We’re all ready for NerdFest 2011.

You know you’re a nerd when you’re very excited about a book stand you made. Thinking about making more/selling them. Not sure if there’s a big demand for these though. Want one? Hit me up in the comments.

Very excited to be sharing a table with the fine folks at Avery. Come hang out with us! We will be at the following places on Thursday and Friday nights, respectively:

Want to read the story Amber Sparks originally published in Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance? It’s now live at The Reprint, a cool project from the folks at Zine Scene, wherein they post stories previously appearing exclusively in print and pair them up with the work of one visual artist. This issue features Pamela Wilson. Go check it out now.

Like Amber’s stuff? Check out an interview with her here.

Over the weekend, a previous contributor to our print issue wrote a post on their blog about the current feature story. In it, the contributor said they wrote and published a story a year ago that they felt T.L. Crum had lifted heavily from while writing “Head.” The contributor has removed the post and they have since rescinded their statements. I’m not writing this in the interest of fanning the flames so I’m not going to mention who it was. But the whole thing did make me think about the conclusions we reach in terms of what to write about.

In Marc Maron’s interviews with Robin Williams, Dane Cook and (you’ve got to listen to this) Carlos Mencia, the subject of joke theft is brought up a lot. All of these comedians had been accused of stealing jokes in the past. In the case of Cook and Williams, they admitted every comedian was drawing from the same reality pool, their jokes were similar to other comedians because they were all writing observational humor and when a subject strikes you as interesting you’re going to dig into it to find whatever is funny. Sometimes comedians pick the same subject and sometimes they reach the same conclusions. When that happens, it’s not stealing, but merely coincidence.

In this case, they agreed that the proper thing to do is take the comedian aside and say, “We’re telling the same joke, what do we do about this?” rather than start throwing out the accusation of theft.

However, in Mencia’s case (really, you have to listen to this, one of the most interesting radio interviews you’ll ever hear), it became clear that he’d listened to bits from other comedians, lolled them around his head a while, blending them with his day-to-day thoughts, and when he sat down to write, the bits he’d heard had lost their owners and he assumed they were his own. It would be hard to call this anything other than stealing, even if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Anyone beyond the 8^th grade level of writing would be an idiot to think they could get very far writing a story about a white whale called Doby Mick, or a lovable scamp named Fuckleberry Hinn. Most creative folks don’t consciously steal ideas. They either reach the same conclusions or they don’t know what they’re doing. Only sociopaths think they can steal ideas and get away with it.

The contributor jumped the gun in assuming T.L. Crum had read and been heavily influenced by their story. It was a case of coincidence, two writers interested in similar ideas and reaching similar conclusions. Funny thing is, when I first read T.L.’s piece it reminded me of a Joe Meno short story in which people who experience human emotions turn into clouds. The human-emotion-leads-to-magical-effect idea is a great seed for a story and tons of writers have taken it to interesting places. That doesn’t mean anyone owns it. It’s a form, that’s all.

The important thing to take away is this: Dane Cook was accused of stealing jokes from Louis C.K. Instead of throwing out the allegation of theft, he chose to acknowledge that yes, the jokes were similar, maybe Cook stole them, maybe he didn’t, but those jokes were done now. They were out in the world and they had been spent. Now it was time to move on and write more jokes and let the talent of the each respective comedian be the final word.

{image: Ted Hollins}

Hey Orlando: The Zora! Fest kicked off last night and is churning up to full speed this week. Two events you should not miss…

And…

You should go to both of these. What else do you have to do this weekend? Go do something that you’ve never done before. Go meet people you might not have otherwise met. Go experience something outside of your little Winter Park, Downtown, Thornton Park bubble. Do it. Not taking ‘no’ for an answer on this one. You will enjoy yourself, I promise. Take pics. Send them to me. I will post them on this blog. Experience something outside of your day-to-day existence. Build a damn bridge for once in your life. Forge a friendship. Talk to strangers. Eat some good food. It’s nice outside.

You surface from the Lorimer L stop onto Lorimer and Metropolitan. You walk west towards the droning BQE. Nestled between the hardware stores, cuban restaurants and noodle joints, embedded in the wood siding facades of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is a weathered white and yellow storefront sign announcing SPARACINO’S BAKERY: ITALIAN FRENCH SICILIAN BREAD. Underneath the subtitle is a less-weathered yellow sign with red lettering reading AND COMIC BOOKLETS. In the storefront window is an art installation lifted from a Roald Dahl fever dream: bright colors and angular shapes, fantastical creatures made of paper, three dimensional sci-fi landscapes and the strange and beautiful creatures that inhabit them. Welcome to Desert Island Comics, an independent bookstore specializing in comics and prints, owned and operated by indie comic guru and Mad Magazine enthusiast, Gabe Fowler. Gabe was kind enough to speak via email concerning the lonliness of the internet and how it’s good to have impossible standards.

1. What’s the Desert Island’s origin story?

I grew up loving Mad Magazine, punk rock, and skateboarding, eventually studied fine art, and spent years working at art galleries. I decided it was time to put all of these interests together in a visual book store. I’ve always loved comics, graphic art, and artists’ books, and thought they would be served well by coexisting in the same environment. I’ve also always loved book stores. After years of obsessing over particular shops, it was fun to design my own and try to address the positives and negatives of other places. I started with little money and looked for a full year for a decent affordable place to rent. And I ended up with the third place I saw!

2. What’s the curatorial process when choosing books to stock?

In keeping with the “desert island” concept, ideally every item in the store should hold interest for a lifetime. Obviously this is impossible, but I think about it when I’m selecting books. If you had to live the rest of your life with this book, would it still pull it’s weight? It’s good to have impossible standards.

3. What helps a book sell? What are some of the more successful books at DI?

If I knew the answer to this one I’d one step ahead of everybody else. There’s a million intangible factors in the hard reality of selling something, especially a poetic product like an illustrated book. Why does anybody buy anything? Long-awaited work from particular artists always sell well. So does nicely handmade work, like sewn binding or screen printed covers. I also do well with limited edition items from known artists, including prints or signed books.

4. Williamsburg has a storied history in the last decade of being both the epicenter of the art/creative world as well as a neighborhood that’s become synonymous with drastic gentrification. What’s it like running a comic book shop there?

Yeah, it still hurts when rich people ruin a creative community by pricing out the artists. It has happened a million times in this town, and it will probably happen to me. Anyway, it’s great to have a comic store in Williamsburg as long creative people still live nearby. Every scene on Earth has originators, participants and spectators, and it’s always the spectators that kill it.

5. How does a brick-and-mortar shop maintain relevance in the age of online commerce? How do you compete with Amazon?

The internet is lonely. My shop is a social place full of surprising stuff, a lot of which you can’t find on Amazon. I host tons of artist signings and provide a place for people to sell their self-published books and prints. There’s tons of reasons why a physical store is not just relevant but crucial.

6. Please describe the store mascot.

Do I have a mascot? Maybe you’re referring to the pirate drawing by Matti Hagelberg which has been on my website for a few years. I don’t think I have a mascot, but I’ve been lucky to work with tons of amazing artists over the years on prints and other projects. Hagelberg is from Finland, and I approached him blindly to design a poster for the store when I first opened. With no further instructions, he created a killer geometric scratchboard piece of a pirate holding a hockey stick with a parrot on his nose. This image has been closely associated with the shop ever since.

Desert Island is a now stocking Annalemma Issue Seven: Endurance.

How many things do you make for yourself? How much do you depend on others to make things for you? When people make things for you does it make you feel important or impotent?

Here’s some powerful quotes from Junot Diaz (via Rumpus) to infest the brain on a Monday morning. Are you making things (stories, drawings, compost, business deals, love)  to feel accepted, important? Or are you making them out of necessity?

(image: Ted Hollins)

Hey Orlando: Next week the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities (or ZORA! for short) begins with the Opening Reception at Club KOHA in Eatonville on Wednesday, 1/26, 6:00 – 7:15 PM. If you’re the type to wait until a party gets into full swing, ZORA fest starts to get ramped up on Friday, January 28th at 12 noon on the World Beat Stage as spoken word artists Nas, Kyla Lacy, Shawn Welcome, Curtis Meyer, Devery and others.

And if you’re lucky, you’ll run into Ted Hollins, author of Issue Seven‘s photo essay highlighting 21 years of the ZORA festival. Go there! Take pictures!

I read contributor Bryan Furuness‘s story Man of Steel, originally published in Ninth Letter and republished in BANR 2010. The story concerns a kid who convinces himself that he sees things, visions of the future, most of them bad and he throws himself into harm’s way in an attempt to mitigate the disastrous future. It’s a great piece about perception, what’s real, what’s not, and the delusions that can drive people apart.

It made me happy to see Brian’s name in the BANR pages. I’d never read anything of Bryan’s work until he submitted something and we picked it up for online publication. Then I started seeing his name everywhere. And then I started reading everything attached to his name. Brian is a fantastic writer. Start here, then go here, then here.

Working on point-of-purchase stuff for AWP.

None of this stuff actually helps us sell anything. We usually sell out of books at AWP because of good old fashioned hand selling and friendly customer service.

Still, it’s fun to make this stuff and cool to give people something to walk away with. Are you going to be there? I hope so. I like meeting people who know/read the magazine. Feels good to make those connections. AWP is good for that reason alone: To hang with the people who are electronic ghosts the rest of the year. Start warming your palms up for the slew of hi fives.

If you’re in DC for AWP this year, be aware that Issue Six contributor Jim Ruland is unleashing his irreverent reading series, Vermin on the Mount, to the uninitiated East Coast. Including readings from Issue Seven contributors Amber Sparks and Nicolette Kittinger, as well as heavy-hitters Kim Chinquee, Roy Kesey, Lindsay Hunter, Tom Williams, Al Heathcock & Scott McClanahan. And it’s sponsored by yours truly.

Over at Big Other John Madera’s been compiling a bunch of year end lists, including one from yours truly.

Keep your calendar open Wednesday, February 16th for the release party of Burrow Press‘s Fragmentation and Other Stories, a book of 11 short stories and 11 photos by folks having some sort of connection with the Central Florida, including a story form yours truly.

This has not much to do with yours truly other than it was in yours truly’s brain this morning: Did you know Arrested Development is still around?