SvenDavisson{dot}com

MOJO WORD GUMBO
Queer Poets and Prose-ets Put Out

7 - 8 pm Sat. night at FAB - Faubourg Marigny Art & Books, 600 Frenchmen Street at Chartres Street - 8 Blocks Downriver from Jackson Square, Open Everyday Noon till 10PM, 504.947.3700

The most ecstatically inspired saints and the lowliest down-and-dirty sinners share their best stuff at the funky not-to-be-missed FAB, a queer gathering place, museum, gallery and bookstore. Featured Readers include Lethe Press’ Steve Berman and Rebel Satori authors Sven Davisson, Peter Dubé and Trebor Healey, along with poets Kyle Conner and Steven Reigns. Bring a poem to share!

Just out from Rebel Satori Press…

Dreams, desire, darkened streets and the sudden miracles that appear there, the deep places of the mind. Two groups made these the heart of a radical project of liberation: queers and surrealism.

Better than many others, queers understand the power of these dark areas. The rich, complicated culture we’ve created for ourselves is constantly ready to allow us to follow our dreams and fantasies, carried by the surging waves of sexuality into some pretty and magical places. It’s just as clear that the surrealists were chasing similar adventures as far back as the ‘Twenties and ‘Thirties. Given the similarity of their motivations, why have the two so often been in violent opposition to each other?

Madder Love is an anthology of cutting-edge writing that wants to look at that a little closer. It opens up the surreal possibilities of queer literature while simultaneously displacing the historic homophobia of Surrealism.

From dream states to erotic obsessions, from the muttering of the unconscious to parallel worlds (and the weirder cracks in this one) Madder Love tackles why surrealism can be so queer, and why being queer can be so surreal.

Contributions from Will Aitken, Stephen Beachy, Jeffery Beam, Stephen Boyer, Tom Cardamone, Sven Davisson, Peter Dubé, Craig L. Gidney, Nicholas Alexander Hayes, Trebor Healey, Kevin Killian, Shaun Levin and Rob Stephenson help make the case.

Peter Dubé is the author of the chapbook Vortex Faction Manifesto (Vortex Editions, 2001), the novel Hovering World (DC Books 2002) and At the Bottom of the Sky, a collection of linked short fiction (DC Books, 2007). In addition to writing fiction, he is a widely published cultural critic with essays on books and the visual arts appearing in journals such as CV Photo, ESSE and Spirale, and in exhibition publications for various galleries, among them SKOL, Mercer Union and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery of Concordia University. Peter lives and works in Montreal.

MADDER LOVE
Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism

Peter Dubé, Editor
ISBN 978-0-9790838-2-2, May 2008
Paperback, $14.95, 146 pages, 5.5 x 8.25.

http://www.rebelsatori.com/shop/

My Hero: A Wild Boys Tale

A Novel by Tristram Burden

ISBN 978-0-9790838-1-5, March 2008
Paperback, $16.95, 269 pages, 6 x 9.

“My Hero is a Jungian tale that combines mythology, science fiction, and eroticism to create a brilliant hybrid unlike anything I’ve read before. Original, exciting, and transcendent. A bloody great read! Very unique.”
—Douglas Ferguson author of The Forgotten Ones

“A brilliant fusion of William Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft set in the post-apocalyptic wilderness of Mad Max…”
—Ashé Journal

2006 Finalist Project: QueerLit

Set in a post-apocalyptic America, Tristram Burden’s novel tells the story of 17 year old Joshua My Hero. The youth lives out a humdrum existence, struggling to find truth and sense in a Christian-fundamentalist trailer park. But his psychic powers and sexual tastes leave him an outsider of his community, and forced to commit patricide in a final and desperate struggle for self-defence against his father’s rage, Joshua escapes into a wasted planet, armed only with an oracular penis, the patronage of an ancient earth spirit sent to rid the planet of all of its ills, and the wisdom of the Tao Teh Ching…

Tristram Burden’s short stories, poetry and articles on contemporary occultism and self-transformation have appeared internationally in a variety of journals and anthologies. This is his debut novel, a finalist in the 2006 Project: Queerlit contest. He currently resides in Bath, England where he’s recording his first album and writing a TV series in-between working on his second novel.

Buy Direct: www.rebelsatori.com

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–To launch the release of the amazing new novellas Some Phantom/No Time Flat by author Stephen Beachy and the collection The Starry Dynamo by author Sven Davisson, Three Roads Press/Suspect Thoughts Press and Rebel Satori Press are proud to announce the following multiple-author San Francisco event August 31, 2007.

Friday, August 31, 8:00
Stephen Beachy (Some Phantom/No Time Flat)
with Sven Davisson (The Starry Dynamo)
Dog Eared Books
900 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Phone: 415-282-1901
www.dogearedbooks.com

Some Phantom/No Time Flat
by Stephen Beachy
Fiction, 5×8, 240 pages, $16.95
ISBN-13: 978-0-9771582-7-0
Three Roads Press, an imprint of Suspect Thoughts Press

“Henry Miller said that the moment you have an original thought, you cease to be an American. Some Phantom and No Time Flat are great unAmerican novellas.” -Thorn Kief Hillsbery

In Some Phantom an unnamed woman arrives in a strange city, fleeing a violent relationship in her past. Taking a job with disturbed children, her own mental stability becomes more and more precarious. A marriage of The Turn of the Screw and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls, Some Phantom poses questions about the line between madness and memory, fantasy and abuse, questions elaborated on in No Time Flat. No Time Flat follows Wade, a young boy who grows up on the American plains in an isolated existence with his elderly parents, as he makes his way through a childhood of playground shootings and mysterious strangers. Becoming a wanderer himself, Wade inhabits a sparse American landscape of fleeting connections, missing children, and possible crimes.

Stephen Beachy is the author of two novels, The Whistling Song and Distortion. His fiction has appeared in Best Gay American Fiction, BOMB, The Chicago Review, Blithe House Quarterly and elsewhere, and his nonfiction and critical essays have appeared in such places as New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Raised by Mennonites “somewhere in the Midwest,” he now lives in California, where he teaches at the University of San Francisco.

The Starry Dynamo
by Sven Davisson
Spirituality/Queer Theory, 6×9, 264 pages, $14.95
ISBN-13: 978-0-9790838-0-8
Rebel Satori Press

“The bastard lovechild of William Burroughs and Alistair Crowley-or was he spawned of an orgy involving Rashneesh, Pan, Ginsberg, Foucault and a dozen or so of Burroughs North African wildboys?-Davisson’s vision is a rich distillation of subversive thought.” -Trebor Healey

Spanning over fifteen years of work, The Starry Dynamo presents an eclectic evolution of material running the gamut from the erotic to the divine and the erotically divine to the divinely erotic. The work moves from charged and, at times, provocative fiction and prose-poetry to scholarly and thought-provoking essays on spirituality and philosophy.

Sven Davisson is the founding editor of Ashé! Journal of Experimental Spirituality. A rebel-publishing pioneer, Davisson edited the small, yet groundbreaking, zine mektoub from 1989-1995. During that time, he also received a degree in Queer Theory from Hampshire College and studied photography with Jerome Leibling (of the New York Photo League). In addition to Ashé, his work has appeared in Abrasax: Journal of Magick & Decadence, sneerzine, The New Aeon, mektoub, Lambda Book Report and Velvet Mafia as well as the collection I Do/I Don’t: Queers On Marriage.

“With its wide-open definition of the word queer and fearless publishing choices that ricochet from risky to risqué, San Francisco’s Suspect Thoughts Press has made the book world a more interesting place to inhabit. Suspect Thoughts has swiftly become the hot press for connoisseurs of transgressive, intelligent literature.” -SF Bay Guardian

Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism

Anthology scheduled for publication in 2008 by Rebel Satori Press.

The Surrealists and the radical edge of gay lib represent two of the most sweeping movements for liberation of the last century—and both continue to this day. Moreover, the pair also created two remarkable “cultures of desire,” seeing sexuality as a primordial, transformative force, and exploring the power of dreams, fantasies, personae. They provided homes to the flaneur and saw the city and its hidden places as vital, almost alive—and in different, but related, ways both saw the worlds of the imagination and “real life” as overlapping each other. More importantly, the two took such things as actively political—revolutionary in fact. These resonances can be found in the depictions of Paris in Aragon and the swooning landscape of sections of White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples, in the novels of Rene Crevel and the extensions of automatism and dream material in much of Burroughs, in the permeability of text-world-voice in (largely queer) New Narrative writing, in the obsessional desire that animates great swatches of both Breton’s anti-novels and Wojnarowicz’s memoirs. And the list of analogues could be longer…Given this, we feel it’s high time for an anthology of prose investigating this subterranean relationship.

We’re looking for:
Short fiction and essays, prose poems, automatic texts and dream narratives, genre-defying pieces that explore/embody the relationships between gay men and Surrealism as a radical/literary movement exploring desire, the imagination and the fluid boundaries between the world and the mind.

We’d prefer not to see:
Memoirs about how seeing that picture in the MOMA changed your life, writing that takes “surreal” as a synonym for “strange.” And, if your main reference points for surrealism are a couple of Dali paintings, this anthology probably isn’t the place for your work.

Send submissions to: Peter Dubé, PO Box 643, Succ. Place du Parc, Montreal, Quebec H2X 4A6, Canada. Enclose SASE (sufficient Canadian postage or IRC’s) for the return of your material if you want it back. Submissions without same will be destroyed. Email submissions will be deleted unopened.

Deadline: September 30, 2007

All that being said, we’re looking forward to reading you.

The current issue of Lambda Book Report (April/May 2005, p. 14) includes my review of Ko Imani’s amazing little book Shirt of Flame: The Gay Art of War.

Just finished Tom Dolby’s Trouble Boy (Kensington, 2004) which it seems was the gay novel of the season–if one discounts the novelization of Latter Days. Judging from the reviews at Amazon, everyone loved this book. I get the feel though it’s in the same way that every old queen loves the cute young twink at the bar–rationalizing it to his personality or intelligence. I just don’t get this book. It wasn’t bad per se and, I do think, it served the summer novel niche well. But I am still not able to make the simple leap to generate interest or energy for these characters and their (yawn) pursuit of happiness. It’s the closest to a gay Bright Lights Big City that I’ve come across… But then I didn’t get the appeal of that book either. Fluff. Not fluffer. Do we really need twink fiction? And if we do then I will leave you with one question…. Why!?

Wait, don’t answer that–Just go out and buy Trebor Healey’s Through It Came Bright Colors or Marshall Moore’s The Concrete Sky.

I have recently been discussing with friends rather McGreevey was bi or a “gay American.” This has led me to dust off my queer theory cap (with the vain hope that the diploma may, one day, be good for something other than dust)…

This is one of the areas that has always fascinated me: the occluded divide between contemporary labels and universal/timeless taxonomy. Currently we have the three teams (or perhaps four, since some argue that lesbians and gay men are only tenuously aligned).

LGBT studies breaks down into two philosophic camps: contructionist/essentialist, homosexuality as innate and historically contiguous vs, homosexuality as a cultural construct denoting the current, temporal modeling of same-sex desire. Essence vs. artifact,

I personally have developed a theory that holds a historic continuity of desire (same-sex desire in this case) and people throughout history have related themselves to this desire in different ways. the continuity comes out both in the desire itself and in the fact, I would argue, that a certain segment of people always have defined themselves in specific relation to said desire. The referential comportment has taken on different cultural meanings among different peoples and at different times.
(more…)

In interviews granted toward the end of his life, French philosopher Michel Foucualt spoke of homosexuality as “an occasion to re-open effective and relational virtualities.” He spoke of an inherent potential to “introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule or habit.” Foucault’s premise is are core values I have carried with me for years. (see my article Friendship As a Way of Life) Now reading Ko Imani’s Shirt of Flame: The Gay Art of War I have found a manifesto that merges Foucault’s positivist vision of Queer placement and a Buddhist-derived concept of universal compassion, while throwing in a healthy dose of Sun Tzu.

Imani book is an amazing find–one that has the potential of turning the reader in a complete 180°. Imani writes with a passion and palpable immediacy: “We must create change now or not in our lifetimes.” Imani writes:

As LGBT individuals and as a queer community, the time had come to make a bold and decisive commitment to the most congruent and effective means to create change that we can muster given our current knowledge.

Imani asks where FIGHTING for our rights has got us and, more a more uncomfortable question, what has it cost us. He envisions a new direction that fully embraces the Buddhist conception of Compassion–fully embracing the “love thy enemy” ethic. The image of Imani sitting in tonglen (Buddhist compassion meditation) amidst Rev Phelps and his fellows protesting at University of Michigan says it all.

Official Site (with preview): Shirt of Flame

I have a piece in the upcoming anthology from Suspect Thoughts Press (San Francisco) I Do/I Don’t: Queers On Marriage, edited by Greg Wharton and Ian Phillips. The piece is called “You Can Keep Your Rights, I Already Gots Mine!” The collection is scheduled for a September release. More details will follow…

Authors included:
Dorothy Allison, Shane Allison, Charlie Anders, Antler, M.J. Arcangelini, Josh Aterovis and Jon Andrews, Cheryl B., Bruce Bawer, Kevin Bentley, S. Bear Bergman, Steve Berman, Chane Binderup, Jay Blotcher, Keith O. Boykin, Christopher Bram, Tala Brandeis, Michael Bronski, Victoria A. Brownworth, Cynthia Burack and Laree Martin, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Patrick Califia, Anne Campbell, Dale Carpenter, Margaret Cho, David Christensen, Cheryl Clarke, Matthew A. Coles, Sherilyn Connelly, Dana Cory, Wayne Courtois, Dani Couture, Jameson Currier, David Cutler and Mark Ewert, Sven Davisson, Robbie Daw, Christian de la Huerta, Maggie Dolan, Neal Drinnan, Lisa Duggan, Dean Durber, Amie M. Evans, Douglas Ferguson, Steven Finch, Gay Shame San Francisco, Jim Gladstone, Thomas Glave, Robert Gl�ck, Daphne Gottlieb, Steve Greenberg, Aaron Hamburger, Brent Hartinger, Kristie Helms, Kris Hill and Karen Stogdill, Thea Hillman, Walter Holland, Michael Huxley, Debra Hyde, Francisco Ib��ez-Carrasco, Rik Isensee, Aaron Jason, Matt Kailey, Davina Kotulski, Gil Kudrin, Greg M. Lanza, Daniel W.K. Lee, Sharon “Vinnie” Levin, Ali Liebegott and Anna Joy Springer, Michael T. Luongo, Jason Mahanes, Jeff Mann, Meredith Maran, Janet Mason, David McConnell, Mike McGinty, Skian McGuire, Mara McWilliams, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Sean Meriwether, Marshall Miller and Dorian Solot, Tim Miller, John Mitzel, Marshall Moore, Eileen Myles, Lesl�a Newman, Geoff Parkes, Christopher Penczak, Elissa G. Perry, Felice Picano, Jeff Poniewaz, Jim Provenzano, Andy Quan, Carol Queen, Jonathan Rauch, Alan Reade, Shar Rednour, Rick R. Reed and Nicholas Reed, Alexander Renault, Eric Rofes, David Rosen, Rob Rosen, Roxxie Rosen, Richard J. Rosendall, Michael Rowe, Lawrence Schimel, Sarah Schulman, D. Travers Scott, Will Shank, Simon Sheppard, Bob Smith, Horehound Stillpoint, Meg Stone, Jackie Strano, Ron Suresha, Steve Swayne, Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore, zak szymanski, Cecilia Tan, Tristan Taormino, Robert Taylor, Richard Tayson, Dylan Vade, Jim Van Buskirk, Jennifer Vanasco, Carmen Vazquez, Kai Venice, Norah Vincent, Jeff Walsh, Patricia Nell Warren, Tom Wilson Weinberg, Judy Wieder, Robert Williams, Evan Wolfson, and Andrew Wolter.

Suspect thoughts voted Best of the Bay 2004…
Best Brand-New, Badass, Superqueer Press
With its wide-open definition of the word queer and fearless publishing choices that ricochet from risky to risqu�, San Francisco’s Suspect Thoughts Press has made the book world a more interesting place to inhabit. First slammed onto the map by Pulling Taffy, Matt Bernstein Sycamore’s experimental memoir, Suspect Thoughts has swiftly become the hot press for connoisseurs of transgressive, intelligent literature. In the coming months we can look forward to works like Bullets and Butterflies, queer spoken word poetry edited by New York City glam-slammer Emanuel Xavier; The Beautifully Worthless, Ali Liebegott’s long-awaited epic road poem; and I Do/I Don’t: Queers on Marriage, an anthology put together by publisher Greg Wharton and editor Ian Philips. And as if serving a readership of misfit queers weren’t enough, Wharton and Philips � stellar writers themselves � have rounded up a gang of authors with good taste in storytelling to judge Suspect Thoughts’ queer-novel search, which gives unpublished scribes a shot at a first book with the upstart press. –San Francisco Bay Gaurdian