Tanks Growing Like Flowers

Pop Lit Fiction

HAVE our smart phones detached us from the natural world? Has contemporary technology removed part of our feelings for others– objectification run amok? Is our humanity gone?

What’s the psychology of the male mind?

These are questions which might be asked after reading Chelsea Ruxer’s short story, “Tanks Growing Like Flowers.”

(What would Jerry Mander say about it?)

Fiction has the ability to raise questions about the world and ourselves. At its best, no art form is more relevant.

I listen as he explains how the world has evolved from a Hobbesian state of nature into a social contract which mirrors it, in which island on island crime is necessary and resources spontaneously regenerate. War is expected, and polite.

 

Coming Soon!

Announcement

Yes, we’re pleased to announce that the long-delayed analog version of NEW POP LIT is at the printer. An actual hold-in-your-hand literary journal! We’ve corrected the mistakes made in our rushed-out prototype, and likely added new ones.

This has been a continual learning experience. We’ve gained a marked appreciation for anyone creating a print journal, because there are an endless number of things which can and will go wrong. Turning out a product with many contributors is far tougher than dealing with work of your own– there’s extra responsibility involved. We want to present great work from terrific writers, and we wish to present that work well. We keep reminding ourselves that this is our first lit product– first step in a long journey.

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Fans of ours will notice we’ve run with a different version of the excellent Alyssa Klash cover. (Purple replacing the green-themed prototype.) We’ve done this for several reasons.

1.) The green cover-with-colorful back was almost too good. Too pop. Too striking, so as to be a tad out of balance with the contents. The purple-and-gray version, being more muted, will stress that we’re pop but we’re also serious presenters of significant, meaningful work. We believe when you read the issue you’ll agree with this assessment. Our objective from the start has been to be pop and serious both.

2.) Presenting our “real” version with a different-colored cover frankly makes the prototype more of a collector’s item.

But all versions of NEW POP LIT #1 will be collector’s items, if we move forward as a major literary player, as is our plan.

Thanks to all concerned for their indulgence and patience.

(To pre-order your copy of NEW POP LIT, email us at newpoplit2@gmail.com.)

Poems of Screams and Fears

Poetry

Is it Halloween yet?

Decorations and haunted houses everyplace tell us that the dubious-but-fun holiday is almost upon us. To add our take we have four poems from Ed Ahern, who specializes in the creepy.

They’re poems about night, death, the adoration of questionable goddesses, and other cryptic topics. Ideal mood music for those who wander the pathways and cemetaries of night– if only within their own heads. Enter corridors of the imagination now.

The rules change at night

When coyotes prowl the gardens

And walled-in huddlers cringe

Energy

Pop Lit Fiction

We at NEW POP LIT have promised to showcase exciting lit talent wherever we find it. We’re also determined to remain topical.

Talk about timing! Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich was announced yesterday as winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. Where is Belarus, you ask? West of Russia; part of the old Soviet Union; at the crossroads still of dramatic historical events.

Stop the presses! We work fast– at least some of the time. Not ones to evah evah evah miss a trend, we present to you a leading writer from Belarus, Andrei Dichenko. Read his magical story about blue pots, Crimea, train rides and magical energy. The able translator is Andrea Gregovich, who appeared here last year with a story of her own about the world of professional wrestling. (Did I say trends?)

Alexander introduced himself as a tourist from Belarus, returned the girl’s smile, and began to peruse the little pots. They were blue, red, and green, and painted with mysterious runes and unfamiliar characters that made it feel as if they were asking for his hands to hold them.

A Sustainable Lit Model?

Announcement

WE BELIEVE it’s a huge advantage for a lit project to be located outside New York City.

In the vicinity of New York, all mindsets are dominated by the modes of the Big 5 publishers and their attached-or-symbiotic organs. (The New Yorker et.al.) It’s nearly impossible for a literary entrepreneur to resist this– to think outside the status quo box.

Yet drastic changes in literature and publishing are occurring outside the world of the Big 5. Our goal is to A.) be at the forefront of those changes; B.) remain flexible enough to adapt to more changes; more ways of thinking and operating.

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We posted no new feature this past weekend because our time and energy are temporarily back focusing on the “model” for presenting new literature. Setting up the necessary blocks for future progress.

The website itself is only part of the model.

In coming days we’ll work on:

1.) Tweaking the long-delayed print version of this site– then doing another printing; the real one with barcode. Learning how to be a publisher, even in the Internet age, involves thoroughly learning the “trade” of publishing. The NPL print journal will be the first of our titles.

2.) Setting up a NEW POP LIT online boutique or “shop” for selling our products.

How does a literary project become self-sustaining?

We’ll cover this matter in future posts. Keep watching!

The Salesman and Other Adventures– and other adventures

Essay

Today we offer an excellent essay by writer and filmmaker Pablo D’Stair– one of the best DIY talents around.

What is “the purest achievement”? What’s the mindset of those engaged in the pursuit of art? This is a must-read essay not just for writers, artists, and filmmakers, but for all those who strive in any way to be creative. It’s written for the artistic soul in all of us.

know what The Thing was that first made you daydream, and then do everything you can until you have gotten that exact Thing for yourself—whatever it is. Until you have that, nothing else matters—

Surviving the Dally

News

Quite an event!

Detroit’s “Dally in The Alley” street festival has more authenticity than any music festival you’ll ever attend. A neighborhood block party gone out of control. Total DIY. No corporate sponsors. No Budweiser banners. No beer logos.

It’s also quite a bit less genteel than your garden variety New Yorker book festival with its bland Jonathan Franzen-style authors. The Dally takes place in Detroit after all. Not Manhattan or Brooklyn. We were one of the few literary outfits represented at the event. Our goal is to make pop lit as much a part of people’s everyday life as music– of which at the Dally there was a lot of.

Read our report on the Dally, and how we did at it, at our News blog here.

NEW POP LIT at the Dally!

Announcement

There will be a NEW POP LIT table at the famed Detroit “Dally in the Alley” street fair this Saturday. The Dally is one of the largest urban street fairs in the country– and because it’s in the Motor City, it’s the coolest, hippest, edgiest such fair anyplace.

What will we have for sale and on display?

-A limited number of copies of the NEW POP LIT prototype lit journal, which contains exciting writing fitting the new “Pop Lit” hybrid category. This is the most important debut of a literary periodical at least since Paris Review came out sixty-plus years ago. The difference is that our journal presents new ideas from outside the mainstream. See what the future looks like.

-Special Kathleen Crane “Aloha from Detroit” t-shirts promoting the Detroit punk-scene chronicler’s e-book collection of stories.

-A variety of zines created by the best underground writer in America, Jessie Lynn McMains. Here’s a prediction: Jessie will soon be recognized as the best short story writer in the country.

(AN ASIDE: Kathleen Crane and Jessie Lynn McMains both have stories in the NPL prototype.)

-Copies of the Dan “I’m not Picasso” Nielsen art-lit chapbook. Prose poems and amazing drawings. Talk about a collector’s item!

-Various other books and zines from terrific new “Pop Lit” writers.

All this in the setting of the colorful Dally in the Alley, THE most amazing organic-and-authentic art festival in the nation.

To top things off, I’ll be there in person. (At one time I was the most exciting and provocative literary performer anywhere to be seen– and may still be.) I’ll have my voice and possibly even my faux-craziness with me. If you’re at the Dally, stop by and say hi!

(Pictured: a past version of this editor at Jeff Potter’s ULA table during an early moment at a previous Dally.)

-Karl Wenclas

Joyride

Pop Lit Fiction

Are you planning on doing much reading this Labor Day weekend? Make sure you include our latest story, “Joyride,” by Sonia Christensen. It’s a perfect suspensfully-tense story for a long weekend, especially if you’re driving someplace. As many people will be doing. The story, you see, is about a relationship, but it’s also about driving. Through mountains and trees, at night. Sonia Christensen has the ability to put you right there, in  the kind of hypnotic mood that driving, at night, creates. Driving– then something happens. Read “Joyride” and escape into the literary dream. . . .

We hit a curve in the road and were in true mountain territory. Not on roads that didn’t have names yet, not on roads where there were no other cars, but roads where there were not many cars, roads where you start to feel like you can do anything, be anybody and there will be no one around to see you or stop you. 

LECLAIR ON FRANZEN

Interview

The topic of conversation this week in the established literary world is the publication of Jonathan Franzen’s latest big novel, Purity— one of those sporadic books meant to justify the existence of said literary world. No American novelist over the past fifteen years has received the same level of critical attention combined with media hype.

Is the hype justified?

To answer that question, NEW POP LIT’s Karl Wenclas questions the esteemed author and book reviewer Tom LeClair, who reviewed Franzen’s novel last week at The Daily Beast. Now LeClair amplifies his thoughts; holding nothing back as he examines Franzen, other reviewers, and the current state of American literature and publishing. Read our exclusive interview with him now!

–the critics who go along with Time’s assertion that Franzen is a “Great American Novelist” will be found out and mocked. . . .