This week I read Deja Everything by Adam Hammer.  It was quite honestly the most fun I’ve had reading poetry in a long time.  Adam Hammer’s poetry is funny and touching and somewhat sad all at the same time.  The best poet you haven’t heard of.  It got me thinking about how little being a well read author actually matters to the quality of the writing.  Sometimes people get lucky and a book or manuscript will be discovered after another book becomes popular like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. But unfortunately, Hammer was killed in a car wreck in the early eighties so besides the soon to be released posthumous chapbook, I don’t think Hammer will have a chance to really stand out as the monumental poet he could have and probably should have been.  In a way, when I am introduced to works like Deja Everything I really treasure that I and only a handful of others are lucky enough to have the pleasure of reading Hammer, like he is our own little secret and was writing just for us.  Its true I have these selfish thoughts, but at the same time I am a little disappointed that aside from the few people I share my copy with, people will probably stop reading his poetry and how odd it is in this time in history where there is so much information available to us, how many wonderful authors are just not being seen and how many authors like Adam Hammer have we entirely missed our chance to get to know.

Have you or your loved one’s recently been struck with writer’s block with no where to turn, spending hours upon hours staring at your computer?  Here is my list to help you enjoy yourself with productive procrastination move on and get back to work.

1. Running errands:  there is always something you need at the grocery store right?  This can be an expensive procrastination technique so try to keep it to essentials.
2. Laundry/cleaning your apartment:  remember cluttered desk cluttered mind
3. Getting in a Workout: no matter how you workout this is a good impulse to go with.  Studies show that people who get regular exercise are less stressed, sleep better and think better.  Treat your brain like a muscle, if you overwork it you’ll end up staring at the screen doing nothing so give it a break and work the muscle below your neck a bit. Read more »

On Friday Molly Giles graced Spokane with her presence and what a treat it was. I’m not going to lie I hadn’t heard of her, but I guess if you think of all the great books out there and all of the really horrible books, its kind of amazing any one author stands out at all. I had come across Giles’s Creek Walk and Other Stories in the local independent book store a few weeks ago. I read the blurbs on the back, which sounded complimentary, as to be expected and the cover was really intriguing. It was even resting on top of a staff pick sign but stupid me I thought about my quickly diminishing bank account and decided if I hadn’t heard of it I didn’t need to take a chance on a book because of the cover.

As the universe goes sometimes, I realized this week that Giles would be in town and that on more than one occasion I passed up picking up a copy of her book so I rode my bike to the independent book store and they were all out of copies. I went home to check if any of the chains stores in town would have a copy and they didn’t. I had no choice but to wait until Giles’s reading to get a copy.

Unfortunately, I had to go to the reading without reading anything the author had written and I hate that then pair that with having a, what was I thinking when I thought I could be a writer, days I got to the reading expecting to not be impressed. Man, was I wrong. Giles was beautiful, poised, articulate and funny. When the reading was through, and though I hadn’t read the book yet, I shyly asked her to sign my copy. We chatted politely for a while and she signed my book. Nothing fancy, simply, “With best wishes!” She closed my book and handed it back to me. Then she told me to just go ahead and read “The Writers’ Model,” that it was short and she winked at me. Okay she probably had dust in her eye, but in my fantasy that Giles and I shared a connection for a moment where she could see that I needed a bit of encouragement that maybe someday I could come close to what she had done. I went home for a while and read the story she suggested and a few others and they touched me in an odd way. The prose is tight, the stories are funny, tragic, thought provoking basically everything I could ever hope for in a story. I know it’s kind of lame to quote a book blurb but, “Wow! …This collection should be on every woman’s shelf. Men too….” (Ruth Moose, News and Record) All I can say is pick up a copy. You’ll be glad you did.

Looking back a couple weeks to Amanda’s post on Flash animation for poetry, I was thinking about how interesting and lacking this mixed media approach is in literature.  The truth is I would like to sneak in a few photographs I took into my thesis, and I was trying to find evidence to convince my advisor that this would be a good idea.  After tooling around a bit the only contemporary novel of literary fiction I could find that had pictures in it was Jonathon Safron Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which came out in 2005.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has pictures spread throughout the book  and at the end has a flip book of a man floating back up to one of the Twin Towers before they fell in the 9/11 attacks.  I thought it was kind of beautiful and creepy and hopeful way to end a novel.  Of course critics disagreed.  They said his use of pictures was just a cleaver way to distract readers from believability issues with the characters and some less than interesting writing.  I guess in some ways I can see where they are coming from, there were some places in that novel I didn’t quite believe or feel necessary but overall I did enjoy the novel.  It has been a few years since I read the book so maybe now that I’m a little older and wiser I will see more issues with it.

I know and truly believe that an author can’t expect his or her work to succeed because of the use of pictures or sound or anything like that but is it possible to succeed despite the use of pictures in novel?  Apollinaire turned his poetry into pictures and those seemed to work, for the most part at least.  Barthelme uses pictures in his short stories.  The visual arts borrow language in there work often.  (Right of the top of my head, Charles Sandison and Rupprecht Matthies who are both on display at the Denver Art Museum if you can check it out.) Is there anywhere else that it works in contemporary literature? Is it a cop-out to use pictures in literature?  What do you think?

I’m getting excited for summer reading season.  Memories of scholastic book order catalogs floating around the classroom are dancing in my head, as are fantasies of reading books on blankets in the sun, swimming pools, and working on my tan.  Being a little bit older and wiser I thought I’d take a better stab at not judging books by their covers by doing a little research to see if any of my favorite authors had new books coming out.

I think the answer is no.  Let me tell you after many wasted hours trying to navigate authors’ and publishing houses’ websites and I think I figured out part of why people don’t read anymore.  It is a lot of work to navigate through all the crap out there.  Thinking back to Marcus’s post about what author’s make hourly I understand why not a lot of money is being dropped on advertising, I really do but really how are we, the consumer, supposed to know what to buy if no one tells us what they are selling in a way that will reach us?  The way things work now book sales seem to rely almost entirely on covers, good placing in books stores, and mainly word of mouth/required reading lists.

A quarter of the population did not read a book last year, not one, but can we be surprised?  I bet if you asked people how many movies they watched it would just be ridiculous.   Why aren’t we selling the obvious, that books are pretty darn cost effective ways to entertain ourselves.  An average book costs what twenty bucks for maybe two hundred pages?  If you figure three minutes a page (depending on reader and the work) that is ten solid hours of entertainment for only twenty bucks.  If you share the book with a buddy it’s only a dollar per hour of stimulation, plus factor in time you spend discussing the book with your buddy and it’s practically free.  Movies on the other hand cost something like twelve dollars to see them on the big screen for maybe two hours, five dollars to rent, and if you want to buy them it’s more like twenty dollars.  I really did see Zombieland on sale for $19.38.  Possibly that’s a forty dollar investment for one movie.  Outrageous!  But people are buying it because every time they turn on their computer or their TV there is an advertisement telling them to buy it and where to buy it despite how illogical it is. But to find out what books are coming out, you have to wait for possibly years before you here someone tell you to read it.  If we could even come close in advertising books the way we advertise for movies, highlight the cost effectiveness I bet people would read at least one book a year and I would know how to shape my pool reading list.

Happy Valentines Day readers and writers.   How did you spend your day?  I guess if you’re reading blogs it probably wasn’t drinking champagne and snuggling up.  Personally, I have had a lovely, quiet day filled with noodle bún from my favorite Vietnamese restaurant, jealously watching the Olympics wishing I was skiing, and reading poetry.  Now that homework is done it is time for my favorite Valentine’s tradition: SLASHER FILM NIGHT!

from http://thisfoodismyjam.blogspot.com

I’m not quite sure what it is about this day filled with cards with bad poetry, overpriced roses, and those chalky candy hearts with the words painted on them that makes a good slasher film an absolute necessity.  Maybe it’s a rebellion against consumerism and the stigma that everyone must find a date or else be branded a romantic failure.  Some people say it’s an excuse for boys to get a little too touchy feely with their dates. Maybe the whole day is just so, dare I say it, cute that something has gory to happen to reestablish equilibrium like when you are reading a really cheesy book where the characters are so in love and they work hard and make all of their dreams come true and in the back of your mind your hoping that someone will step out from behind a brick wall with a machete and hack them up to pieces.  Be honest, you know you’ve thought it too.  Whatever the reason is a, good slasher film or scary book is in order.  Here are my top five recommendations for both movies and books to spend your Valentine’s evening on.

Books:

1. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
2. Maldoror and Poems by Isidore Ducassie (pseudonym:  Comte de Lautréamont)
3. After Dark by Haruki Murakami
4. In the Box Called Pleasure by Kim Addonizio
5. House of Seven Gables By Nathaniel Hawthorne

Movies:

1. Picnic at Hanging Rock
2. My Bloody Valentine 3D
3. Lovers Lane
4. Valentine
5. Zombieland

So today was Super Bowl Sunday.  Did you watch it?  I did.  Not because I am particularly a huge football fan.  Truth be told, I don’t even really understand how the game works.  This year, I think, was the first time I ever cared who won.  (Go Saints!) But despite my general ambivalence to all things football I do watch the Super Bowl out of tradition, being able to hold my own at parties for the following few weeks, and, most importantly, for the commercials.  I know I’m not the only one who turns the volume down when the football comes on.  So why on this one occasion are the commercials so important when normally we go out of our way to avoid them? Super Bowl commercials seem to be much more concerned with creating some sort of narrative than your average commercial and in an extremely economical amount of time.  Sometimes when they work, they function a lot like flash fiction.  Take this year’s Doritos commercial where a young man comes to take out a little boy’s mother on a date.  While the mother leaves to finish getting ready the man eats the boy’s chip and then the boy gets into the man’s face and says, “Don’t touch my mom or my Doritos.”  The commercial develops the protagonist and the antagonist and comes to a shift in under thirty seconds.   While this might not be the most important piece of writing/cinema ever created, it’s hard to say that isn’t impressive.  While the commercial doesn’t make me want a chip it does work in a lot of ways we want our fiction to work.  It efficiently creates a sense of who the characters involved are, a motivation that we can relate to/understand, and it’s memorable.  It also clues the viewer into the point of the commercial that they want you to buy Doritos but without blatantly saying, “Buy Doritos,” in the way we want fiction to not feel explained.

So this last month I have been spying on poets in a poetry classes, and I am blown away.  To be honest I had always thought the difference between fiction writers and poets to be pretty marginal; maybe a shorter attention span, maybe a little bit more emotional than the average bear, or maybe just stronger affinity towards the avant garde.  I mean all writers I know dabble in poetry no matter what their preferred genre is but prose writers tend to write poetry in notebooks and never show anyone.  We say things like “I don’t really get poetry but I like it,” or “I can’t tell whether it’s good or not,” but we all have written poetry for fun at one point or another.  So what is it that makes one writer a poet and one a prose writer? Read more »

Green publishing is scary unknown territory; code for e-book readers and automatic book machines.  Without a physical book, readers are getting an adulterated reading experience and the art of crafting a quality book becomes obsolete.  If this becomes obsolete then legitimate publishers could become a thing of the past.  Without legitimate presses to act as a filtering process we are creating a competition free environment for vanity presses to breed and take over.  Potentially it could change or eliminate literature as we know it…or bring about the apocalypse.

Fortunately, in an uncertain world, Flatmancrooked Press is making the green publishing a little less scary.  In September 2010, Flatmancrooked Press plans to run the first zero footprint book release.  James Kaelen, author of We’re Getting On will take the reading world by storm on his bike, followed by an electric vehicle carrying supplies and copies of We’re Getting On.  Kaelen plans to not take warm showers and to avoid electronics during the tour.

On the zeroemissionbook.com website, Kaelen claims that any necessary electricity needs will be neutralized by purchasing carbon offset credits.  And that’s not all!  If running the world’s first green book tour wasn’t enough, each copy of We’re Getting On is produced with a neutral carbon footprint.  The pages of the book are printed on 100% post-consumer paper and the cover is made with a revolutionary new paper containing dormant spruce seeds.  So if you decide to burry your copy, trees grow out of the cover.

This is really interesting stuff and perhaps the start to something wonderful.  It’s great that Flatmancrooked Press has found away to keep book tours affordable without putting the cost on the author but it seems that they are more concerned about the science of the book than the book it’s self.  In my research I couldn’t find anything about what the book was about other than that it is a collection of two stories and a novella.  If this new technology and mindset is to take off, the book is going to have to be able to stand on its own.  Like they say you can’t judge a book by its cover, so for all of our sakes let’s hope this takes off.