Archive for February, 2009

Saturday, February 28th, 2009
NOON’STENTHANNIVERSARY
SAVE THE DATE
READING & PARTY
friday, april 17th at 7PM
REBECCA CURTIS
CLANCY MARTIN
CHRISTINE SCHUTT
The Mercantile Library

17 East 47th Street

Joy Williams on Flannery O’Connor

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

“almost inhumanly brave as her illness ground her along on her long passage to death. In the hospital the spring before she died, she worked between blood transfusions — she joked that she was hearing a celestial chorus but the song, over and over, was ‘Clementine’ — correcting the galleys of the marvelous short story ‘Revelation’ and completing another, ‘Parker’s Back,’ which she had been working on and revising for years. Always, always in her work, she struggled to find the delivering image, the delivering word that would offer ‘experienced meaning.’” (Stranger Than Paradise)

eating prunes and watching guiding light

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

I have a story coming out in a new magazine called GIGANTIC. They put up one-sentence prose previews.

For the Diane Williams workshop we typed up our favorite sentences from books and stories…here’s what I’ve got so far:

______________________________________________________________

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concern’d in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;(and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:— Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.
______________________________________________________________

“Chuck, what is that up in that tree?” Marie said.
Chuck walked to the window. “A man,” he answered.
“A man? What’s he doing up there?”
“Don’t know.”

______________________________________________________________

Moldenke would remain.

______________________________________________________________

He made his fortune by by and by by by and by he made his fortune by and by by and by he made his fortune.

______________________________________________________________

She told her daughter as she might a lover such things her lover said were best kept secret from a girl.

______________________________________________________________

KEY:

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen Laurence Sterne
“Chuck, What is That?” Laurence C. Peacock NOON 2008
Motorman David Ohle
A Novel of Thank You Gertrude Stein
Nightwork “Teachers” Christine Schutt

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

The iPhone application Electric Smoke allows you to inhale over the iPhone microphone while smoke appears on the screen. The harder you inhale, the more smoke you see coming from your iPhone cigarette.

Electric Smoke works with another application called Sonic Lighter. If you have the Sonic Lighter application you can light your friend’s Electric Smoke cigarette by touching iPhones.

“Electric Smoke is a game as well,” according to the official description. “Challenge your friends to see who has the biggest lungs, who can smoke faster, and who can smoke more.”

urgent

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Do you know what kind of dog this is?


Pre-order Lawrence Giffin’s ‘Get the Fuck Back into That Burning Plane’

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

“Sir! Ma’am! For the safety and security
of you and your family,
I need you to get the fuck
back into that burning plane.
For the 245 whites of Shanksville, PA,
bombed from eight weeks in the future,
recovered into historical memory
from the pixel debris connecting
the monitor to the hardpoint,
please, get the fuck
back into that burning plane.
A finger prodding you through an array
of channels and devices:
lab, factory, prison, school.
Into the time-period you go,
fluctuating like a canister,
handed yourself by the bursar
and the ombudsperson
like a glass of gravitas.
You lick the bottom of the glass;
there is candy there.
You lick the wreckage of racialized vespers;
there is a nation here.
We are living in a serialized world,
and I am the Aleph and the Omega Manifold.
I am there at helpdesk, on holiday in Apartheid Villages.
Wherever information processing continues
indefinitely along one world-line gamma
to the future c-boundary of the universe,
I, cable news, am there, bringing you the federal
double-wide prank of dematerialized corporate America,
but only if you get on the plane.
Get back on the plane, now.
The plane, madam, please, the plane,
get yourself the fuck back to it.”

Pre-order from Ugly Ducking Presse.
Pub date: March 2009
hand-bound with letterpress wrap
$10 ($7 direct from UDP)

Sunday, February 8th, 2009