Ethan has nowhere to go, so he killed the author
Today I spoke with Jeremy Hight, the “curator” of a project called Ethan Has Nowhere To Go. What started as a short story became a multimedia online interactive experience once Hight killed the author by removing himself from the project, and handed over the creative reins to a number of artists. You can check out the project at Unlikely Stories.
Alexandra Naughton: Please tell me about your project.
Jeremy Hight: I wrote a 12 page short story called “Ethan Has Nowhere To Go.” Did a dozen drafts, had a writer’s group workshopping. The whole deal. Then it hit me when it was about be published– invert it.
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May 6th, 2014 / 11:00 am
May 6th, 2014 / 11:00 am
Michael Seidlinger—
One of the features I’m spearheading for HTMLGiant is a weekly indie news roundup called “This Week in Indie Lit.” It’ll run every Monday and it’ll focus on the week’s new indie book releases as well as any and all new book acquisitions announcements from the previous/forthcoming week.
I’m interested in turning this feature into a platform for indie publishers wherein they’ll be able to formally announce a new author/book deal/acquisition and have notice of it in one place, via one weekly feature. This is not unlike Publisher’s Weekly’s frequent Book Acquisitions articles. I haven’t seen that happen for indie lit, not yet anyway, and I really think HTMLGiant is the place to give props to the new. There’s a lot of new and it’s worth noting before it becomes the norm.
Here’s what I need from indie presses: Send me those press kits, that press coverage, your press schedules, everything that clues me into what you are doing so that I don’t miss anyone. There hasn’t really been something like this for indie lit and we, at HTML Giant, want that to change.
Send all material to press@htmlgiant.com
I hope to get this thing rolling by the beginning of June.
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MY BEAUTIFUL “CORRESPONDENCE” WITH PUBLICATIONS I HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED IN (AND/OR IGNORED BY!)
There was a year during which I essentially told my brain that the way to become a writer was to get published by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. During that year I wrote a loooooootttt of things that are totally unusable for any other place and which were trying to get the right tone for that site. In retrospect, I fully blame the editor for always sending me back kind and personalized rejections which encouraged me—or at least I thought they did—to try again. Eventually, I stopped writing Open Letters, Monologues and Lists, but I think I owe my decision to try writing more to that editor and his charming rejections.
Dress in Words: The Self Unstable by Elisa Gabbert
The Self Unstable
by Elisa Gabbert
Black Ocean, Nov 2013
96 pages / $14.95 Buy from Amazon or Black Ocean
Already, I have the problem of memory. Memories act precariously when they are the palate of thought. Example: I can’t remember when I first read Elisa Gabbert, but I remember the rough poetics of The French Exit. Bodies and minds took beatings. The words violenced through the poems. I was especially captivated by the sexual aggression. A voice attempted to transcend the self through bodily destruction, like autoerotic asphyxiation. Like a lack of could force the mind out of the body.
The Self Unstable exemplifies a bodiless self. Gabbert explores how thought dictates action, then action dictates belief. Memories lead the way because they create an illusion of understanding. “It can almost ruin you, the belief that you can choose,” (3). Language shreds the roles of identity. Her Twitter-brain essays/poems fragment connections. Art, games, leisure, love, sex – everything that fills our time – seem like activities to enjoy. Instead, they [dis]assemble the violent act of creation.
Animals, news, dreams pollute the mind. Where is placement? Ego feels displaced. Ego never had a place. Like grandparents coming through Ellis Island, body and mind attempt to locate a self. Look, my Dad found the papers. The family’s entrance was legitimate. At least on my Mom’s side. Names were misspelled, but sound has barely changed. The art of phonetics assert an idea of WHO. Some sort of declaration of I AM.
Generations exist as fragments collaged through shared behaviors. Family is why I’m here, but is family ME? Who has a choice in creation? Forget ideals, love and sex are “enjoyment of adversity,” (67). We ruin others. Relationships start based on these fallacies. Gabbert explains that a shared a taste in music creates the idea sameness. My mixtape to you means SOMETHING.
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May 5th, 2014 / 10:00 am
May 5th, 2014 / 10:00 am
Sunday Service: Will Roche
Baby 4 Lyfe
Here’s a baby
here’s a pic of my baby
just ate my baby
on vacay w/ my baby
baby’s first dance, death;
baby updates baby on baby
baby’s first car crash erased by
baby’s first second car crash
eternal and irrepressibly stale like pound
cake, my baby’s b-day is better than baby
baby grows up so fast
click or you will miss it,
baby on teevee baby glory
baby so hot right now
baby burnout
foreign talk-show circuit baby
she-drinks-too-much baby
baby rehab boo hoo
itty bitty baby pyre
so long
Bio: Will Roche is from Smyrna, GA but lives in Brooklyn, NY. You can see more of his work on his website.
Ascension by Nikki Darling
Ascension
by Nikki Darling
Digital poetry chapbook / Available at Light & Wire Gallery
The ebook Ascension by Nikki Darling is beyond auto-biographical. I don’t even think it is an ebook. I don’t think it is an ejournal or an ediary. What it is . . . is a mess.
Nikki is a mess.
Her hair is usually a mess.
She has dirty feet. And these are not purposeful things. Nikki’s messiness is a direct result of the time she dedicates to personal branding in other areas. The disorder is a result of neglect.
Nikki frequently neglects form and tries to bypass narrative.
Or so she would have you think.
This ebook is an electronic collage. A tribute to all things Nikki.
A dip inside of her brain.
And I have to admit I don’t like it there.
The music is too old. It makes me uncomfortable. The songs are too polished, thick and unbending with old school veneer. Why can’t she just write a story, a chap book for my hands?
Why poems?
Why the appropriation?
Why the mess?
I’m always tempted to tell Nikki to clean herself up. To clean up her work. To pull up her bra straps. To put on a bra. But her poems won’t wear one.
The inclusion of screens, like mini-experiential pockets of havoc, give insight to the cacophony of song that blares in Nikki’s mind. Music is integral to her work and it isn’t just the sound. Ascension reflects her obsession with all aspects of the music including the performers, the presentation, and the cultural context. The performers, or the artists that Nikki focuses on are none that I am terribly familiar with. They aren’t ones that I enjoy. They are gender-benders and here is the crux of my discomfort. Nikki has an eye for cultural construction and is especially gifted at lifting images and iconography of the past decades up and layering them against one another. Again, this is a collage. There is no clear delineation of gender. Her preference for boys is met with a proclivity for presenting them in feminized forms. Think long hair, short shorts, gliding around on skate boards.
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May 2nd, 2014 / 10:00 am
May 2nd, 2014 / 10:00 am
“3490 people bought something besides the bestseller” — Talking with Pete Mulvihill of Green Apple Books
May 3rd is California Bookstore Day, and some bookstores in California have giant worms for mascots. Growing up, that’s where I tried to buy as many of those “code-your-own-adventure” QBASIC books (what were those called?) as possible. Years later, home for Christmas, I bought a first edition copy of Gordon Lish’s Mourners at the Door and tried to convince the bookstore owner to care. “Oh yeah, Lish,” he said. Being as this was California, it wasn’t inconceivable to take an “oh yeah” a certain way, so I asked him: “Did you know him?” And he said “Not if I could help it” and walked away.
Other bookstores have coffeeshops above them or below them. Some bookstores are in old firehouses. (Even if they’re not really bookstores). Occasionally, an architectural firm will have an empty storefront, and they will let you put a bookstore in there. Some bookstores are famous, and you have to be quiet going up the stairs to the good room because movie people are asking Lawrence Ferlinghetti about gold-plated avocados. If you’re a new bookstore, it might be beautiful to sell only poetry and run the store with your spouse and your baby. If you’re an old bookstore, Adam Robinson will probably ask you some questions about the kids painting outside. When you’re a mighty bookstore with your own highway attraction sign, you might put another bookstore inside yourself, like Grey Matter Books did with Troubador. Sometimes you will eat a lot of cheese in a bookstore and buy the books that Peter Gizzi tells you to buy, as I have done in Amherst Books. Other times you will be stranded waiting for a ride in some commuter town in New Jersey, so you will spend all your time at a bookstore until it closes, and the owner will get on his motorcycle and kick you out but give you a free Javier Marias novel because he feels bad for you.
Remember when it wasn’t stressful to be in a bookstore? And you weren’t guiltily squaring your desire for the world’s eyes on your own goo with the sheer magnitude of book stuff that already exists? And it just seemed where-am-I-going-to-get-enough-hours-and-light amazing that all these books—in their bound and sentenced way—felt like talking? When I think about California Bookstore Day, I think about giant worms, and I think about that feeling.
One bookstore instrumental in starting and sustaining bookstore culture in all of Sweet Cali is Green Apple Books in San Francisco. If you live in the Bay Area, or you’ve made stopovers on a regular basis, you probably know Green Apple. They’re down there in the Richmond district, their store is huge and full of good surprises—used books, new books, LPs—and they’ve got that sweet green guy out front. Publishers Weekly recently agreed with the book-buying elbow patches in San Francisco and smartly awarded Green Apple Bookstore of the Year.
Green Apple was started in 1967 by a former United Airlines radio technician named Richard Savoy, but now it’s owned by two Kevins—Hunsanger and Ryan—and a Pete: Mulvihill. They are the big dream scheme cookers behind California Bookstore Day, which they want to push to national prominence on par with Record Store Day. They’re active in a ton of San Francisco area stuff—check this lovely listy quote from PW: “founding the San Francisco Locally Owned Merchants Association, participating on the boards of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association and the Clement Street Merchants Association, and advising Litquake and the San Francisco Library’s One City One Book program”—and sometimes they give you tacos at midnight when Murakami releases a book called 1Q84.
To find out more about what it’s like behind-the-scenes at Green Apple and to shine some hype on Bookstore Day, I asked Green Apple co-owner Pete Mulvihill a few questions, and he was gracious enough to dish some great answers.
Read the interview below the jump!
SONG 14 — POEM-A-DAY from THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN LUNATICS (#17)
I’ve been working on a number of “song” poems, as in songs that are sung under one’s breath, never really meant to be listened to. The songs are often unkempt, ancient and embarrassing. The identity of the original singer is unknown and unimportant, as these songs are constantly getting sung somewhere.
Ryan MacDonald is a lecturer in the Studio Art Department at UMass, Amherst. He is the 2012 winner of the American Short(er) Fiction award. His collection of stories, The Observable Characteristics of Organisms will be released from FC2 in August 2014.
Jordan Stempleman’s collections include No, Not Today (Magic Helicopter Press 2012) and the forthcoming Wallop (Magic Helicopter Press 2014). He edits The Continental Review, runs the Common Sense Reading Series, & teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute. Find out more here.
a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing.
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May 1st, 2014 / 9:05 am
May 1st, 2014 / 9:05 am