Mud Luscious

Reader, go buy.

I did. I will tell you what I think of them when they arrive. And I read them. I will read them before I tell you what I think of them.

I will probably read them before I tell you what I think of them.

There is a 64% chance I will read them, or maybe at least skim them before I tell you what I think of them.

57% maybe.

Definitely I will probably read, skim, or at least open them before I tell you what I think of them.

Also, I am sorry that this post moved Kendra’s down the page a little. I apologize to you, the reader.

And Kendra.

And to…well, you know. Them.

Presses / 4 Comments
October 24th, 2008 / 8:35 pm

See? I’m a useful contributor.

Uncategorized / 22 Comments
October 24th, 2008 / 4:59 pm

Mark Jarman

I mentioned The Reaper during Mean Week. Mark Jarman was one of the editors. He was a teacher at the place whereat I got my (insert name of sometimes maligned writing degree that ends in an A and begins with an MF) and I liked his readings a lot.

(Did I say that about him already? That his were my favorite faculty poetry readings? Mary Reufle was good, too. Maybe I’ll write about her later. She had a lecture that was both really good and it gave me the fucking creeps.)

Anyway.

I have Jarman’s book Epistles sitting here next to me. Sarabande published it. I really like it. This is a little from a poem called “Listening to you”:

Got to the burnt out bulb to study the beauty of failure. There in its violoated space, the arms raised but the filaments incinerated, the flashmark like the feathery white face of a moth, it is no cool and detached, the ruined throne room of a dead sun king.

Here’s an interesting thing. Jarman is a religious poet. He writes about his faith quite eloquently and quite surprisingly. I am, on the other hand, happily agnostic. But I still really enjoy Jarman’s professions of faith.

(O’Connor came up early in the week. Same thing, there. I haven’t read it cover to cover, but I’ve enjoyed some of the letters in A Habit of Being. Somewhere she refers to someone buying a new car as getting a “hale automobile” and for some reason that’s always stuck with me. I have no idea why. And some of the Mystery and Manners essays have been really helpful to me.)

All this to say go buy and/or get from the library a copy of Epistles.

***

UPDATE:

Ah, here’s a weird moment of synchronicity. Google Video has a 2 hour debate about the existence of God between two philosophers. Arguing against the existence of a Christian God is Clancy Martin. See a comment by pr in Jimmy’s last post to see Mr. Martin’s first appearance on this blog today.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3780702651936909797

Author Spotlight / 22 Comments
October 24th, 2008 / 4:52 pm

N, the literary coefficient

Okay, this is complicated: ADD is Attention Deficit Disorder, and the acronym spells ‘add,’ and so, people with ADD are to do two things: 1) read the name of the following journals all the way through by 2) adding the letters following the addition sign. You may ask, ‘what is the point of this shit?’ to which I reply, ‘fuck off, I’m a contributing writer.’

NO [n + O]

I don’t no much about this journal, though they seem somewhat negative. I can imagine their rejection letter: No

NOO [n + OO]

From our very own M. Young and R. Call, this is a beautifully designed journal featuring the hard hitters of online lit today (R. Lopez, T. Lin, B. Butler, K. Spitzer, N. Cicero, C. Smith, et al). The Germanic umlaut is Mike’s way of saying ‘I’m am the fuhrer.’ The black and white logo reminds me of a cow. Noo Moo.

NOON [n + OON]

At 12PM sharp everyday, Diane Williams orders a latte and biscotti and sits down at a café and opens submissions. She has an engraved letter opener which reads “e-mail is for a-hole.” Once, she came across my submission and used it for a napkin. ‘Kiss me,’ my story said, and was ignored.

N + 1 [n + 1 + choad grammar]

There’s something about being really smart and living in NYC that makes people who are either not as smart or not living in NYC feel like shit. Every time I see the photo of the editors in their apartment/office, burdened by the implications of their formidable ideas, I feel obsolete, pathetic, and stupid (I will admit, alot of that is my father’s fault). If you look closely at the clock, you’ll notice it’s 12:30PM, half an hour behind Ms. Williams. She downed the biscotti and is off to zen camp. ‘Kiss me’, I said to those guys, and they said, ‘the comma goes inside the quotation mark.’ Choads!

Uncategorized / 22 Comments
October 24th, 2008 / 1:34 pm

‘This book is a catalog of the life project’

I am in a bad writing phase or something. I haven’t been writing very much recently. Instead of writing, I’m reading a lot of things: student papers, composition textbooks, books to review, and then some stuff to make me feel better. Everyone has that shelf or two of books that they read to feel better, I guess. I’m rereading Ben Marcus. Slowly. I just finished Notable American Women a few days ago. Now I’ll start The Age Of Wire And String. I pulled the book off my shelf to look at it and a few pieces of paper fell out.

I might have shown this to a couple of people, so sorry if this is old news.

On the papers is an index. I made an index of all the terms Marcus defines in the book and listed the page number of the definition. I made this index one summer a few years ago. I enjoyed making it. It made me feel busy and involved in something. I don’t know if it is worthwhile. I don’t even know if this makes sense.

But some of the terms you can actually look up as you read – DROWNING METHOD, for example, shows up in the text on page 10, but it isn’t defined until page 94.

That was a good summer.

Okay, here it is after the jump (and I understand if you make fun of me):

READ MORE >

Random / 22 Comments
October 24th, 2008 / 2:50 am

C O N T R O V E R S Y

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.

Watch the video.

Watch it.

Eat it.

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

Uncategorized / 34 Comments
October 23rd, 2008 / 4:55 pm

In Profile: Rachel B. Glaser

Kelly Spitzer’s ongoing writers in profile project is always a fun one: this week she tackles the badass Ms. Rachel B. Glaser, who if I continue to harp on about how good her PEE ON WATER story in the new New York Tyrant is, somebody will probably think I’m obsessed.

My PEE ON WATER tattoo is on my ass specifically so no one but the real reals get to see it. And whoever’s at the bar when I get happy.

I like Rachel’s attitude about messing around with people in writing, and so forth. Her blog has some archived writing and etc. Do it.

Author Spotlight / 6 Comments
October 23rd, 2008 / 2:01 pm

instead of going to lunch i explode to lunch


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.

Web Hype / Comments Off on instead of going to lunch i explode to lunch
October 22nd, 2008 / 6:03 pm

The seven credos

Ben Marcus guest edits the oct/nov fiction for GUERNICA, asking the seven writers to offer a one sentence credo:

1. I believe that writing is the highest resolution medium.

2. I struggle with the difference between what I pledge to myself and what I do finally; or, what I sometimes call my falseness; but when I say after all I’m not being false for wanting to be a certain way, that I just have high goals, I will have to agree that no one else around is false either and say for myself that I have the perpetual condition of falling short.

3. I endeavor, word by word, sentence by sentence, to write myself an adult-sized, customized uterus in which I and invited guests may duck, buck, and float.

4. (I write because) I am interested in dark and stormy nights, syntax and moments of delicate, major humiliation.

5. I ogle, grope, and weep; always in that order.

6. I don’t trust fiction with no sense of humor and I know I’m writing it when everything adds just so; I know I’m closer when I’m left holding extra parts—parts I know I need even though the thing runs fine without them.

7. I will be a lion for my own cause.

These are unattributed, and skimming to the list before reading Marcus’ intro, I assumed all 7 were his (made more convincingly by No. 3’s “customized uterus,” which shares Marcus’ dry and somewhat grotesque symbolic tendencies). I’m usually annoyed by manifesto-ish stuff, but this seems earnest enough. I really like how unabashed No. 7 is.

Here’s my credo: Everyone has a story, so put it down.

Okay, time to start printing out those long-ass stories. Geez, writers really have a lot of time on their hands. Good job Ben.

Uncategorized / 8 Comments
October 22nd, 2008 / 3:33 pm

I didn’t know Flannery O’Connor was a whore

In their manner of honoring the dead old lady from Milledgeville, GA, UGA Press, ever the pioneering visionaries, have ‘blindly’ selected Andrew Porter’s The Theory of Light and Matter, which comes, blindly, from an Iowa grad who has published stories in One Story, Epoch, the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and so on.

Those factors certainly don’t have to add up to a boring book, if a slightly predictable one, but then the copy on the book’s win already has the thing looking like it will be on the shelf next to all those books we could have read in its place:

In the tradition of John Cheever, ten stories that explore the loss and sacrifice in American suburbia: These ten short stories explore loss and sacrifice in American suburbia. In idyllic suburbs across the country, from Philadelphia to San Francisco, narrators struggle to find meaning or value in their lives because of (or in spite of) something that has happened in their pasts. In “Hole,” a young man reconstructs the memory of his childhood friend’s deadly fall.

Sure, O’Connor wrote narrative stories with development and all, but she did that years ago, before a lot of others, and I can’t imagine what she’d be doing now, years later. I honestly think this kind of repetitive story blandering is a knock on her name more than a praise.

‘Don’t shit in my mouth and call it a cookie.’

Even Barry Hannah’s blurb seems a little stilted: “I’ve known of Andrew Porter’s genius for ten years. He’s a born storyteller. Every page of The Theory of Light and Matter will change something in your life and refresh you. Yet it is an easy read, nothing like classroom lit. He makes his own space instantly and invites you in. Hats off!”

So here’s to another win we could’ve called from outside the stadium. Another contest rewarding mimicry. Can’t wait to read more Cheever. Yay.

Contests & Presses / 42 Comments
October 22nd, 2008 / 12:44 pm