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.
Here in Massachusetts, where it’s raining a little on the chimneys, you get to thinking about Puritanism and grimly mowing the lawn, keeping yourself right in the eyes of Judgment, which is not so much a single set of floating eyes or even many sets of eyes but a vast eye-mucus gum, that sticky feeling of making one decision after another, freighted decisions, handled clumsy, bound for worry, leaving you fraught over past transgressions and mowing the lawn in the rain.
To feel better, you might want to read “Tied to Us” by John Maradik, American Short Fiction‘s web pinup for September. Maradik’s story is about the tension between inevitability and style. It opens by saying “She was an excellent kisser so we couldn’t help but have a baby.” That baby puts its foot in duck fountains and has a face like a zipper. Yards look outer-spacey. Necks pop like bullwhips. We might do well to mention Leonard Michaels or web-favorite Daniel Spinks. But Maradik’s story is also gooey and twitchy in a way that’s very much its own. Its got its own shoulders tensed at a very strange angle, which makes me want to tell you about it. It’s a good story. It’s a big lawn.
DZANC Books‘s new online literary magazine, The Collagist, has just posted its debut issue. Edited by steam-train-among-men Matt Bell (pictured at right, the totally casual one), The Collagist features plenty of big hitters right out of the dugout, including Chris Bachelder, Kim Chinquee, and Kevin Wilson.
The work in The Collagist‘s first issue—stories, poems, essays—covers everything from router anxiety to sinkhole champions; from snowman-inspired carnality to Eastern Oregon; from thoughtful video reviews to thoughtful verbal reviews (including a review of Brian Evenson’s Fugue State by our own Ryan Call); from an essay about being in some dude’s workshop by David McLendon to a story by the dude who ran that workshop, some dude named Gordon Lish, this Lish dude, dude Lish, Gordotron, named a story, ran a shop, worked.
There is also, of course, the clean-as-a-jeweler’s-glasses presentation that we’ve come to expect from DZANC. Kudos to all involved, and do please readers give The Collagist your face, now and deeply. Press release from Matt Bell, with full contributor list, after the jump. READ MORE >
In the category of indie-news-as-sweet-as-white-shoes, Light Boxes by Shane Jones will be reprinted by Penguin in the Summer of 2010. According to Shane’s blog, there are also some original Publishing Genius copies that will be out soon through SPD. Get one before they’re all on EBay!
First Spike Jonze, and now Penguin. Major props to Shane for having his hard work and serious talent so richly rewarded. And kudos to Adam Robinson for knowing a good thing and helping that good thing go. Pretty exciting to imagine a bunch of new faces buried in the war against February. Honey and smoke!
The Difficult Farm by Heather Christle ships August 2009
Once while I was eating some Pop Tarts, everyone was saying that they always went around wishing they were something else. Like ants or marmots or Joshua trees. Not me, I said. Really? Heather Christle asked. She seemed very incredulous, an incredulity of startling emotional intensity. You never, she said, want to be anything else? Not even a boat? Well, no, I said. Then I said something like: there are so many trick ends and trap cliffs in being human; it takes all my time figuring out how to be human; why would I want to waste that time wishing I were a boat?
Those who suffer from random ballads, unrequited ampersand love, sleepwalking in the Donut factory, the need to starve all rabbits to death because you love them like that, a strange anxiety that you are the only one in the world who can’t tell carob apart from chocolate, supplication, irresponsibility, petty secrecy, a reflex by which you clutch epically at whatever night will have you, a bunch of good ideas that you prevent yourself from undertaking because you spend too much time doing laundry, pointed coughs, a whole credit card for the purchase of sunglasses, pony love, pool love, pockmark love, and/or if you are really a spear, a blizzard, or a downfall, and you’ve been faking it through hopskotch and teller interaction this whole time, you will want to click and sink into notnostrums* 3, the new issue of online poetry edited by Guy Petit and Luke Bloomfield. Be sure to gawk the trailer for notnostrums’ upcoming poetry movie If You Think Of It. Roster after the jump. Maybe get some water too.
Eric Oberauf, captain of the publishing house Two Dollar Radio, has a great article in the new Brooklyn Rail arguing that we should be sober but optimistic about the printed book object and its success as a method of literary distribution. In “The Revenge of Print,” Oberauf explains the relevance of independent presses very well, summarizes the identity crisis that passes for a business model at most big and butterchurning book houses, and argues with a thoughtful and historically aware perspective that adapting a “realistic scale” isn’t downsizing expectations but getting back to mattering. What his argument reminds us is that people pay for books not because they’re addicted to mulch, but to read words and like words and carry words around so they can read them some more, which makes the whole thing more communication than commodity. Maybe you’re going to make more friends than money, it’s true. So if corporate book publishers want to continue tricking any cash into falling toward them, they might want to remember that books are closer to party invitations than to coat hangers.
Here’s a pull quote:
The goal for book publishers, most simply put, should not be to undertake a virtual arms race of developing technology with both the Internet and media, or to try to compete on a bloated scale with music and film, or even to translate a work to conform to an undetermined potential future model. The mission for book publishers and print media at large should be to create a product that is irreplaceable and indispensable.
THE PROVISIONAL AVANT GARDE
by Anne Boyer (originally at Odali$qued). I liked this essay so much when I originally read it that I asked Anne’s permission to re-post it here, and she graciously agreed.
1. It won’t be called the avant-garde. It will be referred to by various names, all of them precise, like “the society for touching lightly the forearms of another” or “a tendency toward making chains of half-rhymes in a circle with one’s friends.”
2. It will share with the historic avant-garde that art will often be made in groups, but it will seek or find the artistic and literary expressions that mimic something other than war or machines or violent manly death, something like “human touch” and “animal touch” and “comforting noises made when another is ill” and “maternal protection” and “friendly ritual” and “a little daub of secretion” or “just like playing cards with my aunts and uncles” or “the soft feeling of an arm” or “game for which the rules are never directly stated but which everyone knows how to play.”
New from Blue Hour Press is an e-book of poems by Christopher Cheney (featuring photographs by Estelle Srivijittakar) called They Kissed Their Homes. They’re really something, these poems and photos, apart and together. The whole thing is like a violin you left on the stove and spilled coffee grounds over, which you feel bad about, since it’s not even your violin: you’re just keeping it safe for a guy who showed up at your door late one night smelling half-fried eggs and half-chicory, asking if you would be a brother and hide his fiddle. You don’t really want to, but he keeps shoving the case at you in nervous little here, here‘s, so finally you take it and leave it in your kitchen. He never comes back. But after a while you can’t seem to get the moon out of your refrigerator, and you start to feel like a dog’s around, hiding, watching you, doing that sleek coat shiver, trapped and can’t stop.
Cheney’s one of my favorite poets of disquiet. He’s like a sharpened eyelash. The real deal. Here’s the official blurb from Blue Hour Press about the book, plus some excerpts after the break.
Christopher Cheney’s They Kissed Their Homes is an album of everyday landscapes foregrounded with disquiet. Like warm Polaroids, the poems develop clause by clause; their subjects—the mundane, extraordinary, savage—colorize and sharpen; a nameless, faceless population pulls into focus. Together with the work of photographer Estelle Srivijittakar, Cheney’s declarative snapshots gain collaborative energy, grow even more lucid. The result is a catalogue of the countless small oddities of our American quotidian.
Bradley Sands and I wanted to make an electronic anthology that took Bizarro authors and Blogzarro authors and featured two stories from each, one “real” and one “unreal.” We let everything else figure itself out. And now you can read Dragons With Cancer either online or as a PDF. Read and click. Keep up on things. They’re loading all emotions into a rocket and sending it to Mars, so if you have any left you should use them soon. List of authors after the jump.
In some dizzying crinkle of web logic, I’d like to share not only a post on another blog but the comment stream of that post, which features an interesting discussion of small press successes, funding, avant-garde tendencies, dissonance/dissent, and the CIA.
The post in question is Shonni Enelow’s spotlight of Brooklyn-based Ugly Duckling Presse, which publishes strange and exciting poetry, including lots of work-in-translation, and all in editions of carefully made book objects that preserve bookmaking as an art unto itself. They’ve published great books by Eugene Ostashevsky, Tomas Salamun, and Laura Solomon. They published Dodie Bellamy’s Barf Manfesto, which is terrific, and Aram Saryon’s Complete Minimal Poems, which won the William Carlos William Award in 2008. That’s not the controversy. Controversy after the jump!
