The creases spread horizontally

I recently posted a couple of new Monkeytown excerpts here and here at Fictionaut. Also, still looking for more submissions at Apocalypse Piñata. We've got some good stuff lined up for the first issue, but we could always use some more. 

Our summers were idyllic. Maybe that makes us weird.

I've got a short chapbook, Recurring Childhood Nightmares, up at Ten Pages Press. The book is comprised of 10 flash-fiction "nightmares" that each correspond chronologically to a year in the life of a 26-year-old narrator. There's also a bonus poem about hipsters.

Six of the pieces -- "Buddy," "Why He Went to Guernica," "The Parents Were Made of Gas," "Virtual Zuckerbergian (un)Reality Blues," "American Hubris," and "Homesick at Adult Camp" -- originally appeared in Short, Fast, and Deadly. "Nobody Likes a Pragmatist" appeared in Staccato Fiction a while back. And I put up "Three Degrees of Separation from the Same Thing We Were Still Supposed to be Thinking About" on Fictionaut a couple weeks ago. 

Much thanks to Craig at Ten Pages Press and the editors of the journals where the fictions originally appeared.

The MILF Effect: How Porn’s Use of the Acronym Promotes Healthy Reproductive Values

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submit!

 The Apocalypse Piñata Submission Manager is fully operational! Send stuff now. Launch will be in October. Or if you want, you can still submit to apocalypse.pinata@gmail.com. Whatever works best for you.

a nice, good chap

I'm stoked to be the chapbook reviewer for the forthcoming print publication Short, Fast, and Deadly Monthly, which will be launching in January 2012. I'll also be posting 420-character reviews on Deadly Chaps Press' Facebook page as soon as I get some scribbles down. On that note, if you wrote or published a chapbook or echapbook you want reviewed, please send it to me and I will be happy to promptly take a look at it and write about it. If you know of any chapbook or echapbook that is awesome or not so awesome, I would like to look at it and promptly write about it. Get in touch with me at christopher.vola@gmail.com because we all like chaps and you seem like a good person.

Also, I wrote this novel called Monkeytown when I was in grad school. It's a transgressive thriller about an orphan named Josh from Connecticut who gets involved with a bunch of faux-terrorists in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I'm going to start putting chapters up on Fictionaut because I can't figure out what to do with it just yet: more submitting to skittish presses or the incinerator? Feel free to check it out and hate it and comment on its sophomoric vapidity and gore-porn. Or maybe you'll like it and don't want to comment. Either way.

I just ate two KFC Double Downs

Got interviewed by this literary blog, plain wrap. I'm not special, they interview all their Facebook friends, which is a pretty cool idea.

Any movement / can be part / of the dance

[Love in a Time of Paranoia is the first installment of Diamond Point Press's twenty20 Chapbook Series, produced by the folks at the always inimitable twenty20 Journal. The book is comprised of 20 poems of 20 words or less, ergo a 20-word review]

Love in a Time of Paranoia by Howie Good
Diamond Point Press, 2011
26 pages


Each Good word a heart-headed stalactite, poems a cavern battered by the smallest front-page raven. Carnage-mongers, our time is moot.

frighteningly universal gut-wrenching

My review of Michael Kimball's "Us" is up at Word Riot. Great book, check it out.

barfing and winking emoticons

New story up in Short, Fast, and Deadly's latest issue. Some good stuff in there.

Into the Rabbit Hole with Goals (and Guidelines)

                                           examiner.com

I’m about to start reading John Updike’s Rabbit, Redux so I was checking out his Wikipedia page and I saw that a feminist critic once described him as a penis with a thesaurus. Which is pretty hilarious if you try to picture a penis reading a thesaurus. Anyway, I also like writing book reviews and I was reminded that Updike’s personal rules for literary criticism (first imparted in Picked-Up Pieces, a 1975 prose collection) are probably the best guidelines for how to write solid reviews, whether you’ve been reading freelance gigs at The New York Review of Books or working at a college paper. I always use the rules as a checklist before I send something out.

      1.  Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

     2.  Give enough direct quotation – at least one extended passage – of the book’s prose so the reviewer’s reader can form his own impression, get his own taste.

     

     3.  Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy précis.

     4.  Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. 

     5.  If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?

     To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition or enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in any ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never…try to put the author “in his place,” making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys of reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

Even during his peak period, Updike was known as a purveyor of the old school, but as long as books remain jumbles of letters on pages or screens, his rules will always be a great starting point for how to approach talking about literature. Check out any good review and you’ll see all of these rules. Long live the educated penis!

July Playlist: SMOGGY SUMMER

         http://www.timmcmahan.com/smog.htm

For some reason, summer always feels like the right time for obsessions. Perhaps the free time from school, the days of sun. Middle school was swimming and skateboarding, and before that building forts in the woods based on the American Boys Handbook. Or maybe it’s the things you do to get out of heat, the indoor hobbies – Legos from age 4 to 8, after that comic books, baseball cards, rocks, hieroglyphics (??), playing drums and going to DMB and Weezer shows in high school, Budweisers in 12th through 18th grade. This is the summer of Smog. Not the air pollution derived from vehicular emission from internal combustion engines and industrial fumes that react in the atmosphere with sunlight to form secondary pollutants. I mean the band/man, otherwise known as Bill Callahan. Never heard of Smog? Neither had I until a couple months ago during a feverish Wikipedia surfing session. Since then, I shit you not, I have listened to literally nothing besides this band (except for bar tunes and Chucky the Greek’s housewarming party). This has had an undeniably detrimental effect on my mental and physical wellbeing. My writing has been at its most unproductive in probably the last five years, I have become even more of a recluse, if that’s possible, seldom, if ever leaving the confines of my cave-like ground floor apartment and even cave-ier bedroom. Women have not entered the equation in what has now become an inordinate number of months. Ironically, or perhaps naturally, Smog’s themes of alienation, deconstructed relationships and an unrequited solipsism has gelled with the hermit ethos, and has prolonged it in a way that I am certainly not complaining about. Smog – in one sentence: If Leonard Cohen and Willie Nelson adopted Beck and Jandek’s illegitimate lust-spawn and taught him to self-produce in a slightly less insane and more self-awareu version of Daniel Johnston’s basement. That’s what’s up. Pseudo-country grooves, introspective minor-chord guitar jaunts, out-of-tune experimental crunch-fests,  a vocal poetry equal parts Plath, Ginsberg and Joshua Beckman. The band started as a one-guy operation in the early 90s. Bill recorded his first albums on shit-beat instruments in his basement before moving to indie studios, where the tunes were luckily still shit-beat. The star-fucking ramble can only take one so far in the way of appreciation. The playlist tracks are there for their sonic diversity (lots of choices with 12 albums to cover), but the core of the operation is the same: “Tonight I’m swimming / to my favorite island / and I don’t want to see you / swimming behind”.

1.       “Dress Sexy At My Funeral”

2.       “Chosen One”

3.       “The Hard Road”    

4.       “Hit The Ground Running”

5.       “I Break Horses”  

6.       “Your Wedding”

7.       “Held”

8.       “Cold-Blooded Old Times”

9.      “Teenage Spaceship”

10.    “37 Pushups”

11.    “Strayed”

12.    “Strawberry Rash”

13.    “Our Anniversary”

14.    “Goldfish Bowl”

15.    “I Was A Stranger”

16.    “Bathysphere”

17.    “Everything You Touch Becomes A Crutch”

shortness is cleanliness

Got a super short (6 word) poem up at Twenty20. The issue required contributors to submit stuff in a particular form -- but no haiku allowed. Mine is a reverse hay(na)ku, which, if I remember right, means three words in the first line, two in the second, one in the third. Not sure if there are any other stipulations. Anyway, it's a cool issue (and site) and perfect if you're into the whole brevity thing. I didn't even write a bio.

Ser Charming of House Mickey

All I'm saying is I hope Disney got theirs when HBO jacked one of the company's most popular villains. Also I'm saying that I hope Jaime gets stabbed a bunch of times in the next episode. And that there will never be anymore Shrek movies.

10 anniversary 9/11 story (yeah it's June, whatever)

Three Degrees of Separation from the Same Thing We Were Still Supposed to be Thinking About

Katie stood in the back of the student center, near the coat closet with its dull polyurethane hooks, hands clasped over her stick-jaw pelvis, eyes on the blue sky and bluer smoke being projected through the TV. I thought about us in ten years: I would ask if I could buy her an appletini. There would be functions to attend, pills to swallow, clubs, nipple slips and brunches. Probiotic baby food, His and Her bidets, nurses at four in the morning, IV needles. I shifted my weight and pressed my face into the crook of her shoulder. She shoved me away. “My uncle was in bonds,” she sobbed. “Well, hopefully somebody unlocked him,” I said. Katie gave me this death-by-airstrike look.  No one else laughed at the joke except for Carl, who kept laughing until the Sustainable Oblivion Police dragged him off campus. That night, Katie waited in her bedroom, smoking and checking her inbox. Her mother had been on the phone since the lines opened back up. It was hard to believe that, even very recently, there had been first days of school where nothing happened.

2001

We were never holding back (belated May playlist)

May. A lot of rain and cold. Rain and cold makes mellow. Mellow things here. Also some beachness. Was at a beach for a few days there. Anyway, listen in a dark room with good friends. Or in a bright room with liars. Which means everywhere. June is spicier.

Please Don't Take My Sunshine Away / Sparklehorse

Just Another Day / Brian Eno

Celestica / Crystal Castles

Brian and Robert / Phish

Reckoner (80s remix) / Radiohead

Drugs / Simple Kid

Rumpus / Karen O and the Kids

Stars / Hum

Delicious / Sleeper

Foolish Fool / Sublime

Work Song / Dan Reeder

The Wagon / Dinosaur Jr.

Being Boring / Pet Shop Boys

Opel / Syd Barrett

Oh yeah, and this.

Anatomy of a DOOSH Part 2: The Southern Doosh

                        Dooshy image from southernandpreppy.blogspot.com

Some social gestures are so pointless I want to stab myself. Self-mutilation is a little extreme, I know. OK, so I'll stick to stabbing the perpetrators. Not really, but I want to. I work at this bar downtown, see. Where I sometimes work the door. Yeah, most of the time I work the door. I'm not a bouncer. I don't bounce anyone. I just tell them to wait in line because the bar's usually full or to leave when they go from the wow-that-guy-just-pounded-four-cocktails-but-hes-ZackGalifiniakis-funny to everyone-wants-to-murder-him-or-escape-GaryBusey-drunk. Other than that, it's pretty mellow. So instead of being stressed by patrons trying to shank each other, I spend my nights analyzing the ever-expanding schemes people devise to make my life much more miserable than it has to be. The inevitable transformation from man to DOOSH[1]. 

More often than not, said Dooshes will be oblivious to how douchey they're actually being. Sometimes they are so enveloped in the lipglossy-summers-in-Nantucket bat shit smothering their brains[2] that they are virtually unaware of, and unable to empathize with any foreign perspective. Although this is really, really annoying, it’s somewhat understandable. Getting yelled at by your boss all week and letting all that entitlement flow out of you like elephant piss on Saturday nights, I get it. What pisses me off is when people act douchey and try to justify it in an equally if not more douchey way. You know, the old “I own every Thai-Congolese fusion restaurant in a 3-mile radius, I know everyone that works here and I’ve been coming here the second this bar opened so you have to let me cut everyone in line,” line, or, “I’m the female lead of the now-defunct Spider-Man film franchise but I haven’t done a good movie since Jumanji and I’m a notoriously drunken shitstorm who looks like a troll on her best days. You HAVE to let me in.” Gross.

Those are obviously obvious examples. Most violations of my sanity would be imperceptible to the untrained eye. One such incident occurred last night and was perpetrated by a creature I’ll call the Southern Doosh.

Very generally speaking, there are two kinds of people that come into the bar. There is the Artsy/hipster/celeb/fedora-friendly Doosh, who, though occasionally snarky and possessed of a certain shit-don’t-stink, are usually good peoples. And then there’s the all-pervasive Suited Doosh, bane of my humble nightlife existence. The Suited Doosh (SD) may not actually be wearing a suit (especially the female variety, the FSD), but it’s safe to say that he/she has lived in Murray Hill, does live in the Upper East Side or whatever trendy new neighborhood he/she read about in GQ (which is totally not gay), and spends a significant amount of time vacantly staring out of office windows downtown or in the east 50s and is more than proficient at all those little keyboard tricks on Excel. Not so much Patrick Bateman as Bill Lumbergh from Office Space. There are a variety of theories as to why the SD and/or FSD is generally the dooshiest entity in any given location, but as far as I’m concerned, there can’t ever be one answer. Also, I’m speaking in rampant generalizations. Every corporate employee is not an SD/FSD, and every organic flaxseed blogger from Brooklyn isn’t a hipster. Well…

Anyway, back to the Southern Doosh from last night. Some background: The Southern Doosh is a variation of the SD where the suit jacket is replaced by a corduroy Izod jacket. Add a salmon-colored Ralph shirt, a half-ironic Bass Pro Shops cammo hat, and Crocs (for sunglasses) featuring an SEC football team’s logo. Instead of an MBA from Tufts, he went to UVA. Not a big difference. Going to school in Virginia with many of these characters, I can safely say that on the scale of DOOSH, these guys are toward the bottom of the list. The one thing they do that pisses me off is that they try to perpetuate this façade of being “true gentlemen,” that they are somehow the standard bearers of some nearly forgotten ancient code of morals. Like sounding like sleazy Matthew McConaughey adds a level of chivalry to your persona. Fuck that. I’ve seen enough drunk sorority girls get tricked by these gentlemen into consuming enough dip-spit and other bodily secretions under the pretense that it’s dark beer or lemon-lime Gatorade to have my doubts.

So this Southern Doosh comes up to the bar last night with his female companion. Seeing that they are on the young side, I ask for identification. Of course the girl, who appears to be an FSD, is the proud owner of a monstrous satchel whose ideal purpose seems to be transporting large human body parts. While she scours through the expanse of fabric, I am dutifully holding the door (a super heavy old-school metal door) open for my customers. The Southern Doosh has his ID out but for some reason is declining to give it to me. After 45 seconds of me extending my hand to this SD like a mongoloid and his girl still digging around, I say to him, “You know, I can see your ID now.”

“I’ll wait.”

Uh. More digging.

“So why don’t you just show me your ID now.” (Still holding the door, arm getting sore)

He looks at me like just shit jelly beans out of my nose. “It’s a Southern thing.”

“Oh?”

“It’s being a GENTLEMAN.”

FSD: “Yeah! He’s a gentleman!” (Makes retarded googly eyes that make me want to expell jelly beans out of multiple orifices)

Fast-forward through way too many seconds of my life and the FSD finally finds her ah, NEW JERSEY driver’s license. The Southern Doosh (from Charlotte, NC), who’s been grilling me like I’m some kind of Yankee ingrate for longer than I like, gracefully allows his reverse carpet-bagged plunder to saunter down the stairs[3]. He nods at me dooshily, follows. I finally close the door behind them, stretch my arm, and that’s it.

So you’re wondering what the big deal is? The significance? So a guy waited for his girlfriend so she could give me her ID first. No big deal, brah. It wouldn’t have been a big deal if his reasoning had been different. Because as I see it, part of what defines a gentleman is a combination of courtesy and tact, shown not only toward the objet d’heure (the insipid and unremarkable Jersey girl), but to all rational souls he encounters[4]. Considering myself to be rational for the most part, I find it a little ungentlemanly that someone would want to make me hold a heavy door like an idiot for any unnecessary amount of time. It would seem more gentlemanly to make the process as efficient as possible for all parties involved (especially given the fact that it was cold and rainy last night) and to escort his lady as quickly and as safely as possible (which, if you read footnote 3, you’ll see that this attempt resulted in failure, albeit a common mistake).

This post may seem nothing more than an overblown diatribe from a second-rate misanthrope, but believe me, when you spend 7 hours standing in roughly the same place constantly fending off unappealing hipsters and all manner of Dooshes, all the little annoyances quickly amplify. “It’s the little things that kill,” sang Gavin Rossdale in the mid-90s, and it’s hard to deny that he was writing from the perspective of someone in the service industry.

As you’d imagine, the opposite is also true. If you’re polite, unobtrusive, and can hold a conversation without resorting to weak office-speak sarcasm, then I love you dearly. You are a burst of hope in a vapid, soul-sucking blackness. But the more I think about it, it’s not even worth exerting any energy trying to become the latter type of individual I’ve just described. The bottom line is that some people (probably in the service industry, and especially disgruntled doormen at swanky cocktail bars) are going to hate you, no matter what you do, even if you think you’re not doing anything. The best you can hope for is that they’ll let you into the bar.

---

[1] I prefer this spelling of the word when talking about people. Douches perform a welcome cleaning service, whereas dealing with Dooshes makes me feel anything but clean.

[2] For instance, I wrote about women who carry inordinately large bags with them while watching me card everyone in front of them, only to give me stink eyes for the next 10 minutes as they search through the black hole at the bottom of said bags for their own IDs.

[3] Common sense and traditional courtesy indicates that when a couple is about to walk down a staircase, the man should go first, in order to verify the safety of the stairs and to be there to protect his lady in case she trips on one of her obnoxious Gucci heels he used up half of his monthly paycheck to buy her. Granted there are very few establishments one enters where one must descend a set of treacherous stairs. I could care less whether this practice is observed, the point is that a “real” gentleman should be aware of the appropriate protocol.

[4] It would seem to me that such a display of common decency would help to win the affection of aforementioned FSD. But what do I know? I’m just a doorman from the emotionally frigid Northeast. My bad.

Thank Allah and E! News for the opportunity

So I just got back from shall we say a brief jaunt in the Outer Banks of North Carolina with my buddies Chucky the Greek and Uncle Tony aka Bootnechi. The amount of irreversible damage done to my liver, wallet, and self-respect is still being calculated, and needless to say, I'm happy to have made it back in mostly one piece with only a gross sunburn and an addiction to Sonic breakfast sandwiches. The tales that could be told about this trip are all sordid, no doubt, including an equally horrific and props-inspiring encounter during one stretch of bumper-to-bumper traffic during the hellish 10-hour drive home. But I'll save these yarns for later when they'll find their way into my "fictions".

Speaking of fiction, I've got a new story -- Ex Dictator on TMZ -- up at Weirdyear. After shit started going down in Egypt and Libya, I was watching my lovely friends the Kardashians and found myself thinking about how utterly different their lives and concerns are from say those of Gaddafi or Mubarak. Then I thought about what would happen if their worlds sort of thudded together like some messed up Claymation puppet creature. Then I grilled a lamb-burger and wrote. Then I realized that their worlds were maybe not so dissimilar, and that I spent too much time caring about Charlie Sheen.

And, because sometimes when I read something that is so completely badass I have to explain why it is so badass in more than 1,000 words, here's a review of Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's "Hot Teen Slut" up at Used Furniture Review.

internet robot never forgets

Ah, self-Googling. Ah, college. Found some super old stuff I first published in The Messenger, University of Richmond's lit mag. Or, should I say, the first things I ever got published. Two short stories, The Ride [pg 1, pg 2, pg 3, pg 4, pg 5, pg 6, pg 7, pg 8]  (first "real" story I wrote in 2005) and The Wheelchair (later published in the now-cryogenic VerbSap), as well as La Fille blonde, a French sonnet cuz I used to speak French real nice-like. Makes me want to violently shake my current self into some semblance of productivity. What a precocious youth I was. Now I feel forced into going for a run. Yes, it's 1:46am. Uhh, maybe I'll just try to write a good story. That would be odd. In a good way. Plus, it's going to take more than a sweaty mile to reclaim the girlish figure once seen below. Streaking seemed to be a better idea in suburban Virginia. Still pale as fuck though.

WHO WE BURNIN'? (April Playlist)

Transitory early spring ghosts. Disaster-suckling fault lines. Rain, rain, rain, snow away. Big '90s throwbacks because I said so. Covers because why not. A little country-rock, sloppy pop and crappy country in this slappy country. Second time around is sweatier. Bowie for good measure. Phish, too. Who we burnin' in effigy? Jam out to these bad, bad friends.

1.   "I Just Can't Take It Anymore" / The Lemonheads

2.   "Mykel and Carli" / Weezer

3.   "Ashes to Ashes" / David Bowie

4.   "Window Licker" / Aphex Twin

5.   "Mr. Dobalina" / Del The Funky Homosapien

6.   "Beastie Revolution" / Beastie Boys

7,   "Effigy"/ Uncle Tupelo

8.   "Monkey" / Bush

9.   "AC/DC Bag (7/12/91)" / Phish

10. "Glynis" / Smashing Pumpkins

11. "Awesome Sound" / Ween

12. "As Far As I Can See" / Phantogram

13. "Please Let That Be You" / The Rentals

14. "Unseen Power of the Picket Fence" / Pavement

15. "Sexual Healing" / Soul Asylum

16. "New Style" / Beastie Boys

17. "Saturday Night" / Weezer

18. "Layin' With Linda" / The Lemonheads

19. "Waiting For My Ruca" / Sublime

20. "Hey Nineteen" / Steely Dan

21. "Salvation" / Rancid

22. "Fake Empire" / The National

23. "Out Of Touch" / Hall & Oates

24. "The Gaudy Side Of Town" / Gayngs

length: Waves, big waves.

piles of dirty iPod fingers

I've got two new poems, Postmodernism Isn't Fun Anymore and Emaciated Factbook, in the latest issue of Psychic Meatloaf. Definitely feels nice to be a small part of what looks like a gnarly and bizarre publication. Plus it's always nice to see your writing on dead trees instead of dead screens.