In the world of blog competitors, fuck, we might have one here now: FC2 is blogging live live. Mostly about their authors and new releases and the like, all of which remain good news in my book. Worth a bookmark? Fo sho.
It also seems a brother to the Now What blog, run by similar company, Lance Olsen and crew.
If someone can convince Gary Lutz to start blogging, I will cry a baby doll that will stand on America.
Please?
I know we are supposed to be talking about ‘indie-lit,’ and that the Nobel Prize in Literature is on the other end of the spectrum, but there is some relation: a new disfranchisement.
The prize was announced today to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (what a name! Where’s your hyphen and accent mark Philip Roth?), who most of us haven’t heard of. From this article in The Independent:
The Nobel literary committee today infuriated the bookies, delighted the bookish and thumbed its nose, again, at the American book industry. The 2008 Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a half-British French novelist and philosopher, who lives in America and champions the “lost” wisdom of non-Western cultures.
The last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison fifteen years ago in 1993 (it’s odd, and pleasant that our national representative is a black woman). I don’t want to talk about politics. I just have some questions: is the American psyche becoming more obsolete under a global consciousness? Are we being symbolically punished for our foreign policy transgressions by a globally progressive institution? Or do we just suck? (By the collective ‘we’ I mean Americans, even though I’m Canadian.)
Pynchon and Salinger are burying their food in the woods. DFW is dead. John Updike can’t stop writing about his dick. If American lit has something to say, what is it?
These dudes over at SKINC make a pretty rad magazine called Paperwall, which you may or may not have come across while internet trolling. I must say the concept of this lil’ mag is awesome. Each issue is one pdf page of literature, and it’s usually just a few writers each time. I have a soft spot for typography and creative design, and Paperwall consistently satisfies my want for simple sexy design aaaaaaaand good literature. Woot. Their new issue features Matt Savoca (<3), John C Goodman, and our own Mr. Shane Jones. You can read each issue in about 10 minutes, and it’ll make your day feel special (Not like retarded special. I mean like special special).
Read issue 11 here.
There are all kinds of little weird journals tucked around the internet that no one talks about really, I don’t know why some get talked about and some don’t, some get talked about even though they kind of suck and some that do some really interesting stuff don’t get talked about probably because they just like words and don’t care about showing people, that’s good, maybe I shouldn’t show anybody, I am going to anyway.
The first journal I like that I never see talked about is Mustachioed, which features really cool bizarre, hip-ish art and nice and strange little snippets of absurdist-like poems. The current issue has more known people like The Pines and Nate Pritts alongside several other people I’ve never heard of, which is my favorite way to see a journal: a few semi-knowns, and some new(s). I haven’t read much of this new issue yet, it seems more ‘modern’ than previous issues, but in issue three it had Sean Kilpatrick, who I nominate as the king of something good. Really, it is nice to see journals that clearly make consideration to give a chance to make the work look good, no matter what the words are: the design of the site is clean and nice.
The second journal I like that I never see talked about is COUPREMINE. They do really deconstructionist type stuff with weird graphs and found objects, or at least language that feels as such, as well as seeming erasures of weird mechanical texts. The design of the site is appropriately minimalist to match the structure and reflection of texts, like this excerpt from Maurice Oliver’s piece in the current issue:
Then finally, I make a list of the things we won’t need:
-Hula honey in the airplane propeller.
-A stand-in knot of arsenal bondage.
-Any spittish trail that pours out of chance.
-Straw bales from your marooned pelvic purse.
-Any trifle act of a same-sex drought.
It goes on a little further like that, and the whole site is stuffed with this kind of peculiar disconnection, which makes the fact that is buried that much cooler, so tuck this thing in your computer and shhh don’t tell anybody.
Literature does rule, but I was talking about the rules. Here are some nice websites with implicit publishing parameters, along with examples of my own.
[Example]: The autistic free-style rapper kept on saying ‘word’, like this: Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word. Word.
[Example]: The autistic goth kept on saying ‘the world is a vampire,’ like: the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire, the world is a vampire.
[Example]: John wrote a sentence. This was the sentence. Then, he google imaged ‘ass’ and encountered two types of photos. The first was people’s buttocks. The second was donkeys. There was no third.
[Example]: Once upon a time, John Cage wrote a story.
[Examples]: extremely abridged versions
Story 1: Gatsby loved, the world hated.
Story 2: Leopold Bloom had a nice day (not exactly).
Story 3: Mrs. Dalloway and menopause.
Story 4: Portnoy complained.
Story 5: Lolita gave good head.
Story 6: Kurtz, he dead.
Story 7: Anna Karenina, she dead.
Story 8: Gay boys on the beach, blowing.
Story 9: RSVP, Godot. Not.
Story 10: Two cities, fucked.
Story 11: K., fucked.
Story 12: Arab on the beach, fucked.
I just received the latest winning chapbook from Burnside Review. It is called Superstitions of Apartment Life by Pedro Ponce. The chapbook appears to be a glossary of sorts documenting different things related to apartments. It has been ‘compiled from original sources.’ I’m now in the ‘D’ section. I am enjoying it so far.
Here is an entry from the ‘A’ section.
Augury – Every child is an augur, scrying cracked ceilings from sickbeds, reading figures that emerge backlit from drawn curtains. Language and habit have yet to spackle over the strangeness within carpet tufts, the intricate stitching of shoes. As apartment dwellers, we relive our apprenticeship, pausing at constellated plaster and the runes etched in cobwebs overhead.
Sid Miller is now running the next fiction chapbook contest and is accepting submissions until December 31st. $200 and 25 copies to the winner. Charles D’Ambrosio is judging.
Tao Lin had been talking about making a press for a long time, he had a post once discussing the name, what should he name it, one of the names then was Muumuu House, and now MUUMUU HOUSE has sneakily snuck a website onto the web.
The site, sneakily snuck onto the web, is pretty chock full of stuff already, featuring new fiction, poetry, and Tao’s favorite-artform Gchats, featuring many of the likely suspects from a Tao-run press.
Most awesomely, the press has also announced their first two titles to be published in perfect bound print next year, Ellen Kennedy’s SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS in March 09 and Brandon Scott Gorrell’s DURING MY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN I WANT TO HAVE A BIOGRAPHER PRESENT in June 09.
This was all discovered in a post on Brandon’s blog, in which Brandon announced his retraction of the book from its previous acceptance at Greying Ghost press, which may or may not result in a promotional snafu for the book, if people decide to fuss about the switch or not.
Here is the very Tao-like ‘submission policy’:
To submit to Muumuu House find a person who has been published by or is associated with Muumuu House and read their blog. If you like their blog make a comment in their comments section in a sincere and natural manner, expressing your feelings. Eventually someone associated with Muumuu House will probably read your comment and click your name and find your blog. If that person likes your blog, to a certain degree, then they will probably tell other people in emails or in real life and then at some point you will probably be emailed, not necessarily about Muumuu House, but maybe about Muumuu House. I think this is more natural. It supports a ‘there is no good or bad in art’ mentality, is probably much faster and more efficient than emailing submissions and having people read them and respond to them, and I think it decreases loneliness, boredom, and despair more effectively than with ‘normal’ submissions, based on my experiences with the internet, I believe.
The MUUMUU HOUSE site is nice and calming to look at, the blue/black/white no photos feel is pleasant, it seems a very good thing.
The new indie press PistolPress out of Canada, who earlier this year debuted with their beautiful litmag full of weird lit work, has now announced their first two titles as a press, BUTCHER’S BLOCK by Deanna Fong and WE WILL BE FISH by Jp King.
Both are print books of poetry with covers so nice that they alone make me want to buy the books. And from the quality of the PistolPress issue, I would feel safe doing so even know very little about the authors, as the quality they have exhibited already is quite high.
It’s nice to see new presses of this quality with an obvious eye for art and design, as too often it seems presses are just willing to slop a name and a picture on a book without thinking about the necessity of making a reader cross that bridge on faith.
Publishing: it’s a faith game, it really is, and luckily there are still things to have faith in.
Adam Robinson is redesigning the Publishing Genius website and wants pictures, especially MSPaint pictures, from everyone. He wants to take these pictures and rotate them through the website at the top of the page. Once he has enough pictures lined up, he’ll launch the new site.
You can be famous for a week.
Go here for information.
New Lamination Colony is up with killer work by Amanda Billings, Joshua Ware, Phil Estes, Matt Kirkpatrick, Stacy Kidd, Jamie Iredell, Ian Davisson & Ryan Downey, Krammer Abrahams, Shane Jones, Scott Garson, Angela Genusa, Daniel Bailey, Brandon Barrett, Brandon Scott Gorrell, Gene Morgan, Conn Thomas O’Brien, Thomas Cook, Molly Gaudry, and Matt Bell.
Probably old news to many.
Go read.