Recently in Published Category

Quite awhile ago I spent the summer doing theater in Princeton,and I was able to spend some time in the theater between shows, when the house was empty, the lights low, and the sets shrouded in shadow. Once or twice I was able to be on stage by myself, facing the rows of unoccupied seats alone.

Treading those quiet boards felt a lot like this place does: all set up for a play, but lacking its player and, doubtless, an audience.

There's a very small stack of Draft posts in the Entries section of my Movable Type control panel. One of them, in particular, started out as a blog post about Serious Things and quickly morphed into something else, something that might be destined for places most unblogly. About all I've been really been able to muster up have been little bursts of text over on Facebook. I've also been recording some music again, having figured out how to properly mic the new Guild (you can listen to it here).

I've never been an obsessive chronicler, like some people. I've also never been particularly cheery, that peculiar brand of general optimism that lets one push on through the rough times without getting too bogged down. Me, I get bogged down, and the past couple of months have been boggy indeed.

There is, however, a certain amount of light over yonder, which is simply this: in the summer of 2011, you'll be able to hold my first novel in your hands. And that's all I'm able to say about it at this point. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Right here. And be sure to stop by the front page to get at all the other goodies inside.

This is another first-person bit. That's not all I write, but that's what's been getting accepted. Still, I think I need to put some more effort into my non-first-person, cyborg-monkey type stuff, just to break the monotony.

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¹What is the proper nomenclature for that, anyway? You get published "in" a magazine. Stuff gets posted "to" or "on" a website. Sometimes "over at" works as well ("read it over at endlesswharrgarrbl.com"). "'Hypothesis' is all up in tha Thieves Jargon code and whatnot." That'll work.

I used to work in a bookshop, long ago. A recovery bookshop, actually, which was more than a little ironic considering the relationship I had at that time with my brain and the various chemicals that could make it do interesting things. I say you haven't quite lived until you've handed someone their bronze 20-year recovery medallion while tripping balls.

That's all behind me now, but as the famous sage has said, wherever you go, there you are, so I've still got the same brain, haven't I, and even if it's no longer the quivering science experiment it once was, every so often it'll go tits up and then I've got to hang around and wait for it to get its act together. Plasticity takes time, people!

Big sigh.

Anyway, the Spanish-language translation of Sumerian Pot is due out any day now, which ought to be good for a laugh, and there are other things percolating here and there in vague and dissatisfying ways that haven't got any punch, Gerald, are you even listening? You're not going to keep them entertained with promises unless things are exploding somewhere, and if you keep frightening off the pyrotechnicians this whole circus is going under.

So much work to do, so little inclination.

Ramón González, editor of the Spanish-Mexican literary magazine Letras Libres, read "It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Their Head Stuck in a 3,600-year-old Sumerian Pot."

He liked it. Quite a bit, actually: enough to translate it into Spanish for print publication in Mexico and Spain. Apparently archaeological misfortune is cross-cultural.

It'll be out in July or September, depending on which issue it lands in.

So, I'm pleased about that.

Hee!

Gosh, it's like old home week. I found a yellowed copy of Home Planet News #38 in a box in the closet. It's their "Focus on AIDS" issue from 1995, and it happens to contain the first short story I ever published. That was a good season: first publication, got invited up to read in NYC at the issue release party...all sorts of nifty things were going on. I brought my handsome friend Andrew along, who wasn't bent in any way all, but when I sat back down at the table with him after enthusiastically performing high-class works like "What I'll Think About While Pat Robertson Swallows My Load," (I was so In Your Face™ back then!) I'm sure he could feel the eyes on him, which, I must confess, I enjoyed in a slightly wicked sort of way.

Home Planet News is still around, although they don't have much of an online presence and they certainly don't have archives going back fourteen years. So, I scanned it.

That took a some doing. Home Planet News is printed in tabloid-format, on newsprint, and the story was spread out over two pages and three lengthy columns, so I had to do a bit of cropping and stitching together. And scanning. Then more scanning. It took several tries to get it right, so I hope you appreciate all the work I've done for you. Which is a polite way of saying it was an incredible pain in the ass because the HP PhotoSmart scanner sucks moose ass. Why do technology companies seem to think that "smart" means "We will program our device to make decisions based on assumptions about what you want to do which are totally incorrect and will transform an otherwise simple job into an unending hell full of profanity and holes punched through wallboard?" Bastards.

No, really. Hey, HP? Here's a hint. When you have a nice, friendly, selectable indicator on your scanner that says, "Actual Size," it would be really helpful if the scanner didn't resize the image. If I ever meet someone who works in HP's scanner division I will kick them square in the crotch. Twice. Once for making a fifteen minute job take two hours, again for increasing my cortisol levels, and once more for stealing my evening. So that's three times. No, let's make it four. Plus a blow to the head with whatever's handy.

Or! I'll just disembowel them, drape their viscera about my shoulders, plant both feet into their steaming, empty gut-hole (provided I'm wearing shoes and pants I don't like), and belt out "Jerusalem." Then I will order coffee. 

Anyway, the .PDF is here (1.6MB). I make no promises about the tale. Freshman effort and all that.

Oh, and...you might want to wait awhile to read it, because the story might clash with this murderous tirade right here.

I mentioned recently that I was searching for my copy of FEH!, which contains "my four line epic, 'Ode to Rubber.'"

I found it! As it turns out, "Ode to Rubber" is longer than four lines, and the complete title of the publication is FEH! A Journal of Odious Poetry. It was edited by one Simeon Stylites, which is either his actual name or a nom de plume taken from a fifth century pillar saint. These days, he has a blog over at Salon, where apparent co-blogger "Howard Testicles" shares this reminiscence about FEH!:

Simeon's first magazine was The Sodden Rag: a Bhuttanese Buddhist journal to counter false religious attacks on Bhuttanese Buddhist monks. It was a really strange piece of writing. When I first got a copy in the mail I thought it was junk mail. Mikey soon called me up and asked if I had received some shit in the mail. "It's from the kid. I really got to have a talk with him."

The Sodden Rag became FEH the journal of Odious poetry which would only print poems about flatulence and mucous. It evolved into accepting poems about love, hockey players, and death and, of course, religion. Simeon would write to famous poets send them copies and they would send him new poems. Amazing! He'd photocopy the poems and presto a magazine. He also had a classified section and ran personals and wrote an editorial piece under the name Simeon Stylites. Simeon ended up marrying Morticia who submitted poems with lines like:

   I hate it
   when my titties bounce
   and some stranger, some pig-dog
   dribbles-
   over yonder

FEH! now sells for a small fortune.

I hope so, because I have right here a copy of FEH! numer 10, from August of 1991, that is only slightly if mysteriously stained. It even has the original subscription card in it ("Yes, I do confess my need for FEH! in my life. Yes yes send me lots of FEH! Send buckets and cauldrons and bales and crates of FEH!").

I share page 18 with "Inflatable Penile Prosthesis," a poem by Michelle Perez, an unattributed limerick about a lady of Chichester who made the bishop's britches stir, and "The Reader's Digest Condensed Version of the Carpe Diem Poetry Genre" by Cielle Owens.

But now, without further ado! "Ode to Rubber," by me:

O rubber, O latex!
Heavenly bouncy stuff!
Give me balls,
 give me gloves,
   give me condoms!
Pencils are grand
 with a hard pink nipple,
  galoshes excite me
   so soft and supple.
Tires are splendid
 so filthy and black,
   prophylactics divine
    a man's private elastic
     sack.
Bounce, stretch, pull, and twist,
 ne'er was there such a
  substance as this!

I'm so proud.

Read this thing I wrote over at McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

If you want to, I mean.

No pressure.

Ian Wood has managed to get his head stuck in a 3,600-year old Sumerian pot that was manufactured in Larsa during the reign of Rim-Sin I. This is much worse than it sounds, because the pot is priceless and therefore he must extract his head without breaking it. He is pleased that he can touch type.

That was a Facebook status update I posted on April 14 at 9:08pm.

There seemed to be more to it, so I turned that snippet into a 750-word short and sent it off to Chris Monks at McSweeney's. 

Short story shorter: he took it, and it will be on the site in a few weeks. He didn't even tell me to stop bothering him! My plan, she worked. I'll post a link when it's up.

Now I must see if I can do the same thing to Lee Klein...

Hey there, folks and folkettes: the August edition of Underground Voices is out now. You can read my assemblage of words, Anchovies, right here.

Do read the rest of the issue as well...I'm partial to Joseph Hirsch's Blood From A Steel Turnip myself, mainly because I am all about the freaky cybernetic future holocaust, but check out Jared Ward's Dog Eat Dog for some Ballard-meets-Palahniuk and Sequoia Namagatsu's Shadows of Wonder for some moody half-seen things.