Heart Hammer

2006-11-20T19:51:00.000-08:00

I suspect it's clear to anyone who has popped by over the past few weeks that the lights have gone out here.

Which is to say "click".

And good night.

2006-10-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

If you have a moment, pay a visit to the Tarpaulin Sky web page for Danielle Dutton's forthcoming book, Attempts at a Life. The book is terrific, one of two Dutton has coming out in the near future (the other, Sprawl, from Clear Cut).

Also, Sandy Florian's excellent Telescope is almost out (or is out??) from Action Books. For more info on it go here.

2006-10-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

Brian Evenson's The Open Curtain is out from Coffee House. Awfully nice to be in his company this season. There is a fine review of it here.

2006-10-10T16:39:00.000-07:00

Jim Ruland, in The Voice, on The Ex...

2006-10-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

going dark here for a while...

2006-10-05T22:23:00.000-07:00

Too true?

"...life is short, reading is long, and literature is in the process of killing itself off through an insane proliferation."

Milan Kundera (in the October 9th issue of the New Yorker).

2006-10-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

Time Out NYC and Seattle's The Stranger generously accord The Ex some column inches.

And:

Duncan Barlow's cat, Monkey, approves of the book too.

2006-10-04T22:21:00.000-07:00

Dead Souls meets the Yellow River:

CHENJIAYUAN, China — For many Chinese, an ancestor is someone to honor, but also someone whose needs must be maintained. Families burn offerings of fake money or paper models of luxury cars in case an ancestor might need pocket change or a stylish ride in the netherworld.

But here in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple.

“They happen pretty often, especially when teenagers or younger people die,” said Yang Husheng, 48, a traveling funeral director in the region who said he last attended such a funeral in the spring. “It’s quite common. I’ve been in the business for seven or eight years, and I’ve seen all sorts of things.”

The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants — or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one.

Continued here (requires times select).

2006-10-02T21:59:00.000-07:00

Dennis Cooper on Maurice Blanchot:

"His novels are not really novels, his stories barely stories. His prose is very French in that it can be almost mathematical, yet it simultaneously evokes the most intense feelings of loss, misunderstanding, joy, and death."

2006-09-27T20:38:00.000-07:00

David Gutowski's largehearted boy has The Ex up in its Book Notes section this week. If anyone out there reading this has read the book, and liked the Tulip character, but wished there was more of her, there are some tidbits on her in what I did for this.

2006-09-26T19:52:00.000-07:00

One of the best things I've read in ages is Joanna Howard's In the Colorless Round, a chapbook of short-shorts with illustrations by Rikki Ducornet. It's an amazing thing, sort of baffles description. I kept thinking Jean Follain as I read it -- strange, quiet, haunting -- but also not Jean Follain at all. I've long held that the chapbook is the perfect length for collections of poetry, and I rather think that this may also be true for prose (that said, ahem, in an age of endless big fat books). At any rate, it's something to stalk and get hold of -- it's really marvelous.

2006-09-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

Bud Parr, my new hero (very nice, very smart, plus he's a fellow father), has put up this fabulous little movie inspired by The Exquisite, on his fab blog.

2006-09-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

You know you're really on your way when...

"nyc.freecityevents.com
Free Events in New York City
All Events > Event Locations > Manhattan > Downtown > Lower East Side > Bluestockings >

Reading
Laird Hunt

The Exquisite is her latest novel"

!!

2006-09-22T20:50:00.000-07:00

Another day in New York, a sense of sowhat sets in, it's too hot for the jacket there's no room for in your bag and the streets are endless and there's another fucking event to attend to in the evening, the city could give a shit, a book, sowhat, the city is out doing its business, the business is everywhere, it takes cabs, it sits down at the French Roast on 6th ave. and bitches about the service while the service bitches about it, it buys a bag at the crumpler store in the West Village and sets up a card table with some old ladies on Elizabeth street. The business drives a Lincoln Town car and spits on books as it splashes through another ugly puddle, then has a drink at the horse shoe bar near Tompkin's Square, a Cape Cod, thank you very fucking much, then has another. The business, subset of the city, could care less as it sips its soy chai somewhere or other near the Natural History Museum and slaps its three cards down on the pavement and stirs up some action, while the sun hits everything a little too hot because you are travelling light and there is no room to stow your brown velvet jacket purchased at Target and looking travel stained but still pretty good. This city, with its business, which cares so little, while conjuring up so much caring, positive and negative, so much fuckyouverymuchmydarlingetc, as if it mattered, for a second, which it does, despite everything, whatthefuck. A cup of coffee with friends on 4th Street, a meeting at the Bergen Street F stop, 5 ft of pizza on Allen, early bird sushi at Esashi, sowhat isn'tsobad, the slice of ricotta cheese cake bread isn'tsobad, yeah, the smell of coffee spilling out of Porto Rico, sowhat

2006-09-18T19:57:00.000-07:00

3 days in New York a walk through Harlem past the Alexander Hamilton house closed to the public while its structure is investigated -- it's not safe -- a woman serving roti on 125th street taking care to put together a nice portion across the street from Modells and close to the Apollo then tumblers on the subway like it was 1981 when they hit their break dance moves very polite very professional and fucking amazing paint flaking everywhere stuck out on the tarmac at laguardia doner kebab on houston pizza at two boots (got the newman and the cleopatra jones)saw my dear pals jackhammers on 8th ave at 2 a.m. not my problem so sleeping like a baby drinking the Macallan with Garrett the low grade horrors of bookstores indie and not who don't carry or barely carry the brand new book cool folks like Bud Parr at the Brooklyn Book thingamajig bumped into the awesome Lance and Andi Olsen on Houston saw some model guy ate at Rice (just okay) coveted a bag rescued a galley copy of The Ex from Housing Works (yeah right someone's going to buy it) feet smoking in my shoes brown velvet jacket too warm for this Indian summer thing or whatever that's happening time out at my grandfather's in Connecticut back to town tomorrow maybe a movie probably just more pavement smacking can't beat it not at all

2006-09-14T08:48:00.000-07:00

After years of putting it off (maybe because postage is so ghastly), I finally ordered something from Amazon.fr. It came yesterday -- L'Invité mystère by Grégoire Bouillier, the English version of which has been getting a lot of love at various good sites. I was delighted to discover that the marvelous Editions Allia (who publish Oliver Rohe, a writer I've translated) is behind it. Worth noting that Allia brings out its books in a very small, elegant paperback (of course -- it's France) format. The English edition is handsome too, but of course it's hardback and bigger. At any rate, Bouillier's book, in its original incarnation, which will fit very neatly in my jacket pocket, is my reading for this New York/Providence trip, which starts tomorrow and ends next Thursday.

I'll see if I can't drop in a couple of trip posts along the way -- though I won't have a computer with me (thank god) as I plan to take just a daypack and a totebag.

2006-09-11T20:29:00.000-07:00

This article, by Sara Gran, whose novel Dope I am currently in the middle of and enjoying a great deal, is good fun.

2006-09-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

A filmic teaser for The Exquisite, put together in a heartbeat by Tom Henwood and Daniel Brothers, is now up on YouTube. If you have 2 minutes and 17 seconds to spare, pay a visit to the world of Henry and Mr. Kindt...

2006-09-08T08:12:00.000-07:00

As The Exquisite is now officially out and about (I would love to hear about sightings of it), I will be dropping in notes about its doings and what I'm doing with it a little more frequently.

If you can make it to either of the New York launch events, which will include this guaranteed super-fun soiree, that would be very swell.

Very excited today to drop by The Elegant Variation and see that the book is the Friday give away.

And am extremely pleased to report that highly effective machinations are underway to put together a very short film around the book -- more on that soon.

2006-09-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

From a Brooklyn Rail interview with Grégoire Bouillier, author of The Mystery Guest.

"In a world where being young is valued above all else, I wouldn’t have liked to be labeled a young writer, with the emphasis falling on “young” not “writer.” In my opinion the writer has to place himself or herself in a time outside societal time, and in this sense, it seems to me, writing a book when you’re 40 could even be called a vaguely—very vaguely—political act. Plus, I still think that to write something worth reading you have to have lived. You need to have been up against things and beings, love, death, etc. Living deflowers the eyes and the mind. It tests our mettle. Cioran said that no philosophy survives a bout of seasickness; he could never have written that sentence if he hadn’t spent a day being seasick."

2006-09-04T08:07:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Poets and Writers has a feature on the great Alice Notley -- whose work, if you haven't explored it yet, is major. The Descent of Alette has a permanent spot on my short shelf of books and her new selected, Grave of Light, will be in our household shortly.

What boggles my little mind about it is that Poets and Writers chose to put Jennifer Egan on the cover of the mag rather than Notley (P Roth also is featured -- I'm sorry, but whatever, how many features does the guy need). It's a silly thing, and I'm sure Egan is on her way to being a great writer, etc., but Notley is amazing, has won major awards (if that's what counts) and looks fantastic (check out the photos in the feature). I had it in mind to write in a letter to the ed about it -- but it was just too silly and I didn't know how to do it without making it sound like I thought Jennifer Egan wasn't deserving.

But come on!

2006-08-31T20:45:00.000-07:00

I've just finished Stick out Your Tongue by Ma Jian (translated by Flora Drew). Fabulous. It's wafer thin -- the slenderest of volumes -- but it smacks you on the side of the head with its intensity. A "Han Chinese" wanders the high country of Tibet after a breakup. 5,000 meters (I live at 5,000 ft and think that's something), where the lack of oxygen can make you delerious. He chronicles his (and various characters') muted adventures and bizarre encounters with nomads who have the strangest, darkest stories to tell. Ma Jian lives in London -- publication of this book in the 80s got him in serious trouble with Chinese censors who reckoned Stick out Your Tongue wasn't tooting the horn of harmony clearly enough. There is a great deal of sex and death and peace flags flapping not so peacefully in the wind sweeping those endless plains and vast mountains. It will repay the hour or so it takes to read many times over. I'm sure of it.

2006-08-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

the opening of The Garbageman and The Prostitute
by Zack Wentz:

"I woke up next to the copy machine.
It was warm
Warm. Warm.
Above I picked out little patterns and faces in the surface of the dark ceiling; human eyes and mouths twisting and morphing into animals and landscapes, then back again..."

2006-08-29T16:19:00.000-07:00

The free copy of The Exquisite (see a few posts down) will be going out to Evan Parker of Des Moines for spotting the "glyph" on page 198 of Indiana, Indiana. I just looked at it again, and you would never know that there used to be a short paragraph there. In other words it just looks like something got added, not replaced.

2006-08-27T22:36:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in the past couple of days I saw a list of books that had gone into the making of someone's (but whose??) book. I love that sort of thing, and it made me try to remember what, beyond Sebald and Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia and Ben Katchor's comic strips (all mentioned in the acknowledgements), had been on my desk over the 7 years I was working on The Exquisite. Yeah, right! But here are a few of them:

The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley
Dark Property by Brian Evenson
Kiss Me Judas by Chris Baer
The Pink Institution by Selah Saterstrom
The Book of Jon by Eleni Sikelianos
Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace
Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson
Jesus Son by Denis Johnson
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
Oracle Night by Paul Auster
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem
Berg by Ann Quin

I suspect the list is something like three or four times as long -- I mean of books that nudged me, even just slightly, in some way during this project.