Well, confusion or dissonance are things that sometimes work in opposing ways but they kind of set the story straight. Sometimes the most interesting thing to watch is the way things dance with each other or connect with each other in ways that you would never expect. I’ve always felt more attracted to things that were more emotionally complicated.

I had a phone conversation with Harmony Korine recently about the re-release of his debut novel A Crack-Up at the Race Riots for The Paris Review Daily.

Calling a practice uncreative is to reenergize it, opening creativity up to a whole slew of strategies that are in no way acceptable to creativity as it’s now known. These strategies include theft, plagiarism, mechanical processes, repetition. By employing these methods, uncreativity can actually breathe life into the moribund notion of creativity as we know it.

I had the privilege of interviewing Kenneth Goldsmith about his new book Seven American Deaths and Disasters for The Paris Review Daily.

Global Queer Cinema has just published my essay, “Against Any Consensual Reality: A Revaluing of Bruce LaBruce’s Otto; or, Up with Dead People.”

I am grateful to Jamie Iredell, author of The Book of Freaks, for tagging me in “The Next Big Thing” blog series, wherein authors answer ten questions about their current works-in-progress and then tag other authors to participate. I’ll do my best…

What is the working title of your book?

I always have a handful of projects going simultaneously.  At the moment, I have three books in progress:

(i)  A collection of appropriated stage plays remixed into prose poems, which I’m calling To Be, To Be, Or Not To Be.

(ii) A language-driven novel set in the fantasy world of an imaginary creature on the day of the apocalypse, which I’m calling Glaxo Kreemo.

(iii) A hard to describe work of nonfiction, sort of like David Markson’s Author Quartet meets a personal memoir meets cultural criticism, for which I have no official title yet….at the moment I call it “My Faulkner Experiment” because last semester while preparing a lecture on his novel As I Lay Dying I learned that he wrote it without planning anything out in advance in less than three months, between October 25th, 1929 and January 12th, 1930, so I decided to challenge myself to produce a new book in that same time period.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

(i) My interest in exploring the boundary between experimental writing and conceptual poetics.

(ii) I was reading Homer’s Odyssey for the first time, while concurrently teaching William S. Burroughs’s The Soft Machine.

(iii) I just started typing, trying desperately to produce material, and what came out of me was this nonficiton stuff.

What genre does your book fall under?

I would call them all works of experimental literature. But to give them more marketable labels:

(i) poetry

(ii) fiction (novel)

(iii) nonfiction/memoir

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

(i) The original cast of Twin Peaks to play all the parts in all the various plays. Directed by Harmony Korine.

(ii) Ken Baumann, Mos Def, Amanda Seyfried, Karl Pilkington, and Sofia Vergara. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

(iii) Probably Zach Galifianakis to play me and Fiona Apple to play my wife. Directed by the ghost of Stan Brakhage.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

I think I already answered this question above.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

(That strikes me as a strange binary.) At any rate, I have worked with an agent in the past, however I am currently unrepresented.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Keeping in mind that my attention has been focused these past few years on the research and writing of my Ph.D. dissertation, which critically examines the 20th and 21st century American literary debates over experimentation and convention as they relate to the formation of national identity, it has been inevitable that these creative works have taken longer to produce than I would have ideally imagined.  That said:

(i) I’ve been working on To Be… since the fall of 2009.

(ii) I’ve been working on Glaxo Kreemo since the summer of 2010.

(iii) I began the Faulkner Experiment October 25th and will hopefully be finished with it in nine days.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

All of my work arises from a self-confidence instilled in me by my high school English teacher, Diane Panozzo.  I write today because way back in 1993 she believed in me and encouraged me to pursue it.

To carry on the game, I tag:

Richard Chiem

Kate Durbin

Adam Peterson

Since I, too, don’t want to die, I thought I’d make my version of the best albums of the year. Alas, so many pleasing and disquieting tunes appeared in 2012, I couldn’t possibly include all of the ones I enjoyed. For instance, no room for the new Swans album, the new Godspeed album, Frank Ocean, Scott Walker, Grimes, Raime, Caretaker, etc.

In terms of my listening habits, I spend a lot of time searching for and listening to older and more obscure material (for examples, check out Madrotter-Treasure-Hunt or Bodega Pop or Mutant Sounds, etc.), so I probably don’t listen to as much new music as do many other people. And my list obviously reveals my personal biases toward (mostly) experimental soundscapes of one type of another.

In terms of arrangement, I’ve purposefully mixed up the order, so you’ll never know which is my #20 and which is my #1.  Also one album is absent, so there’s technically only 19 albums on this list.

If you click on the artist’s name/album title you can get the album or listen to samples.

Krallice – Years Past Matter

Prog rock meets black metal.

Graham Lambkin – Amateur Doubles

Because I love musique concrète.

Xxyyxx – Xxyyxx

Someone said this artist is only 17 years old. That’s crazy.  This is a beautiful sample-driven beat-lulling assemblage.

Yokokimthurston

I love Yoko Ono, and I like Sonic Youth a lot, so this pairing is dynamite.  Bang, clatter, and screaming.  Yes!

Pallbearer – Sorrow & Extinction

I hate to agree with Pitchfork, who named this the best Metal Album of the year, but this album is seriously tremendous. Sort of reminds me of Ozzy-era Black Sabbath mixed with doomy epic metal.

Taylor Swift – Red

I mentioned liking this album in front of my students and got a lot of scowls. No matter. This is a fun and catchy album that I listen to often.

Crystal Castles – III

I think track two (“Kerosene”) is my favorite song of the year.

Diamond Terrifier – Kill the Self That Wants to Kill Yourself

Haunted orchestral dub glitch.

Le1f – Dark York

Arrived late on this mixtape, but glad I found it.  Bounce music you might find playing down some dark and mysterious alleyway in a dream city.

Katherine Young’s Pretty Monsters

Heavy metal jazz.

Nico Muhly – Drones

Ever since Mothertongue, Muhly has been a favorite of mine. Creepy contemporary classical.

Macintosh Plus – Floral Shoppe

They call it vaporwave.  Sort of like sample-heavy chopped and screwed bliss music.

Death Grips – Money Store

I also liked No Love Deep Web, but it appears that they vanished that album: can’t find it online anywhere, so either I’m missing something or it’s disappeared.  Can’t beat this album for aggression, passion, and intensity.

Personal & UnkleLuc Present: The Wild EP

Crazy immersion music.  Turn off all the lights and play this very loudly, to transport yourself elsewhere.

Andy Stott – Luxury Problems

Mesmerizing.  And speaking of immersion music, this one also creates a new world.

Fiona Apple – The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

Have always been and remain a huge fan of Fiona Apple. This album is the strangest in her oeuvre, I think.

Key Nyata – Two Phonkey

Many people taut that Kendrick Lamar album or that Killer Mike album as this year’s greatest achievement in hip hop, but I have to go with this one instead.

Sonance – Like Ghosts

Doom metal saturated in black atmospherics.

Mykki Blanco – New Cosmic Angel

Ever since I first saw the video for “Join My Militia” I’ve been hooked on Mykki Blanco.  Aggressive, gender-bending hip hop at its finest.

Available Now!!!

My remix of Pirandello’s 6 Characters in Search of an Author appears in the latest edition of The Coming Envelope, which is BookThug’s beautiful letterpress publication of experimental prose fiction edited and designed by Malcolm Sutton.

Over at HTMLGIANT, I offered holiday gift recommendations for recently published works of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry.

Over at The Paris Review Daily, I interviewed Kate Zambreno about her new book Heroines.

Over at The Brooklyn Rail, the three of us did an interview about ONE.

Over at Fanzine, critic Laura Carter reviews ONE, and declares “There is beautiful language here.”

And the great Dennis Cooper includes both ONE and Bright Stupid Confetti on his list of favorite music, fiction, poetry, film, art & internet of 2012.

Here’s the jacket copy:

As the reading list might suggest, I’m not interested in reifying the obvious.  Horror, for me, is not a given genre that exists for us to study.  Rather, it is a complex and complicated category for us to create.  Thus, one of the central concerns of the course revolves around mapping horror’s boundaries, investigating it’s limits and testing it’s scope.

To begin the process of articulating the category of horror, we’ve looked at four critical approaches: “Absolutely Too Much” by Simon Critchley, “The Critique of Pure Horror” by Jason Zinoman, “The Definition of Horror” by Noël Carroll, and “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. These four essays provide a nice range of perspectives for us to construct a well-informed critical conversation into which we might situate ourselves.  They also help to offer a context for considering the films that follow.  A few of the salient ideas arising from these readings, which seem worth considering include: the relationship between “art horror” and “natural horror,” the necessity (or lack of necessity) of monsters to be supernatural, the relationship between horror and childhood, the role of “spectacle horror,” the relationship between audience and characters, the relationship between form and content, the affect of shock and disgust, and the power of excess.  Just to name a few.

WEEK ONE

Terror!
Directed by Ben Rivers

WEEK TWO

Outer Space
Directed by Peter Tscherkassky

WEEK THREE

The Grandmother
Directed by David Lynch

WEEK FOUR

Living
Directed by Frans Zwartjes

WEEK FIVE

The Re’Search
Directed by Ryan Trecartin