Uncanny Valley

Where We'll Be at AWP

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Rae Bowling) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 23:29:00 +0000

No table this year--we'll be running a mobile operation. We'll have limited copies of the first issue with us, which you can purchase for a discount $10 if you find us. We'll give you a cereal box prize, too. More importantly, just find us and say hi; we can't wait to see everyone! Any given afternoon, you have decent odds of finding us wandering the bookfair or helping out ~~at the Puerto del Sol/Noemi Press table.~~ (Update: Oops, we lied. Noemi Press is sharing a table with Belladonna Collaborative as part of the Table X co-op, and that's where we'll be!) Other that that, we're going to try to be at these locations (updated throughout the week):

Thursday, March 1

Panels we like:

1:30pm: Beyond Pulp: The Futuristic and Fantastic as Literary Fiction
Subtitle: Someday They'll Believe Us.

Basically every year we try to go to one of the panels where Brian Evenson talks about genre fiction as it relates to literary fiction. Usually we don't hear anything we don't already know -- that there is great genre fiction being written every year, that literary writers would benefit from opening themselves to it, and etc. -- but sometimes we like to indulge in nodding our heads to things we already believed.

Readings and Events:

7:00pm: Mud Luscious/Annalemma/PANK Present: Convocation in Chicago

Where we hope to run into contributors Laura Ellen Scott, Brian Oliu, and Roxane Gay, among other wonderful people.

9:00pm: AWP 2012 Karaoke Idol

10:00pm: Action Books/Birds of Lace/Kate Durbin Present: An Evening of Intimate Readings in the Bathroom of a Goth Club

One of us in each bathroom, I suppose. Contributor and pal Carrie Murphy will be reading in the ladies' room, where Mike will not be able to see or hear her. Maybe this is political commentary. (Mike says he really wants someone to use the toilet while they read -- not because it would be a good idea, at all, but because why else are we in a bathroom?)

Friday, March 2

Panels we like:

9:00am: Literature and the Internet in 2012

Contributors Blake Butler and Roxane Gay will be here talking about online publishing, as well as Stephen Elliott and James Yeh. Seeing these folks share their enthusiasm is always encouraging.

4:30pm: The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House: Organizations Supporting Women in the Literary Arts

We are big fans of VIDA and their work drawing attention to gender disparities in publishing.

11:00am: SECRET BRUNCH at the Artifice table.

What is SECRET BRUNCH? We're not sure. But their blog advertises it, so apparently it's not a very closely guarded secret. The Artifice folks are obviously great pals to us, and we buy their magazine every year at AWP. It is a Tradition.

7:00pm: A reading. We don't know which one. We will probably decide based on the number of postcards we are handed. SO EVERYONE GIVE US ALL YOUR POSTCARDS OKAY.

10:00pm: Somewhere else. Drag us by the arm to somewhere where we can dance. Or back to a hotel, where we will give you horsey rides around the pool.

Saturday, March 3

Panels we like:

12:00pm: Making Room for the Graphic Narrative

Comics! These panels never work out as well as you'd hope, but we'll keep trying.

Tortas, caldos, and Mexican hot chocolate TBD at XOCO. Meal companions are very welcome!

6:00pm: Silver Tongue and Orange Alert Present the Unstuck Group Reading at AWP

Contributor and Noemi Press author Gabriel Blackwell will be reading here, along with lots of other cool folks. We'll stay as late as we can manage, but we have to drive home after this!

If you don't find us, we probably got swept up in fun times. Hope to see as many of you as possible!

Exits Are in Alt Lit Gossip

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 01:50:00 +0000

So the Alt Lit Gossip tumblr took a break from posting videos of Noah Cicero and Tao Lin's photoshop art to mention Exits Are. Is Alt Lit Gossip growing up? Are they finally covering real literature? Does this mean they're mainstream? Or was it just a boring day at the office? Or, more importantly, is Uncanny Valley officially Alt Lit enough? Is Titanic the best poker movie of all time???

Exits Are

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:19:00 +0000

Hey guys. Guys! Guys. Ladies.

I'm really excited to announce the publication of my free, online, serialized ebook, Exits Are, written in collaboration with many players. The first game, posted today, is called "Your Brother Isn't Talking." I made it with Blake Butler. You can find out more about how I play the games here, but the short version is that we take turns making up a story over gchat. I usually act like a text adventure (think Zork), and the other player can pretend to play one of those adventures, or they can do other, stranger things. It's up to them. The results are wild, improvisational, weird, and sometimes uncomfortable -- all in the best way. And you can play too! You just have to go here to find out how. Uncanny Valley is publishing the "book" cooperatively with Artifice Books, who have been kind enough to host it.

A new game will be posted every Wednesday, as well as the occasional extra game or bonus material. I'll remind you occasionally to check it out. I've already played games with cool folks like Tim Dicks, Aubrey Hirsch, Brian Oliu, Elisa Gabbert, Robert Kloss, and A D Jameson, with many more on the way.

I hope you'll have as much fun with this as I'm having making it. Go check it out.

Why (When) Subtlety Doesn't Matter

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Rae Bowling) — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:49:00 +0000

I saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close this weekend. As the reviews have said, it is not a masterpiece. It is not a very special or important film. It is nominated for an Academy Award probably by default--nothing else hefty enough to stand up to their kind of recognition.

I do not think, though, that this movie is an F, a fanciful failure, or a manipulative mistake. I think that EL&IC is as sentimental and contrived as any other movie that could stomach Tom Hanks cast as a dead father, and as sit-throughable. Again, it's no masterpiece. But the things that are getting attacked about it seem really artificial.

Many people call out the annoying obsessiveness of the main character, his insistence on doing things a certain way, his histrionics when the emotions catch up with him. I think that the movie is aware that his behavior is objectively annoying, and that it spends most of the film trying to get us to acknowledge that this behavior is sort of necessary and that we need to be able to understand it and forgive it. The movie is kind to him, but it doesn't take pains to always view him through the most loving lens. It does sort of conveniently forget that minor characters in the story have independent lives and that this kid's force of personality wouldn't necessarily occasion the kind of outpouring of kindness and acceptance it gets. But this is a common fault among ostensibly artier, more subtle films. I'm supposed to believe that an entire town actively and with the utmost kindness encourages the relationship between Lars and his real girl? Ryan Gosling's believable sweetness and need does not make the contrivance here any less believable. You must choose to overlook this much if you want to even finish the movie. Is a kid developing an intricate system for decoding what he thinks is his dad's last message for him any less of a stretch? Is that kind of obsession really so unbelievable?

In my MFA program, obsession in fiction was typically viewed through a bifocal lens. On the one hand, people noted, a character has to want something pretty bad to even get a story to happen. On the other hand, people don't usually go to the kinds of lengths that, say, Oskar Schell goes to, and so, the argument went, care should be taken not to strain the audience's credulity too much. But this argument often hinged on the idea that real people do basically nothing about anything, that humankind's true state of being is just a kind of extended sitting on the hands. This led to a lot of stories about nobody doing anything, the kind of strict domestic realism that most of us who want to consider ourselves innovative strive to avoid. The trick for an intelligent artist was, I think, supposed to be to maintain a very tentative balance, where there was some essential sort of wackiness or whimsy, contrivance, about the story's conceit but the execution of that conceit was roughly as difficult or messy (or, if you really wanted to capture the slow, grinding machinery of society, plodding or inconvenient) as it would have been in real life. Oskar Schell's efforts are not really ever hindered by time, distance, practicability, or interference from others. But I really don't think that makes them less real as an expression of grief, anger, confusion, and bereavement. I think the real thing about EL&IC that's sticking for artists and critics is that it does not subscribe to the notion that the truth is subtle, undramatic, and hard to access.

Fiction, it bears repeating, can never be reality. It represents reality. And the challenge for a writer of realistic fiction is how to represent reality in the most honest and appropriate way. The representation that many critics have taken issue with is the film's direct use of images from 9/11. This strikes them as dishonest, calling up already existing emotions rather than creating its own fictive ones. And it's true that for many audiences, the simple act of reshowing the famous footage of 9/11, of reproducing that day, is creating what can fairly be called a false catharsis. Many people are crying in the theater because of a collective emotion that was quickly and insistently attached to those images by others: These are the towers that represented our prosperity and achievement. These are the towers that stood for our strength and perseverance. This is the day we learned what it was to feel unsafe, violated. When our icons were injured, we all were all injured. This is the day we mourned as a nation. And of course (though usually more distantly), these towers represented real lives, abruptly and needlessly ended.

It would be naive to say that the movie does not rely on and intend to call up those associated meanings. But I don't think it spends near the time on calling up our collective meanings for those images that it spends drawing new, extremely specific meanings for them. For me, all the emotional value of the film came when Oskar Schell crumbled, not when the towers did. For him, the towers falling meant a very particular, very visceral, very final loss. In that moment, they meant the loss of the single most important person in the world, and an indelible, lifelong guilt. The weight of that loss was more incredible than the loss we felt as a nation, and it was humbling, heartbreaking to have this new meaning of the disaster drawn, and to feel even the fraction of its intensity that a story allows.

For the majority of us far from New York City the day of September 11, without loved ones there on that day, the measure of a "good," truthful 9/11 story can only be in its ability to provide a window into the very real terror of a city and the very real grief of any single one of its victims. The art born of tragedy can only deliver lasting comfort on the level of individual characters--they may figure out how to move forward in life, but we, collectively, the human race, will never feel "satisfied" by a Holocaust treatment; we will never feel like it's been settled. It is too big to be settled. Especially for our comparatively less tortuous, less decimating, less protracted national tragedy, I do not think it's fair to ask any art made about it to operate subtly, broadly, with the intent of representing our much quieter feelings of collective grief and terror. If we can't derive enough meaning from glimpsing the depth of one person's suffering--and suffering is a loud, sloppy, pathetic, unsubtle thing--if we demand that stories put words to how we all actually feel instead of how individuals might feel, we'll miss a lot of what fiction can do for a society. The only truth worth telling about 9/11 is its cost in individual human suffering. The only lesson worth taking from a story about 9/11 is to become generous in our response to individual suffering--generous enough to break our taboos about letting people into our houses, about participating in their rehabilitation. The argument that this is not what really happens is a weak one. Some of the most valuable fiction is about what could happen. What should.

This movie is saccharine, and it probably won't change your life. It is missable. It probably doesn't deserve a major award. But it's a working story. It's affecting. And if you set aside the notion that truth is by necessity quiet, private, hidden, it carries some valuable truths--easy to name, but also easy to forget.

All of the Air Bud movies

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 06:48:00 +0000

Learning from games: eight virtues of good design

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:49:00 +0000

So I was watching this talk by game designers Jonathan Blow (Braid) and Marc Ten Bosch (Miegakure) and I thought, "This is something we can apply to writing," because that's what I do. There are a number of interesting little discussions here but the centerpiece is a list of eight virtues of good design according to a certain aesthetic both Blow and Bosch advocate as one good option among many -- one way to shrink the space of possible games such that you are more likely to create a good one. You won't have to watch it to understand this post, but here's the talk:

So now I'll list the eight virtues and describe how I think they relate to the problem of writing a novel. These rules wouldn't be shocking to good game designers and their applications in writing won't have shocking consequences either, but they can serve as a useful and memorable heuristic for making decisions (again, reducing the infinite space of possible works to something more manageable).

1. Richness. This one seems like it would require the least explanation. They describe "richness" as the virtue of selecting a space rich with potential consequences for you to explore. But the key here is selecting a space. The richness of consequences will emerge from rules -- in a game, these rules are called game mechanics. (Mario can jump this high, but he can jump this high if he has a running start.) I think a lot of writers find rules frightening because they limit possibility or because we are trying to write toward "the truth" and any limitation will perhaps stand between us and that truth. I think it's common to underestimate how many constraints any good piece of writing necessarily contains, and how these limitations ultimately create a rich space for exploration. Your characters, your choice of tone, your method of structuring scene and chapter and etc., all constitute rules (or even game mechanics: we are playing a game with the reader). In short, while it might seem that richness suggests excess and maximal inclusion, we actually need to be selective about the elements we include, or the novel will not be rich so much as an incomprehensible blur, a smear of language. Think about the very real limitations of Pynchon as a novelist: many complain about his flat characters and slapstick humor, but without those elements to manage the text and simplify it, his already dangerously complex fiction would become unreadable.

2. Completeness. This actually sounds like the opposite of what it is. You're not trying to put everything in, you're trying to use everything you put in as completely as possible. They describe it as "completeness of exploration." Jonathan Blow says that he will do this in a game even to the point of removing fun -- presumably because other, perhaps more complicated pleasures become available . Think here about chess. You don't really get anything out of playing one game of chess, and you don't get much out of playing five. At first, when you don't understand the possible permutations of the game, your moves seem meaningless. After several dozen games, you begin to understand the space of possibilities enough that many moves are meaningful. The better you get, the more you know what can happen in the game, the more rare it becomes for you to take a move just for the sake of taking a move. You can't afford to waste anything. The trouble with Chess is that it has too many moves. This is why I can only intermittently enjoy it: I know that mastery would require a lifetime. (This is also the genius of chess.) And of course Chess has evolved to reach its present state over a very long time, passing through the hands of countless people. Most of us don't have that long. We need fewer mechanics, fewer rules, a smaller space; once we have that, we can begin to explore the consequences of what we have.

When I wrote my novel Fat Man and Little Boy (forthcoming from no one at no time, as of yet) I limited myself to two primary characters who would explore four locations over the course of the novel: Fat Man, Little Boy; Japan (especially Nagasaki (after the bomb)), France (unnamed city, south of Paris), France (the concentration camp Gurs, remade as a hotel), and Hollywood, in that order. I also limited my important secondary characters (two women, one man). I made rules about how long a given chapter could be and how many sections could be in a chapter. There were half-length chapters (about four pages), full-length chapters (about eight pages), and double-length chapters (about sixteen pages). There were also a number of restrictions on the language, in terms of tone, style, and syntax, many of them deeply idiosyncratic. So here is how I wrote the book: I combined these elements in various combinations until I had exhausted their interesting consequences. I asked myself, "Have I checked in with Little Boy recently?" If the answer was no, then I wrote a chapter about Little Boy. I asked myself, "Has he spent significant time with this secondary character yet?" If the answer was no, then I paired him with that secondary character. Sometimes I still didn't know what to do, so I reminded myself of the underlying mechanic for each character: Fat Man was defined by gluttony and guilt (if in doubt, I made him eat something) and Little Boy was defined by shame and a desire for silence (if in doubt, I made him stay quiet against the wishes of other characters). When I had used all the best combinations in a given environment, I moved them to the next one. Do this enough times, put the results in a sequence, you have yourself a plot.

The primary method of advancing story in character driven narratives is to put two characters together who have not been together before. That's really what this virtue of "completeness" is all about.

3. Surprise. Blow describes the desire to make a game surprising as a counterbalancing force to the desire for completeness. You don't have to show everything because we know what results a lot of combinations would yield. By focusing on surprising results, we focus our attention and the reader's on things that will bring pleasure and new information. In a game, this means that Mario doesn't have to stomp a goomba in every possible situation. In your novel, it might mean that we spend very little time with characters who get along and agree on everything: they're not going to surprise us. My character Little Boy only really interacted with my character Rosie, a potential mother figure, when it was too late for her to mother him; because he was too old, and because there were other demands on her as a mother, she had a reason to actively try not to serve as his surrogate mother. Before that, they would have gotten along too well, so I mostly kept them away from each other: a scene where the motherly character mothers the childish orphan character wouldn't tell us anything we didn't know about the characters or their world.

4. Lightest contrivance. When we feel the author's hand too much in the text, we usually lose interest. We like it best when the mechanics of the text guide its outcomes in a way that feels organic. But, as Blow points out, relative levels of contrivance within a game (or, for our purposes, a novel) can matter a lot: if one mechanic is very contrived and another is not contrived at all, that looks weird and ugly. If the amount of contrivance is roughly even throughout a text, that bothers us less. As much as possible, though, we want to let our various rules interact with each other as cleanly as possible, and accept the results as the truth of the novel, even if we ourselves don't appreciate it very much. Unlike a game, the best outcomes in a novel are often (even usually) those that come about because of the rules and in spite of the desires of author and reader. Flannery O'Connor's worst stories are consistently those where she imposes her will on the story in the climax in order to avoid an outcome she dislikes. "Everything that Rises Must Converge" is my favorite example. The old lady's death has nothing to do with the reality of the story and everything to do with our desire to see her punished.

5. Strength of boundary. This is really about knowing the identity of what you're working on. They discuss eliminating unnecessary mechanics. I would say eliminate unnecessary characters, settings, chapters, paragraphs, sentences -- all with an eye toward clearly establishing a voice, style, and identity for your novel. Sometimes you cut things because they aren't you, not because they aren't good. This is another way of saying: revise.

6. Compatibility. This is pretty much the same principle as the last one, for our purposes. Don't add a new element if it doesn't interact with the elements you have in ways that reveal new and interesting things.

7. Orthogonality. Marc Ben Tosch argues that game designers should make sure their game's mechanics are orthogonal -- that they overlap as little as possible. You don't usually want to have two or three mechanics that do the same thing in the same way. In a novel, this often means creating characters that contrast with each other as much as possible. Characters can reveal more about their world and its rules if they have different desires and capacities. For this reason, my last three novel manuscripts have starred comic pairs. The first pair (both cops) was black and white, clean and dirty, careful and careless, empirical and fanciful, respectively. The second pair (Fat Man and Little Boy) had the obvious contrasts (size, apparent age, maturity, hunger, power) and some others (facility with language, virility, "softness"). The pair I'm working with now, two brothers, are contrasted in terms of intelligence, self-control, strength, attractiveness, moral clarity, and fear. Of course this is a very old technique.

You don't necessarily need pairs, though, you just need people that see things differently, or different modes of narration, or different objects for one character or one mode of narration to react with. Language-driven novels without much in the way of character tend to operate by applying one mechanic (one style of language) to a variety of situations and environments: the variety of objects refracts the language and twists it into new forms. (A lot of the writing we talk about here does this.)

One thing Blow and Tosch don't discuss -- probably because it's much more pertinent to fiction than to games, where this issue will often take care of itself -- is that contrasts become most effective when the things being contrasted have a lot in common. The characters, scenes, or situations in a given novel are usually variations on a theme, more alike than different in key respects. (Or often there are several interpenetrating groups of like characters, as in Pynchon's V, where certain tendencies repeat themselves across time and space.) In House of Leaves, the characters are defined by their reactions to the overwhelming reality of the house.

8. Generosity. In Braid, one of the key mechanics is that you can reverse time. You don't have a limited number of opportunities to do this: you can do it again and again. Why not let the player explore the consequences of your mechanics fully? In terms of a novel, this has fewer obvious applications, but I do think it's worth thinking about who is being generous to whom in the case of a novel. In a game, you create an environment and explicit rules for interacting with that environment. You're building a space for the player's agency. In writing a novel, the relationship is much less clear. You're still creating a space for the reader's agency, but you're not sure how that agency will operate, because you're creating the only concrete object that will definitely exist in each writer/reader interaction: they might write a review, they might blog about the book, they might write on the page or tear it up, but they might just read the book and think about it for a little while. So here the generosity has to extend to the person with the more concrete forms of agency -- the writer. You have to trust that if you explore what's interesting to you about the space of your novel, your readers will be generous enough to allow you the time and language that you need to do that. At the same time, you want to remember to allow your readers as much space as possible to experience the book in the way that they want while still maintaining the integrity of your story (such as it is).

Conclusion: Blow discusses how much pressure these rules have taken off of him as a game designer. If the game isn't fun and it doesn't make him rich, as long as it's guided by these virtues it will probably have something valuable in it. I feel the same way about the rules by which I write. So far I haven't published any of my novels, so I haven't been successful in a lot of key respects. I don't know if my books are good or fun or whatever. But I can have some confidence that by following my own rules, I did something that was potentially beautiful according to its own measures. For now, that's enough. As a general rule, I don't know what to do if someone tells me to say something smart. But if they tell me to say a sentence with seven words in it, I can probably accomodate that. These sorts of rules can't guarantee you a great game or a great novel -- but they can limit the space of creation such that creation becomes possible, and provide heuristics by which to judge your decisions.

Playing the odds

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:51:00 +0000

When I was doing my senior workshop during my undergrad, I did something I've never seen another writer do: I took polls on my writing. My project was a murder mystery about a unicorn. The mystery was being investigated by the Atlanta Snuff Films Unit (in this universe, there were a lot of snuff films). It was set in the seventies. Richard Nixon was a character. The killers were the heir and transexual heiress to the Coca-Cola fortune. In the climax, the main character fights a sword-bearing detective on a unicorn. This was all the result of my belief that my best stories come from premises that sound too stupid to possibly work. The class, who were mostly literary realists and memoirists (usually at the same time, usually without acknowledging explicitly the element of memoir) in the way of most undergraduate students of creative writing, were understandably unsure of what to do with the book.

Most undergraduate students are afraid to say "I don't dig this." I wanted to know how they really felt about the book, though, and my instructor was not a fan of the rule of gagging the author during workshop, so I went ahead and tried something. I asked them to raise their hands if they had lost interest in the story at various points. By the end of my questions, I had lost something like half the class. I thought, "Well, probably about ten percent more didn't like this than will admit it, but even keeping forty percent engaged without the advantage of self-selection [i.e., the tendency of people who pick up a given book to be the sort of person who wants to read that sort of book already] is pretty great." I learned a lot from polling them informally on different decisions and scenes in the book.

I realized that I could make my life as a writer easier by thinking in terms of probability. I believe that writers should generally maintain a profound skepticism about their ability to judge their own work or even the works of others. Knowing whether something is good, whether it works, is too damn hard. I don't like trying to sort that mess out. My preference is to structure my work in a way that is more likely than not to satisfy my own requirements and those of my readers. In other words, I try to think less about whether something is the right decision and more about whether these sorts of decisions have tended to work out in the past. I try to think about whether this is likely to satisfy a decent percentage of the people who give the book an honest shot. The two questions are not that different if you accept that the whole exercise is subjective anyway, but it does put me in a different mindset that I find useful. We like to think that we can control the experience of the reader and so ensure a certain level of quality and satisfaction. This isn't very realistic. But to create a book as an environment that is more likely than not to produce a good experience for most of its attentive readers? I think we can figure out reliable ways of doing that, and I think we can apply them. I don't know how to make you like a story. I certainly don't know how to please God or the universe's underlying aesthetic principles or etc. But I have some idea how to make one out of two likely readers enjoy it. And for me, that's enough.

Words With Friends Sucks

noreply@blogger.com (carrie murphy) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:40:00 +0000

It was fun for a while, right? But then the novelty wore off. Now you're stuck with tons of games and all these little notifications popping up so you feel like you should keep playing, but you're totally just doing the easiest move you can because this is boring now and you just want to get it over with without being rude.

I feel weird playing against the "lit" type of people in my life, because I feel like it's a silent-yet-deadly battle to see who can come up with the awesomest words. And I feel weird playing against the non "lit" people in my life, because they know I'm a writer and they're probably like Why the hell isn't this girl better at Words With Friends? But honestly, I feel like Words With Friends is way more about spatial reasoning and I suck at spatial reasoning. My boyfriend kills me every single time we play and it's because he has a math brain. I once played a 106 point word against him and he still won.

I let my mom win like five times and then she legit beat me like five times. The most random people I went to high school with keep playing me, and actually utilizing the little chat box, which is another level of awkward. No, I don't want to catch up on the last nine (holy shit, it's NINE now?!?!) years while we're playing a pseudo Scrabble game through Facebook. No, thanks.

And the app keeps breaking my phone when I use it, and the Facebook version keeps making me reauthorize it. It also keeps wanting to publish my moves/scores even though I have never ONCE clicked yes in regards to that option, because I don't find want to bombard all my social media people with those little blue, yellow and red announcements. I'm just trying to be polite, and Words With Friends is making my online social life about FIFTY BAJILLION times harder, what with the etiquette of notifications, of reminders, or what caliber of word to play against who, of how fast to play a move, when to say good word or damn you or ewwww I have all vowels.

At first I was like Hell yeah Alec Baldwin! Fight the power with Words With Friends! but I'm disillusioned now. It's not with friends, it's with Facebook friends, and we all know what kind of friends those are. It's not friendly, it's oppressive! Down with Words With Friends!

(But Scrabble itself can stay. Because I'm staring you down over the board, about to play QUINCE for a triple word score.)

OOOoooooOOOOOOOOOooooooOOOOOOHHHOOoooooH

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dicks) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:47:00 +0000

(Did you read this post’s title correctly? The correct way to read it is as a ghostly, mournful howl.)

Happy Friday the 13th! I’m going to tell you a ghost story. This is actually a story not about ghosts but about the weird ideas people have about ghosts. I’m joined in this telling by my pal, Sarah.

Sarah grew up in a small town clinging to the Mississippi River. Her grandmother’s brother ran a combination grain/feed/trucking business inside a large agricultural-industrial building, and Sarah and the other kids in her family were sometimes allowed to play inside. There was a lot of open space in the building and there was an office stocked with toys.

After her family left the business, most of the building was converted into storage, but her grandfather continued working out of one of the offices. After he died (during Sarah’s junior year of high school), his office was sold and redesigned into a salon.

You told me this new salon was popular with teenagers in your town.

This hairstylist was very popular with the girls in my high school. She was young and probably what the residents of a smaller town would consider hip. She was known for giving short haircuts with a lot of layers and colors. She used razors instead of scissors! Her products and prices were written in colored chalk on a blackboard like in the coffee shops I would come to know when I left town to attend college and then graduate school. This was all very different from the other salons and stylists around, who were established in the 70s and 80s in a town where the elderly greatly outnumbered any other age group. I will remind you that my graduating high school class was made of 48 students.

You liked the haircuts this stylist gave you. Was it weird sitting in your grandfather's old office, having this woman snip snip snip at your head?

She did give me two very good haircuts. Or maybe they weren’t that great, but were the best I had until that point in my life.

It’s always strange to see things change, especially the things you have fond memories of from being a child. Since my grandfather’s office was only a few blocks from my home, we would often walk over to say hello and eat the candy he kept for our visits. His death was very hard on my family, so I suppose having the office change was in a way welcomed. It was different now, and didn’t have those ghostly reminders and heartaches hiding behind familiar objects.

So let's get to the ghost.

The GHOST!

The first time I decided to get my haircut by this stylist it was a little over a year since my grandfather had passed away. It started innocently enough. We were engaging in the normal conversation. What grade are you in school? What do you want to do after school? And then it happened. “You’re his granddaughter! Did you know he HAUNTS this place!” I could not describe the level of shock I felt.

“Haunts this place?” I asked.

“Yeah! I started to notice that when it’s late and I’m closing up I’ll put something down on the desk and it will DISAPPEAR! I’ll find it later in the back room. And sometimes after I lock up and leave my husband drives by and notices that the LIGHT HAVE TURNED ON! But they are always off again when I get there in the morning to open.”

I can’t really describe to you all the emotions I felt during this conversation. There was an immediate feeling of anger that she had reduced my grandfather to some sort of faceless and strange poltergeist who spent his afterlife taking joy in moving around her curling irons and bottles of hair dye. As if he wouldn’t have anything else better to do! Or that if there is some sort of afterlife, his would be spent wandering the earth, forever doomed to cause problems for this spunky young hairstylist. My grandfather was a very kind and generous man who befriended all he met. And now I was being told that his was how my grandfather was forced to spend the rest of eternity.

Since I am polite and hate all confrontation, I held these feelings in and went along with the conversation. And really, what choice did I have? She was in the middle of cutting my hair. I knew better than to upset a person who was holding a razor. I let it go and listened to her ghost stories. She ended the conversation by telling me that now when she closes up the store she says goodnight to him.

I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife. At that point, I felt a little hope that maybe it was true; if my grandfather was playing practical jokes in this woman’s salon, at least he wasn’t dead. At least he wasn’t gone. Some part of him was still interacting with this world. He did love his job, loved talking to people. Perhaps his spirit found his way back to the office and wanted to shake things up a little now that it wasn’t the same place he remembered it to be. Maybe there is something else after this for me. For all of us. But that wasn’t who my grandfather was. And even though a little bit of me would love to be able to hold on to that hope and believe it, I can’t. At best I could believe that it was some OTHER ghost giving this woman trouble.

Did she seem to have any doubt that you would be thrilled with this news?

I doubt she had any idea that the thought of my grandfather haunting her salon would be upsetting to me. She had to be in her early 20s, and I remember that ghost stories were one of the currencies of cool in my high school. She also didn't really know my grandfather personally, so it must have been easier to see him as a faceless invisible prankster than a real person.

This story highlights a contradiction in how we think about ghosts. We (culturally, in our stories) engage with the sappy undead and the gruesome undead and the horrifying undead, but the vampires and zombies only rarely were ever anything but undead. We rarely see them alive and happy, then dying, then gone; instead, we cut straight to the part where they lurch from the earth. And then, even on a personal, "real-life" level, someone (like your hair stylist) may believe in the ghost as the embodiment of a real, once-alive person, yet believes that this real, once-alive person is now content to rattle around a salon and move bottles of hair dye.

It does seem that we all take on a different meaning to different people after we die. A meaning that we no longer have any control of or participation in. Even the people we knew well become changed in our minds after death, so that we usually remember more of their goodness than their faults. Sometimes they become symbolic to us and take on a meaning they never intended or would have wanted. They become one-dimensional. And for those we didn’t really know, we get to interact with what has been left behind and create our own meaning for it. We can all more easily interpret a traditional ghost from a faceless entity, but it’s much harder to make that leap when we have had a relationship with that person. Ghosts in a sense are divorced from their humanity.

Did your grandfather's (and, more recently, your grandmother's) passing affect how you think about the undead? I'm curious here specifically about your engagement with the undead in stories, or video games, or movies. You're a woman who loves zombies, or did for a while.

I think my grandmother's passing is what made me remember what happened with the hairstylist for the first time in years. It did take me a while to process it, because for a while I didn't really understand what made me feel so violated. It was the first time I was asked to engage with someone I knew and loved in real life as one of the faceless undead we see in stories.

But not all undead in stories are completely faceless. I'm reminded of a scene in Shaun of the Dead which has always stuck with me, in which one of the characters dies while they are all in some sort of getaway car. In one moment he is still their beloved family member who had passed, and in seconds he has transformed into a mindless, flesh eating zombie. I think really good zombie movies and graphic novels are the ones which explore the relationship between real people and the faceless undead.

It's very unsettling because it violates how we view humanity. Are they still human? Are they still the person/spirit/soul we know and love? Or have they become something else? It’s an interesting dynamic.

Do you ever think of your grandfather when you see a movie or read a book populated by ghosts? Does your memory of the conversation with the stylist affect your enjoyment of ghost stories now?

Actually, no. I've never really thought of real people when I see/read zombie/ghost movies/stories. I really haven't thought much about that conversation until we spoke of it earlier this week. I hope it doesn't happen, but it probably will now. THANKS.

I guess I have mostly thought about what I would do if YOU were turned into a zombie. How would i deal with that? Probably throw you to the zombie wolves.

I have three last questions for you:

How would you spend your time if you died and hung around as a ghost?

Interesting question. If there would be a way, perhaps I would like to haunt Xbox Live. Sort of like Master Shake in that Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode with mega-ultra chicken (No! Shhh! He is legend.).

How do you think other people would imagine your ghost spending its time? If someone was convinced you were haunting a house, what kind of behavior would be attributed to you?

I'm sure that every flicker of light, missing object, or loud noise in the night would be blamed on me.

Maybe I should start actively cultivating my ghost personality now so I have some control on how I’m viewed after I die. Mention in casual conversation how I totally plan on doing (insert funny idea here) when I’m a ghost. Just wait and see! And then when that mentioned thing happens, everyone will just automatically assume it’s me.

How do you think I would spend my time as a ghost?

Your specialty would be to cause a very loud noise to happen just as someone took a sip from a cup.

My story "Zero" available for purchase.

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:44:00 +0000

Hey guys. This isn't so much an Uncanny Valley thing as a me thing. I wanted to learn how to make ebooks, so I pretty much hand-coded one from scratch using my story "Zero." The story was originally published in The Lifted Brow, which, that being an Australia-based publication, means you probably missed the story. 1.5 years later it's still one of my best and very likely my most bleak, and so I decided to make it available for purchase. You can get it from the Kindle store or directly from me (in which case you get the epub version as well as the mobi file). Here are the first few paragraphs:

For all legal purposes, her husband was alive. The doctor made a point of this. Given a physician's agreement, removal of a rubber feeding tube was not murder. To put a knife through his neck, or to shoot him, or to instruct the body to end himself somehow—this was different. “Not that you would do such a thing,” said the doctor, “but you should know what could happen, if you did.”

Medically speaking, the case was more ambiguous. If a virus—which has no metabolism but does reproduce, though only through host cells—could be considered alive, then so could her husband. “If,” said the doctor. “The jury is still out.”

Her husband was perhaps a kind of parasite. “But aren't we all,” the doctor said. He adjusted his glasses, smiled without mirth. “There's a joke in there somewhere.”

Philosophically, well, it depended a great deal on one's philosophy. The doctor said that his was medicine. He had to preserve life (or its appearance) at all costs. He asked about her philosophy. When she said she hadn't chosen he insisted she must for the sake of discussion. He suggested possibilities.

“Utilitarian, I guess.”

He didn't seem to know what that meant.

“It means I have to minimize suffering,” she said.

That was all right, then. Not pertinent, though. Her husband was not suffering. It was important she remembered.

“So your husband may not be alive anymore,” said the doctor, “or he might. It's essential that you don't settle the question by killing him. It's called persistent vegetative state, not permanent. He may still come out of this thing. Wouldn't that be something?” He nodded several times.

He said, “It can be frightening.” He said, “The body might be childish at times. He may seem moody. He will do strange things. Sometimes he'll get up in the middle of the night and rifle through the refrigerator, removing expired products. Sometimes he'll organize your records. We don't know why this happens, but it does.”

I hope you'll buy it, and I hope you like it.

Music Doesn't Come From My Brain

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 15:21:00 +0000

I can't make music come from my brain. It just doesn't. If I ever hum anything, I make it up, unless it's the Elmo Song, or the Wedding March, or Do Your Ears Hang Low. How the fuck am I a poet? How did any sonic qualities get into anything I write? Actually the last rejection I got, a good rejection, suggested a path for revision favoring sound and lyric over things and rhetoric...

I do love process though. I love forcing things to arrive by a machine I've created. Here are some beautiful music machines that I love...

I am worse at titles than Carrie.

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:23:00 +0000

Like, a lot worse. I love how her post about the difficulty of choosing a title features like three excellent titles, none of which I could have possibly thought of (with the possible exception of "Riding in Cars with Boys," simply because it's pretty literal). The truth is that when it comes time to title a story or a novel or whatever, I have a pretty consistent strategy without which I am totally helpless, like a babe in the woods. I'm not sure if my first novel ever had a title, but if it did it was probably named after the protagonist, so then "Tom." (It was about a kid who shrinks until he disappears. It was awful. No copies, printed or electronic, survive, and I thank God for that every day.) The second novel had a stupid title and it sucked and I won't mention it here. (Also pretty much gone, although I had my gmail account by the time I finished it, which is the point at which nothing ever really disappears.) The third novel was called "ALASKA," with the caps, because it featured Alaska as a central imaginary location. The fourth novel was called "Goliath in Heaven," because the most important character was named Goliath and he was in a place called Heaven for most of the book. This one was briefly (and poorly) agented, but it's probably for the best that nothing came of that. My sixth novel is called "Fat Man and Little Boy" because those are the two main characters. Do you see a pattern here?

Basically, I have to name every story I write after the most important object, character, or location. Occasionally I go hog wild and name it after a concept instead. If this strategy isn't available to me, I'm hopeless. My fifth novel, which fell into the awkward transition between undergraduate and graduate school, never even got a title. It was about two detectives -- the Atlanta snuff film unit -- who found a video recording of a unicorn being shot to death with a shotgun. It was also about a third detective who found the corpse beneath a statue of the (fictionalized) father of Coca Cola, and what that did to him. It was also vaguely about Vietnam. Richard Nixon was an important character. The villains were an heir and (transexual) heiress to the Coca Cola fortune. There was no way to title this sucker that didn't feel totally ridiculous. What was I supposed to call it? "The Murdered Unicorn"? "Two Snuff Detectives"? "Coca Cola Killers"? I'm actually pretty fond of this story and a little sad it fell between the cracks, but I can't imagine going back and trying to revise it into shape now, so it remains untitled. But I really never have thought of a good one.

One of the best parts of my "Bodies" series is that I got to name them all by number, in the order I wrote them. It doesn't get any easier than that!

My most apparently abstract titles are usually the ones for my Google-based poems, like "A slave is." But actually these are very concrete! Generally I'm just telling you what I googled to find the language that generated the poem.

Right now I'm writing a novel about superheroes. I have no Earthly idea what I'm going to call it. Every title I think of is ridiculous (in a bad way). Most of the characters have sort of idiotic names that work in the context of the book I think but not at all as something that would make you want to pick up and read and maybe buy the book. There isn't really a clearly most important character anyway -- not in the same sense as there usually is, for me. There isn't any one central MacGuffin or concept. Instead there are a million-some MacGuffins and concepts. Practically every other page introduces a new one. So right now, you want to know what the file name is?

"Super.doc."

Because if nothing else, we can all agree that the dudes in this book are "super."

Gonna have to do better than that come publication time. Ayup.

The Tyranny of My Book Title

noreply@blogger.com (carrie murphy) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:58:00 +0000

I recently announced that my first collection of poems, PRETTY TILT, is coming out from Keyhole Press sometime in 2012. I am happy and excited. I had a hell of a time finding a title for it and this is why.

The book, the bulk of which is my MFA thesis, was originally called STICK PINK. I still like this title, but a lot of people thought it didn't fit the book, especially as it evolved. One of my MFA classmates said "Why did you name your book penis?" which pretty indelibly ruined that title for me. The book is largely about teenage girlhood and the formation of identity, so I wanted the title to be something that evoked femininity but also had a dark side. Teenage girls have some very dark sides.

Then I named the book LIKE THE LITTLE LIGHTNING, which was a line from one of the important poems in the book. I still like this title, but I think it's kind of twee and not reflective of the book's overall concerns. This is the final title of the thesis...if you ever go look me up in NMSU's library, that's what you'll see. But I knew LIKE THE LITTLE LIGHTNING wasn't the REAL title.

I haven't ever had too much trouble titling my individual poems, so people were like HEY! Just name the book after one of the central poems. But that didn't work. No one poem or one phrase or one line seemed to sum up or capture the book's whole scope. These are poems I'd been working with for years and I knew their personalities. I wanted a title that sounded good when you said it out loud. I wanted one that instantly evoked a specific image or feeling. I wanted a title that would make me want to read the book if it wasn't my book.

So the book was eventually accepted for publication, but I still had no title. I did everything I could think of to generate one, including going through the book with a fine-tooth comb, scrambling the book a full three times, soliciting opinions from everyone I could think of, emailing the manuscript to friends and teachers, and whining incessantly on Twitter. I whined a lot to myself, too; I've had a hard time adjusting to writing outside of the bubble of the MFA program and I was angry at myself for not being able to title my own book without asking a billion people what they thought.

Still, nothing seemed right or felt right. I thought, maybe, that when I heard the perfect title I would just know, like some kind of message from the art-gods to me. You know when someone has a new baby and you say Oh, how did you pick the name? and they say We just looked at her and knew she was an Anne! (Or, more likely these days, an Ella or an Emma or an Isabella). I thought something like that was going to happen. I would suddenly hear or think of the perfect title and that would be that.

But that was never that. I kept a running list of possible titles in a Gmail draft, but I hated all of them. I sort of wanted to name the book RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS, which is a reference to the 2001 Drew Barrymore movie that I watched incessantly as a teenager. Four poems in the book are titled RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS so it seemed fitting, seemed to tie the book together in a good way. But my publisher said it would fuck up Google search results and that was a good enough reason, so I abandoned it.

So, PRETTY TILT. How did it come to be? Well, it came out of the random scrambling of the manuscript, oddly enough. PRETTY TILT was one of the phrases that the automated scrambler came up with. I kind of liked it and then I asked some people's opinions (OF COURSE) and they seemed to like it, including the publisher. So I said ok. Relatively anticlimactic, right? But it fits the book and I like the way it sounds on the tongue and to be honest, I was just done hemming and hawing over the title. PRETTY TILT is on its way into the world now. That title is going to be printed on a book with my name underneath and my poems inside. Whoa.

Merry New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:48:00 +0000

Merry Christmas: '60s Marvel Super Heroes

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 16:51:00 +0000

The Horse and the Hamburger

noreply@blogger.com (Tim Dicks) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 19:22:00 +0000

A while ago, somebody close to me read about the horse and the hamburger and asked how they had found themselves alone in a medical tent, one tormented, the other unconscious and dying. The answer is that there was violence, of course, and it did not go well for the hamburger. The sad thing, what upset the horse the most, was that the hamburger was not wounded by enemy fire or artillery but by the explosion of a poorly maintained generator on which he was sitting. He was not supposed to be injured, in other words, and this thought dismayed the horse, and it dismayed the horse that it dismayed him, because nobody, of course, was supposed to be injured, it just seemed more natural that if the hamburger was injured it would be because of combat action and not becuase of poor maintenance of a generator.

The horse and the hamburger had not known each other at all, and the total infamiliarity between them increased the horse's dismay. They were alone now in the medical tent, and not just alone for the first time but near each other for the first time; the hamburger was close to the horse but the horse could not be said to be close to the hamburger, really, because the hamburger was unconscious and probably irrevocably so and so nothing could really be said to be close to him. The horse had some ideas about what might be close to the hamburger now, but they were watery and contradictory: the leftover religious want of his youth created a hazy paradise for the hamburger, and a long-forgotten religiously experimental friend from college informed now an idea that the hamburger had transferred into another plane, and the horse's medical training, his strongest influence, inclined him to believe that the hamburger, right now, was nonexistent, nothing, void of feeling and thought, suspended. Then too his own desire influenced him, and his desire was to imagine this hamburger in a delirium, living a fantasy from which he wouldn't want to (and probably would not) return, sharing pizza with a long-forgotten girlfriend or driving his first car, all the world glowing softly and comfortably heated.

The horse and the hamburger may have been friends outside of this tent, outside of this conflict, but it was more likely they would not have been. Despite his respect for soldiers like the hamburger, the horse had difficulty imagining them in positions with status reflecting his own, as physicians or lawyers or politicians or executives. It seemed likely that the hamburger, before this conflict, had worked as a pipe fitter or a plumber or as a cook at the sort of restaurant the horse would usually not visit. It was possible that, had the horse seen the hamburger working at one of these restaurants, he would have enjoyed an uncomfortable moment of pity, a prideful judgment on the hamburger, dressed probably in the baggy, shiny slacks of kitchen staff, in the loose NASCAR t-shirt of kitchen staff, in the sweat-matted hair of kitchen staff, and he would have thought that the hamburger's life was awful, a nightmare lesson to him about the dangers of professional laziness, a congratulations to the horse on the pursuit of his advanced training. And now the horse felt shame for thoughts he hadn't actually had. The hamburger, of course, did not work in a kitchen.

Sharp things frighten me

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 16:30:00 +0000

The fear of knives is called aichmophobia. It also refers to a more general fear of sharp objects, up to and including things like fingers pointed in accusation. I don't think I was always phobic around knives. I don't think I liked them especially. My hands shake constantly. I'm clumsy. Knives are not my friends. But it didn't used to be that whenever I saw a knife I immediately imagined what could go wrong--how it might end up inside someone's body.

It may have started one day when I was unloading the dishwasher. I had put a large knife into the white plastic silverware bin blade-up. I leaned down over the dishwasher to lift up some bowls. My mom pointed out that the knife was pointing up at my chest. If I had tripped, I would have fallen directly on the knife. I'm not sure how deep it would have gotten. The edge was probably pretty dull. Still, I would have fallen right on it. I laughed it off at the time. It still freaks me out a little now.

But I was wondering the other day if it's also partly a thing about writing. My work took a huge step forward when I started operating on the principle that what could go wrong in a story usually should. I started looking for opportunities to ruin my characters' lives. One of the best way to ruin a life is to have a character disregard what seems like a small risk for the sake of a short-term gain. The small risk turns out to have major consequences. A life is difficult to build but it's easy to break down. That's what scares me. It's also what obsesses me.

So the thing is that when I see a knife I can't help but imagine a scenario where it ends up hurting someone badly. Any movie becomes a horror movie the second a character starts chopping vegetables--carrots, say. I always imagine them cutting their fingers, their hands, and on up their arms, as if they wouldn't be able to stop once they had started. When I see one sitting out on a counter I imagine it falling into someone's foot. When someone holds a knife so that it's pointed in my direction--even if it's someone I love, who loves me--I can't help but imagine them stabbing me, by accident or on purpose. I imagine them stabbing each other, too, and themselves.

It's not a crippling fear.

I have a thing with guns, too. I don't consider that a phobia. They're guns. Chekhov said, "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." I assume that if I see a gun then I will see someone shot. Maybe me or maybe not. I had a housemate who wanted to buy a gun. Hell if I know why. Ostensibly for self-protection, but we lived literally five houses away from the university police station. It wasn't exactly a neighborhood with a lot of crime. He didn't really have the money to spend on that sort of thing either. Honestly it creeped me out that he wanted the gun. He told me he was thinking about it. I said he couldn't get one while I was living in the house. I said it that way, too: that he couldn't while I was there. He looked a little shocked and a bit pissed. But I felt I had the right to decide not to live with a gun.

I remember once there was a knife on my TV tray--a steak knife, the cheap kind you get at Wal-Mart. It fell off of my tray (I knocked it off). When something falls while I'm sitting I tend to instinctively clap my legs together. (Remember Huck Finn disguised as a girl, clapping his legs together in the dress to catch the ball of yarn, thus revealing his gender?) I caught the knife not on my legs, but between them. The sharp end passed through my jeans and pressed into my thigh. The meaty part. The blunt end was up against my other leg. If I had brought my legs any closer together, the knife would have punctured the meat of my thigh. I don't know how I knew to stop. It happened so quickly. It was terrifying, but only after the fact, like the knife I could have fallen on.

I have dreams where people casually destroy each other, or me. For instance, one where a man with a hook for a hand tears off my limbs one by one, laughing because it's so easy. And I guess what I'm saying is I feel like writing fiction is at fault for all this, in some way. Like it trained me to see how everything could go wrong. I wonder if other people feel that way too. Or I wonder if I had this tendency already, and it's why writing feels so natural to me--because I was already thinking, always, about how a life might be ruined. Mine or yours.

Mother 3: Over There

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:17:00 +0000

Hey guys, thought I'd let you know that I did a post about Mother 3 over at HTMLGIANT, where I will be writing regularly now. I expect to continue posting periodically to this blog as well, but things have been quiet here for a while due to real-life stuff anyway, and you can expect its somewhat slower pace to continue. It's not that I don't love you! I do, and we do. And we're putting together an excellent magazine to prove it.

Apostrophe and the Post-Romantic Part 4: Conclusion and Afterword

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:07:00 +0000

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1

An interesting thing to me about these above mentioned poets, is that, for the most part, they do not fit into a box. Even the “hybridism,” described in Cole Swensen’s introduction to American Hybrid, does not contain these poets. Swensen’s idea of hybridism, is relegated to only poetic hybrids, discussing nothing of genre hybrids, which is what I see Wenderoth and Göransson doing. This bending and breaking of genre and form to fulfill a poetic goal, seems to lead into the bending and breaking of other poetic conventions, such as the conventions of apostrophe.

Younger poets will always have this ability to shake things up because they don’t have anything to lose, and they are not set in their ways. There are some poets that do change constantly throughout their career, but they are the exception, not the rule. For poetry that confronts the status quo, is alive, and full of potential, and I’ll always look to a younger poet. They still have a sense of ambition, that gets lost somewhere along the way to becoming an established poet.

One can see through these examples that young emerging poets have interesting perspectives, techniques, and ways of employing their unique poetics, at least in the realm of apostrophe. These poets take the apostrophic trope to new levels of interrogation and challenge the preconceived notions of what apostrophe is and can do. Wenderoth shows us that apostrophe can exist inside of theory that exists inside of poetry. Göransson demonstrates apostrophe’s ability to alienate in contrast to its traditional mode of reconciliation. And through Doxsee we see apostrophe blankly evoking the you in opposition to the pathos that so readily typifies Romantic address. Though I’ve shown them against Culler’s romanticized vision of what apostrophe is, these poets still operate inside of the strictures of the trope: the speaking I, utters to the absent and unspeakable you.

Afterword: Criticism of the Criticism

With all this interesting work being done, one must ask, why isn’t there more criticism written about these emerging poets (in academic journals) or on this interesting topic of apostrophe? Some of this lack might have to do with the size of the poet’s publisher, some of it might be the sheer amount of poetry out there and there are too few critics to delve into it all, and some of it might be embarrassing to the critic.

Cole Swensen’s introduction to American Hybrid briefly discusses the shift in the publishing world. She points out that the vast majority of poetry publications come from small independent presses and that the once big publishing houses, now publish only a few titles a year. When examining the role small presses play, and have played, in the world poetry publishing, one can see that they are important. Some important books of the twentieth century were originally small press publications that were later picked up by large presses (specifically, and just off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets, though this can’t be the only example). With the possibility that important work is being published on small presses, is ignoring small press publications really a good idea for critics?

Also a part of this “explosion” of small presses is the explosion of books of poetry. Lots and lots of poetry is being published. I might even say more poetry is being published now than ever before, although I would have no way to know. There is so much poetry out there, any anthology that is superlative, (Best New Poets, The Best American Poetry, The Best of the Web, etc.) is going to be flawed. How could anyone, or even how could any one group, read every poem published in a given year, and come to a sound conclusion about what is “Best”? So how does one talk about all this poetry? Well, the easy answer is, just start reading. Since there is so much, anywhere is a good enough start. Start reading it for fun, start incorporating it into papers, and start treating it as the potentially groundbreaking work that some of it surely is or will be.

Looking at the poets that have been used as examples by the critics I have drawn from for this paper, one can see a common thread: they are all established, well known and/or canonical poets. Now, this isn’t a problem in and of itself, but one can see how voices can be left out of discussions. If the internet, digital printing, and direct marketing are leveling the playing field, as Swensen asserts, then why haven’t these small press poets received the same critical examination as the large press, established poets? The answer to this question, I think, lies in the desire to say something important about important poets and the difficulty it would be to convince the reader of criticism (other critics) that Unknown Poet is important. It would also be embarrassing if no one agreed.

What are the consequences of critics ignoring small press publications? Swensen shows that the rise of MFAs is leading to communities that are analyzing as well as creating the new poetries. Eventually I can see this as a leveling force in criticism, but I honestly think it shouldn’t. I feel that there is a place and a need for both. Poets are already the primary readers of poetry, we don’t need to become our primary critics as well.

LIES/ISLE | HORROR

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Blackwell) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 22:07:00 +0000

Lost weekend: Not alcohol, just work. Accept this entire issue in lieu of usual weekend story link.

LIES/ISLE | HORROR

Of note: Mitch Patrick's video piece, Tyann Prentice's polyvocal poem, M Kitchell's splash page, and Ken Baumann, Helen Vitoria, David Peak, James Tadd Adcox, Mike Buffalo, Eric Wennemark, Ben Segal, Nate Dorr, Elizabeth Witte, William VanDenBerg, Clayton T. Michaels.

A Review Of Juicy Oozers

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:18:00 +0000

Juicy Oozers are a gummy candy made by Black Forest (what a good website eh?). According to the results of a google image search, they come in a variety of flavors and styles (can candy have a 'style'? what is the word I'm thinking of here?) such as sour skulls, sharks or insects (I am here reviewing the Insect variety). Because of this blog's obsession with gummy candy (see gummies! gummies! and gummies! ) I decided that our audience and my fellow bloggers needed to know about this variation of the sort.

Initially I was hoping for Gushers (waaay better website huh?) or something even close, but was prepared for something terrible. Something that would feel weird in my mouth, taste strange or familiarly gross, or a combination of all three.

Texture

Upon first nibble, the "ooz" isn't immediately differentiated from the gummy part of the candy. There is no gratifying "pop" or disturbing dribble of liquid goo. It's very tame. It's kind of like the opposite of fruit in your jello. A softer spot in an already soft nugget.

Flavor

Red: medicine-y; like cherry cough syrup

Pink: creamy; like lifesavers cream

Green: just like green gummy bears

Yellow: like a tartness that's simultaneously overwhelmed by sweetness

Overall

They're a terrible disappointment. I was hoping for an epic adventure for my mouth but I ended up with a walk through the "shady" part of Portland (which, surprise! doesn't exist). My favorite is the Yellow though, because you can see the green goo inside of it and that makes it easier to pretend I'm eating a real bug and sucking its guts out through a hole in its detached abdomen.

Apostrophe and the Post-Romantic Part 3: Doxsee, Göransson, and Wenderoth

noreply@blogger.com (Robert Alan Wendeborn) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Part 1

Part 2

So in Part 3 I'm getting to my argument. In the next part I'll get into my argument's argument, something I even turned in to my professor as an "afterword" that was the whole reason for me writing this paper.
(fast forward to 2:28 for a reading)

In this era of so-called “hybrid” poetry, there are new “levels” of apostrophe that have emerged and existing levels that have been taken to such extremes that they become new, alien experiences for readers of twenty-first century poetry. Contemporary poets are beyond all the levels that Culler describes and are breaking more ground than those that Kenniston investigates. They are not taking pathos as a given for poetic address, they break form and genre more forcefully, and if their address falls into one of the levels, they are more likely to take that level to extremes.

Emotional appeals in Post-Modern poetry often have to be tempered with irony or humor or a sense of self-consciousness so that the reader knows that the poet is aware of their pathos. This is how a Post-Modern poet writes about emotions. But, if a poet is writing in a genre, like apostrophe, that is inherently pathetic, can the poet opt out? In Objects for a Fog Death, Julie Doxsee apostrophizes for the entire book, yet never seems to make an overt emotional appeal. Doxsee uses surrealist gestures to wiggle around the use of pathos. To talk about sex, Doxsee brings up knives: “With a fingertip you cross/my chest beginning to end &//we graduate gradually/to knives” (75). We can see this very intimate and sensual tracing of fingers across a chest eventually leads to violence. To talk about longing, she uses HVAC and typography: “I lined the ductwork//with emails you wrote from Alaska/& the heat thrums, now, on the low//moan linking serif to serif” (56).

Doxsee evades pathos in the apostrophic address through surrealism, though she is also able to address the thing that is somehow eluded as directly unaddressable as a you, though Waters mentions it as a this, and that is, the poem itself (Waters 6).

HALO

On this day

I take a bite of

of glow & become

part of you. I eat

a fireball in someone

else’s wooden yard.

When we fissure

smooth water

with fishhooks

I am handed the

legal pad of words

you hide in. You

are a lizard in the

headlight but I see

only angel and tail.

(Doxsee 68)

In “HALO”, Doxsee addresses the poem itself, “the legal pad of words” that the poem hides in. Her speaker becomes a part of the poem. This fits into one of Culler’s levels, the creation of an event, the biting “of glow”, where the speaker is united, or reconciled with, the other, in this case, the poem. Now, this is the case with all speakers, right? That the speaker is a part of the poem? Doxsee does this consciously, creating a twist, or expansion, of one of Culler’s levels. It also shows that characteristic longing to address present in apostrophe, though it is done with despondency as opposed to pathos, (You//are a lizard) even though the poet wants to romanticize the object (but I see//only angel and tail).

Evading pathos through surrealism isn’t the only way that younger poets are doing so. Johannes Göransson’s Dear Ra: A Story In Flinches evades pathos, even though it’s entirely composed of apostrophe, through invoking the grotesque, hyperbolic, language of the conspiracy theorist, the serial killer, and/or the psychotic. It’s a poetic that feels fresh, though disturbing: “Kidnap a car thief. Talk to him as though you want to be slammed in his trunk like a bag full of rocks.//Talk to me in the woods. To my chest. With your fingers” (31). The achieved effect is often humor, though taken sincerely, the effect is anything but humorous. This may have to do with the form. Who reads/writes poetry sincerely anymore? Hopefully not this poet.

The grand abuse of emotion in Dear Ra actually expands apostrophe out of Culler’s levels. Göransson undoes one of these levels: the creation of an event in which speaker and addressee can be united. Göransson creates an event in which the speaker can be united with the other, but through the speaker’s disturbing discourse the event becomes one of alienation. Even the reader as addressee is fully isolated from the speaker:

Dear Tourists,

You can grope for moist souvenirs in the basement,

but you’ll need patience

because nobody down there will warn you about the floor.

In the streets you’ll find squirrels; on my scalp, bumps.

If you want proof for the folks back home that you’ve surged

like a seagull, print your name and number in the bathroom.

If you want a seagull for a pet, talk to my therapist.

If you find her, tell me where she lives and where her daughter

goes to school. If you want a piece of me, suck my dick.

If you want to sell trips to the general public, take my pulse

or my coffee-table picture-books about Italy.

If there’s a house in the trees, throw up a hammer

and see what falls down. The bleeding kid isn’t

the best prize and you can’t return it, so be careful where

you walk when you’ve had a few.

If there’s a nettle between your shoulder blades

and you’re having trouble breathing, tell the teacher,

but don’t tell her it was me because it wasn’t.

I was just watching, maybe even laughing at your gurgling sounds.

(Göransson 39)

Much of the criticism surrounding lyric and apostrophe sees the speaker as one who turns away from the audience, forcing the audience to “overhear” the poet/speaker. I feel that the opposite happens with Göransson. The audience turns away from the speaker, or he keeps yelling at you like a crazy person on the sidewalk. There is no “overhearing” of Göransson’s speaker because he is quite loud and he is talking to everyone who is reading and everyone that is in his poetic fiction. It’s very hard to do a close reading of Göransson’s work because of his low culture diction, syntax, and subject matter, and the fact that his poems are buried in irony and satire. This also points to the third level.

Like Göransson’s absurdist apostrophe, Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s, uses the epistle address often to comic effect. Letters to Wendy’s is a conceptual/procedural book, in that Wenderoth went to Wendy’s almost everyday for a year and filled out their comment card with a poetic address to the company. Some are purely absurd: “I drink tea at home but would never at Wendy’s. Tea lacks the necessary brutality.” (December 22) and some are purely meditation on poetry: “Eschewing verse, I’ve assumed it best to break my lines like prose. I’ve assumed a visit (to Wendy’s) a full thing—a thing demanding as many words as possible” (December 31). Letters to Wendy’s fits strangely into Culler’s levels of apostrophe because the event is created in equal parts by the poet and by the speaker. Wenderoth, the poet, goes himself to Wendy’s, and then, when composing, chooses the mode of address for his speaker. The event then is equal parts actual meeting of the other (the other being Wendy’s), and the fictional event that Wenderoth creates on the card to foster another meeting, another possible place of unity. Even the act of going to Wendy’s everyday, is in a sense, creating a fiction (who really goes to Wendy’s everyday?). It’s also a way of showing this passion for address. In some ways, it is more akin to Pre-Romantic apostrophe, where the audience is literal and could have a literal reaction to the poet’s performance.

Letters to Wendy’s is also interesting from a genre perspective, as it’s part memoir, part poetry, part diary, part theory, part Dadaist game. Because of this blending of form/genre, Wenderoth is able to chronicle and critique his own actions: eating fast food, capitalism, poetry, even his daily apostrophe:

September 3, 1996

There may be no you—no other to receive and understand

these revelations of myself. The Post Office may burn them

for all I know. It’s not important. I only need you as a good

idea—to make me apparent. I love you, even if you don’t

understand me, even if you burn my attempts to reach you,

even if you are no one, nowhere. After all, I warm my hands

by the same fires.

Here we see a poem that fully explains the concept of apostrophic poetry, and it’s also a poem that exemplifies all of Culler’s levels. It has the passionate intensifying address, even a passion for address itself, “I only need you as a good idea—to make me apparent.” It has the creation of an event where a relationship of you and I can happen, the letter itself and the relation as possibility as opposed to concrete. This poem has the intensification of the I, “these revelations of myself.” And it has the conflation of the I and you, “I love you, even if you don’t understand me, even if you burn my attempts to reach you, even if you are no one, nowhere. After all, I warm my hands by the same fires.” Wenderoth achieves this sign of a successful apostrophic poem in a radically different form and with radically different content than Culler might expect (or pay attention to).

Dear Ra

Objects for a Fog Death

Letters to Wendy's

1954

noreply@blogger.com (Mike Meginnis) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:10:00 +0000

Here is the entirety of Ravi Mangla's story 1954, from his collection Visiting Writers:

Vladimir Nabokov bought my daughter a chess set, with pieces carved from sandalwood by hand. Every little girl should own a chess set, he said, and my daughter nodded in feigned agreement, eager to rejoin her friends. Late afternoon, once the guests had left, my wife sent me to collect the plates and glasses from the backyard. And there was Nabokov, crouched in the garden, his pant cuffs folded to his knees, following a caterpillar across his finger.

Go read them all.

Variations on the Sun

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Blackwell) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 15:26:00 +0000

An excerpt from Mike Kitchell's Variations on the Sun went up at Everyday Genius a couple of weeks ago. A couple of weeks before that, there was another one. I don't know what Variations on the Sun is, but I would very much like to read the rest.

More PokeQuotes from Herman Cain

noreply@blogger.com (Tracy Rae Bowling) — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 21:26:00 +0000

So Herman Cain, in the midst of announcing the suspension of his campaign today, also announced that he is a gigantic nerd by quoting the ending theme from the Pokémon movie. But why did he stop there? A wealth of talking points and life lessons can be drawn from Pokémon. Here are some he missed.

What PokéWisdom do you live by? What PokéValues should your ideal candidate espouse?