Shaman Drum
From Dan Wickett:
Shaman Drum is not doing well these days. There have been articles in the Ann Arbor papers recently and owner, Karl Pohrt, just sent out an open letter trying to explain, to those questioning the articles, just how the store has fallen into financial difficulties.
Having had the pleasure of getting to know Karl a bit over the past year and a half, I can say that his open letter didn’t contain much surprising material – he’s known where things were headed and has been trying to combat it in various ways. He, along with his lawyer, financial team, and others in the Ann Arbor area are pretty desperately trying to figure out the means to make the store still be a viable part of Ann Arbor’s just off-campus business district.
This is to take up Karl Pohrt’s and Dan Wickett’s call for help. If you’re thinking of buying a book soon, why not skip Amazon and order from Shaman Drum? You’ll have to do it special order and their email system appears to be currently disabled, so that means maybe a little bit of time on the telephone. But that can’t hurt, right?
This reminds me also of the 5$ Powell’s Gift Card giveaway that I posted the other week. I’d like to award that gift card to Michael, who posted a story in the comments about finding a draft of the foreword to Djuna Barnes Ladies Almanac tucked inside his Harper&Bros first edition of the book, complete with revision marks allegedly by Barnes. Michael, if you’re still reading, please email your mailing address to htmlgiant [at] gmail [dot] com so I can send you this card.
And finally, take a look at this bookstore finder from Indie Bound to see if you can find any stores near you worth checking out.
Ken Baumann on Shane Jones’s LIGHT BOXES
A review submitted by national heartthrob Ken Baumann, for Shane Jones’s just released novel LIGHT BOXES from Publishing Genius Press.
I feel it’s hard today to find a work of art that is earnest, that is compassionate. (Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody comes to mind). I was startled by Shane Jones’s novel because it is so painfully both; it bleeds itself, and bleeds for others.
Light Boxes is a story about a community, about a man’s quest to rid his community of February, a bitter and long spell of cold that haunts the the town and its people. I don’t want to speak explicitly of the ‘narrative’ here, only because I think there is magic in discovery; it’s a sensual work. Many of the images affected me viscerally, and will stay with me for a long time. Dead bees pour from the sky, a broken father sits in the middle of a snow-covered street, a body surfaces in a river covered in text… I could list all the beautiful, and often tragic, images contained within for awhile.
Uncategorized / 12 Comments
February 25th, 2009 / 1:00 am
February 25th, 2009 / 1:00 am
Partisan hack blogs press release of press he likes: Special Octopus edition
Today, I will be your Bill Kristol.
Dear Octopus Fans,
We have five announcements to make:
1. Eric Baus’s Tuned Droves
2. Shane McCrae’s One Neither One
3. Open Reading in April for full-length manuscripts
4. Subscriptions for 2009-2010
5. T-Shirts
[details on #s 1-5 after the jump, and at the very bottom: a picture of Bill Kristol getting nailed by a pie -JT]
Updates
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.
Thank you, UbuWeb, for giving me some Hitler today.
UbuWeb is the gift that keeps on giving.
Today’s stumbled upon wonderful thing? Benjamin Weismann reading “Hitler Ski Story.”
You should seek out Weismann’s book Headless, which appeared as part of Dennis Cooper’s Akashic books series Little House on the Bowery.
I like Weismann’s book. There are any number of quirky writers out there. Some are even not entirely bad. (Some are actually pretty good.) Weismann is not quirky. He’s not amusing. He’s not wry. He’s not gentle. He’s straight on absurd. The stories don’t just inhabit there own little worlds, parallel to our world. They tear our little world down, grab the necessary pieces, and burn the rest of the shit in a gigantic bonfire. You can actually smell the blaze on his fiction.
Here’s Weismann on Smokelong Quarterly.
Here’s an LA Times list.
Word Spaces (7): Peter Davis
This week in the triumphant return of HTML Giant Word Spaces, we have the kindly and brilliant Mr. Peter Davis, author of the quite hilarious and smart and new-voiced Hitler’s Mustache, (which, with such a great cover, how could you pass up? though the poems are just as awesome: you can read examples of them here) and much else, including, most recently, a series of beguilingly ultra honest poems such as these here. Peter Davis lives, teaches poetry, writes, and raises a family in Muncie, Indiana, where he has so kindly taken the time to tour for us the spot where his words do the make.
Where is my Oscar?
Zach Plague, author of boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, coeditor/designer of featherproof books, and mastermind behind Bleached Whale Design, said fun things about HTMLGIANT at Poets&Writers.
They call it ‘the internet literature magazine blog of the future,’ and I’ve decided joking or not, I think they’re right.
Thanks, Zach Plague, for the good words.
‘I Hate This Essay’
This comment came late to Mike Young’s ‘Magazine Debasers’ essay. I wanted to post it here, because it is cute.
Anonymous comments:
I hate this essay. This is all about the insular world of MFA “writing.” And if the author was at a “top tier” journal, he wouldn’t have written it. But his own journal isn’t even third-tier so he has to come up with this essay to defend it.
Truth is, most journals are full of sloppy writing, soft ideas, poor thinking, and all manner of third-rate junk.
I hate the MFA world. I am an independent: no degree, no connection to universities. I am a writer and I am published.
Here’s my criteria for submitting to a magazine. It’s simple. I just look at how much they pay. That’s number one. Second is the audience. I look at their circulation (if it’s print) or their hits / ad rate (if it’s onine). I’d sacrifice a little pay for more eyeballs, sometimes, but it’s all about the money.
In other words, 95% of those “journals” are immediate nos for me, since they don’t pay squat.
But that’s how writing should be. It’s how it used to be. If more writers went independent, and avoided the MFA schoolteacher CV “credit” world completely, then there would be less of these lame journals and maybe more real outlets that paid.
Remember, a magazine pays its writers because the magazine is professional, the writers who work for them are pros, and above all they have *readers*. These lamebrain unpaying journals don’t have any of that. Who want them? Not me.
Hooray!
Narrative Magazine (‘the gold standard of online publications’) wants $20 to read your short-short
Reporting live from the Narrative Magazine offices, my man Russell Jones, AKA ‘The Only Black God’ AKA Osiris AKA Big Baby Jesus:
WalMart’s down the street, son.
But I mean really…
AWP Chicago: A Human Being’s Notes
Browsing through the many post-AWP posts for something that does something that I don’t know what, maybe something worth mentioning, or something else, I found this up at Agni (via the Newpages blog): ‘AWP Chicago: A Gamer’s Notes’ by JS Tunotre. I read it and tried to think of how it applied to my AWP experience. I found myself resisting it, wanting to respond. Then I told myself I wasn’t going to post about AWP, especially not one of those ‘thank-you’ posts to everyone (which are fine and fun to read, but there are just so many of them, and I can only read so much about how weird it is to meet people in real life whom you’ve only known online). But I changed my mind today when I realized that I couldn’t focus on the student papers piled on my desk. So here goes:
Before you read on, recall that we’ve already talked a little bit about the ‘submissions game’ here, so maybe this AWP post will pick up a little bit where Mike Young left off?
And if you haven’t, please read Blake Butler’s BE AN OPEN NODE post for some more thoughts that sort of go with what I’m thinking here.
So, to the essay. Give it a quick read, then come back and let’s talk. Also, you should know that I’m reading/responding to JS Tunotre’s essay honestly. I’m aware of its satirical qualities, its humor, etc, but I think Tunotre is describing a common perception about AWP, publishing, writing, and so on that I want to treat as a serious argument, despite his framing it in gamer’s language. We can also discuss how serious Tunotre is about this issue in the comments.
Okay, enough delay. My first question after you’ve read the essay is this: does Tunotre speak for you?
I am speaking here for all of us who still cannot walk into a room, a literary arena, without immediately seeing it as a complexly graded hierarchy, a scarcely disguised Hobbesian jungle, tyrannized over not by teeth and claws, but by their verbal equivalents.
Probably not, unless you are a robot, in which case you are probably small and round and vacuuming up all of the crap after everyone leaves town.
Or you are insanely intelligent, live alone in a garrett that you never leave, and write very long books, in which case you have no experience with crowds anyhow.
But seriously, does Tunotre speak for you? I’m curious to hear from people who think of AWP this way (or any other social interaction for that matter).