Rumpus Love: Special Police-State Romp Edition
Hey it’s been a while since we spoke with Stephen Elliott about The Rumpus, the awesome online magazine he runs. So I thought that this would be a good time for us to check back in and see what the site’s up to this week.
“Winston Smith is 39” by James Warner.
Winston Smith is 39.
And, rereading 1984 for perhaps the fifth time, so am I.
I notice now how conscious he is of being middle-aged. Orwell tells us early on that Winston has a varicose vein above his left ankle and has to take his time walking up seven flights of stairs. He has difficulty touching his toes when instructed to do so by the instructress on the telescreen.
A Long Interview with Bill Ayers.
What we thought fascism would look like was that it would have two faces: the face to black people was going to be increasing depression, increasing economic hardship, and the murder of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X. That’s what fascism looks like. That’s exactly what it looks like. Targeted assassinations. Terror against communities. I was in Detroit during the riots of Detroit, I was in Cleveland during the riots in Cleveland, I was in Chicago during the riots in Chicago. And what that looked like was fascism. They were lining up bodies in Cleveland like cordwood. It was disgusting.
The face of fascism in the white community would be conspiracy trials. What we envisioned for ourselves were endless trials, endless prison sentences, conspiracy indictments. And it was all happening. I was indicted on two federal conspiracies. My wife was on the Ten Most Wanted list. That’s what fascism was going to look like. That’s what it did look like.
Even Sugar, the advice columnist, gets in on the social meltdown action!
Dear Sugar,
How in the fuck am I going to survive the econopocalypse? Seriously. What’s your plan? Do you have a plan? What should my plan be? Holy. Fucking. Shit. I am so scared.
[She responds:]
[…]The long dream of American consumption is over. Gil Scott-Heron told us this would happen 25 years ago. Nobody listened. That’s our national specialty, it turns out. That and porn. You can count on the government to keep printing money – it’s what they do when the tea leaves read “busted” – but the real recovery program will be taken on by you, brother. Your personal economy is just about to wave bye-bye to the inefficiencies of abundance.
Speaking of porn, one of the (relatively) more upbeat pieces currently on the site is this addition to The Rumpus Oral History Project, featuring porn performer Lorelei Lee.
Porn was an incredibly therapuetic thing for me. I got to go into rooms with people and experiment with being vulnerable in a place where I had no emotional responsibility. I went into work and people said, “What do you want to do today? What don’t you want to do today?” Nobody ever asked me that before in terms of sex. I could decide at any time that I never wanted to go back. I had to be there for four hours for the shoot and I got to deal with whatever the emotions were afterword on my own.
Not that everything in LL’s essay is sunshine and simultaneous orgasm, but it’s a fascinating insider’s take on an endlessly complicated subject. Also, fyi, the link to LL’s piece is SFW but several of the links from the piece are not.
Tough times call for tough heiresses.
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February 23rd, 2009 / 1:13 pm
February 23rd, 2009 / 1:13 pm
Fairy Tale Review Opens Submissions
Fairy Tale Review wants your Little Red Hiding Hood-related submissions.
The Red Issue will be Fairy Tale Review’s sixth annual issue and, as the color suggests, will be as as devoted to Little Red Riding Hood as was dear Mr. Dickens. This is will be the journal’s first truly themed issue and we welcome your newest and brightest writing to it.
They’re reading submissions from Feb 15th to June 15th.
Read their call for submissions.
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February 22nd, 2009 / 9:30 pm
February 22nd, 2009 / 9:30 pm
NYT loves “Telephone,” the new play by Ariana Reines
The play is an adaptation of Avital Ronnell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, a critical theory text which, according to that same NYT critic, was “created at the height of Derrida-style deconstructionism and laid out (by the graphic designer Richard Eckersley) in the style of a Dadaist phone book… Under the direction of Ken Rus Schmoll, a cast of three and a sharp-eyed design team turn what might have come across as gobbledygook into a stylish and stimulating show.”
So cheers, Ariana, and to everyone in NYC, the show is playing at Cherry Lane Theatre through February 28th (even though there doesn’t seem to be anything written about it on CLT’s website) so catch it while you can.
MORE OF ARIANA REINES
The Cow which won Fence’s Alberta Prize, was published in 2006.
Coeur de Lion was published by mal-o-mar editions in 2008. I wrote about Coeur de Lion (and Katy Lederer’s The Heaven-Sent Leaf) in my FLAUNT magazine column (print only- it appeared in issue #100).
The Agriculture Reader #3, the magazine I co-edit, contains a new piece of prose by Ariana Reines.
Ariana Reines poems at Coconut Poetry.
The real deal. To the real deal's immediate right (photographer's left), wearing his signature green hoodie, basically not in the photograph, is yours truly. - Stain Bar, Brooklyn, 2008.
Sucks to be a Mushroom: in which we read David Orr’s essay on poetic greatness until our hangover goes away
In this weekend’s NYT books section, David Orr weighs in on the sweat-to-brow question of whether Poetic Greatness is suffering–or has already suffered–its Peak Oil moment.
In October, John Ashbery became the first poet to have an edition of his works released by the Library of America in his own lifetime. That honor says a number of things about the state of contemporary poetry — some good, some not so good — but perhaps the most important and disturbing question it raises is this: What will we do when Ashbery and his generation are gone? Because for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness.
Yikes. I keep wanting to be annoyed with this essay, and when Orr is throwing out gems like “Poetry has justified itself historically by asserting that no matter how small its audience or dotty its practitioners, it remains the place one goes for the highest of High Art[,]” it’s really hard not to just smack myself in the forehead, except my head already hurts for some seriously non-poetry-related reasons, so I’m going to save all self-flagellation for the repentance session I have scheduled for later this afternoon.
Submission logs
The tight-rope of submissions, simultaneous submissions, acceptences, rejections, withdrawals, forthcomings, etc. is hard to balance. I eventually got too confused, and committed too many faux pas, that I finally devised an excel spread sheet listing a) the title of the piece, b) where it had been submitted too, c) where it had been rejected, and d) optimal/potential places to submit if needed. I think most writers have some sort of system. So what does your submission log look like?
Here’s mine:
Tabbing from cell to cell often feels like Frogger — squish.
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February 20th, 2009 / 7:43 pm
February 20th, 2009 / 7:43 pm
Pasha Malla, we salute you
Right now, my buddy Pasha Malla‘s gmail status say “BEST WEEK FRIGGIN’ EVER.” True enough.
Pasha’s first book, The Withdrawal Method, was for a time available up in a country called Canada from a publisher called Anansi. Any day now, said book will be available in a country called the United States of America from a publisher called Soft Skull.
He was longlisted for the Giller Prize.
It was also one of the Globe and Mail’s Top 100 Books of the year.
And now, Pasha’s book has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the Best First Book, Canada and the Caribbean category.
Cheers, Pasha.
Follow this link to read some stuff Pasha has written.
Here’s a favorite humor piece that appeared on McSweeney’s: THE BOMBAY PALACE ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BUFFET: A POST COLONIAL PERSPECTIVE.
The Vicarious MFA: Weekend Reading Assignment & Abbreviated Notes
The Vicarious MFA
For Monday:
The Things They Carried by Tim Obrien
I Remember by Joe Brainard
Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson
(I’ve only just started this, but it is awesome. It’s a book that is all about Celine Dion’s album Let’s Talk About Love {the one with the Titanic song on it.} Some chapter titles: Let’s Talk About Schmatlz, Let’s Talk About Hate, Let’s Talk in French and Let’s Sing Really Loud. I am psyched to see Celine Dion burned at the stake of bad taste.)
For Tuesday:
Three Workshop Submissions (60 pages)
Turn-in second workshop piece
For Thursday:
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
For Friday:
More stuff I don’t understand for Psychology elective
(see the presentation I gave last week)
Incredibly abbreviated notes from 2 weeks of The First Book seminar are after the jump….
Torpedo #4: Richard Brautigan tribute issue, now available!
My contributor copy of Torpedo #4 showed up the other day, and it’s such a wild, exciting jam-packed ball of awesome that I can barely even tell you. I’ve been a fan of Torpedo–the quarterly published by Australian indy press Falcon vs. Monkey, Falcon Wins ever since they solicited some of my work for issue two, but totally irrespective (or anyway, independent) of how generous they’ve been to me, they’ve so thoroughly outdone themselves with #4, the BRAUTIGAN issue, that I’d be writing this same blog post even if I’d never met them and couldn’t testify personally to their friendliness and general stellar-osity. Here’s the little blurb about #4 from their site (click thru to go to their store) and after the jump there’s a short Q&A with editor Chris Flynn, some excerpts from the issue, scans of some of the art, and a full T.O.C.
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February 19th, 2009 / 12:37 pm
February 19th, 2009 / 12:37 pm
Gigantic
Gigantic, a magazine run by James Yeh, Rozi Jovanovich, Lincoln Michel, and Ann DeWitt will soon be swelling hands in awful ways. How soon? April soon.
From the website:
Gigantic #1 arriving April 2009
Debut issue featuring:
-Deb Olin Unferth and Joe Wenderoth In conversation on the influences of “bad art.”
-New work from Ed Park, Shane Jones, Pedro Ponce, Justin Taylor, along with other new and exciting voices.
-Gary Shteyngart on meat.
-Line Drawings, collages and photography both odd and beautiful.
-Tao Lin asks Malcolm Gladwell some questions and also talks about genius, hamsters and, well, Malcolm Gladwell.
No sign yet as to how you might buy a copy, but the editors promise that it will be cheap and will cost ‘very little compared to other literary journals.’ Keep on eye on their website for information.
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February 19th, 2009 / 3:56 am
February 19th, 2009 / 3:56 am
Power Quote by Angela Carter: A Fancy Way of Saying “Eat Me”
From the short story, “The Lady of the House of Love” . I would normally stick my tongue between my two fingers, but this is a much fancier and therefore a better way of saying eat me? This is a reaction to all the uncalled for harshness of life, for all the sick joy that people get from their little, or big, acts of hostility (I know, I should save it for Mean Monday, oops. I read the story this weekend, so it is fresh in my mind):
And I leave you as a souvenir the dark, fanged rose. I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave.