THURS. LIVE IN NASHVILLE AT DINO’s; plus: A book that belonged on everybody’s best-of list | Wing & Fly
Join me at the smallest, oldest, dirtiest and yet definitely most kick-ass bar in East Nashville this Thursday for the 3rd edition of the Poetry Sucks reading series. Organized by fellow East Nashvillian Chet Weise, this edition of the series will feature a host of characters from the neighborhood. I’ll be reading some new stuff (if only I can get through that sermon in the finale) and, more importantly, also featured will be all the fine folks noted on the flyer pictured here. Click through it for more from the artist, Rachel Briggs. Of particular note for connections to T2H is past Pitchfork Battalion teamer John Minichillo, whose novel The Snow Whale from Atticus we saw on some of those indies’ best-of lists for the year just past.
I just finished a novel by a more longtime and frequent T2Her, Floridian (former Flint, Michigander) Paul A. Toth, that I’ve been just floored by, given by the general lack of ink it’s gotten, far as I can tell (though I do see where USA Today of all places named it one of the best indies of 2011). The book, Airplane Novel
It’s not an exactly simple task Toth has pulled off, given that the book is told from the point of view of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, a building — and one that, it is acknowledged quite early on by the narrator itself (or “himself,” given that the South Tower prefers to call itself “Cary Grant,” and the North Tower “Gary Cooper”), no longer exists in any physical sense, but of course. But even in death, the tower filters the consciousnesses that made its history, those of the humans — “spider monkeys,” from its perspective — having populated its floors, having operated the Radio Row shops uprooted by the its construction, having created the information that soars through its fiberoptics and still flits in jagged form through its own post-mortem version of consciousness (which Toth expertly re-creates in the end of the book, after the “big event,” the “you know what”…).
I won’t go farther into specifics here, but I’ll say that I think I can definitely recommend it as one of the three or four best books of 2011 (with particular segments of DFW’s The Pale King
Toth also had a fair amount of work in a special section of All Hands On, our 10th anniversary book out in the fall. You can order it here.
LIT FICTION, w/ BEATBOX | Wing & Fly
Fine stuff to share today, a performance from my Philly reading a couple weeks back, touring with the All Hands On book, with Ryan Eckes, Pete Richter and Mickey Hess — all fine and dandy humans with ever capable pens, typing fingers and brains, it’s certain.
Joining Hess and Richter for a Nerves of Steel-worthy performance of Hess’ classic short “The Novelist & the Rapper” (I know it’s been years since I first read it, and Hess reminds me that I made some suggestions on an early draft related to an appearance of headdresses) was a gent who performs under the name Traum Diggs, otherwise known as Dave, doing something behind Richter and Hess’ Q&A he hadn’t done since 1987 — namely, beatboxing, a full marathon-quantity of it too (the story’s a solid 10+ min. affair). Enjoy the vid below, and thanks to all who participated in and came out to the Brickbat reading. Great times, all around. (Oh a-and download Diggs’ new “Black Champion” EP here.)
And speaking of Nerves of Steel, our Chicago performance series resumes Tuesday at Hungry Brain. Details via this link.
THE OBLIQUE STRATEGIES ZINE | Wing & Fly
Just prior to my trip to Chicago last month (hey folks in NY, MASS, PENN, we’re headed your way Nov. 17-19) I got an email from Mairead Case and Erin Teegarden looking for volunteers for an “oblique strategies” zine project that involved the use of the eponymous deck of cards made by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt that offer randomized techniques toward solving various dilemmas. In the project Case and Teegarden described, writers were asked to pick an original piece to revisit, using the “oblique strategy” on an assigned card toward a redraft / rewrite of the piece.
Case and Teegarden made zines featuring eight pieces written in such a fashion, one of them mine, on the occasion of the Chicago Calling Arts Festival, a multi-arts fest celebrating collaboration and culture. The “oh bleek strategy!” I worked from was “Retrace Your Steps.” Given that I was preparing for the Chicago events at the time, our Stupidist Manifestos were high in my mind. So, here’s the retracing of my manifesto, followed by the original. Enjoy:
STRATEGY: RETRACE YOUR STEPS
Would that it were not a cable news catchphrase: Lean Forward
-17. There is we. It exists.
-16. The little girl and I play for keeps, a movie is broadcast on a pile of woodchips, another girl dares the little girl to do what she herself just did. No, I say, shuddering.
…
0. I speak much and often in the first-person plural about things that have nothing to do with anyone but myself. Is it about me? It is. More than likely, anyway.
1. Wanting send-off, intertextuality, life to imitate art and vice versa.
…
15. There was a reading in a cellar for books. I had returned briefly. I had been gone a long time. I was not yet a father, though what would be a daughter was a reality in the womb of the woman accompanying me to the reading, who by this time knew it. I tried to smoke cigarettes as far away from her as I could get. It wasn’t far enough.
…
19. I read the rest of Shklovsky, including his 1920s Soviet military expansion notes; his biographical sketch of Mayakovsky, that pompous ass, on honeymoon on Greek beaches and cafes; his third factory. I read Bolano and well remembered conceptions of movementeering, of schools of aesthetic thought that above all else held themselves in somewhat satirical regard during moments of high philosophical import. Friends laughed, drunk with it all. I laughed with them.
20. A picture in a box in someone’s closet of three humans, two men and a woman as young and perhaps drunk as they look, one of the men with his mouth wide open as if an ape high as a kite. This picture is the essence. This picture distills the day of its taking – stars in high regard, beer patios, drive-by shootings.
…
24. Surrounded by dumb, loud music, surrounded by bodies, sweat, someone proffers a name. “Listen: ‘Stupidism.’” “I like it.” “No, listen: ‘Stupidism.’ You don’t get it.” “I like it.”
…
33. There was another reading. I used the first-person plural to make myself sound as if I had a core of humans at my back who were ready to tear down the walls with me just to get to her. I didn’t think it worked, then, but it did.
…
38. There is no we.
39. We were not at the airport – or on the avenue in Brooklyn running parallel to the East River, Greenpoint, where I last saw her — when she gave me the book, a full-edition photocopy of the book, rather. It held stupid lessons in stupid art, in stupid love, some of the lessons all the more true for their stupidity. “We are in the business of the creation of new things.” That’s one, if extrapolated. “Routine we transform into anecdotes.” Another. “Insults aimed at us can always be jotted down.” The ultimate.
…
56. I drank a measly quite hefty pint of whisky at a party. It all ended well, after the brief headache.
THE STUPIDIST MANIFESTO
We are the lesser primates among humanity — we require digital extensions with pens — but we wear the label proudly, hopefully, forcefully. Apes unite!
We live in a time of intelligence. Everything — from bombs and insurance policies to mood medications and the interfaces that guide our communications devices, which is to say nothing of the communications devices themselves, to the multiplicity of the choices available to us (make it the smart choice, goes a commercial local to someplace in the anonymous American wilds, for a particular brand of soap) — yes, everything, is smart. Everything, except for ourselves, and by extension our literature. Where we might achieve success, ever defined by money and happiness, our literature can only be a good read, a page-turner, a titillating memoir of a CEO come from the brink of financial ruin to a truer self-understanding. Malarky, we say, a word with a rich history that we well know. And this: if we are being excluded from the panoply of intelligence amassing in veritable constellations, or massive, very real military ranks, around us, what can we be but stupid?
It sounds like an insult, but let us embrace it. Philosophs and litterateurs the eons over have played games of definition, after all. Let us be stupid like the fox, that trickster of folklore, stupid like the fools of Shakespeare, like the Invisible Man of the modern American canon, he who once warned us to beware of those who talk of the spiral of history, for they are preparing a boomerang. We hold our steel helmets at the ready. The messengers of the new intelligence amass at the gates to the halls of the literature. The Stupidists meet them, remanufactured typewriters and pens stolen from office garbage bins our weaponry, cast-off printouts from PowerPoint presentations our ammunition. We fill the empty backs of the prints with exquisite stupidity. We need not loaves and fishes — we feed the armada with words.
The Stupidist needs not the comfort of home, she draws sustenance from the road, the experience of the new. And when in Rome, when immersed in the culture of the humans, the apes lives on the rooftops, ever roving, well above the umbrella. The Stupidist is a litterateur for the unsuspecting. We are in the business of the creation of new things.
Busy several days for ‘All Hands On’ upcoming
We’ve got work to do, with a daylong festival in Nashville on Saturday, a drive to Chicago on Sunday for readings Monday and Tuesday evening at Quimby’s and Hungry Brain, respectively, then back Wednesday. It’s all in the name of celebration of 10 and more years of writing published in these halls, which makes it sweet indeed. Below is a listing of the events upcoming, with links to
more information for those interested. Hope to see you out at one.
And here’s a picture from All Hands On‘s first Chicago date this past Monday — with featured writers Lauren Pretnar, Heather Palmer and Mike Zapata at Katerina’s on Irving Park Road. Jacob Knabb snapped it, of Zapata wearing a most apropos t-shirt for a T2H event, I’d say. Apes unite!
EVENTS UPCOMING:
NASHVILLE: Saturday, Oct. 1, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.: Handmade and Bound Zine Festival, Watkins College of Art & Design, 2298 Rosa L. Parks Blvd., Nashville, TN. THE2NDHAND will be tabling with the new book and a new broadsheet and editor Todd Dills will be giving a workshop tour through THE2NDHAND’s history in a practical, conception-to-nuts-and-bolts-type program titled “Toward a self-sufficient, long-lived zine”, 12:30 in room 503: http://handmadeboundnashville.com
CHICAGO: Monday, Oct. 3, 7 p.m.: All Hands On released at Quimby’s Books, 1854 W. North Ave., Chicago, featuring AHO contributors Jonathan Messinger (Time Out books editor, Featherproof publisher, Hiding Out author), Jill Summers and Kate Duva, as well as THE2NDHAND editor Todd Dills: http://the2ndhand.com/THE2NDHANDTXT/all-hands-on-launched-at-quimbys-oct-3/
CHICAGO: Tuesday, Oct. 4, 8:30 p.m.: All Hands On @ So You Think You Have Nerves of Steel?, THE2NDHAND’s monthly variety show at Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, Chicago. This month’s installment brings together longtime THE2NDHANDers with new faces, featuring AHO contributors Joe Meno (The Great Perhaps, Hairstyles of the Damned), Rob Funderburk (visual artist/designer, formerly THE2NDHAND’s design man), THE2NDHAND coeditor C.T. Ballentine, editor Todd Dills, Fred Sasaki and Marc Baez. Also featuring Chicago writer Matt Pine, music by Young Coconut, and Nerves host Harold Ray: http://the2ndhand.com/THE2NDHANDTXT/nerves-of-steels-special-all-hands-on-edition-tuesday-oct-4/
THE2NDHAND at Chicago ‘Sunday Salon’ on Monday, Sept. 26
We’re happy to announce that All Hands On contributors Lauren Pretnar, Heather Palmer and Michael Zapata will join novelist Brigid Pasulka for an event of the Chicago Sunday Salon series on, well, a Monday. Details follow in the press release, but a big thanks goes out to the organizers for keeping this series going. Pick up a copy of the book there, or order here.
Event Moves to Monday this Month
In its ongoing efforts to showcase outstanding local literary organizations and publications as well as writers, Sunday Salon Chicago dedicates September’s reading to THE2NDHAND, a Chicago/Nashville literary magazine. Three writers featured in All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10, will read at this month’s event: Heather Palmer, Lauren Pretnar and Michael Zapata. And, to celebrate the return of school here in Chicago, novelist and Whitney Young teacher Brigid Pasulka will also read.
Sunday Salon Chicago is a monthly literary reading series featuring local and national authors.
When: Monday, Sept. 26, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Katerina’s, 1920 W. Irving Park Rd.
Who:
Heather Palmer, author of Complements, Of Us and contributor to THE2NDHAND.
Lauren Pretnar, contributor to THE2NDHAND.
Michael Zapata, co-founder, MAKE magazine, editor at ANTIBOOKCLUB and contributor to THE2NDHAND.
Brigid Pasulka, author of A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True.
Admission: FREE
For more information, visit http://www.sundaysalon.com/chicago-salon.
Founded in Chicago in the year 2000, THE2NDHAND’s literary broadsheet and online magazine has been in the business of publishing fiction writing in various forms since the year 2000. This year, THE2NDHAND celebrates its first decade in existence with the publication of All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10, a reader including a large amount of unpublished work as well as previously published writing.
Chicago-based Heather Palmer (illustrated here by Rob Funderburk) is the author of Complements, Of Us, out in 2011 from Spork Press; her work has been published in a variety of magazines. In 2010 THE2NDHAND serialized her novella “Charlie’s Train” at THE2NDHAND.com, parts of which were excerpted in All Hands On.
Lauren Pretnar, who first contributed to THE2NDHAND in 2007, lives with her family in Chicago, where she remains hard at work on a book-length domestic horror. Past work in the Chicago arts community includes extensive experience in theater.
Michael Zapata is a writer and educator living in Chicago. He is a co-founder of MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine and works as an editor for ANTIBOOKCLUB. He is also a 2008 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship recipient for prose. Currently, he has been nominated for a Puschart Prize and is working on a novel entitled Children of Orleans.
The descendant of Polish immigrants, Brigid Pasulka spent most of her childhood in a farming township in Northern Illinois, population 500. In 1994 at the age of 22, she arrived in Krakow with no place to stay, no job, no contacts and no knowledge of the language. She quickly fell in love with the place, learned Polish, and decided to live there for one year. Brigid is still a frequent visitor to Krakow; she has also worked, studied or volunteered in Italy, Germany, Russia, England and Ukraine. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (MA) and currently teaches at Whitney Young Magnet High School in the Chicago Public Schools. A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True is her first novel. It won the 2010 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.
WRITE A MANIFESTO; T2H no. 37 upcoming
1. Imagine a literary/artistic “movement” — an aesthetic school, a militant lit troupe — of sorts called “Stupidism.”
2. Imagine further all appropriate tenets/favored aesthetics/styles/ways of living associated with being a practicing “Stupidist.”
3. Now write a “Stupidist Manifesto” of the group and email results (keep it under a single-spaced page) to me for consideration for THE2NDHAND’s next broadsheet, no. 37, a special issue to accompany the release of All Hands On, our 10th-anniversary anthology. Order the book here.
4. Get all manifestoes in by Aug. 5 for consideration for the broadsheet — I’ll definitely take any and all after the date as well into consideration for a special unit here at txt. For an example of a few myself, Spencer Dew, and Kate Duva crafted in 2007, go here.
That’s todd [at] the2ndhand.com.
THE2NDHAND no. 36.1, featuring Joe Meno
It’s been 20 broadsheets and six years since Joe Meno, once a regular in THE2NDHAND’s sheets, has appeared therein. No surprise for the hiatus, really, given since then he’s put out two shorts collections and at least as many novels, in addition to becoming a father. But: our latest broadsheet features a new story that’s also part of our 10th-anniversary All Hands On collection, due within a month. Order the book and find more information about it here.
As for the new Meno joint, it’s called “In the Avenues of Airplanes and Paper,” captures the struggles of a young woman attempting to deal with a compulsive habit she has of putting “air quotes” around near everything she says — to the point, for instance, that she wears mittens on a date.
Within the peculiarity of it all Meno finds — and the protagonist locates as well, inside and outside of her self — the very essence of what it is to be human.
Take a look at it on the broadsheet’s main page or click through the front-side image below for a pdf:
Boom boom — events in Nashville, Chicago this week
Busy week at THE2NDHAND HQs in Chicago and Nashville this week, on top of festivals of hot chicken and backyard BBQ and fireworks, as well as the more not-so-backyard variety, as shown here. (Gotta love that Nashville blow-stuff-up spirit.) Tuesday night Nerves of Steel is back in Chicago after a brief June West Virginia sojourn. It ought to be a rad showing, with writer Michael Czyzniejewski on the program with the comedic duo of the Puterbaugh Sisters, band the Post-revolutionary Letdowns, and more.
In Nashville, an event I’ll be hosting, writer/comix artist Cassie J. Sneider stops off on a 48-state tour behind her new Fine Fine Music
Finally, Cassie herself shared these seven reasons to come to her reading, “even though you don’t know me,” as she puts it:
1. You can tell all of your friends you ‘attended a reading’, which makes you sound really smart and superior and better than them, which you undoubtedly already are.
2. It’s like Hulu-ing Hoarders, but WITH YOUR IMAGINATION.
3. Free comics for everyone!
4. I’ll let you pet my hair and pretend I’m not creeped out by it.
5. I’m, like, a really good reader.
6. Did I mention free comics?
7. I will pet YOUR hair and you can tell your friends you went on a date with me. …
SONG/STORY April 1 in Nashville; Zurhellen, T2H books
A few updates to the musical portion of tomorrow night’s lineup at the Story/Song event at Casablanca Coffee here in Nashville. In addition to cohost Mike Willis, queue Clay Evans (an at-times Bill Withers-esque — for lack of a better on-the-spot description, he’s def. got his own thing going — songwriter and performer, based in Nashville) and Chattanooga’s Noah Collins.
Keyhole Magazine editor/THE2NDHAND contributor Gabe Durham, myself, and the crew from Nashville’s brand-new No Shame Theater will be reading and/or performing short sketches. Hope to see you there…
For the remainder of the details, read this.
AND: If you’ve been missing the ongoing serialization of a chapter from NY-based writer Tommy Zurhellen’s first novel, Nazareth, North Dakota (due out from Atticus Books April 15), check out part 3, just published. I first came across Zurhellen’s work in an issue of the Birmingham-based Red Mountain Review we were both published in. That, too, with an excerpt called “Song of Simeon.” Let’s just say the entire book’s worth checking out: It’s due out from Atticus April 15. Preorders are being taken now.
Speaking of preorders, our Kickstarter campaign for the now-almost-finished All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10, T2H’s 10th-anniversary reader, was successful. If you didn’t reserve your copy there, $15 preorders are now open here. It features a dozen or so new shorts as well as the best of our repeat writers from the last six-seven years, since the publication of the prior All Hands book. We’re shooting for an early summer release, events to follow in late summer and fall.
STEEL proclamation, or A NERVES manifesto, or WE WELL know now who’s got it
Let it be known that when there are challengers there are challengers. One calls to front brain wellsprings of people power sweeping certain distant locales and our own calcified North American adventures of yore, perhaps also in my mind at least the brightening though perhaps still quite dim star of Califone in the pantheon of candidates for Band of a Particular Generation of Which I Am Part, stiff competition for the most consistent, at least, or Radiohead.
Chicago insurgent Mason Johnson came into the Hungry Brain last Tuesday night planning on out-Nerving — or, perhaps, out-Steeling — our own Harold Ray, host of the Nerves of Steel performance series and, well, one tough son of a bitch. Johnson went so far as to build his own parodic event flyer in which he proclaimed his prowess, and there was much online verbal abuse hurled back and forth in the run-up to the event. WWF/E-style theatrics — razorblades, chest-thumping, neck-tendon-tightening growling, etc. — seemed the order of the day.
Needless to say, as results are clear from the picture above (that’s Ray in the wifebeater, Johnson in the karate outfit getting whipped; pic from Untoward mag), the ever-more-lit West Virginian Ray emerged triumphant, a victory Untoward Mag attributed to his “mountain man’s grit,” among other things. Get over there and read their account.