Mythologies

...speaking of The Believer—interviews editor Ross Simonini is one half of NewVillager, and this NewVideo (for their song "RichDoors") is not only a lot of fun—"an IntegratedEvent in ten parts depicting the NewVillagerMythology"—but also features, around the 1:15 mark, our outgoing mg. ed., Andrew Leland! (And just found this, HTMLGiant likes it, too!)(And here's more on the video, at IFC News.)



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Everyone knows about this already: the latest McSweeney's is a box (painted like a head) full of good stuff: a shard of Michael Chabon's abandoned, post–Mysteries of Pittsburgh novel, Fountain City, replete with annotations; a long and funny piece by (Blvr. columnist) Jack Pendarvis, "Jungle Geronimo in Gay Paree"; a "standard" issue of McSwy's; a screenplay; a regular play; a short illustrated story...also a fun surprise by Angela Petrella and her sister. Also the box is great for putting other stuff (pamphlets!) in...



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An antipodean bookseller talks about McSweeney's/Blvr./etc.

"Twenty Questions"

Last week, McSweeney's won a well-deserved National Magazine Award for Fiction...

Last night, for the first time in a while, I browsed for a few minutes and Barnes & Noble (read: looked to see if Personal Days was stocked...yes!...one measly copy!) and spotted a great-looking cover—clumps of hand-written text, a doodle or two (I think)—of what? I couldn't see a title...some of the textual clumpage seemed to be written by, or about, Siri Hustvedt? Hmmm. I opened the cover—it was the latest issue of McSweeney's! (That's how book covers should work, right? A bit of mystery...enough to get you to pick it up and open it....)*

And it turned out to be not just any issue, but the one featuring "Twenty Questions," by my former student Bridget Clerkin!

For now I will just say it is an electrifying story, and I think I mean that literally—reading it again made the hairs stand up on my neck again, just as they did when I read a version of it over a year ago. (And now I'm horripilating again, just writing about the previous horripilations!) This story is so good—and so good at producing this sort of follicular response that surely the barbering/styling industry needs to take note?

I think this is one of those debuts that you'll remember, the way I remember reading George Saunders's "The 400-Pound CEO" in Harper's back in ’92 and thinking: I haven't read a voice like this before, this is something new, something I need, I am going to read Saunders from this point forward...

Now: You will be saying this about Bridget Clerkin!


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*Looks like someone liberated one of the two volumes of the current issue from its slipcase. Here's what it looks like, complete with title:

Sign language

From my Astral Weeks review* of Wolf Mankowitz's A Kid for Two Farthings:

First published 56 years ago, "Kid" . . . conjures a time and place that feels remote -- a mostly Jewish milieu of garment workers and sign writers and prizefighters, of "Shafchick's vapour baths" (containing "the hottest room in the world") and baigels and ads on sandwich boards. Here, the height of technology is the Superheat Patent Steam Presser that Mr. Kandinsky covets: "You put in your trousers -- so. Close it -- so. Press a handle. Pouf. Up comes the steam. Open. There is your trousers pressed. No smell, no consumption."

I wish I had the book here to transcribe the lovely/funny bit about sign writing—but coincidentally, Jenny has linked to a review of a book on "lost London," and quotes this:

The late-19th century was the heyday of ornamental sign-writing, before the advent of neon, and the hand-painted signs covering every shopfront appeal to all possible shades of public interest — those who wish to keep up appearances (“Gentlemen’s Hats Polished for Sixpence”), the desperate (“Hammer Guns and Automatic Pistols Bought, Sold and Exchanged”), the hopeful (“Our Noted Lucky Wedding Rings”) and the moribund (“Funerals To Suit All Classes”). Sunlight soap and Colman’s blue and starch are advertised even in blackest Bermondsey, which suggests that poverty did not necessarily mean dirt. The constant advertisements for patent medicines are a reminder that the average age of death in the East End in 1900 was 30, and 55% of children died before they were five. Signs outside eating-houses indicate keen competition. For fourpence you can get a rasher of bacon and two eggs in a coffee shop near the Tower, or a pint of tea, two slices of bread and a plate of cold meat in Borough High Street. Harris’s restaurant in Aldgate offers pork sausages with bread (“Always Hot Always Ready”) for twopence.

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In other news, the San Francisco Panorama and Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City are staggeringly, inspiringly great...I don't want them to end.


*The review is still almost impossible to find on the L.A. Times site.

American Wei

Jing Wei—greatest artist of all time? (The above is for American Way magazine, which used to have the best Editor's Notes.) Her work is also in McSweeney's new San Francisco Panorama broadside, which is apparently flying off the stands so fast that I will never see a copy!

"I like the meta stuff"

Mussina was first introduced to the website in April, when Yankee closer Mariano Rivera sent out a mass e-mail urging teammates to "check out his latest McSweeney's piece," a "short imagined monologue" written by a toaster. Mussina, who while in the minor leagues frequently submitted to Baltimore's alternative weekly City Paper, said that the site's absurd yet restrained writing style instantly resonated with him.

(The Onion, via.)

SuperJoke!

Today at McSweeney's, Sarah Schmelling retells Hamlet via Facebook:

Horatio thinks he saw a ghost.

Hamlet thinks it's annoying when your uncle marries your mother right after your dad dies.

The king thinks Hamlet's annoying.

Laertes thinks Ophelia can do better.

Hamlet's father is now a zombie.

Auction!

From McSweeney's:

NOW WOULD BE
A GOOD TIME.

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As you may know, it's been tough going for many independent publishers, McSweeney's included, since our distributor filed for bankruptcy last December 29. We lost about $130,000—actual earnings that were simply erased. Due to the intricacies of the settlement, the real hurt didn't hit right away, but it's hitting now. Like most small publishers, our business is basically a break-even proposition in the best of times, so there's really no way to absorb a loss that big.

We are committed to getting through and past this difficult time, and we're hoping you, the readers, who have from the start made McSweeney's possible, will help us.

Over the next week or so, we'll be holding an inventory sell-off and rare-item auction, which we hope will make a dent in the losses we sustained. A few years ago, the indispensable comics publisher Fantagraphics, in similarly dire straits, held a similar sale, and it helped them greatly. We're hoping to do the same.

So if you've had your eye on anything we've produced, now would be a great time to take the plunge. For the next week or so, subscriptions are $5 off, new books are 30 percent off, and the entire backlist is 50 percent off. Please check out the store and enjoy the astounding savings, while knowing every purchase will help dig us out of a big hole.

Many of our contributors have stepped up and given us original artwork and limited editions to auction off. We've got original artwork from Chris Ware, Marcel Dzama, David Byrne, and Tony Millionaire; a limited-edition music mix from Nick Hornby; rare early issues of the quarterly, direct from Sean Wilsey's closet; and more. We're even auctioning off Dave Eggers's painting of George W. Bush as a double-amputee, from the cover of Issue 14. More special items will be appearing as we go, so check back often.

This is the bulk of our groundbreaking business-saving plan: to continue to sell the things we've made, albeit at a greatly accelerated pace for a brief period of time. We are not business masterminds, but we are optimistic that this will work. If you've liked what we've done up to now, this is the time to ensure we'll be able to keep on doing more.

Plenty of excellent presses are in similar straits these days; two top-notch peers of ours, Soft Skull and Counterpoint, were just acquired by Winton, Shoemaker & Co. in the last few weeks. It's an unsteady time for everybody, and we know we don't have any special claim to your book-buying budget. We owe all of you a lot for everything you've allowed us to do over the last nine years, for all the time and freedom we've been given.

Once this calamity is averted, we'll get back to our bread and butter—the Believer Music Issue is already creeping into mailboxes everywhere; Issue 24 of our quarterly is in the midst of a really pretty silkscreening process; and in July the fourth issue of Wholphin, our DVD magazine, will slip over the border from Canada, bringing with it some very good footage of Maggie Gyllenhaal and a Moroccan drummer who messes up a wedding in an entertaining way. And then, a couple of months after that, we'll publish a debut novel from a writer named Millard Kaufman. This book is exactly the kind of thing McSweeney's was created to do: it came through the mail, without an agent's imprimatur, and it was written by a first-time novelist. This first-time novelist is 90 years old. His novel was pulled from the submissions pile and it knocked the socks off of everyone who read it. Millard may well be the best extant epic-comedic writer of his generation, and he stands at equal height with the best of several generations since.

Please do whatever you can to help. We thank you a thousand times. We'll keep updating everybody on how this is going over the next few weeks; for now, pick up a few things for yourself, your friends, for Barack Obama. More news soon—thanks for reading.

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I must say some of these items are very tempting...original Tony Millionaire drawings from The Believer!

Two momentary stays against confusion

Chicago Dizzyheads—

Today, June 9 at 4:30, there's a poetry reading at the Printers Row Book Festival, featuring A Public Space contributors Robyn Schiff, Nick Twemlow, Srikanth Reddy, and more. They'll be at the Lucille Clifton Poetry Tent. This is on "historic Printers Row," around Dearborn and Polk.

New York Dizzyheads—

On Monday, June 11 at 7, Poetry Magazine and McSweeney's co-sponsor a night at the Reader's Room at Mo Pitkin's House of Satisfaction (34 Avenue A btw. 2nd and 3rd) featuring John Ashbery, Lynn Emanuel, and Charles Bernstein, to celebrate The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets.

Some press release info about The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets:

The first McSweeney's foray into contemporary poetry brings together one hundred poems by fifty poets in ten poet-chains, and makes us wonder why we waited so long to try this. How it works: Ten poets choose a poem of their own and a poem by another poet, who then does the same, and so on unto the fifth generation. Thus DC Berman leads to Charles Simic by way of James Tate, and other chains run through Mary Karr, Denis Johnson, C.D. Wright, Michael Ondaatje, John Ashbery, Mark Doty, Dean Young, Yusef Komunyakaa, and dozens more.