Teh Internetz: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I don't often do book reviews for Fringe. I leave that to my colleagues who are down with the learnin'. But guys, as a hardcore interweb nerd, I cannot help but force my bookish opinions on you when it comes to Quirk Books' Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you've been living under a non-nerd rock, then maybe you haven't heard how awesome it is. The original text by Jane Austen is melded with added scenes and twists from Seth Grahame-Smith, who I am now stalking on Twitter (@sethgs).

What you might call an exercise in ridiculous pop culture trend-huffing is probably the best book ever made. Let me repeat that: THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVER MADE.

The book itself is pretty self-explanatory. I will leave other, more powerful bloggers to tell you what the reading experience is like. (Here's a hint: it's awesome, and also, there are ninjas.)

Fans of Jane Austen might balk at an old, beloved story being turned into mindless entertainment complete with explosions and Kill Bill-esque swordfights. But those fans can go to hell. You had your chance, Austen fans. You took the original story and turned it into a thousand and one incredibly boring movies with an unending stream of women with big hair playing Elizabeth and chiseled-jawed dudes playing Darcy. For the last few hundred years, we've done it your way. Now it's time to do it our way.

"Our way" is the internet's way, of course. One of the longest standing rules of the online world is that anything plus zombies is bound to be better. (Ninjas help too.)

Why do you think, months before this book even pubbed, geeks were already frothing at the mouth? Because we knew it couldn't lose.

Everything that makes Pride & Prejudice is still intact. The delicate play of relationships, the unspoken code of honor that doesn't seem to exist in our time, the pomp and circumstance of high society: it's all still there. But it's been augmented just a tad. The zombie threat does something magical here. Not only does it serve to help us through the duller scenes (I thought that ball would NEVER end!) but it steps in to inform the characterization. What had previously been merely Elizabeth's dry wit and keen intelligence is now fashioned into a killing machine. What was originally Darcy's aloofness and haughtiness is now the burden of a lone samurai warrior. These aren't parodies of Austen's characters; they have only grown to strange new heights.

The real brilliance is that the story begins well after the zombie threat has emerged, which gives our heroes ample time to adjust to life amid the undead. Being trained to kill zombies is the norm, and life can continue on despite the frequent attacks. So the original plot has plenty of space to develop with just a sprinkling of crazy violence throughout.

And, oh, did I mention there are ninjas?

Look, you're going to want to buy this book. The hope is that Quirk Books continues in this vein with other classic novels remixed with a little zombie. Can you imagine A Tale of Two Cities...and Zombies"? "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and oh wait, did I mention the zombies!?"

Time Suck: Shakespearean Insult Generator

Like Shakespeare? Feeling too high on yourself? Let the Shakespearean insult generator cut you down to size.

Fringe Contributors Rock: Art Edition

Here's the first of a series of semi-regular posts that will showcase the fine work of Fringe contributors past. We'll start out with the supa-fly visual art by some of Fringe's former artists:

• TM GRATKOWSKI has work up over at Art Slant, YouTube, and the Saatchi Gallery
• Feminism issue artist DAVID BARNES has a new website that highlights his work.
• PETER SCHWARTZ has some keen new photography over at Cella's Round Trip and Foliate Oak.
• ZEHRA KHAN, whose "Back Words" is pictured here, has been hard at work too -- we'll be posting some of her photos this week as we roll out more of the Fringe army's accomplishments.
• The funky and un-categorizable artist/audio collage maven MICHAEL K. MEYERS has a sweet homepage with a bunch of new publication credits.

And please remember: Fringe is still in the midst of a fundraising campaign for our web redesign. We're so close -- only $299 away from success. We need to raise the funds in the next 30, so please consider a $5 or $10 donation. It'd make a big difference to a small literary journal.

post-Soviet splendour

For an agonisingly long stretch of time I’ve been saving all my pennies in order to explore some of the former Eastern bloc. So, in light of my imminent departure I thought it might be fitting to drop a few photographical delights in place of my usual scribbling:

Richtung Berlin/A Soviet Legacy/41 Gymnasia, Angus Boulton

Russia, Andrew Moore

Motherland, Simon Roberts

Soviet Roadside Bus Stops, Christopher Herwig

And for those who can’t stand that sort of thing, I bring you... Absence of Water, courtesy of Gigi Cifali.

My apologies for not adding any fake commentary; I’m currently in the middle of pre-packing adventures (today it’s jotting down those essential phrases I’ll probably never use). So, just in case anyone out there gets their kicks from examining the linguistic nuances between Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian, here’s a phrase I’ll sadly never get to use, translated by Omniglot into all three tongues:

Мой паветраны човен поўны вуграмі

Моё судно на воздушной подушке полно угрей

Моє судно на повітряній подушці наповнене вуграми

Um, so yes... feel enlightened.

Playing Guitar for Charity

Sounds too good to be true, right? Wrong. Wednesday, May 6, Everybody Wins Metro Boston is hosting a fundraiser to benefit the literacy program. I've been volunteering as part of their Power Lunch program since last fall, traveling to a South Boston elementary school once a week during my lunch break to read to William, a third grader. It's been a great experience, and besides the benefits of exposing kids to reading, I'm rediscovering my own love of Curious George, The Magic Schoolbus, and The Bearenstain Bears.

Structured like a "Battle of the Bands," this Guitar Hero fundraiser gives participants the chance to form their own bands and then duke it out for ultimate rock star supremacy. As if that's not enticing enough, when else can you say you're playing video games "for the kids"? It's a no brainer.



{Cross posted to Vernacular}

On Big G-Great and Other Trends

Apparently, when I wasn't looking (or simply not reading the New York Times, which I don't subscribe to in more ways than one), David Orr published this particularly piquant essay, "The Great(ness) Game." With plenty of nods to Donald Hall's essay, "Poetry and Ambition", it's a re-visitation of an old theme.

If you'd like to see some fallout, go to the blog "Everything's Jake" where I found the Orr article while looking for this Whitman quote: "To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too." (Didn't I say all this before? I did, in an earlier blog for Fringe.) You'll find lots of comments.

Oddly (well, maybe not), the Big Authors like Orr tend to overlook much of the young contemporary stuff. It's up to people like me to go after that meat, and in the spirit of that I ask: well, is anyone really Great these days of my Gen-X generation? Now, thinking of "Fame" and all that comes with constant publication, I wonder if Poetry doesn't lack a certain camaraderie with, say, Twitter. In other words, are the impulses that forces people to write inane and ridiculous updates the same?

For an slightly off-topic jaunt in this direction, try this article on Twitter at The News & Observer. My contention is that (sometimes, at least) today's poems are mere "tweets" if put side-by-side with the so-called Great Poems. Decide, as always, for yourself.

Happy National Poetry Month!

NaPoWriMo has arrived! April is National Poetry Month, and Read Write Poem is celebrating with a thirty poems in thirty days challenge. Here's my angle: write all the poems on a theme and have a draft for a chapbook. Yes, some days I might miss a poem, and on other days everything I write might frankly stink. That's what good friends and revision are for. But that won't be the case every day, and getting a few gems out of NaPoWriMo will be worth joining this big alliterative orgy of clever slant rhymes, puns, hypertexts, wit, and sharp social criticism.

An excellent place to look for inspiration is Poets.org's Poem A Day e-mail list, which is also archived on the website. I could list my favorite online places to read poems, but I think it's more fun to find your own. Start with the great work on Fringe and start following links. I always arrive to something cool, most recently Hit and Run Magazine.

Still not fired up? Read Charles Bernstein's satirical Against National Poetry Month. He's right perhaps about what the aim of the corporate sponsorship of NaPoMo is about, but that's no reason to ignore perfectly good free poems a day, and if you're inspired to write anti-poems sometimes, that's good, too.