Asphalt Flowerhead is finally out! Buy it here!

06/01/09 - TOM BRADLEY IS A BRAIN-MACHINE

Whatever the hell that is. But for real, nobody can go wild with ideas the way he can. He just put up a fucking amazing on us Crossing Chaos degenerates at Exquisite Corpse, a "locus of the enigmatic polygeneration" as he calls us... but definitely read it. Even if just to watch the way he juggles language. And don't sleep on what Wayne Groen's doing up in Canada with his incredible press... he's dug more talent out of the underground than you'd believe. Seriously, I feel like a little kid next to these geniuses (which, as Tom Bradley talks about a lot in his article, I am). They'll blow your mind.

05/01/09 - "THE SATURNINE" IN BARE BONE

Kevin Donihe's been holding it down with Bare Bone for years now, but with #11 we reach the final issue. I'm really stoked to have gotten on this train before it leaves for good. This one's one of the best yet, with work from guys like Cody Goodfellow, Cameron Pierce, Kris Saknussemm, Kek-W, and my Swallowdown homies Mitch Maurade and J. David Osborne. Check it out here.

Kevin must be getting busy now with his own writing... within the last couple years he put out House of Houses and Washer Mouth, which are both fucking incredible and show that he's exploding as a writer. For real. The dude's always been great, and had one of the most original (and genuinely insane) minds in the game, but these books have a level of depth and maturity that's beyond his roots. Check him out, keep an eye on him, and don't weep too long over the funeral of Bare Bone because it's only died to give air to more beautiful things.

01/27/09 - AVANT-GARDE INTERVIEWS

Just a quick note to direct you to a batch of interviews (only four, as of the time I'm writing this, but I'm expecting eight more at the least) between the writers involved in the Avant-Garde for the New Millennium anthology. They're all pretty awesome; check them out here. We got Cameron Pierce and myself interviewing each other and a pair of interviews from Amy Christmas and Rick Polney too, and soon should have stuff from James Chapman, Kek-W, D. Grîn, Forrest Aguirre, Prakash Kona and more...

01/08/09 - INTERVIEW WITH RAW DOG

Jennifer from Raw Dog just did an interview with me about the Avant-Garde for the New Millennium anthology for their January newsletter, and I wanted to repost it here. It was a good opportunity to make clear what I hoped to do with the anthology - I hope you'll enjoy it:

What was your main goal for putting together the Avant-Garde for the New Millennium anthology?
It’s meant to be a realization, an epiphany. The anthology is proof that our great writers have not left us. But they are stuck in the shadows, that’s the reality of our contemporary condition. There was a time, you know, when artists were respected, perhaps the most respected members of society, but that’s just not the case today. Everything is gimmicks and money. If you walk the halls of a contemporary art museum you will find nothing but gimmicks and art which has forgotten the tradition of art, it’s forgotten the primary role of art which is to be a function in the artist’s life. We are creating art to teach ourselves, we are also creating art to push the vehicle of art further and further, but today you don’t really find that sort of thing. You turn on the radio, you find formulas, you find songs that were not born out of emotion but out of statistics and market-equations. It’s all playing to the market, it’s all motivated by money. I don’t know, it’s the same with books today. I say let those people have their art, they’re not hurting us. But I would hope to dispel the contemporary condition of amnesia, which has almost forgotten genuine art altogether, and has pushed it out of place to allow more room for stuff which I personally! conside r to be absolute bullshit.

So this anthology is really a collection of all the best writing I’ve been able to get my hands on. A lot of the people I knew about beforehand, and asked them to submit. A lot of people were totally new to me and those turned out to be some of the best pieces in the anthology. All of it’s genuine; it’s not all crazy-experimental, some of it is, but some of it is just totally fresh stuff, written a way only that particular author could have ever written it. If I had to state in one sentence what the goal of Avant-Garde for the New Millennium is, it would be: that the reader who has heard of none of these guys, who spends most of his or her time reading whatever the New York Times tells them too, can pick up this book and realize that there is so much more out there. There’s real, genuine art being created today, that didn’t die with Hemingway or the Beats. It could be life-changing for someone who’s had no contact with this kind of stuff – and that’s a lot a lot a lot of people, much more than you’d expect. And even people who have had that contact, I think they’ll learn a lot from this. It’s certainly bringing a lot of people from sort of different schools of thought into the same place.

The anthology has both fiction and poetry, usually that’s not the case. Why did you decide to include both?
Well, because one is no more important than the other. There’s some incredible fiction happening right now and some incredible poetry, and both are just as important – no, just as necessary. What we are working with, fundamentally is words – nothing but words. The way we format them is an extension of the way we choose to use those words. I don’t really see much of a difference past that. I write both, and really the only thing that dictates whether something is going to be in prose or in poetry is sort of just instinct, sometimes I can tell the words for a piece want to be arranged in paragraphs and sometimes in lines; and sometimes neither of those formats will work, it’s got to be something else. Something bent, something broken. I guess I included both for the sake of freedom, so that every writer was only approaching me with his or her particular collection of words, however they arranged them. I’ve got a story and a poem in there, and Kevin Donihe’s got one of each, too. Some of the pieces were not really a story or a poem, they were something really impossible to put a name on.

Like I say, this book was meant to be an epiphany, so I really wanted it to include everything, all the best – and I think I succeeded in that. There were a couple people I couldn’t get a hold of in time. Eckhard Gerdes comes to mind. I met him recently at the Bizarro Convention and told him I wish I could have talked to him before finalizing everything. Another guy I really, really wanted in this was Cedric Bixler, the singer and lyricist of the Mars Volta. You want to talk avant-garde, literature unlike anything that came before it, just check out that guy’s lyrics, especially from Deloused. But of course he was just about impossible to get a hold of. Who knows, maybe I’ll do another one someday, and be able to include the few I missed, as well as the few that have come to my attention since.

What do you see in the future for the underground writing scene?
I go through phases about it. Absolutely, I know that there will be a turning of the tides, probably quite soon. I hope this anthology and things like it will be good fertilizer for that. Right now I’m in the middle of digging through Boston, trying to establish some kind of scene here (anybody who knows what’s going on around here, let me know!), and I hope to see more physical work being done, because I think the internet is tremendously useful but only to an extent. We need to give people something in the flesh, something they can touch – something they’ll remember much longer and much more vividly. I worry, sometimes, that the environment of America today is going to keep making that harder and harder, but it’s also important to remember that everything we do to try and bring this kind of genuine art to the people will help, and will make the next effort that much easier.

01/04/09 - MODERN ENGLISH TANKA

Happy New Year! I hope you are as enthusiastic about it as I am. Things are going good in Boston. Real busy - but that's because I've got so much stuff to work on that's driving me mad with inspiration and twitches, and I've got a drive to open those things up and discover what's inside of them like I've never had before, and, and - well it's nice over here. Asphalt Flowerhead is done, all the way, it's been a dream kicking around in my head ever since I left high school and I finally got that dream out, after so much time of thinking I saw what it was and realizing what I saw wasn't really what was there, but now it's done, it's got everything I could give to it, and I'm really proud of what stands today. I hope you guys will check out the book when it drops in April (from Crossing Chaos), and that you will feel in letting it enter you all I felt when it was coming out. Aside from that I am on, like, the sixth or something draft of These Walls Don't Hold Out Space - the Brain Spackle book is pretty much set and the Avant-Garde anthology will be hitting the printers any minute now - and there's something else, something I'm really excited about, which I can't really say right now I don't think, but suffice it to know that I may soon get the privelage of being a participant in the Bizarro operation... in a way that you probably won't expect...

Well that thing that prompted this news entry here is that I just found out yesterday that I had a tanka selection published in the Winter 2008 issue of Modern English Tanka! It's really rad to be involved like that, because the tanka poem is such a personal form, without the ornaments or veils inherent in stories or longer poems, and to know someone digs these things that I really only wrote for my own emotional benefit (and published in hopes that I may not be the only one needing these textual medicines), well it's very cool. The tanka form is very powerful, it's an extended haiku (so instead of 5-7-5 syllables, it's 5-7-5-7-7, just adding those two extra lines). Anyone interested should 1) check out the journal here with my work in it, and 2) READ TAKUBOKU. Read Poems to Eat, translated by Carl Sesar. It doesn't get much deeper than this, it doesn't often play the heart's harpstrings so close...

Well, gotta run - everybody enjoy themselves! I'll be back soon!

11/20/08 - BIZARRO CON

Wrote this from the airport, Sunday Nov. 16th:

I'm sitting in PDX at 10:35 a.m., feeling gravity-heavy after two hours sleep, still drunk-phased from last night - this is me who left wide awake for the Bizarro Con and sits 72 hours later feeling like I found a flower in a garden and didn't sleep and spoke to it and cut shreds of my brain to feed to its pedals while taking in the water of its mind to drink myself. My body is sore but the reason my cheeks hurt is from the smiles I've been tasting all weekend, the reason my eyes are so bleary and weak is because they've been perpetually open, wonderstruck, radiating inside other eyes and the spaces in between -

This event was tremendously solidifying for the Bizarro presence. It managed to bring so many of us together who may not have even heard each other's names before, gave space to all who wanted to read and share our words with each other as we hear them, hosted a perfect composition of panels (which were really more like roundtable discussions in which any man or woman was as encouraged to speak up as those "giving" the panel), and ended it all by crowning the two books that did the most for the genre in 2007 - D. Harlan Wilson's Dr. Identity, a novel that threw a new shade of color onto the Bizarro canvas; and Gina Rinalli's 13 Thorns, a story collection illustrated by Gus Fink, that manages to be totally raw in its emotion and remain precise in its impact. The Wonderland Award ceremony was beautiful and a perhaps overdue acknowledgement to several incredibly deserving innovative artists (myself included :-D - joke - no, but seriously). Afterwards, the Ultimate Bizarro Showdown took place, an event featuring 19 writers that was supposed to last only an hour but somehow, in our sloppy-bizarro-drunk fashion, ended up being more like four (?). The mad genius Garret Cook took home that award with an incredible performance (followed by Mykle Hansen in second and Carlton Mellick in third). And in that ballroom, where all the awards were given and us Bizarros filled ourselves with cocktails (lots) and Mexican food (vegan), where the convention which had been a weekend of dipping our heads into a collective tank of dream-plasma climaxed, its impossible for me to describe the beauty I felt, not in the objects in the room but in the radio signals floating between us, the projectiles of emotion and the constant shine inside the pond of every dilated eye. Looking upon the Eraserhead table, with all its books from all the years lined out, you could realize, fully, how much has gone into this dream already, how many writers have given everything they have to the page in the name of Bizarro, so many nights and mornings spent in that silent conversation with the pen. It was a monument, for me, that said first that Bizarro has worked and now their name is sketched in stone; and said second that the Bizarro movement has only really now beginning to move and the Bizarro you see today is only a seed of tomorrow.

But aside from the romantic there was really only one reason we were there, and that was that we are all humans and have already given so much to each other, have already touched each other and made each other think something new, have talked and talked in electronic correspondance but, in many cases (in every case for me), have never even heard each other's voices - it was to be in each other's presence, and that was a bliss I loved every moment of. There are so many stories for what we shared there - every day was spend in sterile (though no less wonderful) intellectual thought, and every night, walking around the house, tunnel-vision, until the next dawn - but the biggest story is the story of this beautiful shared vision that all of us saw.

My plane is leaving - so that's all for now. Check out Bizarro if you haven't already because it really gives the world something it can't get anywhere else. Until next time, bizarros - keep it real - in the words of Ol' Dirty Bastard, "I like ya muthafukkin' style."

(Nov. 20th 12:24 a.m.: Let me restate as I type this up that I was very, very tired/still-sorta-next-day-drunk writing it, only two hours before I woke up to Rose O'Keefe's face hovering above my head, with Kevin L. Donihe reading some crazy manuscript off to the side, and Jeff Burk doing something and someone else doing something else... Mitch Maurade may or may not have walked in wearing an Obama mask... all a blur... but even if my sentences were kind of loosely juggled at points, I said all I meant to say and I wanted to keep it the way I wrote it at that moment, still fresh from the convention, minutes before getting onto my plane back home.)

11/03/08 - CHIMERAWORLD 5, ETC.

So just a few days ago Mike Philbin released the fifth installment of his notorious Chimeraworld series. This is the first one I've ever been included in and I am stoked - it's got a lot of great writing, some from names that are totally new to me, and some from writers I'm already familiar with, including D.W. Green (who runs Crossing Chaos) and Adam Lowe (who's got an art-fiction fusion project called Troglodyte Rose, done in collaboration with artists Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon, coming out from Crossing Chaos in July of '09). This anthology's theme is "The Rejects Issue"... and even in the intro, Philbin writes, "Gah, an entire issue devoted to rejected stories - that'll be shit, won't it?" But the point of it is that, today, the vast majority of stories are rejected only because they don't fit the particular niche-aesthetic that each of the multitudes of journals harbors. Philbin's mission is to save stories that simply don't fit any "niche," but are, in his mind, brilliant, and deserve to be shown to the world. I can't speak for the rest (yet - still waiting for my copy), but I can say that the story I've included is the best I've ever written in the short fiction form, and was rejected when I submitted it before because it was "too sci-fi" for the surreal journals and "too surreal" for the sci-fi journals. On top of that clash of genre niches, it's an extremely quirky piece, very experimentally written and coming to a conclusion that does not prescribe to the Hollywood sensation of making you want to smile, laugh, cry, or reach out and hold your lover's hand. It just ends the way the beginning neccesitated it, which is to say, fucked-up-as-all-hell. But still, I like to think, pretty damn good. (I can talk happily about this story because I wrote it almost a year ago - ask me how I like the poems I wrote this morning and I'll be speaking with a whole different sort of tone. Such is the nature of giving yourself to art every day). All interested parties can aquire the book here.

In other news, things are moving along with Asphalt Flowerhead as the release date slowly creeps up on us. Tony Max, a brilliant surrealist painter who's come into closer contact with his own dreams than anybody else I've ever met, is responsible for the beautiful cover art.

I strongly recommend anyone who has not done so to check out the catalogue Wayne Groen's got lined up already - I am personally as excited to read these books as one could possibly be. Jase has got some incredible stuff lined up, Fox and Locke both have some amazing stuff, Green himself will be putting out an incredible novel in the grand opening release, V. Ulea is getting ready to unleash "Quantum Fiction" upon the world, and Aerni and Jupitter-Larsen are both great, talented artists who will make a big impact on things once heard. Then there's everything Green's got coming up after the initial April releases... you know, sometime soon I'll have to do a real write-up of all this stuff. It's the most exciting publisher I've seen since Fugue State Press and I expect that they'll make a big difference in the realm of underground art.

Also, be sure to check out Tony Max... if you're reading this, you'll love him too.

Tomorrow's the election! I'm going to stay up all night, watch it from start to finish, and get on a boat out of America right away if McCain and Palin win...

10/07/08 - THE WONDERLAND AWARD

Sorry for my silence, but life in the city passes fast and I often find myself buried in things, Brain Spackle articles, poem scraps, my novels for Crossing Chaos, and a perpetually filling journal which will one day become a book called Mixtape. And homework! which I have had to touch since I dropped out of high school (and, realistically, since long before that)… all this to say that I have had little to report, as although I have been enormously busy working on a lot of things, all of them are in early stages and not even fully erected in my dreams yet. But Jase and I recently found out some very exciting news, which I would like to share with you:

The Bizarros have a lot of exciting things planned for the end of 2008, including the first Bizarro Convention, and they have just recently announced that, at the convention, they will be giving out the first-ever Wonderland Awards for bizarro or surrealist texts. The nominees are as follows:

Novels

D. Harlan Wilson - Dr. Identity

Gina Ranalli - Wall of Kiss

Jeremy C. Shipp - Vacation

Carlton Mellick III - Sausagey Santa

Eckhard Gerdes - Million Year Centipede

Collections

Gina Ranalli & Gus Fink - 13 Thorns

Vincent W. Sakowski - Misadventures in a Thumbnail Universe

John Edward Lawson - Discouraging at Best

Forrest Armstrong & Jase Daniels - This City is Alive

It’s a big honor to be sharing the bill with all of these guys. I will be attending the convention (Jase too, I think, in the form of a puppet avatar) and keeping my fingers crossed, but whether or not This City is Alive is the book chosen it’s a big honor to be nominated at all, all of the books on the list are great and deserving of it. And regardless of the award, the convention will be a great thing for bizarro and unusual writing in general - a lot of seminars by the writers themselves, a lot of readings, (a lot of beer, knowing the bizarros), and the “Ultimate Bizarro Showdown” contest towards the end, in which every writer who has the nerve to enter will read a piece within three minutes, to be judged, primarily, by the audience (sounds to me like anyone is capable of being kicked offstage whenever their work gets people too restless) - and, formally, by Bruce Taylor, Gina Rinalli, and other offbeat writers. I’m very happy to have been included in all of this, and suggest anyone in the Portland area to look into the event as well - you can find all the information for it here.

That’s all for now. Asphalt Flowerhead is in the publisher’s hands - which means, despite my impulse to always be tweaking things, I probably can’t anymore. And that’s probably for the better. Besides that, just trying to get things done - and keeping my eyes open to the new sights and sounds surrounding me.

Anybody interested in communication beyond these dead telegrams, shoot me an email: delarocha59@yahoo.com.