Hey Orlando! Anna is sponsoring this year’s Florida Film Festival and as a result, we’ve got four free tickets to go see the Tuesday, April 12th screening of LOUDER THAN A BOMB, a documentary film telling the story of four teams of Chicago high school poetry teams as they prepare to compete in the world’s largest youth poetry slam. Check out the trailer:

Wanna go see it for free? Post a line from your favorite poem to our facebook page. The four most interesting choices will be chosen  this Friday at midnight EST.

Yesterday I talked about my friend Jason and the inspiration for the Issue Eight: Creation, but he’s not the only piece of the puzzle. Meet Lloyd Kahn, also a role model for this issue. We’re trying hook up an interview with him. Until then, watch this short doc on him and what he does and be excited.

Last month an old friend from the Florida days came into town and stayed with us for a weekend. To say thanks, he bought us tickets to see Bright Eyes at Radio City. This was a totally unnecessary move on his part, but nonetheless very much appreciated.

My buddy is the biggest Bright Eyes fan I’ve ever met. He’s seen them probably a hundred times. It was a shame that he wasn’t there with us this night. Radio City is an incredible building and it would have freaked him out.

I couldn’t get over this mural in the lobby. It’s called the Fountain of Youth. Here’s something interesting.

Ezra Winter painted it in 1932. It’s one he’s most known for. He was an incredibly talented muralist who demanded high prices for his work. His story took a tragic turn when he fell off a high scaffolding while working and broke his back. He never recovered his ability to keep his hand steady enough to paint with and eventually committed suicide in 1949 at the age of 63. I bring this up because Bright Eyes songs mention death and dying quite a bit. But their songs have the tendency to be somewhat hopeful too. I’m sure what’s hopeful about Winter’s story. Maybe what’s hopeful is “The Fountain of Youth” still exists and still has the power to move people like myself to think and write about it.

The place was sold out. I don’t know why that’s always surprising to me to imagine that so many people are into this band.

Man, I love art deco. The 30’s and 40’s may be my favorite period in American architecture. I like the idea that “bathroom” or “restroom” or “water closet” sounded too crass or rudimentary, that it didn’t cultivate a feeling of rest at all. You know what word does help you relax enough to have a urinary or bowel movement? The word “lounge.”

Never a fish-eye around when you need it. Notice the glow of the smart phones in the crowd. When I first heard this band I only knew a couple people who’s phones had color screens, much less unadulterated internet access. That was, what, maybe six years ago?

Rad set pieces. I couldn’t stop thinking of Conor Oberst’s appearance in Freedom.

And that made me realize I was wearing flannel and tortoise shell glasses. And at that moment I became aware of how I was very much a white man participating in a very white person activity.

I don’t know what that means, it’s just been on my mind lately. But no one really cares about that.

Was it a good show? You bet your ass. Thank you, Thomas, for the amazing experience.

After almost a year (a fucking year? really?) I finally got around to posting bios from the print issue contributors. Apologies if you were in the print issue and were at a party and told someone you were in the print issue of this bad ass journal and the person you were talking to went home and got on the internet to google-proofed your story and thought that you were a goddamned liar and then started telling people you were a goddamned liar and next thing you know everyone hates you and you’re living in a box. Sorry about that.

Also, contributor Paul Kwiatkowski got a shout out at the Paris Review blog for his essay Lions that first appeared in Issue Seven.

Also, we need artists. If you are an artist or know an artist and would like to illustrate a story we’re running on the web then email me at chris {at} annalemma {dot} net and I will probably like what you do.

Donald by Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott

(McSweeney’s, 2011)

What if Donald Rumsfeld got caught up in the state-sanctioned torture machine he helped design? That’s the premise of Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott’s short novel Donald. The main character is abducted in the middle of the night by a clandestine military group who take him to an undisclosed location where they begin a series of esotheric interrogations. It’s unclear what they want, and before the main character can even discern if he can give it to him, he’s taken to a Guantanimo-like facility where he becomes a prisoner of war he helped create. Events soon blur together, interrogation sessions become more clouded in mystery and alliances with guards and prisoners are formed quickly and dissolved just as fast.

Martin and Elliott have done an impressive thing considering the audience they’re catering to, considering the goal they’re trying to achieve. They’ve made the character of Donald into a person you sympathize with, a person you feel for and relate to and root for even though you don’t agree with his actions, his rationale, or his worldview. It would have been easy to take Donald at face value, to play up the caricature, to feed into the liberal desire to burn him at the stake. Of course, the premise of the book is hurling Donald into the downward spiral of confusing madness that is the military torture machine. The book borders on tedious as the interrogations become maddeningly repetitive and unproductive, but that comes with the territory when you’re trying to mimic the feeling of psychological torture.

People often question the importance of fiction. What’s its role? Is it relevant? What’s the point? Novels like this, ones that make clear, unflinching, political statements (ones that have the balls to come out on the same day as Rumsfeld’s true memoir) seem to be the answer to that question.

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

(Norton, 2004)

This was the one that was everywhere when it came out. The one that was on all the book club lists, the one everyone was reading, even if they didn’t read all that much, even the people who only read three or four books a year, this was the one. I missed it. I missed it cause I was snobbish when this book came out. I was arrogant enough to think that I knew something that everyone else didn’t because I wasn’t going to get sucked into the hype train. What a dumbfuck mode to be in. What a willfully ignorant, up-my-own-ass-for-no-good-reason mode to be in. What mistake to miss out on a book like this because I’m stuck in this mode of thinking that I’m somehow better than someone else. What a waste of time it is to think like this. Think about how much this book could have taught you with its tight and powerful vignettes adding up to a monumental story. Think about all the time you wasted thinking you were hot shit when you were so much the opposite.

DMZ Vol.1: On the Ground by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli

(Vertigo, 2006)

In the not-too-distant future, anti-social militias that pepper the country (once thought of as bastions of crazy inbred woods folk) awake like a sleeping giant and topple the US government. The borough of Manhattan becomes a Demilitarized Zone, where chaos reigns and no one has any concept of what life is like, where rumors end and fact begins. Inexperienced photojournalism intern Matty Ross is thrown headlong into answering these questions as his team is attacked when they land in the warzone and he’s left alone without a contact inside to pick up the pieces.

The macho, bar-stool voice bravado that seems to pervade most male comic book characters personalities isn’t skimped on in this series. The most interesting thing about DMZ is the story that lies beneath the surface, the story the news is often unable to provide about warzones: the story of what life is like for the individual. If post-apocalyptic genre stories should be judged not on the questions of why the word as we know it has come to an end, but what life is like for people after the fact and how communities attempt to rebuild themselves, then DMZ is worth a read in this regard.

I got sent two excellent collections of writing in the mail last week.

The above is Fragmentation + Other Stories, put together by my Orlando homies Jana Waring and Ryan Rivas under their new imprint Burrow Press. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, just blasted through a few that caught my eye, most notably the flash piece at the book takes its name from by Peg Alford Pursell. She knows the key to a good flash piece is to illustrate those emotions we have that spark up real quick and fade just as fast. Tom Debauchamp’s story about a kid that compulsively says the word “skullfucker” before everything had me thinking it was going to be shocking for the sake of being shocking, but then turned out to pull off a real heart warmer. Full disclosure: I have a piece in here. While I would be psyched if you read it (it’s pretty good), that’s not why I’m pumping this collection up. Jana and Ryan are taking the initiative to start a small press for Orlando and the surrounding area, the place where I’m from and a place that doesn’t have that sort of thing. They’re taking a step towards creating an outlet for writers in that area, something that I didn’t have when I was there, and all that makes me feel good. Buy this one, it’s good writing from good people.

Issue Five contributor William Walsh was good enough to send me a copy of this collection he put together with Ampersand Books called RE: Telling – An Anthology of Borrowed Premises, Stolen Settings, Purloined Plots and Appropriated Characters. Issue Six contributor Matt Bell lends his magic to the immortal Mario Bros. in  Mario’s Three Lives. Another contributor from the same issue, Jim Ruland, takes the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme to the seedy underbelly of Amsterdam and the morally ambiguous terrain of adulthood. This collection is all about fun, a chance to watch some of your favorite writers (Blake Butler, Roxane Gay, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Shya Scanlon, Molly Gaudry, Michael Kimball, Lily Hoang and more) take some pop culture figures and tropes and have a good time flipping them on their head or pushing them to limits you’d never imagined they could approach. Pick this one up if you enjoy reading.

{pics courtesy Tim Schreier}

A lot of people think AWP is a fun and good spirited chance to commune with writers and find out about new places to publish. Nothing could be further from the truth. AWP a ritualistic bloodsport activity, a kill-or-be-killed, knock-down-drag-out, fighting-by-tooth-and-nail, backstabbing, betrayal-riddled hell mouth. This is the gaping maw that consumes the hopes and dreams of all who dare to attend. Abandon all hope ye who enter.

Gaze upon the chaotic bloodlust that consumes the eyes of the attendees: writers, professors and students all looking for the slightest hint of your weakness. Once the weakness has been exposed, it is doomed to be exploited.

Feast your eyes on the hellacious blood orgy of organizational networking.

There in the distance, among the rabble and static, shines a dark beacon of demonic power known as the Hobart table.

The horror… the horror!

Tucked in the blackest corner of this hoary underworld resides these perverted minds peddling seeds of evil to corrupt the minds of innocents.

Beware this twisted carnival of soulless ghouls. Beware.

Peace out, New York. We took the Bolt Bus. I will gladly shill for the Bolt Bus if they want to advertise with us. $25 or less and you get a comfortable, swift ride from NY to DC. Free Wifi, free electronic outlets, free beautiful scenery. There were other AWP’ers on this particular Bolt Bus. They will back me up on this.

DC’s public trans is ominous and monolithic. The escalators are poorly oiled and they groan like wounded animals. Inspiring and unsettling at the same time.

Here is the floor of the book fair. We were next to Salt Hill which was real cool fortune. The floor is very quiet on Thursday. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is more people sitting at tables than there is people walking around and visiting the tables…

Here is Matt Siegle. He is nine feet tall and must adjust the microphone to accommodate this fact. We threw a reading with PANK and Mud Luscious and called it Divination in DC. About 50 writers descended on an Irish pub with about four families trying to have a nice dinner on a Thursday night. They were unprepared for what was about to happen to them.

Steve Himmer riffs on the Chuck Norris jokes that were oh-so-popular at the end of the aughts and ramps up the pathos on them.

Mathias Svalina read a poem about the end of the world and its relation to the television show Cheers.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz smoked everyone with this poem about a drunk boyfriend at a poetry reading. The first second got cut off. The piece starts with the words “The drunk boyfriend at the bar, he groans…” I really love this one a lot.

And then she read some transcripts from porno movies. She is my new favorite poet. Thanks Cristin.

{image via}

Just got back from AWP last night and feel like the above image. Many books bought, traded for, given unsolicited and accepted under pressure. Left the camera in the cupboard of the friends apartment we stayed at, so wait for a full report next week. For now, time to get to work!

Crack your fingers. The theme for Annalemma Issue Eight is going to be announced tomorrow.

Also, the computer died for the final time. It is in the process of being banished from the kingdom forever and steps have been taken so that this never happens again. If you’ve sent art submissions in the past month and a half then I probably lost those emails. Please send them again. All the prose submitters need not worry, we keep that stuff on the cloud.

Feel like reading the slush pile? We’re going to be inundated with submissions soon and we’re behind as it is, so contact me at chris {at} annalemma {dot} net if you want to get your hands filthy on some raw words. We could use your help and it could help you learn a bit about what your peers are churning out these days. You will be paid in eternal gratitude and a free copy of the new issue when it comes out.

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: