Rand Richards Cooper provides the requisite summation of how we have ended up adrift in a sea of foreclosures and lost jobs. Yet his essay in DB11 transcends facts and figures, which we’ve all heard before from the pundits, those talking heads on the cable news channels whose word may not really be their word, just a stream of excuses that constitute a job.
Cooper’s lifestyle might mirror my own goals. I have always had a conflict between goals and priorities similar to the conflict between wants and needs — conflicts, by the way, that could be characterized as direct consequences of capitalism, consumerism, and every other negative construct of the western world. I have a goal of publishing a sellable book. Why? Assuming that the book nets a decent paycheck, what do I want to use the money for? A new computer? This iBook G4 is barely passing muster.
Perhaps I’m publishing neither to tell a story nor for the paycheck. I’m winging it. Perhaps our “contraction” is a correction from a collective mistake we made while winging it. So what do I, as an individual, really want? Back to the parallel with Cooper’s lifestyle: are my wants and needs downscale in comparison to the circumstances that led to the contraction, or have they always been authentically modest? Am I just another enabler of the spree? I’m 27 years old, so I’ve had some time to think about these things. It turns out that all I want is a house with no more than two bedrooms, and that house should have decent plumbing and protection against the elements. One car will do for errands and outings; I’m good with public transit. I’d really love to live in the city, but San Francisco is extraordinarily prohibitive. I’ll probably be a lifelong renter. Finally, I’ll need a husband. In the western world, that’s a challenge as seemingly insurmountable as economic woe. But it’s not very good fodder for a cable talk show.
By Joe Ramelo, DB Social Media Assistant.
Drunken Boat contributor Ed Vespucciano meditates on using Second Life to virtualize the art gallery experience.
My first passion was writing poetry, and it still is, but, over the years, as I became a photographer, film maker, musician, video artist, and web programmer, I have always been looking for ways to combine the non-semantic elements of poetry into some wider form of sense experience. I toyed with the “Concrete Poetry” of the 1970s and tried painting poems, even going so far as casting a large Lucite block in which colored words were to float in three dimensions adding to their meaning and effect as the reader moved around them in space. Unfortunately, the toxic Lucite brew dissolved all my ink, leaving me with only a conceptual piece: a clear block of plastic – The Poem that Might Have Been.
So now, in the digital age, my dreams have finally come true! Under the influence of Jonathan Lethem’s excellent novel Chronic City, I investigated the virtual online world of Second Life (SL). I was immediately drawn into the community of artists, poets and musicians who are building the do-it-yourself universe. Poetry readings and musical performances are common in SL; walking into the room as an avatar, listening to artists, also embodied, on a stage, and chatting with other audience members after the show is an experience, if not as good as real, at least several cuts above listening to recordings or ordinary broadcast events.
The possibilities for creation in SL are exciting. Although one can work with real tools like Photoshop, Gimp, Maya, Poser, Blender, etc., and then upload the work into SL, everyone has access to the tools built into the avatars to build complicated 3D objects, take pictures of anything there with a flexible mobile camera view, programming scripts to give movement and life to objects and communicate with other avatars (i.e. people). There is audio – voice chat and streaming music capability – and a limited function to show small videos. The community of artists in SL is growing and everyone there is eager to meet the challenge of building things that an audience can see, hear, walk around, fly around, merge into, interact with, and generally experience without the usual limitations of chemistry, biology or physics. It is free to sign up and log on and the economics of art in SL come close to the digital version of Jean Cocteau’s famous dictum for cinema: “Film will become an art form when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.”
Second Life claims to have millions of registered users and as many as 80,000 people logged on at any given time. I have met people from Hawaii, Uruguay, Equatorial Guinea, Australia, France, Louisiana, Kentucky, Texas, Germany and Japan and communicated with them via my chat translator. In my first few months “in-world”, as they say, I have been able to mount a show of Visual Poetry at Araminta Kroitshov’s Vividblack Gallery, that could never have existed before. I am grateful to the visionaries at Drunken Boat who have championed high quality digital web art and, indeed, for publishing my work. I hope to see their vision extending into the three-dimensional metaverse soon. There is a vast audience of sensitive, intelligent people in Second Life, looking for art.
Click here for details about Sex With Typos, Ed’s art exhibition on Second Life.
SEX WITH TYPOS
February 1- March 12 2010
Vividback Gallery
Drunken Boat contributor Ed Vespucciano invites you to his exhibition of Visual Poetry, SEX WITH TYPOS, at the Vividblack Gallery, in “Second Life”, (near the Hotel Chelsea) February 1 – March 12, 2010.
SEX WITH TYPOS was created for the Second Life world using only the tools and materials available in SL: avatar created pictures and chat texts, the currency of life and vitality there. All the photographs were taken with the SL avatar camera (or perv-cam) and the text layers were created using IBM Word-Cloud Generator software to process actual local chats or instant message (IM) conversations.
“These scenes are sometimes real encounters, sometimes a combination of texts and pictures from different SL sources, but they all represent the heart of experience I have drawn from real people in Second Life. However cyborgian we may get in the virtual world, we are all still thinking with minds of meat.”
No avatars were harmed during the creation of these works of art.
Reception – Saturday, February 6th 2010 at 3pm SLT (6pm EST) at Vividblack Gallery. Party at 7 – drinks & dancing.
: : Click here for more information
The launch of Radha Says, the first book published by Drunken Boat Books, wildly exceeded expectation. On the evening of Friday, January 22, the event, which was open to the public, took place on the thirteenth floor of the National Press Club Building in the First Amendment Lounge. The author of this blog post is a new intern, and after getting lost navigating the streets of Washington DC, eventually I showed up at the event thinking that I had missed the beginning. But due to high sales being conducted by Lead Editors Ravi Shankar and Leslie McGrath at the First Amendment entrance, I arrived just in time to do some mingling and even conduct some very intern-style gophering for Ravi.
After an introduction by Ravi, the launch officially kicked off with a prayer led by the Reverend Dr. Denise King-Miller. In addition to her post as Professor at the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University, she is an AME Ordinated minister.
Those close to Vazirani read selections from Radha Says, but the most affecting segment of the evening was from Heea, Reetika’s mother, who channeled her daughter’s memory with a heartfelt speech that acknowledged and thanked friends and family. The result was a significant reminder that, beyond the publication of Radha Says, Reetika’s essence not only lives on, but was also actively in attendance at her book launch.
A wonderful turnout
Drunken Boat Lead Editors Ravi Shankar and Leslie McGrath
E. Etheldbert Miller, the prolific literary activist and good friend to the late Reetika Vazirani. Miller was responsible for bringing her final manuscript to the attention of Drunken Boat.
Dorothy Harbeck, federal judge and Reetika Vazirani’s roommate at Wellesley.
Ambassador Connie Morella, who served for eight years in the MD legislature, where she befriended Reetika’s mother, Heea Vazirani Fales
After the launch, guests were treated to a sumptuous reception augmented by fine wine, cheese, and a savory rice and beans entree.
While the general consensus was that Reetika would have loved the launch, you also couldn’t deny that the convivial nature between friends, colleagues, and even newcomers such as myself resolutely evoked her presence. Our heartfelt gratitude to the evening’s speakers, as well as the staff of the National Press Club.
You can see more photos from the event here.
Photos by Joe Ramelo, DB Social Media Assistant. Text by Joe Ramelo with Sarah Clark, DB Assistant Managing Editor.
“The crisis is the moment of judgment that suspends all other judgments. In the crisis, imperceptibly quick and interminably long timespans are fused together. In the language of physics, the crisis is the strong force, the recovery the weak force.” ~Paul Stephens
The following post is based on ‘Birthday’, a poem in the new collection Radha Says, published by Drunken Boat Media. Click here to purchase the collection.
When you are intimidated by poetry, meanings in the work become confabulations. Even in a favorite piece, the sense of respect that you develop for the piece, the poet, or perhaps both, is at once overshadowed by fear of unknowing. Readers who are new to poetry will find some comfort in Reetika Vazirani’s frequent use of the caesura. These pauses within verse are part of an overall poetic agenda, but for the casual reader, they are notes of relief; in sheet music, they would be rests. In the case of Vazirani, the agenda might be to introduce a contrasting thought. For the rest of us, the caesura is a chance to take stock, and then move on.
Like the other pieces in Radha Says, ‘Birthday’ begins with an idea, espoused in the title, and gradually evolves. In between “wholeness in me” and “doors opening”, a journey has taken place both literal — a hall, a stock room, and modes of transportation — and symbolic — the past connecting into the present, as “in the house on Tubman Street”, with a looming uncertain future. ‘Birthday’ is also a construct of observation: Washingtonians (the poet was a local) will identify with ‘doors opening’, which in itself marks the end of a journey as well as passage into a new beginning. The poet is our guide, and those of us who are casual readers would do well to savor the breaks in verse, take stock, and then resume behind her lead. Reetika Vazirani passed away in 2003, but she continues reciting in the moment of silence.
By Joe Ramelo, DB Social Media Assistant. Check out the Radha Says book launch event this Friday the 22nd. See the Upcoming Events sidebar for more details.
“I like ridiculous rhyme. I like puns. I like extremely obvious rhymes and extremely cunning, sneaky, impossible or grotesque rhymes. They are all good to me.”
Drunken Boat is looking for short shorts, very short or flash fiction pieces that meditate on the often paradoxical relationship between freedom and belonging. Writers might, for example, consider how consumer culture, dislocation or displacement, migration, interpersonal relationships, familial pulls, cultural and ethnic identification limits or expands ones notions of belonging and home. Folio will be included in Drunken Boat #12. To submit, please go to our submissions page Questions? editor @ drunkenboat dot com. Maximum: 1000 words. Deadline: May 15, 2010.
“Brown buffalos get English in workaday schools a meaningful tattoo of unforgiving blood if they’re lucky. Bullets curse barrio poets who eat them like dulces then spit out histories of pain.” ~ Paul Lobo Portugés
Drunken Boat has wonderful news on a number of fronts!
First, we’re proud to announce the addition of Heather Bryant to our editorial staff as our Nonfiction Editor. Bryant is a well-regarded nonfiction writer with a broad range of interests and some great ideas for Drunken Boat’s future. She is the Spring 2010 Emerging Writer-in-Residence at Randolph College. She won the 2009 Southeast Review Narrative Nonfiction Contest. A fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a Visiting Artist in writing at the American Academy in Rome in 2009, Heather Bryant has taught writing at the Youth Action Coalition and the Girl Scout Scholars Program. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared or are forthcoming with The Southeast Review, Women Writers, and Seal Press.
We asked Heather to give a sense of herself as a writer and she delighted us with the following response:
“My all-time favorite desert island books are If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin, Hurdy-Gurdy by Tim Seibles, All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler, A Fanatic Heart by Edna O’Brien, and Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye. All of these contain the spark, humor, and poetry I look for in non-fiction. I studied writing at Smith College, the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and the Prague Summer Writing Seminars. Between Prague and my time at the American Academy, I visited and met writers in Ljubljana (Slovenia), Stavanger (Norway), and Dublin. I’m eager to bring international writers into the nonfiction folios of Drunken Boat as well as great contemporary US writers. I also want to encourage poets and fiction writers to make the leap over to nonfiction. Topics that interest me include gender, the body, human rights, truth-telling, and identity.”
Drunken Boat is so pleased to have promoted assistant editor Sarah Clark to the position of Assistant Managing Editor. Clark has been with us for eighteen grueling months, starting as an intern and becoming an indispensable part of Drunken Boat’s daily functioning and vision for the future. Clark holds a BA in English and International studies from VCU and was the editor of Poistesme, VCU’s literary magazine. She has interned or worked for Blackbird, the Paris Review, Web Del Sol, and Open City. She plans to finish her masters in modernist literature at Queen Mary, University of London.
2010 is the year in which Drunken Boat becomes a semi-annual publication. We will be launching our 11th issue on January 30th, featuring an interview with United States Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, a themed nonfiction folio looking at Life in a Time of Contraction around the world, as well as some of the best poetry, fiction, photography, sound and web art we’ve ever come across.
Our twelvth issue will feature a folio on Irish American playwright Eugene O’Neill, curated by O’Neill scholar Robert Dowling, with contributions by a number of brilliant, famous, and downright notorious Irish American artists, writers and actors!
