Ron Silliman has an excellent post up about the documentary Thomas Pynchon — A Journey Into the Mind of P. and auctorial anonymity.
Month / August 2006
Return of Cracked
After months in development, Cracked Magazine lives again, looking suspiciously like another magazine. There’s even an eight page preview available.
Virgin Atlantic: Turning Sane Humans Into Basket Cases With a TV Dinner Aesthetic
A Guest Column by Kristin Tillotson
Fiction is dead. It dies and resurfaces, dies and resurfaces. It is Jason from Friday the 13th. It is an unwelcome call from your mother-in-law nagging you about bringing the quesadillas to the family picnic. It is that dentist who says, “This won’t hurt a bit,” when of course it hurts more than a bit.
Fiction! You bastard! Die fiction die! Why won’t you die? Why won’t you transform into a corporeal form like a piñata so that we can all beat you senseless and watch your innards spill onto the floor? Why can’t we wipe the lino clean with your blood? Why can’t we eat you for breakfast?
I want to ignore the fact that humanity thrives on stories for a moment and remind you that fiction is dead DEAD dead. If fiction will not die, then I will make it die. I am on a mission from God. If I catch you reading a novel, I will snatch it from your hands and tell you that you are wrong and that you too will die. And then I will beat you senseless and watch you die. I will laugh at you, foolish fiction reader, you who cannot acknowledge inevitability. I will use Astroglide and a cudgel, if necessary.
I will quote you troubling statistics about John Updike and ignore the 100,000 copies that Terrorist sold.
Fiction, I will bust your chops. Fiction, you are nothing. You emobdy entropy. And I will tell you again that you are dead, even when you pounce on my shoulders and perform an exuberant tap dance.
The Bat Segundo Show #54: David Mitchell II, Part One
[NOTE: This is part one of a two-part podcast.]
Author: David Mitchell
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Responding to the crazed accusations of a major film director.
Subjects Discussed: The similarities between Jason Taylor and David Mitchell, idiosynchratic vernacular, first-person vs. third-person voice, index cards, how Granta unexpectedly kicked off Black Swan Green, the correct pronounciation of Nabokov, the difference between sandwiches in the US and the UK, the use of 1980s technology in writing, the Falkland Islands, on selecting cultural references from 1982, Friendster, the regulation of UK schools over the past thirty years, the use of visual elements in BSG, authenticity, money and Thatcher’s England, MacGuffins in novels and life, being nice to horrid people, the Julia principle, the politics of language, hip-hop culture, the threat of conformity vs. Jason Taylor’s resilience, shaking off the Murakami yoke, the Ed Park review, on using characters from other books, and naming the headmaster Nixon, and character names that “stick on the eyeball.”
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