He introduced us to little magazines and literary periodicals by bringing a box of them to class one day and passing them around so that we could acquaint ourselves with their names, see what they looked like and what they felt like to hold in the hand. He told us that this was where most of the best fiction in the country and just about all the poetry was appearing. Fiction, poetry, literary essays, reviews of recent books, criticism of living authors by living authors. I felt wild with discovery in those days.

—Raymond Carver on his teacher John Gardner in 1983 issue of The Georgia Review, “John Gardner: Writer and Teacher”; stumbled upon in Shannon Ravenel’s Five Points essay, “Wild with Discovery”

I fished in Larry Brown‘s lake, which had good crappie, Florida bass, and catfish in it. (Brown’s posthumously published novel is called The Miracle of Catfish.) We chatted many times on his pier. Larry was great with his hands. He was finishing a solar-powered writing cabin on the south side of the lake when death by heart attach took him, a young fifty-three years of age. As Charles Bukowski says in one of his poems, “When death comes for him / It ought to be ashamed.” From almost zero resources except the books his mother got him at the lending library in Memphis and Yocona and Tula, Larry made himself a brilliant artist who knew his time would be short, with heart disease on his father’s side killing his pa at forty-nine, I think. His father was also a haunted WWII vet, bad to drink. Larry had 120 rejections before the Mississippi Review, a precious organ out of Southern Mississippi University, guided by Frederick Barthelme and Rie Fortenberry, took a short story. Then Shannon Ravenel of Algonquin Books discovered him and served as his exquisite editor and publisher in that fine house begun by Louis Rubin in North Carolina.

—Barry Hannah writing on Mississippi in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America

Triple Canopy 14: Counterfactuals

Without a doubt, Triple Canopy is one the most adept publishers at using the Internet as a unique medium with its own rules and possibilities (each issue brings with it an original online reading experience)—and TC also manages to be one of the best avant garde publications running in any medium. Issue 14, their “Counterfactuals” issue, is their self-proclaimed “first literary, or not not literary, issue,” and like most things put out by TC it is a mind bomb. The theme is summed up by Lucy Ives & Co. as “a sensibility both within and without form, genre, medium”—which includes diagram poems, performance pieces, semi-autobiographical surreal theater from Mina Loy, aphorisms from Sam Moyer, anthropology from Tan Lin, and more work way outside the box/screen.

Monkey Business 1

Thanks to the efforts of translator Ted Goossen and the editors of A Public Space, 2011 readers were introduced to the acclaimed Japanese literary magazine Monkey Business, edited by Motoyuki Shibata (curator, along with Roland Kelts, of the Focus: Japan portfolio in APS 1). According to Stuart Dybek’s letter inserted into the issue, “Each year, a magazine of highlights from issues of Monkey Business will appear in English translation via A Public Space…. The first issue features poetry, manga, a wide-ranging, in-depth interview with Haruki Murakami, fiction from Hideo Furukawa, a beautiful sequence of vignettes by Hiromi Kawakami, and much more.” The extensive, 50+ page interview with Murakami by Furukawa is enough in itself to make the issue a must-read. Adding Furukawa’s own story “Monsters,” Yoko Ogawa’s mesmerizing and disturbing “The Tale of the House of Physics,” and a manga comic based on Kafka’s “The Country Doctor,” sends the issue into the stratosphere.

Conjunctions 56: Terra Incognita

With TriQuarterly gone from the print world, Bradford Morrow’s Conjunctions is probably the biggest doorstop of a literary magazine around, and for good reason. Morrow is one of the best editor/curators of literary magic working in periodicals, and issue 56 of Conjunctions exhibits these talents, offering a kind of literary richness found little elsewhere. The issue reads like walking into a Cirque de Soleil tent, or making a film with Julie Taymor; everything pushes to (sometimes beyond) the edge of the extraordinary. The opening story—Benjamin Hale’s “The Minus World”—explores the lower depths, and sent me enthusiastically back to Mario Bros. video games after a decades-long hiatus, and Charles Bernstein’s manifesto-like “Recalculating” somehow represents both voice and anti-voice, entropy and container. Then there is Susan Steinberg underwater, Kleeman’s “Brief History of Weather,” G.C. Waldrep’s discretions, Coover, Straub, Marche, Swenson… I can honestly say I haven’t read the entire 380-page issue, but neither has it left my desk since it arrived six months ago. I dip in and out, as I would A Thousand Plateaus or The Arcades Project, and, as with those books, am consistently rewarded.

Octopus 14

Certainly there are an increasing number of poetry magazines online, but few of them give such a pleasurable reading experience as Octopus, whose 14th issue is yet again one of the most fascinating collections of verse around. (The reviews in the issue are also fine, and the “Recovery Projects” of older texts very admirable.) The work in this issue almost to a poem seems strikingly in line with the hybrid, rhizomatic poetry described by Swenson/St. John in 2009 (and very influenced by the New York School). But for me, this issue simply contains some of the most engaging, invigorating poetry around—for example. the following excerpt from the long poem, “A Geography of Pleasure,” by Amy King, without a doubt one of the best poems of the year:

…I have never had anything
to say in the face of such prisons. I’m open. My conversation
is a play on the stage of vanity, the who I fuck
and the why I am no boy, how I erase the space
of his mouth’s residence from my skin, how I was never
a room to his marriage plans. I meticulously color out
the ease of nonchalance, the temptation to settle
into permanent housing. Good fences make good cages
and good cages teach patience. Or so the ides of childhood
sell those skeletal portals. I always wanted
escape into dwelling but never held the map’s location.
I beheld the misprints. And ate that choreography…

ZYZZYVA Fall 2011

After threatening to for a couple years, ZYZZYVA founding editor and publisher Howard Junker finally stepped down at the beginning of 2011, handing over the reigns to former managing editor Laura Cogan (Oscar Villalon from McSweeney’s and San Francisco Chronicle took over Cogan’s former position). Issue 92 was Cogan and Villalon’s first issue. Though Junker did so much for West Coast writing and publishing, running an accomplished magazine with one of the most successful literary magazine business models around, with her first two issues in 2011, Cogan has brought out one of the most accomplished literary magazines in content and design I remember seeing in recent years; like a new editor arguably should, Cogan has put her stamp on ZYZZYVA, carrying the magazine to a new level of publishing. Wrapped inside some of some stunning new design work from Three Steps Ahead (I’m a pushover for nice endpapers and french flaps), the issue includes hilarious fiction from Tom Bissell, a band story by Will Boast eerily reminiscent of my time living in NW PDX, alongside more fiction, the usual fine art, and poetry—such as Heather Altfield’s “Houdini at 40″: “There is nothing / that disarms me like milk-cans full of pennies.”

1913: A Journal of Forms 5

Ezra Pound defined lit mags as the home of the avant garde. 1913: A Journal of Forms, published by Sandra & Ben Doller (aka Miller & Doyle), is the journal that seems to be most successfully following that tradition. The magazine is a reading experience, one that admittedly takes time to settle into, time rewarded a hundred times over. (I personally set this no table of contents, no page numbers mass of texts aside for months before reading it.) Intentionally or not, this issue of 1913 feels like one solid unit, a mass of boundary pushing, of pressing words into new forms, of writers so obviously invigorated by language, both its beauty and complexity: Downing, Bernstein, Ives, Mohammad, etc. Reaching again into lit mag past, this issue feels like what Margaret Anderson was trying to create a century ago: If I had a magazine I could spend my time filling it up with the best conversation the world has to offer.

Guernica—all of 2011

Some publications have a great year, with a consistency (and schedule) that make it difficult to isolate one specific moment. Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics, publishes continually fascinating issues twice monthly. Once every two weeks last year, I would lose 2-3 hours in the morning reading through interviews with Craig Thompson and David Simon, fiction from Jess Row and Laura van den Berg, poetry from Limón and Cortázar—not to mention new essays from Slavoj Žižek, Deb Olin Unferth, and John Berger. I began not opening emails from Guernica, not wanting to get lost in the texts, sending links into cyberspace. Sure, their staff has grown over the years, but it’s sill amazing this online publication could cover so much of the globe consistently so well—its literature, art, and politics—and offer it all up for free (with essentially no ads) is impressive, and deserving of more than just recognition: it deserves a wealth of readers.

Trivia: John Hodgman’s story “Villanova or: How I Became a Former Professional Literary Agent” made up the first issue of One Story, published April 1, 2002.

If we think of literature, in any form, as something that enhances experience in some meaningful way, and non-online literature enhances non-online experience, then, technically, online literature should enhance online experience. But most of online literature is just analog literature that’s digitally accessible (stories and poems online). Is there a difference between literature that just happens to be on the Internet and online literature? Have we seen any literature that enhances online experience, or just non-online literature posted online? Have we seen any online literature?

Rattapallax magazine launches VERSE: A POETIC MURDER MYSTERY on KoldCast.TV starring spoken-word poets Jon Sands, Bob Holman, Taylor Mead, Angel Nafis and others. Shot using the new Canon 5d digital camera in full HD, the series is about a young poet who discovers a lost manuscript, and is drawn into the New York City literary world with this, the only key to an unsolved, 30-year-old murder. Producer and publisher Ram Devineni of Rattapallax commented, “I am hoping this new video web-series will get viewers interested in reading more poetry.” He adds that “in the future more people will be reading poetry and literature online and on mobile devices like the Kindle and iPad and integrating video interactively that will add to their experience.”

From PRWeb

–Donald Barthelme, from The Dead Father

INDEX

first-person

second-person

third-person

long-thin

twitter-sized

square

with many paragraph breaks

with rhetorical questions

long

by a famous person

by an unknown person

*

First-person stories are fraught with scars shaped like “I”. These scars occur in every sentence. They’ve been in fights with bears, manually-operated lawnmowers, and women with pedicures. To soothe them, replace each of their I-shaped scars with a palliative “it” and reread twice thusly. They will complain at first. Just wait. They will thank you at the end of the second reading.

*

Second-person stories are very demanding of “you.” They demand that “you” take out the trash, “you” have intercourse with your cousin, “you” kill a lover in a cave, etc. Second-person stories will tell you what to do, but they mean to take you by the hand and leadeth you through green pastures, yea, though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you shall fear no evil for they art with “you,” amen.

*

Third-person stories, as their name connotes, don’t need you or anyone else. They’re fine just by themselves. They get persnickety, though, when they overhear questions being put to their omniscient narrators who, like the Wizard of Oz, are wonderful in some ways but snivelish in others. If you find the Wizard of a third-person story she will try to seem bigger than she is by casting turquoise images to obfuscate. Don’t be fooled: she wants you to slide the silk curtain away and let the sunlight hit her. She wants to be seen through, though she’s done a thorough job hiding herself.

*

The long-thin story is a story of dialogue between two synchronized personalities tuned like piano strings in a writer’s mind. They discuss war, windmills, menstrual cycles, police reports, and mysterious disappearances. They may talk on the phone or in the parlor or in a truck parked in a parking lot in the town where they grew up. The dialogue stretches down the page like a tape worm seeking refuge. Therefore, to remove the long-thin story, a cracker must be held at the opening of the mouth after five days of fasting to entice it to crawl up the esophagus. The story will starve. It will crawl up your throat to get the cracker. When it takes the bait, grab it by its title and pull it up and out of you.

*

The twitter-sized story says more or less what she is and is more or less than she says. She blurps, spurts, then silent-farts her narrative, which escapes into the air through a blow hole on her smooth back. The twitter-sized story must be consumed like popcorn, that relatively recent snack made from the ancient strain of budding plant (maize) that was grown and harvested, we must remember, in the times of Gilgamesh, when the first twitter-sized stories were written.

*

The square story swims in front of you like a blowfish. He demands your attention for a slightly longer period than the twitter story, but with the intention of showing you to yourself in the manner of the ever-so-brief. (This is different than the never-so-brief and the always-so-brief.) The square story is shaped like a frame of consciousness in the tradition of the pictorial theory of meaning, wherein a proposition is a picture that depicts a state of affairs. Accordingly, the square story may be framed and put on the mantel next to the picture of your three beautiful Schnauzers, whom you tell apart by their differently-colored handkerchiefs. The square story’s personality may vary in just this way.

*

The story with many paragraph breaks wants you to look at each of its parts. It is a Ford Model T that has suddenly taken on the soul of Woody Allen after Allen’s unexpected passing. It hiccups what it believes are well-constructed phrases and dialogue and description. The writer of the story with many paragraph breaks has fiddled with the format of the text in their word processing program such that they’ve processed the words in every way and have decided that, like doting parents of spoiled children, each sentence must be seen in the light of its own shining quality, which is obviously present.

*

The story with rhetorical questions is an impostor-sophist, a lawyer-story. Don’t believe it. Don’t look at it another second. It doesn’t understand itself. This is why it asks itself questions that it already knows the answers to. Calmly ask it to be still and wash its hair with a lice shampoo. Comb out the questions like parasites from the story’s curly locks with the understanding that parasites were created (by god or the random walk of evolution over natural selection or plasma-based aliens) to be what they are. They cannot help it. They are honestly parasitic. For this reason stories with rhetorical questions must be sung to with lullabies just before they’re flushed down the toilet.

*

The long story is an incredible blob that wants to take you into it’s jellied folds and keep you there until it spits out a better version of you. It thinks itself a giver of worthy gifts. Give it the benefit of the doubt. It is excited to see you, small though you are in its eyes. This may seem belittling. It is. But we all must be belittled at one time or another, and the onus is on the small if giants are to be conquered. Allow yourself to be surrounded by the blob of the long story. It will be uncomfortable at first–the first sensations of a blob will always demand fast adaptation–but once you sink in and trust it you’ll see its gifts and you’ll exit with new patiences. These patiences will help you achieve your goals, no matter they are.

*

The story written by a famous person has all the advantages. It has wealthy parents in a capitalist system. It has perfect teeth. It hangs out with the cool kids. It has all the clothes from all the commercials. It starred in the commercials. It is accepted as a genius by the department when it is still an undergraduate and is given a doctorate by the chair of the department. Pay attention to this story, but do so quietly. Watch it like the nerd watches the jock. Watch it like Heraclitus next to a river, repeating word “flux” yourself. Know that the story by a famous person suffers inside, just like you; that it is small and juvenile, just like you; that it has not asked to be what everyone supposes it is, just like you; that the material world is a world of hierarchy-makers whose gazes have just so happened to fall upon it; that its immaterial nature, its soul, is just as fragile as yours. The functions of celebrity over time have forced this lipstick upon it. But every story by a famous person knows that the roots of its fame are buried deep in the dirt. Listen, they are constantly begging with their birdsongs to be treated like everyone else.

*

The story by an unknown person is standing by himself in a convention center. Everyone around him talks while talks. He has traveled from South Dakota to be here, packed his big green suitcase. He has had his suit hemmed. He has purchased cologne and has used it. He has left his wife and child, who are beautiful and love him dearly, to attend this convention. His hopes are high and his confidence at the breaking point. He speaks as convention-goers pass his table by, looking at the bright displays of the stories by famous people. He sweats, wondering why he has come. He castigates himself and begins to think he should pack up and go, but the story from an unknown person continues talking, deluded by the dream he’s dreamed for so long in his sleepless nights: that someone will hear him, will find a melody in his voice, just as he has found melodies in the voices of others. If you are attending the convention, keep this story in mind, look for him–you will recognize his blue-green eyes and wavy hair. On your way to the big show stop for him and smile and listen. Everybody wins in this.

Armchair/Shotgun #2

New York City based literary magazine Armchair/Shotgun is looking for a new graphic & book designer:

Job Posting: Graphic and Book Designer

Armchair/Shotgun is seeking a graphic and book designer to assist in
the design, layout, and production of a Brooklyn-based literary
magazine which twice yearly publishes (on paper!) exemplary new
fiction, poetry, and visual arts.

Responsibilities:
- Layout of 150-page literary magazine twice yearly, including
typesetting, cover design, and interior design elements consistent
with existing design template and style.
- Design of supplementary materials such as posters, promo cards, etc.
- Coordination with printer on specs and prepress; approval of printer’s proofs.
- Assistance with coordination of visual arts.

Requirements:
- Strong working knowledge of typography and book design.
- Fluency in Adobe InDesign CS3 or above.
- Fluency in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator CS3 or above.
- Strong working knowledge of prepress color management and file management.
- Strong skills in prepress preparation of visual material (color and
file standards).

An ideal candidate will also have these qualifications:
- Commitment to building community by finding, publishing, and getting
to know emerging artists and writers.
- Interest in and knowledge of photography, painting, drawing, and multi-media.
- Flexible schedule (workload is heavy for 6-8 weeks at a time twice a
year, occasional at other times).

Location: Tri-state area, preferably New York City. The designer will
work from home on his or her own schedule, but should be able to
attend occasional evening and weekend meetings in Brooklyn and
Manhattan.

Compensation: This is an unpaid position as a member of an
all-volunteer magazine staff.

Timeframe: Immediate. Designer will begin coordinating with current
designer as soon as possible and assume primary  responsibilities in
August 2010.

Please send a cover letter and work samples (files or links) to
info@armchairshotgun.com. Work will be reviewed on a rolling basis
until we find the right person.

For more information, please contact info@armchairshotgun.com or visit
us on the web at:
www.armchairshotgun.com
www.armchairshotgun.wordpress.com
www.facebook.com/pages/Brooklyn-NY/ArmchairShotgun/302138571610?ref=ts

Dear Internet,

We are very excited to announce the coming existence of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. The Catalog is to consist of a series of blurbs/short descriptions of books that do not exist. In order to compile that Catalog, we have asked many of the writers, theorists, and text-makers we most admire to imagine that they’ve just read the most amazing book they’ve ever encountered and then write a brief blurb about the imagined text.

As many of you know, The phrase ‘potential literature’ is highly associated with the Oulipo group. We choose to use the phrase here because, as the Oulipo says, their project, properly, is to conceptualize forms and potential works: not necessarily to bring them into being. Literature is potential literature when it is that shimmering non-work of total possibility. Though Official only by way of titular hyperbole (itself, like the blurbs contained within, a kind of unfulfilled and unfulfillable promise), the Catalog will evoke a library of wonderful–maybe even impossible–books; books that, in spite or even because of their non-existence, excite and fascinate. Each paragraph will be the promise of the unopened book in the moment before reading.

We have been incredibly fortunate to be able to work with many fantastic people on this project. Willows Wept Press has agreed to release the Catalog in a limited print edition, and about 50 of our very favorite writers in the world have agreed to contribute blurbs. We already have excellent work on hand from writers including Vanessa Place, Diane Williams, and Warren Motte.

That said, we are opening the project to public submissions because, while we’re excited about the writers and theorists with whom we are currently corresponding, we are still looking for more talented minds whose texts should also fill the pages of our book. We have full confidence in you, readers, and would love to see your blurbs among the other terrific blurbs we’re collecting.

We have decided that the best way to go about exploring public contributions is to blindly review your texts, should you be interested in submitting a blurb for consideration. In this way, we will be able to consider the work you submit in an objective and relatively professional manner.

Also, know that we are discussing the possibility of an extended, online edition of this book–to be released after the book’s initial printing. We might find it wholly appropriate to save some of your blurbs for this edition, as we need strong contributions for both versions. All submissions will be considered for both print and online publication. Please note if you do not wish for your work to be considered for publication online.

So, to the meat of things! Submission Process:

If you are interested in submitting a blurb for consideration, please email potentialbooksbook<at>gmail<dot>com. Your subject heading should read: [Name], Open Blurb Submission. While it’s okay to have your name and maybe a cute message in the body of the email, your actual blurb should not appear in the body of the email. Instead, please send your blurb as an attachment. The attachment should NOT include your name. A third party will have access to the potentialbooksbook account and s/he will collect, number, and print each of your attached submissions for our consideration. Only after we have thoroughly read your submissions will we then pair them with their respective emails.

The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2010.

If you have any questions (not submissions) about the project or the submission process, please email either benbensegal<at>gmail<dot>com or erinrose.mager<at>gmail<dot>com. We’re happy to try and answer your queries and will be totally excited to learn of your initial interest!

Finally, if you have any suggestions of other writers we ought to contact (whether they’re your friends who are doing cool stuff or more prominent writers, thinkers, and text makers from whom you’d love to see a blurb), please send your ideas to either of the above personal email addresses. Your thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Thank you for reading this far and thank you, preemptively, for your mind blowing submissions.

Best,

Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager

benbensegal<at>gmail<dot>com

erinrose.mager<at>gmail<dot>com

potentialbooksbook<at>gmail<dot>com