The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.<
About two years ago I left grad school and got a big boy job. And it was as if someone flipped a switch behind the scenes of my life: all of a sudden, I felt free. And for the first time in a long while, I was able to read books. I could read for fun. I could read without having to worry about wasting time, without having to feel guilty about reading for no other reason than to enjoy it. So I bought books, I bought them from all kinds of stores, from websites, from yard sales. It was great, and I was constantly looking for new stuff to read but didn’t know what to look for. Then I realized that back when I did read books – back before grad school – I had briefly touched upon this world of independent literature that felt so wild and free. So I went back to see what was up, to see what I should be reading, and by convoluted paths over recommendations and tracing out who’s friends with who and mapping out which presses put out which books and etc. and so on, I remember at some point just staring at the evocative and bold cover of Double Bird on the Maudlin House website and thinking “I bet this is good.” Then I looked up some of Bud’s writing and decided “ok, yeah, this is good,” and ordered the dang thing.
Two years ago, the Midwestern book tour I was on with duncan b. barlow concluded on a rainy Chicago night with a reading at Volumes Bookcafe headlined by Maryse Meijer. Hearing Meijer read from her debut collection, Heartbreaker, left me floored; since then, I’ve eagerly read her subsequent books, the novella Northwood and the new collection Rag. Meijer’s fiction is haunting in a host of ways, some of them literal: she brings the reader to the border of the uncanny and primal, while also tapping into something deeply modern and urgent. I spoke with her following the release of her latest book about her short fiction, the role of horror in her work, and titles, among other topics.
The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.
Moments of Resonance, the debut album from Munich-based saxophonist and composer Ralph Heidel and his band Homo Ludens, is the sort of work that eludes easy categorization. At times, Heidel’s work finds a fine middle ground between minimalist composition and post-rock; at others, there’s a more lush and sweeping element to the music. I talked with Heidel about the album’s genesis, the role of improvisation in his music, and more.
Six years ago, I checked out You Private Person by Richard Chiem from Mellow Pages Library. I went to Mellow Pages often, as it was on the other side of the block from where I then lived, a party house in Bushwick with four other roommates. Reading You Private Person felt similar to the excitement of discovering a new band in high school, where the preciseness of certain lines perfectly reflected my own emotions or environment at the time.
I bought Benjamin DeVos’s Lord of the Game a few months ago for a couple reasons. I mean, it’s got a sick title. It’s got a Sam Pink painting on the cover. And my wife was gonna go into labor at any time, and so I needed a fresh smallie to take with me to the hospital. I never did get a chance to open it up in the hospital (a birth is a very exciting time, you might be surprised to find out), so instead I opted to read it out loud to this new infant daughter of mine during our formative midnight hangout sessions. We both loved it. Well, I loved it. She mostly slept through it. And the same thing with DeVos’s more comedic The Bar is Low and his strange, nihilist, subversive, satirical collection Madness Has a Moment and Then Vanishing Before Returning Again. We had a blast, in our own ways.
The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.