RDSP March Update
Welcome to everyone who signed up for the mailing list at AWP!
John Edward Lawson's The Troublesome Amputee, is a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Acheivement in Poetry. Although we hadn't planned to attend World Horror this year John will now be going since the banquet will be held at the con.
The winners have been announced for the Last Burn in Hell: Director's Cut contest. To see who won and read the pick up lines visit the official MySpace page of author John Edward Lawson.
March 14-18
International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts 28
Dania Airport Hilton
Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Michael Arnzen & D. Harlan Wilson Readings & Film Screenings
March 16th • 7:30 pm
Skylight Books
1818 N. Vermont Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Tel: (323) 660-1175
Larry Fondation signing Fish, Soap and Bonds
March 24 & 25
A Writer's Weekend
Rutgers University Inn & Conference Center
New Brunswick, NJ
John Edward Lawson, Editor-in-Chief, Guest Speaker and pitch meetings
March 29 – April 1
The World Horror Convention 2007
Toronto Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre • Toronto, Canada
Michael Arnzen, John Edward Lawson, RDSP in the dealer's room
Publisher's Weekly had this to say about Text:Ur: "Those who like experimental fiction that's not always readily accessible will be richly rewarded...Aguirre, who won a World Fantasy Award for Leviathan 3 (edited with Jeff VanderMeer), demonstrates once again why he's one of today's more innovative genre editors.”
Subscribers to this newsletter can get signed hardcover copies of both Last Burn in Hell: Director's Cut and The Troublesome Amputee: Scarred Edition for just 35 dollars including postage by using this link: http://preview.tinyurl.com/ysnlzd
Remember, if your order is going outside of the US contact us first to find out the cost of shipping.
John and Ron had a great time at SheVaCon doing panels, author signings and generally causing mischief. See all the pics here.
Here's a transcript for D. Harlan Wilson's recent chat on The Lost & Damned Message Board and also one for Ronald Damien Malfi's too.
AWP saw the debut of four of our books. With so many of our authors in attendance it was a great event. More pics here.
Congratulations to these Bare Bone #9 contributors who will receive honorable mentions in The World's Best Fantasy & Horror 2006:
Paul Finch "Elderly Lady, Lives Alone"
Mark Justice "The Whispered Sigh of GratefulSouls"
Joy Marchand "Blood Memory"
Chris Ringler "The Third Horseman"
Alyssa Sturgill "Chokecherryblack"
Your work seems to assert that modern life inspires a certain duality, or even schizophrenia, on both a personal and societal level. Why is that?Schizophrenia and the idea of the doppelgänger have been staples of postmodern literature, and especially science fiction, for a long time. I consciously wrote Dr. Identity within (and to some degree against) this tradition. In both my literary criticism and fiction writing, I often focus on how the human condition is schized by capitalist media technologies. By schized I mean that the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred so that one becomes indistinguishable from the other, a process that makes for exciting thematic, narrational and stylistic experimentation.
Are conflict and violence as inevitable as your novel portrays?
You bet, although Dr. Identity’s brand of ultraviolence is clearly an exaggeration of things that exist in the real world. In terms of social conflict, on the other hand, such as my characters’ petty squabbles, hang-ups and anxieties, I tried to achieve a realistic representation. The tone of the novel is basically existential in that it assumes subjects live in an indifferent, ambiguous, meaningless world where conflict and violence are utterly monotonous. The subjects have become desensitized, preoccupied more with high fashion and good sandwiches as opposed to issues like health care and death. In this light, perhaps, Dr. Identity is sheer realism.
What is plaquedemia? Could Dr. Identity be anywhere else?Plaquedemia is my term for the contemporary academic situation at larger research universities where teaching is subsidiary to the scholarship that academics are required to produce in order to keep their jobs and get promotions. The portmanteau structure of the term is overt—a combination of plaque and academia, which, for me, signifies the absurdity and rottenness of this situation. This is complicated by the fact that I am a plaquedemic myself, although, unlike many of the professors I’ve known in the past, I am equally interested in pedagogy and publication.
For the most part, my experience in plaquedemia is limited to the humanities and liberal arts, specifically the field of English. Hence the profession of my protagonist and his doppelgänger, who are part me, part Philip K. Dick (as represented by various biographers), part antisocial nerds, part Bruce Lee meets Arnold Schwarzenegger. Writing Dr. Identity was both an extremely personal and wildly impersonal experience. As a critique (of academia as well as the science fiction genre, social relations, capitalism, technoculture, and mediatized selfhood), I don’t think it could be as effectively told from another literal or metaphorical location. But the city in which the novel is set, Bliptown, is fertile ground for lots of different stories.
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