How to Build a Bigger Barge

Pen Names and More Author Killing

In my own writing, I’m currently working on a top-secret project which began with me wondering what the deal is with pen names? A number of Barge submitters recently have asked we note that they publish under a pen name, and I couldn’t figure it out. As in, why? I did some thinking and was just left with a lot of questions, but if you use a pen name and want to tell us why, please do.

Is your own name embarrassing to you?

Do you think that a cooler sounding name will make you more marketable/famous?

What’s with authors’ obsession with names anyway? First and last? First initial, middle name, last? First two initials, last name? Full name? Made-up name? Are any of these who you actually are

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Death of the Author (revisiting my fave topic)

Young writer self learned a potent lesson from Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” out of his collection The Things They Carried, the power of not saying what you actually mean. Consider that a story is never about what the story is about, what it’s about is only a window into what it’s actually about. Every story is a lie, a metaphor that masquerades as a sequence of events, yet cannot be. Even speaking autobiographically, the textualization of time and events removes their factual reality and places them in the realm of symbol, metaphor, and relativity to the reader’s own interpretation and experience. A word, a sequence of words, a sequence of sequences spanning pages and books, is itself, as an object, a symbol for meaning

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Guest Blog: M.J. Nicholls on the Problem of Bastard Readers

Let’s forgive our readers. Forgive them deeply, in the most pious Christian sense of the word. They put up with so much venal wicked bastardy from us these days. Frankly, they’re saints. But beware, because they’re also watching us closely, meat cleavers in hand.

Because we’re desperate. We’re desperate to push the boundaries, take it to the edge, get way out there, touch with our ice-cold fingers the tips of the ORIGINAL. So we write and write, read and read, sucking up as much “daring new” fiction as possible before we retire at our blank screens, hitting whatever keys our fingers land on. We call this “writing.”

And we’re struggling. Writers still cling to their grand old notions

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“Experimental” is a Naughty Word

I really have come to hate describing Barge’s material as “experimental.” Why, oh, why? I get it, in a way, that, okay, we live in an age of such overwhelming availability of every conceivable item that the only way to conceivably navigate these oceans is to use the constellations of classification. This is especially prevalent in music, where you have such genres as math rock, indie rock, hardcore, emo-core, ska-core, nintento-core, classic rock, nerd rap, dirty south, and U2. In writing, we’ve got literary, contemporary, mainstream, surrealist, avant garde, magical realism, experimentalism, David Sedaris, and Hunter S. Thompson… For a group of people who are supposed to be good at words, I couldn’t imagine less descriptive terminology for the ways we categorize ourselves

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HTML Giant/BlazeVOX: Questioning Legitimation

Not my usual level of critical focus here, but I was surprised by a topic and felt like weighing in in my own way. Honestly, the topic’s way to big to even consider broaching with a single blog post, so I really just wanted to try to give some food for thought.

I really didn’t have a great deal of interest in blogging about the BlazeVOX hullabaloo of recent – if you’re not familiar, you can check out the <a href = “http://htmlgiant.com/presses/blazevox-goes-vanity-press/”> HTML Giant post </a> but it basically boils down to Blaze Vox asking for a contribution of $250 from accepted authors to publish their books; of course, BlazeVOX says this is a voluntary donation to help defray some costs and help keep the publisher afloat. All in all, I could not really care any less about the discussion of this practice as ethical or not, nor do I believe this makes BlazeVOX a supposed “vanity press.” Really, <a href = “http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=1858”> this post at Montevidayo.com </a> expresses just about every point I would like to make myself, and I don’t see much sense in duplication and reiteration. Rather, I’d like to zero in on a particular notion (not quoting Montevidayo directly, because it spans several points in the blog) of legitimation in the literary world, and how this relates to the author and his ego

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Feminism and Literature: WTF is equity anyway?

I recently came across an essay written for The Walrus by Stacey May Fowles, “The Unbalancing Act: how literary periodicals fail to correct gender inequity”, which you can read in its entirety here. While I may have some issues with the various arguments presented here and elsewhere, it’s definitely worth a read and definitely some food for thought, bringing to the forefront the somewhat underserved topic of women’s role in literature – I would argue this is by and large a non-factor, but not something we should be unaware of, by any means… I was, after all, raised by the standards of a hard-working WWII woman in my grandmother and a certified bra-burning 60’s hippie feminist in my mother.

Among other things, this particular essay suggests that male writers boycott, refusing to submit or even decline acceptances from magazines

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What Experiment?: The Realist Mode, pt. 3

If we consider the realist mode of narrative to originate as a mimicry of the oral narrative tradition, it becomes easier to understand exactly how it functions in terms of how I broke its components down in part 1. The most notable difference becomes the separation of form and language as two different elements. In the oral narrative, they are one and the same – a word is spoken in a particular order as an active event. Because spoken words exist in time and occur chronologically, they themselves carry chronological weight

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What Experiment?: The Realist Mode, pt. 2

The real key to unlocking the manner in which the Realist Mode functions is a deeper understanding of what I mean by “Setting.” In a way, this can be seen as a factor completely external to the text itself, yet simultaneously dictating to its form – at its core are many of the ideas of reader theory criticism. An easier parallel to make is comparing it to a natural force like gravity. Though all mass has gravitational force, on the human scale the gravity we create is not enough to alter anything. Instead, we are locked into the gravity of the Earth which is locked into the gravity of the Sun – gravity dictates where we can go, what we can do, how fast a thing can be dropped, how high you can jump, etc. Conceivably, if you built a pile of humans that equaled the Earth in mass, however, that would be a different story.

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What Experiment?: The Realist Mode, pt. 1

(This is the first in my exploration of some kind of intellectualization of what we may call “experimental literature. The first part’s really long, so I’m breaking this one up into more digestible bits.)

If my goal is to try to somehow differentiate so-called “experimental” (which I’m going to put in quotes until a less derogatory term can be decided on) literature from the “literary” style, then I can pretty much say I have no idea where to begin, except for quite a few beers. Pending that, the most logical place to start is probably the origin of the divide itself – but whether it originates from a forceful rebellion against or from a natural organic break with tradition is an important distinction to make for our purposes. I don’t mean to leave out the option that “experimentalism” is potentially, and contrarily, the natural state of literature and realism its bastard child – that’s just beyond the scope of things at the moment.

In one case, the overt rebellion, “experimentalism” becomes entirely dependent on the standards and norms of realist and literary writing; in the second case, “experimentalism” is already a liberated style and only informed by, at play with, or at odds with literary and realist styled writing. Since both have a relationship with realism, it would make most sense to begin by engaging with the realist mode of writing, whose tenets we’re already well aware of. We can break its components down into three broader categories: Form/Structure, Language, Setting, in order of hugeness.

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Opinion: Don’t Show, Don’t Tell

The more I read of contemporary literature, both from other journals and via submissions to Barge, the more and more I am certain that less is more. Words, the printed kind, are a funny thing – and maybe a lot of this is my love affair with Derrida and deconstructionism – where we, as writers, have a strong desire to tell a story in the same manner as we would if speaking (ideally, anyway, we’d all love to be able to speak as well as we write.) And as readers, by and large, we desire for a story to be told, or maybe not desire but expect.

An analogy:

mixers : booze :: words : meaning

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