Month: June 2015

Nothing on Earth is Big Enough to Crush My Beautiful Heart

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That’s right. Nothing.

heartI made this pretty little poetry book last year, and I would like to share it with you. It’s a collection of poems I’d written over the last several years that, for the most part, hadn’t really seen the light of day; my hubby J laid the book out and together we designed the rad cover, and by designed it together I mean I sat and looked over his shoulder and pointed at the computer screen while he made it, but truly, some of the better design details are ALL ME.

I woke up this morning thinking about poetry, and how important it can be at certain times. There are things in life that are too hard to talk about using a normal string of words. You need the weird grammar of poetry instead, the way it bends and buckles and opens into sinkholes, so you can find another way in. Yesterday I felt incredibly lousy, as I had for the last several days, but I forced myself to get out of the house anyway, to take the bus to the library and look at poetry books. I’m planning a reading that will take place one day soon, and sometimes when I do those I also like to share a poem that someone else wrote. Poems are made to be shared and I think reading them aloud is probably the best way to do that. So I went to the library and poked around and see if I could find a good poem to share.

I went to the huge main branch of Philly’s public library downtown, which is housed in an old Beaux Arts building that’s so preposterously gorgeous it occasionally makes me feel weird, like: I just took the bus through North Philly. Why am I in the Paris Opera House all of a sudden? I went to the literature room and marched to the back, where the sign said POETRY AND POETS or whatever, but i was odd, the only things they had were old, like Shakespeare and Spenser and Yeats. The poets were old and the books themselves were old, too. They weren’t what I wanted, but I looked anyway, in case I found something that would be useful to me. I gave up after a while and was on my way out of the room when I spotted the other poetry shelves, which were crammed with contemporary poetry. Yippee! Kay Ryan, Mary Oliver, W.S. Merwin, Eileen Myles. I took a few of those books home with me and read through them, and woke up this morning thinking about a poem called “Writing” from Skies, a book Myles published with Black Sparrow about 15 years ago. I read it and something stirred in my chest and I smiled to myself, which was what I needed—the stirring and the smiling—and what I couldn’t get any other way. Do yourself a favor and find and read the fucking thing. She is incredible.

I am much, much less of a poet than Eileen Myles is, but I’m not terrible, either. Would you like a copy of my little zine-book? Leave a comment below within the next week, and on June 3rd a robot will choose a winner at random, and then I’ll contact that person privately to get their mailing address. Sound good? Good.

ROTTEN

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lydon2Since none of the, like, five books I have out from the library have been interesting me much, I dug out my copy of John Lydon’s autobiography, Rotten, as I do every few years, to try to extract some of the good stuff from that book (an up-close history of a musical moment I find fascinating, gross-out humor, vivid portraits of the Irish in London), while skimming over the bad (wordiness, seemingly no editorial guidance whatever, cringe-inducing self-aggrandizement). I say this last with great affection for John Lydon, who I really do admire. It’s just that these men brag about themselves so much. Have you tried reading Richard Hell’s memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp? Such a great title, but yeesh. Unreadable.

So yeah, it’s not a perfect book, but I’m enjoying picking through it a little again. Last night as I read by my mushroom-shaped nightlight so as not to disturb my husband sleeping next to me, I found a line I’d underlined years ago. I mean, I must have underlined it myself because I bought the book new, but I don’t remember doing this and now I can’t think why I would have.

“At the time, what we had wasn’t a gang as much as a collection of extremely bored people.”

Ha! Did I think this was funny? Did it put me to mind of myself when I was in school? Was I trying to remind myself to do something useful—like start a band or, you know, a cultural revolution—whenever I felt bored? I’ll have to give it some thought.

Gary, Indiana

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It doesn’t come out for another few months, but the artist and critic Gary Indiana has written a memoir, and it is glorious. I think he’s not as well known as he should be, at least in my circles. I keep trying to talk about the book with people I know, and they all frown and say, “The name sounds familiar,” not getting the joke of it or, therefore, why it sounds familiar to them. I probably shouldn’t quote from the book publicly yet, but I’m just going to leave this here for now, in case anyone needs it:

“The audience was as much the show as the music, raw sound that drilled into the brain and was less important than what the players wore, what they did with their bodies on stage. Everyone competed for the most fucked-up reputations, the most suicidal carelessness with drugs, the most gratuitously hostile behavior. Yet punk musicians and followers I got to know personally were touchingly sweet, highly intelligent, and un-materialistic to a utopian degree. Damaged in one way or another, but who isn’t?”

He’s writing here, of course, about punk, which he experienced when it came to Los Angeles in the late 70s. Before that, he lived in a crumbling hippie mansion in Haight Ashbury. He’s also lived in Cuba on and off for many years. So far, he’s had a kind of extraordinary life, and he is so fucking smart and funny—his writing voice is wonderful company.

(The book’s back matter describes him as caustic, but I don’t see that. He probably wrote the back matter himself because the book’s author usually does, I think, so maybe he’s the one who thinks of himself that way. He comes across as far too thoughtful in his analysis of things to be caustic. He is breath-takingly direct though, I’ll give him that. He doesn’t seem to flinch at all when he has to say something difficult, or unflattering; his descriptions of his family are priceless. But there’s a tiny, chest-ripping tenderness that telegraphs across every mention of the stray cats he sees on the street in Havana or in L.A., even though he usually doesn’t do much more than notice them and describe their looks. But you can’t fool me, Gary Indiana. If you love lost, scrappy little animals, then you love everything that’s good.)

Zine Reading Room

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So my husband and I have decided to organize our large personal zine collection a bit better, display it nicely, and open up our home about once a month as a zine reading room. We are dorks, and we are very excited about this.

Figuring out the best way to arrange the zines was a challenge though. Between us we’ve collected around 500 zines over the last several years, and even though they’re usually much smaller than books, they do take up some space. I thought maybe the zines should be placed in magazine holders of some kind, but Joe wanted them to be out in the open, footloose and fancy-free. Fine, except that the zines can’t be lined up on a bookshelf the way books are, since they don’t really have spines. We decided to display them facing out, so that people could easily see and flip through them, like records in a record store. (This is the method used and written about by Julie Bartel in her book, From A to Zine: Building a Winning Zine Collection in Your Library, according to an uncredited article I found online. Download it here. I have heard about Bartel’s book for years but have never read it. Maybe it’s time!)

But zines are also much more varied in size than books tend to be, so it quickly became apparent that, if they were stacked facing outward, the small ones would be lost behind the taller ones. Our solution was to arrange them by size, and alphabetically by title within those size categories. On the top shelf are the quarter-sized zines, on the second shelf are the half-sized ones, and on the bottom shelf are half-legal sized (which are both large and square-shaped). The magazine-sized zines we put in a cool old magazine rack that used to belong to Joe’s grandparents. (It’s metal and has some kind of battle scene in relief on the front of it; the thing looks like it was forged during the Civil War.) The matchbook-sized and otherwise teensy zines went on the top of the bookcase, in cigar boxes.

We also had to find a way to containerize the zines once they were facing outward, so we went to the hardware store and bought plywood, which we painted with that cool chalkboard paint and nailed to the front of the bookcase, one across each shelf. We used colorful chalk to write the alphabet under each row so that folks can easily locate zines by their title.

Have a look!

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And for fun (as if all this weren’t the most fun ever), I’ll be posting capsule reviews of zines from our collection over the next few days. Here’s the first:

Captcha #7

c7-cover

Captcha is a gorgeous and imaginative sci-fi comic zine series by Jo-Jo Sherrow, and here we have book #7. Jo-Jo’s drawings are intensely charming, depicting humanoid girls whose clothes and haircuts you will definitely covet, but the comic covers deep, mind-bending subjects. This one focuses on psychic self-defense methods of different kinds.