Amanda Fields reads and discusses an excerpt from her story, "Boiler Room," featured in our 29.1 summer issue. Remember, if you'd like to hear previous entries (from Sherman Alexie, Stuart Dybek, Wendy Rawlings, Crystal Wilkinson, and others), just press "posts" and select the entry you want.
Monday, October 29, 2007
IR Bluecast: Amanda Fields
Amanda Fields reads and discusses an excerpt from her story, "Boiler Room," featured in our 29.1 summer issue. Remember, if you'd like to hear previous entries (from Sherman Alexie, Stuart Dybek, Wendy Rawlings, Crystal Wilkinson, and others), just press "posts" and select the entry you want.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Editors on Parade
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. Probably because the idea of coming up with a costume, putting it together, and parading it around is such a radically different creative outlet compared to writing. And the visual aspect offers something inherently immediate that language doesn't.
Anyways, enough of this quasi-deep thought. Let's find out what the staff here has dressed up as over the years.
What was your favorite Halloween costume as a child? As a teenager/young adult? Recently?
Abdel
Childhood: I was always mismatched. We would go shopping on Halloween night, so I would have on a Spiderman mask with some kind of cape. I must have been 10-11.
Teendom: After football practice I would go dressed as a football player.
Recently: I can't even remember the last time I dressed up. But interesting fact though: for Halloween my father would actually buy me eggs so that we could throw them. Peer pressure man.
Jenny
Childhood: As a Cowperson! I had boots and overalls and a red handkerchief, and an awesome hat (a real cowboy hat!). Later on, I'd try to balance that same hat on my big teenage head.
Teendom: I didn't dress up much, except for the Halloween dance. I made this kind of shroud-ish looking dress. So, I guess I was some kind of dead person. It was inspired by the Dracula movie that had just come out, starring Winona Ryder.
Recently: In college I generally dressed like a disaffected youth. So I pretty much wore black boots, black pants, black turtle, and black makeup. I guess that's a Halloween costume.
Danny
Childhood: I was a dinosaur. Had this green and yellow suit with a huge tail and a hood for my head that had little spikes on it.
Teendom: Regan from The Excorcist. I went to my high school in a ratted out wig, nightgown. I even put a can of peas on the blender that morning just to splosh the goop on my chest.
Recently: It's too offensive to write out. But I will say it involved the Virgin Mary.
and introducing... Stephen!!! (our editorial intern)
Childhood: I was the X-Men's Wolverine all the time. At the time I kinda wanted to be Wolverine everyday. I had on a plastic mask, this blue and yellow fabric suit, and gloves with plastic nubs that were suppose to be claws.
Teendom: I was The Highlander. Trench coat with a giant sword. Tied back my long hair. I carried around a real sword too, which I got from Spain.
Recently: Recently I was a Jedi knight. (I have to make up for the dullness of my real life by dressing up as fictional male heroes). Wore a Jedi robe and a light saber that I had long before I even put the costume together. I felt like Obi-Wan.
Happy Halloween ya'all! Please post favorite costumes that you've donned in the past.
Anyways, enough of this quasi-deep thought. Let's find out what the staff here has dressed up as over the years.
What was your favorite Halloween costume as a child? As a teenager/young adult? Recently?
Abdel
Childhood: I was always mismatched. We would go shopping on Halloween night, so I would have on a Spiderman mask with some kind of cape. I must have been 10-11.
Teendom: After football practice I would go dressed as a football player.
Recently: I can't even remember the last time I dressed up. But interesting fact though: for Halloween my father would actually buy me eggs so that we could throw them. Peer pressure man.
Jenny
Childhood: As a Cowperson! I had boots and overalls and a red handkerchief, and an awesome hat (a real cowboy hat!). Later on, I'd try to balance that same hat on my big teenage head.
Teendom: I didn't dress up much, except for the Halloween dance. I made this kind of shroud-ish looking dress. So, I guess I was some kind of dead person. It was inspired by the Dracula movie that had just come out, starring Winona Ryder.
Recently: In college I generally dressed like a disaffected youth. So I pretty much wore black boots, black pants, black turtle, and black makeup. I guess that's a Halloween costume.
Danny
Childhood: I was a dinosaur. Had this green and yellow suit with a huge tail and a hood for my head that had little spikes on it.
Teendom: Regan from The Excorcist. I went to my high school in a ratted out wig, nightgown. I even put a can of peas on the blender that morning just to splosh the goop on my chest.
Recently: It's too offensive to write out. But I will say it involved the Virgin Mary.
and introducing... Stephen!!! (our editorial intern)
Childhood: I was the X-Men's Wolverine all the time. At the time I kinda wanted to be Wolverine everyday. I had on a plastic mask, this blue and yellow fabric suit, and gloves with plastic nubs that were suppose to be claws.
Teendom: I was The Highlander. Trench coat with a giant sword. Tied back my long hair. I carried around a real sword too, which I got from Spain.
Recently: Recently I was a Jedi knight. (I have to make up for the dullness of my real life by dressing up as fictional male heroes). Wore a Jedi robe and a light saber that I had long before I even put the costume together. I felt like Obi-Wan.
Happy Halloween ya'all! Please post favorite costumes that you've donned in the past.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Book Hog
I am very greedy with my books. I hog. I hoard. This is my nest building activity. If ever I run out of furniture, I can build furniture out of my books. Though it won’t be nearly as comfy.
Years ago, when I got my first apartment, I neglected to get insurance, and I knew that I really, really should get it, but I didn’t. And whenever I would leave the apartment, especially for extended periods, I would worry and worry about my babies back home. Were they all right? Had my neighbors set the whole building on fire? Had a tornado popped open my windows and sucked the books out into a whipping funnel of pages and wood pulp?
I have insurance now. So if any tragedy should befall my books, I can at least get them replaced. Except for the signed copies. But I’m still more the kind of person who’d put a bookplate on my book (mine! mine!) than the kind of person who’d open the cage and set a volume free. And I maintain that there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I do admire those generous catch-and-release readers, those book lovers who let their babies loose in the wild. Maybe someday I can be like them. Book Crossing is a collection of such folks, and the books shared by such folks. They’ve been around for awhile, and you may have already heard of them, but I’m not sure just how long they’ve been around. Their Website content is copyrighted from 2001 to present, if that’s any clue. Anyhow, it’s a really fun project, and sometime real soon, I’m going to try to pry some books out of my fingers to take part in it. (I can’t tell you how much easier typing will be then.)
And other groups of folks have taken the model on, too, like the kids at the Newark Center for Creative Learning, with their Leave Your Book project. (When I was in grade school, the closest thing I had to this was when my Girl Scout troop tied messages to balloons and waited for replies. I can tell you none of our balloons made it to Germany or New Zealand.)
I’ve still always got my eye open for a great bookplate, though.
I have insurance now. So if any tragedy should befall my books, I can at least get them replaced. Except for the signed copies. But I’m still more the kind of person who’d put a bookplate on my book (mine! mine!) than the kind of person who’d open the cage and set a volume free. And I maintain that there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I do admire those generous catch-and-release readers, those book lovers who let their babies loose in the wild. Maybe someday I can be like them. Book Crossing is a collection of such folks, and the books shared by such folks. They’ve been around for awhile, and you may have already heard of them, but I’m not sure just how long they’ve been around. Their Website content is copyrighted from 2001 to present, if that’s any clue. Anyhow, it’s a really fun project, and sometime real soon, I’m going to try to pry some books out of my fingers to take part in it. (I can’t tell you how much easier typing will be then.)
And other groups of folks have taken the model on, too, like the kids at the Newark Center for Creative Learning, with their Leave Your Book project. (When I was in grade school, the closest thing I had to this was when my Girl Scout troop tied messages to balloons and waited for replies. I can tell you none of our balloons made it to Germany or New Zealand.)
I’ve still always got my eye open for a great bookplate, though.
--Jenny
Monday, October 22, 2007
Great Moments in Funk history
Having James Brown, Michael Jackson, and Prince together in the same space makes this one of the Funkiest moments in Funk history. Prince's performance, beginning with him riding to the stage on a man dressed like a zebra/wildebeest, also makes this one of the most awkward.
--Abdel
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
another one bites the dust
Literary magazine distributor Bernhard DeBoer announced it was shutting down this August, affecting some great magazines like Lyric and Jubilat...
Last winter, Publishers Group West went under, filing for bankruptcy and putting some fine magazines, McSweeney's and Punk Planet (completely ruined by their distributor's failure) among them, into financial crisis. This useful feature from Salon gives more background...
With this kind of financial craziness, how are little magazines supposed to get into bookstores?
This article from Publisher's Weekly offers a little hope, but not much.
It seems there is a fine business opportunity for a group of people with a little start-up capital, a good website, some financial know-how, and some connections in New York City to provide this service for magazines.
--Hannah
Last winter, Publishers Group West went under, filing for bankruptcy and putting some fine magazines, McSweeney's and Punk Planet (completely ruined by their distributor's failure) among them, into financial crisis. This useful feature from Salon gives more background...
With this kind of financial craziness, how are little magazines supposed to get into bookstores?
This article from Publisher's Weekly offers a little hope, but not much.
It seems there is a fine business opportunity for a group of people with a little start-up capital, a good website, some financial know-how, and some connections in New York City to provide this service for magazines.
--Hannah
Monday, October 15, 2007
Getting to know your editors
We here at IR just received the latest issue of Slab, another literary magazine. Very cute, sexy, and fun.
Along with bios, the staff of Slab asked their contributors to answer this cool 8 piece Q&A list below. I thought it would be fun to interrogate our editors with it. Thank you so very much Slab! Me love you long time.
1. What is your favorite guilty pleasure?
Abdel: Black jelly beans
Jenny: (For the record, I don't think pleasure should be guilty.) Terrible MTV shows, like Next and Parental Control
Danny: Fried food (but only as long as I don't get sick)
Along with bios, the staff of Slab asked their contributors to answer this cool 8 piece Q&A list below. I thought it would be fun to interrogate our editors with it. Thank you so very much Slab! Me love you long time.
1. What is your favorite guilty pleasure?
Abdel: Black jelly beans
Jenny: (For the record, I don't think pleasure should be guilty.) Terrible MTV shows, like Next and Parental Control
Danny: Fried food (but only as long as I don't get sick)
Hannah: http://gofugyourself.typepad.com
2. How do you take your coffee?
A: With cream
J: Lots of sugar, lots of cream -- as far from coffee as possible. Prefer Tea
D: Condensed milk (Vietnamese style!)
H: Black or with a little cream, depending on the time of day
3. Who were you in a previous life?
A: Joan of Arc
J: Mira Bai
D: A farmer
4. Who or what is your greatest influence?
A: James Baldwin
J: Poverty
D: Marilyn Manson
H: ?
5. What is the worst film you ever paid to see?
A: Soul Plane
J: Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace
D: Showgirls (But then again, I bought it on dvd, as well as the special edition box set.)
H: Deep Blue Sea. Samuel L. Jackson getting eaten by a shark in the middle of an inspirational monologue...well, you don't see that every day.
6. What is the best thing you can buy for a dollar?
A: Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pie Sandwich
J: Sour Patch Kids
D: Firecrackers
7. What is the worst present you ever received?
A: I once received the presence of Rutherford B. Hayes. Terrible presence
J: ?
D: Tighty-whites for Christmas
H: Probably some kind of inspirational decorative object
8. What is your favorite word?
A: Circuitous
J: Cup
D: #$@*
H: Gravitas
-danny
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Review of Dark Familiar from 29.1
Aleda Shirley. Dark Familiar. Louisville, Kentucky: Sarabande, 2006. $13.95 paper (ISBN 1-932511-36-9) 88 pages.
Reviewed by Hannah Faith Notess
Dark Familiar is Aleda Shirley’s third full-length collection of poems, following Chinese Architecture in 1986 and Long Distance in 1996. The world of Dark Familiar is haunted, and not just by the usual ghosts. Haunted by the living, the absent, and the dead, in a landscape washed in the saturated colors of Mark Rothko’s paintings, the speaker of these poems vacillates between addressing the haunting figures and a more general reader, exploring all the ways a voice and a landscape can be haunted.
Shirley takes her epigraph from Rothko: “Silence is too accurate.” Devoid of context, this statement could either mean “Silence is also accurate, along with speech” or “Silence is more accurate than speech.” Both meanings fit the poems here, which return repeatedly to silent moments—particularly unnatural silences: a busy casino floor seen through glass that mutes the sound, a mysteriously noiseless helicopter seen by an abducted child from her hotel window, or “silence, like a mirror / where the silver’s gone completely opaque.” Shirley’s poems speak into these silent moments to address the bigger silence of the dead, and the silence of God.
What I find particularly interesting about Dark Familiar is the way that Shirley’s layering of cosmic significance over earthly landscapes invests those landscapes with significance and trivializes them at the same time. In the book’s first poem, “The Star’s Etruscan Argument,” a casino floor becomes a microcosm of the universe, and the speaker of the poem, watching from above, becomes a God-like figure:
A few poems later, in “Phantom Pain,” the casino is refigured metaphorically as a gathering place for the dead:
The speaker’s ability to shift in and out of the land of the dead recalls other famous underworld visitors—Orpheus, Odysseus, Dante—only Shirley’s underworld is not a place to which the poet travels and returns. Rather, this underworld exists in and around the daylight world, haunting the speaker in the most banal of settings.
In addition to the epigraph from Rothko, many of the poems in the book bear titles from Rothko paintings, such as “Brown, Black on Maroon,” “Blue Over Orange,” and “Purple, White and Red.” Although these poems could be read as ekphrastic responses to Rothko’s work, only one of them, “Four Darks in Red” overtly references a painting: “Along the top of the canvas a band of anthracene / that is God or the absence of God / or someone’s ingenuous belief in him.” Like Rothko’s paintings, Shirley’s poems work with color emotionally, sometimes assigning a narrative to the colors, other times setting a scene infused with an emotional approach to the color. The ekphrastic poems feel haunted, too, by beauty and by its absence. Shirley’s fresh approach to color as emotion unifies the book’s voice, making it a compelling address to the Dark Familiar, the haunting presence found in everyday life.
Reviewed by Hannah Faith Notess
Dark Familiar is Aleda Shirley’s third full-length collection of poems, following Chinese Architecture in 1986 and Long Distance in 1996. The world of Dark Familiar is haunted, and not just by the usual ghosts. Haunted by the living, the absent, and the dead, in a landscape washed in the saturated colors of Mark Rothko’s paintings, the speaker of these poems vacillates between addressing the haunting figures and a more general reader, exploring all the ways a voice and a landscape can be haunted.
Shirley takes her epigraph from Rothko: “Silence is too accurate.” Devoid of context, this statement could either mean “Silence is also accurate, along with speech” or “Silence is more accurate than speech.” Both meanings fit the poems here, which return repeatedly to silent moments—particularly unnatural silences: a busy casino floor seen through glass that mutes the sound, a mysteriously noiseless helicopter seen by an abducted child from her hotel window, or “silence, like a mirror / where the silver’s gone completely opaque.” Shirley’s poems speak into these silent moments to address the bigger silence of the dead, and the silence of God.
What I find particularly interesting about Dark Familiar is the way that Shirley’s layering of cosmic significance over earthly landscapes invests those landscapes with significance and trivializes them at the same time. In the book’s first poem, “The Star’s Etruscan Argument,” a casino floor becomes a microcosm of the universe, and the speaker of the poem, watching from above, becomes a God-like figure:
How quickly
smoke swirling from a hundred cigarettes dissolves
above their heads: invisible systems at work, & God
not looking out for any of us from the inverted
domes in the ceiling that watch & record everything.
A few poems later, in “Phantom Pain,” the casino is refigured metaphorically as a gathering place for the dead:
…my dead
must have their own dead to find & so must disperse,
unable to remain in an assembly of my devising.
I wonder if they gather, seasonally, in a vast hall,
the air filtered into fake euphoria, like a casino’s,
a serried music of wealth urging them to wager more,
& on the great window a pale outline of bones.
The speaker’s ability to shift in and out of the land of the dead recalls other famous underworld visitors—Orpheus, Odysseus, Dante—only Shirley’s underworld is not a place to which the poet travels and returns. Rather, this underworld exists in and around the daylight world, haunting the speaker in the most banal of settings.
In addition to the epigraph from Rothko, many of the poems in the book bear titles from Rothko paintings, such as “Brown, Black on Maroon,” “Blue Over Orange,” and “Purple, White and Red.” Although these poems could be read as ekphrastic responses to Rothko’s work, only one of them, “Four Darks in Red” overtly references a painting: “Along the top of the canvas a band of anthracene / that is God or the absence of God / or someone’s ingenuous belief in him.” Like Rothko’s paintings, Shirley’s poems work with color emotionally, sometimes assigning a narrative to the colors, other times setting a scene infused with an emotional approach to the color. The ekphrastic poems feel haunted, too, by beauty and by its absence. Shirley’s fresh approach to color as emotion unifies the book’s voice, making it a compelling address to the Dark Familiar, the haunting presence found in everyday life.
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