Alan Good's Blog

Hi,

I'm not getting much writing done this year, too busy editing books for Malarkey. We've published three books already this year:

Faith by Itoro Bassey
http://malarkeybooks.com/store/faith-...

Music Is Over by Ben Arzate
http://malarkeybooks.com/store/music-...

It Came From the Swamp, an anthology of short stories featuring cryptids (think Bigfoot), edited by Joey Poole
http://malarkeybooks.com/store/it-cam...

Our next book comes out next month. It's Toadstones by Eric Williams.
http://malarkeybooks.com/store/toadst...

If you like B movies, if you like weird, if you like geology, you'll like this. It's fun. I designed the cover and had a lot of fun laying the interior of the book out. Think I killed it with font selection, honestly.

Coming in May, but open for preorders now, is Guess What's Different, a killer essay collection by Susan Triemert, who is a real sharp writer and master of her craft. I also made the cover for this one.
http://malarkeybooks.com/store/guessw...

We've got ebooks of all these titles (except that ones that aren't officially published yet but even those will be in there soon) in the Malarkey digital store: http://malarkeybooks.com/ebooks. We host these ebooks on our own site, bypassing Amazon, allowing us to keep prices low and give the authors 50% royalties. In fact the authors get 50% royalties on net revenue on both print and ebook versions. Which is a hell of a lot better deal than most publishers offer.

We're working hard to publish incredible books following a business model that's not exploitative of our authors, and I really hope you'll check out some of these titles. If you pick up a couple cheap ebooks, you score some cool titles and are genuinely helping a small press and it's authors.

Thanks!

AG

Heyo,

Want to draw your attention to a new book we're publishing at Malarkey Books. It's called It Came from the Swamp and it's an anthology of short stories centered around cryptozoological creatures like sasquatch and the alligator man, among others. Stories were selected by Joey R. Poole. I figured it would be pretty good but once I started working on editing I was blown away at how good it was. I gave it a real nice layout and Sarah Allen Reed created a killer cover. It's available for preorder over at the Malarkey website: http://malarkeybooks.com/store/it-cam.... Comes out in February and until then it's discounted to $13 (plus a little over $3 for shipping).

If you're into ebooks we've got an ebook (available in Mobi or EPUB) on the Malarkey site for $2: http://malarkeybooks.com/ebooks/it-ca.... Unlike other publishers we don't put any lending restrictions on the files. You can let people borrow it. You can also use it across multiple devices. We're also completely bypassing Amazon. I'm working hard to create ebooks for all the Malarkey titles, as well as my own books, and we've got a decent array available on our website, with a lot more on the way.

That's all, stay safe out there.

Thanks!

if you requested a free copy it will ship in a week or two.

Mere Malarkey on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mere-Malarkey-...

The Sun Still Shines on a Dog's Ass on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998171026/...

Can also get them from me direct off my website, alangood.net.

I don't get on here much anymore, but I figured I'd let you know I'll be publishing two books this summer. If you'd like a free copy of one of them you're welcome to get on the giveaway list here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FA.... Just put your address and indicate which book you'd prefer (one is a story collection, one is an essay collection). I won't use your information for anything other than sending the free book. It's not a contest; if you put your info in you'll get a book, as long as you live somewhere shipping is not outrageous for me.

If you'd like to stay up to date feel free to sign up for my newsletter here: https://alangood.substack.com/about?u...

  Interview by Alan Good 

Jennifer Wortman and I live relatively close to each other. Neither one of us wanted to talk on the phone, though, and we both chose to blame our children for not being able to meet up in person, so this is an email interview. Jenny’s book, This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love., has just been published by Split Lip Press. Full disclosure: I haven’t finished reading it yet, which is why this is going to be a two-part interview. Here we go:

Buy. Buy. Buy. This. This. This. Is. Love. love. love.

So you told me you sort of hate your book at the moment, which I definitely relate to, but what do you still love about it?

I love certain lines in the book. I love most of the endings. I have a special place in my heart for some of the secondary characters: Dirt and Cheryl's grandpa in "What Family Does," the man in the alley in "Sometimes Things Just Disappear," Tom's mother in "I'm Dying without You, Tom."  I'm also a big fan of the main character, Shelly, in "I'm Dying without You, Tom," and I love all the protagonists' obsessiveness. I appreciate what I hope is the book’s mix of variety and continuity in style and theme, and its blend of humor and pathos. And I'm completely in love with the cover, designed by Jayme Cawthern, who took my input and made magic.

My hatred was mainly a response to having to proofread the book twice in 48 hours while spotting myriad too-late-to-change problems. But I'm learning to relax my perfectionism: writing and publishing a book has taught me a lot about letting go of that stuff. 

What’s one of your favorite lines?

In "Love You. Bye." when the narrator contemplates cheating on her fiancé, she says, "When you leave the kitchen, does the table within still exist? Common sense says of course. Philosophy deliberates. The animal says, where’s the food in the room I’m in now?"

That’s good. So how did you get hooked up with Split Lip Press?

I followed Split Lip Press on Twitter because I kept seeing cool books from them in my timeline: Kristen Arnett's story collection came out around the time I joined Twitter, and they'd published a chapbook by the remarkable flash fiction writer Kara Vernor. So as a reader, I liked their list, but also my book was on submission and I'd been keeping an eye out for presses that might be a good fit. When I saw they'd put out an open submission call, I jumped at it, and they plucked my manuscript from the slush. I still get all warm inside when I think of that acceptance email. 

That’s the email we all dream about. How long were you submitting before you got that email? 

About a year and a half. Which seems blessedly short in retrospect, but felt like forever back then. That’s the short version, though. I’d been submitting different forms of the collection off and on for a good decade, but mostly off. I didn’t get really serious about it until 2017. 

Ahhhh! Any horror stories from the submitting process?

Only the horror of routine rejection and mounting submission fees. 

That’s a horror we all deal with, and it sucks, even if it’s how we pay our dues; could be wrong but I feel like we have similar perspectives, sort of naturally pessimistic, striving toward hopefulness. What keeps you going, in the face of both the pointlessness of writing and publishing, but also in the face of the larger absurdity and ostensible pointlessness of like the world and shit?

Yes, I also think we have similar perspectives! One thing that keeps me going amid the absurdities of the writing life is experience: I've been at this stuff a long time and have developed a pretty thick skin. Every so often a rejection really stings, but most of the time it's like bad weather: a hassle but I don't take it personally. Also, at 48, I've gone a while without achieving conventional marks of big writing success, and while that can sometimes be demoralizing, it prevents me from getting jaded. I still get super excited about any recognition or achievements, and I'm always so touched when my work resonates with someone. That gratification can fill me for days. Finally, I'm well aware that no one is forcing me to write. I know what I've signed up for and I want to do it anyway, because I feel better when I write than when I don't. The writing, for all its frustrations, is also its own reward, and I'm blessed to live in circumstances that allow me to do it. 

As for the absurdity and ostensible pointlessness of the world and shit, I could write a long, boring book about my attempts to navigate that! I'm exceptionally lucky to have great people in my life, which helps a ton. Meditation and exercise have been game changers for me. And never underestimate the power of a good antidepressant! Meds aren't for everyone, and they're not a cure-all, but they give me the baseline stability to do the other things I need to do to take care of myself. Figuring this stuff out is a lifelong project, but there's obviously other matters at stake than my own well-being. The problem of suffering and evil and the systems that enable them—and my participation in those systems—is big and thorny and I have no easy answer for it.

Damn, you have such a healthy perspective on writing. What were your expectations when you started writing? Were you going to blow up the whole literary world or what?

My "healthy perspective" mostly hinges on good timing: if you'd asked me the same question a year ago, or at 3 a.m., I probably would not have been as sanguine.

I loved reading and writing from a young age, before I understood much about the world, so at first my expectations were amorphous and grandiose. I think I assumed I would just drift into becoming a respected writer; I didn't have a clear vision or plan. Then, when I hit 15 or 16, I got pretty angsty and self-destructive. I was able to keep it together enough to do fine in school (well, I might have gotten suspended once . . .), but I didn't have much left for writing. I had problems with discipline and focus and confidence, not to mention anxiety and depression, and it took me until my late twenties to begin to really work through all that. So by then, I just hoped a literary journal would publish one of my stories so I would feel like a "real writer." Taking the literary world by storm did not occur to me.

You’re like the nicest person on Twitter, but I’ve seen you portray yourself as pretty grumpy, too, which I completely relate to of course. But how does your online persona match up with your real life personality?

I'm struggling with this question! Someone who isn't me would probably be better at answering it—I don't really know how I'm perceived. I think my online persona is definitely a register of my real-life personality. That said, even my real-life personality, like most people's, changes according to context. I'm pretty shy in groups but chatty around good friends. Not much can keep me off a dance floor or a karaoke stage, and I actually kind of like public speaking. But I also quite enjoy hiding in bed.

Anyway, I'm nice to you on Twitter because you're nice to me! In fact, a lot of people are nice to me on Twitter, so I reciprocate. Before I joined Twitter, I thought it was all Nazis, but it turns out it's not. As for my grumpiness, my husband and kids can tell you plenty about that. 

Also I’m glad you used the word sanguine, I like how that word means hopeful but also bloody or bloodthirsty.

And, yeah, sanguine is the best word!

I really hate the what-books-would-you-take-if-you-knew-you-were-going-to-be-stranded-on-a-desert-island questions, so the Earth is on fire and you and your family are able to sneak onto a rocket headed to Mars and it’s stocked with tablets that are loaded with millions of ebooks. What print books would you still take to the space colonies?

Bluets by Maggie Nelson, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch, Briefs by John Edgar Wideman, Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, Sorrow Arrow by Emily Kendal Frey, The New Testament by Jericho Brown, Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid. (I've picked mostly short books so I can fit more!).

My husband would probably want to bring Moby-Dick and The Brothers Karamazov and sci-fi books I know nothing about. I'd throw in some Octavia Butler for my daughter and a Diary of a Wimpy Kid or two for my son.

You mentioned you got suspended one time (don’t have to answer if you don’t want to and don’t feel bad about declining to answer), what happened?

My friend and I thought it would be fun to spike our Tropicana with vodka and drink it in the high school bathroom. Turns out it wasn't fun for me: being drunk at school just highlighted how boring and depressing it was. But my friend kept drinking and got really schnockered and we ended up getting busted. We had in-school suspension for a few days: we were installed in a little room where we basically read books all day long. The suspension monitor was cool: we turned her on to Richard Brautigan.

To be continued . . .

Jennifer Wortman is the author of the story collection This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. (Split Lip Press, 2019). Her work appears or is forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Glimmer Train, Normal School, Electric Literature, Brevity, DIAGRAM, The Collagist, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Colorado, where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and serves as associate fiction editor for Colorado Review. Find more at jenniferwortman.com.

Available now from Split Lip Press. Cover by Jayme Cawthern.

Overwhelming Silence: A Review of 99 Practical Methods of Utilizing Boiled Beef
Babet
Translated by A.R.
Reviewed by Alan Good

Every book review I’ve ever read starts with an anecdote. Why should this one be any different? The first self-published book I ever got my hands on was misplaced in the Morris Raphael Cohen Library at The City College of New York. Instead of re-shelving it immediately like a good work-study, I skimmed through it. I don’t remember the title or the author, only that it was printed by iUniverse and riddled with typos. How the fuck, I wondered, did this even get here? As the weeks went by I began to notice more self-published iUniverse books in the stacks. I could spot them by their laminated covers. They looked like those restaurant tables that have ads and business cards under glass. This would be a better anecdote if, nine years ago, I had investigated, tracked that self-published lump of shit back to its unable-to-self-edit source. Were intrepid indie authors sneaking into the libraries of New York City to give their books a boost? Was our library’s book-buyer a secret self-published author determined to level the playing field for un-agented writers? Was it aliens fucking with us? I’ll never know (I mean, we all know it was aliens). But it sure did sour me on self-published books. 

All of which, with the use of this smooth, clever transition sentence, leads me to my topic, 99 Practical Methods of Utilizing Boiled Beef, a book that has sweetened me on self-published books (even if it’s not technically self-published). A few years ago, when I was ready to publish my first book, the award-non-winning novel Barn Again: A Memoir, I learned, after a year of researching and querying agents and publishers, that no one else was ready for it to be published. Skip to the part where I finally say fuck it, I’ll publish the motherfucker myself and unlike certain people I’ll actually proofread it. And to mask the shame of self-publishing I put it out under a phony publisher name, Malarkey Books. And because of that this website exists and other people are even writing for it, and dozen of people have read my books, and I’m writing this review of a book that was published by another small-time publisher. The thing is, you won’t hear about it on the news or any of the big magazines or literary websites, but some of the most interesting books being published today are being self-published or released by extremely small presses that use the exact same publication method as the self-publishers, which is print-on-demand. Usually with either CreateSpace or Ingram Spark. Obviously Malarkey uses Ingram Spark because CreateSpace is owned by Amazon and Amazon is an anagram for Satan. Cow Eye Press, the publisher of Boiled Beef, also uses Ingram Spark. I asked, but I didn’t need to. You can tell. CreateSpace books are easy to spot because they have this crease near the spine on the front and back covers. You’re right, they should change their name to CreaseSpace. Ingram, once you hold a few, you can tell by the feel of the cover, also the barcode at the back of the book. 

You’d have to be sort of nuts to buy this book. You’d have to be sort of nuts to publish it. I mean, it’s just a book of recipes, none of which is particularly detailed or—can’t even tell if this is the vegetarian in me or the old picky eater in me—appetizing, for cooking boiled beef. But it’s not just a book about boiled beef. It’s also a meditation on publishing and independent literature. What the good folks at Cow Eye Press have done is pluck an obscure manuscript from the public domain and turn it into a metaphor for the existence of the modern writer. The twenty-first-century update of Boiled Beef is prefaced by a note from a fictional intern, who thinks “no more than five people will read this new edition.” But it doesn’t matter how many people read it, the point of this book is that “Nobody’s gonna read a book of recipes for boiled beef” is not a critique but a formula. “Nobody’s gonna read a book of/about/for/by” + whatever category or genre doesn’t really sell. For writers and publishers outside the publishing establishment, we know this, and we do it anyway. Because we’re stubborn or vain or deluded—or because it’s worth doing, even if there ain’t a big fucking market for what we do.

You could really just read the publisher’s note and the intern’s preface and get what the book is about without really looking at the recipes, but while I'm not going to pretend like I read every single recipe, I can’t recommended that approach. The recipes themselves, while maybe not all that mouthwatering, are entertaining. They have their own sense of poetry. Alex the imaginary intern notes that as you browse the recipes “you will notice a surprising, and not unpleasant, lack of detail and specificity.” The intern returns to the realm of metaphor, where these not-that-specific recipes “suggest a simpler world unspoilt by the consequence of modern efficiency and specialization, where a reader might be expected to navigate a certain ambiguity as a fundamental requisite of the intellectual enterprise; to use her own judgment and facility for interpretive thought. Here we pine for an idealized realm where a writer did not always have to spell things out to the nth degree to appease certain overly prescriptive conventions for realistic storytelling.” Such words, spoken by a publisher or an independent writer, might be as unpalatable as boiled beef, but an intern can get away it. Especially when you learn that the intern will probably not get paid, or that the intern has, according to a press release from the publisher, vandalized the book in retaliation for not getting paid. That’s all a separate storyline, part of a performance on the theme of “literature as spectacle” that Cow Eye Press has engaged in on its website and on twitter. It’s not just merit, right? Or talent. A good book alone won’t get you attention. No one would have been talking about Bret Easton Ellis’s new memoir without the spectacle of his asinine comments on millennials and politics. By the way I did not mean to imply that Ellis’s new memoir is a good book. 

But back to the poetry of the recipes. Here’s the recipe for Beef au Gratin, 53 out of 99 recipes:

Rub the bottom of a pie dish with a little butter, or better yet with the fat from a fowl, and dust over with chippings of bread crusts. Cut the beef in thin slices, and arrange in circular fashion on the dish; put on the top a piece of butter or fat, parsley chopped very fine, salt, pepper, and a teasponfull of bouillon. Put it for a quarter of an hour in the stove and serve hot.

There’s no story behind the dish, no food writer trying to sell you on their brand. Just a simple recipe. Maybe it’s not a recipe I’d actually want to try, but you can read it and get the gist, and you can see yourself as someone who doesn’t have to x out ads on your iPad when you’re trying to look up a recipe.

Each recipe is juxtaposed with an image, usually bovine in theme. A cow being hoisted. A cow being beaten. A human plunging an arm into a cow’s ass. Jesus on the cross. But thankfully I’m not an art critic.

Is anyone going to buy this book? Not really. Is anyone going to read it? Probably not all the way through. Does any of that fucking matter? 

“As an independent publisher,” writes Natalie Zeldner in a note at the beginning of the book,

I sometimes wonder why we even bother. It is unlikely that anyone will take note of the books we publish. No reviewer will discuss them. Bookstores will not stock them. The common reader, already drowning in a sea of heavily marketed titles, will never suspect that ours also exist. Our books will be excluded from the prominent “Best Of….” lists and literary awards that have become the last refuge for gaining editorial credibility and an external audience — but that to this day remain the privileged birthright of the publishing establishment and its legacy of patronage and prestige, of old money, of esoteric tradition, of economic expediency, of timeliness, of genre.

She still went and published this book. That’s what we do. Agents tell us no, so politely. Book reviewers ignore our emails. Bookstores charge us consignment fees. We keep writing. We keep publishing. We keep reading. Boiled Beef is more than a book, it’s an homage to those of us who work in the dark, whose publications exist and matter and are met, as Cow Eye Press put it on twitter, with overwhelming silence. For those of us in the independent publishing world, we don’t have publicists or marketing teams. We don’t have agents, managers, or brand strategists. All we have is each other.

Anyway Zeldner definitely said it best: “Boiled beef, indeed.”

99 Practical Methods of Utilizing Boiled Beef
Babet
Translated by A.R.
Cow Eye Press
ISBN: 978-0-9909150-9-6
$14.95

Interview by Alan Good

This started as a joke. On twitter, Anthony goes “Someone should try to interview me for their website so I can be cool and detached and sidestep all their questions, frustrating everyone involved.” Total bullshit, he answered all my questions earnestly and didn’t try to sidestep nothing. He didn’t say anything dumb about millenials, either, which speaks to his integrity, but it also means we won’t get a lot of retweets. 

Neither one of us wanted to talk on the phone so this is an email interview.

What are you working on? And I just saw you say you got an acceptance that has you on cloud nine, so who's the lucky litmag?

I'm writing a book right now. Aren't we all? It's a collection of short stories. The working title is Confidence Man. I wanted to make something that's kind of atypical. It's a collection of different pieces, but they are unified by tone and theme. Almost like a fragmentary novel. If you've read some of my stories, you've probably noticed that I use unnamed narrators that are a bit "off." They also sound like they're speaking from the void. They could all be the same narrator and they could all be someone different. I wanted to allow space for the reader to insert themselves and feel what's happening viscerally. All of the stories in some way address isolation, unspoken desires, and general discomfort with being a human being. There's also a healthy sprinkling of sex and violence. Basically, a rockin' good time. I try to balance out these real, uncomfortable feelings I think everyone experiences at one time or another with prurient interests that entertain. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, I consider myself a song and dance man.

I just got an acceptance from Surfaces which I'm really happy about. Depending on when this runs, it might even be out already! [Narrator: It is.] Hello from the past. Surfaces is one of my favorite literary sites out there right now. The pieces that end up there are always interesting. I enjoy reading them. This is probably when my marketing background kicks in a bit (can't help it), but it's also a great total package. The aesthetic, the visual components associated with each piece of writing, all of it. The whole thing is just so damn smooth and I appreciate the attention to detail. It feels like an experience. So, check them out if you haven't.

Lot of Big Opinions out there about what’s wrong with literature. What’s right with literature though?

What's right with literature? Nothing at all. It all sucks.

No, that's bullshit. I actually think we're living in exciting times for literature. Anyone writing right now, certainly anyone with aspirations of fame and fortune, probably has a hard time finding excitement in it. Literature has never felt more culturally irrelevant, right? OK, so then why do it? Go make videos. Go paint. If relevance and magazine covers are what you're after, you're in the wrong line of work. 

If you do it for the love of the art, though, then you know just how much good writing there is out there right now. That should excite you. There's a lot of crap, too. Don't get me wrong. Because we're all online now and there's approximately one lit mag for every ten writers, there's a lot to wade through. But, if you're discerning, you'll find stuff you love just as much as your classic favorites. I think the internet removing a lot of the old gatekeepers and letting everyone go nuts to their heart's content is what's right in literature right now. You want the weirdest, wildest shit imaginable? You can find it. You want a space where you can read work from likeminded people who share your interests, fears, insecurities, whatever it is you feel like you need? There's a place for that.

No exaggeration, stumbling upon Lazy Fascist Press (RIP) however many years ago totally changed my life. It made me realize there is still exciting, vital, punk stuff getting published. 

The bourgeoisie upper class Random House and The New Yorkergatekeepers are still there. They always have been. Their own relevance has declined, though. And all your old favorites that lived in "better times" died broke too, so.

It’s been a fucking journey, starting out thinking that if you work hard and get better and get published eventually you’ll get noticed and you’ll get that break—then realizing there probably is no break, then realizing there’s freedom or something in not having an agent or working with the big prestigious publishers, that a lot of really great stuff is being published in the shadows. Took me a while to figure that out. Anyway who should we be reading that’s way under the radar?

That's a really hard question because at this stage of the game who is really under the radar? Instead I'm going to go with someone that I think should get more attention than he already does, despite maybe being considered a little more well known than others. I think Sean Kilpatrick is brilliant. He has a decent sized body of work now. I own a few of his books. I think his novel/story collection/I don't know even know Sucker June is one of the best books put out in recent years. Everything about it down to the cover made my skin crawl. It's rare that reading can make you have a physical reaction like that. So, he's my answer. 

Also, bonus shout out to James Nulick who I consider one of the best prose stylists working. A real craftsman.

What’s a book or author that gets a bunch of shit that you actually like?

I'm not sure he really needs defending, but he certainly gets a bunch of shit—Bukowski. I still have love for Bukowski. The pendulum has really swung on him. He's not really cool anymore and it's considered in poor taste in polite company to like him. I certainly understand why. His boorishness and womanizing can be a turnoff. Or inspire outright disdain. I think the reason people really turned on him, though, is that he's single-handedly responsible for creating at least a generation of shitty writers. I think assholes saw him and were like "that's cool, I want to live like that and write like that" so he gets associated with assholes. The difference between Bukowski and every other asshole though is that he actually had talent. He wrote some beautiful things. Even if you strip out all the stuff you might find offensive, there are some deeply moving works there. I'll probably always enjoy returning to his books when the mood strikes. 

OK, a lot of people want him to go away but a lot of people still love him and are pretty open about it. So that’s too safe an answer. Who gets more shit than they deserve and is it because we’re secretly jealous or what?

A lot of the writers that get shit do so for some combination of jealousy, pretension, or because people hate their fans for whatever reason. Like Stephen King. Considered lowbrow, which is stupid. He sells millions of books. You can tell yourself it's because of the great unwashed masses and their terrible taste, but you know what? He's fun! Yeah he might be kind of formulaic or not particularly inspiring at the sentence level, but I enjoy him enough. Sometimes you want to turn off and enjoy a well-constructed pop tune. Nothing wrong with that.

Then go the other way. David Foster Wallace. Pretentious! Only lit bros like him! Which is ridiculous. I know plenty of women who like him. Same goes for Bukowski. People hate his fans. Apparently, everyone has dated someone that liked Infinite Jest and ended up being a shitty dude? I don't get it. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is such a great book to me. I really love a lot of the pieces in there.

I wish I had some big controversial answer, but I don't really. James Patterson, for example, gets all the shit he deserves. But, he gets to swim in a pool of money like Scrooge McDuck so I'm sure he's fine with putting out crappy books. 

I haven’t read Melville’s The Confidence Man in a while but it’s super relevant today, always has been but in a more pronounced way now. Did you choose the title Confidence Man with Melville in mind, or just coincidence?

Funnily enough, I've never read Melville's. I picked the title first because I felt like what I wanted to do with the stories is portray how we're all living a con in some way every day of our lives. Whether it's navigating your professional life or even your romantic one, there is some deception present. The stories that deal with romance are obviously a bit darker since ideally deception isn't part of your relationship! But, it happens.

When I first came up with the title and concept for the book, I mentioned it to my friend who is an English teacher. She immediately said "Oh, like Melville!" so I didn't even know about the book until then. I like that they share a title, though. It's like The Replacements calling their big breakout album Let It Be. It's kind of this bratty, ballsy thing which appeals to me even though it really is just a coincidence.

What do you care about? Like what sustains you, makes life not pointless, what would you fight for? And how does that fit with your work?

I actually think life is pointless. It's meaningless and it can be short. That sounds like cheap nihilism, but I actually find it very liberating and affirming. It means you need to fill the relatively little time you're allotted with things that bring you joy. You're in control. It can be hard to remember that sometimes. I think it also means you need to be good to other people. Don't infringe on their limited time, either. We're all just trying to get by.

I guess I just want people to realize we aren't all that different from one another. Jam pack your life with as much as you can. Happiness, sadness, mistakes. All of it. I experienced the deaths of four people close to me between the ages of 18 and 20. They all died suddenly, unexpectedly, and young from a variety of causes. One of those people was my dad. Seeing how quick the end can come flipped a switch in my brain. That's when I decided to start writing, really. I wanted to leave something behind and maybe say some things that might be worthwhile to others.  

My big motivating drive comes from wanting people to be honest with themselves. Being honest with myself has been one of my great struggles. Sometimes what you want doesn't line up with what your family or friends or community wants. I use my work to explore feelings that I've had or thought about and ones I think others have had. That's not to say they are morality tales or anything. If anything, they are often quite ambiguous. I don't want to provide answers to anything because life rarely gives answers. You receive information and then you can interpret it as you wish. I like feeling my own scum, sometimes. I like making people feel their own scumminess, too. It's good to remind people they are imperfect beings. It makes things less lonely and maybe takes some pressure off. We've never been more connected and it can feel like we're all trying to show how good we are. How highly evolved. We're all fuck-ups, actually, and that's okay. Fallibility isn't a horrible thing. Learn and enjoy the ride.

How do you balance your job and your writing? Especially as someone who can work from home. Do you get things done at home? And for gods sake how? Maybe this interview turns into a tutorial, I don’t know.

I wish I could say I balance everything really well and get everything done, but that would be a lie. I'm probably being driven insane, actually. It's quite difficult to manage. Going to an office every day and having a fixed schedule has its benefits. As nearly anyone can tell you, it can also suck the life out of you. So, I guess the point is, work just sucks. I prefer only answering to myself, but I'm also a terrible procrastinator and my mind wanders like crazy. I jump from thing to thing. What this means is, I'm practically always "on." It's not unusual for me to jump from a business project, to a story I'm working on cause I can't stop thinking about it, back to another paying project. I essentially work all day from when I wake up to when I go to sleep. The one thing I absolutely must make time for every day is working out. That's the one bit of advice I would give to anyone who works from home or runs their own business. Other than remembering to pay your estimated quarterly taxes, the most important thing to make sure you do is exercise every single day. Yes, it's good for your body, but you need it to clear your mind. That hour or so being away from the computer is a life saver.

Where are you from? Gimme an enlightening anecdote from your youth or childhood. 

I'm from Brooklyn, New York. Born and raised not too far from Coney Island, which I enjoy. There's something romantic about Coney Island. And strange. Weird place that has changed a lot. I most often think of it as the place for carnivals and freakshows back at the turn of the 20th century. When I was growing up, it felt more like ruins, which is its own enjoyable aesthetic.

I have many anecdotes that can explain why I am the way I am, but I'll give you this one for some context. I went to Catholic school for most of my life. Up until 10th grade, then we moved. I grew up with scary nuns, existential terror over whether or not god was real, and a whopping dose of weird repressed sexual shit. So, you know, that was healthy. Anyway, I did my first two years of high school in an all boys school, which is essentially like being sent to prison. We had mandatory prayer time in the chapel every so often. I forget how many times we had to go. This one time, I went with my class to pray and was confronted by a priest. I was a really quiet kid in high school. Drawing attention to myself was the last thing I wanted to do and I would have been happier as a piece of furniture or something. So, when this priest stops in front of me in the middle of the pew, I immediately get nervous. He's just looking at me. But, his look is getting more intense with each second. Finally, he says to me "What are you doing here?" and I just stared at him. What am I doing here? I have to be here like all these other assholes. And he asks me again, like angrier. Again, I just look at him not knowing what to say. Then he says something like "You should know not to be in this place." Like, he identified me as the fucking devil or something. It was very strange and unnerving. Then I decided I really liked it.

That’s a fucked up thing to say to a kid. I was raised Catholic in Missouri, went to Catholic school for most of my childhood and adolescence. Don’t have a lot of nice things to say about the Church but it still shaped me. What’s your relationship with the Catholic stuff today? 

My relationship with Catholicism is complicated. I'd say I'm agnostic. I don't feel strongly either way about the existence of a superior being. I'll find that out when the time comes. I'm not a fan of their teachings on sexuality or abortion or any of that. It definitely shaped me though and I think parts of it are rooted in my character. I try to live by the golden rule. I have a strong work ethic. I believe in forgiveness. There is something to be said for rituals and shared culture. My Catholicism is very strongly mixed with my Italian heritage. It's impossible to separate the two. I do enjoy some traditional things. Usually if it involves food. I like churches. I like the idea of prayer. I really just took what I wanted from it and discarded the rest.

Editor’s note: sorry to quote another tweet but you won’t know what the fuck I’m talking about in the next question if I don’t. He was joking again, he goes “In an effort to really stir things up, I’m starting a lit mag where I only want the incomplete shit in your notes app that you already know sucks. I only want total garbage.” People started sending their notes to him, then at some point it blew up and he decided to do it for real, sort of a metaphor for the trump presidency.

 OK, so it looks like you might have a project to promote after all. Are you really going to do the trashmag?

Yeah so it seems I really stepped in shit on this one. I should really stop joking in public. Anyway, I'm going to do it because it seems like the community is hungry for it. I haven't settled on an actual name yet, but I want to create a site where people can let their hair down, stop taking themselves too seriously, and fire off the ideas they have in their notes that they think are terrible. I want it to feel like the old, weird internet before everything became a way to #engagewithbrands. It makes me want to puke. So, yeah. I guess I'll be coding a site in the middle of the night. People have been sending me some very entertaining entries.

Sometimes you joke online and it turns into starting a trashmag or being interviewed by a premier trashmag like Malarkey Books. This is probably enough for now but leave us with something beautiful or profound. Or a dick joke. 

I want to leave everyone with this. Never stop posting. Post through it all. Your terrible jokes will pay off. Tap into your inner child. I know it's still there. Let that child shitpost to its heart content. It's how you will find your people.

Or lose your job. Yeah, you could totally get fired, now that I think about it. Actually, delete your Twitter and go outside. Leave civilization. Learn how to can foods and raise bees. The god damn world is ending. There is precious little time left and you wasted some of it reading my thoughts. I win. Good bye and thank you.

Anthony Dragonetti is a writer from New York City. He writes fiction and reviews books at Neutral Spaces. He's been working in marketing for close to 10 years and it has poisoned his entire worldview. It allows him to work from home and also tweet fairly often in his underwear like every good online person should.

The trashmag is now live on the internet. It’s called Sludge.

You can find Anthony Dragonetti’s stories through his author page at Neutral Spaces.

Read a couple of his book reviews:

http://neutralspaces.co/blog/post.php?id=201

http://neutralspaces.co/blog/post.php?id=145

By Nate Briggs

This review was originally published on February 11, 2018.

You prolly want to buy this book. We usually try to link to IndieBound, because it’s better for your soul and Malarkey Books is part of their affiliate program, but it seems like this book isn’t on there right now, so if you click on the cover it’ll take you to our nemesis, Amazon.

A great book to help you keep your “Lithics” straight. Paleo-, Meso-, Neo-, etc.

But, tangentially, an extended dissertation on the way people used to live—and the yearning we still carry forward as an essential part of our shared Human Nature.

We began with tribes because that was the only way to survive. We had to answer the disadvantages Nature gave us with Community: working and living in a group, small villages, small hunting groups. Receiving the Validation we need as a social species from that close, intimate, continuous contact.

We haven’t changed. We never will.

Tribalism is still alive and well: although we might think that we no longer need it. It’s intensifying, as a matter of fact—as Marshall McLuhan said it would.

As one modern writer has said, tribalism knows no limiting principle (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/andrew-sullivan-when-two-tribes-go-to-war.html). It is effectively infinite within our concept of what “infinite” might be like.

We recognize it in the corporate workplace. The schoolyard. Even on the street.

I have a substantial investment in clothing bearing the insignia of my heroic (and sometimes championship) baseball team. The colors, and the logo, are large enough to be seen by anyone. They embolden strangers to talk to me in airports. And motorists tend to overlook the fact that I’m flaunting established norms by riding a bicycle instead of sitting in a car.

I mark myself as part of a larger tribe—and I’m Validated with that status.

And it feels good because the need for Social Validation is, itself, almost infinite (see Dave Eggers, The Circle).

But not all Validation is created equal.

Even though we have more incoming than ever, the “global village can never give us what the ancient villages provided. When we compare that smoky, uncertain life with instant, worldwide social traffic now, we get the impression that the modern version just offers “empty calories” versus the full social nutrition of face-to-face life as it was lived in the past.

You can finish a bag of popcorn and not really be sure you’ve eaten anything. You can lose track of time on Facebook and end in a mood that feels something like sadness—even though the conversation felt lively and affectionate.

The world Francis Pryor describes is the “up close” world. The one where everyone knows my name—my father’s name—what’s happened with me—where I’ve been—where I’m going.

That world was messy. Crowded. Loud. There was a lot of shit: both literal and figurative. But I was Validated by people I’d known all my life. My tribe—around me all the time.

Fast forwarding into the modern world, I’m Validated by so many more people. But they’re all so far away, and—when I close the laptop—I can’t help noticing that I’m still alone.

About the Author

Nate Briggs is the author of numerous books.

Marxist ( but not Communist). Nomadic. Libertarian. Recovering Bible Kid. Feminist. In the world—but not of the world.

Those not fascinated by tales of beautiful billionaires and dainty bondage, “bad boys” yearning to be “good boys,” sexy werewolves and angelic vampires, or English magicians with father issues are invited to follow my posts on the Facebook page for Church Mouse Productions: @CMouseProd.

Britain BC: Life in Britain and Ireland Before the Romans
By Francis Pryor
Harper
978-0007126934

Tonight I'm Someone Else
Chelsea Hodson
Reviewed or whatever this thing is by Alan Good

A long time ago, one of my instructors at the University of Colorado told me I could write a sentence. I wasn’t certain—I still am not certain—whether he meant it as a compliment or a dig, most of my sentences at the time being dense and weird and hard to follow. It was probably both, and I’ll take it. For the record, I mean it as a compliment when I say that Chelsea Hodson can write a fucking sentence.

See for yourself:

“The only thing worse than hearing your voice at its most desperate is recognizing it.”

“Whenever I remember that dogs began as wolves, my hope for my own domestication returns.”

“Money needs us, depends on us to mint it, distribute it, exchange it, make it mean something, make it last. Dreams, on the other hand, don’t need us at all. Some people have needed me, but the ones I wanted most didn’t need anything or anyone.”

For the past few months, Hodson’s essay collection, Tonight I’m Someone Else, has been dominating my Twitter feed like LeBron against the Raptors (or, now that this simile is a few weeks dated, like LeBron against anyone—fine, with the possible exception, that is, of the Warriors). I started following Hodson on Twitter (@ChelseaHodson) after reading an essay in The Fanzine and I soon started seeing people gush about a book that was several months away from publication. I got lucky and scored an advanced reader’s copy.

It’s nice, in this bewildering and exhausting age of disinformation, hip cleavage, and rebooted racism, to see people getting excited over a collection of essays. Public service announcement: now is not the time to dither. If there’s a book you want to buy, a book you want to read, go on and do it; God knows what horrors await us tomorrow. You won’t go wrong if you start with this one.

Subtle hint: this is a link to buy Tonight I'm Someone Else.

Many of Hodson’s essays are fragmented, made up of isolated paragraphs jumping from one epigram to the next without transition. Here are three consecutive paragraphs from an essay called “The New Love”:

Peak—the height of Bear Mountain. And no, not even that—the highest point was in fact an observation tower on top. Up four flights of stairs, I could see over the mountains and through the clear day: the Manhattan skyline I’d left that morning.

I want to be a building that bends with the wind. I want to be designed that way. I give.

The loudest of voices are the ones heard, but what of the smallest one, strengthening. What of the orchid in the window, getting just enough light.

Maybe fragmented, disjointed times call for fragmented, disjointed literature. Maybe Hodson cares more about the sharpness of her sentences than the apparent flow of her essays. She could, if she had the desire, make a killing with a quote-of-the-day calendar.

January 1, 2019

“I’ve worked for enough millionaires to know that more money doesn’t mean more happiness. But facts were never enough to cancel out my dreams. Wake me up from a nightmare and try to tell me it’s not real. Try to tell me more money wouldn’t fix my life.” 

January 2, 2019

“I have listened to music I hated until I loved it. I have looked at ugly clothes so long they began appearing as desirable objects. I have lived in America so long that money started to seem like a good idea.”

January 3, 2019

“I like walking into the unknown the way I spend money: with my eyes closed.”

Quotability can be a mask, a way to hide the banality of your ideas (sorry, Christopher Hitchens) or the monstrousness of your soul (not sorry, Winston Churchill). I don’t think she’s hiding behind her precision; I think she just thinks enough of her readers to leave some gaps. If this was my book I’d have called it Fuck a Transition Sentence. There’s also a sense of duty (I said fuck a transition sentence and I meant it). “Girls like me,” she says, “we get to choose when and where to look. We get to choose for how long and when to turn away—that’s the real privilege. I think I can train myself to look longer, to remember more, to write more down when I can’t remember, to give testimony worth recording, to learn from it.” I don't want to make it seem like Hodson is a one-sentence wonder like G.K. Chesterton. Her essays are fascinating explorations of self, love, and life.

I only thought of this because I’m reading the Alan Moore Swamp Thing comics, but she could also, with her vivid, concise prose, write a masterful comic book.

This will probably sound stupid, but if you’ve read this far you’re used to that anyway: the part of the book that got to me the most is a part that I’d seem to have little ability to relate to personally. It’s a section about Hodson’s love, as a teenager, for a goddamn boy band:

My love for Brian [Littrell] was fierce, and it was perpetuated by Alexis and Casey, since the group was our main topic of conversation. We wrote entire notebooks full of stories in which we were in high school with the Backstreet Boys before they were famous. Chapter by chapter, they fell in love with us. Even if we’d known the term, we would never have dared to call what we wrote ‘fan fiction,’ because that would imply that the stories weren’t true—and though we knew we invented everything, it seemed true to us. Or, it seemed true to me. Alexis and Casey loved admiring the Backstreet Boys, but I secretly thought of myself as the most devoted of us. What I wrote wasn’t meant to be entertaining, it was meant to change fate’s course.

I knew how famous they were, and that they were in their twenties while we were only thirteen, but it’s hard to explain how close they felt. I filled an entire wall with magazine photos of the Backstreet Boys, and I looked at them with such focus and for such long periods of time that it became like a prayer. It was the first time in my life that I remember feeling physical side effects of longing—I preferred to ache than to feel nothing at all. Someday, I would reach out and touch Brian and he would touch me—but when?

Hodson made me remember my sister, who liked shitty bands like Hanson and the Backstreet Boys, bands I thought were stupid; I wish I could go back and say it doesn’t matter if you like bad music right now, you can still grow up and make something beautiful.

There are a few allusions to contemporary politics, but in Tonight I’m Someone Else our national nightmare exists on the periphery. What matters is what it means to exist, to feel, to remember. It’s not always nice. It’s not always neat or appropriate. It’s just human: 

I always hear stories about how insignificant we are, how alone we are, how the universe is expanding and aren’t we so small, isn’t our English so adorable, so prone to disappearance. And yet, one person’s hand can change a life—one palm, one pull, one paltry touch. Like, how about the immeasurable electricity between two hands about to meet for the first time, how about the texture of a hand on my face versus my forearm versus my thigh, how about the heat of a slap meant as a placeholder for love or harm, you decide. I’ve had hands around my neck that turned from lust to violence. I knew I could die, but still I didn’t fight. Survival of the fittest—a game some choose not to play. I thought if he felt so strongly, then maybe that’s how it ends. That’s how much I love the world—I accept my mortality, my temporality, my weakness, my choice to be held, to disappear.

The passage above starts as insightful and ends up unnerving. It’s at times frustrating to read Hodson’s seeming nonchalance about violence, like when she describes, in the essay “Swollen and Victorious,” goading a male friend into punching her:

Come on, hit me, I said. Don’t be a pussy. Hit me in the face. Even my weakness sounded strong sometimes. He laughed hard, knowing he was about to hit a girl, maybe for the first time ever, who would do that? I guess anyone who looked at me too long with my begging face shining like the moon would do that. I’d always wanted to know what it felt like—in Tucson I’d loved men who believed violence was the answer, and they hit each other until thy got it right. One time I saw a man go down in the alley behind the diner and, later, I held the hand that hit him. It was so big I had to use both of my hands to cradle it—swollen and victorious, I’d said.

The same guy later “grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen and chased after me—I laughed so hard I fell to the ground in the hallway. He pinned me down and put the knife to my throat while my sister closed the door to my room. You can’t do anything now, can you? One of those questions that’s more of a comment. I laughed because I couldn’t believe how much he loved me.” The fuck, as the young folks say.

The hardest part about writing a review of this book is leaving out the dozens of quotes that belong in here but just aren’t going to fit. Chelsea Hodson is a hell of a writer, and I’m going to let her close this thing out:

“Dream logic seems fine for a world that has been theorized to be nothing more than a simulation—a big video game where we think we play the world, but in fact someone else is playing us. I buy what I can’t afford; I idolize people who have nothing to do with me; I refuse to believe one thing leads to another, which is to say I don’t believe in logic, not all the time—not the way this world rotates and orbits, I feel slower than it, too poor to live in it; I want to sleep until I’m someone else.”

“I thought living on Sunset Boulevard seemed glamorous, but each morning I awoke to a new layer of black soot on the windowsill. My address ended with a fraction, my room was painted lime green, and my bed folded back into the wall like a lie.”

“I’ve had enemies so intense that it felt romantic, so mutual it felt like love.”

“I once saw a magic show so convincing that I refused to acknowledge the possibility of illusion. I’ve done that with love ever since.”

Tonight I’m Someone Else
Chelsea Hodson
Henry Holt
ISBN: 978-1-250-17019-4
$17

Note to persnickety readers: I received an advanced reader’s copy of Tonight I’m Someone Else, which is liable to be slightly different from the official published version of the book. I emailed the publicist with the quotes I was planning to use in this thing, but I never heard back, so if any of the quotes in here don’t match up with the final text, it could be because I’m a fuckup, or it could be because no one got back to me.

Bonus note: if you order the book via the link in the image below, Malarkey Books will receive a small fee as part of the IndieBound Affiliate program.

I got this autograph not long before Mickey Mantle died.

A Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle
Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith
Reviewed by Alan Good

I loved Mickey Mantle because my grandpa loved him—or because, after my grandpa died, I heard stories about how much he’d loved Mantle. I grew up in Joplin, Missouri, not that far from Mickey’s hometown of Commerce, Oklahoma. Mickey also played minor league ball in Joplin. He’s one of our only legends. Mickey Mantle. Langston Hughes. George Washington Carver. There were always rumors that Mickey played golf at Loma Linda, a private club for rich people. Something I never understood: if you were rich, why the fuck would you live in Joplin? I would play sometimes at Loma Linda South, which was public, harboring a stupid fantasy that I would somehow see my idol, like maybe he would take a wrong turn and end up at the pleb course. I was an idiot.

I wore the number 7 for a long time, but I had a better season, my senior year of high school, after I switched to 8, which had no history or baggage behind it. I learned from reading Mantle’s autobiography, The Education of a Baseball Player, that I should switch to center field. Like Mantle, I was too wild to play shortstop. In center I could roam and curse and fucking launch it. Moving to center also helped me have a better season; I was freer, less in my head.

Mickey Mantle was a good idol to have because he was flawed, and when I learned about the flaws I wasn’t disillusioned. I accepted that my heroes didn’t have to be perfect. I still loved him. In A Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle, Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, whom I have to admit I’m now extremely jealous of, strip away the bullshit, the phoniness, the manufactured image of Mantle, and leave you with the man. He was flawed. He drank too much. He ran around on his wife. He was a hell of a ballplayer.

Something many people live their whole lives without learning is you can love someone, or something, in spite of flaws, weaknesses, and mistakes. I’d suggest that you don’t really love Mantle if you don’t know that he cursed out an old woman from the dugout. You can’t love an illusion: “The sports journalists who knew him best largely hid that he wasn’t remotely like his public persona and was instead an often moody, angry, hard-drinking, philandering, flawed man. They sold Mickey like political columnists sold America during the Cold War.” The fact that his image was phony doesn’t take away from his accomplishments or greatness. You don’t have to buy Mickey as a hero, as a dutiful husband or moral paragon, to appreciate him, just as you don’t have to whitewash our history to love or appreciate this country.

I can picture the hardcore dumbasses calling the authors a couple of social justice warriors for suggesting that part of the reason America fell in love with Mantle was because he was white, a great white player at a time when some white people feared white athletes were getting overtaken by black athletes. The truth of American racism or white grievance doesn’t take anything away from Mickey Mantle. There’s no indication he saw himself as some great white hope. He just wanted to play ball, and even through all the injuries, pressure, criticism, and fuckups, he played baseball like no one else.

I picked this book up at the library, wasn’t sure I would get around to reading it, but goddamn I’m glad I read it. Summer’s coming. The Rockies, as of this writing, are half a game out of first place. My son, who throws right and bats left and looks like a natural hitter, is about to play t-ball. I’m harboring this delusion that if he keeps batting lefty I’m going to teach him Mantle’s drag bunt. I know I’m being delusional, ignoring numerous other factors, but it seems like this country really started going to shit with a purpose when football became the most popular sport. It’s time for baseball. 

A Season in the Sun: The Rise of Mickey Mantle
Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith
Basic Books-Hachette
ISBN: 9780465094431
$28

Note: if you happen to buy the book via the link below, Malarkey Books will receive a small affiliate fee from IndieBound.