It seems like I’ve been doing a tremendous amount of thanking on this blog, but I can’t help it. The latest Sugar Mule, featuring collaborative works, is up and running on the net and Alan Halsey and your humble correspondent’s unique take on John Dee features among the contributions. Sheila Murphy was the guest editor for this issue, which features folks like Dan Waber, John M. Bennett, Geof Huth, Miekal And, Maria Damon, Kathy Ernst, Eileen Tabios, Rupert Loydell, Mark Young, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, the late Kari Edwards and other names you’ll no doubt recognize. Take a look. As they say here in my adopted nation, Arigato Gozaimasu! And a big thank you to M.L. Weber for the decision to do a paper publication of the issue. http://www.sugarmule.com

Hey Ahadadians!

In anticipation of the impending launch of Jon Paul Fiorentino’s Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books, 2006) I had the opportunity to conduct a quick interview via email for the Small Press Exchange. Fiorentino discusses the practices of a conspicuous loser, PlayStation and Margaret Christakos—among other things.

Check it out here.

Here’s the promotional copy from Coach House:

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen recalibrated North America’s class system with The Theory of the Leisure Class. Introducing terms like ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘nouveau riche,’ he identified a new demographic: the leisure class, a caste of the elite who could afford to spend all their time in pursuit of fun.

Fast-forward a century, and the leisure class has given way to the loser class: geek gangs and rec-room rabble, a landscape of videos, drugs and late-night talk shows. Find your own inner nerd as Fiorentino maps the psychic territory of abjection across the shopworn spaces of suburbia, where losers lurk against a backdrop of aging strip malls, burned-out houses and living rooms littered with video game consoles.

By turns compassionate, funny and filled with self-loathing, The Theory of the Loser Class is poetry for the socially inept and culturally vexed.

Theory of the Loser Class will launch April 6, 2006. For more details, click here.

Hey Ahadadians!

I’d like to draw your attention to a project that Jesse and I have been developing for a long while now: The Small Press Exchange (www.smallpressexchange.com).

The Small Press Exchange is an augmented social Network formed with a number of questions in mind: Could writers and poets better strengthen their relationships through online communities by better connecting people to others with whom they share affinities? Could they do this so they can more effectively exchange information and self-organize? Could such a system help to redefine what it means to be a small press publisher today?

Thus, the Small Press Excange was built with the interest of the independent community in mind, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complementary capabilities across social networks—it was intended to be a tool to help extend creativity among individuals and enhance collaboration among those who share a common interest.

The Small Press Exchange has three main objectives:

1) To create a system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries;

2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commonalities and the values of the independent literary community; and,

3) To enhance the ability of poets and writers to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in order to better engage in the creative process.

So we ask for your participation in the creation of online ontologies and taxonomies that will help shape the stucture of this community! The Small Press Exchange we envisioned would be achieved in an incremental manner, started among a relatively small group of participants, and gradually adopted by larger online community systems as they see fit.

The Small Press Exchange will be built on open standards, an initiative that would coordinate the efforts of many for the benefit of all.

Check it out at www.smallpressexchange.com.