Incendiary Lit

Not sure why, but the media player finally decided to take to the new playlist I’d uploaded. If you haven’t checked it out, the first song is rap, I’m sorry, but “Yesterday” off Atmosphere’s new CD When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold is I think one of the better examples of competent hip hop. But maybe I’m biased cuz I can remember riding the city bus home from Cheapo blasting my new copy of Overcast so loud on my off-brand discman that the driver could hear it from the back. Or because my dad recently passed, and once again Sean Daley touches on a nerve with his lyrics (also see Body Pillow, swingin’ back an forth…) But for the most part it’s a mellow mix of acoustic and instrumentals that will either aid in your reading of the site with their soothing melodies, or intrigue the poetic side of your brain with their interesting narrative. Both lyric and musical. Another thing I should point out is a line from Ben Folds’ “Fred Jones Part 2″: “There’s an awkward young shadow that waits in the hall” which is the perfect description. You can totally see the young employee in charge of leading the old one off the premises. That’s a really, really sad song right there. Then “Bright Eyes I always associate with the Black Rabbit and Richard Adams. I can attribute his fatalistic rabbits in Watership Down for my entry into the world of poetry, so it’s a soft spot for me. And damn. I’m for some reason, at this moment, also hooked on asian pianists. Joe Hisaishi and Nobuo Uematsu especially, though Joe didn’t made it in just yet. Also, poor poor Buzz. I hope you enjoy the songs, and would love to hear feedback of what you’d like to hear in the future.

I, for some reason, thought that the “Page” function of wordpress was a magical place where posts could extend as long as they wanted and didn’t auto-delete the end of the post as you added more. Thus I’ve misplaced over a year’s worth of daily writing exercises on the world-wide-web of yesterday. I know there’re things like webarchive’s “way back machine” (which only applies to sites pre-2006) but have as of yet not been able to figure out how to retrieve those long-deleted exercises. Ho-hum. Add another tally to the “I’m retarded” list.

Bright news, however, is that I’m working on a book of Firestarters. I can’t say anything like “Its being published by ____” because at the moment, the publisher is likely to be Incendiary Lit Press with its first perfect bound book. That doesn’t mean that once it’s together I won’t spend $100 in postage and paper sending out queries, but it’s in the works, and if it’s not done yet, anyone who emails me (in order to avoid too much more spam, it’s simply the site name at gmail.com) in May will get a free ILP version of the Firestarter Book when its finally finished. I’m really hopeful though. Making good progress.

That’s right. Real life is all about work and bills and lame and aching muscles. It’s about wishing you were appreciated for not actually performing manual labor, but for describing that manual labor you no longer wish you had to do. If that happened, I would be so excited. But for now I just have to revel in internet sites like Duotrope, New Pages, South Park Studios, Surf the Channel, Imeem, Muxtape etc. You know, free.

ESPECIALLY WWW.SOUTHPARKSTUDIOS.COM

Any Episode you want to watch, whenever you want to watch it, with minimal commercials (one, I think). For someone with the full South Park library and a narrative addiction, this site is a godsend. While work is done, familiar and hilarious narrative can ensue. MY GOD. Is there a decent audio-book of Catch-22? I’ll look into this and let you all know. If not, why? If so, damn. I’m really slow on the awesome bus.

This is your last day at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs‘ 2009 conference, and I am still bitter. I’ve carried hot plates of food to (some) ungrateful people all weekend, and you got to talk writing and reading and teaching and… ARGH. I’m going next year. Somehow.

Contest deadlines:

Poets and Writers
New Pages

Literary Magazines to browse for submissions:

Duotrope
New Pages

MFA research:

The Speakeasy forum (Poets and Writers’ website)
The MFA Blog (Tom Kealy’s)
Suburban Ecstacies (Seth Abramson’s)

Audio poetry:

Poets.org

There are tons, and tons of great online resources for writers of all kinds. You just gotta sift through a lot of “writing is emotion and therefore perfect just as it is” types of people, but there are definitely a lot of great sites out there. This post was mostly for the publishing minded, but tons of poets now have blogs, some poetic, others more like a public diary.

I’m working on an essay, just, you know, because, and I’m only half-remembering a Vonnegut quote about the two types of writers. One of them he called “bangers” I’m pretty sure, but essentially what he was saying was that some writers mentally edit each line over and over again before they’ll let it touch the page, while others will just write-write-write then spend a lot of time on the editing process. You can’t half-quote or summarize someone in a halfway decent essay, so I turn my search over to you, sentient beings of the internets. That series of tubes. Google was unable to satisfy my search. I feel like a hologram suddenly popped out of R2D2 “Help me internet surfers, you’re my only hope.” I believe the essay was in either Palm Sunday or Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, because I have a distinct memory of reading the quote at work at Red Oak on a break, then re-reading the essay by buslight as I bumped and jostled my way home, eastward in the darkness. But, I could’ve sworn it was Li-Young Lee who wrote “the halved-apple faces of owls” when really it was Amy Hempel. In my defense, my memory of reading that line as I walked into the Singing Hills kitchen at 5:00 to get the restaurant ready to open was indeed correct, it was merely the book that I had wrong, having read both Reasons to Live and Rose in the same week.

So if anyone happens to know the quote I’m talking about, I’ve been scouring both books and haven’t found the quote so I’m beginning to think maybe it was in an unrelated essay, or, gasp, could possibly be an entirely different author. I hope not, though, because I’ve got it in my head that it was K, and I’d hate to be wrong about that.

Here’s the first episode of the Simpson’s Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire

and some of the many South Park Christmas specials all streaming on the internet for free. Word it up and enjoy. Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo, Merry Christmas Charlie Manson, A Very Crappy Christmas, Woodland Critter Christmas

We’ve been playing that Mario Kart Love Song video  like ten times a day, so we decided to make an mp3 of it. Looked through our installed software, then realized that the internet being what it is, there are probably 5 different rips of it as mp3 and avi on 1,224 sites. And we found one fairly quickly. But, to make that search quicker for you, and avoid any accidental Mario Kart porn to taint (heh) your Mario Kart Love Song enjoyment, here is a direct link to a place you can download a pretty good quality mp3.

In the long nights Mario Kart Double Dash kept us company, so there’s a soft spot in my heart for catching up after being blue shelled.

As a senior project three students (Chrystal Hartberg, Jessica Tyson and Zebulon Huset) at California State University- Long Beach produced the following collection of poems and essays.

Though originally meant to be an alternative to the Best American Series, it changed slightly as the process of reading over a hundred literary magazines polished the shrine of subjectivity that is reading poetry. Instead the collection took on the theme of excellent entertainment and was printed for adviser William Mohr.

Digital images of the project are now online here, under the title Better than the Movies 2008.

A Crate of Oranges
by Tana Jean Welch

sat next to the artist every afternoon

as he sipped tea on the cafe patio.
The people of Neulengbach assumed he traveled with citrus

because bright things must be a painter’s constant companion.
Even when the war came and everyone succumbed

to wearing black
with a now-and-then splash of gun metal blue,

and the sound of the rock sparrow was replaced
by the wail of the young soldier’s widow

as she watched the King’s Guard, their posture spoiled
under the weight of oak and brass, load the coffin into the white carriage–

even then, the painter kept taking tea
with his box of happy, bulbous oranges,

so was credited with having a solid spirit.
But these people lived before the time art transformed a urinal,

before the time one could fly in a passenger jet, cruise the cloud-line
to see the earth for what it really is:

a patchwork of velvet: a brown, green, tourmaline grandmother’s quilt,
soft and innocuous, smooth

except where the cities are.
By the end of the funeral, the widow’s garter belt had slipped

causing her fishnet stocking to bunch at the right knee
of her long leg, reminding the painter of the cracked opal

in his mother’s pendant.

By the end of the war
they had pulled the painter from his house,

burnt his blue sketches and paintings of naked girls, naked boys,
arrested him for using oranges as bait–

even though the village children swore the oranges were juicier and sweeter
than the ones placed in their stockings at Christmas

when the evergreen firs are hauled in from the cold
and snow blinds all with a titanium white.

—

I couldn’t find out a whole lot about Tana Jean Welch without, you know, making an actual effort, but here are a couple more poems at La Fovea. This poem won 2nd place in Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, and was published in their Spring 2008 issue. This poem reminds me of Corrine Hales’ “Sunday Morning” in that for the majority of the poem you’re not sure what is going to happen, let’s call it the cuspiness. The poem seems to be tipping back and forth between the nostalgic turn and the ominous. The young soldier’s death/funeral and the whole backdrop seem very ominous, yet there are those “happy, bulbous oranges.” Another key word to note in the tone is “credited.” The painter is “credited” with having a solid spirit. A great word choice that indicates that though credited, there is an ulterior motive, and perhaps its only a symptom of today’s culture of suspicion, but ulterior motives make me think sinister. However, those are happy oranges and there was little more than atmosphere to convict the painter of anything underhanded… the quality of the writing keeps you glued to the page actually because nothing has happened, but stakes are piling up around the title: the happy oranges in the black and gun metal blue world.

I’m a big fan of the abrupt shift in a poem, in narrative poems especially; the jarring turn of events, the dramatic dissected because poetry, let’s face it, is somewhat mystic, it’s about leaving slight ambiguities, about connecting without dictating, the unsaid as much as the said and the said only the root of the experience. The blue sketches are an abrupt shift in the poem, like the mother’s call for silence in “Sunday Morning” and though never specifically indicated, they’re almost expected. The tenseness to the jump-moment of the poem. Where your facial expression changes, even if you’re reading the poem in public. That moment can only really be achieved when the tension in the poem is expertly crafted. It is easy to go over-the-top with dreary images, to get heavy-handed with metaphors, or to forget that there should be a reason for the shift, duality, humanity, something other than just a ‘ah, that’s messed up’ moment to them then nothing else.

Writing exercise: Try writing a poem that sets a pleasant image amidst a very dreary or dreadful background. Give the reader little of the pleasant image, (as in the crate of happy oranges) but that image will be the twisting point for the poem. Whether it’s something good like a type of muffin being sold in a bakery being used as secret code to help persecuted escape, or the more ominous negative side of the happy image, as so many seemingly positive things are being used for a much darker purpose it appears. Make sure that the cuspiness is woven into the atmosphere of the poem, the scenery, the mundane as unstated metaphors… Have at it!

I don’t know why mistranslations and engrish are so funny, but they are. Check out this blurb for Batman Begins on a pirated DVD overseas. Also, I missed the part where Bruce Wayne turned into Spiderman.

more the engrish!

Please allow me to slip deep, deep into geekdom here, I apologize in advance.

Read this.

Now, anyone familiar with the series, or who’s hung out with me while drinking SoCo and Coke (not SoCo and lime,  that’s my “The Jungle” adaptation rant I believe) knows that Robotech is the perfect source material for an Odyssey of a movie/live action series. But that is only after skewering away the fatty material of the series. Here are a few things you two had better do, or I will be a sad sad panda:

1) Fix Minmei. And I mean that like they fixed Luna before we adopted her. I’ve had unfixed cats, and they act (and sound) like the Minmei of the series. She was loud, obnoxious, screechy, and friggan obnoxious. But she had some honest moments where the obnoxiousness dropped away, like when she found out that Rick was MIA during the reconnaissance mission with Lisa Ben and Max. Don’t ask for an episode number, though I could look it up on IMDB, man… I don’t know if I could stand sounding like an even bigger geek than I’m going to sound by writing a list of demands for a badly dubbed 80’s anime… but I grew up on that show, damnit. Minmei should be modelled, mainly after Miley Cyrus I think… though by the time the movie’s made she’d be too old, and more importantly, we’re toning down the annoying, so please get someone more normal who can act like a whiny little brat on command, but still remain a sincere human being when the devastating occurs… not just a brat who can’t act. That’s the character, not the actor you want.

2) Roy Fokker’s death. Holy crap was that traumatizing as a kid. That should be a keystone moment, end of the first act. It propels Rick into his military career, and ultimately into the arms of Lisa. The two couples (Roy and Claudia, and Rick and Lisa) are a sort of parallel that can be drawn, the military hero couple that makes for legends, and what more do you want for the future fate of humanity than legendmakers protecting you? But this point was about Roy Fokker. He was the big brother. He was pulled away by a war he thought he was fighting to make everyone back home proud. But once you’re in, you’re in, so even after he discovered that the war wasn’t something to make them especially proud (as Rick says in the pilot episode (hehe, pilot) “you’re proud of being a killer?!”), he couldn’t leave the army… He feels like, though what he did was right, that he abandoned Rick, and he’s constantly trying to make up for it with grand gestures… his racer repaired, getting Min Mei to see him, saving him on the destroyed Macross Island during the initial invasion. Wow, geek overload on this point. Roy’s a conflicted, important character that you should latch onto immediately, and like terribly, then be pained terribly by his death, then glad that Rick’s finally beginning to step into his shoes. Period. Got that guys?

3)  Get the ages right. Rick and Minmei and half the crew of the SDF One are kids. 15-16. Why? It was a training academy, and it was in the midst of a long-raging world war. Populations were devastated. The standard age of soldiers (18-45) would have been greatly depleted, and the spaceship was still years away from being “ready” though the technology still decades from making sense (at least)… so it only makes sense that for this new ship the children would go study to work… I think it’s important to keep that the same as the movie. Many things that happened, and really had to happen, are because of immaturity, rashness, and lack of foresight, especially in non-combat. This is because they’re really just kids, many away from their parents and on their own at a very young age.

4) The Dinginess factor. OK, sorry, I’m a Firefly fan. But that’s kind of how I see the Zentraedi ships. They don’t know how to repair their ships, they don’t clean (except one sweeps up broken glass from Rick’s Veritech I remember), and the humans, the perspective is tiny, so they’ll see allllll the dirt and grime that a quick swish with a mop or broom wouldn’t fix. Gritty and realistic (despite being grand and ominous) are the Zentraedi. And they’re also a tragic race, really, created for one purpose and they’ve found themselves with purpose (the Invid) but losing the resources to even defend themselves… Holy crap. Geek.

5) Is this just one movie or two? I could see the first saga spanning two, or even three movies easily, and since the majority of the scenes are either internal or CGI (in the spaceship or out of it) with some Macross stuff that could be shot on a soundstage, because that would be how Macross actually was (great 4th wall potential there, especially with Minmei’s acting career), an outdoor scene indoors, it could probably be shot for a very modest budget… keep the actors young (but be get friggan good actors, not just cute teenagers for once in an action movie) and the budget should spread well, right?

6) Minimize the storyline with Rick and Minmei in the ship. Keep the essentials, the shower, the rat, the miraculously airtight pilot jumpsuit and absurdly large tuna (maybe have some inconspicuous explanation in early exposition about genetically modified fish that help feed the base or something) but Minmei is inherently annoying, and I think that little storyline which brings them together should bearas little burden of screechy/childish annoyance in the first run through as possible. There should be those flashbacks later, and they should show the more annoying side of Minmei later on in the Rick/Lisa storyline.

7)  Hire me. As a consultant or ’staff writer’ or producer or something. Please.

Within the “Tip of the Hat; Wag of the Finger” segment is this little literary gem. Of poor baseball bat. I never knew ye.

I don’t normally post about that, but it’s been a little while. Since the Spring when I was in school and busy. Now there’s been a couple months, and granted not during a regular reading period, but it feels good, you know? Makes me want to type a :). Anyway, look for my prose poem “The Fan” in the Georgetown Review (in 2010 or 2011, haha. Dampers the excitement a little, like my first big acceptance, The Southern Review, which was also about 2 years between acceptance and publication).

Here’s a lecture about DIY perfect binding. This is great for class projects like workshop anthologies, theses (doesn’t it seem like the plural of thesis should be thesi? I mean, yeah, the i isn’t a u, but still… theses? Sounds like a Deliverance hillbilly motioning to the captive with a dull, questioning look on his face “We gunn’ get ta taste theses?”– eek!) literary journals, or even just those who want to organize their work for friends and family. The process only involves some small boards, clamps, glue, a paint brush and some waxed paper. Definitely not a commercial process, but definitely passable for small projects. The lecturer is informative and clearly knows a thing or two about the physical crafting of books.

I say again, the literary journal database that revamped this month is awesome.

There’s not an entire mission statement about the journals, and they are self written by the editors themselves. What else proves Pw.org likes us? They include the very pertinent information: what they like which genres they publish, if they accept simultaneous submissions or electronic submissions, and the submission deadlines.

Here’s AGNI’s description of themselves, just to give you a sample:

AGNI

We look for the honest voice, the idiosyncratic signature, experimental where necessary but not willfully so. Writing that grows from a vision, a perspective, and a passion will interest us, regardless of structure or approach.

—

So there you have it. Eat yourself a fudgesicle and save the stick for arts and crafts projects. And while you do that, talented person you are, use the PW.org database to further organize your submission process.

Go GO GO! Or take your time. 50 thousand words is a fair amount, and nothing to take lightly, but it’s also something that you’re going to have to want to finish, and even more so, be able to finish. I’m an outliner. I like to figure out where I’m planning on going with a story, so that when I’m writing it and it doesn’t go there I at least have a barometer of how weird/boring the writing is, as I can weigh it against the first idea. If they’re both stupid, well, I’ll just remind myself that National Novel Writing Month is an exercise in quantity over quality. It means that if I really try, both The Smiles are Killing Me and Saving the Drowned are definitely both expandable and finishable. Dagnabit. So whether you’re starting on your outlines today or you’re jumping into page 1 (or page 57 if you’re like me and sometimes like to start somewhere arbitrary to get the initial first page, the most excruciating page, typed) Get something written today. You don’t want to start the short month with procrastination, I mean, I know you’re writers and all, but this month is about writing, not acting like writers.

Thank you yet again Cornell University. Here for your listening pleasure is an audio interview with Charles Simic from earlier in October (2008) on the Writers at Cornell blog.

I’ve never tried NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) before, though I have talked to people who have (Hi Karen) and seemed to enjoy the process very much. So, this being the first October in five or so years in which I don’t have 15+ units, I decided to try it. The idea is to write a 50,000 word+ novel in one month, regardless of actual quality. A first draft, or even a trash draft. It is essentially an exercise in quantity, so I’m all about it.

Check out the vast array of NaNoWriMo stuffs online like the official website,  Light Fantastic (who has tons of links to forums, webrings, mailing lists),  San Diego Writers, or this website that helps you find meet-up groups if you care to share your stories, woes, seek advice/solace/sanctuary.

In preparation for this upcoming month, let’s spend a week brainstorming different possibilities for fiction. We’ll make a daily list, focusing on one aspect of a novel each day: Locales (and why something would be cool there), quirky character traits, plotlines, names, and  themes/messages.

Today, brainstorm a list of at least fifteen quirky character traits that could come up in a book (be it blinking twice when someone’s lying, never opening a door with their left hand, wearing a side-pony tail, whatever) . Remember, NaNoWriMo is more about quantity and conclusion than spectacular quality. Essentially, it’s speed crapping a first draft of a novel under arbitrary time constraints. But why think of it like that when it can be an open challenge to the realm? (Damn you Lich King.)