| RE: "A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953" (c) - self-published graphic novelette |
[Apr. 16th, 2007|11:40 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  content | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "Daughters of the Soho Riots" - The National | ] |
A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953:
A Cowboy Named Molasses Publishing (2007) self-production & distribution venture.
Nominated for the 2007 Aurealis Awards (Australian Fantasy & Science Fiction)
Category Division of Science-Fiction Short Story
Plot appraisal: "It's a capitalist economic crisis being severed by the emasculating populace of post-wartime Tokyo, and despite the enhanced and incendiary technological advance of Pearson's silicon-based Solar Energy Converting Apparatus, in addition to the decomissioning and redundancy of the nation-state's nuclear power contingency, and the dismantling of its enrichment plants, people are revolting, still to receive the kinetic godsend of rock 'n' roll, and all lamenting the irremediable advent of an unprecedented plague of Azure-winged magpies set to make their collective roost in the rafters and belfries of this ailing megapolis. So if the staggered fiscal and communal malaise wasn't insidious fortune enough, there's the irrefutable evidence of hard times made prevalent by the fallen corpse of Godzilla, sprawled and spanning the stifled cartography of the city. The corrupted antediluvian cadaver has begun to sour the skies with the jagged barbarous winds of carrion rot, and prehistoric decay is incrementally poisoning the waters kissing Tokyo's once-unadulterated coastline.
Frankly, if it wasn't for the spark of vital intellect extolled by one Yasuhiro Dustin T-Bird, the new Minister of State for Economic and Fiscal Policy, a Hiroshima-borne governmental official of beatnik ambition and shogunate-ronin blood, then the greatest cosmopolitan dynasty in the post-industrial world would find itself conceding an arduous and blighted decline of decadence and disaster, the likes of which to rival that of the legerdemain historical downfalls of Pompeii and Cairo. The genius bud of this beguilingly enigmatic orchid lies in Yasuhiro's legislative statute on exportation of commodified mutant saurian meat, because really what better or decipherably more improving providence would remove 120,000 kinn of late-Cretaceous decomposure from the streets and aqueducts of progressive Tokyo? Of course, the singular complexity yet to be assuaged with his Trans-Global Unionised Exportation Trade Agreement of Premium & Cultured Primordial Mince-Meat, is a failure to predetermine the weathered influx of subterranean swine, defammatory Socialists, enviromentalist savages, and the assassination plot on Yasuhiro's life that surely accompanies promotion to an elevated and feared office position.
What the State needs is a solution, and Yasuhiro Dustin T-Bird appears the only wise man foolish enough to encourage illumination. With a skyline populated by photovoltaic solar-panel high rises and brazen Shinjuku-neon, a gregariously hopeful civil servant in Tokyo could near go blind searching for it."
More than this, A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953 (c) features additional creative contributions by Steph Harrison, Liam Monkhouse, Naomi Wilke, Kyja Noack-Lundberg, Lachlan Huddy, Liberty Browne, Greg Merlo, Roy Morris and Michaela Blassnig, amongst others. Consignments with/available from (thus far):
¶ The Book Nook & Little Bookshop Around the Corner, Suite #10, 173 Boundary St, West End, Brisbane, QLD., Australia 4000
¶ Rocking Horse Records, 245 Albert St., Brisbane, QLD., Australia 4000 (product #: ASC0001)
¶ The Outpost Store, 5A Winn Street, Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, QLD., Australia 4006
¶ Kill The Music Store, 1/161 Elizabeth St., Brisbane, QLD., Australia 4000
¶ Daily Planet Comics & Games, 144 Elizabeth St., Brisbane, QLD., Australia 4000
¶ GoMA Gallery Gift-Store & The State Library of Queensland Bookshop, QLD State Library Cultural Centre, Stanley Place, South Bank, Brisbane, QLD., Australia 4101
¶ Pulp Fiction Books, Shop 28 Anazc Square Arcade, 267 Edward St., Brisbane, QLD., Australia 4000
¶ The Wilderness Society (QLD Central) Brisbane Office (to facilitate perusal), 136 Boundary St., West End, Brisbane, QLD., Australia 4101
¶ Polyester Books, 330 Brunswick St., Fitzroy, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3065
¶ Sticky Institute, Shop #10, Campbell Arcade, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3000
¶ Minotaur Entertainment, 121 Elizabeth St., Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3000
¶ Collected Works Bookshop, Level 1, 35-37 Swanston St., Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 3000
¶ Hotel NEW KOYO (within Minowa prefecture; to facilitate perusal), 2-26-13 Nihonzutumi, Taitou-ku, Tokyo, Japan 111-0021
¶ Withstanding copies (approx. 15 divers compendious full-colour editions) are available for individual and wholesale/bulk purchase from:
Kirk Marshall
ph +07 3343 4917 | 0429357756
kirk.marshall@wilderness.org.au or flock_of_seagulls@hotmail.com
formerly of 202 Famille II/
313101 Soubudai
Zama-Shi
Kanagawa-Ken, Japan
228-0011
& presently of (as of 30/01/08) 26/31 Barnsbury Rd.
Balwyn, Melbourne
Victoria, Australia
3103
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Post-entry edit:
Some Celebratory Verbal Press, On Kirk Marshall's Writings :-
"Though our themes and tastes change, McSweeney's...relies on submissions like this." - Jordan Bass, editor of "McSweeney's Internet Tendency", (rejection letter)
"(Marshall)'s writing shows many strengths." - Louise Thurtell, editor and publisher to Arena, an imprint of Allen & Unwin Publishing
"Liked his work (as a new author of short-stories)." - Barry Scott, editor and publisher to Transit Lounge Publishing
"The magazine committee enjoyed reading over (Marshall's work). In fact, we really enjoyed it: his fiction is very clever, with beautiful poetic language." - Kat Muscat, editorial correspondences of "Voiceworks" magazine
"(Marshall) definitely has talent. I enjoyed his writings." - M. Baumer, editorial correspondences of "Thieves Jargon" magazine
"(Marshall) has a distinctive, fascinating and ambitious style. It has a kind of forced grandeur about it, which is charming. There are some wonderful lines, sentences, images... and there *is* clarity and delight in these pages... He writes rich characters." - Nike Bourke, author of "The Bone Flute", Queensland Premier's Literary Awards (2000) Best Manuscript of an Emerging Queensland Author
"(Marshall pays) attention to the writing... and it's a satisfying result. What he's done really well here is capture a quirky narrative voice, played around with that voice (and those of secondary characters) and created something quite unique." - Craig Bolland, author of "I Knit Water", Queensland Premier's Literary Awards (2001) runner-up to Best Manuscript of an Emerging Queensland Author
"This is amazing stuff. It's very subversive prose, lateral-minded, brilliant, eccentric... It's extremely well-written... (Marshall's) writing will impress people... It reminds me a lot of Rabelais. Of course, (Marshall's) work could have been inspired by authors influenced by Rabelais, but this seems much closer to the original." - Professor Michael Meehan, author of "The Salt of Broken Tears" and former Head of the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University
"Some wonderful description here bordering on poetic stream-of-consciousness... Really wonderful writing - it's verbose, but it's stylistic and it flows. It works." - Angela Meyer, author and moderator of LiteraryMinded.blogspot.com
"Sweetchocolatechrist he is a fine writer indeed. From these writings alone, he is quickly becoming one of my all-time favourite poets." - Jason McHenry, author and moderator of smartwentcrazy.com
"Jesus. Fucking. Christ. After reading...his excellent hyper-embellished style, all I can do is nod in blank shock... He is demented. He makes me laugh openly. His voice is fantastic: a bit Hunter S., a bit Eggers & Chris Ware, a bit Palahniuk -- but unmistakably his own. He'll do well. Fucking awesome." - Benjamin Law, senior contributor to "Frankie" magazine
"I liked (Marshall's fiction) a good deal... It’s an excellent piece, in my opinion." - Sylvia Kelso, Fiction Editor, James Cook University's "LiNQ" anthology
"Expected to be Australia's Thomas Pynchon." - Chad Parkhill, editorial advisor to "The Definite Article" literary magazine
"I adored his 'A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953'. Marshall's an original: no doubt about it." - Lachlan Huddy, editorial advisor to "A Solution to Economic Depression...", and State first-prize recipient of the Somerset Celebration of Literature Competition for Queensland, 2002
"I really appreciate... his book." - Glenn Manders, author and artist of "Bad Teeth" comics
"I really enjoyed (Marshall's) fiction... I felt it held quite a few complex ideas." - Adelle Stripe, editor of "Straight from the Fridge" online literary journal
"Methinks (Marshall's) writing stands a good chance -- especially since he is a good writer." - Sean Patrick-Mitchell, editor of "MoTHER [has words...]" independent arts 'zine
"(Marshall writes a) nice story. I sincerely wish his independent fiction-writing career good luck." - Stan, co-editor and design artist of "Excitement Machine" online literary magazine/street press
"Some of the most pleasing poetry I've read in quite a while." - Rebecca Isgrove, founder of Seesaw Press and author of "How the rain stops for you."
"I really enjoyed (Marshall's) fiction. He is a very talented writer. I enjoyed his use of language in his fiction, I thought it gave a really good sense of individuality and helped create the atmosphere of the piece." - Lara Hedberg, Deakin University Honours fellow
"'His Most Dire Rival', the collaboration between Marshall, Merlo and Blassnig is great. I love it." - Joss Guin, author of "Karma Yoga: Bringing Yoga into Daily Life"
"Marshall's writings are fucking great." - Paul Goward, singer/songwriter for band Gowiiee, and artist of the EP record, "The Door"
"Absolutely brilliant story. Exceptional in every way. The humour was both linguistic and visual, the dialect wonderful, the use of language and description...excellent." - Christine Mackenzie, BCC Creative Writing Competition convenor
Relevant practitioned creative writing biography:
Kirk Marshall is a Brisbane-born(e) writer, freelance illustrator, independent filmmaker, and mobilized environmentalist relocated to Melbourne by way of Kanagawa-ken.
Born English by bloodline, Irish by genealogy, and Japanese by social synergy, he has written for Queensland's Laudes Deo magazine; QUT's underground Riff-Raff 'zine; Amazon.co.uk's reviews; JJJ Radio Station's online music reviews; The Zoetrope Virtual Studio; 2002 St. Laurences College Annual publication; The University of Melbourne's Politics and Power 2002 Essay-Writing Forum; Deakin University's DeScribe Writing Group open mic. performances; Sketch: Literary & Design Journal's open mic. performances; The Death Mook's reading salon; Going Down Swinging #28 launch performances; Brisbane band Denvar's Work.Sleep.Die EP promotion feature article; Brisbane band The Clubs' prospective Out With the Truth EP album-leaf content; Utopia; Urban Verve; Frankie; Semper Floreat; Roustabout; Edit Red; Undergrowth; Word Riot (February, 2008); Word Riot (July, 2008); The Flasher; The Slow Review; Other Terrain: an electronic journal of the textual; Cottonmouth (May, 2008); Cottonmouth (July, 2008); Cottonmouth (September, 2008); Cottonmouth (May, 2009); Verandah #23; ThreeThousand; Sketch: Literary & Design Journal (November, 2008); Sketch: Literary & Design Journal (November, 2009); Remix My Lit; Going Down Swinging #27; Going Down Swinging #28; BLOCK #7 (ANU Writers Literary Journal); Voiceworks; The Universe of Logical Unsanity quarterly; Otoliths; LiteraryMinded; Regal 8 // Shelf 8; The Diamond & the Thief; WritingQueensland Magazine; Seven Letter Words; 3:AM Magazine; dotdotdash magazine; Mascara Literary Review; ISM: online; the short-story anthologies before the young get eaten, The Death Mook (published by Vignette Press), One Trick Pony, Through the Clock's Workings (published by Sydney University Press), The Reader for the 2009 Emerging Writers' Festival, and the Cottonmouth Anthology; The Wilderness Society's 2006 SEQ Wild Rivers legislation protest spoken-word performances, and he was the first-prize recipient of the Brisbane Short-Story Competition for youth under the age of 17 in 2000.
Kirk has also been the first-prize recipient for the St. Laurences College Library Collection Literary Competition 2002 and The Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards Foundation/Roman Printing Prize 2002, & in 2005 he completed directorial production on a pennystring-budget mockumentary feature film, lauding the surrealistic theatrics of a make-believe Australian boy-band, entitled About 8, promoted by Prodany Entertainment.
As of composing this most prescient potted biography, Kirk has finalised publication and distribution release of a full-colour illustrated graphic novelette, the 2007 Aurealis-Award nominee, A Solution to Economic Depression in Little Tokyo, 1953 available for purchase at various publishing outlets throughout Brisbane and Melbourne, to be reviewed by Scene entertainment magazine. As of November (2007), he was nationally shortlisted for an employed freelance journalist position with papertiger Media's Yen and Dazed & Confused magazines, and in June (2008), he was awarded a journalist internship with Right Angle Communications. Recently Kirk hosted a biweekly-serialised, online noir-cum-Dada comic about world-first Bogan Private Investigator, Furphy Benjamin Dozer, at his up-to-date web journal (fun_with_kites.)
Kirk was awarded a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Creative Writing) with Distinction from the Queensland University of Technology, a first-class Honours degree in Professional Writing from Deakin University, and has been invited by various indentured members of both Brisbane and Melbourne tertiary faculties to submit extensive proposals for research assistant and post-graduate degree positions within their campuses.
Returning from employment as an English-language conversation school teacher within Tokyo, Japan, in late 2007, he has resurfaced in Melbourne and now edits the forthcoming annual English-language / Japanese bi-lingual literary journal, Red Leaves / 紅葉. Since his return he has sat on the editorial judging committee for The Lifted Brow's Fake Bookshelf Competition, has been awarded acceptance as both a proofreader for Express Media's Voiceworks literary magazine and as a non-fiction columnist for ISM: online, has been a panelist for the 2009 Emerging Writers' Festival and the 2009 National Young Writers' Festival, and is responsible for renaming the Scrabble Event at the Emerging Writers' Festival to "Wordstock".
His Honours thesis (a combined analytic-theoretic dissertation and accompanying fiction novella) is entitled, "Carnivalesque", and demonstrates the narratological relationship between structure and literary parallax in frame-narrative literature. Carnivalesque: And, Other Stories, Kirk's debut short story collection will be published by Black Rider Press in 2010.
His developing canon of writings have been heralded as "absolutely brilliant", and he has been earmarked by one reviewer "to be Australia's Thomas Pynchon." |
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| RE: "We get out sometimes: A story poem, in many parts" - vi (c) |
[Apr. 16th, 2007|11:47 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | optimistic | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "You Were Right" - Badly Drawn Boy | ] |
DAD AND I USED to organise for nights available where
he'd finish
work, early
& I'd complete school with its corresponding drear of
work, early
so that we could drive from the suburbs into the city
and eat hotcakes
instead of dinner
and frequent trading-card pawnstores
instead of cinemas
and he'd instruct me in no inconceivably oblique dialect
that
I could
choose a select deck
of collector cards that would satisfy the integrity
of my collection.
I would quite often return home, much later than
righteous
feeling valid & volute and unnavigably valorous;
recollections, now, of streetlamps typhooning past,
their tense, terse heightened night luminescence
pirouetting on panes
of window
as sugar & adrenaline
shushabyed me to an artful thief's dreamless
sleep. |
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