"Reengineering" back up @ Barrelhouse

This was off-line for a while, but I noticed on Dave Housely's facebook status that the archives had been 'replenished'--is that the word he used? Anyway it's back. I think it's a lot easier to read this time (the screen font was initially tiny). Other stuff is back too (follow the 'archived stories' link) -- including Sam J. Miller's "Little Fingers."

Yesterday

B. made nems while Missouri lost. I watched and laid a fire and folded laundry. Then we ate and watched Totoro. Kurosawa put this on his list of ten favorite films of all time. I think I'm ready to agree.

This and That

Jennifer Pieroni's "Nothing Special" in Wigleaf today.

She has a fine one in the recent Sir! too, which I meant to help promote but didn't. Brian Foley does just an awesome job with Sir! One of my favorite webzines.

Something else: Amelia Gray's ff collection, AM/PM, from Featherproof has been out for a while, but the more plugs the better.


From Featherproof: "Tour through the lives of 23 characters across 120 stories full of lizard tails, Schrödinger boxes and volcano love. Follow June, who wakes up one morning covered in seeds; Leonard, who falls in love with a chaise lounge; and Andrew, who talks to his house in times of crisis. An intermittent love story as seen through a darkly comic lens, Gray mixes poetry and prose, humor and hubris to create a truly original piece of fiction."

Gender Gaps

Ravi Mangla's bookshelf gets 'rated,' in a very amusing way, by Jimmy Chen over at HTML Giant.

Somebody--I think K. Sampsell--stands up for Ravi in the comments section but notes that the stack is a little guy heavy.

This has me thinking: my own shelves are probably tipped towards the guy side of the scale.

So then: why is Wigleaf the way it is? I noticed this because I'm always doing really geeky things relative to the sequencing: making sure there aren't too many first-person stories in a row, that kind of thing. I noticed: for a while now, Wigleaf has been running close to a 3 to 1 ratio of women to men....

New York Tyrant 6: Now on Pre-order

It's 300+ pages, with art from Atticus Lish and an interview with Diane Williams by Kevin Sampsell.

Tyrant 5 is about the best thing ever. So yes, pumped, very pumped for Tyrant 6.


Includes fiction by:

Thomas Bernhard
Rachel Sherman
Justin Taylor
Christine Schutt
Cooper Renner
Daryl Scroggins
Scott Garson
Christopher Kennedy
Jesse Ball
Daniel Grandbois
Michael Hemmingson
Darby Larson
Karl Taro Greenfeld
Ken Sparling
Robert Lopez
S.G. Miller
Kim Chinquee
Jason Snyder
Jessica Blau
Michael Leone

(See me there? See me going 'Hi, Mom'?)

"Rupture" to Archive

If you missed his January post about it, then you might have wondered about how Blake Butler's recent stuff in the Wigleaf main column kept slipping around. There are three pieces, all called "Rupture," and for the past two months you might have got any one of them, depending on when you hit the link. I switched them at first by coin toss, then later by mood.

Anyway they're now available in a steadier way, via archive. Highly recommended, if you haven't had the experience. Teaches you to read all over again.

Live and Free: SLQ #24

Late in posting about this.

I'll be late in reading it too. (The first four, which I couldn't resist reading this morning, are PDG)

(That's: Pretty Damn Good.)

Here's the full list of folks. Very happy to be in SmokeLong w/ them.

Sarah Black, Edmond Caldwell, Bill Cook, Thomas Cooper, Scott Garson, Shane Goth, Tiff Holland, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Darby Larson, Tara Laskowski, Samuel Lee, Charles Lennox, Ravi Mangla, Heather McDonald, Jen Michalski, Gregory Napp, Susannah Pabot, John Riley, Ania Vesenny.

Scott Tries a Mean Monday

I'm in a bad mood. My laptop died. I lost 1500 some words of a new story that's been slow in coming....

So I'm going to say mean stuff about Booth, the forthcoming online mag of the Butler U. MFA program. How can I dump on a mag that doesn't even exist yet? That's not the question. The question is how bad a mood I'm in.

I've seen Booth coming, to tell you the truth. With state budgets everywhere in the red and parents of college-age kids hurting, colleges and U's are feeling the squeeze. Even the most last-century English dept. chair probably isn't going to pull for the funding necessary to launch a new print mag. They'll say, Go online. And they're going to be pushing the eds of their print journals to do the same (Gulf Stream is one recent example).

Here's my problem with Booth: they don't accept email subs.

You're Butler's MFA program, and you want to launch an online lit mag, but you don't accept email subs? What in the hell are you thinking? Let me be more precise about that. What the fuck makes you think that I'm going to spend time licking stamps and running off copies and standing in line at the P.O. to get in your nonexistent journal?

You're freaking Butler, man. All you've got are some words on a white screen.

But I'm being disingenous. I know what Butler is thinking.

Butler is thinking, In the old days, people would have been happy to dump long stories that no one would read in our Butler U. M.F.A. print mag. They'd have been glad to put 'Booth' on their CV's, and we'd have been happy to do the same. In May of 2009, more people will be happy to dump long stories that no one will read in our Butler U. M.F.A. online mag. They'll be happy to put 'Booth' on their CV's, and we'll be happy to do the same.

Year of the Micro -- Addendum

Forgot one of the upcomings when I was mentioning them -- Kristina Marie Darling's Hotel Dieu," which has just gone up.

A Nice but Sobering Rejection

I got a rejection from a print mag last night. Something is making me want to avoid naming it. Why I don't know. Naming it would be easier. It's not old school (Ploughshares, Missouri Review). It's not new guard (Hobart, NY Tyrant). It's not elite (ASF, Tin House). It's not any of those things, exactly, though it is newer. Anyway they rejected one of my longer stories very nicely. The ed. took the time to say that the story had been on their shortlist. But here's the thing: the ed. also mentioned the number of stories submitted during this sub period: over 1200!

Is that normal? I mean, do all somewhat-established print mags that accept email subs get over 1200?

Damn. You get a story accepted in that context, that's like winning the lottery.....

??????????????????

okay where is Blake Butler's thing in the new Pank? I've been thru the table of contents like five times and i can't find it. Is there something wrong w/ my brain? What page is it on? What's happening?

This Morning at my Place

I put on side one of Bowie's '77 album, Low. Side one is on my list of things that are good in life.

Two times -- during "Speed of Life" and again during "Always Crashing the Same Car" -- my kid was compelled to get down from the breakfast bar and dance madly around the house.

I think I'll be happy all day.

But I didn't join him. I was waiting for coffee.

The thing about those songs -- they're all top and bottom and stuff at the sides. The middles are perfect absences. They're what you move through when you dance around the house.