Tree_Cartin

15) tree_bro's twitter feed

Apparently this young man passed a few days ago.

I was mildly—massively—obsessed with it all yesterday (Monday, the 23rd of January, 2012) and was able to find an obituary, piece together a cause of death from what others were saying, learn about a strange incident from tree_bro's real life, find out about his drug/alcohol problems, discover a wing of very talented writers with a very odd and very funny sensibility who had all found one another—and who all had, it seems, discovered this voice/tone/discipline as a consequence of Twitter's constraints.*

It's a style I've played around with but am not sure if I have managed to pick up yet. (Not on my own twitter feed, which is mostly an extension of my more formal/longer writing and another hub for my own online social life, but on an anonymous account that I won't link to here, but assume some people might already know is mine.) But I'm working at it.

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16) Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet & Sexts from Patricia Lockwood by Brian Droitcour

I found the Ryan Trecartin article a few days ago and—being undecided on Ryan Trecartin—thought I should read it to find out if it made me less undecided on Ryan Trecartin. I am happy to report that it sort of did.

I like Patricia Lockwood as a poet and I like her as a Twitter user. I'm fond of this particular series and am happy Brian Droitcour decided to gather them in one place like this.

An interesting sidenote to all this is that I read the Sexts piece today and the Trecartin piece a few days ago, but did not look at the Trecartin piece's byline until I sat down to make a note about it for this reading journal. So it is only now I am realizing that one person was responsible for both.

SPECULATION: I discovered the Trecartin piece by following a link from Patricia Lockwood's Twitter feed. Unable to verify. Maybe didn't.


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17) Momus interviewed by Marie Calloway

Nice job, Marie. Enjoyed this very much.

A friend asked me recently about the interviews I do (for Hobart, for HTML Giant) because she wanted to do a few for her own blog. She was thinking of asking her friends some questions about their creative work, and wondered how I had gotten into asking writers about writing. If maybe I'd read a book.

I have not. I studied journalism briefly, but found that I didn't care being told to go out and ask people a bunch of nosy questions.

When I started interviewing authors, though, I was interviewing friends or writers who were—to my mind—contemporaries. Other "internet" writers. People who published on the same journals I had. And though there have been a couple of exceptions, most of the people I've interviewed have been people I had some sort of prior relationship with.

And, frankly, I think the interviews are better because of it. Interviews have a certain structure to them, and fall into familiar patterns. There are certain questions that are simply "the questions one is bound to ask." When one has a long-standing relationship with the interviewee, I think it becomes possible to adapt those familiar questions, to find new and interesting ways for those questions to be posed, and to find new and interesting sub-questions within them.

(I mention all this because I am aware that Calloway and Momus have known each other for a little while. It shows in the interview. In all the right ways.)

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* In the future, we will all be stalkers for fifteen minutes.