16 July 2008

some litrachure stuff

it's been a long while since i've updated this thing with anything literary.
well, here goes.

the inaugural issue of nibble arrive in my mailbox today, and it's a fabulous little journal. nibble, published by Jeff Fleming (of CannedPhlegm and Cranial Tempest of yore) out of Oakland, is a journal of short poems. i'm a huge fan and big proponent of the short poem, so this journal was right up my alley. many great poems lie between the pages of this magazine, including one by yours truly. :) pick up an issue or, better yet, support them with a subscription.

and that's it.
oh wait, i have a submission out to Nerve Cowboy, but that's about all. it goes slow here.

i picked up a new typewriter as my other two were shot and repairing them ain't cheap. so, i bought a new one (and by "new" i mean i bought in on eBay and it's new to me). it works great and hopefully will for a long while. maybe this will spark a new era in my writing: one in which i actually write. i'll call it my productive period.

what else?
i just finished A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. my wife read it years ago and said i would like it. i put in on my pile and finally got to it. good book. i understand he made up some shit, some of which were important plot points, but fuck it. yeah, so what, it's an alleged "memoir" but fuck it. we all make shit up, and we have since writing began. do we truly believe Herodotus's history of the ancient land? so, he embellished. fuck it. whatever. it's an entertaining read. the thing that got to me more than the fabrications were the odd stylistic choices in his writing: the strange, misplaced "whoms"...the random capitalizations...the run-on sentences, the need to detail every part of the action (he opened the car door and took out his keys and sat down on the seat and inserted the key and started the car and depressed the accelerator and drove off), and the lack of quotations for speech. all that shit pissed me off more than the outright lies. you had to know reading it that this shit was false, right?

anyhow. whatever. good book. next up: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. another book my wife recommended. hmmm...