L.J. Moore's Blog, page 11
February 13, 2012
holla! tupelo hassman: girlchild
Tupelo Hassman's new book, girlchild, will be released tomorrow, February 14, 2012 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Check out this Q&A with Tupelo on Publisher's Weekly
And stay tuned for an interview with Tupelo forthcoming on Litseen.
February 3, 2012
February 2, 2012
digital gothic: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 3)
This piece of the puzzle appears to be complete.
Comments are always welcome and appreciated.
(bear in mind that formatting this poem as it should appear is difficult given the limitations of wordpress and how it interfaces with word)
"On her eyelashes the fog brings you trembling mercury…"
-The Fog, Carlos V. Suárez
Fig. 22: Gate Crashing: [Playlist: iBenji, Seems]
it all starts with an itch that inward look:
then a twist and counter
the speed of oscillation varies with distance from the center of the creature but
the body already knows how to get to other worlds
close your eyes if you must but trust
the break follow the wobble it's a flywheel in your pocket
timing the path of intersection with the already turning
to converge and merge and merry-go-flung
the motion always invisible at onset but you feel it coming
deep inside an internal tissue
a supermassive formation collapsing into a relativistic star
please don't stop cracking the excitable cells in the dragon's tail
until the spike train rolls
with great speed and oscillating friction
from the mouths of voltage-gated channels
and you erupt across the threshold of the rapidly expanding pattern:
I can't tell you, dear sorcerer, what your path to the gates will look like:
all internal language is a secret working
but hang tight in that crawlspace
the worst of the ride is reaching cruising speed
and I can send some guides:
(in the mean time)
enter scarab glittering
on iridescent wings, towing
by fine filaments grasped in hindmost legs
an intricately woven cobweb banner that reads
up and down one column at a time
as well as across, from left to right:
"contrasting" viewpoints on your journey divide prominent philosophers:
Sir Isaac Newton's view is a time to give and a time to dance as other "times" persist,
this view becomes a time to mourn effectively killing time at the time of death
and a time to die is part of the fundamental embrace like frames of a film strip, a spread structure of time to plant time to uproot across neither future event nor plucked thing
what is planted: a dimension in which events sewn then grown (non-discrete, Immeasurable) occur as objects in a sequence a birth a container one could step in or out of but
a silence kept a together lost a wasted search, give up, tear apart, kill, weep, love, hate laugh (that's Leibniz, Kant) the transport time itself an idea certainly but not a thing
a fundamental structure travel-able as thought
(and on a second banner, clinging to the first
via some dust bunnies and a chain of bluish laundry lint:)
Travel:
to go from one place to another, as on a trip; journey;
to go from place to place as a salesperson or agent;
to be transmitted, as light or sound; move or pass;
to advance or proceed;
to go about in the company of a particular group; associate: (travels in wealthy circles);
to move along a course, as in a groove;
to admit of being transported without loss of quality (some wines travel poorly);
Informal: to move swiftly;
Basketball: to walk or run illegally while holding the ball;
the second "l" in the word ball is festooned with busily stitching spiders,
as the passage of time cannot be directly perceived as it happens
but must be re-membered to exist
unendingly given arms and legs
and breathed:
(from trembling drops
spun into vibrating strings)
whose loose ends are lashed and threaded
spliced into the meanwhile by your guides
who have arrived
traveling on the fingertips of the fog
the ravens of Point Conception and Point Reyes:
one has wings contrapted of hollow reeds
lashed to his body by a harness of syntonic commas
every wingbeat a major or minor every dive a glissando
subtle shifts in his primary flight feathers give rise to the dissonance of angels
the melodies of monsters
blind, he glides along the chain link fence of now
dragging his wingtips against the diamonded stutter
knowing where he is by the tone of his harmonics
and by the heat signature of his partner:
she is a blue-black fire
urgent and reckless and easily distracted
condensing the immediate in her hot smell
of dirty underfeathers and contagious desires
made visible as the virga her wingtips cast: black beams slicing triangular seams of now bounded by darkness
but admitting a light that illuminates
points further on:
you are a shadow strung between these shadows
cast through fog (the fog of which you're made,
the fine-flung particles on which you're hung)
a medium through which you will learn to gate crash
to give in to scatter
to understand that piano notes unfurling from the banks of folds and whorls
the waifish threnody of thin and distant notes
can open in a vast and clammy throat from which no lighthouse lamp or lens or flame
can cast a plumb line
only a flux a flex a blur of synthesis of sense
the tap of one feather against the next
and against nearby wingtips
will unlock the braille of entrance
from the sea smoke:
(in this instance)
the Iron Horse
rears clear of the haar and fret gripped thick amid her ribs
(those harpstrings the dream houses pluck on nightly flights)
the blood orange foramen of her double spine:
windows squaring this world with the next
her vermillion scapula and hip caught mid-gallop
the movement of her form so slow as to appear a solid
rostrum thrust forward and tail to ground
her belly stretches taut to guard
cargo ships climbing down the ocean's edge
tugboats and sabots yaw around her fetlocks
forged of ashes she waits of course to rise from ashes
staring down into her mare's nest
past the surface shadow
across which hot life skims into and out of living commerce
to the bluer pulse that breathes below the echo current of what was and still is
a tide of tall ships spilling their bones at the hem of california's skirts hemorrhaging their riches of flea-bitten, half-starved hopes
dispersed and drifting in and out through their mistresses' unlaced eyelets
the silky clacking of all that's left of this influx currents tides
a sea change of ash pearls collecting in the divots and channels
beneath waves of intolerable golden itches swathed
in layer upon layer of alternating hopes and madnesses
hard little nuggets lodged in the surrounding softness
dug free and sluiced measured in dust on scales
cast into ornaments and promise rings now clattering loose on the bare knuckles
of the not-so-long dead in long forgotten graves
beneath the golf course the library the museum
hugging the plumbing sailing slow in vessels rarefied by rotting
what remains after flesh and bone and memory have long since dispersed?
a sussurence that lures the jumpers
the risk to all who perform this alchemy: a mercury a gorgeous poison
slipping perpetually
back and forth between home and Land's End: a transistor
the precious metal points of contact through which pass travelers worldly and otherwise
drawn irresistibly to edges
whether by expansion or collapse
big bang or whimper or barbaric yawp whether by dream or death
it's all the same unmapped certainty
so you can bunker down and be taken by force
or follow the ravens
who stretch their black fingertips to build up drag and static
then clasp their wings tight to slip the quicksilver light
and dive beak first into the dirt
January 30, 2012
Crooked Hills, Book One, by Cullen Bunn (earwig press)
At some point, the head noise of adult life dulls out a vital sense that kids know deep down in their bones: sometimes what you're looking for is also looking for you.
Charles "Charlie" Ward is almost 13, and newly-made man of the house after his father's recent death in a suspicious hit-and-run "accident." Charlie's a Chicago kid who's looking forward to losing his troubles in a summer of video games, horror novels, ghost stories, and baseball with his friends, until certain doom hijacks his plans: a family vacation in the Ozarks with his mother and annoying eight-year-old brother, Alex. But the summer has its own plans for Charlie, who finds himself headed for Crooked Hills, the most haunted town in America, and home to Maddie Someday, a spirit who wanders the woods at night, in search of children she find by the blood-red light of her ruby ring.
Cullen Bunn, who has written for Marvel and DC Comics, Wildstorm, and IDW, is also author of the horror noir series, The Damned, The Sixth Gun, and Like a Chinese Tattoo. His new juvenile fiction series, Crooked Hills, is a cobwebby trap-door that suddenly appears in the ceiling of your clean, new, suburban home: a portal for children to climb into the ghostly back rooms and hidden spaces of supernatural fiction. And unlike the recent turn that tween supernatural fiction has taken into bodice-ripping, fashion-conscious, narcissistic soap-opera, Cullen Bunn delivers the real goods: worms, spiders, headless chickens fleeing bloody axes, kidnapped little brothers, and girls with slingshots who can track ghost dogs by moonlight.
Crooked Hills is a series you'll want to kid to read, or better yet, to read together, because all horror and supernatural fiction fans know that the prickling, shuddersome feeling that comes from a good ghost story is no cheap thrill, it's a vital connection to something larger and and deeper and more shadowy: a key to what's haunting you.
Forthcoming in February 2012: Cullen Bunn's,"Creeping Stones and Other Stories." Individual stories to appear digitally leading up to book's release.
January 17, 2012
A Bird Black as the Sun: California poets on crows and ravens
Please read this review on Litseen
A Bird Black As The Sun: California Poets on Crows and Ravens, edited by Enid Osborn and Cynthia Anderson
reviewed by LJ Moore
Green Poet Press, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-615-53632-3
January 13, 2012
digital gothic: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 2)
Another installment from a work-in-progress:
(comments are always appreciated, particularly on how the audio/visual media works with the writing)
**For best results, watch the video below while listening to the music linked to the playlist at the top of the piece. Then leave the music on repeat while you read the poem.
"On her eyelashes the fog brings you trembling mercury…"
-The Fog, Carlos V. Suárez
Fig. 22: Gate Crashing: [Playlist: iBenji, Seems]
Part 1:
it all starts with an itch that inward look:
the wet dog nanosecond then a twist and counter
the speed of oscillation varies with distance from the center of the creature but
the body already knows how to get to other worlds
close your eyes if you must but trust
the break follow the wobble it's a flywheel in your pocket
timing the path of intersection with the already turning
to converge and merge and merry-go-flung
the motion always invisible at onset but you feel it coming
deep inside an unnamable internal tissue
a supermassive formation collapsing into a relativistic star
please don't stop cracking the excitable cells in the dragon's tail
until the spike train
rolls with great speed and variable friction from the mouths
of voltage-gated channels
and you erupt across the threshold of the rapidly expanding pattern:
I can't tell you, dear sorcerer, what your path to the gates will look like:
all internal language is a secret working
but hang tight in that crawlspace
the worst of the ride is reaching cruising speed
and I can send some guides:
(in the mean time)
enter scarab glittering
on iridescent wings, towing
by fine invisible filaments grasped in hindmost legs
an intricately woven cobweb banner that reads
up and down one column at a time
as well as across, from left to right:
"contrasting" viewpoints on your journey divide prominent philosophers:
Sir Isaac Newton's view is a time to give and a time to dance as other "times" persist,
this view becomes a time to mourn effectively killing time at the time of death
and a time to die is part of the fundamental embrace like frames of a film strip, a spread out structure of time to plant time to uproot across neither future event nor plucked thing
what is planted: a dimension in which events sewn then thrown not discrete or measurable
yet occur as objects in a sequence a birth container one could step in or out of or
a silence kept a together lost a wasted search, give up, tear apart, kill, weep, love, hate, laugh (that's Leibniz, Kant) the transport time itself an idea certainly but not a thing but
a fundamental structure travel-able as thought
(and on a second banner, clinging to the first
via some dust bunnies and a chain of bluish laundry lint:)
Travel:
1. To go from one place to another, as on a trip; journey.
2. To go from place to place as a salesperson or agent.
3. To be transmitted, as light or sound; move or pass.
4. To advance or proceed.
5. To go about in the company of a particular group; associate: travels in wealthy circles.
6. To move along a course, as in a groove.
7. To admit of being transported without loss of quality; Some wines travel poorly.
8. Informal: to move swiftly.
9. Basketball: to walk or run illegally while holding the ball.
the second "l" in the word ball is festooned with busily rebuilding spiders,
as the passage of time cannot be directly perceived as it happens
but must be re-membered to exist
unendingly given arms legs
and breathed
from trembling drops spun into vibrating strings
ad interim, your guides have arrived:
stay tuned for Part 2
January 1, 2012
Pop-Lit Bleed Out: Soulstice, by Lance Dow and Keana Texeira
Soulstice: Luna's Dream
by Lance Dow and Keana Texeira
(613 pages/Red Tide Publishing, 2010)
ISBN : 9780578053721
Soulstice: Luna's Dream is part one in a four-part saga about vampires and werewolves co-written by 15-year-old pop-singer/model Keana Texeira and screenwriter, Lance Dow. Texeira will star in the movie version of the book, which was publicized for release in 2011 but has apparently overslept in its coffin. Soulstice is a teen romance written in the voice of its 15-year-old narrator, Luna Tremaine, a vampire who breaks the cultural code of her species by… you guessed it… falling in love with a human boy.
Before you read any further let me do you a favor: if you are a fan of well-written gothic/horror/supernatural fiction, simply skip Soulstice. I doubt you even need me to tell you that. If you are a fan of the Twilight series, you should also skip Soulstice. Frankly, everyone should skip it. However, I have made it a personal point to only write negative reviews when a book goes beyond being junk reading and crosses baldly into the territory of, as Robert Smith sang it, jumping someone else's train.
Don't get me wrong. There is a longstanding tradition of theft in literature, music, art- in all of human nature. No one really invents the wheel: we steal the idea from nature, and then we steal it from each other, making improvements along the way. The line betweeen plagiarisim and inpiration is really the difference between knock-off and innovation: one is an assisted act of creation, fueled by the influences/samples/riffs of others. The other is a cheap vampire.
For fans of the Twilight Series, (and I am not one, but let's just pretend for a moment) Soulstice is going to seem groan-inducingly familiar: the story takes place in a remote town in the Pacific Northwest, it is about vampires falling in love with humans, the trials and tribulations of high school, love at first sight, feats of inhuman strength, vampires defending the humans they love against other vampires, rebellion against cultural taboos, pop culture and fashion, running really fast in the forest, jumping really far, mood swings, brooding, emotional outbursts, and blood. Don't forget the fashion-conscious-yet-eco-friendly plugs for hemp, as well as Native Americans who appear as caricatures of doomed wisdom.
Soulstice is written in the confessional style it seems pop culture ascribes to being the universal voice of teens everywhere. Texeira's age is a consideration, but not an excuse to confuse bad writing with "voice." To be fair, Texeira hits her stride near the end of the book with fast-paced, truly gory fight scenes. If all of Soulstice were written with that kind of focus, wiped clean of asides, self-conscious meanderings off-topic, and tedious scene-setting blow-by-blows, (now I'm parking my bike, now I'm putting on my headphones) it could at least be a guilty pleasure to read at the gym.
There is very little in Soulstice that is not derivative of Stephenie Meyers' world (itself filled with plagiarism of Anne Rice, but don't get me started), which begs the question: why does Soulstice bother itself with being about vampires anyway? If nothing new is being brought to the mythology, why not do something creative with the concept and take the passionate, fresh, bloodthirsty focus of a teenage perspective and apply it to a new vein? Since the Twilight Series has done this decades' work of re-opening the pop-lit artery, the answer seems to be that there's a feeding frenzy on for derivative blood money.
Meanwhile, a generation of new hemophiles will eventually (hopefully) figure out for themselves that reading books like Soulstice is about as satisfying as a bottle of cold, skunky Tru Blood.
December 21, 2011
Antidote
Drink Me.
The daily demands and tides sometimes make me forget that there is a vast, unexplored territory inside our collective hearts and imaginations, and people are posting these every day: little jewels hung on the web for us to find.
December 17, 2011
digital gothic: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work)
Here is the newest piece from my work-in-progress:
(comments are always appreciated)
Fig. 13: waking the dead. [Playlist: Bassnectar, Timestretch (West Coast Lo Fi Remix)]
dear magician take a lesson from the raven:
you bear the dead with you everywhere
you needn't plant a stone
you needn't carve up your arms
the scent of her lost cologne is trapped in your coils
his good sweat whuffs up from inside the jacket of form
the longer you travel the more backseat drivers the more
histories take a lesson from the raven:
who wrests blood feathers from the meat of memory
and from dead weight soars on hollow bones
transforming the dead into the neutral buoyancy of everywhen
and getting totally high off the overlapping particulars:
raven street view is a see-through into each and every room
in your haunted mansion:
here a girl who wore thigh-high docs
she nicknamed bum kickers came to
live in a railroad flat above a dim set
of stairs above the lucky horseshoe
coffee shop: her room was 5 X 12
but the 12 was vertical
one of many hidden pockets beneath
the skirts of the painted lady, a space
at once a fainting room, a walk-in closet
knicknack storage, the last hitching post
for a boy who rode his horse dead to rights
right through the ceiling, leaving his body
(which could not sneak between the lattice
of matter) rucked amongst the dirty sheets
a source of much distress to the landlord
who dead reckons his 400 crusts a month
from the holey pockets of dreamers who've
stumbled or washed up or clawed their way
back from the dead toward phoenix city out
of the head-scramble of the fog, to find
a non-euclidean punk-rock wardrobe to
a dimension where whole teams of mules
along with their carts, whole brigs and barques can disappear beneath the mud and still go on sailing beneath the feet of bankers the layers of concrete no tomb but super conductor of a vessel that flickers from
form to form between frames
now a seagoing vessel
now a cable car
now a wave organ built of
grave markers (because
this place has no room
[no room!] for what is
not able or willing to
be caught dead yet
keep up jump in hold on
the light rail doors are
closing the destroyer must
navigate precisely on
the right tide to eke
its massy bulk beneath
the bridge [a gate])
into and out of a narnia that smells to some
like an odorless cala lily and to others like
dead men's shoes but to most
like a dry-erase marker, a neuromantic sting
at the back of the throat like mourning
smokes on a piss-splashed stoop
[our painted lady's boots] where
a 24-year-old perfectly willing to
be caught dead will moniker himself
bucky or goon or emperor and languishes
[behind blackout curtains] [in the saloon]
while supplying snow/liquor/gold dust/
lattes/codexes to his kingdom of the dead
you can pay later but sit on his lap for awhile because
playing dead is a full-time occupation and brutal beauty
reigns forever in this garret: bread from dumpsters
peanut butter on plastic knives duct-taped shoes
stump-footed pigeons sharpie hearts and daggers
inked in permanent marker on the thirsty skin
the inhabitants of the rooms forget
they are inside its rooms peering into
little rectangles of other buildings to
other rooms into lcd boxes of
varying sizes all day which give the
illusion that they are not inside a room
which is the soul of mistaking dead time
for something dead for being
dead wrong about what's always going to be
dead ahead
wait now where's the raven our conductress
it's so easy to get lost
when one thing slides so neatly into the nest when
years elapse while we're in the air
just navigating the jamb from one
room to the next and meanwhile
the lucky horseshoe has burned and
all those walls where the dead were
letter ringer certain
doornail dodo
neck up and waist down
in the water spit of and cut
broke and buried
easy drunk gorgeous
rolling over
well it's a dead giveaway:
they've knocked 'em dead and
reopened as a wine bar
raven where's the chicken exit?
the lamp post in the snowy wood
get me out of these chambers or at least
meet me halfway with a psychic map
I'm dead serious
dear magician this is not a beanstalk
it's a metallic breath bitter aspirin under the tongue it's a room so small
you can stand in the middle
and touch five of its six futures
it's an open window the blind soul can't find
hovering, transparent, on updrafts
as it bumps the ceiling and ricochets the walls
it's your work ahead of you
which starts at what everybody takes to be the dead end
and is really
a nimble climb up a pilfered ladder
straight up and out of sight
December 15, 2011
Instant City: a literary exploration of San Francisco, Issue 7
Instant City 7
Editor: Gravity Goldberg
(107 pages/Instant City, San Francisco)
Founded by Gravity Goldberg and Eric Zassenhaus in 2004, Instant City is a biannual journal that publishes fiction, non-fiction and art about San Francisco. Instant City 7, published in spring 2010, is a departure from the journal's usual theme-based collections. For this one, the editors decided to let those mysterious muses that whisper into pens and keyboarding fingers dictate the theme. What were those muses whispering about? Naughty, cheap, objectionable, crass, misguided, desperate, hilarious, absurd, delinquent, questionable, base, wicked and in short, completely riveting bad behavior.
For those readers who live or have lived in San Francisco, there is something unspeakably satisfying about knowing the places where these stories take place. If you thought you were the only person who recognized the 38 Geary bus as a confrontation magnet—you're wrong. Or maybe your experience picks up where someone else's leaves off, as in Lincoln Mitchell's story "Waiting for the 43," where the narrator imagines the bus disappearing to exotic places named Prague and Geneva, after it leaves the Haight. Even if you have lived in San Francisco for many years, (or are one of its seven natives) you will never know the city the same way another person knows it. The idea that your stomping grounds also belong intimately and emotionally to someone else is an uncanny sensation, akin to fitting together the pieces of a metaphysical jigsaw puzzle, or maybe just to shopping at Out of the Closet. And for those who don't live in San Francisco, the place names and specifics won't matter, but the parallel experiences will. Stories, particularly those about people doing what they are not supposed to do, are as universally compelling as playing ding-dong ditch or making prank calls.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Instant City 7 is the nature of the bad behavior people are writing about. It's strange to see, quite clearly, the imprint of economic fallout and its accompanying stifling of a sense of well-being almost unilaterally across these stories: a former convict working as a drug counselor is now being blackmailed for an amount of money he can only obtain illegally; the forced happiness of dirt-streaked, stumbling and sloppy recreational drug-taking; trying (and failing) to be slutty on craigslist; the ugly truth of waking up in a post web-designer, post job, job market.
San Francisco's misbehavior of 2010 is not the glamorous, rock n' roll to-hell-with-it bohemianism of the 60's and 70's, nor the cocaine and cash driven Top-Gun mentality of the 80's, and definitely not a 90's parachute-panted, can't-touch-this, SUV-infested, bling-driven impropriety . We're even past the air-brushed and trout-pouted shenanigans of the early 2000's. San Francisco of the moment seems to be a little dazed, a little tentative: less into escapism and more about survival, which makes sense when Burning Man has become a tourist attraction, or when a life and death near miss might be as simple as accidentally stumbling into a drug deal, or when a sack with a live duck in it seemed like a bright idea until the reality of the knife enters the equation. It seems from these stories, that San Franciscans are feeling an undercurrent of solemnity and exhaustion, like people posting wanted posters on telephone poles that say, REWARD: LOST FUN. Last seen so long ago we're not sure of what it looked like.
Still, even with the more shell-shocked nature of these stories of folly, this is still San Francisco: the Barbary Coast, Baghdad by the Bay, the City that Knows How. It's the place where the best role-model you ever had could best be described as "Rosie Greer meets RuPaul," and where "the sidewalks sometimes sparkle."
Want another take on Instant City 7? SF Literary Culture Examiner Evan Karp's got VIDEO.
Contributors: Robert Arnold, David Becker, August Bleed, Charlie Callahan, Scott Carroll, MK Chavez, Joshua Citrak, Sherilyn Connelly, Amanda Davidson, Sonya Derman, Dylan Dockstader, Andrew O. Dugas, Cathy Fairbanks, Kimia Ferdowski, Rona Fernandez, Casey FizSimons, Philip Franklin, Cody Frost, David Fullarton, Charles Gatewood, Peter Hermann, Beau Knight, Kyle Knobel, R.J. Martin, Rob McLaughlin, Christopher McLean, Cynthia Mitchell, Lincoln Mitchell, Alex Nowik, David Plumb, Aaron Rodriguez, Mary Taugher, Kevin Thomson, Stephanie Vernier, Atom Wong and Chris West.
