Monday, November 20, 2006

I suspect it's clear to anyone who has popped by over the past few weeks that the lights have gone out here.

Which is to say "click".

And good night.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

If you have a moment, pay a visit to the Tarpaulin Sky web page for Danielle Dutton's forthcoming book, Attempts at a Life. The book is terrific, one of two Dutton has coming out in the near future (the other, Sprawl, from Clear Cut).

Also, Sandy Florian's excellent Telescope is almost out (or is out??) from Action Books. For more info on it go here.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Brian Evenson's The Open Curtain is out from Coffee House. Awfully nice to be in his company this season. There is a fine review of it here.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Jim Ruland, in The Voice, on The Ex...

Saturday, October 07, 2006

going dark here for a while...

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Too true?

"...life is short, reading is long, and literature is in the process of killing itself off through an insane proliferation."

Milan Kundera (in the October 9th issue of the New Yorker).
Time Out NYC and Seattle's The Stranger generously accord The Ex some column inches.

And:

Duncan Barlow's cat, Monkey, approves of the book too.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Dead Souls meets the Yellow River:

CHENJIAYUAN, China — For many Chinese, an ancestor is someone to honor, but also someone whose needs must be maintained. Families burn offerings of fake money or paper models of luxury cars in case an ancestor might need pocket change or a stylish ride in the netherworld.

But here in the parched canyons along the Yellow River known as the Loess Plateau, some parents with dead bachelor sons will go a step further. To ensure a son’s contentment in the afterlife, some grieving parents will search for a dead woman to be his bride and, once a corpse is obtained, bury the pair together as a married couple.

“They happen pretty often, especially when teenagers or younger people die,” said Yang Husheng, 48, a traveling funeral director in the region who said he last attended such a funeral in the spring. “It’s quite common. I’ve been in the business for seven or eight years, and I’ve seen all sorts of things.”

The rural folk custom, startling to Western sensibilities, is known as minghun, or afterlife marriage. Scholars who have studied it say it is rooted in the Chinese form of ancestor worship, which holds that people continue to exist after death and that the living are obligated to tend to their wants — or risk the consequences. Traditional Chinese beliefs also hold that an unmarried life is incomplete, which is why some parents worry that an unmarried dead son may be an unhappy one.

Continued here (requires times select).