Check out this cool video for the novel Bad Bad Bad by GIANT Commenteriat regular Jesus Angel Garcia. The video’s all about asking people what they fear. My favorite is the lady who says “Falling off a cliff!” immediately and cheerfully. I also really like the indignant guy with a missing tooth. Some people seem to fear themselves or “actualizing” themselves, and I have no idea what that means but I think it has to do with facial hair. Me I’m afraid of major burns. And maybe that one kind of inverse amnesia where you wake up as the only person who remembers a certain thing, like the Chicago Blackhawks or Cheerios.

Scrambler Books—which (like Flatmancrooked) manages to be awesome despite being based in turd-haven-of-a-city Sacramento—is releasing two upcoming books of poetry that I’m stoked about: Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything Is Quiet and Matthew Savoca’s long love poem with descriptive title. You can get these books separate or together, or together in a hardcover edition, which is pretty fancy for indie lit, right? Click here and here for sample poems from Malone and here and here for Savoca poems. These are sure to both be tender and exhausted collections that feel like drinking the wrong beverage at the wrong time and somehow having that be the only thing that makes you feel better. Can’t wait.

Julie Doxsee is doing a “blog tour” for her terrific new book, Objects For a Fog Death, so I asked Julie to write about her 5 favorite object combinations and her 5 favorite objects to leave by themselves. She did us better than my essaystic suggestion and wrote these “fabley little poem paragraphs.” I have used sophisticated Google Image Search techniques to jimmy up some complements. Enjoy!

Giraffe tooth/Helmet

You pull into a nook in the alley and my helmet clunks yours and this is a kind of talk we’re having but in the talk there is a kill wish and a rocket launch and a bright laser-beam lengthening our hearts across the sidewalk end to end.  There is blood and light.  You pull a giraffe tooth from your pocket, center it in your palm and say have you ever seen one of these?  From under my tongue I pull a giraffe tooth. I center it on my palm and say yes.  We sit this way until the shadows disappear. READ MORE >

The stupendous fictioneer and performance artist Ben Hersey was just telling me about some forgotten camels. Apparently, back before he was President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis was Franklin Pierce’s Secretary of War, and he was convinced by some camel enthusiasts in the U.S. Army—veterans of conflicts with those nasty Native Americans in Florida—that camels would be a badass idea for soldiers in the Southwest. So Davis ordered some dudes off to Tunis to buy some camels. You can read more about the camel episode, but just imagine the spectacle of these pre-Civil War American soldiers bumbling around Northern Africa, haggling with camel dealers. It makes you want a Drunk History episode at least. It makes you wonder what other excellent narratives are floating around out there, recessed from canonical history for being too ridiculous or convoluted to explain. To fit. What are some of your favorite offshoots from history? After Google buys history, will this era be known for its “narrative neutrality?” Do we have nook and cranny concerns? Isn’t it fun on any storytelling level to break “history,” exposing everything as the subjective, harebrained, non-narrative shitstorm that experience really is? How long will it take someone to say “rhizome” if we talk about this? Should we take a shot when someone says it? Are histrionics truer than history? After the camels turned out to be a bust as military equipment, they were sold to zoos, circuses, and private ranchers. Why didn’t they work? Why didn’t camels become part of the military glory we call History?

“Those camels were lonesome for the caravans of their home country. Every time they sighted a prospector’s mule train they’d make a break for it. You’ve heard of how horses bolted at the sight of the first automobiles. That wasn’t anything compared to the fright those ugly, loping camels threw into mules. The mules would lay back their ears and run for their lives and then the prospectors would cuss and reach for their guns and shoot. A lot of camels got killed this way.”

Deeply excited to spread of word of Emily Toder’s Brushes With, which is a little book about meeting shapes that’s coming out from Tarpaulin Sky. Stop shaving your home bases and practicing the same three chords and have a look at this. Excerpt after the jump:

READ MORE >

Sometimes I turn on one of the local Western Massachusetts channels and there is a commercial to promote the news. You see an anchor, then the anchor’s name, then the anchor talking in earnest about their roots in the area. “I’m Slop Slowdorf,” they might say. “I renewed my wedding vows at the Dr. Seuss Memorial. The Slowdorfs have lived in Springfield for six generations. How lucky am I to live and work in the same town where I grew up?” And watching this commercial I grow terrified and throw soup at the television. READ MORE >

(thanks to Michael Schaub, Bookslut editor and occasional HTMLG contributor)

I feel like I’m wired for clutter. The apartment I grew up in was crammed and overstocked. My bedroom looked like a garage. There was a giant wooden cabinet in the middle of the room—way larger than my bed if you’d set it flat—full of things like paint thinner, power drills, broken toys, empty old tins of Danish cookies and Slim Jim boxes stuffed with expired coupons. This was not my stuff. This was being stored. READ MORE >

What’s nifty about earworms is that they’re lodged inside of you because they found something to feed on. I’m pushing the metaphor biological, sure. Thinking more of an “ear parasite.” But what if things burrow into us because we’re somehow fertile for them? In ways we aren’t really aware of? What if we’re drawn when we’re drawn not because of what we want, but because beauty is looking for a brain to eat? I was going to get even more ridiculous and talk about dentistry, but I should probably just shut up and tell you the point: Jordan Stempleman’s poetry gets stuck in my head. READ MORE >

Sampson Starkweather’s latest chapbook, The Heart Is Green From So Much Waiting (Immaculate Disciples Press), is a chapbook of “transcontemporations,” which, Starkweather explains, are to poems what Robocop is to normal police officers. Obviously, if we’re playing along at home, this is both a joke and not a joke. Like maybe it’s a battle cry and a cat call, maybe it’s a desire to be unremoved from the original feeling of seeing through the eyes of Robocop himself. If we’re playing along at home, The Heart Is Green From So Much Waiting feels some kind of gameshow hosted by a monk. READ MORE >

“Friends and family of Paul Smith toasted him with his favorite drink — Coca-Cola — Wednesday at noon and remembered him on Facebook, exactly two years after he died in an accident at work.” — from the Mercury Register

Hi, reader. Writer of things to be read, probably. You, writer/reader, might have read, as I did, that interview between Jonathan Lethem and David Gates where they get anxious about “putting” the internet in their fiction. Or you might have read things about how brand names shouldn’t be “used” in fiction. Now I invite you to read a story about things that people do while they are trying to live, which may or may not help you to untangle these tough philosophical questions.

While we’re on the recommendation circuit, let me recommend Elizabeth Ellen’s brilliant essay “Stalking Dave Eggers” in the latest issue of Bookslut. It’s funny, sad, thoughtful, full of amazing parenthetical asides, wide-ranging in a clever way and honest in the best of ways. Click if you want to read about how we live in the age of clicking.

Not only are we getting our facts about fire doors, but we’re also finding out that Fern City is shaped like a fish bone, finding everywhere a pinhole of light, finding that a shimmer on fingertips is not fireflies (but War is like Go), finding that you are the kind of grasshopper I need strapped to my back, that all my follywise runts are on the rope, and that all of Paris is wearing itchy periwigs. So where do we find all this? In the new issue of So and So Magazine, featuring Michael Carr, Feng Sun Chen, Elisa Gabbert, Lily Ladewig, Guillermo Parra, Nicole Mauro, and Nate Pritts. Check it out.

Via Matt Rohrer of the awesome Northern California-based Small Desk Press, a poetry contest!

Are there monsters in your closet? Or under your bed? Do you see them when you close your eyes? Do you love them? In celebration of the upcoming release of Lizzy Acker’s Monster Party, Small Desk Press is thrilled (and terrified) to present the Monster Poetry Contest. Send us a poem about monsters: think Frankenstein, Loch Ness, serial killers, childhood nightmares, the REM album, The Aileen Wuornos movie, etc., etc., etc. The contest winner will receive a free catalog of all Small Desk Press titles – including Monster Party when it’s released this fall – plus publication on We Who Are About to Die.

Please send submissions to contest@smalldeskpress.com by August 1st, 2010, and write “Lizzy Acker Monster Poetry Submission” in the subject line. Please include a cover page with ONLY the title of the poem. The winner will be notified by email.