Dan Wickett, god of small presses, has announced a Write-a-Thon! on the Emerging Writers Network – basically, you get a sponsor to pay a certain amount of money depending on how much your write and then that money goes to Dzanc Books. He has better details over at the site.
I once did a Jump-Rope-a-Thon! and raised some money that way. I also went Trick or Treating with a UNICEF box.
Oh, also, a prize: the writer who raises the most money gets the ‘full run of’ Dzanc’s titles.
If you haven’t heard by now, Michael Kimball, who I also like to think of as a genie who broke through his own bottle, was recently inducted into the Guinness Book for International King of Postcards.
Over the past few months, Kimball has been working on a series of postcards in which, after speaking to his subject for a while, he condenses their life story into a text small enough to fit on the back of a postcard. Then he mails them the postcard. It’s a pretty peculiar experience, to receive this little piece of paper that encapsulates you into these amazing microwords, lanced by Kimball’s stellar, steady eye. Me, I can’t even draw a decent sketch of a dude’s head.
The results, besides being in the mail, have been cataloged online at his postcard life stories blog. Among others, you can read, in less than a couple minutes, the lives of folks like Kim Chinquee, Adam Robinson, Myfanwy Collins, Josh Maday, Jen Michalski, and a wide range of people from out of nowhere. The scope of the thing is just kind of flabbergasting: Kimball as a filter for all these people’s years. I can’t imagine anyone else capable of such an undertaking.
Oh, and besides all that, he just so happens to have also published one of the hottest, most innovative books of the year.
Pre-Morgan Brice Marden
An article published by The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses online ‘literacy traits,’ put simply, the lack of reading online. Myspace and facebook have turned the human race into a thumbnail. Of course, those of us here are in the old fashioned business of words—being writers, editors, and avid readers.
I will admit, I need to be somewhat invested in the prospects of reading a piece over 1500 words to print it out and read. My onscreen limit is usually under 1500 words. I’m occasionally frustrated when I can’t print out a story due to the web-file’s printer constraints. This got me thinking about various aesthetics of online journals—how editors/designers deal with not just internet’s short attention space, but the visual encounter with text, as the latter effects reader’s tolerance.
Seeing white words on a black background induces dizzy spells. It’s like looking into a congested night full of large ass stars. I much prefer when the words are deeper in tone on the gray scale with a black background. The classic black words on white is somehow the logical default to mimic the printed page, though I find black words on muted backgrounds (Hobart, Pindeldyboz, Juked) a little easier on the eye.
Margins are also a big deal-breaker for me. When there are no margins, and each paragraph stretches across the screen, it looks like some diaspora of abandoned words. In the end, you need to either mimic the printed page, or invent an aesthetic conducive to the screen.
This brings me to Bear Parade from our own Gene Morgan, and as of late, Lamination Colony by our own Blake Butler.
Bear Parade’s design IS the internet. It doesn’t need to mimic the printed page—in fact, it exploits the very qualities only possible on screen. Most of the stories in Bear Parade employ a ‘triad of tone’: 1) background color, 2) text color, and 3) rollover link color. The last one (3) seems almost incidental, but it’s a little blessing each time I rollover. It completely seals the context of the other two tones. Morgan is a rare colorist and designer; his choices are humble, sophisticated, and—perhaps most importantly—embody the tone of the story itself. In Small Pale Humans, readers might (just might) discover the faintest silhouette of a cactus, as if seen under the dimmest moon. Morgan tells a story with mere tone. He puts the zing in amazing.
Lamination Colony’s concerns are not so much about color (though the template light purplish page is deft) but self-conscious placement of text and imagery. The Woman Down the Hall is one of the most beautiful artifacts online. Each transition (the closest word I can summon to describe a ‘chapter’ in e-book scale) is an epiphany. Butler introduces a cinemagraphic element to journal design: fragmented and uncanny visual narratives—an intuitive evolution, given his self-professed Lynchian tendencies. My favorite transition is when an old woman’s face is followed by an extreme close up of the face. Butler draws the reader in closer, deeper. In another part, a small sentence is wrapped around like an egg, positioned perfectly on top an ominous source of light. Text also wraps around teeth. The guy is mad.
Some of you may accuse me of ingratiating myself to the editor and designer of this website. To that I say: I would say such things even on a desert island, holding a coconut, and looking for a bowling alley.
There are three new titles just out from FC2 for summer: LA MEDUSA by Vanessa Place, LEDFEATHER by Stephen Graham Jones, and THE BRUISE by Magdalena Zurawski, all of which look incredible and make me want to order order order.
I really like when FC2 updates their new books as they always supply lots of info to troll around in. Each title has excerpts from the book, info on the the author, press, and so on. It seems pretty easy to get an idea of what the books are like and whether you will want them, and I usually do. You can also always dig around in their excellent archives for same sorts of info on all the great books they’ve done over the years.
They are also still accepting subs for this year’s Ronald Sukenik Innovative Fiction prize throughout the end of the month.
Michael Basinski is the old wise man of small press lit. At the University at Buffalo he runs the archives for chapbooks and anything indie lit related. The guy has been around and knows his stuff. As a student at UB I remember mentioning small presses to him in his office and his reply was something like, “sounds good…i’ll buy everything for the collection.” Basinski is the guy always fighting for indie lit, a guy you want on your side.
He’s also a great person to talk to about the current state of indie lit. With the rise of online, I thought it would be interesting to ask him what his thoughts were on the movement and where he thinks things are going.
The thing with online publishing is that no one is actively attempting to collect it. Therefore, it is up to poets and editors to be their own stewards and to get their stuff into repositories where it can be kept. Libraries and archives can’t do it. Take NY State – a three to ten percent cut across the board. Poetry, I assure you, will not be the saved sacred Apis Bull. So in this climate the art suffers. This is nothing new, of course. But again, it is the individual in this electronic world that has to archive and the editors of such also. I talk to archive folks about this but I get nowhere. That said, because so much is going electronic, there is an entire movement away from online publishing and a return to the individual hands on type of publishing. Type setting is being revived. Individually hand colored and hand made books are being made with frequency. The way we understand the small press has changed but it is still very much there. The question might be, who will know or be able to look at this wave of publishing in ten years? I mean… where will the documents and proof of existence be?
Basinski makes you think.
Author websites that are not blogs are often a much maligned thing: people get these things built and don’t know a lot about html or don’t really know what to do with their page other than update when they get a new thing in a magazine. For the most part the author website is a consistently boring venture.
Jesse Ball, on the other hand, seems to always be a little bit further out there. Jesse’s website, affectionately titled ‘Jesse Ball was a SPY, but has retired to the country,’ is cryptically arranged and full of all kinds of weird literary and visual projects, which seem to span the long hidden career of the author of SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS, among other things.
You could probably spend quite a while clicking around amongst the layerings here, as depending on how you approach different pages of the site, the offerings seem to vary. Among the more interesting things, outside the weird artworks and art projects, are the nested series of all of Ball’s past manuscripts, which he has kept compiled and archived here, with various amounts available to be read by the willing web traveler. The negotiation of the site itself seems to change sporadically also: depending on when you arrive, you may find all sorts of other things. For instance, when I arrived just now to cull more examples of things to talk about, I got caught in a picture loop promoting Ball’s new forthcoming book.
So let’s say this: Ball’s new novel, THE WAY THROUGH DOORS, is coming out in early 2009 from Vintage, which I for one am quite excited about.
yesterday i looked at daniel bailey’s blog. you may know daniel bailey as the most up and coming internet poet/totally hot dude on the web. on his blog he said he had finished a collection of poems. so i was like, “prove it man”. he then sent me the collection. it is called EAST CENTRAL INDIANA. i read it. it fucking rules. it rules like when you do a really good job coloring a page in a coloring book. it rules like when you think there is no more pudding in your fridge and then you move aside an old thing of jelly and there is another pudding cup. it rules like when you find a nest of baby birds and the mom isn’t there and you push a fast food straw into each of the baby bird’s skulls and blow air into their skulls until they expand and burst. here is a quote from EAST CENTRAL INDIANA:
“you looked
at the boney gravel as you said it and then you laid down
and made a bone angel and said, ‘it’s finally starting
to feel like winter is over.’ i said, ‘yeah’
and then i looked up at the sky and it wasn’t there“
Here’s a useful link to folks who don’t think they pay enough entry fees:
Go out there and win some contests, people. And remember to thank <htmlgiant> when you do.
I guess I could preface this recommendation with a short essay on whether or not a person can learn to be a writer. I guess I could.
I won’t, though. Not now. Not in the mood.
I don’t, though, have a lot of interest in books on how to write. Not usually. Not many. Gardner’s book, sure. Some of Kundera’s essays. Some of Nabokov’s lectures. Borges’. Barthelme’s. Calvino’s.
And one more: Charles Baxter. Both Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext have been invaluable to me. Not in that his books offer blueprints, or prescriptive advice. Baxter just thinks about his writing, and the writing of others, in really interesting ways. And reading an essay that he has written about one aspect of, say, Chekhov’s writing, invariably does the triple duty of not simply making you see an element in Chekhov’s writing in a new way, or getting you to find similar tactics in the writing of others, but his work rearranges the way you read, rearranges your brain, and you start finding new and interesting things that have nothing to do with Baxter’s essays whenever you read.
That’s what I’ve noticed, anyway.
He’s editing a series called The Art of…for Graywolf Press. His book is pretty damn good.
Those always massive kids over at Hobart have once again proven their ability to stay on target despite supposed ‘slacker’ status. In addition to the brand new Games issue, which just came out and made me renew my subscription (which also has a series of deleted scenes style stuff on the web for your perusal, if you haven’t already, here), they continue in their monthly reams of goodness today for October with a new update featuring work by Tai Dong Huai, Ed Meek, Jill Widner, and Glen Pourciau, as well as an interview by the always ferocious Matt Simmons with Leni Zumas, which by the second paragraph had me wanting to buy her book.
Their other web feature, the always fun likes/dislikes section, well, I gotta disagree with this month’s dislikes. What’s wrong with BURN AFTER READING? And who doesn’t like watching a couple break up in public?
I am excited, though, about the new Hobart minibook forthcoming, Mary Miller’s BIG WORLD. Not mini at all.