The light from outside
The kaleidoscopic light promises us things, that we will be better engaged at some point. Our time is oft useless, but inside the shimmering fragments we find hospice and tentative repose. Yes, that was somewhat manipulative; I was obviously trying to tie biblical stained glass and iPhone apps together, their rows of minutiae narratives. Ever walk into a dark bar and see someone looking down at their dumbphone with a halo of light on their face? The text that never comes is not a writer’s plight, but we who wait at bars. “Be there in 5,” they all say. To the rows of people in cathedrals, praying, praying — they have their share of waiting too. I say no to these broken rainbows, no to these cruel seductive colors. A fly can only see a million shards of the same scene; its world is broken and short lived. I want to have a heart whole enough to stare at a wall for hours, on which a fly rests as some annoying period for a never written sentence.
“To Be Natural Is Such A Difficult Pose To Keep Up”
Salvador Dali and Gala Dali (1936)
Blockquotes excerpted from Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” dedicated to Oscar Wilde.
Nick Antosca—
I love HTMLGIANT commenter I. Fontana’s new story in Juked. Just as I loved his amazing Jean Harlow story in Spork a while back, which I think was the first short story I read of his.
HORRIBLE POEMS FROM HORRIBLE EMAILS
SOUPBJBB
From an email:
“We’ve started a blog called Horrible Poems from Horrible Emails.
Basically, we take emails that are boring, asinine, tedious, or just plain horrible and turn them into equally horrible poems.
If you or your friends have some emails that fit the bill, please submit them to HorriblePoemsHorribleEmails@gmail.com and we’ll see what, if anything, we can do.
Hopefully we can do at least one a day.
Emails don’t have to be particularly raunchy or obscene. They just have to have the potential to be an awesome (by awesome I mean bad) poem. “
Suggested Pairings: Icehouse and Meg Pokrass/Cooper Renner
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu0uOONkX-E
As I rule I suggest you marry yourself first. Take a moment. OK. Today we will marry a chapbook with a domestic beer.
“Lost and Found” (elimae stories) is glow for the hammock, though I suggest an older model, one swaying for seasons and made of fishing line—as in cutting into flesh–and below it a brush pile with a brown rat you name Brown Rat. You feed Brown Rat crumbling Cheetos. I think these flashes are fragile, about to collapse, falling, as in you/me/us…They disintegrate you forward.
She’s ruined this before.
Abfulled Plank Road (Miller) since 1885, Icehouse pours to a golden yellow, basically the color of human urine in the later stages of renal failure, but don’t let my description (sorry, former RN here) put you off your feed. You probably have some hazy nostalgia—possibly college, a dorm room bathtub full of ice and balthazars of beer?
“I’m not very modern, I’m afraid,” she said.
Outdated things make me sad, like the word, “howdy.”
I’ll Be There For You, Just Not in the Submission Queue
In a community as small as what can be loosely termed the independent publishing community, the lines are easily blurred. With blogs and social networking and sites such as this one, it’s easy for writers and editors to become familiar and sometimes friends. There are days when it feels like every writer is an editor and every editor is a writer, and we’re all submitting work to each other in a deeply incestuous whirlwind of writing. The Internet has also made the word friend interesting. I’ve written on this subject before. I correspond with lots of people. I have many acquaintances and writers/editors with whom I get on well, but the people I consider friends have my phone number and could call me at 7 am and that’s not many. With few exceptions, we’ve spent time together, in person. We know things about each other that we wouldn’t share in 140 characters or less.
A lot of editors write about finding rejection difficult. While I don’t cackle gleefully while sending rejections, I don’t have a problem with doing it. I don’t find it troubling. Sending rejections is inevitable and necessary. It is part of the process for putting together a magazine. Whether I know you or not, whether we are friends, acquaintances, or strangers, I am looking for great writing. If you don’t send me great writing, or if for whatever reason your writing isn’t a great fit, I will reject you and sleep soundly. If we’re friends or acquaintances, I will send you a really nice note. I don’t know if friends expect that friendship translates into an automatic acceptance but I hope not.
HORMONAL DYSTOPIAS
Did you read the recent, and excellent, Laura Miller piece in the New Yorker about dystopic YA literature? It’s built around Suzanne Collins’ massively popular Hunger Games novels, which I’ve read (clumsy sentence-for-sentence writing, but great/addictive plotting) and which are basically Battle Royale for younger readers (group of kids dropped into arena/island, forced to hunt and kill each other as part of a game)… but it also name-checks the great House of Stairs and Singularity author William Sleator (with whom I once did an interview in which he effectively came out of the closet), Patrick Ness (whose The Knife of Never Letting Go had big problems, but was still immersive), and M.T. Anderson, whose amazing novel Feed is like A Clockwork Orange or The Informers or J.G. Ballard stuff masquerading as a YA novel. It’s really brilliant in every respect including the prose, and you should read it immediately if you haven’t and you’re into that sort of thing.
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June 24th, 2010 / 11:05 am
June 24th, 2010 / 11:05 am