Three cheers for all the winners: Larry Janowski, Julie Benesh, Paul Pekin, Fred Sasaki, Kathleen Rooney, Jill Summers, Sheba White, Geoffrey Forsyth, Brent Van Horne, Joan Colby, and Joe Meno. You can see a list of titles and where the winning entries were published on the IAC website.

Heads-up on an event tonight, per Three Walls and Green Lantern Press…

Date: Thurs, May 29, 2008

Time: 5-7:30pm, FREE

Location: Intuit on 756 N Milwaukee Ave.

From their release: “This is the release party for Paper & Carriage with images by Daniel Johnston, artist multiples by Sherri Lynn Wood and Carmen Prince, an artist centerfold curated by Brooke Anderson, in conjunction with the exhibit “DARGERism” at The American Folk Art Museum in New York. Participating with Intuit’s permanent installation of Henry Darger’s room, Dan S. Wang will letterpress a cover featuring a list of objects in Darger’s room.” This event will feature live readings by Kate Zambreno who will read from her piece “The Passion of Henry Darger”, and Michael Bonesteel, who will read excerpts from Henry Darger’s “The History of My Life”. The event is FREE.”

In case you missed it this weekend, WBEZ’s On the Media took on books and the publishing industry. Bob Garfield started the convo by saying “The new media are thriving. The old media are dying. That seems to be the theme of our program from week to week to week. But, of course, it’s much more complicated than that because increasingly the old and new are merging into one another. This week, we’re devoting the program to the oldest of old media – books.” They went on to discuss the usual stuffs: the death of print, “green” paper, e-books & e-readers, if the public has an inherent love of paper. Most promising to me was the idea that with Borders going down and print on demand becoming more feasible, the publishing industry was actually equalizing. Maybe the sky isn’t falling? (Of course, on the more depressing side of things was the mention of the NEA study that “found reading proficiency declining across the board and that nearly half of Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure.” Egads!)

Emily Gould’s cover story in the The New York Times Magazine generated 49 (!) pages of comments before the NYT shut down the discussion.  Roughly two dozen of them were positive — I tried counting, but got bored.  My favorite of the kudos:

“You seem to be a pretty self aware pioneer of the online world, and this account is a very nice record of your journey through it. It strikes me that you have reached a point in your skill building of realizing that the new tool, online storytelling, has some of the same responsibilities as other kinds of reporting. That Aha moment comes to actors too who realize that their onstageness can be used as a political or humanitarian tool.”

I too love that point in an actor’s career where they realize their onstageness is actually a means to convert housewives to Scientology save orphans, and I hope myself to someday be a self-aware pioneer of the online world!

Most negative comments say that the NYT is pandering and that Gould a) is a narcissist and/or b) should go outside. The most inspired response I read comes from Jeff in Chicago:

“Like someone who starts out to be a serious actress, you started to try to be a serious editor.. and you found that LIFE IS HARD and you don’t get things handed to you on a silver platter at a young age. So as an actress starts to show up in slinky negligee, you started to post your life secrets. This enabled you to take the fast track to success and attention. As you spiraled into the world of exposing everything on the net about your life, your analog in the actress world would be doing her first soft-core film and trying various drugs to hide the pain and shame. When you have shown the world everything you are, everything that you have, and they judge you, and your 15 minutes is over, then the world is tired of you and moves on to the next piece of fresh meat. Too bad you cannot get plastic surgery for your actual life to make it interesting enough for people to want to look at it again.”

Yikes!

The question I have is one the article did a poor job of addressing: what is the societal effect of oversharing? I don’t feel at all qualified to comment, but the abundant rectitude of the commenters just drives home the fact that new media is always met with reactionary fears of moral turpitude.

Because of the overwhelmingly negative response she incurred, I guess I’ll skip that picture I was going to take straddling my laptop and that new confessional section of Literago I was going to build. R.I.P., Genie’s Corner, I hardly knew ye.

“Oprah is a truly authentic personality, and she says what she thinks and what she believes in,” he said. “That is part of her authentic charm.”

Saturday, May 24, 2008 at the Green Lantern: 1511 N. Milwaukee Ave, 2nd Floor
Doors open at 4pm, readings start at 5pm.

Stuff your long memorial day weekend with even more literary goodness at the Green Lantern on Saturday, where monthly reading series The Parlor is hosting their first ever Emerging Writer’s Festival. Notable for podcasting their readings (with the help of the good people at Bad at Sports) in order to reach those who may not have regular access to literary events, the Parlor will record the six readers at Saturday’s festival for their June episode. And, attendees will get to choose one of the six to read for the July episode. AND, the evening will wrap up with a BBQ on the Green Lantern porch, so you can still have a hot dog. AAAND, the whole thing is free!

The Schedule:

5pm- A.D. Jameson reads from Five from Amazing Adult Fantasy
5:30 – Anthony Ruth reads Stages
6pm – Laura Zinn Fromm reads Sunlight All Over
6:30 – Jennifer Kikoler reads Stuffed
7pm – Julia Borcherts reads Untitled
7:30 – Ashley Murray reads Anatomy of Birds

Also, go to Parlor Past Episodes for the first four podcasts featuring Jonathan Messinger, Ben Tanzer, Amina Cain and James Lower, or look for them on iTunes.

Date : Thursday, May 22nd – Sunday, May 25th

Time : All weekend long

Location : Various, all in Lakeview (full schedule here )

Participants : authors, poets, librarians, booksellers, publishers

Curated by Amy Guth and Leah Jones, Pilcrow Literary Festival is four days of workshops, discussions, lectures, and readings, all about small presses and independent media. Check Saturday night’s auction, including eyeglasses, brainstorms, and "luck." Proceeds go to the New Orleans Public Library Foundation. And check also the list of participants , from Attenberg to Featherproof to Zulkey. Too bad Pilcrow’s not a football game; Literago’d totally show up in blue wigs! And gold facepaint.

Returning From One Place to Another: A Poet’s Theater Showcase is a four-week, four-program festival curated by poet John Beer. The second program was Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson’s The Widow Party , parts of which were written collaboratively with Jennifer Karmin and Patrick Durgin), inspired in part by a car crash and infomercials.

Beer introduced the play and its players, then wham! old Westerns suddenly beamed across his face, and out flounced McSweeney and Jennifer Karmin. The former wore a red and denim dress, and the latter wielded a drumstick-like plastic gun.

“Blat!” she said. “Blat!”

The show was ninety minutes and a valentine to the outlaw — Ronald Regan, Satchmo, and Britney Spears; audience participation, soap, and the press. Sometimes, this sort of Thing dissolves into chaos and hero worship, but thanks to Johannes Göransson’s clever pen and an engaging cast of weirdo poets (including Literago’s Jacob Knabb! covering Louis Armstrong!), it worked whiz-bang roller coaster well.

Similarly sharp: Göransson’s A New Quarantine Will Take My Place (Apostrophe Books), which has a pretty blue cover. Favorite Line #1: “the codfish is wrangling.” #2: “I WRITE LIKE I’M A GIRL/YOU READ LIKE YOU’RE IN THE CLOSET.”

This weekend features five new works by poet/performer/Californian Carla Harryman, plus sculpture by Julia Klein and text from Kathy Acker’s Requiem . Performances are at Links Hall, on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. More information here .

It has been revealed that megaconglomerate Barnes & Noble will most likely buy the failing megaconglomerate Borders, Inc.  This is horrible, horrible news for several reasons:

1. Breathtaking Irony. Anyone remember ten years ago when Barnes & Noble and Borders were fighting to the death for ultimate dominion? I do — I had just started working for Barbara’s Bookstore at the time. My coworkers and loyal customers were scared to death when Borders announced they were opening a location right down the street from us, following the then-popular Starbucks model of market saturation.  Ten years ago, hundreds of Oak Parkers signed petitions begging the Village to please not allow Borders to open and crush all the tiny, independently-owned stores in town. The Village didn’t listen, Borders opened, and suddenly, half those Barbara’s customers were gone, lured by discount stickers and fancy coffee.  That Barbara’s is lucky it still there.

Now, ten years later, the behemoth which decimated the livelihoods of thousands of delightful bookstore owners and employees has choked to death on its own greed (for anyone who doesn’t know, Borders is failing because of its heavy reliance on tanking record sales). The hubris of Borders execs at the time is well-documented, and I sincerely hope it’s humiliating for them to be getting sniffed by what was once their sworn nemesis. (Unfortunately for the book-buying public, few of the good independents are still around to proffer any variety if the sale goes through.)

2. Evil Robots.  If Barnes & Noble and Borders were to fuse together, they would almost certainly form Bookstore Voltron: Lame Force that would shoot beige carpeting and towers of bargain knitting books at unsuspecting English majors, eventually reversing literacy even among staff at the Paris Review.

3. Annoying Pundits. Nothing inspires lazy op-eds like the “debate” over “independent v. chain bookstores.” Below, I’ve provided you with the three major positions presented in the media so you don’t have to read the same argument eight thousand times:

Percival Merriweather: Lazy patrician who hates the chains; frequently bemoans their lack of informed employees, arcane titles, scraggly cats, and comfy nooks; blames their ascendency on the same illiterate American populace who elected G. W. Bush.

Larry Libertarian: Praises the chains as a dramatic expression of the triumph of the Market over snobbery; sings to the heavens that a potato farmer in Topeka has the same access to Literature as a college professor in Portland; scolds the idependents for clerks that dare to read instead of snapping to attention as soon as he waggles his pocketbook.

Debbie Q. Hipster: Because she personally has good taste and knows how and where to find good literature, believes the selections of the independents are too limited to survive, that the diversity of the marketplace obviates their previous role as the exclusive outlets for specialist titles.

Missing from the list above is my position, which is very much right and not at all lazy and shared by many, many people.  All stores offer a selection limited by space. Space is dictated by profits. Chains are bad because even though they ultimately appear to have a greater selection, their very existence limits the number of outlets that could contain books different from theirs. Therefore, they limit the potential variety of books sold. (I refuse to even touch Amazon.com right now — I really need some dinner.)

4. The Chicago Tribune. Reading peoples’ comments on cultural issues is infuriating! Take Ditto Head from Homer, IL: “This would not be a monopoly. There are lots of booksellers, like Andersons and Barbaras.” Exactly, Ditto: there are lots of booksellers like Anderson’s and Barbara’s — large independents that ape the chains in decor and selection.  Many of the interesting ones were wiped out ten years ago.

Then there’s Don’t Go In Alone from Northbrook: “There are no other options to these sellers in the NW suburbs except the Library, we’re not lucky enough to have good competition from strong independents like Barbara’s. ” Uh, Barbara’s is not a strong independent. That’s another blog post, one I cannot write for fear of litigation. What I can say is that in order to survive the first onslaught of the megaconglomerates, Barbara’s had to focus on small stores in airports. It can be argued that an independent bookstore that sells nothing but mass market paperbacks and newspapers isn’t much of an independent, but maybe that’s my inner Percival Merriweather talking.

5. The Death of the Left. To grossly reduce something South End Press’ Jocelyn Burrell once told me in an interview, you can’t start a revolution without independent bookstores. 

That’s it for today, but I will close with saying I SINCERELY HOPE THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN.

It does not surprise me that these people do not have jobs either.