My Mud Luscious Press chapbook, "SIGNALS / BLACKOUT" has been released simultaneously with Matt Bell's chapbook, "FAWN, FIONA, FJOLA."
(It feels good to think of my work being sealed in the same envelope as Matt Bell's. I met Matt and J.A. Tyler last year at the &Now conference here in Buffalo, and they're both really nice. You can read about it here.)
"SIGNALS / BLACKOUT" consists of two chapters from my novel, The Immortals Act Their Age: "Signals from Electric Ladyland" and "Blackout."
I received some author's copies, and I would like to give away 5 of those copies to the first 5 people to leave a comment here.
You can subscribe to Mud Luscious Press here. Thank you for your time...
UPDATE: All 5 copies have been given away. Thank you...
I got the proof copy of my forthcoming collection of poetry, Of Creatures (Gold Wake Press, 2011) in the mail the other day. It is available for preorder at BN.com, and will be soon through Amazon. The cover is an image called "Ice" by elimae editor Cooper Renner. Reading through these poems, I’d almost forgotten they are an experiment in optimism…
My last journal publication was in the October elimae, Kim Chinquee’s last issue as fiction editor. Before that was a story in August in A-Minor Magazine (nominated for Best of the Web, 2011).
Last year I had over 50 publications, which averages out to one or two publications a week. Many of them were only days a part, and on a good week I had 3-5 publications. This year I’ve only had a little more than 20 publications.
While being disappointed by this number, I realize: Oh, I probably have to submit things. I haven’t been submitting much of anything lately. I used to be obsessive about sending things out, but for a while I’ve been wondering what the point is, questioning my motives, the purpose of publication, etc. Oh, life's questions. For now, I want to focus most of my energy on getting my books published...
I like how these words/phrases look like they’re morphing into another word/phrase, as if made of liquid:
art form : ant farm
stories : stones
whole : whale
carrot : cannot
I want to think of more of these...
I finally have a little money to spend, thanks to financial aid and student loans. So, I have purchased the following books:
Kim Chinquee and I traded books a few months ago. She gave me her latest collection Pretty for Snowing Fireflies. I think Pretty is better than her first collection, Oh Baby, and that’s saying a lot because I think Oh Baby is really good.
Ken Sparling recently emailed me and asked if we could trade books. I traded him Snowing Fireflies for his latest novel BOOK. It came in the mail the other day, and it's beautifully produced. I read the first few pages, and feel like I’ll like it a lot. Big thanks again, Ken.
Tao Lin sent me a copy of Richard Yates after writing an essay about him, and I really liked it. I will read it again soon. I've enjoyed all of his work so far.
J. Michael Wahlgren sent me copies of his books, Valency and Silent Actor, and I like them a lot. He also sent me Gold Wake Press's first three releases, Zachary Bush's The Silence of Sickness, Donora Hillard's Theology of the Body and Kristina Marie Darling's Night Songs. My collection, Of Creatures, will be the fourth book released by Gold Wake Press.
A palindrome is a word, phrase, number or any other sequence which can be read the same forward and backward. I've been interested in palindromes for a long time. I taught my 6 year-old daughter what a palindrome is a while back, and now every time she looks at a digital clock and its says something like 7:07 or 3:53, she goes: "Palindrome!" Here are some funny phrasal palindromes:
A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. A slut nixes sex in Tulsa. A Toyota's a Toyota Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna. Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era? Camus sees sumac. Dammit, I'm Mad. Damn. I, Agassi, miss again. Mad. Depardieu, go razz a rogue I draped. Do geese see God? "Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod. Dogma? I am God. Dumb mobs bomb mud. Dumb mud. E. Borgnine drags Dad's gardening robe. Ed, I saw Harpo Marx ram Oprah W. aside. Eros? Sidney, my end is sore. Flee to me, remote elf. Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog. Go, desire vagina. Man I gave. Rise, dog. God, a red nugget. A fat egg under a dog. He won snow, eh? I madam, I made radio! So I dared. Am I mad? Am I? I maim Miami. I'm a lasagna, hang a salami. Is Don Adams mad? (A nod.) Si. Kayak salad, Alaska yak. Kodak ad, OK. Laminated E.T. animal. Lee had a heel. Lid of fade, metallic soot, emit Garret-simple, help mister ragtime to oscillate me, daffodil. Lisa Bonet ate no basil. Man, Oprah's sharp on A.M. Marge lets Norah see Sharon's telegram. May a moody baby doom a yam? "Naomi," I Moan. Neil, an alien. Never odd or even. No, it can, as it is, it is a war. Raw as it is, it is an action. No, it is opposed, art sees trade's opposition. No, it is opposition. No, Mel Gibson is a casino's big lemon. Nora, a raft! Is it far, Aaron? Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron. Nurse, I spy gypsies -- run! Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo Oy, Oy, a tonsil is not a yo-yo. Party boobytrap. Pull up if I pull up. Reflog a golfer. Rise to vote, sir. Rise, sir lapdog. Revolt, lover God, pal, rise, sir. Roy, am I mayor? Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas. Senile felines. Sir, I soon saw Bob was no Osiris. Sit on a potato pan, Otis. Splat, I hit Alps. Stab nail at ill Italian bats. Star comedy by Democrats. Step on no pets. Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts. To Dr., et al. Re: Grub. Ma had a hamburger. Later, Dot. Too bad, I hid a boot. We panic in a pew. Won't lovers revolt now?
I’m taking Foundations of Language this semester (strange I saved this for my last semester) on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. I had a group presentation this past Saturday, and our chosen topic was Semiotics. (We haven't discussed Semiotics at all in class, so I can't imagine what our professor expected. Luckily, I've already studied Saussure, Barthes and Eco both on my own and for a Literary Criticism and Theory course a while back.) The other three members of my group (all females) focused much of their portions of the presentation on gender roles in literature, television, movies, music and advertisements geared towards both children and adults.
They also discussed, or tried to discuss, gender roles in porn. During the presentation, our professor actually said it was inappropriate to an 'academic setting’. They quickly had to (re)adjust things around what they thought the professor would think inappropriate, which meant skipping past images on the PowerPoint. The issues they raised were valid, and I even helped argue some of their points. It was disappointing to have good ideas about the ridiculous world we live in shut down in favor of 'appropriateness' in regard to an 'academic setting'.
My portion of the presentation focused on signifiers in American culture and how they’re used for propaganda purposes to reinforce dominant epistemology, to promote pro-American ideology. For propaganda purposes, such as which cable news station to watch, who to vote for, what stores to shop at, and army recruitment commercials, we are constantly bombarded with abstract values and morals represented by streams of images of concrete familiarities in order to reinforce an ideology which will, in Althusserian terms, interpellate, or hail a subject into participating in the cultural beliefs they’ve been taught to hold. Semiotics is the study of these images and how they reference the ideology from which they originate, and are, therefore, culturally specific.
The signifiers a culture arbitrarily chooses to represent certain ideas must be universally understood throughout the culture, and so must seek to continually bolster the dominant epistemological discourse of the culture for a sense of solidarity. In our case, we have been taught to believe in American ideas and concepts, or at least the good side of them. The dominant epistemology exists on both sides of the political aisle, and so varies only slightly as the political spectrum circles around on itself.
We therefore run the risk of either not being presented with any negative cultural aspects which may need to be changed, or we choose to ignore them by focusing on other signs which reinforce the positive aspects of our ideology. In many ways, by referring to what is being signified, the signifiers we choose paradoxically conceal much of what they signify. We focus on what we know rather than what we don’t, and so ignore what we wish didn’t exist as it relates to what we are signifying.
My part of the PowerPoint showed a series of images we see every day, signs that point or refer us to an idea or concept that we’ve been trained to comprehend. For each of these images, we have an ingrained understanding of what they mean, and we are emotionally affected when we see them. For this reason they can be used to illicit a response—hence propaganda may be utilized to strengthen a particular dominant ideology. We often fall in line, allowing ourselves to be called, or hailed, to have this emotional response in favor of what the image signifies, then I ‘decoded’ them.
While discussing gender roles in porn, the professor said we were running out of time (I suspect to stop us from going any further). But then we I started on my portion, I got about halfway through and stopped to ask if I had time to finish, and she said yes. So, basically, spouting anti-American rhetoric in an 'academic setting' is perfectly okay, but discussing gender roles on porn is out of the question. Interesting. Here's some of what I 'decoded':
When we see this image, we think of abstract concepts like freedom, virtue, honor, justice, diversity, tolerance, happiness, etc. We don’t think of things like the oppression to this day of minorities and women, unjust wars, imperialism, neocolonialism, and capitalism being one of the most unjust and unequal economic systems ever devised.
When we see this image, we think of the same abstract concepts listed above.
When we see this image, we think of the same abstract concepts listed above. Here, two signifiers are redundantly conveying the same idea, that America is great. We don't think of the American bald eagle as a bird of carrion, scavenging on carcasses.
When we see this image, we think of love, sacrifice, obedience, willingness, etc. We don’t think of how many people died at the hands of Christians during the Spanish Inquisition, the slave trade, the colonization of America, etc.
When we see this image, we think humanitarian aid. We think empathy. We think compassion. We don’t think of how much aid money we give actually goes to funding warlords in many parts of the world.
These were produced during medieval times to catch the attention of people whose thoughts wandered during mass or prayer. They serve only to call (or, in Althusserian terms, interpellate or hail) one’s attention back to the mass or to their prayer. This is precisely what advertising does, constantly hailing us to participate in our culture. Watching television, the shows are broken up to remind us that we are a consumer culture and that we should buy things. We go down the street and see stores, billboards, endless advertisements, each signifier calling our attention back to what we’ve been trained to do as a culture: Consume useless products.
This represents a style of apparel, a way to present oneself. It represents socio-economic status. When we think of Nike, we think of sports, or professional sports players with million-dollar endorsement contracts. We don’t think Asian and Indonesian sweatshops or slavery or child abuse.
When we see this image we think cheap food, happy meals, smiling children playing with a clown. We don’t think cholesterol, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, etc.
When we see this image, we think of news, entertainment, etc. We don’t think NBC is owned by GE, and therefore a plays a large role in the military industrial complex. We don’t think their programming might be biased and doesn’t offer a fair account of world events. The same with ABC, owned by Disney, and the same especially with Fox News, a channel that bases nothing it broadcasts in fact.
When we see this image, we think defenders of freedom, sacrifice, honor, valor, courage, etc. We don’t think of a failed economy leaving the lower-class with no other option but to adhere to the pro-American propaganda they’ve been trained from birth to believe in. We think of soldiers as protectors of freedom. We don’t think of people who enlist as being sent out into the world for the sole purpose of protecting corporate interests.
And then I showed some ridiculous Army commercials, which all of them are. Then I showed and sang along to the intro to the 1987 animated G.I. Joe movie. I loved this movie (the television show, too) as a child, and I still like it for nostalgic reasons. I pointed out how this show and the movie, and other shows as well, are used to promote pro-American ideology to children (boys mostly, and so perpetuating contrived gender roles in society), indoctrinating them. It glorifies violence, but no one ever dies:
My Mud Luscious Press chapbook, "SIGNALS / BLACKOUT" has been released simultaneously with Matt Bell's chapbook, "FAWN, FIONA, FJOLA."
