Young Bright Things

Breeding and Writing: Teaching your baby to swear

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–by Tracy Lucas

 

My child learned how to swear a week or two ago.

He’s one and a half.

About a month ago, he dropped something accidentally and exclaimed, “Oh, SHIT!”

Of course, he’s still mostly baby and not so clear on enunciation just yet, so those particular syllables sound exactly like various other phrases he uses daily, namely “See it,” “Wassup”, and “Sit”. We chalked it up to that, figuring maybe he was asking to see (i/e/, be given) the thing he’d just dropped.

Sure. Whatever lets us sleep at night, right?

Well, yeah, not so much. The Saturday before last, all illusions were shattered.

My husband was doing some laundry down the hall from our living room, where the kiddo rediscovered a zippered bag of blocks he’d loved before but lost to the couch cushion abyss. He can’t open said zippered bag, and therefore has to get help.

He said, “Daddy, blocks.”
The daddy in question said, “Hold on a minute, buddy, Daddy’s gotta do some clothes first.”
Kiddo: “Daddy, blocks now.”
Daddy: “I heard you, I said hold on. Just a second, okay?”
Kiddo, slamming bag to his feet: “Daddy! Blocks, DAMN IT!”

Any pretense of moral integrity, gone. Whoosh. Watched it fly by past my hair…

But you know what you might have thought when you read that?

Not, “Oh, that kid should know better. “Probably not, “Wow, what a disobedient child that boy seems to be.”

Nope.

You probably thought, “Huh. They must curse in front of him. They should really try to watch that.”Possibly even, “Aww, that poor thing.”

I’ve thought it of others. In my less-parental days, I’ve judged them. I’ll admit it. At toddler age, nothing the son or daughter does is his or her own fault. The blame belongs to the parents, probably for a few more years, even. Everything is all my fault until he’s at least four or five. I see that coming. There will be school calls, I’m sure. (And given the other stories I’m not even going to tell you, it should be a hell of an adventure. But that’s not the point right now.)

You know what? Our characters are like that, too.

Anything we have our fictional folks say or perform is immediately ascribed to something that is in the author’s own realm of possibility. Anything we write is something we could do. Any opinion they express must be ours. We are exactly as evil as the people we manufacture out of thin air.

Aren’t we?

I think those of us who read enough fiction get it and can make the distinction, but the public at large? Nope. They see things as either autobiographical or flights of fancy which we wish we could live. (By the way, if you’re here and you know what a literary magazine is in the first place, you’re not among that category of readers. You’re safe.)

But say, for example, I write a hacksaw serial killer in as my protagonist, and even make you like and root for him. (Or her—wouldn’t that be cool? Jotting notes.) If I lend that story to a colleague at the office, she’s going to look at me differently for the rest of our professional relationship. She’s going to wonder—just wonder—whether she should be a little more careful around me and maybe not eat that last donut on the break room table.

If I show an abusive mom-and-daughter scene to my grandmother? She’ll say, “Oh, I didn’t know you felt that way about your mother. Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

If I write erotica, people will assume I’m a slut. Yet in reality, I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 22. Obviously, I spent that time reading—but that’s not what anyone would assume.

The first impression, unless you are submerged in the literary world yourself, is that the writer writes life. That some shred of the story is based in fact. That the mind of the difficult protagonist lurks hungrily in some dark corner of the author’s psyche, waiting for the chance to spring forth into real existence.

It’s the same with my literary babies as it is with the person whose diapers I change.

Yes, I’ve tinged them both (the person, not the diapers. Ew.) Yes, they came directly from me. Okay, so I swear in/around them, and that seeps into the color of those worlds.

For the record, he picked up “shit” because that—my stubbed-toe word of choice. My favorite word is actually George Carlin’s, but I can prevent it from slipping, and usually do. However, “shit” is what comes out when something”‘ sudden on TV, or a plastic elephant salutes into my ass on a kitchen chair, or I drop a glass and it shatters. “Shit” is for an accident, and I’m an insanely clumsy person. Believe me, he’s heard it. A lot.

And see?  I felt the need to say that. To add a disclaimer explaining my choice, my words, my actions. To tell you that, “No, I’m really a good person. I mean, yes, that happened, but here’s all the backstory so you will still respect me…”

And I didn’t even say “shit”—I’m telling you this stuff because he did.

Too often we are forced to apologize for our characters’ choices, story themes, topics, or dialogue.

Why?

Shouldn’t it just be that if people don’t realize it’s fake, screw them?

Or is there an uncomfortable truth to that whole alter-ego corner-lurker theory after all?

What do you think?

When you write, are you always in the story?

I’ve written some dark shit. I’d hope I’m not as fundamentally deranged as every character I can imagine. But obviously I’m still the person who thought that stuff in the first place then, aren’t I? And I could have (theoretically) chosen not to write those more troubling thoughts down for preservation. Right?

Who’s at fault?

The twisted author?  The ignorant masses? The collective unconsciousness, the hive mind, the overextended self-help book section, the all day CNN reports of raped children and looted buildings? What makes dark things happen in a story, and are they real if they do?

Does fiction have a moral obligation to be responsible?

Or does it save us from everyday obligation and free our minds?

What say you?

Museum Appetite 3: Context

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Many specific museum exhibits have stayed with me, for either emotional reasons not relating to the art, emotional reasons relating to the art, or on the basis of the art itself.   The last exhibit I really loved was called “Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary In Contemporary Art” from the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego at their La Jolla location.   I spent an hour walking through the exhibit on my way home to Los Angeles after a weekend in San Diego.   At the time, I had just begun planting the seeds for the novel I was writing and, as I walked through the exhibit, the broad concept for my novel came alive and my ideas snapped into place.   I felt like the exhibit’s curator, Robin Clark, had peered inside my head, glanced at all the half-cocked ideas that were swimming around in my brain, and decided to create something that would answer all of my aesthetic questions and finish my sentences for me, metaphorically.   I felt like the exhibit had been designed for me.   The thematic concept of the exhibit drew me in (from the museum’s website: “Automatic Cities explores the myriad influences of architecture on contemporary art production.”) and I also loved every artist, every piece of art.   I walked through the exhibit three or four times and before leaving the MCASD, I purchased the museum’s book for the exhibit, the first exhibit book I ever bought, because I knew I would want to remember.

The day that Automatic Cities closed, an exhibit of drawings from the artist Rachel Whiteread opened at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.   Whiteread was one of the artists featured in Automatic Cities, so I was excited by the opportunity to examine her art in more detail.   I finally made it to the exhibit of her drawings on the last day it was open, April 25, and I was frustratingly disappointed.   I didn’t like her drawings; they bored me.

The best part of the Hammer exhibit was arrangement of the pieces by the curators Allegra Pesenti and Ann Gallagher.   Instead of arranging Whiteread’s drawings in some kind of familiar taxonomic arrangement, they looked to the art.   Whiteread concerns herself with domestic spaces and buildings, her art is focused on architectural structures, so Pesenti and Gallagher arranged the rooms according to elements in a building.   Her drawings of doors were grouped with doors, her drawings of windows were grouped with windows, her drawings of floors and floor plans were grouped with other floors.

Whiteread is famous for her sculptures, not her drawings, and while a few smaller sculptures were sprinkled throughout the Hammer exhibit, the emphasis was on her work on paper.   Automatic Cities‘ Whiteread section had the same make-up, mostly drawings, with one sculpture, but I loved Whiteread when I saw her in MCASD and didn’t like her at the Hammer.   Context, in this case, is everything.   In the midst of a longer narrative on the influence of architecture on art, I liked her, she meant something.   Out of that context, Whiteread didn’t mean anything to me on an emotional or narrative level.   So instead of remembering her drawings from the Hammer Museum, I remember that the words “Floor,” “Door,” and Window” were painted onto the museum’s walls, separating one section of the exhibit from another.

—

Catie Disabato lives in Los Angeles, 5.0 miles from the Hammer Museum and 120 miles from the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, in La Jolla.   She has written essays and conducted interviews for The Millions and The Rumpus and writes about music for Venus Zine.

Dan Holloway’s Songs From The Other Side of the Wall: A Review By Amy Whipple

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While the big publishing houses continue to fret about the future of the book, Dan Holloway just keeps on going. Founder of the Year Zero¸ Writers collective, Holloway preaches free e-books and otherwise self-published items. Much of what he and his fellow collective members are fighting for is the continuation of literary fiction, a piece of the publishing pie that gets smaller and smaller as sure-thing profitability becomes less and less likely.Something’s working right on the Internet, though, as self-publishing starts to become less stigmatized (Steve Almond’s bold foray probably hasn’t hurt) and finds a comfortable home with the DIY crowd.

Which is how we get to Songs from the Other Side of the Wall, Holloway’s second book. Songs is the story of seventeen-year-old Szandi who “belongs neither in the West nor the East”, but in the middling place where “two worlds spend eternity almost but not quite brushing against each other — hearing the occasional whisper from somewhere they couldn’t quite place; but never leaving even the smallest footprint on each other.”

songs from the other side

As the novel opens, Szandi is called to the apartment of her fellow-artist girlfriend. Yang is the drug-fused whirlwind to Szandi’s grounded sorrow.We soon learn of a dead girl named Claire and a time and place a year before that had Szandi headed in a different direction, which we spiral back toward after Szandi receives a letter about her father’s ailing health.

In threads that shimmer like the novel’s central image of petrol-colored silk, what could have been weaves itself into every situation. The day the Berlin Wall falls, Szandi’s mother, Jennifer, abandons her week-old daughter. They do not meet again until Szandi is a teenager and Jennifer comes back to the Hungarian vineyard to research migrant workers, bringing along her English assistant Claire, who is possibly old enough to be Szandi’s mother herself. Though Szandi and Claire lock eyes through a window only once, it is love on both sides of the glass. Before they can talk — or Szandi and her mother can reconnect — Jennifer and Claire disappear once more. A New Year’s Eve explosion leaves Claire and her brother, Michael — a friend of Szandi’s — dead, and Szandi on the long trail of the love that never was. After taking a journey to London to see her mother and experiencing her father’s initial heart attack, Szandi snaps with the realization that she should be an artist, bringing her to Budapest and Yang. Throughout it all, she receives unmarked packages containing loose pages from Claire’s journal as well as a love letter from Claire.

Holloway writes Szandi with a winsome compassion. Think a European, lesbian Perks of Being a Wallflower, except Szandi is perhaps the one teenage girl in literature who has a good relationship with her father. Holloway also — and this is very much a compliment — writes of Szandi’s sexuality and relationship with Yang without coming across as a creepy guy who just wants to see young women naked with each other. The book successfully integrates the complicated, ethereal world of Internet communities, as when Szandi starts out as somewhat of a big shot on Michael’s band’s website. Szandi narrates:

But under the surface, in the part of the site that really mattered, the user groups and interfaces, it felt like a holiday resort in autumn,”  Szandi narrates in a voice indicative of the novel as a whole. “A few people were still hanging around, catching the last rays of a splendid but fading summer. They’d carry on going through the same routine, seaside tourists looking at the same postcards every day, eating the same ice cream every afternoon even when it was really too cold. But without Michael the heart of the site was shutting down.

For all its good, there are a couple troublesome elements in Songs.   When the story cycles back around to where the novel began, Szandi and Yang seem to have an entirely different relationship dynamic (one that changes their personalities somewhat), which leaves me unsettled. Also, one of the plot points is that Szandi knows Michael’s father — but Michael did not know his father.   I am perfectly willing to accept the father lurking on Michael’s website, unsure of how to reach out to his son; I have a much harder time believing the big reveal involving the father, which is frustrating. There are too many nuanced and well-layered elements throughout the novel to overlook such a clunker so close to the end.

Otherwise, Songs captures the dire intensity of being a teenage girl and how easy it is to become mired in the meaning of every fluttering movement and thought. As an American reader, I also found myself caught in the downright romantic notion of Szandi’s European independence. (She’s seventeen and tells her dad she’s going unaccompanied to London, and he more or less tells her to have a good time. In America, that’s called a fat chance.)

Songs is free as an e-book on smashwords.com and runs for a standard trade paperback price print edition on lulu.com. (If you’re lucky enough to live in London, you can also find it at a handful of bookstores.) The entire Year Zero¸ enterprise is perfect for e-readers, but I’m a grad student and thus had to come up with a less satisfying way of reading the book. Regardless, if the publishing revolution brings about more polished DIY books, then I am there with my nose pressed up against the screen.

Literary Los Angeles: Machine Project

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“Sound Synthesis Workshop;” “Intermediate Welding for Aesthetes;” “Paleolithic Bone Tools Workshop.”   Those are a few of the lectures you could have (should have) attended in the last two months at Machine Project, a non-profit arts and sciences organization that hosts workshops, events, installations, performance art pieces, and lectures on topics from crochet to sea slugs.   Their goal, according to their website, is “to make rarefied knowledge accessible.”

Yesterday I sat down for my second interview with founder Mark Allen, who moved to Los Angeles from Vermont in 1997 to attend California Institute of the Arts and founded Machine Project in 2003.   I asked him about the relationship between Machine Project and the city.

“Los Angeles is a little bit of a hidden city,” Allen says. “A lot of the really interesting cultural things in L.A. aren’t immediately apparent.   It’s a city that unfolds for you over time.”

Many people that live in the Echo Park neighborhood near Machine Project are still discovering it, Allen says, perhaps because the Project is located in an unprepossessing storefront that always looks slightly abandoned despite the fact that it’s staffed nearly every working day.

“Los Angeles has this unique infrastructure,” Allen says, “there are all these different forms of cultural production and unusual available spaces.”

When designing his own cultural production laboratory, he felt it was important for Machine Project to have its own permanent, bricks-and-mortar space.   They set up in a pedestrian-friendly part of town where visitors would have the opportunity to come across the Project by accident. (Many of my very favorite things in Los Angeles I came across on aimless strolls, by accident, including the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the former site of the Velaslavasay Panorama.)

“We wanted a venue where things could happen,” he says, “a meeting place for all these different kinds of activities, a model that allows us to be a tangible presence in the city.   We want to keep it informal and accessible, so people feel they can come on by.”

Yet on-site events are only part of what Machine Project does, and many of their most high-profile events (like their “takeover” of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) have been hosted elsewhere.

“This is a different model of growth than many non-profits,” Allen says.   As many non-profits become more well-funded and well-established, they seek to carve out a bigger physical space or to make improvements to the ones they have, ending up eventually as large, rooted, museum-like organizations.   Instead, Machine Project maintains their small, bare-bones home base while sending out satellites.   From Echo Park the Machine is slowly colonizing the city, showing up at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, then the Hammer Museum, then on the Santa Monica Pier.

This growth model is perfectly suited to Los Angeles, a city that likewise radiates from a few cultural centers and sprawls dozens of miles in all directions.   Los Angeles’ sheer size ensures that unfortunately, many residents of Westwood Village may never make the trek over the mountains to see a gallery show in Echo Park.   But by hosting site-specific installations at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, for example, Machine Project spreads its messages across a wide swath of the city while keeping its eastside headquarters small and easy to maintain.

In recent years they’ve partnered with the L.A. Opera, 826 L.A., Santa Monica’s GLOW festival, LACMA, and the Echo Park Film Center, as well as Critter in San Francisco and Cabinet in New York.   One ongoing project is a series of concerts at The Little William Theater, located in a coat-room in the lobby under the stairs at the Hammer Museum. Each week different musicians provide very personal concerts in this intimate space, which seats only two people at a time.

Machine Project’s proximity to the city’s entertainment industry also allows them to marshal vast talent resources in things like model making, lighting, props, and set design.

“I know I’m only one or two people away from anything I need, from a nuclear reactor to a glass eye,” Allen says.

(Occasionally Machine Project will also appear in front of the camera, as when their project to construct a forest inside the storefront later appeared in the film “Greenburg.”)

I suggested that one thing many people dislike about Los Angeles is how atomized it can feel — a lot of separate communities with their separate passions.   Does Machine Project’s very specialized programming encourage that kind of mentality?

Here Allen stops to sketch a series of diagrams on a piece of scrap paper.   First he draws a tall, thin pyramid that ended in a sharp point.   He labels it “Experimental Poetry.”   This represents one possible approach to programming: present deep knowledge of a narrow subject.   Experimental poetry experts, he explains, could gather for very technical disquisitions on their field of choice.   But once the organization had gathered up all of L.A.’s experimental poets, then what?

In order to expand their audience the experimental poetry organization could start offering a broader range of topics: other forms of poetry, or other literary arts, or arts in general.   More people would be interested, but the depth of complexity for these talks would suffer—the pyramid would have a broader base but a shallower depth.   (Here Allen draws a sort of ungainly, lopsided parallelogram.)

Machine Project, Allen explains, has a different approach to expansion.   If they want to gain a larger following—not just experimental poets but also arc welders, biological engineers, and Bulgarian folk singers—they simply offer more very in-depth, highly specific lectures on an ever wider number of themes.   (Here Allen draws a many-pointed star comprised of tall, sharp pyramids shooting off in all directions.)   With enough hyper-specialized workshops, you eventually get everyone, and no one is talked down to.

Nor must these populations of poets, welders, engineers, and folk singers remain forever separate.   The experimental poets who show up for one event may later come back to learn at least a little something about growing their own medicinal molds.   Now there is a core of dedicated Machine Project devotees that will simply show up for anything they present.

“I like the experience of being immersed in a new subject, of being in another world,” Allen says.   He recalls a recent Machine Project talk with Caltech scientist Jennifer Jackson on methods used to discover what elements are present in the center of the earth.   For about the first five minutes, Allen says, he was able to follow along gamely with the science presented.   Then for the next 20 minutes, he was in well over his head ““ an experience he finds pleasurable, not frustrating, a sort of aesthetic immersion in jargon and diagrams and statistics.

Immersive aesthetic experiences are guaranteed pretty much every week.   Up next at the Machine, Allen promises a “giant boat that will be sinking into the floor” alongside a series of nautically-themed workshops, and the special kids’ Partners in Crime event, where you and your child can learn together how to hot-wire a car.   Or you can donate a houseplant, as I will, for a month-long plant vacation where your neglected fern will be exposed along with hundreds of others to thirty days of cultural and poetic demonstrations in front of one of the Hammer Museum’s sunny windows.

Breeding and Writing: The Uterus Monologues

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–by Tracy Lucas

 

So here’s a question.

Why does having a vagina mean I have to love my work less?

Does the hard-wiring of labia production in a person’s DNA prevent the development of the gene that triggers professional satisfaction?

I know we’re years beyond the feminist movement (of which I’m not particularly fond, believe it or not, though I’ll never argue that it wasn’t needed or didn’t bring about some marvelous things.) I know women in the workplace are common now and that discrimination is mandated against and that it’s no longer P.C. to admit that you think a necktie could do a better job than a pair of heels.

I know all that.

But here I am, decades after this is all supposed to have been neatly solved, and I’m still catching flack for abandoning my family in pursuit of a career.

It’s more passive-aggressive than it was in olden days, to be sure. We’ve come a long way. But that mostly-unspoken bitterness is still there:

I thought you were a mother.

I’ve heard and seen it all. The forum flaming and name-calling when folks in the mommy chat site I visit realize that (gasp) I do more than make dinner, buy groceries and vacuum. The opinion a “friend” of mine holds that I’m a lazy and disinterested parent because I drop my child off at daycare through the week when I’m “only” working from home and can choose my own hours. The pitied looks my husband gets anytime he admits to someone older than twenty that he cooks our meals about half the time. The tongue clucks when someone overhears me tell my child to wait a minute so I can finish typing a thought. The haughtiness. The judgment.

Why is it so far from the realm of natural thought that I can be a mother and a writer?   A writer who loves expletives, erotica, and mindfuck stories, even?

Is that so much to ask?

Does performing my work on my own, without a boss hanging over me, make me somehow less of a contributor? Does it invalidate everything just because I’ve given birth?

People of all types breed and make more people. Then they raise them. Where do you think all the new wave hippies came from? Mostly from old wave hippies—and I think that’s a damn fine thing.

Fathers get lauded for playing with the kids after work. Mothers are chided for having gone to work in the first place.

I never meant to have a family. My plan from age fifteen on—I shit you not—was to be a crazy cat lady. That was my childhood aspiration when everyone else was going to be a vet or a teacher or a rock star. I fully intended to have a digital-ready, log cabin in the Smokies, a dozen cats, a hermit lifestyle and royalty checks landing in my mailbox. I had it all figured out, even down to the architectural layout for my one-bedroom, two-library home.

Actually, that’s still very much the plan, but my husband and son have turned out surprisingly cool enough that I’m going to let them come, too. Never thought I’d say that.   Son. I’m not a baby person. I’m not even that much of a girl person. I’ve always been a tomboy and felt more at home in an XY crowd than an XX.

Girls are too much drama. We’re too high-maintenance. For that reason alone, more than any other, I could never be a lesbian. I don’t have the patience.

(And yes, I’m aware that I have just stereotyped my own gender unfairly. That’s called a double-standard. Women can create those, too.)

Male relationships just make more sense to me across the board. The rules are simpler. My guy friends have never been mad at me for not calling for a month. (Nor vice versa.) My boys have never whispered behind my back when I went to the bathroom, tried to steal my clothes or rolled their eyes at my lame humor. They just go with it or don’t. There are no emotional games.

I hoped, once I made peace with the fact that yes, I really, really, really, really was pregnant and there was no going back, that I would have a boy. Not for one minute did I feel like it would be a girl. I didn’t look at frilly things, or yearn for hair-bows, or even pick a girl name. I dreamed at twelve weeks gestation that a boy it would be; and a boy it certainly was. (Granted, I also dreamed it was twins the week before that, but we dodged that bullet somehow!)

I would have loved a little girl. Of course I would have. She would have been mine and I’d have probably bought into all the pinkness and lace eventually. I’m even leaning that way for next time, if there’s in fact a next time and we do all that baby-making stuff again. I think I’m ready for that. I think I’d like to meet her.

But I’ve gotta tell you, I was nothing short of absolutely thrilled when the ultrasound tech squirted that cold-ass jelly on my belly and announced that I was having a boy.

My dreams weren’t Barbies and My Little Pony dolls. They were tee-ball coaching, and Hot Wheels, and denim and rocks and mud and worms and toothless grins under mottled hair.

Though it didn’t figure into my own reasoning for desiring a son, one of my father—s favorite things to say has always been that boys were far easier to raise than girls—and this was coming from a man who had six kids, so I suppose he should know. “You can’t yell at girls,”he said. “Boys, you can tell to sit down and shut up and they’re fine with it. Girls will cry and make you feel bad and ask you why you don’t love them anymore.”

Females tend to be catty and vindictive. (Me, too, so don’t get huffy. We just are.)

Guys don’t judge each other that way.

Women, why do we? Why aren’t we kinder to each other?

Why the hell do you care whether I breast-feed or buy bottles? Why does it matter if my son, a random child who you don’t know, colors happily with some other kids while I bring home some bacon myself? Why does it personally offend everyone if I’m my own damn kind of mother?

I’ve never gotten it, and I doubt I ever will.

But one thing I do know… I’m whoever the hell I want to be, regardless of whether a mini-person once burst forth from my loins. You choose your own mantle. You pick your own path. If nothing else, I hope the one human I’m in charge of raising for a while learns that for himself and has the courage to live it.

Even if his mama’s a little off her rocker.

And even if she’s more “person” than “girl.”

PANK Contributors Continue to Represent!

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Before you read this, make sure you are seated securely. Take a deep breath. Prepare to be BLOWN AWAY because our contributors have truly outdone themselves this week.

In case you forgot, there is a really interesting, awesome, moving, odd new issue of PANK. Check it out.

At Metazen, xTx writes about a noodle lover and she is interviewed by Fiction Daily. You can also read her story Ready at Necessary Fiction along with a reflection.

While at Necessary Fiction, check out Roland Goity’s From the Ruins and Be Like Us and We Will Like You Maybe by Amber Sparks.

Dark Sky interviews J. Bradley. Go, read, learn things about our Interview Editor. You can also find Ethel Rohan shining her spotlight on Matt Bell.  Jen Percy interviews April Somdahl at The Rumpus. At the Bees Knees, Nicelle Davis interviews contributors Melissa Broder and J. Bradley.

Read Gifts We Are About to Receive by Rion Amilcar Scott at Toasted Cheese. He also  writes about the day that brought power to the people at Tattoo Highway.

Meg Pokrass writes Ethel Rohan’s life story on a postcard and she does some animation at Dark Sky.

Super Arrow 2 is flying straight and true. Read work from Phil Estes.

One of our favorites, The Northville Review, includes writing from Chris Tarry, Gary Moshimer, and Lakers fan Mel Bosworth.

There’s a story from Adam Moorad in Acreage.

Enjoy Meg Pokrass’s Hunting at Dark Sky Magazine.

Alexandra Isacson is Making Ends Meet in Arizona at Staccato Fiction.

There’s a new issue of The Potomac Journal which includes work from Laura McCullough.

Have you checked out A-Minor, edited and published by Sheldon Lee Compton, yet? If you do, you can read The Colonel’s Young Lover by Kyle Hemmings.

PANK contributors are really representing in the June issue of The Collagist with work by Kate Wyer, Matthew Kirkpatrick, Brian Kubarycz, and a book review from Anne Valente.

The June issue of Gigantic features forthcoming contributors Luca Dipierro and Jen Gann. Jen also has work at Annalemma.

I am giddy about Wrter’s Bloc 12. Movie Marquees! Troy Urquhart, Alexandra Isacson, Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, and much more.

Keyhole Press will be releasing stories from Matt Bell’s forthcoming collection, How They Were Found over the next while. Start with Bell’s imaginative  The Cartographer’s Girl which I originally read and loved in Gulf Coast.

David Peak has a story in For Every Year. You can also read an interview with David by Christopher Newgent.

Fictionaut Five shines its spotlight on Jensen Beach.

In the June issue of Word Riot, work from JA Tyler.

Ray Succre’s poetry is up at The Red Ceilings.

We want to congratulate submitter and someday contributor Nicole Scarpetto Monaghan whose story The Little Room Where They’d Fit took first place in the flash fiction contest at the Philadelphia Writer’s Conference. We’ve read that story and it’s quite wonderful.

Check out this promo of Mel Bosworth’s book Grease Stains, Kismet and Maternal Wisdom.

You were totally blown, right?

Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter — A Review By Salvatore Pane

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In 1989, my parents bought me a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas. I was four years old and this was, unequivocally, the happiest moment of my entire life. This is not an uncommon story; the NES sold more than 61 million copies. But what’s always stayed with me is the durability of that memory. I can picture opening that Nintendo for the first time so vividly, and I’ll never forget the contours of the NES controller or the orange and gray gun that came with the system. Today, even as I’m beginning to forget the voices of dead relatives or friends, I can still hear the laughing dog in Duck Hunt. I can still hear the Moon level theme in Ducktales or the one-up sound effect in Super Mario Bros. 3. This is all to say that these games, these artificial worlds, meant something to me and have made an impression that has lasted for over twenty years. This is all to say that I am the ideal reader for Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

Bissell is a writer I’ve admired for a long time. He published a short story in Best American a few years back and his nonfiction is often touted as some of the best in the literary world. Earlier this year, The Guardian posted one of the essays from Extra Lives that detailed Bissell’s descent into a coke-fueled Grand Theft Auto IV addiction, and almost immediately his new book shot to the top of my MUST READ NOW list. Extra Lives does not disappoint. For decades, video game analysis has languished at two polar extremes. On one hand is the fan press, websites aimed at the extreme 18-49 male market like IGN and Gamespot. On the other hand is the turgid muck of critical theory represented by tomes like Persuasive Games and The Exploit. The former is akin to seeking literary discussion from Spike TV, and the later is so mind-numbingly dry you often forget they’re writing about digital ninjas that run around hacking sentries to pieces. Extra Lives changes all that. Without a doubt, this is the book people will recommend when asked for a text that takes video games seriously as a phenomenon, manifestation of digital culture, and even as an art form. And guess what? It’s actually readable!

The nine thematically linked essays included here run the gamut between designer profile pieces to serious analysis of imagery heavy games. The designer profile essays are some of the most accessible. Even if you know nothing about gaming, you can read these essays and catch a glimpse of the bizarre type of hybrid engineer/artists that are fueling an entertainment industry that generates more annual revenue than Hollywood. Calling these people eccentrics would be a compliment. Take for instance, the legendary Peter Molyneux, the brain behind the Fable series, who gives Bissell this choice quote when asked if games will one day have a Sistine Chapel equivalent:

If I were to draw on the wall what a computer-game character was just twenty years ago it would be made up of sixteen-by-sixteen dots– We’ve gone from that to daring to suggest we can represent the human face. And pretty much everything we’ve done, we’ve invented— There weren’t any books on this stuff– Painting the ceiling on the Sistine Chapel? No. We had to invent the paint– There is not another form of technology on this planet that has kept up with games. The game industry marches on in this way because it has this dream that, one day, it’s going to be real. We’re going to have real life. We’re going to have real characters. We’re going to have real drama. We’re going to change the world and entertain in a way that nothing else ever has before.

Holy shit! Are these guys insane or just geniuses? Bissell doesn’t tip his hat either way, letting readers come to their own conclusions. He even breaks down the nerdy engineer stereotype and shows us a whole host of unsuspected characters. The sports car driving, playboy designer, the tormented artist designer, the sci-fi novelist designer: Bissell includes them all, and most importantly, he never reduces them to geek stereotypes. He writes with empathy.

The other type of essay in the book—serious, thoughtful takes on some of the modern era’s most beloved games—works even if you’ve never played the games in question. The four major essays in the vein focus on Fallout 3, Mass Effect, Resident Evil and Bioshock. I’ll admit that I’ve only played the one game on that list released in the ’90’s, but I had absolutely no problem following along with Bissell’s examples or logic, and even found myself dying to get my hands on one of the newer games explained as “a gameworld exploration of the social consequences inherent within Ayn ‘s Objectivism.” This is light years ahead of the game reviews I remember reading years ago in GamePro, often written by people with names like Johnny Ballgame and Lawrence of Arcadia. Extra Lives is so unique because although Tom Bissell is unquestionably a fanboy, he does not view video games with the rosy-colored lens of the fanboy. He comes at games from a literary perspective, and that makes all the difference. Mark my words, Extra Lives will be heralded as a game changer for video game analysis in the same way that Andre Bazin’s texts impacted the world of film criticism.

Obviously, it’s no secret that I savored each and every page of Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives. Anyone with a background like mine—people who have racked up literally hundreds of hours controlling digital avatars—absolutely must read this book. Bissell writes with emotion and life; none of these essays are stuffy. But what about the more traditional readers, people who would never dream of actually spending a few minutes in the Mushroom Kingdom, let alone a few years? Extra Lives may be even more important for them. If Peter Molyneux is right, and we’re only a few decades away from a form of media that’s going to “change the world and entertain in a way that nothing else ever has before”, then this is the ground floor introductory course into the evolving landscape of digital culture. This is a required text for anyone interested in the way media is fundamentally altering the human being.

Museum Appetite 2: The Mixed-Up Files

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Six weeks ago, I spent the night in UCLA’s Hammer Museum during an event called the Dream-In, curated in conjunction with the Machine Project and artSpa. The Dream-In was an investigation of dreams and dreaming, held in conjunction with the Hammer’s Red Book exhibit, the first public presentation of Carl Jung’s rarely seen text on dreaming. My good friend and performance artist/musician, Claire Cronin, was invited by the Machine Project — a “non-profit community space in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food,” according to their website — to lead a dreaming workshop.

Claire told me to sign up as soon as the $25 tickets went on sale and I did.   Most of our friends who tried to get tickets were unsuccessful; the event sold out very quickly.

Claire’s involvement alerted me to the event, but I would’ve been excited to attend even if she wasn’t participating.   I hoped to live out a childhood fantasy of becoming Claudia Kincaid, the 11-year-old protagonist of the young adult novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. In the book, Claudia runs away form home and lives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.   As an 11-year-old girl, I imagined running away to the Art Institute of Chicago and surviving like Claudia survived: sleeping in on the antique beds, bathing in the fountain and living on the coins people throw in to make a wish.   Though I did not expect to bathe in any fountain (or at all), I had wanted the Dream-In to feel like I was violating the sacred space of the museum.

It was nothing like that.   There were too many people in the museum with me and the event was too regimented by museum staff to feel like I was defiling some kind of barrier.   The closest I came to breaking the rules was smuggling little bottles of Sutter Home wine in my overnight bad (alcohol was forbidden) and drinking them secretly, avoiding discovery, and turning away from the pack of photographers that were documenting the event.

Even without magically transforming into Claudia Kincaid and satisfying my childhood self, I enjoyed the event.   Claire’s seminar on Yoga Nidra, or yogic sleep, was illuminating and extremely satisfying.   The musicians that played “bedtime music” were mostly good and drinking illegal wine was fun.   The sleeping areas were nice enough; the bulk of the gallery spaces are built around an inner courtyard, where some people slept.   The others, including me, slept on the second floor balcony that overlooked the courtyard.   We were assigned designated “campsites,” big enough for two.   We went to bed early and I slept poorly; it was an extremely cold night and the marble floor of the courtyard was very hard.

The next morning, I woke up with the sun, walked to the Coffee Bean down the street to get coffee, and returned to the museum to watch Claire play wake-up music.   Then we packed and left by the designated time of 9am.   The Hammer staff needed to get us out early so they could pull up the masking tape denoting the campsite areas and clean up after us before the museum reopened at 11am.   The event was fun, but it wasn’t what I wanted it to be.

The next Monday, the Hammer and the Machine Project started posting pictures from the event.   They had also complied a video of people explaining their dreams; I had volunteered to be woken up at 6:45am and talk to the camera.   (I show up in the video at 11:50, in a brown sweatshirt, cuddling my brown comforter.)

As I was looking at the pictures and watching the video, I realized that the Dream-In was a kind of exhibit, a one-night performance art piece.   The dreaming workshops and music and sleepover setting were intended to educate and inspire us, but the event as a whole was a piece of art that had no audience except its participants.   Actually, we were both part of the piece, moving around the museum at night, and audience, watching the other attendees as they moved around the museum.   The Hammer Museum employees herded us into designated campsites in the courtyard the way exhibit curators arrange pieces of art on the walls of the museum.

Even though I had an emotional response to both Claire’s workshop and the event as a whole, thinking of myself as a piece of art, or even as a cog in a machine of a performance piece masterminded by the Machine Project and the Hammer, inspires me just as much as participating in the event did.   I like to think of myself as part of a painting hanging on the wall and — as an extension of that idea– feeling like the Dream-In wasn’t really meant for me.   I’m not really sure who it was for, but I think it was successful.

—

Catie Disabato lives in Los Angeles, 5.0 miles from the Hammer Museum.   She has written essays and conducted interviews for The Millions and The Rumpus and writes about music for Venus Zine.

June Subscription Drive

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It’s still June, oh, happy days, and we’re still holding our subscription drive. We know, you’ve already bought PANK. Thanks for that. But have you shilled for us yet? Have you gone out there and canvassed the neighborhood, proselytizing and spreading the good news? Go forth, PANKsters, and speak the truth that the people might be redeemed. Paint a bread board, hang it from your shoulders, walk the neon streets at dawn. From every mountain top let the word be bellowed forth, PANK is awesome, buy some PANK! Go time.

Connected: The Web (2.0) of Literature & Strangers by Mensah Demary

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It’s easy to forget the breadth and scale of the world’s literary landscape. Millions of books from all cultures, all perspectives and should one step out of his comfort zone, out of the few genres and authors that move and excite him, the vast literature universe can be disorienting, disconcerting. Even those who consider themselves “well read” must ask, “What else is out there?”

Behind me as I type, two bookshelves dominate the living room. Many of the books were procured by my fiancee during her undergrad and grad school studies. When we moved in together, I lugged three, maybe four boxes of her books up the stairs, impressed by her voracity for literature, albeit necessary for her BA in English and eventual MFA.

Before she moved in, I had my own small bookcase, enough to hold my own collection: a hodgepodge of poetry books, novels and biographies amassed during my years in Washington DC. I peeled the tape from the boxes, and stared at the various titles printed on spines, titles foreign to me. Her collection dwarfed mine three or four times over.

I suppose I had an opportunity to feel inadequate; instead, I took the high road, wanting to read more for reading’s sake, as opposed to some fictitious competition between lovers. I will say, for disclosure’s sake, I did feel competitive—to faceless writers, those who devoured books as part of their matriculation, who could quote the most obtuse Proust passage without spilling a drop of Guinness or Shiraz.

That said, I figured I could start reading my fiancee’s books, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted to start with myself: my tastes, my desires, my favorite things. From there, I could not only learn more about myself as I took the first steps out of my comfort zone, but perhaps discover the limitations of my own perspective—then expand it while, at the same time, approach it from a more nuanced angle.

I use the internet, the interconnectivity of servers and ethernet cables, to fill a literary void in my “real” life. Not just the likes of Amazon, but keeping my virtual ear to the ground, remaining tuned to the cyber streets, to catch wind of a good book or, better yet, a masterwork collecting dust in a publisher’s warehouse near you.

My favorite podcast is the New Yorker’s monthly fiction program. A writer, once published in the magazine, reads his or her favorite New Yorker short story. Though the story was discussed by author Edwidge Danticat, Junot Diaz recorded a reading of “How To Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie,” from his collection  Drown. This was how I discovered Diaz, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning  The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the writer who changed my life for reasons beyond the scope of this little bit of prose.

Technology and social platforms are as useful as you make them. While it’s hip and contrarian to shit on Twitter as micro-banality, with ‘s oft-played-out quips about tweets on users’  breakfast menus and bathroom habits, its reach and ability to connect, to relay information, is so powerful, it made Facebook publicly and shamelessly bite Twitter’s style.

Follow along, if you don’t mind.

I used to follow a particular novelist’s blog. Through this ‘s list of links, I found another blogger, my current favorite. When I gave Twitter a second chance, I became a follower of my favorite blogger and, after the blogger followed me back, I ran into a short story writer who followed my favorite blogger (stay with me).

The short story writer raved about a book that just dropped, from an author whose name was vaguely familiar to me. Soon, others in my Twitter timeline echoed her sentiments and, me being human and on a mission for more books, I couldn’t resist. Through 140 character recommendations, I purchased two of the author’s books, his story collection and the novel that dominated my Twitterverse for about a week.

Twitter introduced me to Victor LaValle. I remembered his name because of his collection.  Slapboxing With Jesus was in my hands years ago, at the bookstore that once employed me. I picked it up because of its title, a quote from Ghostface ‘s “Daytona 500″ from the classic album  Ironman. While the collection was good, albeit in the vein of Diaz’s  Drown, LaValle’s  Big Machine, his second and latest novel, was one of the best books ‘ve read—ever. Octavia ‘s death left a hole in my heart; her novels lit a spark that  Big Machine doused with gasoline.

And without the internet in general, the following books would remain unknown to me: David ‘  Reality Hunger, Elif Batuman’s  The Possessed, Alexander ‘sEdinburgh (and through his blog, the dope  Astonishing X-Men series written by Joss Whedon), Roberto Bolano’s  The Savage Detectives,   James Hynes’  Next, Ralph Wiley’sWhy Black People Tend to Shout, Yann Martel’s  The Life of Pi, Denis Johnson’s  Jesus’ Son, Francis Flaherty’s  The Elements of Story, and on. And on. And on.

Someone once said, “writers read,”  so color me committed to the craft. After reading a good book, I go through my emulative phases, like other writers, deconstructing the elemental makeup of Nabokov’s  Speak, Memory (to no avail, I can assure you) in order to find a new way to arrive at the most daunting of solutions: writing a good story.

And yet, it’s impossible to distill the impact of wanting to read more—and finding online avenues to achieve this—on my personal, professional and creative lives. The best literature impales your perspective years after you closed the book, placed it on the shelf, lent it to a friend (to then never see it again). As much as they’re meant to be read, books are lived as well.

But if you held a gun to my head, and asked me to venture a guess, then I’ll say this much.

Angela Nissel was once the webmaster of Okayplayer.com, the official site of my favorite hip-hop group, The Roots. She soon became a screenwriter for the show  Scrubs and eventually wrote her memoir,  Mixed, on her life as a biracial woman. I read her book because she was funny as hell on Okayplayer and I wanted to support her efforts. I remember feeling some kind of way when I read her chapter detailing her stint in a psychiatric hospital, treated for Depression. Four months later, I was diagnosed with Depression.

The symptoms were upon me before I read her book, but I had no name with which to associate my deteriorating disposition. And it would be revisionism to suggest that Nissel’s memoir somehow, magically and mystically, helped me become aware of the illness. I was sick and no book could’ve accelerated or delayed my diagnosis. But there was a connection.

Years later, as my fiancee and I note the overflow from our bookshelves, contemplating the logistics of managing our still-growing library, I think about what I want to achieve as a writer. Even amid obscurity, should someone stumble upon my future book or stories, perhaps through a friend of a friend on Facebook, that connection could be enough. I read a poet’s early work online in 1999; our wedding is in 2011. Literature and the internet is a beautiful combination–

Mensah Demary (true identity: Thomas DeMary II) is a full-time worker bee, part-time fiction writer and occasional blogger at mensahdemary.com. From his home in southern New Jersey, dominated by farmlands and flea markets, he melds technology and the written word, sometimes with mixed results. You can read his story, “Saturn Return,“ at Up The Staircase.