Category: Announcements

co-founding editor Jenn Meccariello Layman who showed me this story in Pittsburgh Magazine on The New Yinzer‘s 10-year anniversary celebration.

Which means it was just more than 10 years ago that I was working a PR job at an arts center in Pittsburgh and I ran into Jenn one night at a White Stripes concert at the 31st Street Pub, a venue smaller than some exurban garages about which last I knew anything had strippers during happy hour. I “Wanted To Start A Magazine In Town And Call It The New Yinzer,” I’d kept telling people, but I had no idea how to go about it. Jenn, too, was restless and eager. So we started it online and we published our friends and we made new friends who submitted stuff to us or showed up at our happy hours (namely Seth Madej, who graciously went on co-edit for a time), and after five months in the winter and spring of 2002 we had our 10th issue up.^[1] And so we threw a little 10th-issue anniversary celebration at the newly opened ModernFormations Gallery in Bloomfield.

It’s fitting, then, that the 10-year anniversary‘s also being held at ModernFormations. Technically, if you consult the archives^[2] (as I had to), the real 10-year anniversary was back in January, but these new folks—none of whom I’ve ever met, but each of whom I admire and am grateful to—are throwing it September 20. If I were a richer man I’d fly up to be there.

The thing about Pittsburgh was (is, still, I hope) that wanting to do something that could change the landscape of an entire city was always in one’s reach, even at age 24. We got written up in the papers. We pissed some people off. It was a time and a place where you could launch something as small and blase as a Web site (in HTML, no less, using Notepad) and see the thing make waves in the city you’d come to adopt as your own.

I can’t believe it’s still around. I can’t believe it’s still around.

[[]]Jenn and I’d decided originally that to compete as best we could with the two (at the time, RIP InPittsburgh) alt-weeklies in town that we had to be a fortnightly publication. So we had a new issue up every 14 days. It was too rapid a pace in the end, and by that fall we’d become a monthly with no regrets.[[]]

[[]]My favorite issue remains , which in hindsight is very bros-y, but includes the that got me into graduate school, a review I was just thinking about the other day, and a comic by the guy who wrote Casey Affleck vehicle Lonesome Jim (2005, dir. Steve Buscemi).[[]]

Saturday is historically the worst day of the week to read the newspaper. And yet here’s this morning’s Tuscaloosa News bucking trends. Two front-page stories I need to quote from.

First up is an AP article: “Lyon out as chief justice candidate”:

Democrats removed perennial candidate Harry Lyon as their nominee for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court on Friday, deciding he was unfit after he made disparaging remarks about homosexuals, his Republican opponent and party leaders.

That’s the lede. What’s funny about it is that this guy Lyon had already once before been removed from the party’s ballot (in 1994, in the governor’s race) for violating party rules. And so maybe everyone deserves a second chance. Lyon, though,

has referred to homosexuals as “freaks” in online posts and once suggesting killing a few illegal immigrants to scare others away from Alabama. He has been disciplined three times by the Alabama State Bar, including once for pointing a shotgun at a neighbor and her children.

Were any of these embarrassments grounds for removal? No. The Democrats removed him only after some recent rambling presentation where he disparaged other state legislators. What this means is that in Alabama, and within the Democratic Party of Alabama, you can have a pretty steady career despite being a known and total psychopath. A total psychopath who looks like some horrible union of Paul Bryant, Ned Flanders, and Shelley Winters.
Continue reading Big News Day!

I can’t remember the first friend I made. That I can’t remember the first friend I made may imbue my boyhood with a kind of friend surplus, but it was just I lived from day one in a clover-shaped set of cul-de-sacs with four or five kids the same age. Timmy probably was the first friend I had where the things we did involved sleepovers and weekend trips with each other’s families. I don’t know Timmy anymore, but I’m friends with his sister on Facebook.

In terms of longevity, the friends I want to point to here are Clay and BJ. Clay grew up across the street from me, meaning I’ve known him forever, but it took a little while for us to get past a for-the-age colossal 2-year age difference to become what could firmly be called friends. BJ and I became friends in 4th grade upon learning that each of our mothers was a Manilow fan. I just saw BJ and his wife and kid this last weekend. We grilled and played guitars and sat around a little firepit with drinks talking about everything and nothing. It was nice, one of the better (because fuller, because more longly extended) times I’ve had with him in ages.

Clay left Facebook years ago, and then moved to Oregon, where it’s harder to spend time with him. He and his wife (who went to college with BJ, is how friends are often linked) just had a baby. They emailed me photos and I mailed him one of the postcards I got in my limited-edition copy of R.E.M.’s Out of Time record, which postcard he said reminded him of times spent together in the summers of our early teenage years, where we’d sit around playing video games and listening to WHFS on the radio. I miss WHFS and Clay and numerous other friends it’s been too long since I’ve spent time with in person.

When people say that what a marriage means or does is that it shifts your spouse from a person you date to the person who becomes your best friend, I thought it was the sort of Hallmark sentiment people enjoyed saying. I thought it was Live, Laugh, Love. But I’m starting to think it’s something very real, and I’m looking forward to decades of watching it happen.

…All of this is to say that I’m leaving Facebook. My email address is [anything you’d like to type]@[this blog’s URL domain].

I still have a blog. I’ve got recent news and things to go over, and I’ll do them once a day this week, like vitamins we’ll all take to resurrect our blogging health. Stay tuned, friends. Thoughts are forthcoming on sickness, cleanliness, books, The Legend of Zelda, and Post-its.

I’m not sure what one of these even is.

I.
I spent a week on the road in October reading from The Authentic Animal,*** which was a nice fall break full of all the foliage we can’t quite see in the deep south. I sold fewer copies than there are months in a year. But I also saw people I hadn’t seen in many years. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Pat. Thank you, Jenn, and Joan, and everyone else that came out.
Continue reading A Writing Life

I’d’ve liked, had I my druthers, to’ve invented a whiskey-based cocktail. But haven’t they all been invented already? Until then, here’s a refreshing cocktail, unseasonable as all hell, so wait until it’s warm out again to imbibe.

Or: live in the South. It’s still, like the fashions, hitting the 80s here.

Recipe
Fill one pint glass with ice
Pour in 40 mL St. Germain Elderberry Liqueur
Pour in 80 mL cranberry juice
Top with Fresca
Squeeze in 1/4 of a lime and stir

This post is for Mac users, chiefly. And especially those Mac users who are writers. A couple years ago, I blogged about my beloved Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, and how it includes little bits of copy about words and their usage by writers like David Foster Wallace, Francine Prose, Zadie Smith, Simon Winchester, and the composer Stephin Merritt (among others). I bought a copy online and keep it always near my desk.

Did you know everyone already has a copy on his or her Mac?
Continue reading A Discovery

Do you know that The Authentic Animal is ? This means the book’s got a whole Amazon page with all of its little widgets and bits of more information than most folks want. For instance, Customers Viewing This Item [i.e., me or my mom] Also Viewed this item:

It’s a poster you can get for just $6.29.

And then here is a list of Suggested Tags [I guess for more personalized searching?] from Similar Products:

• tina fey
• 30 rock
• satire
• liberal
• humor
• anti-intellectual
• entertainers
• essays
• memoir
• overrated and not funny

O, for TAA to ever become overrated!

You, reader, are invited to start a new customer discussion right there on the page. It’s under “Customer Discussions”. So maybe you’re asking: What do customers discuss regarding nonfiction books about taxidermy they’ve not yet read, written by a guy with no other book credits? Not a clue. Here’s something being discussed over on the page for Heaven Is for Real, currently the #3 bestselling book on Amazon, which is apparently about a boy who died for a bit in the hospital maybe and saw heaven I guess?:

What if you go to heaven, then rebel and become alienated from god again? God might intend for you to do that as part of its greater plan, and you just happened to draw the short straw.

Kudos to that pronoun use, amirite?

So here’s the offer: first person to start a discussion that gets more than 20 responses wins a free signed copy of the book. No, you can’t just respond to your own discussion 20 times. Yes, you can do whatever you want to get 20 other responses. No, your discussion need not have anything to do with the book itself, or taxidermy in general. Yes, you may challenge Amazon.com customers’ personal conceptions of heaven. No, you ought not emotionally devastate a person.

Oh and yes, I know: this is some pretty sad hucksterism.

Movies watched since the tornado hit (in order of my remembering that we watched them):

• Defiance
• Hereafter
• The Green Lantern
• Nanny McPhee Returns
• The Social Network
• Skyline
• Secretariat
• How Do You Know?
• The Royal Tenenbaums
• Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One
• Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
• Star Wars: Attack of the Clones
• Sleepy Hollow
• Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
• The Egg and I
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• Tron: Legacy
• The Tourist
• Bandits
• The Town
• Louis CK: Hilarious
• Thor: 3D IMAX
• Santa Claus is Coming to Town
• The World is Not Enough
• No Strings Attached
• Black Swan
• Kentucky
• The American
• Bridesmaids
• Rushmore
• easily one or two other gems I’ve forgotten, which should tell you something about these gems’ inherent luster

Also, season one of Southland, the bulk of Dexter’s fifth season, and we rewatched all of Downton Abbey with friends. Cable/internet still out. I bought an internet phone and we also bought a cheap antenna, but it only gets ABC and the CW. Oh and WVUA/ThisTV which is somewhat of a revelation.

Two of them made me cry.

We didn’t have any tornado helmets. It was something Neal’d heard in passing on the news broadcast, something our friend Erica had mentioned on Facebook in response to my update, “Tornadoes again. TORNADOES. AGAIN.” We’d had tornadoes in Western Alabama just two weeks previous—another set of warnings a week before that. All told, three times since we’d moved here from Nebraska the sirens had wailed around town. In Nebraska we knew to get to a basement. In Tuscaloosa, no one had basements. We had no rooms without windows, and now we had no tornado helmets.

It wasn’t the sirens that made us take cover. It was the sky Neal saw as he opened the door and stood on our little brick porch. “Can you see it?” I asked. We could see only it, the tornado filling the sky to the west. Debris soaring two hundred feet in the air. The black mass it all swirled around looked to be at the end of our block.

We shut the door. Neal found a wooden wastebasket and our sturdiest stockpot, and we sat, girded Tweedledumly under blankets and housewares, on the floor outside our bathroom. Overhead what sounded like a Panzer growled and grumbled. It lasted only twenty seconds, maybe thirty, those seconds filled with loud plinks against the windows and siding, as though a whole mess of fifth graders were egging our house.

Then it was over, the rumbles replaced by high swishy winds. “Do tornadoes have eyes?” I asked. Another ten seconds. “I don’t know,” Neal said. “I’m going to go look.”
Continue reading Tornado

Lately, I’ve been thinking about memorization. There’s that Foer book that’s climbing the charts. There’s that cell phone I have to which I’ve outsourced the memorization of every phone number in my life save N’s and my parents’. And there’s the final oral exam I assign to most of my undergraduate creative writing classes, where I make them tell from memory a story 100 years old or older. They go to the Bible, Grimm, Greek myth. The idea being to force the essence of narrative into their brains. Sure, they forget these stories by the end of finals week, but it’s a gesture.

I know, from memory, a few things. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (easy) and the obvious, shorter W.C. Williams poems. Certain passages of Prufrock. I know the 23rd Psalm, still, from Bible camp back in sixth grade (but I don’t know the Lord’s Prayer). I know this, mispelled: Continue reading Lately I’ve Been Thinking about Memorization

Getting here? It took nine lifetimes. N nonplussed. It was “worth it.”

Some people for the first time!

Why doesn’t everyone live here?

Just a quick post to say that the redesign (and restructuring … those of you with RSS feeds may need to relink? I’ve no idea how this all works) of the site that you see here is all thanks to my good friend Beth Sullivan.

Why a redesign? I don’t know it’s like a blog is rug, trapping all yer dirt, that needs aired out from time to time. Plus also I’ve got professional demands.

Follow me on Twitter probably soon, I worry!

UPDATE: On posting this post I’ve now stuck in my head Dr. John’s “New Looks” from the National Lampoon’s European Vacation soundtrack, with only my lack of imaginative post titles to blame.

To the right over there you’ll find a smalled-down version of the first page of Bing results when one searches “Dave Madden”. If you look closely, you’ll find a certain Web page missing from the list.

I don’t want to be a prima donna, but I mean, I’ve read all the posts and commentary lately about how Google is no longer as relevant as it once was. How it’s been hijacked by spam and it’s getting harder and harder to find relevant pages. But I’ll have you know that googling “Dave Madden” brings this page up fourth—after the Partridge Family guy’s Wikipedia page, the main page for some Austin singer-songwriter, and the Canadian Partridge guy’s IMDB page.

So, Bing. What’s going on? Am I not relevant enough to you? Is this for all the bad things I’ve said about MS Windows in the past?

I’m sorry. I feel you taking over. Please promote my Web presence?