Spreading the Word
We’re pleased to announce that our friend and recent contributor Erika Meitner is this week’s featured poet at Anti-.
We’re pleased to announce that our friend and recent contributor Erika Meitner is this week’s featured poet at Anti-.
With Conte 5.2 hot off the presses, I wanted to share yet another treat: Poets’ Quarterly just published my recent interview with William Hathaway, a friend and former Conte contributor. Enjoy!
reaching up ever so casually to sliiiide back that release date. We’ll go live with our twelfth issue on January 31st.
Twelfth. That was just more difficult to type than is really warranted, I think. Not really a very useful word. A little hung up on itself if you ask me, and a very unflattering intestinal scramble of consonants at the end there. I guess some utility for discussing eggs or overtime, although truthfully, not that much! Yeah, but what has twelfth ever done, maliciously, to you, you say. Damn. I didn’t mean for this paragraph to become so accusatory. Now you made feel a little bit like an asshole for bringing it up.
To all our readers, contributors, and friends, we here at Conte wish you a Happy New Year!
We are currently completing issue 5.2 slated for publication late January (it’s our twelfth!), so if you’ve submitted work for this issue, you can expect to hear from us presently.
Happy Hanukkah. That comes about 3 days late. I said it to you before I said it to my grandparents. That’s how horrible I am. Are you serious? It’s like December…it’s pretty much about to almost be January.
Well, you guys, I feel like a seagull because of my inbox. See, my inbox has a folder that all the (properly addressed) submissions go into due to computer magic. See, seagulls, if you have never lived in or near a temperate coastal area, are like semi-vicious winged rats that congregate anywhere they can find a place where sea and land meet, and hold languid symposiums about how to spread poop. One thing you can do with them – one thing I’ve never done with them, but it’s commonly believed by slightly angry people who sometimes need a mental image to vent with such as myself that you can do with seagulls – is feed them alka-seltzer. Like rats, they eat anything they can stuff in their greedy little avian gullets (for the purpose of making poop), such as plastic rings from six-packs (that’s tragic), or fizzy white medicinal tablets (if you’re a sick bastard unlike me, I’m just bad to old people). When they eat alka-seltzer, it reacts with their inherently disagreeable seagull nature, and they explode. I don’t want you to hurt any seagulls, but I do want you to understand that my inbox is exploding. On behalf of all seagulls I say thank you, and give me a couple days, I really am getting back to you very soon. I also want you to be nice to your grandparents.
In the meantime, I’m making up for not having shared more lately by sharing something very good. I love short fiction – short short fiction, preferably when it’s funny but also sort of tragically insightful, as long as it makes me laugh. Some people call it flash fiction. I generally don’t care for that name because it makes it sound like the author just wrote something very quick and shot it off. If you’re a genius, this is a great way to write, and you should send me your so-called ‘flash fiction’ – otherwise this is a very terrible method for doing anything, and please don’t send it to me by the way. How do you know if you’re a genius? Are you better than Bob Powers? Bob Powers writes probably the best short stuff I’ve read on the interwebs. Some time ago his Girls Are Pretty blog came back. Nobody told me. Man you cannot imagine how angry I am about that. It puts me way above the level of slightly angry that I claimed in the last paragraph. But if you don’t know about GAP, then you can go here and be told what to do.
The reason I even checked up on Mr. Powers was because someone linked me to this other great thing, Tom Oatmeal. If you write this well without even looking, then please do send something to us. Actually if you have to look that’s OK too. If you don’t write that well (either with or without looking), then you can join my club. It’s called the Not Geniuses, Not Hilarious, but We Read GAP-and-TO club. Joining is hard at the moment, but there might be stickers later.
Though the holiday season is the most hectic time of year for all of us, I nonetheless wanted to share an exciting poetics blog I recently discovered called How a Poem Happens that is quickly becoming one of the best poetry sites online. Edited by Virginia poet Brian Brodeur, the weekly updates feature a sample poem by a prominent American poet and a basic set of interview questions that often lead to surprising answers about craft, revision, and inspiration. Harvey Shapiro, Kathryn Stripling Byer, and Mark Halliday are the most recent among an impressive roster of contributors. So if you get a spare moment among the hussle and bustle, check it out!
It has always struck me as peculiar that Americans (myself included) celebrate Halloween—a holiday that has grown exceedingly morbid and ghoulish—with candy, costumes, and whimsical delight when, at its very core, it is a holiday centered on death. I’ll spare us all the history lesson, as there are several cultural variables that have led us to this odd state of affairs where kindergarteners dress as skeletons and go door-to-door begging strangers for chocolate. Among all the rubber spiders and vinyl Spiderman outfits, though, I’ve caught myself meditating on the work of Thomas James and Liam Rector, two poets whose very lives were haunted, and whose writings don’t garner nearly the attention they deserve.
A long time ago I read a short story which shouldn’t really have been any good. It was called "The Flesh Man," and read with a certain perspective, it probably qualifies as basically pornography with a side of brooding pulp machismo. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone that interpretation, at least. The story’s not really that shocking, although certainly filthy, with a single-minded and irredeemable protagonist like a mongrel Doc Savage who lost his heroing years to a string of Bangkok whorehouses. That’s not entirely accurate because the story is set in Mexico, but you get the idea.
The first time I read it I didn’t think it was going anywhere, which is no reason not to sit through a couple pages of sex and murder – which is good, because about three quarters in something happened that made everything snap into place like a rewinding tape measure. I understood that every grimy gear turned exactly in time, like a music box dredged from the muck and human sewage at the bottom of the Hudson which, when activated, plays Frank Zappa. The premise was unremarkable and the execution almost deliberately off-putting, but when I got it, the mastery of its construction was dazzling. I try to remember that story when I read something that doesn’t snag me at first blush, because it reminds me that even things that shouldn’t work, that logically should be terrible, are sometimes, inexplicably, really great.
This is the spirit with which I recommend Charles Stross’s Missile Gap. The elements at work – premise, setting, characters, everything really – it’s like they’re designed to kill the story before it ever starts. Even the things that seem pretty awesome under independent consideration, like Yuri Gagarin flying a mammoth ekranoplan over an alien ocean through a lightning storm, shouldn’t work in context. Any context. The story is a conspiracy against itself, like a baby made completely of cancer. The crazy thing is how the cancer baby doesn’t just not die, it grows up to have superpowers. Loved it.
That being David Bellantoni – his story Foreplay, which you may remember from the May ’07 issue, got quite a reception as a one-act performance during the Network One Act Festival in NYC this past March. We’re told that after winning awards at the festival, the play earned a reading at the New York Theater Workshop, and was then invited to participate in Lower East Side Festival of The Arts on Memorial Day Weekend. So, awesome. Kudos David!
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