NOÖ Journal

New NOÖ Weekly for holiday shopping anxiety!

2011-12-06T12:26:00.000-08:00

Take a break from all that gift guessing and check out the new edition of NOÖ Weekly, guest-edited by Laura Eve Engel and featuring Karyna McGlynn, Sean Lovelace, Michelle Chan Brown, Patrick Lucy, and Adam Peterson. Here is a prose poem consisting of all my favorite lines:

AT THE VELVEETA PLUMMET CHASTITY CONVENTION, WE ARE ALL OF US FIRST HOMES OF A BEAR SUITE MEMORANDUM TO PLEASE MR. SHANNON
I tried to pass myself off as a kind of candy. Agh, the most miserable lizard bourbons his doorstep. Down the hallway a woman in a man’s suit brings room service and has one of her three thousand daily thoughts: You better love this world, better love it soon instead of waiting around for it to love you. We wear our American luck like a fannypack. We can do can-do. The rare honeycreeper. A physical bear could body slam anything with a body but theoretical bear has no body. My mother had no god and it made her days in the hospital confusing.

Ani Smith edits a new NOÖ Weekly!

2011-11-13T17:56:00.000-08:00

To celebrate a huge and awesome new edition of NOÖ Weekly guest-edited by Ani Smith—and featuring Stephen Daniel Lewis, Andrew Borgstrom, Brittany Wallace, Kuzhali Manickavel, Adam J. Maynard, and Melissa Goodrich—I have culled this prose poem featuring all my favorite lines/sentences from this edition's work:

WE WILL ALL BE COUNTRY WESTERN LIES W/ EXCEPTIONAL ORDINALS AROUND HERE MAKING HOMELESS EYE CONTACT IN INDIA AT DUSK DOING HEROIN WITH THE VANISHING HORSE

Tonight, assholes, we are talking about the sky. How sad a world with money will become depends on your approach. Then I drank some Gatorade someone left in the stall because if I had AIDS, I could drink anything. I will smile benevolently at suicidal farmers and encourage them to name their tractors after me. Or we like tattoos that look like necklaces and necklaces that look like skin. Guess what I lied to her. All of my cardigans have defects. There is a baby driving a tractor in the neighbouring field. Watching a Troll on a beach eating a slice of chocolate cake. I’ll know when there are sounds I don’t recognize in the night, braying or some such, and her milk splashes out of her, and her bloody baby horse comes out. I’ll know when I know.

NOÖ Journal Zine Scene Spotlight

2011-11-08T12:50:00.000-08:00

"From its very beginning, when Mike Young and Kyle Peterson founded the journal in Mt. Shasta, California, the mission was clear: to capture the contradicting nuances of place and hold a mirror to the community. Tension builds character-erects setting-drives time. Enlarging the localized tension for presentation makes art." — Deep thanks to Juan Carlos Reyes for his awesome spotlight/retrospective of NOÖ over at the Zine Scene. NOÖ has changed a lot in the six years we've been around, and Reyes does a good job narrating that history. There's also an interview with me in which I identify our dominant aesthetic as "a voice that would prefer sneaking away from the kitchen party and out to the shed, to make castles out of foraged Cheez-Wiz cans." Thanks, Juan!

Paul Harding: Selfless Man, Thinker, Tinker

2011-11-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

It’s snowing in October and the trees and power lines are conspiring to imprison me in my house which can mean only one thing: it’s the lightning round! I recently received a late night email from Mr. Paul Harding, who was kind enough to answer a few questions, handing over his answers in a email poked with air holes, marked fragile: handle with care, for, as the man himself says - “Answers live…and I call them as I see them, right here, right now.” He is currently traveling after the whirlwind of success finally released him from its funnel cloud, shiny Pulitzer in hand, for Tinkers his “truly remarkable” (Marilynne Robinson) debut novel. And it is truly remarkable, to say the least. For those of you who haven’t yet, “do the read!” as Mike would say. But, “Beware!” as Lorca would counter, for this here book will read you as much as you read it. It’ll read you sideways. You’re sure to find yourself, like that small black dot of a figure on the cover, adrift, lost in a sea of white, body blind and snow blind, unable to see the hands in front of your face. They might be your hands or they might be your father’s hands. They might be your grandfather’s hands or the hands of a grandfather clock, spinning backwards, forwards, spinning every which way but loose. Loose as in a DNA ribbon, unfurling, unwinding, flapping in the wind, giving away its secrets. Jacob’s ladder deconstructed. So don’t lose yourself, or do, if you dare. Here’s a sort of, part 1, Schrödinger’s cat style:

How or where did the story idea begin for you?

PH: The story is based on anecdotes my maternal grandfather told me about his childhood growing up in Maine.

How much did it change and evolve over time?

PH: I’m idealistic. The story did not change at all. My understanding and perception of it evolved over the course of nearly ten years of writing, rewriting, pondering, etc.

Is it autobiographical in any way?

PH: Some of it is autobiographical. For instance, I apprenticed with my grandfather repairing antique clocks. The deathbed vigil is very much like the one my family had for my grandfather. But it would be difficult for me to be less interested in autobiography, per se. I am not much interested in myself. I am interested in the fact that I am a self, that my experience is as a “self” in this life.

The bold, opening line really lays it all bare. Did you have any reservations about the setting the story up in this fashion?

PH: No reservations at all. I have an almost phobic distaste for plot shenanigans. So the way I solved – or prevented myself, really, from any kind of temptation toward sleight of hand manipulation of the material (e.g. “his mother was really a horse!”), was to lay out the entire plot in the first sentence. That forced me to adhere to the ideal that the story is all in the telling.

Some of my favorite scenes are descriptions of clocks and their inner workings, such as “…the escape wheel (every part perfectly named – escape: the end of the machine, the place where the energy leaks out, breaks free, beats time)…” It all just seems so perfect – the clock, time, the dying man immersed in his memories. Do you find it easier to find the sublime in simple description and direct, clear language? I mean, there is an ethereal, mystical, almost magical feel to whole thing (especially the forest, the epileptic fits, the hallucinations at the start), and yet, you seem to want to stick to the direct, the concrete, and elevate that through the language alone.

PH: Yes, yes, and yes. Symbolism and Meaning with a capital “M” are not qualities that the author thinks up, intellectually, theoretically, beforehand and then super-adds to the material. If the subjects are sound, they are their own best witnesses, and so the author’s job is to merely (merely!) describe them as accurately, as precisely as possible. Then, the meaning and symbolism that is inherent in the subjects will emerge onto the page naturally. The process is properly exegetical rather than eisogetical. Profundity, I’ve found, is achieved by immanence rather than what is traditionally (I think) thought of as transcendence. I attempt full immersion rather than floating off into the ether.

There is a sense of both great distance (between the father’s and sons emotionally, geographically within identity and time itself) and closeness (the sharp interrogation you employ in exploring just about every object, sensation, sentence) in the novel. Did you set about to explore life on such a broad scale, or did it just work out that way?

PH: Juxtaposition of the infinite with the infinitesimal is possibly the artist’s greatest means. In music it is counterpoint, painting contrast. The principle holds across mediums, though.

What are some of the toughest choices you had to make, about characters, or setting, etc?

PH: I had to make the mother – Kathleen – nicer, kinder, more loving than the woman upon whom she was loosely based.

The Reasonable Horologist – where did the idea for those sections come from?

PH: The early writing I did was all about the deathbed vigil and Howard leaving his family. It thought, My goodness, this is a dire book; I need some variation, another key, some different textures. So, I started fiddling around with some tongue in cheek Enlightenment philosophy – “Welcome, dear fellows, to reason!” – and so forth. The idea, was, again, to put some contrast into the work, so that it would not keep striking the same note, the same tone (i.e., “mono”tone). Eventually, the material had to pull its own dramatic weight, which I hope I did in that the idea of a logical, rational, reparable universe would be a very deeply appealing idea to a man whose own youth had been so hapless and vulnerable.

—Todd Orchulek

they can't mace the whole human race

2011-10-31T21:32:00.000-07:00

Hope you're enjoying NOÖ [13]! This is our biggest issue yet, so be sure to browse extensively, maybe check out some new names you've never heard of. And be sure to leave comments. Everyone likes comments.

—Print issues will be appearing in cozy physical spaces once I get them from the printer and get them out into the world. We've got a pretty extensive distribution network lined up, but we always like to send to new places, so let us know (editors -at- noojournal -dot- com) if you want some NOÖs in your town. As always: they're free.

—Watch out for new NOÖ Weekly editions coming soon, guest-edited by Ani Smith and Laura Eve-Engel! I'm stoked to get both of these online and keep the NOÖ times rolling.

—Speaking of rolling, submissions are open again for fiction and poetry. Read the latest issues to get a sense of what we like and send away. We're currently reading for NOÖ [14], which will come out next year.

NOÖ [13] IS OUT! DO THE READ! SPOOKY LUCKY!

2011-10-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

"The body is a costume, or it’s a costume that “eats” its own body, “eats” itself."

2011-09-14T15:39:00.000-07:00

Over at Montevideo, Johannes Göransson spills some smart thoughts about the first of Matthew Suss's "3 From Suicide Mountain" in the most recent NOÖ Weekly.

NOÖ Weekly: Duende Edition (guest-edited by Ben Kopel)

2011-07-18T06:43:00.000-07:00

Originally, the duende was a kind of Latin American goblin, from the same roots as dueño, the "real owner of the house." But thanks to Lorca, duende also means art for people who bring down the house (and hearth and heart) in soul-crushing fashion. Which brings us to the dark concoctive assembly skills of Ben Kopel, our newest guest-editor of NOÖ Weekly, and he is bringing us all the duende we can handle: dream chimes, roof capers, wanderer's sadness, king cake babies, donkey-baboon-capybara-woodchuck-kangaroo hips, death pole-dances to Nelly Furtado, landslide poetry comics, gold cobras, zombie cults, nightblooming, and one of the most epic love poems I've ever read.

Here are the beautiful goblins involved: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Graham Foust, Chelsea Hogue, Gordan Massman, Bianca Stone, and Matthew Suss.

Definitely pet your inner duende and check it out. And stay tuned soon for a sneak peak at NOÖ [13], which is due out next month! In the meantime, in the duende spirit, here is a list of the songs iTunes randomly fed me while I put this edition together:

Back To Me - The Positions
Be A Little Quieter - Porter Wagoner
Hope & Fulfillment - Langhorne Slim
If The Brakeman Turns My Way - Bright Eyes
A Little Louder, Love - Connie Converse
Whiskey In the Jar - The Dubliners
Hearts of Palm - Ravens & Chimes
One Night Stand - The Pipettes
Bible Club - Adam Green
Here's to the Days - Drake's Hotel
Wake Up Hill - Old Man Luedecke
Leah - Roy Orbison
Duplexes of the Dead / Automatic Husband / Ex-Guru (Live on KCRW) - The Fiery Furnances
Try to Think About Me - Herman Dune
New York Is Killing Me - Gil Scott-Heron
Victory - Trampled By Turtles
Hold On To Your Breath - Simon Joyner
Oceans - The Format
Orion Town 2 - Frontier Ruckus
Where the River Let Out - Dave Dondero
Four Long Years - Oh! Sweet Music
Living and the Dead - Dave Dondero
All This Time - The Heartless Bastards

“I absolutely could not write Stranger Will today, with a kid" : An Interview with Caleb J. Ross

2011-07-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

Caleb Ross is currently on an epic blog tour to celebrate the release of his two novels, Stranger Will and I Didn't Mean to be Kevin. We here at NOÖ Journal are happy to support flamboyantly ridiculous things like blog tours, and that's why we're happy to present this interview with Caleb by Nik Korpon, author of Stay God and Old Ghosts.

The interview covers Stranger Will and a lot more: messenger pigeons, human limbs, writing a book when you have a kid, and trying to please our overlords of search engine technology. Hope you enjoy! (And if you like the interview, check out the books!)

Nik: Why human remains? Also, why messenger pigeons?

Caleb: Human remains removal felt like the perfect vehicle for William’s [the "Will" of Stranger Will] moral conflict. A metaphorical disgust of human life can too easily—for me anyway—come across as trite and nihilistic, while incorporating a literal disgust with human life allows some elasticity with the metaphor. And when working this balance for 188 pages, elasticity is necessary.

I can’t deny the simple morbid fascination of human remains removal, though. Just the job title alone—profession human remains removal specialist—evokes the kind of imagery that I strive for with everything I write. I love a visceral reaction. And not necessarily by way of blood and guts. The grotesque—as in an ordinary story twisted just enough to jar the reader—can elicit a gut reaction often even moreso than blood. Flannery O’Conner’s “Good Country People,” for example sticks with me more than most things; the idea of a traveling bible salesman stealing a girl’s wooden leg simply can’t be forgotten. And neither can, I hope, the idea of a man scrubbing away the stains left by dead bodies.

The messenger pigeons offer a rare combination of curiosity, antiquity, and possible psychopathy. I grew up in a small town. When leaving via a north/south highway on the west end of town there was a small house with a giant animal cage blocking the entire eastern façade. I never saw who lived there, only the pigeons. The image of this house, more metal wire than brick, stuck with me. It was only a matter of time before I used it somewhere.

Together, the commentary on death allowed by the human remains removal and the tenuous human connection allowed by the messenger pigeons created such amazing opportunity to explore universally appreciated aspects of the human condition but through a unique lens. Even saying that—“the human condition”—feels too kitchen sink domestic drama to me; I have to dirty it a bit with a few blood splatters.

2. How did you reconcile the character of Mrs. Rose with the overall theme of the book?

I spent a lot of time trying to outwit Mrs. Rose. I wanted her to be a fluid symbol, something indefinable in much the same way that William is indefinable. Is she good? Does her philosophy make any logical sense at all? Does she have her own arc that crosses, and at times, matches, William’s arc? On all counts, possibly. But ultimately, I had to tone down the intellectualizing and accept that Mrs. Rose really isn’t any greater than a typical comic book villain.

As much as I like to claim my work is “literary,” (though not kitchen sink domestic, right?) and cannot be confined to mainstream descriptors like hero and villain, I simply cannot with Stranger Will. Once I accepted those designations, the book’s theme was allowed to foster, and with it my ability to erase my own ethical concerns from the page. This means that Mrs. Rose was allowed to be evil. She was allowed to be crazy, which allowed me to focus on William and how he shapes the novel’s theme.

3. You've said before that you wrote Stranger Will a while ago, but sold it after you'd already had a kid. How did the time (and child) change your read of the book?

The simple answer, from which a much longer diatribe may sprout, is that I absolutely could not write Stranger Will today, with a kid.

I started the first drafts of the book during my sophomore year of college. I wasn’t thinking at all about kids at the time. But I was thinking. A lot. About everything. I wish I could capture that head-space again; everything meant something to me in college. Every leaf, every sound, every lecture, every textbook. It’s like I was on drugs, 24/7. I am glad I was able to pair that ceaseless pondering with plenty of time to write. What came of that time was the first draft of the novel, a lengthy, unnecessarily angst-driven pile of crap. Years later, with Zoloft, I approached the novel with a more level head, and came away with a much, much better novel. My advice to writers, I suppose, is write your novel when you feel like shit; edit when you feel great.

Some passages I read now, as a father, and shudder. There’s a part in Stranger Will where a boy, eight years old I think, is learning to read. He sounds out the words on a note that was meant for his mother, a note that basically outlines how she plans to kill the boy. The boy is so excited that he knows how to ready, but has no idea what the words really mean. Damn that scene.

4. How has your authorly understanding of fatherhood changed since then, or since the birth of your son?

I don’t know that my understanding, in terms of how I approach fatherhood in my writing, has changed much. I write the father figure often, and usually as a reluctant authority figure. That will probably stay the same.

Stranger Will is, I believe, the only piece I’ve written—definitely of such length—from the perspective of the reluctant authority. Usually in my writing the father pops in for a few scenes as a device to highlight certain aspects of the main character, and then he drops away.

If anything changes because of my own fatherhood I may begin treating the father figure with a bit more care. I understand the role in a way I never have before (side note: I grew up without a father, only me, my mother, and my two sisters). The father will always be a presence in my stories, and perhaps now just a more informed presence.

5. Being a father, and writing several stories about fathers and sons how do you think your son will react in ten/fifteen years when reading Stranger Will? More importantly, what would you say to him, on walking in and finding him turning the last page?

I’d say, “Wow, you got to the last page. It must not have sucked too much.”

I think my son will react to my work in the same way he might react to any story; I don’t think the thematic weight will affect him. He loves stories, he loves books, and I think the separation of author from author’s work will be a natural concept to him.

Actually, I hope he cares enough about literature to confront me about the book someday. It would be amazing to be able to talk with my boy about my work.

6. You mentioned in a blog post for Father's Day last year that your wife and son gave you a day to write. When faced with all that free time, though, you found yourself distracted and realized that you write better in short bursts. Two parts: Why do you think you function better that way (and is it a result of only having short bursts of time in which to write) and do you feel like you writing is shaped by this practice? By that I mean do you see your work as smaller sections built into sequences (similar to a screenplay) or as one longer narrative? Does that make sense?

Writing is exhausting for me. I spend most of my waking time thinking about what I want to write. Only once I have a few sentences in my head do I sit down to write. Those sentences grow to a few paragraphs, sometimes a page or two, and then I am done. Two hours tops, usually. I’ve always done it this way, even sans-child, though I will say that now with a child I find myself hyper-focusing my writing time. I’ll take my 15 minutes of time and cram my two pages into it. My writing hasn’t suffered through the shift in habit, but it has changed.

I have always written with the goal of producing smaller sections. I then weave these sections into each other as I draft out a novel. So, the finished product may not resemble the fragmented beginnings at all, which I suppose is the point of a novel; it should be cohesive, seamless.

7. I have to say, Stranger Will is a finely cut novel, and reads like the obsessed work of a compulsive editor. How far from the initial drafts is the final copy? Do you find yourself revising more than writing?

I actually really love editing, perhaps even more than the initial writing stage. So, yeah, I definitely revise more than write. For Stranger Will specifically, the final version is substantially different than the earliest drafts. Specifically, the entire first draft was written in first person perspective. There is nothing quite as satisfying, for me, as re-writing an entire novel. The amount of focus I am forced to dedicate to such an undertaking is extremely revealing.

8. You had a really interesting—and relevant (maybe frightening)—column on HTMLGIANT about writing for search engines. You're also one of what I think is a new breed of novelist, one who is using the dearth of social media to both expand your readership and inform the author-as-person. Has this influx of creating content for social media cut into prose-writing? The two seem almost, I don't know, dependent on each other. That you need the prose to back up the attention social media brings, and you need attention brought to the prose byway of social media. How do you make time for each? Do you find one eclipsing the other?

Unfortunately, dedicating as much time as I do to engaging with readers and authors via online networks like Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and all the rest has sucked quite a bit of time from my fiction writing. Though, I got into writing not just to write, but to connect with people; novels just happened to be the best way for me to connect with people at length about a specific topic. Online social networking is the supporting converse to the length and intimacy of a novel. In a way, I have found it to be less a distraction and more of a necessary component to being a well-rounded author.

From a marketing perspective, you are absolutely right. The two aspects—writing (the product) and networking (the sales)—are part of the same piece. A lot of authors, myself included, tend to stay away from terms like “marketing” and “sales”; books are supposed to be better than commerce, right? But the fact is that books only matter when people read them. I think of social networking not as selling but more of helping readers find me.

As for time, I tweet a lot on the crapper.

9. You're right that, these days, the writing and the networking are just about equally important. You present a good case for this in the blog tours you've done (Charactered Pieces' Blog Orgy and Stranger Will's Tour for Strange.) How does I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin relate to Stranger Will? Do you see them as parts of an overall whole or two completely different books?

The novels are similar only in that they both deal with parental abandonment in some way. Some readers have noticed this thematic trend with my work, even back to Charactered Pieces. The realization really came to me as more a revelation than a casual observation. I never had a father growing up, so having been forced to see my work as a product of a non-traditional childhood I have to embrace the circumstances. Though, I’m just the kind of anti-establishment hipster that chances are less and less of my work in the future will involve this same theme. In fact, I’ll probably go the polar opposite way and deal with a smothering of parental support as a character’s main conflict. I’m the kind of guy that stops liking a song the moment he hears it on the radio, as irrational as that sounds.

10. When are you going to write a vampire novel?

I’m working on a novelization of The Lost Boys right now.

11. Everyone is debating the rise of e-readers and their impact of the idea of books. I want to go beyond that. When will we be able to download books directly into our brains, or have some Strange Days-type shit? Also, as popular culture seems wont to do, there is the diametrically-opposed use of typewriters on the rise. Which press will be the one to top them all and get Gutenberg on our collective ass?

If Steve, of Gutenberg fame, ever starts a press I think he would be a shoe-in. He’s got name recognition and Police Academy recognition.

The re-embrace of typewriters feels like a natural reaction to the rise in technology. It has happened with other mediums as well: vinyl records and film come to mind, two forms that most people outside musicians and moviemakers respectively don’t see much need for. I think the same about typewriters. Most readers don’t care how a book is composed, they just want the book. The return to a nostalgic medium is generally more a response of the producer rather than the consumer.

 12. You talk about the human appendage trade in I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin and feature a fetus-in-fetu in the title story of Charactered Pieces. Are limbs symbolic of something bigger for you or is it more of a way to create a visceral reaction from the reader? 

This, like the parent thing mentioned earlier, is also a recurring theme that, until readers called attention to it, I hadn’t consciously acknowledged. Though, unlike the parent theme, I think limbs (their removal, their grotesqueness, and their metamorphosis, as in the case with my upcoming novella, As a Machine and Parts) are probably less a product of my upbringing and more just morbid fascination. However, if I continue the trend, I hope readers will continue to play the role of my couch-side therapist and clue me in to a Freudian correlation. That being said, the image on the cover of Charactered Pieces is a foot…just a foot.

13. Both novels take place in highly specialized worlds. What kind of research did you do for each?

Stranger Will is primary images pulled from my experience growing up in a small town. The fields, the isolated environment, it felt natural to me. I don’t think Stranger Will would have worked if set in a larger town; a small town offers a sense of contention, of not being aware of the larger world, that made Mrs. Rose’s behavior believable. In a big city, she would have been found out much sooner.

I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin has some of the same small town imagery, but has too some settings pulled directly from my college days, which is still a small town but much larger than my hometown. The beef packing plant, the Laundromat, and a couple of the bars all come directly from Emporia, KS (IBP, Norges Laundry, and Town Royal, respectively).

I think fiction, more than anything, has allowed me to embrace and really own my small town upbringing. At one time I resented it. But now, it is more a part of me than any forced environment could ever be.

Caleb J. Ross: Caleb is currently engaged in his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin in November 2011. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb

Nik Korpon: Nik is from Baltimore, MD. His stories have appeared in over 20 publications. He reviews books for the Outsider Writer Collective and is a Fiction Editor for ROTTEN LEAVES Magazine. He is writing his second novel. Visit him at http://nikkorpon.com/

NOÖ Knows Stories #11: Ella Longpre on Flannery O'Connor

2011-06-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

Flannery O’Connor was everywhere. I read her in every town, in three states. It was “Good Country People” that got me. The smarmy Bible salesman and his side-part, he really thought he had everyone fooled, but I knew all about him.

Maybe the third time I’d read that story, freshman year in college, I had just broken with a fundamentalist religious group I’d belonged to for six years. Though I’d never met a Bible salesman, I recognized this character right away. I’d seen plenty of traveling preachers on tour, toting around their self-published books and Gospel CDs and charming Southern drawls. They visited our tiny congregations, young and inspired, often looking for a wife, preaching holiness, devotion, and reminding us that our daily focus should be the transcendence of our sinful flesh. As a teenager, I wanted to be one of them myself. I wanted to preach the word. I gave sermon-ettes on Sunday afternoons. I evangelized door-to-door. Then one day in Atlanta, I watched as one of those preachers committed a sin he had just, that day, preached against for an hour.

That moment opened up holiness for me, turned out its insides made of filthy rags. O’Connor’s Bible salesman opens up holiness, too—when he’s stolen Hulga’s wooden leg and finally unclasps his suitcase where all those Bibles are supposed to be.

Though I took a break from Flannery O’Connor after freshman year of college, I often re-told “Good Country People” in an effort to get friends to read her. I described that preacher in detail, and that moment when he opens the suitcase, and inside there are no Bibles, only glass eyeballs, wooden feet, wooden hands, hooks, and other prostheses pilfered from other girls in other barns. How his true calling is misusing religious devotion to cheat proud women out of their independence.

Last month, someone returned The Complete Short Stories to the library where I work. Thus ended my break from Flanner O’Connor. So many characters I delighted to watch yet again—serial killers, dishonest little boys, upstanding racists and oppressive mothers. I welcomed the South back into my heart and watched as O’Connor ripped it open, ripped the South open, slashing scissors through the great pillow of the South to find the iniquity hidden within. The struggle of goodness puffing itself up against evil until it deflates into a pathetic, mundane attempt of desperate people just trying to do OK.

I got to “Good Country People.” I was pleased—chatty neighbor, yes, she’s here, and here’s the judgmental mother, and the sour-puss atheist with the horse sweatshirt, and finally, the dopey potato-faced Bible salesman. This time, though, in the barn, when he opens his suitcase to throw in Hulga’s wooden leg, inside there are no prosthetic limbs or glass eyeballs or other stolen synthetic body parts. I had remembered the suitcase all wrong, and packed it, myself, with those limbs. Because really, in the story, his suitcase is empty, save for two Bibles. — Ella Longpre

Little Monster Book

2011-06-21T14:06:00.000-07:00

I had never heard of xTx or any of her writing when Mike gave me a copy of Normally Special and said, "You'll like this, it's really freaky." An introduction like that not only sparked my curiosity more than most conceivable things but made me compare xTx's writing to what was perceived to be my taste in literature. The verdict is that Mike was right, I did like Normally Special, and my reaction was directly related to its high content of freaky (see also off-kilter, bizarre, uncomfortable, queer, and "wtf"). This book is the first of California-based writer who publishes under a pseudonym in part because she's written a lot of things she's described as too fucked up for people in her real life to read. Learning this was curiosity-sparker number two. Then I read the book, cried on pages 11-12, and from pretty much there on felt an extremely wide spectrum of emotions including humbled, warm, disconcerted, embarrassed, empowered, and hungry. xTx explores loneliness, violence, and sexuality when they appear in the most unlikely of situations. Her characters are multi-layered and are, for the most part, total freaking weirdoes. This collection of short stories tests the limits of what we can empathize with and is successful if at the very least for its ability to simultaneously shame and make champions out of its readers. More specifically, after I read this book, I realized what a freak I am. And that I kinda like it.

"An Unsteady Place" appears in the second half of the book and is about a woman vacationing with her husband and children at a beachside rental. The house they stay in is nautical-themed down to the handles of utensils. The idea of a fail-proof vacation with a perfect family is supposed to seem unsettling in this context, especially after the speaker says in what I imagine to be a pretty deadpan voice, "There is no way to make a mistake here." This is pretty much setting up everybody in the story for failure, and sure enough, a few pages later our protagonist can't look her children in the eyes because she's convinced they are turning into sea creatures that will devour her alive. She counts the starfish decals on the walls incessantly, and when she gets the same number everytime, the normalcy of that seems to drive her further into madness. "An Unsteady Place" is an example of a time where xTx creates a character who goes completely crazy for what seems to outsiders as irrational reasons, if they even notice the growing psychosis in the first place. Another example is in "The Mill Pond," which deals with a totally different kind of outcast, a chubby, pre-pubescent girl cursed with a bitterly ironic name - Tinkerbell. She toes the edge of what it means to feel sexual, and her underdeveloped sexuality, especially in relation to the polluted motives of the adult world around her, feels disturbing, if not ominous. Without making any kind of negative connotation about sex in general, this story, like "I Love My Dad. He Loves Me.", draws parallels not between sex and being sexy, but sex and estrangement from other humans. Something is really weird and sad about Tinkerbell laying on her back in the sun, pulling her shirt up to her "boobies," and rubbing her belly, alone with her thoughts. I thought for a second that I felt sorry for Tinkerbell and her contemporaries but this reaction was probably just a defensive one. You know how sometimes you pity or hate a quality in someone else because you actually just see it in yourself? I felt this way about Tinkerbell, which I think is a pretty cool/ intense reaction for a writer to get out of a reader. We surprise ourselves by never feeling better off or more sane than these characters, even when they are doing things like fantasizing about a boy named Fritos stabbing himself 33 times in the belly. Other than being compelling and often charmingly relevant, the characters xTx creates in these stories are remarkable for a reason I didn't fully understand until "I Am Not a Monster," the last story in the book. This story's title and most of its first page sound like a character statement of a suspiciously unreliable narrator. But then the narrator says this:

"I am the most timid of monsters. They have removed me from my position within their ranks citing words like fail, coward, reject, weakling, useless, stupid, worthless, dumbass. I tried to hang within their monster ranks, I did. I do. I try every day. It's a reenlisting of a reenlisting of a reenlisting. Every day I think, I am there and every day they kick me out. They make me go back to my life. They know what I know and that is, I have too much to hold on to so I cannot truly be a monster."

I think it's amazing how this character, despite functioning as a complete social outcast, is even a freak perceived by the rest of the freaks. The "freak elite" perhaps. Because she (I assume she is a "she," there is something astoundingly feminine about the majority of narrators in this book), has "too much to hold on to," she cannot fully embrace and be open with her nonconformity. She is certainly a monster, but in a way less tangible way than being green and slimy and living under your bed. That would make things too easy for her. Instead she must privately deviate from the average human emotions, desires, and fantasies. You can't pick her out of a crowd because she looks exactly like everyone else. Only she understands how fucked up she truly is, and this understanding brands her perpetually alone. "I Am Not a Monster" was a perfect end to Normally Special for me because I felt this really exciting catharsis where I was reminded of so many other characters in the book and how they are all secret freaks in the same strange, lonely, undisclosed way. I also started thinking about other secret freaks I know. I thought of Dexter and Dennis Cooper's George Miles. Monsters with pretty brown hair and healthy relationships with their dads. Chubby comic-book readers or young mothers at beachside vacation rentals. Anybody whose weirdness goes completely unsuspected by everyone else, and maybe even by themselves. xTx has said in interviews that she writes under a pseudonym to protect the people in her real life from seeing this ugly, dark, societally "wrong" side of her. It's like under the guise of this alternate persona, her inner freak is unleashed, free to be as wild and disgusting and honest as her characters wish they could be.

Anyways, if that's not incentive enough to read this book, then maybe I should mention its size. It's small enough to fit in my purse, which is so small that I can't carry around a normal wallet anymore. It's cute. It's a cute, unassuming, strange little read.

Meet Phoebe Glick sounds like a teen rom com, but it's actually the title of this interview

2011-06-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

That's right, Phoebe Glick is probably in some other disguise a rambunctious crime solver, but she's also the Summer 2011 NOÖ Journal/Magic Helicopter Press intern, and you'll be seeing her work around these here blog parts. Phoebe is a UMass Amherst student, a sub shop veteran, a fan of Biggie and Peaches, and a prolific blogger and photographer. When I first met her she told me "the weirder the better" when it came to literature, so I gave her a copy of God Jr. by Dennis Cooper and knew she'd fit into the NOÖ fold. To introduce her, here's a little Q&A:

Hi Phoebe! Where did you grow up? What is one interesting character you remember from your hometown?

I grew up in a small town in central Massachusetts called Holden. I tell people I'm from Worcester, which I hope sounds cooler, but which actually just sounds less clean. An interesting character I can think of on the top of my head is this guy who was always in the Holden Friendly's sitting with a cup of coffee and his briefcase open on the table at a ninety-degree angle. There were a bunch of wires and a computer screen in the briefcase. I went to Friendly's recently and he's totally sitting in the same booth, years after the last time I saw him. I'm pretty sure he's recording sounds.

What are some of your favorite books?

I love the Grapes of Wrath, Huckleberry Finn, and the Picture of Dorian Grey. In a broader sense, I like books with protagonists who are lonely or weird, and anything with a homoerotic subtext.

When did you first realize that language could make people feel things?

Probably when a woman from the Holden library read a ghost story to my second grade class about a creature that haunted a man for eating his tail. It made me feel a terror so real that I cried in the bathroom until my teacher sent someone in to ask me if I was having a "problem."

What is your favorite meal?

This is sort of complicated. Last summer I lived in Brooklyn for a month. Two feelings that will always characterize that time for me are that of being really hot and really poor. Perhaps to relieve these uncomfortable sensations, my food cravings took on the form of something light, heat-relieving, and expensive; more specifically: Pinkberry frozen yogurt. The first time I ate Pinkberry, my friend Lanny warned me that there was some kind of addictive ingredient in the pastel-colored, sweetly acidic, self-defined "swirly goodness." He also told me to order pomegranate flavor with raspberries and coconut shavings. It was love at first, uh, lick.

From reading your blog, I feel like you travel a lot. What are some of your strangest traveling experiences?

Once in Utah I almost drowned in a very strong whitewater rapid, and was brought to the shore by a six-foot-five-inch-tall blonde man whose spirit animal was a stallion and whose name was Tex. Because Tex spent so much time under the sweltering sun of the Western United States, cracks formed on the surfaces of his palms and he filled them with superglue to keep his skin together. Naturally, I fell in love with him. The way you fall in love with someone who saves your life. I'll never see him again.

NOÖ Knows Stories #12: Mark Cugini on Grace Paley

2011-05-27T10:13:00.000-07:00

I've been riding Grace's dick for a while now. Grace dick-riders give her props for an assload of different reasons—her feminist activism, her colloquial voice, her clever insight, etcetera—but what she's so brilliantly adept at, I think, is owning the shit out of her shit.

This probably sounds vague. Good. It's supposed to. What I'm essentially saying is that when I read a Grace story, I know immediately that it's a Grace story, and this is what implores me to refer to her by her forename and her forename only because I'm sure you know exactly who I'm talking about.

Take "Wants," for example, which was the first Grace story I ever read. "Wants" is chock-full of all the necessary requirements we so frequently want from our fiction: conflict, that conflict's progression, an enormous change at the last minute. The thing, though, is that none of these elements are existing on their own but instead are eloquently unified for the sake of survival. It's sort of like what Gary Lutz said about words that are destined to belong together: without all of Grace's eloquences working towards one poignant whole, there would be no ripple effect, no rocking of the boat, and no Grace dick-riders.

And this, I argue, is what all fiction (or short stories or poems or novels or bathtubs) should be striving towards: an immense sense of ownership over the craft, a unity so strong that every last syllable is riding the current of one subtle ebb tide, easily drifting towards its own narrative coast so its readers can find it buried in sand. I'm supposed to be this romantic when I'm talking about these things, you see. If not, our stories will be lost forever, drifting further and further along on the endless current of boring, predictable prose. — Mark Cugini, editor of Big Lucks

Todd Orchulek on The Lime Twig by John Hawkes

2011-05-22T06:41:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what would happen if those things you dream about but never, ever tell anyone about came true? Ever wonder what it would be like to live out your most depraved fantasies, you know, the ones that only come creeping out of your subconscious under the cover of darkness, behind the shadow of dream? Well, John Hawkes certainly has, and he was kind enough to share. The Lime Twig is the thing, and it’s a fever I have never quite gotten over. I first read it the summer before transferring to UMass and it’s one of the things that Mike and I talked about at our first meeting, where I landed my internship, NOÖ style. It was fitting that I had read it in the haze of summer, in a field, under the watchful eye of shape shifting clouds. The free association feel felt right. I named clouds. I listened to the brittle music of Hawkes's narrative, snapping the lives of the bored Banks and the unfortunate Hencher in two. I watched them squirm under the long scrutiny of Hawkes's wish-fulfillment-gone-awry microscopic lens.

It all happens in the name of love, somehow, for as Hawkes says, “Love is a long scrutiny like that.” If you know nothing else about Hawkes’s style, you should know that. The quote is applicable to the whole. The narrative lens filters like consciousness itself. It’s discriminatory, distracted and spastic. But there’s always love and there’s always terror; the two are forever inextricably intertwined, just like in life. And that’s what it’s all about, really. It’s like a study in love and terror and desire and the places where those things meet, and it’s all wrapped up in a tasty poetic prose tortilla. There’s also a horse and kidneys cooling on the ledge. Hawkes's other works - The Blood Oranges, or Death, Sleep and the Traveler explore similar areas, but in different ways, mostly without the overt sense of terror, and without the sinking feeling that The Lime Twig can give you. The Cannibal might be a sister to The Lime Twig, and, really, you can’t go wrong reading any of his stuff if you’re even a tiny bit curious. Finding Hawkes was, for me, like stumbling across some fantastic secret or discovering some previously unknown, underground band that you feel right away, from the first beat, the first note. I remember, straight off, I wanted to simultaneously share and not share it, him, with the rest of the world. I wanted to keep him all to myself, but in the end I knew I couldn’t do that. He’s too good. So here I am, shouting from the rooftops.

It’s that long sense of scrutiny that holds it all together, all the out of focus elements, the fuzzy in-betweens, the moments of reflection. Hawkes' ability to hone in on the most minute details renders certain scenes lucid, even transcendent. You’ll feel like you’re dreaming, or reading a dream, if that’s even possible. Some say it isn’t, but I disagree. I’ve done homework in dreams before. Yes, that’s about as exciting as it sounds, and no, that wouldn’t be an example of the kind of dream Hawkes' is talking about here. So don’t worry, or do, if you’re afraid of the dark, because this book is full of shadows. Read it in a well lit room. The narrative thrust oftentimes leads you into moments of uncomfortable clarity precisely because of its capacity to convey a sense of terror with a single image. Or just clarity, depending. You’ll find yourself immersed in an image, a smell, a sound—the smell of lime, the image of the horse, a pair of buttocks, or the sound of footsteps a floor below. You’ll wonder how you ended up there, but not how the narrative ended up there. And that’s an important distinction, because wherever the story goes, it feels right, even when things go wrong. It feels hyper real. You don’t wonder about it, while you’re reading, because it’s so brilliantly rendered. It’s only after you’re done (which won’t be long – at 175 pages, it is more novella than novel) that you stop and think, wait, what?

And the imagery haunts. Measured against those moments of intense, long scrutiny, the rest of the time things simply aren’t as clear, as is often the case with life, or dreams. That’s where it becomes, for me, “magic time” as Kevin Spacey would say (doing his best Jack Lemon impersonation), because it is a dream, after all. And like a dream, this novel is filled with those moments of transition, where identity and focus become blurred and fuzzy—people go in and out of focus, images appear and disappear, time speeds up or slows down without you even noticing. And then, boom goes the dynamite, things suddenly snap back into focus. And it’s a clear, lucid, sick focus that Hawkes throws at us. It’s a sharp, frayed, lyrical focus.

As for the story, well, Hencher’s the way in. He’s a fat man, missing his mother, living in the past. He finds a new outlet for his loyalty, the misoneist Banks, Michael and Margaret. Hencher wants to please them, to show what a loyal dog he really is, so he decides to help Michael fulfill his dream, owning a race horse. It’s a dream that everyone seems privy to, Michael and Margaret and Hencher, too. It affects all of them, the dream and the horse. Their lives and relationships are inextricably tied to that horse, Michael’s dreams, and their own.

“You may manipulate the screen now, William,” Hencher’s mother tells him in flashback, and he does. Hawkes does, too, subtly shifting perception and summoning tension at will, with a deft turn of phrase, or an image, suspended. He messes with holotropics, hanging the image of the horse in the middle of the narrative, in the Banks’ apartment, teasing and toying with the reader and reality. It’s unnerving, but an effective narrative mechanism:

“Knowing how much she feared his dreams; knowing that her own worst dream was one day to find him gone, overdue minute by minute some late afternoon until the inexplicable absence of him became a certainty; knowing that his own worst dream, and best, was of a horse which was itself the flesh of all violent dreams; knowing this dream, that the horse was in their sitting room-he had left the flat door open as if he meant to return in a moment or meant never to return-seeing the room empty except for moonlight bright as day and, in the middle of the floor, the tall upright shape of the horse draped from head to tail in an enormous sheet that falls over the eyes and hangs down stiffly from the silver jaw; knowing the horse on sight and listening while it raises one shadowed hoof on the end of a silver thread of foreleg and drives down the hoof to splinter in a single crash one plank of that empty Dreary Station floor; knowing his own impurity and Hencher’s guile; and knowing that Margaret’s hand has nothing in the palm but a short life span (finding one of her hairpins in his pocket that Wednesday dawn when he walked out into the sunlight with nothing cupped in the lip of his knowledge except thoughts of the night and pleasure he was about to find)-knowing all this, he heard in Hencher’s first question the sound of a dirty wind, a secret thought, the sudden crashing in of the plank and the crashing shut of that door.”

Once Michael gets involved with Hencher and his mob friends, things begin to change for everyone, and not for the better. Michael is spared, for a spell, and gets to live out his most lurid fantasies. Margaret and Hencher, well, not so much. It all quickly devolves into a nightmare from there. The chrysalis doesn’t change into a butterfly, but a beast.

What Hawkes does best is manipulate time. In this study of reality vs. unreality, or fantasy vs. nightmare, this has the greatest effect on the narrative. He has it on a string throughout, speeding it up, slowing it down, or suspending it altogether. He flashes forward, flashes back. He does away with it completely when it becomes burdensome. This allows the terror to bloom fully within the reader’s mind. And the image of the horse resonates and echoes throughout, from start to finish, for temporality has no dominion in the realm of dream or nightmare. For Michael, and for me, it carries with it an eerie, undeniable sense of jamais vu.

So, be careful what you wish for, or, at least, remember what that old adage, “if you can’t be good, be careful,” because who knows, there might be a horse out there somewhere with your name on it.

NOÖ Knows Stories #11: Carolyn Zaikowski on The Little Prince

2011-05-19T16:05:00.000-07:00

Carolyn Zaikowski's tattoo: "I believe that for his escape he took
advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds."

I read The Little Prince about once a year. I did not read it when I was little; I read it for the first time when I was about fourteen (though as a wee one in the eighties, I do remember The Little Prince television cartoon, and thus I've always known the imagery of his planet, his wide pants, and his sad rose.) I read The Little Prince once a year to remember what I care about and how I want to live as a person in the world, a world where love, sadness, foxes, roses, tipplers, lonely kings, simple lamplighters, merchants who sell thirst-quenching pills, obsessive businessmen, egomaniacs, snakes, obligations, and friends exist. A world where nothing is permanent and everything, no matter how much we forget, is magical, totally beyond the limited understanding of our human minds.

I do not say these things lightly nor to invoke cliché. The Little Prince is not just a "cute" book to me, my love of it not just a quirky or fun part of my identity. Each year I wonder, is this the right year to give it to my nephew, himself a little prince? At what age will he finally understand, and what does understanding mean? Perhaps it's I, in my self-satisfied adulthood, who has fallen from wonder and needs to be reminded that a plain hat and an elephant being eaten by a snake are not the same thing? I keep it next to my bed in a small pile of crucial books that includes Gandhi's autobiography, S.N. Goenka's guide to Vipassana Meditation, the Bhagavad Gita, and an archive of Thich Nhat Hanh. When a friend of mine died, it was The Little Prince we read at her funeral: "And at night you will look up at the stars. Where I live everything is so small that I cannot show you where my star is to be found. It is better like that. My star will just be one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens... they will all be your friends. In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night. And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me." In my dark moments, I think of this. I go out to the hill behind my house, alone, and I am reminded of the expanse—sad here, glorious there, but every inch of which proves the impossibility of aloneness. When Antoine de St. Exupery's plane, which crashed and killed him in 1944, was found in 2004, a rush of heat filled my esophagus and pulse and I felt humbled with wonder. It is so good to remember wonder. "Is the warfare between the sheep and flowers not important? Is this not of more consequence than a fat red-faced gentleman's sums?" There is a small group of indigenous people in Argentina who speak Toba, a language into which only two books have been translated in modern memory: The Bible and The Little Prince. There is a reason why. — Carolyn Zaikowski, editor of Dinosaur Bees

NOÖ Knows Stories #10: Bradley Sands on Stephen Dixon's "The Stranded Man"

2011-05-18T10:31:00.000-07:00

Stephen Dixon

Stephen Dixon is one of my favorite authors and I have no idea why. He does not write the type of fiction that I would usually be interested in reading. I have read more of his books than most people on Earth. Many of them are very long and go on for pages and pages without paragraph breaks. I got into his writing because before I moved to Colorado to attend grad school, I visited my parents for a few weeks and didn’t have much to do, so I raided my brother’s bookcase. He had an advanced reader’s copy of Dixon’s novel, Old Friends, that he had probably gotten from when he used to work for a newspaper. I read it and loved it. I don’t think my brother ever read it or maybe he told me that he tried to get into it but failed.

I always found it more difficult to get into Dixon’s story collections than his novels. At first, I am unable to read more than one story per day. Eventually, I really get into the books and try to read them in their entirety in a day because it feels like I have acquired the ability to enjoy more than one story in one sitting and if I don’t take advantage of this ability, I will lose it and go back to only being able to read one story per day. Since I don’t like reading story collections that way, I try to devour the entire book in one sitting if possible.

I checked his collection, Sleep, out from the library about 8 months ago. I was only able to get through a couple of stories before returning it because I had banned myself from reading adult fiction books to prepare for the endeavor of writing a novel for children. After finishing the novel, I checked the book out from the library again. I read a few stories here and there and it took me a while to gain the ability to enjoy more than one story per day. But I achieved the ability today and finished the book.

Regarding Dixon’s writing, he often uses protagonists who obsess over every decision and detail of their past, present, and futures. Obsessing about the future stands out in particular because the characters often consider the many ways in which events can occur in their lives and the stories include their rapidly changing speculations. I see this as a commentary on how every person on this planet is a storyteller because we all speculate about our futures, although perhaps not to the same extent as Dixon’s protagonists. This sort of speculation is very prominent in Sleep, or at least in the first fourth of the book or so.

I’m going to comment about a story that I read about a week or two ago: “The Stranded Man.” In the beginning, the protagonist starts out by describing his life on a deserted island and how he is lying in a hammock. Within a few sentences, he says, “Not quite a hammock. Nothing like one. On some dried grass, in a hut.” Upon reading this, it becomes a typical Dixon story. If this were a person’s introduction to his work, their sense of the story’s reality will be disrupted. For those who are already familiar with Dixon’s writing, these sentences reveal that the protagonist is imagining that he is on a deserted island. For about a page and a half, the protagonist continues to describe his life on the island and keeps changing his mind about certain details. Then it is revealed that he is not on a deserted island. Instead, he is at home, lying next to his wife in bed. He tells her that he was thinking about how he would be able to get himself to a deserted island that was thousands of miles from all bodies of land and be able to survive for years without being found. The idea of being alone is very appealing to him. The man’s wife does not seem bothered by this, but this is not a surprise in a Dixon story. The man tries to figure out how he would end up alone on a deserted island in a way that would not result in anyone’s death, but he cannot conceive of a scenario that would be successful. The wife suggests swimming to the island, but he says it would be too far. Neither he nor she come up with the idea that he could go alone to the island in a boat, although I suppose that wouldn’t work so well considering he would have a means to leave the island, but he could always destroy the boat. Soon, the man speaks of the “stranded man” of his fantasy as if he were a separate person from himself. His wife falls asleep and he continues to contemplate ways to reach the island. He imagines meeting a native girl and becoming her lover. They have children together. No, he never meets a native girl. He fantasizes that his wife is a native girl. After years, he is rescued. His island family comes back with him to the United States. No, they does not. His wife remarried while he was missing. He grows old and dies in the native girl’s arms. No, they go back to the island. Their children decide to stay behind and have children of their own. The man’s children sometimes visit their parents. He dies on the island. Or does he? — Bradley Sands, author of Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You and editor of Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens

NOÖ Knows Stories #9: Frank Hinton on sex stories

2011-05-17T08:16:00.000-07:00

"I was alone in the house, my family was outside working in the garden and I snuck into my parent’s room and found a yellowed paperback called You Always Remember Your First Time. I didn’t understand what it was about but read the first story and discovered what sex was and maybe more importantly, what words could convey.

Up until then, sex had been a penis resting still in a vagina. I didn’t understand there was a motion to it. I knew nothing. The stories in the book expressed a kind of sadness about sex. They were filled with regret and pain. Some were happy and ecstatic. One story was about a very old man seducing a very young girl. I remember a description of tears sliding down chests and over nipples. I’ve thought of this happening to me when crying, in a vague, disconnected way.

I was fascinated. I re-stashed the book and found myself sneaking back to it every possible moment. I started to write stories about sex or really, about bodies moving together in uncomfortable/comfortable ways. I hid the stories in single folds between sheets of old coloring books and never re-read them. That summer I think I wrote maybe thirty ‘sex’ stories and became convinced that this was the ultimate form of fiction/expression. I think now, reflecting on this, that book has been an influence on me being a writer.

One day I went into the drawer with the book and it was gone. I’d always been careful to replace it exactly, but I was caught. Maybe. Maybe my parents had just tossed it out during a cleaning. I’d read every story 3-4 times and felt a solid ‘adult’ grasp of the metaphors and language used. My sex stories are still somewhere in a box, in a basement, in between poorly colored sheets. I haven’t thought about any of this in a clear and organized way for a long long time." — Frank Hinton, author of I Don't Respect Female Expression and editor of Metazen

NOÖ Knows Stories #8: Tao Lin on Charles R. Johnson

2011-05-13T19:59:00.000-07:00

"Two stories I like that I haven't discussed before on the internet (except here, where I also list other stories I like) are Charles R. Johnson's "China" (from his 1986 collection The Sorcerer's Apprentice: Tales and Conjurations) and "Kwoon" (from his 2005 collection Dr. King's Refrigerator: And Other Bedtime Stories).

"China," based on my memory, is about a man and his wife. In the beginning the wife is worried about her husband's failing health. She thinks things about what she'll do when he dies. Then the husband becomes involved in martial arts and becomes increasingly healthier and more "Zen," to a degree that the wife, somewhat confused about why she feels this way, becomes disapproving of the husband's behavior and, in her view, seeming self-righteousness. The story ends with the wife watching the husband doing a jump-kick and crying upon realizing that she is going to die before her husband dies.

"Kwoon," based on my memory, is about a person who is teaching martial arts. He is alone, seems to have no friends or family, and lives in the same location where he teaches. He seems older, maybe in his 30s or 40s, and to have a resigned view of life. One day a new student challenges the person and beats him badly in front of his students, embarrassing him. Most of the students begin training with the new student. The story ends with the person and the new student both implying, or accepting, that they have things to learn from the other, I think.

Based on my memory both stories are in 3rd-person. I was reminded of Lorrie Moore when I first read "China." Both stories are ~20 pages. I think I first discovered Charles R. Johnson when I was trying to find writers who had an interest in Buddhism." — Tao Lin, author of Richard Yates

NOÖ Knows Stories #7: Kevin Sampsell on "What I Did" by Rebecca Brown

2011-05-11T14:47:00.000-07:00

"Rebecca Brown is a fantastic writer of risky, dark fiction as well as some nakedly heartfelt nonfiction and works in other mediums. She lives in Seattle, Washington but her work is underappreciated in America (though apparently she is big in Japan), with the exception of gay readers and authors, who see her as a lasting influence.

In 1992, City Lights released her story collection, The Terrible Girls. This was right when I moved to Portland, Oregon. I bought this collection without knowing anything about the author. I simply loved the title and that cool cover design. I was still fairly new to book-reading and my early, impressionable interests were stories and novels that challenged censorship and had been banned—works by William Burroughs, Terry Southern, Karen Finley, Henry Miller, and folks like that.

Rebecca Brown fit perfectly into this misfit canon. One story in particular, 'What I Did,' shows up 2nd to last in this book and it's the one that felt transformative to me. It's a detailed story about a woman carrying some sort of duffel bag through a dark, desolate land. It's so dark that the woman can't even see the bag. She can't tell what it's made of and she feels no seams or weaves in its construction. She does not say what's in the bag (you learn that in the next story, 'The Ruined City'). She is only trying to get a place where she can bury it. It's a 10-page sensory sensation. There is nothing in the story except the woman and the bag and the action between them and the reader feels everything, in the dark, with her fingers and her sore, thirsty body.

I remember being so impressed with the story that I tried to write something similar (I vaguely recall something dangerously plagiaristic, like about a man carrying a box through a tunnel or something like that), but my story failed. I had nowhere near the talent of Rebecca Brown.

Rebecca Brown, author of "What I Did"

Two years later (1994), I had my first published story in an anthology called Good To Go: Short Stories West Coast Style (published by a small press called Zero Hour). Rebecca Brown was also in it. I went up to Seattle for the book release party and nervously eyed Miss Brown from across the room. I was pretty young and self-conscious and had a weird feeling that lesbian writers disliked me.

While I waited for a chance to say hello to RB, I met Stacey Levine, whose book, My Horse and Other Stories, remains one of my all-time favorite collections. Finally, I worked up the nerve to talk to Rebecca, and wouldn't you know it: she was super nice. Not like a "Terrible Girl" at all. Meeting her was one of my first lessons in the fact that authors, even if they write creepy, mentally tormenting tales, can be completely warm and normal and approachable. Rebecca and I became fast friends. She's been totally encouraging to me and my writing (and publishing) ever since.

Her own work has continued to be awesome (though I feel that it's still not as talked-about as it should be), from Dogs: A Bestiary to her recent essay collection, American Romances. For short story fans who haven't read her work, I say start out with The Terrible Girls or her 2006 collection, The Last Time I Saw You." — Kevin Sampsell, author of A Common Pornography and publisher of Future Tense Books

"It is totally appropriate to have alien sex in public, even on their planet." — Alicia LaRosa on Lizzy Acker's Monster Party

2011-05-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

Monster Party, by Lizzy Acker, is a genius collection of short stories that tie together the reality of interpersonal relationships, human and not.

Each story, in and of itself, is beautifully crafted. Moving from different ages, children to adults, Acker pushes the boundaries of what is proper and what actually exists in reality. And then, just when you get comfortable with what you’re reading, feeling as if you could snuggle up with these people and their problems—the aliens visit. They don’t just visit, however. They show you how you simply love wrong, have sex the wrong way, and that you wouldn’t even know that they’re having sex right in front of you. But “it is totally appropriate to have alien sex in public, even on their planet.”

When you think you’re comfortable with those perfect, sexual aliens, different creatures show up that are even more bizarre in a wonderful, spectacular way. “I love you baby. Good luck with planet Earth.”

Personally, my favorite thing about this collection of stories is how one element, no matter how small—like an image or a feeling—finds its way into another story, another set. At first I thought I was imagining things—which isn’t a hard thing to do—but when the aliens and their lovemaking found their way into another story, in another set, I knew it was more deliberate than not. The bottle rockets, the basement: everything has its purpose. Nothing is left out. The hints and pieces of the puzzle are intricately laced into the full collection.

Lizzy Acker, author of Monster Party

These stories are full of such raw emotion, so much that it is impossible to put the book down until finished. The title story, “Monster Party,” is one of the most emotional stories of all, as repressed as it is. “I suddenly don’t want to tell him, but here I am. I have to. I put all the parts of the machine together all by myself and all that’s left now is to turn on the electricity.” As the reader, I wanted the narrator to scream, cry, punch, and kick her way into the heart of the man she cared about. “I try to think tougher, like a boy would, or like a terrorist or a serial killer. I open the party mix and my skateboard rolls around over my head.”

Soon, I will also take her initiative and put my name in multiple stories of my own collection. “This hasn’t occurred to me before and it seems like a brilliant solution, a dream solution.” Ballsy move, but one that emphasizes the emphasizable.

Each story is worth reading, down to the last word. Whether you can relate to the stories, pick them up and chew on them to reveal their taste, or simply stare at the words until they come together and slap you in the face with meaning—this book is worth the time.

NOÖ Knows Stories #6: Mark Baumer on the future of storytelling

2011-05-10T16:16:00.000-07:00

"I once read a short story called, "I don't believe in the short story anymore." I forget who wrote it. I think I remember there being a man in a canoe. The man in the canoe was tired of his canoe. He burned his canoe and decided to just float in the water for a while. After an hour of floating in the water he began to wonder if he could swim. He became worried. He could see the remains of his canoe in the distance. He began to float towards these remains, but as he got closer he realized it was a barge of burning tires. The barge reeked. The man decided to stop moving towards the barge. He was not sure what to do. A few years passed. The man ate gullweed and salmon. The outer layer of his skin turned into a natural gortex. The man could float as easily as he could breathe. He still was not sure what he wanted to do with his life. One day a magazine floated by. He picked it up. The magazine was full of jetskis. The man became very excited. He ordered a jetski. He felt very happy when it arrived. He never thought about his old canoe or the burning barge of tires again." — Mark Baumer, who once walked across America and at another time ate pizza every day.

NOÖ Belly Flops Into the Wigleaf Top Short Fictions of 2010

2011-05-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to everybody on the list of Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Online Fictions of 2010! Including our Associate Editor Ryan Call and his sister Christy Call, NOÖ [12] illustrator, for their story "Snowstorm as Nostalgic Accumulation."

NOÖ had a strong showing in the long list, with 6 stories placing. Here they are in alphabetical order by author last name:

"Running the Drain" by Brian Allen Carr in NOÖ [12]

"Nine Reasons Not to Kill Yourself East of St. Marks" by Kyle Hemmings in NOÖ Weekly (Sep 20th edition guest edited by Thomas O'Connell)

"Everyone the Same, But Not at Once" by Cami Park in NOÖ [11]

"The News" by Julianna Spallholz in NOÖ Weekly (Sep 20th edition guest edited by Thomas O'Connell, double dunk, nice work Thomas!)

"A Staging" by Michael Trocchia in NOÖ [12]

"Case History #3: Catie" by Carolyn Zaikowski in NOÖ [11]

Congratulations to everybody, and thanks to Lily Hoang, Ravi Mangla, and Scott Garson of Wigleaf! Thanks to all the contributors, guest editors, and readers of NOÖ Weekly, and stay tuned for NOÖ [13], coming this summer!

"Perhaps the most frightening aspect of Call's stories is that he makes them seem so believable."

2011-05-09T12:07:00.000-07:00

Check out the Emerging Writers Network's review of The Weather Stations, NOÖ Associate Editor Ryan Call's new book of short stories. Congratulations, Ryan!

"Each and every story has a human component that Call has written with such care, with such straightforward language, that we cannot help but get pulled in and root for them while they battle elements so much greater than they have the capacity to truly battle. They are doomed to lose and we know it, and they know it, and we know that they know it, but still we care and we root and that says a lot for the abilities of Ryan Call."

An Exclusive Interview with Ofelia Hunt

2011-05-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

OFELIA HUNT might not be 100% real, but she writes 100% real books. Her first novel, Today & Tomorrow, is forthcoming from Magic Helicopter Press in a mere 10 days. To get the mills milling, our brave intern Alicia LaRosa ventured into a correspondence with the mysterious Hunt "herself." As we get closer to the release date, we might give you more details about who Hunt "really" is, or we might just link to pictures of Will Smith and tell you that's a clue to Ofelia's "real" name. Or we might just tell you to look on the copyright page of the book itself. The important thing to remember is that OFELIA HUNT IS BACK and MAY 15TH: THE TODAY TOMORROW COMES.

AL: In Today & Tomorrow, did you deliberately place "Tomorrow" smack in the middle of the book? (When it opens, "Tomorrow" is directly in the middle of the spine). Was it a precise, diabolical plan or was it an unconscious decision?

OH: I have many diabolical plans, but sadly, this was not one. I began with the restriction of two parts in two days and arbitrarily named them 'Today' and 'Tomorrow' in my Word document. Initially each 'day' was to have twenty-four chapters—which may have lead to the center placement of 'Tomorrow'. I abandoned the twenty-four chapter structure because it looked annoying in Word, and because Ofelia Hunt did/does not like paragraph breaks (and so every place where there was a paragraph break became a chapter).

AL: Do you take on a specific persona as Ofelia Hunt? Do you dig deep within yourself to find this person, detach yourself from reality this way by projecting this personality, or do you simply act au naturale?

OH: I'd like to say I put on a special bathrobe and eye makeup and kitten slippers. But I'm far more boring. I decided Ofelia liked a number of specific things and typed them out: 11 point Garamond, hyphens, repetition, trickery, 'math rock', parking lots… I made a list of writers Ofelia admires: Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, Stacey Levine, Franz Kafka, Lydia Davis, Kenneth Koch, Kurt Vonnegut, Lisa Jarnot, Diane Williams, Joy Williams, etc... Ofelia Hunt does not like or understand plot. Her favorite move is Suicide Club (a Japanese movie sometimes called Suicide Circle). I woke every day for about two years at four a.m. to write and revise for sixty to ninety minutes before work. This may have detached me from reality. I remember feeling tired a lot, and listening to a lot of hiphop. Ofelia often writes about the kinds of things I muse about throughout a day, the things I find funny or strange. I think of Ofelia as both the "I" in the novel and the writer of the novel, so the novel may be a memoir.

AL: Are any of the characters in the novel based off of people you know personally? Related to?

OH: No, or not really. At most, certain moments, memories, instances, are based on reality. I grew up near Highland Ice Arena, and throughout middle school the Friday night skate was the place to be. I'd like to say that every character is a composite of every person I've ever met if that composite had been born me. The grandfather character is probably the parent I wish I had, and to some degree, has a sense of humor very much like my mother's.

AL: If you had to pick one day of your life to live over and over again, just like Bill Murray did in Groundhog Day, which day would it be?

OH: Probably the day I moved to Portland with my partner. That day was full of possibility and exhaustion and carrot cake.

AL: Who is the man in the corner?

OH: I don't actually know. When I was very small, and sometimes even now, in darkness, as I pass near parked cars, the image of a very long arm reaching to grab my ankles appears in my mind. It is possible that this arm is the man in the corner.

Read excerpts of Today & Tomorrow in NOÖ Journal and Alice Blue Review. Stay tuned for more info about the novel and exclusive Ofelia Hunt secrets!

NOÖ Knows Stories #5: Guest Post by Bryan Coffelt

2011-05-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

"A short story is a four or five minute stretch at a bus stop. Or a sac bunt vs. a "battle at the plate."

I just told my cat, "No." He pawed a thumb drive off of a shelf. I think a short story would make a bigger thud if it fell off a shelf than a thumb drive, but less of a thud than a hand job that you somehow remember for a long time. Or maybe they are all the same thing: the thumb drive, the short story, and the hand job. Maybe even my cat is the same thing as a hand job.

The short story is unfortunate, at least. Like when you fall weird on your wrist or ankle when making a gamble for something unimportant—or at least something inconsistent. Something hard to judge with your eyes. With your eyes. A short story does not start and stop, it just can be seen a little different. Maybe it's two different points in a river. At one point, you're having an MVP season with the San Francisco Giants, and then, holy shit! You're finishing your career with the Dodgers. I guess I'm saying my answer to the question is "Jeff Kent."" — Bryan Coffelt, poet and designer extraordinaire at Future Tense Books

"I cope with my life with a daydream in uniform."

2011-05-04T09:46:00.000-07:00

Heart scratching gags, comments that offend Gretchen, nightcrawler worms, all manner of human documentary, floaters, and 101 ways to love a man without $exxx: just a few things from a 90s kids Haters Going to Hate NOÖ Weekly edition guest-edited by Richard Chiem. Featuring Luna Miguel, Steve Roggenbuck, Frank Hinton, Timothy Willis Sanders, and Ana C. Give it a gawk.

NOÖ Knows Stories #4: Guest Post by Jonah Vorspan-Stein

2011-05-04T09:39:00.000-07:00

"Amy Hempel’s Reasons to Live is the only book I have ever read twice in one sitting. I sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair in my dorm’s lounge. "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," in particular, has quickly become one of a few seminal objects in my ways of thinking about the short story. It is a shepherd of an entire genre of hospital humor, and I mean this as much in tone, in attesting to the gravity of a situation, as I do in content.

Amy Hempel has an ear tuned to what it means to be dolefully aware of a situation’s consequence, yet equally aware of ones powerlessness in the face of that consequence. To the universal fear that there is more we can offer a person than our "presence." The narrator, in coming to terms with her best friend’s death, struggles with her perceived responsibility to offer whatever grand or sincere gesture seems required of a person in such a position.

Amy Hempel deals with this struggle brutally. The story hums with a certain background noise to the reality which neither woman ever acknowledges. The story, as drawn out of the two women's relationship, operates on a medium of humor, a shielding humor, the sort that comes when we find ourselves confusing humor with composure." — Jonah Vorspan-Stein, award winning fiction writer at UMass-Amherst

NOÖ Knows Stories #3: Guest Post by Jamie Iredell

2011-05-03T07:04:00.000-07:00

"I haven’t read a short story in a long time. I’m reading novels and book-length nonfiction. Lately, even in literary magazines, I’ve been turning to the nonfiction rather than the stories. I’ve been reading the things I’m reading because those are the things I’m writing, and I’m writing those things because it seems a natural progression to start off by writing short stories and “graduating” to writing novels. Also, as everyone knows, editors and agents want novels, not short story collections. I don’t think, though, that I’m not writing or reading short stories now because I want to give editors and agents what they “want.” I’m just doing what interests me now. It’s liberating to fall into a long work (either reading or writing it), like a novel. In the book I’m working on I run off on tangents, explore characters that I’m pretty sure won’t be important to the overall book, get off on descriptions, record songs and dreams—all kinds of shit. I’m not really worried about what it is I’m producing. I suppose all that will eventually get honed in successive drafts. I don’t think I could work like that with a short story. Short stories thrive on focus, a minimized number of important characters, conflicts, and settings. But maybe I should explode all that in a short story. I never have before. I should try it and see what happens. A short story that does that is Rachel B. Glaser’s “Pee on Water.” It’s about everything. It’s amazing." — Jamie Iredell, author of The Book of Freaks

NOÖ Knows Stories #2: Guest Post by Christy Crutchfield

2011-05-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

"Short stories assigned in high school:

·      Came from heavy textbooks with bodies of water on the cover.
·      Were often simple translations of fables and always had a definite moral.
·      Provided good examples of metaphor.
·      Provided characters that served the larger moral and did little else.
·      Were unobtrusive and politely agreed with my Catholic school.
·      Came with a lot of response questions.

I was not a reader.

Then, Ms. McPherson assigned “Parker’s Back.” At sixteen, I couldn’t articulate why I loved it, why I then chose to read the entire book, even the unassigned stories.

I’ll try now:

·      The good guy wasn’t a good guy, and I was rooting for him.
·      Characters were spiteful, proud, wrong, and hungry.
·      This hunger had nothing to do with a quest to kill a monster. I understood this hunger.
·      Love was possibly not love and not easily won, even after a quest.
·      There was metaphor, religious moral, but these were as complicated as the characters, complicated like my religion teachers were pretending Christianity wasn’t.
·      It was difficult.
·      At sixteen, my description of O’Connor’s language was: “Wow. Yes.”

This is still my description." — Christy Crutchfield, associate editor of Keyhole

NOÖ Knows Stories #1: Guest Post by Ken Baumann

2011-05-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

"A short story from another Mike–M Kitchell–possessed my computer. And Blake Butler's. We were laying out his story (Paul Garrior in Jacques Riverrun's "The Abyss Is The Foundation of the Possible") for the third issue of No Colony. This was the most difficult document we've ever built. I proffered myself at the altar of Word. I think I nearly killed a neighbor's dog, to appease this story. Blake had done most of the work, and then passed it to me, finished and ready to print, and then I opened it up and it garbled into some new fucked iteration. I had to manually address every space, every margin, flex and touch the images nicely. I thought about crushing my computer, I thought about headbutting the keyboard (I did do that, actually). Again, FINALLY, it was done, and then I opened it up to check it one more time and all the page numbers disappeared. I saw them go. There was a ghost in there. I don't know how I fixed it; I've heard many people go into fugue states under great duress. The story, though, Kitchell's short story, is one of my favorites and creates a zone of horror and confusion unlike anything I've read. But goddamn." — Ken Baumann, co-editor of No Colony and author of Solip

Getting In on the Action: NOÖ Knows Stories #0 (Featuring Nick Antosca)

2011-05-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

We here at NOÖ are excited to play along with Short Story Month, championed by such stalwarts as the Emerging Writing Network and the Fiction Writers Review. Unlike those places, who are making very impressive and durable efforts to celebrate short stories, we at NOÖ are excited to unveil our weird and lazy plan, which is as follows:

I have emailed fifty cool people whose interesting thoughts on short stories I've A) heard or B) read, and I've invited those fifty people to "type 200 words as fast as they can" about a specific story. We will post these on this here NOÖ Journal blog, and here's hoping they will serve as supplements to the noble action happening elsewhere, like maybe they will be like Jell-O shots after the dinner.

Already we have our first participant, who just emailed me fifteen seconds ago, and who managed to impressively not follow the rules at all: Nick Antosca, author of Midnight Picnic—which is not a short story—and "Rachel Mia's Existence"—which is a short story—has written in to declare that: "A bad short story is like spinach but a good short story is like sex-flavored sorbet." Thanks for your efforts, Nick. Stay tuned for more!

Revenge of the review - Moby Dick (or, the Whale) Part 2: What do you do with a drunken sailor?

2011-04-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

When there’s no land around you, you look to the horizon to keep from getting sea sick, an old sailor’s trick, but when a towering Melvillian wave of words comes rolling toward the Pequod, you really have no choice, you're going to go green. And neither do Melville’s characters, they have no choice but to spill their guts, and their secrets, into the sea and onto the page. The men dry heave both body and mind, whispering sweet nothings of spit into the sea. Into the great gaping maw of the South Pacific Sea they spill forth their silent reverie. Horizon and equilibrium gone, it’s always the same, this song. It ends with a man and a whale, an inevitable destiny for one, just another day for another:

“Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooners still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.”

But it also starts, and ends with our narrator. Enter Ishmael, a “quiet ghost with a clean conscience.” It is through his eyes that this story unfolds. He’s an innocent, ignorant of the ways of whaling, and, to a certain extent, the world. Excited for the adventure of the thing, he surveys the scene with a keen eye. He really is a ghost, blending into the background of the story, disappearing completely at times, haunting the narrative. In this respect, Melville is master. Ishmael makes fast friends with Queeqeg, and this theme of friendship and fellowship runs like a strong undercurrent throughout the rest of the story. These lives are intertwined, not only Ahab and Moby Dick, but Ishmael, Queeqeg, Starbuck and all the other crew members.

Melville’s prose is highly elaborate, with imagery and metaphor wound tight like the coils of rope attached to the harpoons Melville so loves to present to us, as if they were nothing but harpoons. Sometimes a harpoon is just a harpoon. But sometimes it isn’t. These aren’t just porous wet dreams, though. They are dense, heavy dreams. Soaked through and wrung dry and soaked solid. Layers of symbolism unfold in a holotropic manner, begging for interpretation and dissection. Most passages are labyrinthian and very easy to get lost in, but in a good way. It’s a good kind of lost to be. The imagery is indelible, once it enters your eyes:

“It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea…”

Ahab throws almost as big a shadow as Moby Dick. Before we even see him, it becomes clear just how unhinged he is, this captain. Oh captain, my captain. Then, when we do meet him, he becomes something more than just a man hell bent on revenge, he becomes an archetypal figure, tall and grim, hyper vigilante, wiry and distant. His dialogue often contains philosophical, possibly metaficitonal asides:

“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?”

Etched upon his brow is the truth that he carries, the pain and loss he’s endured at the hands of the Whale, and this is something that Ahab uses to gauge others and feed his obsession and paranoia. He looks to their brow; he inspects them for signs of understanding, of acquiescence. But, the men respect him, Starbuck and the other crew members swear by his word, and, though they don’t understand his intentions, they still go along for the ride. Starbuck has a brief moment where he considers putting an end to the man, and, therefore, potentially saving the lives of everyone aboard, but he doesn’t. He takes a rifle to where Ahab sleeps but he doesn’t pull the trigger. Buy the ticket, take the ride. So, what is it about, then, but a Folie à deux, a shared delusion, a willingness to follow their captain to the bitter end, to go down with him, and the ship, as it were?

“And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end; and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their curses;-when all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab’s brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing at it, without being able to drag the firm thing from its place.”

Ahab’s descent into madness is a failure of revenge. His obsessions ultimately doom everyone aboard the Pequod, save Ishmael, who ends up floating to safety aboard Queeqeg’s coffin. The White Whale, too, lives. He descends into the deep with his new chew toy in tow, Ahab on a stick. But Ahab’s memory is indelible; a lasting impression, a mark upon the stone of memory, that blackened tablet. Like the man himself says, presciently:

“I am immortal then, on land and on sea,’” cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision;-“Immortal on land and on sea!”

So, Ahab and Moby Dick live on. Fitting, that, for they are something more than just characters, more than a man and a whale. They are all encompassing symbols and forces of nature. But, the whale is ultimately impenetrable. We aren’t privy to his thoughts or consciousness. He is the unknown. He is the other. In New England and beyond, in our cultural imagination, there will always be that white whale, lurking in the deep, just below the surface of our lives. No matter how much oil is loosed upon the Gulf, he will remain white, pure, and untouched by man and all his pride and obsessions. He will forever remain Ahab’s nemesis, Queeqeg’s murderer, Ishmael’s muse. He will remain.

Vote BULL!

2011-04-26T07:05:00.000-07:00

Putting out a free literary magazine, we know it's tricky to get funding. That's why we're stoked to support BULL's efforts to win a Levi's grant. Here's what BULL editor Jarrett Haley has to say:

BULL is now one of five finalists up to win 100K in funding through Dockers’ (Levi’s) “Wear the Pants” Contest. It’s an unprecedented sum for a lit journal, and an unprecedented chance for the literary community to show its strength in numbers.

WE NEED YOUR VOTES—one a day, every day this week. Here’s why you should care about this and take action:

Your votes are a statement—that reading and writing matter, that journals and small presses are deserving of funding, that stories are important to people and their authors should be compensated.
The money will go straight to writers. No one’s getting a salary out of this. All funds go towards expanding BULL as a journal and small press. This funding will go into the pocket of artists like you.
The exposure will bolster the indie lit scene, engaging and informing the public of what’s happening on all these pages, on all these sites. Independent literature is too good to be kept a secret. We want to make more readers in the world, and we’re starting with men.
This is not a handout, not a Kickstarter campaign, and we’re not asking for a dime. All you have to do is click a button on Facebook. Those clicks alone can create a paying fiction magazine, one with a proven commitment to working closely with writers and building editor/author relationships.
The opportunity is unprecedented! This is the first time a journal and small press can be founded and well-funded simply by enough people clicking their mouse.

If this is your first time voting, you’ll have to “allow” the voting app and “like” Dockers. There will be boilerplate permission notices, but I assure you it’s legit. Dockers sees only your most basic profile info—what’s already public, what any old stranger can see. They won’t use it for evil and they won’t bombard with you ads. It’s a legitimate contest through a legitimate company.

A chance like this comes along never. BULL wants to win this with, and for, the literary community. We can’t do it without YOU. Just one click a day and you’ll have done your part. Vote today, and every day, here:

Congratulations to Brian Baise!

2011-04-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

Brian Baise's story "The Coyote" is a storySouth Million Writers Notable Story of 2010. Major props to Brian and to NOÖ Weekly guest editor Gabe Durham for picking Brian's story.

Review: Moby Dick, or the Whale

2011-04-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

All hands on deck. It’s thunderstorms in February and the pelting hail of shared silence. It’s the deep rumble of thunder overhead that you feel in your feet. A little lightning to dance to huddled close together in the cellar. Maybe we should build an Ark someone said. A little Port later and we built a miniature one instead, and set it sail inside the vast empty sea inside the bottle. That was a good ship. But now, a sea change, an anchor, a drag on reality, a dragon in the sea, a hungry leviathan coming for you.

We all have our own white whale. It’s out there, under the surface of the sea of our lives, massive in every definition of the word. Could it be used to fuel your imaginative life? Could the oil drained from its corpse light your way? Chase down your white whale and “look him straight in the eye,” as Mastodon would say. Search those irises for evidence of enmity. Enlist the TSA if need be. I say make friends with your inner white whale, but, as Lorca said, “Beware!” This is not your father’s Fudgy the Whale.

Until this past winter break, all I’d known of Melville’s opus, Moby Dick (or, the Whale) was peripheral at best. As a Native New Englander, born and bred, this might seem like sacrilege, but I don’t know, I guess I just never got around to it. It seemed like a bit of antiquity, nothing more. I vaguely remembered that movie with Gregory Peck, and wondered why Atticus Finch was playing at Ahab; I’d known of Ahab of course, who doesn’t have at least a cursory knowledge of Ahab? Paranoia, personified, an ivory leg to walk on and a monomaniacal thirst for revenge. But even my experience of that movie was second hand. I had never seen the whole thing. I just knew about it. But I had read Green Shadows, White Whale, by Ray Bradbury, his travelogue of the trip he took to Ireland to write the screenplay for that failed film. There’s yet another layer of removal, of separation, between Melville and me. Strange that I had read the book about making a movie about the book that I hadn’t read. It was a bit like seeing your reflection repeated on to infinity, what the French call mis-en-abȋm. Still, all roads led to the whale. It’s funny how we come to books, sometimes.

So, shouldn’t I be getting to the point already? Here’s the weird part, I am. I feel like I’ve soaked in so much of this novel merely through living in New England that I wanted to contemplate this work, and the impact it’s had on me, and the area, from a cultural perspective. Even before I got into the words, before I cracked the cover, and before I’d felt that first break of the binding, like oars hitting the water, it was like I knew it inside and out, somehow. This, I believe, is a phenomenon worth exploring. Before I consider the source, I sometimes like to consider the connections. Sometimes, I like to trace my way back to the start from the finish. Sometimes I like to tinker with reverse engineering. And that got me thinking, what else did I know about Moby Dick, without knowing anything about Moby Dick? Well, there was that Mastodon Album Leviathan, with the chorus of Blood and Thunder that goes “White Whale, Holy Grail.” That bounced around the insides of my brain case like Queeqeg’s coffin in the open sea for quite a while, planting the seed.

There was also that summer that my family had set out on our boat, off the coast of Cape Cod, in search of whales. Out on the open ocean, some thirty miles out, enormous whale watching boats dwarfing our own little Pequod (a 25 foot miniature, anyway), dolphins splashing and jumping out ahead of us. I remember thinking, this is adventure. Into the quiet of the ocean we drifted. The whales were near; I could hear their presence before I could see them. They exhaled and heads turned 360’s, hands raised to blot out the sun, fingers pointing like English Pointers. More exhalations - their breath, palpable spurts of salt water spray. Still, from a distance, they were camouflaged, hidden by the sea. Mostly tails. I was in charge of the video camera and, as a whale approached, my hands began to shake. A baby humpback and still it dwarfed our little boat. It swam right up to us. It turned on its side and gave me a knowing look. It was sizing me up. I saw it see me. The tides turned in that moment, and I remember wondering, is this whale-watching, or people-watching? Who’s watching who? The camera shook. Easy there, Fellini. Then the whale dove under our boat, disappearing below. Still, I held my breath. It could’ve overturned us with a flip of its tail, but it didn’t. We had a moment of shared silence, that whale and I. A metaphorical precursor perhaps, to my first encounter with Melville’s whale. The white-green of the underside of the fins shone through the deeper blue of its hide and the water surrounding, and that was the last thing I remember seeing before it disappeared, that white-green glow of its face and fin.

That was an adventure; that was true “Mad Christmas.” The whale watching boats squawked at us over the radio, telling us to “stop disturbing the whales.” What they really meant was stop hogging the whales. But we didn’t choose that whale, it chose us. And I, in turn, chose this book for this quasi-review. Finally, a decade or so after that day, I got the book and it saved me during those long interminable January days when the blue was traded in for white; just like Queeqeg’s coffin saved Ishmael. Buoyant stuff; like Joe’s steamer trunks in Joe vs. the Volcano. Plus, I found, it was contemporary, kind of, but not really - they just found the Pequod, or an analogue, so that’s something, at least.

Look, people are sponges. We soak stuff up, that’s what we do. But sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes we need the real thing; we need the experience, downloaded direct to our hearts. We need to plug right in. So I did. And I found out that Moby Dick is an exhaustive, exhaustingly elegant book. Meticulously detailed, there’s a savage beauty in the way Melville frames Ishmael’s journey, soaked in brine and blood and madness. Gross and soggy as that may leave you once you’ve finished, it’s well worth the price of admission. It’s all encompassing in its scope and depth, and, of course, there’s that memorable opening line, “Call me Ishmael.” Call me enlightened.

It’s an undertaking, no doubt. It’s heavy on every detail of the whaling industry, things you never thought you’d care to know, and probably don’t. It’s exhaustive about the beast itself, chapters devoted to taxonomy, autonomy and philosophy. This is not hagiography here. Nor is it for the weak of heart. Humanity is stripped apart, like a carcass, with each piece separated, cleaned, and weighed out like so many crew members, histories and myths. The bas-relief quality of the chapters about the “high and mighty business of whaling” may stand back against the meatier, character driven ones and that might tempt you to skip ahead, but don’t do it. The devil’s in the details. The beauty is in the depth, and the journey is the thing, not the destination. The narrative, once it strays from Ishmael’s sympathetic point of view, does lose something, only to find it later, amidst the sea spray, blood and thunder and blubber. Haunting refrains will stick in you like rusty, tetanus inducing harpoons. You will find yourself pulled down, in that final death spiral, along with Ahab, freezing black waters covering over you like the biggest blanket the world has ever known. But then you’ll be done, but we’re just getting started, so let’s get on with it, as Ishmael says:

“Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost.”

So, I’m hoping that this kind of thinking is something that ya’ll do, too. Is it? If so, maybe you’d care to share? This is all about the experience, and, hopefully, the conversation. This doesn’t have to be just about Moby Dick. What books make your brain shake this way, if any? What we’re after with this post is chatter, talk, not chowder, not chalk. No schoolyard stuff here, just good honest cheer.

to be continued....

(thanks to José María Pérez Nuñez for the art - to see more, check out his homepage)

rad poetry #24: for amanda sabo

2011-04-07T14:35:00.000-07:00

RAD POETRY THANKS JEREMY BAUER FOR HIS GENEROUS DONATION. FYI: THE MUG'S NAME IS LUCY BUT HE IS STILL A MAN.

IF I SAID YOU HAD A BEAUTIFUL BODY WOULD YOU HOLD ON

for Amanda Sabo

A man, duh, will do the things of love he
learned from his favorite songs. Often, this
involves him spilling a bag of red lentils or
losing your cat, then turning to lines like God
is a place you will wait for the rest of your life
for advice. Forgive him. At thirteen he wore
pooka shells. From this it takes decades to
recover. Other times he will sew a tambourine
skin with your face on it from the pages of your
favorite children's book, which he found your
copy of. You guessed it: forgiveness. On planes,
he won't even put his phone in flight mode
in case you call, even though your father's a
pilot and you've explained over and over how
precariously information contains itself in the
air. Let's say I do this, you say, kissing a tissue,
ripping it up, tossing the shreds his way as he
ducks. You sigh. He takes your guitar into the
bathroom and closes the door. Yeah, but listen
to this, he calls. He is in there playing. He's in
there and you can hear him but he's not
staring at the mirror, I swear. He's between
the song and you, with only a little ways to go.

New NOÖ Weekly!

2011-04-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

So maybe it shouldn't be called NOÖ Weekly anymore, but you should call on it, because this Melissa Broder edition is sporting stuffed Saint Peter, a pill of shark cartilage, a t-shirt of a body, summer brains, supreme gentleness, a shoulder shimmy for the soldiers, measured selves and kindly butchers, a sequence of sequins and an archipelago of names. A hefty ten poem event to tide you over. Read up!

fwriction : review

2011-03-31T12:41:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the delay. Sometimes real life and the imaginary lives we wish to lead clash into a form of submissiveness called exhaustion. I’m sure many of you can relate. For those that can’t, then you should receive medals and share your secrets.

In my online stumblings, I happened upon fwriction : review, which is a nifty online literary journal. I fell here first and then worked my way backwards, back and back to bigger and larger collections of writing and writers—I always do things backwards.

For those that stumble and tumble, don’t let this online literary magazine fool you—it’s a Tumblr in disguise (or not really, it only took me a few seconds too long to realize that I could “follow” or go to my “dashboard” from the website—I’m guilty of tumbling). How backwards did I get?

Well, fwriction : review is the sister site of fwriction, also disguised as a Tumblr—I’m still going to say disguised, you can’t stop me. fwriction has lots of goodies like the story of the day to lose yourself in. Larger than that, its mother, Fictionaut, is there to check up on her daughters weekly. In one of those check-ins with Fictionaut, Danny Goodman, the creator of fwriction and fwriction : review, stated lovingly, “I am better at promoting other people’s work than I am my own, and that led me to the journal. I love discovering new writing, sharing it with the world. fwriction : review gives me that opportunity.” Now who wouldn’t want to submit their work to this journal if it receives this kind of primo treatment? Between these two sisters, you can get lost for hours. If the age difference doesn’t bother you, I’d see what Mommy Dearest is up to, as well. See if she’d want to go out for a drink.

Warm-welcoming in regards to submissions, if you’re a writer (I bet you are) then lay down your best and send it off to a good home. All rights remain with the author, so no bamboozling allowed. Unfortunately, “fwriction : review is unable to pay its contributors, but your work will have a wonderful, nurturing home, complete with a link and posting on the main fwriction site and on Twitter/Facebook.” If money’s your aim, then you’re obviously here for the wrong reason. Who wouldn’t want to submit their work to this journal? It’ll be loved and squished to death in hugs and attention.

New pieces will be posted once a week, on Thursdays, giving each accepted submission a good amount of time to be showcased. Three times a year, a “Best Of” will be put together as a PDF for free download. This is for fwriction : review. While you’re waiting for those stories, check out every other link I gave you. Once you’re done with the reading of wonderful stories, you’ll find yourself at Tumblr. Then you’ll never know what hit you—if it hasn’t already hit you and taken hours and hours of your time from you.

I’d say that’s a pretty sweet deal, no? All things considered?

HOUSEFIRE!

2011-02-15T10:27:00.000-08:00

Here I am, new intern. Be gentle.

The first thing I want to post about is something I've been damn-near obsessed with for the past few weeks:

HOUSEFIRE, an extended "sort of a sister-cousin site" of METAZEN "that focuses on writers making writers write" begins their run with a flash fiction prompt collection from writers such as Riley Michael Parker and Frank Hinton (Brother and Mother Superior), Caitlin Laura Galway, Ryan W. Bradley, and our very own Mike Young—and that’s barely scraping the list.

I had fallen heels over head with the project before even realizing Mike had written something for it. Flash fiction prompts are an old favorite, and see a huge group of writers pooling their talents for the cause… why, it warms my cold, cold heart.

The initial prompt is “first time,” which has the danger of falling flat in the less talented of hands, but is already off the charts with momentum of anything but. The only kind of danger here is good kind of danger. Wander with your imagination and take a walk. The topics are ranging far and farer in between, some opting to choose the obvious route of that awkward virginity-stealing occasion (or, just losing it on vacation and hoping it would turn up somewhere) where some choose the less likely fat, white worm using an earlobe as a home forever and ever.

Want some prison whoring? Need to be torn in two, down through the mattress to forget every loss? Dying for an old man of indiscriminate accent? Better yet, would you like to fall in love with a mirror girl? Of course you do, I didn’t ask these questions to take up space.

You know where I’m going with this.

HOUSEFIRE releases two or three stories a day. Satisfying the craving but enough to keep you wanting more. How many more can the internet handle? I say stuff it with more and more until it bursts. Continue on that walk with your imagination, stop and let it sniff.

If you haven’t already found this collection and devoured it, go to allthingsburn.tumblr.com to get your fix. When you’re done with that, actually eat something. You’re starving.

HOUSEFIRE is also working on a nifty, tentatively titled TWO-FIFTY, limited edition chapbook that needs the support on Facebook in order to be come a reality—as real as the ity can get, so go like the page so you can get your hands on some goodness. Jump on the book of faces and like the HOUSEFIRE page for the awesome to occur.

Meet Alicia LaRosa, new intern!

2011-02-15T07:42:00.000-08:00

Alicia is the new NOÖ Journal/Magic Helicopter Press intern. She is a student at UMass-Amherst and very enthusiastic. She sometimes has blue in her hair, but she is not a blue person. Besides doing behind-the-scenes stuff, you'll see Alicia here on the blog keeping things active: interviewing NOÖ contributors, reviewing books, highlighting cool stuff from other literary journals, and running sweet contests. Get to know!

Hi, Alicia! Where did you grow up? Do you remember any strange characters from your hometown?

Well, hello! I grew up in Hyde Park, Massachusetts—which is a part of Boston. For those who are unaware that Boston is made up of small towns, you just learned something new! Strange characters, strange characters… besides those I share blood ties with, there are always odd individuals wandering the streets of my neighborhood. I was too lost in my own mind to notice.

What are some of your favorite books?

Topic-wise, I eat interpersonal relationships, dysfunctional or not, up. Favorites include Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, Choke by Chuck Palahniuk, The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, and The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. I encourage life-changing recommendations.

When did you first learn that abstract squiggles could make words that made people feel real things?

When I felt things. I then wanted to create those squiggly things in order to feel even more things.

What is your favorite meal?

There are memories of meals that have left impressions. While one will never be duplicated, one other can hope to be obtained. In Rome, on a corner of Campo de’ Fiori, there is a small panini shop that’s open until the middle of the night. On hot ciabatta bread with fresh mozzarella, mortadella, and lettuce… it’s a drunkard’s wobbly wet dream.

You speak multiple languages. When I was learning Spanish in high school, we all thought it was funny that the Spanish word for "pregnant" sounded like "embarrassed." I guess these things are called "false friends." What are some of the most interesting/funny things you've discovered in the process of learning different languages?

False friends get me, as well. Like how the word ‘bimbo’ means ‘poor’ in Japanese but ‘baby’ in Italian. Another favorite is Engrish—Google it and lose the rest of your day/night. Lastly, the aspect of each language I’ve dabbled in that has impacted my life—astronomically—is the music. There is so much out there past what you hear in English.

rad poetry #23: for kathryn gordon

2011-01-25T19:51:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS KATHRYN GORDON AND THE BEWITCHINGLY TALENTED RYAN MACDONALD!

New NOÖ Weekly! Guest-edited by Todd Orchulek! Original work and photos!

2011-01-25T07:57:00.000-08:00

Stroll on over to NOÖ Weekly to read new work from Ofelia Hunt, Leigh Stein, Rachel B. Glaser, and Phil Estes. Todd Orchulek, blog contributor and intern alum, solicited some NOÖ all-stars to write pieces based on strange photos he's collected from family coffers. The results are pretty sweet. Check it out! Look at this cow!

rad poetry #22: for james haug

2011-01-11T19:24:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS JAMES HAUG AND PUBLIC DOMAIN FILMS!

THE WORLD IS NOT AN ARGUMENT

for James Haug

The world's not an argument
The world's not a hair salon
(Where) you're not allowed to bring your dog
Even if you're blind

The world's not an argument
The world's not a tennis match
Gray hairs in your mustache
You shave one at a time

And I'd like to say the world / is a rowboat full of apples
Drifting toward some island / that doesn't have a shore
And I'd like to say the world / is under the lid of a Snapple
A quip thought up by copywriters / on the umpteenth millionth floor

But the world is the world
And I'm sleeping near the door
The world is the world
And I'm sleeping near the door

The world's not an argument
The world's not a county fair
Pillow stuffed with horses' hair
That the store will not take back

The world's not an argument
The world's not a bowling league
The world's not a guy named Steve
At the pool swimming laps

And I'd like to say the world / is a joke about a ghost
Delivered by your murderer / who's funnier than most
And I'd like to say the world / is a coupon for some cheese
A kind that no one's heard of / and snow chokes all the trees

But the world is the world
And I want better dreams
The world is the world
And I want better dreams

rad poetry #21: for stephen pemberton

2011-01-09T03:23:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS THE AWESOME STEPHEN PEMBERTON AND THE AMAZING TALENTS OF BEN HERSEY, WHO HAS CONTORTED HIMSELF INTO VARIOUS PEOPLE TO BRING US THESE IMPROVISATIONAL MONOLOGUES

"Nighttime at the Prayground" by Ben Hersey

for Stephen Pemberton

Vampire teeth and childhood toys for pre-ordering SMILES OF THE UNSTOPPABLE

2010-12-29T00:57:00.000-08:00

Yes, you read that right. Left to right, I mean, but right. Over at the Magic Helicopter Press Tumblr, find out how you can get vampire teeth and childhood toys for pre-ordering Jason Bredle's Smiles of the Unstoppable.

"In room 345 bed bugs from a French suitcase are about to change the hotel’s summer expenditures."

2010-12-27T12:59:00.000-08:00

Hey, eat some leftovers and check out the new NOÖ Weekly guest edited by Crispin Best, featuring octopi, a man who's a moon landing, a lobster who eats donuts, and three TVs to watch the shows you missed while you were asleep. Starring Adam Coates, Shiona Tregaskis, Stephen O'Toole, Nicolle Elizabeth, and Janey Smith.

rad poetry #20: for beth thomas

2010-12-12T20:35:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS THE VERY PATIENT BETH THOMAS AND THE VERY AWESOME RYAN MACDONALD (briefepigrams.blogspot.com/) FOR MAKING OUR FIRST EVER RAD STORY FOR THE RAD POETRY SERIES!

"Retirement is a Flamingo Pond" by Ryan MacDonald

for Beth Thomas

Cami Park

2010-12-09T14:26:00.000-08:00

We at NOÖ Journal are deeply blue to announce that Cami Park has passed away. Cami lived in Nevada, and she was a sly and observant writer, someone whose work knew the world tenderly and could—as Scott Garson put it—"wake you up where you sleep." Cami was also a generous and delightful person to correspond with. Read some of her work at Fictionaut, Necessary Fiction, Night Train, PANK, and No Tell Motel. Her story “Everyone the Same But Not At Once” appeared in NOÖ [11]. Her blog can be found here. Visit this post at HTMLGIANT for more links and remembrances. I am sad to have never met Cami Park in person to tell her how much I enjoyed her writing. Cami’s words will live on and around in these windows of ours. She will be missed.

rad poetry #19: for christy crutchfield

2010-12-07T09:07:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS CHRISTY CRUTCHFIELD, CAROLYN ZAIKOWSKI, MAUDE (OF COURSE!) AND ANNE HOLMES & LILY LADEWIG, AUTHORS OF THE COLLABORATIVE CHAPBOOK I AM A NATURAL WONDER AND SCHEMERS OF THE I AM A NATURAL WONDER PROJECT

I AM A NATURAL WONDER

for Christy Crutchfield

I

A wonder is the name of what we pass across the table. My face is you tell me.
What there is: wonders collude with stub-noses, with reduction,
with meals in boxes. Nothing is shaped. Hard work pays. And pays.
We pay in our own names, so tell me mine. Wonders are trivial pursuits
like putting a flag on the moon. A table pretends that things exist between natures,
no, wonders are the bird overfeeding on soap and stool by accident. Some naturals include lazy
pitchers and suicidal mathematicians. There’s no design for a wondrous mouth.

II

Wonders are trivial pursuits like putting a flag on the moon.
My face is you tell me. My skin is like a comment box.
Wonder is natural because it comes and makes me
me. There’s no moon when there is plain. What there is:
wonders collude with stub-noses, with reduction, with
meals in boxes. We pay in our own names, so tell me
mine. A wonder is the name of what we pass across
the table. A table maybe tea lights maybe sunburns,
when really there is all this wondering.

I opened the envelope and it was full of blue butterfly wings

2010-11-30T14:35:00.000-08:00

After weeks of heavy deliberation and much hand-wringing (or maybe it was just a tryptaphane induced coma?), we're proud to announce a winner of the latest NOӦ contest!

The envelope please (insert drumroll here).....

And the winner is: Sarah!

Here's the scene of wonderful, white dwarf imagery her right brain gave birth to, right here, on this very site, on the very wrong subject of craziest dreams involving literary figures:

Sara said...: "I was picnicking with Vladimir Nabokov and Michael Phelps in a wooded clearing.

Michael Phelps was devouring his usual 10,000 calorie breakfast – the whole buffet – eggs, bacon, pancakes, French Toast, a few roast chickens, a couple of liters of Coke.

Nabokov said, "No, no, Michael Phelps. That's no way to start the day.”

He brought out a basket of delicately fried iridescent blue butterfly wings from under the wooden table where we three sat. He began eating them one by one in dainty little nibbles, with great relish.

"See," he said, as he continued crunching. "Like this."

Though I was sitting between them, I said nothing."

Sometimes it's better to say nothing.
Stoicism rocks.
As do crunchy blue butterfly wings for breakfast.

So, are you Sarah (are you in the marketplace in Savanna-la-Mar?)?

If you are, please come to the customer service desk located in the back of this blog to claim your prize (or, just drop us a line at: editors@noojournal.com), a brand spanking new copy of Dennis Cooper's book "Smothered in Hugs!"

If you're not Sarah, please stay tuned for your regularly scheduled programming...

and we're off to see the wizard

rad poetry #18: for michael trocchia

2010-11-28T22:22:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS MICHAEL TROCCHIA AND DANCING CAROLYN!

(We are actively raising funds to help us print NOÖ [12], so if you'd like your own videopoem, we'd really appreciate any and all help. Find out more here. Thanks!)

EXCUSE ME, I THINK I LEFT SOMETHING

for Michael Trocchia

If you sleep inside the water, the water stares back.
I was tempted to split that clause with an Oh. Which
O/h? The kneeling or the reeling? (O)ne means I'm
moved to rhapsody upon witness of my conditions,
and the (o)t(h)er means I'm prepared to make a slight
newness of life. Now the bus only costs five dollars.
They're selling fuzzy crosses in the banner space.
This season isn't as funny as that season, but they're
fake, oh yeah, so they only care a little more than us.
If you back into the water, the water draws your back.
The house across the river has a spokesman. Do you
remember that episode where K. becomes Moviefone?
And then the real Moviefone visits K. at the end?
And this is a moment of terror for everyone except the
studio audience? I have never been in one of those,
but I have reassured people by saying "It's okay, your
name is on there." What am I supposed to do, just
forget the feeling of so many headlights in the other
lane at night? Thanks but no thanks. One story had an
enormous M&M cookie in the glovebox irrelevant to
itself, and I found this very realistic. And did I want to
weep, oh yeah, but there was nobody around to show.

Review of Carol Guess's Love Is a Map I Must Not Set on Fire At Lambda Literary

2010-11-22T12:52:00.000-08:00

Check out Jocelyn Heath's review at Lambda Literary of Carol Guess's new book, Love Is a Map I Must Not Set on Fire by Carol Guess. Of the book, Heath writes:

It is a risky move by Carol Guess to write more than a simple response to these events; the choice to do so raises age-old questions of the appropriation of tragedy and who has the right to write it. Two things save this subject matter from becoming sentimental or overly political: the authenticity of emotion and the integration of this recent history with the troubled love story of the speaker and Denira, whose relationship is nearly as turbulent as the times in which they live ... One of the loveliest sequences in the book is the quintet of love lyrics spanning pages 16-20, in which Guess makes an announced “detour” from the history of the speaker and Denira to contemplate love and loss for the speaker alone. Though not entirely extricable from Denira, these poems represent the vulnerability that the speaker subordinates to her lover throughout much of the narrative. “I live in the shadow of a breathing volcano in a city with seven days of sunshine a year” refers to more than life in Seattle, especially when followed with the admission that “I can speak of you now to anyone because I’ve stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you” (17).

Guess's poem "Detachable Sainthood" is live in the new NOÖ [12].

12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12 12

2010-11-20T12:58:00.000-08:00

NOÖ [12] is live!

Hey everybody, it’s NOӦ interview time!

2010-11-18T14:34:00.000-08:00

We're having words with Mr. Timber Masterson
( interviewee extraordinaire)

Timber Masterson is a man on a mission. What’s that mission, you ask? Why, to poke and probe at the quivering mass of strangeness that lurks just below the surface of our personalities, the Blob of our unconsciousness if you will, and to try to get under its skin to see what makes it tick. Or quiver. Or, well, whatever it is that a Blob does.

He deals strictly in the weird and unexpected, specifically, the fantastical space between reality and unreality, imagination and delusion, fact and fiction. His work runs the full gamut of the electromagnetic spectrum, infecting you as you affect it. Reading his stories is like looking at old, grainy, black and white photographs, faded by too much time spent stuffed in shoe boxes in locked attics. The images flicker in and out of transmission. They could be of Minotaurs or mustachioed street sausage vendors in Toronto. They could sound like a papier-mâché Mel Tormé, singing somewhere, off in the distance, in all his velvety, foggy glory. The melody carries over the miles but the image is not indelible. Rub the photographs with an errant thumb and you get a clean slate, like so many of his characters can only dream of, and do dream of. Like so many of us dream of.

Secrets best kept secret often come tumbling out of his stories like clowns out of a clown car. The resulting effect is that of the narrative, running far behind the secrets, terribly out of breath and desperate to catch up, cursing that free gym membership offer it threw away last month, then finally stopping, giving up, and drowning happily in a flood of seltzer water amidst a hailstorm of lemon meringue pies. This is not to say there’s a preponderance of clowns in his stories, or any at all, for you coulrophobics out there. That was just to prepare your eyes for the burn. Timber Masterson stories live on the borders, in the in-betweens, and they are summarily thrust upon the reader, in media res, like a hot potato, as if to say, “here, take this, I don’t know what to do with it.”

And away we go:

Hi, Timber Masterson!

1. A lot of your stories have a dream-like quality to them. Consequently, a lot of your characters remain trapped in vague and ethereal spaces, where they discover some truth about themselves or their world that, paradoxically, may or may not even be true. That leaves a lot of room for audience participation; the reader has to fill in the blanks, and decide just how much they want to believe - is that something that you consciously try to construct when working on a story, or does it simply happen that way?

There does leave a lot of room for the reader to kind of involve his own character, his own beliefs, his interpretations, why should I dictate it to him. Since I’m the writer, I also say NO RULES, and you can choose to believe it or choose to believe that the protagonist is so out there, like just on the edge of his own world that it is a kind of truth from him. It’s also based on the strangest things I think while I walk around the city, like, hey, imagine if that guy asking for money isn’t a veteran, like from war asking for donations, but he’s a ‘Veterinarian” and go from there, how odd, has business gone down, and then not only have you got a humorous bizarre place to go from, but it’s up to you, the reader to ponder, “Hm, what would that look like?”

2. Can you describe your writing process?

I use only the Hindu language, a sharply shaven purple crayon on a cocktail napkin, it’s a good system as long as I remember to number the napkins. Then a team of tiny villagers work day and night, transcribing, at a dumpy fleabag of a motel near the airport, then they staple it all together back to my assistant and voila, my first draft.

3. A lot of your work seems to revolve around questions of identity and self, and unusual perspectives if not outright insanity or fantasy – do you get the feeling that there’s something horrible and insidious going on outside right now, right around the corner? If so, what do you think it is?

It’s a hairy old Jewish lady that mutters under her breath at me….I’m convinced she waits for me with her whips and Polish meats. Yet, I am strangely drawn to her thick leg wear.

4. What’s the most disturbing thing in your fridge right now?

There appears to be something moth-ridden near to the back, which moves on occasion. Let me explain. I swear one day, it was in the crisper, then one day it was in the back right of the fridge, now it’s on the left; I recall a grade 9 science project I worked on, that involved moss and growth hormones and something, I’m scared and hope it goes away. I will have my assistant check Tuesday.

5. “Siamese Twins” (NOӦ 4!!) is a grainy gray matter that deals with identity, duplicity, possibly repressed memories or outright lies, strange leaps of logic, and, halfway through, out of nowhere, it suddenly shifts gears into a full blown plea for help to the audience. The sudden shift in form feels completely natural and seamless, and one comes away from the story with a sense of having taken part in an event, or shared an intimate truth with a perfect stranger. Could you talk a little bit about that story?

I think that sort of tale enters into the realm of “what if” I mean, it’s in everyone that is if you allow it to, a question of what if something was kept from you, from parents, a lover, a best friend, some huge thing that if you came upon, say, as in this character did, “…while rifling his mother’s drawers”…what would that feel like, is that the reason for my isolation, loneliness. I’ve always thought there has had to have been some deeper reason for this sense of depression, apart from the world, feeling not a part of, so I guess in this essay I used the “separation metaphor…which also could lead down the pathway further into abandonment issues.

6. You travel a lot. What are some of the strangest things you’ve seen recently?

I travel the most from the living room (the tv) to the kitchen, to the computer/office/internet place, to that glorious soft cloud of cushiony la-la land, known as the bedroom. It’s a boudoir I suppose if one is single, though now that I think about it, it becomes French - a “boudoir” - if you’re sharing it with a lady friend for the evening; I picture a red light, a la Woody Allen’s Annie Hall plus four poster bed with silky material hanging about the joint.

7. Who are some of your favorite authors? What are some of your favorite books?

I like it best when I’m surprised, like when I come across something really unexpected, like I’ll be in a bookstore and read a few paragraphs and then, whammo, something hits be in there that I connect with. I recall this best when I picked up Nick Flynn’s book , “ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY” The way he conveys his isolation and day to day loneliness but keeps getting on through…it blew me away, there’s not that much brilliance out there, brilliance I speak of that also possesses originality, then again what’s wunderbar to some toads isn’t so to another animal, if you get what I mean. It’s all so personal. I’ll give you ten as far as fave authors and books, but it would take many pages to describe why and how these particular ones came about and why it hit me and just how the whole deal; the advice I can give is go check these out and pick ‘em up off the shelf and spend 3 - 4 minutes flipping around the pages and then you’ll be able to tell if it’s something you’d spend your hard earned dough on.

David Foster Wallace - "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", "Infinite Jest"
James Frey - "A Million Little Pieces", "My Friend Leonard" Bright Shiny Morning”
Nick Flynn - "Another Bullshit Night In Suck City"
Richard Hell - "Go Now"
Dave Eggers - "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
Elizabeth Wurtzel - "More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction"
David Rakoff - "Fraud", "Don't Get Too Comfortable" (Canadian)
Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall - "Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shanty Town", “Ghosted” (Canadian)
Dan Kennedy - "Loser Goes First: My Thirty-Something Years of Dumb Luck and Minor Humiliation"
Bret Easton Ellis - "Less Than Zero", "American Psycho"
Jay McInerney - "Bright Lights, Big City"
David Sedaris - "Me Talk Pretty One Day"
Mark Leyner - "My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist", "Teatherball"
Heather O'Neill - "Lullabies for Little Criminals" (Canadian)
Mordecai Richler - "Barney's Version" (Canadian)
Robert Bingham - "Pure Slaughter Value"
Denis Johnson - "Jesus' Son: Stories"
DBC Pierre - "Vernon God Little"
Augusten Burroughs - "Running With Scissors", "Dry"
Martin Amis - "Experience: A Memoir"
Peter Hyman - "The Reluctant Metrosexual: Dispatches from an Almost Hip Life"

8. What are you working on now?

I’m working on a pop-up book, scratch-n-sniff pamphlet for adults; you could pick them up at roadside diners along the highways and byways of our great nation, it’s still in the works. I have just finished my collection of stories/essays (when I say “just”, I mean a few months ago, still looking for someone to publish it.) It’s called: True Imaginings from the Dementia Cul De Sac: A Bizarre But Entertaining Life I Seem To Have Survived. The title felt oh so appropriate, as I’ve felt I’ve really explored the life I’ve lived so far, and there have been some weird avenues and boulevards I’ve said to myself, “How the hell did I get here?!” But in retrospect, now, I wouldn’t change it, maybe a little a bit of the heart break I would have exchanged for something else, but the rest has made me who I am.

Thanks for your time!

____________________________

While finishing his mammoth personal memoir, “A Long Way From Kind and Pretty,” Masterson has been cleansing his mind, keeping his website up to date and donating his imaginative talents and heartfelt jazzy epistles to online and print journals: So New Media, Word Riot, Fresh Yarn Salon, Yankee Pot Roast, Ghoti, Wandering Army, and most recently in his home town Toronto, The National Post and Now Magazine. He co-produced and hosted a monthly interactive literary series at The Drake Hotel in Toronto entitled Word Substance Spatula and is a regular contributor to CIUT's talk radio show, HOWL, with Nik Beat and has read a spooky Halloween story on National Public Radio. Mr. Masterson ventured to Philadelphia to ply his literary wares at The 215 Festival. "A Big Thrill", Tim says, as this was where he first saw and drew inspiration from authors of the McSweeneys collective years earlier. He's been awarded a Toronto Arts Council Grant for this writing project and has put the finishing touches on his latest project, a compilation of essays and stories, (some published some not), "A Bizarre But Entertaining Life I Seem To Have Survived: True Tales From The Dementia Cul De Sac". He is not the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship or any other fancy shmancy glammarama literary prize...yet.

For a full listing of his work, and anything else you’d like to know, check out his homepage at: www.timbermedia.com

**** Mr. Timber Masterson reports that, yes, while living at present in Toronto Canada, he is exquisitely moisturized, (he has dual citizenship, his Dad was American) yet this doesn't stop him from being, on occasion, terrifically lonesome, so he wouldn't mind at all if you dropped him an email, just about anything at all, your fave game show host from the 70's/80's, sandwich meat, carnies, cuddling, even the art, love and appreciation of books and magazines and stuff, don’t be shy.
(timbermasterson@yahoo.com) ****

rad poetry #17: for emily toder

2010-11-14T15:55:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY CELEBRATES THE IMPENDING RELEASE OF NOÖ [12] WITH THIS WAY OVERDUE POEM FOR EMILY TODER!

DO WHAT NOW

for Emily Toder

We are things embarrassing, strange, and hang around
feeling everything things, things, considering beautiful
that which does not consider anything. Are we? Strange
and hang embarrassing, things around, beautiful
feelings. Consider everything. That which considers
we are. Feeling feeling, not beautiful. Hanging things.
Everything we are, strange, which does not feel. Strange,
that which hangs around feeling. Consider beautiful
embarrassing anything. Which thing? That thing thing.
We hang around embarrassing our strange everything.
Consider feeling. Are we? Beautiful everything, we that
does and does not. Hang strange, things, things feel.
We are. Everything feels that strange which feels.
Everything that strange which feels. That strange
everything. Which feels. That strange beautiful
anything which feels strange and embarrassing.
Are we? That hanging strange and everything which
feels considers that we feel, things, hangs, things
and feeling everything we are. Oh and not who.

Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy: Bradley Sands's new book of prose poetry

2010-11-06T13:17:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard elsewhere, Bradley Sands has a new book of prose poems out called Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy, featuring his poem from NOÖ [10]: "Eggs Benedict," Here's the beginning:

I AM SITTING BY MYSELF in a booth, eating Eggs Benedict. It is during peak hours. I have been eating the same breakfast for the past 72 weeks. The waitresses have just started to give me dirty looks. Hungry, tableless people also give me dirty looks. A tyrannosaurus rex sits down across from me. She is a very rude tyrannosaurus rex. I say, “You are a very rude tyrannosaurus rex. You should have asked if it was okay to sit at my table.” The tyrannosaurus rex does not respond. I leer at her. She feeds coins into the jukebox. Her eyes become fluorescent lights. Her teeth become a stack of menus. Her mouth becomes the door to the women’s bathroom. She becomes the diner. I feel lightheaded.

Check out Brad's book! And if you're an old NOÖ contributor with a new book out, let us know! Email us at editors at noojournal dot com.

"What I Feel, Maybe, I Guess:" Gabe Durham on James Robison’s The Illustrator

2010-11-05T08:02:00.000-07:00

expanded and revised from Gabe's blog at http://gatherroundchildren.wordpress.com/

A few months ago, I had my first visit to the fiction stacks of the downtown Nashville Public Library, a big impressive room where Dawn Raffel’s collection graced the new releases shelf and where people actually seemed to be reading stuff. I hit the R’s looking to see if they had the new Mary Robison (they didn’t), but they did have James Robison’s The Illustrator (1988), which I’d never heard of.

And I thought, “James Robison, that guy who said a something nice about one of my pieces on Fictionaut?” (I have a special talent for remembering people who compliment me.) The full-sized author photo on the jacket’s back proved it was the same guy, just younger and with more hair. In a blurb, Donald Barthelme called the novel “a brilliant piece of work” and “a remarkable achievement.” I was sold enough to check it out. I just didn’t expect it to be so good.

The Illustrator follows Ash, a middle-aged Bostonian who’s just quit being a commercial artist to be an Artist-artist. Ash falls for an almost-legal high schooler named Q (whose actual name is Erin, whose actual-actual name is Pauline). He takes a job in South America and tortures himself with thoughts of Q, then returns to Boston and remembers what she’s actually like and kinda loses interest. And starts painting big weird anti-paintings.

The plotting is loose and natural while each short scene is a like tightly constructed flash, ready for Quick Fiction, often complete with punchy/mysterious last lines. The looseness and Ash’s obliquely cool temperament gel nicely. Each narration and conversation volleys from irony to sincerity and back, and Ash is never more tentative than in a situation that calls for sincerity. “I recognize the escalation of faith and terror that is, I guess, love,” he narrates of his thing with Q. “It’s what I feel, maybe, I guess.” Every genuine feeling expressed is a quailfier-fest, every joke a razor.

Roles change constantly as the characters create what the dust jacket pretty astutely calls a “present tense morality out of the moment.” Throughout the book, Q goes from hook-up to semi-girlfriend to longed-for lover across the sea back to semi-girlfriend to daughter to, finally, something like a distant niece.

The wow-sharp dialogue is never better than when Q is talking or letter-writing. Young and eager-to-impress and language-lax, but smart, too smart to dismiss, Q’s voice gives me the zap of recognition that goes, “Sometimes pop culture makes me forget that teenagers in the mid-to-late 80′s basically sounded exactly like teenagers today and like teenagers always will until the end of time.”

And then Ash’s ex-wife, Lucia, literally shows up at his doorstep. She’s barely mentioned in the book’s first half, but when she shows up (“Hello, Ash. You could hug me, I guess.”), she arrives with so much nuance and emotional baggage that Ash has to be reconsidered in the light of her arrival. “Look at your oeuvre,” she says in the same scene, looking over his paintings for the first time. “My, my. Aren’t you weird. You know, I never minded that we both had sex with so many others while we were married–I thought that was fine. But what I minded, minded purple, was that you didn’t love me, Ash.” “I minded that too,” Ash says, “but you were terrible, just terrible awful. You’re not awful anymore probably, isn’t that so?”

It seems for awhile that Lucia might restore some lost part of Ash, but she’s a protagonist in a book full of protagonists, and has her own stuff going. When, late in the book, Lucia goes with Ash and Q to Vermont, she gets consumed with doomed love for a guy who’s barely on the page at all.

Employed here is the kind of minimalism that uses telling and concise details to point outward to the big lived-in world. By the end of the book, so much ground has been covered that it makes for a jarring return to the opening pages after a first read. At any point in the book, it feels both as if anything might happen next and as if Ash doesn’t care one way or the other what will happen. And yet the difference between this book and slackery “the point is that not much happens” books is that his actions do affect him, again and again, and usually for the worse. If Ash had a stake in himself, he might save himself, but doesn’t, so won’t.

To rope in David Shields for a minute, The Illustrator is a choice example of what’s wrong about Reality Hunger’s point that fiction writers waste so much space on character when the writer could just get to the point and say what he or she thinks. “The world exists,” Shields writes. “Why recreate it?” But what in the hell kind of personal essay could the heart of The Illustrator be reduced to? The feeling’s there in each scene and gone when you name it. Even if we’ve got the spotlight on Robison, he’s decked out in a suit and tie, and have Charlie Rose and Oprah ask him, in unison, “So what, Jimmy, would you say the book is about?” I’m not sure he could give an answer more satisfying than, “Scuba,” or, if then accused of being difficult, “Scuba in America.” I mean that like the opposite of an insult.

James Robison’s only other book, Rumor and Other Stories, came out two years before The Illustrator. The opening story, The Line, pushes the observational people-watching story as far as it will go, waiting until the last minute to point to any sort of meaning, a neat trick he later repeats to even greater effect in “The Indian Gardens.” Even with its subversive touches, Rumor is more of a classic book than Illustrator, less of its time, still minimal but working closer to the tradition. My favorites are, “Envy,” “Eleven,” and the title track, “Rumor,” all of which slow-build their loss and longing and tend to end pretty hopefully.

Eventually, the web helped me put this together: James was married to Mary Robison, hence hence hence. (Pretty perfect, then, that I found him while searching the stacks for his wife.) The Illustrator is dedicated to Mary. If you go looking for stylistic parallels, his book has more in common with Mary Robison’s more-recent Why Did I Ever than with the stories she was writing when The Illustrator came out.

But really, James Robison’s style (circa Illustrator) is closer to Frederick Barthelme’s than to his then-wife’s. And surprise! They all went to grad school together. In Barthelme’s famous & fun article “On Being Wrong,” there’s a great long paragraph in which Barthelme characterizes the “beyond irony” writer scene of the John Hopkins MFA, 1976, in which Barthelme and his colleagues grew to suspect that “a plain sentence, drab as it may seem, might be more powerful by and large than the then standard-issue clever sentence.” He characterizes the teachers: John Barth, Charles Newman. Then continues: “And the students were good too. Mary and Jim Robison were there; everything in Mary’s stories ‘snicked’.”

It’ll be a shame, though, if this passing mention is going to be James Robison’s legacy: A good writer who was present for a scene in which his then-wife had a starring role. Mary Robison herself, in an interview with BOMB, praised her ex-husband’s prose while simultaneously burying him: “[Being labeled a minimalist] did a lot for me (laughter) in that I received some attention other deserving writers did not. Patricia Geary, Moira Crone, Liz Inness-Brown, Steve Barthelme, or even my late husband, James Robison. Joke, my little joke.” Ha?

Not even a little dead, Robison’s with us, he’s writing, and has actually had a lot of shorter stories appear on the web recently. Here’s my favorite new thing of his: a story called Guard from the latest Smokelong Quarterly about a museum guard striving to out-ironic a condescending artist who has used him in her exhibit. It’s more pointed and conceptual than his old stuff, and no less careful. Makes me hopeful that a second collection’s on the way nearly twenty-five years after the first. But why rely on new books to get the hype machine humming?

An exciting thing about my time in an MFA was getting to be in a community of readers who passed books around like secrets. Noy Holland taught The Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine (1972) to a class I wasn’t even in, and in a couple years we’d all read it and Mr. Crawford Himself was guest-teaching a workshop, riding the wave of Western Mass enthusiasm for a beautiful strange book he’d written three decades earlier.

Not that I need to cite examples of how word can spread about aging books. Just saying it’s exciting when it does, that a friend’s recommendation has a better batting average that playing the Nashville Public Library Stacks Lotto, that it’s easier to beef up somebody’s “critical standing” it used to be, that it’s fun to do the open node thing, and that it’s easier and cheaper to track down out-of-print books than it’s ever been.

The Illustator is a book that could use some noise. I might kinda love it a little.

EXTRA! EXTRA!

2010-10-23T10:15:00.000-07:00

It’s a new NOӦ contest!

Do you need a Hug?

How about a good old fashioned smothering?

You do? That’s great, ‘cuz we’re giving ‘em away,

400 pages worth of Hugs! For free!

Here’s what it is:

(Warning: this book may or may not be full of tiny plastic bears, so open at your own risk)

Here’s where you can get it: HarperCollins.com

Here's what the jacket (not a members only) has to say about it:

"Selected from the range of Cooper's essays and reportage in Artforum, Bookforum, Detour, Interview, LA Weekly, Spin, and the Village Voice, among other publications, Smothered in Hugs presents the best nonfiction of one of America's greatest writers. Cooper has written on grave social issues, producing touchstone pieces for a generation of readers. His obituaries for Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, and William S. Burroughs offer portraits that are both crystallizing and appropriately indefinite. His reckonings of contemporary writers are astute and unsparing. And, of course, he serves as witness to the work and play of an illustrious roster of cultural personalities—and does so with an acuity and fairness missing from most pop culture criticism."

And here’s Mr. Cooper’s The Snow Globe for the uninitiated, or the memory-challenged, which you can see read taste smell hear in NOӦ 11:

____________

A SHAKY FLASHLIGHT BEAM illuminates a stiff. Is that the boy you hit? It’s prone beneath the snow wearing your overcoat and dirty, scotch-taped glasses. Yes, sir

He had a deep depression, the worst one in our short lives’ storied history. It reduced him to a speck. The storm helped. That snowball hid a rock.

You froze to death ten feet from here under white out conditions. It took years, this glass of scotch, and a cheap crystal ball to find the body.

He hobbled through a blur and hurled his snowball at my head. That missed. Later, he’s lit by a jittering beam. Once this ugly little globe was the whole earth.

___________________

Here’s what you need to do:

IT'S A NEW(ish) NOӦ BOOK REVIEW!

2010-10-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

Times Ticking Past Ahead: Tinkers by Paul Harding

“Remember the night of deliverance when – your unraveled body falling away like a veil – you breathed a little of the incorruptible air; and remember the sticky animals that seized you again”

- René Daumal

If Cyndi Lauper were to write a novel, I doubt it would read anything like Paul Harding’s Tinkers. Still, reading the novel, I can’t help but think just how much Lauper’s song “Time after Time” is a perfect microcosm of Harding’s Pulitzer Prize winning opus. I can hear the calls of “sacrilege!” ringing out throughout the tinny tubes of the interwebs, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Tinkers is about connections, and how they hold our lives, our minds, and the very universe itself together. So it’s only natural that my brain tracks this seminal work to something as random as an 80’s hit pop song, right? Tinkers is a meditation on the life of one family, specifically, a father and son, and their nearly lifelong disconnection and eventual reunion. Harding tinkers with the connections between man and mind, father and son, husband and wife, time and timelessness, with the same steady handedness that the horologist protagonist, George Washington Crosby utilizes in the taking-apart and putting-back-together-again of the guts of clocks.

The sublimity and clarity of Harding’s narrative occurs precisely everywhere, everywhen. His prose shines bright as an epileptic’s fit, specifically that of Howard Aaron Crosby, a tinker and George’s estranged father, whose life we see in flashback, reverse engineered for our reading pleasure. We even get a glimpse of his relationship with his father, burrowing further and further into this wormhole of family and time. Harding takes care to craft his singular mix of prose and poetry with the elegance and precision expected of one attempting to measure life and the universe with the gilded calipers of his words, to borrow an image from William James’ painting Urizen as the Creator of the World. The written word, here, takes the place of law and reason on either side of those mythic calipers. But what does it mean to measure a man, a life, or a universe? For Harding, that means taking apart the mystery, to see what makes it tick, but never giving away its secrets. He keeps those locked up in the imaginal realm, somewhere between the forests of cognition through which Crosby rides and the rivers of the unconscious through which the reader must wade.

“He tinkered. Tin pots, wrought iron. Solder melted and cupped in a clay dam. Quicksilver patchwork. Occasionally, a pot hammered back flat, the tinkle of tin sibilant, tiny beneath the lid of the boreal forest. Tinkerbird, coppersmith, but mostly a brush and mop drummer.”

The floating consciousness of a dying George Washington Crosby frames the narrative of his father Howard’s life, as an epileptic and tinker, who left his wife and son, under fear of being committed. It also touches on the life of Howard’s father’s, a preacher who, as his faculties began to go, openly speculated to his congregation about how maybe the devil wasn’t such a bad guy after all. So, three generations of New England fathers and sons are caught in this strange loop of estrangement. It is meticulously detailed, painted in lush brush strokes and finally played out with a warm, ferocious detachment in a final reunion scene between George and Howard, flashbacked and forwarded by father and son, respectively. It is a quiet scene of understated emotion and wormhole beauty. This scene of Howard’s brief reconciliation with his son, if only for a few fleeting moments, if only to leave as quickly as he came in, represents the most delicate of truths, applicable to all of our lives - that we never can truly know one another and no matter how connected we are, there is always some level of separation, and there will always be some form of disconnect. The metaphor encompasses all, and the narrative, like a clock, is ticking past ahead.

Into the river Lethe, repeatedly, Howard Aaron and George Washington Crosby dip their toes, feeling for temperature, testing it for comfort and clarity, only to forget their place, their person. But they don’t forget each other, or their collective story. And neither shall we, even if we do, for the artifice is almost done; you can smell it all the way upstairs - the burning bacon and eggs smell of synapses misfiring, then firing for the last time, and snapping off their connections with one another, forever, their long fingered tendrils waving good bye like jelly fish limbs in slow motion underwater tango moments.

Meet Todd Orchulek!

2010-10-06T20:35:00.000-07:00

Todd is the new NOÖ Journal/Magic Helicopter Press intern. He is a student at UMass-Amherst and a Massachusetts native. He applied to be an intern and I hired him when we started talking about John Hawkes's The Lime Twig. Todd is a human person and not a twig or citrus. Besides doing behind-the-scenes stuff, you'll see him here on the blog keeping things active: interviewing NOÖ contributors, reviewing books, highlighting cool stuff from other literary journals, and running sweet contests. Want to know more? Yeah, so did I. Here is my interview with Todd:

Hi Todd. Where did you grow up? What is one interesting character you remember from your hometown?

I grew up in Ludlow, Ma. and still live there. One interesting character that can still be seen riding through the area on occasion would have to be “The Can Man.” He rides around on a beat up old mountain bike, digging through trash cans and dumpsters with a gaff, with duct tape all over his shoes and pants. That, in and of itself probably wouldn’t make him all that interesting of a character (gaff notwithstanding), but knowing that he is a retired telephone company worker who drives around in a BMW in the daytime makes him, I think, possibly, some kind of super-hero/vigilante, fighting evil doers and non-recyclers alike at night, while living a life of luxury during the daytime.

What are some of your favorite books?

That would have to include just about anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Denis Johnson, John Hawkes, Philip K Dick, William Gibson, Hunter Thompson, James Joyce, Alex Garland, Jean Paul Sartre, E.E. Cummings, Jonathan Lethem, Robert Olen Butler and C.G. Jung.

When did you first realize that these squiggles called writing could affect people in real ways?

Probably the first time I heard Christopher Walken recite “The Raven.” Or, more likely, the first time I read a Robert Frost poem. It was eye-opening.

What is your favorite meal?

That’s easy: mixed vegetables in garlic sauce and General Tso's chicken from the Great Wall in Chicopee. I hope that gets me a free meal.

You used to manage a gas station. Do you have any crazy gas station stories?

I would use the term “manage” loosely, but yes, I do have some stories. One time, for instance, I watched as a 95 year old woman lost control of her car on the street adjoining the place and swerved directly into the express lube—you know, one of those oil change buildings with open doors and open floors, going about 35 mph. She slammed into the car that was in the bay, pushing it and the car behind it out into the parking lot, and in the process somehow managed to half submerge her car in the bay, so it was teetering half-in, half-out. All the while, she had the accelerator pinned to the floor. So the engine was roaring, the tires were still spinning like mad, and the guy who was working downstairs had just narrowly avoided being decapitated. We had to get her out of the car, and then fish the car out of the bay. So I can say, ‘I once caught a fish this big,’ in all seriousness. There was also the time that a beat up old Pinto pulled up to the pumps engulfed in flames because, you know, what better place to park your car when it’s engulfed in flames than at the gas pumps?

Two new Drunk Sonnet write-ups

2010-10-01T13:18:00.000-07:00

Some Drunk Sonnet news from the interwebs. At Molossus, Vlad Osso writes: "The accomplishment of Bailey’s all-caps sonnets ... transcend the gimmick of their genesis to achieve a sort of beauty that aches with simple honesty."

Meanwhile, on his blog, Zachary Whalen writes: "This book is like a crazy homeless man that runs into your bedroom screaming and distributing Xeroxed pamphlets in a haphazard fashion, but somehow he ends up becoming your best friend and you ride a Ferris wheel together and you both stare off at the distant lights of the earth and the stars in the sky and contemplate the mistakes you've made in your respective lives in a calm, accepting manner."

Thanks Vlad and Zachary!

If you haven't already picked up a copy of The Drunk Sonnets, you should soon, because we're almost sold out of the first run.

New NOÖ Weekly! Edited by Thomas O'Connell!

2010-09-23T17:36:00.000-07:00

Check out the new NOÖ Weekly edited by Tom O'Connell! Featuring Julianna Spallholz, Corey Mesler, Kyle Hemmings, and Steve Kissing. Train dismemberment, damned rivers, pretzel scammers, and dinner club blazes! This might be the last Weekly before NOÖ [12], so stay tuned!

Cami Park on Evelyn Hampton's WE WERE ETERNAL AND GIGANTIC

2010-09-11T07:26:00.000-07:00

Cami Park has a nice little write-up about Evelyn Hampton's We Were Eternal and Gigantic at her blog Odd Citrus, where she is writing about a different poetry book for every day of September. Awesome! Park calls Hampton "uniquely insightful about people and their relationships" and says that the book "covers America’s money-obsessed culture, superficiality, capitalism, sexism and other heavy topics so lightly and effortlessly, you barely notice."

Congratulations to D.A. Powell!

2010-08-19T22:58:00.000-07:00

D.A. Powell won Ep 32 of the Literary Death Match in San Francisco! As a representative of NOÖ Journal! Pretty sweet. Congrats to Doug and all the readers, and kudos to Opium for going strong with such an awesome series.

New NOÖ Weekly! Edited by Adam Peterson!

2010-08-12T19:26:00.000-07:00

Check out the new NOÖ Weekly, edited by Adam Peterson! Featuring Laura Eve Engel, Angela Hume, Jeff Downey, and Dave Madden! Flies in fruit jars, incentive-white, abandoned hospitals, Christmas scarfs, and Shiner Bock!

Drunk Sonnet #10 as performed by Jesus Angel Garcia

2010-08-08T18:05:00.000-07:00

Click here for more Jesus Angel Garcia and click here for The Drunk Sonnets.

root for D.A. Powell!

2010-08-08T08:39:00.000-07:00

The endlessly awesome poet and champion of poets forgotten, D.A. Powell (read his poem "Space Junk" in NOÖ [11] is going to be representing NOÖ Journal at the August 13th Literary Death Match in San Francisco. Go root for him!

Where: Elbo Room, 647 Valencia St.
When: Doors at 6:30pm, show at 7:00pm (sharp)
Cost: $7 pre-order*; $10 at the door; $7 with a valid student ID. This event is free for Literary Death Match subscribers.

a new Adam Peterson edited NOÖ Weekly is coming soon, but first check out this line-up for NOÖ [12], due in late September!

2010-08-07T18:46:00.000-07:00

NOÖ [12] WILL BE ILLUSTRATED BY THE EPIC Christy Call AND FEATURE THE WRITING TALENTS OF THE FOLLOWING LOVELY CREATURES:

Trina Burke
Brian Allen Carr
Todd Colby
Mark Cunningham
Charles Du Preez
Gabe Durham
Andrea Fitzpatrick
Carol Guess
Nathan Logan
Ben Mirov
Emily Pettit
Ted Powers
Nate Pritts
Emily Siegenthaler
Gregory Sherl
Sampson Starkweather
Jordan Stempleman
Zack Sternwalker
Eugene Thomas
Michael Trocchia
John Dermot Woods

COMING FREE TO YOUR SWEAT PAWS AND EYE SAGS LATE SEPTEMBER/EARLY OCTOBER!
*Not the cover har har

July 4th NOÖ Weekly! Guest edited by Sara Mumolo!

2010-07-05T12:51:00.000-07:00

Check out the new NOÖ Weekly, which is back after a month's break and guest-edited by the awesome Sara Mumolo. Tons of great Bay Area-based writing from Craig Santos Perez, Lorelei Lee, Jared Stanley, Alisa Heinzman, and Barbara Claire Freeman, featuring loincloths, a Holiday Inn diner, the scumble of a pika, heavy straws to shove in necks, and the location of everything from laughter to lighting fluid. Do yourself a gawk, kind reader. You won't regret.

Vouched Books

2010-07-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

Check out Christopher Newgent's new project Vouched Books, where he promotes and sells independently published books at art events (concerts, openings, etc), and all the books on his table are books he's read and likes. Very communal and organic DIY spirit. Check it out!

Jack Christian guest edits this week's NOÖ Weekly!

2010-06-03T13:15:00.000-07:00

Jack Christian, author of Let's Collaborate, is at the helm of the new NOÖ Weekly, which features raspberry dental pain, God tromping the sky in his undershirt, Verlaine’s bullet, free-climbing the live crown of a forked blade, lethargic vacillations, the extension cord's other outlet, and more! Check it out for work from Diane Seuss, R.H.W. Dillard, Kevin Goodan, and Philip Pinch.

Praise for We Were Eternal and Gigantic!

2010-05-28T10:46:00.001-07:00

Nice words are rolling in for Evelyn Hampton's We Were Eternal and Gigantic: thanks to Andy Linker and Jack Boettcher for their write-ups. And hey, while we're on the subject, congratulations to Evelyn, winner of the 2010 Collagist non-fiction contest!

2010 Wigleaf Top Very Short Fictions: NOÖ makes the cut!

2010-05-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

Brian Evenson has selected two stories from NOÖ [10] as 2010 Wigleaf Top Very Short Fictions: Matt Bell's "Brother, There Is a Field" and Karen Gentry's "Treasure Island." Congratulations to Matt and Karen, and thanks to Brian and Scott Garson for their work on spotlighting online fiction!

"There’s much to reap from The Drunk Sonnets even if you don’t often feel like throwing up at work"

2010-05-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

Joseph Goosey wrote a very thoughtful review of The Drunk Sonnets for The Rumpus. Here's an excerpt:

Just as Charles Bukowski could be typecast as the despairing drunk and Frank O’Hara could be typecast as the joyous drunk, Bailey’s work embodies more accurately the bi-polar nature of drunken thought, sharing both his despair and his joys and all that sits in between.

Thanks Joseph!

"If we are kin, that is a rare and dangerous thing"

2010-05-08T16:17:00.000-07:00

NOÖ Weekly returns with selections from Guest Editor Joe Hall. Check out the work from A. Minetta Gould, Caren Scott, and Eric Scovel, of which Hall says: "The blood here is not pure but wonderfully polluted with technology and crucifixes and things I do not know about. If you drank it you might die."

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN THERE'S A SHAPE IN YOU THE SIZE OF YOUR BODY?

2010-04-21T09:13:00.001-07:00

New from Magic Helicopter Press

$5 | First Edition | 75 Numbered Copies

When some haircuts are wolverine kits and some cling to bulwarks? When you want to be more sincere but the economy says NO / EAT MORE?

NOÖ Weekly April 19th Edition! Guest Edited By Carrie Oeding!

2010-04-19T20:19:00.000-07:00

New NOÖ Weekly! Guest-edited by Carrie Oeding, this week features Mary Biddinger, Angie Mazakis, Scott Poole, Star Rockers, and Martin Arnold. Inappropriate penny loafers, casual escapes, President Nixon's best friend, tuna sandwiches for Christmas dinner, and scarab beatles--all of this and more awaits your eager eyes.

funny statistic about NOÖ Journal and the Million Writers Award

2010-04-13T14:27:00.000-07:00

Jason Sanford has been posting some cool statistics about the Million Writers Award at his blog. Here's one I'd like to add: Because we're such slackers, NOÖ only published one issue in 2009. In that issue, only two of our stories were over 1000 words (thereby meeting the criteria for Million Writers Award Story Notability): Kim Chinquee's "One Below" and Crispin Best's "At the End of This Story Three Months Will Pass." Both stories, however, won Notable Story mentions. Therefore (you probably see where this is going) 100% of NOÖ's eligable 2009 fiction won Million Writer Awards. Not that we're competitive or anything, but I hate losing at tennis, and I like posting 100% in large font. Next round's on us, eh? Thanks to all our contributors and submitters for allowing us to showcase such amazing work. We're here because you're awesome!

going to awp? come to these things!

2010-04-04T18:46:00.001-07:00

1) Thursday Afternoon Dewclaw reading! (Click image to see bigger)

2) Friday Afternoon Panel on Independent Publishing!

Noon-1:15 PM | Friday | April 9th

Room 108
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level

F150. Indie Mags: Publishing Outside of MFA Programs and Other Institutional Support. (J.W. Wang, Aaron Burch, Dave Clapper, Mike Young, Jennifer Flescher, Blake Butler) Independent journals provide an alternative to the established journals affiliated with universities and creative writing programs, and they frequently serve as pioneers in the world of literary publishing. Join editors from Tuesday; An Art Project, Hobart, NOÖ Journal, Juked, Lamination Colony and SmokeLong Quarterly for a roundtable discussion about the workings of independently-published literary journals, what it takes to keep them going, and what these journals mean to potential contributors.

"a toothed walleye / is not worse than being down fifty"

2010-04-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

This week's NOÖ Weekly is guest-edited by Gabe Durham and features Sarah Boyer and Brian Baise! Scone toasting on the heart! A statue that may or may not be funny! Check it out.

Congratulations to Kim Chinquee and Crispin Best!

2010-04-03T12:34:00.000-07:00

Hooplah's in order for Kim Chinquee and Crispin Best, whose stories from NOÖ 10—"One Below" and "At the End of This Story Three Months Will Pass" respectively—are Notable Stories in the storySouth 2009 Million Writers Award. Blammo!

NOÖ Weekly March 26th Edition! Edited By Carolyn Zaikowski!

2010-03-27T17:06:00.001-07:00

It's up! Read new work from Dawn Sueoka and Ben Hersey. Visit NOÖ Weekly.

"Not even above using a better period" : Nat Otting on the first week of NOÖ Weekly

2010-03-24T20:45:00.000-07:00

NOÖ Weekly is the new bi-weekly or weekly arm of NOÖ Journal, allowing us to publish more great writing all the time, and it's guest-edited by a different person each week. We couldn't have picked a better inaugural guest editor than the erstwhile Nathaniel Otting, Minutes Books publisher, HTMLGIANT contributor, a distinguished founder of the Robert Walser Society of Western Massachusetts, and a supporter of literature whose enthusiasm and sweetness seems magic enough that I often believe he was born on a submarine made of buttermilk. Oh, and he's a pretty diabolical poet his own self. We're honored to have him talk a little bit about his choices for the first NOÖ Weekly.

You toss something in Italy / that lands at my feet. I pick it up. You read something funny on the internet, like "Terrible pass, great catch, terrible shot" (Seth Landman quoting Lewis Freedman), and then you read Guy Pettit's poems and think how perfect that the spot on the internet where you go to do so is called catch catch throw throw. You go, and lo:

MIRACLE GRENADE

I am standing next to the solid gold tube.
When I wait for it to speak a religion hurries in,
like a recycled screen, I call the Capitol.
I pose indirectly for a stranger
until I’ve discredited every inch of my body.
The Capitol is not your head. It tells your head
that you have none until it’s gone.
I see the figments of a careless toss.
You toss something in Italy
that lands at my feet. I pick it up.

From Italy (great catch: your toss is "in Italy", "my feet" could be anywhere), you cross the Brenner Pass into Austria where you read Pettit's "Even If It Lasts For Hours" and "Archive Your Mistakes" to Ilse Aichinger, the nigh-on-90-year-old-master (Bernhard's elder, an Austrian Beckett, Kafka's etc.), whose "Bad Words" begins:

I now no longer use better words. The rain which pounds against the windows. Previously something completely different would have occurred to me. That’s over now. The rain which pounds against the windows. That’s sufficient. By the way I just had another expression on the tip of my tongue, it wasn’t only better, it was more precise, but I forgot it, while the rain was pounding against the windows or was doing what I was about to forget.

(translated by Uljana Wolf & Christian Hawkey in the latest Poetry Project Newsletter)

After reading Aichinger's "Salvage" (from Bad Words), you won't feel bad about leaving better words to Dakotah Burns, whose Austria ("Also since I returned from Austria I've been back to wanting to do all kinds of stupid things in the woods.") is neither Aichinger's nor Bernhard's. Watch him throw around gait: "my gait moves from marvelous to monstrous in an instant" or "my gait’s mistakes are excused as a tantrum of imperial feeling" or "my gait consented to a period of more formal instruction." Burns--read his story "NBA Fantasy" and you'll see--is not even above using a better period, a period of more. As he once put it, on the internet:

What about two periods,
at the end of a sentence,
instead of one. Two periods.

NOÖ [11]! NOÖ [11]! NOÖ [11]! NOÖ [11]! NOÖ [11]! NOÖ [11]! NOÖ [11]! NOÖ [11]! NOÖ [11]!

2010-03-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

NOÖ [11] now out!
First installment of NOÖ [weekly] now online!

rad poetry #16: for erin fitzgerald

2010-03-12T16:49:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS ERIN FITZGERALD AND DANIEL BAILEY!

ROCK OF LOVE BUS: THE TORNADO EPISODE

for Erin Fitzgerald

I held a tornado
let loose amongst the people
who keep blood in their veins

for too long.
Beverly called it lifelines,
but Mindy called it french fries.

The longer it sat
in my palms the more paths,
Taya said, I could take

with my life.
Then she said it could be like
in a bus or something. And I could bring all

my friends. And I
said what if I hold the tornado again?
Wont we all die in my palms?

And she said, Yeah.
But it wont be that bad.
It never is.

rad poetry #15: for michael jauchen

2010-03-06T19:47:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS MICHAEL JAUCHEN AND ELLA LONGPRE!

JAKE SAID NOT MY WHALE AND WE SAID OKAY, WHATEVER YOU SAY JAKE
(written one word at a time by Ella Longpre and Mike Young)

for Michael Jauchen

Home trails in a gorge.
Slate tiles outlast my flat
notions, upscale neighbors
disapprove. Meanwhile, our
growing congregation of talcum-
colored cacti lay untouched and
depraved. Careless! Mobile,
lifting patches, ranking wayside
skinheads.

This time, the whale wouldn't gesture
to anyone, but maybe she expects sympathy
or revenge. Eh!

And, thankfully, the less we notice this
backasswards nostalgia, this imminent
mealtime snack, this understated crunch,
the bigger our luck. Windy, mulchy, barren,
swamped. It's a timeless turbine
that performs. But frail as passing.
Faulty signals, fitful returnings.

rad poetry #14: for nicki-poo demske

2010-03-06T15:34:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS NICKI-POO DEMSKE AND FRIENDSHIP COUNTY (FOR DELICIOUS PROMPTING)

EVERYONE'S A LIGHT SWITCH IN A SUNDOWN TOWN
(as read by Carolyn Zaikowski)

for Nicki-Poo Demske

We moved and mom took the pylons.
We reconvene, sinister ventriloquists,
cliquey as a microbrew. Sure I get down
hill, but I don't use skis. Is there anything you
know that you didn't find on the wet underside
of a Snapple lid? Thanks, but no. Thanks, I'm
good. We moved and mom put the pythons in
expensive Tupperware. My dad worked in a salt
mine and then he worked in a lighthouse. My dad
works for nothing and then he'll work for love.
I don't sit, I study. When we move in together,
you're not allowed to bring the setee. Hard candy
and Skoal. Cum and photo chemicals. We sat up
all night writing blurbs for cereal. Sandals and dust.
Prayer cards and piglets. I would care about the world
more, I think, if it would meet me with the things I think.

rad poetry #13: for roxane gay

2010-03-06T13:53:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS ROXANE GAY!

JUDGE JUDY AT THE GYM
by Carolyn Zaikowski & Mike Young

for Roxane Gay

In walks a robe we all know. It covers
leotards we don't. In walks a known we've all
robbed. We will never know a cape. We will never
cowtow a charred knoll. Is there justice
in a hot mama? There is no fallacy in a can.
If you're on TV, is it ever a real gun?
It's never, ever a toad of steel. The way
I see my problem is this: if it's not my
problem, I'll accept a smaller check.
I don't have a Sam to worry about nor do I
take Deborah well. It's not like I'm paying
for these seats. This shampoo's got a
hole in it. Frig. How many reps does it take
to know yourself? About a quart, we said,
about a thimble knock. If I was a judge,
we said, I'd be mostly in it for the wig.

rad poetry #12: for jono tosch

2010-03-06T12:47:00.000-08:00

RAD POETRY THANKS JONO TOSCH, CAROLYN ZAIKOWSKI, AND—OF COURSE!—MAUDE

SONNET? I DON'T EVEN KNOW HER!
by Carolyn Zaikowski & Mike Young, starring Maude

for Jono Tosch

Sometimes you cook 'em the big trout.
Daddy eat my sugar. Daddy clean my bark.

Don't you gimme me that looking get.
Daddy eat my sugar. Daddy clean my bark.

Grandpa pair of dice swooned for the pork.
Daddy eat my sugar. Daddy clean my bark.

Don't marry that kale before you know her.
Daddy eat my sugar. Daddy clean my bark

Tow your bride to a burn pile.
Daddy eat my sugar. Daddy clean my bark.

Don't pinch an itch on the side of the tweeze.
Daddy eat my sugar. Daddy clean my bark.

If you don't take your breath, agreed?
Daddy eat my sugar. Daddy clean my bark.

New books from NOÖ Journal contributor Elisa Gabbert and NOÖ Journal friend Chris Tonelli

2010-03-05T09:34:00.001-08:00

They're debuting from the awesome new press Birds, LLC. Here's the scoop:

Birds, LLC is a new independent poetry press specializing in close author relationships in order to make the most awesome books in the world.

The first two books published by Birds, LLC are The French Exit by Elisa Gabbert and The Trees Around by Chris Tonelli.

SPECIAL PRE-SALE OFFER: Buy the first two Birds, LLC releases for just $20. Pre-Sale offer lasts until March 31st. Books ship the first week in April.

About The French Exit:
It’s a pleasure to listen to the opinions of the narrator of The French Exit. Clear-eyed imagery and wit control the anxiety: “[A] boy at the counter disappears / or I can see through him.” Likewise, in a fine prose poem: “Do not be afraid of angering the birds. What angers the birds is fear.” The energy throughout Gabbert’s collection has the clip of the French exit itself – allons-y! – self-aware, self-sufficient, in control, in touch.
- Caroline Knox

About The Trees Around:
Full of the will and the weather, that great skeptic Wallace Stevens walked to work and wrote his poems, poems you may well already love and believe. (Good, as they say, for you.) And as for Chris Tonelli, he walks in that integrity: read him, and be merciful unto yourself. His foot standeth in an even place. This book’ll make you bloom.
- Graham Foust

Mary Miller's Less Shiny now re-available!

2010-02-25T15:04:00.000-08:00

The second edition of Mary Miller's Less Shiny has been released. Get yours now!

Thanks Mary Miller!

2010-02-17T14:16:00.001-08:00

In the March 2010 issue of The Writer, Mary Miller lists NOÖ as one of "7 Hip Literary Magazines You Need to Check Out." Of the seven she says:

I often feel like I don't have much in common with the editors of literary magazines. Many of them publish stories I can't relate to and poems I don't connect with, so it comes as surprise to find that I have little in common with those selecting them. I'm happy to report, however, that I've recently discovered a handful of lit mags that aren't what I would call stuffy or boring, with editors who aren't looking for the standard-issue, traditional content. And the editors at these magazines might even get nonwriters to start reading lit mags, which would be a coup for us all.

The others are Keyhole, Kitty Snacks, The Normal School, Open City, Opium, and PANK, all of which are excellent. Here's what Mary says about NOÖ:

What: A free print and online journal. Its mission "is to encourage mainstream readers to connect with independent literature and diverse critical thinking." Who: Mike Young and Ryan P. Call, excellent writers and nice guys. Looking for: Fiction, poetry and visual art, as well as essays and monologues about political, philosophical and social issues. No word limit, though most work is 2,000 words or less. Accepts e-mail submissions. Reading period: Varies. Why I love it: The magazine is eclectic, the blog fun and informative. The editors also run the super-cool Magic Helicopter Press, which publishes print, online and multimedia books.

Thanks, Mary! In other news, the second edition of Mary's chapbook Less Shiny is getting its coat polished and will soon be available through the Magic Helicopter Press website and more.

Congratulations to Mary Hamilton!

2010-02-02T18:13:00.000-08:00

Mary Hamilton's story "You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You, But Me and Theodore Built a Time Machine" from NOÖ [10] will appear in DZANC's Best of the Web 2010. Congrats to Mary and thanks to Matt Bell and Kathy Fish for picking this terrific story.

Julian Dalrymple Has Made Several Beautifully Drunken Drunk Sonnet Videos And Here They Are

2010-01-12T15:52:00.000-08:00

They are read by Peter Cavanaugh, Kyle Manning, Eric Johnson, and Grace Rex. Thanks for the videos, Julian!

Drunk Sonnet #14 from Lush For Life on Vimeo.

Drunk Sonnet #18 from Lush For Life on Vimeo.

drunk sonnet #8 from Lush For Life on Vimeo.

drunk sonnet #53 from Lush For Life on Vimeo.

Dialogue from Ofelia Hunt's amazing Today & Tomorrow, coming in December from Magic Helicopter Press

2010-01-08T00:27:00.001-08:00

"Grandpa should be worried about you Merna, not me. You're who's pregnant with twins, married to Noah with his weird hands. You'll have to raise the twins alone. Noah works like a hundred hours a week, sleeps at the hospital, on a gurney, right? You'll be always alone and talk only to the babies, babies who can only cry or burp, so you end up walking dark alleys in nightgowns, banging your head against dumpsters—probably the twins'll be boys and the twin boys'll grow up without a paternal influence which will make them violent, dangerous, apt to take risks, knife-fights, baseball-bats, drag-races, chicken at night with no headlights, drugs and alcohol, and you can't stop that because teenage boys only care about exerting themselves on the universe, existence and stuff—also negating the universe, fear of death or something and they'll ask you where Noah is and you'll tell the twins he's at work saving people in the emergency-room, which will internalize their anger somehow, make them quiet and passive, angry at these saved people, searching them out, in their casts, on their gurneys, looking savagely for oxygen-tanks to switch off, IVs to cut."

"Noah doesn't work that much."

"He only exists at work. He only exists in his emergency-room."

"He gets vacations."

"Emergency-room," I say. "Anyway, if there's an emergency, which could happen on vacation or any time really, moment to moment, at every moment, like he's potentially talking to the twins, teaching them important life skills, speech, cooking, street-crossing, his long fingers grasping carefully their tiny shoulders, and there's the cell-phone, the hospital, a surgery. The boys never learn to speak. At street corners they panic, scream silently. You lock them in basements, feed them scraps, orange-rinds. The police come and absorb them."

Submissions Now Re-Open For NOÖ Journal / Magic Helicopter Press Catalog For 2010

2010-01-01T12:49:00.000-08:00

Hi friends,

Two big news items for a new decade:

1) Submissions now re-open for NOÖ Journal! Click here to see the new Submission Guidelines.

2) The Magic Helicopter Press catalog for 2010 has been announced! See below:

• Spirit Cake, a pocket-sized writing book with illustrations and inspiration, featuring artwork from Evah Fan (including the image to the left), and delightful writing prompts from Gabe Durham, Sam Pink, Tao Lin, Chelsea Martin, Dara Wier, Mathias Svalina, Heather Christle, and more TBA. Also includes plenty of lush blank pages. A collectible notebook. A tender gift. COMING FEBRUARY 2010.

• We Were Eternal and Gigantic, a chapbook of prose and poetry from Evelyn Hampton featuring houseboats, glacial till, moonwalking, wolverine kits, and really great mustard-colored skies. COMING APRIL 2010.

• Smiles of the Unstoppable, the third full length collection of poetry from Jason Bredle, author of Standing In Line For the Beast (New Issues Press, 2007) and Pain Fantasy (Red Morning Press, 2007). These are hilarious and swooning poems, caramel in sensibility and endless in feeling. COMING SUMMER 2010.

• Today and Tomorrow, a novel by Ofelia Hunt. A stunning adventure of identity melting, ice skating, memory, and consciousness. Hunt's inimitable prose splays and pets its way to new skins of expression. COMING WINTER 2010.

• Less Shiny & Typewriter, the return to print of Mary Miller's and Jimmy Chen's popular chapbooks, with second editions of 50 copies each. COMING FEBRUARY 2010.

Visual art for NOÖ 11! We need it!

2009-12-17T15:10:00.000-08:00

Do you like to draw strange things? Do you like to photograph strange things? Would you like your art to appear in NOÖ [11] (due February 2010), hugged by amazing stories and poems? Then please send your art to editors at noojournal dot com>.

Also, in other news: we're all caught up on submissions (email us if you feel like we never responded and therefore probably lost your submission) and prose and poetry submissions will re-open January 1st. We'll tell you again when the time rolls close, but here's an advanced heads-up.

Have good holidays, everybody!

WINNER OF DIFFICULT FARM CONTEST: Nals Goring

2009-12-05T14:59:00.000-08:00

For his brevity and swirly weirdness, Nals Goring wins our contest to win Heather Christle's Difficult Farm:

BEST AND WORST EXPERIENCE WORKING IN A GROUP
--Nals Goring

Worst:

I was invited to hang out with a group in a lobster shack
I got all dressed up but they just wanted to work

Best:

I was friends with a group of medical students and we went in for a couple of kayaks
we alternated
then most nights we went to the pool hall
but we spent one night in a hot air balloon

***

Congrats, Nals! Thanks to all who entered. Make sure to pick up a copy of Difficult Farm from Octopus Books.

Jack Christian reading in Cambridge on December 14th!

2009-12-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

Monday 14 December @ Outpost, 8 pm
186 1/2 Hampshire St. in Inman Square, Cambridge, MA
Small Animal Project Reading Series presents
Jack Christian, Cheryl Clark Vermeulen, Zach Savich

Jack Christian is the author of the chapbook Let’s Collaborate from Magic Helicopter Press. His poems are upcoming in Drunken Boat, Sixth Finch, and Thermos, and his work has appeared recently in Cimarron Review, notnostrums, Phoebe, and DIAGRAM. He is from Richmond, Virginia, and lives now in Northampton, Massachusetts.

"OUTPOST 186 is a new arts, media and performance space at 186 1/2 Hampshire St. in Inman Square, Cambridge. Continuing the best traditions of the Zeitgeist Gallery, OUTPOST hosts several ongoing series of experimental music and performance events Wednesday through Sunday, and special art exhibits. It also serves as a node for progressive and experimental media. Open 1-4pm Tuesday-Sunday or appointment. Contact: Rob Chalfen - robchalfen@hotmail.com"

THE PERHAPS FINAL COPIES OF Let’s Collaborate WILL BE AVAILABLE!

Erin McNellis on The Drunk Sonnets

2009-12-04T14:20:00.000-08:00

At the blog Uncomplicatedly, Erin McNellis has written a terrific and thorough essay on Daniel Bailey's Drunk Sonnets that contextualizes the poems—quite thoughtfully—in the landscape of contemporary poetry and contemporary poetic sincerity. From the essay:

What gets me so excited about Drunk poetry as written by Bailey and friends is that it breaks down the pervasive assumption that experimental form is incompatible with emotional content ... I am not proposing that a return to Byronic levels of sincerity is imminent or even advisable, but that as we feel our way back from posturing in silly haircuts to occasionally being able to say what we mean, we are going to encounter a lot of weird situations that look a lot like Bailey’s poems.

Thanks, Erin!