The Weekly Atticus (08/23/2017)

A recap of the week at Atticus Review, along with some extras.

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Dear ,I recently read an AV Club article about the mashup of the Batman series of comics with Elmer Fudd. The review was glowing, wholly endorsing this deeply weird, neo-noir exploration into the darkness of Fudd’s broken world. Needless to say, I went out and bought the comic (along with Wonder Woman featuring the Tasmanian Devil, the Martian Manhunter vs. Marvin the Martian book, etc). Not only was the story gripping and well told, it was also wonderfully tongue-in-cheek. I loved how the story was told entirely in Fudd’s adorably speech-impedimented voice and that the comic never once copped to the joke: 

I didn’t gwow up in the fancy part of the city. I gwew up in the dirt of the countwy...In duck season, you ate duck. In wabbit season, you ate wabbit. You didn’t find your pway, you starved. So you wearned to find your pway. I weft the dirt when thewre was nothing elwse to kiwl. Despewate for cash, despewate to eat, I found the onwy work I could do. Men paid me. I hunted what those men needed dead. 

I’m sorry. But that’s classic. Writing is serious business. Or it would be, if we got paid commensurately, right? Instead, it can be and often is a grinding endeavor, railing against the dark, shaking our fist against passing clouds. Pay attention to us, love us, validate our writing. And sure, we get that, in drips and dribbles, but too often we worry and worry and worry some more. We want our lines to be just right. We need to be accepted by just this journal. When our expectations aren’t met, we die inside.What I loved about the DC-Looney Tunes mashup was the obvious fun the authors and creators were having. Here are old companies—venerated masters of their respective medium—doing something different and oddly joyous. Sure, they’re trying to sell comic books too, but so what? It worked. Back in grad school, I read Night Moves by Stephanie Barber (Publishing Genius, 2013), a book of curated Youtube comments from Bob Seger’s video “Night Moves.” That’s all it is. Night Moves was supposedly unedited, much of the content nonsensical and boring—“I’m here from How I Met Your Mother” was like 20% of the text—but the book itself was engaging, fun; it tried something new. Inspired by Night Moves, I “wrote” a series of poems about David Hasselhoff, culled from Amazon reviews. Taking Barber’s idea and spinning it, I edited, tweaked, stopped short of rewriting. When finished, I had 10 curated poems. People actually liked them and published them. I was surprised, so I wrote more (actually writing them this time), about other pop culture figures, published in Barrelhouse and Queen Mob’s Teahouse and more forthcoming. It’s become a thing, a thing I enjoy.But this isn’t about me. I only bring them up because when I’m writing these things, I’m not worrying about if people will like them, I’m having a good time and trying to make myself laugh. If I want to write poems about David Attenborough and mash them with 90s hip hop, well, I can do that. I just have to let myself know that if I like writing them, someone out there will like reading them. That’s the way it works; we write what we like, inspired by what we like. And you know what? If we like it, someone else will too.I love when I find something like Elmer Vs. Batman, like Night Moves, like Chuck Tingle’s Space Raptor series, writing that challenges what I think writing can be. Writing so clearly written with joy and an abundance of snickering.  Let's have fun with it, you guys. Let's stop worrying so much. Let's make ourselves laugh. Let's write something weird, something we're not sure we can get away with. We’re all going to die, the sun is going to burn out, we only live once. This labor feels less laborious when we’re enjoying it.Good stories await you below. Thanks for reading. We're glad you're here.

Michael B. TagerBook Reviews Editor

ATTICUS NEWS

ANNOUNCING OUR FIRST ANNUAL FLASH FICTION CONTESTJudge: Carmen Maria MachadoSUBMIT HERE!First Prize: $250Second Prize: $75Third Prize: $25Deadline: October 22nd, 2017Winner Announced: November 27th, 2017

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THIS WEEK AT ATTICUS

FERAL TOWN by Adam Gustavson

Considine

BOOK REVIEW: In Glorious Cubist FashionA Review of A HOUSE MADE OF WATER by Michelle Lin. Review by Dewey N. Fox."The parts that make up Lin’s story are all present: memory, femininity, family, culture (from dual viewpoints of assimilation and tradition), identity (racial and sexual). But Lin opts to relate the tale in a gloriously Cubist fashion, bending and then offering it back so we’re able to see all its constituent pieces at the same time. In this way, the book’s title—with its built-in contradiction—perfectly represents the material contained therein. This is an account constructed in the most unstable fashion, in fragments and images, yet it somehow holds its shape."READ MORE

FICTION: LITTLE GREEN EVERYTHINGby Chuck Augello"Flynn put down his coffee and studied the mark, a purplish bruise the approximate size of a thumb. Little green men, she said. Massive foreheads, triangular faces, just like on TV and in all those cheesy tabloids. They had snatched her from the office parking lot and transported her to their mothership on a beam of light."READ MORE

POETRY: ICE SKATINGby Janet Franklin"No one could ever get tired of this.The families skate around and aroundfor no apparent reason, like a shoal of minnows."READ MORE

NONFICTION: HAIR REFLECTIONSby Reneeka Massey-Jones"I have hated my hair since I was in preschool. It is not the same kind of hate you feel after a bad haircut or ugly hair dye job. I mean the kind of hate that makes you angry at your genetic makeup. When my hair grows, it grows straight up and out. It takes a crate of products to tame my small mane, and that’s just so my hair won’t dry out the second I walk out the door. My hair didn’t move around like the other kids’ hair. My hair didn’t bounce freely as I ran around the yard with my friends playing hide-and-seek."READ MORE

MIXED MEDIA: Four VideoTonePoems from Payson StevensVideoTonePoems are short multimedia montages that speak to both hemispheres of the brain in energetic mash-ups of words, images, and music all created by the director. They explore three Message categories: Spiritual Messages, often influenced by Indian spiritual & cultural sites; Natural Messages, portraying pristine environments; and Afflicted Messages, meditations on the human condition. A tone poem is classically defined as a piece of orchestral music, usually in one movement, on a descriptive or rhapsodic theme.READ MORE

FILM REVIEW: A Hollow Crescendo of Surrealist ManiaA review of MOTHER! from Darren Aronofsky. Review by Emily Moeck."Mother! tries to be many things—psychological thriller, haunted-house horror, marital farce—but ultimately smothers itself in a blanket of religious allegory too simple for all of the film’s moving parts."READ MORE