what i did in 2006. I'm excited about this: I've just finished the first story in a new fiction series called Miniatures. The series was inspired by Lily and Hyacinth, the "people" who live in the dollhouse my dad made for me when I was 5. I will be publishing the stories as zines. The first one, "Lily and Hyacinth Go To the Renaissance Faire," is all laid out and it looks pretty, like a novel circa 1925. The only missing component is a cover illustration, and once I find someone to do one for me I'll release the book to the zine-reading public! Check back here for updates. October 2oo6 I’m guest blogging for Powells. Also, the Compulsions issue of 400 Words is out. Also! Last week’s Zine Fest was a big success. As always, the people who organized it did a terrific job. I had a blast, sold and traded a whole bunch of new things I’ve made within the last few months, and found out about a number of other people's exciting projects. Fun fun fun. September 2oo6 Here’s a neat little linguistics lesson for you. Japanese has tons of onomatopoeic words, maybe more than 2,000. Some of them are imitative of actual sounds, which of course is common in the world’s languages, while many others are mimetic, describing physical states (gitaigo) and psychological states (gijougo), which is much less common. There are so many sound-symbolic words in Japanese it’s almost like a language within a language, as one dictionary editor put it. Anyhoo, I researched this and contributed a few words of gitaigo and gijougo to a book about love terms in other languages (awww), forthcoming from Oxford University Press in January. Also, not too long ago I was contacted by Flying Cow Productions in Los Angeles regarding a new documentary, Bomb It! The Global Graffiti Documentary. It’s being produced and directed by Jon Reiss, whose previous feature films include Better Living Through Circuitry (about rave culture) and who made the Nine Inch Nails video “Happiness in Slavery”. Yessss. Bomb It!, which will be out in early 2007, chronicles the story of contemporary graffiti from its roots in ancient rock paintings to Latino placas through the rise of hip hop culture in the 1970s and graffiti as we know it today. And they’re using my article “No Rooftop Was Safe”, about Philadelphia’s early graffiti “kings,” as a resource. August 2oo6Kate Coyer, a media scholar and community radio activist, asked me to contribute a chapter about zines to a book she’s editing called the Alternative Media Handbook, which I happily did. I love talking about zines and I hope this article will get more people excited about self-publishing. The book will be published in January of ’07 by the UK-based academic publisher Routledge.
July 2oo6 My travel column "The Dubliner" won an Association of Alternative Newsweeklies Award for column writing! You can read the columns here. May 2oo6 Just found out that an untitled piece I submitted to the fabulous literary journal 400 Words will be published in its Summer 2006 issue. Hooray. 400 Words publishes autobiographic pieces of 400 words or shorter, and the results range from the clever to the beauty-full. April 2oo6 Shhh, listen. My zine is on your iPod! Download and listen to a scratchy-voiced me reading one of the found poems from my collection Word Math. The zinester podcasts—which are such an awesome idea—are produced by the independent publishing resource Fall of Autumn. |