Dylan Fisher

In my “WORDS SHOULD MEAN SOMETHING” era.

In my “WORDS SHOULD MEAN SOMETHING” era.

More SPECIMEN Blurb Week praise from Dylan Fisher: "Liu strings together minute pieces of evidence—a tender text exchange, a dreamed Parisian scene, a Bolaño quote—to imbue what we so often mistake for the casualties of everyday life with purpose and meaning."

www.splitlippress.com/specimen

So tell me ... why is the John Templeton Foundation (an org with a history of financing conservative/libertarian/anti-science projects and think tanks) funding literary magazines?

(Translated by Maria Jolas for the @ndbooks.bsky.social edition.)

It appeared certain, when you opened the door and saw the stairway filled with relentless, impersonal, colorless calm, a stairway that did not seem to have retained the slightest trace of the persons who had walked on it, not the slightest memory of their presence, when you stood behind the dining room window and looked at the house fronts, the shops, the old women and little children walking along the street, it seemed certain that, for as long as possible, she would have to wait, remain motionless like that, do nothing, not move, that the highest degree of comprehension, real intelligence, was that, to undertake nothing, keep as still as possible, do nothing.

From Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute: “It seemed certain that, for as long as possible, she would have to wait, remain motionless like that, do nothing, not move, that the highest degree of comprehension, real intelligence, was that, to undertake nothing, keep as still as possible, do nothing.”

If you’re a writer on a book tour and Austin, TX is your only “Southern” stop, I have some questions!

Every time I see a book tour announcement that skips the South, I’m reminded how insular and intellectually incurious so much of the publishing industry is.

My favorite genre of poetry is the Jenny Holzer.

Today’s dog photo. Sisters on a rainy day.

Victoria Redel Reads “Living” by Grace Paley Victoria Redel reads Grace Paley's story “Living” at the 2007 event A Tribute to Grace Paley: An Evening of Readings and Remembrance.

3. In "Living," another Faith story, a friend dies, life (in all its precariousness) distilled into a handful of sentences. Writes Paley: "I was bleeding. The doctor said, 'You can't bleed forever. Either you run out of blood or you stop. No one bleeds forever.'" soundcloud.com/penamerican/...

2. "A Conversation With My Father" from Paley's 1974 collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, is a story about telling stories and ending them. "My father," it begins, "is eighty-six years old and in bed. His heart, that bloody motor, is equally old and will not do certain jobs any more."

YouTube video by 92NY Plus 75 at 75: Grace Paley Reads From "The Used-Boy Raisers"

1. "The Used-Boy Raisers" (1959) is the first of Paley's "Faith Darwin" stories—a character, as her name suggests, born out of the tension between the secular and the religious, the personal and political. (Text isn't readily available online, but there is a recording read by the legend herself.)

Everyone should read Grace Paley's fiction. But folks seem to anthologize "Wants" (and *only* "Wants") in spite of her many other terrific stories. Sure, "Wants" is great, AND here are a few additional Paley stories you should be reading:

YouTube video by Ariel Goldberg Leonard Cohen in 1964 - On being a Jewish writer, a Canadian and a seeker of G-d.

Here's a 1964 recording with additional context: youtu.be/HwUtZGWaePo?...

“Judaism is a secretion with which an eastern tribe surrounded a divine irritation, a direct confrontation with the absolute. That happened once in history and we still feel the warmth of that confrontation, divorced as we are from the terms of it. That happened a long time ago. Today we covet the pearl but we are unwilling to support the irritation, the burning nucleus, and our spiritual life today has the exact consistency of an unclean oyster, and it stinks to heaven. I would say categorically at this moment that in any junkie's kitchen there is a greater contact with the spiritual world than any given synagogue on the North American continent.”

Leonard Cohen (via @zackamenetz.bsky.social at Emory’s 2025 Science on Spiritual Health Symposium): “I would say categorically at this moment that in any junkie's kitchen there is a greater contact with the spiritual world than any given synagogue on the North American continent.”

Fellow authors, I love you, and I know it feels like we don’t have a choice, but B&N and Am*zon both scheduled sales this week to preempt Independent Bookstore Day, a hugely vital source of income for indie bookstores. Please don’t promote their sales; please promote your local indie this week.

Today’s dog photo. A tired dog.

When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. But for this occasion, we may leave such misappli- cations aside and consider the kind of fiction that may be called grotesque with good reason, because of a directed in- tention that way on the part of the author. In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to ob- serve everyday, or which the ordinary man may never expe- rience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ig- nored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone try- ing to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters in these novels are alive in spite of these things. They have an inner coherence, if not always a coher- ence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the un- expected. It is this kind of realism that I want to consider. All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.

Flannery O’Connor: “I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

Caught the dogs frolicking in the grass this afternoon! Good for them!

'Kiki's Delivery Service' Is a Rebuke to the Miyazaki AI Trend It shows exactly what AI art and all it represents threatens to take from us.

A few years ago, @daniellamazzio.bsky.social introduced me to one of her favorite movies, Kiki's Delivery Service. In a new piece for @autostraddle.bsky.social, she wrote about the movie's vision of community, creativity, & solidarity. Check it out!
www.autostraddle.com/miyazaki-ai-...

Italo Calvino on Invisible Cities: “The image of ‘megalopolis’ - the unending, undifferentiated city which is steadily covering the surface of the earth - dominates my book, too. But there are already numerous books which prophecy catastrophes and apocalypses: to write another would be superfluous, and anyway it would be contrary to my temperament. The desire of my Marco Polo is to find the hidden reasons which bring men to live in cities: reasons which remain valid over and above any crisis. A city is a combination of many things: memory, desires, signs of a language; it is a place of exchange, as any textbook of economic history will tell you - only, these exchanges are not just trade in goods, they also involve words, desires, and memories. My book opens and closes with images of happy cities which constantly take shape and then fade away, in the midst of unhappy cities.”

Italo Calvino on his Invisible Cities: “The desire of my Marco Polo is to find the hidden reasons which bring men to live in cities: reasons which remain valid over and above any crisis.”

Today's dog photo. My ghostwriter.

“Portrait With a Donkey” by Nicolas Party

“Heat” by Florine Stettheimer

“Self-Portrait in Bowler Hat” by Max Beckmann

Some favorites from a visit last week to the @brooklynmuseum.org!

YouTube video by Pulp Pulp - Spike Island (Official Video)

New Pulp! www.youtube.com/watch?v=-27a...

the cat is indeed out of the bag.

meow.

💖 @sevenstories.bsky.social

Read about it in @publisherswkly.bsky.social ⬇️

🔗 www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

trump’s reaction (or lack thereof) to the attempt on the lives of gov. shapiro and his family ON PASSOVER is why it’s journalism malpractice to credulously report ANYTHING he does as being in service of fighting antisemitism.

jews are pawns in his nazi game and don’t ever get it twisted.

The Three Signs of New York City

This Passover I’m thinking hard about the holiday’s history of resistance to tyrannical leaders, and the imperative for Jewish people to stand with all oppressed peoples of the world.

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With the Sun (Rev. 12:1-4) From the Brooklyn Museum: Commissioned by his patron Thomas Butts, Blake created this watercolor based on a passage in the book of Revelation that refers to a "great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet" and a "great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns.”

Today I learned that the poet William Blake was also the painter William Blake.