, NOON 2011, etc.) that I will hopefully complete before the year is out. I've only re-read one book so far this year (the Carver). Favorites so far:

Taking Care by Joy Williams, Wilson by Daniel Clowes and Hunger by Knut Hamsun.

Full list:

1. Wilson – Daniel Clowes
2. The Death of Doctor Island – Gene Wolfe
3. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – Raymond Carver*
4. The Mezzanine – Nicholson Baker
5. Great Expectations – Kathy Acker
6. The Clouds Above – Jordan Crane
7. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
8. Werewolves of Montpellier – Jason
9. The Shadow over Innsmouth – H. P. Lovecraft
10. Illustrated Three-Line Novels – Joanna Neborsky
11. Baby Leg – Brian Evenson
12. The Late American Novel – Jeff Martin and C. Max McGee
13. The Baltimore Atrocities – John Dermot Woods (manuscript draft)
14. Stories V! – Scott McClanahan
15. Visitation – Jenny Erpenbeck
16. Us – Michael Kimball
17. The Sisters Brothers – Patrick deWitt
18. Antwerp – Roberto Bolano
19. 1963 – Alan Moore
20. Supreme: The Story of the Year – Alan Moore
21. Supreme: The Return – Alan Moore
22. The Killing Joke – Alan Moore
23. Ultimate Fantastic Four HC Vol. 1 
24. Ultimate Fantastic Four HC Vol. 2 
25. Ultimate Fantastic Four HC Vol. 3 
26. Ultimate Fantastic Four HC Vol. 4
27. Ultimate Fantastic Four HC Vol. 5
28. Love and Rockets New Stories No. 3 – The Hernandez Brothers
29. Understanding Comics – Scott McCloud
30. World War Hulk
31. Ultimate Iron Man – Orson Scott Card
32. Silver Surfer: Parable – Moebius and Stan Lee
33. Bottomless Belly Button – Dash Shaw
34. Taking Care – Joy Williams

Take a dip

I'm happy to say that I have a new dialogue story up at Hobart this month, Little Girls by the Side of the Pool by Lincoln Michel. Here is how it starts:

“Did you see what Suzy did when her father tossed her into the air?”

“No, I was looking at Jimmy.”

“She screamed. She screamed like a little piglet right until she hit the water.”

“My father is really good at tossing me into the water.”

“Yes, my father can toss me so high that I get afraid I'll never come down.”

“My father once threw me like ten feet out of the water and I did two cartwheels in the air before splashing.”

“My father once tossed me so high into the air that I was at eye level with the top of a tall tree and in that tree was a bird and that bird unfurled its wings and looked at me in a loving way, like a sister.”

The Joy Williams Commute

My new commute lasts exactly two Joy Williams stories no matter which combination of trains I take.

Animals in Midlife Crises (dot com)

Animals in Midlife Crises, the comic strip by John Dermot Woods and me that is published regularly on The Rumpus has a second home now at animalsinmidlifecrises.com. The only difference is that the comic runs vertically on The Rumpus and horizontally at Animals in Midlife Crises. You can read one or both sites based on your orientation preference.

Escaped Furries Beaten and Tranquilized in Chinese Zoo Uprising

Facing a shortage of exotic animals for the ever-growing zoo-industrial complex, the Chinese government has begun caging humans in amusing anthropomorphic costumes. The costume seams are held together with a form of bamboo-derived industrial glue to prevent wardrobe malfunctions. However, these caged and costumed attractions, being slightly more intelligent than the animals they play, have begun figuring out how to escape their cages. Two such incidents involving a "tiger" and an "orangutan" occurred recently in the Sichuan province to the great disturbance of the children and women present. Luckily, the escaped faux-animals were quickly subdued and returned to their enclosures before they could do physical harm to any of the zoo-going public who had, after all, paid their admission in full.

Explosive

The new issue of Tin House is here and looks fantastic, as usual. It includes new fiction from Gary Lutz and Jodi Angel, interviews with Ann Patchett and Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and more. It also includes, I'm very happy to say, an essay by me on Herbert Read's enigmatic only novel The Green Child. My essay isn't included online, so you'll have to check out the print issue if you want to read it.

Coming Straight Outta Kansas

Beecher's Magazine, put out by the University of Kansas and edited by the fantastic Chloé Cooper Jones, has just released their first issue. I'm very pleased to say that Beecher's One includes two short stories of mine as well as work by great writers like Joshua Cohen, Rozalia Jovanovic, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, James Yeh, Alec Niedenthal and John Dermot Woods. You can check it out here.

Sunday Style!

We took a break last week at Animals in Midlife Crises, but this week we are back with a full-color Sunday style strip. Click on the hermit crab above to read it.

Greatest moment in American cinema?

- Harpo's tattoo barks at Groucho in Duck Soup

--

Harold Bloom once composed a short list of what he called the twentieth-century American Sublime. It included Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, the story of Byron the light bulb in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, songs by Bud Powell and Charlie Parker, and, amongst a few others, the war scene that concludes Duck Soup.

I've always loved how Bloom is willing to pick very narrow and specific passages or segments of longer works in this list. Increasingly I find that art grabs me in these little moments. This is not always true, of course. A work like Blood Meridian overpowers with its totality. But often it is brief bits of brilliance in a work that I return to again and again. (At our old Gigantic blog, we explained our magazine's aesthetic in such fragments... although here I see I broke even Blood Meridian down and singled out Judge Holden's dialogue.)

But back to Duck Soup and The Marx Brothers. The war segment is indeed sublime, but my favorite moment is even briefer and even more surreal. From 0:33 to 0:47 in the following clip:

GIGANTIC GIGANTIC GIGANTIC

Gigantic print issue #3 is hot off the presses and here just in time for the big Gigantic launch party on Friday.

Party will take place at 285 Kent in Williamsburg and go all night long. We've got rad readers, an indie arcade installation from Babycastles, music from NewVillager, cheap booze, and late night DJing by Frank Gilbert Lyon II, James Yeh, and Me.

You should really come!

"Hopefully you aren't in the hospital with a horrible brain injury from biking"

"Hopefully you aren't in the hospital with a horrible brain injury from biking."

- voicemail from my mother

Forthcoming

Essay in Tin House

Story in NOON

Story in Unsaid

Story in Indiana Review

Story in Hobart online

Stories in Beecher's Magazine

Poems in PANK

Weekly Animals in Midlife Crises comic strips at The Rumpus

Plus Gigantic issue three: Gigantic Indoors

Collect 'em all

Animals in Midlife Crises

More to come...