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Thursday, April 7, 2011

Prime Directive for 2.99


A poem this long has to be broad and deep, and Prime Directive is both, examining fatherhood and son-hood and their avatars-creation and destruction-in many ways, but most powerfully through the astigmatic and revelatory American lens of Star Trek. It’s also a page-turner, a rare virtue in poetry.” - Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Cohabitating and Marriage, Belgian Style

For research purposes, in terms of a story I'm writing, and access for later:

Belgian laws for romantic cohabitation. Same sex couplehood is legalized.



2 By Mina Loy

Mina Loy was of the same period as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. The years have not been kind to her, as she is largely forgotten and is only a footnote now in poetic modernism. Still, she deserves a place by both Pound and Williams, as well as T.S. Eliot, as one the greatest American poets of the early twentieth century.



Minor SEO Writing: Depression Quotes

Sometimes, SEO writing is awfully banal to write. Other times, it's an interesting challenge. Here is an example of what filling an order can sometimes look like. The order was simple. The word "Depression Quotes" had to be used four times... once as the title and three times in paragraphs. For whatever, reason, this couldn't be used -- the submission system bounced it back, and in some writing interfaces, resubmitting will trip their plagiarism automated-bot (since it already has a record of it word for word in the system). No biggie. Not the greatest bit of writing, I confess, but I was only out of ten minutes worth of wasted time writing it.

Depression Quotes

Misery loves company—the phrase has been used so much, it has become a cliché. However, it does not change it from being both true. In times of depression, people seek comfort in knowing they are not alone. Yet, a sympathetic friend or clinical therapist may not always be available. This is when some people turn to literature and find depression quotes. After all, a good piece of fiction or poetry allows a person to feel empathy towards the writer. As a result, this often helps with their personal struggles.

Over the course of centuries, many writers have grappled with depression. For this reason, knowing where to look may prove difficult to the uninitiated. Still, there is one genre of literature that may prove useful. In twentieth century American poetry, there was a group of writers called “The Confessionalists.” These writers include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman and W.D. Snodgrass. Each of these poets grappled with their emotions in unique ways, and they often built up their own personal mythologies.

An interested reader will find depression quotes throughout much of their work. As a result, these writers helped change the course of American poetry. Before them, most verse centered on elevated themes, and these made the resulting literature inaccessible to the common reader. Confessionalism brought poetry to a level many readers could emotionally relate to. Now, decades after their deaths, many poets now write like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

Reading will never cure clinical depression by itself. However, coping with it requires dealing with it outside clinical therapy. Developing a list of depression quotes can help with troubling emotion on a day-to-day basis. To this end, confessional poetry can help

Brian Keene's Fade To Null



Typically, some stories use circular structures for one of three purposes: 1) to show absolute futility, 2) to demonstrate some sort of unified, cohesive, but non-linear dream logic, or 3) a mixture of points 1 & 2.

Brian Keene's Fade To Null (in Unhappy Endings) employs point #3. It also taps into a tradition often seen in short fiction. It reads like a nightmare narrative, in that it displays a variety of surrealistic images -- for insance, a squirming eyeball-on-a-tentacle that makes noise without having an actual orifice. Yet, short stories that rely only on jarring imagery are usually not well crafted. Keene, after all, has a point. The center of the story has Alzheimer's patient and is elderly. The surreal imagery is a product of a brain that isn't functioning, and the circular nature of the story makes it horrific.

And the circular nature only works due to use of subtlety. Quiet often, it a narrator came out and said, "And every other day was the same thing," it would be heavy handed. The structure of the story is more of a cinematic loop, where the ending words are often cues that signal something very similar to the beginning.

Edit To Add: Holy shit, I was just cruising around amazon and saw Unhappy Endings listed for sale with a price tag $289.23. I still can't wrap my head and genre small press collectors.

Nook vs. Kindle: Page Turning

My first ereader was a Sony, but I quickly wanted something more, partially because I wanted access to ebooks only available through Amazon/Kindle. So, I recently obtained a 5 inch tablet phone with Android's operating system. I downloaded both the Nook and the Kindle tablets and set to reading.

Here is one petty gripe while comparing the two reading experiences. The Kindle For Android app shifts blocks of text to the left or right with a finger tap. Nook For Android gives the reader a little animation of a page -- as a sheaf of paper -- turning. I find this aspect of the Nook's app mildly annoying. After all, I read ebooks because I want cheap access to written content, not because I want to "feel good!" about reading. If I wanted the comfort of seeing a real page being turned, I would go to my bookshelf and pluck out a volume of a real book -- one with pages made from tree pulp.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Prime Directive by Bryan Dietrich




Bryan Dietrich is unique in the great expanse of the American poetry, as his work straddles a line seemingly no other poet has be able to walk. He revels in genre culture as a man who truly loves it, but he can also see through the eyes of an academic. As the result, he plays with genre tropes with a greater eye towards contemporary culture. Yet, he is also a skilled poet with an eye towards language. Simply put, he is the best poet science fiction, fantasy or horror has to offer. It is for this reason that I am extremely proud and happy I could help bring out his book length poem, Prime Directive. Sure, I may think it's awesome, but you don't have to take my word for it. Here's the legendary Joe Haldeman:
A poem this long has to be broad and deep, and Prime Directive is both, examining fatherhood and son-hood and their avatars-creation and destruction-in many ways, but most powerfully through the astigmatic and revelatory American lens of Star Trek. It’s also a page-turner, a rare virtue in poetry.” - Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War