CityLit Festival :: April 16, 2011

Photo by Melissa Streat

Time is such a pain in the ass. There’s writing to be done, edits to be obsessed over, submissions to read, blogs to blather into, page layouts to suck the minutes out of the day – all to be done in seclusion, all to be done in the riptide of imagination, mine or someone else's. I’m not complaining. We, I, publish a magazine and write not because it’ll make us famous or get us laid, but because we love it, because... what else are we going to do. Actually, with every step deeper into the swamp that is the literary world, anyone can see the opportunities for celebrity slip further into absurdity. But we didn’t want to be famous anyway. Right? Fuck you world. I'll do what I do, and you can pay attention or not.

This, of course, is it’s own delusion. It’s own narcissism. One born of long hours in front of a screen insisting to your computer that your words are all that matter.

For me, the remedy to draw me outside myself is the magazine. There is a world outside gazing at my navel, one with people who will speak back to you when you say: Hay, here I am. A world where other writers walk the sidewalk. One where people go to literary festivals with infants strapped to their shoulders donning hand made socks to fit their impossibly tiny feet. A world with people who scowl at flyers depicting two men in a moment of homoerotic bliss. These are not people I encounter often.

Yes I know this all sounds a bit hyperbolic, and it is – I’m writing. What writing isn’t hyperbolic? Yet, it is true I rarely get to see that species of human the Republicans love to pander to: “Real Americans” (though I’m sure the people I’ve seen recently, East Coast People, aren’t actually the people they have in mind, but it’s close). Most of my social interaction takes place drunk at bars, spouting off about, say, the piteous plight King Leer shows is latent in the human condition. And sitting here sober I can see no reason to dispute this claim of Shakespeare's; I think he was right. Though there is another side to that coin. There are people who will step out of their houses, into the chaos of terra firma, to find what little publishing houses are doing, despite the fact they are confined to a wheelchair from losing a leg to a Brown Recluse bite (a terribly sad story a woman told me with a smile on her face, a smile that, to a certain extent, proves Shakespeare wrong). 

Loosing myself in imaginings about my work, and in the imaginings others have conjured with theirs, has saved me from more than one tricky situation – or saved me from admitting to more than one tricky situation. But it is nice to step outside this bubble to see that there are people out there. Though, I guess it could also be said that those people are just contained within a slightly larger bubble, one with its own territorial divisions and special hand shakes. But, be that as it may, that larger bubble is one I rarely wander into, except when the magazine pulls me to sit still in front of a public who will come and oh-my-God talk to me. I don’t regret a second of it.

I would at this point like to thank everyone who came by the Artichoke Haircut booth at the CityLit Festival and hung-out, if only for a second. And even though I am again stuck alone behind a computer screen writing, I feel a bit richer, even by those who turned their noses up at us. Thanks.   

-By Adam Shutz

For more pics from the CityLit Festival click here.

Dionysus Reading :: March 10, 2011

  

Saralyn no like picture

Drunken Weirdos Confess and Entertain

About halfway through the process of putting this magazine together—for the second time—it sort of occurred to me that we might have made a mistake. 

We agreed early on that we would resist all forms of thematic consistency.  All of us had taken classes with a teacher who told us that her definition of “good” writing was “verbal surprise,” and we were all stuck by that in one way or another.  So, we would organize our magazine according to an inexplicably organic sense of flow, rather than adhering to genre associations or the alphabet.  Though I think we’re all too hesitant to admit it for fear of sounding pretentious, our decidedly ambiguous method has always been a point of pride. 

Once we started soliciting submissions, though, the confusion arose:

    “Submit to our magazine,” I would say.
    “What’s it called?”
    “Artichoke Haircut.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “What should I submit?”
    “Whatever you want….something good.”
    “How do I know if it’s good?”
    “Um.”
    “How do you know if it’s good?”
    “I don’t know…”

…And so on.  Eventually, it started to feel like I was talking people out of submitting.  I’d wanted to inspire writers to create something surprising or to find something surprising in their existing work, by robbing them of expectations and parameters.  In practice, the approach just came off confusing and pointless.  At least, that’s what I was thinking as I headed into the March 10th reading at Dionysus. 



It was a rainy night and I was sick.  I remember telling Adam I shouldn’t have driven, having downed a rather heavy portion of cough syrup a few hours prior to our meeting up.  Melissa was worried that no one would show up, and so was I, though I was telling her not to worry.  We stood outside of the bar trying to “heckle” people into joining us.  Our utter lack of mission, which had at one point seemed inspiring, was disturbingly transparent.  So I busied myself, arranging and rearranging tables and chairs while people trickled awkwardly in.
Once the music started (a local band called Us and Us Only), my nerves started to calm a bit.  The open-mic sheet was filling up; the sound of bottles colliding softly behind me indicated an occupied bar.  Before the band’s set was over, I remember even having to shush people with a cold stare. 

The editor readings were no surprise to me (we read each others’ work constantly), but between Saralyn’s sincerity of tone and the disproportionate level of attention given to Adam’s elusive flask of Jameson, I started to feel like people were getting a real idea of what we, as editors and as friends, were all about.  I like to think that our readings helped set the tone for the rambunctious open-mic that followed, something I found delightfully surprising.
It started off abrasive, with Natan Lefkowits’s strange/funny/assaulting poems, and continued on in an intoxicating slur, ranging from embarrassing to desperate to outright hilarious pieces by some of the best writers you’ve probably never heard of.  Somewhere around the middle of Timmy Reed’s story about a tiger-liberation farce, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of success.  I realized that night, listening to the drunken weirdos confess and entertain, that the theme of our magazine had been happening to us, that the community of writers who had decided to assemble at that bar on that Thursday night, for whatever reason, was all the consistency we would need.  It was inexplicably organic.

So…If you read at Dionysus on March 10th and have not submitted, do it now.  If you’re thinking of submitting but don’t know what to say, come out to Dionysus on May 12th and find out what you’re getting yourself into.  Reveal something to us, about you and about ourselves.  Surprise us.

-By Jon Gavazzi

Ian Humphrey... reading?

For more pictures of the reading: www.flickr.com/artichokehaircut