ADVANCE UNCORRECTED PROOF

Tuscaloosa Book Arts Student Sets Up Shop in Memphis

2011-06-16T07:35:00.001-07:00

Many Memphians watched in shock as news coverage revealed the extent of the destruction visited on Alabama towns such as Tuscaloosa on April 27 of this year. The horror had a personal edge for recent graduates of the University of Alabama, like Friedrich Kerksieck.

“I felt horrible and horrified, and helpless,” said Kersieck, an Iowa native who moved to Memphis two years ago after completing his MFA in The University of Alabama's Book Arts Program. “I was glued to the computer reading/watching news and checking to make sure all my friends were accounted for.”

While the University’s main campus was not hit by the tornado, many people who attend or work for the university lost their homes. This included Kersieck’s professor Steve Miller, coordinator of the Book Arts Program.

At Alabama's Book Arts MFA program, students learn all aspects of book design and production from papermaking to book binding to typesetting and type design, often working closely with students at Alabama’s Creative Writing MFA program, where Kersieck took courses in poetry.

“I learned my craft in Tuscaloosa,” he says, “And I really matured as a poet there.” Alabama’s MFA programs presented Kersieck with opportunities both personal and financial, including funding to travel to the annual conference of the AWP (Associated Writing Programs), and to Cuba, to participate in a collaborative book project with artists at the Taller Experimental de Grafica in Havana.

Today, Kersieck operates his own printing studio in his midtown apartment in a large front room dominated by his Vandercook No. 4 press, a battleship-gray assemblage of metal and rubber that was state-of-the-art technology for commercial print shops sixty years ago and is now one of the preferred tools of fine art letterpress printers. Kersieck was lucky to find one already restored and in good working order – and lucky that the floor joists of his building were substantial enough to support its half-ton weight.

With his wife Gabrielle Trimm, Kersieck runs Small Fires Press, which produces poetry chapbooks and broadsides (single sheets of paper typically showcasing one poem) as well as Matchbook, a miniature magazine of poetry bound inside vintage matchbook covers. Kersieck also works for the Mississippi-based letterpress stationery company Lucky Luxe, which features owner Erin Napier’s designs for event invitations and stationery.

Recently Kersieck has been busy designing the poster for a benefit event, "Tuscaloosa Ink: Alabama Writers in Memphis,” which is scheduled take place at First Congregational Church on Thursday, June 23 at 7 p.m. The evening's lineup will feature University of Alabama professor Michael Martone, along with former and current students from Alabama's MFA programs.

Admission to the event is $10, with proceeds going to the University of Alabama's Acts of Kindness fund, to help students, faculty and staff who need help. The event is co-sponsored by Bama on the Bluff (Alabama Alumni Association, Memphis Chapter).

For more information, visit www.facebook.com/tuscaloosaink, or contact Bard Cole (UA MFA 2005) at (901) 337-1695 or email tuscaloosaink@gmail.com

Alabama Writers Read in Memphis To Raise Money for Tuscaloosa’s Recovery

2011-06-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

"Tuscaloosa Ink: Alabama Writers in Memphis": Writers from the University of Alabama's Creative Writing program will be in Memphis reading from recent work at a benefit event raising money for victims of the tornado that devastated Tuscaloosa this past April.

"Tuscaloosa Ink: Alabama Writers in Memphis" will take place at First Congo (First Congregational Church at 1000 S. Cooper) on Thursday, June 23 at 7 p.m. The evening's lineup will feature University of Alabama professor Michael Martone, author of Fort Wayne is Seventh on Hitler's List, along with former and current students from Alabama's MFA programs.

While Tuscaloosa is most widely known for competitiveness in sports, Alabama's Creative Writing MFA program is now ranked 17th in the nation, according to Poets & Writers' 2011 annual survey. As graduate teaching fellows, students in the program typically teach core curriculum writing and literature classes to undergraduates.

Among the writers confirmed for "Tuscaloosa Ink" is Barrett Hathcock (UA MFA ’04), recent Visiting Assistant Professor at Rhodes College whose first collection of short stories, The Portable Son, will be released by Aqueous Books later this year.

The poster for the event was designed and printed by Friedrich Kerksieck, a 2009 graduate of Alabama's Books Arts MFA program who now operates his own printing studio in Memphis. Copies of the poster will be on sale at the event.

The evening will also include a silent auction featuring signed work by notable Alabama authors such as Mark Childress (Crazy in Alabama), Warren St. John (Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer), cartoonist Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby) and other items, including a gift subscription to Alabama Heritage magazine.

Admission to the event is $10, with proceeds going to the University of Alabama's Acts of Kindness fund to assist students, faculty and staff affected by the tornado. The event is co-sponsored by Bama on the Bluff (Alabama Alumni Association, Memphis Chapter).

For more information, visit www.facebook.com/tuscaloosaink, or contact Bard Cole (UA MFA 2005) at (901) 337-1695 or email tuscaloosaink@gmail.com.

# # #

The 32 different categories of people I knew in college, delineated as generic descriptions that are as specific as possible

2011-05-15T19:11:00.000-07:00

I was thinking today about my upcoming college reunion, and the different people I knew. "Friend" seems like an inadequate term to describe the diverse and specific kinds of relationships I had with all the different people I went to college with. As I walked along my morning walk, I tried to come up the adequate descriptions for the different diverse and specific kinds of relationships I had in college. This is my first draft of the list.

1. The friends I saw all the time, whose rooms I would hang out, who I would do things with just one on one, and also with a larger group, who knew all sorts of stuff about me, who I talked to about feelings and plans etc., who (eventually) would meet my family, come to my house, etc. The people who if they had a birthday party I would be obliged to help make the cake or go pick up the keg. That's probably about 5-6 people, being somewhat generous and or vague.

2. Friends I saw all the time, whose rooms I hung out it, who I'd do stuff with, but almost always with a few people, not so often one on one. That's probably like 10 people. (As we move down the list, my expectation of receiving a wedding invitation drops).

3. People I saw all the time etc. mostly with other people but who I really liked but who I always thought of as being some friend X, Y, or Z's friend, really.

4. People I saw around campus pretty frequently who I liked a lot but didn't always hang out with, but with whom I would occasionally end up hanging out one on one.

5. People I knew and liked and saw around a lot who had their own group of friends not entirely congruent with mine but with whom, as a group, I would occasionally hang out with.

6. Going back to #3, a similar subset: people I saw all the time who I liked but who I thought thought of me as being X, Y, or Z's friend, really.

7. Going back to #4: People I saw around campus frequently, who I occasionally hung out with one on one, but whom I only liked moderately.

8. People I really thought were neat and cool and wanted to hang out with more, but who never did hang out with me.

9. People I thought were neat, who I'd have a hard time saying I was friends with, but who would occasionally seem to want to hang out and do stuff.

10. People who dated my friends and hung out with a lot while they were dating my friend, but who I hung out with a lot less or not at all after the breakup.

11. Addendum to #1: I mean the people who, if someone wanted to ask them on a date or get them a present, someone might ask me what I think they'd say or what I think they'd like.

12. People who lived on my hall who I would occasionally hang out with.

13. My suitemate (I always had a randomly assigned suitemate and I always had an awkwardly nonexistent relationship with my suitemate. It's a weird relationship, sharing one room that you're never ever in together at the same time... although I guess it would be weirder if you were in the bathroom together at the same time).

14. People who lived in the hall/house of my friend who, if I came by to find my friend and my friend wasn't there, I would hang out with.

15. People who I thought were too cool to ever really notice me or be my friend.

16. People who I thought were cool enough that they were totally under no obligation to notice me, who occasionally did.

17. People who I thought thought they were too cool to ever really notice me but had never convinced me that they were really were that cool.

18. People who were nice and in a class of mine but I never really saw them out of class.

19. Or I saw them out of class but they were always in the middle of some big friend group that was totally non-overlapping with my friend group.

20. People who were really annoying at first who grew on me.

21. Very similar to #14, people who weren't great intimate friends but whom I'd have no hesitation joining if I was in the dining hall at a weird time and none of my regular companions were there.

22. People who I'd join for a completely random late night trip to the Argonaut even though I didn't really know them well otherwise.

23. People I was afraid thought I thought I was too cool for them.

24. People who I actually did kind of think I was too cool for, even though I tried to prevent myself from acknowledging that I was really thinking that.

25. People that everybody else seemed to like that I thought there was something wrong with (bad vibes!) and was uncomfortable hanging around.

26. People who I feared thought of me as an insensitive dumbass who said stupid insensitive things out of his ineluctable dumbassery.

27. People I would always flirt with when we were both somehow completely away from our usual social companions.

28. People whose friendship groups would intersect, at parties and large social events, with the expanded version of my social group, including the friends of people I mostly thought of as being friends of specific friends of mine.

29. The people whose names I knew, whose friends I knew, but who somehow I can't ever recall speaking a word to.

30. The people I'm better friends with now than I was in college.

31. The people who I was cooler than in college who are now totally cooler than I am.

32. Teachers and stuff, I guess.

My contribution to internet detrius.

2011-05-01T08:30:00.000-07:00

Dedication: A New Series on Belief and Misbelief

2011-03-30T20:39:00.000-07:00

I owe my recent fascination with false knowledge to a person I never met – a person that nobody, as a point of fact, ever really met. This garrulous yet evasive person was called JT Leroy, a former street hustler, a gay teen runaway from West Virginia and – as it turned out at last – an elaborate fictional construct from the mind of an older woman writer who had invented him.

Writers have used pseudonyms before. But Laura Albert manufactured a whole person who had friendships with people. It seems likely to me that this was the whole reason she invented him – to get close to some of the writers she admired who she accurately guessed would be more interested in someone like JT than they'd ever been in her. I had a couple good friends who "knew" JT. They were young gay guys close to "his" age and they emailed him regularly; they talked to him on the phone. They were completely willing to accept that, on occasion, JT told lies– that he'd carried around a fax machine while he was living on the street in order to fax pages of a story to the writer Dennis Cooper, for example – and they would admit he was a bullshitter. It did not make them doubt he existed.

You couldn't argue with the sheer number of people who knew him. Even if they had never met him in person, other people had, or were assumed to have had. Like author Mary Gaitskill, who definitely had met him in person, once, very briefly, in a San Francisco bookstore – him departing so fast, according to her later description of the event, that she did not speak to him and could not really describe him physically. Yet everyone knew she had met him. Or what about Dr. Terrence Owens, the noted psychiatrist that JT credited with saving his life and encouraging him to write? He was verifiably real, he was the head of an adolescent psychology unit at a very real hospital that truly worked with street kids. If JT wasn't real, why would he allow his name to be used and abused? It seemed improbable he could be anything but a real boy.

My most personal connection to the story: I spoke to JT just once on the phone, when I was visiting San Francisco on my first book tour. Our mutual friends had suggested I send him a copy of my book and see if he'd review it. Calling him was a surreal experience. The woman who answered the phone transferred me, or put me on hold – a number of odd noises – then, from the bottom of a deep dark well, a pale fragile voice spoke to me, horrifyingly, like a spirit voice through some oracular device. The ghostly voice complimented my writing and then asked me if I would mind writing the review of my book myself, and sending it to him so he could touch it up to make it his own.

I did as he asked, I will admit (though he never published it). As humiliating as it was, he was very hot at that moment. But I knew then that there was something messed up about JT Leroy beyond the things that were supposed to be messed up about him. That was the year 2000. It was more than five years that Laura Albert's increasingly elaborate and increasingly incredible hoax was unmasked.

As a writer, I've been friends with people I've never met – pen pals, we used to call them, across the country. In 1991 I interviewed by telephone a young writer named Joey Manley who lived in Alabama; I did not meet him in person until 1994, but I believed in him from the moment I saw his name on a book jacket and heard his voice on a phone. It never occurred to me that I needed more proof that he existed. He does exist, and Joey Manley is his real name, almost certainly; it's what his mother calls him, if that woman I've met really is his mother; though I have not seen his original birth certificate.

In the first years of our friendship I knew no more about Joey than those friends of mine knew about JT. What would be the use of skepticism? In 2002, when Albert's young sister-in-law began making silent, wigged, sunglassed public appearances as Leroy, my friend Phillip got to meet his pen pal for the first time. The next day he was terribly hurt at how monosyllabic, rude, and unfriendly JT had been to him. He was angry and felt that JT was social climbing – friends with actors and rock stars now -- and way beyond being friends with some unknown young writer. It was many months before Philip was able to imagine that the person he'd met that night was someone he'd never spoken to before in his life.

In the five years it took for the hoax to come to light, I didn't enjoy talking about my suspicion, verging into strong belief, that JT Leroy was not real. It made me feel paranoid -- crazy. And now that Laura Albert's role has been unmasked I still feel – what? dirty? uncomfortable? embarrassed? – talking about it. Only now it seems doubtful that anyone could have really believed.

It was a bubble, I guess – a bubble of belief. Once the bubble's popped, you can't unpop it, and the very fact that it existed suddenly seems improbable. But I learned a couple of things from JT Leroy. One, that each and every day we assume the reality of all sorts of things that, practically speaking, we couldn't begin to prove.

And two, once you begin seeing all the gaps between what you think is true and what you can prove is true, it makes you feel like the world's a slippery place to stand on. And who needs that? Yet here we are, slipping.

MATT & GUEST: A Short Film by Bard Cole

2010-11-09T10:02:00.000-08:00

"Go Ole Miss! My Mother is a Fish!"

2010-02-25T10:36:00.000-08:00

These are my ideas for mascots for Ole Miss... I think "Flasky" has the most potential for mass appeal. Please feel free to distribute my images. Go FLASKY!

The Question of Taste -- A Beginning

2009-12-12T10:54:00.001-08:00

During my last year of workshops for my MFA I had a pair of Siamese twin epiphanies – one, that I no longer particularly cared whether or not people in my workshop liked my writing; and two, that some of the people in my workshop were working on projects that I had nothing worthwhile to say about.

It took me a while to accept that, for me, this was an achievement, the very state of elevated consciousness that the my whole course of study had for three years been urging me toward. I was deeply focused on the craft of writing, and the momentary opinions of others had become at best a kind of mirror allowing me to see my stories from new, slightly awkward angles. And I felt strongly, morally, that it was unacceptable for me to blabber about someone else's work if I felt I didn't really understand what the writer was doing.

Not commenting on someone else's writing was hard to come to terms with, because it was a violation of a social code. Not commenting on someone's work had one self-evident meaning – that you did not consider it worthy of your time. Our poet friends often confided in us fiction writers their resentments about such-and-such a person who never commented on anyone else's work and for the most part, we fiction writers were able to feel properly judgmental about such asshattery because we did, as a rule, spend a lot of time close reading and commenting on our peer's work.

But that final semester, I was in a class with writers whom I'd known for nearly three years, long enough to have formed judgments and been forced to discard them at least one time and maybe more. One of my workshop peers was writing long, richly detailed stories that bewildered me. I didn't know whether he intended it to evoke the feel and language of a real place he knew or whether it was a florid, folksy surrealism. I wasn't sure if there was a plot structure I ought to have been following or if I was expecting something that was not there. And, most important, I wanted to figure out these things the same way any reader figures out what an unfamiliar new writer is doing: by reading it, not by commenting on it to the author. I wanted him to do what he wanted to do. And I wanted to find my own understanding of it.

The post-World War II critical approach which came to be called the "New Criticism" is not something that many critics or academic writers have defended for many decades now. It is generally seen as conservative and homogenizing, among other things -- but nevertheless its approach is still in many ways the definitive critical approach of our time. A critic following this established model will diagnose a work in supposedly objective formal terms, and come up with an explanation of how these formal qualities equate to a successful or unsuccessful work. In this view, a story is a machine, and its parts must be operational to produce a certain movement. When the critic finds a story successful, there is almost nothing subjective to say about that – it is successful because it works. Now, what else can you talk about in workshop besides whether or not a piece "works"? Whether its details, its prose, its story structure, "function" together?

There is almost nothing in this approach that allows you, as critic, to talk about whether you like a certain piece of fiction -- or on what basis an intelligent human being "likes" something. It tends to force us to insist that anything we don't like or understand is poorly crafted. Or, conversely, we can give up and say that liking or not liking something is beyond criticism.

Liking or not liking something which may be perfectly well crafted for its author's purpose and in other intelligent readers' eyes – that to me is a question of what we call "taste." No one doubts that critics form, promote, and police "tastes" in contemporary literature but they do not talk about taste as they do this. My impression is that right now "taste" is a vastly undertheorized area; and that other approaches of criticism are weakened and tainted by being forced to do the duty of conveying ideas about taste. So this is my beginnings of thinking about taste. Cheers!

clothes i can't throw out #3

2009-09-22T20:05:00.000-07:00

My friend Jodie was the queen of thrift store shopping in the early 90s. At a certain point she owned literally about twelve rack feet of random vintage clothing, in variable condition, all packed in tight. Sometimes on a Saturday night we would drink and dress up. Eventually we might even go out, but much much less often than you might imagine.

This shirt from the early 70s is polyester. It is patterned in a sort of random Indian calico fashion. It is brown. It is fairly see-through. I wanted it, at a time when my aspiration was to dress somewhat like Madonna and somewhat like Axl Rose, all at the same time. At some point Jodie decided that she never wore it and never would wear it and that I could have it. I was happy as a clam. Was it flattering at the time? Impossible to say. Is it flattering now? Certainly not, although I was pleased to note, this past weekend, that I can still get the motherfucker buttoned all the way up.

clothes I can't throw out #2

2009-09-21T18:14:00.001-07:00

I think there's a picture in one of Molly Griest's facebook picture albums showing me wearing this cummerbund and tie set in 1986 or thereabouts.

They were old and they were my dad's. I don't know exactly how old they are -- whether they were from my dad's high school or college formal stuff in the 50s or whether they were for Lions Club formals in the 70s. My dad died in 1985 and I'm the only boy so I got to sort out his clothes and non-golden accessories. I had a lot of things of his. I miss a pair of polyester glen plaid pants tremendously. They were already ten or so years old and the knees fell apart almost instantly. I got another year or so out of them as cutoffs.

My dad used to let me pick the lining of his suits when he had some made, when I was seven or eight. We were not having an especially good teenage-year father-son relationship. I know that there are often worse, but still. I would have liked to have worked past that but you know what, in life you often are stuck with things being other than what you would have liked.

I have another formal set like this one, only maroon satin, and one of my dad's business ties, in dark wool, with moth bites now. I will probably never wear them again, although I do feel that the look of being a boy in his dad's clothes is one that has never entirely left me. Part of that is because I gain and lose weight more frequently than I buy a lot of new clothes.

clothes I can't throw out #1

2009-09-21T17:51:00.001-07:00

I wore these leather gloves from the winter of 1991 to sometime in the mid-90s. They seemed inappropriate for my corporate job and were beginning to seem worn. They left blue-gray smudges on very light clothing, such as a broadcloth buttondown shirt.

They came into my possession in this way: In 1991, after graduating college, I moved into a brownstone on Willoughby Avenue in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, NYC, and shared an apartment with my friend Danny, who had lived there for a year already. It was a strange building -- a former boardinghouse where the division between apartments was somewhat permeable. We had a front door on the ground floor that led into our kitchen, but between our bedrooms on the second floor a hallway linked two stairs for the upstairs floors. And there was a set of back steps that led into our apartment from the second floor that had no door at all. Consequently Danny had developed an informal relationship with one of our upstairs neighbors. This was before Seinfeld so the idea of a neighbor who just popped into your apartment randomly was not quite a familiar thing. Our upstairs neighbor was a painter in his mid to late forties named Carlos Hernandez. He painted pictures of devils, among other things. There was one devil with a blond flip and heart-shaped glasses called Lolitadevil. Carlos was a leatherman. Sometimes he wore black leather suspenders. Sometimes he wore a red silk kimono. He berated me for keeping unsweet tea in the refrigerator. He said, "I am spick, I need a lot of sugar in this, honey." He was born in Cuba, raised in an Catholic orphanage in Nashville and had the vocabulary of a San Francisco leather queen and performance artist. Altogether it was a memorable accent.

Anyhow, the gloves. He forgot them several times and we stopped making a point of reminding him that he'd left them. I was cold one day and they seemed like good gloves. I've never been "into" leather but I did have a leather biker jacket (that belonged to my friend Shelby when she was a student at an all-girls' boarding school in Rome, Georgia) and the gloves seemed to go along with that. I realized living in Brooklyn, taking the endlessly slow and unreliable G train, that I needed a new style. I was also poor. I was thinking of how I should dress, what I should look like, who I could be, when those gloves came along. And they fit. I felt like a scary biker and Cher all at the same time. I got my first tattoo not too much later, choosing a guy who had advertised in a gay weekly magazine called NYQ, which later changed its name when the New York Quarterly, a noted poetry review, hinted at legal action.

Carlos died in 1992 or 1993, after I had stopped living in Brooklyn and he had moved to a new apartment. He was sick but it wasn't supposed to be HIV, but then it was, and then he had died. He had been a junkie when he was younger and had told us lots of stories about friends dying and people ODing. Years later I would find practical application for some of his stories about things to do to keep your friends from dying so I am always grateful to him.

Six Little Things #16 -- Fall 2009 now online

2009-09-16T19:53:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Six Little Things is now online at Six Bricks Press -- http://www.sixbrickspress.com/ -- Issue #16 Fall 2009, is themed "The Unannounced Guest" and features new, short work by Arlene Ang, Cheryl Chambers, Michael Fontana, Bob Heman, Terrie Leigh Relf, and Maryanne Stahl, with paintings by Alex Warble.

The next issue will be #17 Winter 2010, themed "Half in Jest" -- Deadline November 30, 2009. Please direct submissions or inquiries to Bard Cole at editor@sixbrickspress.com.

If you are in Memphis, TN, feel free to drop by Burke's Books tomorrow evening, Thursday, Sept. 17, to hear Six Little Things editor C. Bard Cole read from his new book, This is Where My Life Went Wrong (BLATT Books, 2009). The event starts at 5:30 with the reading portion of the entertainment scheduled to begin at 6:00 p.m. Please feel free to say hi!

BC

from Chapter 52 of THIS IS WHERE MY LIFE WENT WRONG

2009-07-16T16:14:00.000-07:00

A small town catastrophe: a minyan rampaged down the streets of Airborne, Georgia, on March 11, 1939, angry about the elevated prices charged for Kosher salt at the Merriwether Grocery. The town milkman lost his horse, Buster, who took flight that morning and had an aneurysm two days later, he reported.

Small town tragedy: One Mister Clarence Dawkins of Chelsbrough TN died as the result of a traffic light explosion predicated by a light bulb accidentally filled with freon during a routine repair. A fragment of yellow lens glass approximately three inches in length penetrated his right eyeball and thence his brain as he escorted his elderly mother home from the epidemiologist's.

Small town mishaps: According to deputy sheriff Mona Honsbach, the worst fire in the history of the Cardiff Falls, TN, police department happened on June 10, 1992, when one single match used to relight the pilot light of a gas stove caught the box of grocery store plastic bags she kept under the squad room pantry sink on fire. The melting plastic quickly spread the flames to the wallpaper, which adhered with some kind of petroleum-based cement. For several minutes, Honsback says, all four walls glowed with a blue light. Besides needing a clean-up, the police station was otherwise undamaged.

Small town accidents: On September 12, 1978, the homecoming hayride tractor of Dutton Wainwright High School of Meridien Iowa was run off the road by Mr. Jake Issit, director of Bob Weins Funeral Home, who wanted to deliver a corpse to the home so that he could have it refrigerated with enough time for him to catch the game. Melanie Gamble, 15, broke her left clavicle in the accident. Issit paid her hospital bills and her folks consider the case resolved satisfactorily.

Small town Criminal Misadventures: County Alderman Meryl Normins picked up a teenage prostitute in his hometown of Diamond Falls, KY, and took her to the Good-Nite Motel where he read to her from the Bible and lectured her about her sinful ways. At some point, the young lady, Miss Doniqua Watson of Fairleigh KY, reported, he physically touched her by holding her forearms & pushing her into an armchair. This was the evidence cited in his later arrest for kidnapping and endangerment of a minor. He received a $500 fine & 40 hours community service from Judge James Dickerson, who commended him for his action. Mother of Doniqua Watson, Mrs. Cheryl Lee, personally thanked Normins by baking him brownies with peanut butter chips.

Watson was reported dead of a heroin overdose three months later.

Six Little Things #15: Summer 2009 now online

2009-06-19T12:21:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Six Little Things is now online at Six Bricks Press -- http://www.sixbrickspress.com/ -- Issue #15 Summer 2009, is themed "Captain McHurkeydurkey's Utterly Masturbatory Prose Parade" and features new, short work by Rev. Wayne Austin Goodchild, Amir Kenan, C.J. Krug, Dan Piepenbring, Terrie Leigh Relf, and Ben White, with paintings by Erik Parker.

The next issue will be #16 Fall 2009, themed "The Unannounced Guest" -- Deadline August 30, 2009. Please direct submissions or inquiries to Bard Cole at editor@sixbrickspress.com.

No Love for LOOSERS!

2009-05-22T16:37:00.001-07:00

I like the English language and I have been an English teacher. But I like it when people say "supposably." It makes me smile. Also "lie-berry." It doesn't really get under my skin when people "take things for granite", or confuse your and you're, or it's and it. Simple mistakes like that, I just assume they've done it "on accident." I enjoy accents and I enjoy regional and cultural dialects and language patterns. Generally when people correct other people's accent or syntax or word choice or grammar, I feel irritation -- I think it's rude, presumptuous (unless you are an editor or teacher correcting someone you're paid to correct) and, too often, displaying real ignorance about English language conventions.

However, let me say that if it was lawful to punch people in the face each and every time they spelled "lose" or "loser" as "loose" or "looser," they'd soon learn the right way to spell it, and everyone would be better off.

Exactly what you expect... in a weird way

2009-05-22T10:34:00.001-07:00

This is an interesting movie, but then I'm interested in the emotional structure of perverse movies. I call movies "perverse" when their main emotional effect is, apparently intentionally, achieved by unnatural effect; a misuse or misdirection of the audience beyond the storytelling on the screen.

Alpha Dog is a movie, based on a true story, about a fifteen year old boy kidnapped and murdered by a young drug dealer's posse. All I knew about the story before seeing it was just that. The posters and promotional materials all refer to the true story, and if you didn't know that the kid was murdered, you'd certainly figure out that he was kidnapped and it was a big crime. The poster design emphasizes this point -- it was a crime, a big deal crime, with lots of documented witnesses and a documentary air.

One thing you know going in, is that what happened is what happened. There's no getting away from it. It's a true crime movie so there's going to be the crime. Like most viewers, I knew exactly what the crime would be.

The movie's not complicated plot-wise. It appears to be a pretty straight reenactment, fictionalized but otherwise ambiguous. The story goes, this kid is the little brother (half-brother) of a petty drug dealer who owes a lot of money to another petty drug dealer. Both guys think they're big tough guy bigshots. When he spots the kid walking by the side of the road (having run away from home -- he's fighting with his parents), the bigshot drug dealer (Emil Hirsch) has his guys grab the kid and hold him hostage. After an initial burst of adrenaline, things mellow out and soon the kid is smoking pot and playing video games with his captors -- primarily Frankie, ably portrayed by Justin Timberlake. For several days, they party together, and the "hostage" situation is treated like a friendly joke. Then, at last, freaked out by the possibility of being charged for a capitol crime, the drug dealer orders his posse to kill the kid and they do.

What you want from this film is something you are told in advance you cannot have. No matter how much you grow to like this character, he will be killed in the end. No matter how much you grow to like Frankie, and the moments of friendship and cameraderie between them, Frankie will participate in his murder. Your emotional hopes are pinned, constantly, on some little gesture or twist that will provide some relief from this wretched story, and the movie stimulates those hopes through these small moments of possibility -- many small moments when Zack might have realized the danger he was in, if he did not prefer the excitement and apparent friendship of the moment; many small moments when Frankie could have saved him, if he had ever had the nerve to admit that he was the cause of another human being being in mortal danger

It's that moral epiphany that one waits for, and craves, that would make both Frankie and Zack into real people, and their story worth retelling. Even if Frankie tried to stop the murder and failed, that would have been something, but the closer they get to the murder the more he fails to own up to his own actions, instead wallowing in self-pity and attempting to wash his hands of his involvement. When Zack is finally killed, the movie's interest in Frankie abruptly ends. He only had one task in this movie -- to save Zack -- and having failed, he is of no possible further concern.

I can't figure out whether this movie is more or less than the typical slasher film, where you get to see a character in their normal life, ignoring the signs of impending doom, and then being explicitly murdered for the entertainment of the audience. It's slower and better acted, at least.

Willie Morris and the Hollywood Southern Accent

2009-05-13T17:11:00.000-07:00

I have been reading books by Willie Morris for the last month -- first New York Days, about his time as editor of Harper's Magazine in the 1960s and early 70s, and then his earlier autobiography North Toward Home. One of the last scenes in New York Days is set in 1999, when Morris returns to Mississippi to visit the set of the film based on his book My Dog Skip, where he was supposed to help coach the child actors with appropriate accents. He was sitting in a hotel bar in Natchez, he writes, when a tiny ten year old boy pulled on his sleeve and asked him, "in a Southern California tongue," if he was Willie Morris. Who are you, he asked. "I'm Willie," said Frankie Muniz. "I'm you." Morris, who not even 65, died later that year, before the movie was released.

I watched My Dog Skip this week, and it's a decent enough kids' movie, though a little messy and little emotionally disorganized, managing to sentimentalize some of the weird details and situations that appeal in Morris's work precisely because they seem incapable of being rendered sentimental. What I really noticed about it, though, was that Frankie Muniz's accent was pitch perfect throughout while the adult stars -- Kevin Bacon and Diane Lane as Willie's parents -- were complete Hollywood Southern Hamhood. Could be that Muniz just has a better ear, and always did; but the fact that he was ten makes me wonder if kids have an advantage. The accent he came up with was the accent that Willie Morris taught him. Where would he dug up a different one? But adult actors can't help but draw from a range of memories of Southern accents, many of them, possibly, movie accents -- phony accents -- that in many people's minds are more authentic than an authentic accent.

Oh they weren't as bad as Nicholas Cage in ConAir but how many people could be? You know I once saw a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at the University of Alabama and the student actors, who were Southerners, acted the parts of Brick and Maggie in exactly the same moronic fake Southern accent that any college students in any theater department in the country would be likely to use. As if no one ever though, well what if we just use a normal accent, since we're all Southerners to begin with? Maybe when you're ten, you haven't been exposed to enough terrible fake Southern accents to take them into yourself.

Learning to Enjoy Internet Paranoia

2009-04-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

What makes me curious these days? Internet paranoia, for one thing. Do you know what gangstalking is? You probably don't want to know. It's the idea that organized vigilante gangs harass "targeted individuals" by doing things like walking past them, making offhand comments, looking at them or not looking at them, giving them the general sensation of being constantly followed and observed. The scariest thing is how many people apparently recognize themselves in this description (from The New York Times: Health Professionals Fear Web Sites That Support Theories on Mind Control.) There are videos on YouTube documenting this phenomenon, every one of which I've seen shows one of two scenarios – either nothing in particular is happening, or else bystanders react to someone videotaping them. Any article on the subject published in an internet newspaper that allows comments is very quickly tagged with dozens of responses, some utterly deranged, some distressingly reasonable. Sometimes "targeted individuals" with different world views rebuke others for anti-Semitism or homophobia or political bias. There is of course no blanket agreement on who is behind gangstalking or its ultimate purpose, but they do generally agree on its techniques. It's both fascinating and horrifying to me, for some reason.

A fundamental fact of humanity is that we're always trying to find explanations for things – generally, explanations that tell us why something happened, as well as telling us what happened. And life, I'm afraid, is often devoid of good whys. The internet, however, isn't. And I'm not sure that the only danger is to people experiencing paranoid delusions.

Take the Smiley Face Killers, for instance, which was news last year at this time (as in this CNN article online). Basically what happened was, these two NYC detectives had worked on the case of a Fordham student who disappeared in Manhattan in 1997 and was later found drowned. At some point, they began looking into similar deaths of young male college students who drowned after nights out at bars and decided this was a "pattern" best explained as the work of a transcontinental serial murder cult.

Out of more than forty similar drowning deaths investigated by the detectives, twelve displayed this unifying characteristic: some version of a smiley face was found painted near a location the detectives had decided on the basis of their intuition was likely where the killers put the body in the water.

Nobody took this seriously, of course, except for some news outlets which took it exactly as seriously as they take octomoms, celebrity breakups, and terrorist attacks. But clearly a lot of ordinary people were delighted to consume this theory, and chatted it up on every internet discussion board available, all pretty much saying the same thing – that it made no sense that so many college age white men would die this way, so there had to be an explanation. Why would anybody who was drunk want to wander down to a river? It "defies logic," as one Smiley Face proponent said. (Never mind that doing stupid things that normally you'd have the common sense not to do is a well-known characteristic of being drunk; never mind that nobody really had any idea about the normal baseline level of drunk people accidentally drowning to compare to this "outbreak").

I know that most people who seemed to want to believe in the Smiley Face Killers didn't really fear the Smiley Face Killers. And a month later, they probably didn't give a shit anymore. Some of them are people who would clearly be capable of unwrapping and dismissing the story all on their own, if they'd chosen to do so. So what's the appeal of believing – or pretending to believe – or enjoying the pretense of believing – in something like this? That's what confuses me – and scares me a little. There's apparently something very satisfying about joining a witch hunt.

The ranking foul-up that affected Amazon.com last month, removing a lot of LGBT book titles from sales rankings and search features – I'd lump the reaction to that in with the same critique. Anyone's accurate knowledge of what was going on was obviously limited, particularly during the Easter weekend these outages happened. While I understand perfectly why LGBT authors and readers were distressed, angry, and wanting explanations for what had happened, I don't get the instant conspiracy production. That Amazon.com had decided, at some high corporate level, out of nowhere, to completely capitulate to some heretofore unknown demand from "the far right" to censor all books with positive images of gay people... this thought never once seemed credible to me, yet almost a month later, some still cling to this interpretation – that it's only because Amazon "got caught" by the brave AmazonFAIL twitterers that the company decided to reverse its position.

There was something impressive about the inventiveness of interpretation applied to a deliberately opaque form letter sent by a service rep to the author of an apparently self-published genre novel which was apparently inaccurately tagged as an "adult" book several months earlier, but it mostly made me wonder if any of these angry people had ever had real jobs with companies. My work experience makes me pretty skeptical of the idea that a big company can nurture secret ideological leanings, and pretty receptive to the idea that recently added software functions misused by a few employees, probably by accident, could cause an assload of trouble.

This of course is not the only example of this kind of stuff – I think also of recent controversies about Obama's birth certificate, Sarah Palin's baby, 9/11 controlled demolition theories, interpretations of the last episode of The Sopranos and more. I've been on the paranoid-seemingside too, feeling that there was something just not right about JT Leroy, especially after the one time I spoke to him on the phone, and seeing, apparently, everyone else in the world accepting this increasingly bizarre and inconsistent persona as a real human being who exemplified "authenticity" in writing, and I do thank god for Stephen Beachy and the other writers who helped reveal Leroy as a somewhat unhinged conspiracy set in motion by a writer who'd never gotten the attention she'd wanted writing as herself. It was a relief to know that what had come to seem very self-evident to me was in fact a fact, even though for a time people dismissed it utterly.

I think there's a lot more paranoid readings of the world now, more widely circulated, than ever before. I don't think it's a good thing although I wonder why it particularly unnerves me, when some people clearly find it amusing to entertain these ideas without any apparent ill effect to their psyche. I like for facts to be facts, and I like to refrain from jumping to conclusions, and, in the way of human nature, I understand that these could probably be considered irresolvable character flaws as much as they could be considered anything else.

Faulkner Movie: The Reivers (1969)

2009-04-18T08:06:00.001-07:00

First, I have decided I could happily read every last book by William Faulkner if I could be assured, in advance, that a semi-comical plot twist involving horse trading would play no part. I'm not in love with Faulkner, as it turns out. As far as the Snopes trilogy goes, I found The Hamlet intriguing but disjointed and confusing, The Town very satisfying and emotionally resonant, with a strong sense of character and real lives, and The Mansion just sort of a letdown, sometimes contrived and sometimes boring but with very little emotion to it. To me, it's a sense of purpose that Faulkner's writing sometimes lacks, and when it does his multi-voiced narratives just wear me out.

Anyhow, I borrowed the movie The Reivers from the library the other day, and despite the flaws -- it's very 1969, bright evenly lit Hollywood-Western cinematography with an "Apple Dumplin' Gang" style soundtrack that kicks in every time the action approaches comic slapstick -- it's a surprisingly nice adaptation. Diane Ladd appears in a small early role as a Memphis whore. The cultural representation of the turn-of-the-century Mid-South does have a strange air of being translated from a foreign language but the landscape is right and there seems to be a sincere integrity in it, particularly in its representation of race. Not that it's not in some ways stereotypical, but it does seem to want to develop Faulkner's actual themes and ideas, rather than making the uncomfortable ones invisible and Hollywoodizing the rest.

For a movie that is set in part in a whorehouse and turns on the sexual relationship between Steve McQueen's Boon and his Memphis gal Miss Corrie, it's an awfully sterile movie in terms of sex appeal. This isn't altogether odd because it's from an eleven year old's point of view, more or less, but it does have a stagey, unphysical quality that seems strange nowadays. It's like all these people can fight and wrestle and get covered in mud and stuck in jail and they might get dirt on their faces but it's hard to imagine them with B.O., even though the narrator refers to one mean Arkansas sheriff's B.O. That's what I mean about the translation, I guess: that it wants to convey the real earthy complexity of its characters and settings but more often it simple acknowledges them.

It did make me cry at the end, though, even though nobody died, not even the horse.

Six Little Questions for: SARAH SCHULMAN

2009-04-15T07:43:00.000-07:00

The first thing I ever read by Sarah Schulman was her third novel, After Dolores, a vivid contemporary quasi-noir mystery set in the East Village, and it is one of three books I have read (the others being The Amityville Horror and Helter Skelter) to have left me with a lasting irrational fear -- in this case, an exaggerated sense of the dangers of keyholes. Also, in a time when most discussions of fiction are primarily focused on aesthetic questions, and somewhat more rarely on moral questions, Sarah has always been to me an utterly convincing voice for an ethical point of view -- one that makes as stringent demands on the storyteller as it does on the story. I met Sarah in 1992 when I interviewed her for The New York Native when Empathy came out -- it was rereleased in 2007 by Arsenal Pulp Press with a new introduction by Kevin Killian -- and though it impressed me (or probably overwhelmed me) at the time, it wasn't until I reread it a few years ago that I truly appreciated the spare precision of its prose, and its masterful attention to maintaining the individual logic of its characters' thought processes.

In addition to her novels (8 published, 1 forthcoming), Sarah Schulman is a playwright, essayist, activist and teacher. With Jim Hubbard, she founded The New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, now known as Mix NYC. A member of ACT UP, she is now one of the curators of the ACT UP Oral History Project, and everyone should spend some time watching and reading those interviews.

One form of writing for which Sarah is not generally known is the prose poem, but she did write a rather Whitmanesque one for me for issue #3 of Six Little Things.

1. What project are you focused on these days?
I have three books coming out next year. They have been written at different times over the last decade but all landed with similar publication dates, so I am getting them ready for press. In October, Arsenal Pulp is publishing a novel, The Mere Future, about a futuristic New York in which the only career left is marketing. In November, The New Press is publishing Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences, which I believe is the first substantial analysis of homophobia in the family and its consequences on the individual and society. Then in the spring of 2010, University of California Press is publishing The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness to the Lost Imagination, which is a kind of history of how Gentrification has affected the way we think. All of these books will be published in hardcover editions followed one year later by paperbacks.

I'm also working on a number of plays.

2. You've been working on the ACT-UP oral history project for several years, and the interviews are fascinating to read, in part because they aren't ancient history, they're just long enough ago to have a little distance on. What it is like for you to do those interviews?
This is a fascinating group of people. Of the 103 interviews that I have conducted so far, more than ninety have been really interesting and engaging. These are diverse individuals who had the integrity to stand up at a crucial moment in history and do the right thing. They each describe their motives and experiences differently, and with great understanding. I have enjoyed every second of this project and we are only half way done. Unfortunately we are currently out of money, but hoping that a major donor will appear so that we can complete our task.

3. What's the first thing you write when you have a new idea that will eventually become a new novel, play, or essay?
I don't know. It can be a word. Yesterday I heard the poet Kay Murphy say "All the cards were wild" so I noted that. I read in Hermione Lee's biography of Edith Wharton that she had commissioned Sargent to paint a portrait of Henry James, but after only one year of hanging in the national gallery, the painting was slashed by a suffragist, so I noted that. I watched John Casssavettes film Shadows and it reminded me of watching Woman Under The Influence and I made a note that in the introductory directions for a play I am writing, the actors will be asked, at the first rehearsal to watch Woman Under The Influence. I realized that a character in another play, Mercy should remember the coffee can earlier in the play than where it is currently situated. Etc.

4. Can you tell be about a writer or book you once liked and now dislike, or vice-versa?
No one springs to mind. I still love the people I loved long ago: Jean Genet, Carson McCullers, Edith Wharton, Jack Kerouac, Isaac Singer. And of my contemporaries I am partial towards Rabih Allemedine, Caryl Phillips and the great Mary Gaitskill.

5. What have you learned about writing from your students?
I had a student years ago named Temple Hay, an older woman from South Carolina. Her work had a rich sensuality and truthfulness that I often return to as a model. Sadly her book was never published, but it was truly masterful.

6. What would you consider the greatest danger for a contemporary writer?
Homogeneity. Telling people what they already know in order to get approval is despicable :).

Erasing My Way Through Sanctuary

2009-04-14T16:17:00.000-07:00

The Memphis Public Library owns much of William Faulkner's work in a 1950s Random House edition with good solid typography and beautifully minimalist white covers -- I ordered a box set of Snopes last month and was somewhat disappointed that the books were not as nice, no second color on the title page and no dust jackets. Currently I am reading Sanctuary but I am reading it with my big fat white architecture-school eraser. Because the copy I borrowed from the library was marked up in pencil.

Some would say that it had not been defaced. In fact, the most salient trait of this book-marker was her (it had to have been a her) neatness. (It also seems to me very pre-1969 in some way, although pockets of pre-1969 survived until the mid-80s in some parts.) Her lines under the text -- on some pages, every single line of text is underlined -- are about as straight as a hand-drawn line could possibly be. Her comments are brief, crisp, and small -- very professional, certainly academic. But boy are they annoying. I've read underlined books before. It is this reader's annoying presence that I can't stand reading on the page.

A scene in which poor blacks are depicted gets underlined: "cf Native Son."A fucking landscape gets described: "cf Sarah Orne Jewett." A curse word: "!" A minor character makes a stale joke: "heh." A group of townie boys are described, their diffident, defensive attitude described: "Was WF a townie? hint, hint." And as I said, in some places every line on a page is underlined.

I understand some people have a habit of doing this and it helps them read better, but why leave it like that? Perhaps I'm being harsh. Perhaps she dropped dead before getting her master's degree in whatever school of learning led her into that dreary, self-satisfied "cf"ing nonsense. I hope these notes are the only things she's written and that, by the time I get to the final page, the erasure of her "hehs" and "hmms" will be complete.

Six Little Questions for: DOUGLAS A. MARTIN

2009-04-04T07:22:00.000-07:00

I don't remember when I met Douglas Martin but I knew his writing before I knew him. He was younger than me and better looking and his first book Outline of My Lover was being written about and praised and worst of all it was really good. Usually people that are just awful phonies -- they've even been known to not really exist -- but my envious preconceptions were immediately discarded when I met him for real. In 2001, I was excited to have him as one of the readers in my Readings A Go Go series, being held at Bouche Bar on 5th Street after the demise of IC Guys, the original venue. He's a really fine writer whose work blends a poetic sensibility with a strong sense of human character and a deep interest in the creative impulse. We were talking recently about my new book and I wanted to be able to ask some questions of Douglas too.

Douglas A. Martin is the author of the novels Outline of My Lover; Branwell; and the forthcoming Once You Go Back (Seven Stories Press - June 2009); They Change the Subject, a book of stories; and In the Time of Assignments, a book of poetry. Born in Virginia in 1973, and raised in Georgia, he lives in New York City. (photo of Douglas A. Martin by Bobby Abate)

1. What is your latest project?
I have a novel coming out in June with a new publisher, Seven Stories Press, which is cool because they do some of the living writers I admire most (Ernaux, Jelinek). It's like the beginning of my first book, Outline of My Lover, the childhood stuff people who wanted to take some high ground with that work responded more positively to, but different concerns. I finished up a PhD a couple of years ago, so some version of my dissertation on Kathy Acker might also hopefully see the light of day. The thing I'm sitting down to now when I go to do my writing I sometimes call my "murderous brothers" book--it's something I've been taking notes on and drafting on-and-off since around 2001, trying to get the right approach and voice.

2. What is the most important thing about writing for you?
Seeing a mind in action, and all the emotions in those wakes.

3. What is your favorite thing to look at?
One is the Andrey Reiser photo of Thomas Bernhard accompanying Frost. It's maybe crossing a line, but also I have pretty prominently displayed in my office "Straight to Hell," the cover with the guy in a chair with Micky Mouse shirt, sneakers, no pants, scratching his head (#66). My favorite Francis Bacon painting is "Study of a Baboon."

4. What was your first writing project?
When I was in the third grade, I tried to write a novel. For my mom. Into the Nancy Drew formula, 20 chapters, openings describing Nancy's hair, age, etc, I put Krista Teseau (Mindy Lewis) from The Guiding Light. I don't think I got too far with it, though.

5. What effect has teaching had on your writing or your outlook?
It's slowed me down, but it's also gotten me out of my own obsessions some. Maybe it's made me better. I don't ever try to act like I really know any more or that my opinion is any more valuable than another reader's. That includes my students. I try to learn myself through their reads, if I can, what does and doesn't translate to whom, when and maybe why.

6. If a graduate student of the future wanted to argue that a secret theme ran through all your work, what would that secret theme be?
As opposed to those I wear on my sleeve? Something about not really having my last name, my authorial imprint, or what have you. I'm adopted, and I've only ever told one boyfriend the name I was born under, but the theme is something about the "Y" that had us--me and my sister--at the end of all alphabetized lines. Most people would add another letter, a "c", to our last name, because nobody'd ever heard of one like ours, especially in the South. Though even when I search for my Dad's last name, my real one, on the internet like I sometimes have, nothing comes up. We then took a more common one. It's something about the thing you really are inside other trappings, how so or not like the one of a swallow family.

Six Little Questions for: ARLENE ANG

2009-04-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

There's only two things that really matter to me in this life/blog: that I help promote the prose-poem as literary form, and that people read me! So I thought it might be nice to start talking to some other writers working in the form, starting with Arlene Ang. If Six Little Things was Hollywood Squares -- which it isn't -- Arlene would be its Paul Lynde, which she isn't. I am not yet very articulate about what I feel makes an effective prose poem but from the moment I read one of Arlene's submissions, I recognized in her work an exemplary representation of those qualities of allusion and compactness, surrealism and specificity, visual evocation and linguistic playfulness that, to me, define the genre. She has appeared in 3 of Six Little Thing's 14 issues, which is like 21% or something. I've never met her, although seeing pictures of her on Facebook has finally convinced me that she is real. She lives in Spinea, Italy, which now that I actually see it on a map is close enough to Venice that maybe I'll plan to pop in to visit some day! (Picture at left is where Arlene works!)

Arlene Ang is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being a collaborative work with Valerie Fox, Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon (Texture Press, 2008). She received the 2006 Frogmore Poetry Prize and the 2008 Juked Poetry Prize. For additional information, visit her website: www.leafscape.org.

1. What is your latest project?
Right now I'm just happy to be writing every day. But some old projects, like the novel I was writing with Valerie Fox and the serial sonnets (Petrarchan) based on Chopin's Preludes need to be, at some point, finished.

2. What are, to you, the characteristics of a satisfying prose poem?
Six little things: (1) surreality, (2) inventive language, (3) general weirdness, (4) element of surprise, (5) steady or rapid heartbeat, (6) ability to provoke thought and/or carnal feelings in the reader.

3. How has living in a non-English-speaking country affected your writing?
One thing's for sure: I can't do slang, only bookworm English. And it's limiting when it comes to fiction and dialogue.

4. What is your favorite object in your home?
My two-year-old laptop. But this doesn't mean it loves me back.

5. I think I told you that at one early point I worried that "Arlene Ang" was a pseudonym along the lines of the great Australian poet Ern Malley, and that one day a very conservative traditionalist poet would proclaim that he or she had written the works of "Arlene Ang" as a spoof, lambasting all the editors who had published these works. What did you think of that?
I was particularly tickled. Being an invented character whose works are ghostwritten by more than one person is priceless. As a child, I actually wanted to evolve into multiple personalities but the mental grafting didn't take.

6. If the internet had never existed, what kind of writer would you be?
I'd be a public washroom graffiti writer. The kind that gets fined and imprisoned for being a public nuisance.

Candy Bar: A True Encounter

2009-03-29T08:19:00.000-07:00

The following took place yesterday evening at the Walgreen's. Background factoid #1: There is no place on earth with slower-moving register lines than Walgreen's, but unfortunately on many of my journeys from A to B, it is right there at midpoint AB. Background factoid #2: For the last few weeks, the cashier has been obliged (I assume) to ask every customer, "Would you like to try the new limited edition candy bar from Hershey's, the Thingamajig? They are two for a dollar." Of course, nobody wants one, ever. In the year 2009, you either want a candy bar and have selected the one you want by the time you get to the register, or you are out the market for candy bars on that trip. I'm only glad I can actually understand what the cashier is offering to upsell me. When I go to Backyard Burgers, the squawk box always barks at me, "WELCOMEtobackyardburgerwouldyouliketotryourmmmbmbmbmbmbmbmbmbmbtoday...?" And I say, no thank you. Sometimes I wonder what I was in fact offered. What if they were saying, "Would you like to try our burger without spit in today, you dumb asshole?" And there I was blithely replying, "No thanks."

Anyhow, onto the true story of the THINGAMAJIG:
I'd already observed the chatterbox yuppie lady (triangulate Parker Posey in Best in Show, Teri Hatcher in Desperate Housewives, and of course, a dose of reality about what people actually look like) making small talk in the line around her. She was very nicely dressed, in preppie-yuppie fashion, in tight khakis and a black cable-knit sweater and a deep brown leather clutch. You could smell Volvo with an Obama magnet on her.

CASHIER: Would you like to try the new limited edition candy bar from Hershey's, the Thingamajig? They are two for a dollar.

YUPPIE LADY: No. (beat) As a matter of fact I don't eat candy bars.

ME: *Snort* (chokes laughter)

I should add I was buying two pints of Ben & Jerry's AND a candy bar. But JESUS! Just fuckin' say "No thanks."

Hand

2009-03-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

There was a Botero exhibition at the Brooks Museum of Art that included several bronze sculptures displayed outdoor. This is my hand and Botero's Hand, in a picture by my friend Sam Smith.

2009-03-19T21:32:00.000-07:00

A new issue of Six Little Things is now online at Six Bricks Press. Issue #14 Spring 2009, is themed "Glass Rooster" and features new, short work by F.J. Bergmann, Nicole Cartwright Denison, Dawn Corrigan, Kristen Eliason, Janis Freegard, and Kevin Nolan, with paintings by Las Vegas tattoo artist Shawn Nutting.

The next issue will be #15 Summer 2009, themed "Captain McHurkeydurkey's Utterly Masturbatory Prose Parade" – Deadline May 28, 2009. Please direct submissions or inquiries to Bard Cole at editor@sixbrickspress.com.

---

If you like things that you can't figure out whether they're fiction or poetry or some goddamn chimera with the worst qualities of both, you may be interested in my new book, This Is Where My Life Went Wrong, published by BLATT, and now available for pre-order on Amazon.com.

Novelist and playwright Sarah Schulman said, "In this associative road trip through "Americaville", Bard internalizes the true history of our literature. Playful, intense, filled with leaps off of various cliffs. A tribute (high and low) to the thought/sentence - how its preserved secrets and blurted truths operate in daily life."

Thanks - I hope you enjoy the newest issue of Six Little Things.
BC

Reading Snopes

2009-03-16T15:56:00.000-07:00

CLARA VARNER (Joanne Woodward in the 1958 film The Long Hot Summer) is a character that appears nowhere in the work of William Faulkner. Then again, neither is Will Varner, as played by Orson Welles, a character from the work of Faulkner. An enjoyable enough movie, as a whole, it gives off the very Hollywood impression of being a makeshift substitute for a Tennessee Williams play, constructed from fragments of William Faulkner's fiction.

I am in the midst of reading, for the first time, Faulkner's Snopes trilogy. NO SPOILERS PLEASE!!!!! I don't know how it ends so don't ruin it for me. It's been ages since I've gotten to read a great (good and long) work of literature in a kind of innocent ignorance; too many good old books everyone's already talked them to death. Snopes is reminding me of In Search of Lost Time more than I would have guessed reading other Faulkner fiction; it differs importantly in being about collective social memory rather than about individual memory, but it has a lot of the same progressions -- following the naturally conservative viewpoint of a child who sees the world around him as a stable status-quo that has some roots and some purpose for existing and then exposing the power of the tectonic motion that is slowly but surely altering the terrain. And, as with Proust, sometimes I feel fed up with Faulkner's pretentions and shallow thinking about social class, sex, or race, only to be faced, suddenly, with an action or a line of prose that turns it all around into a powerful rebuke of pretention and shallow thinking, in a way that seems so natural and so without intention that it evokes the wholeness of life rather than the intelligence of a writer.

Boredom

2009-03-14T07:13:00.000-07:00

I believe strongly that boredom is an effect that a widely ranging work of literary art needs to call upon at some moments. I have just spent two weeks skimming Faulkner's The Hamlet and I cannot imagine how else it would be possible to read it. Reading every word carefully as if that's how to make it make sense -- that's like moving to a new city and trying to know every crack on your street's sidewalk before leaving your block to see where the hell you are in relation to everything. It clearly is designed to dump a miasma of names, references, and story fragments into your consciousness, not string you delicately along one distinct narrative line.

I may have to go back now and try to read James Purdy with the same mindset. I've loved his short stories ever since I read one called "The Candle of Your Eyes" probably in 1991 or so in a Christopher Street anthology. And it's weird -- no matter how formally inventive or obscure or dense his stories are, I love them, but I've never been able to force my way through a whole novel.

2009-03-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

I was reading Elizabeth Stark's blog Write Angles: The Art of Craft this morning and I really enjoyed her restrospective description of the naive joy of getting your first book accepted for publication. It was spot-on... if a little less cynical than I sometimes am about it.

Elizabeth wrote, quite accurately in my opinion, that nowadays, "if you are a novelist–and this is more true now than it was then–you are a small business owner or you have a hobby. Those are your choices." And it made me think, and decide that I have a hobby. I do know something about editing and literature and the book business, and there's no way, if I meant for this to be a viable small business, I would write the things I do, period. That's neither self-pity nor a proud statement of artistic integrity. It's just a fact. I'd be far better off financially selecting someone else's books to promote and sell.

Every so often I try to get into the whole idea of being a multimedia fiction-writing entrepeneur but I'm just not up for it, I think. Working on video productions and all is a whole other thing, because it fundamentally is about working with other people to shape some creative ideas into something an audience can grasp, so you are always pitching it to a real idea of an audience -- a real audience, that will sit down and look at the end product. As a reader, I appreciate a whole spectrum of reading experiences, and perhaps most of all the pleasure of finding an unexpected interesting thing; so much so that I think I've begun to write things for these imaginary sidelong readers -- someone who will discover a book like I discovered Robert F. Jones' novel Blood Sport at my friend Harry's dad's cabin. The intimacy of that discovery is something I've tried to evoke in This is Where My Life Went Wrong. I don't expect people to read it and process it in one read, certainly not in a quick read designed to produce a review.

Of course, people who don't write impenetrable bullshit may have entirely different luck with their careers. I'm just glad I have other employment skills.

2009-03-03T08:50:00.000-08:00

Now available for pre-order on Amazon: This Is Where My Life Went Wrong, the winner of the 2007 BLATT Novel of Novels contest, by yours truly.

out in public

2009-03-01T14:29:00.000-08:00

The Live Nude Girl In the Devil's Territory Tour Blog

My friend Brian and I went to a reading at Burke's Books last night -- authors Kathleen Rooney (Live Nude Girl -- memoir about working as an art model) and Kyle Minor (In The Devil's Territory -- short stories), along with Burke's Corey Mesler. Rooney and Minor are on a 25-city reading tour, joining a local writer in each city, and keeping a blog. This intrigued me though I had not read either of them before, and it was a terrific reading. The sky had opened up and crapped a ton of snow on Memphis so it was a limited turnout. I am awfully shy (or "socially retarded" as some have put it) in public and very broke so I'm not the most exciting person to have come to your reading but I am better than nothing!

It made me remember a reading I did at Borders in Minneapolis in 2000 when I was promoting Briefly Told Lives and despite a really enthusiastic events coordinator exactly ONE person came, and I read basically right to him for twenty minutes, and then he thanked me and left. It was a beautiful day with no snow at all.

A New Book, A New Blog...!

2009-02-28T06:48:00.000-08:00

I still don't know what a normal human being is supposed to do with a book -- particularly a book of experimental fiction / poetry. There's only three options I can see. One is to get so many awards and to be so intellectual about the whole deal that you can convince yourself that those who don't appreciate you are mere cretins, a solution I might consider if I begin getting awards except I wouldn't have much fun hanging out with that crowd. Two, is to create a whole nutty-whoo-hoo trickstery mystery nut job persona, which I have seen done very effectively but despair of emulating -- it's more of a straight-guy thing anyhow. Three, my current tactic, is pretend that the book just sort of happened, like an unplanned pregnancy -- nothing to be ashamed of, of course, but clearly demurring from any expectation that others should be doing celebratory backflips in your honor.

Anyhow, my second book is going to be available to the general public within, I guess, the next month or so -- I'll be updating info on www.cbardcole.com.