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We are pumped for Friday! Our April Fool's Day Salon is coming up soon with a beautiful round-up of talent. Remember, it's RSVP only. Take a look at the Facebook event page and if you need a visually stunning reminder, we have just the thing for you! Check out the lovely intro trailer Susie Kirkwood and Jill Summers made for us.

ACM: April Fools Show from susie kirkwood on Vimeo.

We'll be playing it on the big screen on Friday. It'll be more fun than you can believe.

Speaking of publishing and Twitterature, Dan Sinker, an assistant professor at Columbia College Chicago, has been offered a book deal by Scribner for his @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed, which kept followers entertained during the Chicago mayoral election this year. I'm not gonna lie, we're pretty excited for this over at ACM, and maybe even a little jealous that we didn't think of it first.

Atticus Books's Dan Cafaro writes about publishing today (and how confusing it is). Follow that up with Mary Maddox's essay at HTMLGIANT on self-publishing. Happy Sunday!

Pank Magazine's Roxane Gay writes in The Rumpus about the language of sexual violence and how it has defined society's treatment of rape and assault. "We live in a culture that is very permissive where rape is concerned," she writes. "We live in a strange and terrible time for women." Last month, Gay wrote about what it means to be a woman and a writer today, and how each action she takes, each word she writes, is political, whether she intends it to be or not. I think this is something that is true regardless of gender, though gender affects the way writing is treated and perceived. If a writer chooses to write about a particular issue it's seen as political, and if a writer chooses not to write about a certain issue, that, too, is seen as political, regardless of the medium. The personal is still political. And as a woman, it certainly seems that that is intensified. The question, then, seems to be, what can writers do to change the way sexual violence is perceived? Because I think it's time for those steps to be taken.

Check out this article from Psychology Today on diary keeping and narration. I'm especially interested in the differences between a personal diary or journal and a personal blog. Most writers I know have one or the other, and as someone who personally has both, I'm interested in the differences in presentation. I find that I often use my journal for note taking and rambling reflection — I think on first glance, my journal wouldn't make much sense to an outside reader. My blog, on the other hand, allows me to pare down those thoughts into something presentable. How does the intended audience change the way we present our lives to the world? And how is this different from creative pieces to be published in magazines or books? Is the intent the same?

""What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it." --Gertrude Stein

"...what good is the gentle / if snap goes the halo shh shh shhhhh / lovesick blues was a toss off all the assholes / with souls like clean tableclothes didn't / want the thing at all..." -- Abraham Smith

I've been reading Gertrude Stein's amazing Tender Buttons alongside Abraham Smith's Hank for about a week now. Both books are daunting in the same ways that they are brilliant: they employ a furious rush of words, they use odd juxtapositions and phrasings and unexpected parataxis, they don't have typically constructed sentences building typically constructed meanings, they are divided into seemingly logical yet concurrently illogical sections, etc. For every moment of sheer confusion (of which there are many) there are accompanying moments of clarity and intense beauty. And that's what is keeping me reading them, to be honest, and thankfully so. They are teaching me more about violence and delight.

I recognize the importance of avant garde experimentation and the significance of abadoning traditional forms. And so I'm loving that aspect of these books even while that aspect is stifling: I am constantly forced to be aware of the act of reading and to form meaning and take away images and understanding in radically disruptive ways. At most times I just want to be able to read a book. What I've landed upon as a compromise is to read these books in smaller chunks. To read a section and mull it and then move on. To return and read another the following day. 

A few days back the quote I've written above got trapped in my mind. It comes early in Tender Buttons, in the opening section entitled "Objects." It appears in a prose piece called  "A Substance in a Cushion." When I came upon it I was jolted out of my concentrated attempt to make sense of Stein. I stopped, read it over and over in my mind, and then aloud. It struck me then as it strikes me now as brilliantly apt.

What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness? There ought not be any, for why would anyone seek out any delightfulness that is violent in nature? Yet I seek a violent delight all of the time. I listen to music that punishes me by eschewing standard song structures or by focusing on horror and dysfunction. I spent the better part of my twenties with Sonic Youth and Godspeed You! Black Emperor pummeling me from my headphones. The discordance and auditory violence were the very aspects I sought. I tend to watch films that mess with my perceptions of time and image and that focus on miserable failure or gorgeous rot. Bela Tarr's Werkmeister Harmonies might well be my favorite film for those very reasons and always reduces me to tears. I am committed to this artistic mode, it seems. Hell, it extends to my personal affairs as well, but I'm going to hold back on that for the moment.

I take delight in violence though I shouldn't. I suppose that makes me perverse. Still, the Stein quote doesn't cease on that musing. It goes on to ask, What is the use of violent delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not tiring of it? The double-negative there gave me pause and for me is the source of the energy in these words. It portends something lasting, a recurrent engagement. It is not strictly nihilistic. If it were, once would delight in the very act of tiring of it: each violent delight would be only for itself and would end leaving nothing really save for the pleasure of having tired of it, of having committed the perverse deed and finished with the thing. We delight in it and then it is done, so to speak, and so one must live for the deeds themselves since there will be nothing else to delight in. Here is something different, the idea of a constant engagement with violence, with a delightfulness and pleasure that is caused by it, that doesn't cease and that isn't a thing unto itself. And it would be useless save for the fact that we do not tire of it. Were it the act and experience in itself and nothing more, there would be no use for it. But since there is more, it is useful. It's delightful, in fact. 

Now, I'm sure I'm mangling things up some, but this is how I understand the quote. And I like that understanding. It strikes me as both true and revelatory. It makes me want to make something that embodies that notion. It would work well for a text-based tattoo or an epigraph at the beginning of a story. 

To be honest, I didn't read that section of Tender Buttons this morning. I read a later section that didn't jolt me in the same ways. And having finished it, I turned to Abraham Smith's long poems to see what my engagement with it would bring for the day. Hank is divided up into long sections of 5+ pages that lack stanza breaks and are composed in long sentences that seem endless and that force me to read them aloud, over and over, to determine with my ear where emphasis might go and to make sense of them. They are in this voice that on the one hand might well be the voice of Hank Williams Sr. were his voice alive and cognizant or somehow everlasting and eternal. They are also the voice of Abraham Smith, the writer. And it is a gorgeous voice when read aloud. One that begs description. 

I am reminded of a description I saw on an edition of Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion and will paraphrase that along with using my own sense of my experience of Hank: these poems are a belt of bourbon, an endless stream of misery and joy, packed to the gills with images and sounds and words that could well be the formations of a mind like Hank Williams', a mind addled with pills and alcohol and mean women and endless backroads. Often they are a pure joy to hear aloud, in the same ways that Hank Sr.'s songs are a pure joy to sing or to have sung. But they aren't as neat and compact as Hank's songs - they last well beyond 3 minutes and though there are a slew of poetic devices at work, the rhymes aren't neat and compact either. Smith goes more for the slant, the crooked clarity  of a voice bent by alcohol and violence and song. I could go on but I am trying to get at something and so must leave the pleasure of articulating why I love this book for the time being. 

This morning I read the second quote listed above, itself a musing on violent delightfulness and those who seek it. A value claim of sorts. Meekness is broken, halos destroyed. And those with tablecloth-clean souls are assholes. And "Lovesick Blues" ain't for them. It's a toss off, a thing produced quickly and violently and sung for spite. And the only folks who it's for, who will really hear it, are those engaged in Stein's notion of an ongoing and endlessly delightful sort of violence, those who know the score, those who have lived. Most importantly, those who have been burned by loss and just can't seem to get over it in the end.

I come from an odd family. Some of us are retiring, shy, eccentric loners. Some of us are singers and carousers and raconteurs. And some of us are both. I'm one of the latter types, at home when isolated and in my head as well as in a drunken crowd or on a stage. My Pawpaw, Harold Ray "Tony" Ball, taught me how to live as though I've never met a stranger. He also taught me how to sing and to command a stage in my own peculiar way (or at least to possess the lust to do so). And boy does he love to sing old Hank Williams songs. For him there isn't even much use in specifying which of the three singers who go by the name 'Hank Williams' since Hank Sr. is the only one he gives a damn for. I'd doubt he even knows of Hank III or would give two shits in a bucket for his music. Which is fine and as it should be.

The sound of his Appalachian twang when he sings those songs is just devastating to me sometimes. It is so unlearned and raw. His style of strumming on his shitty old guitar is one of plucking strings and molding pretty much every song into 2 or 3 keys that match his voice. His singing voice is rich with his Hewitt's Creek, WV, twang and his delivery, even now in his 80th year, is still rich and emotive. Watching his thick fingers and arched eye-brows, his lips curling into the chorus. his weak legs bobbing some as he plucks, is something powerful. And I love singing along. A few years back he began losing his ability to play his guitar as well and we bought him a karaoke machine. And so the machine has mostly replaced the guitar, though not entirely. His go-to disc on that machine is Hank Williams Sr. and Pawpaw can sing them all from track one to track 16.

I know Hank through this man, through his dying flesh, aged and broken by manual labor. And though he is a sober man who has like-as-not never been drunk, and for certain has never been high, he is the audience for "Lovesick Blues." And I wonder about what that means. I wonder about this poet Abraham Smith too. How does he know Hank Sr. so intimately? Smith's poetry is so convincing to me that I take it as verse, as gospel truth, as an honest invocation of what Hank Williams Sr.'s thoughts on that famous song "Lovesick Blues" might damn well be. And I delight in it. It's a delight of a violent sort and my mind is overwhelmed with sounds and with music.

In short, with memories that will seemingly never end until I am ended. It all makes sense to me somehow, the union of these two quotes in my mind, this life in which I play out my own destruction, the ways that my personality is enacted through my own violent clash between compulsive urges to vanish myself somewhere and simultaneously to be everywhere at once. And my enactment of those urges, my spiritual dissonance, my mental feedback, my demons, my personal rot, my self-lacerations, my broken affairs - all of those things and more - well, shit man, they're delightful to me. I don't think I'll ever tire of them, because boy if I do then nothing will be left for me of joy and that notion strikes me as a pretty miserable thing.

The Chicago Underground Library saw some damage after the blizzard last month, which has rendered it currently homeless. Help it out with its mission to preserve zine culture and the underground literary scene by donating here. And check out the Small Press and Comics Symposium of Chicago and the Chicago Zine Fest, both going on this weekend.

Is that even possible? According to Vanity Fair, it is. Check out this review of the Indle, a new ebook that subscribes to independent book stores to provide its readers with electronic literature. However, as much as I appreciate the convenience and technology of ebooks, I'm still not sold. Call me sentimental and old-fashioned, but I'll take my shelves of books and the physical space of bookstores over technological advancements any day.

Flavorwire has compiled a list of the best books to read when you're hungover. Read it now, and then again on April 2, after you've attended ACM's Salon on April 1 (no, this is not a joke). Details below!