February 2012
1 post
January 2012
2 posts
“A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed questions, tried to...”
– Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim.
December 2011
2 posts
500 Words: Mark Lewis at artforum.com →
November 2011
1 post
Interview with Matthew Stadler at 01 Magazine →
I’ve interviewed my longtime friend — and recently, publisher — Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio for 01 Magazine. I conducted it back in June, before his book tour, so it refers to something that’s already happened.
October 2011
1 post
Faits Divers from Lagos →
Novelist Teju Cole is using his twitter page to write faits divers, a la Félix Fénéon, based on Lagos newspapers. Cole calls them “small fates,” or “remixed” news reports. It’s not the first time I’ve seen a Fénéon-inspired twitter feed, but it’s definitely the most pointed and nuanced.
September 2011
1 post
A Public Retraction
A while ago on this page, which I normally use as an archive of events, etc., relating to my various literary endeavors, I made a comment about not being the biggest fan of Tony Judt. At the time, it seemed everyone from Momus to the NYRB was fawning over him. I brushed him off, finding the numerous excerpts from his autobiography in NYRB tedious. Man was I wrong! The setup: I’ve been in a...
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
3 posts
What the Heck Fest →
I love that by default the nomenclature of What the Heck’s website has listed me as a “band.” I’ll be reading from Letters to the Pacific in Causland Park tomorrow, just after Nick Krgovich’s side-project To Bad Catholics play.
June 2011
5 posts
May 2011
2 posts
Reading dates so far, early summer
7 June. AzKM - Ausstellungshalle zeitgenössische Kunst Münster, Münster, Germany
8 June. Hotel Chelsea, Köln, Germany
9 June. Malkasten, Düsseldorf, Germany
11 June. Bischoff Projects, Frankfurt, Germany
16 July. What the Heck Fest, Anacortes, Washington, USA
More details forthcoming—
April 2011
2 posts
Publication Studio/Deck Towel's collaborative book... →
The towel posted below is now available for purchase through the Publication Studio website with an elegantly typeset edition of Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. This towel is gorgeous. I’ve been using mine alternately as a bedspread or a poncho. I can’t wait to take it to the beach or travel with it this summer.
Unpredictable Pictures: An Interview With Jeff... →
A digital copy of my interview with Jeff Wall, which recently came out in the Dutch photography magazine, Foam. Accompanying the interview are portraits Stephen Waddell took of Wall. If you live in Europe, pick up a copy.
*Apparently, the link had expired. I’ve added a new link, but now you have to browse through the magazine. The interview is the first major article in the issue, starting...
March 2011
1 post
February 2011
1 post
January 2011
2 posts
December 2010
2 posts
Narrative, Cinema, Literature: A Seminar →
I will be facilitating a seminar through the Kootenay School of Writing called “Narrative, Cinema, Literature” this March/April. Four weeks, every weekend for two hours.
November 2010
4 posts
Diedrich Diederichsen's "People of Intensity,... →
Clint Burnham's review of The Bewilderments of...
“I was also quite taken by Aaron Peck’s The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis, and not only because I read it while on a road trip through BC and Alberta, some geographic details of which make their way into the novel. Anyone who works Revelstoke and the Enchanted Forest — kitsch BC highlights — into a precocious Künstlerroman has my vote. Framed as a discovered manuscript...
WatchA short video clip, taken by Marissé Aguilar González, from the book launch of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis, at Supermarket, Toronto, Ontario, 27 November, 2008.
Rap
From Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois’ new Anthology of Rap, recently published by Yale University Press:
‘The name KRS-One is an acronym for “Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone.” He values the power that knowledge confers while he critiques the knoweldge we recieve…Never using “Street Knowledge” as a means to mystify or merely self-advertise, he...
October 2010
1 post
97. The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis (Aaron...
95books:
A compressed novel, a prism refracting madness, mysterious, a bewilderment itself.
— Jonathan Ball
September 2010
3 posts
WatchSome footage from the book launch of my collection Letters to the Pacific, a series of letters with accompanying visual annotations by Adam Harrison and Domic Osterrid, a book that Publication Studio published in June. Get a copy at the following link: http://www.publicationstudio.biz/books/40
How Should A Person Be?
Last night, I saw Sheila Heti who has been visiting the West Coast for the past week. She gave me (among others) a print-out of the first two chapters of How Should a Person Be?, her new book out with Anansi in October. Here is the first paragraph:
“How should a person be?
“For years and years I asked it of everyone I met. I was always watching to see what they were going to do...
August 2010
6 posts
“We must further accept one last freedom: that of reading the text as if it had...”
– Roland Barthes, S/Z, 15.
John Kelsey on Alice and Wonderland →
Been thinking about this article a lot since it appeared in the May issue of Artforum. Serious. The ways in which cinema is changing right now has led to a lot of good conversations between myself and A: what effects this could have on the way in which cinema is presented, and how this may effect its extrinsic narrative structure, i.e. the way in which its fictive space is generated by a theater...
n+1: This Will Kill That →
towerofsleep:
Pragmatically, for intellectuals to stake a claim on such things as “attention” or “concentration” is an abdication of our best ground: content. There is no valid reason to think that War and Peace teaches deep attention any better than a first-person shooter game. There are plenty of reasons, enduring ones, to think that War and Peace aerates and nourishes our daily lives more...
“So we arrive at a certain paradox. The classic defines itself by surviving....”
– J. M. Coetzee, “‘What is a Classic?: A Lecture,” Stranger Shores, 16.
Have been reading a lot of literary criticism lately (Coetzee and Wood, Said and Adorno) as I continue to think about how I want to execute my next book and what I want the stakes of its execution to be. Until I...
“Seen in this light, there is almost no area of narration not touched by the long...”
– James Wood, How Fiction Works, 25.
July 2010
2 posts
June 2010
8 posts
“He looked at me patiently while I was thinking of something to say, but I could...”
– Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 48.
“The facts those men were so eager to know had been visible, tangible, open to...”
– Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 19.
“Could this sentence, which perhaps seems not the most jubilantly exultant where...”
– Robert Walser, Microscripts, 45.
