Gabe Durham's Blog, page 20

FUN CAMP will be published by Mud Luscious Press

Whoa, whoa, wow: Friends, I am very excited to announce that my FUN CAMP, my novel-in-shorts, is going to be released by Mud Luscious Press in 2013.

As a part of their novel(la) series, FUN CAMP will join the ranks of Sasha Fletcher, Ben Books, Molly Gaurdy, Matthias Svalina, Michael Stewart, and Norman Lock.

A huge thank you to Mud Luscious editors J.A. Tyler and Andrew Borgstrom for giving the book their close attention and interest. I also want to thank Sasha Fletcher, who strongly suggested I send MLP the book. "I don't know," I said, "I think this book is too chatty for them." And then I sent it anyway.

Also, big thank you to the UMass friends who looked at early forms of many of these pieces, and to the editors of Matchbook, Notnostrums, Dogzplot, Everyday Genius, A cappella Zoo, Nano Fiction, Saltgrass, Hobart, Western Humanities Review, decomP, Wigleaf, The Lifted Brow, NOÖ Journal Gargoyle, American Short Fiction, Monkeybicycle, Quick Fiction, Dark Sky Magazine, The 2nd Hand, Pear Noir!, and Diagram.

I've posted a lot of google image camp pictures on this blog. Now here are a few personal ones (all enlargeable):

me on the far right

(To be clear, that's a Skamania '98 t-shirt I'm wearing in the first photo.)

Two years is both a long wait and not a long wait at all. Two years ago, I'd already written a handful of the earliest pieces in FUN CAMP. Two years from now, I will still occasionally be getting ideas for new Fun Camps and begging J.A. Tyler to stop the presses so I can cram new ones in.

So let's all promise that in two years from today, we'll meet again, and we'll see what kind of people we've blossomed into. I will be the one trying to sell you a book.

Paul Thomas Anderson Movies from Least Favorite to Favorite

Hard Eight

Magnolia

Punch-Drunk Love

Boogie Nights

There Will Be Blood

I met Debra Leigh Scott at the AWP book fair in DC, and t...

I met Debra Leigh Scott at the AWP book fair in DC, and then she interviewed me and others (Sarabande, University of Iowa Press) for her New York Journal of Books article, Small Presses and Literary Magazines Continue to Innovate and Thrive. Seems like she went away with a positive impression of the small press book world. Check it out!

"I know art, but I don't know what I like."

If I write a marriage memoir, it's going to be called, Want to Split a Beer?

My favorite bit in This is Spinal Tap: David says, "You know, if we were serious and we said, 'Yes, she should be forced to smell the glove,' then you'd have a point, but it's all a joke."  Nigel jumps in and says, "It is and it isn't. She should be made to smell it, but…" and then David goes, "But not, you know, over and over."

I wrote a bunch of dumb lists this weekend, starting with the Radiohead one. I'll roll them out now and then.

I have this vision where if we fill the internet up with enough dumb lists and cats, some brave government will eventually roll out The Internet 2, a long continuous sheet of blank bytes across the ocean floor. What will we fill it with? Will the internet's sequel be the one to actually save us?

I sang The Hearse Song for my tutoring kids and won big points. By the end of the day, they all had photocopies of the lyrics. I'm glad that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is no less cool now than it was when I was a kid. I was surprised, looking at the book as an adult, at how many of the stories ended with instructions to scream something spooky. Maybe that's the ultimate ending to anything.

Cedar Rapids was funny.

Bob's Burgers is funny. Great use of Kristen Schaal.

Rango was okay. Liz and I took our friends' kid to see it, and he liked it. In the car afterward, he'd go, "Liz, who was your favorite character?" "Gabe, who was your second favorite character?" "Gabe, who was your least favorite?" I bet I was like that.

Archer is another edgy cartoon that gets too many kicks out of oh yeah I went there. I've seen the first 3 episodes. Maybe it gets better.

From this Norm MacDonald interview: "In my entire life in comedy, I've only seen Kinison, Stern, Saturday Night Live when I was a kid, and Letterman's first talk show—those are the only original things I ever fucking saw in my whole comedian life. Everything else, you say, "Oh, I've seen that about 10 billion times." There's that saying, "I don't know art, but I know what I like." The inverse is kind of true. I know art, but I don't know what I like. You get so immersed in it that nothing appeals to you."

And: "I guess what I find funny is that when I'm bombing, I start smirking; then they fucking hate me. Because they think I'm making fun of them or something. But the reality of it makes me laugh. Comedy is surprises, so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh, that's funny. It's definitely funny watching. If I'm in the back of the room and a guy's fucking bombing, that's the fucking funniest thing ever. There's nothing funnier than seeing that. So I have a little bit of an out-of-body experience where I enjoy the scenario, and I really do like seeing a crowd turn into a mob, and I do nothing to stop it. People can become really dangerous."

And: "I tried really hard on Weekend Update to do something that I considered original, which was, I tried to cut all cleverness out of the joke. I've always been very averse to innuendo, especially sexual. I find it cowardly or something."

I've always been rooting for Norm. In high school, my friends and I watched Dirty Work many times. So little regard for acting or even wardrobe. Like anytime someone calls him Mitch, I expect him to flinch a little and correct them: "No, no. My name is Norm."

The 20 Best Radiohead Songs

This list began as "just my opinion" but was later confirmed by scientists.

From Pablo Honey: None. But to be fair, I don't think I've even heard all of it.

From The Bends: Just, High and Dry

From OK Computer: Airbag, Paranoid Android, Karma Police

From Kid A: Idioteque, Everything in its Right Place, Morning Bell, Optimistic

From Amnesiac: Life in a Glasshouse, Packt Like Sardines

From Hail to the Thief: There There, 2 + 2  = 5, Sit Down Stand Up

From In Rainbows: 15 Step, Reckoner, All I Need

From The King of Limbs: Separator, Lotus Flower, Giving Up the Ghost

From B-Sides and Other Stuff: None.

-

Close Calls: Jigsaw Falling into Place, Weird Fishes, Exit Music, Let Down, No Surprises, Fake Plastic Trees, I Might Be Wrong

Aquatic Monkeys vs. Cannibal Meat Farms: The Dueling Futures of Dougal Dixon

My post on Dougal Dixon's After Man and Man after Man is up at The Rumpus as part of their "Last Picture Book That Creeped Me Out" series.

Story/Song @ Casablanca Coffee, April 1

Hey, hey: Please join me at a Nashville reading on Friday, April 1.

Todd Dills with the scoop:

Musicmaker Mike Willis (http://mikewillismusic.com/), good friend of THE2NDHAND in our south co-HQ, proposed an idea not so long ago that now comes to fruition, an evening combining song and story toward a different sort of Music City listening room with interplay between genres.

On the first Friday of April, none other than the grand Fool's Day, we convene with Willis and other guests for the first such event, a couple hours' worth of shorts and music from 6:30 p.m. on at Casablanca Coffee in the Gulch. Stop in, enjoy a hot brew or a beer and listen:

Story/Song @ Casablanca Coffee, 602 12th Avenue South, Nashville (615) 942-7666

FEATURING

**prose work by: Nashville writer/Keyhole magazine editor Gabe Durham and THE2NDHAND editor Todd Dills

**music by Mike Willis and others

**sketch theater shorts by the crew behind the burgeoning Nashville No Shame Theater, featuring among others Lynn Edwards, Dean Shortland, and Marin Miller

SmokeLong Weekly

Hey, I'm going to be guest editing SmokeLong Weekly very soon: March 14-20. So in one week, I'll be reading every submission that comes my way (make sure and submit to SmokeLong Weekly and not general submissions) and then I'll pick my favorite for publication. Thanks to Beth Thomas for inviting me!

Here are the other upcoming guest editors:

March 7-13: Doug Paul Case

March 14-20: Gabe Durham

March 21-27: Sherrie Flick

April 11-17: Ben Loory

April 18-24: Aubrey Hirsch

May 2-8: xTx

See you in a week.

Aquatic Monkeys vs. Cannibal Meat Farms: The Dueling Futures of Dougal Dixon

A couple of the more exciting book-stumbles I've enjoyed recently are Geologist Dougal Dixon's "zoology of the future" After Man (1981) and its "anthropology of the future" sequel, Man After Man (1990).

After Man is a credible paleontology/speculative fiction bonanza that runs on the sober premise that our era is over. The end wasn't dramatic or sudden or particularly sad, it was just the culmination of humanity's long-brewing bad habits. We blew it and died and took a lot of animals with us.

But not all the animals. Those that survived kept evolving, and now we're visiting them 50 million years after the Age of Man. The book skips around to various ecosystems–jungle, desert, plains–and shows artist renderings of what the animals there have adapted into, with captions explaining why.

For instance, rabbits have grown to fill in the niche deer left in their extinction and rats have grown to fill the wolf niche:

Monkeys have learned to swim:

And here's a cuddly hell-spawn called a night stalker:

If I remember right (the book is back at the library), the night stalker evolved from the bat, outgrew eyes, grew big fangs and claws, and turned its wings into ears.

You've got to wonder if some of these creatures began in the author's nightmares, if he worked backward to make them plausible. I wouldn't fault him for it.

What this "picture book for grown-ups" did for me was remind me that our planet's real timeline isn't one of human history, but of its own history. And if you look at pictures of dinosaurs while consciously turning off the part of your brain that goes, "yeah, yeah, dinosaurs," another voice goes, "holy shit, there were dinosaurs on the earth." Like many true things, it sounds dumb when you put it into words. In this light, After Man starts to look less like sci-fi entertainment ("What if it was like this?") and more like a speculative science ("It could go kinda like this").

So why didn't this book, now 30 years old, spawn a new genre? A science fiction with an emphasis on the science minus plot or characters? A literature of Darwinian curiosity?

Well, it did spawn a bad British TV show called "The Future is Wild," a 2003 CGI mess without a high enough budget to be entertaining or a low enough budget to be campy.

[image error]

But Dixon's own sequel, Man After Man, is really more of a spin-off. It's also way closer to straight sci-fi because it supposes a whole lot more.

In a new potential future, humanity has run out of resources so it relies on genetic engineering to create sea humans, robot humans (like the heads in jars on Futurama), and space humans (who can venture outside the spaceship to do repair work without a suit) to adapt to the new challenges of life on Earth, and then sends classic humans out to colonize other planets.

With most of the classic humans gone, genetic engineering goes forgotten and the engineered tribes of humans live in competition with one another. (See? Less intuitive than "animals kept adapting.") Also, there are a lot of groany flash fictions of what it's like to live in that time and place. As in After Man, the real fun here is in the pictures & captions, and Dixon's a way better creature creator than he is a fiction writer.

Chicken fight!

The perpetually anxious sea people:

Then comes the twist ending. 5 million years later, the ancestors of the humans who colonized space come back and take over Earth. They don't know it's their home planet, though, and they ravage the place into submission within a hundred years, but not before engineering the locals into food giants:

This last drawing is most depressing and rings truest: Millions of years in the future, human ancestors make meat farms out of other human ancestors.

Even if the second book's premise is a bit more strained, Dixon pulled off a neat trick: An initially sunnier premise ("We found a way to make it! Humanity persists!") begets a world much more nightmarish than one in which we've been wiped out.

So would it be misanthropic of me to choose Future World A with the giant rabbits over Future World B where we're shaving gyro meat off our brothers' backs? In a classroom, here's where I'd explain to students that the question I've just posed is a great example of the "either/or fallacy" in which two options are presented as if they're the only two options when really there are many possibilities for the long-term future of our species. Then I'd pray I'm right.

Johnny Cash's "Hurt" came on the radio and she began to cry softly onto her odometer.

I'm reading a bunch of undergrad literary journals for a contest I'm judging. These stories and poems are talking to each other in strange ways.

The biggest thread is: These young short story writers cannot stop inserting music and lyrics into scenes. The girl gets into the car and who is playing on the radio but LADY GAGA? You love experiencing her in life, now experience someone experiencing her in art! The girl and her boyfriend get in the car (almost always the car) and–uh oh–there's that Beyonce single they both enjoy! At the pharmacy, a guy overhears Toad the Wet Sprocket's "All I Want" and taps his foot. (And then in that story there's actually a footnote recommending "All I Want" to the reader in case he or she is unfamiliar.)

For these kids, the songs are usually a kind of insta-mood creation that over-relies on the reader's familiarity with the song(s) in question. "I don't know, I just liked it!" Fair enough. As John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction, "I guess every superhero need his theme music." And in fact, I remember doing the same thing in a story I was writing in college. I don't think it was learned, but rather absorbed from movies and TV, which doesn't reference music but actually plays it. The radio in fiction nearly always feels conspicuous. It's a tiny deus ex machina, God crooning some truths or ironic falsehoods about the character's condition. Or it isn't God, it's just a song on the radio, just some song, in which case the song sits there, begging to be contended with.

If you've just got to soundtrack your fiction, the CD player and iPod are better plot devices because they can be attached to character. (The iPod on shuffle, however, could get you back in trouble. You have 7,000 songs and God wants you to land on the one in which John Mellencamp sings about how life goes on long after the thrill of livin is gone.)

Still. Music is part of life. It has its place. Never set rules about leaving stuff out of fiction. So let's try a responsible one… how about… An hour into her drive, she noticed that music had been playing. Journey's Greatest Hits. Still? For how many months had the disc been on permanent rotation? At what point had she ceased to hear it at all?

Or you know. Like that but better.

If I was nineteen, I'd currently be shoehorning the following into my fiction:

Typhoon

Jonsi

Laura Veirs