welcome to the end times

Had a couple reviews come out last month -- J.A. Tyler's "A Shiny, Unused Heart" in The Brooklyn Rail and George Williams' "Gardens of Earthly Delights" in Prick of the Spindle. Both of these guys are in my top 8 books of 2011, so check 'em out, now. Actually, now that I mention it, I should just share my top 8 books of 2011. Why keep you anxiously salivating? And why 8? It was my number in baseball and water polo and I'm too lazy to think of 10. Boom. 

1. Look! Look! Feathers by Mike Young (Word Riot)

2. A Shiny, Unused Heart by J.A. Tyler (Black Coffee Press)

3. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories by Don DeLillo (Scribner)

4. Gardens of Earthly Delight: Stories by George Williams (Raw Dog Screaming Press)

5. The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals by Rae Bryant (Patasola Press)

6. Us by Michael Kimball (Tyrant Books)

7. The Blue Tower: Poems by Tomaz Salamun (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

8. Animals by Janey Smith (plain wrap press)

Also, I was going to announce to the five people that read this sporadic attempt at bloggery that I would be taking a more or less complete hiatus from posting for the next several months because of my involvement in two top-secret projects. However, one of them, a movie-related thing, has fallen through as those things tend to do. So my list of covert projects has been reduced to one, a kind of online literary monstrosity, a collaboration with novelist John Reed that is so totally sweet that the coolest hipsters are already checking it out before it exists. So needless to say, I will still be posting, probably with alarming frequency. I'm sorry. 2012 is the time to step one's proverbial game up (and to get pumped for Ridley Scott's ancient aliens-influenced Prometheus). Let's do it.

Budweisers and copyediting stole my 26th year!

You guys should check out an essay by the inimitable John Reed, “Arthur Phillips Stole My Bike,” in this month’s Brooklyn Rail. There’s a lot going on here: A heated dialogue about how best to create a new Shakespeare play using the Bard’s own hallowed (or hollowed) words; the value of community in a literary world that too often caters to isolationism; the controlled chaos inherent in being a working writer and professor; a touch of nostalgia for a Manhattan childhood and young adulthood; the complexity of getting anywhere on time in New York; a mysterious theft.

As personal essays written by NYC fiction writers are wont to do, I found myself considering my own situation as it pertains to literary things (solipsism alert!), and realized that this year has been somewhat of a setback. Sure I’ve tinkered with my novel a bunch (which hasn’t slowed the slew of rejections), published a bunch of reviews, an e-chapbook and a few poems, but I could have done so much more. I’m not talking about writing 2,000 words a day and finishing a novel and two books of poetry in six months, I mean in like, life.

Like, it probably wasn’t the best idea for me to sit on my boxered ass all day every day taking six hours to complete freelance work that could easily take three, thereby destroying any time to do work I actually wanted to do. Like, going to the same seven or eight bars and making no effort to look on either side of the Budweiser pressed to my rotting lips. Like, feeling fine continuing as a doorman for way too long when other opportunities have continued to slap my jaw and I do nothing but shirk. Like making, uh, not much effort at trying to meet girls and forming what could be considered the loosest of interpersonal post-friend-level bonds, and heroically sabotaging anything that might actually be good for my lonesome ass. Like, failing to immerse myself in the many coteries of writers this fine city offers (What John’s saying about the need for community and collaborating, duh) and remaining a mostly anonymous curmudgeon.

This ineptitude, coupled with the fact that my freelance contract of 1.5 years has ended without much of a warning (putting the “starving” back into my job description), has me feeling better and happier than I can remember. Spending one’s time working alone can only be justified by meaningful work, not mind-numbing “editing” work for a major corporation that will probably tank within the next few months. What my week now lacks in a nifty paycheck, it makes up for it with TIME. Time to write what I want, to finish/start projects I’ve been brooding over for months, to work on the literary magazine that I know can do big things. Not as much money to decimate my once-youthful body with toxins and lard, and I've never felt so fucking energized, baby!!!

Events will be attended, group projects will go down (including a Monkeytown screenplay collab I’m not at liberty to discuss)! Time to get excited, 2012 might actually turn out OK. Until December 21.

Also, I just wanted to mention that Short, Fast, and Deadly in its current incarnation has put out its final issue. I am eternally grateful to SFD for publishing many of my flash fictions and poems in the magazine and in the 2010 Anthology. I’m more stoked that I will be the staff chapbook reviewer at the bigger, badder Short, Fast, and Deadly Monthly, dropping this January. Watching the empire grow from within.

Stay posted, and stay fulfilled! Hoo-ah!

She needed to be, in one moment, destruction and restoration

Double-header: got a review of Wesley Stace's latest novel, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, up at The Brooklyn Rail, and a new story -- The Parents Were Made of Gas -- up at Short, Fast, and Deadly. Have to give a shout to my buddy and fellow future publishing magnate Garrett McDonough because I definitely stole the title from something he wrote. Sorry, Garrett!

Don't Look At The Cameras!!!

I've got a new review/essay up at The Brooklyn Rail. Check it out. In it, I detail why David Bajo's newest book "Panopticon" isn't the best thing I've read this year, but why it also freaked the shit out of me. It's all about surveillance cameras and how sinister nerds can basically steal your life and make a twisted movie out of it. I did some research and found out that not only is the technology very real, it's probably happening to you, to me, to the guy on the subway with two different sneakers, right NOW. The world is quickly becoming like Minority Report. Oh well, 2012 is coming up. Can't get too much worse before then, right?