open letter to the troll on tao lin’s blog
Dear when.parents.flee.the.country,
I don’t usually get involved in blog-related confrontations, for what I assume are obvious (though, perhaps, not to you) reasons. You are hardly the first troll/weirdo that Tao Lin has had to deal with, and I am sure you won’t be the last. That fact of Tao’s life has little–if anything–to do with me, other than that it makes me sad for him sometimes (also exhausted and pissed off on his behalf) but this isn’t why I’m writing today.
Agriculture Reader #2 was edited by my good friend–the magazine’s founder–Jeremy Schmall. I have some poems in it, and soon after that issue came out I moved to my present position as its co-editor. (Our next issue will come out in February 2009.) You probably noticed that the AGR is a handmade journal with a prominent design element. Its entire print run is somewhere in the low to mid three figures. We hope, therefore, that every copy we sell or give away will be cherished.
Your utter lack of civility, displayed repeatedly over the past few days in the comments section of Tao’s blog–including but not limited to stalkerish language and intimations of violence, compounded by the cowardice of your refusing to reveal your identity–makes me doubt your capacity to appreciate art in general, and the AGR in particular.
It grieves me that Agriculture Reader #2 may not be bringing you the joy you had hoped it would, but my greater concern is that you are not the sort of reader we are looking for. The AGR is a finite resource, every copy of it is precious, and I hate to think of even one copy being wasted. I hope you will consider returning your copy of the magazine, so I can give it to someone who can appreciate it. (Note that I do not say “will.” We do not require our readers to provide a guarantee of validation or an echo chamber of praise; but we confess to a bias for those with the capacity for comprehension and, if need be, civil discussion.)
Please contact me in the comments section of this post regarding my offer. We can exchange mailing addresses, or perhaps agree to meet at some neutral location. In exchange for your remittance of the magazine (undamaged, and with the included audio CD), I will bring you several paperbacks from the thrift store near my house. In a best case scenario these will be Tom Clancy’s Op-Center(TM) novels written by someone other than Tom Clancy, or perhaps some entries in the R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series.
Yours,
Justin
Press Press Press
If you’ve decided to abandon our [fucked] economy of slightly practical needs (plastics, soup, etc.) and concentrate entirely on the purchase of independent poetry, you should visit Press Press Press. This blog is a kind of small press mall, with links to a legion of small poetry presses and continual announcements of new titles. Recent entries include links to Rebecca Loundon’s new book Cadaver Dogs from No Tell Books and Kristi Maxwell’s Elsewhere and Wise from Dancing Girl Press. It’s a great idea and a great add to your RSS feed.
Free for Magic For Beginners for all
Kelly Link, in celebration of her new collection just released, PRETTY MONSTERS (of which I am stoked), has released to the reading public and online freakshow free digital copies of her incredible collection MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS.
MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS is one of my favorite story collections ever, so if you haven’t read it yet, maybe this will give you the push. ‘Stone Animals’ is easily in my top 5 stories ever, for its weird magical listmaking and supreme creeps, but all of the stories in MFB are pretty damn fantastic.
The newer PRETTY MONSTERS book also has a website which makes me excited for the book. Here is what it is said to contain:
# A phone booth in Las Vegas
# Aliens
# Unhelpful wizards
# Possibly carnivorous sofas
# A handbag with a village inside it
# Tennessee Fainting Goats
# Dueling librarians
# A statue of George Washington
# A boy named Onion
# Pirates
# An undead babysitter
# A nationally-ranked soccer player
# Shapeshifters
# An unexpected campfire guest
Kelly Link can eat you. Read free then buy.
Daniel Bailey’s exploding face
Earlier this year a new secret head emerged from the face of the internet, it was a new journal that instead of words on screens that you can look at and read decided to feature video feature work only, though to this point work that contains poetry and semi-corresponding videos made by lonely young male authors.
The site is called HERE EXPLODES MY GIANT FACE and is run by a fine man by the name of Daniel Bailey.
The videos run thus far have been mostly all really well put together and fun to watch, a nice shift in public poetics. I particularly like the most recent video on the site by Sam Pink, which features a video of a man walking through the woods with a flashlight until he comes upon a rather cryptic and somehow very creepy scene in a house, all while Sam reads his one-liner-ish words from his recent Jaguar Uprising Press release YUM YUM I CAN’T WAIT TO DIE. The whole experience of the video caused weird rashes and giggle marrs on my knee.
I think I’ve said before that Sam Pink should become a stand up comedian, I would go see him.
The rest of the stuff on the site, including work by Brandon Scott Gorrell and Ken Baumann and Matthew Savoca and several others, is all very nice viewing. Check it, and submit!
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October 4th, 2008 / 12:43 pm
October 4th, 2008 / 12:43 pm
LIKE FEST
Barrelhouse is a thing we like and their blog has reviewed new chapbooks by people we like so you should read the review and like the books and the people too.
A Tale of Two Chaps discusses They All Seemed Asleep, by Matthew Rohrer from Octopus Books, and Hit Wave by Jon Leon from Kitchen Press.
Here are two unhelpful excerpts from the review:
On Rohrer- >>You’ve never heard of anything like that, right? <<
On Leon- >>I should say that the chapbook begins with two quick odes…<<
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October 4th, 2008 / 12:20 pm
October 4th, 2008 / 12:20 pm
for godot: Issue 1 Release, mhmm
This issue features new poems by Nada Gordon, Evelyn Reilly, Julianna Mundim, Emmy Catedral, Enid Bagnold, Richard Siken, Stephen Ratcliffe, Michael Gottlieb, Jodie Childers, Norman J. Olson, Brent Hendricks, Sean Kilpatrick, Tom McCarthy, Stacy Doris, Michael Rerick, Corrinne Clegg Hales, Mark Decarteret, Hadewijch of Antwerp, Darren Wershler-Henry, Letitia Trent, Debra Di Blasi, Laura Elrick, Bruna Mori, Popahna Brandes, Robert Sheppard, Diana Magallan, Kristine Danielson, Ed Higgins, Drew Gardner, Kyle Kaufman, Matthew Thorburn, Tiel Aisha Ansari, Christopher Wells, Vanessa Place, Simon Pettet, Grace Vajda, John Bennett, Ian Patterson, Joseph Hutchison, John Cotter, Cheryl Lawson Walker, Scott Esposito, Jason Nelson, Daniel Kane, Kimo Armitage, Alan May, J.D. Nelson, Bob Hershon, Jennifer Karmin, Kim Rosenfield, Nathan Austin, Pearl Pirie, Rosmarie Waldrop, Tara Betts, Donald Revell, Jim Ryals, Danuta Kean, Jeff VanderMeer, Alfredo Bonanno, Irene Latham, Michael Hennesy, Dick Higgins, John Hanson, Billy Merrell, Sam Ladkin, Jeff Ward, Debra Jenks, K. Lorraine Graham, Kenji Okuhira, Sean MacInnes, Adam Seelig, Steve Halle, David Mus, Monique Wittig, Joyelle McSweeney, Daniel E. Levenson, Luke Daly, Henry Thoreau, John Palattella, Abby Trenaman, Kristen Taylor, Vassily Kamensky, David Jhave Johnston, Gene Tanta, Cate Marvin, Alison Roth, Shad Marsh, Asher Ghaffar, Henry Gould, Justin Theroux, Susan Grimm…
Lame House Press new release
Last week, Lame House Press officially released Kate Greenstreet’s chapbook This is Why I Hurt You. I got my copy last week and it’s a good looking piece. The writing is killer. Lame House mastermind Gina Myers, a fellow Saginaw native who earned her MFA from The New School, consistently publishes interesting and intelligent chapbooks (each copy of which she handcrafts, of course). Lame House is grouped in my mind with other independent presses like Greying Ghost and Publishing Genius, each publishing high quality chapbooks at ridiculously reasonable prices.
Chapbooks have been around forever (apparently Neanderthal Man’s hunched back is due to carrying around so many stone chapbooks ), but the chapbook has become a sort of art object in itself. Yes, the writing is excellent, of course, but the chaps themselves feel like something more than string, paper, and staples, thanks to the ambitious work of the many indie presses like Lame House, Greying Ghost, Publishing Genius, et al. Nice work, everyone.
Eyeshot’s Tentacled Rejecting Appendage
The best thing about internet-published fiction writing a few years back was getting a rejection letter from Lee Klein at Eyeshot.
The best. Seriously.
“At first I thought you took some pages from a Frank McCourt memoir, copied them, then added a dash of Pac Man.”
Lee was funny. Lee was direct. Lee was fucking merciless.
(Lee is still all these things, by the way. Eyeshot remains. Eyeshot continues to publish and, as far as I know, continues to reject. But, now, on the submissions page, you read: “PLEASE REALIZE we used to try to respond very quickly, often in mere minutes, generally within 48 hours. And that we used to tend to have some fun with our rejection letters. Now we might just send a link to a beautiful form letter. But occasionally we may still respond personally and performatively and whatever, depending on time and energy.”)
His rejections sometimes felt like a prolonged, broken narrative, a story being sent out to the world, one person at a time. Luckily, he collected them for us. READ MORE >
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October 3rd, 2008 / 4:43 pm
October 3rd, 2008 / 4:43 pm
/nor 4 gives more
The 4th issue of New Ohio Review, or /nor, is out now, their site is also facelifted for it and looks really nice. The new issue includes a new story and interview with Frederick Barthelme, as well as a lot of new work by new and familiar names. My copy of /nor 3 is one of the ones I continually go back to read, the work is top notch and the design on the book and quality of the paper makes one of those kinds of book objects you feel good just touching.
In addition to free pdf previews of certain work on the site by Stephen Dunn, Claire Bateman, William Todd Seabrook, and others, /nor is currently running an incredible deal where if you subscribe for a year, they will throw in another free year. A one year subscription is $16 including shipping. The $4 per-issue price on that is sick, and for the quality I know is in the journal, mixed with the great design, you almost can’t turn that away. I love that they are doing this, it almost seems to say: we just really want you to read this. If more journals made it more financially lucrative to get in the door, as recently Hobart and Fence have, I think we’d see a lot more journal activity. The /nor deal is good through October.
I’m particularly interested to see how the aesthetic of the work in the journal shifted after the editor for the first 3 issues was hoisted for seemingly printing too much ‘experimental’ work. I don’t know how anyone could look at those first 3 issues and want to end it, but hopefully the experimentation level hasn’t been squashed too hard. From the previews on the site, it seems things are still on.
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October 3rd, 2008 / 1:44 pm
October 3rd, 2008 / 1:44 pm
THE NEW BLURRY PHOTOGRAPH
It may have started, as many internet-lit things seem to do, with Tao Lin. His drawings of weird animals rendered from Microsoft Paint are endearing and comical. That the Adobe platform (illustrator/photoshop/indesign) is not employed is what I call ‘guerrilla pixel-dom’—crude, design-unfriendly, kitschy in a Bill Gates kinda way. Such aesthetic seems to be propagating. Enter Mike Bushnell and our own Sam Pink.
Mr. Pink, sans Reservoir Dogs, is, um, an interesting character. He brings us an adolescent violence that, constrained in its virtual medium, is benign and somehow charming. Looking at this blog, I don’t know whether to become aroused or duct tape my penis to my perineum for safety.
Mr. Bushnell, of face warpaint fame, is, um, an interesting character. His drawings of anthropomorphic creatures, while not necessarily violent, are of vehement temperament. Yes, Jean-Michel Basquiat tread such ground in the 80’s, but in oils.
Just what are these guys saying? Tao Lin, a master of quick-witted sayings that evoke complex existential quandaries, brings us ‘sad pterodactyl living a life of fear and anxiety’ and ‘elderly obese frost bitten squirrel’, among many others.
Pink and Bushnell’s drawings seem reactionary, void of the deep—yet somehow self-effacing—sadness that is Tao Lin. Maybe they are on to something different, and the comparison is unfair. I’m humored by all three gentlemen, all whom make me want to duct tape my penis to my perineum for safety. (For Tao, I’d use organic hemp tape.)
When one saw a blurry black-and-white photograph, one knew poetry was coming. Every journal had some BW photo of some chick’s shoulder up close, or some tree’s shadow. Blurry photo meant poetry.
Now, for some, a fucked up MS paint drawing means poetry. Are we cruder? younger? of binary soul? or just bored?
While supplies last.