NICETIES: Aural Ardor, Pardon Me by Elizabeth Mikesch
Out today from Calamari Press – Niceties: Aural Ardor, Pardon Me by Elizabeth Mikesch
Niceties debuts today and pokes a hole in the coma of language. The tired factions, lyric versus experience, this tribal cliché, mellifluous pretension, or language generating language, assaulted usually converse by the plain and sneering, story time, popped out of their tepid beers now by a handier relic, just got outmoded – combined to hurt itself inside a voice both beyond and including narration, the personal event broken to the heart’s proper arrhythmia. A flaying can still be vulnerable even if it takes you with it. The sobriety of our times cannot support this book because the general crusade has been swatted operatic. Anything without khakis is giggled about in these great plots for safety so-called artists use to call themselves important. How much precedence might ones pellet-sized message keep in the face of such wrought mystic twirling up the bowel meant for silence? Don’t fret. Mikesch is here to kick you out of your crib and flout the world that hasn’t started. Think those loops Markus swerves us through tied up in a Finnish peninsular whelp, with an elbow caught between each breath, the chorus tapping out a feel good suicide. I don’t want beauty unless it’s clawing me permanent.
Announcing Issue 7 of Requited
Requited is an online journal that I help edit. I’m pleased to announce that the seventh issue is now up. In the section that is my province (essays) you will find:
- Jeremy M. Davies on reading Gilbert Sorrentino;
- William Bowers on watching Spider-Man;
- & Curtis White on rethinking Freud and childhood sexuality.
There is also a review, by Daniel Green, of the book We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love and Literature at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, edited by Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer (Skyhorse Publishing, 2011).
In the rest of the issue you will find:
- fiction by Maya Sonenberg, Hilary Plum, Eugenio Volpe, & Adam Moorad;
- poetry by Neal From, Christine Hamm, j/j hastain, Stephen Daniel Lewis, Amy Pence, Andrea Rexilius, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, & Daniel Godston;
- excerpts from Calamari Press’s Ark Codex ±0;
- a performance text by Michael J Pagan;
- visual art by Mark Aguhar;
- a video by Dara Greenwald;
- & a comic by Dylan Williams.
Requited is edited by Amanda Marbais (fiction), H.V. Crammond (poetry), Ira S. Murfin (performance texts), Fereshteh Toosi (visual art and videos), and myself (essays and reviews). We publish two issues per year. Our complete archive is accessible here, and our submission guidelines are here. If you have any further questions or comments about the journal, I would be happy to receive them.
Enjoy Issue 7!
For you: a copy of ARK CODEX ±0. Comment to win, and I’ll respond to the winner in a day or so. I have this book at home and it is beautiful.
Derek White, publisher of Calamari Press, writes beautifully about the operations of the press in its eighth year.
Utterance
Divorcer
By Gary Lutz
Calamari Press, 2011
120 pages / $13 Buy from SPD
It’s no wonder that someone who might be said to live in the sentence would apply its logic—and its subversions—to his lens on the higher-order structures of life. In Divorcer, Gary Lutz tinkers with each level of human-linguistic interaction, cascading from social power structures, to family dynamics, personal relationships, full-scale utterances, isolated sentences, words, morphemes and phonemes, with an eye to at-once humorous and devastating exposure of the failures of empathy and failures of semantic coherence echoing throughout.
READ MORE >
September 12th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
Calamari Contest
Derek White has offered up 3 “chef select” prize packages from his Calamari Press Liquidation Sale for us to throw into the game. That’s three prizes of a dozen books each (you pick 2, Derek picks the other 10) from the Calamari Press archives.
To enter, comment with a brief write up of a dream you had where you went either to a country you’ve never been to, or a place that does not exist. Or write about writing in a language that does not exist, either in a dream, or in your underwear at your desk. Or you could tell about something weird that happened to you after watching a Cronenberg movie. Whichever.
Two winners will be picked for their fine job, one at random. Entries close tomorrow night.
Liquidated Calamari
Calamari Press is having a relocation liquidation sale, including all 24 titles they’ve released for $100, all back issues of the amazing Third Bed for $40, buy one get one free, and various other ridiculously cheap package deals. Grabbit.
David Ohle’s Boons + The Camp
Coming very soon from Calamari Press is a double sided book containing two new works from the magical David Ohle, Boons & The Camp. Anyone familiar with Ohle already will know this is an event to be excited for, and those who don’t, well, it’s about time you ordered Motorman.
In anticipation of the book object, Derek White presents two video trailers, and a sneak peek of the gorgeous book covers, as well as further art from inside the book and on and on. I, for one, am quite excited:
Ever Contemplated by PR’s husband
UPDATE! CONTEST! Find the three 80s indie/punk band album titles in his piece (one title contains the adjective rather than the noun in the two word title) and I will send you a bunch of books. I will be seriously impressed, too.
We all have a better half. My better half is actually a human being. He wrote his thoughts about Ever by Blake Butler. Here they are:
Dear Leader
Blake Butler—our fearless leader here at htmlgiant—has a novella coming from the mighty Calamari Press. Go here to pre-order it.
That is all.