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.
{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?
My lady got me the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010 for Christmas. I was all pumped about this edition since I found out Anne Elizabeth Moore‘s essay from Issue Five got a head-nod in the “Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2009” section. I hadn’t picked up one of these in a while. I’m not sure why. They’re always good. I’d rather have one of the pieces we publish reprinted there than in Best American Short Stories or BA Essays. It starts with an incredible short story by Sherman Alexie from his collection War Dances. In the midst of getting a growth in his brain checked out by the doctors, the narrator juggles his children, his dying father, and the very real possibility that he may be dying soon too. Alexie hasn’t lost his edge. It feels like he’s grown more crotchety as he’s gotten older, which is great. He’s at his most entertaining when he’s barbed and thorny.
There’s an etherial comic by Lilli Carré that’s a good example of when tone and feel are enough to carry a story.
Rana Dasgupta‘s essay, Capital Gains, on India’s unregulated capitalism run amok is discomforting, shocking, and an enthralling read from start to finish. Dasgupta attempts to hold a mirror up to a hopelessly corrupt government and a national psyche obsessed with the accumulation of wealth above all other things.
An excerpt from the photo journal/graphic novel hybrid “The Photographer” by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefévre and Frédéric Lemercier tracks a photojournalist covering a doctor’s travels in Northern Afganistan in 1986 treating mujahideen soldiers and residents of small villages effected by the war against the Soviet Union. The parts of the story unseen Lefévre’s photos have been dramatized by graphic artist, Emmanuel Guibert. I’m always thinking about roles that the arts play in politics and war, if they play any role at all other than Greek Chorus. “The Photographer” feels like a good example of commentary by-way-of objective storytelling.
I started reading War and Peace. I don’t really know why. I guess I felt like I was ready for it. For some reason it feels comforting in a way, to read about Russians in the 1800’s, to know that people haven’t changed all that much since then. We like to think we have but we haven’t. The settings and circumstances change, but we still behave the same. I’m having a hard time getting through the politics of it. If anyone’s read it before and or some advice for getting through the first few hundred pages (having difficulty keeping up with names and references) that’d be appreciated.
It’s unlikely I’ll finish another book before the year’s out so I’m calling it a bit early. I didn’t come close to hitting the goal. I don’t even think I hit the halfway mark. I think it was something closer to 55 books. It’s hard as shit to read 120 books in a year. Who’s got the time for that? I read an interview with Sherman Alexie where he said he’s got a personal library of something like 5000 books. That’s roughly ten books a week for ten years. I guess it’s doable if you’re Sherman Alexie. Otherwise, I can’t recommend forcing yourself to read 120 books in a year for recreational purposes. It’s more than likely you’re going to burn yourself out.
Does it count for yearly reading that I cycled through roughly 1000 short stories this year? Even if they didn’t get published? Just because a work isn’t published does that mean you can’t learn something from it? And ultimately does that mean that you the piece is somehow validated if someone learns something from it or impacts them in some small way? That’s what you want with publishing, right? Validation? That sweet crack-like drug that makes you feel like you matter, that there’s a purpose for you here? That in the event fire were to rush across the sky and singe all life from the surface of the earth in a brutal cleansing, you’d be someone they’d make sure had a place in the bunker? That would feel good, wouldn’t it?
Once I unlocked the possibility that I could read two books in a week then I got faster, so that was cool. But the books I was reading didn’t have a natural progression, I was just picking up whatever was on the shelf, mainly whatever small press stuff I’d got in the mail. But since I had a goal to hit, since I knew I could read faster than I had months before starting, it made it a lot harder to finish a book I didn’t care about, or even start one that didn’t sound exciting. When you force yourself to do something you quickly learn what’s a priority and what’s not. If I learned anything it’s that I’m only reading stuff that interests and excites me from now on. Anything else feels like a waste of time.
I’d wished there was a natural arc to the books I’d read this year. Like I said, I was mainly picking up all the stuff on my shelf I’d been meaning to get to, or stuff put out by my small press cronies. It was a year of mainly digging into that world and seeing what it’s all about. Now that I’m familiar with it, I’m kind of done with it for a while. I want to start reading the stuff that everyone else is reading, Colum McCann, Aleksander Hemon, Deb Olin Unferth, that sort of thing. Good books make you want to talk about them with other folks. Small press books are hard because not a lot of people know about them, which makes conversation scarce at best. The very cool thing about small press books, though, is that the writers are very grateful to have their stuff read. And they’ll be happy to talk to you about their books if no one else will. Also cool: they, unlike big name authors, will return your emails and sometimes you end up meeting new friends. Which, in the end, is what reading and writing is all about: connecting.
I liked writing the reviews. I imagine I’ll keep on doing it, especially if I think it’s a good small press book that deserves more exposure. But I’m done with counting how many books I’ve read. Ultimately it doesn’t matter how many books you’ve read. There’s no magic number that, once achieved, grants you enlightenment status. It’s a journey that only ends when your mind falls apart. What matters is that you read a lot and get a lot out of what you read.
Noteworthy books read (in chronological order):
Shoplifting from American Apparel
How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew
Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever
Adam Robison and Other Poems by Adam Robinson
Hobart #11: The Great Outdoors
If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your …
“What if you are part of the problem? What do you do when you realize that your history is …
Rumpus: Is this interview being monitored right now? Potter: Maybe. The more important question: Is that going to stop …
“(C)ourage is vital piece of any well-lived life.” – Sugar on body image at The Rumpus.…
Copyright Annalemma 2009
