Smears & Straight Talk
This season’s political blockbuster brings us a mediated brawl fought with logos, banners, websites, email spam, online videos and doctored images. Amused by the strivings of the righteous and desperate, we already know the campaign catchphrase will be something akin to, “It’s the YouTube video, stupid.” We also know that no one will ever know for sure whether or not anyone else knows for sure about anything.
Barack Obama said something or stood too close to someone else who said something. He wore something or didn’t wear something. He went somewhere or didn’t go somewhere else. His wife also said something. She might also have gone somewhere.
John McCain said something and then said something different. He stood apart from someone and then stood next to someone. He is this old or else he is that old. He called his wife something. She might also have called him something.
Who has time to triple-check the counter-claims? It’s far more expedient to be political fans the way we’re sports fans—mindless, rabid—and we have the logos and T-shirts to prove it.
Full essay at Voice.
Opium 6 Go Green! (But Save Me First)
The Go Green! issue of Opium Magazine (Spring 2008) is now available. Sample spreads at davidbarringer.blogspot.com. (You can also see sample spreads of issues 3, 4 and 5 on my site). Meanwhile, buy the issue or subscribe here.
Contents: stories by Aimee Bender, Benjamin Percy, and many others. Winners of the Opium Bookmark Story Contest. Each issue comes with a bookmark on which is printed the winning 250-word story. Interview with Amanda Lear. 100-word stories from Tuesday Shorts, including one by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Select stories from the wit-lit ezine Sweet Fancy Moses. Beautifully wrought satire from the “Go Green! Guidebook of Restraint & Responsibility,” by yours truly. Art from Tymek Jezierski. Cartoons from CM Evans and John Callahan. Editor Todd Zuniga.
Bad Company: New Opium Issue 5
Editors: Todd Zuniga, Elizabeth Koch
Designer & Contributor: David Barringer
Contents include fiction, poetry, cartoons, winners of the short-memoir contest judged by Daniel Handler, an interview with author William Gibson, and much more
Winter 2007 | 7×10 | 144 pp. | $10
Subscriptions at OpiumMagazine.com. See cover & sample spreads at davidbarringer.com (where you can also purchase the mag and/or bundles with other books).
LAUNCH PARTY SAN FRANCISCO TONIGHT 10/12/07
Litquake, Opium5 launch & Literary Death Match at the Swedish American Hall. Features Daniel Handler (Opium) v. Wesley Stace (Swink) v. Gary Kamiya (Salon) v. Evany Thomas (McSweeney’s). Judges Ben Greenman (New Yorker), Oscar Villalon (SF Chronicle) and Shaun Landry (Oui Be Negroes) pick the winners. Doors open at 7, show starts at 8. $15 price gets you entry and a copy of Opium5.Information here.
LAUNCH PARTY NYC 10/23/07
Information here.
Barringer’s American Home Life
+ American Home Life, the new comic family novel by David Barringer.
200 pages | $12 (includes shipping within U.S.) | Signed Copy | Choice of Free Gift!
“With a smidgen of George Saunders and a touch of Aimee Bender, Barringer’s American Home Life is an original American confection: bittersweet, satisfying and true.”—Dave Housely, Barrelhouse
+ Bundle AHL with other books and products (postcards, posters, other books) at a discount.
To order:
1. Pay by Paypal to account “davbarring AT aol DOT com” and include your address and choice of free gift when ordering.
-OR-
2. Send email to “dlbarringer AT gmail DOT com.”
Link.
Harper’s E-Archive Interview
For designers and all those who love to study the visual histories of periodicals, reading text without seeing the page is like reading a screenplay without seeing the movie. Harper’s Magazine, on the other hand, has gone all the way. It has created what associate editor Paul Ford calls “a massive, interlinked, searchable document that provides quick access” to 157 continuous years of Harper’s—with illustrations and all. Working alone, without any consulting team and without fuss, Ford has been a man with a plan, a scanner and a lot of patience.
Carnage for Kids
Horror movie DVDs are included with every other genre of new-release DVD on Blockbuster’s wall. That means Andre the Butcher chops next to Aquamarine. Cello accompanies Cheaper by the Dozen 2. The Descent snuggles up to Dr. Doolittle 3. Harry Potter, Hoot, Hoodwinked and How to Eat Fried Worms share real estate with House of Blood, Heart Stopper, Headspace, Haunted Highway and The Hills Have Eyes (Unrated). I’m not a prude. I’m disturbed by lacerated bodies, strung up and gutted, not naked ones, pumped up and thonged. I don’t care for horror flicks, but I don’t begrudge the tastes of horror fans. I’m all for the “free to” half of our civil rights, but I’m also in favor of the “free from” half. Others are free to watch Silent Scream. I’d like my kids to be free from seeing the cover for Severed.
Link.
Submit your work to “The Bush Years” Anthology
The Bush Years
A graphic literary anthology
Published fall/winter ‘07
So New Publishing
200 pages | 6×9 | black and white | paperback
Essay, Interview, Letter, Fiction, Diary, Poem, Graphic Art, Photography
Submit to: dlbarringer AT gmail DOT com
Deadline: Soft. Shoot for August 1
Editor & Designer: David Barringer
I WANT personal work exploring how you have been influenced by events/moods/trends over the course of the Bush years. Your piece does not have to literally address Bush/Cheney or Rice/Rummy, 9/11 or Afghanistan, Iraq or Abu Ghraib, Gitmo or Jon Stewart, Scooter Libby or Anna Nicole Smith. But it very well could, and it must at least be influenced by the past six years. The more directly your piece defines some mood or state of mind or tension set off by events of the Bush years, the more likely it will be accepted.
I WANT your personal experiences, not your rants and raves. I want to know how you in particular have absorbed, digested, and expressed any number of the big events of the past six years: terrorism, war, natural disaster, celebrities, corporate misconduct, new technologies. How does Iraq and Dubya, Katrina and Islam, American Idol and Apple iPods, Saddam’s execution and Osama’s evasion come out in your speech, your habits, your relationships, your emails, your artwork, your poems? It could be one paragraph from an email to a friend or an I.M. exchange with your mom or a note to yourself about how it’s hard to think about your own needs while so much is going on in the world.
Feel free to email me for clarification. I’ll post again when I put a page up about the project on my site.
Man and WIHF
My wife and I are working parents. She’s a family doctor and I, as a friend once joked, am the doctor’s wife. Nowadays, that’s “WIHF.” Before I’d read Ellen Lupton’s Voice essay, I had no idea terms like “Working In Home Father” existed. Or is it “Working At Home Father”—WAHF? No. Sounds too much like other WAFs: Women in the Air Force, the World Armwrestling Federation, the Workers Autonomous Federation, a Chinese union. Yes, I’m an exploited WWII pilot, arm-wrestling Chinese women. “Hold your grievances, boys. We’ve got a textile worker at two o’clock. Dive, dive!”
My mind flits like this, from light to light, as I stand and slice apples or sit and set type. I star in Daddy Day Care meets The Shining. This is the crazy that working parenting is. Take a WIHF.
Link.
Books of the “S.U.A.B.I” Genre
I’ve somehow finished five books this month already (airports and a cold beach), and of those are three from the “Shut Up And Buy It” Genre.
“The Last Novel,” David Markson
“Family & Other Accidents,” Shari Goldhagen
“All Things, All At Once,” Lee K. Abbott
O4 Reading NYC with Greenman
Opium Issue 4 Party
Saturday March 31 from 8:00pm to 10:30pm
at The Musical Box (East Village)
219 Avenue B (b/w 13th and 14th Streets)
NY, NY 10009 // 212-254-1731
NYC reading features new issue of Opium Magazine and The New Yorker’s Ben Greenman, who will be there with his new book of stories, A Circle is a Balloon and a Compass Both. Opium’s designer and Clusterflock contributor David Barringer will also be there. Check out more info on the Live Well Now! issue at opiummagazine.com and davidbarringer.com. Ben Greenman = bengreenman.com.
Xlibris/Alibris Conspiracy Against Authors?
I suspect, with only anecdotal evidence to back me up, that Xlibris is selling the books of their self-published authors to Alibris at a severe discount, whereupon Alibris sells the books online to their customers, with neither Xlibris nor Alibris paying a royalty to the author of the self-published work.
1. I believe this happened to me. My book, The Leap and Other Mistakes (2000), sold on Xlibris in softcover for about $18. If I, as author, wanted a copy, I’d have to pay $12 to Xlibris. On Alibris, however, I have purchased copies of my own book, The Leap, for only $3 to $4. They were clearly brand new, never opened, spines unbroken, etc. I bought at least 4 or 5 copies this way, and they were both hardcover and softcover. I never received a royalty from Xlibris or Alibris from these sales. I should have received a royalty from Xlibris when the copy was sold to or through Alibris. I suspected that this was infringing on my copyright, and so I withdrew my book from Xlibris. After I withdrew it, the $3 and $4 copies of my book disappeared from the Alibris website.
2-4. I then checked out the books of other Xlibris authors and found that their books, too, are selling on Alibris at discounted rates. (I am not counting books being sold by used-bookstores on Alibris; I’m only looking at those books that Alibris itself sells.) Black Wax, by Benjamin Watson, for example, sells for $18 on Xlibris; on Alibris, there are 13 copies for sale, each for $2.95. There are “>10″ copies of Dead Cat with Firelighter, by Francis Day, on sale at Alibris; same goes for Deadstream by Bradley T. Platt.
Now, most Xlibris books that I looked up on Alibris were not being sold online by Alibris. They were being sold by used bookstores. So this is not something happening to every author. But, I warn ye Xlibris authors to check your titles on Alibris and then check your royalty statements on Xlibris.
Love Letters, Vol. II
Volume II of Emigre’s Love Letters type catalogs features 7 new love letters. Sign up and get one free.
“Dear Priori: If Death is sleep, I will dream of you forever. In dreams, you are a goddess and I am a slave to the exercise of my mind. My mind races to conjure you and hold you still. Awake, I cannot retrace even the last seconds, cannot enter the dreamworld backward. I can only go forward, the day a blank sheet of paper I must tread, scuffing black letters to you as the planet turns so dumbly away from the light.”
Link.
Interview with George Saunders
DB: You more explicity reveal in your latest book that undergirding your satire is a spiritual primitivism, i.e. a very simple and basic individual humility in God’s world. The reason your spirituality is so primitive is because the current value systems, especially in these fictional extremes, reduce your characters to an elemental state of consciousness, very much stunted and in desperate need of loving relationships and truthful language. Diminished by circumstance, your characters are doing the best they can. Your artistic decision is to locate our moral salvation in a God toward whom our first steps are likely to be sincere but awkward. Why?
George Saunders: I like the phrase “spiritual primitivist,” kind of. I am not traditionally religious. I was raised Catholic and got a lot of good from that. My wife and I are Buddhists now, me in no small part because a lot of things I’d come to believe, through observation and experience (and via writing), I found present in those teachings…. Though it may not be a happy state of affairs, we are only as good as our individual moral impulses, and these are only as good as our willingness to be constantly reappraising them…. So maybe the important human work is to constantly be working to clarify and fire-test these impulses while improving our ability to monitor them…. In this book, what kept happening was, somebody who was lost in a shitstorm of bullshit and lies and propaganda kept struggling to get to that place of innate wisdom/kindness. To me, that’s moving, and it’s also what each of us is doing every day, maybe more in these crazy times than in others, although actually I doubt it. We’re just doing it in a particular flavor. But the extremity of the anti-truth forces (corporate logic, government forces, happy-face New Agers, our own darker impulses) and their newfound volume (via the new media, totally in bed with money) make it all that more urgent a struggle and maybe necessitates a kind of loud restating of basic truths.
Link
Link
The New Graphic Literary Journal
Opium Magazine: What do you think makes for successful editorial art in the realm of the little magazine?
Steven Heller: I think successful “editorial art”—which includes typography, illustration, ornamentation, and other visual matter—is best when the artist has free reign to create. An art director or art editor can push, pull, and otherwise make better (if necessary), but the initial impetus must come from the artist or designer, who, after all, is the expert. An editor (indeed many editors) feel they know about art, but rarely are they truly fluent enough to make a mediocre piece good, and often make good work mediocre.
From an interview in the latest issue of Opium Magazine, which itself happens to be a graphic literary shazaam (co-perpetrated by DB).
Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence
Edward Tufte is design’s champion of reason. His principles of scientific rationalism are old school, but his expressions of analytic design are sophisticated, smart, and painfully relevant. Eight years in the making, Beautiful Evidence, Tufte’s fourth book, makes a soberly brilliant case for renewing responsibility in design.
Red & Yellow: Hazard or Hamburger?
Why do we use red and yellow to alert us to fast food and danger? One 1989 theory posits that mammals developed the ability to distinguish between red, yellow and orange in order to identify ripe fruit. If this is true, then do we glimpse the red of a stop sign and salivate for cherry pie? And why, then, are poisonous snakes and frogs as brightly colored as any still life by Matisse? Fortunately, the brain doesn’t encode experience with the binary inflexibility of a machine. We are more than what is dreamt of by primates and professors.
Twisted Fun
The first offering from Elope Press is David Barringer’s Twisted Fun, a witty, racy and heartfelt collection of 35 stories, essays, satires and more. A collection of new and uncollected work, Twisted Fun is 182 pages, 6×9, with photos, illustrations, and inventive typesetting, available now for $10. Twisted Fun is what happens when a writer/designer designs and typesets his own work. Some stories are laid out conventionally, others incorporate photography, and several are laid out as found documents, such as letters, brochures, and emails. Every turn of the page brings another surprise in the exploration of form and content. Barringer is the author of the book of autobiographical design criticism, American Mutt Barks in the Yard, co-published by Emigre and Princeton Architectural Press, and the novel Johnny Red, published by Word Riot Press. He writes for I.D. Magazine, Eye Magazine, and AIGA’s Voice.
Link
Literary Lingerie
A book cover for a literary novel today is like a miniature version of the designer’s bed on Sunday morning, revealing in its exquisitely wrinkled satin sheets exactly how responsive and gentle and comprehensive a lover this cover designer can be (albeit working alone). Other than recognizing how hot the cover is and, by extension, how much enthusiasm was lavished upon the work beneath these rumpled sheets, most readers of literary novels are, presumably, not prepared to spend time interpreting cover designs. They expect to be called upon to break a sweat in the boudoir of interpretation, sure, but only between the covers. Most covers today look expensively elaborate enough so that a book buyer is not embarrassed to be seen carrying them to the counter (there are cringing exceptions). But beyond that, the reader expects the writing itself to carry the weight of meaning. The covers, in a sense, are as dispensable to the participants as lingerie balled up on the floor.
Amateur E-Reviewers are the New Indie Taste-makers
Indie bookstores employ book buyers for their individual stores, which makes for a diversity of tastes all over the country and a way for titles in smaller press runs to find audiences. As indie bookstores die out, so too go the number of book buyers. Now only a handful of individuals buy books for every Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million, Costco, Target, and Wal-Mart in the country. If you had thousands of indie-store book buyers before, now you have less than a dozen people deciding what the country’s stores will stock. Amazon (and other online sellers like Powells.com and Alibris.com) combat this by offering any title under the sun, new or old, but of course you have to know what title you want in order to search through the millions of titles at Amazon. The eccentric selections and browsing that used to be done at indie bookstores must now be done online. Hence, you have those amateur reviewers on Amazon listing their favorite design books or murder mysteries. These people are assuming online the roles once played by indie-store book buyers. Nevertheless, the result is that small-press titles that may have sold 5,000 copies in the past are ignored by publishers because the elite cadre of book buyers for BN/Wal-mart is not interested in small titles, only best-sellers. It’s a vicious cycle for the brick-and-mortar stores. For the serious or niche book reader, hope lies online, both in sales, in browsing, and for authors whose books might only sell 100 copies through Amazon.
The Evolution of “Intelligent Design”
Language evolves. The current connotations of “intelligent design” are already fast being absorbed by popular culture in media headlines and taglines (a quick Google search brings up articles on fashion, motorcycles and cell phones co-opting the i.d. phrase as a “gotcha” to make you look). Even the NYT has co-opted the phrase for a book review, the title being: “‘The Naked Woman’: Highly Intelligent Design.” Language evolves because we play with it. We never leave it alone. We use and reuse it, stealing the latest phrase for a frisson of resonance, making a bad pun to meet a deadline, cracking jokes at the bar. Remember the U2 remake of “Helter Skelter”? Bono says, “Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.” Intelligent design was never a catchphrase until political actors seized on its apparent neutrality for use as a thin edge of a wedge into public-school science classrooms. Its prevalence may have more to do with the very ease of its popular co-optation than with any intent to “own” the phrase by its political sponsors. Its very success as a phrase, in other words, may be due to its essential lack of meaning or, maybe, its flexibility to carry several meanings depending on context. It’s a bucket that can carry water or wine, cynicism or Creationism, Eve or evolution, depending on the accompanying photos. I’m also reminded of the phrases over the entrances to concentration camps in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia, things like “Work shall make you free” and “Work to fulfill the plan” and “Everyone gets what he deserves.” Theft of language recurs throughout history as a strategy in the battle of power against truth. Stealing it back, in today’s world, is more about slow dilution through repurposing in new contexts, overusing a cute phrase until its multiple cross-references refer to nothing but its own use as a familiar phrase. The popular media will drain the phrase soon enough, and the i.d. proponents’s legal defeats and community backlashes will undermine the phrase’s political utility, such that both may be searching for a newer species of sloganeering. Language evolves because we adapt it to our misuse. We’ll always come up with something new to say to ourselves.
Sign up for free Emigre type catalogs of love letters
The next two volumes of type catalogs from Emigre feature 17 love letters inspired by 17 of their typefaces. Each love letter is 250 words, and each one is a work of fiction, from the lovelorn monologue to the raging wail of the betrayed. Honestly, having written these love letters, I feel like I’m having a book of fiction published. By the way, they’re free. Just sign up on their website.
First Review of George Saunders’s Next Book
In Persuasion Nation is the next fiction collection from George Saunders. It’s due out in May. Read the first review of it at Word Riot.
“George Saunders writes social-protest fiction from the future. Sort of. Maybe it’s more accurate to say he writes corporate-protest fiction from the future. Like successful satirists from Voltaire to Vonnegut, Saunders identifies present trends and pushes them to their extremes. He imports the value systems of corporations, advertising, consumerism, and government (all American-style) into daily life, into social relationships, crossing every border until even a character’s mind, memory and identity are defined by these imposed value systems.”
I.D. Religion Issue
I.D. just published a nice religion and design issue. I have two articles in it, but don’t let that dissuade you. Here’s an excerpt from my article on the evolution of the ape-to-man graphic:
“The image is a troublemaker. Intended to simplify the difficult concept of evolution, the pictorial sequence of ape to hominid to Homo sapiens has come to stand for evolution itself. The graphic is more powerful than the concept, more moving than the caption, more seductive as a narrative myth of our beginnings than any 300-page book by Richard Leakey or Stephen Jay Gould. It is also inaccurate, misunderstood, and misleading.”
Yes, an evolution story in a religion issue. Amen.
Bush Scraps Address for Oprah
Tonight Bush scraps State of Union Address to appear on Oprah. Fresh from a public shaming of author James Frey for his memoir of lies, Oprah agreed to interview President George W. Bush about his feelings on the State of his Union.
Oprah is expected to Frey him where he sits, in a big comfortable beige chair/sofa thing on the Oprah set. If all goes as planned, Oprah will publicly shame the President for his lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, about the beneficiaries of his tax cuts, about the disasters of the recent year, and about his past alcoholism.
In front of a news media stunned by this development, White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan assured them that “the President is fully on board with this. He never liked big-government elitist stunts like Union addresses anyway. He’s a Texan. He’s the people. And Oprah knows the people. And he’s going to talk to the people through Oprah. Bush to Oprah to People. It’s gonna work.”
[Continued here.]
Quick, Make a Gift!
If it’s too late to click, then make a gift. If you’re running into shipping deadlines for your online-shopping errands, then here are a few ideas.
My kids and I often make collages. We cut up magazines and catalogs, newspapers and old books we pick up at second-hand sales or library giveaways, and we arrange the clippings on notebook pages, on large sketchpad pages, or even on posterboard, which the kids then tack onto their walls or corkboards. Instant creative and personal gift that you can forever humiliate people for even thinking about throwing away. I like to collect collage material that has to do with the receiver’s interests, from motorcycles to skydiving, from Batman to jazz.