Posted by dave.
Hail, The Chapbook Review!
In its inaugural issue, TCPBRD’s latest, Play by Mathias Svalina, gets reviewed not once, but twice. Twice!
I especially enjoy this passage:
The function of a game played by children is to socialize them, move them from childhood to adulthood with the skills necessary to live in culturally acceptable ways. The function of Svalina’s games seems to be to socialize readers to poetry. And poetry, it has always seemed to me, is a way to embrace the culturally unacceptable—the absurd, the surreal, the nonsensical, the beautiful. Everything that is not in any way useful or pragmatic. Everything that makes life good.
Copies still available.
Posted by dave.
The third volume of The Cupboard is now available to order. Play, by Mathias Svalina, is a collection of 29 games for children. You have never ever played any of them ever before.
Mathias Svalina is a co-editor of Octopus Magazine and Books. He is the author & collaborator of numerous chapbooks & his first full-length book, Destruction Myths, is forthcoming from Cleveland State University Press. He lives deep in Brooklyn, NY.
Here’s a sample:
Crossing the Brook
(for 2 or more players)
If you draw two lines on the asphalt, about 2 feet apart then a brook will spring up between the lines. Children will then run in groups & try to jump the brook. They will scream as they are running. They will scream as they are jumping. If they land in the brook they must run home & change their stockings. The successful jumpers are guided into a white bus & driven to wider & wider brooks. The last child to make a jump is the winner. Those that fall into the brooks must run home to change their stockings. But they are so far from home & the driver of the white bus will not speak to them. There is a light in the forest. Is that a distant fire or the buttery windows of a warm farmhouse? It is difficult to tell from here, where the sleet has just begun to fall.
Posted by james.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
I am obsessed with Google Earth. This is, undoubtedly, the result of my long friendship with an esteemed, if obsessive mapmaker—you know who I mean. Some days I sit at my desk and scroll over the surface of the planet, picking out and zooming in on significant places from my life:
The hospital in Ohio where I was born.
The fast food restaurant that replaced the bar where I met Louis.
The donut shop where I met my wife.
The family graveyard in Eaton, Ohio where my ancestors rest – two empty plots.
The facility where Louis resides.
I wonder if Louis would have even thought to make his map had a resource like this been available thirty years ago. We make our own new-maps now, recording longitude and latitude, magnifying and panning. Lives traced on the virtual globe.
Sometimes I look at the places I’ve spent my days over the last few years. I search parking lots for my car, hoping to find some trace of myself. Maybe one day I’ll see my bald head striding through a brisk spring afternoon. I will be my own monument – a pin-prick lost in Oklahoma’s rolling planes and tiny cities.
Posted by dave.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Cupboard-related news:
I.
We have sold our last copy of Jesse Ball’s Parables & Lies. The Cupboard was incredibly fortunate to be the first to bring these strange little tales of Ball’s into the world. Thanks foremost to Jesse for sending them our way, and thanks to all of you who bought a copy.
II.
This Sunday, 1 March 2009, is the last day we’ll be reading submissions for a while. We’ve almost booked up the whole next year of pamphlets, but we still have a couple spots open. If you have something we need to read, stop hesitating and throw it at us please.
III.
Today is almost over. Out my window the sun is facing me. February’s nearly gone.
IV.
Our next volume should be in our hands in a matter of weeks.
Posted by dave.
For any readers of this still-young blog who’ll be in Chicago later this week at the AWP Conference, The Cupboard will be sitting every day at table #368 in the bookfair, with our dear friends, Octopus Magazine and Rope-a-Dope Press. Here’s a map to get yourself situated toward us:
We’ll have our new volume, Louis Streitmatter’s A New Map of America (James Brubaker, ed.) for sale, as well as the last remaining copies of Volume 1: Jesse Ball’s Parables & Lies.
Also, stop by for a free preview of the soon-to-come Volume 3: Play, a book of reluctant children’s games written by Mathias Svalina.
Posted by dave.
Get off the couch and proceed a few steps east to the front door. Open. Step. Close. Bear east through the “courtyard” if you can call it that until you get to 26th Street. Turn right. Walk south two blocks. Turn another right. You are on Holdrege Street.
George W. Holdrege was a man with five kids and no pets. He went for a jog every morning and ran the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad Company, which, in 1870, made its way from more mid-western parts of the Midwest to the more Great-Plains parts of them. Namely, Lincoln, Nebraska. The wide flat space between Lincoln and Denver was filled with Bohunks and methamphetamine trees and prairie grasses with root systems that drove twenty feet down into the soil.
Or maybe they’re route systems. On 10 December 1883 the citizens of an unnamed frontier town gave their town a name—Holdrege—to honor the man who brought the railways out so far. Holdrege became the seat of Phelps County one year later, but all that was thousands of years ago.
And how did you make it to the printer? You are at 17th and Y streets. It resembles no kind of intersection.
Posted by dave.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Every time I walk from my parents’ downstairs to my parents’ upstairs I turn the corner of the stairwell and pretend I can’t see on the walls surrounding me the fruits of my father’s thirty-five years of labor. The map of Grenada he made just weeks before the onset of Operation Urgent Fury. The one of our neighborhood, where he shaded in orange all the best hiding spots for MANHUNT! games. A map of St. Petersburg and a really boring map of Virginia. All of these hung salon-style in a corner of their pre-fab that gets very little light. Contour maps, political maps. Maps I’ve never been able to make sense of.
And this, the map of his thin-worn patience on the morning of my twenty-third birthday:
I’ve always had an excellent sense of direction.
Posted by dave.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
I am a cartographer’s son.
I and my sisters—cartographer’s daughters, each—played often with Matchbox cars growing up, down in the unused room on our house’s basement level. The closet in the room had no door to it, and the carpet was thin and unpadded. It had the same pattern of stained tweed pants you bought for cheap one sad afternoon.
One day my dad came home from work and stepped down to the unused room and set on the ground a 3-D map of the moon. “Here,” he said, and we looked at it. It was made of molded plastic, like our Halloween masks, and spread over the ugly carpet an area about the size of four to six disposable cafeteria trays. Peaks and valleys pushed up and down as tall or as deep as Lego men. The whole thing an unsightly putty gray color you’d never pick to color with. Dotted lines and dashed ones; italic fonts spelling out the names of seas.
We drove our Matchbox cars all over it until it broke.
