Rob Walker's Blog, page 7
October 20, 2010
Author Updates
IN THIS UPDATE: Christine Hill, Joshua Glenn.
1) Earlier this month, Christine Hill's project Volksboutique transformed into a Berlin shop. The primary activity will be an updated version of her Armory Apothecary from 2009 [pictured above]. The shop features an apothecary counter that will be filled with an inventory of talismans for visitors to consider; Hill provides a file box of "attributes" on flash cards, and together she and the customer/visitor assemble a care package that consists of the objects they've selected with the character traits they've assigned them. Volksboutique, Choriner Strasse 51, Storefront, 10435 Berlin Prenzlauer Berg: Open Fridays 11 am — 7 pm and by appointment.
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2) As our readers already know, Significant Objects co-editor Joshua Glenn is also co-editor of HiLobrow. Recently, he helped launch another website: Semionaut is an international magazine of semiotic cultural and brand analysis. Though most of its contributors work in the field of commercial semiotics, Semionaut is aimed at a general readership. Josh's recent posts include "Yoga minus Contemplation" and "Inevitable Parenting."
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MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!
October 18, 2010
S.O. Book News
IN THIS POST: Dan Chaon, Colleen Werthmann, Christine Hill, Charles Baxter, Bob Powers.
This is the eleventh installment in a series of twenty posts announcing — in no particular order — which 100 stories will be collected in the Significant Objects book (forthcoming in 2011 from Fantagraphics).
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51. Dan Chaon's COOKING FORK story. Excerpt:
It was a two-pronged carving fork with a bright red plastic handle. When I was twelve, I stole it from the silverware drawer. I was very interested in the weapons of fantasy at that time: halberds and katanas, daggers and scimitars. The sorts of things your character would wield if you were playing Dungeons & Dragons.For a while, I pretended the fork was a magical treasure I'd found in a barrow, and I hid it in my room under the mattress. During the autumn of seventh grade, I used to like to poke myself with the fork. Late at night, when my door was locked. This was before I'd discovered masturbation.
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52. Colleen Werthmann's ABSOLUTION FIGURINE story. Excerpt:
The altar kids (boys and girls, now!) pick their nails during the homily, hoping nobody's watching. They wear nice pants and nice shoes under their cassocks, no sneakers, definitely no sneakers. Scheduled depending on who has a swim meet, who's got ice time, who's visiting their relatives. In the sacristy now, one of the Eucharistic Ministers is always around ahead of time. You know, just in case.Disillusionment is a box of Communion wafers. 1000 quantity. Sale price $11.89, originally $16.99. You save $5.10!
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53. Christine Hill's WOODEN BOTTLE story. Excerpt:
On Sunday when we are feeling lighthearted, M is waving the bottle around in dramatic poses, playing judge and jury, and then orchestra conductor. When it is my turn to act out, I thunk him over the head with it playfully and he says, in his German accent, "Aua, that actually hurts."I come home one evening late after we've had a disagreement and the bottle is next to our bed, playing the role of a bud vase, sporting one little pink blossom. M is contrite and I worry that the cat will knock it over and cause my copy of Maintaining Your Polyamorous Union to get soaked.
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54. Charles Baxter's CERAMIC SHELL story. Excerpt:
"Was Professor Schlempp able to determine of what materials the meteorite consisted?" Emily inquired, somewhat baffled, syntactically, by all the attention her discovery was garnering."Yes, he was," Mr. Duderstadt said.
"What's in it?" the impatient schoolgirl asked.
"Well, that's the interesting part," Mr. Duderstadt said, leaning back in his chair, and rearranging his necktie. "Professor Schlempp put it into his spectrometer, and then placed a tiny microscopic sample into the Gigatron® electron microscope, and then, dissatisfied with his result, put the meteorite into the university's Super-Vulcan X-ray Analysis Machine, where a definitive analysis finally became possible."
"And?"
"Well, here's the surprise," said the genial wizard of Kiesiewicz High. "The piece naturally has a high content of Iron, whose symbol, as you know, is fe. But more interesting was Schlempp's discovery that the object has a high content of the rare earth, Probabilium, along with a certain amount of Potassium, Cyanide, and Blorth."
"Blorth?" asked Emily. "That's awesome!"
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55. Bob Powers' CHROME TURTLE story. Excerpt:
"Won't be neighbors for long," I said. I was moving out of my roommate situation and into my girlfriend Paula's place. Paula owned."Looks like," she said. She was moving out of her studio and into her boyfriend Max's place. Max inherited.
"I'll take it," I said, holding up the turtle. She offered to give me a freebie, saying there might still be some of my blood on one of the feet, but I insisted. She charged me two bucks and my cell phone number.
We never even got the boxes unpacked. At first we'd do it at Paula's, since Paula's schedule was more reliable than Max's. Then we fought about risk-sharing, so we started doing it at Max's, but only when he traveled.
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MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!
October 17, 2010
Significant Tweets for Week Ending 2010-10-17
Horse Bust + Beth Lisick story, our last Root Division-benefit auction. Heating up, ends today. http://bit.ly/blKnf5 #
Marriage, Memories, and 'The Morning News': Rosecrans Baldwin interview on Atlantic http://t.co/pTxZ7ls #
Julie Klausner on Flaky Guys and Funny Ladies [Texas Book Festival Interview] http://t.co/xYRH1OH via @austinist #
Peter Tonningsen photographs of discarded objects collected from shoreline. http://tumblr.com/xr4lpmkd1 #
Today's auction-ending: "4"-Angel + Katie Williams story. Nice stuff. Proceeds to Root Division. http://bit.ly/cikppD #
Six minute video about desks. Surprisingly interesting. http://tumblr.com/xr4llm62y #
Grandpa Mug + Chris Colin Story. We hear this was a big laugh-getter at our @litquake event. Bid before it's gone. http://bit.ly/aThu2R #
Time running out to bid on Monster Toy + Rob Baedeker (@robbaedeker) story. It's very funny. http://bit.ly/bBky0g Proceeds to Root Division. #
Coverage of S.O. at #litcrawl is here: http://bit.ly/cwpGWB #
Auction ends today for this fine-ass Candle Holder + Miranda Mellis story. Proceeds to Root Division. Snap it up! http://bit.ly/apOzeZ #
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Author Updates
IN THIS UPDATE: Nomi Kane, Jeff Turrentine, Terese Svoboda.
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1) Terese Svoboda is reading today (October 17) at KGB with Ben Greenman and Matthew Salesses, 8:00 p.m.
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2) Nomi Kane just finished co-editing and contributing to a new project called Peep Show. "It's a pin-up calendar by a gaggle of Center for Cartoon Studies she-toonists. Twelve of us have created beautiful and, slightly scandalous, illustrations to enjoy every month of 2011!" You can see a preview and order a copy at Kane's website Brew for Breakfast.
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3) Jeff Turrentine tells us that he's finished the final draft (he hopes) of his first novel. It's called Cities of Sand, and he's sending it out to agents now.
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MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!
October 16, 2010
S.O. Book News
IN THIS POST: Douglas Wolk, Dan Reines, Deb Olin, David Shields, Doug Dorst.
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This is the tenth installment in a series of twenty posts announcing — in no particular order — which 100 stories will be collected in the Significant Objects book (forthcoming in 2011 from Fantagraphics).
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46. Douglas Wolk's PORTABLE HAIRDRYER story. Excerpt:
Finally, on May 12, 1983, Sanangelo was sharing a motel room with Cowen in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where he was booked to play that night. An altercation between them ensued sometime that afternoon; Cowen, in a rage, smashed Sanangelo's guitar, and the two of them went on to build a bonfire in the parking lot and burn virtually all the possessions they had with them before the police arrived. Five minutes before showtime, Sanangelo turned up at the door of the Little Groove Hut with a black eye, torn clothes, and an unnerving smile on his face, carrying a small plastic case with a yellow travel hair dryer inside — the only item from his luggage that he'd spared from the fire.
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47. Dan Reines' FRIDAY MUG story. Excerpt:
So that's kinda how the Death Mug became the Death Mug. When Lara got fired, her and Manny and me went to the parking lot and did about five tequila shots each from it, and then when Sharon left to go take care of her mom in Seattle, she brought in some box wine and a bunch of us went over to the Piper and sat on the patio and drank it, and she drank out of the mug. And then she came back after her mom died, and they laid her off about six weeks later, and we did it again, only me and Tracey brought the wine this time and we made sure it was good wine."Nothing pink!" That was Tracey's rule. Good rule, right? For wine? "Nothing pink!" Only he said it the way Tracey would say it.
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48. Deb Olin Unferth's PAN FLUTE story. Excerpt:
I was an ambassador once—of a small African nation. All of us diplomats, that is our dream: to be an ambassador. At least once, at least for a little while. Many of us get a little Eastern or African nation for a year or two. We are eager when it happens because our life's goal is complete. But it isn't so special after all. Soon it's over and we continue on. We are diplomats again, and our time of glory is reduced to a sentence we can say in passing at a party, "Oh, I was ambassador there once, for eighteen months." Or at a meeting, "Well, when I was ambassador, as I recall, witchcraft was still a powerful force in the north. I knew a man who believed his daughter had turned into a tree."Or when entertaining one's wife's friends, "That flute? Oh yes, when I was ambassador, the prince of the country rode two days on a camel to present it to me. Don't know where he got it. They love plastic, you know. Who are we kidding? Plastic was the real revolution."
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49. David Shields' MILITARY FIGURE story. Excerpt:
MICHEL LEIRIS: If this were a play, one of those dramas I have always loved so much, I think the subject could be summarized like this: how the hero leaves for better or worse (and rather for worse than better) the miraculous chaos of childhood for the fierce order of virility.PAUL FUSSELL: The letterpress correspondents, radio broadcasters, and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them on behalf of the War Effort.
BEN SHEPHARD: From early on in the war, the RAF felt it necessary to have up its sleeve an ultimate sanction, a moral weapon, some procedure for dealing with cases of "flying personnel who will not face operational risks." It was known as LMF or "Lack of Moral Fibre." Arthur Smith 'went LMF' after his twentieth "op." The target that night was the well-defended Ruhr and the weather was awful. Even before the aircraft crossed the English, he had lost control of his fear; his "courage snapped and terror took over." "I couldn't do anything at all," he later recalled. "I became almost immobile, hardly able to move a muscle or speak."
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50. Doug Dorst's RUSSIAN FIGURE story. Excerpt:
From a high window, someone saw Vralkomir leave his shop, glance around the empty village square, then trudge into the forest. He returned hauling a freshly cut tree. In the square, he sawed the wood into discs like the one you see on the icon. Vralkomir then hopped onto one of the discs and began dancing, dancing, dancing to the tuneless music in his head. He danced faster and faster. The villagers watched as he wheeled and spun and tappatapped, his legs and feet a blur in the subarctic gloom. A plume of smoke rose from under his feet, and he kept dancing, and then there was more smoke, and he danced on, and soon the wooden disc was ablaze. Vralkomir leapt to the next disc and set it alight, and the next, and the next, and the Dnobstians came out and gathered round the fires, drinking in the precious warmth, happy to be alive. The bearded man danced all winter, they say, as no one else in the village could duplicate his feat of terpsichorean ignition, and he died of exhaustion in mid-April, a beloved martyr. Some say he had stitched contraband flints into his soles; others claim he lit the fire with dance alone. My grandmother preferred the latter, and so do I.
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MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!
October 15, 2010
Significant Objects Meme (21)
Emily Spivack writes to let us know about Worn Stories, a website where she's publishing stories about clothing and memory. She explains: "Every item of clothing we wear has a story behind it — perhaps it was passed on to us by someone special, worn during a significant event, or is emblematic of a specific time in our life. So I'll be asking interesting people to tell me a story based around a favorite piece of clothing and then I'll share those narratives on Worn Stories."
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For more evidence of the Significant Objects Meme, click here.
MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!
October 14, 2010
Bee Bucket + Sam Reiff-Pasarew Story
Object Slam Story By Sam Reiff-Pasarew
[This past Saturday night, the above object was revealed to the audience at the first-ever Significant Objects live event. Anyone brave enough to play along had 10 minutes to invent fresh Significance for this $1 thrift-store item. Seven rose to the challenge; only one could prevail. Sam Reiff-Pasarew, a Brooklyn resident visiting San Francisco, says he was on hand by chance -- but perhaps it was fate? After all, it turns out his work with Story Pirates includes writing workshops in which kids invent meanings for objects! Whatever brought him to Root Division that night, he won the world's first Object Slam, and the Bee Bucket. We are pleased to share his winning story with you here.]
I like to put things in little containers. I've been searching a while for the perfect little container. It needs to have a few practical characteristics that will really set my mind at ease when I'm worrying about its possible applications. It should be big enough for a hearty bouillabaisse or enough suntan lotion for 6 or 7 weeks at the beach. It shouldn't be too hard to clean — I don't want my bouillabaisse tasting like suntan lotion.
It should also be heavy enough that if it's the only thing in my backpack and it's empty and I lift up my seemingly empty backpack that my back pack should feel like it has something in it. That way if I'm looking for it and I want to know if it's in my backpack I just need to lift it up, and not open the backpack.
Also it needs to look like a black hole and be covered with bees.
Author Updates
IN THIS UPDATE: Kate Bernheimer, Michael Atkinson, Matthew Wells.
1) As we reported in August, Kate Bernheimer is very busy. Here are a few updates: October 16, Boston Book Festival, fairy-tale reading and discussion with Kathryn Davis, Kelly Link, and Maria Tatar. October 27, reading from Horse, Flower, Bird at The Booksmith in San Francisco. Also on October 27: Gregory Maguire introduces My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me at New York's Symphony Space. October 29, Antigone Books in Tucson, fairy-tale reading from My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, with Lydia Millet, Joy Williams, Alissa Nutting, and Karen Brennan.
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2) Michael Atkinson is on a panel ("Let's Pretend We're Strangers: Including Real People as Fictional Characters") at Boucheron in San Francisco today. He also tells us: "New pieces in The Village Voice, The L Magazine, In These Times, IFC.com, LA Weekly and Mystery Scene!"
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3) Matthew Wells' online reading of The Manhattan Sonnets will be streaming tomorrow morning on the New River Dramatists section of the Art International Radio site.
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MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!
October 13, 2010
Lit Crawl / Object Slam notes
Baedeker in action at S.O.'s Lit Crawl event. Pic courtesy of Electric Literature's blog.
Sounds like things went pretty well at our debut live event out in San Francisco, at least if our friends and contacts are to be believed:
"It was fantastic! Loved it. Huge crowd, super fun." "Not sure how to explain how awesome it was. Total, almost bizarre, success. Rob [Baedeker] was a perfect emcee, the readings were punchy and terrific and then the slam part blew everyone's minds; painful to pick a winner from all seven excellent submissions. All in an hour!" "Most of all — awesome. … . A short fun reading in which there is at once formal constraint, benefaction, sociability, literary verve, and gallows humor! Now that is weird! More of that please."
You get the idea.
The last remaining piece of business is to fill in those of you who couldn't make the scene about the Object Slam. Seven brave audience members stepped up to invent stories, in a mere 10 minutes, about an object revealed at the event. Most, we hear, wrote their stories longhand. Interesting, no? But as it happens, the winner wrote his story on an iPhone! We'll publish that story tomorrow. The object, however, will not be sold (or not by us, anyway) — it now belongs to our Object Slam winner, commemorating his triumph. (Making it a Significant Object indeed!)
Meanwhile you still have time to snap up one of our last few Objects + Stories with proceeds benefiting our event venue, the estimable Root Division.
Get bidding!
P.S. more pix plus an account of the evening on the Electric Literature blog.
Author Updates
IN THIS UPDATE: Sheila Heti, Robert Lopez.
1) Sheila Heti's new book, How Should a Person Be?, was released on October 5 in Canada by House of Anansi Press. (It can be ordered online by Americans.) David Shields writes, "Sheila Heti's voice in How Should a Person Be? is utterly beguiling: blunt, charming, funny, and smart. She subtly and beautifully weaves together ideas about sex, femininity and artistic ambition. Reading this genre-defying book was pure pleasure." The prologue to the book can be read on her website.
Heti invites S.O. readers in Toronto that day to attend the launch party on October 14th at 8 pm at Stone's Place, 1255 Queen Street West.
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2) Robert Lopez's new collection of stories, Asunder, is due out from Dzanc Books in November. He has stories in The Brooklyn Rail, Unsaid, and Sententia this month. On October 22nd, he'll be reading at Issue Project Room for The Brooklyn Rail's 10th anniversary. Old American Can Factory: 232 3rd St.
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MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!
