Some fine writing by the one and only J.A. Tyler now lives on my little online book concern, Happy Cobra Books. You should go read it.

And then, listen to this song by the New Orleans doom/sludge metal band Thou. It’s—maybe—the only doom/sludge metal song you’ll hear today that opens with a blast beat.

bearing the cross -- for you

I just got finished with Annalemma Six (with the Sacrifice theme), which just came out.  It’s fucking awesome, and not just because it features Giant familiars like Roxane Gay, Ryan Call, Jimmy “the gangbang took place in Unit #209” Chen, J.A. Tyler, Brandi Wells, and others.

I also loved stories by folks I’d never read before, like Jonathan Messinger’s “Ashore, An Island” which is short, simple, and very good, and especially pleasing to me because it’s about one of my favorite topics, Bad Things Happening to Dogs.  (See also: the short story “Bill Bailey” by Tony O’Neill, from Black Bile Press.)

Ryan Call’s story (which lives in the bigger territory called Bad Things Happening to Animals of All Kinds) contains a sentence beginning, “But when Gary looked down at his two sons, the word tubers appeared in his head…”

Roxane’s excellent story “How” is about a woman named Hanna who “lives in the North Country where the stars make sense” and “finds it difficult to be aroused by a perpetually unemployed man,” and her twin sister Anna, and how they get away, sort of.

The Henry Ronan-Daniell story, “The National Pastime,” is one I almost skipped because it seemed to be about baseball, but I read it and it was actually one of my favorite stories in the issue.

Jim Ruland’s story “Fight Songs” contains the phrase, “which is hard to do when your heart feels like a potato in a microwave,” which reminded me of Cortazar’s “your heart feels like a broken window” in Blow-up, I think.

The other thing about this thing is: It’s really good-looking.  Like, a handsome book, well-designed, with strong paper and good printing and excellent art and photography, including a photo essay by Cara Faye Earl.  Chris Heavener & co. did a great job with this.  You can buy it here.

 J. A. Tyler’s Mudlicious Press publishes these tiny chapbooks.(Click here to order.) Mine arrived today. They are cute things, these chapbooks. I like getting them. Today I got P’.H. Madore’s ”Da Vinci Died Before Cigarettes”, Matthew Savoca’s “Altruism”, “In Praise of Virgins” by Johannes Goransson (sorry that I have no umlaut)  and a sticker with a picture of a dead looking whale that has the words “bleached whale” on it.

Now, generally speaking, I am not ML Press’s ideal reader. I have, over the past decade, grown away from an interest in experimentalism and am prone to reading straightforward, narrative fictions. That said, my involvement here at Htmlgiant has been wonderful in that it pushes me to read stuff I would normally not read. This is good. It keeps me from feeling I am growing old, boring and stubborn even if I am very much doing so. Here are my reactions to the chapbooks:

I first read Goransson’s “In Praise of Virgins”. I’ve read his blog occasionally(click here) largely because he lives in South Bend, Indiana and I have a soft spot for South Bend. He discusses poetic “movements” and issues and so forth with fierce, obvious intelligence and deep commitment.  I read his blog and think, “Wow, I’m really glad I was a good bartender.” “In Praise of Virgins” I will call a poem. It is handwritten, which I like. I like people’s handwriting. Very personal. There are funny pictures between the pages with words. Here is a line– “I liked hearing my voice with a plastic bag over my head. It sounded like I was underwater or pregnant.” This poem made absolutely no sense to me. And yet, I enjoyed it, just enjoyed the images and the way they were put together. It also had a sort of anger to it that was neat.

Next I read Madore’s piece. I read his blog occasionally, too. He is the editor of the lovely online journal (click!), Dispatch Litereview, which has a great story by Elizabeth Ellen. I will be frank: he irritated me on a few occasions  because he left some hostile comments here at the Giant (as everyone knows, I can’t stand those), but he hasn’t done that lately and now that I’ve read his blog, well, I want to make him a sandwich. Young men occasionally bring that out in me.

I will call “Da Vinci Died Before Cigarettes” a poetic story as well as a mood driven piece. I love smoking and there are nice bits about smoking in this piece. He begins with — “Holding the cigarette between two fingers, cherry down, letting nicotine  air weave wavy up into my downward palm”. There is a discernable narrator in this story and he is in a house or apartment and someone is knocking on his door, but he doesn’t want to answer the door. He also takes a shower. I would say that he is thinking on the pages of this story, and here are some of his thoughts: “Think of painters who never learned not to write on walls not thier own. I think of the billions who’ve lived without ever totally accepting the boundaries laid upon them by kings and bankers.” I like that last line. There’s real heart in that line and in the piece in general.

Lastly, I read “Altruism” by Matthew Savoca, whose blog you  can reach here, and whose blog I have also read on a few occasions. I will call Matthew a poet. He has interesting facial hair and very deep set eyes according to the pictures on his blog. While I am unclear on the title’s significance, I do believe this poem is narrated by a young man who is having some relationship problems with his significcant other. I would even call this a “love poem”. I like how Savoca refers to football fields repeatedly as a unit of measurement. I like football, period. I also really liked this part, because it was funny (sorry the line breaks are off, I blame WordPress):

what we’re not saying is that we are bored of each other

which really kind of means we are bored of who we are

when we are with each other

it’s the result of never spending time with anyone else

we talk about this

and then go spend some time with other people

until we remember that we don’t like other people

I could really relate to those lines. And that’s it! That is my time spent with ML Press’s chapbooks! It was a nice thing to do today, as otherwise I would be doing dishes, cleaning up cat urine and being hungover. Thanks, ML Press, for making my Monday less stupid.

So I did.

Between July and December I’m going to receive in the mail the books with the stories I could have read on the Internet. But these I can read on the john. You can too, and you oughta.

Order shitlongs from MLP and get books by RYAN CALL (sucks at ping pong), ELIZABETH ELLEN (probably this one will be a dirty story), MOLLY GAUDRY (this one will be exact), KEVIN WILSON (dilligaf), MARY HAMILTON (I thought she was dead) . . . there’s 18 of them in all. That’s just the first five. The next five are CRAIG DAVIS (never heard of him, sorry), KENDRA GRANT MALONE (agagagaga), LILY HOANG (oh shit scary), AMY GUTH (nice glasses), MARK BAUMER (I bet this one’ll be funny). Wait there are eight more: BEN TANZER (of the blog tour), KRAMMER ABRAHAMS (best twitterer), JOSHUA COHEN (I thought he was dead too), EUGENE LIM (nice), CL BLEDSOE (okay I’m ready), JOANNA RUOCCO (best vowels in the bunch), JOSH MADAY (never heard of him, is he cool?) (yes), MICHAEL MARTONE (pompous jerk). So that’s my summer, fall, and early winter, in paragraph form.

But wait, there’s more. You will also get the first ever Mud Luscious novella in perfect bound format. This means it’s held together with glue, which suggests that it will be sufficiently lengthy to require a binding process of this sort. Which means, for people with metal allergies, you will not find a staple in the entire book by Molly Gaudry. This staple-less miracle is called, WE TAKE ME APART. I think it’s a novel in verse. Which means it’s going to be partly like poetry so you won’t understand it, but partly like a novel, so you will understand it. Whatever, I bet by itself Gaudry’s book will be worth the MLP subscription price.

Thanks Mud Luscious Press. You make me happy when skies are gray.

This post simply brings to your attention things worthy of attention, with extremely light commentary from me.

• Ellen Kennedy’s new book Sometimes my heart pushes my ribs is available from Muumuu house. This is probably widely known, but I wanted to officially note it here. Ellen Kennedy feels like a Dorothy Parker who doesn’t have enough energy to rhyme.
• Chelsea Martin’s new book Everything was fine until whatever will be released March 2009 by Future Tense Books. Watch her read this piece. The ingrown logic and breath-taking/sigh-inducing excess of each subsequent line reminds me of Tao Lin’s ‘the next night we ate whale,’ except each line is different.
• The prolific J.A. Tyler redesigned Mud Luscious archives and ML Press, and his entire site. He would scare me if he wasn’t so nice. His obscene publication list is prone to make one feel like a slacker.
• Juked No. 6 is out. Check out the contents and order. Juked is one of the oldest literary websites out there. It makes me feel good that they are so consistent and devoted.
• Robot Melon Issue Seven is live, including J.A. Tyler, Crispin Best, yours truly [gag], Ryan Manning’s ode to Sam Pink, and one of my personal favorite online writers, Krammer Abrahams. I really like the ‘head trauma at night in the woods’ design.

So those are my updates. I could not find a picture that embodied this post. [*UPDATE: Ryan Manning sent me a picture to post for this post. The 4 colors do not match the 5 updates. He was no doubt driven conceptually.] Thank you for supporting online literature.

The city would get fucked up. High rise buildings in ruin. Virgins slaughtered. Expensive military vehicles raped.

The big green guy wiped his ass with Tokyo. Gratuitous aggression at its pinnacle.

There was always a downfall to his reign.

In a few of the movies an attractive young girl with some moxie devises a way to spank his dick and send him pouting back to his ocean floor studio apartment.

The battle for Tokyo is here and now(once again). Godjira has resurfaced. I am afraid. I need to be held by a comely female or a frail man with soft skin until the battle is over.

Please pretty young girl defeat Godjira and save us all.

In my email (also probably in yours?), a message from JA Tyler, editor of Mud Luscious:

readers & the like.

 

look, look, look:

 

mud luscious issue six is live & death-defying. new work by brandi wells, jamie lin, jared ward, charles lennox, laura hirneisen, lauren becker, tim jones-yelvington, m.d. kempis, ryan dilbert, howie good, kyle hemmings, & drew kalbach. this issue also includes a review of every online & print work available from publishing genius press.

 

go here to view the issue: www.aboutjatyler.com

 

ml press also opens today for pre-orders of the jan. trio:

 

LIKE IT WAS HER PLACE by kim chinquee

A HEAVEN GONE by jac jemc

SOME OF THE LETTERS THAT WERE CUT by michael kimball

 

each volume is $2 (includes shipping), is limited to a single run of 50 copies, & will ship jan. 15.

five-month subscriptions are also available. $30 / 15 volumes.

 

go here to support ml press: www.mudlusciouspress.blogspot.com

 

also the new flash collection by j. a. tyler EVERYONE IN THIS IS EITHER DYING OR WILL DIE OR IS THINKING OF DEATH is available now from the achilles chapbook series. this collection will only be available in a signed, limited edition of 50 copies. $5 (includes shipping).

 

go here to order: www.aboutjatyler.blogspot.com  

 

read up & share out.

 

happy 2009.

JA Tyler has reviewed the entire Publishing Genius catalog. That is exciting.

Someone should review the entire Dalkey Archive catalog.

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.