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.

“Electronic Literature” N. Katherine Hayles

Published in The Fanzine, Aug. 2008.

With newspapers feeling the bite of advertisers’ migration to the internet and the music industry, for better or worse, in dire need of a new business model, the era of digital media seems to offer more fodder for fears than opportunities for innovation. Advances in electronic ink technology have brought resurgent interest to e-book devices, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle, and so readers of literature might be wondering if a similar fate awaits their medium of choice. N. Katherine Hayles’ Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary profiles the work of writers who are diving into the new creative methods headfirst. In her forward, Hayles makes explicit her aim to create a canon of electronic literature and to introduce it both to lay readers and the university classroom. Additionally, Hayles’ book provides an overview of the critical discourse on the subject, arguing that this new kind of writing will require a different critical perspective than its print predecessors, advocating an examination not just of what appears on screen but the coding beneath.

Read the complete article at The Fanzine.