Failure, A Writer's Life

by Joe Milutis

Overview

Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds.
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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780997049
Publisher:	Collective Ink
Publication date:	01/16/2013
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Joe Milutis is a writer, media artist, and Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Washington-Bothell. He is the author of Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (Minnesota).   

Table of Contents

Ungreat Books

William Gold 1

Marguerite Duras 3

André Breton 6

(photography) 10

Charles Fort 13

Monsters of the Memorious

Jill Price 20

Henri Bergson 26

(film) 32

Richard Owen Cambridge 44

Oulipo 51

Bruce Ivins 65

Cthulhu 73

Alchemists of the Everyday

Unidentifiable 87

Marcia Nardi 91

David Lyle 105

(spam) 113

Continuity of Dumps 132

The Weathermen 144

Ernest Hemingway 165

Prelusivity

Solaristics 171

Roland Barthes 183

Walter Benjamin 189

(archive/library) 199

Abraham Lincoln Gillespie 208

acknowledgments 212

Notes 216

Index 264

Editorial Reviews

- "The unfinished, unreadable, unpublishable — the scribbled and illegible, the too slowly published, the countless unpublished, all that does not seem to count at all.. .. here lie all manner of ruins.  From Marguerite Duras to Google Maps, Henri Bergson to H.P. Lovecraft, Orson Welles to Walter Benjamin to a host of literary ambulance drivers (not to mention the FBI, UF's, and UbuWeb), _Failure, A Writer's Life_ charts empty spaces and occupied libraries, searches databases bereft of filters, files spam and porn and weather reports into their respective _konvoluts_, and realizes the full potential of cultural inscription. In a series of snapshots concatenated in the best surrealist mode, Milutis has curated a catalogue of curiosities as essential to understanding our current cultural condition as they are eccentric. With Nietzschean _witz_ and self-reflexive bravura, he teases out the occult links between heterogeneities in the tradition of Allen S. Weiss and Greil Marcus. In the process, Milutis redefines the 'virtual' as something much broader and more interesting than digital simulacra: as the unmanageable storehouse of memory and the inevitable expanse of forgetfulness. Here, in all its glamorous success, is the horizon of failure." —Craig Dworkin

From the Publisher