22.5.11
8.5.11
Matter Press
The Matter Press blog will be featuring a quote of mine on compressed fiction soon and will have a link to my blog here.
So, in short, I need to start posting more and get someone in here who knows how to make this stuff look good.
Click the title to check out the blog.
So, in short, I need to start posting more and get someone in here who knows how to make this stuff look good.
Click the title to check out the blog.
29.4.11
Read this blog!
If you're not familiar with the writer Jack Pendarvis, get familiar. He lives and works in Oxford, MS. The best way to start out loving him is by reading his blog. Click the title for a link.
13.4.11
11.4.11
Wag's Revue
Wag's Revue is an awesome new-ish web magazine (hence, Wag) that is revitalizing and sophisticating the presentation of online published literature. Check out there manifesto below and click on the title for a link to their website. They publish some interesting work:
“Think of the Internet as a literal place, a newly-conquered frontier. It’s a familiar comparison: the pioneering switch-circuit supernerds of ARPANET; the trailblazing explorers of Usenet and Mosaic; the waves of immigrants, establishing Geocities, getting to know their AOL postman by his ubiquitous catchphrase. Now Google’s twelve-lane freeways roar across the Web, Facebook and YouTube are visible from space. Unfortunately, as with most frontiers, the development of the Web has brought with it the swift and ruthless execution of native populations. The old empires of printed media are undergoing a greater crisis than ever before, one from which they will never fully recover. They have succumbed to the pox of Internet expansion.
These wrongs must be redressed, not by retrenching ourselves in the printed medium, but by salvaging what its best citizens stood for. We cannot mistake the decline of the printed form for the death of quality writing and content. The need for literature and letters to be reliably and intelligently disseminated exists now as it always has. Go back and read how scribes decried the printing press. This is just another medium change—from bleached plant matter to glowing liquid crystal.
The reason many people worry that the written form is dying, and the reason most writers consider online publication second-rate, is that no journal has yet succeeded in marrying the editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the Internet. A high-quality print magazine—a Harper’s, a Partisan Review, an n+1—is a micron filter of minds applied to the endless wellspring of human creation, allowing only the finest trickle to pass through. As it stands now, the Internet is the opposite: an unbridled and infinite purveyor of information—creation unbound—and it has all the delicate subtlety of a tidal wave.
The countless blogs and Web-based literary reviews are brimming with unexceptional content. With endless gigabytes of storage space, editors of the online corpus sacrifice stringent controls and adopt a shotgun approach, publishing mediocrity en masse, obscuring the rare gem. Readers end up with entire cows’ asses on their plates, rather than the succulent, butterflied filets they were hoping for. Even the bastardized online cousins of prominent print magazines and literary reviews—which often keep their best content dead-bolted behind subscription fees—are visually unappealing and cluttered with unwanted content. That print titans can’t get the Web right either shouldn’t be surprising: the best carriage makers didn’t make the best cars.
We at Wag’s Revue are intent on revolutionizing online literature. We wish to create something entirely of the Internet, never printed and never meant to be printed, but with all the editorial and aesthetic controls that entice people to read and trust the finest printed media. We will insist on strong editorial oversight, from first draft to final copy. We will re- conceptualize the printed page online, and we will explore its space, cultivate its aesthetics. Presentation will be sleek, clean, and controlled.
We will find and foster the new and great writers of the online generation. Alongside interviews with the waggish luminaries of our time, we will publish poetry, fiction and essays. We will allow and encourage authors to exploit the Internet for the new creative territory it provides: contortions of page, mixed media, electronic writing, interactive narrative. We will publish complete, polished issues, quarterly—no constant dribble of blogging and unwanted content. And there will never be subscription fees; all content will be free to the public, greatly expanding the readership authors can reach. We are planting our flag in this, our little corner of the Internet, establishing a true Web-based magazine (a “wag,” if you will)—a magazine that brings the rigors of print publication over to the online medium, to flourish under the vast new freedoms it allows.”
- The Editors, Wag’s Revue
(Issue 1, Spring 2009)
“Think of the Internet as a literal place, a newly-conquered frontier. It’s a familiar comparison: the pioneering switch-circuit supernerds of ARPANET; the trailblazing explorers of Usenet and Mosaic; the waves of immigrants, establishing Geocities, getting to know their AOL postman by his ubiquitous catchphrase. Now Google’s twelve-lane freeways roar across the Web, Facebook and YouTube are visible from space. Unfortunately, as with most frontiers, the development of the Web has brought with it the swift and ruthless execution of native populations. The old empires of printed media are undergoing a greater crisis than ever before, one from which they will never fully recover. They have succumbed to the pox of Internet expansion.
These wrongs must be redressed, not by retrenching ourselves in the printed medium, but by salvaging what its best citizens stood for. We cannot mistake the decline of the printed form for the death of quality writing and content. The need for literature and letters to be reliably and intelligently disseminated exists now as it always has. Go back and read how scribes decried the printing press. This is just another medium change—from bleached plant matter to glowing liquid crystal.
The reason many people worry that the written form is dying, and the reason most writers consider online publication second-rate, is that no journal has yet succeeded in marrying the editorial rigors of print to the freedoms of the Internet. A high-quality print magazine—a Harper’s, a Partisan Review, an n+1—is a micron filter of minds applied to the endless wellspring of human creation, allowing only the finest trickle to pass through. As it stands now, the Internet is the opposite: an unbridled and infinite purveyor of information—creation unbound—and it has all the delicate subtlety of a tidal wave.
The countless blogs and Web-based literary reviews are brimming with unexceptional content. With endless gigabytes of storage space, editors of the online corpus sacrifice stringent controls and adopt a shotgun approach, publishing mediocrity en masse, obscuring the rare gem. Readers end up with entire cows’ asses on their plates, rather than the succulent, butterflied filets they were hoping for. Even the bastardized online cousins of prominent print magazines and literary reviews—which often keep their best content dead-bolted behind subscription fees—are visually unappealing and cluttered with unwanted content. That print titans can’t get the Web right either shouldn’t be surprising: the best carriage makers didn’t make the best cars.
We at Wag’s Revue are intent on revolutionizing online literature. We wish to create something entirely of the Internet, never printed and never meant to be printed, but with all the editorial and aesthetic controls that entice people to read and trust the finest printed media. We will insist on strong editorial oversight, from first draft to final copy. We will re- conceptualize the printed page online, and we will explore its space, cultivate its aesthetics. Presentation will be sleek, clean, and controlled.
We will find and foster the new and great writers of the online generation. Alongside interviews with the waggish luminaries of our time, we will publish poetry, fiction and essays. We will allow and encourage authors to exploit the Internet for the new creative territory it provides: contortions of page, mixed media, electronic writing, interactive narrative. We will publish complete, polished issues, quarterly—no constant dribble of blogging and unwanted content. And there will never be subscription fees; all content will be free to the public, greatly expanding the readership authors can reach. We are planting our flag in this, our little corner of the Internet, establishing a true Web-based magazine (a “wag,” if you will)—a magazine that brings the rigors of print publication over to the online medium, to flourish under the vast new freedoms it allows.”
- The Editors, Wag’s Revue
(Issue 1, Spring 2009)
10.4.11
NAP 1.3
NAP literary magazine has accepted my short story "Tumbleweed" for publication in their summer issue (should be released in June or July this summer). Be on the look out for it!
29.3.11
NAP literary magazine
Click on the title to view some new poems by Allen Edwin Butt and some really fantastic poems by Andrew Durbin.
15.2.11
The Most Wanted/Unwanted Songs
This is a fantastic musical experiment undertaken by Komar and Melamid & Dave Soldier. Thanks to Allen Edwin Butt for bringing this to my attention (Allen is a good friend of mine and a poet from South Carolina. You can find some of his work in Otoliths, 2River, and Poetry).
This piece is on UbuWeb, a neat online database of avant-garde material. Here are some notes on "Most Wanted Song" and "Most Unwanted Song" by Dave Soldier:
This survey confirms the hypothesis that today's popular music indeed provides an accurate estimate of the wishes of the vox populi. The most favored ensemble, determined from a rating by participants of their favorite instruments in combination, comprises a moderately sized group (three to ten instruments) consisting of guitar, piano, saxophone, bass, drums, violin, cello, synthesizer, with low male and female vocals singing in rock/r&b style. The favorite lyrics narrate a love story, and the favorite listening circumstance is at home. The only feature in lyric subjects that occurs in both most wanted and unwanted categories is "intellectual stimulation." Most participants desire music of moderate duration (approximately 5 minutes), moderate pitch range, moderate tempo, and moderate to loud volume, and display a profound dislike of the alternatives. If the survey provides an accurate analysis of these factors for the population, and assuming that the preference for each factor follows a Gaussian (i.e. bell-curve) distribution, the combination of these qualities, even to the point of sensory overload and stylistic discohesion, will result in a musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably "liked" by 72 plus or minus 12% (standard deviation; Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic) of listeners.
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.
Art for the people-
Your pal, Dave Soldier
June 1997
This piece is on UbuWeb, a neat online database of avant-garde material. Here are some notes on "Most Wanted Song" and "Most Unwanted Song" by Dave Soldier:
This survey confirms the hypothesis that today's popular music indeed provides an accurate estimate of the wishes of the vox populi. The most favored ensemble, determined from a rating by participants of their favorite instruments in combination, comprises a moderately sized group (three to ten instruments) consisting of guitar, piano, saxophone, bass, drums, violin, cello, synthesizer, with low male and female vocals singing in rock/r&b style. The favorite lyrics narrate a love story, and the favorite listening circumstance is at home. The only feature in lyric subjects that occurs in both most wanted and unwanted categories is "intellectual stimulation." Most participants desire music of moderate duration (approximately 5 minutes), moderate pitch range, moderate tempo, and moderate to loud volume, and display a profound dislike of the alternatives. If the survey provides an accurate analysis of these factors for the population, and assuming that the preference for each factor follows a Gaussian (i.e. bell-curve) distribution, the combination of these qualities, even to the point of sensory overload and stylistic discohesion, will result in a musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably "liked" by 72 plus or minus 12% (standard deviation; Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic) of listeners.
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commericals and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.
Art for the people-
Your pal, Dave Soldier
June 1997
13.2.11
William H. Gass Reads from The Tunnel
Pretty rare video from the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe. Everyone should read this man.
Dream Song 14
Always a favorite video. John Berryman, drunk as always, recites Dream Song #14 ("Life, friends, is boring..."). He also discusses the relationship between Henry Pussycat and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
12.2.11
11.2.11
Another Journal/Magazine Database
This one is similar to the Poets & Writers database; maybe a little less organized, but a little easier to customize. Constantly updated, with distinctions made for active and inactive sites.
10.2.11
A Great Interview with CAConrad
Click the title to read a great interview with the poet CAConrad on the Poetry Society of America website. CAConrad speaks about what it means to be an "American poet" and discusses a poet's use of popular and traditional culture.
Galatea Resurrects
This is a site where you can review books (mainly of poetry), and in return you get a free copy of the book. Some pretty good stuff on here.
9.2.11
PennSound
Lots of poets reading their work on PennSound, operated by the University of Pennsylvania.
8.2.11
A Blog Everyone Should Read
Ron Silliman's blog, "Silliman's Blog: A weblog focused on contemporary poetry and poetics"
Great resource for poetry events, new books, etc. He also finds some great photos.
Poets & Writers
Click the title of this post and it will take you to the Poets & Writers website under the tab "Literary Magazines". It's a useful guide to help discover journals and magazines, their submission requirements, review periods, etc.
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