Hey Chicagoans: Come to Beauty Bar tonight and see some wild humans ejaculate perfection from their mouths. People found out how much fun this was last year. Expectations are high this year. Will they be met? Come and see, come and see.

Hey Chicago folks! We’ll be setting up our AWP book fair table tomorrow afternoon. Please come by table H18 in the Southwest hall to outfit yourself with some of our new postcards and maybe a magazine or two (or twelve).

Words and images excerpted from Annalemma Issue Eight: Creation. These are also free with any purchase from our store.

An asymmetrical configuration for the nonconformist in your life:

Hope to see you there!

p.s. Come to our reading we’re hosting with [PANK] and MLP, Convocation in Chicago. Will post more details tomorrow.

{image via Chase Heavener}

Hello potential submitters. If you’ve been waiting until the last second to send something for Issue Nine: India, consider this the last minute. The deadline for all submissions is January 13th, 2012. Now is the time to send your best story, essay, artwork, photography with some connection to the country of India and her people. The submissions have been piling up and some fantastic names and faces have thrown their hats in the ring. In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve not gotten close to reading any of them yet, but I have a feeling the submission stack is brimming with nothing short of the most harrowing tales of love, struggle and triumph that I’ve ever had the privilege to publish. Think your work can measure up to that? Click here to find out.

Big ups to Issue Six contributor Jim Ruland for winning the grand prize in the Reader’s Digest “Your Life” contest! A few weeks back I posted up a blog about voting for Jim and his story of a wandering sailor who eventually found his way. Jim got enough votes and he won. Thanks to everyone who found out about Jim here and clicked on over to vote for him. It’s great to see the community coming out and supporting a great writer like Jim. And be sure to check out his story collection, Big Lonesome, which I interviewed him about here.

Well done, Jim!

MLP, [PANK] and us are doing it up at AWP again. It was a fantastic time last year, way better than I expected it to be, and that’s saying a lot because I usually expect these things to be great. Some new names on the bill this year. I’m very excited to see Scott McClanahan and Brandi Wells. I saw Scott last year and no joke almost cried and Brandi is a rad writer. You will be bummed if you miss this.

Issue Six: Sacrifice contributor and all-around great dude Jim Ruland is competing in Reader’s Digest Your Life Contest. From what I can tell, the competition gets people to write 150 word memoirs, other folks vote on their favorites and the winner gets 25 large and published in RD.

Click here to read and vote for Jim’s entry, a salty tale about a sailor sinking to the depths of a metaphorical sea and, well, I won’t ruin the ending for you. Go read and vote for it! Like I said, Jim is a good man and a great writer and if anyone deserves to win a huge chunk of change for a minimal amount of words, it’s him.

One of the best curated bookstores I’ve ever been to in my entire life, St. Marks Books, is in trouble. Facing a rent increase from the Cooper Union, the 34 year old New York City institution faces a financial bind it might not survive. The community has supported by buying books in droves and signing petitions but what it will take is the clemency of the college that owns the building. As of this writing St. Marks is scheduled to appeal their rent increase, though no date has been set for the meeting. If you would like to help out, co-owner Terry McCoy puts it best…

“Think of us when you’re going to buy a book or magazine or even a card or postcard. We have calendars, too, and Moleskine…. That, to me, is the best kind of support. The point we are making, the difference between how we approached Cooper Union last summer and this summer, is that we’re saying we’re an integral part of the community. Last year we approached them with numbers, and they came back with their own. But this community is really concerned about preserving independent businesses and diversity, to keep this from becoming a mall-type chain-store bank-branch neighborhood.”

Even before I moved to New York, every time I’d visit I would make a special trip to St. Marks just to walk around, find some stuff I wouldn’t have normally found if I’d been searching online. This is the importance of the well-curated independent bookstore: to introduce voices to the community that would not have otherwise been heard. What makes this instance of indie bookstore plight important is this is happening in the center of the literary universe. What happens here has a ripple effect on the national and global community. And what happens when the indie bookstore is closed? Voices get silenced, once again.

{quote via}

This happened over the weekend. A lot of people got pissed off. Some of them had good reasons, some of them didn’t. Seeing as it’s pretty much over, I don’t have anything to add to the conversation other than to say, all that time spent talking and thinking about something like this could have been spent so much more productively, like making something like this:

People like to talk about this stuff because controversy and outrage are a fun distraction from doing work. But it’s easy to forget that it’s just that, a distraction. These are the sorts of topics on the internet that get more hits than any fiction or poem that’s published on the web and further perpetuates the devaluing of art and writing in the world we live in. Bothering yourself with “controversy” like this is taking the place of writing and creating something that will provide a service to people long after you’re gone. There’s so many other things in this world worthy of your ire and scrutiny. In five or ten years, no one is going to remember these flare ups of our small corner of the world. You probably barely will as well. What will matter is what you created. What matters is what dig for and what you make out of it and how it effects people.

It’s easier to talk about creating than it is to create. You think that guy in the video spent hours and days ruminating over the state of the dance world? He probably just danced his ass off.

Let’s stop talking and start doing.

{hat tip to booooooom for the video for “Pop Culture” by Madeon}

When I first got into indie publishing a few years back, novelist Jim Munroe was the man who’d seen and done it all. After jumping ship from a Harper Collins publishing deal, Munroe began NoMediaKings.org, a vast resource of knowledge on DIY publishing for the subversive and creative mind. Everything in Silico, Munroe’s sci-fi, cyberpunk novel about lost people using technology before it uses them, was as endlessly entertaining as it was thought-provoking and left you more than a little bit scared at what technology might have in store for us just around the corner.

Ghosts with Shit Jobs, a new sci-fi mockumentary written and produced by Munroe, asks what happens when the global tables are turned on a socio-economic level: 30 years from now America is a bankrupt third-world country that survives off jobs outsourced from the East. The Cantonese slang for indigenous Americans doing the work Chinese are unwilling to do is, “ghosts.” Check it out:

This movie looks fantastic and timely as hell. Well done, Jim.

Issue Eight: Creation got a very thoughtful review by writer/designer Nancy Smith on The Rumpus today. I keep The Rumpus open in a browser tab pretty much all the time and periodically refresh it throughout the day, so, naturally, this pumps me up to a degree that I’m having a hard time expressing in words.

In the review, Smith focuses on the essays, including Blake Butler‘s piece on RPGs, Jen O’Malley‘s personal history of bridal gowns, and Gina Ishibasi’s essay on the importance of knowing how to work with your hands. Smith also includes some of her personal history and relationship to exercise of making things. I thought this part was especially beautiful:

My grandfather was a clockmaker, and for my fifteenth birthday I received a lovely grandfather clock, which remains one of my most beloved possessions. Why is this more important to me, than say, a clock I bought at Target? Because someone close to me made it, with me in mind. And because there are no others in the world like it. My grandfather made clocks for all five grandchildren, and each one is completely unique, and specific to each of us. He died several years ago, and though I received many presents from him over the years, this is the only thing that I will keep for the rest of my life.

Also, not only is Smith a great writer, but she’s an equally great designer/illustrator. Check out this rad Dear Sugar poster she made (which is available for sale for all you big time Sugar fans):

Thanks Rumpus. I love you and I don’t care who knows it.