August 10th Book Party: Chicago Center for Literature and Photography Celebrates Four Years

Jason Pettus is a writer, photographer, and founder of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. CCLaP has been an unique kind of cyber-center for the small press since 2007, offering a number of amenities to the literary community of Chicago and beyond. CCLaP is a publisher of e-books by emerging authors; a blogger of book reviews, movie reviews, and essays; a creator of podcasts with authors a few times each month; and a host of Chicago reading events. They have published four e-books thus far: Life After Sleep by Mark Brand, Salt Creek Anthology by Jason Fisk, 99 Problems by Ben Tanzer, and Too Young to Fall Asleep by Sally Weigel. In honor of the upcoming fourth anniversary book party (August 10th at Chicago's Beauty Bar), the books are now available as hand-bound editions as well, something Jason calls "Hypermodern Editions."

As the Center's anniversary approached, Jason answered some questions for me on building a readership, the state of the book review, and the Chicago lit scene.

What led you to start CCLaP?

I was a working author myself for about ten years in Chicago, then back in Missouri was a working photographer for around five years previous to that; and coming from the punk/zine community of the 1980s when I was a teen, I've been doing fun little DIY creative projects for a long before either of those. So when I first entered middle age in the mid-2000s, and started becoming more and more dissatisfied with trying to continue pursuing a career as a creative writer, something like CCLaP was just naturally one of the first things that popped into my mind as something to do next with my life. Although truthfully, I came very close to opening an internet startup company instead (that's what a lot of my day jobs in Chicago have involved), in which case CCLaP wouldn't actually exist right now.

How has the reception been for the e-books you’ve published so far? I’m not trying to single out your authors, but more to ask how you reached out and found an audience, and what you learned about how to find your readers in between Book #1 and Book #4.

When I talk to my friends who run more traditional basement presses about this subject, it looks pretty certain that in general terms, CCLaP is generating the same amount of paying customers from the ebooks as they are from their paper books, which as most people know is nothing to sneeze at but no great shakes either. The nice thing, though, is that since the ebooks are released under a "pay what you want" scheme, it means that our paying customers only make up around 25 percent of the book's total readership; and so if you're talking just about how many eyeballs the center's books are getting in front of, you can think of it in general terms of about three to four times the amount of a typical basement press. The biggest lesson I've learned so far about gathering an audience is that this stuff really does fall along traditional age lines to a great extent; so that is, whenever I publish a middle-aged author with a middle-aged audience, downloads of the electronic version are always smaller than a title by a twentysomething with a college-aged audience, even when that book will often generate the same amount of press and interest away from the internet. The adoption of ebooks is truly a generational issue, I'm slowly learning.

What do you look for in a writer you’re deciding to publish?

Oh, it's a whole complicated host of factors, actually. Obviously the first and main issue is simply the quality of the actual manuscript; but then whether or not they're in Chicago comes into play as well, since that's so much more a convenient option for things like getting them to sign books, etc. And since part of CCLaP's mission as a more general overall arts organization is to help nurture artists over the course of their careers, part of what I look at when examining submissions is where that author is in their career, and how much a CCLaP book would be able to help with the long-term picture; so if someone like Ben Tanzer comes to me, for example, who now has a number of successful commercial novels under his belt, but is sitting on something more experimental or personal that will make his audience think of him in a new way if someone were to publish it, that counts for extra in my mind when making decisions about what to put out.

I think it’s great that you’re making handmade books out of CCLaP e-book releases. Will you continue to do this, or do you think it’s more of a special event for the 4-year anniversary?

The paper versions of CCLaP's books have actually always been a part of the plan, since starting up the publishing program in 2008; it's just that it's only now that I've actually been able to afford it. In general I'm trying to take my cues off how many musicians now do things, which is to entirely skip the middle step of distribution altogether; so in my case, the plan has always been to release an electronic version that people can download for free if they want, and a handmade, hardback paper version that costs a little more than a paper version normally would, and that can be directly purchased at the website much like how an Etsy store works, and then just skip the trade paperback version and the bookstores and Amazon and the traditional distributors altogether. It's my opinion that this is where most small presses are bleeding the most money these days, so my hope is to keep costs under control by simply eliminating this option entirely.

I’m so glad you’re running frequent book reviews on your blog. In a time when newspapers are downsizing their book review sections and laying off reviewers, can you speak to the importance of book reviews in our culture?

Well, I'm just amazed that more people don't do the same thing! I think that blogs got saddled at the beginning of their existence with this bad reputation, as if they were some form of literary genre unto themselves and with their own artistic pluses and minuses; but really, a blog is actually just more a type of technology, a specific kind of medium for delivering whatever you want, good or bad, just like it would be ridiculous to say that a piece of content is somehow artistically better when read on a piece of ivory-colored paper versus cream-colored paper. In this sense, then, a blog is nothing more than a giant unending sheet of paper that's given to you completely for free, and so makes it the best medium in human history for long-form, thoughtful essays. I think once we get to the next generation of online users, the ones who don't automatically equate blogs with unthinking idiocy, we're going to see a flowering again of long-form critical thought that could scarcely be imagined by previous generations.

Do book reviews become even more important in a moment of so many publishers, underground publishers, self-publishers, and varied formats? Do book reviewers help hold The Book together as hyperlinks and e-readers try to morph it?

That's a good question, and I confess one I've never really contemplated before. Certainly you paint a vivid mental picture of "artistic thought" being some kind of runny goo, and that different conventions like "novels" and "feature films" are differently shaped boxes that we put around this goo to try to contain and shape it, so that we can then put two of them side-by-side and compare them. Does our society need this in order to even understand the arts, and for it to be of any practical help in our day-to-day lives? And is it important for critics to continue holding up the "novel-shaped" box, when things like narrative videogames and hyperlinked stories create little holes in the corners for that goo to ooze out? I think those are more philosophical questions than practical ones, and probably better debated at dinner parties after a few drinks than a declarative answer given here.

If the big newspapers were considered reliable sources who often had the last or loudest word on book reviews, what should a reader look for in seeking trustworthy reviews in the blogosphere? Is the dismantling of the newspaper reviews a good thing or a bad thing for the small press?

Deciding which critics to trust has always boiled down to some simple criteria in my opinion, and I'm always surprised that so many people have a hard time with this, which is merely trust plus time. Too many people, I think, have this attitude towards critical thought that's similar to God speaking to His minions, that it's this booming random opinion coming in out of nowhere that we should blindly trust merely because someone in a position of authority is telling us to; but finding a good critic is actually much more similar to paying attention to the opinions to a good friend, in that the entire reason we even trust what they're saying is because they've proven over and over again that they CAN be trusted, precisely because they have very similar opinions to our own. That's always the best way to get good recommendations, I've found, is simply to find people whose tastes closely match your own, then pay attention anytime they rave about something you've never heard about, or argue for a project that you may have not cared for at first.

I think a big part of the problem occurred during the big Hollywood boom of the 1980s, when newspapers suddenly found themselves with an opportunity to sell many more pages of movie ads if they simply had an excuse to actually print those pages; that forced every newspaper in the country to hire their own staff of reviewers, who were basically no more than an excuse to even have a pullout movie section every Friday and sell a thousand percent more ads than they were before. That's when you really saw the first big proliferation of this "From God's Mouth" attitude about criticism, where critics became an endless series of faceless anonymous shills, and the only reason you would put stock in any of their opinions is because this big expensive newspaper was telling you to; and then when this became a successful paradigm, it of course bled over into things like book reviews as well. So in that sense, the dismantling of the newspaper review system is the best thing that could've happened to both readers and small presses; because what's rising in its wake is both the much more reliable crowd-sourcing process at places like Amazon (which, let's face it, is a HIGHLY trustworthy way of learning simply about any particular book's general strengths and weaknesses), combined with long-form critics like myself who take our cues off the old masters like Pauline Kael, who people trust in the same way they trust their friends, and who can recommend unknown things in a way that Amazon crowd-sourcing never could, no matter how sophisticated their algorithms get.

What have you learned about small press publishing since setting up shop in 2007?

Oh, dear, we could be here all day if I started to answer this, so perhaps I'll just skip this question altogether. The short answer is that I've learned hundreds of things, and that the very best advice I can give a person who's interested in the subject is to simply go out and start a small press themselves, to learn all the hard lessons they never will simply by reading about other people's experiences.

Chicago has a thriving small press scene: From afar, I know about Quimby’s, the Orange Alert Reading Series, the Chicago Underground Library, Another Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Zine Fest, the “Quickies” Reading Series, MAKE, Featherproof Books. Have you paired up with any of these folks in your events or in other ways?

I have yet to formally partner with any of these groups, but you could absolutely say that an informal network of support exists here in Chicago within this community: we all tend to go to each other's events, buy each other's books, provide publicity for each other's big things, recommend artists to each other, send submitting authors each other's ways, etc. In fact, back when I quit writing myself in 2004 and was first coming up with the idea for CCLaP, this is one of the main reasons I decided to follow through with the particular plan I did, was knowing what a strong and longstanding literary community there actually is here in Chicago, which now that I've traveled a bit I can confidently state as one of the largest and most tight-knit ones in the world.

What’s on the horizon for CCLaP?

Well, more books for a start -- another three before this year is through, then another five in 2012. And more live events, more podcast episodes, and the same 150 book reviews at the blog next year as I publish every year. Plus it's looking likely that we'll finally be offering our first classes and workshops next year as well; because I have to say, the requests never stop coming in from people wanting to learn how to make the kind of handmade books I do for CCLaP, so I'm thinking strongly of just charging a fee and teaching the people who really do want to sit down and learn. Then of course the center has a long-term vision as well, for those who don't know; everything being done right now, for example, is in service of hopefully one day finally opening a permanent physical space somewhere here in the city, at which point CCLaP will morph more into the traditional community center that I've always envisioned it as.

*****

Find the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography online here.

Under the Volcano Books Opens October 15th, Mexico City

Grant Cogswell hanging shelves at Under the Volcano Books, July 2011.

The last time I saw Grant Cogswell, he was making me laugh hysterically in Austin, Texas. Seventeen years and a few cities later, this filmwriter/ activist/ longtime Seattle resident is gearing up to open an expat English-language bookstore and gathering place in the Roma District of Mexico City (D.F.). The store will be named Under the Volcano Books after the Mexico-set novel by expat writer Malcolm Lowry. The grand opening is set for Saturday October 15th, 2011.

Yesterday Grant was kind enough to answer some interview questions in between constructing a bookstore interior at Cerrada Chiapas 40-C, Colonia Roma Norte.

What led you to want to open a bookstore? Was this a life-long dream, or did it have more to do with timing and opportunity?

Not a lifelong dream. I'd worked in bookstores stateside, and it never really occurred to me until I came to D.F. and saw there wasn't really anything for readers of English - and began to imagine what was also missing, which was the kind of semi-public community that might grow around such an institution. After I decided to move here in 2006, my imagination of what kind of life I wanted here just kind of grew the store within itself, like a pearl, becoming the center of the impulse. By the time I was here full-time in late 2009 it was what I was doing.

I understand that you have a particular vision for this English-language bookstore in a world-class city, in a neighborhood with a long history of artists and expats. Knowing you, it will be much more than just a store. Tell us what you hope for the bookstore to be, and what steps you will take to see that vision through?

Well, I think it will be a place of a very particular kind. I'm very insistent that there won't be wi-fi available, even when we have coffee and tables and who knows maybe even some kind of food. There's a kind of psychic silence that to me is very much associated with reading - I think a lot of people go camping to find it, or hell, I don't know, have sex with strangers-- so that's the first thing: analog. I'll often be playing Coltrane, or The Band, or KEXP (ironically) online - there's also an amazing station here at 105.7 that has its finger on the pulse of whateveryouwanttocallit Indie rock from the US just as firmly as anything on the internet. Our location is at the end of an alley in a hundred-year-old working neighborhood, but we have this lovely little tiled back garden. I'd like it to be a place that a large assemblage of travellers and residents and even people in the English-speaking world who'll never go to Mexico recognize as an outpost of, I don't know, the examined life? That sounds so hard. The life of books, thought, self-education, art. Once my Spanish is good enough to read at a decent enough speed for literature (I can get through the newspaper fairly quick, but am constantly resorting to a dictionary) I just have to make sure I don't end up spending my off hours hanging out at El Pendulo or Conejo Blanco. I love those places. We could do a lot worse than just be an English version of them. There will at some point be a literary journal based in the store called Mexico Review focusing on translations from contemporary Mexican writers and Americans writing about Mexico, in the very most expansive sense. We'll be open every day, because a 24-hour-layover on a NY-Buenos Aires flight happens at its own convenience, and I am counting on those people coming to the store.

What kind of books will you feature?

Used contemporary and classic fiction and poetry, translations from the Spanish, politics, history, philosophy, urban planning and architecture, lit crit, interesting nonfiction, art books, punk culture, comics, travel books, language aids, 'expat lit'.

Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio recently read in the space that will be Under the Volcano Books. Do you plan to hold readings frequently? What types of writers will you court? From how far away?

I'll have visiting writers, obviously drawing for reasons of airfare and my personal connections far heavier from the West Coast of the US than the East. But a lot of people come through here. Not too often - I want to maintain the sense of them as an event, and the bar will be high, nobody without a published book at the very least. I can't see flying anyone over from Australia, but otherwise the sky's the limit.

What has been the most challenging aspect of opening the bookstore so far? What has been the most unexpected challenge?

Finding a space; finding a space. By custom here you need to have a property-owner guarantee your lease when you rent, and that goes for residential as well as commercial property. Arriving here as an immigrant without particularly deep local roots this was looking almost impossible - years off. Then my good friend and roommate bought a house in Roma Norte for his recording business and it was kind of the Hand of God.

You’re opening a brick and mortar bookstore in 2011. You’ve been blogging about the store, keeping far-flung friends updated on Facebook, and you’ve created a catalog of your store’s inventory on LibraryThing. How do you see the relationship between your bookstore and the digital world? Are you interested in selling books online, or just getting people into your space?

I'm going to do what I enjoy: I think going outside of that would be to the detriment of my pleasure in the store and thereby bring it down. There are people who want to see this become an emporium for the materials they use in their English classes here: that's not going to happen, nor am I going to become an online dealer. My skills are choosing the inventory very carefully based on a knowledge of the literature of the English language and contemporary culture, and curating a place for people to come to in a splendidly comfortable and affordable neighborhood. I will also make coffee.

One plan you had was to sell books on the street while waiting to find the right space for the store. Have you done much of that? How have sales been? Have you liked the feeling of selling literature on the streets of Mexico City?

I haven't sold anything on the streets. I soon found out those street markets are a web of old relationships and there's a reason you don't see foreigners working in them. I was about to get a permit from the Delegacion to sell in Coyoacan when Sylvain bought the house where the store will go and it just wasn't worth doing at that point.

I’ve been noticing a new business model among bookstores being opened by working artists and writers: The kind of bookstore that is not required to sustain itself. The owners’ income/s from art and writing jobs help to supplement the bookstore, which they choose to open because they passionately want a bookstore in their city. Will Under the Volcano Books be required to sustain itself?

Yes, but there are lots of ways we can make that happen if things get tight. I see the store over time becoming a magnet for people who want to practice their English. If there's a store full of people four nights a week at 50 pesos a head chatting away because that's what's needed to keep us afloat, that's perfectly fine with me. I think our overhead is a fraction of what it would be in the US. You see a lot of places here you wonder, how the hell does that store stay open? Things are just a lot cheaper in general here is how, and I am counting on them staying that way. I can't imagine the brass it would take to do this in the States, and don't want to.

On a Youtube video that seems to have vanished since I saw it, you made a very provocative statement that you hoped the bookstore would introduce both Mexicans and Americans the better sides of themselves to each other. That [currently] Mexicans know too much American scorn and Americans hear too much about Mexican crime. Tell us more about your hope and how literature sheds light on our better angels.

Well, most Americans simply have hardly the faintest idea about this country: what it contains, what its 'normal setting' is, the daily life of the majority of people. Now that the drug killings have reached around 50,000, people throw around the statistic that the narco wars have killed as many people as Americans died in Vietnam, so people think there is a war going on here. (There is in some places near the US border, specifically Ciudad Juarez, and in some of rural Tamaulipas where it could be classified at that level.) Well, that's true. But two million Vietnamese died in that war. Nothing like the same scale. Don't get me wrong, the situation is an enormous and terrible tragedy and I think most people here believe we have further to go with it than we have come yet, and who knows what it will lead to. But this is a nation of 100 million people most of whom have no connection with or direct experience of any of that world. And their lives go on, day to day. Americans sense not the least texture of that reality for the most part, or the nature of life here in DF, which is now one of the safest places in the country and a magnet again for that reason. Nor the particular and complex past and the nature of the national identity it produced, which I think may be a healthier approach to being of the New World than I have seen come to fruition in the U.S.

On the other side, American mass-culture floods the airwaves and the video stalls here, and it is usually the movies and music with the most money behind them, which are not always the worst, but very often. I've run into smart, worldly people here who were totally unaware the US has a culture of art cinema, for example. Mexicans in general are not big readers - which is okay for me, because Mexicans in general are not my target audience. But I'd like to at least get the very privileged cultural class here to be aware of Whitman, of Keats, or Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf. I think there's room to create that awareness, and a hunger for it, because contact with American culture is seen from the very least on an economic plane as sophistication, as self-development. And I'm sitting here with the literary aspect being almost entirely absent from that conversation wanting to lean over and say "There's something pretty wide here you missed..."

Visit the Under the Volcano Books website here.

Meet the Author at the Bus Station: Or, How to Book an Affordable Zine Tour in Tight Times

Zines on wheels: The Fly Away Zine Mobile toured through Pittsburgh in July 2011.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the rise of author signings in airport bookstores ("Meet the Author at the Airport"). I loved this image of an author touring without even leaving the transportation hubs, and having a roster of signings dedicated to travelers.

But airport bookstores are unlikely to cater to small press readings any time soon. Likewise, many small and micro press writers would be financially deterred from touring by airplane. For writers from our side of the tracks we have discount buslines, those new web-booked, low-overhead, curbside, wifi-equipped, post-Chinatown bus lines like Megabus and Bolt Bus that cost riders as little as $1 per trip. A few weeks ago, I interviewed zinester Ocean about her August 2011 zine tour via Megabus, the "High on Unemployment Tour."

The tour name refers to both her current unemployment checks (her government job shuts down in the summer) and her current zine series, "High on Burning Photographs." Ocean's storytelling is intense, compelling, and intensely personal, as she offers hilarious, poignant, inspiring, or heart-wrenching dispatches from one young woman's "aging riot grrrl" life. Ocean's life as written has been full of adventure, full of tight friendships with vibrant and fearless friends, and full of astute reflections and complex observations from quieter seasons. Her scope is deep and wide, reporting stories from her kitchen table at 3:00am, from her local laundromat, from penpal conversations with prisoners, or from the landscape of young, queer America. Lucky for her readers, she's been recording her stories in xeroxed zines since 1996, when she was a young teenager.

Ocean originally hails from New York, but now lives and writes in Pittsburgh. Conveniently for her, Pittsburgh was recently made a Megabus hub connecting numerous points on the East Coast and the Midwest. On tour, she'll be concentrating on the cities of the Midwest, and she's excited to get to know that part of the country, with which she's not very familiar. Not all dates are set in stone yet, but she has plans to read in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago (another Megabus hub), Madison, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. Columbus is a maybe and she'll do a last reading back in New York.

Ocean is already a seasoned veteran of bus trips. "In most ways, I don't miss Greyhound, but with Greyhound, you know you'll always have a story," she mused as we talked in Pittsburgh's Lili Coffee Shop. Instead of heading to college, when she graduated from high school, she bought a three-month Discovery Pass on Greyhound. "There were the fights, the drunk people (who somehow manage to get past the strict no-drinking rules of Greyhound), and then there was the guy who asked me to marry him. We were just talking, and he said, 'Let's get married and go to LA.' We weren't even riding in the direction of LA." In those days, Ocean had a "Greyhound outfit" consisting of a silver tank top and a '50s style skirt patterned with pigs and clover. The idea was to dress "the kind of outlandish so that good people would approach me and bad people would stay away."

Ocean's also done her share of rides on the Chinatown bus: "They drive so fast, I always think I'm going to die." Similarly, a recent overnight bus ride between Warsaw and Lithuania was frightening for its high speeds. "I took a sleeping pill but I was too anxious to ever fall asleep." In contrast, Ocean calls Megabus "the sane bus." She loves riding in the top level for its views, even knowing about "the accident."

I was curious which method Ocean had used for finding reading venues in unfamiliar cities. "Sometimes I relied on word of mouth from friends, and other times I just typed the city's name and the word ZINE into Google to see what came up. It worked!" Though Google has been a helpful pointer, she still prefers to pick up the phone to book a venue. The process has been mostly gratifying: "Sometimes when I get in touch with people about an event, I find out they're already readers of my zine."

TOUR STOPS

In Cleveland, Ocean will read (August 6th) at the longstanding literary bookstore, Mac's Backs, which has been open in Ohio since 1978, and in its current Cleveland Heights location since 1982. In Chicago, where she'll join up with a few zinester friends, Ocean plans to read at the quintessential DIY bookstore, Quimby's. Her Minneapolis venue is zine-friendly Boneshaker Books, and in Detroit she's excited to read at the anarchy space, the Trumbullplex, in conjunction with their new zine library. In Milwaukee she's hooking up with QZAP (Queer Zine Archive Project), in Madison she hopes to hit the Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, and she'll wrap up with a reading at Bluestockings Bookstore in downtown Manhattan around late August or early September. For this last reading Ocean will pair up with the For the Birds feminist collective.

As for accommodations on a budget, Ocean's hoping to crash with her fellow readers in most cities, but when that doesn't work, she'll rely on her membership at Couchsurfing.org or look up local hostels.

The young writer seemed excited about getting on the road to meet and greet the zine community. She talked about missing this aspect of the zine experience from her early days. "When I first got into zines, most people who read my zines would write me a letter back. That was normal--I guess before the internet we [zine writers] were all stranded in random places, desperate to find people we could relate to. Now I think I hear from about 10% of my readers. Even the zine ordering process is not as personal as it once was. Now we have these great distros, but back in the day, every zine had a zine review section. They gave the address and said 'send $1.'" These days Ocean usually skips the distros and sticks with mailing and handing out her zines to friends or longtime followers.

To get the latest issue of "High on Burning Photographs," send $1 or two stamps to:

Ocean
PO Box 40144
Pittsburgh, PA 15201

Stay tuned for a full list of tour dates and venues for Ocean's High on Unemployment Tour.

More Bookstore Briefs: Good News, Plus an Elegy

NYC's Word Up pop up bookstore has extended its run through the end of September! (via Word Up website)

DC's Busboys and Poets expanded to a fourth location (in Hyattsville, Md.) this week (via WSET)

Rebel Bookseller panel happens this Friday at Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore (The book's subtitle: Why Indie Businesses Represent Everything You Want to Fight For, From Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities)
(see the Facebook event page)

Pittsburgh's Big Idea bookstore will move to the avenue and gain a cafe and event space (via Big Idea website)

Book rep Ann Kingman asks whether bookmobiles can be the new food trucks? (via Twitter)

And book critic Scott McLemee has published a thoughtful essay, "The Bookstore at the End of the World": "The algorithms at Amazon are no match for an intelligent person behind the cash register." (via Inside Higher Education)

Bookstore Briefs: The Bad News and the Good

East Liberty, Pittsburgh. Photo by Jamie Phillips, July 2011.

Borders Books is going out of business, 40 years after two brothers opened one small bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As the Detroit Free Press reports, liquidation sales could begin as early as Friday. A chain-wide closure will mean the loss of 400 stores and almost 11,000 jobs.

In other big news, Amazon will start renting e-textbooks via Kindle as soon as the Fall of 2011, an announcement that will affect university bookstores across the nation. Gabe Habash tells us how this will be bad for the bookstores, textbook publishers, and authors, but good for the students.

In good news, Greenlight Bookstore (a retail store in Fort Greene, Brooklyn) will expand its space and add a coffee bar by partnering with a local business. Greenlight opened in 2009.

Maple Street Book Shop in New Orleans will also expand, opening two new locations in the city, one in Faubourg St. John and another in Faubourg Marigny. Read more at the Gambit. Maple Street sells books both new and used & rare, and opened as a paperback bookstore in 1964.

I recently went back to Charlottesville, Virginia for the first time in 14 years. I was thrilled to find that Heartwood Books was still alive, still a stellar second-hand bookstore, and at least one familiar (unforgettable) face was still behind the counter. I especially enjoyed the Books On Books section.

Heartwood Books on Elliwood Avenue in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Book Review: BAD BAD BAD by Jesús Ángel García

Jesús Ángel García, badbadbad. Colorado: New Pulp Press, 2011. Fiction. 237 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9828436-3-5.

Jesús Ángel García's debut novel, badbadbad, is lousy with exquisite contradictions. The protagonist, Jesús Ángel García, is a fallen angel with a Jesus complex, a lost man with a mission. The novel is a bildungsroman told by a young man who is already divorced with a child; or do I mean a coming-of-age in reverse, an "adult child" seeking his own lost innocence? If he's looking for his innocence, it's through sexcapades with kinky chicks on the social web, and though he's enjoying a lot of sex dates, sex toys, and other Triple-X adventures in the Bible Belt South, he mainly seeks out troubled women who might need his healing powers of love and listening. He attends church services every Sunday morning, but that's just for appearances: He's more excited about evening performances by the local punk band Children's Crusade, but he makes a living as the webmaster for the biggest evangelical congregation in town. By day he forms allegiances with his custody lawyer and the Reverend; by night he shares bourbon and MP3s with the Reverend's excommunicated son. The story's a pulp fiction narrated (from jail? from beyond the grave?) to a younger brother he abandoned long ago to an abusive family. The novel's almost a stroke book, but some of the sex scenes are decidedly unappetizing. And although the novelist uses his own name for his protagonist, I have no idea (as reader) whether the book is thinly-veiled autobiography, metaphor for lived experience, or pure fabrication using the device of truthful confession.

One of the most perfect chapters is one where descriptions of a gay pride rally and a KKK march are intertwined. Both events attract the same two camps, it's just a matter of who's marching in the center (each in their own brand of costumes) and who's holding the protest placards on the sidelines. Another choice chapter sees Jesús (aka JAG) take a trip with two of the "fallen angels" (the name of the underground hook-up website JAG frequents) to a huge Southern tent show featuring "guns, knives, and dolls." The scene has a carnival atmosphere, even as it takes place under the kind of tent that (on another day) might house a religious revival. The "dolls" featured at the show are bikini-clad babes who pass out lemonade to shoppers and set up targets for customers enjoying their new guns. The weapons are lit by halogen lights as if they were jewels. The air smells of fried dough. JAG observes the families who push their baby strollers from booth to booth, window-shopping like they're at a mall. His "alt" friends encourage him (against his preferences) to buy a gun, a plot point that makes the reader wonder how alternative these kids really are. They teach JAG how to shoot, how to handle his gun, while the sexual healer imagines his ex-wife as the target. Nearby, some men have brought their own targets: images of black civil rights leaders. In the background, the sound of endless American war marches on.

Over and over in badbadbad, the plot reveals hypocrisies and paints contradictions within characters or scenes that once seemed to be only black and white. Other times it draws parallels and similarities between camps that are supposed to be polar opposites. Weren't the bigoted Bible-thumpers being set up as the bad guys and the queer-fabulous music-lovers the good fellows? What about the third-wave feminist hotties who are unashamed to declare what they want, but push their self-love to the point of shallowness? Are we being robbed of a symbology we thought we understood, or is García (the author) simply righting and complicating perceptions that were far too simplistic when we started reading?

JAG's story is full of people. But as characters enter, entice, and evaporate, one character remains. This reveal sneaks up on the reader: JAG is a narrator who provides some reflection, a certain amount of internal commentary along the way. But often enough the story reads like we're following him as an enchanted observer in a forest of wacky Southern characters—some long familiar, others new to the scene. Eventually, after the reader passes through all the distractions of colorful 21st Century punks, ravers, earth mamas, bondage queens, and neo-goths; after we wade through the rabid religious homophobes, Klansmen, and right-to-lifers, the character of JAG himself emerges. He's surrounded by pals and booked with play-dates, but his loneliness is only growing. His pull towards the social web is compulsive, his need to shop for the next hook-up is constant, his separation from his son is never-ending, and his desire for connection remains dangerously starved. Like JAG's own sudden revelation that constant online contact and overlapping cyber-relationships have added up to nothing, all these compelling characters suddenly disappear from the plot like ciphers: We're dropped into a sudden awareness of a profound emptiness in JAG that's been gathering steam while we were paying attention to everything else--a void growing ever more hungry, angry, and violent under the surface.

Badbadbad draws on styles and themes from familiar stories and older literatures. The novel sustains the straight-talk trashiness of 20th Century pulp, the sex-romp identity games of Kathy Acker, and the dark inevitability of Giovanni's Room. But it considers an absolutely current societal malaise: the twin-headed hydra of selective isolation and social media addiction. In the process, badbadbad reveals a new brand of lust for life and a new kind of lost generation.

Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, literary fiction, small press fiction, emerging authors, neo-pulp fiction, fiction about the internet age, and Southern fiction.

*****

Find badbadbad on New Pulp Press here.

Find more about this "transmedia" novel (and the 32-city book tour) on the author's website here.

Briefs: Bookstores & Book Tours

Word Up bookstore has opened! The Upper Manhattan pop-up bookstore and community space was welcomed by an enthusiastic crowd on Friday, June 17, and featured small press books in English, Spanish, Russian, and even Armenian. The grand opening got very nice write-ups in the Manhattan Times and the New York Times.

San Fran small press author Jesus Angel Garcia has embarked on a cross-country tour for his new 21st century pulp novel about sex, cyberspace, alterna-scenes, and evangelist religion in the Dirty South: badbadbad (New Pulp Press, 2011). His LA debut reading was held Friday, June 17 at Skylight Books, a great (indie-press friendly) bookstore in Los Feliz; his next reading date is in Austin on Wednesday, June 22. See his tour schedule (39 shows in 32 cities!) here. Read his first tour blog at Electric Literature here.

Under the Volcano Books will host its first reading this Friday, June 24 in Mexico City. The reading will be Matthew Stadler 's fourth stop on a 12-city "NAFTA Tour"--he'll read in Canada, US, and Mexico from his new book, Chloe Jarren's La Cucaracha. Novelist Stadler is also former lit editor of Nest, and the publisher of Publication Studio, a new indie press (and innovative publishing model in the vein of OR Books and Cursor) that started (in one sense) with a binding machine obtained at a good price from Brooklyn's Vox Pop Bookstore (RIP). The reading event will be in the future location of Under the Volcano Books, an English-language bookstore set to open (once funding allows) in the Roma District of Mexico City. The reading starts at 7:00pm, location address is Cerrada Chiapas 40-C, Colonia Roma Norte. Find more event details on Facebook here. Read an interview about Publication Studio here. Read more on Under the Volcano Books here.