Super Reading

From our friends over at SUPERMACINE:

SUPERMACHINE ISSUE #2 LAUNCH PARTY
7:30pm, Sept. 10, 2010
The Schoolhouse
330 Ellery St
Brooklyn, NY 11206

Readings! Music! Your Autumn Crush!

with:

Macgregor Card
Chris Cheney
Lonely Christopher
Corina Copp
Jon Cotner
Joanna Penn Cooper
Anne Cecelia Holmes
Lauren Ireland
Simone Kearney
Dorothea Lasky
Paul Legault
Emily Pettit
Christie Ann Reynolds
Matvei Yankelevich
Matthew Yeager

Are You Fucking Kidding Me ?!

The Tipsy Critics: Hamlet (Part 2)

The Corresponding Society is drunk to present the second part of the first installment of our new video feature The Tipsy Critics. Recently, writers Mae Saslaw and Lonely Christopher sat down to discuss the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare over drinks. In part one, which you can watch here, an attempt to summarize the action of the play led to a discussion mainly about ghosts and the Twilight movies; in part two it is concluded that, contrary to popular belief, Shakespeare wasn’t a black woman (but he was a terrifically bad writer, who knew?). See for yourself:

Tipsy Critics Present Hamlet, Part II from Mae Saslaw on Vimeo.

New Deadline

Hey everybody! As you might have realized, The Corresponding Society has been vaguely inactive this summer, due to the traveling schedules of so many of our editors. We’re ready to vamp up again and have a lot of work ahead of us --- including finishing our long-awaited, long-delayed second series of poetry chapbooks, which should be forthcoming in the very early Fall and editing issue four of our lit mag Correspondence. As you may know, our original deadline for submissions to issue four was August 15. We have already received a bounty of exciting work, and can’t wait to start sorting through it all, but we’d also like to present the opportunity for those of you who have not yet submitted anything to do so. So! We’d like to announce an extension of our deadline (a very common occurrence in independent publishing, to be sure). We will now continue to accept new creative work for consideration through September 20, 2010. If you are curious about what exactly we’re looking for, please refer to the guidelines on our submissions page. We are very serious about publishing the most exciting work from emerging writers that we can find, so please let us know if you happen to be an extraordinary writer (we bet you are) and have material we might want to publish in our next issue. Thanks!

Fama Rama

big pic!

Ben Fama, in his life and his work, fancifully cultivates an aesthetic somewhere between mid-cult mystic and cosmic troublemaker. Sitting on the couch of his Brooklyn apartment, you’re as likely to find him enthusiastically watching a documentary on Aleister Crowley as you are an episode of My So-Called Life; a conversation with him about the publishing industry is likely to be speckled with incongruous references to the Twilight Saga and the films of Kenneth Anger. The earnestness with which he absorbs a psychedelic patchwork of cultural influences, and reformats them under the rubric of his personal style, eschews the twee irony of hipsterdom. Not to mention he is an exciting and kick-ass poet. Not to mention he is one of the trendiest and integral operators in the youthful Brooklyn poetics scene today.

Let me explain that previous statement. Ben is the driving force behind the Supermachine reading series, which has run at Brooklyn’s Outpost Lounge, and which has routinely featured some of the greatest, probably coolest, contemporary poets in and around the city. A list of the most recognizable names from Supermachine’s sparkly stable of featured readers include Joshua Beckman, Chelsey Minnis, James Copeland, Matvei Yankelevich, Christian Hawkey, Jen Bervin, and Dorthea Lasky. The Supermachine series has been providing a catalog of fantastic examples re what’s up in poetry today (at least on the East Coast), not to mention ensuring an array of fabulous nights for lovers of verse. Moreover, this year Supermachine launched its own biannual journal, also called Supermachine, with the purpose of presenting some dazzlingly great poetry all wrapped up in the giddy, trance-like, but impacting style that characterizes Ben’s endeavors as organizer and publisher. A few poem titles featured in Supermachine #1 might help illustrate what that style leans toward: “Do Me, Dreamlife,” “Your Mom’s a Falconress,” “Journey to the Sun,” “Two Small Vampires,” “Your Sorcery Embarrasses Me,” “Dreams in Winter,” and “When It’s Sunny They Push the Button.”

Fama’s newish chapbook is titled Aquarius Rising; it was smartly selected by Ugly Duckling Presse for their really awesome series of chapbooks. For anybody who happened to miss Fama’s earlier poetry collection Sun Come, or what he’s published in journals like GlitterPony, Pank!, and No, Dear Magazine (plus, let us not forget, Correspondence), you’re going to want to hunt this baby down. A weirdo pessimist might dismiss Ben’s shiny verse with some semi-clever put-down (“Ben Fama is the Progressive Insurance Lady of poetry,” for instance, and no I cannot recall if I made that up, or if Ben did, or if somebody actually said that), and granted: his poems have a distinct and fun lightness to them, but if you let the kid talk to you from his pages, and he will, gregariously, you will, omg, totally develop a crush on this writing. There is a sassy gravity to his lines… take this (the opener from his ingenuously and ingeniously titled piece, “Glitter Pills”): “To live a serious life / that’s a fucked up thing[.]” That really strikes me, for its honesty wrapped in playfulness, but I might as well just reprint the whole poem:

To live a serious life
that’s a fucked up thing
I would have to rent out a cabin
beneath terrible angels
if I get old wipe the dust off my tits
I should have a serious log cabin
the cabin’s name is Ben Fama
find directions on the internet
when you want to leave you can
I’ll stay there just me and my heart
bigger than the sun

That’s not the best poem in Aquarius Rising, but it’s pretty representative of his ability to mix real feeling with the unpretentiously transcendental and some trademark winking, celebratory, hyperbolic mystification of the self. He plays fast and loose here and there, but not to the detriment of the reader’s possibility to enjoy, which seems like something Fama strongly wants you to do, even if he’s dancing around other complicated emotions. So, here’s this book, little and winsome, that Ben’s given us as a sort of spirit gift. Go and play with it in the grass. Try to keep an eye on Fama himself too, as he continues to engineer stellar venues, in print and in performance, for contemporary poetry. Yay!

(Lonely Christopher, editor.)

White Swallow

The White Swallow series, a queer literary event hosted by Angelo Nikolopoulos, will be featuring the following performers tomorrow (Monday the 9th) at the West Village’s Cornelia St Café: Lonely Christopher, Matthew Hittinger, Billy Merrell, and Paul Lisicky. It’s going to be great fun!

The White Swallow Reading Series
(featuring guest host Zachary Pace)
6pm-8pm
$7 (includes one house drink)
Cornelia St. Cafe (Downstairs)
29 Cornelia St.
New York, NY

MATTHEW HITTINGER is the author of the chapbooks Pear Slip (Spire Press, 2007) winner of the Spire 2006 Chapbook Award, Narcissus Resists (GOSS183/MiPOesias, 2009), and Platos de Sal (Seven Kitchens Press, 2009). Matthew received his MFA from the University of Michigan where he won a Hopwood Award for Poetry and The Helen S. and John Wagner Prize. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2005.

BILLY MERRELL is the author of Talking in the Dark, a poetry memoir (Scholastic, 2003), and a co-editor for The Full Spectrum (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2006), which received a 2006 Lambda Literary Award. Most recently, he is co-author of Go Ahead, Ask Me (Simon & Schuster, 2009). He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from Columbia University and is currently the Web Developer of Poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets.

PAUL LISICKY is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and the forthcoming books The Burning House (2011) and Unbuilt Projects (2012). His work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review,StoryQuarterly, The Seattle Review, Five Points, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Henfield Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City and Springs, New York, and has taught in the graduate writing programs at Cornell University, Rutgers-Newark, and Sarah Lawrence College. He currently teaches at NYU.

LONELY CHRISTOPHER will be presenting two arias from his new opera Stegosaurus (a collaboration with composer Reese Revak). Featuring pianist Jennifer Peterson, soprano Heather Green, and tenor Brandon Snook. Presented by The Walt Whitman Project.

The Tipsy Critics: Hamlet (Part 1)

The Corresponding Society is drunk to present a new semi-regular video feature for our blog, The Tipsy Critics. The premise of the videos will be pretty simple: writers Mae Saslaw and Lonely Christopher sit down to discuss works of classic literature over drinks (lots of drinks). For our inaugural video, which apparently is going to turn out to be a two-parter (we had sixty minutes of soused footage to edit down), we decided upon tackling the immortal classic Hamlet by William Shakespeare. A few drinks in, we also got around a bit to the Twilight movies, but it’s mostly Hamlet. So, Internet, here come the Tipsy Critics:

Tipsy Critics Present Hamlet, Part I from Mae Saslaw on Vimeo.

Proust/Killian

Delight of delights, this week we are pleased to be featuring the multi-talented Kevin Killian’s answers to our redacted Proust Questionnaire. See here:

Introduction to Kevin Killian

Kevin Killian has written two novels, Shy (1989) and Arctic Summer (1997), a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows (1990), and three books of stories, Little Men (1996), I Cry Like a Baby (2001) and Impossible Princess (2009). He has also written two books of poetry, Argento Series (2001), and Action Kylie (2008). With Lew Ellingham, Killian has written often on the life and work of the American poet Jack Spicer [1925-65] and with Peter Gizzi has edited My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008) for Wesleyan University Press. For the San Francisco Poets Theater Killian has written thirty plays, including Stone Marmalade (1996, with Leslie Scalapino), The American Objectivists (2001, with Brian Kim Stefans), and Often (also 2001, with Barbara Guest). New projects include Screen Tests, an edition of Killian's film writing, and a new novel Spreadeagle which Alyson Books will publish one of these days.

Kevin Killian Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Compassion.

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Versatility.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Steadfastness.

Your chief characteristic.
Addictive behavior.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Looking the other way.

Your main fault.
I can’t stand to have anyone upset with me.

Your favorite occupation.
Following Kylie.

Your idea of happiness.
Not for the public to know!

Your idea of misery.
To have lived without meeting Dodie Bellamy.

If not yourself, who would you be?
Nicholas Hoult

Where would you like to live?
Vancouver

Your favorite prose authors.
Outside of my friends: Agatha Christie, John Cowper Powys, Faulkner, Proust, Charlotte Armstrong, James Purdy

Your favorite poets.
Outside of my friends: Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jack Spicer, Victor Hugo, Langston Hughes, Mina Loy,Ted Berrigan.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
Sherlock Holmes, Holden Caulfield, Mr. Knightley, Dr. Matthew O’Connor, Oddjob, Clay (Less Than Zero), “Lord Jim,” Eric Ashley (in Michael Campbell’s Lord Dismiss Us)

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Cymbeline, Imogen, Miranda, Alice, Scout, Emma, Gwendolen Harleth, Mrs. Moore, Mrs. Dalloway, Janie Crawford, Maria Wyeth, Veronica (Mary Gaitskill), Erica Kane

Your favorite painters and composers.
Outside of my friends, Seurat, Tintoretto, Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Florine Stettheimer, Warhol, Sturtevant, Sarah Lucas; Puccini, Mozart, R. Strauss, Brian Wilson, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Michael Brown, Arthur Lee, Jimi Hendrix, Laura Nyro, too many to name in each category

Your heroes in “real life.”
Not too many! Writers mainly, Robert Gluck, Dodie Bellamy, Dennis Cooper, Sarah Schulman, Samuel Delany, Eileen Myles, Raymond Pettibon, Kota Ezawa, Derek McCormack, Thom Wolf....

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Stalin, Nixon, Mao, Hitler, St. Paul.... On a different scale, Robert Frost, W H Auden, Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Rilke, many more

Your favorite names.
I wanted to have twins Ricky and Raquel, and we would call them Rick and Rack. I also thought Brando Killian would be a nice name for my son or daughter. But that didn’t happen.

What do you hate the most?
The unrelenting ignorance I see in the world and I can see in my own soul.

What military event do you admire the most?
Is this a trick question? I suppose the liberation of Hitler’s death camps, if that was a military event.

What reform do you admire the most?
Civil rights legislation of the 1960s and 1970s.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
Either drawing or playing the guitar.

How do you wish to die?
“In the saddle” would be nice, though embarrassing for my partner.

What is your present state of mind?
Thanks to Welbutrin, hopeful.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Obsession.

Your favorite motto.
“Try anything once. Then keep trying it until you like it. Then never stop.”