http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com
Mike Young is the author of Look! Look! Feathers (Word Riot Press 2010), a book of stories, and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (Publishing Genius Press 2010), a book of poems. He co-edits NOÖ Journal and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
After reading the new issue of iO, I know some new things. Like some people will forgive you right to your face. Like every pier is out to get you. Like animals get into the distillery just fine. Like one thing you do is you want to hear someone say “that’s the one I want.” And the other thing you do is you know that, as you age, your desires start to feel less unusual. Then the way you know it’s real is when no one’s dreamed about you so much, or told you they dreamed about you so much, and in such detail. The way it is is a sad song about oranges. No one really cares about germs. The world moves even if you don’t take it out for a walk. My cereal tastes funny does your cereal taste funny? Some things I still don’t know, even with iO to help me. I still don’t know what roll tide roll means. Or how many corporations does it take, anyway, to make a dark that shreds the citydark like a bed of incriminating documents? How many years does running in the wrong direction become, if not right, at least something people stop niOticing?
Okay, so Derrick Rose will maybe never again play basketball like such a firefly, but that doesn’t mean you should stop believing in the triumph of the canny and soulful: for example, friend of the GIANT Heather Christle has won The Believer‘s 2011 Poetry Award for her book The Trees The Trees. Congratulations, Heather!
The other night I was doing my taxes and commiserating with softballers and wondering why the water was still running behind a locked door and getting shoved passive-aggressively by a woman whose love of darts I was unconsciously interrupting when the guy to the right said that he liked it when I used to post on HTMLGIANT about new issues of online magazines, and I was like “You mean the only thing on HTMLGIANT I was ever good for?” and he was like “Yeah, exactly,” and then one thing led to another and the Yankees got swept in their opening series by Tampa Bay, so I figured what the frick I would tell everybody about:
)) People who think they have secrets over at Sixth Finch, but actually they just have the word DOOR superimposed like a crosshair on their smallest confession.
)) People who meld heads and flood banks and steal mother scarves over at Dark Sky, but really they just stand around covered in hair in the mammal room.
)) And if that’s not enough for you Yankees fans, you can take a NAP, and when you wake Up, you can conduct enough electricity to become a diode. The important thing is that every time you read an online literary magazine for the rest of your life, you should also imagine the gangsta in the woods reading along with you.
“If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.” — John Waters in the Wall Street Journal on the debate between transparent and topographical sentences.
“My religion is Poetry, not a religion of kindness and love but one of absolute permission. If poetry doesn’t strip me naked in front of my enemies then nothing will.” — CAConrad, in an amazing (duh, it’s CAConrad) and even downright rousing interview with Thom Donovan at The Academy of American Poets, excerpted from A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, Conrad’s new book of (Soma)tic exercises out April 1st from Wave.
Hey Mike is there a one stop poetry megasite where I can 1) go to read cool poetics essays by everybody from C.D Wright to Laura Glenum, 2) catch up on reviews of books out from presses like City Lights, 3) watch videos of shit like Joshua Clover getting kicked out of a bank, 4) scan all the current poetry news that stays news and otherwise, 5) dive into a nicely manageable monthly poetry journal that features one poem by three people per issue, especially if those people are like Noelle Kocot or something, and 6) speaking of people also maybe find smart interviews with people like Tyrone Williams? Also it would help if this online poetry megasite were based out of the American desert. Like not the proverbial American desert but some actual sand and shit. Like also if the site were designed to be as clean and navigable as a desert highway.
Oh cool, I like them. What is this thing called?
Awesome. Also why is there a light on your water pitcher that flashes different colors depending on filter age?
I have no idea, but it’s terrifying and soothing in equal measures.
Yeah, yeah, ‘equal measures,’ boring, whatever Mike, if you’re so fucking smart why don’t you go talk to yourself using some bloated smart person prepositional phrases like ‘that which’ while I actually do something with my life like checking out The Volta.
=(
Sorry just kidding Mike I know how you need relentlessly undiluted adoration all the time so don’t worry I still love you.
=)!!!
Wow I didn’t think you could put exclamation marks after emoticons, that’s really kind of a new low, please don’t ever talk to me again.
[Matchup #25 in Tournament of Bookshit]
DECLARING ___ IS DEAD VS. NATIONWIDE FACEBOOK INVITE TO LOCAL READING
-OR-
HOW I SPENT MEAN WEEK MAKING A POST SO STUPID THAT AFTER YOU READ THIS POST THE POST WILL HAVE A CHILD NAMED “GOOBER T.L.D.R” BECAUSE THE POST ISN’T EVEN GOOD AT COMING UP WITH NAMES FOR ITS CHILDREN
On the one hand, nothing really dies. Like I have this receipt from a movie I saw right here in my pocket. What good is it doing anybody? The movie was about the financial industry. We were made to feel sorry for people because they buried their dogs just like everybody else. In one scene, Snapple showed off its brand of bottled water. The best scene was when a guy who used to make bridges explained that money wasn’t a bridge, e.g. it didn’t save anybody in traffic. Adam and I saw the movie in NYC. Driving home, Adam and Joe and I got stuck in traffic. The reasons were mysterious. Adam’s chips were locked in the trunk. I wasn’t really hungry because I’d eaten two breakfasts and Adam’s tiramisu, which he gave me to shut me up after we argued about the relevance of the bridge scene. The tiramisu was delicious and sort of ridiculously conceptualized, just like NYC. -+-+-+-+-+- Listen: READ MORE >
If it’s raining on you and the music you’re listening to, I suggest adding even more input to your afternoon by checking out Barrelhouse’s new all-poetry online edition, guest-edited by Justin Marks. All the time cool stuff comes out in the vein of online magazines, etc, but I forget to post about it, but this time I didn’t want to forget, particularly because the author pictures are maybe inadvertently the best set of author pictures, together, that I’ve ever seen. I mean look at Dan Hoy (originator of this post’s title line) with that bear. Look at Ish Klein with those eyes. Look at Jeremiah Gould sideways on the railroad tracks. That also all the poems are pretty great, that’s like a coupon for your favorite chips right there on your favorite chips bag. Go go and see see.
What a sweet week for mice who live in walls. Wait, I mean what a sweet week for this pink skull and crossbones wrist thing. Wait, I mean what a sweet week for all these old MTA bus passes I am uselessly collecting. Wait, I mean what a sweet week for new litmags. That’s it. Adam already posted about LPZ, and since I just got in trouble the other day for accidentally double posting about Ryan Call’s Whiting Award, I’m going to stick to a strictly newsworthy diet.
Dark Sky 14 is out! You should read Dark Sky 14 if you like mustached short Siamese women, a family crawling naked from the sea clutching plastic suitcases, counting bullet holes, Burt’s cans of nuts and screws, broken floating, a horse in a Dumpster, seagulls collecting Styrofoam with their beaks, Mars sex, kicking ants, cashmere moons, warbling accountants, smoke that turns into bears and vice versa, and anonymous book reviews where the book itself is the anonymous.
NOÖ [13] is out! You should read NOÖ [13] if you like dance-offs, Russian salads, laundromats outside of burnt down malls, people who give you their ADD medication for your birthday, Ivan Lendl nostalgia, Hawaiians with machine guns, fake boyfriends, people who marry houses, confused police, sisters who are boxes of snakes, sisters who threaten you with ginsu knives, pummelhorsing social compromise, meat screams, oysters collected by widows, letters to jailed Lil Wayne, hearts too full of apples and wind, slut bags, triangle booth sandwiches, fucktrys, lung balloons, the bicycle in the wrong part of the neighborhood, the fast snapping motion of a neck during the fickle stages of a swan-dive, whiskey & chocolate, roller hockey coaches, furniture apocalypses, people who swallow entire friends, and eerie floating underwear. Plus one review of one giant book, a book written by a person named Adam Jameson Rod Smith Jennifer L Knox Brad Liening Jennifer Denrow Christian Hawkey Ryan Ridge Dan Hoy. Can you imagine calling for that guy in the doctor’s office? Luckily you don’t need a doctor to read either of these two new issues, but you might need a doctor after them.
20 years is a long time. Future Tense Books, run by Kevin Sampsell, has been putting books out for 20 years. These books are about things like talking to the moon and petting whale carcasses. They’re about finally figuring out what it means to belong to what you are, which is that it means you’re a freak. They’re about when your son loves Spiderman. They’re about pictures of ceiling fans in different emotional states. They’re also Gary Lutz, Zoe Trope, Elizabeth Ellen, Shane Allison, Chloe Caldwell, and 20 years worth of folks all the other peppermint cans were too freaked out to publish.
Along with putting out these books, Kevin Sampsell has also been, for 10 of those 20 years, single-handedly curating the most amazing small press cave at Powell’s in Portland, OR. Occupy Indie Lit is a leaderless casserole, except Kevin is probably the one who lent us the stove. He’s been around. He’s helped everybody. He’s sexy. He’s the shit. All of which is to say: do you want a cake maybe? Do you want someone to write a ukelele song for you maybe? Do you want incentive perks, I mean? Most importantly: do you want to support a press that’s been around 20 years and is now running its first ever official fundraiser to help push itself to the next level, literally shank anything depressing you can think of about “the state of publishing,” and take over the world? Well then go here. Help the Future of Future Tense.
“There is a collie here whose only countenance is the business-like countenance of a herder. He is unleashed, and he is unwavering in the anti-personal way he circles the gathered crowd. He has no time to be petted as he weaves through the people’s herd.” — For those of you who have been allergic to the arguably necessary but gratingly chalky rah-rah language of the Occupy movement, here is Anne Boyer in Lana Turner writing about Kansas City and making some good old fashioned song outta that fizz.
Your Facebook friends have probably already showed you the We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr, but here it is again. It’s PostFrankness instead of PostSecret. Camwhore angles repurposed for a who’s-there roll call in the deep effed.
“My momma always said I got a head shaped like a heart. Not like them cartoon hearts bitch girls draw about other boys in their notebooks. Like the real thing. A pumping chambered ugly of a muscle not meant for no light of day. Guess that means instead of brains I’m all blood. Guess that’s why I ain’t ever been scared of blood. It’s warm like I’m warm. It pools thick and gorgeous and don’t step in it less you want to make a painting of what you done for any passing bitch to start hollering about.” — from “Heart,” a great new Lindsay Hunter short in Burrow Press’s “15 Views of Orlando” project
“My writing isn’t a career or a craft or a hobby or anything like that. It is more like a tiny annex to my life, a little crawl space in which I occasionally end up by accident in the dark.” — Gary Lutz, interviewed by David Winters @ 3:AM Magazine. Also: Lutz is reading tonight at the Soda Series.
And now for a book trailer for Myriam Gurba’s Wish You Were Me from Riley Michael Parker, a trailer notable for its revolutionary use of pillow suicide, lampshade helmets, and slapstick vulgarity:
from Julio Cortázar, The Art of Fiction #83 in The Paris Review (via Matt Bell)
INTERVIEWER
Have fame and success been pleasurable?
CORTÁZAR
Ah, listen, I’ll say something I shouldn’t say because no one will believe it, but success isn’t a pleasure for me. I’m glad to be able to live from what I write, so I have to put up with the popular and critical side of success. But I was happier as a man when I was unknown. Much happier. Now I can’t go to Latin America or to Spain without being recognized every ten yards, and the autographs, the embraces . . . It’s very moving, because they’re readers who are frequently quite young. I’m happy that they like what I do, but it’s terribly distressing for me on the level of privacy. I can’t go to a beach in Europe; in five minutes there’s a photographer. I have a physical appearance that I can’t disguise; if I were small I could shave and put on sunglasses, but with my height, my long arms and all that, they discover me from afar. On the other hand, there are very beautiful things: I was in Barcelona a month ago, walking around the Gothic Quarter one evening, and there was an American girl, very pretty, playing the guitar very well and singing. She was seated on the ground singing to earn her living. She sang a bit like Joan Baez, a very pure, clear voice. There was a group of young people from Barcelona listening. I stopped to listen to her, but I stayed in the shadows. At one point, one of these young men who was about twenty, very young, very handsome, approached me. He had a cake in his hand. He said, “Julio, take a piece.” So I took a piece and I ate it, and I told him, “Thanks a lot for coming up and giving that to me.” He said to me, “But, listen, I give you so little next to what you’ve given me.” I said, “Don’t say that, don’t say that,” and we embraced and he went away. Well, things like that, that’s the best recompense for my work as a writer. That a boy or a girl comes up to speak to you and to offer you a piece of cake, it’s wonderful. It’s worth the trouble of having written.
I just got this email from Chris Newgent of Vouched Books in Indianapolis, IN, which I think is a generous, lovely project, so I am re-posting this here.
“Big Car Arts Collective is in the running for a $25,000 Pepsi Refresh Grant to support our new community space here in Indy called Service Center for Contemporary Culture + Community! The top 15 projects get funded. We are in the final push at 9th place with 10 days to go, which means if we can just hold on we get the grant!
At this new space, we plan to host events (the next Vouched Presents reading will be here), maintain a community garden, hold art and writing workshops (e.g. we plan to have a Dzanc Day event here next year), and have a lending library (you can bet I plan to stock that puppy with small press literature galore). On top of that, they’re devoting a shelf to Vouched Books so people visiting the community space have the opportunity to buy my books whenever the space is open. The whole endeavor is to kickstart a revitalization of a neighborhood in Indy that is in desperate need for new life. READ MORE >
