That said, given that Lulu’s page for Mr. Wideman features news of two appearances to promote Briefs, one wonders whether there will actually be, you know, copies of Briefs for sale there. Alternately: will the end result of this find more authors of literary fiction gravitating towards Lulu, or Lulu ultimately behaving more and more like a traditional press, at least for a tier of more established authors?

*-pieces of his earlier Philadelphia Fire are still rattling around inside my head after reading it a dozen years ago, for what it’s worth.

…while the band and producer Jim Eno (of Spoon) seem to have savored the opportunity to use the studio, the most straightforwardly played songs on Animalore — the ballad “Wanted” and the breathy folk-pop of “Oh Blah Wee” — are among its best. And the stylistic variation doesn’t always work — consider “Babies,” which at times recalls the subdued funk of Belle & Sebastian’s “Your Cover’s Blown.” That in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but the chorus’s refrain of “I want to make babies with you” leaves it unclear whether this is a sincere statement, or a tongue-in-cheek parody of slow-jam excess.

You can read the whole thing here.

Halfway through “Estrellas y Rascacielos,” the third story in Justin Taylor’s collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, there’s an exchange of dialogue that’s at once unexpected and critically important to what follows, both for that story and the rest of the book. The scene is a anarchists’ party at a punk house, where stolen beer is imbibed and ideologically inconsistent tomes sentenced to burn.

It’s an excellent collection: Taylor manages to write scenes of daily life that ring true while unobtrusively raising larger philosophical questions. His interview for the Times’ Paper Cuts blog expands on this, and makes me even more excited for his novel, expected to see release next year:

I’m interested in the boundaries — if there are any — between religion and politics, faith and fanaticism, and what happens when those boundaries break down. But I also wanted to explore this very specific and fleeting moment in our cultural history, when the cross-pollination of early ’90s slacker ethos with the pre-millennial notion that we were living at or after “the end of history” produced some remarkable bodies of utopian lifestyle-politics.

(Taylor’s conversation with Kyle Minor about Joshua Cohen’s A Heaven of Others is worth citing here as well.)

What I’m curious about are the labels that don’t bundle a download code with records: Drag City is the most prominent (perhaps because their music lends itself particularly well to turntables) but there are others — Type and Woodsist both come to mind. Admittedly, if I wanted an easily-digitized physical format of almost anything on almost any of these labels, I could get it on CD. (Though not everything.) But assumably, the people buying vinyl from these labels also own computers and MP3 players and, presumably, listen to music there as well.  All of which begs the question: is the label expecting that someone wanting to hear an album on vinyl and MP3 will purchase that album twice? Or does it come from a more cynical place, where the assumption exists that since someone can easily find an illicit version of that album online, they’ll just go that route once they’ve spent $15 for the vinyl?

[T]he weirdest part was that I sold out at every reading. I’d love to believe that this was because people were just blown away by my incandescent prose. But I think it had more to do with a kind of communal feeling. Readers liked the fact that the book wasn’t available everywhere.

I haven’t read either of the books that Almond refers to here, though my interest is definitely piqued. I did, however, recently read Warren Ellis’s Shivering Sands, a collection of essays that Ellis made available via Lulu. It’s a similar case to Almond’s, in some ways: most of the pieces here were already written, and time was taken to make the book look distinctive. In this case, Ariana Osborne’s design echoes the look and feel of the work she’s done on Ellis’s recent graphic novellas, which makes sense — even with the author’s name on each blanked out, it would be clear that Shivering Sands and Aetheric Mechanics come from the same pen.

It’s the literary equivalent of a b-sides and rarities collection and, well, I always gravitated towards those. (One of my first exposures to R.E.M. came via Dead Letter Office; the habit stuck.) A few weeks ago, Ellis added an update with the first two months’ sales figures, which make for interesting reading.

The NEPHL, wrought with financial problems from the day they dropped their first puck, is down to two teams with the Connecticut C-Dogs ceasing operations with the forfeited playoff game vs. Rhode Island. The New York Aviators will apply to the Federal Hockey League…

There’s something inherently enjoyable about a professional hockey game with a ten dollar ticket, seats close to the ice, and a friendly bartender upstairs. And the “human slingshot” contest between periods — which involved watching a khaki-clad guy riding an inner tube into the boards and, eventually, into five ten-foot-high inflatable pins — was likewise entertaining. The Aviators ended the night as 10-0 winners (to his credit, the Stingrays’ goalie did stop 53 shots). Players were checked into the boards, helmets were lost, “Song 2″ was played after many a goal. Not a bad night of hockey…

Calling this Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s most accessible album should not be taken as an indication that we’re in pop-song territory, or even that most of these songs have a verse/chorus/verse structure. The group’s discography (and, for some of its members, their time spent in Godspeed You! Black Emperor) suggests a fondness for slow builds leading to fissures of noise, strings swirling and whorls of feedback from guitars.

You can read the whole thing here.