
January 15, 2010
Round Up (Part 1?)
- NYT Mag Editor Paul Tough recently took a buyout to do more writing. A quick google search will turn up Tough’s more prominent feature-length work (e.g. “The Black White Supremacist”), but A Man Named Me has always liked this easily overlooked piece On Sorting Jokes, from Tough’s short-lived but well-loved liminal venture Open Letters. It’s a fitting essay for an editor.
- Writer-editor Gordon Lish on sorting sadnesses, from a few years prior.
- A Man Named Me recently visited Open Letters’ site to track down a passing encomium of Paul Maiszewski’s, on behalf of Willaim Gaddis’ J.R. (in this letter), a recommendation which turned out to be less emphatic than A Man Named Me remembered. On route however Maliszewski’s review of Alexander Theroux’s 2007 novel Laura Warholic turned up, in which he says: “Not since William Gaddis’s The Recognitions has a novel addressed the fallen present with such anger, love, and eloquence.”
- Maliszewksi has an interview with William Gass in the new Vice Fiction Issue, which also contains three amazing Robert Walser stories translated by Damion Searls. (The Italian Novella: It will break your heart and destroy your love and leave you wanting more!)
- Searls, as it happens, is the recipient of A Man Named Me’s Footnote of the Year Award – 2009. From his Believer essay about how he wrote a certain one of his books (; or The Whale): “There is a tradition of [writing with chance methods or deterministic procedures] in American Writing, which grew out of the midcentury confluence of second-generation modernism with the popularization of Zen. A good place to start exploring it is in the works of Jackson Mac Low, Joan Retallack, and Kenneth Goldsmith.”
- Open letter to Searls: Don’t leave us hanging man! You should write that article. If you don’t know where to publish it, A Man Named Me has a couple of suggestions that may or may not be helpful.
December 18, 2009
Scenes from Bloodsport (A Love Story)
The dark of night. A uterus begins to itch.
—
A Brooklyn bar, the one with the wood. GUY #1 is visiting from San Francisco for the holidays, out with his old, local friend GUY #2.
GUY #1: This bar, whoa the wood, blah blah blah sex. Everyone in San Francisco thinks everyone in Brooklyn is getting laid all the time.
GUY #2: Everyone in Brooklyn IS getting laid all the time because everyone in Brooklyn’s wife wants a baby.
—
Mid-morning, the Temescal Oakland farmer’s market, the outskirts of the line for coffee. GUY #17 is monologizing at GUY #18.
GUY #17: …so I told her, I said, it’s cool we can have kids but I am not getting married. I do not breed in captivity….
—
Bar area of [fashionable Oakland club], ROWENA and HER FRIENDS are out to celebrate Rowena’s thirtieth birthday .
GIRL#I SAY 14 BUT IT’S ACTUALLY A BIT HIGHER: Did you go to Rowena’s birthday brunch this morning?
GUY #62: Naw—you know when I turned thirty, couple years ago, it was the summer I was sleeping with Rowena, she got me a cupcake. So for this I was like, I am going to [raises an illustrative index] ONE event.
CUT to the hands of DIAGETIC DJ, who has until now only been seen in the distance over GUY #62’s shoulder. DIAGETIC DJ drops the needle on Shocking Blue’s Love Machine. CLOSE on the spinning record. SLOW FADE to a spinning ovum, shining white and recently fertilized. It is being turned by the surrounding unsuccessful sperm (played by GUYS #1-61, excluding #2) all working-wiggling in concert. WIDE to reveal this is happening on the dance floor of [fashionable Oakland club]. GUY #62 approaches from the bar, takes a place among the sperm, puts his shoulder to the ovum. FADE to black.
December 11, 2009
Detainee 063, a creative and effective use of new media’s relentlessness, has 470 followers as I write this
December 10, 2009
Wishing you the best in Brooklyn with weather and stuff like that
A Man Named Me never makes it to as many shows as he’d like to (agoraphobia, vitamin addiction, decent bath tub), and Weasel Walter’s various bands/projects/acts of terror have been no exception. You may know him from the Flying Luttenbachers or XBXRX or Burmese or several deranged free-jazz #tets and ensembles with his name in there like its a law firm (eg Smith, Myers, Wesson, and Walter). Anyway he’s definitely one who’s been out there working to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed and A Man Named Me likes this town that much less knowing he’s no longer down the street operating
(video via spockmorgue)

