The Return of "Cow Vase"

Last year I participated in the Significant Objects project, writing a very short story around a knick-knack selected by editors Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn. Now several of those stories have been collected into a book, and I'm happy to be included alongside authors such as Nicholson Baker, William Gibson, Heidi J., Colson Whitehead, Neil LaBute, Sloane Crosley, Tom McCarthy, Jonathan Lethem, Lydia Millett....(I could keep going!)...

It looks like there will be two covers; I wrote about the delightful "Cow Vase" featured on the pink one. The books are out in July and are available for pre-order.

Today the project was featured on Studio 360. There's a contest, and a video...

Book Notes™ With Ed Park

I. Closing out my D&D/RPG "trilogy" of tales (thus far comprising "Welcome to Tyosen™!" and "Cow Vase") is "Dungeon Masters Guide," my contribution to Bound to Last: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book! (Sean Manning put it together.) Pub date is October 26. The interviewer inside my head wants to step in for a moment.

Q: Are all these pieces part of some greater work?

A: I can't answer that right now, I'm sorry!

II. Speaking of "Cow Vase"—it will be included in the forthcoming book Significant Objects (Fantagraphics, 2011)!

III. F.S. Yvonne Woon's YA novel Dead Beautiful is out—what a cool website!

IV. Jenny D on her Kindle experience.

V. Lev G on his Yale experience.

VI. My sister went to Montreal and got me this Ed the Happy Clown comic. Someone should write something about Chester Brown's notes on his old work—the notes are equally fascinating!

VII. I think that's all for now...

Rorty's wake

No one writes like Heidi Julavits: "The daughter of dour pragmatists who prefaced many a conversation with the phrase, 'In the wake of Rorty,' my wife initially mistook me as a source of peculiar brightness."

Read her short story "Wooden Apple Core" at Significant Objects, as Believer week draws to a close.

Believer notes — update!

V. This week, worlds collide, as Believer writers take the Significant Objects challenge and imbue random objects with enormous meaning for eBay hijinks/charity.

First up is Damion Searls (translator extraordinaire, author of the superb collection What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, editor of Thoreau's journals, president of the United States) on a Bubblebath Teapot. Coming up: Justin Taylor, Trinie Dalton, Miranda Mellis, and...Heidi Julavits!

(My Significant Objectifying last year: this attractive cow vase.)

Mixed doubles

Luc Sante on William S. Burroughs and...a flannel ball.

Mountains of Moralia

This is Ed Park's bot, blogging for him while he's away. At the Significant Objects project, he invests this curious bovine vessel with maximum meaning. (If you like what you see/read...bid on it!)

Here's the first graf:

If you came of age in the ’70s and ’80s, you probably have some sense of what the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons was like. Players became characters — dwarf or knight or wizard — and wandered labyrinths looking for treasure, battling monsters along the way. Dice were rolled, charts consulted. Even if you never played, you probably knew someone who had, a brother of a friend or a nose-breathing cousin who himself resembled a minotaur.

* * *

UPDATE (8/15): At the last minute, $62 was bid!

Disambiguations for July 22, 2009

I. Over at Driftwood Singers Present:

Remember when your whole M.O. was to avoid living a life of "quiet desperation"? Books and music were going to save us. By the time you realize your liberal arts education was designed to fulfill the self-indulgent solipsism of youth, you've become a "content provider" scraping for a shred of dignity in the digital age. How poetic! Then one day you wake up and find yourself on your knees on the sidewalk flipping through boxes of crappy $1 vinyl like some vagrant off his meds: Hey, maybe this Strawbs album will be good. Pathetic. (Btw, it's horrible.)

II. A little oeuvre sleuthing over at Paper Cuts, on Nabokov and Lolita:

Nabokov himself may well have deplored this combing of his work for clues to his life, or vice versa. The alchemy between the two was among his great subjects, and even in this memoir (subtitled, significantly, “An Autobiography Revisited“) he suggests there can be no literal translation from life to literature. But he wasn’t averse to leaving a trail of bread crumbs; indeed, he left so many of them that his books sometimes seem like solid loaves of hints and puzzles.

(Solid loaves! Very funny.)

III. Re-reading around the edges: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. This book is TOO GOOD. I can't write about it here.

IV. The Believer music issue is also TOO GOOD to be blogged about..................I'll just say GO GET IT.......then tell me which song you liked best on the CD. (The CD is really good but there is one song in particular that is TOO GOOD to be blogged about.)

V. Why is "The Dizzies" now called "Disambiguation"? (For that matter, why was it briefly "As I Please"?) These questions are TOO MYSTERIOUS to be blogged about.

VI. Laird Hunt has an original take on the Living With Music playlist-format at Paper Cuts. Example:

6) Inflammatory Writ, Joanna Newsom. “Oh, where is your inflammatory writ? Your text that would incite a light, ‘Be lit’ ?” “The Exquisite” was, I’d like to hope, my inflammatory writ.

“Ray of the Star”: Written in one mad six-week sprint during the fall of 2007 after a visit to La Rambla in Barcelona, where the most elaborate living statues coexist with newspaper stands, flower stalls, bird vendors, locals and tourists. My fever-dream version of Barcelona includes bathing ghosts, haunted shoes, bargains with devils and demonic art critics.

Love that he ends with Sonic Youth's "Providence." (Secret source for the Psychic Envelopes "Providence #3?). Mix idea: Songs with/mentioning/utilizing answering machines/their ingoing/outgoing messages...Replacements, "Answering Machine"...that weird tidbit at the end of one of those early TMBG singles/EPs...uh...the list goes on...

VII. Am very late on this: Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker's Significant Objects project...I have written something for it (not posted yet)...More info at Paper Cuts (your one-stop shop for Disambiguation fodder)....also more at Jacket Copy.

VIII. On Sung J. Woo's site: Photos from the 7/1 Korea Society panel.