My brother, avid Mac disciple that he is, sent the above video this morning. He told me Annalemma should think about developing an application (cannot bring myself to say “app,” the word feels soft and wimpy on my tongue) for the iPad. Making one for the iPhone makes sense, I guess. Something like 65% of all content on the web is viewed with a mobile device nowadays (and I’m willing to bet that 90% of that content is Facebook related). But the iPad feels like such a colossal waste of money. What does this thing do that the iPhone does not? The e-book/reading feature is kinda cool, I guess, but it feels more like an afterthought than a primary function. The publishing world was asking for a savior and they got tossed table scraps.

What it boils down to for the magazine is whether or not what we do is accessible to people. I’ve always desired this magazine to be inviting to the savvy reader and first-timer alike, but with a $700 price tag I can’t see anyone buying this thing just for reading purposes.  It’s going to be owned by the tech elite initially and then, months or a couple years later, it’s primary function is going to sift through, or it will be a total flop.

I’m not really interested in being the first lit mag on the iPad. It would probably garner some initial press and a few people would find their way to the site and even fewer might actually subscribe. But if we created a revolutionary use for the iPad, beyond its original intent, then it would be a signal flair to the audience, to people like you and me.

Who can say with this type of shit, though. I’m the worst tech forecaster ever. What say you, Internet? Do you plan on buying an iPad? Are you excited about this thing at all? Or is Wired simply playing their role? Developing an application because they are expected to, not because it serves any purpose? There for the sake of being there?

(p.s. Someone neglected to mention that Wired’s creative director is a cyborg. Makes perfect sense though.)

Random thoughts:

If you’re like me, whenever you start to read a new story or novel, a slick-haired-pressed-shirt-energy-drink-sipping Hollywood agent in your brain sits down behind an over designed desk made of glass and stainless steel, listlessly listening to the pitch while tapping away at a Blackberry, occasionally barking into the Bluetooth in his ear. If he doesn’t hear the 5 crucial elements of storytelling within the first 5 minutes then he gets bored and annoyed and pushes a flashing red button on the underside of his desk, which causes you to throw the book across the room or delete the text file and move on to something more interesting.  I don’t know if this comes from being an editor for the past three years and having to sift through a lot of bad writing, for which I have little tolerance. But the agent has become something of a problem when I sit down to read an author like Brian Evenson.

Evenson forces the agent to slow down. He swats the Blackberry out of the agent’s hand, flicks the Bluetooth from his ear, dumps the latte out on his head. Not in one swift motion though, it’s a slow assault. One by one. When Evenson starts telling a story he plucks the agent from his high rise corner office and drops him into a dark labyrinth, where the only choice he has is to follow Evenson, and the only certainty is that it’s going to get darker.

This makes Fugue State a maddening read at times. Evenson plays on a reader’s expectations and natural desire for a clear storyline by sending them on an inwardly spiraling journey into insanity and paranoia. The characters often don’t know that there’s an irreversible, life-altering change chugging toward them like a freight train, until it’s too late. Characters trade places, become the people that they despise and fear most. They let darkness take hold of them until they forget who they are and who they were. If you’ve ever know anyone who’s lost their memory you know it doesn’t get much more terrifying than that.

I don’t know anything about this book but I’m already interested. When designing a book cover, this is the sentiment you’re trying to get out of a random book buyer. Caketrain not only nailed this requisite, but they just plain knocked it out of the park with Kim Parko’s Cure All. They’re getting their money’s worth out of Elene Usdin’s dreamy, haunting photograph. Full of movement and light, straddling a line somewhere between enticing and frightening. Well done, Amanda and Joseph.

Heads-up: Elene Usdin is unveiling her new show, “Femmes D’Interieur,” in Brooklyn this month. If you like this cover you should go check out this very talented French photographer.

I found out late last minute that Sam Lipsyte was reading at Housing Works so I dropped everything and trekked through 91 inches of slush to see one of my favorite authors because events like these are the reason you move to New York. Heidi Julavits and Colson Whitehead were there too, along with some big wheels from Harper’s. Like I said, this is the reason.

The man himself, who doesn’t have a website, which kind of pisses me off. Why are authors so slow to adopt technology? Is it because updating real-time information is so antithetical to polishing and crafting sentences and stories? The complete opposite of what they strive to do in the first place? Or do they just think it’s a waste of time? Whatever. All I know is his reading made me want to buy The Ask even more than I already do. And that I got no business writing if it’s not going to come out as good as his.

Colson Whitehead has good stage presence and delivery but his set-up veered dangerously close to being overly complicated. Heidi Julavits read a story that I feel like I would have loved had I read it my room, but didn’t translate all that great to a reading.

Pop quiz:

You are at a reading with some of the most well-known and influential people in the New York literary scene and you only have one copy of your magazine to give away. Do you give it to…

a) Sam Lipsyte

b) Colson Whitehead

c) Heidi Julavits

d) one of the big wheels at Harper’s

e) Justin Taylor

The answer is…

Trick question. You put on your coat and you leave immediately to go eat Thai food and catch up on Lost, because you have been holed up in your apartment for days and lack of human contact has devolved your social skills into that of a pubescent PC gamer and speaking to other humans at this point would only be an exercise in making the both parties uncomfortable. And first impressions are important.

Fucking February. You may make it through the holidays with some positivity still in tact, you may even coast through January with a little hitch in your step, but fucking February is always waiting to choke it right out of you. And if you make it through Valentines then you are simply not human.

On a positive note: How about the Housing Works Bookstore? Pretty amazing, right? Every dollar from book sales to food and beverage go to homeless men and women living with aids. All the merchandise is donated, all employees are volunteers. New favorite book store.

Some deliciously painful rejections were offered up yesterday in competition for the newest issue of PANK. Some highlights included Leilani, who got dumped by a dude because he was scared he might fall “too much in love,” Reynard, who got an entire boot of beer poured on him, and David, whose camp counselor called him the ugliest fucking kid he’d ever seen.

But there can be only one winner and that person is Peter Richter:

5th grade I ask a girl if we could “go steady.”

At lunch I sat with her and she told me, nicely, that we wouldn’t make a good couple. And then she goes “But you’re pretty.”

I thought it odd to be called pretty but I remembering thinking it was still nice of her to say so I replied. “Thank…”

and she interrupted, “Pretty pathetic.” And the entire lunch table erupted in laughter.

I took my lunch and embarrassment to another table.

Ouch. Hopefully the wounds of the past can be healed with the gift of literature, Peter. Congrats on winning the new issue of PANK, a publication that would never insult you publicly. Their new slogan perhaps?

Random thoughts:

I was reading this on the train platform, waiting for the F, when a ginger with dreads and a two nose hoops sat down on the bench next to me. Gingers with dreads are always that weird urban sighting like a baby pigeon, something that you’ve heard legend of but never believed really existed. He asked me what I was reading. I tried to describe the book but I wasn’t doing a good job, “It’s a book of these weird instructions, like how to cut yourself open, how to take the skin off your head…” He was wincing. I was having a hard time conveying the heart of the book, how the bizarre instructions and images of self mutilation where elaborate metaphors for the painful transition into manhood, fatherhood, adulthood.

I got sent an extra copy so I reached into my bag and gave it to the ginger. He said thank you. I said no sweat. We got on the same train car, through separate doors. Rode a couple of stops and got out at the same place, trying to ignore the weird coincidence. We walked out of the stairway and emerged on the street. The ginger plonked down on a skateboard and slowly coasted past me saying “Dude, thank you, so, so much,” emphasizing his syllables with the book in his hand. I told him of course and that I hope he enjoyed it.

It felt good. I had fantasies of Aaron Burch’s prose poetry turning on a light in some strangers brain, starting them on a journey into the world of chapbook culture. Then I went into the grocery store. The kid was in there. We did the cringe and head-knod thing to each other, acknowledging the weird coincidence and moving on. Staying away from each other in order to keep the previous interaction positive, to not smother this ember that I’d imagined was glowing in this kid’s mind.

I want to get the “How to (grow antlers)” piece tattooed on my body somewhere:

Grow antlers. Focus, visualize. Apply balm or lotion to the base. Prepare for the added weight but be ready to adjust. It never happens or feels quite as you’d expect, nor all at once. Balancing can be tricky, like learning to walk all over again for the first time. Be proud. Stand straight, or as straight as possible. Knock them around a little, rough them up. Rub them on trees, the walls of your bedroom. Be proud. Exude pride. Feel at home, finally, as yourself.

The Desk Set is having a book drive for a New Orleans elementary class. If you’ve got some extra scratch and are feeling generous go here and buy some books for the youngn’s. Also, there’s the above event for all the NYers. Let’s spread some literacy, people!

Today’s Holiday in Cambodia day here at Annalemma and we’re hoping to get you more psyched on this zine of ours that you have ever been on any other zine in your life. Thus, excerpts:

From Greyhound Christmas by Al Burian

I had been curious to see what sort of person takes an overnight Greyhound ride on Christmas eve. Would there be exciting, sinister motivations for needing to leave town at such an odd time? But the answer, depressingly and obviously, is that it’s mostly born again Christians. This became clear within a few minutes of departure from downtown Chicago, when the first person, an elderly gentleman in a crinkled suit, whipped out a bulky, well-thumbed and thoroughly hi-lighted jumbo print Bible and began shouting praises across the aisles. I looked around for someone to receive my exasperated eye roll, but found no one. The entire bus was enraptured. Soon, Bible quotations and hallelujahs were flying back and forth between the aisles.

My instinctual reaction to loud displays of fervent proselytizing, of course, is to want to jump up and begin yelling counter-arguments in a louder voice. Fuck religion, as the song says, but in this case I immediately recognized that as an inhumane, culturally insensitive attitude, and also that I was hopelessly outnumbered. So, rather than yelling out Crass-style lyrics, I restrained myself and listened.

From Jumping Rope with Satan by Cassandra Lewis

My mother is mentally ill but refuses to undergo treatment.  The first time she was hospitalized she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  However, another psychologist who met with her and later became my therapist said she believed my mother was misdiagnosed and should have been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia since my mother fails to return to reality, entrenched in delusions.  She’s been hospitalized, arrested, and incarcerated, blaming everyone but herself, refusing to accept responsibility.  It’s all a big conspiracy, of course.  She believes everyone is against her and either works for the mafia, the CIA, or Satan.

From A Christmas Fax from Dad’s Lawyer by Ryan W. Bradley

The clearest Christmas memory I have is waking up, my sister and I beginning to sift through our stockings while our stepdad prepared breakfast in the kitchen. We’d only started celebrating Christmas since our parents had both remarried.

We heard the fax machine downstairs whirr to life. It was from our dad’s lawyer, passing on a court order that my sister and I were to spend Christmas day with our father. We got dressed, hurried through opening our presents, and fumed by the window waiting for our dad’s Isuzu Rodeo to arrive on our street.

From Survival Recipe by Liz Grover

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I went to Cambodia. I only knew that it was going to be difficult. My goal was to document what local activists were doing to protect street children from child sex tourists, indigenous tribes fighting to protect their dwindling rainforests, and women landmine survivors learning how to make a proud living through weaving, a tradition that was nearly erased during the dark days of the genocidal Khmer Rouge, Cambodia’s totalitarian ruling Communist Party of Kampuchia. Oh, and by the way, it was my first time visiting a country where massive genocide took place.

From My Justice for All by Todd Dills

“I’ve seen the frayed ends of sanity,” Edwin said, finally, pretentiously, as he marched off to the Silver Dollar’s bathroom.

“Me too,” I called after him. “Wasn’t that a Metallica song?” though I knew it was, from the classic …And Justice for All. Metallica was about insanity, after all, and more explicitly death. In their 1980s heyday they sought, however confusedly, to encapsulate living organisms’, man’s, inexorable and punishing route toward death in their hectic, unyieldingly pounding riffs. Death via war, via insanity and bad choices, via addiction, via chance in the chaos of human experience: the unfinished business of the bell, which on their second album they left up in the air, incomplete, but if you got the reference to Donne — and you’d have to be a Neanderthal not to — the implied finale was clear. Luck be damned. Time marches on. The shortest straw is pulled. That bell tolls for thee.

Remember: Limited press of only 100. Supplies will not last. Click here to order!

It’s finally done. And only six days late!

It all started last week, when I had to re-learn how to make a zine. I hadn’t made one since college.This was the Wednesday before last, when the iPad was getting announced. It felt real weird to be doing the most rudimentary practice of media distribution, while thousands of miles away, the “future” of it was being unveiled.

Prototypes. I did a shitty layout, then sent it over to Jen who typeset it beautifully. And for free! Big heart on that O’Malley.

It came time to print and I was having major issues. Printer was claiming I hadn’t loaded the paper properly or there wasn’t enough paper when I told it, repeatedly, that this was not the case. I contacted Epson, who was no help. I was having nightmares of having to take this thing into Kinko’s. Then I saw this red button. And what do you do to a red button? You press it. And the printer started working. That’s all she wanted, just to know that I was there, that I hadn’t forgotten about her. This is apparently the reassurance button.

And BOOM! You got yurself a zine. Not long after this photo was taken I did an email with The Cambodian Daily about this project. No joke. First bit of international press! Oh, and Yahoo users: did you know about this?

Festive table of contents.

Very happy with this one. Oh yeah, did I mention…

Red staples. It’s called attention to detail, people. Maybe you should look into it (this hubris does not apply to typos).

This zine’s dancing with talent!

Did I mention that we’re only print 100 of them and that orders are shipping now? Click here to buy!

Random Thoughts:

Damn. Remember Burn Collector? Remember Al Burian? Not that either of these things is forgetable, but Al seems to have taken a few years of from the zine making business and kind of fell off my radar.

Reading BC feels like such a singularly Chicago thing to do. Most of what Al writes about takes place there and I first found out about it when I was hold up in my absolutely frigid shit hole apartment, in the throws of writing school, getting bored with most of the required texts. BC offered a kind of refuge, a metered and comfortable voice talking about the places and people I was starting to familiarize myself with.

Reading this time around I was trying to figure out why Al Burian’s style is so damn compelling. It’s not crafted masterfully or anything. It’s not like there’s a ton of lush imagery or drastic conflict arcs. On paper it just appears to be a collection of loosely connected observations on life.

But I think that’s precisely why it’s so compelling. There’s a comic panel in the new BC where Burian’s hastily scribbled version of himself proclaims, “Best to keep it simple… to the point… that’s the only way I’ll be able to have a hope of capturing the chaotic maelstrom of my existence even fractionally…” The fact that it’s not literary makes it appealing. It’s a clear, uncynical voice, not critiquing something disposable like a new album or movie, but critiquing every day life.

One quote in the book I must take issue with:

(Regarding the cold in Chicago and how it strengthens you) “It sucks, but at times there is a euphoric shock to that knowledge, the only we know what we’re feeling feeling that makes you suddenly love everyone around you with an intensity of unified righteousness that they just don’t have in Florida. In Illinois, it takes effort to find the good, and that makes it all the more remarkable when it’s there.”

I’ve lived in both places and the hellish cold that occurs there did nothing to instill that kind of camaraderie in myself or anyone else I knew in that town. It just made you want to curl up in your bed and wait for May. I’d argue that Florida has some of the most beautiful, driven and creative people I’ve ever had the pleasure to know personally. And if it takes effort to find the good in Illinois then it takes a goddamn journey to the center of the Earth to find it in Orlando, and if you do find it you feel like you’ve stumbled upon the treasure of the Sierra Madre.

But I’m sure you didn’t mean it like that, Al. I still like your stuff.

Favorite quote:

(regarding bike messangers) “These people are like vegetarian hell’s angels, displaying similarly brazen, hard-headed pride in their chaotic, dangerous mode of living – and they’ve got to be proud of themselves, because no one else is on their side.”

Also, he skillfully picks apart an essay written by Dan Clowes in 1998. Impressive.