This is Ezra. He used to try to bite me when I’d go to put his harness on, which made walking him sometimes very precarious, but he recently had a urinary tract infection (an urinary tract infection?), and, well, now he doesn’t try to bite me anymore.
This is Slim. He can be finicky at times — emotionally sensitive and prone to bouts of jealousy regarding his family’s newborn. It’s not uncommon for him to puke from anxiety.
Gabe Durham is starting up an incredibly cool new press called Boss Fight Books that will revolve around creating great books about classic video games. The launch titles will be Earthbound, Galaga, Super Mario Bros. 2, ZZT, and Jagged Alliance 2 with a great lineup of authors from a variety of backgrounds. These include Ken Baumann, Michael Kimball, Anna Anthropy, Jon Irwin, and Darius Kazemi. I recorded a two minute video short with short clips for each of the games to commemorate and celebrate the news, as well as a reminder of how cool each of the titles were. I got goosebumps just recording/playing Earthbound again! As their Kickstarter surpassed initial expectations, it’s happening for sure, though you can still get in on the action and help them reach their stretch goals by clicking the link below. The first of the books is coming out near the end of the year and there’s a lot more of the details on the link. The book covers look beautiful and you can check out what the press will be about directly from Gabe Durham and Ken Baumann on the Kickstarter page. And of course, make sure to check out the books when they release, as well as the games themselves!
More info on the Kickstarter Page.
Some info directly from the site:
The Series:
Each of the books will take a critical, creative, historical, and personal look at a single classic video game.Some books will be about the history of the game’s creation, some will focus on particular elements like level design, story, and music, some will investigate the subculture that has formed around a game, some will bring in outside art, science, and media, some will have a strong autobiographical element. Many books will be a combination of all these things.
The Format:
All the books will be available in paperback and ebook (all formats), and sold both directly from our site and from other major online bookstores. Each book will be numbered, collectible, and will look great on your shelf together.
Poet Will Alexander’s summer reads:
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Black Mirror: The Selected Poems of Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, by Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Trans. David Rattray (Station Hill Press, 1991)
Rasa, by Rene Daumal (Norton, 1982)
The Exiles
by Matthew Kirkpatrick
Ricochet Editions, March 2013
49 pages / $10 Buy from Ricochet Editions
In Matthew Kirkpatrick’s chapbook, The Exiles, we find ourselves instantly swept into something strange. A young boy’s mother asks him in a car ride home how sixth grade was. This means that he must have just finished sixth grade. He answers that he can’t remember. Lately he’s been feeling confused over the things around him, that happen to him, what he sees and the things he dream: “Things he remembered seemed unreal, and the things he forgot, like what had happened to him only hours before, disappeared from his memory as dreams upon waking.” At the same time, the neighbor girl routinely runs up and down and backwards on her front porch. We don’t know why yet, and so this makes us wonder if she is running backwards in reality, or if this is another confusion in the young boy’s vision. These two have something in common besides their oddities, and that is that they watch each other. In fact, each person we are introduced to in this world seems to watch someone else for one reason or another. The young boy James mainly watches in hopes of resolving his confusion over who really is real – his Dad at the dinner table, or Dad in the basement. The neighbor girl watches in reaction to those who watch her. Neither James, nor the neighbor girl seem to be aware that they are exiles under the watchful eye of their exiled world, but Dad in the basement is barely cognizant: “At times, he thinks that he exiled himself, and other times he thinks he was exiled; surely, he has done something.”
We begin with the young boy James, initially unnamed, his sister and mother going in the car through the rain. We end with the same boy (or is he really the same?), whose name we now know as James, with Sister and Mom (and possibly Dad?) going again in the car in the rain, only now the rain is warm because it is almost summer, whereas the opening scene is absent of season. We don’t know what season it is, but we do know that this trip in the car that opens the text is not the first of its kind: “There they go again in the car through the rain home.”
The Moon’s Jaw
by Rauan Klassnik
Black Ocean, Feb 2013
76 pages / $14.95 Buy from Black Ocean or Amazon
Rauan Klassnik writes and makes ugly things seem kind of beautiful.
Rauan Klassnik is a writer I follow on Twitter. A while back he sent me a tweet asking if I would like to review his new book, The Moon’s Jaw, and of course I said I would. Several days later, a package arrived in the mail containing two books, The Moon’s Jaw and Klassnik’s previous work, Holy Land (2008), both with autographed and illustrated title pages.
There are recurring images in both collections of prose poetry: shooting guns and shooting cocks, the female body (sometimes bruised, sometimes being ejaculated on), circles, god, duality (simultaneously: man & woman, love & hate), birds, restraints, death.
The images in The Moon’s Jaw add up to bizarre dreamscapes of the fearful, beautiful, and grotesque. Lines read like excerpts from an erotic horror film script:
“Under the moon’s tightening wrists–Leaning down to pet yr dog, you looked up at me & shot the dog in its face. We fucked. & we fucked again. & when I came to you were sucking me off.” (page 15)
“Waves. & Flowers. Revolving. In black lace: Gurgling. You’re pushing me back down on the bed now. & you’ve got my wrists above my head. & you’re eating me out– Licking up between my breasts. It’s dusk. Lights, Wound, Up, In a Spiral: Hooked–Thru Me, Like Gut, On, Fire. Yr grip’s tightening. I’m sinking: Like fish–In cool shade. Birds, like planets–All ripped up.” (page 22)
David F. Hoenigman with Denpapapa vocalist Naoko Suzuki at PAINT YOUR TEETH vol. 20 (03/30/2013) Tokyo, Japan (photo by Alex Paillé)
An author of a novel directly influenced by film (You With Your Memory Are Dead, written during a 2-week-marathon viewing of Begotten) asks another author of a novel directly influenced by film (Squeal For Joy) some questions about making monsters.
I’ve lived in Seattle for a little over two years now and since AWP, the big show, is coming to town next year I thought it might be a good idea to introduce you to some of its stand-out authors. (I plan to do this periodically. ra ra ra.) And you’ll get the sense, after a while, that Seattle has a strong and growing lit scene. (the first year or so I just stayed in and took baths all day, but now I’ve ventured out and discovered some of what’s on offer. and there’s a lot.).
The first spotlight’s of Richard Chiem. Richard’s great to read, talk to, be with, has great energy, and is very shrewd, kind and edgy. Richard Chiem and I kind of hit it off right away and have gone on walk talks together. Ice cream and pizza sit talks too. We talk all sorts of shit: UFC, literary Gods, Collage Methods, Fucking the Reader, Dwarves, etc, etc. And this weekend we’re dim sum double dating!
So, anyways, Richard Chiem’s Seattle Author Spotlight consists of a brief interview, Bio and photo.
Brief Bio:
Richard Chiem (b.1987) is the author of YOU PRIVATE PERSON, a collection of short stories published by Scrambler books. His work has appeared in Thought Catalog, CityArts Magazine, and Everyday Genius, among other places. Richard lives in Seattle with his girlfriend and their loud cat. He is currently working on two novels.
Brief Interview:
Rauan: How does Seattle make, or make it into, yr writing? (plz be brief)
Richard: When I write about rain right now it’s about Seattle. But other than those few instances, Seattle hasn’t made it to the foreground quite yet. But I love this city. It’s finally my home. I am thinking about writing a novel about a cult or secret colony in Seattle. There seems to be a lot of things here waiting to shock and be discovered.
RK: To give our readers a taste could you plz quote a sentence or two from yr debut collection of short stories, You Private Person (aka YPP, which, for the record, I think’s a novel) (plz be brief) ?
RC: ‘Love feels like a thing people eventually learn to live without like tonsils or god.’
RK: The voice in YPP comes off as quite a “sensualist,” enjoying the transformations before sex, etc. Your thoughts? (plz be brief)
RC: I don’t know if you did this, and it was a thing I started to do when I was younger, but whenever I had a pain in my left hand, or a bump or scar or something, I would check my right hand to see if the same thing was there. I would do this with friends too, meaning if I was having some fucked-up day, I would ask if they had fucked-up days too. I learned how alone I was in some moments, and how common some experiences really were among my peers.
I value the little scenes, sometimes sensory observations, that make up our long boring ass days. In how we mirror each other. Or not at all.
Richard Chiem (w/ Frances)
Hello, here is an interview that I did with J.A. Tyler. We started it via email soon after the announcement that his press, Mud Luscious, would have to close down. It’s fairly long. First we talk about all the things he did with MLP, then we get into the nitty gritty of what happened that caused its demise. I really appreciate that he would do this. I’ve asked other presses to do a similar post mortem but they’ve declined. It’s not easy, I know. You run a press, you feel an almost paralyzing responsibility to the people you publish. You have a book that does well, you’re fucked because your responsibilities seem to increase. It’s not a thankless job, art — not by any means — but it’s a tough one. And the place where art intersects with business IS thankless unless your strength is on the business end of things. Anyway. Get into this interview. Remember MLP for its growth and its commitment and its problems.
Hi, J. A. How are you feeling? Would it be an understatement to say you’re sad?
Yes: Sad, overwhelmed, frustrated, sick. A million things all at once.
Well, we started this interview back in April, so it’s been a while. How are you feeling about things now? Is the remorse turning to relief? Have you started to get a glimpse of what a normal life can be yet?
Normal life, probably not. There is this residual layer of guilt that I presume will take much longer to unwind from wherever it is in me. I do see how much time I spent doing MLP related things, both on the “free time” I’m now allotted and in the size of the hole it left.
Taipei
by Tao Lin
Vintage, 2013
256 pages / $14.95 buy from Amazon
1. “Paul dreamed something about his cube-shaped room being a storage facility in which he’d been placed by an entity that believed in his resale value.”
2. “He felt like he was trying to remove the surface of a glass bottle by pawing at it with oven mitts.”
3. “‘Nice,’ said Paul staring transfixed at Fran’s delicate and extreme gaze, like that of a skeleton with eyeballs, or a person with their face peeled off.”
4. “Daniel arrived with his friend Fran, 22, whose intriguing gaze, Paul noticed with interest, seemed both disbelieving and transfixed in discernment, as if meticulously studying what she knew she was hallucinating.”
5. “He awoke at night fifteen hours later and, while showering, felt like he lived in a module attached to a spaceship far enough from any star to never experience daylight.”
6. “The book party, like algae, feeling its way elsewhere, moved slowly but persistently from the bookstore’s basement to its first floor, to the sidewalk outside, converging finally with other groups at a corner bar…”
7. “There were times when his memory, like an external hard drive that had been taken from him and hidden inside an unwieldy series of cardboard boxes, or placed at the end of a long and dark and messy corridor…”
8. “Daniel was standing with limbs and neck uncoordinatedly extended, slightly striding in place–the pre-predatory stance of a chained thing that had broken free and didn’t yet know where to direct its vengeance, or what to do generally.”
9. “…watched the police car, or a police car, zoom past in the left lane, with emergency lights on and sirens off, quick and soundless as an apparition or the hologram of itself.”
10. “One the plane, after a cup of black coffee, Paul thought of Taipei as a fifth season, or ‘otherworld,’ outside, or in equal contrast with, his increasingly familiar and self-consciously repetitive life in America, where it seemed like the seasons, connecting in right angles, for some misguided reason, had formed a square, sarcastically framing nothing–or been melded, Paul vaguely imagined, about an hour later, facedown on his arms on his dining tray, into a door-knocker, which a child, after twenty to thirty knocks, no longer expecting an answer, has continued using, in a kind of daze, distracted by the pointlessness of his activity, looking absently elsewhere, unaware when he will abruptly, idly stop.” READ MORE >
Today Sueyeun Juliette Lee shares some of her summer reads:
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We Come Elemental by Tamiko Beyer (Alice James Books, 2013)I’m very excited about this text. A queer ecopoetical exploration of landscape and being, of bodies and transformations all set in relation. I’m very interested in these ideas, in how we collaborate with our environments…how our bodies are practices set loose among a landscape that is constantly being iterated with us.
I think Tamiko is a FREAKING GREAT poet and someone I’ve had my eyes on for a while. She actually once submitted a short manuscript for Corollary, and it got snatched up elsewhere!! That’s what happens when I move at glacial speed. Sigh. But I’m super excited her work is getting more attention. She’s a major player!!!
Impressions of Africa by Raymond Roussel and Death and the Labryinth by Michel FoucaultAn old friend of mine used to LOVE Roussel. I resisted reading him for a long time, and I’ve dipped in and out, but I’m ready to make a little study. I’m stymied by the fact that I don’t read/speak French, and I think to really appreciate all of Roussel’s language games, you have to have a nuanced understanding of French syntax and vocabulary. That said, I think the dissonance in reading Roussel in English will still be of interest, and having Foucault’s study of Roussel’s writing strategies can help illuminate some of the conceptual parameters and frameworks Roussel was working in.
I’m not someone who uses much language “play,” per se in my work, but it’s something I’m of course very interested in. What writer isn’t?!?! Some of my friends and former classmates write this way–I’m thinking of Lawrence Giffin and Steve Zultanski. And they do it so elegantly–with wit, irreverence, but also devastation there, too. A quick plug–Zultanski’s Agony (BookThug) and Giffin’s Christian Name (Ugly Duckling) are AWESOME and so devastating in their own ways. I was surprised by the depth of feeling these works actually evoked in me.