Artifice Magazine

The Future!

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:23:32 -0500

So you’ve probably noticed we’re not too active on the ol’ tumblr anymore. Since we’ve had the main site up and running, and an active facebook account, we’ve found that, unfortunately, there’s not a lot left over for this tumblr site to do, dear as it is to our hearts. So, while we’ll be keeping the site up for oldtimes’ sake, if you’re interested in what we’re up to these days, you should friend us on facebook. We’re very friendly, after all.

Also, for any of you in the Chicago area, we’ll be at the Printers Ball tonight, kickin it with the Chi-town literati. The event’s free and open to the public, so hope to see you there!

Seriously, y’all? This bookstore is awesome. Give them...

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 02:23:42 -0500

Seriously, y’all? This bookstore is awesome. Give them money.

tylercoates:

Save Women and Children First!

Linda Bubon is no stranger to battling the economy. The co-owner of Women and Children First sounded the alarm two years ago, when it became clear the bookstore might not make it through the end of the year. Co-owner Ann Christophersen took another full-time job and pared down her duties at the store, but it still wasn’t enough. So in April 2007, WCF made a plea to its customers: Save us.

“The story got legs really fast,” Bubon says. “In-store sales that May were up nearly 70 percent.”

Membership at the store—for $25 a year, you get a 10 percent storewide discount—grew from about 300 to 1,000. Donations poured in, and the store finished up over the previous year’s profits for the first time in five years. It wasn’t a stay of execution so much as a vote of confidence from the citizenry. Women and Children First is one of the last feminist bookstores in the country and is revered for its selection and programming, which often features prominent women and gay authors. In 2004, Bubon and Christophersen created the nonprofit Women’s Voices Fund to support the programming.

But just as WCF seemed to have turned everything around, last fall’s downturn hit the store hard. Sales in October were 23 percent below the previous year’s, and the holiday season clocked in 13 percent under. With online megaretailers like Amazon exempt from charging sales tax and able to procure sweetheart discounts on bulk orders, Bubon says she’s not so sure Women and Children First can even compete in the business anymore.

Someone read this and tell me whether I should read it.

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:01:29 -0500

This. BTW it’s real long.

this makes me want to cry. wolfandfox: (via benjaminhilts)

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:01:06 -0500

this makes me want to cry.

wolfandfox:

(via benjaminhilts)

Today's haul from Myopic Books*

Sun, 31 May 2009 21:03:00 -0500

Airborn by Kenneth Oppel
Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel
The Firework-Maker’s Daughter by Philip Pullman
Don’t Tell Me the Truth About Love by Dan Rhodes
Gold by Dan Rhodes
In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Found by June Oldham

*I think someone angered Leonard, the cat that lives in Myopic, because everywhere in the bookstore smelled of cat pee.

Bookninja just pointed me to Mine via a writeup on Slate and my mind is currently being blown.

Fri, 29 May 2009 09:58:23 -0500

Bookninja just pointed me to Mine via a writeup on Slate and my mind is currently being blown.

One thing I really like about the internet

Wed, 27 May 2009 11:58:13 -0500

is that you can ask it questions. For example, I just asked the internet “What is exciting?” and got a response.

And I have to admit, an explosion sailing on the ocean would be pretty dang exciting.

Hello! It's Everyone Read "The Rise of Capitalism" Day!

Tue, 26 May 2009 15:34:14 -0500

Sample? No problem:

The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude — melancholy sadness — toward it. This attitude is not correct. Fortunately your letter came, at that instant. “Dear Rupert, I love you every day. You are the world, which is life. I love you I adore you I am crazy about you. Love, Marta.” Reading between the lines, I understood your critique of my attitude toward capitalism. Always mindful that the critic must “studiare da un punto di vista formalistico e semiologico il rapporto fra lingua di un testo e codificazione di un — ” But here a big thumb smudges the text — the thumb of capitalism, which we are all under. Darkness falls. My neighbor continues to commit suicide, once a fortnight.

Find the full text here.

I’m so glad this happened. jacobsknabb: “Huh? What? Right?...

Mon, 25 May 2009 19:08:28 -0500

I’m so glad this happened.

jacobsknabb:

“Huh? What? Right? Uh.”

Among the potato pictures that I have seen on tumblr, this is so...

Sun, 24 May 2009 02:36:38 -0500

Among the potato pictures that I have seen on tumblr, this is so far my favorite.

damhnait:

I had seen leaves poking up out of the vegetable basket and assumed that it was a handful of strange lettuce or herbs from the farmers market that I wasn’t familiar with. Then I discovered they were all growing out of this sweet potato. It might be time to say goodbye.

Boy-Scouts-affiliated program teaches our youth to fend off terrorists, impoverished immigrants, etc.

Fri, 22 May 2009 16:06:59 -0500

Boy-Scouts-affiliated program teaches our youth to fend off terrorists, impoverished immigrants, etc.:

I’m pretty sure real life is in the process of becoming a Pynchon novel. Money quote? Young Cathy Noriega, 16, on firearms:

“I like shooting them,” Cathy said. “I like the sound they make. It gets me excited.”

tylercoates: (via baldysour/preretirementnerves) A vision: that...

Thu, 21 May 2009 13:13:56 -0500

tylercoates:

(via baldysour/preretirementnerves)

A vision: that this picture gets reblogged by every blogger in the US. You can help make my vision come true.

Basically, I love any book with maps in it. So count me as...

Wed, 20 May 2009 12:57:31 -0500

Basically, I love any book with maps in it. So count me as excited.

marginalgloss:

The gifted, precocious child has become a common trope in the modern novel. There’s Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (which I liked), Jonathan Safran-Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which I half-liked) and of course there’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (which I loved). Those are the ones I’ve read and recall right now: Stuart Evers names a few others here.

Generally, I liked Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. I’m going to tell you about it now (and there may be some slight spoilers). I whipped through it in a couple of days — it’s not that long, it’s very easy to read, and I enjoyed it whilst I was reading it. Book and accompanying website are slick, handsome productions. There was a similar buzz around The Raw Shark Texts in 2007, but this book is if anything even more visual — rather than House of Leaves and its academic pastiche/concrete poetry-style textual manipulations, there are proper illustrations and marginalia here, and very nice pretty they are too. At times it feels like an issue of McSweeney’s or a graphic novel, neither of which are necessarily bad things. Larsen’s writing is perfectly fine; slick, polished, imaginative, often quite funny. But.

But: it’s not boring but it is often quite bland. A few chapters in, a ‘book within the book’ appears, which overturns the whole ‘road novel’ side to the text that was just getting interesting, drags on for far too long and really doesn’t work at all. There’s an odd subtext about science/darwinism v.s. religion/faith. Near the end another curious sub-plot about a secret society and wormholes emerges, sort of like a half-hearted House of Leaves but actually Selected Works as a whole probably has more in common thematically with Mark Danielewski’s second ‘novel’, Only Revolutions, without the linguistic inventiveness. Some reviewers have compared it to the neglected Nicholson Baker and his wonderful Mezzanine. I don’t think it’s as good as any of these books.

What troubles me is that Spivet sees the world not like a gifted child at all, but like a pretty good writer wearing his influences on his sleeve. He’s supposed to be a difficult, troubled child, but there is nothing difficult or troubling about his writing. Sometimes he’ll talk to inanimate objects around him and they’ll reply, which could be interesting if Larsen could be bothered to sustain it (see also Kleinzeit) — as it is, it’s sort of interesting but mostly just quirky and cute. Spivet writes like a writer, not a mapmaker. In fact most of the time Spivet actually sounds more like one of Nabokov’s alienated academics (is that a Pale Fire reference on the first page?), with a sprinkling of Delillo in the details, even the odd dash of (oh lord) E. Annie Proulx. Sometimes he does write quite beautifully:

‘When I looked up, I saw them coming toward me: in the distance they looked like a swirl of dust, a dense knot of hands opening and closing, humming through the air, skitting across the surface of the water in my direction. I was not afraid. As they came closer, I could see that they were birds, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, flying so close together it seemed impossible for any single bird to flap its wings on its own. Indeeed, the clot of wing and body and beak moved as one unit with one mind, every wing tip fitting into the glimpse of space just vacated by the previous wing tip, and so the mass moved like the oil-softened teeth of many intermeshing gears. As they came down the canal, I could hear the pump of their muscles, the thrushing of feather on feather. Their eyes stared in all directions at once, seeing everything and nothing, wires of comprehension extending out to every object in space. The sound of a thousand radio stations emanated from their mouths.’

That’s one of my favourite passages. But I look at it again and think: well, no, oil doesn’t actually soften machinery, does it? ‘Emanated’ is wrong there. That’s not how wings work — that’s just how they appear to work. Spivet wouldn’t confuse these things. Ordinarily little stylistic quibbles like this might not matter to me in most novels, but when I’m supposed to believe in Spivet before Larsen, things fall apart.

At least with Safran-Foer, DFW and Baker, you got the impression that (knowledge aside) their characters were understanding the world in fundamentally different ways to everyone around them, even when that made their narratives sound ‘difficult’ or ‘insincere’ at times. We see the world differently after reading writers like Borges, Calvino and Ballard because they really do see the world afresh through pure language — they might involve themselves with strategies of cartography, but they also realise that to reproduce the maps they describe in language would be to miss the point entirely. Or another example — James Kelman’s narrator in Kieron Smith, Boy was no prodigy, but he didn’t need to be because he was entirely human, with a voice unique and different and consistent enough for his world to seem both familiar and alien, above all absolutely involving.

Spivet’s methods of mapmaking just don’t seem consistent with his method of writing. The most basic question of style that Larsen should have asked himself before setting out — ‘How might my mapmaker write a book?’ — is basically ignored in favour of a style which, whilst not unpleasant or offensive, is somehow insufficient.

Do we read this text like we might read a map? We do not. I wish we could.

(Oh, and I noticed a couple of mistakes in the illustrations. At one point there’s a ‘Boredom Box’, a callout from the text that is supposed to describe five different kinds of boredom (p83 in my edition). Only four are listed. Near the end of the book there’s a story about how ‘Tab’ soda got its name (p360/361) — by asking a computer to produce a list of all possible four letter combinations with one vowel — but the list in the margin is a list of words (presumably Spivet-generated) that includes things like ‘Tabu’ and ‘Tada’ and ‘Tame’. I’d like to be able to say these were deliberate mistakes, that these inconsistencies would somehow open up portals of understanding in the text that would lead me on to interesting secret things, but unfortunately I find myself not caring much either way.)

marginalgloss: xcllnt (via some men are brothers / guardian) I...

Wed, 20 May 2009 11:21:09 -0500

marginalgloss:

xcllnt

(via some men are brothers / guardian)

I wonder what it would be like to read Avoid without knowing about Perec’s self-imposed constraint beforehand. I’m pretty sure it’d be a different book entirely…

We WERE

Tue, 19 May 2009 18:35:34 -0500

there.

But you can’t see us in any of the pictures.

You can see our friend.

But not these friends; they didn’t come.

The Pilcrow Lit Fest is going on

Tue, 19 May 2009 11:23:52 -0500

and we couldn’t be happier. Tonight!:

Quickies! Reading Series
Innertown Pub
1935 W. Thomas (map)
A Chicago flash fiction reading series featuring complete stories read in 5 minutes or less. No excerpts, no cheating. Hosted by Mary Hamilton and Lindsay Hunter. No cover, open to the public, 21+.

Re: Great Literature is no longer necessary, k thx bye.

Mon, 18 May 2009 15:50:00 -0500

There was possibly some—possible more than some?—irony in my previous post. Far be it for us at Artifice discount devices, literary or otherwise. Though in certain cases* I’ll take the tweet…

*Jane Austin

jacobsknabb:

If great literature is merely great due to plot, then no, nothing is lost. After all, that’s the plot Jane Austin gave us put most succinctly.

Ergo: Hamlet’s daddy dies, his mom bones his aunt, he shames his girlfriend to suicide and kills her father, and, in the end, through his own indecision, a bunch of people die, including him.

If great literature is more than just a great plot and has, you know, things like great literary devices that make it so spectacular, then no, that summary is a pathetic joke and all those who honestly believe it sums up Jane Austin are idiots. Afterall, plot is merely an after-effect of a finely wrought story. The way the story is told makes all the difference…

artificemag:

Via Bookninja:

Great literature latest to be fed like mafia informant into Twitter’s language woodchipper

My favorite?

janeaustin: Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.

Bonus points if you can make a convincing argument that anything is actually left out of that particular abrigment.

Music for rocking out the slushpile. Keep those submissions...

Mon, 18 May 2009 15:37:40 -0500

Music for rocking out the slushpile. Keep those submissions coming in, kids!

Great Literature is no longer necessary, k thx bye.

Mon, 18 May 2009 13:16:08 -0500

Via Bookninja:

Great literature latest to be fed like mafia informant into Twitter’s language woodchipper

My favorite?

janeaustin: Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.

Bonus points if you can make a convincing argument that anything is actually left out of that particular abrigment.

What is up, Mile-High City?

Wed, 13 May 2009 10:50:22 -0500

When it happens, we will be there.