luzmag is dead, but remains to be read. skicka is born. the difference between the two may not turn out to be so big, but with the new mag, i'd like to focus a bit more on longer poems & sequences, & short prose. so, drown me in delightful words.

people sometimes tell me that i've been in their dream that night. nothing strange about that. most of the time i've done quite normal dream-things like dying. once a young university student i hardly knew told me that i had declared the death of sexuality. she found that really funny. now for the first time i've crossed the atlantic, & have a cool poem to show for it. i reproduce it here with the permission of Adam Fieled, whose poem it is & whose dream it was i raided a couple of nights ago

LARS PALM DREAM

I was staying in
a dorm room with
Lars Palm, who
was throwing
lobsters. A yellow
globule tried to
get our goat; a
wall started talking.
Lars was furious.
Some girls were
involved with us,
as junk piled up.
Lars threw a
lobster at the
yellow globule,
roaring. It was a
pivotal moment--
we moved out, on--
bare walls. Rubbish
heap. Fuck you, globule.

entering
the year
of the cat

leaving the year
of the
dog

something on dogs & the canary islands. about 80% of the dogs you see here have their tails cut off, either by the breeder or the current owner, a great deal also have their ears cut. in the mountains of tenerife (& most likely the other islands as well) there are openly arranged dog fights where the guardia civil have been known to be in the audience & betting instead of breaking them up & arresting organizers, which is what they should be doing. all these things are against european laws, by the way

i've been thinking the last week or so about how to write an essay on James Crumley. the notion struck me after having read his latest (or so i think) novel The Right Madness, which put me beneath an avalanche of thoughts & other intellectual debris. more so than the earlier ones i've read. do i try to write it like he writes prose? do i start from the word madness in the title? if so, how does a mad essay behave? like a mad king? like Crumley's prose? what has been written about his work previously? not counting reviews which are usually not mucfh use in this kind of endeavour. the finished piece, how ever it may look, will be posted here, methinks

if you want some more reading, i suggest paper craft by Catherine Daly, just out from moria & Stacy Szymaszek's (google her) mutual aid, now available as a free pdf from g o n g press, the print edition of 125 copies being sold out. two really fine chunks of poetry, a third i just discovered while checking the link is Part First-Chopin's Feet by Mark Tardi. & Craig Dworkin's eclipse is being updated with plenty of yummy stuff. & Tomas Ekström has started a blog with occasional things in english, so far just some poems yours truly translated

am sad to report that Flashing in the Gutters is no more & that all the stories have been deleted. so i want to thank Tribe for the romp & wish him good fortune in whatever he does next

just gave up trying to post the cover of lips, a really cool drawing by Sandy Lam. so what else is new? a couple of recent publications; eighteen easy pieces in Adam Fieled's PFS Post, this thing just kept returning in the third issue of Mark Young's Otoliths (submissions for the fourth issue close at the end of january)& a poem & three translations of Tomas Ekström in Alexander Deriev's Ars Interpres. apart from that it's christmas, although that's not a big deal here, just another excuse to close town, as if they needed any more of those. They prefer to celebrate reyes in the beginning of january, the day that the three wise men supposedly found baby jesus, that's when they give gifts.

New MARTIAN PRESS Chapbooks!

I am very pleased to announce SIX new(ish) MARTIAN PRESS chapbooks:
Aberrant Lounges by Kimmy Beach
on stealing lips by Lars Palm
acts of barbarity and vandalism by Daniel Tysdal
Document 1 by kevin mcpherson eckhoff
Of Quixote’s Lap by ryan fitzpatrick
generations by rob mclennan
Some of these have been out for a while but I haven't had time to promote them, and others just came out. If you want to know anything about the books, ask me. If you want to know anything about the authors, Google them. All chapbooks are $5 plus postage ($2). You can have 5 for $20, and I'll pay the postage in that case. I might even throw in something special, for free. Just because I'm feeling generous, and in the holiday spirit. And you can always order older books. I'll give you the same 5 for $20 deal. Older books include:
Film/making by Jonathan Ball
The Martian Press Review, Volume I
The Road to Power: Taking Control of Your Life by Barbara Berger by Aaron Mauro
oppidum by Norah Bowman
Call & Response by derek beaulieu & Jonathan Ball
If you want anything, e-mail me: JONATHAN at JONATHANBALL dot COM. Thanks, and Happy Holidays!

- Jonathan

he returns. & will post properly tomorrow, now it's time to do other things. so, until tomorrow, support your local (& otherwise) micropress.