NOTES ON THE SUPERNOVEL:
1996–2016
The First Twenty Years of the BOOK OF O’KELLS
By Michael Conniff
Copyright © 2017
All Rights Reserved
INTRODUCTION:
A Brief Note On
NOTES ON THE SUPERNOVEL
What follows herein begins in September 1996 and concludes (temporarily) in June 2016 after twenty years of blogging and slogging. Our subject is the so-called Supernovel, first known in these NOTES as the Cybernovel, the notion that the 21st Century will be home to a new “form of forms” to supplant or otherwise supplement the print-based novel where I cut my teeth with multiple media.
That idea, in…
© Copyright 2017
All Rights Reserved
From BOOK OF O’KELLS: THE BIG HOUSE
Then Gennifer going nowhere with no clue about anything up to and including the mad supersonic dash on burnt rubber down Montauk tarmac. Pregnant Gen heretofore in her own head, Gen with demons only she can see, real devils, alive and dead, that exist only in the pus and corpuscles of her soul.
Memory?
Hers and not ours. Her memory a dream that doesn’t depend on when you wake up. Gen remembering, imagining, seeing things — but she can’t be sure if she believes what she sees…
© Copyright 2017
All Rights Reserved
From BOOK OF O’KELLS: THE BIG HOUSE
Then Gennifer going nowhere with no clue about anything up to and including the mad supersonic dash on burnt rubber down Montauk tarmac. Pregnant Gen heretofore in her own head, Gen with demons only she can see, real devils, alive and dead, that exist only in the pus and corpuscles of her soul.
Memory?
Hers and not ours. Her memory a dream that doesn’t depend on when you wake up. Gen remembering, imagining, seeing things — but she can’t be sure if she believes what she sees…
CON GAMES: Life As Content
After slinging the hash of storytelling for forty years less one, the time has come to let the world have a taste. Or not. I’m way past expecting to be paid for any of it, but to keep these stories captive in the kitchen, on the hot plate of my consciousness, is unconscionable — and far beyond the power of tasteless culinary metaphors.
Better just to sling it — and to see what sticks to the wall.
That’s where you come in. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to read my slop…
Copyright © 2017
All Rights Reserved
From The Novel BOOK OF O’KELLS: SINS OF THE FLESH
Jake O’Kell had never seen a house like this in his life, not even from the street: a house big enough to hold the biggest family and all of its branches, with one sprawling wing opening up into the limb of another, each hallway home to silver bowls and chalices as fine and as thin as so many wafers. …
CON GAMES: How I Learned To Love The Bomb
Given the world we Americans now live in — with assault weapons and snipers and innocent civilians and police falling like flies — it should have come as no surprise that we had a bomb in our suburban subdivision over the weekend.
The bomb was in the house right across the street from us, where police sedans and SUVs from every jurisdiction had arrived by Sunday morning. Our local police officer said there was a bomb in the house but the people had left and there was no danger. …
© Copyright 2016
All Rights Reserved
by Michael Conniff
FROM The Novel BOOK OF O’KELLS: NATURE OF THE BEAST
Gaps — one learns to be unconcerned about gaps.
With our gaggle of press agents and fixers, we O’Kells have always been capable of filling in said gaps regardless. Our relationship to history has always been both cursory and unblinking: we can curse the darkness and lighten the very nature of the narrative by simple acts of derision and deletion. With enough money, we simply do whatever we want to do and worry about the actual details later (if at all)…
Very proud of my Canterbury School classmate Greg Coleman, now the president and chief revenue officer of Huffington Post, HuffPo now at 25 million unique monthly visitors. An amazing career and an even better person.
1. Ohio Rep. John Boehner (R), the man who will almost certainly take over as Speaker of the House when the 112th Congress convenes early next year, is a blank slate to large swaths of the public.
