Final State Press has just released my new collection of stories

Final State Press has just released my new book, The End is the Beginning, a collection of stories I've been writing since 1998. This is the first book I've published with Final State, but they plan on releasing a novel next year, The Double E, and hopefully more books after that. I wrote many of the stories for reading series and events around the Pacific Northwest, including the Brontesaurus, a day long celebration of the Brontes at Richard Hugo House, a writing resource center in Seattle, back when Rebecca Brown was the Writer in Residence there. Although it was, one of the first I wrote in this collection; it wasn't published until last year in The Clackamas Literary Review. Most of the stories are about the end of the world, death destruction, and other light subjects. I wrote one story, called "Caffeinism" after I suffered a serious reaction to an overdose of caffeine. I wrote another about the day I was activated for the first Gulf War. And another is about the end of reading. Stories have been in mags such as Seattle Magazine, First Intensity, The Raven Chronicles, and The Wandering Hermit Review, and Web sites such as The Mississippi Review (Web), Smokelong, Slouch, Semantikon, and The Steel City Review.

You can purchase the book at Amazon, Powells, or Lulu.com (where you can get it either as paper or PDF). If you are interested in reviewing the book, email me at matt(dot)briggs(at)gmail.com.

The Hornets Came Back the Very Next Day

In the middle of July hornets started to build a hive in the small fruit tree next to my mailbox. Shortly after I first moved into my house, my prior mailbox had been flattened in the middle of the night. I woke in the morning to find my old mailbox crushed on the side of the road as flat as a Pepsi can left on the macadam. I replaced the mailbox with a Rubber Maid contraption that jiggled and threatened to come apart whenever I opened the plastic flap of a door.

The hornets had a cantaloupe-sized hive in progress. The hornet nest wasn't that big. I had seen one as large as volleyball. A few summers ago I'd removed one the size of a watermelon from the tree behind the house.

I took the hose and set it to the conical spray and then sprayed the hive at the point where it was connected to the tree. The nest popped off the branch. It fell onto the cement lip edging my lawn and the street.

Obama's O on his Jet Plane

This came across the tubes and cables of the Internet, "I don't get this one----it is offensive... WHAT A DISGRACE!!! AND HE IS ALL AMERICAN????" -- Denise Emch. Emch is presumably offended by the fact that previous campaigns have used the logo of the American flag. Obama, though, is using his own sunrise/flag "O" logo. The transgressions here is somehow an affront to the fixed iconography of American principles.

Black Sabbath's Master of Reality and Shoot the Buffalo

Laura Pearson posted lists of reading suggestions for summer, Preserving Our Independents: Summer Reading List, from the likes of David Lasky (Comix drawer in Seattle), Jonathan Messinger (featherproof books in Chicago), and Mairead Case (Proximity magazine in Chicago). Mairead Case had a list that had both a 33 1/3 book about Black Sabbath's Master of Reality as well my novel, Shoot the Buffalo. I had never listened to any Black Sabbath, really, until this last winter and as of June 14th, according to my iTunes, I've listened to the 5:17 minutes of "Children of the Grave" 54 times ... starting there to the end of the album skipping over the changing-it-up tune "Solitude" 32 times. I'm not sure what these metrics reveal, except I keep listening to Master of Reality. The heavy metal is supposed to do bad things to a person's brain. I should read the book, I guess.

A Compendium of Miniatures by Tiffany Lee Brown

Tiffany Lee Brown (writer) and Clare Carpenter (design and book)

Tiffany Lee Brown and Clare Carpenter produced a book this last spring, A Compendium of Miniatures. It is a hand-bound, hand-set letterpress 48-page book that was produced in an edition of fifty copies. It has already sold out. (Well, nearly sold out. There are still a few left.) The book itself is beautiful. It uses type cutter Frederick Goudy's Deepdene (named for Goudy's long-time home) a face informed by the end of the Arts and Craft movement and the demands of machine composition at the turn of the century. However, unlike the type he designed for the University of California Press, (Berkeley) Deepende is free of short descenders. The face is a great choice for a book that recalls the handmade, small press productions of the turn of the last century.

The prose snippets used throughout the book also recall early Modernist experiments. The book explores a very simple structure in 23 variations. Almost all of the entries in the book link a general abstraction, such as hope, love, or truth to a very specific and brief passage.

For example...