May 2013
10 posts
7 tags
Dumb Angels
Stay out of it, you say, and you storm back to your lobby to wait out the lunch break, piano wire cutting through the denim patch over your thigh. The whole time you think of how bad the instrument’s gonna sound. Worse: the rest of the instruments get their tuning from the piano, so every other instrument at the recordings will be out of tune also. Kids just learning to play will hear this...
10 tags
7 tags
nickssassybakeoven asked: you are literally speaking to the biggest nick/jordan shipper in this fandom
8 tags
10 tags
5 tags
Dumb Angels
You can picture the cherry of his cigarette floating in space somewhere right of his fat cheekbone, a misaligned third eye bobbing in time with the chords. His other eyes squint. His teeth grind. Are you trying to insult me, he says, shaking your skull, or Bill Evans? It’s important to me to know.
10 tags
The Rumpus Interview With Miracle Jones - The... →
mraclejones:
“The Rumpus” interviewed me about all kinds of crazy crap, including the future of publishing and being from Texas and all.
READ THIS INTERVIEW.
7 tags
April 2013
12 posts
4 tags
6 tags
Dumb Angels
Really developed muscles always look like the opposite of health to you, Brian, kind of like lymph growths.
5 tags
Dumb Angels
The water roaring out of the faucet is almost loud enough to drown out the voices coming from the back room. You stare at it, its vibrations circling your ears, and on impulse you bend down and put your head beneath it. If you inhale water you’ll drown; you won’t be in this house any more. You try to turn your head around so that the water’s pouring directly down your nose, but...
1 tag
4 tags
4 tags
Dumb Angels
How many ways can you subdivide time, Brian? How many methods are there? The clock hands, moving. Your feet tapping. The aches building in your legs when you keep them still. The voices swirling in your skull, snatches of radio you’ve heard blending with them smoothly. For fun, you arrange them: run away in the falsetto, why am I here in the bass, it will always be this way in the midrange binding...
6 tags
can't sleep short fiction
I return to the table. My stuff isn’t stolen, and she looks up at me like a happy retriever.
I’ve changed my mind, I say. We can go back to my place. But you have to promise to leave when I tell you to leave. Otherwise I’m gonna call the cops on you no questions asked. Deal?
She nods. I have an apartment, she says. It’s totally no problem to go back to it whenever you’re tired of me. I prefer...
4 tags
A Grim Parley with the Horned Queen →
Who here remembers Boat Girl? I am at last in the mood to draw more BOAT GIRL ADVENTURES, at least tonight I am; maybe never again
4 tags
Dumb Angels
Wheezing, he takes a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lights it. Stop crying, he orders, smoke billowing around his face. Like the wall in Ali Baba’s cave, your tears dry up at his command.
5 tags
Dumb Angels
She doesn’t come lean in the hallway for you. You eat some whipped cream on Wonder Bread in the kitchen, chewing sugar as you keep watching the candle flame burn down like it’s a tiny meteor, time lapse photography of it falling into the ocean. Then you go back to bed.
6 tags
Dumb Angels
No, you can’t help me, she said. It ruins it. She shook her wrist and clawed at the thread blocking the zipper until it tore loose and the zipper slid down. She turned—he was staring—and took the dress off, then her slip, then her bra and the thick buttons of her cotton shorts. She tried to look mysterious and veiled while doing it, smoking eyes on him, hopping on one foot with the coats...
March 2013
5 posts
6 tags
Dumb Angels
It’s a song called Crossroads, he said. The idea is that he’s selling his soul at the crossroads. Marriage is also a sort of crossroads.
Are you saying that I’m the devil, Alice asked politely, bending her knees and spreading her legs.
I wouldn’t do this, Bill explained. I was just sort of trying to commemorate the occasion.
4 tags
Dumb Angels
I don’t need one, Alice said. I’d swim out under the moonlight.
She could imagine how her skin would look as she said this, Brian, all covered in blue salt and dead moon pale, wet with brushstrokes of kelp and water.
5 tags
Dream of Doctor Bantam a Lambda Literary Award... →
Whoaaaa! I want my publisher to print out a horrible garish lime green sticker in the shape of a sunburst and put it on every copy of the book now, saying that this book is a Lambda finalist, and making everyone who has a copy have to curse and scrape it off because bad glue is used. How can this happen?
7 tags
Dumb Angels
Sometimes she looked at older paintings too: nude Renaissance studies, ripple-chested shepherds and Bible heroes. These she dug because she could imagine injecting germs into their rich thick skins, the inevitably warm solar tones of the paint turning blue and cold, the muscles wasting to lean suggestions on long scrawny bones, the weird fever bloom of the tiny genitals the old-school painters...
3 tags
Dumb Angels
Standing in the hall, nightgown hem a halo around her ankles, she stared up at the morbid painting of a man and woman that was saving her entire life.
January 2013
1 post
4 tags
Neon Magazine reviews Dream of Doctor Bantam →
“If you think that the protagonist’s involvement with a cult is an odd direction for the story to take, then you’re right. But this novel is built on odd directions, strangeness, darkness, sudden violence and the wildness of youth. The presentation of the book is similarly intriguing, with punkish, hand-drawn illustrations fronting each of the long sections, and an intermission in the...
December 2012
4 posts
5 tags
Dumb Angels
Gumption’s what led me to this town, made me take those night classes. Middle of the Depression, I busted my ass. And look at me now. Driver for the Red Line in one of the greatest cities in all America.
He clanged his bell and Bill felt a still, kind of Nietzschean feeling dawning in him.
5 tags
Lambda Literary reviews Doctor Bantam →
“Julie and Patrice, despite their constant bickering, forge a crazy, intense bond. It is in these moments of desire that Thornton is at her finest, capturing the wondrous, torturous moments of first love: “And the lock in her heart felt like it was coming open again, the gears and tumblers falling piece by piece until there was nothing but a pile of metal, glittering, on the grass.””
...
Books Matter: Fall Reading Roundup: The Dream of... →
booksmatter:
The world of The Dream of Doctor Bantam, Jeanne Thornton’s debut novel, mostly resembles our own except no one seems to want to be in it (you may think that, too, is a similarity, but I prefer not to).
I also like that they call one of the cult’s central premises “eerily convincing”!
5 tags
The Club
If Sash went to the club she could find this person. She dreamed of it dreamed of it dreamed of it. Her dream lover dancing in the misty fog machine, her skin made all of diamonds, totally impervious to any of the poison that wept from Sash’s pores whenever she touched.
November 2012
1 post
5 tags
Dumb Angels
That night, your dad lay on the blanket, breathing deep under a bruised framework of ribs; no one called him to dinner, maybe knowing he wouldn’t have gone. Across the sand he could hear your grandfather bragging about how many oranges Bill had brought down, how much brighter these were than the oranges of the even much older and more experienced men who’d worked beside him. Bill’s shoulders...
October 2012
7 posts
3 tags
Dumb Angels
She stopped to look at him: he tapped the drums with dreamy dispassion, lips drawn back from pearl teeth, sandy brown hair slicked back in a dark linseed cap, eyes blue and bright and shining from skin lit silvery by the fake jazz light. Alice’s fingers slipped into her mouth. How easy it would be, she figured, to crawl up there with him, through the picture frame of the footlights, to join him in...
9 tags
Book Notes Playlist →
This is my favorite publicity thing for the novel: a FUN PLAYLIST, plus bonus essay about how Music is Fascism!
HOWEVER: There are two songs not on the Spotify playlist! They are:
Why Worship Death? — http://vimeo.com/5545086
Sympathique/Je ne veux pas travailler — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLaY4aksfRo
5 tags
Dumb Angels
For hours when she’d been young and sick with mono (her family assumed it was some kind of terminal-grade polio and bought a grave and funeral plot for her; when she recovered six months later this became her favorite place to visit when some feeling got too much for her to handle) she’d dragged herself to the porch steps, sat slumped with her back to her house, and stared at the leaves of the...
3 tags
4 tags
I'm interviewed by Royal Young of Interview... →
Now there is a sinister doppelganger of me making statements in the media, and I will never be able to control this doppelganger really ever again.
4 tags
The Black Emerald
She was sitting in Miss Stevens’s desk with a truly massive mug of cold coffee in front of her, a photograph of Bob Geldof cheaply printed on it with a word balloon saying Tell Me Why I Don’t Like Mondays! and the prominent address of a website that produced and sold custom novelty gifts.
September 2012
4 posts
3 tags
Dream of Doctor Bantam gets a rad PW review →
“Thornton’s hypnotically intense writing style makes the story simultaneously attractive and repulsive, though consistently powerful.” I like the idea of squibbing this quote to just be “repulsive” sometimes!
5 tags
The Dream of Doctor Bantam at Vol 1 Brooklyn →
“Julie closed her eyes and trailed her arm out the open window and let the wind bend her fingers back, dipped her arm like a dolphin’s nose through the headwind, like she was a mermaid, swimming in a dream.”
"Dr. Bantam Says There's Only One Way to Be...
orbooks:
from the Institute of Temporal Illusions. God, we love that place.
6 tags
Love is a Battlefield!
Love Is a Battlefield! — A Publication of the Institute of Temporal Illusions
A piece of scurrilous religious propaganda for my book!
August 2012
4 posts
4 tags
Dumb Angels
Again, you don’t talk on the drive on the way home where your mother will be waiting to wrap you up in her arms—her cigarette smoke will caramelize your nostrils—she will ignore her husband. And you think that the world is round, and if you kept walking in the direction you were going eventually you would have gotten there on your own; there was no need for him to come back to save you.
5 tags
Dumb Angels
Now you’re stuck on the little thematic tag melody that plays right as Porky Pig is sputtering his inarticulate goodbyes at the end of a Looney Tunes short. It always seems bittersweet to you, pathetic the way Porky struggles and fails yet always with a good heart, and you don’t like to think about Porky to this day. You can imagine him renting a lot of romantic comedies and watching them start to...
3 tags
“I hate white Christmas lights, she said. They’re like Michael Bolton...”
– Just a teaser from Jeanne Thornton’s debut novel, The Dream of Doctor Bantam (Oct), which Eileen Myles hails as “Lush and trashy…all punk heart, messily thudding.” Take part in our Goodreads giveaway and you could win one of twenty free galleys… (via orbooks)
5 tags
Dumb Angels
You feel like she might cry at any minute. She shows no signs of it, but she doesn’t always. You sit down on the piano bench. It feels like you’ve wet the bed or gone outside naked, like you’re not just wrong about Johnny Wyrostek and Ralph Miner, but actually basically wrong. You are a white pepper moth on a tree turned black with factories. Or you’re a black pepper moth alighting on unspoiled...
July 2012
4 posts
4 tags
Dumb Angels
You are at the ocean. Her headlights send white rays across the sea spray. She shuts the engine off and the sea disappears except for its sound.
3 tags
Dream of Doctor Bantam on Goodreads →
My publicist says I ought to encourage you all to add this to your “to-read” lists, which will make the book a sought after title. It seems like a good idea to me!
