what's good?

• Dear McSweeney's is out now and somehow we hornswoggled
  Brendan Emmett Quigley into making a crossword for the occasion

• I interviewed the incredible Mary Ruefle and that interview has now
  been published in German, which neither of us speaks

• The book of the same name, only a cool ten years of the making,
  is on its way at last! See (hear) also this free audio companion

• It's never not a good time to visit the Foreheads of Wikipedia

• Ecstatic to introduce Fern Books and its inaugural title,
  Eduardo Berti's stunning An Ideal Presence

• A conversation with the excellent Michelle Kuo and Jeremy Davies
  about translating Éric Chevillard and his erudite jizz-humor

• I'll be chatting with Kevin Barry about his predictably dope new book,
  That Old Country Music, 1/14 at ("at") Midtown Scholar

• Michelle and Albert have a Substack and you should absolutely subscribe

• Presenting Distancing, a quarantine music column over at the BLVR

• I loved 17776 and somehow, impossibly, 20020 is even better

• Jaswinder Bolina's wise, compassionate Of Color is out now
  (read an essay at at The Paris Review)

• For Music & Literature, I translate some of Éric Chevillard's quarantine journal,
  because what else am I going to do with all this time at home?

• I'll be discussing François Morellet with Béatrice Gross and Bertrand Lavier
  2/4 at the Beaux Arts de Paris

• Twenty absolutely riveting minutes of sudoku

• I introduce this dizzying trove of Harry Mathews's poems, out in February

• I'll be waxing Chicagoan in conversation with Rebecca Makkai 12/11
  at the American Library in Paris

• ... and moderating a chat between Valérie Mréjen and Katie Shireen Assef
  on Forêt noire and/or Black Forest 11/26 at Librairie Yvon Lambert

• Mario Ariza on climate gentrification on Miami, Madeleine Watts on
  the Australian Gothic, Michael Snyder on Salvador Novo, and
  Trevor Quirk on Utah's next big one

• The vague implication, if you read enough of this list, that there are no years

• Chicken(s) of the Sea!

• Print volumes one and two of the McSweeney's anti-Trump and pro-doing
  stuff besides complaining about Trump essay series out now

• Ian S. Port's riveting history of the electrified guitar, The Birth of Loud

• A veritable grip of U.S. release events for All That Is Evident Is Suspect,
  my new Oulipo anthology with Ian Monk:
• 11/13 at East Bay Booksellers (Oakland) with Jez Burrows
• 11/15 at City Lights Books (San Francisco) with Hiya Swanhuyser
• 12/29 at Seminary Co-Op (Chicago) with Alison James
• 1/6 at Politics and Prose (Washington, DC)
• 1/7 at New York Public Library with Ed Park & Giovanna Calvino
• 1/8 at Harvard Book Store (Cambridge)
• 1/9 at Riffraff (Providence) with Emma Ramadan
• 1/13 at Malvern Books (Austin)
• 1/16 at Deep Vellum Books (Dallas) with Will Evans
• 1/18 at Brazos Bookstore (Houston)

• I'll be talking about chance and oulipian mischief at this symposium on the
  charismatically obtuse François Morellet at Dia:Chelsea on 3/3

• "At sixteen my ejaculations were strongly influenced by Rimbaud, but they
  weren’t very good now that I think about it."

• I have written some dignified lyric poems for Trick Dog's new cocktail menu
  and been recognized for my efforts by the Poetry Foundation

• I'll be discussing Italo Calvino's Harvard lectures at Albertine in New York
  on 6/14 with Jeanne Gang and Giovanna Calvino

• I play Q. to Damion Searls's A. re: his new Hermann Rorschach biography
  at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in SF on 3/14

• A rolling anthology of last sentences read before abandoning a book
  is now open and welcoming your contributions

• I'll be talking about cities as literary subject, surface, and constraint
  at the Architectural Association in London on 2/6

• I remember the indispensable Harry Mathews in the San Francisco Chronicle

• For you, for you I have assembled these low-commitment, high-reward
  relaxation/hypnosis aids

• For the pub date of The Revolutionaries Try Again, I ask Mauro
  some hard-hitting questions and his answers are mostly about brunch

• One of these page 147s is mine!

• In which I translate a text from a French with a 503-word vocabulary
  into an English with a 484-word vocabulary

• This book slays

• Go ahead, write a petit récapitul portatif for National Poetry Month

• I'm talking Oulipo at Sarah Lawrence, on the mathematically auspicious
  date of 4/4/16, in the nomenclatorially enchanting Titsworth Lecture Hall

• Serenity in our time

• My perfectly unscientific inquiry into literary pareidolia is in issue 3
  of La moitié du fourbi

• I'll be kicking off the first-ever San Francisco Moby-Dick marathon
  with like 25 straight minutes of paratext

• Penguins of Madagascar. What? It's delightful!

• At long last, I divulge the many steamy secrets of Believer-editor life
  for the excellent Cureditor

• A quick encomium to Juan Villoro's THe Guilty (sic) for the inaugural
  issue of The Scofield

• I chat with Emma Ramadan about her magnificent translation of Sphinx
  on 6/23 at Green Apple Sunset (update: audio here)

• The Believer needs your help! Back this Kickstarter campaign now and
  I'll write you an oulipian epithalamium

• I have prepared a little squib for this reader on the excellence of
  Calvino's Harvard lectures

• Sam Lefebvre on rap lyrics in criminal trials is essential reading,
  especially if you like being indignant at the powers that be

• I read in the most excellent company of Derek Beaulieu, Christian Bök,
  Nikki Sheppy, & J-J Poucel at Shelf Life Books in Calgary, 5/16

• I wax inspirationless on the Oulipo, computer-generated literature,
  and why the twain seldom meet at Carleton College, 5/7

• I discuss the recent work of disgraced lepidopterist Kendrick Lamar
  at Diesel in Oakland, 4/6 with the god Jeff Chang

• At Music & Literature, I discuss the monovocalic trifecta of Levé, Perec,
  et Lefebvre (and coin the phrase "incipient Bolañofication")

• My ode to a painted slab of concrete in 99 questions and 999 words

• "Who needs a beer? You could own a wide selection of pneumatic
  solenoid air valves."

• My Painting at Dora translation now in handsomely hand-sewn form

• This achingly lovely progressive sestina by his donship Harry Mathews

• McSweeney's helps inaugurate California Bookstore Day with a very tall
  and extremely elegant and also rather limited-edition flatiron thing

• I make some statistically negligible year-end book picks for Salon's
  What to Read Awards

• Looks like I've got my Halloween costume for next year

• My year in review for Dusted (disquisition on Fuck Buttons redacted)

• Proud to present this late-blooming bouquet of newly translated
  Oulipo work at Words Without Borders

• New Yorkers: catch me mumbling something about longtemps je me suis
  mouché de bonne heure at this panel on desacralizing Proust

• Announcing a multi-day Oulipo mini-festival, in which PF & HLT & yrs truly
  bring the joy and mischief of potential literature to the Bay Area:
• 11/6 at City Lights Bookstore
• 11/7 at Mechanics' Institute Library
• 11/8 at Green Apple Books
• 11/9 at San Francisco Art Institute

• The world's most soundly reasoned manifesto, now at BOMB

• My 99-part introduction to Davis Schneiderman's [Sic] may well be
  the only original (so to speak) text therein

• Roman's mammary rodents (bottom right)

• All of the installments to date in the Hugo Vernier saga, now available
  in English and soon, unprecedentedly, in French

• FLL’s wonderful Dora memoir, published for the first time in English

• “Index of first lines” is anthologized in the sumptuously weird and
  double-sided &Now Awards 2 (the side with the ampersand)

• My Ready To Die essay, now in German: "mein Gott, die Bitches!"

• Davis Schneiderman interviews me about death, porn, and the pursuit
  of belonging at The Nervous Breakdown

• La Boutique Obscure is coming to your town, assuming you live or
  work in or otherwise identify with one of the towns below:
• 2/19 at City Lights (San Francisco) with Scott Esposito
• 2/21 at Issue Project Room (Brooklyn) with Chris Clarke,
  Frederic Tuten, Lynne Tillman, and Rivka Galchen

• On the eve of the Exercises in Style reissue, I discuss the Oulipo
  and its various writhing tentacles with Chris Clarke (1, 2, 3)

• The Ruppert & Mulot conquest of America begins in 2013

• I guest-judge December’s Critical Hit Awards at Electric Literature

• Qualcomm at CES sounds like utter Dadaist pandemonium

• Finally, the authoritative explication of ‘Pataphysics everyone in the
  world has been waiting for

• Once again, a year-end roundup at Dusted and an audio sampler

• Extended remix of my Fuck Sleeves interview (featuring three rare
  #based MSC footnotes) at Writers No One Reads

• I read “Tries to Cook and Eat Girl” (American Psycho) for Banned
  Book Month, oblivious to the queasy relevance of my T-shirt

• A chat with Vice Mexico about the legend of Mujeres Encinta

• Metropho.rs, a simple and beautiful geographic snowclone map

• My multi-musketeer translation is shouted out in the NYTBR

• 2012 needs only one Mitt and that Mitt is this baby walrus

• Colin Marshall asks me tough questions about cities and culture.
  If only I’d had some kind of advance notice!

• Melville House catches the mildly communicable Ou-X-Po fever

• I attend Outside Lands, see too many “Keep Calm and Carry On”
  spinoff shirts, wax curmudgeonly about meme fatigue

• Seattle reading 8/18 at Spine & Crown, as commemorated here

• MSC readings in Paris:
• 6/11 at Le Bal with Harry Mathews, Ian Monk, Doug Nufer,
  Wendy Walker, and Tom La Farge
• 6/15 at Shakespeare & Co.

• Two interviews: on Perec and typewriter shopping with Full Stop;
  on Fuck Buttons and Fuck Sleeves (etc.) with Green Apple Books

• Up now at Berfrois: chapter three of MSC, with still another limited-
  edition footnote

• This is amazing and it’s all downhill from here

• Readings for/from Many Subtle Channels!
• 4/23 at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn
• 4/24 at KGB in Manhattan
• 4/27 at 57th St. Books in Chicago
• 5/10 at Z Space in SF with extremely illustrious company

• New Oulipian, whose name makes me sound like a congested
  toad when I say it in casual conversation

• Easily more than half of the sentences, qua sentences, in
  A Partial History of Lost Causes

• The meteoric rise toward world domination of Woodcut Maps

• I’ve been breaded!

• I meditate on wordplay and the secret legitimacy of the pointless
  in the Wall Street Journal

• Das book!

• See a Frankensteined excerpt of Many Subtle Channels in
  February’s Believer (with limited-edition footnote)

• Fellow paratext-nerds everywhere, rejoice (sorry, Andi)

• This.

• Another early winter, another year in review. Nuts to you, last few
  weeks of December!

• My triumphant return to extremely short-form fiction comes in a
  book that comes with a study guide

• “One mustache. One side burn. One soul patch. About 500 photos.”

• That time I started the modestly successful hashtag
  “#magazineswiththewordsweatyinthename”

• I round out Doug Nufer’s focus on “uncreative writing” in the latest
  
American Book Review

• Look at this fucking hamster

• Would-be reviewers take note: this list hits the sweetest of sweet
  spots toward the early middle

• Some hypotheses on Tyler, The Creator’s last album (which,
  according to Metacritic, I hated)

• The totally excellent Plouk Town: now in pocket-sized edition!

• My close-reading of Fabo’s “I’m Raw” at BLVR and at Rap Genius

• This.

• “In a way, Lil B is the cheapest self-actualization guru on the 

  market today”

• On “I’m coming after you like the letter V” and other high points in
  rap letterplay

• “Let me ride” in The Point: In praise of Jay Electronica, criticism of
  William Buckholz, and unlikely adulation of a Cam’ron lyric

• Maslow’s new hammer: when you have a blog about sad things on
  the street, everything on the street is sad

• Late March in San Francisco lent itself spectacularly to this
  Clams Casino instrumentals mixtape

• On Cheap Trick’s would-be “I Want To Be Wanted By You”

• That it takes place in a town called Krasnooktyabarsk is only the
  beginning of why this story is amazing

• Somehow this is sublimely validating

• My rap label infographic in The Believer (is, um, the one piece you
  can’t even preview online)

• The most favorably I have ever been compared to French cuisine

• Watson the Thriller cat

• Year-end roundup time again: list, discussion and audio companion

• The Notorious B.I.G. and the invention of the human at Rap Genius

• Oulipo documentary premieres on Arté (after dark) on December 20

• “Going to a Wu-Tang show to see RZA rap is like going to a
  National League baseball game to see the pitcher bat”

• Parisians, go see L’Oulipo mode d’emploi: the scene where I
  wander around a courtyard in a silly hat is a triumph!

• Delight your francophone infants with Le Petit Oulipo, which
  includes a text by me even shorter than this sentence

• “Quand je tousse, on dirait un arbre qui tombe dans la forêt”

• Some Tampa Bay Rays intern reimagines DJ Drama as a cat

• PF and HLT say some very sensible things, compliment me, and
  pronounce my last name in that sublimely French way

• I now wax self-important daily for the SF Weekly at All Shook Down

• “Hello, this is Dr. Pleasure Dinosaur”: inexplicably irresistible

• I hereby accept Matt Wendus’s boot in my nads

• Tom La Farge enjoys my B.O.—wait, that doesn’t sound right

• Face B at La Maison Rouge (who knew it would be so hard to find
  an album whose name contains all the letters in the alphabet?)

• The best po-ro epic of 2010 so far now has a totally creepy video

• Monolith exists! Act now and get a mystery CD!

• 2009 in music: year-end appraisal with accompanying audio tour

• Schwarzenegger pulls a Kenneth Toomey and suddenly American
  governance gets awesome

• I am interviewed by a gentleman with very particular vowel policies

• Your favorite death-obsessed rapper’s favorite death-obsessed
  rapper has been considering his mortality again

• Fred in re-sidence au Comptoir des mots

• Do these people know the goldmine they’re sitting on?

• Slang City: “You will feel drunk with love looking at my buttocks”
  (warning: adult themes)

• Jonah Weiner: workaday thesis on fascinating rhetorical device

• Spinning tops in the Oulipo!

• Ryan North tweaks the fourth dimension of the reading experience
  (and does a passable job with the lipogram)

• Mozinor: “too soon” par anticipation

• Oulipo on Bookworm: worth it just to hear Marcel say “to pee or
  not to pee”

• Ninja Turtle (pt. 2)