Our reading session officially opens today, August 1st 2007. This year marks our 20th anniversary and we here at the magazine are very excited about issue 20.1. While a call for certain themes is forthcoming, please feel free to submit your work; we accept fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and essays. And don't forget about the 2007 Wabash prize in poetry being judged this year by the fabulous Eavan Boland! The deadline for submissions is October 15th!

I am so excited!  Edwidge Danticat's new novel, is set to be released on September 4th!  I can't go on praising Danticat's work enough...but she has written my favorite first lines ever, the opening lines to "Children of the Sea," from her collection  

"They say behind the mountains are more mountains.  Now I know it's true.  I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas, and lots of people in this world whose names don't matter to anyone but themselves."

Absolutely brilliant.  Before I came to Purdue, I used to teach my first day of 8th grade English by writing these lines on the board and having my students talk about it.  I love the book so much that I plan on using it this semester with my freshmen.  This is all to say that if you haven’t read Danticat, RUN, Run I tell you to the closest bookstore and pick up Krik! KraK? And mark your calendars for September 4^th! 

Sven Birkerts article published in the Boston Globe, Lost in the Blogosphere, makes a very interesting point about the impact of literary blogging on print reviews. Ultimately, he argues, the proliferation of blogging doesn’t necessarily mean that as a culture, we are keeping the art of criticism alive. More voices don’t translate to greater wisdom. His article (very eloquently written I might add) makes a very valid point, fearing for the demise of print criticism. I found the below quote particularly interesting:

“The implicit immediacy and ephemerality of "post" and "update," the deeply embedded assumption of referentiality (linkage being part of the point of blogging), not to mention a new of-the-moment ethos among so many of the bloggers (especially the younger ones) favors a less formal, less linear, and essentially unedited mode of argument”

Only twenty-six years old (although I too, Sven, am quickly graying), I too found this a problem when I first started blogging. I couldn’t help but here that teacherly voice asking me: “So what?” “What are you trying to prove here?” Not being a blogger myself (prior to the Sycamore blog) it took some getting used to. At first, I found myself writing drafts of my blogs, editing them, trying to pinpoint my argument and to communicate it in as straightforward a manner as possible. Then I realized that I had to get with it.

Perhaps, blogging shouldn’t be perceived as drawing on the tradition of criticism or even the less formal review, but rather as an offshoot, a more simplistic, less formal approach to saying what’s on one’s mind. Yes, it’s informal. Yes, it’s elementary. But in the vast reaches and seemingly endless space of the internet, I ask, what’s wrong with that? At the very least, it’s honest.

Last night I watched the film Factotum based on the novel of the same name written by Charles Bukowski. Not being familiar with his work, the film was a crude introduction. Apparently, the protagonist (Henry Chinaski) is semi-autobiographical. The film follows Henry from bar to bar, job to job, boarding house to boarding house, and between two destructive relationships with alcoholics like himself. When he finds the time, he writes. Completely rejected by the publishing world, a recurring line in the film emphasizes that writers should only write for themselves. Apparently, Bukowski was completely disillusioned with the publishing world and published most of his fiction with John Martin of Black Sparrow Press. His poems appeared in numerous anthologies and ECCO apparently published his last posthumous collection The People Look Like Flowers At Last in 2007. Apparently, his work is largely ignored by critics and his poems are often dismissed. I wonder what you poets think of his work?

Seeing the film and reading about Bukowski online got me thinking about the validity of the sentiment that the writer should only write for himself. I’m not sure I agree. In fact, I’d even say that it’s ridiculous and hypocritical to think that way. If a writer only writes for himself, then why even pursue publishing? Why submit story after story, as both the fictional Chinaski and the real Bukowski did? Ultimately, I think all artists are the same; they have a need to share their work with an audience because only then can it be really known as art, and appreciated.

I recently read an interesting article published in the last issue of Poets & Writers by Tova Mirvis about where writers do their best work. The piece is entitled: “A Writer’s Bed, The Center of All Good Things.” I think the title says it all. Although writing in bed does have its pitfalls, Mirvis writes, there are also many rewards. All I have to say is after reading the article, I feel much better about spending lazy summer mornings lounging in bed with a book. Although I’ve never written in bed, I do believe I might give it a whirl. You know what they say, everything’s better when you’re doing it in bed!

From Lot 49: Last August, AOL accientally released the search logs of around 658,000 users.  This quickly became an internet privacy scandle, which led to the resignations and firings of several AOL employees.

Nothing too unusual here: so far, it's just another event in the ongoing loss of our rights to privacy.

What is odd--downright mysterious, actually--is the log of search queries attributed to user 23187425, which reads more like one side of an highly associative IM conversation than a list of search queries.  So in some sense, this log is readable in a literary way.  So much so that Superbunker (in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) is publishing the log in a book entitled i feel better after i type to you.

Thomas Claburn, who first made slight altercations for the sake of readablility to the log and republished them online (see above), wrote this about it at Lot 49:

Whether it's fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It's a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberation. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL's search engine?

I do find it compelling, and maybe he was right to not call it poetry as I have.  But then maybe there are a lot of poets writing today that are no longer working in poetry, however that has been defined in our culture, but in some "new genre of writing."  It certainly makes one wonder.

Mindy grew to 5'2.5" drinking the Fluoride-enhanced waters of her hometown, Elgin, Illinois. Since 2001 she's set up camp in Indiana, first attending Butler University and now Purdue as a 3rd year poet in the MFA program. Her personal heroes include Fran Quinn (a poet publishing with the Blue Sofa Press and running his own independent poetry workshop) and Aussie Bindy Irwin.

Mindy's literary taste is proving democratic; this summer she read and loved equally Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, The Time Traveler's Wife by new author Audrey Niffenegger, and the final (sniff, sniff) installment of the Harry Potter series. She considers the closing line of William Stafford's poem, "Ask Me" to be among the greatest ever written, but otherwise has no poetic favorites (unless you count poet Dave Shumate and Mary Oliver's poem "Members of the Tribe"). Make of that what you will.

She was recently engaged to a fellow poet and is looking forward to their life together eating Ramen and sleeping in a refrigerator box while fighting over whether or not they can write in the margins of their mutually owned books.

Silliman's Blog should require no introduction by now.  According to the Wikipedia entry on Ron Silliman, the blog has had more than 1,000,000 hits since it's inception in August of 2002. [Mine just broke 300.  Sigh.]  Wikipedia also describes it as "(arguably) the most influential English-language blog on the web that is devoted to contemporary poetry and poetics."  It's certainly one of the most influential to me and quite a few of my friends who keep up with it regularly.  No one else has done what he has done.  No one has even come close yet.

His blog, naturally, has also made me more curious about his poetry.  Thanks to /ubu_editions, I have now read two of his works, The Chinese Notebook and Sunset Debris.  Tjanting is on the reading horizon, too.  But you don't have to develop a fondness for language poetry to get something out of this blog (although it certainly wouldn't hurt).  Two of my favorite features are his lists of literary news links that he posts roughly on a weekly basis, and the extended list of links to poetry and poets' blogs running down the lefthand side.

Anyone interested in contemporary poetry should check his blog out, as well as anyone interested in blogging about poetry.  He has set the standard.

Thanks go out again to Daryll Lynne for finding this article by James Surowiecki from The Financial Page at The New Yorker.  The article, "The Science of Success," discusses the recent use of "prediction markets" by publishing companies to decide on which books to put their money into.  These prediction techniques have been used over the past few years by film and television companies, with what seems a relatively good success rate itself; but many are sceptical of the implications this may have in the book publishing trade.

From my perspective, though, I can't imagine any book I might ever publish would ever turn a profit.  I don't think books of poetry do very often, unless I put "Chicken Soup" in the title.  Hmmm.

Rajaa Alsanea's novel, Girls of Riyadh, has been translated into English. Many attempted to ban this book in her native Saudi Arabia, forcing it underground where, reportedly, copies were circulated for £300. She's received many death threats but has also seen astounding support for her work by young Saudi women who see her as a herald. I heard her on an NPR interview the other day and was really impressed with this 25 year old author. She has succeeded in writing an indirect political novel, although that wasn't her intention. In the interview, she repeatedly stated that she only wanted to show life for a woman in Saudi Arabia.

Those of you who know me will know that I have no business talking about fasion, let alone viewing a blog dedicated to the exploration of fasion around the world.  So you can all thank Daryll Lynne for picking up on this literary oddity.

From The Sartorialist, we have this post [oh, come on; no permalinks?] from Monday, July 9th, called "Grapes of Wrath & Sullivan's Travels."  It's a short post, but here's an excerpt:

More than just about overalls ,to me, this look is about how Japan sees our (American) historic costume - i.e. 30's Dust Bowl - in a much more romantic way than we even see ourselves.

You've got to see the pictures to really understand it.  And it seems that this is just one of many current fashion trends in Japan that come out of their fascination with old books, American as well as Italian (The Sartorialist doesn't mention any others in this post).

This makes even less sense to me than fasion usually does.  But hey, who can account for taste?

I've never felt so comforted by Samuel Beckett's face before I found you, UBU Web. That is Beckett, isn't it?

Anyway, it seems like every week I find another great literary resource on the internet, so I've decided to select a handful of my favorites (old and new) and write a post featuring one on the blog.

UBU Web has been around for awhile now, and it shows: this site is massive. It describes itself as "a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts." It features mp3s, essays, and, most importantly, it's own online publishing house, /ubu Editions.

It might not be for everybody's tastes, but if you want to see some innovative (and did I mention free) new writing, this is the place to go.

We're teases here at the Sycamore Review. Every week or two, we're going to be revealing another piece of the new issue, just tempting you to fork over that roll of ones to get your own full monty.

You can already view an excerpt from the story that won this years Wabash Prize in Fiction (see below or visit the Current Issue page).  Now you can read Lucia Perillo's poem, "Metropolis."  We're proud to say that this issue features two of her poems; and after reading this one, we're hoping you'll want to see more.

This week we are welcoming Jon Sealy, the new fiction editor of the Sycamore Review. He grew up in Central, SC and is in his third year in Purdue's MFA program.  He enjoys southern writers, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, British novelists, and trees and shrubs.  He plans to post with advice for fiction submissions as the reading period approaches, but for now he recommends people check out what past editors have said about publication.  A more detailed flavor of his personality and interests can be found on his blog.

Sycamore Review’s Summer/Fall 2007 issue has arrived, and it’s packed. Issue 19.2 includes Jacob M. Appel’s “Exposure,” winner of the 2007 Wabash Prize for Fiction (see below), poetry by Priscilla Atkins, Jim Daniels, Lucia Perillo, Jonah Winter, drawings by Matthias Adolfsson, and much more. Jump in!

Check out the table of contents and find out how to get your hands on this delightful issue.

You'll also find a preview of Jacob M. Appel's story in the table of contents.  More preview excerpts are to follow weekly, so check back for more.