Adam Robinson—
Dark Sky founding editor announces their closing — very nicely done, too.
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Oversoul: Stories and Essays by Mitchell S. Jackson
Oversoul: Stories and Essays
by Mitchell S. Jackson
The Collections House, June 2012
92 pages / $4.99 Buy from Amazon
To Mitchell S. Jackson, being a voice writer means capturing the sound of a moment. As he ruffles you through Oversoul, his e-book collection of short fiction and essays, there are few street signs, few identifiable marks. Yet somehow, there is no confusion. You hear a growl: “G O T D A M N Y O U M E.” And from the very first page of “Head Down, Palm Up,” the opening story about a young man initiated into the drug game by his charismatic uncle, you know exactly where you are—the other America. The one you drive through with your windows up.
The book is sworn in with a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose 1841 essay, The Oversoul, gives title to the collection: “Our faith comes in moments. Our vice is habitual.” Jackson’s own rough past—selling dope, his time in prison, and growing up fatherless in a world of emotional disfigurement—accounts for much of his writing. But there is something else, too. Delving further into “Head Down, Palm Up” and later “Oversoul,” about an ex-con fraught by newfound freedom, it becomes clear that Jackson doesn’t just recount the turmoil of those years. He listens, reaching past memory, to free the living voices of hope and hopelessness:
“Those first days, weeks, back in the free world, you see all of mankind’s progress in the blink of an eye. When you left we’d just invented the wheel, but now, now we’re flying spaceships… But sooner or later, after you inhale those early, emancipated breaths, inevitably sooner rather than later, you end up gaping into the maw of the real, live, wide, apathetic, show-me-what-you-gonna-do-this-time cosmos.”
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September 7th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
September 7th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
11 foducts 4 the lamily
1. Hobart 2.0, wow, with new web features, etc.
2. Diagram 12.4 is OUT!
3. Joshua Cohen:
The repetitions are, in my mind, linked to the idea that the Internet is conceptually vast, but you end up spending the bulk of your time visiting the same sites again and again (or perhaps this is just my own practice). I’m not especially interested in the variety of the Internet; rather I’m interested in the human experience of the promise of variety, a promise fulfilled only by a similarity or sameness, and the idea that the computer seems to license every option of virtuality, while our own humanity seems limited, or to self-limit, through laziness or shame, to the same thing every day.
7. Disorientation, a reading list, at The Millions:
11. My writing tip of the day: It isn’t done when you think it is done.
5. My Grading Scale for the Fall Semester, Composed Entirely of Samuel Beckett Quotes. (By Matt Bell)
they found a new photograph of Emily Dickinson
From the Guardian:
A photograph believed to be an extremely rare image of Emily Dickinson has surfaced in her home town of Amherst, Massachusetts, showing a young woman in old-fashioned clothes, a tiny smile on her lips and a hand extended solicitously towards her friend.
The rest of the article is fascinating, especially the details of how they verified the facial features of the new photograph against the old photograph. The official medical report, linked in the article, is incredible. To quote it:
Other similar facial features are evident between the women in the daguerreotypes. The right earlobe is higher on both women. The inferonasal corneal light reflex suggests corneal curvature similarity, allowing us to speculate about similar astigmatism in the two women. Both women have a central hair cowlick. Finally, both women have a more prominent left nasolabial fold.
She needed glasses.
Leaving Hawaii: An Interview with Heiko Julién
OK, interview. (interview is beginning)
(swallows gum)
I am listening to Riff Raff “Rice Out” on repeat, for context.
I am currently broke.
(Irony)
Cool. I am wearing my brothers t-shirt and shorts and am on his computer at my parents’ house.
Nice.
He has soccer shorts but he doesn’t play soccer. He just likes to watch the players I guess.
What topics are on the table. Your ebook. Can we talk about Hawaii?
Wonder if he calls it Football. Not sure how authentic he is… Yes indeed we can [talk about Hawaii].
Sweet.
I have a lot to say about Hawaii.
Please talk about, Hawaii… READ MORE >
Blake Butler—
At the Quarterly Conversation, “Ed Park, Laird Hunt, Dan Visel, Jeremy Davies, A D Jameson, John Beer, and Daniel Levin Becker each discuss one of [Harry] Mathews’s books… from The Conversions (a novel worthy of William Gaddis, as Dan Visel puts it) to Cigarettes (Mathews’ most conventional, and only truly Oulipian, novel, says Jeremy Davies) to Mathews’ poetry (discussed by award-winning poet John Beer) and his unclassifiable Selected Declarations of Dependence (discussed by his fellow Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker).”
Automotive Experience
The Impossible Global Freeway
Catch me showrooming a discontinued Saab in New Jersey – I would only buy online. I’m trolling the dealer, he’s thinking I can afford a new interior. I’ll end up with Ford, I’m sure. Or, catch me in Paris, loving the low-emission turbo diesel cab. See me climbing the North Cascade Highway in a borrowed Rav4 or my parent’s (now gone) Forest Green Toyota Sienna.
When I think about everything we’ll lose in the next century, the automobile comes into my mind. It roars in with the the force of the locomotive and the companionship of a horse. I’m reading Train Dreams now, and last week, I read High Life. It’s like, we’re all at a party, singing to the wind blowing by. We’re all smoking dinosaur bones in a back room of a bar at closing. This kind of thing can’t last. Eventually they ban cigarettes, even on city streets.
Here are the cars of my life. May there be many more.
1985 VW Scirocco – This was my mother’s car when she married my father. Silver with leather and it looked very fast. When I was 9, my parents escaped serious injury when it was rear-ended by a large white commercial truck. Totaled. They were driving back from a ski trip to Whistler BC, Canada. The driver was an epileptic who failed to take his medication. My parents chose not to file suit, partly because of the Canadian jurisdiction. I remember very little of my time with this car, though I would like to have it now. I also remember my father’s Yellow Nissan truck, from this period, though it was an ugly thing that he sold or gave to a relative.
Behind the Scenes & Technology / Comments Off on Automotive Experience
September 4th, 2012 / 9:01 pm
September 4th, 2012 / 9:01 pm
Ways to Use Twitter
I’m relatively new to Twitter. I’ve only posted ~200 tweets. This compared to three people I follow: @blakebutler who has posted over 3,000 tweets or @matthewjsimmons who has +6,000 or @sophierosenblum who has ~9,000.
While I got my twitter account a long time ago, I never used it because I couldn’t figure out my approach. I mean, I couldn’t figure out how to use it in a way that seemed interesting to me. Also, I couldn’t understand the protocols, all that R/T and # and @ this and that. Nor did I understand the etiquette. How many times a day is it okay to tweet? Are you supposed to follow everyone who follows you? And so on. I felt like an old man confronting his inability to adapt to technology.
So, because I’m a nerd, I studied Twitter for a while. I began to pick up on the etiquette and protocol, and what I noticed was that the individuals I found most interesting had some kind of a angle. For instance:
We Need to Talk About Batman
I want to argue that the conceit of Batman having a secret identity no longer works.
It once did, back in the 1930s and ’40s, when Batman was essentially a badass moonlighting in tights, socking hoodlums and thugs in their jaws. At that time, the extent of the audience’s suspension of disbelief was that the fellow wouldn’t get shot.
How simple, compared to today. The Batman of 2012 is a one-man paramilitary force capable of investing hundreds of millions of dollars into being the Caped Crusader—a one-man Blackwater USA! Frank Miller was right: there’s no way that the U.S. government would permit this guy to exist:
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, page 84 (detail)