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1 September 2010: Fifth Anniversary of Present Magazine

September 1st, 2010 by Peter Jurmu
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Today we received a heads-up from Pete Dulin, Emerson alum (‘02) and EIC at Present Magazine:

In 2005, I launched PresentMagazine.com, an online magazine based in Kansas City devoted to covering local food, music, arts, and community. Today, we celebrate our 5th anniversary as an independently owned and operated publication.

Dulin echoes other small pub/press editors:

Financially, it’s been a tough slog…but we still attract a varied client base of advertisers and sponsors and survive with low overhead and community support. … I’d like to emphasize that the technology, tools, and resources are out there to create your own opportunity, attract an audience and financial base, and tell stories that enrich the lives of readers…

Congratulations to Pete and Present Magazine, and here’s to another five years in the city that’s given us Robert Altman and Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue.

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A Short List for the New Blood

September 1st, 2010 by Peter Jurmu
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What? School?

1. If you’re looking for the WLP department’s website, look here instead. While you’re there, watch Steve Yarbrough in a short interview. He’s the acting department chair.

2. Orientation schedule! (You’ll get a more detailed one tomorrow.)

3. Those of you interested in applying for a Fulbright, contact GradStudies@emerson.edu and attend the workshop on 15 September in Piano Row, Room 118. The deadline for application is 1 October.

4. At some point during your orientation, Iwasaki employees will tell you how great Emerson’s library is, and they aren’t lying to you. As soon as non-summer students could reenter campus buildings last week without jumping the requisite fifty jacks during the walk signal at Boylston and Tremont, I checked out three books. Their collection is more substantial than their square footage suggests, and why wouldn’t you look there first? The Boston Public Library‘s central branch is five blocks west of EC (at the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston) and much bigger. Neither library is perfect, both will frustrate you, hard times for libraries, limited resources, run by human beings, etc. If you live in some far-flung neighborhood or happen to be passing a BPL branch, your card is good anywhere in the city, and you can return books checked out at one branch to another. Sometimes these (and other libraries throughout the city) are your best bet for finding required reading you doubt you can resell and would rather not own forever. Your Emerson ID is good enough for Iwasaki–for the BPL, bring to any branch one or two pieces of mail with your Boston address on them if you have out-of-state ID.

5. With any luck, one or a few of us will remember to show up for the WLP’s orientation event, Thursday afternoon at 1:15 in the Black Box Theater (Paramount Center, 559 Washington Street). The jist of what I’ll say, if you can’t make it: to obtain information on how you can write for us, send an email to vernacularlit@gmail.com.

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We Are Champion + Elisa Gabbert + Amy King =

August 19th, 2010 by Peter Jurmu
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Context, Parts 1, 2, and 3.

In brief, We Are Champion published an all-male (nevertheless excellent) issue–which editor Gene Kwak maintains was “a shitty confluence of timing and event”–and the ensuing fallout has prompted a series of dialogues (above, elsewhere) about language + gender + aesthetics + publishing practices that can be enlightening for anyone on any side. The pitch has remained wildly sane on this one, and people have donned many hats for the occasion.

Gene’s posted an interview with Elisa Gabbert at the WAC blog, to be followed soon by another with Amy King.

Why do you think there are more submitters who are men, when, it seems that a majority of people who are coming out of MFA programs are either a majority or equal number of women?

EG: I get the sense that men are generally more confident that their work is ready for the world and deserves to be published. Again this probably goes back to men being published and celebrated more. I still get more submissions from men than women, but a lot of that can be attributed to the same men submitting over and over again (sometimes not even waiting until I’ve rejected their last sub) or men submitting work that is not at all right for my magazine. Men definitely do this more than women—I guess it’s that overconfidence again, as in, “Why do I need to read the journal first? Anyone would want to publish this.” Once I throw out all those submissions that are totally inappropriate or obviously unpublishable, the gender balance of subs seems pretty even.

It may also be a question of free time. Many women are working mothers and just don’t have time to send out submissions every week. This isn’t to say no men have busy schedules. I’m just trying to account for the tendencies. If you have less time and/or you feel the market is less receptive to you, you’re likely to be more selective about where you send work.

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KIM LIAO

August 19th, 2010 by Peter Jurmu
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Kim Liao has a Fulbright. Kim Liao leaves for Taiwan next Tuesday. Kim Liao will be researching her book in Taiwan. Kim Liao has started a blog. Kim Liao has named it Girl Meets Formosa. Read Kim Liao’s blog. We wish Kim Liao the very best.

An excerpt from Kim Liao’s first post:

With her husband’s life hanging in jeopardy, Anna [Kim Liao's grandmother] raised money selling prescription drugs on the black market to bring her kids to America. Meanwhile, Thomas was able to broker a deal for himself: instead of death at the hands of the KMT in Taiwan, Thomas was allowed to remain under house arrest in Japan. There, he continued to rally support for his political cause. When Anna raised enough money, she brought her children to America to be raised as New Yorkers.

And never spoke of her husband or Taiwan again.

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Research Bump

August 18th, 2010 by Peter Jurmu
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MIT makes material from 2000 of its courses available online, for free. Here’s a sample. And another.

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Jarmusch Translated Kafka into American Western in 1995

August 16th, 2010 by Peter Jurmu
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[Image taken from Scott Turis's 2008 Onion AV Club article*]

Three key sentences from “Kafka and His Precursors” by Borges:

The word ‘precursor’ is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it from any connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Extremely brief summary of The Castle by Kafka: the (unfinished) novel consists of K.’s increasingly pathetic attempts to gain entrance into the castle and obtain a sincere and full directive from within. My edition (1982 Knopf) ends after the landlady shows K. her dress collection and tells him to come back tomorrow, when she’ll have obtained a new dress for him to evaluate. The definitive German edition ends shortly after that, trailing off at Gerstäcker’s mother’s bedside, “aber was sie sagte”…

With this in mind consider William Blake’s situation in the first act of Dead Man. (You can probably find it on DVD in a grocery store for $6, like I did, but online you have other options.)

WB has arrived in Machine to accept an already-filled accounting position, been rebuffed and shut out by his would’ve-been employers and the townsfolk, detached from his previous life, whatever it might have been, entered a town comprised of ambiguous locations that are powered or ruled or both by a maze of sinister machinery not unlike The Castle’s nightmarish administrative labyrinth filled with scholars/officials and their doppelgängers, fallen in with a barmaid/whore without whom he’d be better off, just like K. and Frieda, etc. So far, so closely translated, a Western of The Castle directed by Jim Jarmusch. A body can abide this. It would be incorrect to call this unconscious emulation—Jarmusch portrays the situation in his own style, obvious in the opening shots of train wheels and their churning connecting rods, the actual movement from place to place instead of paralysis (elsewhere in “Precursors” Borges calls “the moving body and the arrow and Achilles…the first Kafkaesque characters in literature”), the blowjob in profile, Robert Mitchum and the stuffed bear, etc., etc. But the scenario is virtually identical.

Then this happens:

[Read more →]

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Also Also Recently…

August 10th, 2010 by Brooks
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Mel Bosworth’s novella Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom is now available for pre-order.

Laura van den Berg’s collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us made the shortlist for the Frank O’Connor Award.

I Looked Alive by Gary Lutz is soon to be back in print.

Over the past (circa) 3 years, the phrase “really,” incredulously voiced and often said twice with a falling intonation, has reached a possible saturation point.

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Booksmith Sets Bait, Hunkers in Bushes

August 2nd, 2010 by Peter Jurmu
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Brookline Booksmith‘s “Super September” lineup consists of Gary Shteyngart (9/15, Super Sad True Love Story), Per Petterson (9/16, no idea…maybe I Curse the River of Time?), William Gibson (9/22, Zero History), and Michele Norris (9/23, The Grace of Silence).

The readings are at Coolidge Theater across Harvard Street, so you have to pay $5 to see each, but among the nonessential things toward which you could apply $20, are you really going to do better? Sometimes someone brings wine, even, and crackers, so you can say, to the people staring at your full plastic cup while you grab a handful of crunchy salted starch, “Um,” or some other bon mot. Or you can bring your own and have as much as you want ≤ 750ml. After which it’ll seem like a good idea to say to Shteyngart, “Well, you know, I do so much prefer early Ian McEwan to late Ian McEwan, ahem hem.” Then he’ll know you watched his book promo.

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Monday Steel Toe v. Posterior

August 2nd, 2010 by Peter Jurmu
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From George Lazenby’s Tumblr.

Yes.

The more pressing anxiety to [Christopher] Nolan [while filming Inception] is the nightmare of anyone engaged in sustained creative activity: that the ineffable juice will find a crack in you somewhere, and drain away. We’ve all seen these movies. Formally, they’re in tip top shape: taut script, polished photography, sympathetic editing, the whole nine yards. But you come away from them with a profound feeling of emptiness. They’re like a piece of coral you’d keep on your desk. Incredibly intricate. Everything has proceeded in lockstep to make something enormously complicated, but it’s vacant. It houses nothing. Wind whistles through its impressive construction.

Best part: “That Ken Watanabe’s moneyman-character tags along begins to look a lot like the on-set junior executive whispering notes into the porches of Nolan’s ear. In Nolan’s world, this guy gets shot almost immediately…”

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The Drum calling for submissions

July 22nd, 2010 by Peter Jurmu
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Guidelines.

From the FAQ:

–Will I be able to create another recording of this piece for another website, podcast, or other form of distribution?
Absolutely. You’ll retain all rights to your work except the rights to the particular recording of it that will appear in The Drum.

–Will I be able to publish my piece in print form at a later date?
Yes. The Drum holds only the rights to the particular audio created for The Drum and holds no rights to the print form, though we may ask you for those rights (which you may decline to give) in the event that we decide to put together a special print collection at some later date.

–What if my piece has already appeared in print form elsewhere?
Your piece can still appear in The Drum in audio form, provided that any contract you might have with the previous publisher doesn’t claim an exclusive right to any future audios.

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