Trinie Dalton, Kevin Sampsell, Joanna Ruocco, Louis Chude-Sokei

Just wanted to pass along some links to some of my favorite new pieces up on the Fanzine.

“Sex and Micro-Prose” — Trinie Dalton on Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography and Joanna Ruocco’s Man’s Companions. Trinie makes a lot of interesting connections between the two works.

“Pottymouth” — Kevin Sampsell talks dirty in his piece on the conversations that occur in bed.

“Knowing Me, Knowing You, Knowing Them” — Louis Chude-Sokei reviews Shameem Black’s Fiction Across Borders but perhaps more importantly tangles with the echoes of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the way it has inhibited fiction writers from imagining and/or speaking as characters who are culturally, racially, sexually different than the writers themselves. He aptly describes the way that disdain has become indistinguishable from respect. I always find Louis’s work to be pretty incredible but here he says quite a few things that seem long overdue. The accompanying collages are from Berlin-based artist Paul Tyree-Francis, who has done quite a bit of graphic design for the Luaka Bop record label.

The Fanzine: Linh Dinh, Slavoj Zizek, Interview with a Bouncer, Joanna Ruocco, Matt Bell, Blackface, Queer Children

One of the most popular articles at Fanzine of late has been Matt Bell’s micro-fiction Greyson, Griffin, Guillermo. The accompanying artwork by Joshua Hagler makes Bell’s unsettling world all the more vivid. Bell is an editor at the online literary journal The Collagist and the author of several novellas.

Another great fiction piece came from Joanna Ruocco who Derrida-ian second-guessing of oneself into a piece that has a kind of perfectly off-kilter comedic timing. Ruocco has received praise from Robert Coover and Carole Maso and has a collection of short stories out on Ellipsis Press.

Prof. Louis Chude-Sokei makes some interesting distinctions between the meaning of blackface when performed for a domestic audience and what it can mean in cultures outside the U.S. He touches on Turkey’s newscaster who performed in blackface after Obama’s visit, as well as America’s Next Top Model, Mexican cartoon characters and the popularity of blackface festivals in Africa.

Berlin-based curator Jesi Khadivi reviews Slavoj Zizek’s First as Tragedy with vivid details on the brilliant theorist’s tendency to over-salivate.

Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, reviews the latest from Vietnamese-American writer Linh Dinh. I’m a big fan of Dinh’s short stories and I’m eager for his novel Love Like Hate, which Seven Stories will publish in May.

Also, don’t miss Jennifer Blowdryer’s interview with bouncer Frankie Clinton about his experiences getting stabbed and the proper way to handle drunks, and Aaron Nielsen’s tackling of Kathryn Bond Stockton’s The Queer Child or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Stockton’s book is intriguing in part due to its investigation of the oddities of the entire conception of childhood in western culture.