antennae 12 (the last issue)
January 2012
$10

Lee Gough
Andrew Zawacki
Cupola Bobber
Ray DiPalma
Kristen Gleason
Thomas Hummel & Brett Fletcher Lauer
Joshua Ware
Andrew Durbin
Matha Oatis
Janice Lee & Laura Vena

Cover by
Thomas Hummel & Brett Fletcher Lauer

If you’re related to me, don’t read the rest of this sentence: I got most of the people in my family books this year for Christmas. I don’t usually do that, actually. For a writer, it seems rather hazardous. Because, for one thing, though I love my family and I want them to be happy, I’m not going to intentionally purchase things that I consider truly shitty on their behalf. But on the other hand I’m not going to go out and buy them, say, the FC2 catalogue just because I happen to like it; that would be a Real Dick Move. But even once I’ve negotiated that mess and found the place where my tastes and those of a given family member overlap, there’s still the risk that you’re essentially giving someone homework for Christmas. The fact that I want to read a book someday has nothing at all to do with whether or not I want to read it now. By giving someone a book, you either rob them of that decision or, more likely, give them something that they’re going to feel guilty about for several months (or even years) but likely never actually read. But this post isn’t about giving books for Christmas, really. It’s about ebook pricing.

Because here is the thing: I was reminded by my Christmas shopping that, among major publishers, it is still common practice to charge more for ebooks than for paperback copies. You don’t have to know the particulars of their business models, of their distribution networks and royalty schemes, to understand that this is some bullshit. Whatever it costs to typeset the book and design its cover, to truck it out to Amazon, to give Amazon their cut, that has got to be more than making the ebook (something most publishers are still too cheap to do properly) and uploading it to the Internet, still giving Amazon a cut but keeping the lion’s share.

This is the thing about selling ebooks: every single sale, past those few needed to pay for the ebook’s creation, is basically free money for the publisher. Consumers know that 11.99 is too much to pay for an ebook, especially when the paperback is available for less, and so for the most part we don’t pay these prices. My family actually prefers their Kindles, by and large, to print books (a position I share in some cases, actually), but I went the print route anyway, partly because you can wrap them up like proper gifts and partly because the thought of paying more for something that cost much, much less to produce was simply too much for me to accept. The publishers know that I and many others feel this way, that we won’t actually buy their products at punitive prices. And, weirdly, that’s the point. They’ve actually said as much.

It all goes back to hardcover books. Hardcover books are, of course, hilariously overpriced themselves (as you can work out by observing the way that chain retailers will cheerfully discount the new, say, hardback Harry Potter by 33% or more, laughing all the way to the bank) but major publishing houses have been able to make them a major profit center. Now personally I almost never buy hardback anymore — I find them physically less user friendly, sometimes in the extreme, and their fancy slipcovers just get in my way. (I usually remove them for use as bulky bookmarks until I’m done.) But apparently other people still dig them. Publishers fear that ebook sales will cannibalize their hardback sales, and so they fight against every other stakeholder (Amazon included) to keep prices artificially high. The downward pressure on prices will, I am confident, eventually push them to a more reasonable place. The fact that ebooks have grown so quickly in spite of ridiculous paranoia about piracy and attempts to depress interest through punitive pricing only demonstrates the resilience of the digital revolution in publishing. Under the circumstances, you have to wonder how much money these publishers could make if they actually tried to sell their ebooks.

Small presses seem to have the opposite problem. Observing that the bestsellers on Amazon are often priced between .99 and 2.99, they price their digital offerings too low. I think this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how the 99-cent books on Amazon become big sellers: by and large, these are not especially good books. They are usually exceedingly dull, predictable genre exercises (formulaic thrillers, often written by the same people you’ve been ignoring on Wal-Mart’s bargain book rack for a decade, and “urban fantasy” featuring sexy lycanthropic vampires). They’re priced at 99 cents because they’re designed to sell to people who buy indiscriminately from a given genre. There are exceptions, of course, but as a generalization this seems to hold. You price your book at .99 because you want people to buy it more or less by accident, on a whim. There’s nothing wrong with that! For a lot of books, this is an excellent strategy, and many writers benefit from a strategy where their books are temporarily 99 cents (or even free), or where they sell small works at very low prices and large ones at normal prices. But the problem most good small presses have isn’t, in spite of what many seem to believe, convincing people that their products are worth dropping twelve dollars on. The problem they (we) have is that practically no one knows they exist.

Think about it this way: when was the last time you really wanted a small press book but decided not to buy it, not because you didn’t have any money but because the book itself was just too damn expensive? It’s not uncommon to be too broke for a book, but it’s rare indeed to be just broke enough that you’ll pay seven bucks, but not ten, for a book you actually want. Once a person has decided that he or she wants a given book, it’s in the publisher’s interest (and the author’s) to charge as much as possible for the book without turning the buyer off. Unless you think your book is really bad, you have to figure that the magic number is higher than $2.99. Most of us rightly value the time it will take us to read a book more than we value the money we spend on that book — and most purchased books are never actually finished. The 99-cent book is priced the way it is to stop the buyer from even thinking about how much time is going to be wasted on the book: if, after spending just one buck, the reader decides not to actually read the book, then there will be no guilt in wasting the money. Essentially nothing’s been wasted. Simultaneously, the 99-cent book is priced the way it is because most of the people who read those books don’t really value their own time, in a sense. They read the books they do to get outside of time — to absorb themselves in something that allows them to stop worrying about time’s passage. The 99-cent price point communicates to readers that the publisher has an appropriate disrespect for their time, that they will waste it just as the reader wants them to.

They are both amazing — unbelievable, really, in their existence. It’s remarkable that human beings can do this stuff.

Open the cottony screenprinted cover of Prism Index – which is large format, like bigger than my copy of Inc. that sits near it — and there is a scanned napkin that lists Bowers’s goals for this issue. “Let the whole thing play out like a mixtape,” is one. “Maybe a bit longer” is another, and my favorite is “Handmade Book (make layout & format as meticulous & peculiar as the content.)” In this, he succeeded.

The magazine features writing by Kevin Sampsell, Trinie Dalton, Stephanie Barber, Bill Cotter and many more people. Amy Bender, Brian Evenson. There is vibrant art from Matt Furie and Eric Yahnker and Mel Kadel and Bowers himself. I can’t list everything. There are 88 pages and they are all startling. There is also a DVD and CD that I haven’t watched or listened to yet, but the names of the contributors are familiar to me.

I can’t do it justice. Just click here for images of the spreads.

The Disinhibitor’s review of Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will, from NewLights, says that Aaron Cohick (who runs NewLights, the press that did the $400 Brian Evenson book) did 202 runs on this letterpressed book. For each copy. Does that compute? For each page, you have to do at least one. Then you want to add another color or something, you do another one. You want to have different textures, which is popular now, you do another one. This book is about 40 pages long, maybe. It has a dust jacket over the two codexes, so it sits on the shelf with a spine like a perfect-bound book. The labor that went into this thing is incredible.

But it pays off. It ensures people are going to read Schlesinger’s poems, I think. I know I kept wanting to see if the print quality on the next page is as good as the page before. The poems are printed in the negative — a black column creates the letters in outline. Then there is a column that looks like a palimpsest of the poem. That works really well for the content, since the poems are tentatively insistent as well. For instance:

There’s Nothing More

To it
Than that

The sky is
Broken and

It’s making
A mess

The book is only $20. Prism Index is only $25. I am enthusiastic about them both.

Officially released today from Muumuu House, $12.

Beautiful logics, awkward brains, fun sentences, fresh new shitt!

A year’s passed since the last issue of the Tyrant came out. That’s fucked up. This is unacceptable for a magazine that is supposed to be a bi-, or even tri-, quarterly, and my sole excuse is that I don’t have an excuse. I want to blame it all on Luke (co-editor, friend, part-time lover) in full, for moving to Texas, but I won’t, because I really can’t. Whatever took it so long (and come on, who noticed or really cares that much?), to try to make up for the time you’ve had to wait, I thought I would expose/humiliate/shame myself for you all to have a good cringe or laugh at. Hopefully maybe both. My idea for the cover was to have me in drag on it because I thought it would be really like, self-absorbed-seeming. I wanted to try to get ultra-vanity press on it, even though that doesn’t even mean that.

I’ve always thought drag queens were exceptionally brave people, but personally, I’ve never been “into” wearing women’s clothes or looking like a woman. However, I have done it twice in the past year so who knows what’s up with that. Drag is such an odd experience. For me, it was strangely intoxicating. While I was dressed up, and even for a couple of hours after, I felt like I’d been drugged, but in a good way. Probably best we don’t get into all that here though.

For the shoot, I asked my boyfriend to do me up in something sleazy, so he did. Ryan Field, my oldest friend (did Montessori together), took pictures of the whole thing. A few weeks after, I was looking at what the cover image was to be on my iPhone when I tapped it and it zoomed in like iPhones do when you tap them. I thought the zoomed pic looked more iconic or something and I liked that better than the full shot for the cover which, though also a good photo, just makes me look like, gay or something. Maybe I was wrong, but I feel like I’ve captured the essence of “trying too hard” pretty well. Will Baker (one of my interns) took all of the outtakes from the shoot and put them in a slideshow, accompanied by a song I used to hate but now, thanks to Dent May, just fucking LOVE. I’m kind of hesitant to post this weird thing. It feels wrong and embarrassing, but that’s what we’re supposed to be doing, right? Humiliating ourselves? Also, I really want to promote the new Tyrant because it fucking rules.  In this issue, to be released on November 20th, you will find these champions of putting it down:

Edmund White

J.A. Tyler

Daniel Long

Christopher Kennedy

Sabina Murray

Jason Schwartz

Susan Froderberg

Daniel Bailey

Rolli

Erik Morsink

Evelyn Hampton

Eugenio Volpe

David Nutt

Greg Mulcahy

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

Mitchell S. Jackson

Adam Wilson

Sean Kilpatrick

Daryl Scroggins

Ryan Shea

Chiara Barzini

Michael Bible

Scott McClanahan

Gary Sheppard

Karl Taro Greenfeld

Brian Kubarycz

and Ken Sparling

There’s so much good stuff in this one. Please trust me on this. You should be able to trust a guy who just showed you some deeply embarrassing shit, right? Order here.

N.B. I know that the m/f ration is fucked on this. I can’t help it.

N.M.B. My boyfriend, Chris March, made the red and black thing I’m wearing over my shoulders. It’s made out of human hair and was originally a skirt.

Giancarlo DiTrapano

@nytyrant

To celebrate the union, they are offering Jack Boettcher’s Theatre State and Ben Spivey’s own Flowing in the Gossamer Fold at a reduced price, here.

I asked the parties involved some questions, starting with J. A. Tyler:

When did you first start paying attention to Blue Square Press?

I reviewed Ben Spivey’s Flowing in the Gossamer Fold in Oct. 2010 for The Collagist and I was immediately in love with their sense of physical presence (their books are damn lovely), their wordly aesthetic (the first two titles are a really right balance between exposition and otherwise), and their slow-growth process was something I envied, being able to spend months and
months of focused energy on one single title at a time, creating a genuine nest for their authors.

How did the idea to join forces come about? Or as my mom would say, what was the urge to merge?

I bought a copy of Jack Boettcher’s Theater-State when it released just a bit ago and, as Ben and David and I were talking back and forth about a variety of small press matters, they casually mentioned that if Mud Luscious Press was ever looking for a little sister (their phrase) to join our already birthed Nephew series (our phrase) as an imprint, they’d be interested. Many conversations later and bam, Blue Square Press is an imprint of MLP.

What does that mean? Like what does BSP get out of it, and what do you get out of it?

The imprint status of Blue Square Press is a non-financial partnership, meaning that BSP still foots the bill for all of their work and keeps editorial control over every aspect of their titles, but now with the added bonus of the Mud Luscious Press distribution plan, customer pool, knowledge base, staff, and other resources always at their disposal. What MLP gets out of it is what we always want: to release more brilliant titles that we either don’t have the time or money to send into this world (like Sean Kilpatrick’s fuckscapes, M. Kitchell’s Slow Slidings, and Darby Larson’s Irritant, all forthcoming from BSP).

That is cool. So it’s safe to say that these are books you would have published yourself, if you didn’t have limitations like time and money?

Absolutely, yes. In fact, we read Larson’s Irritant awhile back and were really torn with that book in particular – it was a title we desperately wanted to pursue but couldn’t due to various timing issues – so when we found out that Blue Square Press had contracted it, that only further cemented the deal to move forward with BSP as an imprint.

This merger seems like some big time business stuff. It’s really neat. How do you foresee the growth of MLP over the next five years?

Very businessy indeed. Paperwork and everything. In the next five years, MLP will:

• Work with Dzanc books to offer all of our current and forthcoming titles (including Nephews) in an ebook option
• Publish another 5-10 Nephew titles, solidifying that already exponential series
• Publish another 5-10 novel(la) titles, continuing to push the range of that prose/poetic genre
• Bring about our Transduction Series – something we are so stoked about but can’t talk about just yet
• Take Blue Square Press with us into a continually higher level of distribution and readership in all the untapped places of indie lit

Finally, on an unrelated note, why are you always telling people to choke on words? Doesn’t that seem mean spirited?

This is actually very related – thanks for asking! More than anything, I want people to read books that are difficult to digest – not linguistically, as in books that are impossible to read, but as in books that cram such vibrant and beautiful new language at us that we are choked up, cut off from all necessities, brought into a greater state of being by near suffocation from the norm. I strive for this in my own writing – my most recent book Girl With Oars & Man Dying  attempts to unwrite the story itself – and Mud Luscious Press seeks this in all of its titles and series – as with Robert Kloss’ How the Days of Love & Diphtheria our latest Nephew, which is a difficult book to read in both its emotional brutality and its linguistic shove but which is worth every bit of chokeable pageantry involved.

–+|[and then I interviewed David Peak and Ben Spivey, who run Blue Square Press]|+–

When did you first start paying attention to Mud Luscious Press?
DAVID: Probably around the same time I started noticing new writing on the internet. Back when HTMLGiant still had a pea-green background and people would say goodnight to each other in the comments section before going to sleep. It was the title of a chapbook by Shane Jones–”Black Kids in Lemon Trees.” I remember thinking, What the fuck is that?

BEN: With their first chapbook by Ken Baumann, Y2K.

What does being an imprint for MLP mean most to you? How do you foresee it affecting your editing and business practices?
DAVID: I think I’m mostly thrilled to be a part of this thing that’s meant so much to me for so long. In terms of editing–we’re very much our own entity. Ben and I will always exercise full editorial control over what we do. That’s what makes us us. In terms of business, this can only make us stronger. JA and Andrew have an incredible wealth of experience and knowledge. We’re grateful to learn whatever we can from them–and put as much energy and support back into MLP as possible.

BEN: J.A. and Andrew are two great people who have a lot of passion for words. We get each others aesthetic. That’s what matters the most to me. When we started discussing working together and imprinting BSP it felt very natural and fluid. It’s actually something David and I discussed well over a year ago, how we felt we, even then, aligned with what they were doing. I’ve worked with J.A. on several different things throughout the past 2 years or so and we’ve maintained a healthy e-mailing relationship and he helped us out when we first started BSP and has always been supportive of our titles and efforts. Our editorial style won’t change much. Only positive things will breed as far as business efforts are concerned. Imagine if John Carpenter never teamed up with Kurt Russell.

J. A. Tyler said that the idea for merging came from you mentioning it during a conversation about publishing in general. So, after all the details were ironed out, do you feel like what you’re left with is about what you had in mind from the start?
DAVID: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been pretty amazing how it all worked out. Ben and I used to joke around about something like this. Then one day I said, “They already have a nephew–so how about a little sister?” For some reason that stuck and we decided to propose joining forces with JA. He responded positively, and we just went from there.

BEN: The end result is a perfect hand-shake.

Will you still be using the amazing David McNamara for book design?
DAVID: Yes! David McNamara is the elder God–the eyeless Old One–lying dormant beneath a dreary, foggy kingdom. He sees beyond.

Where do you see Blue Square Press in five years?
BEN: We’ll have a lot more books in our catalog.

DAVID: Publishing video games? If anyone is interested in that–in any way–please get in touch with us. Point-and-click adventure games. Books in code. Text-based adventure or role-playing-games-as-literature.

Other than that, I just really want us to keep publishing the kinds of books that we love.

What’s the next book you guys will be doing?
DAVID: Next is Sean Kilpatrick’s fuckscapes. It is the Castlevania of books. After that, Darby Larson’s Irritant. Which is just … something else entirely. And then M. Kitchell’s Slow Slidings. All three of these are our children and they were manifested from intense rage and have no belly buttons.

With tons of good-sounding ones, including:

Amina Cain: Hunger
Danielle Dutton: from A World Called the Blazing World
Carmen Giménez Smith: Can We Talk Here
Bhanu Kapil: (a poem-essay, or precursor: NOTES: for a novel: Ban en Banlieues)
Vanessa Place: Untitled #5
Nada Gordon: SOng of My OWnself
Leslie Scalapino: ‘Can’t is ‘Night’
and many more!!!

Sale ends Nov. 15th, so get them while you can.

Also check out their Annual Benefit Performance and Live Auction on December 13th in NYC. Advanced tickets are on sale now.

20 years is a long time

Along with putting out these books, Kevin Sampsell has also been, for 10 of those 20 years, single-handedly curating the most amazing small press cave at Powell’s in Portland, OR. Occupy Indie Lit is a leaderless casserole, except Kevin is probably the one who lent us the stove. He’s been around. He’s helped everybody. He’s sexy. He’s the shit. All of which is to say: do you want a cake maybe? Do you want someone to write a ukelele song for you maybe? Do you want incentive perks, I mean? Most importantly: do you want to support a press that’s been around 20 years and is now running its first ever official fundraiser to help push itself to the next level, literally shank anything depressing you can think of about “the state of publishing,” and take over the world? Well then go here. Help the Future of Future Tense.

2. Hobart needs more stuff about luck. Think of this way: If they accept you, you kick dino-ass. If they blar your work, no worries. It was just bad luck. Here is a pretty epic “wish-list” and I wish more editors would do this, announce what they are thinking, on a rolling level, week to week–I feel it germinates a writer. This list has made me write. I see a future where editors throw out sparks like such as this. Glow.
3. Can someone confirm or deny that Brautigan left a suicide note saying “Messy, isn’t it”? It smacks of mean, lazy urban legend and sort of pisses me off.
4. Creative Nonfiction would like your “True Crime” stories. All of my favorites are Morrissey songs. No, no, here’s my favorite: I’m a Memphis teenager.  I shoplift Pac-man cards. I walk outside the mall and 5 kids surround me, threaten to go exponential on my spleen, rob me, of my stolen cards. Irony? I hate that dumb word. This: welcome to Memphis.
5. John Dermot Woods–drawings or words or source material–is bad-ass right here, right now. Just saying.
6. Betty has collected 11,020 labels from bananas. In a hundred years, we will know Betty. Us? Never. It makes you wonder.
7. Airplane Reading is surprisingly OK, these little flashes about flying on airplanes. They want you. Fly.
   
8. Go right ahead, friend. The entry fee is one dollar, sixty cents.