I Like Caketrain a Lot and interviewed them about it
When I say Caketrain never ceases to amaze me, what I mean is that Amanda Raczkowski and Joseph Reed are always amazing me. Even when I’m not doing anything but trying to fall asleep, even when I’m doing tons of stuff like negotiating printer maintenance costs for the Stamford office, I marvel: how do they do everything they do so well? The things they publish in the journal are continually new, smartly readable, and surprising. Their books are fun to hold. Their design is consistently impeccable. And they’re making it happen so affordably that anyone can buy and read them. What a great way to save literature, to not overcharge for it.
So one day, when I couldn’t take my publisher’s envy anymore, I sent them a few questions that first rattled to mind. They responded generously, taking my trivialties and forming from them genuinely interesting subjects. And even better than that, they included pictures and captions and links that fit seemlessly into the HTML Giant archives. Read the interview below the fold. READ MORE >
Caketrain 6 for presale
Anytime there’s a new issue of Caketrain, I immediately place an order. If you ask me, Caketrain has taken up the space left by the void of 3rd BED, as each issue is packed with new words, weird words, innovation of form and content and etc. They take care to make the words look their best on clean, nice heavy paper with lots of white space and good images. You know when you buy Caketrain you will be able to read it pretty much from cover to cover. That’s often a rare find.
CAKETRAIN 6 is now available for preorder, to be shipped in December. It’s only $8 including shipping, which, shit, how can you beat that.
There’s a full list of the site of who’s got what inside but this issue seems to contain a bunch, including Michael Kimball, Norman Lock, Kim Chinquee, Shane Jones, Ryan Call, Brian Foley, Joshua Ware, Sara Levine, Jac Jemc, Forrest Roth, Kate Hill Cantrill, and etc.
Get this. Get the back issues if you don’t have them. They are all issues I go back and read over and over again, and that’s not a stretch.
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October 31st, 2008 / 11:15 am
October 31st, 2008 / 11:15 am
i randomly selected a journal off of blake butler’s sidebar because he is cooler than me and then i edited the journal’s “about” page
well, as i explained in the title of this post, i selected a journal at random from blake butler’s sidebar. it was “caketrain”. i went to their website and edited some of the text on their “about” page.
here it is:
Caketrain is edited by A CHRISTMAS TREE and A HAMMER, who cofounded the project in 2003. In short, we (A CHRISTMAS TREE and A HAMMER) found ourselves realizing that this “crazy” passion-for-the-arts thing, which had long been fostered in all of us, was not going to be muffled by EVIL WHITE PEOPLE, or logic, or PRAYERLESS ASSASSINS SLEEPING IN TREES. Yes, the drive was here to stay, and we had HERPES; fortunately, we shared these HERPES with one another, and together, turned them into a journal and press (AND ITCHY GAPING SORES ON OUR LIPS AND GENITALS). Many have taken this route before, and we are proud to be accepted into their number. All of us—readers, writers, editors, and PEOPLE WITH HERPES alike—are engaged together in the struggle to stand our ground in a larger landscape in which literary daring is marginalized, ghettoized on small, out-of-the-way shelves where it sits unnoticed, unread, and ultimately forgotten (BECAUSE IT HAD WICKED HERPES AND STUFF).