Mike Young is the author of Sprezzatura (poems), Look! Look! Feathers (stories), and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (poems). He designs and publishes NOÖ Journal and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.tumblr.com. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.
“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.
Wonderfully lucid and idea-rich post by AD Jameson at Big Other: Alternative Values in Small Press Culture. This is one for bookmarking. Jameson looks at three values that small press culture inherits somewhat lazily, Jameson claims, from culture-at-large: celebrity, youth, and money. Then he says: “What values might replace these? What else could writers and presses be prioritizing, and pursuing? And what would that look like?” In answering these questions, Jameson throws out a ton of practical and exciting suggestions. Cool stuff.
Tonight in Brooklyn: Dawn Raffel, David Peak, Ana Božičević, and Edward Mullany—HTMLGIANT crushes one and all—at the Soda Series. Check it out if you’re in NYC: 7PM at the Soda Bar in Prospect Heights.
Sasha Fletcher reports via GMail chat on how we can turn indie lit commerce into alcoholic camaraderie:
so there’s like 20 copies left
and if we sell out today, ja will paypal me money to get drunk on fancy beers
I know we already linked to it, but Mark Baumer’s walk-across-America trekblog is awesome.
New all-prose Alice Blue features heavy hitters Brian Evenson, Amelia Gray, AD Jameson (from whose “Whisper, Current, Gust” the title of this post is snagged), Susan Moorhead, Erik Leavitt, Julio Peralta-Paulino, Erika Kristine Bogner, Sam Schild, Timothy David Orme, Michael Kimball, Benjamin Buchholz, and Aaron Block
