My List of Books From 2011
Because it’s that time again. My personal list of favorite books from 2011, or some books I found to be particularly significant, insightful, brilliant, masterful, enjoyable, notable. In no particular order.
Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist – by Doug Rice (Copilot Press, 2011)
“She moved, like any other apparition, from darkness to light. It’s what makes a photograph possible.” – Read my review of it here.
Compression & Purity – by Will Alexander (City Lights, 2011)
Another one from prolific surrealist poet Will Alexander.
“I am never given due as to sum or proportion / I am seen as the source of something leprous / as no longer the motive of who I was thought I was shaped to be.”
{LMC}: A Conversation with Robert J. Baumann and Iris Moulton
We have a pair of interviews with the editors of Beecher’s. First up, Gene Kwak talks with Robert J. Baumann and Iris Moulton. Next week, Roxane talks with Chloe Cooper Jones, Ben Pfeiffer, and Daniel Rolf.
—
Beecher’s One is a beautiful, gun-covered thing. A good gander will give you an eyeful of clean living and slick word wizardry. You get the sense that the editors want to wrap readers in a thick-knit blanket of play. I had some questions for my own pondering and figured the LMC was as good a reason as any to poke a stick at a thing. How often do you get to ask editors to flash their thought bubbles? Equally, I wondered about future space and word games and figured maybe they’d shed light on issues two and beyond. I had some high hopes of my own (in short, that going forward they include a few longer fiction pieces and mix in some non-fiction), but I hesitate to say anything as it’s issue one and give people a break, yunno? Here’s the dig between two fine poetry editors, Iris Moulton (former Asst. Poetry Editor, now Beecher’s co-Editor-in-Chief) and Robert J. Baumann (former Poetry Editor, now a bookslinger at the renowned Woodland Pattern). They were entirely too gracious.
HTMLGIANT’s Tournament of Bookshit
This year in place of our regular “Mean Week,” HTMLGIANT will be running something we’d like to call our Tournament of Bookshit, in which 64 book related shits will be placed into an NCAA style bracket to square off and determine, by the most arbitrary means possible, [something]. What that [something] is I have no idea, but I do know that our tournament will operate by the same wily-nily sure let’s do it this way found in most any literary competition, whether it be list making, book jousting, or whatever else you’ve got.
Below you’ll find a list of the 64 entities selected pretty much on a whim to be our contestants. They’re silly. For each round a guest judge of various description and sensibilities will analyze each in light of each other and then select one by whatever terms they like to go forward, with perhaps a Mean Week attitude in mind. In the end, we’ll crown a very special winner the King Shit Mountain of Super Bookshit.
We’ve also set up, for those taking score at home, a bracket system where you can fill out your predictions if you want. It requires you to sign up but only takes a second. At the end we’ll have a prize pool of literary stuff to give to whoever somehow pulls that magic high score out of the hat of darkness.
Any authors/publishers/etc interesting in throwing in on the prizes, please leave a comment with what you’d like to give away and we’ll include it in the winnings and link it in a round up of Kind Souls.
Registration and prediction is free and will be open until the first decisions begin posting on Wednesday around Noon. Playoffs will continue at whatever pace they continue at.
The contestants: READ MORE >
121 Comments
November 28th, 2011 / 11:04 am
November 28th, 2011 / 11:04 am
Sunday Service: Kathryn Mockler poem
Bookstore
The bookstore was on top of another store
at the corner of a busy street. I walked up the stairs
and was met by God, a middle-aged woman
with blonde hair and glasses. God told me to take
my time looking around her father’s store. The
store had not been in operation for several years.
Who’s God’s father? I wondered. No one ever
talked about him. It was once a fine store that sold
rare and out-of-print books, she said. It now sat
dusty, and soon the building would be sold. A
lot of organization is needed, I said. She agreed.
I picked up a white and brown plastic clip-on
earring off the floor and put it on. It looked like
the kind of earring my mother kept in her jewelry
boxes, so I made a mental note to find the other
one straight away. But something drew me to the
back of the store, even though I didn’t want God
to think I planned to steal the earring, which
must have been worth a lot of money. I walked
past bookshelves, which were in varying stages of
disarray and stopped at a corner shelf near the back
exit. There I found a navy blue ledger. When I
opened the ledger I saw a list and then I saw my
name and signature and the date—January 11,
1993. That’s me, I said to God who was now standing
beside me. Yes, she said, I knew you’d come back
for it. And then she walked to the front, leaving me
alone to figure out exactly what I had come for.
Kathryn Mockler is the author of the poetry book Onion Man (Tightrope, 2011). Her writing has been published most recently in Rattle, Joyland, and CellStories. Her short films have been broadcast on TMN, Movieola, and Bravo and have screened at festivals such as the Toronto International Film Festival, Palm Springs International Festival, and EMAF. Currently, she teaches creative writing at the University of Western Ontario and is the co-editor of the UWO online journal The Rusty Toque.
2
{LMC}: The Multiplying Self
Sometimes we want to dance, even those of us who say we don’t like to. Colin Winnette’s narrator meditates upon this desire, but only for a moment. The narrator exists in fragments, and the part of him that wanted to dance, named “An Evasive Aspect of My Personality,” is denied the pleasure of turning and moving to music, denied this approximate transcendence. In certain moments, different aspects of the narrator take precedence. We are a sum of our parts, but it doesn’t mean the parts have to work together.
Personalities are shaped in fiction by the discourse. We say, “This narrator is unreliable.” “This narrator is sympathetic.” “This narrator shows what it’s like to live in a war torn country and how to go beyond nationalism.” However, even these moves are not transparent inside of fiction. Characters are led by their authors to decisions that lead us to judge them. Dialogue helps characters reveal themselves to us, we get exposition, or free indirect discourse moves a reader along inside a character’s head, trailing his or her thoughts.
Teenwolf as Kafkian Experience
Teenwolf (1985) begins with the muffled sound of a basketball in place of, or competing with, a heartbeat — that of Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox), a lanky self-conscious high school student trying his very best at basketball. The conquest of men, drained of blood and necessity, finds its charade in contemporary American sports. The opening scene is shot from below, with Scott’s head prophetically eclipsing the round lunar overhead stadium light. Despite the brief elevated pulse, we see Scott under his pallor, unwittingly negotiating the complexities and politics of the external world, tightly mapped out on a basketball court. Comparisons to Goethe’s Young Werther, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, and Dostoyevski’s narrator in Notes from the Underground are likely, though we all know the imminent metamorphosis into wolf (i.e. the postmodern “other”) is essentially Kafkian; thus, Teenwolf preserves the legacy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as the grotesque as metaphor for perceived self-deformity and body dysmorphic disorder. One may note, or at least this contributor, the inverse-POV angle of Scott looking at us from above, intent on our gaze, sweaty, as if we, or the cameraman, were fellating the young actor; though the space between these two orientations is collapsed by the camera’s super-consciousness, its pictorial convex sweep bestowed with omniscience, as if we, void of God, were desperate to find its robotic mascot. Hey boy, big boy, we think under muffled vowels at the film’s opening shot. It seems the director, in an act of cinemagraphic authority, has been careful to put us into place.
Alexis Orgera—
Fictionitis |fick shun eye tus|
noun
a disease of the frontal lobe that obliterates the impulse to write fiction almost before (in the time-space continuum) the impulse is acted upon; the foiling of grand plans and even grander fantasies as a result of said disease: I contracted fictionitis minutes after conceiving of a fiction-writing-for-poets series on HTMLGiant; I will wash my mouth out with soap, but it won’t cure the disease.
LIES/ISLE PRESENTS: Unrepairable by Russ Woods
Since it’s the terrible day of capital-death known as BLACK FRIDAY, I’ve decided that a more positive gesture, to assuage all the guilt of those who are pimp their souls to save a buck (we’ve all been there in some regard), is needed. Thus, I’d like to publish a brilliant work of literature that specifically makes use of the medium it’s being published on; namely THE INTERNET. Russ’s work takes a note from old text-based RPGs (MUDs to be more specific) on telnet, an entirely antiquated form that, as Russ’s work proves, is ripe for exploration.
Russ Woods lives in Chicago and edits Red Lightbulbs with his wife Meghan Lamb.
Click “more” to read Russ Woods’s brilliant Unrepairable.
READ MORE >