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 are two things I like a lot about FRiGG, which is edited by Ellen Parker:
1) It always looks amazingly ornate. Each issue flings these full color graphics at you for every author’s page. I think this is a smart way to be an online magazine in a different way than we normally imagine. Normally we think online lends itself to streamlined, simple, a few solid colors. Sure, that makes sense. But FRiGG’s approach also makes sense because you couldn’t do this lavish kind of stuff in print; it would be too expensive, right? Yes. And then the paintings are smart enough to recede into the background for the text, which is just a very simple black on white. I feel like there is a curator’s sense of individual-by-individual care that goes into presenting all the authors, and that’s great.
2) FRiGG seems aware that people don’t usually want to read 2000+ word stories on the Web, but they publish some anyway, and usually the ones they publish seem smart in their length: broken up cleverly or chasing you with enough line-by-line momentum that you forget the idea of eye strain and read the whole thing. I think this is terrific editorial shrewdness.
All of which is to introduce FRiGG’s new issue, which features stories and poems from: Joshua Ben-Noah Carlson, Louie Crew, Barry Graham, Crystal J. Hoffman, Tiff Holland, Paul Hostovsky, Dennis Mahagin, Ravi Mangla, Mary Miller, Suzanne Ondrus, Jennifer Pieroni, and Katy Whittingham. Peek it now.
All sorts of magic people will be at AWP Chicago Feb 11th-14th: you, some guy with a surgical mask, sixteen blind elves, and Tony Danza. You know, as in “Hold me closer, Tony Danza” and “Tony Danza in the sand.”
In our spirit of selfless community service we here at HTMLGIANT have decided to help the needy, the dispossessed, the charlatans, the men and women whose haircuts remain anxiously unaware of where they’ll end up mussed: that’s right, some of usall of usmost of useveryone in the worldat one point or another HTMLGIANT’s readers might need a place to crash in Chicago.
So why not see if we can have one GIANT <A> TAG help another? If you need a couch, post in the comments. If you have a couch free, post in the comments. If you’re a couch, buy a sweater.
GOOD LUCK! GODSPEED! CHICAGO BLACKHAWKS 09!
This evening, I got an email asking me if I wanted to add NOÖ Journal into a new literary magazine database called litmags.org. Here is some text from that email:
Dear Editor:
I’m a student working on my MFA in creative writing, and my final project for one of my classes was to construct a website through which readers and writers can more easily find literary magazines that suit their tastes and styles. This is an invitation to have your magazine listed in the site’s database.
Okay, sure. Sounds good. Like competition for Duotrope. Cool. But here’s what I wonder: do these databases really aid some earnest reader’s desire to find a new favorite magazine all about snowshoe poetry? Because sometimes it seems like they just facilitate the ability to find “markets” that “suit” a submitting writer’s “aesthetic.” Which seems–with all due respect to the people who maintain and program these databases, people who work awesomely hard on their projects–like a depressing and bullshit way to go about reading and writing.
Bozipede: a type of famous, old-guard internet literary magazine insect, commonly called a “pindle” or a “pindle bozz.” The bozipede is also called a “pin del dee boz” by the brave, a “pee bozz” by people who spend too much time on their hair, and a “pin diddily boss” by the same people who think it’s funny to mix Kool-Aid and hydroplaning. Bozipedes are well-regarded for being interesting and awesome and spinning out six stories of varying forms, styles, and effects every couple months or so.
That’s right: a new PBoz is out.
Gawk the new fictive dreams from Digby Beaumont, Kristin Fouquet, Chelsey Flood, Tai Dong Huai, Patti Jazanoski, and Lydia Copeland.
What I’ve always liked about Pindeldyboz is how so many of the stories they publish seem small at first–scenes, Christmas muzak, malls, mice, lunch, a few teetering emotions–but always turn irrevocably weird. This isn’t categorical: lots of stuff gets published there that has nothing to do with this feeling of mine. But I feel like Pindeldyboz has an eye for chewy realism in the way that Eyeshot does chicanery or Hobart does mathematician truck driver humor.
All of these magazines have RSS feeds to which you should subscribe, so you won’t even need me–your hot yogurt man, your lumberjack-in-the-rain–to tell you these things. Yes: what I aim for is ultimate dispensibility, also known as “the opposite of sugar” or “not the new Pindeldyboz.”
Cut your fucking ears off and put them in my mouth, chud fucke*s. All y’all ever talk about up in this bitch is your fucking Morning Nutritious blend Vitamin A cattle finch pomegranate quicksilver soggy sonnet dick bullshit literature.
Your indie this / Adbusters that / dead white guys with white beards and ski caps.
Fuck ski caps.
What you need is the feeling of car keys against your throat. What you need is a little yellow smiley gone bloodsoaked, with some mutton showing, with its face jiggling off.
What you need is some STRONG POETRY.
And bless your shoe licking hearts, I’m here to deliver, courtesy of the only man I’ve ever seen eat six anvils with a cock ring on: K “THE SILEM” MOHAMMAD. Witness this, his analysis of what makes a STRONG POEM, and by analysis I mean free steak:
George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Barack Obama are strong poems. Al Gore, John Kerry, George H. W. Bush, and Geraldine Ferraro are weak poems.
The relationality of the strong poem should not lead one to believe that its strength is not tangible.
The strong poem fully expects to be hated by many. This increases its strength.
The weak poem is reducible to a rectangle or rhombus whereas the strong poem resembles a parallelogram, or more exactly a trapezoid or irregular quadrilateral.
Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin” is a weak poem. Charles Olson’s “The Lordly and Isolate Satyrs” is a strong poem. The verdict is out on Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”
Not every instance of the term “strong poem” is relevant to the definition at hand. Sometimes it is merely a convenient, informal, and largely meaningless designation, as in “Good, Susan, that’s a strong poem compared to your earlier work.”
The strong poem carries with it the undercurrent of a threat in the guise of robust confidence. It is always on the verge of violating something.
“Strong,” but not yet stale, sweat.
And, yes, there’s more. You thought that was it? It? You don’t even know half of it! That’s because it is a half of shit, and half of shit is your shit (oh! what!) and half of your shit is the shit I just shit on your shit. Bitch. That’s because you’re a–wait, no, you’re not a pussy, not even that, no, you’re a bunny cunt, you’re a blowjob in pajamas. Go eat a fucking Mounds bar, girl. That’s what girls do. They just sit around eating Mounds bars and–
Thanks to Brian Foley’s sharp eyes, here is a terrific NY Times profile on Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift, the contemporary artist’s Bible and parking meter guide to plying our (or “their,” if you hate artists and you just came to this blog looking for our we’re-a-real-literature-blog practice of Boobs Friday) “trade” in an era of commodified everything, when you have to explain how poetry is supposed to make you the skrilla. We don’t even have patrons anymore! So how–ask the barrel-chested Rotary Club wardens of the world–is poetry supposed to seat us cleanly on the respectable cultural (read: cash exchanging) train of gravy? Hyde is the original and saintly articulator of the “gift economy” theory, which answers that question by pointing out how commodity trading economies throughout histories have cordoned off space for an alternate system of exchanges based on gifting, giving things to people as gifts and accepting gifts in return, where you have 1 to 1 value (“oh, that is your gift, here is my gift”) and not weighted currency (“two of your sheep for eight of my fingernails”). This system builds its own communities based on–think Christmas afternoon–a kind of buzzy empathy.
Though I’ve never read Hyde, I’ve heard enough about this “gift economy” idea second and thirdhand to understand the basic principles, and I’ve always been kind of skeptical. Not because I’m into making bank off my litter-a-churr, but because I’m a little uncomfortable with the whole idea of “gifts,” the latent obligations of them (“dear grandma, thank you for the lizard balls”) and their harrowing ideological weight (“’tis tradition, young man, this gift giving!”). “Gifting” seems to formalize in some unnatural and self-congratulatory (self meaning group self here) way a process that should feel, I don’t know, more humble and altruistic or something. If we want to trade poetry, why can’t we just trade poetry? Maybe it’s just that the whole “gift economy” idea seems to be apologizing to the capitalists (“oh, here it is in a way you can understand, you know Christmas, right? you know about the ‘gift’ of talent?”), and that leaves a shitty aftertaste.
But! Like I said, I’ve never actually read the silly book. And this profile makes Hyde’s philosophy seem really appealing. All the ideas about how we’re communally developed, for instance, and how whatever genius might arise is not unique but accumulated: that sounds good. So maybe I will read the book now. And I’ll like gifts more.
What thinketh the commentariat?
Uh oh. On the heels of our Rain Fade announcement comes another new journal introduced by video. Not only that, but this new journal comes to us from the rubble from those infamous Jaguar Uprising boys (or two of them, anyway). It’s a challenge to Rain Fade, it’s an explanation of what happened to Jaguar Uprising, it’s a journal for the working class who just want to “put their feet up, eat pork and beans, and read the most uprising literature they’ve read in over a decade, baby.”* Yes, *that’s a composite quote. It’s not real. Is that a duck? Sauce? Thanksgiving? Who’s the manbitch now? Also, yes, we’re talking about: BEAR AND BOY BOOKS.
Who will win? Who will last all night? Who will send you home in the morning with a tin of molasses biscuits? With an @ shaped hickey? Rain Fade VS. Bear and Boy Books. Rain Fade VS. Bear and Boy Books. Rain Fade VS. Bear and Boy Books.
THE BATTLE IS NOW: FOR THE FUTURE: OF NOW: BATTLE: THE: IS
Do you care about static electricity? How can you not? Recent polling shows that particles of static electricity are the final undecided voting bloc. Luckily, this invaluable constituency is now addressed by a new online journal of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and photography/visual art: Rain Fade. Bryan Coffelt and Wille Ziebell edit Rain Fade. In their words:
Rain Fade is interference and degradation of a signal.
Rain Fade is the barrier between words and objects.
Rain Fade is the space between your eye and my eye.
Rain Fade is a new journal of interesting and innovative writing and visual art. We are interested in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, photography, painting, and much more. Send all submissions and inquiries to submissions@rain-fade.com
There’s a lovely video at rain-fade.com that features the two editors introducing the video and interviewing each other, wherein Bryan explains what would happen to him if he turned into Kurt Russell.
NO OTHER JOURNAL IS ADDRESSING THE KURT RUSSELL FACTOR. TAKE THAT, BITCHES.
My first Mean Week post is totally cheating because I’m not going to be mean and, instead, shall direct you to my favorite Mean Poet: Joseph Massey. Joe lives in the woods in Northern California where he is like a gentle Swiss bear. He drinks taco beer and sculpts word machines of fern-smelling delicacy. But on the internet! O Lord. On his LiveJournal blog, Mr. Massey is a cranky son-of-a-bitch and not afraid to take it to your ass with a whip made of questionable meat products. Witness this gristle he dropped recently into a favorable review of Peter O’Leary’s memoir:
It’s an antidote to so much of the bullshit that counts as what it seemingly must mean to be a poet these days, thanks in huge part to the MFA android machine. It’s a palate cleanser after spending too many hours — shame on us! — reading blogs where you come away disgusted, as if you had just eaten a pillowcase full of cotton-candy washed down with generic cola, as if poetry can be reduced to the ego-bloated emptiness of notices of acceptance and rejection by journals and magazines that are mostly amorphous blobs of visionless shit, mirroring the very system that supports them, and the endless crowing over the scramble to get books published that no one will read because their only audience is a CV.
Joe’s even got a poem coming out in The Nation, so you know his agenda is like political and shit. That’s right, Blake, political.
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.