The grievously undercompensated Web editor starts typing out the polite, nonspecific response: “Dear [author], Thanks so much for getting in touch…”From "readings...":
The reader at the reading, not talking right into the microphone, wondering if people will care if he goes on a little longer than the amount of time he’s been allotted by the organizer, whom, deep down, he doesn’t actually take very seriously,
Jimmy: ha jin's in the background rubbing one out
me: had bacon, nachos, elk or something, iced tea, and breast milk for dinner
am i going to die
6:32 PM Jimmy: that's not vegan, and yes we all eventually die
i read about frank stanford on i think blake’s blog.inspired by responses like this one, blake butler has a great post, on how he found out about shit. one of those, is this great story also about how he found out about tom waits:
some girl i liked gave me in watermelon sugar to read.
i learned about bukowski from reading about tom waits
i learned about tom waits because my dad hates the ramones and came into my room one day and took the cd out and put in mule variations and told me to “grow the fuck up”
i learned to love tom waits after years of talking shit about his music, i remember being in TGI friday's one night and saying to two of my friends who liked his music how i thought anyone who liked his music must be lying, because it sounded like someone rubbing two stones together inside his voice, now that is one of the things i most like about his voice, i think a lot of the things i really like now are things i used to talk shit about or hate for the same reasonsmyself, i found tom waits through kazaa or limewire or bearshare or some shit like that my freshman year of college. i was doing a search of "polka" music to put on as a joke while i was out of the room. (i'm not really sure why, other than i think i imagined, then, that it would be funny to walk by a person's dorm room and hear polka blasting through the door and i wanted to provide this experience to others. also, i was kind of an ass.) i downloaded waits's "cemetary polka" to go along "beer barrel polka" and some other polka song i can't remember the name of. i set the three songs to repeat, turned the volume all the way up, and then locked my dorm room door and went out for a while. this all happened a few more times until it became clear nobody really cared what music i listened to or what i did at all and i stopped, because it just seemed sad to try to instigate with no response. seemed embarrassing, ineffectual, etc. it wasn't until years of shit-talking him later that i thought of tom waits as anything other than the creator of that awful noise i used to put on to piss people off.
Indie lit blog HTMLGiant is doing a Secret Santa Gift Exchange. It looks like a lot of fun.
Steps listed below:
1) If you want to participate, email your name and mailing address to htmlgiant@gmail.com with the subject line: SECRET SANTA. The due date for this is Midnight on Friday, December 5th.
2) As soon as possible, we email you the name and address of your assigned gift recipient.
3) We assign your name and address to another Secret Santa.
4) By Christmas, you purchase for your gift recipient a wonderful gift and email us to let us know what you got him or her.
5) You simultaneously enjoy the gift that you receive from your own Secret Santa.
Link and photo of "chopper"-riding Santa here.
"[James Yeh is] probably one of the four or five best writers in the United States who hasn’t yet published a book."
--Kyle Minor, HTMLGIANT
