I Celebrate Myself: The Walt Whitman Self-Review
The Age of Self-Promotion has a new patron saint.
Chris Adrian reads from The Great Night
Check out this clip of Chris Adrian reading from his forthcoming novel The Great Night (April 26) is a few months old, but timely and worth a good chunk of your day.
Awful books by awful people.
The end of Achewood? This is basically a thing.
Chris Onstad recently announced on his blog that he will be taking an indefinite haitus from his long running webcomic Achewood, the best thing on the internet. Rough chuckles all around.
Spend the Night at the New York Public Library
On May 20th, the library will open its doors to 500 young writers, who will spend the night on a scavenger hunt for some of the library’s most important works. Each participant will write an essay about their findings and the essays will be collected in a book (which will be sent, in a pneumatic tube, directly to God).
Flatmancrooked, the innovative indie publisher of novellas, is shutting down.
The Blankness is Your Mother: Robert Kelly and Fukushima
Modern poetry is a product of the same culture that made Fat Man and Little Boy possible. Not even just possible, but inevitable. Nuclear bombs can only exist in the same world as Robert Kelly’s poems, mega-churches, and David Lynch movies. I just hope that the most beautiful and humane parts of the whole thing have as long a half-life as the most radioactive ones.
A week in online reading: the photographer W. Eugene Smith celebrates a lesser known Tennessee Williams play, a biographer of Dickens and a translator of Rimbaud give notes on their work, the Criterion Collection re-releases Mike Leigh. And more!
Ozzie Guillen Would Like to Tell You About The Great Gatsby
Dan Bulla, who also co-wrote and directed this clip, perfectly channels Guillen’s unique approach to language: one part Spanish, one part English, and thirty parts profanity, none of it remotely decipherable. Sample dialogue: “And then all kinda thing starts to happen: [indecipherable cursing].” Also, the book apparently ends with Nick Carraway sticking his dick in the ocean. Oh, the things I missed in English class.
Insulted by (a lot of) Authors
The writer Bill Ryan has been going to book readings and requesting that rather than signing his book with a simple inscription, that the authors insult him on the page. He’s recording the results on his blog, insultedbyauthors.com, and he’s gotten some really stellar ones so far: