Prison Is a Place on Earth
Thu 1 Mar 2001 - Filed under: Chuntering On, Free Stuff to Read| Posted by: Gavin
House prices far out of reach?
Can’t afford an apartment?
Come to Prison!
“It’s just like my old man told me,” says Prisoner X, male, 37, married with two children. “Three squares a day, a job and a place to sleep. I’m doing better here than I ever did outside!”
Tired of the noise, the rat-race, the pressure of urban life? Many prisons are in rural and suburban areas. Enjoy the peace, the fresh air of a new prison. Laugh at people hurrying along from one city to another as you take a relaxed walk beside the highway (Keeping America Beautiful as you go).
Worried by overcrowding? It’s not a feature of all our prisons. Besides, there’s always solitary confinement which Charles Dickens enthusiastically described as a “slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain.” (American Notes for General Circulation, London: Chapman & Hall, 1842)
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 7
Thu 1 Mar 2001 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
Ellen Klages’ story, “Flying Over Water” was on the final ballot for the Nebula Award.
Number 7 has stories from Jeffrey Ford, Ellen Klages, John Trey, James Sallis, and the usual exceptional extras: the list of my recent breakfasts (powered and non-powered), possible futures for ex-presidential candidates, and last but not least, well, maybe it was, but I’ve gone and forgotten it. Available Now.
Contents
Fiction
High Tea With Jules Verne – Jeffrey Ford
Flying Over Water – Ellen Klages
Imenda – John Trey
My Bet’s On Her – Jeremy Cavin
Faces, Hands: Kettle of Stars – James Sallis
Poetries
Permian Basin Blues – Lucy Snyder
Photograph of a Lady, Circa 1890
A Visit to the Surreal Poet’s House – G.O. Clark
Salome – Dora Knez
Various Nonfictions
One music review, Chris Smither
Naoko Takahashi’s Thank You
Hello Bostonians – Jack Cheng
Height Games
Zines
Definitions
Searching for Giant Worms
Prison
Full Disclosure
Contributors Notes (dropping the seriousness a little)
Decent number of zines &c reviewed, including two of my favorites above. Check out the Snow Monkey site (Simple, but beautiful) and just orderWestern Lore – from No.6:
Western Lore, #3, $1, 28pp. Tim White, 3322 Broadway, Sacramento, CA 95817 What a great zine. I’ll report next time on whether the batch of stuff I’m going to order arrives (t-shirt, Field Guide to Food, stickers and Beer!). ‘Ghost towns and related junk.’ The center of this issue is a strange comix tale where the 3 protagonists take a road trip to Cadillac Ranch. Besides giving it away this is the best destination for a single slim dollar I’ve seen for a long time. Hell, send them one of the new gold ones and listen to them curse.
Yes, the beer came and it was good. The back issues were more than worth it and the t-shirt, well, what can I say? At last, something truly bright red.
Now, really, it’s a buck, order it!
Decorated with a what? Illustrated? A playing card. Why? well, it’s a simple enough story. There’s a game we like to play (or inflict upon others, depending on your perspective) whenever we have about a dozen people together called M*f*a. The first part of the game requires everyone taking a card and discovering from said card their role: either a villager, a m*f*a, or the commandante. The cards were meant to be in envelopes or little plastic sleeves so that everyone could have one, they could be traded, drawn on… you get the idea.
Sadly we went the non-biodegradable route — always a mistake — and bought lots of little plastic sleeves. Then (this is where it becomes obvious that Martha Stewart does not live here) we found that you can’t glue plastic. Oh well. So the cards were permanently attached and the only way to swap them around is to swap copies of the zine with friends.
Now we have all these little plastic sleeves so we’re knitting gloves to go with them.
Contributors
Jeremy Cavin works in many media. He is living off the proceeds from his series of What Would Jeremy Cavin Do products somewhere in the South Seas.
Jack Cheng‘s drawings once graced the interior of this magazine. Congratulations go out on his recent engagement. Sadly, he no longer sleeps on a deskbed. He has a rather nice musical instrument collection, pictures of which cannot be seen at this time on his rather neat website.
G.O. Clark lives in Davis, CA, a city with an above average population of good writers.
Electric Eel Embroidery Club, The The editor wishes to thank the members of the Club for their generosity.
Jeffrey Ford is the World Fantasy Award winning author of the novels Physiognomy,Memoranda andThe Beyond. His short fiction is worth searching for-we’ll give you warning when a collection comes out. You can find his stories in the pages of many magazines and online at scifi.com & Event Horizon.
Gavin J. Grant always wanted to.
Ellen Klages is a writer on sabbatical from the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco. Her story, “Time Gypsy,” (Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction) was nominated for the 1999 Hugo and Nebula Awards. She is well known in her alternate career as the auctioneer of the James Tiptree Award.
Dora Knez‘s first chapbook, Five Forbidden Things, has just come out from Small Beer Press. Her poetry has previously appeared here and in Tesseracts.
Kelly Link is troubled by her neighbors in the village. They seem trustworthy until she examines them a little closer. As the evening, for it is inevitably evening, wears on, she becomes more and more convinced that they are not what they seem.
James Sallis‘ story “Faces, Hands” first appeared in Nova 1 (as “Faces & Hands”), then in his collection A Few Last Words. It has been hard to find but with short fiction collections appearing in the U.K. and the U.S.A. it will now be easier. The second part of this story will appear in LCRW no.8. Read his Lew Griffin series of mysteries.
Lucy Snyder‘s writing can be found in such places as Midnight Zoo, Cosmic Visions andSnow Monkey. She also runs the Dark Planet web site.
Margaret Thatcher has given up her attempts to communicate with humanity which alone explains her absence from these pages. A determined fantasist of the social-experiment genre, her work was not always successful. Examples can still be found in the dole queues throughout Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales.
Naoko Takahashi (NT1) did in fact win the Olympic Gold Medal in Sydney for the women’s marathon. The Naoko Takahashi (NT2) that we know, however, did not. NT2 paraphrased and invented this from translations of the winner’s (NT1’s) speeches. Thanks go to NT2 and NT1 for their sense of humor. (We hope).
John Trey is an editor and writer living in a suburb in the Midwest. This is the second appearance of his fiction in print thus far. A fast-talking Midwesterner, he can be found at a range of conventions pulling bar duty, selling patio furniture and leading tours of The House on the Rock, in Spring Green, WI. Despite all this, he still manages to run a decent website and write more than decent stories.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, No.7, October 2000. LCRW appears twice a year as if by magic from Small Beer Press. info@lcrw.net www.lcrw.net $5 for a sample issue or $16/4. Contents © the authors. All rights reserved. Submissions, checks (made out to Gavin Grant), books, zines, stock certificates, music, chocolate (preferably dark), stationary supplies, caffeinated and/or alcoholic beverages, requests for guidelines &c should be sent to the address above. As always an SAE-or at least an email address-will speed up our reply. The comments in this portion of numerous comics, books, and magazines have been so overwhelmingly witty in recent months that none were thought necessary here.