Category Archives: Uncategorized

What to do with what remains?

via My Modern Metropolis:

The Book Surgeon (15 pieces)

Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed.

Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms.

Just a note that dennisyginoza.com will now redirect to akopos.net. Nothing on the blog has changed except for the name and the URL. Thanks!

Interesting essay by a talented writer.

Photo by Tony Rinaldo

Fail better

What makes a good writer? Is writing an expression of self, or, as TS Eliot argued, ‘an escape from personality’? Do novelists have a duty? Do readers? Why are there so few truly great novels? Zadie Smith on literature’s legacy of honourable failure

Zadie Smith
Saturday January 13, 2007

… If it’s true that first-rate novels are rare, it’s also true that what we call the literary canon is really the history of the second-rate, the legacy of honourable failures. Any writer should be proud to join that list just as any reader should count themselves lucky to read them. The literature we love amounts to the fractured shards of an attempt, not the monument of fulfilment. The art is in the attempt, and this matter of understanding-that-which-is-outside-of-ourselves using only what we have inside ourselves amounts to some of the hardest intellectual and emotional work you’ll ever do. It is a writer’s duty. It is also a reader’s duty.

* hat tip to Luna Park Review

My short story, “Euler’s Identity“, appears in Issue #5 of Prime Number Magazine.

Prime Number is an online lit mag put out by Press 53, a small independent publisher of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

I must admit it took me a second to figure out the joke. The followup (PDF) is even funnier.

via Discover:

NCBI ROFL: The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block”.

*hat tip to Boing Boing

Just back from Seaside, Oregon where I’ve spent the last ten days attending writing workshops, craft lectures, and faculty readings at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program. Hadn’t even unpacked when, while scrolling through ten days worth of tweets, I came across this buzz-killing link by Willow Springs (a cool literary mag, though its name sounds like a porn star’s nom de guerre). The article it references came out more than three months ago, but what the hell– a strong dose of “shut the fuck up and write” is always good for this MFAer’s soul. <—[“soul” is too abstract, a cliche. Concretize the image? kthnxbai]

via The Village Voice:

Are Creative Writing MFAs a “Ponzi Scheme”?
By Foster Kamer

A Master of Fine Arts in creative writing in America is a curious piece of paper, one that says something about the person holding it — mostly, that they survived an MFA program without killing themselves, which apparently isn’t easy — and also, in some circles, acts as a certification that the MFAs holder is a writer of a specific, high regard. But as the debate as to whether or not an undergraduate degree is losing its value in America rages on, the question as to whether or not post-graduate writing degrees are actually worth anything — in fiscal amounts, craft, or otherwise — remains a lesser-asked inquiry, because only people who think they can become writers actually give a shit. But it’s a question that remains, no less.

So, is it?

* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I post a pointer to a site that offers fiction either as free content or as samples from subscriber issues. Today’s pointer is to BLIP.

Pointer #25 will be the last scheduled post here as I am shifting my efforts from a personal blog to a more lit specific one. Please check back for details and thanks so much for visiting!

About:

BLIP began life in 1995 as Mississippireview.com, which was among the first and most pop­u­lar lit­er­ary mag­a­zines on the Web. As of 2010, the mag­a­zine has more than fif­teen hun­dred sto­ries and poems in its archive, work by such writ­ers as Thom Jones, Ben Mar­cus, Francine Prose, Pad­gett Pow­ell, Barry Han­nah, Tom Drury, Eliz­a­beth Gilbert, Rick Bass, Ben Nei­hart, and from newer writ­ers like Brian Oberkirch, Michael Der­man­sky, Court­ney Eldridge, David Ryan, Lau­rie O’Brien, Jaime Clarke, Stacey Richter, Susan Hub­bard, Larry French. BLIP is the new, inde­pen­dent ver­sion of the mag­a­zine, with the same edi­to­r­ial staff, plus some new addi­tions. We will be pub­lish­ing a quar­terly lit­er­ary mag­a­zine, the first issue of which is the Sum­mer 2010 issue, and we will be doing daily and weekly updates to add mate­ri­als that seem inter­est­ing enough to war­rant atten­tion, rebroad­cast, retal­i­a­tion, etc. It’s bombs away time. We hope you make the mag­a­zine (which we fully intend to rename, per­haps repeat­edly) a reg­u­lar stop in your Web trav­els. We wel­come you and encour­age your participation.

Fiction excerpt:

Physics
Kim Chinquee

I sat there on the floor, read­ing about red cells for my the­sis. My cat Patches was curled at my feet.  My boyfriend William had come over, we were try­ing things again, and now I lis­tened as he talked to my son Jamie about his job as a reporter. Jamie nod­ded, more inter­ested in the TV, where some guy was smack­ing his gui­tar and dou­ble leaping.

My mother called.  It was almost Christmas.

“Eileen,” my mother said.  “Come and see your stepdad.”

“What should I say?”

“He loves you, you know.”

Patches rubbed my leg.  She was cal­ico.  I pet­ted her and she started purring.  There was silence on my mom’s end.

“I’m say­ing maybe you should come now,” she said.  “At least think about it.”

* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I post a pointer to a site that offers fiction either as free content or as samples from subscriber issues. Today’s pointer is to Café Irreal.

About:

The Cafe Irreal is a quarterly webzine that presents a kind of fantastic fiction infrequently published in English. This fiction, which we would describe as irreal, resembles the work of writers such as Franz Kafka, Kobo Abe, Clarice Lispector and Jorge Luis Borges. As a type of fiction it rejects the tendency to portray people and places realistically and the need for a full resolution to the story; instead, it shows us a reality constantly being undermined.

Fiction excerpt:

Fibonacci Sequence
by Stephen Guppy

In your new life as a Babylonian astrologer, you are entrusted with the regulation and taxation of shipping. You wonder about the relevance of maritime commerce to your knowledge of the stars, but you decide not to ask the Comptroller. The question remains on your tongue like a dark patch of blight on a leaf. For several days, you search for the harbour. In the fragrant bazaars and used-car lots of the metropolis, people avoid your gaze and refuse to reply to your questions. Some try to ward off the influence of your presence with intricate symbolic gestures. Others distract you with detailed answers that have nothing to do with your questions. Eventually, you wander off.

Talk of the Nation hosted by Neal Conan. Panelists include Lynn Neary, NPR correspondent covering books and publishing, Peter Osnos, founder, Public Affairs Books, Paul Chan, publisher, Badlands Unlimited. Both the audio file and a transcript can be found here.

Some interesting points raised, especially the last one:

Mr. Osnos: The notion that you can have the book instantly in front of you in a device and read it is a really big change … You think you want to read it. If you have a device, you can be reading it within a minute …

*

Mr. Chan: … And as a small publisher and an artist myself, I think one of the things I saw was difficult was that you would make, let’s say, 500 or 1,000 beautiful catalogs, and there only existed 500 or 1,000 of them because we didn’t have money to publish any more.

Well, with the advent of publishing e-books, we can not only make a paper version of it but as well as an e-book version of it. So it drastically expands the potential of people experiencing your artwork in book form, whether it’s a paper book or an e-book.

*

Mr. Conan: … we’ve had a lot of inquires about those who, well, can’t afford a Kindle or a Nook or an iPad.

Video at link.

via GalleyCat:

Broadcastr Debuts at the eBook Summit

At the eBook Summit on Wednesday, Electric Literature c0-founders Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum introduced Broadcastr, a storytelling app that will let people record audio versions of location-specific stories around the globe. We’ve embedded video of the presentation above.

Like Foursquare for storytellers, the new platform will link the audio to that specific place, allowing listeners to hear your story when they enter the same location.