Go-go Dancers Strategically Placed in Literature

The Metamorphisizing

One day when Gregor Samza awoke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a go-go dancer. He lay in his sparkly silver booty-shorts, and when he lifted the covers he saw pink boots rising above the bend of his knees. The bedding was hardly able to cover the sprawling display of hair atop his head and the pillow seemed water-logged with glitter. His arms and legs, pitiful thin things they were, waved helplessly in involuntary gyrations.

“TEAR THE CLUB UP,” he thought. It wasn’t a dream. His room, a proper non-go-go room, unadorned with suspended dance cages or even the barest of laser lighting, remained peacefully between its four walls. He tried sleeping a bit longer in hopes of forgetting his consuming need to dance, imbibe sweetened alcohol concoctions, pop mollys, and sweat, while hip thrusting in assorted places, but that was something he was unable to do because his room was dreadfully absent of the pounding wub of repetitive electronic beats.

Anna Karenina-na-na-n-na-na-na-n-na

Honorable dancers are all alike. Every dishonorable dancer is dishonorable in their own way.

Everything was in confusion in Club Rain. Bailey had discovered that the bartender Trevor was carrying on an intrigue with a new girl whose specialty it was to work hula-hoops into her routine, and who had been once a trainee of Bailey’s at a previous club, and Bailey had announced to Trevor and all their mutual besties that she could not go on working in the same club as him, but each of them refused to seek a new job elsewhere, or even change shifts. This position of affairs had now lasted two weekends, and not only Trevor and Bailey themselves, but all the stage girls and night managers, were painfully conscious of it. Every person in the club felt that there was no sense in their working around each other, and that the stray club-goers brought together by nothing more than the basic need to gyrate under the influence of high grade E, held more in common than they, the employees of the club.

Three days after the quarrel, Tyler Collins—TC, as he was called in the DJ world—woke up at his usual hour, that is two o’clock in the afternoon, not in his gf’s apartment, but on the understuffed cushions of the sofa in his best boy Steve’s place. He shifted his lean, well-cared-for person on the sparse sofa, as though the weed he had smoked the night before still beckoned him into a long sleep; he vigorously embraced the balled up hoodie he had used a pillow on either side and buried his face in it; but all at once he jumped up, sat up on the sofa, and opened his eyes.

“Fuck dude?” he thought, going over his dream.

-By Justin Sanders

Surprise, or, What I Learned as an Editor

John Berryman singing hymns (or, frozen in the moment before a sneeze)

In my third semester of undergraduate study, I enrolled in a course called Syntax, Semantics, and Style. It was a required course, one of those over-regulated, over-evaluated staples of certain curricula that no student ever expects to like. I was lucky enough, however, to have been assigned an instructor who understood these things. On the first day of class, without speaking, she wrote two words on the whiteboard: “Good Writing.” She then asked each student to define the term in as few words as possible. 

I’ve tried over the years since to remember what I wrote, but I think memories have a way of prioritizing themselves; the simple two-word definition our instructor eventually revealed to us—after ten minutes or so of ripping through her students’ careful attempts—has stuck in my mind ever since. “Verbal surprise,” she said. “It’s that simple.”

Of course, nothing is that simple—not to say that little aphorism didn’t serve me well throughout the remainder of my undergraduate studies. I clung to it like a mantra. Each piece I read in workshop:
“Is this surprising?” Each passage I was instructed to analyze: “How does this surprise the reader?”  Simplicity certainly has its place.

That place, unfortunately, doesn’t extend far beyond the Bachelor of Arts degree, at least not in terms of literary criticism. Once I graduated, I began working as an editor for Artichoke Haircut. Finding myself increasingly in the company of better writers than I encountered in my undergraduate workshops, I quickly recognized the inherent fallacies of my beloved mantra.“This piece is/is not surprising,” may have worked for a few theses, but it didn’t exactly hold up to the scrutiny of an editorial staff hell-bent on putting together a quality collection of fiction and poetry, not only  to be read and enjoyed, but marketed as well.

Toward a Certain Type of Literature

That tiny blue dot is Earth as seen from Voyager 1, 4 billion miles away.

I've been confused most my life. There was a brief time, around the age 19 or 20, that I had what one might call a real moral structure to guide most of my thinking about justice and ethics and so forth. From that window, I could see how the world had gone off track, how it had veered into the wrong. I could identify the parties that made it do so (capitalists, mainly -- being the socialist that I was back then). I could probably even name the men whose actions had turned the world from the just and verdant place I knew it could be. And because I could pinpoint the causes (all the causes) with a certainty I now find naive and maybe even stupid, I could also prescribe certain remedies. Step-by-step instructions on "How to Fix the Ills of the World, pt. 1."

Now, as you probably could already tell, I have no idea. Though I still (kinda) have a system of ethics, it's mostly just a bunch of vague notions and even those are riddled with holes. All the tiny bits of information that surround and support it are unstable, even volatile. I can't seem to know anything. I've accidentally slipped into a kind of moral relativism, which drives myself and everyone else nuts. Everything I know, all those bits of shit lying here and there about my brain, look different every time I give them a passing glance. They shift positions and color and size and blah blah. So my "system of ethics" is really just a big pile of unanswered and unanswerable questions -- which, someone could argue, rules out my "system" from being considered ethics at all.

The Trash Heap: Creativity & Doug Aitken

Maybe the question is stupid, but whenever I've been asked something along the lines of, What is creativity? my mind immediately conjures images of children finger painting or throwing glitter at smears of Elmer's glue, making cotton-ball clouds and tapping them in a ziti sky. And maybe, after those images pass, I'll see an image of an art gallery or museum or something. But the childhood images always come first. And while those images don't, in the least bit, answer the question of creativity, childhood is probably a good place to start the discussion (and this essay). This, like most other things, is where creativity is learned. For this short period of time, the only real, intellectual goal for a child is to figure out what exists and what is possible. So, because they are just kids and there are no real consequences to this kind of day dreaming, there are no limits imposed on these experiments, and because of the lack of limits, creativity and imagination, that two-headed dancing beast, can rear their heads and run wild with every insignificant thing it finds.

But despite having my own ideas about creativity, I find myself drawn to the theories of others: hypothesis about what it is/what it means, interviews with artists/writers/chefs about where these ideas come from and the processes that evoke them.

Lately, there have been not a few articles by neurologists of different stripes hoping to nail down exactly what process in the brain cause one, when confronted by a problem, to find a unique and creative way out of the situation. While interesting for purely intellectual reasons, these scientific explanations seem to be little more than a man scratching at bark to find the nature of a tree. It's true, he may very well find something (a bug eating at the wood, for instance), but the essential nature of the tree will remain hidden. It could be that the essential nature of the thing will always remain hidden, is a thing beyond our limited mind, and may not even be a thing that exists, just a word that attempts to stop time, to freeze a moment in the metaphysical lab of the mind, tries to examine the world in order to develop true generalities from a specific. But by the time anything is gleaned from these experiments they have already spoiled and turned false. The moment has irrevocably passed and everything has changed.

Not to brag, but being a pretty famous neurologist in my own right, I have my own conception of what happens in the brains of truly creative people:

To find the spot where creativity happens, you must get past the bogs of last night's binge drinking, past the screens looping, repressed memories from childhood, to the places where the these experiences have swept though and left smoldering piles of rubble. There you will find large swaths of circuitry ruined. Disconnected wires flailing about like loose fire hoses, spraying bits of information in places they have no earthly right to be. There strange piles of images and phrases and ideas combine in large, rank compost heaps. In theses heaps, disparate tidbits collect from years of seeing and hearing, combine into an amalgamation all their own, combine and (if your prayers are said earnestly, and the muse is disposed to smile kindly) come out of that pile of shit looking brand new. 

After these strange chemical reactions comes the truly audacious aspect of the creative arts, where what Liz Diller (video above) calls naivete. The element of naivete seems just as important as the creative act itself. Having the naivete to believe that theses strange amalgamations mean something, are important. The naivete to believe that these divergent stimuli can be magnetized and attracted to one another in a way that is interesting, in a way that doesn't just make you look crazy. And, most importantly, having the naivete to believe that the connections, these new amalgamations, will make a sweet enough sound to attract other people, an audience, a public. That people will, and do care to listen, to see, this new world that was just, a moment ago, created from nothing, from everything.

For a bunch more interviews in this vain, by the filmmaker Doug Aitken, click here. I strongly suggest the interview with architect David Adjaye, and, oh, there are also interviews with Beck and Jack White that are quite pleasant as well. 

-By Adam Shutz

The Death of a Mouse

So I killed this mouse. It was cute. It jumped and ran in circles. It stopped and sniffed the air. It was bug-eyed and tiny. It was a mouse. It was a fool. Now it’s dead.

I knew the mouse only for a very short period of time, but in that time I could tell all those things. Not that I paid it much mind myself. I got most of that from the brief period of indecision, the lull so that my girlfriend could ooh and ahh and say baby words to it before it died. And even then, while my girlfriend babbled non-words to a shitlessly scared mouse, I spent in thought of how it might die.

Once I decided… it was brutal – really, it was just bad– but it was also (if I might say so myself) humane (more on this later). But before I get into the details and series of events that resulted in this mouse’s demise, I first want to relate a story. This is the origin story of this essay.

So as I just said, I killed the mouse. It happened as we were on our way to bed. It popped its little mouse head out from behind some toilet paper rolls. My girlfriend screamed, panicked, pushed me in the room with the mouse, closed the door behind us, and there we all were, trapped. My girlfriend and I standing on tall things so as to protect our feet, I guess – I don’t really understand this reaction – and the mouse searching frantically, from corner to corner, side to side, for a hole that didn’t exist. Then I killed it (again, details to come), brushed my teeth, locked the front door and went to bed.

Attn :: Men of Baltimore

To the men who feel obligated to stop me on the sidewalk to make comments about my legs,

Look. I know my socks are super awesome because I wouldn’t wear them if they weren’t. In fact, they’re so awesome, when my neighbor gave them to me she said, “I think you might like these, I’ve had them since the 70’s and never wore them because they’re ridiculous.” I can only imagine that she meant to say awesome, that she never wore them because they are awesome. So yes, I like them too.

But please, PLEASE do not tell me how awesome my tattoos are. They’re not tattoos. They are awesome socks. And anyone who decides to get tattoos from their feet to their knees is stupid because that’s a stupid tattoo. Sleeves are fine, but not kneehighsocktoos – I don’t even know what to call them because no one does that because it’s stupid.

I’m not mad that you think my socks are awesome. I not mad that you think my “tattoos” are awesome, but do not stop me to ask if you can take a picture of my legs. And do not stop in the middle of the road in your white stalker van, blocking traffic, cars backing up, whizzing by, horns blaring, JUST so you can yell out “I like your tattoos!” Because… what do you think will happen? That your comment will make my panties drop? That your comment will make me realize that we were destined to be, and while you sit there idling, awaiting my response, I’ll come running over and jump into your van and we’ll ride off in the three o’clock sunlight – because it isn’t sundown yet, oh but we’ll drive until it is.

And to the mister with the white button up and Pest Control embroidered over the left breast, did you think I’d go all sexy-up-in-the-air-leg-pose because I’m a young college girl and damn if Girls Gone Wild hasn’t taught us that these are moments when a girl’s low self esteem just SHINES. What would you have done with it? Would you have shown your friends? Maybe uploaded it to facebook. You would say, “Hey, lookit this girl’s tattoos, they look like socks!” And someone would reply, “Man, that girl has low self esteem.”

While I think that these socks do deserve the attention that you are throwing at them, anyone who has tattoos that looks like socks is dumb and therefore your attention is dumb. Don’t get me wrong, I like tattoos, even have a few. But don’t get mad when I laugh at the look on your stupid face as I roll down my socks and say “THEY’RE JUST SOCKS.” Awesome socks.


Thanks,
Melissa

A Letter to Citizen Garbage

To the guy who was driving a van that looked like an Astro van but wasn’t because you weren’t cool enough,

I was the one on the yellow motorscooter who honked at you. Your van was that ugly, retro grey-brown that people thought was an awesome color, but isn’t anymore. You were on the larger side. Not the oh-my-god-I’m-so-fat-I-get-stuck-behind-the-steering-wheel fat, but enough that your van probably sinks to one side when you get in. We were on some road in Towson, headed for Bosley Ave. I think you were wearing a white tee, and if I could imagine it – which I can – it was probably stained yellow around the pits, neck and on the stomach where you probably drop a lot of food. It wasn’t that warm outside and the wind was blowing. Your windows were rolled up but you were probably sweating. Not a lot though. Just a thin film of sweat on your face. Not enough to turn into droplets, but moist. You were pulling left, out of your parallel park job, to merge into my lane. I was the one behind that medic truck. You were looking right as you pulled out left.

I don’t understand this. Were you looking at something in your passenger seat? Was a Towson girl, over tanned, with blonde hair, walking by? Were you looking at the clusterfuck of papers, maps and McDonald’s wrappers on your dashboard and thinking, “Why the hell is all this shit on here?” Well I was thinking that, because I saw the clusterfuck on your dashboard and you looking the other way and pulling out in front of me and I was thinking, “What is that clusterfuck on his dashboard? Why is he looking away? Is he pulling out?” and that’s when I honked my horn. It wasn’t a hey fuck you buddy honk, but a hey, don’t hit me honk. Because I don’t like being hit, and I’m sure you didn’t want me to sue you or have little pieces of dead girl in your carburetor because I hear that it’s a bitch to clean, not like you would clean it you fat fuck. And I’d just sit there collecting all sorts of nasty shit. I’d just sit there, a part of your stupid van.

I was doing you a favor. But after that nasty look you gave me, maybe it should have been a fuck you honk because you seem like a dick. So next time, why don’t you look where you’re driving, so when you see me I don’t seem like a jerk for doing us both a favor.


Melissa

A List of AWP in Chicago

Just recently 75% of our editorial staff (sounds fancier than listing our names) went to AWP in Chicago. I thought about writing up a Gonzo-esque blog post, but I forgot to take my upperdownerLSDbarbituate-tonic mix. Instead, here is a list of things collected throughout the trip:

Wednesday February 29, 01:14 am
1 List

A Brief Inventory:
5 socks (un-holey)
1 green t-shirt with a brown smear of
unknown origin on the bottom right hem
1 camera
3 underwear (no thongs)
2 jeans in which you’ve slightly peed in
   on separate occasions: laughing too hard and
   that one time when you were drunk
1 pair of contacts (no solution, get water or orange
   juice in Chicago)
1 tampon (just in case)
1 iPod
1 toothbrush (which one is mine?)
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace

Thursday March 1, 02:27pm
2 photos of the Poetry Building

Editors' Shorts :: Vol. 1.5

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

So we received about 230 submissions (over 500 individual pieces) for issue number two.  We’re happy to have had the chance to read/discuss/analyze the hell out of some great pieces.  We’re even happier to be getting some new blood into this issue.  We will be publishing writers from faraway places.  We will be publishing photography.  Most importantly, though, we won’t be publishing ourselves.  It’s great to finally have so much to work with.

We are, however, still arrogant and self-centered, so we the editors compiled some of our recent work in an online issue, which we hope you will download.  It’s free, and we put a lot of work into it. 

For anyone still wondering what our magazine is all about, take a look.  Maybe you can derive some sense of what our criteria might be.  If you figure it out, maybe you could give us a heads up.
 
Thanks for reading, and keep watching for new stuff.

(To download click here and go to the far right box with the down arrow, otherwise you can just read it online.)

Editors' Shorts :: #2

Laura Letinsky, "Untitled #85"

Sunday

Sunday is my day to pretend I am not

animal I clean my clothes and wash

the pots that have pondered

for a week and grow

not in size that would be preposterous

but in life egregious

they mimic the rest of the world

or at least the part that runs

behind your back whenever you turn.

I’m sad to think that everything

in the world has already been touched

or nearly like a rock I found sitting in a gutter

by a flamingo feather I picked up

the rock and not the feather because though

they both sat perfectly next to one another sharing

color and a yearning for the market or a sleek city

condo the feather must have been retched

so I picked up the rock and not the feather

put the rock in my pocket smooth from some other

long place and time

and watched the feather lend the gutter pink

starving itself with generosity and ecstasy

while a trickle from someone washing their car

slid it closer and closer to the drain.

           

                                                              – Adam Shutz

Editors' Shorts :: #1

Narrative Flow

The thought was in the head; the head

was somewhat

connected to the neck; the neck

was frail and wanted badly to snap, but

                could not.

It was

begrudgingly

interested in the head.

It

wished secretly

to be pulled into the skull’s frivolous breezing

like a string,

to

fray.

 -      jonathan gavazzi