RE:Telling

RE: PANK Review

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 10:06:04 -0400

Sarah Lippmann gave RE:Telling a good read and wrote a really nice review over at the PANK BLOG.

RE: Open Letters Monthly Reviews RE:Telling

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 21:07:27 -0400

Peter Jurmu gave Re:Telling a thorough reading over at Open Letters Monthly, pairing us with Robert Coover’s collection A Child Again (McSweeney’s Books, 2005). Strange coincidence that I gave Coover a copy of RE:Telling when he read with us in Providence back in April. The reading was in a bar, so Coover offered to buy me a beer. I said I’d have a Bud Light. He said, If you really want one. He wasn’t pleased with my order. So I said, I’ll have a Guinness. Coover said, That’s better.

Please read Peter Jurmu’s review of RE:Telling and A Child Again at Open Letters Monthly. And please buy me a Guinness next time you see me. Thanks.

RE: Mona Lisa Mona Lisa Mona Lisa

Wed, 18 May 2011 22:54:00 -0400

In addition to collecting fiction and poetry from thirty accomplished writers, RE: Telling features a folio of acrylic paintings by Teresa Buzzard that re-tell da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” ten times. Buzzard’s work is bold and bright. She mixes exuberance with a sweet humor, and she brings a narrative quality to her subjects.

(NOTE: Before you read this Q&A, link to H&M’s Your Art Here T-Shirt Design Contest and VOTE for Teresa Buzzard’s Tea for Two T-shirt.)

………………..

Your “Mona Teresa” series re-tells da Vinci’s famous portrait. You apply a Mona Lisa treatment to ten iconic figures, Princess Leah from Star Wars, Alex from A Clockwork Orange, Mrs. Potato Head, SpongeBob SquarePants, and others. What was your thinking process behind this series and how did you select your subjects? Is the series ongoing, and if so, who else will get Mona Teresa’d?

My thinking process behind these paintings? I looked at the original Mona Lisa, (which we all know is pretty realistic and warm-toned) and I aimed for the complete opposite. I wanted to get as stylistically far away from the original as possible, yet still have it somewhat recognisable (ergo the kept pose)- and what better re:tells a Renaissance treasure than goofy distorted cartoons? :) Regarding the subject selection, it was purely silly and selfish: I nicked ideas and influences from a few of my favorite things! Initially, the idea was to create a lot of mixed media Mona Lisas from all walks of life… However, once the canvas was cut and primed and had its first taste of acrylic, nearly all of my intentions were abandoned in favor of a new creative creature…

If Ampersand Books has another batch of Re:Tellings as well as a desire to see more Mona Teresas, then count me in for round two! This seems an appropriate place to mourn the Mona Teresas lost in the Great Coffee Spill of 2010; Rest in Peace (or until future restoration) to the Missing Mona Lisa (background fully intact) the Mad Hatter, the Jazz-Inspired, the Pee Wee Herman, the Mardi Gras femme fatale, a Native American beauty, and the Punk Mona Teresa (complete with a mohawk, safety pins, and CBGB shirt). Damn that list, methinks a revival may be in order…

What are the specs on these pieces, that is, what are their sizes, what media did you use, etc? And are the originals for sale (or already sold)?

All of the Mona Teresas are acrylic on canvas, finished with Kamar varnish. I hadn’t originally intended for these paintings to live anywhere but my studio, so the pieces are all various (and somewhat awkward) sizes: The Hollywood inspired is 19x24, Woodstock and Star Wars inspired are 18x24, the Flapper inspired is 16x24, Rainbow Brite and Mrs. Potato Head inspired are 13x15, the Geisha, Burqua-shrouded and Clockwork Orange inspired pieces are 12x16 and the would-be Mr. Squarepants is a diminutive 8x10 on canvas board. There are a few originals still available for purchase, and there will also be prints of all of the paintings available online soon!

Are you primarily a portraitist? If so, can you talk about that? And if not, can you talk about your other painting interests?

Am I primarily a portraitist? Not exactly. I dabble here and there with class assignments- I’m aiming to eventually obtain a Master’s Degree in Art Therapy-it’s a long way away, and I started school a lot later in life than the kids in my classes, but damnit I’m there…that counts, right? I also attend as many local Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School events as I possibly can (life drawing meets burlesque, how can you go wrong? www.drsketchy.com find one near you!)… so, I’m learning new things everyday. Abstract paintings have been fun to create, I love that nearly anything goes with those. I took my first painting class last semester, so I still have a LOT of styles and exercises to explore… I’m excited for new creative adventures!

I like the typewriter still life that you did, but you say that you hate painting still lifes. What do you hate about it? Is there anything in still life painting that you can apply to your portrait work?
Thanks much for digging on the typewriter still life! I’m glad you enjoy it! I suppose I should have been a little less harsh with my wording, hate is a mighty strong word- though I do sincerely dislike still lifes. If I can take a photograph of something, I don’t want to draw or paint it. I want to add my own flair to it, I want to create something new, I want to make it mine. Additionally, I don’t believe I have the patience for details. However, still life sessions are a good lesson in patience and attention to detail, both of which should certainly be applied to portraiture.

What are you working on these days and/or what’s next?

These days I continue to juggle part time work, full time school, family time, creative projects and play. I have an opportunity to assist in teaching a cartooning class at a local art center, with a cool cat I met at a Dr. Sketchy event: Len Peralta (very talented and lots of fun: www.lenperalta.com ). Modeling for and sitting in on his classes have been a blast, and I feel privileged to be able to have an opportunity to do more in this line. I have a few other creative projects swirling around my head, waiting for their chance at fruition. The only tough thing about all of these wonderful things is the honesty in the label “starving artist”- damn the man! One of these days, all will balance out.

Bonus question, I understand that you’ve know Ampersand Books publisher Jason Cook since fourth grade. Has he matured at all since fourth grade? And what stories of his should be re-told?

Like a fine wine, baby! Cook is a rockstar and a monkey fightin’ role model! True story. What’s your definition of “matured” by the way? ;) Seriously though, that kid is a ninja-he makes things happen. Working with him is a great privilege, and being able to call him one of my best friends is even better. All of our adventures the past two decades are in need of some re-telling…Europe, New Orleans, and each of our current ‘hometowns’…no city or continent is safe. Of course, this time with a lot more funding, alcohol and bellydancers.

RE: New Review in decomP

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 08:27:00 -0400

Read Spencer Dew’s comprehensive review of RE:Telling at decomP.

Quoting:

“The variety of engagement with retelling as act and idea makes this an exciting and intriguing volume.”

Special mentions of retellings by contributors Jim Ruland, Molly Gaudry, Shya Scanlon, and Henry Jenkins.

RE: Michael Martone

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:01:00 -0400

MICHAEL MARTONE is the author of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction, including Unconventions: Attempting the Art of Craft and the Craft of Art and Double-Wide: Collected Fiction of Michael Martone. His work has been recognized with two NEA Fellowships and the AWP Book Award for Non-Fiction. He teaches in the program for Creative Writing at the University of Alabama.

His contribution to the RE:Telling anthology is “Borges in Indiana,” which is equally about Borges and Indiana. I misled Michael Martone when I requested this Q&A. I promised him a few “softballs,” but then I started him off with a question about his life as a fictional character named Michael Martone. Fortunately, there are no questions that Michael Martone cannot answer. I should have asked more…

In addition to being a contributor to the anthology, you are also one of its subjects. Quoting from Josh Maday’s “Distractus Refractus Ontologicus: The Dissemination of Michael Martone”: “Michael Martone is a mantra, a rosary, a repetition, an incantation that grows slippery…” How does it feel to be the product of another writer’s imagination? Particularly, a “mantra, rosary, incantation”?

How does it feel? And this, you suggest, is a softball question I am to hit out of the park? This semester in Alabama, I offered a graduate class in plagiarism. So your question arrives not just with an anthology that appropriates appropriation but also as another zephyr in the zeitgeist. We are just reading Lewis Hyde’s new book As Common as Air that worries the notion of the cultural commons and intellectual property. Most striking to me is the true radical history of Adams, Jefferson, Franklin who went so far as to write, invent, think things in order to give them away before someone else could copyright or patent those same things. Jefferson’s metaphor is of lighting a candle with the flame of another not diminishing the light, not taking, but adding to the light. It is about the exchange, the transmission. I have felt, for a while, that the machine I am using right now and this network it is connected to will far more efficiently deconstruct the author than any continental essay ever could. Subject? Object? Author? It feels like a warm bath to me, moving from the personal to the massed mass. I feel of the new magazine, The New Anonymous, with its namelessnesses. It feels like the future to me. I just checked. There are 62 Michael Martones on the Facebook right now. I have friended them all. They are all my friends. A Michael Martone, not this Michael Martone, granted an interview published in Meridian. There is another one in Hayden’s Ferry. They are not me, it seems, but they are me. Or they are not I but they are I. I think that if we do this—me, you, Josh—if we are artists at all, the work we do is along the borders, between the boundaries, and the spaces in between. We redraw them. Redefine them. Break and shape the spaces in between. I love the smell of osmosis in the morning. It feels like iodine. It feels like CO_2.It feels sublime.

You’ve written stories from the point of view of Derek Jeter, Dan Quayle, Mark Spitz, Audie Murphy, and other figures from pop culture. How do you develop an interior voice for a living character who is so familiar to readers? The Spitz voice is very childlike. Where did that come from?

See above. I steal the voice or perhaps more accurately I tap into the one voice that runs through us all. I like to think that what I do is mythology. I am a mythologist. I am not a writer of new things but only a shaper of shared things already here. No one owned or originated or copyrighted Oedipus and so Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and all the unnamed playwrights could use the circulating story, shape its sonic wave. Oedipus is essentially voiceless, a vessel to be filled. We only think we know someone’s voice. It is ventriloquism and the desire on the audiences’ part to provide the inflection. Spitz, the character himself, is body surfing the wave. His child-like voice is being downloaded from the magazine he is reading, Highlights. Osmosis again. Permeable.

One of the archetypal characters from “Borges in Indiana” is The Comp Lit Student Who Had a Car. I’ve met maybe a dozen writers who have stories of picking up visiting writers at the airport or train station and driving them to campus. Did you ever taxi any famous authors when you were a student? (If not, can you talk about a younger Michael Martone meeting a writer that he admired?)

I drove Czeslaw Milosz from Des Moines to Ames, Iowa, who spoke only in Polish with the Iowa State math professor who came along for the ride. I drove Wendell Berry out to Maurice Talleen’s draft horse farm in the middle of winter, there to inspect Percheron mares and their yearlings steaming in the middle of the night, snow swirling through the flashlight beams. I smuggled Tomaz Salamun across the Mexican border. Driving Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to a commencement speech in Syracuse. I am sorry I missed a chance to hear John Barth and James Michener talk about the Maryland blue crab.

What are you working on now or what’s on the horizon for you, writerwise?

Four for a Quarter, a book of fictions, comes out this fall. I am finishing a project called Winesburg, Indiana, a hybrid book that is anthology and collection of stories that take place in the town of Winesburg on the Fork River in Northeastern Indiana. I am working on science fiction fictions called Amish in Space. I am working on a book called Philo T. Farnsworth in Fort Wayne. The inventor of electronic television lived in my hometown. A play, Alive and Dead in Indiana,will be produced in several Indiana cities over the next few years. I have begun a new book that rewrites and re-imagines southern icons like the battles of the Civil War and books like To Kill a Mockingbird. And I want to do a book of interviews I have done. I am thinking of calling it You Can Say That Again.

RE: Lily Hoang & Kathleen Rooney

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 06:46:00 -0400

LILY HOANG’S first book, Parabola, won the Chiasmus Press UnDoing the Novel Contest. She is also the author of the novels Changling (Fairy Tale Review Press), which received a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and The Evolutionary Revolution (Les Figues Press). Her newest book is a collaborative collection of short stories called Unfinished (Jaded Ibis Press). This fall she will be joining the faculty at New Mexico State University’s MFA Program. You can find her virtually at HTMLGiant.

KATHLEEN ROONEY is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and the author of the memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (University of Arkansas Press) and the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint). Her first book of poetry, Oneiromance (an epithalamion) was released by the feminist publisher Switchback Books.

Their story in RE: Telling is “So Cold and Far Away,” a contemporary reimagining of The Book of Ruth with a camera.

WW: Lily, “So Cold and Far Away” is part of your series of collaborative stories called Unfinished (Jaded Ibis). You asked a number of writers to send you their unfinished stories and you finished them. Pretty amazing concept. Can you talk a bit about the project?

LH: A few summers ago, as I was struggling to come up with a new book project, I went through my “trash/story starts” folder and realized that everything I had was really trash, but then, I figured out that if I had so many bad story starts I wanted to throw out, every other writer must too. On a whim, I asked 30 or so of my favorite writers to give me their abandoned stories. I didn’t think it would work. I didn’t really think anyone would send me their unfinished stories. But, within the hour, the ever-generous Brian Evenson gave me four story starts, and each one was more than promising. And so, I started writing.

After I finished each story, I emailed it to the original writer, and depending on the writer’s preference, we either did collaborative edits or the writer completely signed the story over to me.

Unfinished also displays “finished” art. Artist Anne Austin Pearce completed unfinished art by her favorite artists, and they are truly splendid.

WW: Kathleen, what was it like, entering into a collaboration like this?

KR: Lily is an amazing writer in her own right, and a total joy to work with. She is the person you would have wanted to work with you on every group project in grade school ever because she has a ton of energy and completely pulls her weight and then some. A-plus. The first phase of the project was incredibly simple since all Lily needed was the beginning of an abandoned short story, based on which she drafted a completely new piece. Then she and I revised back and forth fairly extensively, and that was super-simple, too, since Lily’s quick on the e-reply and not at all opposed to edits and suggestions.

WW: Your story is a contemporary retelling of the Ruth-Boaz-Naomi story from the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible. Some biblical scholars see the Book of Ruth as Naomi’s story. But would you say that your re-telling is Ruth’s story? Is it Ruth’s story because she has the camera? How does she possess the power in each relationship?

KR: Lily might answer differently, but I’d say our version is definitely Ruth’s story. Susan Sontag—and lots of other intelligent people who observe such things—has written that the camera can be a stand-in for both a penis and a weapon, specifically a gun. So if you look at it that way (or even if you don’t, and the camera’s “just” a camera) Ruth’s being a photographer does give her a measure of control and at least partial invulnerability in each relationship, even though the relationships are unequal (and not in Ruth’s favor) in other ways.

LH: I love Kathleen’s response, and I agree with it completely. Reading the Book of Ruth growing up, I always wondered why it wasn’t called the Book of Naomi. Throughout our story, Ruth takes back that power, whether it is through the camera—yes! A weapon!—or how she denies Boaz sexual fulfillment. Even with Naomi, Ruth is the one with power.

WW: What other retelling(s) have you done? (If none, can you name a few stories that you think are ripe for retelling?)

KR: On and off for the past ten years or so, since I was finishing up undergrad, I’ve been working on a novel-in-verse based on the life and work of the poet and mysterious disappearee Weldon Kees, using his fictional character, Robinson, as a biographical stand-in for the man himself. The project is finished now, and part of it—the first section, set in New York in the 1940s and early 1950s—was published recently by Greying Ghost Press as a chapbook called After Robinson Has Gone. This project felt like a re-telling, definitely, since I’m actively reimagining Kees’ life and using his own creation to do so, but it also felt like a collaboration or even a translation. Kees is no longer around, obviously—he vanished in 1955—and he and I have never had a conversation, per se, but it feels sort of like I’ve been talking to and working with him for a decade.

LH: In my first book Parabola, I wrote a re-telling of the Adam-Eve-Lilith love triangle. Arguably, my second book Changing is a complete re-telling of the I Ching or Chinese Book of Changes. I also have a forthcoming book called Invisible Women, which is a feminist re-telling of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

In general, I’m a big fan of appropriation and often use it as writing exercise in my fiction workshops. Re-tellings engage in an explicit dialogue and offer opportunities to collaborate and pay homage to our writer-heroes.

WW: What are you working on now? What’s next?

KR: Hardly a day goes by that I don’t do some collaborative writing over Gmail with Elisa Gabbert , so I’m always working on a poem of some sort. In terms of solo stuff, I’m in the process of revising the manuscript that I hope will be my first novel, a political coming of age story called (provisionally, anyway) O, Democracy! That’s what’s next from me personally. And Rose Metal Press has just finished an Open Reading Period, so Abby Beckel and I are working on reading submissions for that to figure out what will be next from RMP.

LH: I’m working on a collaborative novel with Molly Gaudry. It’s a long love letter. It’s a funny story because the whole project started because Molly appropriated three love sentences I wrote a year ago. A month ago, we discussed the possibility of doing a big collaborative project and it began with her sentence, which was a mash-up of my three sentences.

Other than collaborations, I only write once a year, during the summer, so I’m just now beginning to think of ideas for a novel, but I’ve recently been pretty obsessed with remote islands. That’s where I think I’m headed, eventually.

Just as a quick pitch: Please look for this anthology I co-edited with Blake Butler called Thirty Under Thirty, due out this summer with Starcherone Books. We have 30 fabulous stories by 32 hot young writers (originally submitted when they were) under 30. It’s been three years since then, so…you know…we age.

Another quick pitch: The gorgeous full color version of Unfinished is available now at Jaded Ibis Press. The black/white version will be released later this summer!

RE: Win a Copy of RE:Telling

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 06:59:18 -0400

Necessary Fiction is running a RE:Telling contest. Visit their site and post an idea for a story re-telling. Your re-telling can be of a movie, a book, a tv show, a video game, a cartoon, or whatever.The best re-telling idea will win copy of the RE:Telling anthology, courtesy of Steve Himmer, Necessary Fiction Editor.

Entries close at noon, this Saturday, April 2.

Enter here! Enter now!

RE: Review in Prick of the Spindle, 5.1

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 08:14:00 -0400

Nice review of RE:Telling featured in the new issue of Prick of the Spindle.

Cynthia Reeser, founder/publisher of Prick of the Spindle and Aqueous Books, highlights stories by contributors Matt Bell, Alicia Gifford, Michael Martone, Josh Maday, and Corey Mesler, saying: “(stories) in the collection…refract and distort the original stories as they interpret, re-purpose, and frame anew.”

Check it out.

RE: The Plot to Kidnap Stonehenge

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 14:56:00 -0400

COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published four novels, a book of short stories, numerous chapbooks and one full-length poetry collection. His workhas been nominated for a Pushcart numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He and his wife run a bookstore in Memphis.

Your retelling, “The Plot to Kidnap Stonehenge”, features characters from King Arthur, and it’s part of a larger series. What attracted you to these characters?

The Arthurian legends run so deeply through our literature. I think I already had absorbed their wisdom before I even read The Poky Little Puppy. I liked T. H. White’s Once and Future King, but I loved the modern retellings of Thomas Berger (Arthur Rex) and John Steinbeck (The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights), not to mention perhaps the greatest reworking of the myths, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Also, in high school, we did Camelot and two of my best friends were the leads. I learned that play from their rehearsals. The most intriguing element in the legends, to me, has always been the idea that Merlin is living backwards, coming from his old age and the future and moving toward the past and his birth. That spark led to my little bit of frippery.

“The Plot to Kidnap Stonehenge” is told almost entirely in dialogue. I know you’ve used this constraint quite a bit in your writing. What are the benefits to this approach, and what are the challenges?

I fell in love with dialogue, I guess, from reading plays. Pinter, Albee, Beckett, Mamet, these guys were really telling stories as rich as any novel, through dialogue. When I started working on my first novel, Talk, and I hit on the idea of writing the entire thing in unattributed dialogue, I thought, well, this is fun but no one will want to read it. Dialogue is all rhythm. I think I always wanted to be a musician and dialogue is as close to music as writing gets. The real challenge is, of course, to actually tell a story with well-defined characters, and something of a plot. I am still not sure whether I succeeded or not, though some overly kind folks have said I did.

Can you talk about owning and operating an independent bookstore (esp. a bookstore with such history)?

My wife and I bought Burke’s Book Store, a Memphis institution for 125 years, in 2000. This was right before the bottom fell out of the bookselling world. Two things happened simultaneously. The internet was busy being born and the attacks of 9/11 occurred and suddenly brick and mortar businesses, especially ones selling books, especially bookstores built for browsing (like all good used bookstores are), were experiencing a dramatic decrease in foot traffic. We almost went under. With the help of donations from the community, and from the community of writers, we managed to survive. We moved the store 5 years ago to a neighborhood with more pedestrians and, for now, we are doing ok. Not great but ok. The irony of our business, as it stands right now, is that little guys like us are still alive and the big bullies, who moved into the book business and shuttered many small independent stores, are failing. I have no idea where the book business is going right now but it’s a little frightening.

What are you working on now (or what’s up next for you)?

I am readying a few manuscripts for submitting: an Altmanesque novel called Memphis Movie, a crazy-quilt book about Beale Street called Diddy-Wah-Diddy, and another full-length collection of poems. Thanks for asking.

RE: First Review

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 09:55:11 -0400

TimeOut Chicago gave RE:Telling a three star review. Nice headline: New Anthology Strikes Silver While Mining Cultural Touchstones.

Check it out.

Blake Butler RE: Lynch

Fri, 25 Feb 2011 19:50:00 -0500

Blake Butler is the author of the forthcoming novel There Is No Year, the novella Ever, and the novel-in-stories Scorch Atlas. He edits HTML Giant as well as two journals of innovative text: Lamination Colony and No Colony. His writing has appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, and Dzanc’s Best of the Web.

Blake’s contribution to RE:Telling is called “Fire Walk With Me”, a story about eating Oreo cookies in bed with David Lynch. Blake also directed more than a few talented writers to the project. What follows is a collection of sentences from Blake’s blog that mention David Lynch:

“The tornado fucked up my ERASERHEAD and THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH dvd sets, which were $50 each and came in these really amazing box packages. (The tornado was not a surrealist.) I promise not to mention David Lynch for a while after this. Several people have written me about watching David Lynch for the first time. Several people have sent me Lynch mashups. David Lynch constructs a universe and it is an easy one to get immersed in. One of the great things about Lynch to me is his cryptic weaving, in which the films all seem to run together in slight ways, and the little loopholes in the film that lead off to other places. Kafka, he works the same way, and I know is a big hero for Lynch, as is the process of dreaming. Lynch is working on a new film already. BLUE VELVET: This is the logical beginning spot to any Lynch experience because it encapsulates a lot of Lynch’s themes and sensibilities and ideas into his probably most easy to like film, without sacrificing any of the FUCK. I could listen to Lynch talk in his cheeseball manner about the excitement of dreams for hours. INLAND EMPIRE: Maybe my favorite Lynch film period. ERASERHEAD: This is the progenitor of all of Lynch’s ideas and probably the most visceral of his films still. You really need to get the version Lynch released himself on DVD because if you try to watch it on VHS a lot is obscured by the low quality. MULHOLLAND DRIVE: This film, coupled with INLAND EMPIRE, its sister, are perhaps now becoming my favorite experience in Lynch’s set. Beyond Lynch’s own mentioning of the mesh of words, most vocally between MULHOLLLAND DRIVE and INLAND EMPIRE, but also, I would insist, between all the films, in many ways the blank or horrendous spaces that make the films seem the most ‘underneath the viewer’s skin’ are the creation of the space itself, a portal both from film to film, as well as, I must demand, into human. TWIN PEAKS: Not all of the episodes are directed by Lynch himself (he only does episodes 3, 8, 10, 15, 29) and near the middle of season two when he leaves the set, the show begins to take a bit of a swing for the worse, but the final episode is itself perhaps one of the most disconcerting pieces of film ever recorded. TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME: This is my favorite Lynch film, I think, but you can’t watch it without having seen the series to its completion. WILD AT HEART: Now you need to see Lynch sort of mocking himself. This film contains one of the most iconic Lynch scenes of a woman covering her face with lipstick. THE ELEPHANT MAN: It is unlike all of Lynch’s other films in that it is mostly based in reality and does not employ the absurd. LOST HIGHWAY: Probably one of the most shit on of Lynch’s films, though the first 40 minutes of this movie are some of the creepiest viewing ever put on tape. It is filmed at Lynch’s home and contains shots of people just walking into black, as if the home is endless. The signs of connective tissue in the films of David Lynch are in places very clear. Lynch confessed that LOST HIGHWAY and TWIN PEAKS take place in the same world. DUNE I did not include above as I don’t really see it as a Lynch film, particularly because it was butchered by the studio and not his story (though ELEPHANT MAN still feels like Lynch’s), but it is still worth seeing and could be one of the better science fiction movies. THE STRAIGHT STORY I also did not include even though I like it, because it is different than all of the above, being a G rated Disney movie (for real: which alone is Lynchian enough) but probably still fits with everything else in some strange way. The rips in spaces in Lynch are all throughout, and in many ways, the definitive space of Lynch: the totem-being behind Winky’s, Club Silencio, the Black Lodge, the pink house on the soundstage and the ‘other version’ of Hollywood & Vine in INLAND EMPIRE, the Rabbits, Ben’s house in BLUE VELVET, the exploding shed in ‘Lost Highway,’ perhaps the entire terrain of ERASERHEAD, etc., etc. You could list these rooms forever. SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH: By now you’ve seen most everything and you’ll be wanting more. Absorbing all of these spaces, I think, is the room displayed in the credit sequence of ‘INLAND EMPIRE,’ the room where ‘Rita’ appears and sits and watches the logger cutting, the singing man, an Asian woman wearing a Laura Palmer-esque wig, the dance crew’s insanely mesmerizing performance of Nina Simone, and various other Lynch-pins, if you will, creating a kind of den within the film within the film, an anterior both to the Black Lodge and a space that operates for me as the crown and blood of the whole film, which seems interesting, in that it is used for the viewer as an exit, a segment that is usually walked out on, and also contains all the scrolling names of all the human bodies used to ‘create’ the film itself. These connective rooms, this blank space, space filmed and not filmed, the antithesis of the actual connectivity which instead then creates actual terrain not on the film and therefore somewhere else (where?): these are what make the body of the air milked in the Lynch rooms so full of and empty of light at the same time. Sound in Lynch’s films is vital moreso than any other filmmaker I can think of. Certainly, as well, Lynch’s affinity for lighting, electricity, doors, curtains, specific foods: these are organs in the massive body. The space of this room, and the other-logic of it (amazingly rendered in Ajvaz’s post-Kafka, hyper-hyper-aware prose), feels much like, and perhaps even embedded in or connected to, the rooms and spaces Lynch is able among our human lights to absorb. Humans seem clear on distinguishing themselves politically from the unknowing others, whereas in Lynch, the hidden peoples are murderers, rapists, loons. Last night watched the documentary LYNCH, supposedly about Lynch’s process particularly during the creation of INLAND EMPIRE. It was okay, kind of disappointing, as the directors seemed bent on coming off ‘artsy’ as opposed to just portraying Lynch in his habitats. There was a lot of random decay over the shots, cuts to bugs and weird noise, all just masking the subject and more annoying than illuminating, but overall, you can’t hide Lynch’s humor and talent for moving into nothing: he could talk about most anything and make it great. Plus there was a decent amount of him building, conjecturing, figuring out architecture, making up, painting, etc. A rental, for Lynch diehards, but not a must. One of the things Lynch talked about was making a point to say that, in essence, that there used to be a big stigma that to make art you had to suffer, and that in creation there must be some pain invoked etc., but how this was completely untrue he thought, and that the more centered, the more happy and clear-headed you are, the more you can aim and get into the ‘pool of creativity’ (I love how he talks in such new age ways sometimes and makes it something to smile about rather than cringe), and that really the most ideas and most innovation often comes out of a pure state, and of happiness. There’s a moment in the film where Jeremy Irons calls with interest about the film, and Lynch kind of explains how he really doesn’t even know what Irons will be doing, but that he’ll be there, and you can imagine Irons’s head as all these Lynch-words are coming in. I’ve talked a lot on here about trying to write the David Lynch novel. I wrote a novel last year called MORE LIGHT trying to write a David Lynch style novel and was told the characters were unsympathetic and that you could not feel for the characters. I am going to find a way to get David Lynch to blurb this book. There are definitely Lynch-isms loaded here, the mother is referred to as Mary X. I will corner the David Lynch literary market. I am still looking for a book that appropriates the experience that David Lynch creates in his films. I can’t think of any book that is very close to David Lynch in style. I think one day Lynch will be remembered as the greatest video artist of all time. (Lynch) has influenced me as much if not more than any writer—he is one of the few things I am still fanboy about, the others being David Foster Wallace and candy.”

—Text from www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com

RE: Mario's Three Lives

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 21:29:00 -0500

Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found as well as three chapbooks, Wolf Parts, The Collectors, and How the Broken Lead the Blind. His fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Willow Springs, Unsaid, and American Short Fiction, and has been selected for inclusion in anthologies such as Best American Mystery Stories 2010 and Best American Fantasy 2. His book reviews and critical essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, American Book Review, and The Quarterly Conversation. He is also the editor of The Collagist and of Dzanc’s Best of the Web anthology series.

His story “Mario’s Three Lives” was the first story solicited for RE:Telling.

Q:Super Mario Bros. just celebrated its 25th anniversary. Why do you think these game characters have remained so popular for so long? And what was your earliest experience with the game?

A: I think Mario had the good fortune of being tied to the real beginning of home video gaming in America. A lot of people had Atari, but seemingly everyone had a Nintendo or at least had friend who did. Because the game was packed in with the system, it ended up in every home that the system did, and many, many people—and this is always surprising to me, who was and is a fairly obsessive player—never buy very many other games. So everyone played Mario, and lots of it.

It was also very simple to learn, and difficult to master, which is the mark of many great games.

I actually never owned a Nintendo. We played a lot of games, but initially on the computer, first on the Commodore 64, then an Apple IIc, and then a series of progressively more impressive PCs. The first console we owned was a Turbografx-16, a less popular (but in some ways very impressive) contemporary of the SNES and the Genesis, which my dad brought home when the department store chain Hill’s went out of business. Because I didn’t have Mario at home, all of my early experiences with the game were at other people’s homes, which probably helped keep it and all of those other classic NES games more mysterious than they might otherwise have been.

Q: Your story “Mario’s Three Lives” finds Mario pondering God and his own will to play. His deference to the gamer becomes prayerful. Can you talk about the gamer/God dynamic?

A: When I was younger, I was a fairly devout Catholic, and I used to struggle with what I saw as the balance between the need to praise and the need to ask for forgiveness. It seemed that when you did something good, you were supposed to thank God for it, and when you did something wrong, you were supposed to ask forgiveness. Now I’m not saying that’s anybody’s proper theology except mine, but I know I used to find it particularly confusing, and then later off-putting, if it’s possible to be mad at God for something you maybe made up yourself. It seemed unfair for God to be mad at people for making a mess of things, if he’s the one who gave them the qualities that caused them to make the mess, and if he’s the one ultimately pulling the strings. This is all pretty basic “problems with free will,” of course, but it used to frustrate me quite a bit whenever I thought about it.

In the end, I still think my Mario is in the right: an omnipotent, all-knowing, all-seeing God who manages to treat you poorly as “part of God’s plan” shouldn’t be able to get mad when you mess up. In this particular metaphor, sending you to hell for your sins seems a lot like a child throwing a controller because he can’t get his avatar to do what he wants. After all, it’s not Mario’s fault when he falls in the fire, but the gamer’s.

Of course, I didn’t set out to put any of that into the story, but if it hadn’t started to appear maybe there wouldn’t be much there at all. So I suppose I’m lucky it did. Certainly it would have been a lot harder thing to touch on in a more realist story. It’s even a lot harder thing to describe here, in plain talk.

Q: What story elements of the game appeal to you most? Or, in general, what gamer narrative elements appeal to you?

A: I talked about this a little bit at our panel we did on retellings at &NOW in 2009 (it’s amazing that’s already so long ago), and I think my answer is still about the same: One of the reasons video games are ripe for retelling (especially these older games with much simpler stories) is the same reason so many myths and folk tales and legends can be retold. There’s a certain blankness or emptiness in them that creates a container than can hold an awful lot of other things. In games, this is often caused by the why behind the game’s plot rarely being explicit. Mario’s a good example: In the original NES game, all you really need to know to make the whole game go is that Mario wants to save the Princess, and that the Princess is in another castle.

I wonder how many people knew even that much when they first loaded up World 1-1. I’m not sure I did. It might have been even simpler: You could only go to the right, and so you went right, and everything else that happened after followed from that simple constraint.

In certain more contemporary games, you get a lot more motivation and access to the interior life of the character you’re playing, and that prevents the same kind of insertion from happening. There’s less of that kind of imagining you can do yourself, for better or worse. Personally, I like both ways: I’m happy to spend fifty hours in an RPG learning every detail of a character’s backstory and feelings and then watching their growth over the course of an adventure, but I’d be lying if there wasn’t still more than enough in far simpler stories. “The Princess is another castle” goes a long, long way with me.

Q: My kids are really into the late-80s Super Mario Bros. TV show, which streams via their Wii. It’s awful, part cartoon and part live action. Captain Lou Albano plays Mario. He can’t act. And there are lyrics to the Mario Bros. music. My question: Why do you think it’s so bad? The game is so good, but the TV show and the movie (with Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo) are just awful. (I think it might have something to do with dialogue, that the characters are meant to be mute. So when Lou Albano says something like, “holy stromboli,” the character is destroyed. What do you think?)

A: I’ve never seen either the TV show or the movie, although I’m familiar with the basics of both. I think the muteness is part of it, and I think that relates to the simplicity/blankness I mentioned above. It’s somewhat like the simplicity of fairy tales: It’s enough in Little Red Riding Hood that there’s a girl going to see her sick grandmother, and that there’s a wolf with a penchant for disguises who wants to eat them both. You don’t need or want more motivation or backstory than that. Every single thing you explain diminishes the magic. Super Mario Bros. works in a similar way. Do I know why mushrooms make Mario bigger? Nope. Do I know why they’re kept inside glowing bricks, or why if Mario is already big, then the bricks contain a glowing flower instead? No idea. And it’s totally fine not to know! It never even occurs to me to want to. But as soon as you start explaining any of that—as soon as you start giving Bowser political motivations, or explaining how Mario and the Princess were childhood sweethearts—you start filling that beautiful blankness with all kinds of trite, worn-out material, and you also start giving me all kinds of entry points into doubt and disbelief, and then the magic is over. Explanation seems almost always to be the enemy of emotion in fiction, and I don’t see why it’s effect should be any different in video games.

Q: What’s up next for you?

A: My next book will be out in 2012, although it hasn’t officially been announced yet. Soon! Beyond that, I’m working on rewriting what will hopefully be my first novel (my first published one, anyway). It’s all I’ve really done since last January, and I’m reasonably happy with the progress. It’s a slow thing though, and I might be at it quite a while still. Hopefully in between drafts I’ll get the chance to write a shorter piece or two: I’ve been in novel mode a long time, and I’m missing working on stories.

RE: Young Riippi

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 07:40:00 -0500

JOSEPH RIIPPI is the author of the novel Do Something! Do Something! Do Something! (Ampersand Books). Recent writing appears in The Brooklyn Rail, PANK, Everyday Genius, elimae, Emprise Review, Epiphany, The Bitter Oleander, and Salamander. His latest book, The Orange Suitcase, is coming in 2011 from Ampersand. He lives in New York.

His contribution to RE: Telling is called “The Confusions of Young Joseph”, which is written after Musil’s The Confusions of Young Torless.

Can you talk about your interest in Robert Musil and his novel The Confusions of Young Torless? Is Musil one of your major influences?

The Confusions of Young Törless and a few short stories are all I’ve read of Musil, so he’s hardly a major influence. I came across Törless on the recommendation of a poet friend.My most recent project is a book called The Orange Suitcase that’s ostensibly about childhood and the way a person remembers it. I spent the bulk of 2009 reading a lot of fiction of that mode (Nabokov’s Speak, Memory; Coetzee’s Boyhood/Youth/Summertime trilogy; the first hundred pages of Swann’s Way, a few others that didn’t stick quite as hard). What stuck with me hardest about Törless however was Musil’s conveyance of adolescent psychological terror. Fear of sexuality, fear of violence, insecurity, embarrassment—there’s nothing more affecting until a person falls in love. The Orange Suitcase deals with that tension between, but for Re:Telling I chose to retell Törless because that’s where my head was at that particular day.

Your Joseph seems to follow in Musil’s academic footsteps—a parent-directed engineering student drawn to literature. Was this also your academic track? Are you a practical engineer drawn to the impractical practice of literature?

I went to college as a pre-med major and left an English Lit major with minors in film and women’s studies, and my father was an engineer at Boeing when I was a child so there’s a link there, too. I hadn’t thought of it in the way you just presented it, but I do take a very practical approach to writing. My work gets a lot of criticism for being too fractured, however I almost always draw up a schematic of sorts for how the narrative of a piece is structured. I fear too much fiction now, especially in the arena of independent, small press stuff, relies too heavily on language and not enough on the practicality of narrative structure. While the complaint many have about Jonathan Franzen (including myself) is the opposite, that he lacks eloquence of language and just tells a big American tale, a lot of the new flash you see out there today is all violent imagery and language games. Some amazing musical language with no narrative holding it up—it’s every bit as enticing (and yet ultimately one-sided) as Franzen. The best writing—Coetzee, McCarthy—strikes a balance between narrative and language. Art is form and content, not one or the other.

What should we know about The Orange Suitcase?

The Orange Suitcase is a book of 35 stories told in the same voice, from the same retrospective point of view, and was very nearly considered a novella because of that. (One of the blurbers did, in fact, refer to it as a novella not knowing any different). When people ask, I say it is about childhood and memory. But I also say that if I were capable of summing it up in a sentence, I would have just written a sentence. Ampersand Books will be publishing it at the end of March, along with a second edition of my novel Do Something! Do Something! Do Something! in the weeks thereafter.

RE: Why The Minotaur Remained A Virgin

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 18:14:00 -0500

J. Bradley is the author of Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books) and the flash fiction chapbook The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You Is A Robot (Safety Third Enterprises). He is the Interview Editor of PANK Magazine and lives at www.iheartfailure.net.

“Why the Minotaur Remained a Virgin” is one of three poems in the RE:Telling anthology. It seems that poetry has a long history of re-telling. Why do you think fiction writers don’t use allusion and appropriation as much as poets?

I think it’s because fiction writers prefer to tell the story than to have fun with the confines of fiction. I’m a big fan of mashing up genres (like my Roman vampires in space story that was in PANK a couple of months ago). We don’t all have to be serious.

What is it about the Minotaur’s story that made you want to re-tell it?

I was on a mythological beast kick for awhile because of the season one episode of The Encyclopedia show that used mythical beasts as its topic and I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of the Minotaur in high school since high school is the most dangerous maze of all. Everyone would want to bang the minotaur in high school since he would be the star linebacker, wearing the heads of his victims like a necklace.

As the interviews editor at PANK, you ask some very challenging questions. Has one of your interview subjects ever declined to respond to a question? If so (without naming names), what was the question?

I asked a writer six questions once and he only answered four of them. The two questions he didn’t answer were these:

How do you like to be photographed?

Who have you lied about being in a relationship with? How long did you keep the lie going?

Maybe I hit a nerve or maybe he didn’t want to answer the questions. Who knows?

What are you working on now and what are your writing plans for 2011?

I am working on getting a hybrid of flash fiction, fiction, and poetry published called We Will Live Like Our Ghosts Will Live, which is about my divorce and how I put myself back together again. I’m working on a short story collection where people use Craigslist to get themselves out of their engagements and then they have to help the next person, like a really fucked up version of Pay It Forward. It goes slow because writing about destruction is hard. I hope to have that done mid to late 2011.

RE: A & P

Wed, 22 Dec 2010 20:26:00 -0500

Heather Fowler’s stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals, including PANK, Prick of the Spindle, Necessary Fiction, JMWW, The Northville Review, riverbabble, and The Nervous Breakdown. Her new book of stories, Suspended Heart, will be available very soon from Aqueous Books (more below on that).

In her contribution to the RE:Telling anthology,“A&P, Come Again”, Heather re-positions the point of view of John Updike’s often-anthologized “A&P”.

Can you talk about the inspiration behind your story “A&P, Come Again”?

Updike’s story starts with the short but telling line, “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.” Then the male protagonist spends quite some time describing the girls, what they are wearing, their relative level of attractiveness, and so forth. Yet something jarred me in the reading of this story, each time I read it, something urgent in the reason for why these girls, inappropriately dressed as they were, different as they were, had arrived at this mid-town A&P, nowhere near the shore, to buy some pickled herring snacks in sour cream. Herring snacks? Really?

Immediately, and always, I thought: They were not there for snacks, but on a mission! A secret, unfulfilled mission. Because of so much scrutiny, that mission was thrown off somehow, which is how I decided I wanted to tell their story of what that mission was: They were at that A&P for a pregnancy test, thank you very much—and the very same embarrassment that becomes crucial in Updike’s piece as a rationale for the cashier quitting his job at the end is echoed in my own story, though with different reasons. It’s not easy to have sex with your mom’s boyfriend and then fear what will happen next, but this pregnancy scare would be a clear enough reason for why the girls could leave after a sacrifice purchase made hastily, without looking back, oblivious or uncaring about the sacrifice of the cashier. Let’s face it. In my story, they had bigger issues. The story was about them. The cashier was no longer the star.

What was your first experience with Updike’s story?

I remember reading that story and reveling in the girls’ power, wanting to be like them. Immediately, I felt delight with the way they were the story’s lascivious focus and stood out, so teen-appeal iconic, all skin and money, in a dreary shop so full of the mid-town unhappy and burbish population. Having worked several low-paying jobs with bosses like Lengel, I swooned for the cashier who both looked at the girls in the way he did and quit for them at the end of the story, sensitive to their embarrassment, resigning quickly enough for the girls to overhear—desirous of their approval. A sensitive guy! What a heartthrob. I fell in love with him the first time I read this piece. Too bad my poor little rich girls were so otherwise afflicted.

What other short stories would you like to revisit and retell?

Oh, I love retelling stories, especially when I make female narrators more prominent than they were in the original. I’ve already worked with one from Gabriel Garcia Marquez where an angel’s wife comes to visit a village that treated her husband poorly—and another story from Kafka where Gregor Samsa has a new twin sister, acting as a maid, and his other sister Grete is a Satanist. Recently, I wrote an homage piece for Rick Moody’s “Boys,” entitled “Girls,” which cycles through female experience in a similar fashion to how Moody treats male development. I will probably revisit and retell something from Oscar Wilde next, but I’ve got 300 stories to edit, a novel to finish, and lots of poems to organize, so it may be a while before I have that pleasure.

You have a new collection out called Suspended Heart (Aqueous Books). What should prospective readers know about this book?

Suspended Heart was a delight to publish; the book includes many of my own favorite pieces of my fabulist work and is a manuscript that has always been very important to me because I feel it is both funny and moving and definitely a book devoted to women’s stories with difficult love, women’s heartbreak, and women’s overcoming. It’s quasi-comedic throughout, the way I think we must all get through things sometimes. Between the sheets, or pages, there are people addicted to static. Also, crack-smoking parrots! Really, who can resist a book with those? I’d buy that in a blink.

Additionally, for the life of the book sales, ten-percent of my author’s proceeds will be donated to a local battered women and children’s charity here in San Diego called the San Diego Family Justice Center, which helps women and families find legal counsel, temporary housing, career help, and other wonderful things they need to avoid being endangered in their own homes. Please pop in and view the trailer for the book if you get a chance.

RE: Cover! Nicely done by Chris Katz.

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 13:33:00 -0500

RE: Cover! Nicely done by Chris Katz.

ALIAS: Roxane Gay

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 21:05:00 -0500

Roxane Gay is co-editor of PANK, fiction editor of Blue Stem, and an assistant professor of English at Eastern Illinois University. Her fiction has appeared in a number of journals, including Annalemma, Artifice, Mid-American Review, Necessary Fiction, Keyhole, Everyday Genius, and elsewhere. Her contribution to the RE:Telling anthology is called “Alias: The Complete Series or Some Hearts Are Fainter Than Others.” It’s a take on the great J.J. Abrams TV series Alias.

…………………………………….

I’m a big fan of TV shows/movies with women who kick ass. I rank top three as Dark Angel, Kill Bill Vols. I and II, and Buffy. Can you make a case for Alias to be ranked top three? Dark Angel is hard to beat because she is genetically enhanced; Beatrix in the Kill Bill movies might also be unbeatable (I think because she is already dead); and I think Buffy is unbeatable because she is righteous/single-minded in her quest and because vampires have so many weak spots.

Sydney Bristow is, in my mind, the top ass kicking woman of all time because she’s human and because, sometimes, her frailties show. To my mind, true strength lies in also being able to acknowledge your weakness. Also, she can wear the hell out of a wig, speaks at least seven languages, doesn’t back down from a fight, enjoys rough sex, and knows how to use a gun. I’ll take that over genetic modification, the undead, and those who hunt the undead.

Have you done any other re-telling—using characters/premises that belong to other writers? If so, what, and if not, what attracted you to riff on Alias?

The only other re-telling I’ve down is “Law & Order: The Complete Series,” a story I wrote for the Law & Order issue of Frigg. I love procedurals, the cadence of them, the tropes they play on so it was fun to take those tropes and approach them in different ways.

I was interested in writing something that riffed on Alias because it’s my favorite show. I loved the emotional extremes of the show, how Sydney was so tormented. A lot of my stories are sort of decadent in their suffering. I am really drawn to that sort of thing. Throughout the series, Sydney Bristow endured torture, heartbreak, isolation and still managed to kick ass. She is pretty representative of the kinds of women I like to write.

If another writer were to write a story featuring one of your characters or settings, how should they proceed? What must they know about your characters in order to write them?

The main thing another writer would need to know is that my characters can survive anything.

Yes.

RE: Darcie Dennigan Would Prefer Not To

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 15:18:00 -0500

Darcie Dennigan, author of Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse, has contributed a poem to RE:Telling called “Bartleby in Domesticity.” In her telling, Bartleby is a dog who prefers not to bark. But, of course, that’s not what the poem is about. I asked Darcie to talk a bit about her long-standing interest in Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, and here’s what she said:

I guess you could say I am preoccupied with Bartleby. This is the fourth poem I’ve written that was maybe trying to figure out something in the story. There’s so much mystery in it. That ending: “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!”, the dead letter office anecdote that the narrator hears later on, and Bartleby himself obviously — “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!”

The narrator says right off the bat that he has a profound conviction that “the easiest way of life is the best,” and yet he’s completely confused and disturbed by Bartleby, who might be said to be taking the easy way, by not doing work, except that he really seems to be picking a difficult way through life, by resisting it, and suffering it.

I am a pretty lazy person, and the internet has in some ways decimated my reading life because when I read something that confuses me or even just makes me wonder, I go online and see what others have figured out or imagined. But I would never do that with Bartleby. I don’t want any answers, any literary criticism, any charts and graphs.

A long time ago I dated this guy who loved to be read aloud to. He loved this Melville story, Bartleby the Scrivener, and so I would read it out loud to him— I think we read it maybe three times aloud? And it’s so funny in the beginning, the way he describes Turkey and Nippers, and then much frantically funnier each time Bartleby goes “I would prefer not to” — the story sort of trembles with humor, until it’s maybe more crying than laughing.

Anyway, I always loved what a strong and funny tone it was written in, and I was always moved by this man’s resistance, and I still cannot figure it out. When the narrator asks Bartleby the reason why he will do no more work, Bartleby replies, “Do you not see the reason for yourself?” and that line especially gets me. I can posit some possible reasons, but none are satisfying. And Bartleby thinks it’s so obvious.

And it probably is.

“Bartleby in Domesticity” by Darcie Dennigan will appear in RE: Telling, available from Ampersand Books, February 2o11.

"The Devil explained that he was ready to admit defeat. He had been flushed out by the citizens of..."

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 09:03:11 -0500

“The Devil explained that he was ready to admit defeat. He had been flushed out by the citizens of this, the godliest part of the country. He could no longer depend on subterfuge if his quarry were so alert to the usual tricks. So he had decided to conduct his business out in the open, like any
tradesman.”

- Pedro Ponce, from “The Devil and the Dairy Princess”

Whereas 13 and 14

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 08:32:28 -0500

Whereas the Godzilladelic and the Bunyanesque are both tales of dwarfing awe; and

Whereas the Abbaesque and the Madonnaish;