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Geography Thursdays #5: Gypsies, Romanies, and Travelers

Gypsy/Romany/Traveler Photographs by Lyn Smith, from the DX Collection

How do you study a people who don’t have a fixed national home, about whom there is no scholarly consensus about how to define the object of study, and who largely don’t want to be studied in the first place? That’s the difficult task faced by David J. Nemeth, ethnographer, “radical geographer,” and curator of the DX collection at the Carlson Library of the University of Toledo, where you can peruse photographs, video and audio recordings, blogs, and bibliographies related to the study of Gypsies, Romanies, and Travelers.

Random / 4 Comments
October 21st, 2010 / 8:08 am

Sean Lovelace—

Yo editors, you just solicited a writer’s work. Do you read it with the same eye/mind as the slush pile?

Kristen Iskandrian—

Ariana Reines on Acker, Gallo, genital life, and “the absence of a living moral referent.” Via her bewitching blog.

Jimmy Chen

For Esmé–with love and squatter

J.D. Salinger's toilet à la Duchamp

Duchamp’s Fountain is signed “R. Mutt,” arguably an alter-ego, though others consider it code for “Ready Made utt [eut été in French],” which would read “Readymade once was.” His work, and titles, were never forthcoming, so the interpretations and word games will go on. J.D. Salinger’s toilet, auctioned on eBay for a million dollars, is no longer available, meaning someone may have bought it. The former dadaist ceramic conceit may have been lost on Rick Kohl (a collectibles dealer who bought the toilet from a couple who now own Salinger’s old home), who placed the auction. Oh Esmé, how I wish it were you.

You take a dead man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his plu– with all his p-l-u-m-b-i-n-g intact.

Random / 2 Comments
October 20th, 2010 / 6:29 pm

Adam Robinson

Absent

There’s a new issue of Absent. They’ve done 5 issues since 2006, which isn’t a brisk pace, but I’m glad they’re still plugging away. One of the most radical things a journal or press can do is exist (even if they are Cannot Exist), so good job everyone who’s still at it.

What are some of the things you’ve published in defunct places? How did that make you feel?

Web Hype / 8 Comments
October 20th, 2010 / 5:00 pm

Guest Post: Janey Smith

Publishing Gone Wild: Writers? The city is yours!

“A form of speech does not lose First Amendment protection based on the kind of surface it is applied to.”

So, writers, now that TATTOOS are protected speech, what about GRAFFITI? Is GRAFFITI (i.e. nonsense scribbling, political messages, tags, excerpts from your favorite novels, etc.) on public or private surfaces (i.e. walls, sidewalks, garage doors, sides of cars, etc.) protected speech? Why? Why not? If so, then why are we submitting our works to magazines and journals when entire cities lie before us?

Here are some words I saw while walking.

{LMC} On Ken Sparling’s “What Can the World Do For Elrond?”

Ed: You can read a PDF of this story, here, so you can better participate. Buy NY Tyrant. If you would like to have the full PDF of NY Tyrant 8 so you can participate in this month’s LMC discussions, get in touch with me. But still, when you buy a literary magazine, an angel gets its wings.

“My life comes in bits, fragments, brief paragraphs, and sometimes a page or two, so it makes sense that this is my unit of storytelling.”

Sparling drops this quote in an interview conducted by Michael Kimball, published in The Faster Times (read the whole thing here), and it’s a wonderful distillation of his technique, even more appropriate in its very succinctness.

He goes on: “It isn’t so much that the storytelling units are small in my books, more that they don’t seem connected, they don’t seem to relate to each other. There seems to be no rules for what happens after a reader encounters an expanse of white space and moves onto the next little bit. Whatever it is that sustains each individual section seems to break down as soon as a section ends.”

Interview: Stephen O’Connor

I don’t know why you don’t already know and love Stephen O’Connor. He has never before been mentioned on this blog and for that I am trying to make amends. He’s published two collections of fiction and two works of nonfiction and the most recent is Here Comes Another Lesson, a collection of short stories that will just split you open in so many ways.
Here, go read his story “Ziggarut.” It was in The New Yorker but it’s completely unlike your typical New Yorker story– the main character is a Minotaur and, well, you should just read it. The interview below was conducted over email a week ago.

Catherine: What one attribute (or attributes) do most (or all) of the characters in Here Comes Another Lesson have in common? (Feel free to answer this question by inverting it.)

Stephen: One of the things that has most disconcerted me about my books is that almost everything I have written — fiction or nonfiction, realistic or not — tells the same story about a character who tries to do the right thing and fails. In my memoir about teaching in the public schools, Will My Name Be Shouted?, I am that character. In Orphan Trains, a nonfiction account of a controversial 19th century child welfare effort, Charles Loring Brace is that character. But this character also appears over and over again in Here Comes Another Lesson, just as he (or she) also did in my first collection, Rescue. He’s the Minotaur in “Ziggurat,” the Iraq veteran in “White Fire,” Charles in the “Professor of Atheism” stories, and so on. The reason I am disconcerted is that I never set out to write about this character, and only find out that I have after the fact…. READ MORE >

Author Spotlight / 7 Comments
October 20th, 2010 / 11:03 am

Roxane Gay

A Random List of Things

1. A review of Ben Greenman’s Celebrity Chekhov.

2. An Ultimate Flash Fiction Package Giveaway (deadline 10/31).

3. Knee Jerk Magazine is going offline. They need help raising money for their first print issue. Consider contributing to their Kickstarter campaign.

4. There’s a new issue of absent magazine. It’s one of the only magazines I’ve read in its entirety, in recent memory.

5. Willow Smith, the 9 year old daughter of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith has a music video and I find it so damn charming and the song is catchy and I am now very confused.

6. Super Arrow is looking for good writing. The theme is collaboration. There are also submission guidelines.

7. Eco-Libris is holding a Green Books campaign.

8. There is a great story by Susan McCarty at Wigleaf. It seems so real, doesn’t it?

9. If you were curious about what the Rock of Love girls were up to, and why wouldn’t you be, there are some answers.

10. Of course there’s no 10.

Random / 10 Comments
October 20th, 2010 / 11:00 am