The Open End

Revelation Reviewed at The Open End
herocious

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For some reason three is a good number. There’s a balance to three, a symmetry that seems to establish an axis. Three is triptych, three is trinity. With a title like REVELATION I feel like trinity is the more applicable to Colin Winnette’s first novel.

It’s a good book. There’s a weight to it that sits heavy and savory, like the first book you ever read.

Colin Winnette must’ve lived an entire life before deciding to write this book. It comes from the future. It spans across eras in a very direct and new way that uses plain and accessible language that still carries poetic cadence.

        “I don’t know. No. Not a lot. I like science,” she said. “I like         math and religion and that kind of thing too…”

        “Could you say why you like those things?”

        “Because they tell us why things happen… and why people         do the things they do.”

(People wonder if I serve only the purpose of flattering writers and building up excitement of small press books. The thing is I stay away from ones that don’t hit the notes I need to hear. The ones that hit those notes, even for a little bit, I write about, and I’m thankful to all these books even if, in the end, I only gave them a couple TOEs. But seriously, writing isn’t like painting, writing isn’t about a single stroke, writing is strange hieroglyphs on a shiny blank page, floating, queued, immovable, indistinguishable, and there it is, forever, so explicit yet so hidden. Of course I write highly about the books I read and love, even if only for small stretches, I write highly about these books because I’m thankful for them. Theirs is a difficult task: to say something that spans across eras.)

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Interview of Colin Winnette in Monkey Bicycle

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(Recently, Monkey Bicycle interviewed Mutable author Colin Winnette about Revelation, his writing process, pressures, and hopes for the future. This interview can be found below.)

MB: Given that Revelation is a novel built on the accumulating calls of the biblical book of revelations, perhaps this is the most obvious place to start: Are you a particularly religious person? What is your religious background?

CW: I’m not a religious person at all, really. Far from it. But I had the unique experience of being a non-religious person growing up in a small town in Northeast Texas. So throughout my life I was steeped in various devoted interpretations of biblical narrative. The closest our family ever came to adopting a religion was when, in an arguably noble attempt to set our family on a, well if not more righteous, certainly more socially accepted path, my older sister (who was very young at the time) insisted our family begin attending church. The idea was that we would then be more like the other families in town, more like her friends’ families, and a little less…our strange selves. My parents were very open-minded and supportive, so we went. I don’t remember which denomination it was, or even what we did there. I only remember dressing up for a few Sundays in a row, then being very happy when we abandoned the project. Christianity, in one form or another, was the dominant religion in our hometown, but I never really got into it and, aside from this little experiment, I was never really asked to. Then, in grade school, I had a good friend who was Muslim, (his was the only Muslim family in our school, I think) and I used to talk to him a lot about his beliefs and his particular religious practices, and the benefits/challenges of these. I distinctly remember him telling me that I had to believe him about something or other because he couldn’t lie as it was against his religion. That struck me then as very convenient; to have a system of beliefs that worked as a set of rules governing your behavior. In my head, he didn’t have to worry about lying because he couldn’t lie. It was against the rules. I was open to, and enthusiastic about, his religious experiences and accounts because he was my friend and they were so unfamiliar to me. The idea of finding something like that for myself became appealing, and I asked my mother to take me to the library so I might read up on various religions and see which one best suited me. Then I too might have a set of rules by which to live. On the one hand, the project was a failure. No single text, or tradition, really fit me that well, but it all seemed really wild and each religion exhibited these great imaginative capabilities. I was learning a lot. At the same time, I was struggling my way through Tolkien, some Shakespeare, Greek mythology, that kind of thing. It’s probably for this reason that I have always viewed religious texts simply as powerful narratives, as literature, rather than existential truths or solid guidebooks for how to live. At best, I guess, they’re examples of how things could be, or might have been. But, again, this was just my experience. Since then I’ve always studied religious texts as/alongside literary texts, particularly the Bible, as it was such a dominant narrative voice in the town/state/country where I grew up. This was one of the initial sparks for this project, engaging a biblical narrative on literary terms, and exposing it to the same manipulations/experimentation one might any other literary tradition.

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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.

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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.

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