CUTTY SPOT

[words on THENEWERYORK ISSUE 2]

*

I forgot how I stumbled upon theNewerYork folk

but their attitude instantly intrigued me

as I explored their site: http://theneweryork.com/

they felt ‘fresh’ & exciting & bold

they claimed to embrace the ‘absurd’

I saw that their second issue was released recently

I bought their second issue for 10 bucks: http://theneweryork.com/shop/issue-2/

I am listening to TEEBS as I write these words about theNewerYork

Teebs is possibly my favorite musician to listen to esp. while typing or reading

I recommend him to all

after I ordered their second issue

(the same day I ordered New York Tyrant’s new issue: http://nytyrantbooks.com/home/magazine)

I didn’t receive it for a couple of weeks

so I tweeted at them

they sent me a msg saying:

‘What! We sent it right away. Will put another one (and some extra goodies!) in the mail today!’

& it came in like 2 days w/ stickers & postcards included

I took the book down to the Baker Beach parkinglot across from my house

it was raining

yesterday

it was gray & I parked where I could see the ocean

& I read the whole magazine in one sitting while it rained a little bit

the book has 82 pages of eclectic work:

experimental Acts from plays

something like ‘prose poems’

visual art

‘guides’

a translation of ‘Baby Got Back’ from English to Latin to English again

w/ resulting lines like:

‘Welcome to rising or delete it, but the force of pull out’

&

“Oh, I want to get the child with you’

quotations in big font that are sardonic & cryptic, like:

‘Hey you, wearing the asshole sign, how about a picnic in the chamber of solitude’

there are ‘erasure’ type poems, but instead of lines being erased they are crossed out so you can still see them (obscured)

a piece called ‘Letters I Have Written to the New Yorker’

which is pretty great

some of these letters are ‘irreverent’ & ‘inappropriate’

theNewerYork is not afraid to ‘go there’

& whether they are actually letters or not

I think there is ample potential for writers to write things like that:

mock letters

mock emails

mock conversations w/ ‘known’ people

etc etc etc

it’s already happening

I don’t know if these ‘Letters’ in theNewerYork were ‘mock’ or not

they say things like:

‘I am cancelling my subscription after your use of the hideous cliché “to come out in hives” in your last issue. In my book, the phrase should only be used when describing gay bees.’

there is an experimental ‘Mediterranean Diet’ in here

I very much enjoyed the last ‘piece’ in this issue

‘The 21^st Century Interlude of Daniel Lustigman’

it has somewhat of an ambiguous tone

serious & humorous

written by Justin Rossier

here’s a part of it:

‘Why’s everyone so serious? Who said that line, ‘You’ve got to laugh or we’ll all start crying’? I believe that. It’s easy to get down, the world a burden on your shoulders making you feel guilty for eating chimchangas when people are starving to death in Africa. The world’s burning up because we’ve got too many polluting factories and machines running things. But that’s human, right? We’re no good that way. We stop caring after a while. Humanity is a lazy bum, what can you do? Plough ahead, I say’

I also very much enjoyed ‘Dear Readers’ piece by Editor Joshua S. Raab

here are some pieces from it:

‘About fifty-years ago, Marshal McLuhan predicted the effects of this instant connectivity. He predicted that around this time (2012) humanity would be interconnected in a Global Village; where what happens to a man some street in China, pops up on a screen in my living room, and might as well be next door. McLuhan predicted the unification of what is now called crowdsourcing. The idea that whole swaths of the population can take an active part in solving whatever problem needs solving, as if they have a shared consciousness’

‘Simultaneously, I experience the alienation of not knowing where to begin’

‘It seems to me that we are taking part in a shared madness’

*

anyways this magazine is intriguing

I can’t say every piece gripped me, but that’s based on my own subjective ‘tastes’

I truly enjoyed the prosepoems ish work in here

theNewerYork embraces the ‘in between’

the ‘cross-genre’ or perhaps even the ‘no-genre’

the experimental & that which ‘challenges’ ‘expectations’

I admire them for this

you may not enjoy it if you desire a quiet order to a magazine

or uniformity

it’s a pocket-sized book

it made me want to explore new modes in my own writing

tones & processes & entry points

it felt ‘replenishing’ to see a magazine like this

‘absurd’ perhaps but also oddly ‘optimistic’

or at least I feel ‘optimistic’ about what ‘literature’ or ‘post-literature’ can do as I read it

I wrote this thing on the last blank page of the magazine

WHAT I WANT

surprise

images

odd turns of (il)logic

‘honesty’

spontaneity

condensation

silence

momentum

color

blend of tone

juxtaposition

paradox

vividness

cinematic

subtlety

*

& I think this magazine ultimately has all those things