Puck

The last page of every ink-on-paper issue of Harper’s (one of the three or four best magazines in English) is dedicated to a roundup of the month’s weird and bizarre news. The column (or whatever it is, as it defies genre and classification) amounts to a poem. I’m not sure folks realize, though, that Harper’s kicks out a Weekly Review via email, and you don’t even have to be a subscriber to get it. You can subscribe by sending an email here, or by going here and looking for the little box with a Go button next to it. Here’s a snip from this week’s Review:

Russian President Dmitri Medvedev warned Obama against continuing Bush’s plans for missile-defense systems in Eastern Europe and threatened to move short-range missiles into the Baltic near Poland and “to neutralize, when necessary” American installations there, but Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi insisted, “I don’t see problems for Medvedev to establish good relations with Obama who is also handsome, young, and suntanned.” The Secret Service revealed that a spike in death threats against the Obama family coincided with Sarah Palin’s attacks against Obama’s patriotism in the final weeks of the campaign, and McCain campaign insiders suggested that Palin lacked rudimentary understanding of civics and geography. “Those guys,” Palin said, “are jerks.”

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Visiting with writer Nisi Shawl a couple weeks ago, I asked her what she was working on. Among other projects, she mentioned she was working on a review of Neal Stephenson’s forthcoming novel, Anathem. That got my wild up, as I’m a big fan, so she let me peruse her advance copy. Tucked in was the usual PR stuff from the publisher, in this case a letter from Stephenson’s publicist, Jack Womack.

“The Jack Womack?” I asked. “Yes,” said Nisi. “He’s Gibson’s publicist, too.”

I devoured Womack’s novels in the ’90s as they were published. I’ve been waiting for a new one for quite a while now. Nisi said she was afraid I might have to wait quite a while longer as, for some reason, his novels didn’t sell, so he wasn’t publishing. He’s publicizing. WTF? Continue Reading »

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Andrew Macrae, an Australian writer and artist, wrote to say that although he lives

a long way from the centres of cultural production in the northern hemisphere… maybe there’s something of interest in an antipodean perspective.

Oh my. The man knows how to write a pitch to snare an Irrepressible, no?

So check out his typewriter art (I suspect Photoshop or Illustrator, not an “actual” [or “Real,” as Andrew says below] typewriter, but I could easily be wrong; and don’t get me wrong: I respect and admire mimicry): Acid Head War. The thing that grabs me about Macrae’s pieces is the bridge between the dot matrix and the typewriter. All you can see here is the dot matrix; to get the typewriter detail, you need to visit Acid Head War.

What we’ve got here is the translation of photographs into typewriter art-via an algorithm which offers, I can only imagine, a good deal of user control. (Indeed, I suspect that each character is handpecked, but I’m a Romantic.) I have no idea of how many languages Andrew speaks (other than an obvious fluency with English, that is), but translation–or anyway, the engineer’s strategy of bridging–is clearly a forte. In that regard, check out Ordinary Magic, “the ecstasy of everyday things,” a minimalist WordPress blog in action. Continue Reading »

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I just got mail from a fella in Spain name of Abel. He writes that he’s working on a dissertation on the great (if that’s where your boat floats) American writer, Charles Bukowski.

Abel wrote to ask if I, in the persona of Puck et alia, had ever published Buk.

Nay, says I, tho I was once published on a facing page with a poem in a short-lived zine called 10,000 Flies Can’t Be Wrong. Shall I send you a copy of the Bukowski poem? I asked.

Please, replied Abel, and supplied further needs that convince me he’s for real. (There wasn’t any real doubt anyway; who the hell is going to put Puck and Bukowski together and think, What a perfect mind fuck I could play on this guy!?) Here’s part of Abel’s slightly less than colloquial but perfectly rendered reply:

For bibliographical reasons, I would need copies of the Bukowski content as well as copies of the cover and masthead pages. Of course, if you have any spare issue that you can send or sell to me, I would appreciate it. I have to wade through tons of paper to find things here, while mags and books are tidily kept in the bookcase. If that’s not possible, then scan/xeroxes will do.

Actually, most of my books and zines from that era are untidily shoved in boxes hiding under other boxes in the back of a closet, but I get Abel’s point.

Which is, help me out if you can. I’m going to go rooting through old zines and have myself a walk down memory lane, digging for that brief brush with fame when I, your humble blogger, was published not just between the same covers but on the facing page from the bodacious Buk.

So I thought I’d throw the word out to you, the old contributors to my various literary outings, and others: let’s help this guy out. He’s working on a detailed bibliography of Buk’s zine publications, among other things, and that shit is ephemeral as hell. Hard to find, hard to pin down. (Abel said my explanation of my publishing history was “confusing.” Yeah. Well. How many librarians have said that to me? Let me count the leaves.)

Contact Abel (cirereta AT telefonica DOT net) before he graduates, gets a tenure-track job, and has to start writing some serious bullshit.

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A few facts (some may be made up) about Permeable Press.

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I’m reviving Puck, which I published as an ink-on-paper magazine back in the 1990s when there were still trees. I’m looking for a few good contributors. Interested?

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A draft of the new Creative Commons license has just been published. According to bOING bOING, in its first 3.5 years, 160,000,000 works were released under the license.

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Defective by Design has a great page listing a number of online vendors of music, books and video, all of which are DRM-free. Please support these business models!

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“Unbounded Freedom by Rosemary Bechler is a new publication from Counterpoint to be launched in partnership with the London Book Fair on 29 September 2006.” The report is free, of course, because it’s under a Creative Commons license. Cool. Meanwhile, the British Library has published a Manifesto calling for the simplification of copyright and IP law in the digital age, as well as for reasonable and restrained statutory limitations.

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Noted small-press publisher David Memmott has resurrected his much-loved press, Wordcraft of Oregon, and has a gorgeous new web site.

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