O Captain, My Captain — Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller)
Ben Bush12.18.10
When Tom Waits’ Bone Machine first came out my favorite song on it was "She’s Such a Scream" and I played it…
The Dehumanizing Effects of Sam Pink’s Person
Jamie Gadette12.15.10
The narrator of Sam Pink’s novel Person has sex with his neighbor, shoots himself in the face with a pellet gun and agrees to kill his roommate’s father, but primarily the book is composed of elaborate fantasies, none of which come to pass. Perhaps anticipating this criticism, Pink has commented, "people will say nothing happens in the book but that’s impossible, you silly motherfucker!" Jamie Gadette, who has quaffed deeply of the waters of eccentric literature in her previous reviews for the Fanzine, retorts that it’s fine to create a text chock full of anti-social psychosis, but please don’t bore your readers.
He’s a Riot!: In Which a Boston Globe Columnist Makes Liverpool Fans See Red
Pete Hausler12.12.10
It’s one thing to opine on subjects one clearly knows nothing about. Since George W. popularized the "going with my gut" instinct, while failing to validate it as any kind of scientific/factual evidentiary process, it was still "good enough for me" to win the seal of approval for most Americans to run their mouths about anything their gut tells them. But it’s quite another thing to publicly opine on English football when clearly one knows very little, except enough to think he knows what he doesn’t like. Boston Globe columnist plays a dangerous and ignorant word game that has the Liverpool FC fan base up in arms, and Pete Hausler isn’t going to let him weasel out of it. Artwork by the great Danny Jock.
Assume Vivid Astro Focus: Chaos Bound
Gean Moreno12.02.10
Try and judge Assume Vivid Astro Focus’ first monograph by its cover and you may be falling for an old adage which instructs one not to bother. Instead start flipping. Flip, then focus. Then go back and read the main essay and appreciate the fact that it’s gonna be a bitch to put a hardcover lid on an art collective that is heir to the Situationists International. Artist Gean Moreno tackles that notion, and all this movement, color and vivacity, but sets off on a different tack, one tinged by say… Caribbean Carnival?
I Have a Fake Body Part. Guess What It Is.
Various Contributors11.28.10
New work from seven poets spanning several of our nation’s major metropolitan areas – Chelsea Martin, Kevin Sampsell, Aneesa Davenport, Brandon Scott Gorrell, Claire Donato, Jeff T. Johnson and Michael Thomsen. Poetry isn’t dead, it’s just been feigning an injury to get worker’s comp benefits and is about to go to town with a pocketful of cash. Sweet illustrations from artist Rachel Pollak.
I’ll Take Detroit
Tom Flynn11.24.10
Tom Flynn remembers a simpler time when all he had to do to get his Thanksgiving thanks and grub on was get himself through a soggy football game in the miserable cold of early winter. If one played sports in the 80s and 90s, it’s easy to recall with wincing redolence the solid "foam" core of helmets, the bulky pads, and of course, the cheap no-name cleats that hardened with weather and time to resemble craggy griffin-like claws, their faded black exteriors stale and cracked, and souls just as black and evil in color and comfort. Flynn also recalls relaxing post-game with the Detroit Lions game perenially played on Thanksgiving. Having no personal affiliation toward the Lions then and now, he contrasts the stark fortunes of Detroit (both the town and the team) with the excesses of the other game-of-the-day, that of the Dallas Cowboys, and finds something to which Detroit can represent on this day of thanks.
“Le Rire de la Meduse” – an excerpt from The Correspondence Artist
Barbara Browning11.15.10
The Correspondence Artist, Barbara Browning’s 21st century epistolary novel is jam-packed with cultural references and lubricated body parts and has been praised by Harry Matthews, DJ Spooky and Rebecca Miller. In a fiction that merges with cultural theory, Vivian and her lover Tzipi Honigman, a 68-year-old Nobel Prize-winning Israeli novelist, make out to a mix tape that includes such hits as Lacan’s seminar on Poe, Sartre and Simone Beauvoir’s threeway, Tippi Hedron the Swedish Jew and mistranslated sexual idioms. Is it a federal offense to steal a letter or is it in fact totally impossible? When you steal a letter, do you become the letter’s true intended audience? Either way this is mail worth rifling through. The book is due out in February from Two Dollar Radio.
For Tyler Perry Who Has Made the Movie When the Stage Play Is Enuf
Desiree Burch11.11.10
Ntzoake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf was first produced in 1975 in a bay area bar and has since appeared off-broadway, on broadway, PBS and innumerable iterations on college campus — in a way that to my mind recalls the viral popularity of something like Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. Comedian and performer Desiree Burch takes a look at Tyler Perry’s aesthetic and what it means for the film adaptation. She finds much to praise in the ensemble cast but, in addition to all the other colors of the rainbow hears the melodramatic speechifying of a tiny man dressed in gold.
Site: OurGoods.org
Ben Bush11.10.10
Feel like trading your skills at canvas stretching for web design? Wanna swap your grant-writing chops for a letter-pressed edition of your short…
Bluets by Maggie Nelson
Ben Fama11.08.10
Belatedly but, as always, with the purest of hearts Fanzine offers poet Ben Fama’s thoughtful take on Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Despite or due to its incorporation of Wittgenstein and Goethe, Nelson described this meditation on the color blue in a grant application as "heathen, hedonistic and horny." Nelson, who has appeared on Unsolved Mysteries, examined the death of her aunt in The Red Parts and Jane: A Murder and Bluets is not without its darkness.
