Today, we have a story for you that can only be described in one word: "relentless."



I don't know who Shane Castle is. I don't WANT to know who Shane Castle is. Maybe he is some hard-up dude living in a trailer somewhere, praying to a revolver, in and out of prison, spiral tattoos up both arms to hide the needle tracks.



Maybe he is a cynical, seventy-year-old language poet who hangs out in a small-town Starbucks, watching the lives of the children around him and trying to understand.



Whatever the truth is, his fiction is top notch, the kind of fiction that you can't really write, you have to "bleed." His story is rude, undefendable, and too excellent to ignore. Maybe it will make you mad. We are publishing it because we have no choice, though if there were some kind of "story penitentiary," that's where we would send it instead.



But when a story like this shows up in your "submissions queue," you ask no questions. You treat it like contraband.



You don't want to know where it came from. You nod, staring at the floor so no one can see the fear in your eyes. You do a grammar edit, and then put it out there for the world to deal with, urging people not to worry about how Adam lost his eye, but to focus instead on that star, that goddamn star...

Posted by miracle on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:48:08 -0500 -- permanent link

This fall, CVS will begin selling cheap-ass generic ereaders in their stores.

This moves ereaders from the realm of "like magic" to the realm of "like a calculator." This happened in three years.

Soon there will be one of these devices in the kitchen drawer of every home in America, right beside a bunch of pencils, rubber bands, thumbtacks, unpaid bills, and old flash drives.



No big deal.


***


Alright, so there is information to which you want permanent, roving, stable access. When you fall asleep at night, you want to believe that this information is still there somewhere, the same way that you want to believe that somewhere in the world there is a library that has a copy of every book ever published, and this library is guarded by a sacred order of furious library monks who have read every book ever written about guarding, killing, and firefighting.

You want this information to be protected and inviolable, because it is AS IMPORTANT to understand the context of this information (how people in the past consumed and assimilated it) as it is to consume it in the present.

You want to see the same copy of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" that Benjamin Franklin saw. You don't want this copy of "Common Sense" to suddenly contain postulates that would lead people to question the idea of a free press, allowing opportunistic tyrants to monkey with the chain of ideas in order to provide themselves with justification for further acts of malice. You want "Common Sense" to stay "Common Sense," and not suddenly lose whole paragraphs or gain new chapters with names like "However, In The Event of An Internet, Everything Changes, Obviously"



Information that falls into this category includes novels, histories, math treatises, political records, and everything that was written down, published, and saved from destruction before 1994, which was the year that the band "Nine Inch Nails" released the album "The Downward Spiral," and is as good of a year as any to date the beginning of the modern information age.

This sort of information isn't just babble and vomit. It has survived purges, boredom, and political squabble because it is timeless and wise, or is at least really, really fucking entertaining. This sort of information has a personality and has proved that it will fight its own battles. It has managed, time and again, to worm its way into people's hearts and win people over, convincing them to defend and propagate it.

Let's call this type of important, formal, self-defending information "sacremonia."

We all agree that "sacremonia" is sacred and must be protected from harm or corruption as we slowly move it from ink and paper into the electronic age.

Never mind whether or not you think massive multinational corporations like Google are the best possible shepherds of our priceless "sacremonia." We may disagree on who should be responsible for its upkeep, display, and protection, but we all agree that SOMEBODY should do this job.

Our relationship to "sacremonia" is nothing at all like our relationship to "fulp."

"Sacremonia" is to "fulp" as diamonds are to people talking about diamonds in an alley. Fulp is the messy agglomeration of constantly changing ideas and opinions that form around mental pushpins in the global bulletin board. Not even "fulp" producers care very much about the "fulp" they produce.

"Fulp" is not at all interesting as a permanent source of contextual data. "Fulp" is only interesting in the moment. "Fulp" was once known as private conversation and private correspondence, before we became able to make all of our private conversation and private correspondence public.



The internet was invented to produce and collate "fulp," which is why it seems strange when people try to publish "sacremonia" on the internet. It seems like somebody is simply being pompous and long-winded when they try and put "sacremonia" where "fulp" should be.

Before the internet, "fulp" was only saved if it was "fulp" produced by someone very skilled at also producing "sacremonia." However, now that we can collect both with equal ease, we are now confronted with a huge and annoying problem that we have not effectively solved yet.

Computers cannot tell the difference between "fulp" and "sacremonia." And by storing our "fulp" alongside our "sacremonia," we run the risk of our "sacremonia" being degraded, being altered, and disappearing due to lack of interest or upkeep. We WANT "fulp" to be malleable and plastic. That is the fun of "fulp." We can do things to "fulp" that we would never dream of doing to our precious "sacremonia." But we want there to be a gulf between these two types of information, otherwise there is no fun at all.

This is what people actually mean when they say that they don't like reading books on their computers. It doesn't hurt their eyes: it's just that the cognitive dissonance is too strong and they don't enjoy the effect. Reading "sacremonia" on a device meant for "fulp" is like watching porn in a public theater. Some people find this thrilling, but most people find this type of activity to be aesthetic trouble.

Don't get me wrong: I am a punk ass motherfucker and I believe that "fulp" and "sacremonia" have a lot to learn from each other. However, I also know for a fact that there is a lot more money in "fulp" than in "sacremonia" these days which makes it much more fragile and unstable, and I also know that without "sacremonia" we would have nothing to "fulp" about.


***


Ereaders are the first attempt to solve the problem of how to store and read "sacremonia" electronically. The solution is pretty bad: instead of taking all the "sacremonia" and creating a single, special database policed by academics and "sacremoniacs" that can be illustrated and perfected, we have allowed corporations to rip apart all of our "sacremonia" and sell it back to us in thirty different proprietary formats, all of which have different standards and price points, all of which are basically just text files.

This does something incredibly strange to our relationship with "sacremonia." It makes us have contempt for it. It makes us feel like "sacremonia" belongs to these corporations as just another asset, and makes us feel like "fulp" is truly the more free and open medium, merely because there are (seemingly) no gatekeepers to "fulp" and because the machines with which we produce "fulp" are the same machines with which we consume it. If we want to make and illustrate some "fulp," it is as simple as learning .html or purchasing a scanner.

This is not true, of course. Most of the "sacremonia" that we know and love was produced under duress by serious and angry people who would never in a million years consider producing "fulp." The freedom of "fulp" is an illusion. It is the freedom to say nothing of consequence. Real, earth-shattering "sacremonia" would never survive the cruelty, fire, and lawyers of the internet.

Here is the problem, stipulated in more clear terms: how do we maintain the necessary divide between "fulp" and "sacremonia," even though this divide is aesthetic and computers can't tell aesthetics from a big jar of rubber dicks in the ground?

I don't have any answers to this problem, beyond the possible solutions posed in these three articles: "Wunderkammer Seeds," "The Best Part About the Print-On-Demand Future Will Be the Arbitrary Book Covers," and "Sexy, Wired, Loud, International and Undefeated."

I do know, however, that in a street fight, "fulp" will always win unless those defenders of "sacremonia" who also have power and community respect (not us) start getting more creative and start wresting control of "sacremonia" away from the three computer companies who want to bury it behind a mountain of "fulp," and the six publishing houses who are more than willing to let this happen for a very small amount of money.

If the world is not an evil place that is mechanistically designed to be rotten, then the biggest consumers of "sacremonia" (and those with the most stake in protecting it) should also be the most fearless and creative among us. Understanding what is at stake and how QUICKLY things are changing ought to be enough to get these good people motivated to take action and defend perhaps the one thing in the world worth defending.

Posted by miracle on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:40:52 -0500 -- permanent link

Q: So I heard you guys are going to have a seance this month.

A: Where did you hear that? Did you receive this information in a "heart vision" or perhaps during a guided automatic writing session?

Q: The internet -- I don't know.

A: Well. Anyway, your intuitive insight is correct. We have booked the KGB Bar for Saturday, August 28th at 7 PM, where will be gathering together in order to pierce the veil between life and death. We want to interrogate New York City's most iconic dead writer and ask him questions about the state of modern fiction, an art form which many people have also claimed is dead.



Q: Why August 28th?

A: It is a pretty important day, spiritually. It is the birthday of Goethe, Tolstoy, Jack Kirby, Shania Twain, and Jack Black. It is also the day that Prince Charles and Princess Diana were divorced, in addition to being the day that legendary bullfighter "Manolete" was gored to death in Linares, Spain.

Q: Which iconic NYC writer are you talking about? Jonathan Safran Foer is still alive. You don't have to do a seance. You could probably just call his publicist.

A: No, our goal is to get in contact with the spirit of Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald. No one encapsulates the soul of New York triumph, despair, and excess better than F. Scott Fitzgerald. His fortunes rose here and then fell here. He may have died in California, but his spirit will forever be intertwined with the spirit of this godless Hell Island.



Q: How do you intend to get in contact with the ghost of F. Scott Fitzgerald?

A: We are going to tap into the latent occult energy of our audience using every trick we can think of, including jazz, and then we will command the spirit of Mr. Fitzgerald to possess one of our own editors, Mr. Xerxes Verdammt. Verdammt will be preparing for the ritual all week by reading Fitzgerald biographies, visiting locations in the city important to Fitzgerald, listening to jazz, and drinking.

Q: You guys aren't REAL psychics. How are you going to raise a ghost? You guys are full of shit.

A: We are not full of shit. We may be amateur mediums, but we are pretty sure we know what we are doing. In fact, we have special equipment. We have fucking MIND-MACHINE-INTERFACE equipment that you don't know about.



Q: What are you talking?

A: At this Fiction Circus, our very own 2600 Club madman, Mssr. Goodman Carter, will be deploying a brand new method for interacting with the electronic and chthonic worlds -- a dangerous, untested electronic peripheral called EMOTIV BRAIN TELEKINESIS TECHNOLOGY!

Q: Emotiv brain telekinesis technology? What the fuck?

A: Here, look at this:



We've got one of these EEG machines and we are going to repurpose it to help us shoot psychic wads of ecto darts into the ethereal plane. We are going to pop Mr. Fitzgerald in the neck with one of these ecto darts and drag him back to base camp.

Q: What if you open a portal to a dimension of pure evil and drag all of New York with you?

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A: Probably this happens four or five times a night in this city. Do not worry. We are pretty sure that New York is the dimension of pure evil that other dimensions are worried about.

Q: Will there also be fiction readings at this seance?

A: Hell yes, we will have fiction readings. If all goes according to plan, Christopher Herz will be reading from his badass supernatural gentrification political thriller "The Last Block in Harlem." Christopher Herz is easily New York City's hardest hustling young novelist, and his psychic energy output alone (measured in ergs) ought to be enough to help us bust through to the darkling plane.

Q: What questions are you going to ask Mr. Fitzgerald?

A: We will be soliciting questions from our audience and from members of the press. This will be the first time in fifty years that you will be able to get quotes from F. Scott Fitzgerald ON THE RECORD. Perhaps you would like to ask him what he thinks about the recent stock market collapse? Or perhaps you would like to ask him how he feels about the rise of the ebook marketplace? Maybe you are curious about his relationship with Zelda, or with his own children? It is up to you. We will provide the ghost.

Q: What are the three takeaway PR points that I should get from this FAQ?

A: 1). The Fiction Circus will be holding a seance to raise F. Scott Fitzgerald from the dead so that New Yorkers can ask him questions in this time of trouble. 2). In order to do this, we will be using an Emotiv EEG machine to channel psychic energy into a spiritual chokepoint, infusing one of our own editors with the ghost of this famous dead writer 3). Christopher Herz, author of "The Last Block in Harlem," will also be reading from his novel at this event.



Q: Why do you think this is a good idea? This is not a good idea. You are messing with forces that you don't...

A: ENOUGH! Saturday, August 28th at the KGB Bar, at 7 PM. WE WILL RAISE THE DEAD.



Posted by miracle on Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:08:31 -0500 -- permanent link

So Barnes and Noble is now up for sale, like a shoebox of "Magic the Gathering" cards on a cardtable in front of somebody's garage. You can buy Barnes and Noble if you want. It would make a pretty good place to play lasertag or to train a plucky roller derby team.

Barnes and Noble isn't the only bookstore going out of business these days, however. They are just the biggest and ugliest. Bookstores themselves seem to be a finished institution.



We shouldn't be crying about the death of bookstores, however. We shouldn't even be crying about the death of books.

The death of bookstores means an opportunity for literature.
No more bookstores means that we will have a chance to recreate the personality of literature -- to sever the identity of literature from the identity of academia -- and to recreate the art of fiction apart from the art of cookbooks, self-help, and military history.

However, since bookstores are going out of business, the first thing that this new revved-up, cut-loooose literature will need is a new front.



A new front for literature means a new personality for literature, and that will be so nice for those of us who are tired of defending our passion with shit like "literature is very important for children" and "reading books is a thing that smart people like to talk about."

We need to be able to say:

"Hemingway used to hit people -- you know -- for being too rich. If you were too rich and you were at a party with Hemingway, you were probably going to get hit, and then he was going to steal your girl. Also, William Burroughs and William Gibson invented everything that you think is cool during one long night in 1976. Also, Virginia Woolf had ESP pyrokinesis and she used it to win WW1 for the Allies. The screams of her victims haunted her for the rest of her life until she killed herself by walking into a pond with her pockets full of rocks. And we all know that Fidel Castro and Che Guevara started communism in South America. But did you know they did it because Gabriel Garcia Marquez put a gypsy curse on them? Fidel Castro cannot die because he is already dead!"

Instead of selling literature as medicine and conscience, we should let literature sell itself -- as sex, murder, wisdom, glamor, whimsy, and armor.

Imagination is so dang, fucking powerful that it doesn't need defending or reinforcement.



We are losing bookstores (and books) because stories -- the living creatures -- are bored of bookstores, books, and their boring custodians. The new technologies for Story Deployment and Dissemination are clearly more efficient, robust, sleek, and energetic than the old ones. And we can make them more beautiful, too.


***


All art forms have a front, and an effective, representative sales floor is important if you want to stay lit up in people's minds. Here's how other disciplines do it:

MUSIC: clubs, venues, bars. When you look at your friend and you say "FUCK THIS SILENCE, WE NEED NOISE," you know where to go.

What this front says about the personality of music: music is beery, transgressive, sexy, aggressive, young, vibrant, and all about quick cash.



MOVIES: Big movie theaters full of wheezing people with elbow rolls who text each other during trailers ("I WUNT TO C IT NOOOOOOW!"), popcorn drool leaking from the corners of their mouths onto their rhinestone-encrusted cell phones

What this front says about the personality of movies: movies are communal, populist, greasy, overwhelming, and unite all kinds of illiterate folks under one big dome. Movies are big, like their fans.



LEGIT THEATER: Small theaters with names like "The Hurt Bear" or "Space 184" where everybody is very serious and there is nO popcorn.

What this says about the personality of legit theater: legit theater is exclusive, serious, and not intended to impact mainstream culture, or really anything at all



VIDEO GAMES: state of the art electronics stores

What this says about the personality of video games: You can only afford one at a time. Choose wisely.



COMICS: Tiny shops plastered with posters full of heaving breasts, swelling muscles, and grasping tentacles. A white man in spectacles is grinning at you, "sizing you up."

What this says about the personality of comics: comics are thirteen years old and are very excited about everything that happens to the human body, with sound effects




***


So the question becomes, what sort of personality do we want literature to have, now that -- thanks to the collapse of the publishing and book-selling industries -- we suddenly have a choice?

How do we want people to think about fiction? How can we undo the damage of the past by changing the nature of the place where fiction is sold today?

Given the opportunity, we should strive to make fiction's new front have four distinct personality traits:

WIRED: Lit shops should be technological marvels, where electronic media can instantly become hard-bound paper objects through the magic of print-on-demand, but without the inventory problems of big chain bookstores. Instead of huge barns or tiny cramped shops, lit shops will be more like bars or coffee shops, where a skilled bookista delivers you a novel (to taste) like a latte from the machine in back. You flip through the pages while you wait for the night's fiction reading, checking your email and finishing marketing reports for work or some shit. Whatever you people do.

INTERNATIONAL: New lit shops in America will not only sell English books, but will be repositories for digital and paper versions of books in every language. They will be hubs for international conversation, global discovery, translation, and language education. They will take The World to small towns everywhere, serving as miniature United Nations where the news from EVERYWHERE is available, collated, sorted, and on display. At a lit shop, helpful hacker/witches will guide you to information you didn't even know existed.

SEXY: Lit shops should be a place to get a drink, to find a mate, to argue about strange political theories, and to smell your own pheromones in the walls. They should be a place to see a naked cabaret or do drugs that don't have names yet. Stories are the satisfying meat and mead that people are missing when they go out to soulless modern bars and clubs, aching for some spark of connection or transcendent truth. Lit shops will fuel the human urge toward orgasmic connection using the time-honored glue of Powerful Wall-Busting Higher Narrative. The operating mantra: "We are all here to dance and get laid with people just like us" shall be replaced with "We are all here to merge minds and miscegenate like mad rats."

LOUD: You can go home and read your book in peace and quiet if you want. Lit shops are gonna be noisy. They will host bands, readings, arguments, games, contests, and wrestling tournaments. Lit shops will compete against each other to be the coolest, the most flexible, the most exciting, and the most rude. The days of giant bookstores are over. There is nothing cool, or noble, about a barn.

ANOTHER WORD FOR NEW IS "NOVEL!"

TIME TO GET TO WORK, NOVELISTS!


***


How to Start a Lit Shop in Your Neighborhood

It's not possible to "open a bookstore" anymore. You will never get a loan and no one wants classique booke shoppes anyway except some irritable old men who will not buy your books and who will hang out, scaring away potential customers.

Bookstores make people feel like they are at school, because books have traditionally been tied to places of learning which most people view as places of boredom, mind control, captivity, and silence.

Don't get me wrong. I love books and bookstores. But my associations are not the associations that the rest of America has toward books.

ACCEPT THIS. DO NOT GET ANGRY AT PEOPLE BECAUSE YOU THINK THEY ARE STUPID. Our elitism fucked up the fiction marketplace, and now we have to fix it.

We must lay our eggs in the brains of the animals that still live.

Steps to take:

1). Find a bar/coffee shop/club that you like and that feels right to you. It should have an atmosphere conducive to conversation and yet still have an edge.

2). Get a job there or get to know somebody who works there. Find out how the place functions and whether or not the owner is willing to try new things. Make sure they are willing to hold live events. Your goal is to shape the demographic of the bar by bringing people in for events that you manage and control. You are gonna take over the difficult job of events coordination for the overworked owner who will be grateful.

3). Bring in literary events three nights a week. Pick one slow night and do an open mic. Do it Reverend Jen Antislam Style, where everybody gets ten minutes, no matter what, with a sign-up sheet. Pick one busy night and invite a reading series in your town to perform, like The Moth or The Literary Death Match or...ahem...The Fiction Circus. Start your own Fiction Circus. Or start your own completely different fucked-up reading series. One night a week, hold a poetry reading in some other language. Poetry is actually exciting in languages that aren't English. Spanish poetry night, or Japanese poetry night, or Russian poetry night, or all three together!

4). Start a singles book club in this coffee shop/bar/bookstore. Get everybody reading a book that the lit shop sells them. Start a couples book club. Start a book club for athletes. Start a book club for busy executives!

5). Push for a small paperback bookstore rack. One of those twirly things you see in drug stores. Fill it with good paperbacks you pick up online or at used bookstores or wherever books are dumped. Charge a dollar a piece for the old paperbacks, and keep it well-stocked.

6). As the price of on-demand printing goes down, push for an Espresso Book Machine or something like it. Get on-demand books moving in and out of the shop to people who are coming and going, whether they are there to attend events or not.

Here, read this essay to see how to maximize the possibilities for on-demand printing...

7). Start holding book signings at your local lit shop. Convince the authors who are doing book signings to perform with your local reading series to raise the profile of both events. Convince bands to perform with your reading series in order to cross-pollinate and bring in cross-traffic.

8). Drugs! Find a drug dealer and help them build a client base. Not HEROIN....but everybody likes pot. It is basically legal now anyway.

9). Get yourself a reputation as a bon vivant and raconteur. Travel around to other lit shops and perform with their readers. Ask bars you go to whether they are a lit shop, or just a bunch of squares. Be real pushy and act like fiction and literature is the only goddamn thing that matters in the world. You believe this already, right?

10). Slowly change the nature of the bar/coffee shop/club that you frequent until people think of it as a literary establishment. The people who work there should have degrees in literature (it is not hard to find people with degrees in literature who need jobs). Take the bar/coffee shop/club over, now that the people there are more loyal to you (events coordinator and social butterfly) than they are to the beverages and seats.

11). THE WORLD CHANGES, FICTION IS SAVED

12). Make amends?


***

Lit shops are gonna be so badass. Don't worry. Let bookstores all die off. Soon we are gonna have a better place to hang out. Don't worry, don't worry. Books are not being stamped out. They are being freed.

Stories are tired of wasting empty decades in empty stacks; unread and unloved. Stories want out! And they are going to drag storytellers with them...

Posted by miracle on Sun, 08 Aug 2010 22:34:08 -0500 -- permanent link