Even though we at Is Greater Than publish to the digital ether, we still love our physical printed objects, screenprints in particular. We're excited to offer up this video of Delicious Design League at work to preview this year’s Printer’s Ball, which takes place this Friday, June 30 from 6:00-11:00 p.m. at The Ludington Building at Columbia College Chicago (1104 South Wabash Avenue).

Delicious Design League is a screenprinting shop founded by Jason Teegarden-Downs and Billy Baumann in 2006. Since designing the 2007 Printers’ Ball poster, Teegarden-Downs has become the chair of the Chicago Printers’ Guild, one of the event’s sponsors.

The Chicago Printers Guild partnered with the Center for Book and Paper Arts and Poetry magazine to create the 2010 Printers’ Ball Art Book. The organizers at the Poetry Foundation explain the project:

The project pairs 20 local printers with 20 local writers to make a book of broadsides. Each broadside is hand-printed, and the sets of twenty are bound by the Center for Book and Paper Arts in an edition of fifty. Forty editions will immediately go to the participating artists and the remaining ten copies will be donated to local and national arts organizations. Since this is such a rare, fine printing that would otherwise be unavailable to the general public, we’re digitizing the book for electronic distribution. Copies will be available the week of the Printers’ Ball. This is one way we’re showing people how PRINT <3 DIGITAL. This fine-printed book can belong to anyone with a click! The purpose of the book is to commemorate the Printers' Ball, but more importantly it's an exercise in collaboration. We took the opportunity to engage two communities of artists who otherwise have little contact. To get things started, we had a mixer at the Center for Book and Paper Arts to introduce the writers to the printers. We asked each writer to bring in an object that either represented the piece they were contributing to the book, their work in general, or something that they just liked or is important to them. We anonymously set out the object on a table and let the printers take turns choosing the object they responded to most.

Check out what Delicious Design League does in the following video, and we’ll see you this Friday at the Printers’ Ball:

Also be sure to head over to the Printers’ Ball afterparty at Reggie’s Music Joint sponsored by our friends at Make: A Chicago Literary Magazine. I’ll be doing a short interview at 9:45 with Brandon Wetherbee of the You Me Them Everybody podcast.

Midsummer has me thinking about inspiration. Who, in the midst of hot and humid July, couldn’t use a cool dose of it? W.S. Merwin, recently named the 17th U.S. Poet Laureate, is inspired by his Hawaiian hideaway. The 82-year-old poet lives on a former pineapple plantation atop a dormant volcano in Maui, and in his new role as poet laureate, he hopes to emphasize the need for connectedness to the natural world. Copper Canyon Press, a nonprofit publisher of poetry based in Port Townsend, Washington, has released many books by Merwin over the years and now has a form on its homepage where you can send the poet your personal congrats. (Or perhaps a congenial “Aloha”?)

Speaking of poetry, Lynda Barry speaks of poetry in a short documentary on the Poetry Foundation site, The View from Here, describing memorization as the best way to experience poems. She’s particularly inspired by the cadences of Emily Dickinson’s verse (which, she demonstrates, can be sung to the tune of “The Girl From Ipanema”) and her messy handwriting.

Many people were influenced by the late, great Harvey Pekar, who passed away on July 12 at age 70. In an appreciation, collaborator Dean Haspiel, one of the artists who worked on American Splendor, described Pekar as “a certified curmudgeon who became a cultural icon,” as well as a “true-blue mensch.”

For some visual artists, books serve as objects of inspiration. For his series “The Stacks”, artist Paul Octavious arranged his hardcover and paperback books into colorful, slightly precarious sculptures. Meanwhile, artist Brian Dettmer creates amazingly intricate sculptural works with altered books, such as vintage encyclopedias, handyman guides, and history textbooks.

Recently, the literary corners of the Internet were all abuzz about a new website called I Write Like a “statistical analysis tool” where you provide a few paragraphs of your writing (e.g., blog post/comment/journal entry), and then it informs you what author you write like. Developed by a 27-year-old Russian guy who modeled it on software for email spam filters, I Write Like may not be the most reliable analyzer of writing, but hey, it’s fun. (Or well, it was fun…until I found out I write like DAN BROWN! NOO!)

There has also been a lot of buzz about Tin House Books and Tin House magazine’s controversial new policy of requiring anyone who submits unsolicited work between September 1 and December 30, 2010, to include a receipt from a bookstore. Called the “Buy a Book, Save a Bookstore” campaign, Tin House specifies that “Writers who are not able to produce a receipt for a book are encouraged to explain why in 100 words or fewer,” which we assume will prompt some interesting responses. Ann Arbor, MI-based nonprofit publisher Dzanc Books responded this way: “We at Dzanc Books are motivated to reply with what we hope is an alternative solution to one of the issues Tin House seems to be raising; to wit the decline of books being purchased—and purchased at independent bookstores.” Dzanc is offering a program for the month of July where it donates a book to a school/library for each proof of purchase provided of a book bought at an independent bookstore.

On Friday, July 30, in Chicago, the sixth annual Printers’ Ball brings together a myriad of magazines, publishers, printmakers, and Chicago literary organizations. This year’s theme is “Print <3 Digital,” and to inspire attendance, the Chicago Underground Library is offering an online preview of “daily blog-down” to the Printers’ Ball throughout the month of July.

Photo by Flickr user kingdamus

What do the hair depilation scene in The 40-Year Old Virgin, Todd Haynes’ Superstar, and Sarah Manguso’s stunning, lyrical memoir The Two Kinds of Decayhave in common? According to David Shields, author of the book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, these seemingly disparate art objects all share a commonality in that, while they are works of the imagination, they also toe the line between “reality”(a word that Nabokov claimed should always be in quotation marks) and fiction in a wholly new way. “Art is theft,” begins the book, with a quote from Picasso—one of the only quotes out of hundreds actually attributed, in the text, to the original speaker, and Shields spends the next 205 pages making just that argument.

Taking a clue from hip hop–particularly sampling–Shields “borrows” from other sources as a way to build a new kind of collage.  Each chapter of Reality Hunger contains short numbered vignettes, entire passages taken from other sources, without citing (on the page) the original source. Curious readers can flip back and forth between the body of the book and the appendix–which publisher Random House insisted be included to avoid legal ramifications—but Shields suggests that the reader instead grab a sharp pair of scissors and remove the pages by “cutting along the dotted line.”

While I didn’t heed Shield’s advice to cut out the appendix (it was a damn library book for god’s sake!), I did control my urge to flip back and forth between the appendix and the vignettes, an act that took a shocking amount of self-control on my part. In this action, I felt like I was actually interacting with the book in an intriguing way, one that got me thinking the assumed lines between attribution and originality, between myth, memory, and truth. Soon, the reading felt liberating. I have been struggling to finish a series of short stories for the past three years, trying to finesse them into something that resembles what I think they should look like, something so wholly fiction that the seams are hidden, like a fine couture dress. Shields book helped me to think about the “reality” that often times, I am more drawn to writing in which the seams are ragged and transparent, than those stories that are polished to perfection; while I do enjoy sinking into a nice work of fiction, the older I get, the more I enjoy books that challenge genre without adhering slavishly to the guidelines monitoring fiction.  Examples include the Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstrom, and Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

“This book contains hundreds of quotations that go unacknowledged in the body of the text. I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost. Your uncertainty about whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature,” writes  Shields (see, I can’t help but give the guy credit) just before he suggests cutting out the appendix with a box cutter.

Why all this trouble to “steal” from other sources, to muddle the reader’s expectations of truth and fiction? Well, Shields is writing a manifesto, one that forefronts the argument that an artistic movement is forming, one that shares certain key components.

1. A deliberate unartiness; “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, unensored, and unprofessional. Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity,; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity, reader/viewer participation; an overly literal tone, as if a reporter were viewing a strange culture; plasticity of form, pointillism; criticism as autobiography; self-reflexivity; self-ethnography; anthropological autobiography; a blurring ( to the point of invisibility) of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction; the lure and blur of the real.

In short, Shields declares that the novel is dead, or in the process of dying a slow and painful death. The time of the seamless Tolstoyan dream has ended, to be replaced by a mixed, hybrid form. In fact, he argues that this is not so much a replacement, as a return to original form. And while I find these ideas intriguing and freeing, as a so-called “fiction” writer, I am even more intrigued by the interaction between art and “reality.”

I started thinking about this while listening to the new Charlotte Gainsbourg album. I find Gainsbourg to be endlessly fascinating, ever since seeing her in a 1996 movie production of Jane Eyre—a book that I have read five times, thank you very much. The actress plays the patron saint of homely and disenfranchised girls with a confused, bemused energy, her lopsided mouth a perfect representation of the Jane Eyre’s homeliness. Gainsbourg is also a singer and her latest album is titled  IRM, the French acronym for an MRI scanner. In interviews, she has talked becoming intimately familiar with the IRM machine after a water-skiing accident led to a brain hemorrhage in 2007. The title track captures the experience of being in a hospital, undergoing tests, wondering if you are going to die. As I listen, I’m not sure if it is the actual song that I am drawn to, or if I am so fascinated with the history behind the song that I’m filling in the meaning, making it into an experience outside of the art object itself. Many albums are autobiographical, but this one in particular has got me thinking about the increasingly blurred lines (reality television has something to do with this) between what is made up and what is “reality,” and the importance of what both the artist and the reader (or listener) bring to the table. “Urgency attaches itself now more to the tale taken directly from life than one fashioned by the imagination out of life,” writes Shields –or not Shields. This not only explains the popularity of the Real Housewives franchise, it also gives liberty to writers and artists to pull unabashedly from their own experience, to break genre, to wallow in the freedom of being able to be both the “I” and not the “I” all at the same time.

Everyone loves a list. That’s cause they’re:1). a quick read; 2). assertive; 3). curiosity-piquing; 8). logically organized. (Except, of course, when they’re not.) Still, not everyone in the literary world appreciated a list in the New Yorker Summer Fiction issue—“20 Writers Under 40”—in which a score of writers were recognized for capturing “the inventiveness and vitality of contemporary American fiction.” Feeling rivalrous, the Telegraph proposed its own list—“Britain’s 20 Best Novelists Under 40”— and HTML Giant kicked the discussion up a notch (or, refreshingly, down) by offering a list of the “Top 400 Writers Worth Watching Under the Age of 1.” According to HTML Editor Blake Butler, selecting the baby scribes was a difficult process. “Unfortunately there were some fantastic young pen holders who’d just had their first birthday party who we had to cross off the list,” he wrote. “I also crossed off those babies who didn’t quite have that look in their eye. You know what I mean.”

Speaking of HTML Giant, one of the site’s contributors, Ben Spivey, recently co-founded a new small publishing initiative, Blue Square Press. The first release will be Spivey’s novel, Flowing in the Gossamer Fold. Meanwhile, on the Featherproof Books website, you can download new (free!) mini books from Patrick Somerville and Mary Miller. Soon the Chicago-based press will move into a new shared space with Green Lantern Gallery & Press, featuring a bookstore, café/bar, art gallery, offices, and other bells and whistles.

Via Literago: The king of King-Cat Comics, John Porcellino, has more zine and comics available through his mailorder distribution co. Spit and a Half. (Think: Gabrielle Bell, Lilli Carré, and of course, King-Cat Comics and Stories.) In other Midwesternness: Stop Smiling/Melville House Books has released Listen to the Echoes, a collection of Ray Bradbury interviews conducted by biographer Sam Weller, as well as How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip-Hop, by music journalist Dave Tompkins.

There are books about audio—and then there are audio books. A British writer, Nathan Dunne, is releasing Underwood, a new twice-yearly publication produced as a vinyl LP. “The MP3 has an alien digital gloss,” Dunne told the Telegraph . “It’s streamlined, corporate… Listening to a short story on vinyl is the purest antidote to that.” Also for the record: singer-songwriter Bill Callahan is putting out a new book via Drag City. Titled Letters to Emma Bowlcut, it’s an epistolary novel that’s been years in the making.

The AIGA recently selected the best in book design from 2009. Check out the winning books and covers. There are some real lookers!

The legendary Shakespeare & Company Bookshop is launching a literary publication, Paris Magazine. Edited by Fatema Ahmed, formed ed. of Granta, the magazine will feature fiction, nonfiction, and illustration. The bookstore will also start awarding 10,000 euro (that’s $12, 292!) every two years to the author of the best novella (defined as 20,000–30,000 words). So in other words, writers, time to start stretching those short stories…

Photo by Per on Flickr

About a week ago in San Francisco, a few ambitious writers, editors, and designers (from publications like Dwell and Wired) gathered in the offices of Mother Jones to put together 48 Hour Magazine, an experiment in using crowdsourced tools to erase media’s old limits. The project involved writing, photographing, illustrating, designing, editing, and shipping a glossy magazine in a mere two days, as well as putting forth a transparent funding structure. The theme was, appropriately, hustle, and the inaugural 60-page issue is now available from self-publishing service MagCloud. I love the emphasis on both web-based tools and a printed end product. Hustle over here and get a copy.

Experimentation is alive in other corners of the literary world as well. Erinrose Mager and Ben Segal are assembling a book of blurbs about books that don’t exist, titled The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. They’re accepting submissions through July 15, so if you’d like to blurb a fake book, now’s your chance. Willows Wept Press will publish the Catalog in a limited edition.

Brooklyn-based indie publisher LoudMouth Press recently released a book based on a project by artists Carla Repice and Geoff Cunningham, titled The Office of Blame Accountability. Beginning in 2007, Repice and Cunningham—acting as Blame Accountants—set up a table, a typewriter, and a red telephone at such places as Ground Zero, Wall Street, and the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. They invited passersby to fill out Blame Forms (I blame:______ for: ______. My role: ______) or voice grievances into the red phone, in hopes that these acts would afford the opportunity for catharsis and reflection—and maybe even inspire action. The book, subtitled A Compendium of American Finger Pointing, collects all kinds of blaming scenarios, from major injustices to everyday minutiae.

Here’s another opportunity for writing something potentially cathartic (or at least fun): the Letters with Character project, in which you compose a letter to your favorite fictional character. The particularly great submissions are published on this here blog. Check out the ones already posted, such as the letter to Gatsby (of The Great Gatsby), to Seymour (A Perfect Day for Bananafish), and to Cathy (Wuthering Heights). They’re clever, hilarious, rambling, succinct, and just generally awesome.

Also in the experimental category (I think I’m just gonna go ahead and declare this National Literary Experiments Month): Independent arts magazine White Fungus recently relocated to Taichung, Taiwan, from Wellington, New Zealand, and released an eye-popping 11th issue. And have you checked out the new(ish) online journal Cerise Press? A collaborative effort between three French and American editors, it features poetry, prose, photos, artwork, reviews, interviews, and translations (with an emphasis on French and Francophone works). C’est magnifique!

Another new journal of poetry and prose, Little Star, was recently born. The first issue gleams with the talents of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Lydia Davis, Padget Powell, Mary Jo Salter, among others. Edited by Ann Kjellberg, a former editor of the New York Review of Books, Little Star is poised to have no small impact.

Lastly, if you like to hang out in the Twitterverse, you should definitely follow some famous literary characters. I particularly recommend edgar_allan_poe (sample tweet: My most beloved iPhone app is the one that transmogrifies my phone into a bottle of absinthe.) and halfpintingllas, the Twitter account of Laura Ingalls Wilder (Folks really ought to keep their hands off their blackberries while driving. Leave them in the pail! You can eat them when you get home!). I’m not much of a Twitterer, but I love these little tweets from the prairie and from beyond the grave.

Photo by Flickr user su-lin

Some of the publishers I spoke with were branching out into digital formats, while others aimed to kindle interest in books better than a Kindle™ ever could. Whatever their approach, they all demonstrated a propensity for outside-the-box thinking. I interviewed Jen Loy and Kaya Oakes of the late, great Kitchen Sink magazine; Johnny Temple of the adventurous Akashic Books; and the creative minds behind Small Beer Press, Green Lantern Press, and Mule magazine (among others). I spotlighted the literary magazine and press Tin House, located in Portland and New York, and the Zurich-based publishing house Nieves, which specializes in good-looking limited edition zines and artist books.

Rather than revive that column, I’m preserving the literary theme and launching a new recurring feature, “Pressing Issues,” in which I’ll share a selection of news and notes about small presses, periodicals, and other bookish goings-on. Feel free to chime in: If you have any interesting literary news/notes/events of your own to add, please do so in the Comments section or email me at laura@laura-pearson-net. Onto the pressing issues…

Poised to baffle, muse, and bemuse, the legendary Chicago-based cultural and political magazine, The Baffler, is back. Founded in 1988 and published until 2007, the magazine reemerged in Jan. 2010 with Vol 2, Issue No 1. In this humdinger of an issue, the eds. declare, “…We are losing our faculties of inquiry at precisely the moment when public-minded scrutiny of our institutions is most needed,” going on to promise “a strong dose of our particular brand of scoffing: Strong ideas, elegantly expressed.” Reminds me of George Saunders’ essay, “The Braindead Megaphone,” in which G.S. proposes a remedy for shallow and sensationalistic mass media: “Every well thought-out rebuttal to dogma, every scrap of intelligent logic, every absurdist reduction of some bullying stance is the antidote.” The antidotal issue is available in stores and via subscription. (I got mine at Powell’s.)

Paul Harding just won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his debut novel Tinkers, an elegiac story of a clock repairman on his deathbed. It was published by Bellevue Literary Press, a teeny indie operation located in a tiny office in New York’s Bellevue Hospital Center. It’s the first small press to put out a Pulitzer-winning novel since 1981, when Louisiana State University Press published A Confederacy of Dunces. Turns out that “books at the intersection of the arts and sciences” are just what the doctor (and Pulitzer committee) ordered!

Speaking of small presses, last month was Small Press Month, and in case you missed it, the Chicago Tribune’s book blog, Printers Row, spotlighted a variety of local presses, including Agate, Haymarket, and Flood Editions. Works by these publishers (and tons more) are available for perusal in the newly expanded Publishers Gallery in the lobby of the Chicago Cultural Center.

April is National Poetry Month, and in celebration, CA-based independent bookstore, Diesel, is posting a video poem each day. Palm trees and Rumi, anyone? Meanwhile, the Academy of American Poets has launched Poem on the Range, a collaborative multimedia-mapping project in which people upload and geotag videos of poetic pilgrimages, landmarks, and roadside ephemera. Maybe someone could do a video recitation of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” while standing by the company lost & found. Or how about an Anne of Green Gables-esque recreation of “The Lady of Shalott”? An endless range of possibilities, people.

Moving on…South End Press, formerly based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, moved to a new HQ in Brooklyn. The 32-year-old indie has opened an editorial office at Medgar Evers College (CUNY) and will partner with the school’s Center for Black Literature and the DuBois Bunch Center for Public Policy to sustain and grow SEP publishing initiatives. Also check out SEP’s other cool sustainability effort, Community Supported Publishing.

Other publishers have opted to go digital. According to the Media Bistro blog, eBookNewser, Graywolf Press and Melville House are among some indie presses that plan to release frontlist titles (and a bit of backlist) as eBooks.

David Shields’ collage-y, controversial manifesto Reality Hunger was published by Knopf last month, but did you know that before that, it was serialized in the fledgling literary journal Knee-Jerk? F’reals.

Those hungry for dessert, rather than reality, participated in the Seattle Edible Book Festival on April 10. This idea is so awesome: Participants make literary-themed culinary creations—food like The Bun Also Rises, Curd Vonnegut, and S’more and Peace—and are awarded prizes for “Most Pun-derful,” “Most Appetizing,” etc. My friend Kate, one of the organizers, posted some photos from last year’s fest.

This summer Chicago Artists Resource, a project of the Chicago Dept. of Cultural Affairs (full disclosure: I work for CAR) launches a new literary component, featuring Artist Stories (essays by writers, publishers, and other lit-minded people), informative articles, and links to opportunities and resources. If you live in/around Chicago, consider participating by emailing ideas or submitting an Artist Story. (Email literary@chicagoartistsresource.org).

We just learned the meaning of “hypocorism” and “couvade,” thanks to this list of all the words David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary. It comes courtesy of the Ransom Center, the research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, which now houses the DFW archive. From “Viking Poem,” composed when he was six or seven years old, to obsessively annotated copies of Cormac McCarthy and John Updike books, the archive is sure to foster additional interest in the late writer.

Check back next month for still more pressing issues.

In this economy, and as visual and short bits of information rather than long-form, thoughtful stories become increasingly standard, this might seem like an act of stupidity to some. But, I think of us as warriors, we believe in some essential truth that can be put to page, that what we are doing is important, and that someday it might be rewarded. On the phone, my friend talks about how she is struggling to put food on the table for her kids while I bitch about not being able to afford my monthly allotment of beer and books and not being able to pay of my student loans, but we are struggling to establish the same identity—one that revolves around creativity, speaking truth to power and finding a way to escape the urge to return to full-time “non-creative” work. Is this selfish? Maybe? Is this brave? Definitely.

At times, it seems to be a daunting and desperate effort that may amount to nothing. But in my clearest moments, I know that my focus should not be on the end result, but on the way that I feel when I’m putting stories on paper, when the characters begin to speak, and I can explore subjects and motivations that I may not have the words to understand or express in daily conversation, in regular life–the dark rivers that flow underneath our waking consciousness, and how people can do the strangest things.

I think about the work of writers like Laura van den Berg whose short story collection What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, published last year by Dzanc Books, traverses those dark rivers in such a completely delightful and soul-filling way. For me, a good short story carries the same satisfaction quotient has a well-constructed and tasty burrito—it doesn’t take long to get through but at the end you can lean back, put a hand on your stomach and say: “Ah, that was delicious and I don’t regret spending a minute of my time on it.”

Van den Berg’s stories of elusive, half-visible sea monsters, bigfoot impersonators and aspiring long-distance swimmers carry that steep sense of satisfaction. Her characters are all women; from teenagers to forty-plus married professors, struggling to navigate (sometimes falling into) the lacunas and pits that make up their daily lives. In the title story, a young woman named Celia travels to Madgascar with her mother—aging beauty and expert on primate habitats—only to realize that her mother cares more about doggedly pursuing myths than acknowledging what is truly before her. Celia is left alone for the most part, and she fills the long days with walks to the coast—where she practices long-distance swimming in the seawater, avoiding the shrieks of the Indris that inhabit the forest. There are moments in this story and the rest of the pieces that sing with beauty—descriptions of bodies at rest and in motion, of dusty African hunts, of murky lakes, of caves and poppies, and of emerald-green jungles. Animals, beasts, darkness, heat, absence, ache, water, sickness, obsessive research and sweat, weave through each of the stories—pulling and swelling up against the main characters as they escape to faraway places, both physically and psychologically, as a way to make sense of the inhospitableness of the world around. It is a lyric exploration of the tug between making sense of difficult situations and trying to escape a reckoning with the mysterious forces of life, the strange territories of the people we love the most.

In the end, it is the discovery and savoring of stories like these, that makes me want to continue to write. The words fill me with a drive to achieve the same catharsis, when a sentence perfectly captures a moment or feeling that previously felt uninhabitable. Like making maps of private mountains—and giving those over to be discovered by whoever decides to read them. The key is to have the self-determination to draw out that map in the first place, even in the face of monstrous fear. As Ariel Gore another fantastically inspiring working-class woman writer says in her latest book, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness: “We can write our own scripts, write our own stories, take stock of all the things that have made us unhappy. And we can follow the threads of joy, too, like sparks flying from the campfire, see where they land.”

Photo by Flickr user Athena

Almond is funny, and the self-deprecating nature of his discourse is part of his charm, but the presentation of self-publishing as some brilliant new innovation got me thinking about the elitism of the publishing industry in general, and a gate-keeper mentality that I hope to see destroyed in the next few years as technology forces the literary world to widen their view of exactly who can participate in the making of literature and books.

“I simply decided to publish the book myself. But the truth is more damning. I felt self-publishing was beneath me, the province of deluded wannabes. I still craved the legitimacy bestowed by a publisher,” says the author about his decision to go DIY with This Will Only Take a Minute, Honey. After explaining the process of developing and editing the book, he exhorts authors to think about self-publishing as a way to gain literary traction since the “old way of doing things is collapsing under the weight of its own inefficiency.” And here is where I start to wonder: What exactly is the difference between Almond printing up his books himself, and all of those people who stole Kinko’s copy keys back in the nineties (okay, maybe not everyone had to get illegal about their zine-making, but I did) for the joy of placing those cut-and-paste sheets of typewritten words,  confessional stories, tour diaries, band interviews, onto the glass pane to be copied over and over, stapled together and released to whomever in the world might stumble across this black and white masterpiece. I guess I’m just not getting what is so innovative about self-publishing when so many people have been doing it for years?

Granted, there ended up being a glut of “bad” writing out in the world during the heyday of the zine-era, but the opportunity was also opened up for good writing to get in the public sphere that would otherwise never have seen the light of day. I mean, Doris Zine, Evolution of a Race Riot and Cometbus have inspired me more than most corporate releases. DIY self-publishing is not something for “deluded wannabes” though Almond’s comment sheds light on why, when I told one of the instructors at my MFA program that I would just self-publish a collection of short stories if I didn’t feel like dealing with pandering to an agent and trying to shove my foot through the tiny crack in the New York publishing world door, she looked at me as though I was out of my mind.

On that note, one my 2010 resolutions is to read more under-the-radar (in addition to the more well-established) literary journals. Annalemma No. 4 is a beautifully designed journal that focuses on visual art and photography in addition to writing. The first two stories were solid and short, like quick bursts of energy. The photographs and illustrations in the magazine, especially the lovely fine-lined and colorful pen and ink illustrations of strange birds, by Justin Gibbens, are worth the price alone. I also picked up a copy of CakeTrain Issue 7, which leans towards more experimental forms of writing.  After reading the first few pages, I thought damn, there’s a lot of poetry in here; I’m not the world’s biggest poetry fan, my preference being solid blocks of text I can sink my teeth into. But a funny thing happened on the way to me shutting the journal and placing it underneath a stack of books where it would gather dust and neglect–I kept reading. And I began thinking about the simplicity of the poem, the challenge of telling a story or at least conjuring an idea, a thought, a spark with only a few words. And another funny thing happened after that, I actually took out my notebook and wrote my own poem. Weird.

The new Tin House is pretty fantastic. There’s a story in it by Antonya Nelson about a forty-something divorcee in Albuquerque who has lost control of her son, her mother-in-law and her own life. I’d like to be able to write a story like that, one where the ends are frayed but satisfying.

Musically, I spent the mid-point of January listening to the new Yeasayer on repeat. It’s the sound of Grizzly Bear in the bath with Stevie B. while a copy of Depeche Mode’s Violator plays on a cheap battery-operated boombox.  The new Rocky Rivera album is worth a spin as well. I heard a couple of her songs on Hard Knock Radio, and damn, that is some good stuff. Political, super-charged lyrics with a sharp flair. Just the kind of music we continue to need in this day and age, like a reminder of what is possible. Oh, and she put the album out herself, yep.

Many coming-of-age novels are not like boxes of chocolate. You know what you’re going to get: a guileless narrator seeking first love or first understanding from others and from themselves. There’s likely an unhappy childhood from which to flee. Count on heaps of self-discovery and, if lucky, any life lessons taught are done so subtly, softly and with bath bubbles.

But every once in a while, a coming-of-age novel does more. Anchored by a likeable narrator in a truly unusual situation, a good coming-of-age story makes us question the definition of right and wrong, perhaps even shine a light on institutions we know nothing about. If lucky, the characters stay with us long after we’re done reading.

Tony Dushane’s novel Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk does more. Not a memoir as the title might suggest, Dushane creates the little-known world of Jehovah’s Witnesses through the eyes of a teenager named Gabe, whose primary motivations for a good portion of the book are 1) to get laid to an elusive fellow Witness named Jasmine and 2) get into Heaven without being killed by God in Armageddon.

For the first part of the book, it seems there isn’t going to be much more than the ever-universal adolescent quest for nookie, which makes the drama decidedly more Jay-Z than Nas in terms of heft. Gabe has a few colorful friends in the congregation like Jin, a Korean kid addicted to junk food, and Peter, the wild man Riggs to Gabe’s more cautious Murtaugh. There’s even the obligatory humorous use of the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High and what, perhaps to this day, constitutes the finest work of Phoebe Cates and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s careers. Some dramatic tension comes from the fact that just about every teenaged rite of passage constitutes a religious sin (including sleeping in the same house alone with a girl even if when in a different room) punishable by death at the hands of God at the imminent Armageddon.

Lucky for Gabe and his friends, being Jehovah’s Witnesses doesn’t seem to stop them from partying and drinking and listening to good music, which inevitably helps Gabe get to first base, then second, then third and so on, all to the soundtrack of bands like Black Flag, Einsturzende Neubauten, and Dead Kennedys and the backdrop of puking teenaged girls. Gabe’s female interests are many, including the ideal Jasmine, Julia, a worldly girl who Gabe French-kisses with the subtly of a power drill, and most interestingly and incestuously, Karen, his dreadlocked, worldly cousin who takes him out to punk rock shows and exposes him to happy lesbian couples for the first time.

Just when it seems the book won’t go much deeper than boy-meets-girl, the book smartly shifts into darker, more significant territory. For seemingly trivial reasons, Gabe is disfellowed by church elders (after an inquisition nearly worthy of Guantanamo) and spends a full year with no more than secret contact with members of his congregation. The church’s surprising cruelty to Gabe begins to expose the darkness behind those Sunday Bible Studies in Millbrae, California. Gradually, Gabe becomes exposed to the questionable aspects of being a Jehovah’s Witness and sees Peter and Jin each confront the congregation about their personal crises with the faith. Even Gabe’s parents begin to crack under the pressures of their doubt.

If there’s one weakness in the novel, it’s the weakness of many coming-of-age novels: the far-too-passive lead. The reader questions many of aspects of Gabe’s life long before he does and while Gabe’s female interests and his friends are well-developed, Gabe’s parents and the backstory of how Gabe and his family came to be Jehovah’s Witnesses are little more than shadows in the narrative.

But by the time the climatic tragedy is revealed and all the characters are transformed forever, Gabe and the rest of his lovable lot of fallen sinners will stay in your mind like friends you know, long after the final page and if the Jehovahs are right, long after Armageddon.

Welcome to Value Added, a semi-monthly column named after one of the most despicable phrases in the English language. Expect capsule reviews of assorted culture I’ve been consuming, that is not necessarily timely, but is worthy of attention:

Podcast: Tank Riot
Hailing from “Tropical Madison, WI,” as they announce at the beginning of each show, Tank Riot is best described as a “geek podcast”, but without the self-satisfied smarminess that pervades many such podcasts. The three hosts are undoubtedly geeky, but have a wide array of interests: history, politics, film, technology, and yes, geek culture. Each episode focuses on a single topic or historical figure–think the History Channel as hosted by three drunk smart-asses from Madison. It’s consistently engaging stuff, and the hosts’ lack of guile is refreshing–even the prehistoric site design harkens back to a more idealistic vision of podcasting, one that was both entertaining and educational, before it was over-run by self-styled SEO experts and wannabe comedians. They’ve been at it for four years, so there’s a lot of gems in the archives, but I’d recommend starting with the Henry Kissinger, Rod Serling, or Nicola Tesla episodes. The affectionately skeptical series on conspiracy theories is a must-hear as well.

Book: Wormwood, Nevada
Though it’s being marketed as a science fiction novel, David Oppengaard’s second novel Wormwood, Nevada is more cosmically existential than fantastic. The story centers around Tyler and Anna Mayfield, a midwest couple whose newlywed glow is fading. They move to the small Nevada town of Wormwood and come face-to-face with the desolate state’s eccentric culture, from alien cultists to meth addicts. When a meteor crashes in town, the population scrambles for meaning, with some townspeople considering the meteor to be potential tourist bait, others as a sign of the end of the world. It’s a story of small-town Americana, loneliness, coming to terms with adulthood, and in a very broad sense, the inscruitability of the universe. While it’s clearly the work of a young author learning his voice, Oppegaard’s language is lyrical when called for, and the world is completely enveloping.

Movies: “For All Mankind”
This 1989 documentary of the moon landings is a refreshing counterpoint to the current documentary style, in which even PBS docs overuse gimmicks and quick cuts. There are no such gimmicks in “For All Mankind”: told entirely through stock footage and interview clips, there’s almost a zen-like quality to this collection of rarely-seen footage taken from the moon lander. There’s an affecting desolation to the the lingering footage of the moon’s surface (scored by an ambient Brian Eno soundtrack.) It would be hard to bankroll a languidly-paced documentary like this now, which is a shame–it’s meditative, beautiful work. It’s available to watch on streaming Netflix.

Music : Sleigh Bells
Described by a friend as the sound of a head exploding, blog-buzz band Sleigh Bells have hit upon one of the most unique sounds I’ve heard in a long time: alarm-siren guitars, lo-fi buzz, and blue-eyed R&B refrains compete for attention in the din, as if My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields had been tasked with remixing a Nelly Furtado single. It’s an delirious cacophony, forcing the listener to wonder where all that sounds are coming from. Remarkably, it’s only a duo, guitarist Derek Miller and vocalist Alexis Krauss. The band has yet to release a full-length album. There’s no way of knowing whether the gimmick will hold up over an album, much less a career, but it’s rare and refreshing to hear something that sounds so exhilaratingly new.