Our Friends at Guernica Are Throwing a Party, And You Should Go

Our good friends at Guernica Magazine, the magazine that Howard Zinn (!) has called an “extraordinary bouquet of stories, poems, social commentary, and art” and Esquire called a “great online literary magazine,” is having a party to celebrate their fifth anniversary. If you are in New York on October 28 this is where you are going to want to be.

It's quite impressive what Guernica has accomplished in just five years. Some highlights include E.C. Osondu’s story “Waiting,” originally published in Guernica, winning the 2009 Caine Prize, Africa’s leading literary award. A panel discussion on activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, part of the PEN World Voices Festival, was featured in the New York Times. In addition, the Guardian, Salon.com, The New Yorker and other publications have all written about Guernica on their blogs and in their pages.

(Full disclosure: I am Guernica's Blog Editor. That being said, the reason I wanted to be a part of Guernica was, and continues to be, because of the voice they add to the political and artistic conversation that goes on daily in the world. I am consistently impressed by the content that appears on the site and am glad to be a part of it.)

Here's the press release:


Guernica Magazine Celebrates Five Years

with Bash Featuring Jonathan Ames,

Brooklyn Lager, Music, Food, Prizes


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
October 14 – To celebrate five years of award-winning coverage of international arts and politics, Guernica Magazine is throwing a birthday party on Wednesday, October 28, at the powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, NY. The Guernica at 5 benefit bash will feature a reading by author Jonathan Ames, the creator of HBO's Bored to Death, along with performances by a special musical guest. Partygoers will enjoy free food and drinks, including beer provided by Brooklyn Brewery, and will each receive a complimentary two-year subscription to Time Out New York.


Guernica at 5
Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 7-10 p.m.
powerHouse Arena, 37 Main Street, Brooklyn, NY


“Guernica has a strong tradition of hosting provocative and exciting cultural events, and Guernica at 5 promises to provide even more of the energy that our followers have come to expect from us,” explained co-founder Joel Whitney. Guernica’s popular monthly New York City salons have offered the opportunity for writers, readers, and artists to gather together to share drinks and opinions. Recent Guernica events include a live conversation between Mia Farrow and Bernard-Henri Lévy, a sold-out Hudson River cruise, and a discussion on activist Ken Saro-Wiwa which was featured in the New York Times.


Tickets to the Guernica at 5 can be purchased online through www.mycommunitytickets.com for $45. The first 50 ticket holders will be automatically entered in a raffle to see Andrew Bird perform in Philadelphia on October 25. Funds raised by the benefit will directly support Guernica's ongoing mission to expand the grass-roots international arts and literary community. Members of the Benefit Committee include Mia Farrow, Tom & Susan Chehak, Mark Dowie, Tim Gray, Howard Zinn, and Wendell Potter.


ABOUT THE MAGAZINE: Guernica was founded in 2004 and has grown into an indispensable forum for cultural conversation. It has sparked discussions about the environment; published great stories, poems, paintings, and photos from around the world; and weighed in on topics ranging from the crisis in Darfur to the Iraq war. The magazine has featured heads of state, Nobel Prize winners, literary stalwarts, lawmakers, filmmakers, salsa gods, and cabinet members.


MORE INFORMATION: To arrange for an interview, press passes, or publicity stills,
contact Robin Beth Schaer at guernicamag@gmail.com.

What We've Been Reading

Brad:
I'm reading In Cold Bloodfor the first time ever. How I'm this old without ever having read it is beyond me. But this book is rocking my socks off. The prose is both concrete and lyrical, and the story is just so horrifying. I'm happy to be making up for lost time.

I'm also reading The Beginning of the Fieldsby Angela Shaw. The aesthetics and the subject matter aren't my usual cup of tea, maybe, but this is also a really excellent book, full of concrete and lyrical writing, and my socks here too are in the process of being rocked off. Wonderful.

Dustin:
I just finished my bi-annual reading of TS Eliot's The Waste Land & Other Poems, as well as the last two parts of Beowulf. (I had the urge to read something in Old English. I had to memorize the first 100 lines of Beowulf, in Old English, when I was a junior in high school and I haven't read any Old English since. When I started working on this blurb I wrote a long apology for reading something in Old English, as though I had offended everyone's family. Fuck that. It was fun.)

I'm currently plowing through Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project.It's pretty great so far. Structurally, it's pretty wild. Though I feel like I've been saying that a lot lately. Maybe I've just become interested in structure and that's what I'm seeing but Hemon's flashing between this story that the main character is trying to uncover and that characters real life is done seamlessly. It's beautiful. Socks, consider yourself rocked.

American Life in Poetry: Column 238

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Though some teacher may have made you think that all poetry is deadly serious, chock full of coded meanings and obscure symbols, poems, like other works of art, can be delightfully playful. Here Bruce Guernsey, who divides his time between Illinois and Maine, plays with a common yam.


Yam

The potato that ate all its carrots,
can see in the dark like a mole,

its eyes the scars
from centuries of shovels, tines.

May spelled backwards
because it hates the light,

pawing its way, paddling along,
there in the catacombs.



American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Bruce Guernsey. Reprinted from New England Primer by Bruce Guernsey, Cherry Grove Collections, 2008, by permission of Bruce Guernsey and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

InDigest Picks

Books:
Chronic Cityby Jonathan Lethem [Doubleday]
+ Lethem's newest book crosses the river from his beloved Brooklyn and utilizes Manhattan as a central location. The book is a meandering study of friendship and everyday observation as two odd friends, Chase Insteadman, the spouse of an astronaut stuck in space, and Perkus Tooth, a cultural critic with too little to do, wander on the margins of the cities elite.

Hear an interview with Lethem about the book at Amazon here.

Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Listsby The Onion AV Club [Scribner]
+ Inventory is a collection of some of those amazing lists you read every week in The Onion AV Club, with a lengthy intro by Chuck Klosterman. On top of the AV Club writer's lists there are lists from Andrew WK, Patton Oswalt, John Hodgeman, Zach Galifinakis, Paul Thomas Anderson, "Weird Al" Yankovic and more.

Photography:
Grungephotographs by Michael Lavine and text by Thurston Moore [Abrams Image]
+ With a similar feel to Moore and Byron Cooley's No Wave, Grunge is a collection of photography that seeks to capture the zeitgeist. Grunge lacks the intimacy and sense that Moore is letting you in on a secret no one else knows about like he did in No Wave. Yet, there is something really spectacular about the photography here. Seeing Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Chris Cornell, Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Billy Corgan and others who've become something totally different in our over the last two decades (see: Chris Cornell's hip-hop album...blek); they are heroes, major rock stars now, but these photos are a beautiful reminder of where these people started, how the music they made at that time was the focal point of an underground movement that changed the trajectory of rock music in America.

Music:
Lightning Bolt - Earthly Delights[Load]
+ Multi-hyphenated noise rockers Lightning Bolt come out with a new album that's just as noisy and incomprehensible as their brilliant Hypermagic Mountain. Oddly enough you can sense maturation in Earthly Delights, which isn't something that always happens with bands as loud and spastic as Lightning Bolt.

Preview their track "Collosus" from Earthly Delights here. [via Pitchfork]

The Flaming Lips - Embryonic[Warner Bros]
+ The last LP from Wayne Coyne and co. was a mixed bag. Some catchy tunes and some songs that were less than exciting. The good news for those of you who were also disappointed: Embryonic rocks. It's The Flaming Lips playing with their sound, evolving and taking risks again. It's an incredibly beautiful album.

Other Notable Releases: Anti-Pop Consortium: Fluorescent Black, Bob Dylan: Christmas in the Heart, Fuck Buttons: Tarot Sport, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down: Know Better Learn Faster,

In Theaters:
One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur (Curt Worden) [Kerouac Films]
+ This often surprising documentary tracks Kerouac as he deals with becoming an international phenom, an alcoholic and reluctant figurehead of a movement. He retreats to Big Sur and writes the novel of the same name. Friends remember the circumstances surrounding the book and, along with fans, read excerpts of the novel. The documentary illuminates the novel and is essential viewing for any fan of Kerouac.

Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze) [Warner Bros]
+ One of the fall's most anticipated films finally hits theaters. The build up from McSweeney's releases (both Egger's Wild Things and Heads on And We Shoot), The Arcade Fire laden trailers, coloring books, short films from Spike Jonze at MoMA and in the new issue of Wholphin, along with enough hype to choke The Killers and the rumored fights between Jonze/Eggers and the studio makes it a frightening weekend where we will remember how fallible the hype machine is, while, probably, still enjoying this film quite a bit.

Other Notable Releases: Black Dynamite

DVD:
The Mighty Boosh Special Edition (Seasons 1-3)[BBC Warner]
+ If you aren't watching this show yet you've made a mistake. Now, go watch crack fox.

Dusan Makavejev: Free Radical- Eclipse Series 18 [Criterion]
+ Eclipse series is one my favorite things happening in the world of cinema. The Eclipse series (by Criterion) restores important, but marginalized, films that have never seen a DVD release in the US. Even if I know nothing about the films being released I get excited. Previously releases of Sam Fuller's early studio work, the first screenplays of Bergman and Flamenco films of Carlos Saura have made my loins throb.

Comics:
Deadpool #900[Marvel]
+ Deadpool hits his 900th issue (is that right?) with a 104 page epic comic. Might as well buy this now before Ryan Reynolds ruins any enjoyment you get out of Deadpool. The whole Merc with a Mouth thing is great when it's written but when Ryan Reynolds keeps blathering on it becomes, not surprisingly, quite painful. (He was only in around five minutes of Wolverine and I wanted him dead.)

Other Notable Collections: The Batman Chronicles Vol. 8 (various), Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk Vol. 1 (Damon Lindelof, Leinil Francis Yu)

Other Notable Single Issues: Red Robin #5, Batman #691

What We've Been Reading

Ashleigh:
The past few days I've been reading Michael Thomas's novel Man Gone Down.It won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award this past summer, and I'd read a lot about its unabashed literary-ness, its fearless exploration of race in contemporary America, its tender depiction of a man who has long since given up hope of finding his place in the world. And while I can't yet say I love the book (I'm only about 100 pages in), it's fascinating to see the unnamed narrator spiral deeper into digressions and ruminations as the pressure builds to make a new start in life. It's always hard to watch someone fail in real time, and even harder to watch them fail because they are mired in exhuming the past, but Man Gone Down demonstrates that there can be a kind of beauty in it, too.

Jess:
Moby DickThis shit is incredible. The Pequod is ribbed with whale bones. I'd put in a vote for the most badass book in American literature. Plus it's funny.

Minneapple in the Big Apple

Check out this nice piece on InDigest and the 1207 Reading Series over at the Minneapple in the Big Apple blog.

InDigest Picks

Books:
The Wild Thingsby Dave Eggers [McSweeneys]
+ Maybe this is just in New York, but it seems everywhere I turn there is something reminding me that Where the Wild Things Are is about to come out in theaters. Based on the children's story, and tied together with the screenplay for the film co-written by Eggers and director Spike Jonze, this is a more in depth version of Where the Wild Things Are. It's a dark, beautiful story that Eggers has adapted. You should of course get the fur-covered edition (pictured to the left).

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Sonby Michael Chabon [Harper-Collins]
+ Chabon's first work of non-fiction is a series of intertwining essays that essentially amount to an auto-biography. Chabon's writing is always a pleasure to read. Reviews have already called this an "instant classic" (never heard that before), yet there is not reason to believe that this is not the case when it comes to work by Chabon. It seems that so much of his work does, all cliches aside, become an instant classic.

Music:
The Mountain Goats - Life of the World to Come[4AD]
+ The newest disc from John Darnielle is what you would expect, and yet still a little surprising. Every song on the album is named after a bible verse, which Darnielle explained/refused to explain as soon as the track listing was announced. The religious overtones make it a fascinating extension of Darnielle's discography, as he's always had a sort of intrigue with the stories of religion, while maintaining an agnostic stance. The Life of the World to Come is a great album that hits all of your favorite Mountain Goats tropes: piano ballads, catchy sing-along moments, Darnielle's rambling bellow and his wry sense of humor.

No Age - Losing Feeling[Sub-Pop]
+ The young Noise pop duo leaves LPs behind for their formerly favored EP format. It's a killer disc, that is only missing a waft of their fantastic collaborations with Bob Mould from their last tour and ATP appearance.

In Theaters:
Good Hair (Jeff Stilson) [Chris Rock Entertainment]
+ This Chris Rock hosted documentary seems to be of the mind that docs can be fun [gasp]. Rock travels the world stopping in laboratories, beauty salons and talking to people on the streets to discover the "mystery behind African-American hair."

Comics/Graphic Novels:
Dark Reign: Fantastic Four(Jonathan Hickman, Sean Chen)
+ I may have said this once or twice before, but Dark Reign is the best thing that's ever happened to the Marvel world. The collections of the comics, such as this one, are just starting to come out. If you haven't been keeping up with the comic world here's a good spot to start immersing yourself in Dark Reign. The Fantastic Four series isn't the best thing happening in Dark Reign, but, so far, everything has been pretty fantastic in this world.

InDigest 1207 Tonight

It's that time of the month again. Oh yes, it's time for the InDigest 1207 Reading Series. Tonight we are proud to present J.C. Hallman (The Hospital for Bad Poets [Milkweed]), Paul Harding (Tinkers [Bellvue Press]) and Dana Rossi.

The reading will be happening at (le) Poisson Rouge in New York (158 Bleecker St. between Sullivan and Thompson). All readings start at 7 with happy hour starting at 6. That's right, happy hour. Be there at 6. Book by reading authors will be available at the reading as will authors for the signing of artifacts.

J.C. Hallman grew up in Southern California. He is the author of The Chess Artist, The Devil is a Gentleman, and The Hospital for Bad Poets. A book about modern utopias, In Eutopia, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press in Spring 2010.

Paul Harding has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught writing at Harvard and The University of Iowa. He lives near Boston with his wife and two sons.

Dana Rossi is a freelance writer and stage manager. She has written for Time Out New York, Broken Pencil, New York Press, and a couple of websites here and there. She recently won a New York Press Association Award for a feature article she did on actors understudying celebs on Broadway. Her blog is Party in the Back and it compares current events, trends, and news to 80s movies. On the theater side, she has most recently stage managed at Manhattan Theatre Source and at Soho Playhouse in the NYC Fringe Festival and Encore Series (where she also sound designed her first show). When she's not stage managing, writing articles, or comparing the state of the economy to Back to the Future Part II, she works as a story analyst for Sony Pictures Television

American Life in Poetry: Column 237

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006


An aubade is a poem about separation at dawn, but as you’ll see, this one by Dore Kiesselbach, who lives in Minnesota, is about the complex relationship between a son and his mother.


Aubade

"Take me with you"
my mother says
standing in her nightgown
as, home from college,
I prepare to leave
before dawn.
The desolation
she must face
was once my concern
but like a bobber
pulled beneath
the surface
by an inedible fish
she vanished
into the life
he offered her.
It stopped occurring
to me she might return.
"I'll be back" I say
and then I go.



American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Dore Kiesselbach. Poem reprinted from Field, No. 79, Fall 2008, by permission of Dore Kiesselbach and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

What We've Been Reading

Brad:
I'm currently reading Popular Music from Vittulaby Mikael Niemi. Niemi is a Swedish novelist who grew up within the Arctic Circle, in northern Sweden near the Finnish border. The novel takes place in the small town of Pajala (where Niemi himself grew up), with Matthias (as a grown-up) writing in his journal about his youth. It's a strange, eloquent book, with splashes of magical realism as Matthias and his friends slowly encounter Elvis, girls, and lots and lots of snow. I'm not very far along in it yet, but it's proving to be difficult to put down, and once I've done that, difficult to shake its warm hold.

Dustin:
I just foraged through Paul Harding's Tinkers.(Full Disclosure: I read this a couple weeks ago and I'm writing about it now because, not coincidentally, Paul Harding is reading at InDigest 1207 on Wednesday Oct. 7.) Tinkers concerns is two occasionally converging stories: An old man on his death bed looking back at his childhood, and the story of his epileptic tinker father and the battles that each encountered as their life paths ran in parallel and forked. The language flowers into beautiful labyrinths of digressions and descriptions. It reads almost like a work of modernist existentialism but is ultimately more pointed than that. It's complex and beautiful, one of the more demanding and satisfying works I've read in a while.

American Life in Poetry: Column 236

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006


Cecilia Woloch teaches in California, and when she’s not with her students she’s off to the Carpathian Mountains of Poland, to help with the farm work. But somehow she resisted her wanderlust just long enough to make this telling snapshot of her father at work.



The Pick

I watched him swinging the pick in the sun,
breaking the concrete steps into chunks of rock,
and the rocks into dust,
and the dust into earth again.
I must have sat for a very long time on the split rail fence,
just watching him.
My father’s body glistened with sweat,
his arms flew like dark wings over his head.
He was turning the backyard into terraces,
breaking the hill into two flat plains.
I took for granted the power of him,
though it frightened me, too.
I watched as he swung the pick into the air
and brought it down hard
and changed the shape of the world,
and changed the shape of the world again.



American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Reprinted from When She Named Fire, ed., Andrea Hollander Budy, Autumn House Press, 2009, by permission of Cecilia Woloch and the publisher. The poem first appeared in Sacrifice by Cecilia Woloch, Tebot Bach, 1997. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

J.C. Hallman: The Disciplined Soul

In preparation for J.C. Hallman's reading with InDigest 1207, Tin House Books has kindly allowed us to re-post Hallman's recent and upcoming blog posts from their blog.

In the fourth and final installment of J.C. Hallman's series of essays about his forthcoming book The Story About the Story he discusses what makes the essays in that book stand apart from traditional literary criticism. Thanks to Tin House Books and J.C. Hallman for partnering with InDigest to bring you this series of essays.

J.C. Hallman: The Disciplined Soul

The essays in The Story About the Story differ from traditional literary criticism in many ways. They contemplate rather than argue. They do not artificially sublimate subjectivity. They preserve mystery instead of dissecting it. And often they expand the scope of what they are willing to address so as to speak to the basics--the history, the process, the purpose--of literature itself.

I didn't quite mean to do this when I started collecting pieces for the book, but the essays in The Story About the Story add up to a solid century's worth of literary wisdom--straight from the horses' mouths.

This wisdom takes a number of forms.

Cynthia Ozick ("Truman Capote Reconsidered") begins with an elegant aphorism: "Time at length becomes justice." Similarly, Nabokov ("'The Metamorphosis'") introduces Kafka with a rapid-fire definition of art, "Beauty plus pity," a maxim that a few pages later is met with Camus' insistence ("Herman Melville") that Melville is the furthest thing from Kafka but still offers "inexhaustible sources of strength and pity."



Other contributors suggest trends. Michael Chabon ("The Other James") recalls that "all stories...descend from the fireside tale, told with wolves in the woods all around..." and Frank O'Connor ("An Author in Search of a Subject") contrasts Katherine Mansfield with "Joyce and Proust, who in their different, more worldly ways were also attempting a magical approach to literature by trying to make the printed page not a description of something that had happened but a substitute for what had happened."

The book's essays often seek to make the effect and purpose of reading a visceral experience. William Gass ("In Terms of the Toenail: Fiction and the Figures of Life") describes beginning a book ("How easy it is to enter. An open book, an open eye, and the first page lifts toward us like a fragrance...") and Susan Sontag ("Loving Dostoevsky"), on ending one, is "purged, shaken, fortified, breathing a little deeper, grateful to literature for what it can harbor and exemplify."

On the stakes of literature, Robert Hass ("Lowell's Graveyard") finds a metaphor for a poem's capacity to change life irrevocably: "Poems take place in your life, or some of them do, like the...day the trucks came and the men began to tear up the wooden sidewalks and the cobblestone gutters outside your house and laid down new cement curbs and asphalt streets." Charles D'Ambrosio ("Salinger and Sobs") unapologetically articulates why he reads at all: "Admittedly, wanting practical advice is a pretty primitive idea of what a book should do, but...I didn't know any better, and probably still don't."

Walter Kirn ("Good-bye, Holden Caulfield. I Mean It. Go! Good-Bye!") reveals the true life of books: "People tell me that the mark of a great book is the way that it sticks with you, stays vivid over time, but I disagree. The best books fade into the scenery, dissolve into instant backdrop, return to dust. But that dust is never the same; it's changed forever." And E.B. White, writing of Thoreau, proposes that the reader-writer relationship is much more than a contract: "He is a better companion than most, and I would not swap him for a soberer or more reasonable friend even if I could."

Sven Birkerts ("On a Stanza by John Keats") sets out to question the whole business of writing about reading--"Is beauty that has been made out of words impervious to other words?" To which Phyllis Rose (an excerpt from The Year of Reading Proust) offers an answer: "No matter how full we make our accounts of reading...what we produce is less than the text it describes."

But of course, what's at stake in the writing life is more than just chat. Seamus Heaney ("Learning from Eliot") reminds us that a writer's life means "the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of a life."

The Story About the Story is full of such-disciplined souls.

__________________________________

Courtesy of Tin House and reprinted from their blog.

J.C. Hallman will be reading in New York as part of the InDigest 1207 Reading Series on October 7 at 6pm.

J. C. Hallman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Chess Artist and The Devil is a Gentleman. A collection of his short fiction, The Hospital for Bad Poets, was published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year. His work has appeared in GQ, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, and a number of other journals and anthologies. He is working on a book about modern expressions of utopian thought.