We wanted to include as many organic sounds as possible so we took a lot of field samples with a fancy ‘Blow Out’ recording device and used a lot of common objects found around the Oakland streets where we recorded. There are knives, bricks, piano innards, tin foil, elevator doors, drum pedals, glass and much much more in there. We took all those sounds, processed with studio trickery, and matched them to an already finished music album with the goal being 3 separate co-linear musical experiences: music album, noise album and a merged version that is free for experimentation. It is the most interactive album we’ve made and we strongly encourage people to get their hands (and ears) dirty with it. (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Band Booking: Talking J.G. Ballard and Noise With Seattle’s Iron Lung)
To source the paper I went to a weird alcove-warehouse in the middle of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. You go through paper swatches like you do with paint swatches. I walked out of there spending a lot more money than I intended, because it turns out I’m a paper nerd. After that I formatted it and just printed it out on a laser-jet printer and sliced the pages. There’s actually a whole community of bookbinders in Brooklyn. There’s a supply center called Talas in Bushwick that has all the bookbinding stuff you could ever want, so I got all these wonderfully weird items like an awl which looks like a murder weapon. (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Writing and Building “Concrete Fever”: An Interview With Nathaniel Kressen)
“It’s a cliché – itself an old printing word – but true: one of the many ways that capitalism works, or doesn’t, is that it forces more responsibilities on less people. In books, that means that over the past century editing, for example, has gone from being the province of editors, to that of agents, to that of MFA programs. I might not have a problem with a future in which the writer must become his or her own publisher (editor, art director, marketing department), distributor, wholesaler and retailer… But I do have a problem with the disingenuousness of the job description. Read between the lines and find a future in which the writer is also the reader – the only reader. Which is fucked. For me, the only justification for a massmarket has always been how it’s kept me out of “communities.” I don’t do well by communities. I like living alone, borrowing clothing, and eating all my meals at delis.” (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn | Revisiting Numbers and Documenting Atlantic City: A Between Books Interview with Joshua Cohen)
So I’m going to be DJing happy hour every second Thursday during the summer at Dream Baby on Ave. B. The night will be called MORE THAN A FEELING, and it will feature a whole bunch of friends of mine as guests.
May 30th Maura Magazine vs. Vol. 1 Brooklyn (Me + Maura Johnston)
June 13th Michael Miller (New York Observer) and Ryan Chang (Electric Literature)
June 27th Maggie Serota and Daniel Ralston of the Low Times podcast
July 11th Caleb Bratten of Sacred Bones and Aaron Lefkove of Littleneck
July 25th Judy Berman and Tom Hawking of Flavorwire.
August 8 Lincoln Michel (Gigantic Mag) and Ryan Chapman (Atavist Books)
August 22 Bill Pearis (Brooklyn Vegan/Sound Bites) and Maria Sherman (BuzzFeed, Impose, a bunch of other places) more TBA
The main lesson my chapbook has taught me about current projects is: find the format that fits your story, not the other way around. Just because many of us dream of publishing a book that provides a nice advance, not every story is suitable for the for-profit enterprise of commercial publishing. It’s a business. Some of our prose is too experimental for that outlet. Some of us write black sheep forms like the essay. I think of it the way I think of individual pieces. Some things you write are essays, some are articles, and some of the ones you thought were articles turn out to be short blog posts. The same goes for book projects. Some stories are chapbooks. Some are longform lit mag pieces. Others are books to send to trade publishers, and others are eBooks. Not every long narrative is a potential trade paperback to give your agent. Sometimes it’s best to go indie–not to be forced to, but to want to. Independent presses and relatively obscure literary magazines foster some of our country’s best writing, hands down, and writers should try to match our story to the venue.
“I always liked clarity and simplicity and balance. All rhythms can be seductive. I was attuned to the music of language as well as the music of music. Learning another language when I was seven probably made me hyperconscious of language; also the German language in the classroom was a wall of…
I’m excited to be able to share the news that Soho Press will publish my next two books, including my second novel Scrapper and a new collection of stories, over the next couple of years. Working with the Soho team on In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods has been a…
