March 10th, 2010
Flatmancrooked’s First Annual Poetry Prize ended at the close of January. The response was enthusiastic and a bit overwhelming. The editors read thousands of poems, then reread, and read again, whittling them down to this list of semi-finalists that will be included in Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetry, due out this summer. And the semi-finalists are . . .
“Crush” by Marina Pruna
“i,eve” by Christy Delehanty
“I Remember” by Justin Alvarez
“hollow phrases” by Diego Baez
“Americanism” by Diego Baez
“Pre-Linguistic Bones” by Gleah Powers
“Akimbo” by Amy Bleu
“Zoology #1″ by Jilly Dreadful
“Two Dot, Montana” by Micah Ling
“How I Never Want to Have Coffee with You” by Anna Clarke
“Wormwood” by Marissa Bell Toffoli
“A Life in Piles and a Hundred Goodbyes” by A. Ruth Macaux
“O Time Thy Pyramids” by James Benton
“Oceanus Pacificus” by James Benton
“Petrichor” by Shideh Etaat
“The Fistulated Cow” by Katie Cappello
“Enlightenment” by Samuel Slaton
“Something Like Five to Seven Years On Average Give or Take …” by Zachary Hill
“When You Told me You were From Sierra Leone” by Sara Stripling
“Dorothy Comes Home From Work” by Rebecca van Laer
“Tracks” by Emily Pulfer-Terino
“LA Confidences” by Cami Park
“Cape Hatteras” by Ali Shapiro
“Editing out the Mistakes” by Kat Jahnigen
“Konstantin Wakes Up Fifty” by Ronald Jackson
“Tend” by Rebecca Keith
“September” by Caitlin Gildrien
“On the First Cold Morning in October, My Cat Kills Another Starling” by Heather Lynne Mercer
“WALDEN” by Will Dowd
“Bridges” by Theo Schell-Lambert
“Role Models” by Kimberly Olsen
“To My Daughter Grace, Nine Years Old” by Christopher Locke
“The Karloff Egg” by James O’Brien
“Post-Op Image, 1984″ by Francis DiClemente
“Recess Beyond the Old Equipment” by David Cooke
“Russian Caravan” by A. Ruth Macaux
“Boston Elizabeth” by Christine Smith
“For the Sun” by Julia Halprin Jackson
“To Sally Hemings, slave lover of Thomas Jefferson” by Khary Jackson
“Love’s Austere and Lonely Offices by Thomas” K ORourke
“Stories” by Sara Stripling
“The Replacement” by Megan Moriarty
“A Condensed History of Parachutes” by Megan Moriarty
“Aftermath” by Brian Adeloye
“Descent into Phoenix” by Kristen Kuczenski
“And Then” by Heather Judy
These poems will be available for your reading pleasure, along with work from poetry giants such as Eleni Sikelianos, Forest Gander, Mathew Dickman, Andy Jones, Christopher Erickson, and Kevin Prufer in Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetics, available Summer 2010.
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March 8th, 2010
Kenneth Turan LA Times
Genre is powerful, especially in the hands of as gifted a filmmaker as France’s Jacques Audiard. His new film, the masterful “A Prophet,” is an answered prayer for those who believe that revitalizing classic forms with contemporary attitudes makes for the most compelling kind of cinema.
Part prison film, part crime story, part intense personal drama, this all-consuming narrative with the power and drive of a Formula One racer has been something of a phenomenon since it took the grand jury prize at Cannes last year. A “Sight & Sound” poll of 60 critics worldwide named it the best film of 2009, it’s one of the five foreign-language film Oscar nominees, it took Britain’s prestigious BAFTA award in that category and, with 13 nominations overall, it’s a prohibitive favorite to win the Cesar, France’s Oscar, for best picture. (Read More)
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March 6th, 2010
A.O. Scott of The New York Times has an interesting review of “Ajami,” Israel’s submission to the Oscars for Best Foreign Film. “Ajami” is opening in the States now to a limited release, so check your local times and listings.
Written and directed by Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab (who also plays an important supporting role), and Yaron Shani, who is Jewish, the film is acutely insightful about the social divisions within Israel, but it examines them without scolding or sentimentality.
There is no finger-pointing here, and no group hugging either. Instead there is a sharp sense of just how deep and wide the schisms are, not just between Jews and Arabs but also between Christians and Muslims, rich and poor, farmers and city dwellers, men and women, young and old and so on. (read more)
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Bye John Madera |
March 3rd, 2010
It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that city life is superior to smaller town life, to rural life. In “Surrender,” Maso describes how she had been hired to teach at Illinois State University, and how low her expectations were of living and working there, but also how her feelings shifted:
I was expecting nothing. Then, after a while I was expecting an extreme provinciality from my Central Illinois. But finally I came to realize that it is not more provincial than one of the minor cities: Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, say.
Maso’s eventual openness allowed her to see the Midwest’s beauty:
This land of stark miracle springing from the extraordinarily fertile earth. Flat earth. Where each night on the flatlands I dream of a curvaceous woman. She cups water in her hands. And I marvel at the beauty of the cornfields and the sky. Count pheasants. Visit what I’ve dubbed the Beckett tree, straight out of Godot. The land is breathtaking in its austerity, in its uncompromising forever, as gorgeous as anything I’ve ever seen. A different sort of ocean.
She also developed a real love for her students and wanted to “celebrate their instincts, their feeling for language, their willingness to try anything” with her:
Writing classes are about trust, of course, and after a while, in the safe place that we have created together they begin writing their dreams, their fantasies, their desires. What many of them write about again and again is a thing they have never seen—the ocean. I am moved by their longing—these children of the Midwest, these children of ISU—cinder-blocked, landlocked. They swim in high water. They never tire. They begin to learn how to write themselves free.
Imagine a classroom built not on stranglehold notions of discipline, of policies and procedures, but on trust, on reciprocity, on freedom, a classroom that’s a safe haven for, as Maso writes, dreams, fantasies, and desires.
My experiences in the classroom have rarely felt that way. More often, it was structured around fulfilling requirements, about having to prove acquisition of key concepts, about putting my guard up rather than being encouraged, and given a safe space, to be vulnerable. So, have you ever had an experience in the classroom where you were free to dream, to fantasize, to express your desires? Have you ever been in a classroom where you felt you could try anything as a student? as a teacher?
(originally published by and reprinted in partnership with www.bigother.com)
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March 2nd, 2010
Fresh off a buzz-generating appearance at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the enterprise and consumer electronics firm DMC Worldwide is in New York City showing off Copia, a new Web site offering a reading social network platform and e-commerce that includes a suite of linked digital reading devices set to hit the market this spring. DMC stopped by the Publishers Weekly offices to demo its social reading platform in advance of its presentation at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference set to open next week.
DMC is a 50-year-old private firm looking to invest in, produce, and market new consumer technologies. DMC Worldwide senior v-p Anthony Antolino said that Copia is the result of the company’s long-term examination of “emerging markets, content consumption, and what makes consumers tick.” Antolino described Copia as a “social reading platform that combines all kinds of content—books, movies, comics, music—and collaborative tools that let people read and enjoy books together, and, of course, it offers commerce.”
The hub of the Copia network/device venture is the social network, a Web-based platform that is free to consumers. It will launch a limited beta in March and a public beta by the summer. Antolino said that Copia offers a distinctive online graphical display as well as a search infrastructure that allows readers to discuss and compare books, but that also attempts to visually recreate book browsing. While Copia offers the usual social networking functionally—connections with like-minded readers; title and subject-focused discussion groups; the ability to compare book lists—the site offers its own nifty and intuitive ways to do so. (read more)
Bye Steve D. Owen |
February 25th, 2010
Daniel Grandbois, The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir, Los Angeles, Green Integer Books, 2010, $13.95
How shall I review The Hermaphrodite? One could simply label it a humorous book that revels playfully in the unraveling of received meaning, of apparent opposites, of anything under, over, or between the sun. To be sure, one could start with the tired and true convention of placing Daniel Grandbois’ latest hallucination within its larger literary context. One could mention his name along the likes of Richard Brautigan, Italo Calvino, Woody Allen, and Dr. Seuss. Yet does one truly experience the fundamental essence of The Hermaphrodite from this approach? Yes, you say, this is a fabulist work, Mr. Reviewer, I see! An enema for the habitually realist mind! Indeed, this assertion appears to be as true as “true” can be, but what of our sacred yet bowlegged hermaphrodite, its unfresh breath “pungent with the odor of protoplasm?” What is the meaning of this El Hermaphrodita? you demand. Meaning? I demur, sliding rather pleasurably into convention number two of my literary arsenal, AKA, genre identification.
The Hermaphrodite, I exclaim, could be described — like Grandbois’ previous collection of tales (Unlucky Lucky Days) — as a tour-de-force in various short forms such as the fable, the parable, the fairytale, the allegory, and the creation story.
But what does any of that explain? you observe, rather willfully.
Similarly, I shout, one could say that Grandbois has written in tour-de-force fashion a novel in prose poetry — quite often stunningly beautiful in its hallucinatory lyricism — wherein the sentence as a unit of meaning functions much like the line in traditional poetry, to undermine expected meaning, to defamiliarize rather than linearize: “Simone’s surrender commingled with the cotton fibers of her panties, staining them with fertility icons and incomprehensible crystalline formations like snow. Oceans can be drawn into glaciers to reveal connections between lands.” To expect the unexpected, therefore, is surely one meaning that can be abstracted from The Hermaphrodite’s often startling juxtapositions.
I hate the unexpected! you pout, packing your bags for an Iowa workshop.
Stop, dear reader, I interrupt, one can go even further and point to the journey as an essential form here; although unlike Cervantes’ Don Quixote, The Hermaphrodite’s cast of characters do not, as Milan Kundera says, “go out freely and come as [they] please.” No, here the journey is best understood as the multidimensional adventure of the mind, perceptually tripping balls off LSD/other hallucinogens: “One day, as Alfred was meditating in his tree, using the knocking of a woodpecker as his mantra, the significance of the hole became clear. It revealed itself as a kind of bird that took him in its beak and soared through the stratosphere and out into space, until the man’s humble hole took on the properties of an astronomical black hole, to which Alfred surrendered, as one must.”
Drugs are illegal, you observe, rather preachily.
Reader dearest, I sigh.
Yes, sir?
Just hush.
And finally, one would be remiss without addressing the supposed memoirist nature of this “memoir.” Just whose memories exactly are we remembering here? Grandbois? The hermaphrodite? The answer probably falls somewhere in-between, as most of the meaning does here, but one could read this as an absurdist’s metaphysical riff on humanity’s various and sundry attempts to find meaning in the world, which, of course, brings us rather happily back to the question of El Hermaphrodita. Just what the hell is it? Neither fish nor fowl, male nor female, the hermaphrodite lives happily “in the bliss of confusion, having surrendered unknowably to the unknowable.” And that, dear readers, is my final answer to you: The Hermaphrodite is all about reveling in the experience of life — however confusing it may be — rather than attempting to understand or categorize an enigma. Stop making sense, David Byrne says. Indeed, we respond, with a cockeyed glance, dropping the tab of Grandbois on our tongues. Oh, yes. I see now. Ah.
by Steve Owen
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Bye A D Jameson |
February 23rd, 2010
from BigOther – re: John M. recently quoting something that Paul wrote at his blog, and re: Roxane’s recent post and the resulting epic thread regarding writing and its worth, I’d like to pick a bit more at the bones of genre fiction.
I love genre, because genres are basically conventions. They’re expectations that both authors and readers (and editors, and sales people) bring to a text—suggestions as to what should be inside, and how it should be arranged. And I dearly love conventions, because they’re the very stuff of communication, and of artistic structure—whether we’re obeying them, or departing from them.
I’ve never really understood what some people mean when they talk about “exploding genres” and “writing between genres,” and so forth, because I myself can think of very little writing that is pure genre. Most literature that I read—even the more conventional things—already exist between multiple genres.
Consider The Lord of the Rings.
On the one hand, it’s a “pure” example of contemporary fantasy fiction. Right? Hell, it’s the cornerstone of contemporary fantasy fiction. And it definitely is fantasy fiction:
Sorrowfully, they cast loose the funeral boat: there Boromir lay, restful, peaceful, gliding upon the bosom of the flowing water.The stream took him while they held their own boat back with their paddles. He floated by them, and slowly his boat departed, waning to a dark spot against the golden light; and then suddenly it vanished. Rauros roared on unchanging. The River had taken Boromir son of Denethor, and he was not seen again in Minas Tirith, standing as he used to stand upon the White Tower in the morning. But in Gondor in after-days it long was said that the elven-boat rode the falls and the foaming pool, and bore him down through Osgiliath, and past the many mouths of Anduin, out into the Great Sea at night under the stars. (The Two Towers, Book V, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)
But when we look even more closely, we find that Tolkien’s writing contains traces of other genres. It’s contemporary fantasy, to be sure, but it’s also heavily inspired by Norse mythology, Old English and Middle English literature, German Romanticism, and Victorian children’s literature. Tolkien synthesized these various interests to craft a new kind of fantasy literature that differs from, say, fairy tales.
“Throughout the history of literature, writers have plundered modes, approaches, styles, forms, genres [...] practically every work of fiction you can name has borrowed liberally from history, biography, science, travel, philosophy, other fictions, and so on (and conversely, every work of history, biography, philosophy and such has borrowed liberally from other fictions and the rest). In other words, if interstitial fiction exists, then it is indistinguishable from fiction as a whole.”
And if we look closer, we can find places in The Lord of the Rings where Tolkien didn’t completely blend those disparate genres into a homogeneous fantasy paste. There’s more than one spot where one genre sticks out more than the others, like an undissolved lump of brown sugar waiting inside a cookie. As we read, we find the different genres receding and dominating, their conventions stepping forward at different times to control different aspects of the fiction.
For example, a friend of mine delights in pointing out the following section in Chapter 3 of Book I of the first book, The Fellowship of the Rings:
Just over the top of the hill they [the hobbits] came on the patch of fir-wood. Leaving the road they went into the deep resin-scented darkness of the trees. Soon they had a merry crackle of flame at the foot of a large fir-tree and they sat round it for a while, until they began to nod. Then, each in an angle of the great tree’s roots, they curled up in their cloaks and blankets, and were soon fast asleep. They set no watch; even Frodo feared no danger yet, for they were still in the heart of the Shire. A few creatures came and looked at them when the fire had died away. A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed.
“Hobbits!” he thought. “Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There’s something mighty queer behind this.” He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it.
This is the only place in the entire Lord of the Rings epic where the POV switches to a passing, talking fox. My friend argued that this was a trace of an earlier draft of the book, when The Fellowship of the Ring was still The Hobbit Part 2.
(As is widely known, when Tolkien found that he had no interest in writing The Hobbit sequel that his publisher wanted, and was instead writing The Lord of the Rings, he went back and revised even The Hobbit. The later, darker tale that he found himself really wanting to tell altered its more childlike forebear, which became a prequel—just as The Lord of the Rings later became a prequel to The Silmarillion.) (Or so I’ve heard. I’m afraid I haven’t quite finished The Silmarillion.)
Bakhtin tells us that all novels are shaggy monsters—some more than others, to be sure. But all bear traces of their construction, and obey influences from competing literary conventions that may prove difficult to reconcile. All writing inhabits a history, usually multiple histories, and it finds its place(s) within those histories as best as it is able.
Tolkien had other influences as well, some of which came later. Today, we read certain sections of LOTR biographically, looking at it through the lens J.R.R.’s experiences in WWII. Peter Jackson’s film adaptations (and thereby the conventions of 2000s Hollywood cinema) have influenced how many people read (or don’t read) the books. Before that, various sections were appropriated by the hippies; it’s hard to read the Tom Bombadil sections, and some of the Gandalf parts, and a tremendous amount of the hobbit/Shire/pipe-weed stuff, as anything other than 60s psychedelia.
Now, if you’re still with me, a few words about “high” and “low” art in regards to genre. As I mentioned in my first post at this site, T.S. Eliot stole lines from Sherlock Holmes stories while writing the inspiration for the musical Cats—deal with it, lit snobs. As Jeremy M. Davies then pointed out, more Holmes snuck into Murder in the Cathedral. Wittgenstein, around the same time, was sneaking out of Cambridge to watch bad Western flicks. It’s not just postmodernists like Pynchon and Acker who find joy—and inspiration—in popular art.
Or vice versa. Allow me to point out one of my favorite parts of The Lord of the Rings. It was originally pointed out to me in grad school by my above-mentioned friend (hi, friend!) and by my Milton professor.
You’ll recall that in Book VI of Paradise Lost, Raphael relates to Adam what happened when Satan led his followers against God. Both sides, being immortal, found their wounds closing up as soon as they were formed (just like Wolverine’s healing factor!). Yet all of the combatants felt pain, and the thought of endless painful battle put everyone into a funk.
That night, the opposing sides made their camps, and Satan knew he needed to devise some edge:
Deep under ground, materials dark and crude,
Of spiritous and fierie spume, till toucht
With Heav’ns ray, and temperd they shoot forth [ 480 ]
So beauteous, op’ning to the ambient light.
These in thir dark Nativitie the Deep
Shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame,
Which into hallow Engins long and round
Thick-rammd, at th’ other bore with touch of fire [ 485 ]
Dilated and infuriate shall send forth
From far with thundring noise among our foes
Such implements of mischief as shall dash
To pieces, and orewhelm whatever stands
Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmd [ 490 ]
The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt.
And so, foreshadowing their imminent fall:
Forthwith from Councel to the work they flew,
None arguing stood, innumerable hands
Were ready, in a moment up they turnd
Wide the Celestial soile, and saw beneath [ 510 ]
Th’ originals of Nature in thir crude
Conception; Sulphurous and Nitrous Foame
They found, they mingl’d, and with suttle Art,
Concocted and adusted they reduc’d
To blackest grain, and into store convey’d: [ 515 ]
Part hidd’n veins diggd up (nor hath this Earth
Entrails unlike) of Mineral and Stone,
Whereof to found thir Engins and thir Balls
Of missive ruin; part incentive reed
Provide, pernicious with one touch to fire. [ 520 ]
And the next day, when the battle resumed:
From those deep throated Engins belcht, whose roar
Emboweld with outragious noise the Air,
And all her entrails tore, disgorging foule
Thir devilish glut, chaind Thunderbolts and Hail
Of Iron Globes, which on the Victor Host [ 590 ]
Level’d, with such impetuous furie smote,
That whom they hit, none on thir feet might stand,
Though standing else as Rocks, but down they fell
The battle turns truly desparate then; both sides even begin throwing mountains at one another. (It’s like The Thing battling The Hulk!)
Tolkien, a tremendous Milton fan, pays homage to this in Book V, Chapter 7 of The Two Towers, “Helm’s Deep.” The plot, briefly: the good guys are holed up in a fortress that’s under seige, but that has never fallen:
‘Nevertheless day will bring hope to me,’ said Aragorn. ‘Is it not said that no foe has ever taken the Hornburg, if men defended it?’
‘So the minstrels say,’ said Éomer.
‘Then let us defend it, and hope!’ said Aragorn.
And at first they successfully hold off the bad guys (Saruman’s forces). But then:
Even as they spoke there came a blare of trumpets. Then there was a crash of flame and smoke. The waters of the Deeping Stream poured out hissing and foaming: they were choked no longer, a gaping hole was blasted in the wall. A host of dark shapes poured in.
‘Devilry of Saruman!’ cried Aragorn. ‘They have crept in the calvert again, while we talked, and they have lit the fire of Orthanc beneath our feet. Elendil, Elendil!’ he shouted, as he leapt down into the breach; but even as he did so a hundred ladders were raised against the battlements. Over the wall and under the wall the last assault came sweeping like a dark wave upon a hill of sand. The defense was swept away.
Two pages later, Aragorn reports:
‘[T]he Orcs have brought a devilry from Orthanc [...] They have a blasting fire, and with it they took the Wall.’
Devilry indeed. Saruman has copied Satan’s solution: to dig into the earth, and to devise gunpowder.
…Ultimately, it does him no good, because just as God sent forth the Messiah in his Chariot to defeat Satan, the chief good guys ride forth in their own Glorie, their “count’nance too severe to be beheld”:
And with that shout the king came. His horse was white as snow, golden was his shield, and his spear was long. At his right hand was Aragorn, Elendil’s heir, behind him rode the lords of the Houise of Eorl the Young. Light sprang in the sky. Night departed.
‘Forth Eorlingas!’ With a great cry and a great noise they charged. Down from the gates they roared, over the causeway they swept, and they drove through the hosts of Isengard as a wind among grass.
The orcs, we’re told, “cast themselves on their faces and covered their ears with their claws.” No doubt, like Satan’s followers,
they astonisht all resistance lost,
All courage; down thir idle weapons drop’d;
O’re Shields and Helmes, and helmed heads he rode [ 840 ]
Of Thrones and mighty Seraphim prostrate,
That wisht the Mountains now might be again
Thrown on them as a shelter from his ire.
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