Your 2010/2011 Staff

Hope your having a wonderful summer so far. Here’s the new staff list. Be on the lookout for new posts and updates coming soon and sharpen your pencils, 12th Street website submission guidelines are on the way!

12th Street Website:
Online Editor-in-Chief: Liz Axelrod
Online Literary Editor: Philip Anderson
Assistant Online Editor: Jennifer Giglio
Assistant Online Editor: Jeff Vasishta

12th Street Journal:
Editor-in-Chief: Mario A. Zambrano
Managing Editor: Liz Axelrod
Interview Editor: Patrick Hipp
Fiction Editor: Eric Marsh
Nonfiction Editor: Anthony Grassi
Poetry Editor: Rebecca Melnyk
Readers: Jennifer Sky Band, Noah Beigelmacher, Myriam-Skye Holly, Rachel McAlpine
Editor-at-Large: Luke Sirinides
Faculty Advisor: Rene Steinke

MFA Teaching Assistants:
Print: Addie Morfoot
Online: Alex Wilson

 

Big Event & Closing Remarks

Business first:

Tuesday, May 18, 7pm
12th Street Magazine Issue # 3 Launch
33 East 17th Street, Barnes and Noble Union Square
Celebrate the launch of the third issue of 12th Street, the literary magazine edited and published by the students of the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy. Robert Polito, director of the New School Writing Program, will host an evening of readings by students and novelists Mary Gaitskill and David Gates.

This could arguably be the most festive Riggio event of the year, so I encourage all who can attend to do so.

Now, a personal note: as another academic school year comes to an end, so must the majority of activities we – students, professors, scholastic community members – have come to embrace over the last nine months. For some, this time represents only a break in the pursuit of an extensive educational goal. For others, it is the culmination of years of hard work and academic devotion. I implore you all to be proud of what you have achieved.

That said, another year has come and gone for the staff of 12th Street magazine. As on-line editor, this was my first. The group of individuals who produced 12th Street, Issue #3 is bigger than the sum of its parts and will, unfortunately, exist only in the record of this year’s journal. There are those of us who will graduate next week. Many of us will return next year, perhaps in different capacities, and there will, of course, be new contributors to 12th Street, who will bring fresh and exciting perspectives to the magazine. But, the team that produced this year’s journal, like all things, must evolve. For myself, I am grateful and proud to say I was a part of this team, be it in my small (and yes, somewhat removed) position as on-line editor. Like many aspects of the journal, the 12th Street website is still in its infancy, and only time will mold it into the comprehensive media outlet I and the remaining staff wish it to be.
As on-line editor, I had a generous amount of unexplored territory to navigate. At times, I may have stumbled, to which I acknowledge my shortcomings. For all that I accomplished, I have to give credit to those who helped, particularly Pat Hipp, Liz Axelrod, and Julie Carl. Their assistance was invaluable this past year, and they have my sincere gratitude.

I don’t wish to make this a long-winded affair, so I’ll leave with this final request: contribute. Not just to the journal itself, but to the website, as well. No one appreciates print more than I, but this is the new media and it’s important that talented and authoritative voices be heard here. Bear this in mind next year when you’re developing your work for 12th Street. Whether it’s myself or someone new, 12th Street Online looks forward to your contributions.

Have a great summer.

~Tony

 

Pictures from the latest Riggio Reading Series

Don’t forget to come by the Lang Center this Friday, May 7, for the finale in the Riggio Reading Series. Graduating seniors will be reading excerpts from their thesis projects. It’s an event not to be missed. Formal attire is expected.

 

12th Street: Writing & Democracy event

12th Street Celebrates the Release of Issue Number 3!

The literary journal of The New School’s Riggio Honors Program, Writing
and Democracy, will celebrate the launch of its third issue at Barnes &
Noble in Union Square at 7:00 PM on Tuesday, May 18th. The reading will
feature New School undergraduate student contributors, Robert Polito,
Director of The New School Writing Program, and special readings by two
writers interviewed in this issue – David Gates and Mary Gaitskill. 12th
Street is edited and published by students in the Riggio Honors Program:
Writing and Democracy at The New School.

The Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy is an innovative
sequence of writing workshops and close-reading seminars designed to
offer gifted undergraduate writers in the New School Bachelors Program a
balanced and substantial literary education. As one part of the Leonard
and Louise Riggio Writing and Democracy Initiative at The New School,
the honors program accents “the writer in the world,” and extends to
undergraduates the mission and accomplishments of the New School’s
well-known graduate program in Creative Writing.

 

Launch Time

Monday, Monday, Monday!

April 26th is the New School’s 12 Street Magazine launch party. Contributors will be reading excerpts from this year’s journal. Refreshments will be served.

The launch will be held at:

66 W. 12th St., Rm. 510
@ 7:00pm.

We look forward to seeing you there.

 

Behold, the Spring 2010 Journal

It is alive!

Don’t forget: Next Monday, April 26, is the New School launch of 12th Street: Spring 2010. More details to follow.

~T

 

The Moment is Soon Upon Us

12th Street: Issue 3 is scheduled for release April 15.

This year’s contributors include:

Ben Clague, Vesper T. Woods, Selene Sonrisa, Julie Buntin, Jeff Vashista, Luke Sirinides, Patrick Hipp, Jay Boss Rubin, Buku Sarkar, Paul M. Capobianco, Mario Zambrano, Rachel McAlpine, Finnegan Brantley, Marisa Frasca, Aaron Simon, Zoe Miller, Jeanette Anderson, Liz Axelrod, Rebecca Melnyk, G. Collins, Joey Cannizzaro, and Jesse Stewart

Please note the following dates -
April 26th will be The New School Launch Party for 12th Street; time & location: TBA

May 18th is the Barnes & Noble Launch Event with special guests Mary Gaitskill and David Gates. This will be held at Barnes & Noble’s Union Square location.

Be sure to check back for more updates and a sneak peak at this year’s cover.

 

Big Event:
Riggio Student Reading
Spring 2010 Opening Night!
Lang Cafe
65 W. 11th Street, ground floor
6:30 pm

This Friday, your fellow students are hosting a reading in the Lang Cafe at 6:30 pm. Come support your fellow students. Have a slice, sip a drink, clap for your friends and, if you’re a Riggio student and want to share your work, step up to the mic! Write to Rebecca Melnyck at melnr992@newschool.edu if you are interested in reading.

Reading Committee:
Liz Axelrod, Sarah Finch, Rebecca Melnyk and Jennifer Sky Band

On behalf of the 12th Street staff, we look forward to seeing you there.

 

The Fiction of Food

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer
In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

I know it’s been said before, and I’m not here to raise the picket sign, ‘MEET YOUR MEAT!’ I love my beef, pork, lamb, and seafood. But after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I am left frustrated as hell for living in a country that dismisses the truth about the farming industry, sweeping it underneath a corrupt and glorious media of bad (yet absolutely incredible) advertising frenzy.

You’ve heard the stories: what they do with so-called chickens, their beaks cut off, keeping them in their own waste in a perimeter the size of a Harry Potter book cover, soaking them in brine to fatten them up. It’s cruelty. Jonathan Safran Foer gets into details and testimonies about the farming industry in America, and yes, it’s frightening. But reading his book was like lifting the rug in the living room. We know there’s dust under there and we procrastinate cleaning, but the day finally comes when we lift it up, and the sight disgusts us. You cough, you sneeze, you immediately get the broom out and clean. But unfortunately, this mess, this abused identity of what we ‘think’ we’re eating as opposed to what we are eating, is bigger than any broom or mop can clean up. The book is heart-wrenching, at times pushing the ethical lever a little too hard. But facts are facts. 99% of all meat that Americans consume comes from the farming industries talked about in this book. Difficult to swallow, but good medicine to digest.

I read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan after Eating Animals and it appeased some of my discomfort about slaughterhouses and corporate giants, letting me know that, Okay, this isn’t the end of the world. Things are bad up but we can get through this. Michael explains the historical trajectory of, what he calls, Nutritionism: the conscious lifestyle of staying healthy by taking vitamins, calcium, iron, Vitamin A, B, C, D, and E, getting our Omega-3s, and so on, which we must admit, is occasionally fashionable. He explains how scientists have studied and researched what all vegetables, grains, and fruits contain, and once they’ve come to an arguable conclusion, they find ways to put those nutrients and vitamins into our cereal, our juices, our water, steering us away from food itself and leading us towards consumer products that are, fundamentally, imitations of food. He ends the book with eight helpful tips to stay away from highly processed, scientifically engineered products. One tip: Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. Loved that one.

Reading Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was a healing way to end my mad onslaught of food reality. An acclaimed writer, she shares her story of an entire year living on a farm in Virginia with her husband and two daughters. They grow pretty much everything: peaches, tomatoes, spinach, kale, melons, pumpkins, cherries, you name it. The youngest daughter raises her own flock of chicks while Kingsolver herself raises turkeys and also makes her own cheese; her husband bakes bread daily. The experiment: to see if she could feed her family for one year with food from her own garden. Does she succeed? Yes, she does; they all do, including the soil. It’s a wonderful book, inspiring, especially after learning about the agricultural slaughter this country is going through. It reminds you of what seasonal actually means, and puts into perspective how illogical it is to eat strawberries during winter.

For epicures, I’m concluding with honorary mention of two great cookbooks that promote healthy, natural eating and an eco-conscious lifestyle.

Lucid Food, by Louisa Shafia
Super Natural Cooking, by Heidi Swanson

Reviews by Mario Zambrano

 

Book Review

Death Becomes Them by Alix Strauss
Reviewed by Liz Axelrod

Did you know that one person attempts suicide every thirty-four seconds and one death occurs for every twenty-five suicide attempts? In America eighty-six people succeed at killing themselves every day. Divorced men are 400 times more likely to kill themselves than women. Men favor guns; women favor pills and razors. These and more tidbits can be found in Alix Straus’s clever and compelling Death Becomes Them. Ms. Straus does not go deep into the reasons or despair involved in the celebrity suicides she unearths, but she gives us insight and illustrates the methods and morality involved in famous suicides such as Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Sylvia Plath, Michael Hutchence, and Kurt Cobain.

These dark days of winter are the time of highest suicide rates so, dear reader, pick up the book instead. Get engrossed in the lives and the interesting and sometimes shameful details of the deaths illustrated here, such as Virginia Woolf’s first attempt at suicide – she tried to jump out a window but failed since it was on the first floor. Hemingway bought the gun for his own self-inflicted death from Abercrombie & Fitch (OMG!!). And after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, his wife, Courtney Love, found a piece of his skull on the floor and washed it, then later clipped off a swatch of his pubic hair as a memento. This well researched collection makes no statement in defense of or against suicide; it merely heightens our collective wonder and offers us a chance to live through some of our idols’ famous deaths.

Alix Strauss is the author of the award winning short story collection, The Joy of Funerals (St. Martin’s Press), and the editor of Have I Got A Guy For You, an anthology of mother-coordinated dating horror stories, (Adams Media.) Her latest book, Death Becomes Them: Unearthing the Suicides of the Brilliant, the Famous and the Notorious, was released by Harper Collins and has been optioned for TV. Her second novel, Based Upon Availability, is due to be released in June 2010, also by Harper Collins. Alix lives in New York City. For more information please visit her web site: www.alixstrauss.com

 

Events!

The Writing Program is hosting a couple of keen events this week, so don’t miss out.

Tonight, Laura Cronk will be moderating a discussion with Catherine Bowman. They will be talking about Catherine’s new book, The Plath Cabinet. This is a must for Plath devotees. Bowman is also the editor of Word of Mouth, an anthology of poems by poets she has reviewed and featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Her poems have appeared in six editions of Best American Poetry.

On Wednesday, Greil Marcus is hosting a Riggio Forum with David Thomas, the lead singer and founder of the legendary avant-rock band Pere Ubu. Pere Ubu were an innovative force during the rise of punk/new-wave in the late seventies and early eighties.

Remember, these events are free for students and faculty, so be sure to check them out.

Tuesday, December 1
Poetry Forum: Catherine Bowman
Laura Cronk, moderator
6:30 p.m., room 510

Wednesday, December 2
Riggio Forum: Ghost Line Diary
A conversation with David Thomas
Greil Marcus, moderator
6:30 p.m., Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, room
510, $5; free to all students and New School faculty, staff, and
alumni
with ID

 

Cover art from 12th Street, Vol. 2

 

Volume 3 is coming… And here is your staff:

Editor-in-Chief: Zoë Miller

Managing Editor: Liz Axelrod

Fiction Editor: Mario A. Zambrano

Poetry Editor: Marisa Frasca

Non-Fiction Editor: Luke Sirinides

Interview Editor: Patrick Hipp

Editors-at-Large: Anna Utevsky & Kathryn Waldron

Faculty Advisor: Rene Steinke

And I am your complaisant On-Line Editor: Tony Grassi

Brief biographies of this year’s staff will follow shortly.

To be considered for 12th Street Magazine, Volume 3, please submit your work to Julie Carl at juliecarl13@yahoo.com by November 15.

Be sure to visit 12thstreetonline.com for more updates coming soon.

Best,
Tony

 

Foster Children, DJs, and Hermaphroditic Dogs

Yesterday was Wednesday, so I of course read the NYT Dining section.  I generally read it online, but since I was Long Island-bound, I got myself a copy for the train ride.  Eventually I found myself at Section A, with the International, National, and Local stories, followed by the Op-Ed pieces.  I always read this section from back to front, and once I passed the Op-Eds the last page of local news contained 2 articles.  Above the fold a sad girl, seemingly in her late teens, stared out at me, and below the fold was a photo of three 30-something people standing around a turntable.

The Article up top was about how kids age out of the foster system. With unemployment climbing in the city, many of their advocates are concerned they are now effectively on the fast-track towards homelessness.  They are the forgotten children, bounced around their entire lives and then cast off to fend for themselves.

The other article was about a bunch of recently unemployed people who have decided to become DJs, and who have gone to school to learn how to spin records and mix music digitally.  The undercurrent has a whiff of people becoming unbound by the falling economy: with little left to lose, they can now pursue their youthful dreams. The top note, however, was about the rise of enrollment in DJ schools and the semi-lucrative opportunity DJing affords people who are slowly whittling away their severance packages.

At first I was taken aback at how the foster youth article was essentially buried in the paper, hidden. They are the forgotten ones, indeed. I am aware of the hierarchy of newspapers, the way stories are prioritized based on what sells the most papers—but still. This story made it sound as if foster kids definitely don’t have the dollar and change to spare for their daily NYT.

But what the page really made me think of is the characters we give voice to in fiction and the worlds we illuminate in our stories, and if in shedding that light we create portals of opportunity for our readers.  When we write about marginalized people, or show a kaleidoscopic (and often grim) view of humanity, are we in effect helping to make the marginalized more mainstream?  Should that be the duty of a writer?  Or should we avoid such subjects at all costs?  If so, are we then effectively marginalizing ourselves as authors?

But to come back to my trip to Long Island: I was headed there to visit my Grandma and spend the day making gefilte fish and matzoh ball soup for the Passover meal. Over the course of the day somehow my uncle’s dog came up in conversation.  That dog has been dead at least 20 years, but Grandma’s stream of consciousness can wind in unexpected ways. She asked me if I knew the dog was born a hermaphrodite.  I said that perhaps I did, but who could really say whether or not that was true? 

While I don’t mean to place aspiring DJs, foster children and hermaphroditic dogs all on the same plane, maybe it is important to create pointed characters.  Perhaps we should make an effort to carve out places in literature for those who cannot afford to buy the books written about them.

All this is by way of me asking: Where do your characters come from?  What do you ask them as you write their stories?  Is literature salvation for “lost” peoples?     

 

Worried, or Just Plain Lazy?

The blog has been quiet as of late. The print journal has been shipped back and forth, from New York, to California, to Canada, then back around again. The next time I see it, it will be in its finished form, ready for the shelves of Barnes & Noble, ready to be found on my bookshelf, and this year I am going to work hard to place it on the shelves of other booksellers too. (Should anyone have any suggestions, or advice, it would be greatly appreciated.)

While getting the journal ready to go has been time consuming, I don’t think it is actually the culprit for my lack of blogging. I went back and looked at old blog entries and realized how heavily influenced they were by my restlessness last fall—restlessness that I think stemmed from anticipating the election. Unease at the thought of certain governmental policies being continued, rather than dismantled. And now my mind is a bit calmer. It isn’t that I am writing less; it’s just that I have been less inspired to blog.

We talk a big game about how reactionary and responsive blogging is, but I’m not sure I knew what I was saying until I watched my interest both wax and wane. I don’t think I am any less interested in the world around me, but I may be less worried about it. Does that make sense? I don’t know if I am blind to how the economic problems will effect my future, but I find comfort in the idea that the problems are communal. I think that makes the pain less acute.

Or maybe I am growing complacent and should be worried. Perhaps we all become complacent when we are happy with who is at the helm of our government, and that is why every 4 or 8 years we see major party shifts. While one side sits and fumes for 8 years, it galvanizes them to go and win an election, and the other side gets comfortable and finds itself without enough steam come election time.

I know our readership doesn’t all share the same politics, but do you find your investment in the current climes waning post-election? Was the constant noise of the campaigns just so exhausting that you are taking a bit of a break? Or am I just making up excuses for being lazy?