• Have you ever wanted to toss back a decanter of Eau de Vie and pass out on the same hardwood floor that F. Scott Fitzgerald passed out on while writing The Great Gatsby? Then stuff your duffel with 4 million dollars and head to Long Island to buy the mansion in which Fitzgerald wrote the great American novel. The kitchen has TWO islands. You can name one East Egg and the other one Also East Egg Because Fuck West Egg. From the photos it looks like you’ll have to pack your own chaise longue.
• Fun Tip: If you’ve never read A Moveable Feast, you should. There’s a whole section where Hemingway and Fitzgerald pal around France and eat cold chickens and drink white wine and Fitzgerald keeps falling asleep at restaurants. Bonus: Here’s Hemingway’s recipe for a Bloody Mary. “If it lacks authority add more vodka.”
• O. Henry Awards have been announced. You should care about these awards because they tell you who wrote the best short stories this year. Read Molly Antopol’s winner, “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story,” if only because it will allow you, if only for a moment, to think about the city from the perspective of someone traveling through a sewer.
• The New Republic just figured out that conceptual writing exists. Congratulations. Now go read this interview I did with Vanessa Place and tell me if you think she’s at the forefront of thought on the intersections between race and art and controversy or if she’s, you know, bad. Did you just frown at me for promoting my own piece? Then I appropriate your frown and frown it right back at you, knowing full well that I’m taking upon myself the burden of that frowniness, in the interest of making myself sad with your sadness.
• In other conceptual art news: Someone blasted former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins’s book, Nine Horses, with a fucking shotgun and then returned it to the shelf! According to the Asheville Citizen-Times, Miegan Gordon—a bookseller at The Captain’s Bookshelf in Asheville, NC—walked into the store, noticed some books had been tampered with, and upon inspection found a signed copy of Collins’s book murdered, riddled with the buckshot of a .410 fired at close range. But also: “On the rear inside cover, Collins’ author photograph had been meticulously defaced in ink with a devil’s beard and mustache and the eyes blacked out.” Who could ever get that mad at Billy Collins? I thought we’d all agreed he was just someone’s dad who had wondered into poetry and got lost looking for the door he used to come in. Also, this poem ain’t so bad, right?
• Speaking of the dead, Joyelle McSweeney will read from her book, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults tonight at INCA Institute at 7:30pm. She will be accompanied by one of Seattle’s finest poets, Don Mee Choi. If you call yourself a free witch and you are not at this *deep breath* group reading/screening of a video of Don Mee Choi’s poem “Twin Flower, Master, Emily” in Spanish translation by Valerie Mejer Caso and Josefa Gonzalez, then you are not a free witch at all, you are a sad witch.
• The only acceptable reason for not going to that reading is if you’re home writing and trying to publish your own work. This weekend, try submitting to one of these fine local journals, all of which accept submissions year round. The Seattle Review takes long poems and novellas. Pacifica Review takes fiction, nonfiction, poems, photos, and visual art. PageBoy takes “all genres of creative work so long as it does, indeed work.”
