MUT017

Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey
College for Little Ladies

An Original Radio Play | 52 Episodes | $ Free Download |

The year is 1903 and the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies is closed for the summer session, the windows empty, gargoyles and latin script cut into the arched doorways, the buildings now abandoned but for a few who have no other home, a handful of teachers, administrators, and orphans.

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I Think I Still Remember

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Some time ago we did a shout out for song poems. Song poems as in song lyrics that have been set to music for a fee, although in our case there was no fee. We simply wanted to recreate a similar outsider aesthetic as can be found in such classics as “Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush” and “Blind Man’s Penis (Peace and Love)”.

We got exactly one response from a fellow name of Colin Williamson, and when we did I had completely forgotten about our little post requesting poems to be transformed into song and said, “Well, what do you expect me to do with this? How about sending me some more poems, and then we’ll see.” Only later, did it occur to me that he might have intended his poem to be transformed into a song, and it turned out this was in fact the case.

The result of our efforts to indeed turn this song poem into a song can be found here.

A Mutable Decade

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Mr. Geebee on the dawn of Mutable

It was ten years ago this month that we here at Mutable put out our first product, a green vinyl record called, “A Journey to Happiness Island”. It was just a little joke of an album we wrote and recorded over the course of a weekend with a roomful of friends in a loft in Greenpoint, New York. We had no idea we would still be putting out records and books ten years later.

Mutable began in a diner in Brooklyn Heights over a conversation between myself and Zach Katz. It began in a projectionist’s booth when a local filmmaker gave us the name. It began when we put out a run of books called Seven Short Plays for the Bedroom using Kinko’s and our own efforts at binding. It began when we put out our first album in conjunction with Mr. Records and began when we put out our first professionally bound book, Manifesto I, a collection of manifestoes. It began when I spent a summer performing plays in bedrooms across America and placing Mutable products in bookstores and record shops.

Mutable Sound, which was Mutable Press, and will always be Mutable. Which has become as much a part of me as I am. Which has been a source of uncertainty and rage and adoration and affection, which has brought people together and given me hope when I was otherwise hopeless, through which I have come to know so many wonderful and interesting writers and musicians, has now come to define an entire decade of my life. And so I must commemorate this moment, even if I’m alone in doing it.

Of course I’m not alone. There’s Zach my co-founder and Malcolm Felder my current partner. There are also all the people who have been involved in Mutable projects over the years, or had their projects released through Mutable and by so doing have become members of the Mutable family, artists from across the seas, and writers with a distinctive vision. We continue to experiment with sound and narrative, and continue to entertain ourselves first, and everyone else second.

Follow the link below to listen or download some free music, a mix of some of our favorite Mutable moments from the past ten years.

-GBoyer

Listen to A Mutable Decade

The Steve Himmer Blog

Review of Revelation by Colin Winnette
Steve Himmer

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Revelation, a novel by Colin Winnette, is a story about the end of the world in which, somehow, the apocalypse isn’t the biggest thing going. The story follows a core of three friends (Marcus, Colin, and Tom) from youth to old age as they lead ordinary lives in the midst of exploding trees, vanished oceans, plagues of locusts, and the Four Horsemen. Mundane traumas like a lost teenage girlfriend are more devastating to these characters than a lost ocean, and the vast wasteland of dead, rotting fish left behind as it dries are taken as a wretched novelty but not much of a warning.

It’s disorienting, at first, that the novel insistently focuses on these men growing older, having children, entering and leaving marriages, and so on, rather than offering specifics about why the world is on fire or what will will be done about all these plagues. It goes so fiercely against expectation, reversing the genre of apocalypse tales; think 2012, in which hollow stock characters are put in the story only to lead the viewer from one special effect to the next. In Revelation, by contrast, the explosions are there to lead us through the years of these characters’ lives, and for the most part the catastrophes of the story — both apocalyptic and domestic — happen “off stage.” That stylistic choice of huge spans of time passing in between pages is disorienting, too, reducing the chronological context of how these boys became the men they are to ambiguous events of religious conversion, time spent in jail, multiple wives we don’t meet, and so on. We drop on these characters once in a while, at moments that aren’t their most dramatic but are more like the aftermath of drama, and all along the apocalypse goes on in the background as ambiguously explained as their lives.

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Three poems by Kristina Marie Darling

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(Who is Kristina Marie Darling? Whoever she is, her poems have affected us strongly, even as we cough uncertainly in the far east, growing weaker by the day. Three of these aforementioned poems can be found below:)

Noctuary (i)

The brass locket, which contained only an empty frame, was the first in a series of ominous love tokens that appeared beneath her window.

                                                *

When he fastened the clasp on her necklace, every nightingale seemed to sing. Their swollen throats and colorless eyes.

                                                *

He reminded her of Petrarch, driven by the necessity of pursuit. The beloved as interchangeable, a vessel. A bird heaving under the weight of an otherworldly song.

                                                *

The homage felt contrived, mechanical. And still the luminous buttons on her shirt.

                                                *

It was then she wished the pursuit would continue indefinitely.

                                                *

She presented him with a miniature bird, which bore the most unusual inscription. Her wrist still heavy with silver charms and locks of his knotted hair.

                                                *

She remembered his eyes growing dim. Her fingers tracing the brass locket’s empty frame.

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Necessary Fiction

Necessary Fiction Reviews Amazing Adult Fantasy
Jess Stoner

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The artist statement of sorts, “Fiction”, that begins the first half of the stories in A.D. Jameson’s Amazing Adult Fantasy, teaches us how to read the entire collection: we’re told that we’re reading a book that’s been lost in a fire, that the book we’re reading doesn’t exist. A better metaphor for childhood, the gratuitous fiction of how we remember it, might not exist either.

Untrustworthy narrators guide us through these first stories, as familiar characters perform un-self-conscious, transition-less mutations: Snuffy, in “Bird Bird and Snuffy,” is a feared, retired barber, frozen in ice, who becomes Scruffy, a cute guy, then Shuffy, a foe of two bear characters (who were previously referred to as brothers), who then becomes Stuffy, who will marry the character who thought Scruffy was a cute guy, and finally he becomes Snuffy again, brought back together with Big Bird, who died twice in a previous paragraph, once from a star crashing down upon him, though he’s now been raised from the grave by a similar experience. On first reading these stories, it’s difficult to refrain from diagramming character relationships, sketching timelines of events, or even writing in the margins: “Isn’t s/he supposed to be legless?” Whether these mutations are a result of Bacteria X (in “Ota Benga Episode Guide: Season 3” this substance transforms a Congolese pygmy into a jungle bear, for instance) or because they mimic the plotlines of the tales and films and television shows we consumed in our youth, doesn’t matter in these stories told through the warped filter of nostalgia.

There’s plenty of stories in the world that wallow in a kind of slick, gilded throwback to childhood pursuits and desires—and they have nothing in common with Amazing Adult Fantasy. Maybe it was Longinus who complained first: “the genius of the present age is wasted by that indifference which with a few exceptions runs through the whole of life.” (On the Sublime) What’s special about Jameson is that he’s incapable of indifference, and the stories in this book feel as if they were so goddamn fun to write: handsome Riker of Star Trek Next Generation, who I’ve always had a tendre for, boasts of the number of tacks he can fit in his mouth; C3PO feels abandoned “like the ghost of a grocer pimp”; in “Oscar the Grouch,” the lovable curmudgeon we only thought we knew steals women’s bikinis and has published a terribly reviewed first chapbook of small nasty words, or was it his critically praised first chapbook small nasty worms?

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MUT016

Revelation
Colin Winnette

5.25" X 8" | Softcover | 208 Pages | $12.95 | NOW AVAILABLE!

Click to enlarge

“In Revelation, Colin Winnette sets fire to the world, and in the aftermath, characters wander through smoke, struck dumb by devastation. A forceful book — stripped down, cool, and painful — about the absolute peril of desire.”

“Colin Winnette has… made a provocative work by framing the ordinary in the unfathomable.”

Revelation, Colin Winnette’s debut novel is a startlingly simple, fresh and audacious retelling of the famous biblical apocalypse tale. Winnette’s Revelation is, on the one hand, a very everyday and modern story, in which desperate characters wander and slip from one year to the next, but behind what would otherwise be a mundane detail lies an architecture of the supernatural — a father carries his son to his grandfather’s retirement community, but does so across a parking lot consumed in a plague of locusts, two childhood friends construct a fort from the hull of an enormous ship abandoned by the oceans as they recede, a body falls from the sky as a warning, but only demolishes the deck of a character’s lakeside home.

To us here at Mutable, Colin Winnette seemed to pop out of nowhere a year ago to instantly become a force of some renown among the indie literary world. A Finalist for the 1913 Press First Book Award, Winnette has stirred up notice from all corners for his innovative and striking stories, as well as his various narrative experiments of larger size. However, Revelation is more than just a stylistic exercise, it’s a powerful emotional document.

Revelation is available now! Click here to read an excerpt from Revelation.

Noo Journal

Rave review of Amazing Adult Fantasy
Jonah Vorspan-Stein

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AD JAMESON’S Amazing Adult Fantasy opens with a brief indictment: “Fiction may be the worst thing about the 21st century.” The stories that follow—fabled, sardonic, sharp—venture to strip fiction of its conventions, substituting in their place a new narrative logic: one that brandishes an acute playfulness and grandiose sentiment, one of mustachios and infatuation, the most mature kind of absurdity. These are stories about obsessions and deficiencies, about people who glare every bit of themselves, who feel the world on its largest scales. In these stories, astronaut Buzz Aldwin falls into the bad graces of NASA, a girl shares her various and mutually exclusive truths about Oscar the Grouch, and Bronx monkeys devote themselves to preserving earth’s aurora borealis. While these are certainly stories of insistent and shifting forms, they are also stories that always endeavor to a literary beauty.

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