I’m always interested in my own process. Something about the publication of Thank You For Your Sperm has made me want to look at old stuff. This photo is from a 2010 notebook with a story (on the right page), later called “Constable Cock” (and posted at Flawnt’s), that didn’t make the cut for the collection (despite its cockiness). One of 200 stories from that time which didn’t. There’s a stiff competition among the pages of my many notebooks for attention! On the left page is an index card on which I noted some doubts about my method. I have since moved on from writing to typewriting to dictation. Looking at my own notebook now makes me almost feel jealous: heavy paper, blue-black ink, an elegant Waterman fountain pen…I miss those artifacts of writing longhand.
«As I’m recording this blog post I realize that I really, really don’t like using this space to relate news, you know, raw information, subjective or objective, about what’s been happening or what happens right now. I really like to write nonfiction for the same reason and with the same aspiration as when I’m writing fiction: namely to surprise myself. I do not want to know beforehand what I’m going to say or, when I’ve said it, what I’m in for next by way of attention, or inspiration, or desperation. And I believe that this is exactly why you are reading this now. You’d like to be surprised; you’d like to have a thought that you didn’t have before, or a feeling not yet felt or have them with greater, or with less intensity, strength, duration than you’re used to. To find out what’s new you should join platforms that are known for, and to some extent have been optimized towards, sharing of news and daily information, like Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. I regularly look at my own Facebook page to prove to myself that new things are happening to me, too, but when I need confirmation that I’m still thinking bravely and feeling deeply I return to my blog.» [continue to read full post on the blog]
![«As I’m recording this blog post I realize that I really, really don’t like using this space to relate news, you know, raw information, subjective or objective, about what’s been happening or what happens right now. I really like to write nonfiction for the same reason and with the same aspiration as when I’m writing fiction: namely to surprise myself. I do not want to know beforehand what I’m going to say or, when I’ve said it, what I’m in for next by way of attention, or inspiration, or desperation. And I believe that this is exactly why you are reading this now. You’d like to be surprised; you’d like to have a thought that you didn’t have before, or a feeling not yet felt or have them with greater, or with less intensity, strength, duration than you’re used to. To find out what’s new you should join platforms that are known for, and to some extent have been optimized towards, sharing of news and daily information, like Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. I regularly look at my own Facebook page to prove to myself that new things are happening to me, too, but when I need confirmation that I’m still thinking bravely and feeling deeply I return to my blog.» [continue to read full post on the blog]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/a38496c8e6faef979f3f252e994988b9/tumblr_mn3swycJb91qfvbxto1_r1_500.jpg)
Thank You For Your Sperm will not help solve major global problems but it is art. Every copy counts. There is SO much you can do with this book: you can read this book, hold on to it, buy another and leave it at a coffee shop or at another public meeting place and thereby put it into widespread circulation. I dream of finding a copy of TYFYS one day somewhere at a completely unexpected place, say on the desk of a banker (not a sperm banker), or peeking out of the bag of a handyman or on a subway seat or in a museum shop or in the hands of a priest who’s reading TYFYS while queuing for pizza. Or in a photograph with the German chancellor who keeps TYFYS on the small coffee table visible in the photo shoot when she talks to other heads of state. She might even reach for it and hold it up: «by a German writer who composes in English,» she says proudly. «That is most impressive,» says her guest, «and why is it called “Thank You For Your Sperm”?» At which point the camera homes in on the title and on the angel. The chancellor never blushes.— Photo: TYFYS on the way to the beach.
«After twenty years of marriage K. had given H. everything except children. It was clearly too late for that. Everybody said so, especially the doctors, who were the experts on childbearing. H. had been 67 when he met K., who was 37 then. Biology had spoken.
For the first few years they made love like very young people again: without regard for time or space or the many demands of grown up life, which insert themselves so easily and effectively between a couple’s genitals. K. used protection, if only because that’s what she’d always done; and as if to show that even at his age he was still a responsible adult, H. used protection also, so that they were doubly sheathed against the chance of new life. …»
A different version of this story was published in 2012 at THIS literary magazine.
Reblogged from altlitgossip|11 notes |#
From all over the US people are sending me photos and letters, letters and photos, and letters, and photos. Today: Baltimore, Maryland writer Timmy Reed absorbs “Thank You For Your Sperm” so thoroughly that the cover temporarily replaces his face. Also, he finds himself transported to Germany. Miracles that only books can achieve. Thank you for picking TYFYS out of the pile! — THANK YOU FOR YOUR SPERM can be bought at MadHat Press or via Amazon, and you can get Timmy Reed’s own collection “Tell God I Don’t Exist” here. If your face, demeanor or location are affected by TYFYS, please do not worry, everybody who’s been afflicted has eventually turned back to normal or perhaps you’re better off. Some readers of #TYFYS have reportedly turned into Playboy bunnies, others have morphed into enormous sperm. This made them very happy.
«If there is a table at which the best writers of flash fiction should be seated, Marcus Speh deserves a chair – with his name on it. In four short years Speh has gone from obscure internet ego Finnegan Flawnt to nearly a household name, at least among the three thousand or so writers competing for that tight little club listed on Duotrope, championed by small press, and swirling in constant motion among the blogs and posts and coffee house readings out there these days. It’s an exciting time, a world without agents, where anyone with the will and imagination can start a literary magazine, but the truth will out, it always does, and someday soon flash fiction will not be so cutting edge, some other blade will be forged, and student’s will study and teachers will teach and the old ones will remember when. With the publication of his first collection, “Thank You For Your Sperm”, Speh is helping to launch this genre into the main stream. Someday, names will have to named, founders have to be found. I think this collection may be one of those…» [Read full review by Derek Osborne]
![«If there is a table at which the best writers of flash fiction should be seated, Marcus Speh deserves a chair – with his name on it. In four short years Speh has gone from obscure internet ego Finnegan Flawnt to nearly a household name, at least among the three thousand or so writers competing for that tight little club listed on Duotrope, championed by small press, and swirling in constant motion among the blogs and posts and coffee house readings out there these days. It’s an exciting time, a world without agents, where anyone with the will and imagination can start a literary magazine, but the truth will out, it always does, and someday soon flash fiction will not be so cutting edge, some other blade will be forged, and student’s will study and teachers will teach and the old ones will remember when. With the publication of his first collection, “Thank You For Your Sperm”, Speh is helping to launch this genre into the main stream. Someday, names will have to named, founders have to be found. I think this collection may be one of those…» [Read full review by Derek Osborne]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/a1b79617fe7e362a14f246bf8140cf2d/tumblr_mmhquoJhqJ1qfvbxto1_r1_500.png)
The photo shows a copy of “THANK YOU FOR YOUR SPERM” among work materials of the cover artist. The cover by my wife Carlye Birkenkrahe is, for me, an eyestopper. It would be easy to pick out this book because of it even if it didn’t have this confusing title. Yesterday in class I showed the cover to some students (not suggesting they should buy it which wouldn’t have been fair), but proud enough to mention it and one student (from the Philippines) after exclaiming “Sperm!” a number of times, clearly shocked to the core of his existence (did I go too far? It was an advanced MBA class on problem solving techniques, surely they could handle it?) asked what the cover image “meant”. I didn’t have an easy answer for him except that there are parallels between the imagery (mythology, angels, strong colors) and the content which I feel close to, the realm where I feel at home, where all manner of creatures, including men with wings, dwell, where dirty dogs dance, where characters dally and lose story ends dangle. Whatever the meaning, I love this cover. I hope we’ll collaborate on other books in the future. Here’s an article I wrote about her 2012-2013 exhibition in Berlin for Glow Magazine.
What I did this morning. Look into the abyss. Only just discovered this quote by Lionel Trilling, via Vargas Llosa’s book on cultural decadence in our time (“Alles Boulevard”; Suhrkamp). Interesting how Vargas Llosa (in the German translation of the Spanish original) gets this quote by Trilling wrong. By misquoting as if the students (and not the Abyss) had said “How interesting”, which he then uses as an indicator ofcultural decadence (the students’ inappropriate answer to the deep mystery of the Abyss). It’s pretty mean, that, and typical for (semi-professional) cultural pessimists who take their ammunition from anywhere or if none’s available, fabricate it. This book doesn’t really deserve being mentioned it’s not even well written (but I also don’t like his prose and I don’t understand how anybody can like it
—maybe he is one of those writers who gain enormously in their own language?). Vargas Llosa evidently doesn’t mind a little cheating, despite his 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Sadly he himself turns into a better example of cultural decay than the (made up) examples he presents. Needless to say, I’m not a cultural pessimist. I’m currently thinking about writing a book against cultural pessimism myself. Trouble is I don’t like cultural optimism either. Extreme positions can never reflect the complexity of truth, they can only cramp it with their zealousness. A book that does: Cultural History of the Modern Age by Egon Friedell (1927), beautifully written, too. He wrote: «We can never see the world other than incompletely: deliberately to see it as incomplete is to create an artistic aspect. »
«I am thinking along the distance between the time/energy/effort that a writer expends to create a text, in this case your work, and the relative brevity that a reader expends in reading and absorbing it. Though I am not a stranger there is something for me exotic and different in the experience in picking it up in the media of a book. I feel in it something akin to when I lose touch with my own work and come on it in a different setting, or wake up with a phrase written in black ink on my palm and I don’t know why, or what it means and I wonder to myself where it came from though it seems quite familiar. I feel the best way to read “Thank You For Your Sperm” is to read a little bit then fall asleep, wake up, read a little bit more, maybe best on a train where one needs to be patient to sit and doze off until the last platform and with the elm trees and sun that rush past, or on a slow canal boat pulled by mules, or in a dream a revival tent with nearby bird song that beckons one away from important work. Regardless, with as much of life felt in between passages as between the worlds of words to be savored.» —Gabriel Orgrease pulling a packet boat after purchasing TYFYS.
Reblogged from marcusspeh|9 notes |#
Buy this at Amazon now and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Leave a review and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Send me an encouraging comment and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Pass this on to a powerful reviewer and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Mention me in one sentence with your favorite authors and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Give the book away to a donor and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Say that I’m Alt Lit and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Sell one of your duplicate DFW books to get the funds to buy this and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Send your spouse to the next bookshop to get this and I will Thank You For Your Sperm. Talk about it to your friends and I will Thank You For Your Sperm.
Cover art by Carlye Birkenkrahe. Also available via MadHat Press.
original texts by marcus speh — all photos: the artists. visitors: | Creative Commons License
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