June 14, 2008

Richard Nash at Soft Skull was nice enough to post my response to a a speech called "The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers" by Mike Shatzkin that he'd linked to on his blog. I had wanted to post a comment in response (but the technology of comments for blogs is confusing which is one of the many reasons that hosted blogs such as Blogger are such a free and sweet deal.) My own blog runs on Moveable Type on its own server and my brief attempt to run comments here was such a horrible failure (I still have thousands of SPAM posts I'm lugging around) that I turned them off. I didn't miss them, really, because only two or three people ever commented on my site. Instead more people (and those same people) email me, and posting relevant responses seems more in line with whatever I'm doing here which is mostly a kind of proto-blog anyway. My posts are too long and infrequent. But Soft Skull is interested in getting comments to work on his site. If you know how, maybe you could help him?

I also mention in my response something that Maria Massie, the agent for Lydia Millet and for a while Stephen Dixon, said to me about writers who publish too much. She said they should publish a book every six years or so, (or some time frame like that) so that each book could be an event. I think she was a fine literary agent and did what she could with my own work. And perhaps me for me she was actually telling me something -- some writers should publish every six months. Other writers, well, we would all appreciate it if they took a lot longer, like forever. I don't know. My consistently poor and peevish relationship with literary professionals has led me to believe that it is probably better if I approach the whole enterprise as an amateur effort.

April 20, 2008

Ever since reading that novel the whole city read at the same time, the boy had imagined what he might do, how he himself might behave if trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger. "I'd tame the tiger," the boy told his friend. "I'd fashion a whip from fishing nets and detach the whistle from my life preserver and for my tiger tamer's chair I'd use a..." [Read Voyage of the Peapod by Steve Himmer]

March 13, 2008

I found this recent interview with Matthew Stadler kind of reassuring because unlike a lot of writers Matthew Stadler has jumped into the so called "Social Web" completely and yet retains a sense of "the book" as a medium. There isn't the either/or mentality that seems to go hand in hand with many writer's assessment of digital media. In this interview I was struck by Matthew's openness to new technology and his fondness rather than nostalgia for the old technologies of books and rooms where people can meet and cavort. A room is itself, I suppose, a technology, and far more social in most cases than the hottest chat room.

March 1, 2008

I am back to being virtual, finally. I've been able to post Justin Dobb's contribution to A Boy, A Cay, a Lifeboat. I will be posting more contributions over the upcoming weeks. If you are interested in contributing, yourself, please let me know [matt.briggs(at)gmail.com]. Thanks.

February 5, 2008

The Man Who Couldn't Blog has posted some illustrations I drew for his posts. An illustrations looks like this, a post look like this. They are all here.

October 18

Checked the sample locker, and it's been static for some time. No one cares anymore, like this is it.

Surroundings? It's gray all over. Walls. Chairs. Bins. Counter. Coffee pot. Coffee har har. Leaves. I bring them in and tape them to the wall. Scotch tape. Gray tape dispenser.

Better for them. No stimulus.

* * *

In other blog-style news, I've started to receive great contributions to my blog, A Boy, a Cat, a Lifeboat. I've already posted a piece by Brandon Scott Gorrell and will post today a confession by John Olson. In the next couple of weeks work by Claudia Smith and Justin Dobbs. I hope you are interested in sending something in.

January 27, 2008

A note from Matthew Stadler:

If it interests you, I have closed "Matthew Stadler's Personal Weblog" with a short piece discussing that experiment: www.urbanhonking.com/matthewstadler

Meanwhile, another site I put up continues indefinitely... www.promisenottotell.com

If you weren't familiar with Matthew Stadler's blog, he had it written by random people at Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Stadler paid 10 bucks for someone to write something based on his sketch. The results were interesting and at first promised to be varied. Gradually they assumed an oddly consistent tone; even more odd considering they were written by random people from around the planet. I once tried to take part, but Matthew works very late into the evening, and I fell asleep before he posted his premise and by the time I woke the global nature of the web had answered Matthew's call and already there was something on the blog.

Matthew writes in his statement, "The End:" The web is a kind of communal insane person who never stops muttering to himself.

I can somewhat hear the sense in this, but simultaneously I don't agree with it. The web is no more a person than a city is a person. I think when a person tries to understand any organization or community as if they were a person, it cannot help but appear as an insane person because the metaphor does not hold when applied to the monologue or interior life of the organization. It isn't a monologue that you are hearing, but a conversation. It isn't talking to itself. Rather its members are talking.

January 19, 2008

Willie Smith has a great collection of poems on YouTube. Hopefully there will be regular updates.

December 23, 2007

Doug Nufer read at the SubText Reading Series this past year, and it has been posted: Merry Christmas.

December 9, 2007

Profile of Whatcom Poetry Series

A profile of Jim Bertolino and the Whatcom Poetry Series by Michelle Nolan appeared recently in the Bellingham Herald.

Free Range Words

Melanie Noel, Jared Leising, and Bret Fetzer

Thursday Dec 13 at 7:00 PM at Tougo Coffee, 1410 18th Ave. at Union in the Central District. Free.

Molly Tenanbaum at Elliott Bay

Molly Tenenbaum will be reading from her new book Now (Bear Star), joined by Portland poet Kate Gray, also reading from her recent book.

Thursday, Dec 13, 7:30 pm at the Elliott Bay Book Company. Free.

S.A.M. Poetry Night Series

Vis-a-Vis Society with a site-specific, interactive (not-scary), multi-media performance by the Vis-a-Vis Society, and readings by poets Catherine Wing and Cody Walker. The S.A.M. Poetry Night Series offers readings and performances
inspired by specific rooms in the museum's collection and current S.A.M. exhibitions.

Thursday, Dec. 13, 8:00 - 9:00 p.m. (but please come a little early to fill out a survey) Seattle Art Museum - South Hall. Free.

Robert Mittenthal at Apostrophe

Jurg Hock (Dance), Robert Mittenthal (poetry), and Robert Pedersen (music - electronics) will perform at Apostrophe. Apostrophe is a monthly series presenting three solo artists in one hour, testing for vistas within the camera obscura. Without theme or intermission, a dancer, musician and poet present their work, posing questions about the compositional frame (page, body, breath, instrument, floor, room) and how it shapes imagination and space. Co-presented by gallery 1412 and Seattle Improvised Music. Curated by Beth Graczyk, Gust Burns and Melanie Noel.

Saturday, Dec 15, 2007 8 p.m. gallery 1412 [1412 18th Avenue (at Union Street)] $5-15 sliding scale

December 4, 2007

The Future of Reading at Diveintomark.org

When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this. -- Jeff Bezos, Open letter to Author’s Guild, 2002

You may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content. In addition, you may not, and you will not encourage, assist or authorize any other person to, bypass, modify, defeat or circumvent security features that protect the Digital Content. -- Amazon, Kindle Terms of Service, 2007

The Future of Reading is a great mash-up of the various efforts (and their implications) in making books business digitial (with the implication of central control, aka Winston Smith's job of updating the historical record to support contemporary political decisions).

October 28, 2007

JEFFREY BROWN: Marshall and Deavel had run a general bookstore for seven years until a Barnes & Noble opened not far away.

JOHN MARSHALL: And I know I just saw it.

JEFFREY BROWN: The two then did something that does sounds nuts: Rather than fold their tent and find a new business, they went into an even smaller niche, all poetry, all the time.

For the streaming video or the transcript visit: PBS.org

October 20, 2007

My short story, "The Death of Charlotte Bronte," appears in this year's Clackamas Literary Review. The story is about the repeated appropriations of the Bronte's by first Charlotte (who acquired Anne, Emily, and Branwell after their deaths), and then Elizabeth Gaskell who wrote the biography of Charlotte Bronte after Charlotte's death, and then writers since then. I wrote the story in 1999 as part of Rebecca Brown's Brontesaurus, a day long celebration of the Bronte's and closet writers.

A review of Flight by Sherman Alexie appears in the the WaterBridge Review.

Zits, the narrator of Sherman Alexie's seventeenth book, is a teenager who is tough in the long tradition of American angry young men, such as Huckleberry Finn, Holden Caulfield, and Russell Banks's Bone. In this tradition the narrator is self-damning, self-hating, and comic. "I'm ashamed that I look like a bag of zits tied to a broomstick," Zits says. These stories tell the American myth of self-determination: anyone, in America, these stories say, can become anything.

August 1, 2007

This from Evil Editor:

Guess the Plot Saturday, July 14, 2007
A while back I posted the titles of some books that were nominated for some award from some organization and invited Guess the Plot writers to try their hand at them. There wasn't a lot of interest, but here's what we came up with. Correct answers at [Evil Editor].

Shoot the Buffalo

1. Come one, come all and watch as Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley and Spot, the wonder Chihuahua, battle Cherokee indians and drunken settlers to carve a new Ponderosa in South Pass City, Wyoming. Also, the ghost of Andrew Jackson appears as a railway conductor.

2. Nine-year-old Aldous Bohm's parents leave him alone with his younger siblings. When the kids go looking for the parents, one of them dies of hypothermia. Aldous is wracked by guilt, and later joins the army. Also, a drug-addicted uncle in the attic.

3. He has no name; he is of the herd. The mother protects him, the cousins gather round him as they follow the paths of sweet clovers across the plains. But to others he is special, unique even. They give him a name: Cloud Mane. They follow the herd on their striding beasts and watch him, waiting for the time when they can harvest his pure white pelt. Only by learning the arts of the ancients, and learning to trust his human instincts, will Cloud Mane the Minotaur be able to escape the Alustrein Hunters.

4. All anyone at Sherman High cared about was hot cars, fast women and totally wicked skiing. To get the girl of his dreams, Matt Dongle has to ski the Buffalo: an illegal slope with a deadly record. Matt learns a little about life, a little about love, and a lot about skis when he attempts to Shoot the Buffalo.

5. When a lesbian big-game hunter and a gay National Geographic nature photographer meet over a water buffalo carcass in Africa, they form an unlikely alliance to expose deadly corruption in the world's largest intravenous drug manufacturing company.

Check Evil Editor for the complete quiz and answers.

July 13, 2007

Kathryn Trueblood is reading from her new book, The Baby Lottery tonight at the Elliott Bay Book Company (7:30 p.m. free). A long review appeared in today's Seattle PI:

That is definitely not the case with the auspicious debut by Kathryn Trueblood of Bellingham. Trueblood's "The Baby Lottery" courses with the messy complexity of real life. And what makes that accomplishment all the more remarkable is how she manages that in a slim novel that runs only 249 pages, yet also provides well-realized portraits of five major female characters.

Dogmatika posted this police sketch of Willie Smith. Actually it is by Willie's wife, but there is a "Have you seen this man?" quality to the portrait. They've also posted some of his stories. "When I grow up I want to be a big Willie," writes Paul Kavanagh. There is also a story by Justin Dobbs.

July 5, 2007

A couple of weeks ago David Santen wrote a profile of Matthew Stadler in The Oregonian. Matthew Stadler has a response to Santen's profile at Urban Honking.

June 28, 2007

WoodWorks Press proprietor, long-time Red Sky host, and Washington State poet, Paul Hunter will be profiled on the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Past poets have included the likes of Lucille Clifton, Donald Hall, and Galway Kinnell.

June 21, 2007

I recently reread Matthew Richter's great essay “The Nonprofit Motive� published in The Stranger a while ago. Richter has been the director at Consolidated Works, a performance and gallery space located in a warehouse in Seattle's South Lake Union area. After an altercation with the board, he was let go.

In the essay, Richter points to why most nonprofits fail and questions if nonprofits are actually beneficial to a city. Seattle has a very high ratio of nonprofits per capita, and finally how ALL nonprofits are in competition for essentially a single pot of money:

"The influence this money exerts is often very positive, but can also be negative, sometimes pulling the organization away from its mission in favor of what the grantors want to see happen."

-- The NonProfit Motive by Matthew Richter

June 20, 2007

Here is Frances McCue, a founder and long-time executive, talking about Richard Hugo House's community function -- why it might lack definition because to define it clearly might "fix it." Richard Hugo House was a community writing center in Seattle from 1997 - 2006. My interpretation of this was that Hugo House was more of a vector for people who wanted to write in Seattle, i.e., infrastructure, in the way a network or alphabet or blank paper enables voices in the community to express themselves in tangible form. As you can see the concept of ownership and awarding something like space or money doesn't really mix with the idea of Hugo House as an extension of the community since really it already belongs to them:

Some innovative foundations and nonprofit programs are looking at communities with an attitude of appreciative inquiry rather than an expertise based on a “we’ve-identified-the-problem� approach. They look for assets that already exist in a community, and work from there. For example, in her book "The Life and Death of American Cities,"Jane Jacobs describes the little old ladies who used to sit in lawn chairs outside their row houses in Boston’s North End. On the surface, they seem like ladies sitting outside and conversing, but, because there is a group of them, they prevent robberies on their blocks. Their watchfulness is an asset.

From Making Things and Making Things Better, at the Community Arts Forum in 2004.

When I worked at Hugo House in 2005, several homeless men spent much of their abundant time hanging out and reading books and old copies of literary magazines. They kind of knew everything that had happened around the neighborhood, and when worse came to worse, there was always somebody in the audience. Their presence to me indicated an underlying vitality to the organization -- a striving toward an ideal where the permutation of "house" might just include for some people, a dry place to sit and read. Late last year around the time Hugo House was kicking out SubText, the homeless men disappeared. Someone sent me a flyer they found in the copy machine. It was a list of rules. One of the rules was "No B.O." A rule like this, most likely someone's idea of a joke (ha ha), also indicated that the days of embracing the old ladies on the blocks, the homeless man in his baseball cap, the experimental writer in with his tiny round glasses and goatee, was over. The place as a social experiment, then was over. The place was an experiment was over. It was fixed.

Related:

Richard Hugo House Evicts The Raven Chronicles and Floating Bridge
The executive director recently evicted the last of the small presses and literary magazines renting space at Hugo House.

Open Office Hours
I saw about three writers a week while at Richard Hugo House. In the two years I saw just over a hundred and fifty writers.

June 15, 2007

Will Allison, who has just published a book, and used to be a fiction editor at STORY in the 1990s has an interesting piece at MaudeNewton on his days as an editor at the magazine and working with Laurie Henry and Lois Rosenthal. He has this to say about reading a slush pile:

I did have some trouble getting up to speed, though. Having only recently left the world of MFA creative-writing workshops, I was used to dutifully, painstakingly giving each and every manuscript its full due. Lois didn't play that. If a story failed to hook her by the first page or two, she was on to the next. I was struck by her ability (and Laurie's) to plow through a bin of manuscripts in a couple of hours, emerging with only a handful of stories requiring closer attention. It wasn't just that she read with great confidence -- in her taste, in her ability to recognize quality -- but also with great impatience. How dare an unworthy story waste her time!

In 1991, I won 7th prize in their first college fiction competition. I was a college freshman. Many of the people who placed where in MFA programs. I thought that was it. I had it made. I kept sending stories and STORY, including Will Allison kept writing rejection slips. I have a little stack of notes. Eight years later, still not in. I never got into the magazine. In fact, they stopped the contest several years later because of a lack of wonderful material. STORY closed in 1999, and Will Allison talks about why it closed in his piece.

June 14, 2007

Weird Deer! is Travis Nichols web, bloggy, space that looks like a vital and interesting place. "Please, have a look around," Nichols, writes, "listen in, and read up. We’re a home for cultural correspondence, so make yourself comfortable, and join in." Just found this extension of The Stranger's brief history of SubText after getting the boot from Hugo House. Evictions are a time to give thanks to the landlord for having provided a roof over your head when they did provide a roof over your head, even if they are no longer providing a roof over your head now. Or as my father used to say, "What are you complain about, it's food innit?"

Writers include: Matthew Stadler, Paul Hoover, Maged Zaher, Marjorie Perloff, Sarah Mangold, etc.

June 13, 2007

Leslie Bussert, the UW-Bothell libraries, and Jared Leising, a local writer and teacher at Cascadia, have been working on a community literature collection at the UWB/Cascadia Comm College library.

Leslie poins out that they are having trouble with the "authors page," becuase:

"I'm still struggling with the authors page - mainly because I had a
heck of a time tracking down local author blogs. I think that's
because a) not everyone uses their names in their blogs, making them
hard to find via a search engine, or b) they're not from our area. So
I've listed about 12 regional author sites/blogs, and basically my
criteria for including them is that I actually found them and they had
content beyond a writing sample and contact info."

Jared asks that if if you ahve any suggestions regarding this particular aspect of the
site (or other parts of it) please send them.

Also, if you're a local writer and would like to be listed on the
author site please send a link to your site or blog, and if you are
listed and would prefer not to be, please let me know that as well.

Send them to: Jared Leising

June 12, 2007

Portland writer Diana Abu-Jaber published an interesting article in Poets and Writers about the cost of bringing writers to town. I have often wondered what the price tag was for someone like Toni Morrison. ($50,000+) I once tried to set up a reading for Russell Edson in Seattle. He said he'd read for $2,000, plus airfare and expenses. This seemed like a reasonable cost, even though I suspect I'd be lucky to get 50 people to come to his reading. Really lucky. The math of this event then works out very poorly. I would be better served probably to just buy copies of Russell Edson's book for 200 people. It would surely result in more books sold for Mr. Edson if I just bought them. I have rarely been to an event (especially in Seattle) where people line to up to buy the author's book en masse. I did a reading with David Guterson once and several dozen people started grabbing his book and lining up. It was weird. (No one bought any copies of my book. In fact, the bookstore working the event didn't even have copies of my book.) Charles d'Ambrosio's reading from Orphans at Elliott Bay right before Christmas had people buying stacks of his book. But these seem like freakish happenings. In Diana Abu-Jaber's article, one writer notes, "I wouldn't mind appearing for free if I knew that at least here were ten people who bought my book, but then I find only one of them has."

-- Putting a Price on Writers Who Read

June 11, 2007

A long profile of Matthew Stadler appeared in The Oregonian by J. David Santen titled "The Citizen Intellectual," which covers a lot of Matthew's including The Back Room, Clear Cut Press, his ongoing talks on the suburbs. It leaves out, interestingly, Matthew's blog and his ongoing class Using Global Media. The profile also covers some of the prickly responses to Matthew's talks. "Stadler, a writer whose parallel life as Northwest literary gadfly has won him many ardent admirers and a few dissenters, asks those present at Podkrepa Hall in North Portland not to leave after dinner has ended."

April 20, 2007

There's no getting around it: This is one grim, tough, upsetting book. Yet it's also shot through with a painful radiance and level intelligence that keep you with it every step of the way. -- The Seattle Times

P.S.: Corrinna Wycoff will be reading at Jack Straw this May.

April 19, 2007

Justin Dobb's posted an interview with Tao Lin on his current blog yesterday that is to my tin ears excellent for the most part, although Dobb's asks Tao Lin about Northwest Writing and Lin really has no comment. But having no comment doesn't stop either from generating text, such as this:

Dobbs: Do I frighten you?
Lin: Main Ho said that fear is something you feel when you feel afraid. Ithink that's right. I don't fear you.

Tao Lin will soon have a book(s) released from Melville House. He has been working the internet for that last couple of years. One of the (to me) interesting things that happened with him a year or so ago was a fizzeled project between him and Kevin Sampsell. Future Tense Press, Sampsell's press, was going to publish a chapbook by Lin. Sampsell had some editorial changes (being the publisher). Lin (being the author) didn't want to make any chanes. So Future Tense didn't publish the book. While this is a standard kind of conflict, Lin published the entire exchange on his blog. I found the whole thing interesting in that it made the exchange completely transparent, it used the transaction between the two parties as a method of generating text around the project, and finally continued to emphasize ways in which the the virtual world creates new problems for publishers and writers but also by turning the virtual existence of the author into text created a cloud of extra-information around a book.

Anyway, here is Dobb's interview on his site. If he removes his blog or post, I dropped the whole thing below.

An Interview With Tao Lin by Justin Dobbs

Recently I met a writer on the bus. She asked me what I was reading. I said that I was reading Tao Lin. She asked me to describe his writing. I said that his work was hyper-minimal, postmodern, and meta-fictional. He writes about googling. Also, his work is shocking. "In what way?" asked the writer. I said that it was sexual. "Sexual how?" "Sexually perverted." "Oh," said the writer, "I think I would like that."

In the following interview, Tao talks about veganism, his favorite writers, and why he might like to write shockingly.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Who is your favorite Taiwanese writer?

My favorite Taiwanese writer is Main Ho. His first novel was about opening a Chinese Restaurant in Orlando, Florida. The title translates to "Indecision," which is where Benjamin Kunkel got the title for his novel. I think if you want to know what a good writer is you just have to look at Granta's list of best writers. They probably did a lot of research for that list. They probably researched semantics, epistomology, ontology, etc. to define "best" and then probably did scientific tests on each writer, on each of the 2,000,000 or whatever writers there are in America. We just need to click the link and read Granta's list. I don't understand why people even discuss who is"good" or "bad" when a list with answers exists.

Where do you live? Where does Noah Cicero live? Where does Ellen Kennedy live? Do you all live close together, like on a farm?

Noah lives in Ohio. Ellen lives in Pennsylvania. And I live in Pennsylvania. I think people with a "common aesthetic" find each other on the internet. There are millions of people in the universe and some of these people will be similar. Millions. The similar people find each other, like each other, and then move to be near each other

You just graduated from a university, right? Does this make you proud?

I have a B.A. in music theory from New York University. My favorite professor was James Chapman. He taught me that a half-cadence soundsgood. I didn't like how it sounded but he taught me that it sounded good. That's like Granta. Granta teaches me that Noah Cicero is one of the 25 best writers alive. I'm glad Noah made the list. I didn't thinksomeone like Noah, who wasn't born in America, but in Taiwan, would beon a list called "The Best American Novelists," or whatever it was called.

Do I frighten you?

Main Ho said that fear is something you feel when you feel afraid. Ithink that's right. I don't fear you.

What is your physical reaction to my writing?

Neutral facial expression but ultimately life-affirming.

What is your perception of Northwest writing?

People I know from Washington are Matthew Simmons and the people involved with Alice Blue Review and Kevin Sampsell and some others. Matt Briggs sent me a myspace message once saying it was interestingthat I sabotaged my own chapbook with Kevin Sampsell, or somethinglike that. I've heard of Matthew Stadler and Stacey Levine.I think Nietzsche said not to drink alcohol, but to feel the loneliness or disillusion or whatever you are feeling, so that later on when youfeel happy you will feel even happier, due to contrast. I think my ownphilosophy, for myself, at this moment, is that it is irrelevant whatI feel; only the concrete and mathematically calculable effects of myactions on the world, in terms of how much pain and suffering itcauses or relieves, matter. I hope you understand. I tried to condenseit into one sentence. I think Clear Cut Press is from the Northwest also. Shya Scanlon usedto live there I think. Shya is my literary rival. Whenever people seeboth me and Shya in their range of sight they come up to one of us and point at the other one and say something about us being literary rivals.

What do you think of Seattle as a place, based on what you've seen in person or in the arts? What do you think is most common about these viewpoints?

When I think of Seattle I think of a giant, light-blue, obese hamster huddling against a beached blue whale for warmth and also to fightloneliness.

Are you still editing poetry for 3 a.m. magazine, and, if so, what are you looking for in a poem?

Yes. I am their poetry editor. What I look for in a poem is whether or not I like it. I think a lot of people don't like their own writingbut also think that it is a rule that a writer does not like their own writing, or something. I like my own writing. The writing that I don'tlike I delete or something. I'm a person, you are a person, and thewriting is on the computer screen. It doesn't matter whose writing it is. If you write something and don't like it that is the same asreading someone else's writing and not liking it.

Having read a wide variety of your writing, I have found that you can both really minimal and effusive, even Nabokovian. But how do you know which to turn on?

I'm glad you have read a wide variety of my writing and found that I can be both "really minimal"and "effusive, even Nabokovian." Thankyou. When I saw "turn on" in your question I felt sexual.I've said before that I have two basic modes of writing but I'm not sure if that's true. It changes over time. Nabokov said that Humbert Humbert was a "monster," which is a derogatory abstraction. Thereforehe wrote Lolita just to incite controversy to get more attention for himself, or else for reasons he can't articulate.I think if I wrote Lolita I wouldn't call Humbert Humbert a "monster."I wouldn't call anyone a monster. I would try to use concretespecifics instead of value judgements in all of my sentences.

Pretend we are in a cafe drinking coffee. A jukebox is playing. Ispill your coffee and distract you while I steal your telephone. Ithrown my telephone at my friend sitting behind you? I say: what is the role of one's personal health in one's writing? Why are you vegan?

Being vegan is moral, can make you live longer, can make your brainwork harder and longer and therefore can create more art. Eating meat supports factory farms. Factory farms cause severe pain to billions of animals, severe discomfort to hundreds of thousands of people who livenearby and breathe the toxic fumes, and long-term damage to areasaround them and to areas around rivers that are near the factory farms.It takes something like 100 calories of non-meat substance to create 1calorie of meat. Those numbers are wrong, but they are something like that. Also, factory farmed animals are fed corn and corn is grown,now, in a way that uses up energy inside the Earth and energy frompetroleum, which is converted to fertilizer, as opposed to justnaturally using the energy from the sun and being neutral in relation to the Earth's energy.Therefore meat is not sustainable. In the future oil will run out,there will be no fertilizers to grow unnatural amounts of corn, andnot enough corn to feed cows and other animals. By that time the toxic shit from factory farms will have destroyed the Gulf of Mexico andother places. Land where corn was grown will have no "energy" left inthe soil to grow other crops with.Eating meat is a circuitous way of punching a small child in the face repeatedly, injecting someone with diabetes, taking a shit on anendangered animal, torturing animals in your backyard in a torturechamber, throwing toxic shit into a river, or creating a machine thatconverts soil into toxic shit and putting batteries in it and turning it on. Eating is very moral. It isn't just about being "healthy."In terms of "art" though the person who is healthy will have more timeand brain power to create more art. People who drink and smoke and do drugs who also say that they are devoted to art would stop doing thosethings if they thought factually about their situation, if they arehonest about being devoted to art. Eating meat isn't just about saving animals. Vegans save human lives and prevent human suffering also. It is irrelevant whether or notanimals feel pain. If a meat-eater him or herself feels pain then theyshould stop eating meat, because eating meat kills humanscircuitously, by ways I've described above. From a comprehensive view there are no morals that are not arbitrary,though. But a human being does not live comprehensively, but withgoals and meaning. A human being is alive and continues to live eachday. Which means they have morals, even if those morals are onlyimplicit in their actions. Therefore there's no way that I know ofthat a human being who is alive and conscious can unsarcasticallydefend him or herself from eating meat. But people can live contradictorily. A person can process the factsabout eating meat, say, "I'm just an asshole," and eat a turkey, andthen go home and blog about the outrage they feel that a small boy has been murdered or tortured and then vote in an election with sincerity.For some reason people can do that and still continue existing.Probably because they do not truly live a paradoxical life, but onlychange worldviews and philosophies many times per day.

I like that you're explicit in your writing. Can you tell me why write like this?

Thank you for liking that I'm quite explicit. I think whatever taboos a society has, if those taboos are expressed in a neutral, unweightedway, someone will say that the person is being "explicit."

Finally, what are working on? What do you read? Are you real or are you a robot? What would you liketo say to writers living in the pacific northwest? Is it really so hopeless?

I am working on a sex book called "HOT ASIAN SEX." It has eighteen essays on sex. I'm also working on a collection of poetry called"ORGANIC COLD-PRESSED VIRGIN COCONUT OIL." I read Main Ho, Ha Jin, andBono Bos. Bono Bos was a 12th century novelist who grew up in Taiwan and later died in the Crusades after he moved to Constantinople to benear his friend.I'm real. I was born in Taiwan. I would like to say to writers in thePacific Northwest that I'm real and was born in Taiwan.

April 14, 2007

The second issue of the Steel City Review has been posted with new stories by GK Wuori, Barbara Jacksha, Margot Miller, Jeff Tannen, Mark Spencer and Tania Hershman.

March 14, 2007

• Novella Carpenter has another story about her skills at animal husbandary on Salon.com: Buzz Kill."Preparing my back-porch beehive is my favorite rite of spring, but this year my flock mysteriously went missing. I'll miss more than just the honey."

• The University of Arizona Press has just released Kathleen Alcala's first collection of essays, The Desert Remembers My Name Check out her web site for a list of upcoming readings. Publishers Weekly writes, "Alcalá displays an intellectual curiosity that has led her to think and write creatively about less personal matters. Her essay on the Opata peoples of Mexico is fascinating, and in another essay, she masterfully blends the harrowing experience of Andrea Yates, who drowned her five young children, with the mythic stories of Mexican folklore."

• Jared Leising has a reading this Friday, March 23rd, 7-9 p.m. $5, on Phinney Ridge. Gallery (2nd floor) of Phinney Ridge Neighborhood Center, 6532 Phinney Ave N. Untitled [Intersection], 2007 features Rebecca Loudon and Jared Leising
  with Sheri Brown as performance artist. Reception with wine & sumthin to eat.

March 1, 2007

From Esther: "Dear Friends and Supporters of it's About Time:
The monthly schedule is now on line. Since it is too late to announce in newspapers this month, please forward to your friends and post at libraries, bookstores etc. Thanks, Esther

February 18, 2007

Evan James (of San Francisco by way of Portland by way by way of Olympia by way of Bainbridge Is-Land) has launched/is launching a new magazine. It has found itself halfway launched, tottering in blog-space before being lost to print. He desribes his magazine this way:

"Control is at heart a lifestyle magazine, without a magazine, but the lifestyle is one of controlled, aesthetic acts of triumphantly unconventional syntax that address lifestyle topics (music, food, fashion, design, and so on). Control is a mutant lifestyle magazine without a magazine."

The first issue is a perennial "Best of..." issue. Portions are being released, here and now.

February 1, 2007

The Jack Straw Pod Cast is live. The first post features Seattle Poet, Larry Laurence reading from a series of poems entitled “Reading Aloud with Both Ears Open” at the 2006 Jack Straw Writers Program Reading Series. This performance was recorded with a live audience during the Spring of 2006 at Jack Straw Productions in Seattle.

Subscribe (free) with iTunes or visit the site.

January 31, 2007

A note from Matthew Stadler:

Once again, I am teaching a workshop. It might be of interest to you or a friend. Details are available at www.usingglobalmedia.com.

(You can also find ongoing reports from this current class there which make for a free and easy way to eavesdrop to hear what was going on.)

January 14, 2007

Okay, now I don't get to sleep. Just had this pointed out to me. A cut up engine (ala W. Burroughs or Brion Gysin) which is like a blender for your text. Check it out. or this a Burroughs-load of text generators and auto-text mashers.

minds as to whether it is credible.
and make up their own to accept it as the truth. wait staff. Laura worked research if they want explore all a relief. We really didn’t know what staff at the grill to the lunchtime buy really excellent gin, Bombay Sapphire. As a drink became an activity. In the climate of the classroom to give them a few was going on and after a few tonics fewer hours, made more money, and began to emailed me with a similar viewpoint would be from the evening hostess board overreacted. I don't think one parent sides of the issue. but in this case, I think he/the think your point has validity and is should dictate policy to the school board. the evening. She had given up her or Bob G. who me the article. I didn’t care. Karen H. (another Laura had enrolled in theatrical makeup class in the docmentary - but just because group we hadn’t really been really knowing anything about minds as to whether it is credible. Freedom Mirror guest columnist) also emailed respect for Board Member Hungry Larson aspirations as an actress, not because she the four of us not to bring someone to paid. Her boss moved her students see the movie I will be writing an article on wasn’t good enough, but They can also do their own it is published doesn't mean everyone has drinkers. But with this square blue bottle, If they want credible. I have a lot of minutes to express an opposing viewpoint (readers Dick Cook pragmatically, she wanted to be ourselves, a whole bunch of gin was perfect) but in any case, they should let the

January 7, 2007

December 7, 2006

Tarpaulin Sky has posted an interesting interview with Matthew Stadler by Selah Saterstrom that shows the infectiousness of Clear Cut's language. Here is (part of) Selah Saterstrom's first question:

"Clear Cut titles remind that reading is an event—a temporary space of heightened significance. In thinking about how to begin, I've been considering my own history of engagement with Clear Cut titles. In one way or another, these engagements have always put me in contact with issues of memory and desire."

In other Stadler news, it looks like he was one of the winners of the United States Artists award. Excellent.

I found these sentences in recent things posted recently:

A clean-cut guy in the audience asked the writers, 'Does your lifestyle change when you get published?'" from Molly McQuade's report at PoetryFoundation.org on the Literary Writers Conference in New York City.

When the brochure said ‘a haven for bikers,’ we assumed Schwinn, from Martha Clarkson in the new issue of Hobart.

December 1, 2006

They came, they hailed, they grossed me out.

Last night’s Loudhailer with the Stranger Genius Award literary winners sans Rebecca Brown (who was dearly missed) was mind-bending fun.

(Note that Betsy links back to this site, so you could, conceivably, get stuck in an endless loop of clicking on the Henry Blog, back to this blog, until finally your clicker broke. You could actually do that if you were a machine.)

November 22, 2006

Ron Silliman has written a brief appreciation of James Bertolino and answers the mystery of how a poet like Bertolino can end up an island like Guemes, off the shore of Fidalgo Island.

October 12, 2006

Frank Sauce on Paul Constant on the Man Booker Prize: "you, Constant Paul, you appall me, though I'm attracted to your gun-shot text and your devil-may-care tone." About the Man Booker Prize at Frank Sauce.

September 17, 2006

Chiasmus Press will be at Elliott Bay on Sept 30 with Stacey Levine and Diana George and other local contributors to the collection of deviant prose found around the Pacific Northwest. Diana George hasn't been reading much lately and is always a quiet and funny reader of her excellent stories. Saturday September 30, Elliot Bay Book Company, 3 p.m.

September 7, 2006

Michael Silverblatt at KCRW's Bookworm has recently interviewed John Updike, Carlos Fuentes, and David Mitchell. This last June when Clear Cut Press visited LA he interviewed Stacey Levine. The interview just aired and has been posted here.

September 5, 2006

A note from Ryan Boudinot, whose book The Littlest Hitler has just arrived in bookstores:

Friends, "friends," and acquaintances--

My short story collection The Littlest Hitler is now in bookstores. You can find it at your local independent bookseller, a big dependent bookseller, or here:

Amazon or Powells.

Thanks for buying it if you do. Or you can always check it out from a library. Or disregard this message as annoying self-promotion, the growing plight of the American author. -- Ryan

August 24, 2006

Matthew Stadler will be teaching a workshop this fall, called "using global media." It is intended for writers, artists, and activists. If you are reading this, perhaps you have an interest in using global media? If so, it may be worth your while, or maybe you know someone who might find it worthwhile. Thanks for passing the word along. Matthew Stadler has been an editor at large. He edited Nest Magazine "using global media" coordinating the production of writing for the magazine (with a New York, New York address) from the misty confines of Astoria, OR. For more info: www.usingglobalmedia.com

August 10, 2006

Anna Maria Hong on Doug Nufer and John Yau
As an old film noir soundtrack faded out, host Chris Putnam took the stage. Noting that the night’s event had no title, he proposed several based on anagrams of the readers’ names, including “A refund guy—oh, Juno!” and “Donahue, fungo, jury.” -- at The Poetry Foundation

Doug Nufer's New Book
The Mudflat Man b/w The River Boys - Ace Double format / one book in two (STRB-002) can be found online at soultheft records. Mr. Nufer is reading at Barca on August 22nd. I suggest you leave a walkie-talkie at Barca and come to the Rendezvous Tavern to drink and participate in Trapdoor62 and then listen to another reading while watching Trapdoor62! That's just a suggestion, but it could very well work. It would be a reading in Ace Double format.

Get Your Novel Published
Fryan Masters recently sent me this note:
If you know anyone who has a snappy manuscript that has been
failed by the traditional route of publishing--perhaps you could send that lost soul to the site I work for now--there resides a contest whereby, if they won said contest, their book would be published and given the once over by a professional editor, book designer and they would also receive book coaching, consulting and OH SO MUCH MORE. Here is the deal, here. It's twenty-five dollars to enter.

June 2, 2006

MonkeyBicycle associate Eric Spitznagel has a memoir out from Manic D Press, Fast Forward: Confessions of a Porn Screenwriter. He is interviewed by Elizabeth Ellen at Hobart:

He has this to say for himself:

When I sold the book, my publisher didn’t once ask me if any of it was true. But after [James] Frey’s public stoning on Oprah, I was suddenly getting frantic phone calls about adding a disclaimer. So yeah, I’d have to admit that this book is a sorta-memoir. Everything I wrote about is at least based in reality. I was a porn screenwriter, I did meet some very eccentric and weird people, I did have delusions of grandeur and convinced myself that I could write the Great American Porno.

Read the full interview.

May 21, 2006

Mr. Stadler writes, "Old stories, reflecting our nostalgia for the 19th-century city, must be displaced by new stories." Read, Losing You Might Be the Best Thing Yet: What Has Become of Cities" or last month's article about Beaverton, the suburb of Portland.

April 19, 2006

From The Seattle Times on Easter:

Peep Apparition in Man's Sweat by Jeanne Gold. Jerry Gold is the publisher of Black Heron Press, and the medium for the appearence of this peep.

March 11, 2006

Jona Bechtolt (aka YACHT) produced a radio show for the P.S.1 radio station.... You can listen to it here. with RealPlayer.

First broadcast March 6, 2006

From P.S.1: The Hour of Power is a program produced by the Oregon-based Clear Cut Press, a publisher and distributor of new literary work. This mix was assembled by Jona Bechtolt (of the band YACHT) in conjunction with Fine Print: Alternative Media at P.S.1, a series featuring lectures, readings, performances and other public programs spotlighting innovative publications from New York and across the USA.

Playlist

01 Thunder Sundress - Nether Plane
02 Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - Young Shields
03 Calvin Johnson - When You Are Mine
04 Andrew Kaffer - The Loosen Up (feat. Cameron Bird)
05 Greg Davis - Furnace
06 Lucky Dragons - Katydid Copier
07 Karl Blau - Slow Down Joe
08 BARR - Lights Out
09 Matt Briggs reading from Shoot The Buffalo
10 The Blow - Babay
11 Thanksgiving - I Am Yours (Radio Edit)
12 White Rainbow - deepafrogrooveROUGH
13 Bobby Birdman - "Victory At Sea"
14 Architecture In Helsinki - Do The Whirlwind (YACHT remix)
15 Stacy Levine reading her short story Tiny Twin
16 Swan Island - Night Owl
17 New England Roses - Blood, Blood, Blood
18 Dear Nora - My Friend and I (for Gretchen)
19 Thunder Sundress - Brugmansia
20 Mirah - Jerusalem (Chopped and Screwed by YACHT)

October 20, 2005

You're standing in the middle of a crowd at Seattle Center, and everyone's pointing and staring because you're completely naked!

Don't worry, it was just a dream, but it may actually mean something.

"I would call that an anxiety dream," says Seattle writer Stacey Levine, who also interprets dreams. "I think just because it's (a dream) in a symbolic language doesn't mean that it's meaningless."

Hear the story at Komo News

May 21, 2005

The 2nd reading in this series occurred in the Gallery of the Senses above the Artificial Limb Company. Three excellent performers of their work read to a sparse audience. Nevertheless they spoke loudly and clearly. Mr. Hishack menaced the audience with the threat of hiccups, that managed to, sadly, clear up before his reading. To hear audio.Read on for bios.

A Leg To Stand On: A reading of new work, Thurday May 19, 2005

Paul Hunter is working on a new book of farming poems, Ripening, which follows his widely reviewed and praised Breaking Ground (Silverfish). His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Iowa Review, and Poetry Northwest, among other places. His letterpress press, Wood Works, now has 21 books and 44 broadsides in print.

Willie Smith is deeply ashamed of being human. His work celebrates this horror. He is a regular contributor to the magazines myfavoritebullet, thievesjargon, zygoteinmycoffe, corpse.org, and bloodcookies. His work grosses an average of $100 annually. He is otherwise gainfully unemployed, reasonably clean, and fairly sober.

Gregory Hischak is a writer/ performer who has recently been published in the Bellingham Review, Zyzzyva, and the Harper/ Collins anthology May Contain Nuts.

June 21, 2004

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