Airport Doughnut

Mud Luscious Press has long been known for its devil-may-care eschewing of the neatly categorizable reading experience so endemic to conventional publishing and, instead, offering up sexy little volumes of blow-your-pants-off wordslinging from the likes of wunderkinds Matt Bell (Cataclysm Baby), Molly Gaudry (We Take Me Apart), Gregory Sherl (The Oregon Trail Is the Oregon Trail), Norman Lock (Grim Tales), and Mathias Svalina (I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur), among others. As if that weren’t enough, MLP also cranks out the occasional Nephew—pocket-sized nuggets of what is essentially literary MDNA. 

But even the most bad-ass small press publisher needs an assist from time to time. Right now, Mud Luscious Press needs 2000 bucks to keep doing what they do. So, natch, I’d like to help them out. I’ve got three SIGNED copies of MLP founder J. A. Tyler’s 2011 Fugue State Press book A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed—paired with one of J. A.’s childhood toys (seriously)… and a copy of Trnsfr’s All Fiction Issue (featuring Tyler’s “The Woman She Carried an Egg Into the Ocean”). Please, grab up one of these cool, one-of-kind bundles for $30 and help MLP rock on with its awesome self in the process.

#11

Sotheby’s, monotype, 2009, signed Jared Joseph
Hardly in soft pencil, on Arches with a Mourlot
    blindstamp, Forged. Completely unjustified
Margins, the image printed off-center & the left
    margin
Doesn’t exist, major wrinkling & crinkling &
    winkling & crumpling &
rumpling & rumplestiltskinning and ampersanding &
    creasing & thinning in the margins
Particularly at the edges, every corner folded,
    abrasions
In the central upper margins, a few soft handling
    creases
And a few hard ones, a few fox marks, a few too many
Scattered areas of stray printing ink and staining,
    even
Some fucking thumbprints. Misprint or mistake or I’m
    missing
Something, ink scraped from a solid block of deep
    red ink
Via the subtractive process (Man is the sum of what
    have you)
SoThe
Bees
Printed from right to left and backwards as if it is
    being
Held up to a mirror, as if it is Sotheby’s holding
    the mirror up to art-
ists, as a reflection is light thrown back and
Rejected, so you see what the mirror doesn’t
Want. Or Sotheby’s,
Queen bee, the queen bye bye
And by, running this show or the next one
(9/27 Manhattan) raise your hand, the great
    valuator,
Mis-singing the print’s praises, yours,
Misnomering the print’s s’appelle, yours,
Karl Lagerfield on the face of the waters
Puttering cosmology

What was Marcel Duchamp’s first words?

Dada.

What do you call a baker’s rate of success?

A margarine of error.

Man is the sum of?

What have you got?

I wanted to sweep everything off the Wave Books table into my bag and HAUL ASS.

M. Kitchell may have introduced the diners upstairs at Beef & Brandy to the finer points of gay sex.

I spilled beer on my copy of Artifice 4. I saved it though. It’s good.

I wanted to bone ______ right there on the floor in front of everybody.

Wanted to snatch the first edition of O’Hara’s A City Winter from the Columbia Center for Book/ Paper Arts and HAUL ASS.

How have I not heard of Green Lantern Press? (Stop reading this and go buy something from them right now.)

I got a huge-ass bruise on my arm from I don’t know what.

The guy at the Fence table complimented me on my cap. I later lost that cap.

The ______ reading was nothing but academic d-bags. I heard someone tell a racist joke there.

Kasey Mohammad traded me three issues of West Wind Review for a copy of my chapbook. Hands-down best trade.

I saw a crow picking the choicest bits from someone’s vomit.

JUST missed the Propaganda reading and was genuinely pissed.

Saw Roxane with her Literary Death Match medal. Seriously, Jane Smiley, Darin Strauss, Major Jackson—you really thought you stood a chance?

Found ______ to be surprisingly queeny and pretentious. Promptly looked for table selling “Someone I thought was really cool online was not at all cool in person” t-shirts. Didn’t find it.

EVERY SINGLE BAR was understaffed at AWP.

Several times at the Literature Party, I heard someone yelling uncouthly. Each time, it turned out to be Blake Butler.

Matt Hart’s hair is even bigger in real life.

Joseph Riipi and I talked about Bolano for longer than is probably sensible.

Ben Kopel and Nate Slawson are inappropriate together.

Did the Post Road reading ever happen? I had to cut out after an hour of having to elbow people out of my way just to get the beer glass to my mouth.

The SPD booth was sex.

The chick at the McSweeney’s booth said: “Are you familiar with McSweeney’s?”

Ariana “Keep That Curtain Closed! I’ll Throw A Fit” Reines looks like Lady Gaga impersonating Joyce Carol Oates.

I left the Yes Yes Books/ Sixth Finch reading before KMA was forced to use her Mother Voice.

I knew he was Adam Robinson because of the the beard. It’s like the Susan Sontag’s hairdo of beards. (Also, dude can DANCE.)

If you didn’t find glitter somewhere on your person after leaving Beauty Bar, you did it wrong.

xTx DOES exist.

I told Jason Teal that Aaron Burch looks like Justin Timberlake. He didn’t see it.

No one at the Beecher’s/Parcel Happy Hour will ever eat mayonnaise again.

Nick Demske’s hair is really long. Nick Demske is really tall.

Saw Mark Leidner in a group seated on the floor outside the book fair petting the spine of Adam Levin’s The Instructions.

I used to think the pages-long exchange of insults in The Sot-Weed Factor was funny. Now I think AD Jameson is a god.

One reading was so packed, all I could see was the back of some dude’s neck. That neck turned out to be Paul Legault’s.

Lindsay Hunter is the best emcee EVER. I want Lindsay Hunter to emcee my LIFE.

Was that PBS’s Jeffrey Brown walking down Michigan Avenue?

First thought upon leaving book fair: “I never want to publish anything ever again.” Immediate next thought: “I’m so getting a table for AWP Boston.”

I have a new chapbook out.  It’s called Status Area.  So I decided to make this video.  I’ve never done this before, so I felt a bit awkward at first.  I thought about doing a second take, but this is pretty much what you’d get if you saw me in person.  I also have a cold right now.  In lieu of subtitles, you’ll find the poems I read in the video after the jump.  I hope you like them.  I hope you like them enough to buy the book.  You can find other poems from the it here, here, and here.  You might be able to hear the dulcet tones of The High Strung in the background, so, um, yay for that. 


Read more …

J.A. Tyler: In much of your writing, instead of named characters you use he, she, the husband, the wife, etc. Can you talk a little about your choice to render stories in this way and what consequences you believe it has (or you want it to have) on your readers?

Maliszewski: The short answer is I like to keep things simple, to pare it all down. Parables don’t often have named characters in them. You just get the carpenter, say, or the beggar. When I read, I often lose track of names. I’m always flipping back to the beginning, trying to figure out who Culpepper is again, or who Annabelle married. I’m really good at remembering faces but just awful at recalling names.

The effect of not having names is a trickier question for me to answer. Namelessness is not my default setting. I have two novels underway: one has names while the other is as name-free as the stories in Prayer and Parable. I don’t mean for the namelessness to suggest that the husband is representative of every husband. I don’t think of these people as universal types, an every-family. I think of my characters as individuals. Maybe I just don’t think names are that important—or even necessary for a good story. When I’m writing something, I don’t find it helpful to think of a character as Peter Eagleburger or Hans Hellenspout or whatever. I want to find more particular ways to make them real. I’d much rather give a character a great dream or an odd habit than some made-up name.

Paul Kavanagh: Prayer was once an art form placed above painting, sculpture, music. Do you think it has been hijacked by the lunatics?

Maliszewski: Was prayer an art form? I’ve never heard that. It’s not some specialized pursuit, like painting or music. Was prayer once something that only an elect few could participate in? I must admit my ignorance on the history of prayer. Your question, though, makes me think of William Gaddis. There’s a painter in his novel The Recognitions, a talented painter who becomes a successful forger of masterpieces. His dealer hears a Fra Angelico “sold somewhere for a high price” and so he asks the painter to “do a Fra Angelico.” The painter says:

Do you know why I could never paint one, paint a Fra Angelico? Do you know why? Do you know how he painted? Fra Angelico painted down on his knees, he was on his knees and his eyes full of tears when he painted Christ on the Cross.

And now, this is the painter speaking still, but about van Eyck. The ellipses are his. I’m leaving nothing out:

This … these … the art historians and the critics talking about every object and … everything having its own form and density and … its own character in Flemish paintings, but is that all there is to it? Do you know why everything does? Because they found God everywhere. There was nothing God did not watch over, nothing and so this … and so in the paintings every detail reflects … God’s concern with the most insignificant objects in life, with everything, because God did not relax for an instant then, and neither could the painter then.

Here’s the thing, I don’t believe this personally. I don’t accept that only by believing in god can you create great art. I’m not even sure Gaddis believed it. But he explored the belief, honestly. He took it up. Certainly, what he’s describing was true of some artists. The works the painter is talking about, they are religious works, they are works of devotion, incredible faith and deep piety. I haven’t answered your question, I know, but what I like, and what I do believe, is that the painter or writer or what have you is like that god, and not one of them can relax, not for an instant. No object is truly insignificant. Nothing is not worthy of our total attention.

Brian Mihok: How do you start writing? In other words, do you start from a character, a place, a word etc.? Or do you imagine a great many things, like the world of the story already existing, and then try to pick a spot in it to start?

Maliszewski: I think I usually begin with a situation, often between two characters. It’s like the kernel of a scene. There’s some problem, or maybe one person has said something to the other, and I have that line of dialogue hanging in the air, not yet answered. Sometimes this situation will become the beginning of a story, and I’ll just figure out what happens next. Every so often, though, the kernel of a scene will become the end of a story. I’ll just know somehow that I have to work my way to it, not that the path is clear. The path usually isn’t clear at all. I may have some idea of how I’ll get there, but I frequently turn out to have been wrong. There was another way. Usually, for me, it’s a longer way.

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