Paul Jessup

So, I found something I’d thought I’d lost ages ago between three moves: The Beat Generation cd’s. I used to love these things, back in those mad days when I was a teeanger/early twenty something. And it’s interesting now, listening to these with the current OMG HIPSTERS thing trailing around the internet and the media landscape.

The above title, btw, is a quote that comes from the CD’s….spoken in an interview with some random Greenwich Village beatnik who is explaining how he ran up and down the street buying sherbet in random places.

Anyway, I also watched PealJam:20 this weekend as well on Netflix. It’s an odd congruence of things…a lot of the early bits of this movie focuses on the media asking over and over again what grunge is, and interviewing grunge acolytes. It smacks of almost an exact copy of all the stuff on the Beat Generation CD’s that don’t involve Burroughs, Ginsberg or Kerouac reading poetry. It’s almost identical…and it’s almost identical to the whole media response of the whole Hipster thing going on now,  and almost identical to the what-are-hippies things that went on the 60′s.

Things are just spinning around, returning, changing, transforming back. It’s all crazy to watch and to think about…

Another interesting thing- there is a marked difference between the big name actual Beats like Ginsberg and friends and the Beatniks that were interviewed and reading their poetry just off the street or in a coffee house. It’s fascinating the sheer levels of quality, but also of emotional verisimilitude and depth. Ginsberg reads America and you can sense this playfulness, this melancholy, the word play, the rhythm of his words, the tone of his voice. It’s a beautiful reading, as well as Kerouac reading his Railroad Earth poem which is just transcendent and depressing and raw and real. They both talk very openly about sex and drugs and being down and being hungry and starved, and trying to work some job just to make a few bucks, and getting drunk and fighting in bars.

There is a combination of sadness and nostalgia, of regret and love and loneliness. A powerful cascade of emotions that crawl out and sing to the real beating heart in us and doesn’t try to do one thing or another, doesn’t try to be heavy handed or poetical or anything. They’re just expressions of complexity, of emotional rawness.

And then you compare this to the random beatniks in coffeehouses shouting poetry about machinery of death and how working for the man kills you and they all sound the same. Soundbytes of pop philosophy as poetry screaming. The angry feels all fake, the philosophy culled from idiotic platitudes. It’s like the skimmed through the start of Howl and tried to copy it, but leaving out all the poetic beauty and haunting melancholy.

Listening to this makes me pine for being part of a writing scene. A movement in the old sense of the word, not in the current let’s just slap -punk on the end to everything and start a manifesto and all write about X thing but different! Like the Lost Generation and things like that…

And listening to them all talk about how they’ve starve and etc and never knew if money was going to come to them at all and how they wrote what felt real to them, never knowing if they’d ever make a single dime…well, that makes me think of the big damned thing that’s wrong with Genre right now.

Everyone talks about money, about writing to market, about honing your craft for publication and five cents a word. The genre landscape is littered with tons of people just trying to make a buck, just trying to talk business business business, just ignoring the actual beating heart and bloodied bones of the whole thing.

And this is also doubly why I will never call the self-publishers indie. They are the worst, far worse than anyone else about it all being about the dollah dollah bills cash money blingbling put on that ring. Everywhere I turn they’re talk about how to make more money, how to tap into X hot market by writing Y.

Fuckit. I’m going to write damnit I’m going to write what I write and I’m not going to write for a buck or a million or whatever because in the end, what’s true is that word- that word flickering on screen, that word pixellated or e-inked, or pushed onto paper so rarely these days from the bellies of giant massive book machines. That word is the real even if the word is filled with lies because in the end the real is an emotional core not a truthcore, it’s a core that sings to the end of ages.

That doesn’t mean I’m not going to be published or anything like that, or send stuff to high paying markets, etc, etc. I’m just not going to hustle and shake and try to predict what to write just to make money.

So here are some examples of the style of stuff you should expect to see after the great transition for Coffinmouth (issue 3- which will be renamed into something else):
-Kafka on the Shore, Windup Bird Chronicle, Wild Sheep Chase- Murakami
-Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet – Ben Marcus
-Any of Kelly Link or M. Rickert’s short stories
-Paul G. Tremblay’s The Teacher
-Head’s Up, Thumb’s Down by Gavin J. Grant
-Twin Peaks

Strange, surreal stuff, usually modern day, magical realist, poetic prose, powerful imagery, plot is barely there if there at all, haunted realities, endings and beginnings are moot points, etc, etc, etc

Some people call this Slipstream, others interstatial, still others weird shit.

So I have a plan set in place for the next year for Coffinmouth magazine, something I like to call the GREAT TRANSITION. The next issue of Coffinmouth will be crazy, insane, five cents a word but sticking to the roots of the site and just publishing random, unconnected madness.

Issue three will be the move away from Coffinmouth as the name, as the brand, and of the site design. It will get an overhaul, have a new name, a new look and feel, and focus on literary experimental weird fiction. Slipstream, kitchen sink magical realism, weird shit, whatever you want to call it.

Fiction that is mostly modern day, combining surrealism and magical realism, with focuses on characters, no plots, slippery smart works. Stories of a haunted world, so to speak, with heavy surreal touches and poetic language.

That said, I’ve noticed that the first issue of Coffinmouth was heavy towards the masculine sides of things. This wasn’t done on purpose, but I need to rectify this with the second issue: so please, woman writers who rock- send me stuff!

http://simplydelete.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/review-of-werewolves-by-paul-jessup-illustrated-by-allyson-haller/

Also nice to see the compliment re: writing female characters. Most of the main characters I write are female (I don’t know why…it just feels natural to me) and it’s good to know I’m not bowing to some culturally brainwashed concept of what women should be vis a vis the media, etc.

So, go here-
http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2012/01/theft_of_swords-comments.shtml

All right, done reading? Did you read the comments? You probably didn’t have to read too many to get the gist. It’s all basically:

• She’s a meany being all mean and a bully and how dare she!
• Why does the review even exist?
• And finally- She’s just jealous for X or Y reason.

The first one is silly. I mean, really it’s the most common one, and it’s just plain crazy. It’s like the people who got mad at Ebert for slamming Transformers. A bad book deserves to be torn apart, no matter how many five star reviews people give it. Just because they enjoyed it doesn’t make it perfect.

As readers, don’t you deserve a book that is not only enjoyable to read, but is also interesting, well written, has good characters, good plot and is intelligent? But for some reason, due to the fact genre fiction is steeped in the history of pulpy fiction we have a large group that insists that books in genre have to be dumb, simple and easy to read. They have to be the big macs of books, and if you disagree…well, poo on you I shall spit venom on your face for actually being smart and having taste you elitist bastard.

The second one is usually asked by the people who visit SH for John Clute’s Scores and the smart and clever SF stories that SH publishes. These are the people that go around expecting to find new, interesting, quirky books in the reviews. Stuff that would be interesting to read about.

These people ask why why why are reading this?

But I think this review has a very important purpose. It’s a stone thrown at the so-called Kindle Revolution. Those self publishing fanatics who want to overthrow the brick and mortar stores, tear down publishing and have bought into Amazon’s self-serving money based greed infused diatribe.

We hear all the time these days about people going the “indie route” which isn’t indie at all, has nothing to do with indie publishing or small press, and is completely a co-opted code word to mean self published. We hear about this revolution, this democratization of the publishing world.

Well, this is the future they want. This. Really awful books published by hand and picked up by publishers for no cost and shoved down our throats in a paperback format. This is what they want- they want ninety nine cent crap, less then quality books, books that are down right idiotic and formulaic.  If you read the review in this light, you can see her criticism of not just this book, but of that future. The future that’s been thrown up like bile in our faces on almost every blog and forum and convention out there.

This is what they want. And it’s not pretty. It’s not good. A friend of mine got a Nook for christmas. Before hand she was a supporter of the selfpublishing scene. After she got it? She thought there was a huge downside- there was so much crap, it was hard to tell what was good anymore. It was a mountain of bad books with reviews that were mostly half truths. Who has time to sort through all this?

This is the future Amazon wants us to have. Why? Because it makes a ton of money off of this future. No publisher as the middle man. No one to fight with over rights and DRM. Remember this: Amazon is not your friend.

The last one is stupid. It’s just tea party mentality. It’s the kind of people who say that they 99%’ers are just jealous of the one percent. And I’ll just leave it all at that.

I’m trying to find a phrase for a kind of book I love to read, and the kind of stuff I like most when I write it. It’s surreal, very surreal usually. It uses a magical realism approach to reality and to genre (no world building!). And it is usually modern day, with a very gothic/weird approach. A way of seeing the world as haunted, which sort of reflects the magical realism aesthetic.

Karen Russell, Kelly Link, Shirley Jackson, Crowley’s Little Big, M. Rickert’s amazing short fiction, some of Jeffery Ford’s work (Night Whiskey), a lot of the stories that used to be in Fantasy Magazine, Best American Fantasy, stuff like that. It’s also usually literary, with little plot, and experimental.

Maybe Weird shit will just have to do.

I’m talking about a specific kind of weird writer here- the one who straddles the borderline between literary and genre fiction. There are quite a few of us out there- those who fit into neither camp, but write in some kind of borderland world, never crossing over fully into one reality or the other.

The writing is usually of highly poetic quality, the plots are usually called plotless by regular genre fans (and their narrow view of what constitutes as plot- mangled by thoughtless movies over the years) and the characters are not just plain cardboard archetypes, but living breathing creatures that exist beyond the page. There are references to literature, to genre books from the past, as well as experimentation abounding and rules breaking and all that fun stuff.

Part of me wonders why– why do we do it? It’s not like this stuff is hot genre material, and it’s not like most of the literary tradition scoffs at the idea of anything fantastical at all. It’s not easy living between two worlds, it’s a difficult road with few pleasures. But I guess those pleasures are worth it- your name can lasting longer, your ideas burn brighter. When you get fans you get OMG YOU ARE AWESOME fans for life kind.

And you get to write what you want. I think that’s the most important- us weird writers, writing modern day surreal/magical realist style stories with poetic voices- we don’t write to sell, we don’t write for popularity or for formulaic success. We write what we love. And that can be important, more important than all the rest.

So there ya go. For the next issue of Coffinmouth I plan on paying five cents a word OR one scream. You chose.

There is no theme for the next issue, just make it different for fuck’s sake. Break open my brain with a hammer.

Check out the old issue:
http://coffinmouth.wordpress.com

Submit Here