Golden Handcuffs Review 13

{ Golden Handcuffs Review 13 Hot off the press }

After coming home from an afternoon walk, I had to wait for the mailman who had parked in my driveway. His truck was idling. I couldn’t really tell what he was up to. I suspect it was likely something he didn’t want to do right on the street. In my mailbox, I found the newest issue of the Golden Handcuffs Review, edited by Lou Rowan. It has two pieces by me, a story called “Wart” about my experience of unwanted fungal skin growths while living in Baltimore, and an essay, “A Gas Gas Gas,” about what I think is the lost mission of The Avant Garde. It is weird and great to appear in a magazine along side folks like David Antin, Meredith and Peter Quartermain, Charles Bernstein, Toby Olson, and so on. It’s a beautiful magazine and should be, according to the editor, making its way to those places that carry literary magazines.

 

Taibi Mastelse paints Shoot the Buffalo

Shoot the Buffalo by Taibi Mastelse

Brooklyn artist Taibi Mastelse posted a picture of a small painting she made based on my novel Shoot the Buffalo. It is oddly evocative of the novel in ways I hadn’t thought of — star bursts on linen. Too, my father has been taking snapshots of his hiking trips for decades. He is not exactly a nature photographer. His pictures are quick snapshots like family photos. Instead they are of lakes, trees, and rocks. There aren’t any people in his family photos. I used to spend a lot of time drawing with my friend as a child. We had endless drawing contests, and my friend always won. We would draw sheets of customs, sequences of animal/human hybrids, and a lot of 18 wheelers. Mastelse’s drawing remind me of these drawings (only better of course). She has drawings of cat people, dresses, and other things. Check it out. Thanks for the painting, Taibi.

 

Publication Studio Opens Three Store Fronts

This from my friends at The Publication Studio:

Many of you don’t live in Portland, or perhaps do live here but are busy or away. Please forward our news and the attached invite to anyone you think might enjoy the party. We’d love to meet your friends. So here it is:

Dearest Pioneers,

Thank you for trusting us with your beautiful work. For the last 10 months we’ve been asking the writers and artists we admire most to let us print and bind their work, make the books available to the public, and then see what comes of some hitherto-untried strategies for building a public, which is to say a readership and also a market.

We’ve had dinners, lectures, cocktail debates, 10 am gin parties, art exhibitions, collective writing experiments, an online “reading commons,” and numerous trips to other cities to spread the word in person. Notably, we have not had reviewer copies, paid publicity, bookstore readings, or any of the conventional engines of desire in the book marketplace. The key to our method, as you know, is “just-in-time” production of books: the ability to make one book for one reader who wants it, and then make another for the next and then another, and so on and so on, over and over and over.

Along the way we’ve learned how to make a public and keep it growing, how to expand the circle of readers and waste little or nothing along the way. Thanks entirely to you pioneers, our business is growing, and we’re about to make a move that puts what we’ve learned fully to work.

On July 1 we will open our very own for-real PS storefront at 717 SW Ankeny, in downtown Portland! We’ll now have a 24/7 dedicated space for producing books, hosting the social life of production, and housing gatherings where the bigger conversation around books can take place. At the same time our first two sibling studios — Publication Studio Berkeley, CA, and Publication Studio Vancouver, BC — have begun producing their first books and hosting their own gatherings. Meanwhile, we will launch our literary periodical, WEEKDAY, edited by Patricia No.

Please come be our very special guest on Thursday evening, July 1, 6 – 10 pm. Get a copy of WEEKDAY. Have a cold beer. Our friends Lisa Schonberg (ex-Explode Into Colors) and Jonathan Sielaff will play some music. And if you want to make plans with us about the future of your book (or another book you’ve been wanting to make) let’s make a date. We can have a publisher’s lunch! We’ve learned a lot this year about the best ways to support your work and give it a long life. We look forward to doing that,

Matthew & Patricia

 

MTV PSA for 40 Stories by Donald Barthelme

Timothy Hutton appears in this PSA for MTV pitching 40 Stories by Donald Barthelme. This was one of the better Donald Barthelme clips that I could find on YouTube. There just aren’t very many which seems kind of weird.

 

The Balloon by Donald Bathelme

This movie inspired by Donald Barthelme’s iconic short story, “The Balloon” (60 Stories) has just over 200 views. It deserves a lot more. Great soundtrack, and balloon face tattoos. Check it out.

 

Student’s “Music Video” for Frances Johnson by Stacey Levine

Chioubacca posted this video “as part of a project I did for my Postmodern Lit class. It’s based on the excellent book, Frances Johnson, by Stacey Levine. The song is “Happy Alone” by Earlimart, off of their album Mentor Tormentor, all rights reserved to them and all that. Starring Claire Williams, directed/edited/etc by me.”

 

Short Story in TRNSFR Magazine – The League of Bears

I’ve been meaning to post that my two copies of TRNSFR Magazine, featuring two alternate covers in a kind of perfect bound matchbook-style wrap around cover arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago. The magazine includes a ton of great work by the likes of Jac Jemc, Nate Pritts, AD Jameson, Heather Momyer, Cris Mazza, K. Silem Mohammad, Jennifer L. Knox, Marc Olmstead, Shya Scanlon, Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert, Keith Higginbotham, David Ehren-stein, and Paul Maliszewski. They published my story “The League of Bears,” which I wrote for the first Opium Magazine Lit Death Match in Seattle, where I was defeated by Ryan Boudinot. Boudinot was in turn defeated by Matthew Simmons. I believe TRNSFR is accepting submission for issue three right this minute. My story begins this way:

My wife bloomed in her late thirties. She had always been pretty, but pretty in a cute kind of way. Her inner geek trumped any fashion sense. When our old Mac PowerBook, which was known for running way too hot, hot enough to leave second degree burns, cooked its hard drive, she was the one who unscrewed the lid, and cut open the protective foil with an Exact-o knife to swap the drive. Late in the summer of her 37th year, she experienced a transformation. She lost a bit of weight. She focused her geeky energy on vintage dresses. She began a regime of mild exercise and became sexy, kind of as a hobby.

I, on the other hand, began my rapid decline into middle age. I had expected this based on the physical appearance of my uncles. They were short, bald, fat hermits who lived frustrated lives of randy irritability.

–

 

Novel Review – Shya Scanlon on Shoot the Buffalo at The Rumpus

The Last Book I Loved - The Rumpus

Poet and novelist Shya Scanlon wrote a review of my novel re-issued first novel Shoot The Buffalo at The Rumpus:

The other core strength of the novel is Briggs’s ability to conjure the voice and perspective of an intelligent, watchful child, with all his limitations intact. Aldous Bohm is a brilliant portrait of youthful consciousness in its attempt to negotiate the complex emotions of early adulthood. To watch him grapple especially with a generous measure of misplaced guilt around which much of the book revolves, is nothing short of heartbreaking.
– for the full review

 

Amelia Rosselli at the Shafer Baillie Mansion (5-22-2010)

On Saturday, I’m reading along with Dot Devota, Dickey Nesenger, Francia Recalde, and Brandon Shimoda read from Amelia Rosselli and our own work to celebrate the publication of Deborah Woodward and Giuseppe Leporace’s translation, The Dragonfly by Amelia Rosselli.

We’ll be at The Speakeasy in the Shafer Baillie Mansion, located in Capitol Hill at 907 14th Avenue East Seattle, WA 98112. The reading will start around seven and end at nine. I hope you can join us.

Here is one of Rosselli’s poems:

The inferno of light was love. The inferno of love
was sex. The inferno of the world was oblivion to the
simple rules of life: stamped papers and a simple
protocol. Four beds face down on the bed four
dead friends with a gun in hand four false notes
of the piano that are cause for hope.
–Amelia Rosselli

 

An Evening of Paper (Tonight)

Truculent or translucent

I’m going to see William Allegrezza read along with Stacey Levine, Em Kanskje, Evelyn Hampton, Jarret Middleton, Summer Robinson, Tyler Holm tonight at the Good Shephard Center in Seattle for An Evening of Paper. I am not sure exactly what the performances and or reading will be as they have something to do with paper. The Pilot Books web site describes it as, “An Evening of Paper—unfolding as probable and improbable geography of the arts. Creative events auteur Sharon Alexander has arranged a montage of ideas, images and sounds for your experience and enjoyment.” Doors open at 5:30, and performances start around 7:30 or so. See you there if you are there.