Music & Meaning

Seventeen weeks in the womb, and now your ears are open, ready to receive, exquisitely developed. You live in a waterworld, immersed in vibration and sound: the unceasing whoosh of blood through the uterine artery, your mother’s heart and breath, the surprising syncopation of your own glorious heartbeat.

Memorial for Ronald Sukenick

As many of you already know, Ron Sukenick, co-founder of FC2, died eight days past his seventy-second birthday on Thursday, 22 July, 2004, of complications from inclusion body myositis, a rare degenerative muscle disease with which he had been doing battle for years.

State of the Art, or Art of the State?

A question I carry around with me like my own skin, like dna, like dreamecho: in the clusterfucked world of American publishing, with its market-driven glitz and hype, its television-on-the-page drama and ineloquent plot thuds, its selling-is-the-center godhead, can fiction still interrupt capitalism?

Opposition as Ontology

Let’s seek out books with rough edges, scandalous books, books distinguished from trash only by vigorous writing, books that break taboos, that piss you off or that sweep you away with their urgencies. And above all, books that don’t toe any line of doctrinaire ideology, no matter how virtuous.