Misc.

Thunderclap Magazine is out with Issue 5. They gave me love. It's late at work and I'm too tired to link (I know: Loserville: Population: Me). Anyways, Issue 5 is out and it rocks it like a slut in bad shoes. Buy it.

I'm currently working on trying to figure out a strange but small thing that occurred on Facebook earlier today. I'll never figure it out, and that's okay. That's the way things work. I'll eventually put it out of my mind.

On the more-self-promotion front, I also have work coming out soon from Moon Milk Review, Night Train and Connotation Press. Also Short, Fast, and Deadly as well as Fiction Collective accepted work from me today. Boom. I like people.

Potato cakes with bits of onion mixed in are good. Not good for my 1,200 cal diet with moderate exercise. But that just means extra working out. Okay.

Don't Drink and Write.

I have little to say, which you will soon find out is a complete lie. I need to use the bathroom but I'm going to just hold it. It's like when you were young, maybe on the playground or at a birthday party, and you knew you needed to just go ahead and go, but no way was that happening. Miss a moment? No way.

So now that I have you thinking of how you probably need to use the bathroom, too. Let me just say that I've developed habits. Television, as I've mentioned here before, is one. It's an escape from reality. That's my real thrill. To be jettisoned away from this bad world and find another that has strict plot lines and developments that are not nearly as disastrous as those encountered in the real world. Oh, man....the REAL world. What a scary, scary place. No?

Of course I'm only joshing. The real world is a beautiful place. The sunshine beaming down on your face. The touch of a loved one. The sharing of stories among friends. The true feeling of accomplishment that comes with doing work that MEANS something. Really MEANS something. How can these things be replaced?

Better yet...how about telling me how these things feel. If they even exist at all.

I sent my boots to a boot person who fixes boots a week ago. When I gave them to him he said they would be ready (new leather soles, etc.) in two days. A week ago. That's seven days, I think. I wonder what my boots are doing right now while I wear these slimy Sketchers and wait for the return of real footwear? Are they sitting on a shelf somewhere wondering where I am? Probably. Jack Rear, I'm going to call him Jack Rear (copyright Joey Goebel). Jack Rear said he needed to order some piece of equipment to fix the boots with and that was the reason for the extended whateverthefuckitis. Well, I want my boots. Tomorrow, fixed or not, I will spring them from this boot-fixing prison and take them home. Half-done, not touched. It doesn't matter. I want my goddamn boots. And I will have them tomorrow.

Read a post earlier today about some lady who didn't like a review written about her book, which I think was self-published and is lame unless you're Walt Whitman or James Joyce and you're not, and laughed hard. I don't laugh often, so I was grateful to have this moment to get a good gut laugh in. My book is FINE! She said (exclaimed, yelled to convince herself, etc.). I just think it's wonderful. Roxane Gay the Great and Gorgeous posted about this at the GIANT. Thank you, Roxane Gay. You help make me laugh. Negative reviews? Give me all you can. I will eat them like oranges or apples with salt or watermelon, also with salt. I will drink them like black cherry whiskey. Reviews are just reviews. Opinions. If you're gonna get that worked up about a negative review, stop writing. Just fucking stop. Do something else. Plant corn. Build model airplanes. Get your own talk show. I forget the lady's name or I would have mentioned it. I'm glad I forgot it. She pissed me off.

Ah, the rambling I've indulged in these past few hundred words. It was silly, no? I hope so.

Keep it bent, folks.

Dang.

REVIEW: Redneck Poems by Rusty Barnes

I'm not a poet. Wouldn't know a couplet from a coupling. It's why I rarely talk about books of poetry and even more rarely write poetry, but I felt a stout and strong urge to talk a bit about Rusty Barnes' REDNECK POEMS.

In this collection of fourteen poems, there is much to appreciated in as far as poetic device is concerned. I can recognize that much, but I'll go no further on that topic. Rusty moves as easily from poetry to short short fiction to longer works to editing the writing of others with equal ease and skill.

Here we're pulled into a world of hard people who by turns are aslo looking for nothing more than any of the rest of us – peace, companionship, redemption, and a healthy dose of risk in ultimately seeing these things obtained. At other turns, we're shown with a true Appalachian voice just how hard those edges can be, the misery that can come from falling against those edges as we traverse through the collection.

And at times, Rusty allows his characters to fail at the thing they most seek to obtain, as in "Hollywood Appalachian Noir: A Lesson".

In this poem, the narrator has decided to beat a guy's ass for more or less fucking with his woman, the sort of thing that spreads like wildfire in mountain towns, a virtual heat-seeking bomb of information that makes its way with record speed from the nursing home to the honky tonk.

"...I love my wife and Vaughan, /but with his sweat-thick hair and brandy snifter ways /like having a job and cold green in his pocket, /whiskey he doesn't have to color with tobacco /and
all the white teeth in sweet red gums /he didn't have to pay for on a plan but was born /with. All the teeth in the world won't save him."

And so our narrator makes his move, but there is no hero moment to be found.

"...Vaughan turns round /and strokes my jaw loose on its strings with his hard-/working fist. I am no hand at the arts of mayhem, I fear."

Then in a moment of near metafiction that Rusty manages to pull off without the usual pitfall of authorial intrusion we find the narrator is telling of this encounter after the fact to a cousin as a warning of sorts.

"Soon I am ass-over-teakettle and not even Patrick Swayze /can save me now. Vaughan kicks me into next week, /from which I write this verse. Cousin, don't mess with a /ridgerunner woman."

It's a poem that gives that clear picture of redemption or revenge perhaps that ends, instead, with failure and defeat and then wisdom as a result. And this told through a mix of both lyrical and regional tongue. A strong start for the collection as a whole.

Many of the remaining poems will often move back and forth between this lyrical and common style, but is strongest when we have that in-your-face and matter-of-fact tone such as in "Ode to ___________", where the second stanza starts with both an observation and then confession, all written with economy and that regional voice Rusty has tuned into so well. That voice and this poem is testimony to how clearly Rusty keeps his sense of regional identity in mind and how also well he is capable of sharing it on the page.

"A woman I barely know called /me cowboy tonight. I auto-denied /it; but she's right."

For the most part, the fourteen poems in REDNECK POEMS deal almost exclusively with relationships between men and women, with the exception of two that come immediately to mind – "Cutter" (a father and daughter) and "The Electric Fence" (a group of boys) – which, by contrast, may not fit the overall theme of the collection beyond the idea of relationships and the dynamics within those relationships, but remain powerful even as they stand apart in a collection this size.

At times in REDNECK POEMS, Rusty will write from the man's point of view and then twist his pen and write with spectacular skill from a female point of view as in "On a Miscarriage."

"Outside the piss-yellow moon fucked against the sky. /She thought of the children lost in the night by blood/and by accident and by God. The stars don't twinkle, /she thought. They stick up there out of pure love /or out of cussedness. All those dead babies up there, /she thought. They dare not fall to earth, ever ever again."

This is never an easy task for a writer, to get into the mind of the other gender and especially when tackling a subject such as this, but I feel it is by far the strongest, most honest and well-crafted poems Rusty offers in this collection.

For a chapbook that comes in at just under twenty pages total, Rusty has packed these poems with meat and bone, the hardness of the land and its people, and the heart and heartbreak at core of it all. It's a collection of poems I'll return to frequently just for the joy of a well-told moment in the lives of characters both complex and yet simple in the best ways, and also for the talent in craft that is evident in each line.

To get a look at REDNECK POEMS for yourself visit here where you can buy a print version for a fair and reasonable price or download the chap for free.

Time Management and Breaking My Word.

Ah, hell.....too much going on at work today for me to finish up my thoughts on Rusty's fantabulous poetry. Sorry. It'll be up here soon though. Feel free to call me and expound on what a loser I am at time management and so on and so forth.

Remember, I love you all. Whatever love I have to offer after all my love has battled through, in whatever form from which to give, I give to you. And, yeah, dammit, I'll be giving it hell on REDNECK POEMS tomorrow. And of that you can be sure.

UPCOMING: Talking About Redneck Poems by Rusty Barnes

I've now read Rusty's REDNECK POEMS and I'll be talking about it here tomorrow.

Until then, here is how I feel:

The Strong Survive. Yep. Maybe.

This guy's name is James Justice and he, no joke, knocked a mule out once. He said he felt bad about it, but the mule was about to give him a good kick and he just reacted. I could tell he was being honest. He seemed genuinely remorseful about the incident, holding his head down while telling me about it. And he only told me the story after a friend of his insisted.



Oh, the hammer. Indeed.

Yeah, that's the largest sledgehammer in the world he's got there. It weighs 100 pounds. I lifted it to just about my shoulder and that was giving it everything I had. James hit that oak stump four good swings in about 20 seconds with it. Sometimes it is about strength.

The second largest, also in his possession, is a 60 pound beast. I did get a swing in with that one. Okay, I just bragged and made myself a little bit sick. I'll get over it. Besides, swinging it is not the hard part. The competition where they see who can swing the hammer X number of times in X minutes is the hard part.

This Whole Pseudonym Thing.

Catherine Lacey, whose work I have to admit I've not had the opportunity to read other than posts here and there, shared this article about writing under a pen name a few days back called "Fear and Bravery of Pseudonyms". It sparked a bit of chatter, and I've been thinking about it, just hadn't written anything yet.



It'd be good to link to and read the article as well as the comment thread before continuing to read here. I'd recap, but the article and comments would be a more informative way of understanding the general thing itself and maybe also my final take on all of it. I left this as a comment on the thread as well. A rare thing for me, but anywho...

So anyways, here's my two cents:

I get the spark that started all this, to a point. But it's always the story itself that's most important. The very job of the writer is to step aside, drop behind the curtain and allow the reader to enter into a fictive world in which the hand of the writer is not seen. At least that's what I've read and been told. Who knows?

Point is, it's the story first and before all else. And I say this while withholding the fairly strong temptation to defend any other points made in relation to this post, especially the writer in question and others for that matter. I know it sounds simple, and as if I'm attempting to take this complicated and healthy debate and toss some water on it, but that's not the case. It's just that it's the work that matters.

Now, can I have my two cents back? I really kinda need it.