Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

All Media is Mainstream Media

John Winkelman

The title of this post sums up everything which is to follow.

All media sources which have internet access are mainstream. Full stop. Any story which appears virally on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram or any of the other click-bait aggregators, even if the original outlet was created only an hour earlier, is at that moment mainstream.

Post 2016 election, much hay has been made of “fake news” and how to distinguish the real from the unreal. Without falling into the rabbit hole of implicit vs. explicit bias–which is about as useful in this context as debating free will vs. determinism–let us agree that there is news which is deliberately false in its entirety, and news which is true from a certain point of view.

The news which is deliberately false is that in which the headline serves as click-bait, ESPECIALLY when the headline in question imparts no information about the content of the story. These are headlines which are in the form of a question, or are followed by a listicle. These are headlines meant to drive traffic rather than impart information. With this filter in place approximately 75% of all social media noise can immediately be ignored. For the rest, the next filter requires a little more thought.

Deliberately false news also includes everything which falls under the category of “opinion” or “editorial”. Here we can safely dismiss everything from Fox News and Breitbart, and all right-wing hatriot hives like World Net Daily, InfoWars, The Blaze, Focus on the Family, StormFront, Red State, and so forth.

This is not to say the left-leaning news and information sites don’t have similar problems, but “the liberal media”, to the extent that it ever existed, is responsible for only a tiny fraction of all noise generated by American outlets.

Oh: Fair warning–my political sensibilities fall fairly far to the left by American standards, which by rational world standards would make me ever so slightly to the left of center on most issues.

The entirety of mainstream American political though is skewed severely to the right side of the global political spectrum. Our Democrats are, in the main, to the right of where Reagan stood when we were engaged in nuclear brinkmanship with the USSR. Our Republicans are somewhere far down a slope along which lies plutocracy, corporatocracy, neo-feudalism, Dominionism and straight up reactionary sensibilities. And the Democrats are fast on their heels. Thus the center of American political conversation is substantially to the right of center. And thus any “compromise” between political parties moves the entire local spectrum farther to the right.

All of which is to say, any American media outlet which deliberately brands itself as “conservative” can be dismissed out of hand. The output of these outlets can be ignored for the same reason that fish have no words for “water.”

With these filters in place, recognize that whatever news media remains is driven first and foremost by the profit motive, and (distantly) second by journalistic integrity. This is a subtle form of regulatory capture which has always existed, but came to prominence when the Fairness Doctrine was revoked during the Reagan presidency.

So when someone on social media posts a story which includes a headline hinting of some grand conspiracy of silence, it can be safely assumed that the originator of the underlying story or meme is simply looking for attention. Or a quick buck. Not that there is much difference between the two.

Sometime soon, I’ll discuss the difference between “media” and “journalism.”

Implicit and Explicit Boundaries

John Winkelman

We now live, as some of the snarkier pundits would have it, it a post-truth world. Given the sorting of world views which led to the recent election results I can’t find a specific argument to counter that statement. However, I would call it incomplete. The world isn’t so much post-truth as post-narrative, or even post-objectivity.

All of the dominant narratives are collapsing under the weight of the democratization of information. No new visions of the future have yet sprung up. Or rather, too many visions of the future have sprung up, and no one or few of these has asserted itself sufficiently to allow the random disconnected threads of attention coalesce.

This is an oversimplified view of an extremely complex process which has been ongoing since the mobile phone – which is in reality a pocket computer – became the dominant means by which humans access information and communicate with each other. Free access to information untethers people from the narratives into which they were born and allows a new kind of tribalism based on common beliefs or aesthetics. A tribe need lo longer be bound to proximity in a three-dimensional or even a four-dimensional space. Family roles need no longer be predicated on blood relations.

What we are seeing now, and have been seeing for the past two decades, is the exploration of boundaries which we did not even know existed at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And we are discovering exactly how arbitrary were the tacit boundaries which have guided and constrained the evolution of civilizations and societies over the past ten thousand years.

On Narrative, and the Threading Thereof

John Winkelman

Many years ago I read Interface by Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George. It was a decent techno-thriller, most notable for being written in part by Neal Stephenson. In it was a brief passage explaining how the substrate of American politics had evolved over the years:

In the 1700s, politics was all about ideas. But Jefferson came up with all the good ideas. In the 1800s, it was all about character. But no one will ever have as much character as Lincoln and Lee. For much of the 1900s it was about charisma. But we no longer trust charisma because Hitler used it to kill Jews and JFK used it to get laid and send us to Vietnam…We are in the Age of Scrutiny. A public figure must withstand the scrutiny of the media…The President is the ultimate public figure and must stand up under ultimate scrutiny; he is like a man stretched out on a rack in the public square in some medieval shithole of a town, undergoing the rigors of the Inquisition. Like the medieval trial by ordeal, the Age of Scrutiny sneers at rational inquiry and debate, and presumes that mere oaths and protestations are deceptions and lies. The only way to discover the real truth is by the rite of the ordeal, which exposes the subject to such inhuman strain that any defect in his character will cause him to crack wide open, like a flawed diamond.

A few years after reading the book I had the good fortune to attend a signing event for Stephenson’s book Anathem. At that signing I attempted to ask him about this quote, and what he felt would be the next Age after Scrutiny. Of course I was struck dumb by fanboy nerves and couldn’t get the question out, so I never got my answer.

But, in the process of exploration and research and simply living my life here in modern America, I think I am sneaking up on an answer.

We are now in the Age of Narrative. Scrutiny became fractured fractal panopticon empowered by the extreme density of global information systems. The signal has become so ubiquitous and strong that the structure of stories breaks down under the weight of ten million self-referential and cross-connected media sources. Within this undifferentiated mass swim the billion threads of narratives, no one of any intrinsically greater value than any other. We are no longer bound to the stories into which we are born. We can choose to align ourselves to any narrative, or invent new narratives out of the pseudo-random bits of information in which we are immersed in every waking moment of our lives.

We are in the age of narrative because there is no objective overriding story by which we are compelled to live our lives. Both prediction and reminiscence have become democratized and made subjective, and if one story line proves inadequate we can easily align ourselves with another.

But thanks to the proliferation of both signal and noise, we are already nearing the end of the Age of Narrative and are seeing the first glimpses of a new tribalism, where the non-physical borders and boundaries of the last five thousand years become increasingly tenuous, and all allegiances will be by consent instead of by tradition.

And won’t that be an interesting time to be alive?

 

2016 Reading List

John Winkelman

The 2015 reading list was so much fun that I have decided to do it again! I am making a couple of minor changes to the criteria here. First, this list will include books I have read, books I have purchased but not read, and literary journals which I purchase and/or read, all in the 2016 calendar year. With any luck I will have an even dozen from Caffeinated Press at the end of the year. Since 2016 is a leap year this may give me just enough time to reach that goal. Why not only list books I actually read? Because feck is over-rated.

Helping to fill this list are the subscriptions I have to the catalogs of independent publishers Open Letter Books, Restless Books, And Other Stories, Deep Vellum and Horse Less Press, as well as subscriptions to The Paris Review, Granta and Zyzzyva. These should get me, at minimum, 35 things to read this year. Just shy of three a month. So without further ado, here is the list.

January (65)

  1. Zyzzyva, issue 31.3
  2. The Paris Review, issue 215
  3. Rodoreda, Mercè – War, So Much War (Open Letter Books)
  4. Anderson, Benedict – Imagined Communities
  5. Rattle, issue 50
  6. Piketty, Thomas – Capital in the Twenty-First Century
  7. Clark, Patricia – Sunday Rising
  8. Harrison, Jim – Dead Man’s Float
  9. Mecklenburg, Virginia – Modern Masters: American Abstraction at Midcentury
  10. n+1, issue 24
  11. Labbé, Carlos – Loquela (Open Letter Books)
  12. Comola, Jessica – Everything We Met Changed Form & Followed the Rest (Horse Less Press)
  13. Bettis, Christine – Burnout Paradise (Horse Less Press)
  14. Burns, Megan – Sleepwalk With Me (Horse Less Press)
  15. Midwestern Gothic, issue 20
  16. Dunes Review, issue 19.2
  17. Mieville, China – Three Moments of an Explosion (Subterranean Press, signed, number 268/400)
  18. Michigan’s Voices, issue 3.2, Spring 1963
  19. The Noble Savage, issue 1, February 1960
  20. Gulf Coast, issue 20.2, Fall 2008
  21. Bamber, Linda – Metropolitan Tang
  22. Wakoski, Diane – Argonaut Rose (Black Sparrow Press)
  23. Meltzer, David – No Eyes: Lester Young (Black Sparrow Press)
  24. Kashin, Oleg – Fardwor, Russia! (Restless Books)
  25. Velázquez, Carlos – The Cowboy Bible and Other Stories (Restless Books)
  26. Clark, Anna (ed) – A Detroit Anthology (Rust Belt Chic Press)
  27. The Tishman Review, issue 1.4
  28. Michigan Quarterly Review, issue 54.4
  29. Taylor, Jonathan Jay and Neill, Foster – The Michigan Poet
  30. O’Brien, Colleen – Spool in the Maze (New Michigan Press)
  31. Krieg, Brandon – Invasives (New Rivers Press)
  32. El-Mohtar, Amal – The Honey Month (Papaveria Press, signed)
  33. Klaver, Christian – The Adventure of the Lustrous Pearl (signed)
  34. Klaver, Christian – The Adventure of the Innsmouth Whaler (signed)
  35. Kalver, Christian – The Adventure of the Solitary Grave (signed)
  36. Klaver, Christian – Shadows Over London (signed)
  37. McClellan, Brian – Servant of the Crown (signed)
  38. McClellan, Brian – Forsworn (signed)
  39. McClellan, Brian – Murder a the Kinnen Hotel (signed)
  40. McClellan, Brian – In the Field Marshal’s Shadow (signed)
  41. Steinmetz, Ferret – Flex (signed)
  42. Steinmets, Ferret – The Flux (signed)
  43. O’Keefe, Megan – Steal the Sky (signed)
  44. Underwood, Michael R. – Genrenauts: The Shootout Solution (signed)
  45. Underwood, Michael R. – Genrenauts: The Absconded Ambassador (signed)
  46. Collins, Brigid – The Southern Dragon (signed)
  47. Bennett, Robert Jackson – City of Blades (signed)
  48. Olson, Melissa – Boundary Crossed (signed)
  49. Toyama, Kentaro – Geek Heresy (signed)
  50. Duncan, Andy and Klages, Ellen – Wakulla Springs
  51. Wilson, Kai Ashante –The Devil in America
  52. Smale, Alan – Clash of Eagles
  53. Swanson, Jay – Into the Nanten (signed)
  54. Kloos, Marko – Terms of Enlistment (signed)
  55. Brown, Pierce – Red Rising
  56. Hurley, Kameron – Mirror Empire (signed)
  57. Hurley, Kameron – God’s War (signed)
  58. Gnarr, Jon – The Pirate (Deep Vellum Publishing)
  59. The Gateway Review Issue 2.1
  60. Eastern Iowa Review, Spring/Summer 2015
  61. Tenev, Georgi – Party Headquarters (Open Letters Books)
  62. Rajaniemi, Hannu – Collected Fiction
  63. Dickinson, Seth – The Traitor Baru Cormorant
  64. Wojtaszek, Kristina – Opal (World Weaver Press, signed)
  65. Parrish, Rhonda (ed) – Scarecrow (World Weaver Press, signed)

February (30)

  1. River Styx issue 95
  2. Granta issue 132
  3. Farooqi, Musharraf Ali – Between Clay and Dust (Restless Books)
  4. Harrison, Jim – The Ancient Minstrel (signed)
  5. How Do I Begin? A Hmong-American Literary Anthology (Heyday Books)
  6. Barr, Terry – Don’t Date Baptists: and Other Warnings from My Alabama Mother (Red Dirt Press)
  7. Sternin, Grigori and Kirillina, Jelena – Ilya Repin
  8. Rucker, Rudy and Sterling, Bruce – Transreal Cyberpunk (Transreal Books)
  9. Bell, Cristalyne (ed.) Rebel Reporting: John Ross Speaks to Independent Journalists
  10. Meruane, Lina – Seeing Red (Deep Vellum)
  11. Eco, Umberto – Six Walks in the Fictional Woods
  12. Granta issue 134
  13. Estes, Phil – High Life (Horse Less Press)
  14. Olszewska, Daniela – Answering Machine (Horse Less Press)
  15. Eco, Umberto – How to Travel with a Salmon
  16. Eco, Umberto – Travels in Hyperreality
  17. Eco, Umberto – Kant and the Platypus
  18. Eco, Umberto – Misreadings
  19. Eco, Umberto – Serendipities
  20. Eco, Umberto – The Search for the Perfect Language
  21. Leckie, Ann – Ancillary Justice
  22. Tomaszewski, Z.G. – All Things Dusk
  23. Dillard, Annie – The Annie Dillard Reader
  24. Hawthorne, Nathaniel – Short Stories
  25. Melville, Herman – Great Short Works of Herman Melville
  26. Tolstoy, Leo – The Death of Ivan Illych & Other Stories
  27. Campbell, James – The Ghost Mountain Boys
  28. Least Heat-Moon, William – PrairyErth
  29. Eco, Umberto – The Prague Cemetery
  30. Eco, Umberto – Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages

March (27)

  1. Abani, Chris – The Face: Cartography of the Void (Restless Books)
  2. Aw, Tash – The Face: Strangers on a a Pier (Restless Books)
  3. Ozeki, Ruth – The Face: A Time Code (Restless Books)
  4. Lynch, Sean – The City of Your Mind (Whirlwind Press)
  5. Whirlwind, issue 5
  6. Whirlwind, issue 6
  7. Whirlwind, issue 7
  8. Sinister, Bucky – Black Hole: A Novel (Soft Skull Press)
  9. Ali, Taha Muhammad – So What (Copper Canyon Press)
  10. Hô Xuân Huong – Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong (Copper Canyon Press)
  11. The Paris Review #216
  12. Pfeijffer, Ilja Leonard – La Superba (Deep Vellum)
  13. VanderMeer, Ann (ed.) The Bestiary (Centipede Press)
  14. Chambers, James – The Engines of Sacrifice (Dark Regions Press)
  15. Meikle, William – The Plasm (Dark Regions Press)
  16. Pugmire, W.H. & Thomas, Jeffrey – Encounters with Enoch Coffin (Dark Regions Press)
  17. Sammons, Brian M & Barrass, Glynn Owen (eds.) – World War Cthulhu (Dark Regions Press)
  18. Jamneck, Lynne (ed.) – Dreams from the Witch House (Dark Regions Press)
  19. Accola, Rosie – So That Tonight I Might See (chapbook)
  20. Lake, Brandon – Something Lacking, vol. 1 (Split Filter Press, chapbook)
  21. Brace, Kristen – The Farthest Dreaming Hill (chapbook)
  22. Austin, Melissa B. – Keys (chapbook)
  23. The Bandit Zine – Issue 3, Alt Fashion and D.I.Y.
  24. The Bandit Zine – Love + Heart Break issue
  25. de Alba, Cassanda – Habitats (Horse Less Press)
  26. Schapira, Kate – Handbook for Hands That Alter as We Hold Them Out (Horse Less Press)
  27. Porter, Bill (Red Pine) – Finding Them Gone (Copper Canyon Press)

April (36)

  1. Fanning, Robert – Sheet Music (Three Bee Press, chapbook)
  2. Fanning, Robert – American Prophet (Marick Press)
  3. Zyzzyva 32.1
  4. Volodine, Antoine – Bardo or Not Bardo (Open Letter Books)
  5. Hirsch, Edward – A Poet’s Glossary
  6. Rich, Adrienne – Later Poems
  7. Pederson, Miriam – This Brief Light (Finishing Line Press, chapbook)
  8. Ferlinghetti, Lawrence – Writing Across the Landscape
  9. Custer, Nic (La©luster) – Nothing Works, Everyone Labors
  10. Secret Bully, issue 1 (chapbook)
  11. Stairs in the Middle of the Street – Creative Youth Center of Grand Rapids
  12. Under the Sun – Creative Youth Center of Grand Rapids
  13. Green a Table, Green an Elephant – Grand Rapids Creative Youth Center
  14. Pratchett, Terry and Baxter, Stephen – The Long Utopia
  15. Bat-Ami, Miriam – Two Suns in the Sky
  16. Pushcart Prize VIII (1983-1984)
  17. Stoppard, Tom – The Invention of Love
  18. Startling Sci-Fi (New Lit Salon Press)
  19. Haight, Ian – Magnolia and Lotus (White Pine Press)
  20. Best of Vine Leaves Literary Journal 2015 (Vine Leaves Press)
  21. Topology Magazine (Spring 2016 issue)
  22. Hariharan, Githa – Almost Home (Restless Books)
  23. Tin House issue 61
  24. Rastall, Janeen, et al – Heart Radicals (ELJ Publications)
  25. Magoon, Mark – The Upper Peninsula Misses You (ELJ Publications)
  26. Hamilton, Carol – Umberto Eco Lost His Gun (Pudding House Publications)
  27. Winn, Howard – Four-Picture Sequence of Desire and Love (Front Street Publishers)
  28. Bridges: Poets of Dutchess and Ulster Counties (Springtown Press)
  29. Hamilton, Carol – Such Deaths (Purple Flag)
  30. Cope, David – Turn the Wheel (The Humana Press)
  31. Big Scream, issue 51
  32. Big Scream, issue 54
  33. Hinrichsen, Dennis – Skin Music (Southern Indiana Review Press)
  34. Rappleye, Greg – Figured Dark (University of Arkansas Press)
  35. Atkins, Priscilla – The Cafe of Our Departure (Sibling Rivalry Press)
  36. Granta issue 135

May (10)

  1. Villoro, Juan – God is Round (Restless Books)
  2. Zhadan, Serhiy – Voroshilovgrad (Deep Vellum Publishing)
  3. Audin, Michèle – One Hundred Twenty-one Days (Deep Vellum Publishing)
  4. Neruda, Pablo – Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems (Copper Canyon Press)
  5. Gross, Terry – All I Did Was Ask
  6. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – Collected Novellas
  7. Barker, Clive – The Scarlet Gospels
  8. Martin, George R.R. and Dozois, Gardner – Rogues
  9. Pratchett, Terry – Raising Steam
  10. Saer, Juan Jose – The Clouds (Open Letter Books)

June (20)

  1. Gablik, Suzi – Conversations Before the End of Time
  2. Pavlov, Konstantin – Cry of a Former Dog
  3. Burrows, E.G. – Man Fishing
  4. Kooser, Ted – Local Wonders
  5. Tvedten, Brother Benet – The View From a Monastery
  6. Duras, Marguerite – Abahn Sabana David (Open Letter Books)
  7. Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala Press)
  8. Conversations with Henry Miller (University Press of Mississippi)
  9. Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (University Press of Mississippi)
  10. The Paris Review, issue 217
  11. Jodorowsky, Alejandro – Albina and the Dog-Men (Restless Books)
  12. Enjoy! (826michigan)
  13. Vigus, Rebecka – Rivers Edge (Lilac Publishing)
  14. Edwards, Zev Lawson – The New Punk
  15. Glaysher, Frederick – The Parliament of Poets (Earthrise Press)
  16. Clay, Anissa – The God Conception (Red Engine Press)
  17. Third Wednesday, Vol. IX, No. 2
  18. Reynolds, Alastair – Beyond the Aquila Rift (Subterranean Press)
  19. Moon, Jung Young – Vaseline Buddha (Deep Vellum)
  20. Laroui, Fouad – The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers (Deep Vellum)

July (12)

  1. Klougart, Josefine – One of Us Is Sleeping (Open Letter Books)
  2. Chu, Wesley – Time Siege
  3. Yoss (Gomez, Jose Miguel Sanchez) – Super Extra Grande (Restless Books)
  4. Colasacco, John – Two Teenagers (Horse Less Press)
  5. Jordan, Ahmunet Jessica – Black and Blue Prints
  6. Granta 136
  7. Boullosa, Carmen – Before (Open Letter Books)
  8. Devi, Ananda – Eve Out of Her Ruins (Deep Vellum)
  9. Lawrence, Stephon – Nervs (Horse Less Press)
  10. Miller, Frank – 300
  11. McGuane, Thomas – Gallatin Canyon
  12. Salter, James – All That Is

August (17)

  1. Saccomanno, Guillermo – Gesell Dome (Open Letter Books)
  2. Poetry (July/August 2016)
  3. Gaiman, Neil – The View From the Cheap Seats
  4. Year’s Best Science Fiction #32
  5. New American Writing #34
  6. Amezcua, Eloisa – On Not Screaming (Horse Less Press)
  7. De Rojas, Agustin – The Year 200 (Restless Books)
  8. Volksmode 2014 (Issue Press)
  9. Campbell, Anna – Ever Your Friend (Issue Press)
  10. Curry, Erin – Poems to the Sea (Issue Press)
  11. Johnson, Cathy G – Thank God, I Am In Love (Issue Press)
  12. Wietor, George – Past Lives (Issue Press)
  13. Batt, J. Daniel – Keaghan in the Tales of Dreamside (Story Jitsu)
  14. Genius Loci – Tales of the Spirit of Place (Ragnarok Publications)
  15. Eastern Iowa Review issue 2
  16. Vuong, Ocean – Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press)
  17. Zyzzyva #107

September (21)

  1. Neuman, Andres – How to Travel Without Seeing (Restless Books)
  2. Stephenson, Neal – The Diamond Age (Subterranean Press; signed – 292 of 500)
  3. Benford, Gregory – The Best of Gregory Benford (Subterranean Press)
  4. McCammon, Robert – Blue World (Subterranean Press)
  5. Chu, Wesley – The Days of Tao (Subterranean Press; signed – 321 of 1000)
  6. Kuznia, Yanni (ed.) – A Fantasy Medley II (Subterranean Press)
  7. Powers, Tim – Down and Out In Purgatory (Subterranean Press)
  8. Lansdale, Joe and Lansdale, Kasey – The Case of the Bleeding Wall (Subterranean Press; signed – 278 of 500)
  9. Armstrong, Kelley – Driven (Subterranean Press; signed – 502 of 1000)
  10. Armstrong, Kelley – Forsaken (Subterranean Press; signed – 372 of 1000)
  11. Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
  12. Levy, Ariel (ed.) – The Best American Essays 2015
  13. N+1 #26
  14. Pagano, Emmanuelle – Trysting (&  Other Stories)
  15. Raud, Rein – The Brother (Open Letter Books)
  16. The Paris Review #218
  17. Browne, Colin – I Had an Interesting French Artist to Visit Me This Summer (Figure 1 Publishing)
  18. Yahgulanaas, Michael Nicoll – Red – A Haida Manga
  19. Scott, Walter – Wendy (Koyama Press)
  20. Bell, Marc – Stroppy (Drawn & Quarterly Press)
  21. Bernard, Bruce (ed.) – Vincent by Himself

October (9)

  1. Hines, Jim – Libriomancer
  2. Allfrey, Ellah Wakatama – Africa 39: New Writing from Africa South of the Sahara
  3. Passages: Africa (PEN America)
  4. Glossolalia Issue 2 (PEN America)
  5. Suah, Bae – A Greater Music (Open Letter Books)
  6. Montes, Lara Mimosa – The Somnambulist (Horse Less Press)
  7. Powell, AJ – Grayson Rising (Caffeinated Press)
  8. Brewed Awakenings II (Caffeinated Press)
  9. Joshi, S.T. (ed) – Black Wings V (PS Publishing)

November (24)

  1. Fonseca, Carlos – Colonel Lagrimas (Restless Books)
  2. Sanchez-Andrade, Christina – The Winterlings (Restless Books)
  3. Spencer, Cynthia – Girl Tramp (Horse Less Press)
  4. Danos, Stephen – Missing Slides (Horse Less Press)
  5. Okorafor, Nnedi – The Book of Phoenix
  6. Geiger, Arno – The Old King In His Exile (& Other Stories)
  7. Loeb, Paul Rogat – The Impossible Will Take a Little While
  8. Byatt, A.S. – Babel Tower
  9. Earley, Tim – Linthead Stomp (Horse Less Press)
  10. Jimenez, Claudia Salazar – Blood of the Dawn (Deep Vellum Publishing)
  11. Jaffe, Noemi – What are the Blind Men Dreaming? (Deep Vellum Publishing)
  12. Rabasa, Eduardo – A Zero-Sum Game (Deep Vellum Publishing)
  13. Poetry magazine CCIX:2 November 2016
  14. Lehman, David (ed.) – Best American Poetry 2016
  15. Burton, Richard Francis (trans.) – Tales from the Arabian Nights
  16. Millidge, Gary Spencer – Alan Moore: Storyteller
  17. Campbell, Hayley – The Art of Neil Gaiman
  18. Zaleski, Philip and Zaleski, Carol – The Fellowship
  19. Crowley, John – The Chemical Wedding by Christian Rosencruetz (Small Beer Press)
  20. Crowley, John – Lord Byron’s Novel
  21. Mondrup, Iben – Justine (Open Letter Books)
  22. Davis, Jean – Sahmara
  23. Kaag, John – American Philosophy
  24. Pushkin, Alexander – Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin

December (41)

  1. Ellis, Warren – Transmetropolitan 1: Back on the Street
  2. Ellis, Warren – Transmetropolitan 2: Lust for Life
  3. Ellis, Warren – Transmetropolitan 3: Year of the Bastard
  4. Ellis, Warren – Transmetropolitan 4: The New Scum
  5. Ellis, Warren – Transmetropolitan 5: Lonely City
  6. Ellis, Warren – Transmetropolitan 6: Gouge Away
  7. Ellis, Warren – Transmetropolitan 7: Spider’s Thrash
  8. Ellis, Warren – Transmetropolitan 8: Dirge
  9. Ellis, Warren – Transmetropolitan 9: The Cure
  10. Ellis, Warren – Transmetropolitan 10: One More Time
  11. Pratchett, Terry – Discworld Companion
  12. Zyzzyva #108
  13. Tea, Michelle – Black Wave (And Other Stories)
  14. Calvino, Italo – If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler
  15. Calvino, Italo – Invisible Cities
  16. Hines, Jim C. – Codex Born
  17. Hines, Jim C. – Unbound
  18. Borges, Jorge Luis – Selected Non-fictions
  19. Paris Review #219
  20. Eir, Oddny – Land of Love and Ruins (Restless Books)
  21. Granta #137
  22. Shah, Bullhe – Sufi Lyrics
  23. Cardoso, Lucio – Chronicle of the Murdered House (Open Letter Books)
  24. Chambers, Robert W. – The King in Yellow (Book Revivals Press)
  25. Reppion, John (ed.) – Spirits of Place (Daily Grail Publishing)
  26. Dillard, Annie – The Abundance
  27. Marshall, Tim – Prisoners of Geography
  28. Marx, Karl – Das Kapital
  29. Bakunin, Mikhail – God and the State
  30. Kropotkin, Peter – Anarchism
  31. Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam – Manufacturing Consent
  32. Hedges, Chris – Wages of Rebellion
  33. Hedges, Chris – American Fascists
  34. Hedges, Chris and Sacco, Joe – Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
  35. Hedges, Chris – Empire of Illusion
  36. Ismailov, Hamid – The Underground (Restless Books)
  37. Goff, Nichole – Aluminum Necropolis (Horse Less Press)
  38. Gurton-Wachter, Anna – Blank Blank Blues (Horse Less Press)
  39. Snyder, Gary – The Great Clod
  40. Coates, Ta-Nehisi – Between the World and Me
  41. Diaz, Junot – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

On This, the Day of My Journal’s Editing.

John Winkelman

So here I am, sitting in the Lyon Street Cafe for the first time in several weeks, having just finished listing my tasks for my first completely open Sunday in months. To put it gently, Sunday isn’t open any more. The duties and needs of Caffeinated Press in general, and The 3288 Review in particular, have eaten up all of that nebulous part of my life I used to call “free time”. Am I exhausted? Yes. Is it worth it? ABSOLUTELY!

The first and most important consideration is that never have I had so much good writing at my disposal.

At ConFusion 2015, in one of the panels (“Staying Sane While Sluicing Through Slush“) a panelist pointed out that submission quality falls along a bell curve, with the majority being “competent” – meaning well written, professional, etc., but not exceptional. In my time at Caffeinated Press I have vetted something over four hundred written works- long, short, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Few of them were terrible. They didn’t get published. Few were extraordinary. They DID get published. I don’t know how submissions fall out in the rest of the industry, but the bell curve of the work we receive leans toward the high end which, given the amount of work we receive, help to keep us from succumbing to feelings of tedium, ennui, etc.

My active involvement at CafPress is just about exactly a year old. In that time I have picked up a surprising number of skillsets, both primary and ancillary. Editing, obviously. An eye toward story structure. A renewed appreciation of poetry. A powerful ability to metabolize coffee. All important skills for an editor.

I also, for the first time since my days at Schuler Books and Music, have a big-picture view of what’s going on in the publishing world. Most is not at all surprising. The big guys are getting bigger, the little guys are struggling. So it goes. Small presses are run by several people working part-time, or one person doing the work of three and several people working part time. This is the way of the world now.

But this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Small presses are more nimble, more able to take chances with the innovative and the avant-garde. Small presses are not held captive by shareholders whims. But being small enough to fit a niche often means being small enough to fall through the cracks. Thus small presses learn to innovate.

One of my favorite (and more personally expensive) discoveries of the past few months is that several small presses offer subscriptions to their catalogs. For a nominal price, you will receive roughly a book a month for a year. This is not the old book club model of the pre-Amazon days; this is more an investment in the voice and taste of a small group of people who turn out excellent product. My first subscription was to Open Letter Books, quickly followed by Restless Books, Deep Vellum, and several others. All excellent publishers, and all beautiful books. I will explore this idea further in an upcoming blog post.

Suffice to say, I will not soon run out of excellent reading material.

Subscribing to Book Publishers

John Winkelman

A list of 50 book publishers who offer subscriptions to their catalogs. This list may or may not be updated regularly. I have subscriptions to Open Letter Books, Restless Books, And Other Stories, Deep Vellum and Horse Less Press, and I love every one of them!

They Grow Up So Quickly

John Winkelman

The 3288 Review, vol. 1 issue 1

It’s here. It has landed. The first issue of The 3288 Review is out and available for purchase. How do I feel about this? Hmm…let me think…

BOOYAH!!!

…or words to that effect.

I took a personal day on Friday so I would have a a full four-day weekend. Rolled into the Caffeinated Press offices around 11:00am, and right at the stroke of noon UPS arrived with five boxes full of magazines. 100 copies of the inaugural issue. They are beautiful! Three full months of hard work, long days, late nights, and learning the Ten Great Skills (page layout, InDesign, etc) and the Thousand Minor Skills (talking to people, avoiding Papyrus and Comic Sans, etc).

It has all paid off! Responses from the viewing public are enthusiastic and orders are starting to roll in. Close to half of the initial print run are already spoken for. With any luck we will need to place another order by the end of the week.

In the other parts of my life, the martial arts class has recently been ascendant. On August 11 I and my friend and classmate Rick loaded bags into a rented van and drove Master Lee and his wife and his visitors from Vietnam to see the Niagara Falls (Canadian side). It was a great trip! We heard several stories of what class was like back in The Day in Saigon. Rick reminisced about his trips to New York and back, when he would pull up to the falls and sleep for a couple of hours before continuing the drive.

I have never been to the Falls. They are amazing! Huge and powerful and the rumble starts in the feet and rises up through the viscera and makes everything seem just the slightest bit out of focus. At one point the walkway overlooks the edge of the falls and you can look straight down the cataract to the lower river. Here I felt a strong pull, like the falling water was calling to the 60% of me which is also water. After five minutes staring at falling water, everything else I looked at seemed to rise slightly.

It Gives a Lovely Light

John Winkelman

Hello, my friends and foes. Wow, what a summer this has been. A series of semi-connected data points follow.

Caffeinated Press

The new office of Caffeinated Press feels like an office! I work the day job from there a couple of days a week, next to an open window serenaded by songbirds in Ken-O-Sha Park and traffic accidents at the intersection of Kalamazoo Ave and 32nd Street. The first issue of The 3288 Review is on track to hit the shelves by the end of the month. Half a dozen books creep ever-closer to production. We have several seminars on the calendar, centered on the getting published side of the writing process. Everyone is exhausted, but excited. Once we have a catalog we can register with the larger professional organizations and that will, we expect, open the flood-gates of submissions. I think I have read around 300,000 words of unpublished manuscripts and poetry over the past six months. 300,000 words in six months isn’t really all that much, but for me usually those words have other peoples’ eye-prints all over them. Thus I feel a certain responsibility to those words.

Martial Arts

Our annual Sifu Day celebration took place yesterday downtown. Loads and loads of food, an iron shirt demonstration, and half an hour of hamming it up with posed photos. We are blessed by the presence of some of Master Lee’s students from Saigon – the same people who showed Rick and I the sights in Vietnam this past October. In a couple of days Rick and I will travel with the whole lot of them on an overnight trip to Niagara Falls.

I am embarrassingly far behind in posting photos of the previous year or so of class events. Once the Caffeinated Press workload dies down I will spend a long weekend getting caught up.

Work

As of today I am off of the crazy project which kept me burning the midnight oil for most of July. All of the extra time I hoped to have during the hiatus from the iron shirt class was co-opted by the day job. Thus the upcoming burning the midnight oil for CafPress. On the positive side, I learned a lot more about advanced Backbone/Marionette programming techniques. This can only help me going forward, if I ever work on another Backbone project.

Life

Still making plans for upgrades to my house, now that I have paid off the mortgage. The bank account is rebuilding more slowly than expected because of the amount of cash I invest in CafPress. Ah, the life of the startup entrepreneur. Practically, all that means is that the work which would have happened in the autumn will now happen in spring 2016, and spring 2016 work will now happen in autumn 2016. Big expensive projects over long time spans, and I want it all to happen NOW.

The Farmer’s Market is at its peak. Almost everything in the world is in season right now. Two weeks ago I was in during the magic time when strawberries, blueberries and sweet cherries were all ripe. It’s difficult to gain weight on a vegetarian diet, but during times like these it is possible, and also delicious.

Random Stuff

I haven’t had a lot of time for entertainment and amusements this summer. Based on a conversation with Jack Ridl I picked up Mile Marker Zero, the story of The Scene in Key West just after Hemingway’s time there. A week ago I watched Paris at Midnight, Woody Allen’s beautiful exploration of wistfulness and acceptance and the literary scene in the Paris of the 1920s (which also involved Hemingway). There’s a meditation to be written on the confluence of these two experiences.

And now off to work on the magazine. These pages won’t write themselves.

Six Months Later

John Winkelman

Dawn came early this morning, as it always does at the beginning of July. And even moreso the day after Independence Day. I live in a mostly quiet neighborhood, aside from one house full of renters who refuse to acknowledge that they live in the middle of the city, and not out in the sticks. Therefore their private lives spill out into the public domain several times a week. I have the GRPD non-emergency number on speed dial. Three times in the past week I have started a conversation with “HiI I’d like to register a noise complaint, and it isn’t about fireworks.” It’s fun to hear the officers on the other end of the phone mentally shift gears.

I’ve grown used to being sleep-deprived at this time of year. The long holiday weekend simply means I don’t need to drag myself to work, but it also means neither does anyone else, so I get three days of regulated apocalypse instead of the usual two. Not that I have the moral high ground to complain too loudly about neighbors with bottle rockets, but even as a dumb kid I had the sense to not shoot them directly at other houses and cars. And the neighbors with the fireworks aren’t dumb kids; they’re just not very good at being neighbors.

Caffeinated Press

We have furniture! Thanks to some connections at PeopleDesign, and a Friday full of vigorous exercise, the Caffeinated Press offices (3167 Kalamazoo Ave SE, Suite 104) have tables, chairs and storage space. Perfect timing, too, for the upcoming slew of meetings, both internal and author-facing. Brewed Awakenings II is taking shape, as is the first issue of The 3288 Review. I am taking a crash course in InDesign, page layout and typography, assisted ably by some exceptionally talented people who make me feel old and slow. As things stand at the moment, it looks like we will publish six book and two issues of the journal before the end of 2015.

And that ain’t bad at all.

Somedays

John Winkelman

Some days, to quote Emo Philips, it’s simply not worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.

Sunday morning at the Lyon Street Cafe, just east of downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. We are in a small break between waves of storms rolling through the region. The first hit around three o’clock this morning. I know this because I was awake at the time thanks to a barking (okay, more like “howling”) dog just across the way. The air is warm and quite humid and smells of green things. The chestnut trees are covered with potent flowers and the bakery next door smells like heaven.

At this moment, as the city wakes up, I could imagine myself in New Orleans.

Time is ticking down for several writing-related projects. The selection process for the contents of the next volume of Brewed Awakenings begins today. We have scores of stories to vet in an excitingly short amount of time. Next, we have roughly two weeks until the submission deadline for the inaugural issue of The 3288 Review. We have already had several excellent submissions, but we have room for many more.

I have never before been involved with a startup company. The work is plentiful and exhausting, and sometimes borders on overwhelming. At the same time, the energy, vision and optimism more than makes up for any feelings of overwork or intimidation at the size of what we are trying to accomplish. I love doing what I do.