Ethel Rohan’s short shorts in the new FriGG. Well, really the whole new FriGG. Fantastic and beautiful as always.
This crazy good, original, terrifying, funny, moving story by Greg Gerke in Annalemma.
We always knew it, didn’t we, ladies? Now you can confirm it by reading this piece on the myth of the fairer sex, in the American Prospect.
Can liberalism still win? Jon Chait thinks, yes, we can. (Okay, that was cheap. But read this anyway.)
Categories: favorites · literary mags · politics · smart people
I think community colleges are underrated and fantastic. I think more people should take advantage of them. I think Kay Ryan kind of rules for realizing this:
“I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly — and with very little financial encouragement — saving lives and minds. I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, expect perhaps the bicycle.”
–Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate, quoted in Boneshaker, Issue 42-400.
(Lifted pretty much directly from Balloon Juice–thank you, mistermix.)
Categories: Education · smart people
Few things piss me off more than righteous attitudes about violent video games and children. Like many people my age, I and my friends grew up using cheat codes to do fatalities on Mortal Kombat and we all seem to have turned out okay. (Some of us also listened to a lot of gangsta rap and metal and played Dungeons and Dragons and yet strangely, none of us has shot up a school or slaughtered his or her family. Shocking, I know.)
It’s not that I think kids SHOULD be playing violent video games or watching R-rated movies or whatever–I just think parents should make that decision, not Washington or some censor board or parental advisory committee. And I think blaming violence on video games and heavy metal is an easy, false, and sometimes dangerous answer (the very probably wrongful conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham was in part based on the FACT THAT HE OWNED AN IRON MAIDEN POSTER AND NO I AM NOT KIDDING I WISH I WERE) and that there are always, as Tom Bissell says, other places for the bad son to go:
The other day I finished Columbine, Dave Cullen’s unbelievably good and bulldozingly definitive account of the Columbine Massacre. The perpetrators of the massacre were both fans of a modded version of the classic shooter Doom. Much was made of that at the time. Less was made of the fact that one of the boys, Eric Harris, was also a classic-lit buff. Shortly before the massacre, he quoted a line from one of the most transcendent works of literature in the language, The Tempest: “Good wombs have borne bad sons.” For Eric Harris, the ecstasies of violent inspiration could be found everywhere. If we dutifully close off those forms of creative expression we find distasteful, the bad son will go elsewhere.
Read the whole, very good essay here.
Categories: smart people · video games · writers
What are you doing on July 18th at 7 pm? If you’re in NYC, you COULD be attending a really cool event in Brooklyn: Soda Series Installment #2.
The Soda Series is a bimonthly reading/conversation of writers at the Soda Bar in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, hosted by Greg Gerke and John Dermot Woods. This particular installment will be a conversation with Matt Bell, John Madera, Jeff Parker and me. I feel awfully humbled to be included alongside these ultra-talented and ultra-prolific writers, and I’m hoping to learn a lot from them during this event.
Hope to see some of you there, too, if you’re in the area. And thanks so much to Greg Gerke for inviting me to participate in such a cool reading series.
Categories: cool stuff · my work · smart people · writers
I’ve been terribly lax blogger, but forgive–I’m on a big road trip seeing old friends and family in the Midwest, and there’s been very little time for blogging. But I do have a deluge of fantastic publications to share with you, so listen up. Oh, and sorry for formatting weirdness–I’m doing this from my iPhone:
Emprise Review’s July issue is www.emprisereview.com, and I’m super excited for you all to read this baby. We have: fiction by Roxane Gay, Jessica Hollander, Sarah Pinsker, Reynard Seifert, Meg Sefton, Adrian Stumpp, Steve Upham, Ajay Vishwanathan, Eugenio Volpe, and Snowden Wright; poetry by Joan Glass, John McKernan, and Shannon Azzato Stephens; an interview and three pieces by our featured writer, Anne Valente; and nonfiction by Sam Bell, Jennifer Spiegel and Chris Wiewora. Whew! Go read!
JMWW’s summer issue is up, and holy crap does it look good. Here: httpSeriously, check out this lineup: George Blecher, Savannah Schroll Guz, Jane Hammons, Jensen Beach, Ryan Ridge, Jensen Beach, Bonnie ZoBell, Jon-Michael Frank, R. A. Allen, Andrew Borgstrom, Kim Chinquee, Robert Coover, Jeremy Davies, Luca DiPierro, Brian Evenson, Lily Hoang, Tim Horvath, Joanna Howard, James Iredell, Brian Kitely, Norman Lock, Robert Lopez, Sean Lovelace, Stacy Muszynski, Ken Sparling, Teresa Svoboda, and J.A. Tyler.
DecomP is up at: http://www.decompmagazine.com/ and featuring new work from Jane Cassady, Hunter Choate, Kat Dixon, Ethan Kilgore, Gary Moshimer, Mike Philbin, Megan Casella Roth, Jon Sands, J. A. Tyler, and Joy Whalen. Additionally, they’ve got reviews of Brendan Connell’s Metrophilias, Thomas Rain Crowe’s The Brucciano Poems, and Christian TeBordo’sThe Awful Possibilities.
Mud Luscious Press’ online quarterly is up to issue twelve now & featuring the work of Gregory Sherl, Daniel Carter, Jack Martin, Parker Tettleton, George Moore, N. God Savage, Howie Good, Diana Kole, Jarrid Deaton, Sean Lovelace, Darby Larson, Tim Roberts, Nicelle Davis, & Robert Kloss. Fiction & poetry for your summer reading pleasure here: http://www.mudlusciouspress.com/twelve
And last but very certainly not least, the always terrific Hobart has gifted us a new online issue, the July Hobart, with fiction from Sara Bohannon, Brian Allen Carr, Travis Kurowski, and Matthew Salesses. Also, an excellent World Cup piece by Karl Taro Greenfeld and interview with Andrew Ervin by Bayo Ojikutu. Check it out here: http://www.hobartpulp.com/website/july/salesses.html
Enjoy your summer holiday, kittens and kids. I know I am/will/have.
Categories: favorites · literary mags · smart people
My story is called Be Like Us and We Will Like You Maybe. Would you like to know where that title came from? Would you like to know why enjoy evangelizing on behalf of Matt? Are you just really fucking confused now? Well, you’d better click over to Necessary Fiction then.
(Also, thank you, writer-in-residence Roxane!)
Categories: literary mags · my work · smart people
Roger Ebert has a beautiful piece up on his blog with his thoughts on the Arizona mural horrorshow and his reflections on growing up with the rest of the country, out of innate racism and into greater understanding towards equality. It’s really lovely, and made me feel a little more hopeful about the situation; it made me feel that these hateful people are a small, small, damaged and sad minority.
I began up above by imagining I was a student in Prescott, Arizona, with my face being painted over. That was easy for me. What I cannot imagine is what it would be like to be one of those people driving past in their cars day after day and screaming hateful things out of the window. How do you get to that place in your life? Were you raised as a racist, or become one on your own? Yes, there was racism involved as my mother let the driver wait outside in the car, but my mother had not evolved past that point at that time. The hard-won social struggles of the 1960s and before have fundamentally altered the feelings most of us breathe, and we have evolved, and that is how America will survive. We are all in this together.
But what about the people in those cars? They don’t breathe that air. They don’t think of the feelings of the kids on the mural. They don’t like those kids in the school. It’s not as if they have reasons. They simply hate. Why would they do that? What have they shut down inside? Why do they resent the rights of others? Our rights must come first before our fears. And our rights are their rights, whoever “they” are.
Read the whole thing here. It’s well worth it.
Categories: history · smart people · stuff that sucks
Categories: favorites · smart people · stuff that sucks
You really don’t have to suck at your job or suck at your writing. You really can do both well. (Provided, of course, that in this lousy economy you can find a good job.) And this guy proves the point. Like Wallace Stevens, he’s a dedicated career man with a very private life of superb poetry. How cool is that?
Via Bookslut.
Categories: poetry · smart people
She really is a new kind of “politician” (in quotes because is she? Celebritician?). Matt Taibbi explains how she panders to the worst common denominator, probably because she really is part of her target demographic:
Palin has figured out that this is really all you have to do to win elections in this country — flatter middle Americans’ moronic fantasies about themselves. The great thing about flattery is a) you can’t overdo it as hard as you try, and b) it doesn’t pin you down to messy political positions, controversies, things you can be harassed about by Chris Matthews and other press weasels.
It’s basically a risk-free strategy. You get up on stage and you say, “I’m just like all you idiots. And you idiots rock!” People will fall for this stuff. The ingenious part in Sarah Palin’s case is that she probably genuinely believes it.
Taibbi argues that even Dubya never had the same success with these same methods, because he was too used to the high life despite his cowboy image. Palin, on the other hand, really is of the people–her people.
Categories: political idiots · politics · smart people · stuff that sucks
