new litmags

“Ad Break” by Haoyi Zhang

SHORT PROSE

The coffee-toffee-caramel of my hot liquid handwarm looks luscious. It is also the exact same hex-code shade as the last nub of supermarket mudcake, resting on an A4 exercise book receipt book book book poetry books to-do list book tower on desk. I gnaw and gobble at both, sticky fingers returning to the clacker palette.

It is the witching hour, ideal for tickling my muses. Beyond my window sash, distant cicadas float in the black pool of night.

This is an appreciation letter to all the owly writers chained to their desks: your lit mag publications will fill up your bios but not your growling hearts (or egos). Get yourself a friend not for listening to you air your novel ideas or read at that gross anarchist bookstore, no. Someone who likes talking to people at the park, believes life is good and yes, helps you unclench so the words finally start flowing from your lips.

Touch grass. Get stung by a wasp. Bite the sun.

Haoyi Zhang is a reluctant student at FASS USyd and hopes to poem good for Cordite one-time this livin’. Drag them out for kebab + walks. Off all socials except Discord: @open_far

An Excerpt from “Climax of Horrors” by Ben Fidler

I lied. That asteroid was never going to hit earth. Or cyborgs. Made that up too. Pretty good, huh? That stuff sells. Besides, I know we have a whole department of the Space Force looking for asteroids. I saw a bit on the evening news about the heroes keeping our skies safe. They called themselves “The Homo-Spacians.” They interviewed a general and in not so many words he said the minute we see one its blamo! We’re going to nuke that bitch. Turns out it was a good idea to keep all those nukes after all. That’s a win for Bush One and Gorbi. 

I know the system works because the last asteroid that thought it could pockmark earth—the one I lied about—got blasted all to hell. Dan and I watched them nuke it, the remnants raining down all night in green and orange ribbons, tying together in neat little neon bows. It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Dan took my hand as we laid on the grass and I knew at that moment, there under the falling sky, we would never be safe.

COMING SOON TO NEW POP LIT!

What If the Literary Establishment Were a Car Company?

A SPECULATIVE ESSAY

IS IT ABSURD to compare literary products– novels and books of stories and poems– with automobiles?

Yes and no. After all, one is considered “art” and the other merely engineering and design. Plus there’s the unwanted question of aligning literature with Capitalism– even though the literary realm is dominated by giant conglomerates– centered on the same Big Money island as them– with the literary intelligentsia as embedded in the publishing system as anyone, and long has been.

Besides, a few of us believe literature, done right, carries many of the same attributes as a well-made vehicle. Speed, power, beauty, and sound internal structure, to name a few of them.

WHAT IF?

What would the name of said literary car company be, do you think? I have one picked out:

STODGY MOTORS

Fits the vibe. General Motors circa 1970, but worse– stuck in an outdated mindset with an arrogant belief that only they know the right way to do things.

But for the Stodgy board members, everything is great!

“We have all these great models,” they tell themselves. “Why is no one buying them?”

Yes, after all they have their long-time favorite top-of-the-line model, the Proust, first introduced in 1913– same year as Ford’s Model T. (Shown: a more recent model.)

(photo c/o youtube)

Or, the much-lauded Woolf model. Not very quick– top speed of 45 mph– and uncomfortable seats, but will eventually get you where you’re going. Who could not want it? “The engineering is actually remarkable,” a Stodgy salesperson assures us. “Well put together, if you examine it closely. I mean, the parts fit. They really do.”

(photo c/o autoevolution)

Or the more recently designed Beckett. Another award-winner.

(photo c/o car.info)

But what about cutting edge design, consumers ask? The Stodgy Company has that covered, with a more experimental model they call the Kafka. Pushing the boundaries of, well, something.

(photo c/o ugly car)

“How can you not love it? All of it?” the Stodgy representatives ask.

They do. They’ve staked their reputations on their tastes and choices, and will not go back on them. It’d be unheard of. After all, who knows better than them?

“It’s a golden age for Stodgy, you see,” they affirm. “It really is.”

-reportage from Karl Wenclas for Fast Pop

“Tide” by Ken Kakareka

NEW POETRY

(c/o thespruce.com)

i was
sitting
underneath
a great
big
avocado tree
throwing a
pity party,
drinkin
& thinkin
what’s the
point?
when one
dropped
& clunk me
square on
the noggin.
i looked
around
startled:
who else
saw that?
no one!
it was
a sign
from god.
then
a sexy woman
and her
beautiful dog
walked by
smiling
at me.
my god!
another
sign –
how quickly
the tide
can turn!

Ken Kakareka’s latest novel is Summer of Irresponsibility (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). His words have appeared or are on their way in numerous rags including Gargoyle Magazine, The Gorko Gazette, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety. A list of selected publications can be found at kenkakareka.com.

About Modernist Literature

A RANT

WHAT TRUE MODERN LITERATURE SHOULD LOOK LIKE

FUNNY: Modernist writers Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and their famous protege, Ernest Hemingway, saw the key to moving literary art forward in removing Victorian-era verbiage. They stressed “economy of language.” They saw modernism in the same terms as modernist painters, architects and designers: via simplicity and clarity. Eliminating the unnecessary to get to the core emotion beneath. Hemingway’s own prose, beginning with his earliest in our time vignettes, embodies this philosophy.

I ASK, then, how did we arrive at the piled-on unreadable verbiage of High Literary Modernism? A combination of Henry James sentence fetish, detail disease, and word clot? Run-on Joyce Faulkner Woolf paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness nonsense within endless Proustian narratives, through which the reader haplessly hopefully wades, as if digging through a garbage dump, until said reader, stupefyingly bored after hundreds or thousands of pages, at last cries out, “Enough!”

WHO PRAISED these High Modernist con artists? Who made them an essential inextricable part of the literary Canon– the art’s Pantheon– while more accessible and frankly more intelligent authors were expunged? High Modernists are held up to gullible students as role models, but in reality they’re giant OBSTACLES preventing the art from moving forward.

OUR STANCE at New Pop Lit is that Ernest Hemingway was not an end point of modernist writing, but a beginning, marking a path to take– one of outward-looking, in-the-real-world expectation and experience. A clear-eyed, clear-headed plunge into the world of now, connecting DIRECTLY and immediately with readers in electric communication– a current of art running through readers like a surge of energy.

THAT’S the path to follow. New art which wakes up the stunned sleepy public to announce, “Literature is BACK!” Then spreading across the planet.

Anyway, that’s the plan.

-Karl Wenclas

“Today’s Poetry Scene” by Brian Pilling

NEW POETRY

(photo c/o ctvnews.ca)

If you’re reading this poem, be sure to use the promo code: Percy
Shelley, which entitles you to a free lunch at the prestigious
Rainbow Room, high atop Rockefeller Center. Be sure to tip the
Russian-speaking maître d’ with a crisp green Andrew Jackson.
From your table hob-nob with the mega yacht captains who list
and lean to the right of you. If you haven’t yet, please note this
poem’s lack of slant and internal rhyme, the lack of line breaks,
and the small print—alcoholic beverages not included. But
foremost, please alert your server to any allergies, particularly to
the mixing of politics, religion, and art.

XXX

Brian Pilling has been published in The Main Street Rag, The Berkshire Review, Down In The Dirt, The Droplet Journal, Missive Magazine, and other literary journals. His chapbook The Poet’s Struggle is published by Bottlecap Press. Brian is a recent winner in The Cape Cod Times poetry contest. His previous appearance at Fast Pop Lit was here.

Humans Versus Robots!

COMMENTARY

(Pictured: Self-portrait by human artist Vincent van Gogh; a shot from the 1927 film Metropolis.)

DO PEOPLE KNOW exactly what kind of world tech moguls and tech hustlers are planning for us?

Here’s the crackpot vision of one of them, David Holz, CEO of Midjourney, who is fully captured by the More Technology religion:

The assumptions made in the paper are many– that everything goes smoothly with no setbacks; a science fiction fantasy disconnected from the earth, bureaucracies, reality. One can find statements of writings from other plutocrats as fantastical and dangerous, including Elon Musk’s plans to merge humans and computers so that we become in effect, ourselves, robots.

Keep in mind it’s all being done in the name of money. More money! The reason banks and Venture Capitalists are throwing billions of dollars at these madmen. More outlandish plans, more gimmicks, more ways to get suckers inside the circus tent to enable and enrich the tech guys. “Look at me! I can be an artist! A writer! Golly gee!! Just by saying a few words into this here device.” But you’re not an artist or writer, merely an enabler generating imitative mock-artistic garbage while simultaneously allowing the scamsters to ask for ever more funding, more expansion, more unnecessary electronic gadgets: more madness.

The name of the game for the tech guys is accelerationism, a kind of economic blitzkrieg. In their credo, “Move fast and break things.” Moving ahead as quickly as possible in a narrow path to reach a far out objective. The idea of simply achieving the distant objective, worrying about damages, destruction and repercussions later. Therefore, the all-out media blitz for AI and various AI gadgets– to make, in the minds of the public, their anti-human technology accepted fact.

“It’s clear that AI is a permanent part of our digital lives–” -Scott Lamb, VP of Content at Medium.

A 100% push to put the tech over, requiring from the other direction in order to limit or stop it an equal amount of pushback. Otherwise, the many ills that afflict society– including alienation, homelessness, and an out-of-control wealth gap– will only get worse.

Are we up for the fight?

-Karl Wenclas

(If you haven’t yet signed the “Save the Writer!” petition, please do so.)

Why 2024 Is Not 1968

COUNTERCULTURE

1968 WAS A KEY YEAR for the Sixties counterculture, highlighted by anti-Vietnam War protests on college campuses and the protest-to-end-all-protests at the Chicago convention:

1967-68-69 marked the peak of the American Cultural Revolution (yes, the U.S.A. also had one) which lasted from 1955 to 1973. A subject for a much longer essay.

THE POINT is that the college protests of 1968 were political, but also part of an entire cultural movement, which gave the demonstrations much of their strength. Music, styles, and mores had changed drastically. Culture was in upheaval– cultural revolution that’d been kicked off thirteen years prior by the roots musical explosion of rock n’ roll and by two Hollywood movies celebrating youth rebellion.

(“Rebel Without a Cause” 1955; Kent State 1970.)

An authentic counterculture was fully underway– rejection of handed-down homogenized standards combined with an embrace of new ways of living and thinking. Back-to-the-land artisanal small-scale attempts to escape the top-down corporate rat race, in search of independence and personal freedom.

They thought their world had become too conformist, too big, too intrusive– too unequal and stratified. Yet in its totalitarian get-in-your-head aspects that world carried a small fraction of the omnipresent technological intrusiveness of now.

If they had reasons to get out of their world– what about us?

Did the Sixties counterculture live up to its ideals and its promise? Of course not. But for a few years it sent shock waves through the technocratic system and the hierarchy-based U.S. establishment. Culture gave the campus protestors and convention demonstrators of 1968 a cachet– a glamor– they would not otherwise have had. Protest songs from Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and those who followed them served as soundtrack to the seizure of university buildings and shouts of “Peace Now!” and “The Whole World Is Watching!”

For all the energy put into current political protests, among a host of mistakes they lack the force of a full-scale cultural assault.

It’s what’s also missing from pushback against the top-down megabillionaire-backed assault of AI-generated work and art– though artists of all kinds are among the most affected.

NEEDED: A brand-new counterculture disconnected from the bought-and-paid-for hierarchical institutions of today. More human ways of thought, creativity, and expression; of experiencing the world: the real, analog world. A return to what makes us human, to serve as a model for those completely trapped within, and owned by, the electronic hive.

An escape door. A way out.

-Karl Wenclas

An Excerpt from “The Unhoused Gift” by Peter R. West

FICTION!

He had no compassion for homeless people—to him, they were an ugly boil on the face of the city, parasites that threatened the very fabric of the community. He reflected on his meteoric rise to the top of the legal world, clawing his way from a humble, working-class family, through a modest Cal State LA Law School, to building his own office by initially taking on less-than- prestigious cases that top lawyers had shunned, to finally developing a ferocious knack for scandalous murder trials that put him on the evening news. If he could make it, there was no reason for anyone else to sleep on the sidewalk or comb through trash cans.

As he approached the city, the drivers around him tried to maneuver their cars ahead of one another, as if a big prize was awaiting the one arriving first. Stanley could hear their incessant honking as they zigzagged in and out of lanes. But his silver Bentley was like a Roman galley warship rising through rough water, smashing all obstacles in its wake. His hand gripped the fine leather on the steering-wheel. His body pressed against the soft skin of the seats. His reflection in the mirror was of an attractive man with a kind face imprisoned by a tight ostentatious tie. He took a slight turn toward the homeless camp, which in the general direction of his office. The dismal sight of the people he maligned in court held a sordid appeal for him.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

Scoping Out the Future

AN ANALYSIS

c/o snarkybites.com

NOBODY KNOWS for certain what the artistic future will look like, including in the literary realm, given the approaching flood of AI-generated “art”. But we can make an accurate guess.

A.) The most massive part of the book market will be imitative tomes generated by chatbots. They’ll come from all directions, as they’re already coming from all directions. From hapless writer-wannabes who want the accomplishment of creating a novel or collection of poems or stories without doing any of the work. From content mills in faraway places creating thousands upon thousands of ebooks, as well as the print version, to generate income based on sheer volume. From new tech publishing outfits eager to get in on the AI game, presenting at least the pretense of quality but for whom the goal remains the same: generating income based on volume. Increasingly, much volume will come from the Big Five established conglomerate publishers themselves, who’ve begun recruiting tech people to work in the AI field.

B.) A small number of actual writers with some talent will try to push the envelope of what an AI chatbot can produce– hoping to thereby create innovative new literature (it’s no more than a hope). They’ll find themselves also swamped by the AI deluge, and more, perhaps carrying the same AI brand of aesthetic inferiority and artistic theft.

C.) The current self-publishing/fan fic/genre crowd, whose massive numbers have already congested the book market. Many will turn to AI (many already have) to produce more books faster, which will be self-defeating.

D.) The small press litmag community. For most of them (like ourselves, in part) their steadfast efforts are a labor of love. Survival, though, will become more difficult– unless they find ways to stand out. Which means going beyond either the literary or subliterary templates which permeate their underground realms.

E.) Holding up the tottery fort of the literary present-morphing-swiftly-into-past– especially in New York– will be the literary status quo. While storms rage outside, they’ll cling to their canonical high modern postmodern writings, as if perpetuating an ancient dead language. Like Essenes, they’ll continue to write inscrutable papers about unreadable texts, and hold events– in halls of cloistered academia, or high-brow venues in upscale gentrified neighborhoods– going through the motions of an archaic cult. Shuffling monks in robes, reciting properly approved words, affirming in gesture and invocation their artistic belief system. If asked why, they’ll stare blankly. No one will know.

F.) THEN there will be an alternative. The rebellion. A counterculture positively fighting the inhuman deluge of botbooks and other fake AI-generated crap. Those embracing human creativity and making it new, by returning to our cultural roots– to our forebears; our ancestors– and there finding inspiration. Drawing upon our most human abilities. Not just our underused natural brains– ours, not a machine’s– but especially upon our hearts and our souls. Emotion. Compassion. PASSION. New writing which screams, vibrates, and lives. It won’t be easy: to rediscover ourselves and find artistic purpose and humanity while existing in a soulless artificial world. But we’ll do it.

-Karl Wenclas