NEW BLOG

Follow my continued adventures at annsterzinger.com.

Friday, January 31, 2014

Don't just take my word for it...

...there are quite a several people who would recommend purchasing and reading NVSQVAM and/or THE TALKATIVE CORPSE and/or GIRL DETECTIVES.

I've begun a reviews page over on the HOPELESS BOOKS UNINC. site; so far I haven't been able to find a reviewer for Ignatius P.'s BEYOND THE BUSH (any and all comers: email me at asterzingerzATgmail for a free review PDF), but I've begun stockpiling my own works here:

Don't let me die, as Daniel Clowes once said.

Thanks for reading!

Monday, January 27, 2014

Guy Debord and why am I posting another stupid picture of stupid Thickie Jr.?

I remember back when I was a copy monkey at a weekly newspaper, and we would play games with the staff writers' copy. No doubt it's hard to pump out an article every week (I did so on top of proofreading 40 hours a week, of course, but that doesn't count because I started out obscure and therefore... well, it just didn't count), so I guess you could cut them some slack.

But nonetheless, some writers lean awfully hard on certain words. Although, for example, I admire his work as a journalist very much, Ben Joravsky, as a writer, should be fined for every additional occurrence of the word "clout" after using up his per annum allowance of 600 or so.

And if even the good writers could get on your nerves... well, after years of hearing a certain film critic insert a humblebraggy reference to his student days in Paris in every other paragraph week after week, I'd also like to cut copious slack for the person (who shall unfortunately have to go uncredited due to lawsuits and other unpleasantness) who got the bright, nay, brilliant idea to do a search and replace on all of his copy, replacing every instance of the word "Paris" with "my pants."

That was fucking hilarious. "Back in 1968, when I was enjoying an intellectual-rich opening reception in my pants..."

Now for the less hilarious uses of search and replace. Hell-o, shitty reality! I was reading this passage from Guy Debord's La Societé du Spectacle (speaking of my pants) today:

The spectacle presents itself as an absolute given*, inaccessible, and never up for discussion. It says nothing except: "What appears is good, and what is good, appears." The attitude that it demands we take on principle is that same passive acceptance which it's really already nabbed by appearing unopposed, through its monopoly over appearances.

...and I realized it would be even better, troooooth-wise (if even worse for one's tenuous mental health), if one replaced the word "spectacle" with "life."

The problem really transcends the politics of any one time or place, after all...

...although I have to hand it to Debord, this particular trough of panem et circenses does seem to be getting more nauseating and alienating by the news cycle.


*I realize this is a weirdish translation for " une énorme positivité," and yeah, it only gets half of the meaning of positivité, which I could have translated from French philosopy-ese straight into English philosopy-ese ("positivity"), but that's rather lazy. Nothing like having to guess whether a translator actually knows what the hell the passage means. Anyway, "positivity" could mean "good thing" or it could mean "given," but for the sake of clear and simple English I went with the latter, since the "good thing" idea is reiterated in the next sentence anyhoo. (Of course, the "it's a given" idea is reiterated in the SAME sentence, but for the sake of the meaning I took from it I chose to emphasize the idea that the damn thing's shoving itself down your throat. See what a lousy business this is?)
-->

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Sneak snip from the Mirbeau novel I'm translating

From IN THE SKY:

All around, coming from everywhere, you hear rifle shots; above you, from all over, like moans, like screams. The sky is filled with death throes, just like the earth.
            This evening, I came back up from the canal a bit drunk, not really wasted, but with a strange heaviness in my head. On the threshold of the cabaret, where I left the grinning men behind, a chill seized me, and the ascent from the canal bank hasn’t warmed me up. Ordinarily when I’ve drunk too much, I fall like a lump into bed and I sleep and sleep, a happy sleep, a sleep full of parades of beautiful chimeras and consoling joys. But this evening I’m not sleepy; I’ve never felt as sad as I do tonight. I try in vain to recover and follow the train of my memories. I remember nothing anymore… it all floats in my head, like a heavy, impenetrable fog. And I’m afraid of the silence that surrounds me, I’m afraid of my shadow there on the wall, I’m afraid of that wailing dog… why does he only bark when I’m sad? Oh! These still nights! These dead nights, when not a breath of air comes to stir the branches of the trees, or lift the tiles of my roof, or make the windows crack—how terrible they are! I try to take refuge in the past, to recall faces and things… my father is dead, my mother is dead, my sisters are married… but this evening I can’t even remember how all of that happened!...
            Ah! Here’s my companion. My only companion. It’s a little spider. She dropped from the ceiling on an invisible thread and stopped a few centimetres from the lamp’s glass cover, but outside of its glow. And she rests there, her long limbs folded, at the end of the thread she just spun. Why? There are no more flies, no more insects. And she hangs there idle, doesn’t spin any webs or lie in ambush. She seems to sleep, her belly turned to the warmth of the lamp. She sleeps or she dreams. A mischievous impulse makes me move the lamp to the right. So, nimble like a gymnast, the spider climbs back up the invisible thread, crosses the ceiling, and drops back down a new thread until she’s set herself up again in the heat of the lamp. She refolds her long spindly legs, seesaws for an instant, and is still again. I repeat the experiment several times, pulling away the lamp, to the right, to the left, and the spider always climbs back up and back down to station herself, with an admirable precision, close to the glass with its gentle warmth. As I watch the spider, the minutes pass, the hours roll by; I watch the still little spider, and it seems that she’s watching me as well, her eight eyes fixed ironically upon me; and I hear her say to me:
            “You’re sad, you despair, and you cry! It’s your own fault. Why did you want to become a fly? You could have easily been like me, a joyful spider… Don’t you see, in life, you have to eat or be eaten? Myself, I prefer to eat… and it’s so amusing! The flies are so confident, so stupid. You put out a little snare, practically nothing—a few threads in the sun, between two leaves, between two flowers. The flies like the sun, they like light, they like flowers, they’re all poets. They come and tangle their wings in the webs strung round those flowers in the sun… and you take them, and you eat them. Flies taste so good!... Oh, how stupid you are, go away! Your lamp is dying, good night!’
            And the spider climbs back up to the ceiling and disappears behind a rafter in the shadows.
            That dog is still barking outside! Another dog, farther away, answers. I feel the chill of death invade me.
            I go to the window. The moon has risen and chased away the fog. Between the bare branches of the trees, the sky alights and the stars burn cruelly. And I think:
            “So what if I had been a human spider, so what if I had savored the joy of murder? Would I have been happy, or happier? Would I not have been crushed anyway by the mystery of that sky, by all that’s unknown, by all of this infinity that weighs on me? What does it matter if I live the way I live? Life is the only sorrow! To live in pleasure amongst the crowd, or to live in solitude, surrounded by dread and silence—aren’t they the same thing? And I don’t have the courage to kill myself!”

            I didn’t drink enough tonight...

Thursday, January 2, 2014

I didn't know there were best of the year lists for nihilist fiction...

But THE TALKATIVE CORPSE (now out as ebook and paperback as well on Amazon) is on Ben Arzate's!

In the not at all unpleasant (they aren't unpleasant, damn you, sunshine!) company of Celine, Florence King, Irvine Welsh, Ligotti, and Georges Bataille...

http://dripdropdripdropdripdrop.blogspot.com/2014/01/top-ten-favorite-reads-of-2013.html