FIREWHEEL CONTEST
complete information after break.
Sam Pink—
chris higgs’ latest post produced a discussion about audience. i have thought about this before. my question is: can you ever have an audience (outside of yourself) in mind while you are writing? if you have an audience in mind before writing, doesn’t that mean that you are dealing with something that is already common? and doesn’t that mean that you are offering something that is not truly unique? the discussion branched off into the classic “indie small audience” versus the “mainstream big audience” talk. i don’t understand anyone wanting either in advance. audience seems to be something that happens afterward, long after anything the writer does. i understand eventually feeling good about a large group of people reading something you are pleased with, but i don’t understand wanting this in advance of pleasing yourself. again, i am not suggesting that only small audiences are good (good meaning representative of quality) and big audiences are always bad. what i mean is, can you imagine how drained a book that appeals to the whole world would be? i don’t think it’s even possible to imagine a book the entire u.s. would like, or an entire state. which to me, seems to mean that the audience you don’t have is also important. i’m just thinking.
59
relatability
how big an issue is relatability? what i mean is, when you are reading something, how much of your interest in it is the direct result of relation? i think it could be argued that relationships are what every book is about one way or another. this means all things relatable (ie, the relations between characters, the relations between reader and book, the relations between words and ideas, etc).
POWER QUOTE: AR AMMONS
“where i came from it
wouldn’t be smart to talk about art:
talk about sawing logs or getting
the swamp hogs up or worming tobacco
or gutting ditches would be a lot
safer: when in Rome: don’t try to
get the Romans to do what you do.”
(from the poem GLARE)
Sam Pink—
i am assuming that a lot of people who read this site do not write their own work for a living, meaning, their income is predominantly the result of another job. what have other jobs taught you about writing? i worked at a daycare and i learned that even a book someone may want to hear read to them day after day is still not as important as juicey juice and graham crackers and a table full of your friends. i worked as a house painter and i learned that thinking long term is depressing and to focus on just doing small things right. i have learned working with customers at other jobs that each individual’s problem is almost always him or herself, but his or her life manifests as a series of outward aggressions. working at a pizza place i learned my boss was a dick and that some people hate you so much they don’t even need a two week notice. these are pretty cliched lessons but i am posting this because i like to know what other writers (not necessarily famous) do or did for work. also, since there are more writing programs at colleges, (maybe) it has become easier to do something related to writing for a living. how does this type of job impact writing? i can’t tell if this is a good or interesting article. the school across the street from my apartment just had a three hour recess beginning early in the morning so i feel demented.
Sam Pink—
a question: do you like to hang out with other “writer types/academic types/artist types” or do you prefer hanging out with people who aren’t those things, at least not professedly. and why is that. i am really interested in what people think about this. also, to preempt, i mean “instead of being alone,” which is obviously preferable to both.
Sam Pink—
PH MADORE asked me to post this for him:
if you pledge to write ten (or more) articles over ten (or more) weeks at http://undergroundlibrary.info, i’ll have a free copy of LITTLE WHITE POETRY JOURNAL sent to you. you have to be one of the first five people to pledge.
if you write a decently legit blog/tumblr/whatever post describing how you wish you had a copy in your hands and how much you enjoyed the free online archives, and you are one of the first three people to do this, i will send you a free copy.
there is way more information about little white poetry journal seven at http://lwpj.henrychalise.info. you can also e-mail jac jemc and ask her about it, she edited it after all. i’m just the chump clearing the way for it to happen.
submissions for the eighth issue can be sent to h.chalise@gmail.com, i guess.
Sam Pink—
sean lovelace releases his new chapbook HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS (rose metal press) onto the world much like a mean janitor releasing the class pet just to make everyone sad. read an excerpt here. the excerpt is really good. it has fullness.
FENCES by BEN BROOKS
ben brooks wrote a book called FENCES. fugue state press published it. james chapman (editor) mailed it to me recently. it is fucking righteous. i read it in like two hours. i couldnt stop. most important to me was my ability to concentrate on it. lately i have a bad attention span but this book booted that lack in the throat. FENCES contains some of the strongest lines i have read in a while. it’s not a book for someone looking for a traditional story or anything. it’s more like a somewhat-narrative poem. but for real, it’s so well done. you can feel the filth of solitude from the very beginning where the narrator is “in a hole” where “nicotine eyes” stare at him. the book then seems to progress by branching off endlessly into different tracts of hopeless love, self-hatred and general dismay. this book is the message left by a burning tree blowing ash against the side of a garage where inside a man huffs gas to feel like a king. the biggest success of this book to me was how disconnected it was while remaining engaging. fuck. good job ben. don’t kill yourself yet.
i like “paradise lost” a whole lot and “paradise regained” a little a lot and i haven’t read “samson agonistes”
this is a picture of john milton. he looks like if you asked him if he wanted to just rent a super nintendo and chill he would nod once and say, "indeed."
for real though, i like milton. there is no manifest point to this article. i just wanted to tell people that yes, i really like milton. i like milton. i also like that he was blind. i don’t mean that i like blindness is general. but it makes me want to be his friend more (he’s dead though). i think he had his daughters write down his poems as he spoke them. i wonder if he was mean to his daughters or nice. if i was one of his daughters and he was mean i would just write down random shit instead of the actual poems. to recap, i enjoy milton. he makes satan seem really lovable. and in “paradise lost” i liked the war in heaven. he was writing slayer song titles centuries in advance. i like milton.
Uncategorized / 8 Comments
August 17th, 2009 / 11:41 pm
August 17th, 2009 / 11:41 pm
Sam Pink—
kari freitag showed me this website. scroll through it. it’s really great. here are three of the pictures i really liked (click on them once to make them full size):
the whole website is filled with them. they are nice to look at and also seem to mean a lot when you think about them.
RILEY MICHAEL PARKER’S CHAPBOOK “BOYS”
is really fun to read. it uses a tonal device that is kind of like a discovery channel show, or something on the nature channel but “boys” are the subject, not animals. the language is usually, “some boys are like this…these boys can be seen…etc.” it’s like a typology of boys. i like the way it moves from funny things to serious observations. here is an example:
“some men hate women and only sleep with them to stop other men from having them.
some men do their best to destroy every relationship they come across.
a lot of these men eventually learn to play the guitar.”
i think another aspect i liked was that, even though it is using language that objectifies the topic, and makes each example so transparent, it also does things to complicate these ideas and then make them clearly about the narrator. the book looks really nice too and it only costs two dollars. email wonderlustzine@yahoo.com
Uncategorized / 12 Comments
August 17th, 2009 / 4:34 pm
August 17th, 2009 / 4:34 pm
thinking about “flash fiction”
is there any definable characteristic that separates what is called “flash fiction” from what is called “short story” or “novella” or “novel.”
i read this story and wondered that.
