NewPages Blog

A note from Andrei Codrescu, Editor of Exquisite Corpse:

Did you miss us? We missed you. It’s only been a brief eon but the idiots have taken over the world, and the internet is seducing us all into trading in our brains for beads. Welcome back to the Post-Katrina Resurrection Corpse, back from a dank hiatus of one year in a formaledehyde-poisoned FEMA trailer. We festered, we raged, we contemplated suicide, and in the end, voted for life because we are a Corpse already and we hate to keep on dying, just like the ideals of the Republic.

Our guest-editor for this issue is the formidable poet, publisher, New Orleanian, and homme-du-monde-et-de-lettres, Bill Lavender. Bill has ploughed through the accumulated debris in our trailer, turning over towers of submissions and lovingly removing mold and giving new lustre to tarnished but potent weapons of poesy, crit, and story-time. We will continue to exalt, irritate, surprise, be loving, merciless, and obscene, just like you.

Our Bulgarian genius, Plamen Arnaudov, has updated our technology so that the Corpse may flow continually, with updates posted as quickly as the zeitgeist requires.

We also welcome Vincent Cellucci, poet and chef to Our Gang, so that we might eat well while we tryst and plunder.

Readers, please come back, visit, and, most importantly, re-register to join our raiding parties, and ride with the Resurrected Corpse. You don’t need to bring your own horse to the raiding parties because we are planning (secretly) to offer ship cruises to our subscribers (it costs nothing to subscribe).

The Corpse is back.

Electronic Literature
New Horizons for the Literary
N. Katherine Hayles
Notre Dame Press
March 2008

“Hayles’s book is designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, and the complex and compelling issues at stake. She develops a theoretical framework for understanding how electronic literature both draws on the print tradition and requires new reading and interpretive strategies. Grounding her approach in the evolutionary dynamic between humans and technology, Hayles argues that neither the body nor the machine should be given absolute theoretical priority. Rather, she focuses on the interconnections between embodied writers and users and the intelligent machines that perform electronic texts.

“Through close readings of important works, Hayles demonstrates that a new mode of narration is emerging that differs significantly from previous models. Key to her argument is the observation that almost all contemporary literature has its genesis as electronic files, so that print becomes a specific mode for electronic text rather than an entirely different medium. Hayles illustrates the implications of this condition with three contemporary novels that bear the mark of the digital.

“Included with the book is a CD, The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, containing sixty new and recent works of electronic literature with keyword index, authors’ notes, and editorial headnotes. Representing multiple modalities of electronic writing—hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, narrative animations, installation pieces, and Flash poetry—the ELC 1 encompasses comparatively low-tech work alongside heavily coded pieces. Complementing the text and the CD-ROM is a website offering resources for teachers and students, including sample syllabi, original essays, author biographies, and useful links. Together, the three elements provide an exceptional pedagogical opportunity.

“N. Katherine Hayles is John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature and Distinguished Professor in the departments of English and Design/Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.”

Apple Valley Review
Volume 3, Number 1 (Spring 2008)

The Apple Valley Review is an online literary journal. It is published twice annually, once in spring and once in fall. Each issue features a collection of poetry, short fiction, and essays.

This issue features fiction by Kathy Anderson and John Lowry; poetry by Pat Daneman, Anna Evans, Lucia Zimmitti, Laurie Junkins, Brian R. Lutz, Lyn Lifshin, David N. DeVries, Elizabeth Barbato, Lori Huskey, George Moore, Tammy Ho Lai-ming, Julie L. Moore, and Mark Thalman; and cover art by Cynthia Tom.

News from the Editor: Apple Valley congratulates writers whose work previously appeared in AV: Kerri Quinn’s short story,“How to Leave,” was selected by fiction judge Merrill Feitell for Best of the Net 2007. Quinn’s story was one of only six selected for this annual compilation. “Pageant Queen,” an essay by J. W. Young, and “Island Fever,”a poem by Edward Byrne, were selected by series editor Nathan Leslie and guest editor Steve Almond for Best of the Web 2008. This print anthology, forthcoming from Dzanc Books, has an anticipated release date of July 2008.

We will accept submissions for our Fall 2008 issue until August 17, 2008. For more information, please review our submission guidelines.

Authors with Tattoos
Excerpted from AbeBooks

Authors just don’t spring to mind as the most likely people to have tattoos. But authors are showing their tattoos in publicity shots, they are arriving at award ceremonies with tattoos clearly visible, and they are loud and proud about the words and images that adorn their bodies.

Get that stereotyped picture of tattooed sailors and truck drivers out of your head. Tattoos are mainstream and have been for several decades now, plus the literary world actually has a long tradition of wearing tattoos and also writing about them.

Herman Melville wrote with humour about South Pacific tattooists and the tattooed in his 1846 novel Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life and George Orwell, who rarely conformed with the British establishment, had blue spots tattooed on to his knuckles. In 1951, Ray Bradbury published a book of short stories called The Illustrated Man – all the stories were linked together by a tattooed vagrant. Each one of the character’s tattoos had a story to tell. America poet and writer Dorothy Parker had a star on her elbow. Sylvia Plath wrote about The Fifteen Dollar Eagle, while Franz Kafka wrote about a nightmarish tattoo machine in his short story In The Penal Colony. The list goes on.

In fact, the book Dorothy Parker’s Elbow – edited by the tattooed duo of Kim Addonizio and Cheryl Dumesnil – reveals how writers have addressed the issues surrounding the needle and the ink including the actual process, the tattooists and their work, the reaction of friends and family to the artwork, mirrors, meanings, and even the tattoos forced upon prisoners in German concentration camps…[read the rest at AbeBooks.com]

“The Key West Literary Seminar has been drawing lovers of literature to our small island in the subtropics for more than a quarter of a century. Each January an audience of passionate readers gathers together under the tropical sun for three and a half days of conversations, readings, panel discussion, lectures,and festive Key West parties where it is possible to mingle with the world’s most illustrious writers.

“In 2009 we will explore HISTORICAL FICTION and The Search for Truth. Speakers will include Andrea Barrett, Geraldine Brooks, E.L. Doctorow, Allan Gurganus, Thomas Mallon, Barry Unsworth and Gore Vidal among others. This is sure to be one of our more popular events, and we highly recommend early registration.”

30 Years of J. Hoberman
Brooklyn Academy of Music
March 10 – April 3

BAM: “J. Hoberman is one of the greatest film critics to emerge from his generation—his writing is adventurous, erudite, and provocative, while simultaneously expressing a boundless pleasure in the art of cinema. To celebrate his 30th year as film critic for The Village Voice, we’ve asked Hoberman to select films that have sparked some of his most stimulating reviews and articles, as well as a few personal favorites. All text excerpted from reviews by J. Hoberman.”

The site includes a PDF of J. Hoberman’s reviews and articles for each of the films featured in this series. A MUST for avante garde film fans.

John Del Signore interviewed Hoberman for the Gothimist (March 5). Here’s an excerpt:

JS: Besides Manhattan, can you cite some films you reviewed that you feel differently about now?

JH: There are some films I like less, certainly. I liked Diva when it came out but I don’t think that held up as well. There are some movies I possibly appreciate more now than when I first saw them and Eraserhead would be one of those. I liked it but I didn’t realize how good it was when I saw it. I think there were filmmakers I was initially cool to; Abbas Kiarostami would be an example. It took me a while to appreciate what he and others were doing.

Unmarketable
Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity
The New Press

“For years the do-it-yourself (DIY)/punk underground has worked against the logic of mass production and creative uniformity, disseminating radical ideas and directly making and trading goods and services. But what happens when the underground becomes just another market? What happens when the very tools that the artists and activists have used to build word of mouth are coopted by corporate America? What happens to cultural resistance when it becomes just another marketing platform?

“Unmarketable examines the corrosive effects of corporate infiltration of the underground. Activist and author Anne Elizabeth Moore takes a critical look at the savvy advertising agencies, corporate marketing teams, and branding experts who use DIY techniques to reach a youth market—and at members of the underground who have helped forward corporate agendas through their own artistic, and occasionally activist, projects.

“Covering everything from Adbusters to Tylenol’s indie-star-studded Ouch! campaign, Unmarketable is a lively, funny, and much-needed look at what’s happening to the underground and what it means for activism, commerce, and integrity in a world dominated by corporations.”

Read the eXpress Milwaukee for a review and commentary by Michael Carriere.

The Kerouac Project of Orlanda is now accepting applications for the September-November 2008, December-February 2008, March-May 2009, and June-August 2009 residencies. The application period will be from January 2008 through April 2008. We will read the applications in May and announce the winners in June. The intent is to have four residencies annually: September-November, December-February, March-May, June-August.

We just got back from one of those refreshing getaways that help us to survive long Michigan winters and living in a small town. The event was “Writing in Public: A Celebration of Karl Pohrt,” sponsored by the University of Michigan and the support of the good people of Ann Arbor. Karl Pohrt is the founder and owner, for the past 27 years, of Shaman Drum Bookshop in downtown, a-block-from-the-university Ann Arbor. He is one of a dwindling breed of independent bookstore owners and book lovers who works tirelessly and with a continued passion to bring both new and well-known authors and important and sometimes difficult issues to his community.

There to celebrate Pohrt were guest authors Andrea Barrett and Gary Snyder, both of whom read on Thursday evening. On Friday, there were three panels: Literary Publishing, Writing in the Schools, and From Page to Screen. We were able to attend Literary Publishing with Sven Birkerts, Editor of Agni, Michale Wiegers, Executive Editor of Copper Canyon, and Rebecca Wolff, Editor and Publisher of Fence Magazine and Fence Books.

Each of these three speakers provided great insight into their particular niche of publishing. (I hope Michael will hold good on his word and provide us with a copy of his remarks to be published on the site soon.) Birkerts, being the college professor that he is, is the kind of speaker from whom I wish I could take a class, just to hear him speak. He is interesting, thoughtful and honest, and whether from reading his books or hearing him speak, always strikes a chord with me that resonates in my thinking for days, and, in some cases, years.

Birkerts talked about his daily grind as editor of Agni, of coming to work each day to find a mail bin filled with manila envelopes, most of which he knows will be returned to the sender. Each day, he enters and there’s a full bin, and when he leaves, it’s empty: “it’s the systole-diastole of literary respiration in the American culture,” he commented. And “rather than being cynical or jaded” about the repetitiveness of the work, he described it instead as renewing a feeling of “ongoingness” for him, to come in each day and see the bin refreshed with submissions.

The process, he went on to detail, starts with his opening each envelope, beginning to read, and “waiting to be struck.” He’s not “looking to determine the ultimate value and worth” of the piece, but rather is “looking for traces of something we would want for the journal.” How often I have heard the woes of editors upon reading submissions: “Don’t they even read our journal before they submit?” Birkerts’s comments hit to the heart of this, assuring that “it may be a great story, but not what we are looking for.”

And what is Birkerts looking for? He commented that his role is not in personal reading but rather “public reading: in the capacity as a representative of the journal.” That he looks at the work in the larger context of “what’s going on in our culture. What our culture needs. What there’s too much of in our culture. What’s under threat in our culture.” Surely, a huge role for any one individual to take on, but at the same time, the very reason Agni has been and endures as a leading literary journal.

Knowing that the majority of the submissions will be sent back to the authors, Birkerts commented that he makes rejections very carefully: “I’m aware that every submission that goes back, goes back to a person that invested a lot of hope in this.” Indeed, a writer friend of mine who has been rejected a *few* times by Agni said he was actually okay with the rejection because he at least got a note with each one. He felt his efforts had been respected, and in turn, he respected the rejection. What a great comment on the sense of connection and community inherent in the submission and publishing process.

However, Agni, like so many publications now, is turning to e-submissions. After the panel, I questioned Birkerts on how this process was going to change what he had so endearingly referred to as his ‘morning meditation,’ and I, his ‘zen process’ of handling manuscripts. He offered his cautious concern, indicating he was still sorting his feelings on this one, that, like so many of us who hold to our books vs. ebooks, he will miss the tactile nature of the process. Ultimately, though, his reconciliation was that the origin and the destination of literary submission has not changed, only the process in the middle. That the writer is still creating and making art, and the publication to which it is submitted still involves a reader who is making meaning. It seems to touch upon a “deep grain of literary opposites” he contended, yet at the same time, e-submission is something he believes will help offer a “kind of leveling” for those making their submissions (specifically, he mentioned receiving submissions from India; that e-submissions may open that international door a bit wider).

Perhaps for the publisher, this is true, but for those like my writer friend, I’m not sure getting a form e-response rejection will be a welcome component of this methodology. Let’s just hope if there’s a space for “comments” on those e-submission rejections that will allow publishers to continue (or in some cases begin) to maintain the connection between writer and reader by offering a few words in respect of that investment of hope.

Without a doubt, there would likely be fewer of those rejections if only writers would familiarize themselves with the journals to which they send their works. Sending out blind submissions with greater ease (I know it happens because NewPages often gets literary submissions for our “magazine”- ?!) or using database services to mass-submit to magazines the writer has never even heard of , let alone read, have become the downside of e-submissions.

For editors like Birkerts, who are seasoned professionals in their work, handling the onslaught may not prove as great a challenge. If the first few lines don’t ring true, Birkerts moves on. In a final demonstration of his process, Birkerts opened the most recent issue of Agni (66) and read the opening lines from Harrison Solow’s essay, “Bendithion”:

“Vulcans have an inner eyelid.

“On one of the episodes of Star Trek, Mr. Spock is invaded by a fatal parasite on a remote planet. Exposure to high-intensity light appears to be the only cure—a treatment that would blind humans. Because of Vulcan physiology, however, a hidden ocular membrane descends to shut out intrusive rays, and Spock emerges intact, undamaged by his contact with an alien world.

“It turns out that y Cymry have an inner eyelid as well. More like an obfuscatory veil than a solid barricade, it allows the Welsh to see out, but effectively shades the inner self from the eyes of the inquisitive, casting all that is behind it in shadow. It is a dusky looking glass, presented innocently enough to the stranger, deceptively luminous and reflective, its transparency clearly controlled by time and measured, in nanobytes, by trust.”

And Margo Berdeshevsky’s story “Pas de Deux, à Trois”:

“Ok, blond. Ok, fifty. Ok, an emotional centipede, a poet, a vagabond. Ok, she drinks tea with milk, café au lait, when it doesn’t make her breasts ache. Ok, is homeless in spirit and has a house between a sleeping volcano and the wind-slapped sea and nowhere—now she has a pied à terre in Paris. Lucky bitch. Wait. Needless. Survivor. And suckles love like every other human. Meditative. Can sing in an alto-husk sort of way. Can climb hills. Can speak French very well, Russian very badly, can say good night in Indonesian, good morning in Tagalog. Can dance a tango barefoot, worries about her shape, waltzes clumsily. Likes: nakedness, Renoir, early Picasso, late Pinter, late Shakespeare, early W. S. Merwin, nature, beauty, sex, cognac, museums, cello, empty space, solid oak tables, old torqued trees with twisted fattened trunks and dwarf red birds fighting over high notes, the taste of rain, the taste of sperm, the smell of Eau Sauvage Cologne for men splashed on her own skin, Fragonard perfume, the smell of darkest red, the smell of praise, bundled wheat, mountains, the cry that might be love, kissing, white silk, walking-boots. There are wiser women. The tests of our faith are like that classic: spin flax into gold, empty thimblefuls of lakes into thirsty canyons.”

After both of which he commented, “These are stories I want to know more about.”

***

In addition to having selections from past issues accessible online, Agni has started a new online exclusive feature through which they hope to publish as much original content online per year as they do in the print journal. But, don’t worry, for now at least, Agni has no intention of going completely online. When that happens, Birkerts said he would need to “go find a small patch of woods in which to live, if there’s any left.”

Hotel Stories
by Mike Tyler
Published by The Art Cannot be Damaged

When Tyler was on tour with the Nuyorican Poets Café, he was locked out of his apartment by a girlfriend. He moved into a hotel – not just any hotel, The Carlton Arms Hotel, on East 25th in Manhattan, where all the rooms are decorated by artists from around the world. Tyler found a home there, becoming the poet-in-residence for eight years. These eleven “hotel stories” cover everything from the sharp edges of intimacy and the posing extremes of a high, to the complexities of friendship and the philosophy of everyday life, all prospering or wilting under the atmospheric protection of anonymity that a hotel provides.

Tyler is a celebrated artistic writer, but more akin to street artists like Banksy (who regularly sprays his words) and musicians like Beck (credited by Spin magazine as influenced by Tyler). His work includes appearances in magazines, anthologies, college-reading lists, as well as three books of his own, and is an acclaimed and influential performer (infamous for breaking an arm while doing a reading).

Yes, NewPages has taken a foray into the wild, woolly world of publishing. Our first book is a collection of poems by David Fraser. Dave grew up in Detroit with the likes of Andrei Codrescu and Ken Mikilowski among his poet friends, and myriad other 60s artists and musicians, all before they became great, fizzled out, or disappeared. Dave may have left Detroit, but Detroit never left Dave, and his writing is a blend of brick buildings, hot pavement, jazz and indie rock, and the deep woods, cool flowing rivers and tempestuous nature of “up north” Michigan. He’ll be reading at his local town library in April, so we’ll see if we can get some decent YouTube video. In the meantime, the book is available directly from NewPages: catch it here. A limited number of signed copies available while they last; make a note in your order form if you’d like one.