Fringe, the Noun that Verbs Your World

(Jeff Questad is taking a well-deserved week off, but he did send me the lion’s share of the following links. And never fear, Q-Heads–he’ll be back at the Occupy Roundup helm next week.)

Saturday in Oakland turned into a clusterfuck (although doesn’t it always?) as OPD arrested over 400 protestors–and, by accounts which are beginning to trickle in/out, members of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department proceeded to humiliate and possibly torture the detainees. Keep your eye on this one, folks.

And keep your other eye on Miami, where police have raided the #OM encampment. I don’t have anything to link to yet (as usual, a big Thank You to the mainstream media), but here’s a piece from the Miami Herald which details the situation just after sundown, the time at which the protestors were ordered to be gone.

Boy, for a movement that’s supposed to be on its last gasp …

I can in no way come up with anything new to say about last week’s release of Mitt Romney’s tax returns, but here’s a calculator to tell you how long it took Mitt to make what you made in all of 2010. FYI (TMI?), Mitt took in my entire 2010’s-worth of income in less than half a... more »

The “unmuzzled throatful” of words soar from these pages. Elyse Fenton’s Clamor aligns itself with the contemporary witnessing of poets like Brian Turner, Matthew Doherty, Sinan Antoon, and Kent Johnson. In keeping with the tradition and pageantry of the human condition, Fenton’s debut collection breathes life into the smoldering heart of war.

The reader is presented with a speaker who resides on the home front waiting to be reunited with her beloved. Fenton’s portrayal of love, loss, and war are dynamically conveyed through lyrical and prose poems. A belief in the resiliency of words as more than symbols, Fenton’s love of language and life, resounds in “Love in Wartime (I).” Here, words represent sensations and emotions directly:

When I say you and I have to mean

not some signified presence, not

the striking of the same spent tinder

but your mouth & its live wetness, your tongue

& its intimate knowledge of flesh.

Words embody living moments of the mind; they must. It is a longing for the intimacy and for the physical presence of another half a world away that allow these words to be comforting. The poems in this collection reach out for those who escape our grasp, for those beyond the “rifle’s reach.” Deftly, the... more »

– I am a writer and a photographer, and sometimes I like to combine the two art forms, which in fact are my favorite vices. Such is the case with “Ask Not,” which is what I hope is the first in a series of visual texts is support of the Occupy Movement. For “Ask Not,” I wanted to re-invent the statement made by John Kennedy in his inaugural address. I understood that the young president wanted us to look beyond our personal lives to see the greater good. Ironically, as a little kid I saw John Kennedy in Houston on November 21, 1963, the night before he was assassinated.

You never forget your first victim of police brutality. Way back in October, Scott Olsen took one for the team in in Oakland, the victim of an apparent tear gas canister fired at close range by an Oakland cop. In a movement that has no leaders and no big names, that knock on the head made Scott a rock star, and now he’s profiled in Rolling Stone. This piece also has some good stuff about life on the Occupied streets of Oakland and a picture of Scott rockin’ the neck brace.

Don’t call it a comeback. Occupy San Fran has been feeding people and shutting down banks, licking its wounds after having its encampments forcibly taken down. But the movement is being reborn for Spring 2012 as Occupy Wall Street West. Friday’s march through the financial district included more than 50 groups that have aligned with Occupy. It rained, but Occupy says it was the biggest turn out they’ve had yet and the banks suffered more than the Occupiers. Of course, if Mark Wahlberg had been there, it wouldn’t have gone down like it did.

Your Occupation Calendar:

• February 3rd – National day of action against the NDAA (Facebook)
• March 30th – National Occupation of... more »

Fringe has extended the deadline for submissions to the REMNANTS theme issue. Check out the original call, and send us something wonderful.

The new deadline for Visual Art is February 15, 2012. The new deadline for all literary genres is March 15, 2012.

This week we’re featuring three poems by Maryann Corbett. Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips asked for her thoughts on the poems and on the writing life; she shares them here.  Please share your own thoughts about the poems in the comments section below.

“Art Song’s Chicken Wings” makes such a great conceit for “Stream.” How did the idea for the poem come to you?

Utter serendipity and plain fact. There really was, for many years, a billboard right near one of the entrance ramps to Interstate 94 that advertised for a local Asian restaurant whose proprietor’s name was Art Song. As a singer with some serious training, I have several basic books whose covers read “Arias and Art Songs.” Over many years in choruses, I’ve known many, many aspiring musicians who have had to give up their career dreams. Those streams of consciousness had a way of segueing one into the other.

You’ve used couplets of tetrameter to good effect in “Mean” as well as other poems, such as this one from Umbrella. The closeness—maybe I mean tightness, along with the really nice rhyme, make these poems the kind I want to pick up and hold, to see on a broadside (or a billboard,... more »

The nature of the occupy movement has a striking resemblance to the Vietnam War protests back in the 1960s. Pundits of that era characterized the protestors as pot-smoking hippies who needed to get a haircut, bath and a job. Not much has changed. A single event crystallized that generation and is memorialized in photos that are as powerful today as they were fifty years ago. The words of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio” still summon vivid memories of that horrific day on the campus of Kent State University.

It is an over-dramatization to compare the protestors who were pepper sprayed on the University of California-Davis campus with the students who were shot dead by National Guardsmen in May of 1970. But the image of a campus police officer calmly stepping over a peaceful group of protestors, displaying a can of pepper spray like an actor displaying the Oscar he’d just won, and methodically spraying the chemicals directly into the faces of defenseless students, was disturbing. Fellow-officers forming a defensive circle with weapons fixed on the nonviolent students who watched added to the absurdity.

Over the past couple of months, pundits have vilified the protestors as dirty, naïve and aimless—actually those were some... more »

Jeff Questad will be on hiatus for a bit, but he did send me the majority of these links. Because he’s a stand-up dude and Black Sabbath enthusiast.

We’re still taking submissions for Occupy Fringe, FYI. Send your poetry, essays, short fiction, or artwork to FringetheMagazine@gmail.com.

Lots of fun stuff to talk about from last week, and plenty of upcoming Occupy events all around the word. So spread the word, huh? And join in if you can. Your local Occupy group likely has Facebook and Twitter accounts.

– — This happened a few weeks ago, but I’m just seeing it now: Newt Gingrich being “mic-checked” during a speech in Iowa. I can’t decide how I feel about this one. On the one hand, anyone who wants to disrupt anything Newt Gingrich is doing has my support. I’d very much like it if the American people gave Newt plenty of free time with which to write more of those shitty alternate history novels. And this clip did make me grin from ear to ear. And giggle some more at that awkward oaf who knew he wanted to do something but couldn’t quite figure himself out.

But. Is this the right kind of action? Or does it bring negative attention and... more »

What would you do for love? This week, “Fresh Bread” author Tom Bonfiglio talks about love, sex, and other blood relations.

This story, “Fresh Bread,” is the fifth I’ve published featuring Frankie Rossi, and it’s the third I’ve published in which his cousin, Jade Rossi, makes an appearance, though this is the first where they are together. In the stories apart from each other, they each smoke a lot of pot and cigarettes, get drunk, deal with the incessant bullshit of daily life, masturbate, fuck, lie, swear, sneak around, and attempt to float invisibly through rooms filled with smoke and anger and the bitterly disappointed. So of course I had to have them fuck each other in this story, blood relations and Jade’s pregnancy be damned. They’re just a couple of lonely kids, and I owed it to them to at least give them chance at pretending to be wanted, and fucking is the best pretense at love there is. What’s more real, words that may or may not mean a damn thing, or the idea that another human being is willing to share their genitals with you for a spell?

In the story, Frankie relates to the reader how his grandfather ripped... more »

The Occupation continues into the new year.

We can begin 2012 by looking at some of the battles the 99% have won. Don’t forget the smaller cities. Even serious movement watchers and participants sometimes make the mistake of overlooking Occupy groups in smaller cities, even as their wins stack up. Check out McAllen, Texas, a little (but fast-growing) town on the southern most tip of Texas just across the Rio Grande from Reynosa, Mexico.

We can look way back, as Michael Moore tells us the story of The First Occupy.

We can embrace the new year by looking to the future. Noam Chomsky says it’s time to advance to the next stage. While we’re at it, we could start speculating about the proposed May 1 celebration/demonstration/occupation.

We could look outward, to the Arab world, where the Occupiers Of Tahir Square say they support the American Occupy movement. Democracy Now has a special episode looking at the year of global uprisings. Did you know there was an Occupy Tokyo?

We can look in the mirror, at the best Occupy photos of 2011.

Or we can stay in the moment:

January 17 is the next big occupied date on the calendar. Organizers hope Occupy Congress will be the biggest gathering yet. The date is... more »

On January 17th, Occupy Wall Street goes to Washington. The 4th-month anniversary of the movement just happens to coincide with the day Congress comes back, and OWS wants a million tents there to set the tone for the session.

That’s ambitious, and it wouldn’t be out of line to question if it can be done. Just how big is the movement today? Nobody has more of a finger on the pulse than Firedoglake, and they put the number of active encampments at 61 this week. This number is in constant flux and may not reflect some smaller groups.

But the strength of the movement is measured in the many fronts on which news is happening and things are getting done. That’s why you read Occupy Fringe. Let’s see where things are, and have a little fun. Day 100 of The Occupation was celebrated on Christmas day. Here’s what was happening this week in Occupied America:

“We Are The 99%” has been chosen as the year’s top quote by a guy who chooses the year’s top quote.

The 99% celebrated Christmas in public spaces all over the country. In Zuccotti Park, now fenced off and tightly guarded, at huge cost to the city, demonstrators came together for a holiday celebration... more »

This week we reprinted William Donoghue’s “Killing McGinty Safely,” a short story about a hardened pedophile seeking to kill the man who has uncovered his secret. And of course, we asked Prof. Donoghue a couple questions about the piece.

What inspired this story?

The Boston clergy sex abuse scandal. We all know that the most respected and trusted individual can be leading a double life, in the basement or on the internet. I just wondered what it might sound like inside the head of someone like that. Sade was the first to discover the literary effect of juxtaposing rationality and bestiality, and that’s what I was after.

Looking at it five years later, is there anything you’d change?

Yes, I think I’d make it a bit clearer how McGinty has made the discovery on his computer that leads to his having to be killed. You don’t want to insult the reader’s intelligence by explaining too much, but in worrying about that, you can sometimes leave too much out. I think I’d spend a little more time on the computer angle, make it clear how both men visit the same child porn site and so on. The story horrified me to the point that I wanted... more »

Justin Torres’ We the Animals begins with elegant, pounding language and a kind of aching clarity that forces the reader to take notice; the rhythm of the narrator’s voice propels you through stories about his brothers Manny and Joel, and their secret language of “We,” through a game of Gallagher the brothers play with their mother and through nights when the boys are forced to sleep on the floor of a brewery under the acid glow of a vending machine. Torres takes the reader into the basement of a neighbor’s house where the three brothers watch child pornography sitting on an old mattress, and finally to a dumpster in the snow where the secret language of “We” loses a participant.

This debut novel reads like a collection of linked, creative nonfiction essays that are so visceral and real they make your palms sweat—at least for the first 2/3 of the book. Then a time jump in the last chapters leapfrogs the story forward in time and it loses its realistic tone and delves into serious melodrama that involves a much-hinted-at sexual awakening and a trip to the mental institution. Torres gives the reader just enough to feel as though they are sitting on... more »

Recognizing the Roche limit

He shakes his head. ‘Ah it is a shortage.’

‘A shortage of what?’

‘A shortage of initiative,’ he says, without missing a beat.

It seems as though we are always seeking

seeking

seeking.

And never finding.

I came from such a long way away

Now I pass my time daydreaming about Conceivable.

Anything beautiful bequeaths a strong aftertaste

Like rejection.

Or wasted ambition.

Or an idea that resonates.

Or clarified possibility.

We would have smiled here,

and embraced here.

We would have ignited here.

Revolutionized here.

But you quickly look away,

and now I am exhausted.

I want to sit quietly for a minute, or a decade or a life time or so

and watch the world dismantle

and rise

from compulsory renovations,

without requesting anyone’s

Compliance

anymore.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been spreading like a plague. American protestors are pretty upset that big business got the bailouts while the Regular Joe got diddlysquat. Approximately one in ten Americans is unemployed. All those out-of-work people have one thing in common: a lot of free time for gossip and complaint. Yet, whether you are part of the “99 percent” or the “1 percent,” we’re all in this together. If we want the “occupiers” to stop protesting and get back to work, we must change the current economic system. Capitalism isn’t working and neither is communism. It’s time to find something different that will satisfy both the needs of the poor and the wealthy.

I have rediscovered an economic system that will do just that. History provides us with a successful economic structure that, with just a few tweaks for this modern age, could be just what the United States needs. Although this system hasn’t been in use since the fourteenth century, it was highly successful for over a thousand years in Western Europe. It will provide all the basics for the many unemployed individuals who are fit and able to work. At the same time, it will continue... more »

In this week’s Fringe feature, Brian Nicolet reviews Pleiades Press’ Unsung Masters Series, which revives work by great, overlooked writers of the 20th century.

Chat about the series and the piece here. Have you read Dunstan Thompson or Tamura Ryuichi’s work? Are you looking forward to the series’ forthcoming volumes?

Still, as an adult, I have yet to shed my love for all things societally juvenile. Unicorns. Backpacks. Pop rocks. And, yes, YA novels. Even the terribly written ones with flat plots and exhausted tropes, I hold close, as if protecting a child from the harsh reality of high-minded, fiction-reading, intellectual types. Give me drama! Give me angst! Fuel my tortured teenage soul!

LIE by Caroline Bock is an unusual YA case, pairing all the teenage things I crave in a novel (angst, young love, obsession over image, loss of innocence), with all the things I crave from damn good writing. Bock has an MFA in writing and it shows, in her imagistic and somewhat minimalistic approach. She paints characters with such vividness that it’s easy to get sucked into their personalities. And she means for you to, given the first-person structure.

Through accounts from each character involved, we learn that the story centers around a racial hate-crime that no one on Long Island is speaking about. The main character, 17-year-old Skylar Thompson, suffers the brunt of guilt, having to protect her boyfriend, 18-year-old Jimmy Seeger, one of the accused in the violent attacks on two Salvadorian brothers. The seriousness of the content is... more »

(Today’s post is a two-parter from Ian Singleton. Ian joined the Oakland arm of the recent Occupy the Ports protest, and shares his experience below. After the page break are Ian’s reflections on an earlier action, the November 2nd incident in Oakland during which protestors also shut down the Port.)

Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Last night I again rode the subway to West Oakland and walked to the port, which had been long shut down and remained shut down throughout the evening, until after 3 a.m.

During these last couple of weeks, we’ve seen actions including bank shutdowns, plaza demonstrations (as we’ve seen before), and—best of all—demonstrations against home foreclosures, known as “Occupy Our Homes.” This was a return to the Port of Oakland; however, this time with solidarity port shutdowns along the West Coast and including Houston. Portland shut down its port, Seattle shut down some of its port, and Los Angeles had some success as well. In Oakland, the police were in greater presence within the port area than they were last time, but they did very little violence in comparison with other port occupations. This time, there were fewer people, even though we still numbered in the thousands, meaning that... more »