Joseph Beuys, “I Like America and America Likes Me,” 1974
(via Green Lantern Press)

It’s about boredom, for God’s sake! Only an estimated one third finished at the time of Wallace’s death, The Pale King is about a group of IRS agents with jobs the crushing dullness of which “ultimately sets them free”[…]

The obvious problem — and the one that Wallace was apparently still struggling with before he died — was how to spin the premise into non-tedious narrative. According to his editor, Wallace “posed himself the task that is almost the opposite of how fiction works,” which — as every author who is not Stephenie Meyer knows — is “leaving out the things that are not of much interest.” So who the heck wants to read about a bunch of tax-processing bureaucrats filling out forms?

@ NY Mag

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Over 45 years ago Susan Sontag wrote that redundancy—an experience of joblessness or irrelevance—was the chief affliction of modern life, a verdict that has yet to fall out of date. Insignificance and redundancy make special problems for a writer. Speaking generally, what a novelist aims to do is to convey or impose meaning, and meaning is what redundancy undermines—precisely why irrelevance is one of the natural and insoluble terrors of writing. If you were looking for a neat expression for the awful sense of uselessness that anyone with a commitment to the written word must feel from time to time, then Philip Larkin’s phrase would be hard to better: “Books are a load of crap.” “Depressive realism” (a clinical term) becomes an occupational hazard for the author and reader.

@ The Point

Peace. Only the medal for bravery still remained as a reminder of the failed attack on New Orleans. And daily work… for that was now more arduous. So many were missing.

The battle, they said, had been superfluous. Unfortunately, the news of a long-since-concluded peace had arrived too late. But what did ‘too late’ mean? They hadn’t waited for it long enough. That’s what it meant.

The ship was now on its way to England. During the first weeks they still talked about their defeat. Five and a half thousand British against four thousand Americans. But in blindly running against them, the British lost two thousand men at the start, while the Americans, thanks to their secure fortifications, lost only thirteen, and those only because they broke out and wanted to become heroes.

What Franklin had to say about this was amply expressed by his silence. To talk about the senselessness of a battle was to attribute sense to war itself. Then, too, he was still very weak. ‘A few hidden deserters and some contraband,’ one of them said, ‘were not worth a war with the Americans.’ That person could actually imagine aims that might have been worth it.

~ Sten Nadolny, The Discovery of Slowness

If you take an interest in birds, then you must take an interest in their habitat—the world in which they live—and if you do that then you have assumed a curiosity and concern about the wider environment. To be interested in the environment is to be interested in our own habitat, and once that holds your attention, you have become interested in the future. You have become interested in life itself. Birds, for me, have confirmed that ours is a life worth living.

~ Niall Edworthy

The ice screams as it folds over itself. I want the fog to kiss me, but it wraps like a damp scarf, tightening, sliding down my throat and dying in my belly like a sigh. I count rabbits and daisies and pale women. So cold my piss bounces off the ground. My breath ripens and falls. Words crystallize and fail. So cold my God has already said checkmate, has already retired to bed.

~ Tara Laskowski @ Everyday Genius

JM: I could never imagine doing something like this because, beyond that brutalness of exposing yourself, there’s also an honesty that potentially could be hurtful to others, to parents, siblings, old lovers. We always want to believe that people, ultimately, think mostly good of us. Or, at the very least, we want them to lie if they can’t say anything nice. Have you spoken to anyone in the book after the fact, now that it’s out? Has there been any weirdness?

KS: There’s not much weirdness…yet. I’m still waiting for my mom to give me her thoughts. But my personal feelings on it is that most of these things happened twenty years or more ago. People forgive or forget in that time span, I hope. I got a couple of messages from old girlfriends about the book. Erin, who I wrote about in a couple of chapters, said: “I don’t remember doing some of those awful things, but they sound true. I was 19 after all.” To be fair, I tried to own up to my own dumb behavior more than anyone else. I think that’s really the way to do a memoir. You can’t make yourself the victim and you can’t pretend to be a hero.

~ Kevin Sampsell interviewed at JMWW

Think about how stories typically circulate in the world. I write a story, send it to a literary journal, it gets published, and maybe one or two people emails me to mention they read it. One of the perplexing questions I get asked a lot is “How is your book doing?” (Rebecca Brown has a perfect retort for this. She says, “Great! It’s finished!”) I’m never quite sure how to answer this question. I haven’t seen sales figures for either of my books recently, I have no idea who the people are who read them unless they contact me, and I have no idea where in the world individual copies end up. With Found and Lost, I can see where each individual story is and where it has been and who has touched it. I can read comments from that person about the story and what they were doing the day they found it. I can see photos that the person has uploaded, and I get an email alerting me whenever the story has been placed in a new cache or is picked up by someone new. I can send each person a personal email if I wish. And if they seem to enjoy my work, I can let them know about new stuff coming out.

~ Ryan Boudinot on his story geocaching project Found and Lost

It seems inevitable that eventually this story about cruise ships stuck in unusual levels of Atlantic ice, and this one about a growing Atlantic garbage patch, will merge into floating islands of plastic settled by the pilgrim/passengers of trapped cruise ships.

Céline Clanet, Morning Sun Over Tundra, 2009
(via roo)

I tried to watch Patricia McInroy’s “In/organic Transmissions” at qarrtsiluni but a problem with the embedded video gave me this error message instead:

For a moment I thought this was the video, because it indeed shows “a conversation that is not taking place,” and the natural engaging the artificial. Makes me wonder if this is the best option for Vimeo’s error message — seems a bit self-defeating, doesn’t it? Because even as one conversation doesn’t take place — the networked one — another conversation does, face-to-face as our pixelated trio turn away from the inoperative screen toward each other and toward the landscape around them.

(PS The real video is working now, so check it out.)