ARTIFICE MAGAZINE IS A SPECTACULAR THING
Friday night marked the release party of issue two of the always excellent Artifice Magazine. I managed to catch the second half of the event, and although it would have been nice if I had been able to catch the whole thing (unfortunately my roommate who tagged along does not understand that it is possible to miss a train)1, I still managed to have a great time. Unfortunately I only managed to catch three people reading: M. Bartley Seigel, Elizabeth Hildretch, and Fred Sasaki. Everybody was great! But my tardiness meant that I missed HTMLGiant’s own Roxane Gay, David Welch, and Caroline Picard. I’m sorry! I’m sure you guys were also great! Did I mention PANK was there too? It was exciting & I wish I could have caught the whole evening’s vibe instead of just the second half.
Anyway, as Friday’s event was a release party, it’s worth mentioning that Issue 2 of Artifice Mag is now out in the world and available for you to purchase. You should get it, somehow, if only because the editors of Artifice are totally awesome. Rebekah Silverman, James Tadd Adcox, and recent addition Ian M McCarty are all putting a ton of their time and effort into the mag & its promotion, and meeting them it’s really obvious that they are totally excited and into what they’re doing.
Also, Blake mentioned it last month, but to help promote the second issue, Artifice Magazine is going on tour! I’m going with them!2 This is awesome, and the reason this is awesome is because it is a tour that is set up like a band going on tour, except this is the editors of a lit mag & some dudes published in the mag instead of a band: traveling together in a van, crashing on floors whenever and wherever they can, slowly losing all hints of care for hygiene, existing with a total lack of sleep. I think more lit mags should do this. My roommates and I let bands crash at our apartment almost every weekend. This is pretty cool, and always fun, but in my experience writers are generally better conversationalists than strung out musicians.3 Click through to see where we’re going:
Lynch LSD Walks Sprawl Tour
Our #3 face is sexy, we are almost 3. That's close to 7.
1. @ Montevidayo, Johannes Göransson posted an excellent consideration of Nathan Lee’s consideration of a few books on David Lynch’s work.
2. @ DC’s, Dennis Cooper posted an excellent roundup of fun and interesting oddity, including re: Drawing on LSD, Kathy Acker’s last work, an Urs Alleman interview, and lots of else.
3. @ Thought Catalog, Franklin Bruno wrote up a thoughtful consideration on Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch’s fantastic Ten Walks/Two Talks.
4. Next Friday, September 24, if you are in Chicago there is a launch party for Danielle Dutton’s brilliant new novel Sprawl, 7:30 PM at the Women and Children First Bookstore, also featuring Kate Zambreno.
5. In celebration of their about to be released second issue, Artifice Magazine is going on tour! A magazine on tour seems amazing.
Don’t Do It for the Lagniappe
Artifice Magazine is just too good to give things away. Like, okay if you’re mediocre it’s not a bad idea to offer an incentive. But when you’re Artifice, one of the best on the block, people come knocking on your door with wads of cash and apologetic looks. You beat them off with a stick, or deign to serve them.
Not blowing smoke. This is a great magazine design-wise and editorially — the first issue has an embossed matte cover, black on black. The writing — by people like Butler, Rooney, Schneiderman, Walsh, Yelvington — is as writing in journals ought to be: on the forefront, compelling, and with a range of mystery. And wait. WAIT. It’s cheap! Already it’s cheap: only $7.
Get out of town with your seven dollar embossed covers and Jessica Bozek poems.
So, but, cool, y’know. Good for Artifice. What else is going on here at this stupid htmlgiant website, any good fights? WAIT! Before you scroll down to Lovelace’s erupting hangnail or weigh in on Lily’s consideration of wtf is next with paper, just wait a sec. Let me catch my breath.
Because what the editors there, Adcox and Silverman, are proposing to do in July is sign up 50 new subscribers. I’m all like, only 50?!
No sweat. HTMLGIANT gets like 90,000 unique hits every second, so this post ought to bring them to their goal by 2:15est. And if it isn’t my appreciative bombast that sells you — yes, you, reader — on the subscription, let it be this: READ MORE >
Uncategorized / 37 Comments
July 1st, 2010 / 2:13 pm
July 1st, 2010 / 2:13 pm
Listening In
iphone Denver by poet Rick Bursky
-There’s a piece called “How to Unfeel the Dead” by Lance Olsen in Artifice that knocked my socks off.
-A review of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters, something I’ve been thinking a lot about. Richard Howard summarizes Grossman’s thesis:
In the end, Grossman warmly (after all) and gratefully rehearses the twofold answer to the question of her title: translation matters because it is an expression and an extension of our humanity, the secret metaphor of all literary communication; and because the creation of any literary translation is (or at least must be) an original writing, not a pathetic shadow or tracing of the inaccessible “original” but the creation, indeed, of a second — and as we have seen, a third and a ninth — but always a new work, in another language.
-I was tired this year at the AWP Conference. I couldn’t sleep past 5am, and my head swam in treacherous waters all day. New CollAge magazine had a table—we sold about 2.5 copies—at which I sat for 15-20 minute intervals before getting the jitters and flying the coop. Lots of wandering around the Denver Convention Center, admiring the big blue looming bear, sneaking peaks at the car show, listening in:
IN THE HALLS
I can’t just get drunk and flirt with all the students—
Jesus wouldn’t come down and have sex with me like that.
I feel like my arms look like big white baby harp seals.
I’m glad nobody got raped.
I got my MFA in deleting words. I don’t know anything
about throwing babies.
Blake Butler—
1. Another excellent interview by Kimball at the Faster Times with Christopher Higgs.
2. Artifice Magazine is selling a special edition of their first issue, as well as beautiful screenprint illustrations of the works inside it.
3. The most majestic Matt Jasper’s Moth Moon is now live on sale, some of which you may have seen, or should now, in his chapbook from Publishing Genius.
2
Artifice Magazine #1
New magazine Artifice, out of Chicago, has just published their first issue, with new work by many radicals, including myself and our own Roxane Gay:
Carol Berg – Jessica Bozek – Blake Butler – Neil de la Flor – Andrew Farkas – Ori Fienberg – Elisa Gabbert – Kelly Haramis – Roxane Gay – Kyle Hemmings – Tim Jones-Yelvington – Gregory Lawless – Jefferson Navicky – Lance Olsen – Joel Patton – Christopher Phelps – Derek Philips – Cynthia Reeser – Kathleen Rooney – Davis Schneiderman – Maureen Seaton – David Silverstein – Susan Slaverio – Kristine Snodgrass – William Walsh
Featuring:
Koalas, terror, that one time you watched your father boil lobsters, infidelity, faithful robots, faithless robot dogs, compromising situations, and at least one missing body.
In the spirit, they have offered to give away three free issues to HTMLGiant readers.
All you have to do is looking at their submission wishlist, which lists the kind of stuff they are looking to publish, and make a suggestion of something to add to that list. Examples are: # 1 piece you’d tell a child not to put in their mouth, # 3 halves of a story, # 1 game code that unlocks a secret level. Comment with your suggestion and 3 winners will be picked tomorrow afternoon.
In the meantime, consider picking up an issue, and/or sending your work!
[P.S. This is the 3000th post at HTMLGiant. Weird.]
