ny tyrant

{LMC}: They Have Not Been Nice

If you would like to have the full PDF of NY Tyrant 8 so you can participate in this month’s LMC discussions, get in touch with me. But still, when you buy a literary magazine, an angel gets its wings.

It’s true: The editors of New York Tyrant have given me a stern talking-to. They’ve cleaned a few small clocks. Instead of prudently pussy-footing their way along the long shore of mainstream taste, as do some editors who purport to be “open to experimental literature” (carelessly using the derogatory term): the Tyrant’s editors have chosen bravely to lead us into the wild and brilliant, mind-losing woods and then lead us back out, then lose us into the woods again, then lead us out, then get us happily lost yet again. But, of course: I already knew what the Tyrant has purported to be about — I knew what they were interested in. Therefore: their tactic was not a surprise. I thought I would live with it, and now I live with it.

There are two ways to read a print journal. If you’re like me then you’ll begin reading New York Tyrant #8 at approximately two-thirds of the way through, with the first piece that grabs your eye, this being, in this case, Josh Maday’s spooky, fragmentary Dark Math.

This is the sort of material one reads literary journals to discover. Maday is now on my watch-list.

{LMC} On Ken Sparling’s “What Can the World Do For Elrond?”

Ed: You can read a PDF of this story, here, so you can better participate. Buy NY Tyrant. If you would like to have the full PDF of NY Tyrant 8 so you can participate in this month’s LMC discussions, get in touch with me. But still, when you buy a literary magazine, an angel gets its wings.

“My life comes in bits, fragments, brief paragraphs, and sometimes a page or two, so it makes sense that this is my unit of storytelling.”

Sparling drops this quote in an interview conducted by Michael Kimball, published in The Faster Times (read the whole thing here), and it’s a wonderful distillation of his technique, even more appropriate in its very succinctness.

He goes on: “It isn’t so much that the storytelling units are small in my books, more that they don’t seem connected, they don’t seem to relate to each other. There seems to be no rules for what happens after a reader encounters an expanse of white space and moves onto the next little bit. Whatever it is that sustains each individual section seems to break down as soon as a section ends.”