My history is the history of things imagined and not-happened
Sam Pink, PERSON
Rich Baiocco
WRITING Published Elsewhereplace
BOOT N' RALLY zine Issue #1
DADDY ISSUES & DRONE NOISE essay :: 'What A Beautiful Face' Neutral Milk Hotel zine
The Dropbeatles :: Everyday Genius
Kentucky Backworld Conduits :: The Smoking Poet(scroll down)
Are You Decent :: Blog San Diego
Posts tagged books
Feb25
Feb22
Rifled Through Treasure, Busy Friday Afternoons
Just got back from Florida and Panama. Been there most of February. Incredible time. My 2 biggest scores while there were these: The Time of the Assassins : a study of RImbaud by Henry Miller, and this Bob Dylan special issue of Rolling Stone containing all the interviews the magazine every did with Dylan. Tons of gems in this rag. For one, at some point in the late 70s//early 80s when Dylan claimed he was falling out of touch with all the contemporary music that was going on around him (new wave?) he said the only record that got it right was So Alone by Johnny Thunders, which features one of my favorite tunes ‘You Can’t Throw Your Arms Around A Memory’. Check it out if you get a chance. Warm killer of a tune.
There’s also this gem that one of the interviewers (Jonathan Cott) gives Dylan. Highlighted are my favorites
I wanted to read to you 2 Hasidic texts that somehow remind me of your work. The first says that in the service of God, one can learn 3 things from a child and 7 from a thief.
From a child: 1) always to be happy
2) never to sit idle
3) to cry for everything one wants.
From a thief: 1) to work at night
2) if one cannot gain what one wants in one night to try again the next night.
3) to love one’s co-workers just as thieves love each other
4) to be willing to risk one’s life even for a little thing
5) not to attach to much value to things even though one has risked one’s life for them
6) to withstand all kinds of beatings and tortures but to remain what you are
7) to believe that your work is worthwhile and not be willing to change it.
Feb19
sweet endorsement for Pioneers Press (formerly Microcosm Distribution) from my friend and writer Benny Kolp. He and his 2 Purdue buddies run a killer Fiction Craft Discussion podcast called What I’m Trying To Say, breaking down some short stories on the sentence level and talking about things like POV, re-telling, book publishing and more. I think they’re on episode 3. Its like being drunk in a bar in Indiana talking about books, what could be better? Click on the link here and check em out.
And check out Pioneers Press here for a full catalogue of smutty zine objects to fetishize and maybe fall feet over February for. Right?
~rjb
ROCKS N’ THINGS & PHYSICAL CULTURE
i’m not a dick, but i’m no liar either - my heart gets a lift whenever i take a plane and the stewardess forces people to power down their eBooks and tablets and Kindles during lift off or landing, and the collective groan of those justifiably frustrated readers, and i sit there with my cheap paperback, reading it still, or not, or writing shitty poems in the margins. Or not. And i could do as i please.
stay free to do as you please.
Feb6
Free copy of Boot N’ Rally to anyone who orders the Death in a Rifle Garden zine!
We JUST NOW got a handful of limited-edition copies of Rich Baiocco’s Boot N’ Rally zine. They go FREE to the next buncha people who order his Death in a Rifle Garden zine. Both of these are must-haves from one of our favorite up-and-coming zine-makers. Check out Death in a Rifle Garden here at Pioneers Press (formerly Microcosm Distribution).
So Pioneers Press (formerly Microcosm Distro) has copies of my new fiction zine Boot N’ Rally (issue #1). 24 pages, pocket sized. I guess, technically, it’s the first zine I’ve put out. You can get it for FREE if you order a copy of John-Vincent Greco’s poetry zine, Death In A Rifle Garden for $4.
Boot N’ Rally (issue #2) coming soon…
Feb5
There are so many shitty books out there, it’s not wonder Borders and Barnes & Noble stores will die. Actually it’s a wonder that they lived so long, but people love being in bookstores, surrounded by so many powerful inanimate objects. And a good book is such an amazing object. ‘Cause the television talks its head off, changes its face in a constant manipulation for your attention - it can’t be trusted; the program interrupted with advertisement after advertisement anyway. The Internet too, I don’t even know what shape it is, do you? & all those passwords, fuck. But a book is this unchanging, silent object that you can trust; it gives you a whole headful of images and ideas; it can take you to a different place in your mind, in your mood; it can summon ghosts and memories you’d long stuffed away. Sometimes even just holding a book is enough to move you - that’s really weird, but it happens: walking home from the used bookstore with like a copy of Celine’s ‘Journey To The End Of Night’ in my hand, or Knut Hamsun’s ‘Hunger,’ and dissatisfaction, discontentment, anger in my heart, and a recently discovered dark sip of Baudelaire and Lautremont, French literature poisoning my mind. Holding this paper object in my hand, knowing this is the right time for this, thinking ‘what an experience this is gonna be!’ before I even got a chance to read it. Books do that. Books have that power. And if I liked it, or if I didn’t like it, or if I left it on a bench by the bus stop; it would not lose time or power for the next person who discovered it. All the while this silent, unchanging object capable of tremendous power. I can’t think of anything quite like it….maybe my brother’s dead body at his funeral. The first time I saw a dead body up close. That silent, unchanging object capable of summoning memories and ghosts and tears and rage in me by just allowing my plain sight to fall upon it. Bodies and books, these objects of power.
John-Vincent Greco from Full-Throated Glass Half-Mast :: Notes On Entertainment, pg. 187-88
Nov12
Death In A Rifle Garden 1s & 2s
1) I’m so excited! Through the sincerely amazing folks at Microcosm Distribution you can now order the poetry zine Death In A Rifle Garden by John-Vincent Greco. I started selling and trading it at the San Francisco Zinefest back in September, but now it’s available anywhere in the WORLD!
Super cheap, hand-painted, 24-pages, one of a kind. They started selling it two weeks ago, so hurry if you want one because they’re almost gone.
2) To Celebrate, I’m doing a reading in LAS VEGAS on Thursday night! With Tomas of RAD DAD!!
Here’s a flyer that my brother’s girlfriend, Randi Fusco, made for the event. She’s my favorite realist.
Las Vegas Zine Library
Thursday, November 15th
7pm
520 Fremont St. Las Vegas Nv 89101
Come on out and say what’s up
~rjb
May31
11 Kinds Of Loneliness
I don’t have enough money/Proof of Residency to get a California Driver’s license (YET) but I got a San Francisco Pubic Library card. Even that wasn’t easy. I had to mail myself a postcard to prove that I receive mail at my girlfriend’s adddress…I do. I brought the librarian the postmarked postcard and I now own more Public Library cards (4) in my life than I have cell phones (3).
Support Your Local Library. Some of them even carry rare Richard Yates short story collections that the used bookstores don’t often get.
Speaking of support, I can’t get enough of this photograph.
I’ve seen it on a book cover before, but for some reason this wider shot just mesmerizes me. Maybe it memorizes me, actually, and I go on auto-pilot looking at it.
To find out who took it, and read a great essay on farm life in Nebraska, click here
~rjb
