Flyer For July 11 Reading

The flyer for the Mac's Backs Reading on July 11 is posted here (683KB PDF). It's got a nice comic strip featuring a thirsty bear and hungry snake on it, which you might enjoy even if you can't make the reading. Please download it and post it wherever you want!

How Can 575 Comic Books Weigh Under An Ounce?

I posted to the Library, "How Can 575 Comic Books Weigh Under An Ounce?: Comic Book Collecting In The Digital Age", a paper I presented at this year's national Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference. It takes a look at the collections of comic books that have been appearing on DVD-ROMs such as those GIT have been producing, and the challenges and possibilities electronic comic book collecting present to traditional print-based comic book collectors and readers. You might have noticed that video stores have started to disappear. Will comic book stores be next?
P.S./ I've updated the link above to go to the expanded, revised, and updated version of the paper that has appeared as an article in The Journal Of Electronic Publishing.

Hundred Yards

It's been a bit since I posted a poem on here, so here's one I wrote in November.

Hundred Yards
by Wred Fright

Yesterday
Literary conference
Renaissance Hotel
Downtown Cleveland
A fancy place in a not so fancy city
From the looks I got from the staff and guests
I judge I must be just on the boundary of respectable
Up the elevator because I couldn't find the stairs to
Meeting rooms named for robber barons
Rockefeller
Others who didn't do so well, but well enough
In the meeting room, the literary critics talked of human suffering.
I had to wonder
Did they experience it firsthand or just read about it in stories?
Walking to the hotel
I passed some human suffering
Homeless guy sleeping
Steam grate
People pay a lot to stay at the hotel
But they could sleep for free across the street
True, there's no room service
No complimentary Starbucks Coffee
But you don't need a "Do Not Disturb" sign on the doorknob
You could freeze to death and no one might notice until spring
It's a free country or at least a freeze country.
It's a great nation or at least a grate nation.
Only one hundred yards or so was the distance between hotel and grate
Was that the difference between rich and poor in America, or at least in Cleveland?
Only a hundred yards
But a hundred yards that can take a lifetime to cross.

12 November 2007

Walking Man Walks To Guild

The Guild of Outsider Writers is running the below yip for Walking Man.

Yip!: Walking Man by Tim W. Brown

Walking Man is a novel that poses as the biography of Brian Walker, America's "most famous zine publisher," who publishes a zine about how he loves to walk. As author Tim W. Brown relates Walker's rise in the zine world of the late 1980s/early 1990s, he keeps the humor deadpan, but he can't disguise the fact that this story is a hoot! If one knows anything about the zine scene of that era, it's tempting to read the novel as a roman a clef--for example, Stet, former busboy and the publisher of Buzzboy, starts off as a Dishwasher Pete figure, but then morphs into an R. Seth Friedman figure, who publishes Ned's Feat Live, a Factsheet Fiveesque review zine--but the novel is more concerned with getting the spirit of those times accurately rather than satirizing specific figures. In any case, the zine world of that time was so wacky that one barely needs to satirize it in order to make things comic. Brown was active in the zine scene of that era so he knows his stuff, and he gets all the details right--photocopies, petty postal rivalries, the question of selling out, and, of course, the strange folks driven to publish zines--making Walking Man a very fun read.

Masked Professor Sighting!

Who is that mysterious man holding a copy of The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus in his left hand? Could it be the masked professor incognito?

Guild of Outsider Writers

The Guild of Outsider Writers has started running some of the reviews from this blog. First up is the review of The Digital Plague by Jeff Somers.

Emus Excerpt

Part of the first chapter of The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus, my garage band novel, is excerpted in INSCAPE, The Ursuline College Fine Arts Annual 2008, so if you're around Ursuline College, stop by and pick up a free copy. If you're not around the college, then just buy the whole book!