News from ‘the waves’ — nominated for a Pushcart

Mythium Literary Journal nominated a poem of mine for a pushcart.

And I almost got into a fight with a friend’s roommate trying to tell him about it. Maybe Robert McKee’s negative & positive scene theories are true….

district 9 — the one piece of dialogue I wish I came up with

“Don’t point your fuckin tentacles at me!”

deleted line from a poem

“the gun in my hand isn’t a bunny”

writers who’re married or ‘together’

… so if you married a writer, are you required to mention that writers name in interviews if it happens to come up if you’re married or not or whether you show drafts to someone.

Can you just say “I’m married to a writer?” Is it disrespectful not to mention names?

Is it a form of promotion to mention the name of your spouse in an interview because you want to help their career? Does this turn into fights at home or tension if one half of the couple has a better career and thinks name-dropping will help?

If you don’t mention your girl/boyfriend, does this lead to fights?

why does poetry take longer than fiction to accept/reject?

duotrope insight:

publications respond to fiction in huge waves. whereas the same publication responds on poetry, while logged at the same time, in fewer numbers.

could be due to an individual editors tendencies. but what about editors who double-serve as poetry editors.

whats the deal? I guess poetry is just that much more cool.

federal dollars at work

blogger is blocked now.

at first i couldn’t comment on blogspots, but i could look at the blogs. that was nice.

discovered today all of blogger is blocked.

no more gamefaced, no more greencitynews, no more newpages blog…. im sad…

Litdrift.

My response to LitDrift’s JK Evanczuk on “Everyone Will Be Famous For 15 Minutes”

– literary capitalist-communism.

LitDrift is a good website.

New Pax Americana

New Pax Americana out.

People in it I know, in terms of how one can really know someone via interwaves:

sam pink

nathan tyree (!)

& molly gaudry

People I know of and kind of excited to read:

mark bibbins

j.a. tyler

jimmy chen

& the others I don’t know of but am glad I do know of ‘em now:

john straddler,

bianca stone,

brandon johnson,

sampson starkweather,

matt everett

john reed

jillian brall

zachary jernigan

still here?

Language as stamped genetic output/explosion of pent up cellular energy

From ‘Lives of a Cell’ by Lewis Thomas:

Language is, like nest-building or hive-making, the universal and biologically specific activity of human beings. We engage in it communally, compulsively, and automatically.

[...]

We are born knowing how to use language.

[...]

We are programmed to identify patterns and generate grammar.

[...]

Chomsky, who has examined it as a biologist looks at live tissue, [said] language “must simply be a biological property of the human mind”.

The universal attributes of language are genetically set; we do not learn them, or make them up as we go along.

[…]

Language, once it comes alive, behaves like an active, motile organism. Parts of it are always being changed, by a ceaseless activity to which all of us are committed.

[…]

New ways of stringing words and sentences together come into fashion and vanish again, but the underlying structure simply grows, enriches itself, expands.

[…]

If language is at the core of our social existence, holding us together, housing us in meaning, it may also be safe to say that art and music are functions of the same universal, genetically determined mechanism.

( and to insert a little more on the subject, what follows are excerpts from the chapter about ‘information’ )

According to the linguistic school currently on top, human beings are all born with a genetic endowment for recognizing and formulating language. This must mean that we possess genes for all kinds of information, with strands of special, peculiarly human DNA for the discernment of meaning in syntax. […] If this is true, it would mean that the human mind is preset, in some pimary sense, to generate more than just parts of speech.

____________________________________________________________

Yes. If this is true, does this mean writers can be fantastic, legendary, geniuses without ever having read a single word outside of the foundations taught in elementary school (specifically the base building classes, we’re talking 2nd grade and below)? It cannot be that insane of an idea that a writer need not read to be a great. If I were looking for a more pure expression, would this not be the road to follow? Let’s take this idea even further and say that the foundational classes may not have been taught.

Well, if you take into account quantum entanglement—basically the theory we are all connected—the atoms of my being, combined with the genetic markers of language (one in the same essentially), would continually inform my creation of language in a vacuum. Makes me wonder whether this idea in the literature community that it is a mistake for a writer not to read, and read heavily, could be more of writers feeling betrayed that not even other writers read each other.

Does a football player have to watch hours and hours of the game to be a hall of famer? Yes, the coaches have them review tapes, and some players review tapes for leisure, or because they feel it is the best way for them to get better, but is it necessary?

That is the question. What factors are necessary to make an artist (moving from localized to general artsmanship) a great artist? By great I mean individual expression that has the ability to reach deeply, while expanding the horizon of what is possible in not only their desired medium, but reaching into other mediums and informing them, however slightly, of other possibilities.

It is easy to assume that our natural human tendency to stockpile information like insects is essential to our creative manufacturing of this info. We read not to inform our language, as that may be a byproduct of reading, but to add to our informational reservoir. We are animals in caves looking at a wide variety of foods; stuff we may never eat, stuff which even disgusts us but we have it anyway, salivating at the many choices, or we are animals in caves with a small variety and having the knowledge of where the other foods are, engrained in our genes. We go get what we feel we need.

These are possibilities.

Can the clustercloud of all these individual walking and talking humans, all these individual cells adding to the hum of language potentially be more hazardous than good? Can reading too much actually be bad? Some writers read in search of a purer expression, and while this search is almost required for growth, shouldn’t these writers be searching insides themselves?

It is said we live in a post-literate society, after the full introduction of the internet and advanced societal technologies. Well… haven’t we always been post-literate societies? Before written word, we spoke. After written word, we spoke. Communication, the vocal/visual form of it, has always been the ground. Written word is the navigational craft constructed out of the woods and metals of language.

But… back to my initial thesis— what kind of writer doesn’t read? Is the writer that doesn’t read, or the artist that doesn’t immerse themselves in the buzz of their craft, at a loss versus those that do? Or is such a writer, such an artist, actually what most of us should be chasing after if we wish to uncover the purest form of expression, untempered by the tangles of anothers ideas?

New BlazeVOX up

The Fall issue of BlazeVOX is shaking a tail feather.

C-C-C-Checkitout.