Thank You For Your Sperm

August 24th 2012

When the (then still) mysterious literary online magazine > kill author asked me in 2011 to write a guest introduction to their issue eleven named after Raymond Carver, I began my work by ordering a celebrated Carver biography praised byStephen King (!) and reading all the Carver stories I could get hold off. That wasn’t the smartest way to start…I do know that too much research too early in the day can silence the birdie. Interestingly, I had not thought of myself as a Carver fan but I became one in the process – even though the obsession with detail in Sklenicka‘s biography did eventuall put me off as much as the details of Thomas Mann’s digestion in his diaries full of suppressed anal eroticism bored me stiff when I tried to read them years ago (never mind the comparison, which concerns form not content). Carver is such an « American » writer. I was amazed that I liked him so much even though his background and his sujets were so different from my own. What I especially enjoyed was his sense for theabsurd, which I had never noticed before and which was going to become my point of entry for the editorial. …

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Posted at 10:31am and tagged with: 100 days 2012, kill author, carver, review, metafiction,.

When the (then still) mysterious literary online magazine > kill author asked me in 2011 to write a guest introduction to their issue eleven named after Raymond Carver, I began my work by ordering a celebrated Carver biography praised byStephen King (!) and reading all the Carver stories I could get hold off. That wasn’t the smartest way to start…I do know that too much research too early in the day can silence the birdie. Interestingly, I had not thought of myself as a Carver fan but I became one in the process – even though the obsession with detail in Sklenicka‘s biography did eventuall put me off as much as the details of Thomas Mann’s digestion in his diaries full of suppressed anal eroticism bored me stiff when I tried to read them years ago (never mind the comparison, which concerns form not content). Carver is such an « American » writer. I was amazed that I liked him so much even though his background and his sujets were so different from my own. What I especially enjoyed was his sense for theabsurd, which I had never noticed before and which was going to become my point of entry for the editorial. …
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August 24th 2012

2 notes |#

You may have noticed that I’ve been busy blogging since end of June as part of a 100 day project. Yesterday, Dorothee Lang suggested a few questions to reflect upon the process and the result at the 50/100 mark, and I’m only too glad to accept the challenge, since the height of summer finds me in a reflective mood much like one of the confused sexy young men in a Tennessee Williams play:

1. From your own work so far, which day is your personal favorite? — My favorite is “Marlowe and me”. This post is blood colored and it is built upon my recent rereading of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the first of a series of novels with private detective Philip Marlowe. I became interested in the book again, because I’m currently conceiving of a detective story, and this was part of the birthing process. But I also favor this post, because it reminded me of my much younger self and made me conscious (in a good way) of how far I’ve come in my life path. And existential insights are my favorite pastime. …

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Posted at 10:23am and tagged with: 100 days 2012, halfway,.

You may have noticed that I’ve been busy blogging since end of June as part of a 100 day project. Yesterday, Dorothee Lang suggested a few questions to reflect upon the process and the result at the 50/100 mark, and I’m only too glad to accept the challenge, since the height of summer finds me in a reflective mood much like one of the confused sexy young men in a Tennessee Williams play:
1. From your own work so far, which day is your personal favorite? — My favorite is “Marlowe and me”. This post is blood colored and it is built upon my recent rereading of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, the first of a series of novels with private detective Philip Marlowe. I became interested in the book again, because I’m currently conceiving of a detective story, and this was part of the birthing process. But I also favor this post, because it reminded me of my much younger self and made me conscious (in a good way) of how far I’ve come in my life path. And existential insights are my favorite pastime. …
[continue reading]

August 20th 2012

4 notes |#

What is the longest running lie of your life?Met a few old writer friends for pasta, beer and ice cream. I notice how I’m relentlessly trying to stir the discussion away from trivialities and towards writing: technique, process, books, samples, stories of writerly failures and successes. On the way I read how self-devalorizing Beckett was, apparently unconscious of his own place in the canon. As if he was trying to evade or ignore the building of momentum that would eventually lead to his canonization. He didn’t get much recognition before his fifties. And when it came, it paralyzed him almost entirely. Success for some writers is like a virgin falling among vampires.

Samuel Beckett:

“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”

I like this mantra. I fear this mantra. (from: The Unnamable, 1954).

[Continue reading full post and discussion]

Posted at 11:02am and tagged with: beckett, 100 days 2012, vampires, success,.

What is the longest running lie of your life?Met a few old writer friends for pasta, beer and ice cream. I notice how I’m relentlessly trying to stir the discussion away from trivialities and towards writing: technique, process, books, samples, stories of writerly failures and successes. On the way I read how self-devalorizing Beckett was, apparently unconscious of his own place in the canon. As if he was trying to evade or ignore the building of momentum that would eventually lead to his canonization. He didn’t get much recognition before his fifties. And when it came, it paralyzed him almost entirely. Success for some writers is like a virgin falling among vampires.
Samuel Beckett:

“I can’t go on, I’ll go on”

I like this mantra. I fear this mantra. (from: The Unnamable, 1954).
[Continue reading full post and discussion]

August 18th 2012

3 notes |#

Two Martians, let’s call them Big and Bug, are standing around the rover. Big kicks the machine. Why are you doing that, says Bug. The heat shield almost hit my ex-wife, says Big. But she’s been dead and dusty for years, says Bug. Well, says the other, that’s no reason to put up with the earth men sending us their garbage. It’s not garbage, says Bug, they’re trying. At least they’re still trying, it’s more than you can say about us. Look, he says, it’s called “Curiosity”. They are curious! What are we doing? We just stare at the desert and wait. For some reason he feels defensive of the humans and the little robots. We do watch TV, says Big. Yeah, says Bug, where does the TV come from? Earth! I don’t think it’s right we don’t even throw them a bone. We were curious once, says Big, and look where it got us. At this point the rover makes a rattling noise. It turns one of its arms towards Big. We must go, says Bug. It will be 14 minutes until they can see this. All right, says his friend. They open the rover and replace its electronic brain by something that looks like a red stone. Peekaboo, says Bug to the camera, and makes the peekaboo gesture as he has seen it on TV. But they’ll never see it.

Posted at 6:45pm and tagged with: 100 days 2012, Mars, Curiosity, NASA,.

August 8th 2012

10 notes |#

You are You.

Look what I discovered today among heaps of manipulative information. I wonder if this image created itself at random. It has got an accidental beauty to it. This kind of imagery cannot be conceived of. It’s like a visual rustle, a murmur of paper, felt pen and prejudice. In any case, while I refuse all responsibility for this piece of found art, I’ll accept suggestions for the title.

There is just something special about making art, making anything, in the real world, without the help of digital tools: the roughness of the paper, the smell of the glue, the ruse required to move the pieces into their proper position, the irreversibility of it all, the thought “what if?” that has to be preserved for another attempt at mastering things, physical things connected with a myriad of other physical things, just as digital things are connected with one another, but not across the invisible divide: pixel or permanent, but never both.

Source: images from Der Spiegel 32/2012; paper, ink, felt pen, chutzpah. See also: Peter Watson, “The German Genius” (guardian review).

Posted at 8:22pm and tagged with: 100 days 2012, deutschland, germany,.

You are You.
Look what I discovered today among heaps of manipulative information. I wonder if this image created itself at random. It has got an accidental beauty to it. This kind of imagery cannot be conceived of. It’s like a visual rustle, a murmur of paper, felt pen and prejudice. In any case, while I refuse all responsibility for this piece of found art, I’ll accept suggestions for the title.
There is just something special about making art, making anything, in the real world, without the help of digital tools: the roughness of the paper, the smell of the glue, the ruse required to move the pieces into their proper position, the irreversibility of it all, the thought “what if?” that has to be preserved for another attempt at mastering things, physical things connected with a myriad of other physical things, just as digital things are connected with one another, but not across the invisible divide: pixel or permanent, but never both.
Source: images from Der Spiegel 32/2012; paper, ink, felt pen, chutzpah. See also: Peter Watson, “The German Genius” (guardian review).

August 7th 2012

4 notes |#

missing flower of evil. «… I feel like a lover, who is looking for a particular, but common flower, a very elementary thing: after all it’s a flower. A thing of natural beauty. How hard can it be to find it? It’s not been rare before. However, all florists tell me: nobody else wants this flower anymore. And when I asked them don’t you find it beautiful? They respond: beauty is not the point of the flower. And when I insist and want to know what is the point of a bouquet if you can’t pick the flower, they ignore me. Their main justification is that now they sell more flowers than before. They have in fact replaced the flower by something else, which is alien to me. Perhaps an invasion has occurred and all the flowers have been replaced by something else that is ugly and functional. …»

[Read full post][Photo: Böger, Flower Oracle, Wikimedia]

Posted at 1:22pm and tagged with: 100 days 2012, Baudelaire,.

missing flower of evil. «… I feel like a lover, who is looking for a particular, but common flower, a very elementary thing: after all it’s a flower. A thing of natural beauty. How hard can it be to find it? It’s not been rare before. However, all florists tell me: nobody else wants this flower anymore. And when I asked them don’t you find it beautiful? They respond: beauty is not the point of the flower. And when I insist and want to know what is the point of a bouquet if you can’t pick the flower, they ignore me. Their main justification is that now they sell more flowers than before. They have in fact replaced the flower by something else, which is alien to me. Perhaps an invasion has occurred and all the flowers have been replaced by something else that is ugly and functional. …»
[Read full post][Photo: Böger, Flower Oracle, Wikimedia]

August 5th 2012

3 notes |#

On The Origin Of Androids. Woke up this morning imagining that there were no more animals in the world. No natural animals anyway: rather, they had all been replaced by mechanical devices, which worked devilishly better than nature’s invention. At least this is what everyone thought at first. But the absence of animals and their replacement by machines soon made itself felt in an unexpected way: suddenly there was nothing to aspire to anymore. To be top dog there had to be a real dog. An automatic puppy that only rolls around, does what you say no matter what you ask and guesses what you might’ve wanted to say in a inbuilt desire to satisfy all your needs, won’t do. You can’t come clean unless someone else is dirtier than you.

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Posted at 11:56am and tagged with: 100 days 2012, darwin, android, animal,.

On The Origin Of Androids. Woke up this morning imagining that there were no more animals in the world. No natural animals anyway: rather, they had all been replaced by mechanical devices, which worked devilishly better than nature’s invention. At least this is what everyone thought at first. But the absence of animals and their replacement by machines soon made itself felt in an unexpected way: suddenly there was nothing to aspire to anymore. To be top dog there had to be a real dog. An automatic puppy that only rolls around, does what you say no matter what you ask and guesses what you might’ve wanted to say in a inbuilt desire to satisfy all your needs, won’t do. You can’t come clean unless someone else is dirtier than you.
[Read full story]

August 4th 2012

7 notes |#

hommage to kill author/vaughan simons.My own experience with editing and online literary magazine is limited to a stunt of several months with the then fairly new e-zine Metazen, founded by Frank Hinton. Under the nom de plume Finnegan Flawnt, whom I had fully made up, with his Celtic lineage, a Welsh lisp and an Irish limp. Finnegan had emerged straight from The Wake. He was Flann O’Brien’s younger brother, he looked like a disheveled Benjamin Franklin, and the murkiness of his descent undoubtedly predestined him for a career in editing. However, what Finnegan hated more than anything, was to have to read other writers’ stories. If he were still around to ask, he would probably admit that one reason was his own insecurity as a writer, and his absolute ambition, which made it difficult for him to look at anybody else’s work with the cool eye that an editor must possess. This is how I imagine the ideal editor:

“I looked at the man by the workbench now. He was short and thick-bodied with strong shoulders. He had a cool face and cool dark eyes. He wore a belted brown suede raincoat that was heavily spotted with rain. His brown hat was tilted rakishly. He leaned his back against the workbench and looked me over without haste, without interest, as if he was looking at a slab of cold meat. Perhaps he thought of people that way.”

(From: Chandler, The Big Sleep) … [read full post]

Posted at 4:20pm and tagged with: 100 days 2012, kill author, frank hinton, metazen, Chandler,.

hommage to kill author/vaughan simons.My own experience with editing and online literary magazine is limited to a stunt of several months with the then fairly new e-zine Metazen, founded by Frank Hinton. Under the nom de plume Finnegan Flawnt, whom I had fully made up, with his Celtic lineage, a Welsh lisp and an Irish limp. Finnegan had emerged straight from The Wake. He was Flann O’Brien’s younger brother, he looked like a disheveled Benjamin Franklin, and the murkiness of his descent undoubtedly predestined him for a career in editing. However, what Finnegan hated more than anything, was to have to read other writers’ stories. If he were still around to ask, he would probably admit that one reason was his own insecurity as a writer, and his absolute ambition, which made it difficult for him to look at anybody else’s work with the cool eye that an editor must possess. This is how I imagine the ideal editor:

“I looked at the man by the workbench now. He was short and thick-bodied with strong shoulders. He had a cool face and cool dark eyes. He wore a belted brown suede raincoat that was heavily spotted with rain. His brown hat was tilted rakishly. He leaned his back against the workbench and looked me over without haste, without interest, as if he was looking at a slab of cold meat. Perhaps he thought of people that way.”

(From: Chandler, The Big Sleep) … [read full post]

August 1st 2012

4 notes |#

I’ve only just heard about theplagiarizing/fabricating scandals involving Jonah Lehrer. It is, from the point of view of a German speaker and teacher, unfortunate that his surname in German means “teacher”. Though it may be meaningful, since he obviously had to teach us something, something many of us already knew: namely that even in the metaverse original content has a special value. Since the metaverse is supposed to be a greater mind space that includes the known universe, it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that the extra space consists of rehashed, or, as Dustin Kurtz of Melville House calls it, ‘repurposed’ content (what a terrible word!). Of course, this isn’t true. There is plenty of original thought and creat ivity to be found on the Internet. But there’s also a small group of profiteers, who probably like to think of themselves as ‘intellectual entrepreneurs’, who are lacking the basic respect of other people’s word work - plagiarism – and the reader’s justified expectation that anything announced as original is actually original – self-plagiarism; Lehrer was found guilty of both. This respect is basic, because it has formed the basis of creative communication since the beginning, and it is probably not too far-fetched to call it a cornerstone of humanity. … [Read full post]

Posted at 5:00pm and tagged with: 100 days 2012, plagiarism, Jonah Lehrer,.

July 29th 2012

12 notes |#

«It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.»

—From: RAYMOND CHANDLER, ‘The Simple Art Of Murder’. At age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression, and went on to write classics like The Big Sleep, The Long Good-Bye and Farewell, My Lovely. [Full post ‘Time Of Heroes’ at Nothing To Flawnt] [Deutsch]

Posted at 6:55pm and tagged with: 100 days 2012, Raymond Chandler, quote,.

«It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.
In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.»
—From: RAYMOND CHANDLER, ‘The Simple Art Of Murder’. At age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression, and went on to write classics like The Big Sleep, The Long Good-Bye and Farewell, My Lovely. [Full post ‘Time Of Heroes’ at Nothing To Flawnt] [Deutsch]