After an extended hibernation, Anemone Sidecar has just returned with its latest chapter. The journal has gone online, but it’s a PDF, so it’s like offline-online. Looks like the wait was worth it and Kathryn Rantala has packed this thing full with literary goodness. I’m really into Wain Ewing’s image-text story “Transport.” His typwritten sentences and incidental drawings create a narrative environment that is flickering and quivering and could blink out if you don’t finish creating it yourself. I’d like to find more of Ewing’s work.

Blake Butler is running a free writing contest. Send him one story, and if you win he’ll publish it as a stand-alone issue of Lamination Colony (so people will read your work) and he’ll give you a bunch of free stuff (so you will receive material reward for your CHOPS). And other people are offering free stuff. And the contest has no entry fee; it’s clearly not run by Narrative Magazine in any way.

And Blake brought up Fugazi. I thought about “Merchandise” and how Ian MacKaye was the guy who taught me as a kid that not charging a lot for stuff is cool. Shows we’re never more than $5, always all ages, etc. That reminds me of one of my best stories. In college, I was the local music columnist and I was stuck for a column this one week, so I looked up Beecher St. address on the back of my Minor Threat album (the address of the house where the picture on the back was taken), having heard the Dischord address was Ian MacKaye’s mom’s house, in the white pages. I called it and Ginger MacKaye answered the phone. She has to be one of the kindest people I’ve ever spoken with. She talked to me for two hours, told me all kinds of stories, including making breakfast for Henry Rollins (who was living with her family at the time) and some group from Long Beach, CA (Black Flag) who then convinced him to be in their band. She still worried that Ian would get hurt skateboarding, but said she didn’t have worry about him getting in too much trouble because he didn’t drink as he was involved in this movement “straight edge.” She talked about how nervous she was when Ian introduced her to Leonard Cohen.  About her dog getting tied up with another dog at the local park only to learn the woman was the mother of Brian Baker (from Minor Threat, then Bad Religion). She said she went to lots of Ian’s, and his brother Alec’s, shows, especially in DC. And they usually still had Sunday dinner together. I was really late for my painting studio that day but it was worth it. She sent me this really nice note with a print of an old building in Northwest DC (if I recall correctly) after the column came out and had some kind words. She also told me that she always made sure to pick up our student paper which was available at the local Safeway. A very cool woman.

Anyway, free stuff is good for art.

Just got the new American Letters & Commentary which has some really wonderful stuff in its special feature on ephemera (including some beautiful color reproductions of Joe Brainard’s work). Nancy Kuhl’s introduction to her poetry imprint, Phylum Press, describes a prime example of a publisher who understands sharing, the gift economy, and how it can be used to create an engaged reading community. I especially appreciate the fact that when she sends out the work she publishes she writes the recipient’s name and address in pencil so that reader can erase it and replace it with the address of another potential reader.

Cover of Tulips:A Collaboration (2004), words by Charles North, images by Trevor Winkfield

I’m not suggesting that all small presses must follow Phylum’s completely gift-based system, but it is an interesting model for how non-market distribution can work, and I hope will be one of the voices encouraging a trend in this direction.

I’ve been reading Lewis Hyde‘s book The Gift, (subtitle: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World), and despite the title and this cover -

- it’s an amazing discussion of property and commerce. It confirms a lot of my ideas about ownership and what it means and how it affects the way we create art, Still, it’s edifying to see it presented so coherently by Hyde. This book was written twenty-five years ago, but it’s difficult to imagine a time when it’s value is more apparent than right now, when we’re witnessing a thriving literary and artistic community supported primarily by gift, not market, economies.

Hyde writes:

“Bad faith … is the confidence that there is corruption, not just that the covenants of men may be severed, but that all things may be decomposed and broken into fragments (the old sense of “corruption”). Out of bad faith comes a longing for control, for the law and the police. Bad faith suspects that the gift will not come back, that things won’t work out, that there is a scarcity so great in the world that it will devour whatever gifts appear. In bad faith the circle is broken.” (page 167)

I think about this in terms of the independent publishing world, which, in general, I’m quite enthusiastic about these days. I think the plurality and uncentered nature of the literary landscape that we are experiencing is not irresponsibly called a renaissance, but there are still some common practices, overtures to the centralized, hierarchical, once powerful corporate publishers, that indie presses seem dedicated to maintaining, and I’m not sure why. Ideas such as number book runs (“This is a FIRST printing.” “Look at me, I SOLD enough books for a third printing!” “We invested a ton of cash and material resources in printing an arbitrary number of books for our sweet first RUN.”), and the big one is the support of the archaic, abusive copyright system that has been so oppressive to the kinds of literature that they are trying to disseminate. The molasses-walking speed at which small presses are adopting healthy policies like using reasonable and arts-supportive Creative Commons licenses is baffling to me. The insistence on reserving all rights and subscribing to American copyright policy seems completely antithetical to the purpose of so many of these presses – encouraging dialogue, challenging systems, inventing new norms. I mean, I even see people putting “all rights reserved” on their blogs.  Really?!

The best I can come up with that is not so much a choice, but an imitation of the institutions that they are in many ways opposing. Applying copyright is a decision of default, I think, usually made in ignorance of the harm of the system. I don’t know … maybe some small press editors could shed some light for me?

We had our first open submissions period for the month of April and we got a ton of stuff.  I just started picking through the pile and it seems like there is no lack of quality art in here. Thanks to all of you for sharing your work; we’re going to have a good time reading it all, and we’ll be in touch as soon as possible.

We’ve got a new issue coming in a month or so, and then we’ll have an issue full of work from the open submissions. The next issue will have a special section featuring abstract comics that I’m particularly looking forward to and talking to people about.

By the way, if you haven’t read the current issue of Action,Yes, you’re treating yourself more harshly than you should.

He needs it.

No earned runs and a loss for the second time this season and it’s only May.  Two of his wins are 2-1.

Some images from one of my projects with Tim Wood:

Our other project may be in your mailbox soon.  It’s a pair of growing books and we’ve decided that they need to leave our loving hands and go experience this great country of ours. More on that soon…

I completely forgot to post about this two weeks ago. Our last episode of Apostrophe Cast featured Shane Jones.  He read a good chunk of his sublime Lightboxes for us. The thing I like about Shane’s work is that he is not afraid to jump into the deep end of fantasy. He borrows generously from childhood fancies, much like Sabrina does (her new books is coming out from Saturnalia in a few months, which I am really looking forward to), and uses it to present a very threatening and immediate reality of his own creation.  My experience of reading his work in neither heady nor visceral; it’s an exploration of pathos. I’d like to write more about Lightboxes soon.

Here a link to Shane’s reading. Here’s a link to his Apostrophe Cast interview. Here’s a sweet picture of the author with a cardigan and a beard:

Last Friday, I had the pleasure of visiting a movie night that Brandon Downing curated at Dixon Place, a very cool theater/performance space on the Lower East Side (as well as meeting Brandon and Gary Sullivan who was nice enough to give me a couple of books, including the third issue of his comic Elsewhere which is a collection of his The New Life strips from Rain Taxi – really cool to read a bunch of work quickly that spans ten years). Moving-ish images on a screen was the one constant of the half dozen or so performances, but the exciting thing about the whole event was the evolving tensions between the agents (human, electronic, visual, aural, and rhetorical) assembled for each piece, and trying to follow how the disrupting or interacted with one another.  Julian Brolaski’s neo-benshi take on Bette Davis’s less-than-classic Another Man’s Poison was pretty amazing.

On Saturday, Brandon organized another movie night featuring exclusively Hollywood movies. I hope that one went as well as the first, so he can have more of these in the future.  If he does and you live in New York City, find a way to go to it.