Fashion Available, new archive

That's right. Fashion, dear readers, is now available for you. Fashion is just one click to download away now that Whiskey & Fox announces its issue archive as part of the journal's new program for distribution. Over to the bottom right of your screen you will find files of new and old issues along with printing and assembly instructions.

As a start and as promised, the most recent issue is being made electronically available: Vol. 2 No. 2, May 2008 | Fashion, featuring work from Tomaž Šalamun, Thomas Kane, Sten Carlson, Emily Gropp, Robin Clarke, Daniel C. Remein, Julie Granum, Kelly Ramsey, Joshua Zelesnick and Sarah Bagley; cover by Greta Hambke and Matt Lee.

announcement re: submissions

Submissions will remain open for what will be Vol. 3 No. 1:"Doing Politics with Animals."

We are pleased to announce that the issue will include a response to all of the work collected within the same volume by Karl Steel (Asst. Professor CUNY Brooklyn), historian and theorist of the human/animal boundary between the medieval and the contemporary.

2 Announcements!

Whiskey & Fox announces two major changes. No longer will Whiskey & Fox only be available by coming upon it at those sites where it is distributed by the journal's co-conspirators. Starting with Vol. 2 Issue #3, each issue of the journal will be made available for home-printing, free of charge, to all readers. A PDF file-edition of each issue will be made available for download through this website, along with printing and assembly instructions [basically, this will mean printing the file, double-sided, and arranging the signatures in order, then folding and perhaps even stapling the book together].


The editors have been considering a manner by which the journal could move to increased distribution, longer issues, and thus easier rhizome-growth of the literary/political hopes we aim to provoke in texts of Whiskey & Fox. Also under consideration were the possibilities of seeking funding for a nicer and more widely distributable printed format, using Open Access journal tools, or switching to an entirely electronic format by means of our own web-design and hosting. While we understand fully that being hosted by Blogspot participates fully in the material forms produced and maintained by market forces and Google [think, dear reader, how the choices of blog tools offered to Blogspot (et. al.) users, largely for market reasons by Google itself (et. al.). determine and limit the forms of human consciousness, imagination, and its products], we believe that the form of the weblog, while not entirely democratic [access to this internet is by no means level or evenly distributed], does not require the participation in Capital to the extent of paying for a domain and web-hosting, or, variously, participating in book-production and manufacturing markets. As a journal interested in what the material aspects of print-formats can offer uniquely, as they are altered in the context of [read, their interconnection with, sometimes to the point of dependancy on] electronic media, and with reference to the political struggle against totalitarian regimes of thought that so restrict human imagination, we believe that this new combined production/distribution format allows us to exploit the cracks in workings of Capital and grow much more virally, and effectively, from where we now stand in this labor.


Additionally, Whiskey & Fox announces a felicitous change in the Editorial Staff. The Editorial Staff is now as follows:

Daniel C. Remein, Editor, New York University

Sarah Bagley, 'theory' Editor, University of Pittsburgh

Sten Carlson, 'poetry' Editor, University of Pittsburgh

Blaire Zeiders, historiographical Editor, University of Wisconsin, Madison


edit: please note that vol. 2 #2, Fashion, with thanks to graphic designer Matt Lee and fashion designer/illustrator Greta Hambke, was released this summer, and will eventually also be released by the new method.

work of mourning

Whiskey & Fox mourns the loss of the poet Julie Granum, most recently from Pittsburgh, PA, who died in an accident last week in San Diego while visiting her brother.  

Those who knew her as a poet also knew her as a friend.  And we are, simply, devastated. 

 Julie's work as a poet was important and admirable for its deep engagement with language and issues pressingly important to the critique of American consciousness. She was able to register in her work, simultaneously, language that can only be called Gothic and Southern alongside language that can only be called Surreal, and do so in linguistic and cultural scenes at once of the northeast urban, and of the southern rural, while maintaining the sense that the work was also hard at work to not give in to the reification of those difficult terms. The scenes are sometimes of the quiet estate, sometimes unapologetically of the excess of the life of the bourgeois or the gentry poor in northeastern cities. Such a rich and complex language attempted, above all, to look the sickness of American late-capital in the face, to admit that we can't escape it, and still, to continue to live.

For a writer who, as mentioned, engaged with the pessimism of the Gothic, she surprised us with a Whitmanic energy recombined with the strange-making transformations more like those of Bréton, or, more recently, of David St. John's engagement with Surrealism in the early 70's. This is to say that she found a way to transgress--even a little bit--, sexually and mentally in language, from within a place in history which, according to Slavoj Zizek, leaves us unable to transgress by removing all the limits which make transgression meaningful.

Take, for example, this bit of Julie Granum's poem "the frog princess," which is as hopeful in its transgression as it is terrifying:

i didn’t realize this whole time that i’ve wanted you every time

i’ve wanted something. i can’t read a whole page at a time

without taking a break so how could i have remembered you.

fucked three men since the last time we kissed. and i want one

even now, sitting here with my coffee.

you tell me that people send you, from time to time, submissions

telling you they’re dying from cancer. could you please publish them,

last wish. but the writing, swan song or not, is atrocious and

you can’t make yourself.


Or alternately, more surreal, these lines from "Potomac":

Inside the river mothers, with mud-boots

and starched muslin sunday dresses,

hold their babies firm against the undertow

while preachers, daddies, cousins nod

at the wind holding the soft, reptilian skin

of a well-worn bible .


Reading these little bits of her work of poetry may be, for some us, the best way to start the fact of of our lives as a work of mourning that needs to include an adieu to Julie Granum. To look look America's sickness-factory in the face and, with a surreal or transgressive dance-move of a poem, figure out ways to go on living.

An yet, the loss of Julie is incalculable. Those that knew her knew an energy that was at once loving and loved. Once, while her friends sat around a campfire, she read Shakespeare (according to the lore, it was Twelfth Night ) for a graduate seminar by flashlight because she dared to love Shakespeare that much genuinely, without apology. Some will recall her loving a dog as much as we should love our companion animals--as a person--and throwing dessert parties so that she might rap about absolutely nothing for 5 minutes straight. This kind of energy was singularly what we named and name as Julie Granum, and in naming, love and loved as Julie Granum, just as she loved as well.


From a secular magazine, this is a religious address to a person that cannot answer: goodbye Julie Granum. Of course you cannot answer back, of course you are dead; but we do not care how mournful and transgressive it might be: please, please, haunt us.

Vol. 2 # 1, February 2008: Modern Love

The new issue is out and dispersing itself. This fox really noses around. Contributors: Emily Gropp, Nels Beckman, Meagan Manas, Dan Remein, Jon D. Witmer, and Sarah Bagley.

The front cover for Modern Love

Vol. 1 #2, October 2007: Soviet Gothic

The new issue of Whiskey & Fox, Soviet Gothic is out and dispersing itself. Contributors: Thomas Kane, Sarah Bagley, Rebecca Wigginton, Jon D. Witmer, Carolyn Elliott, and Dan Remein

the spread of this issue's cover:

Vol. 1 #1

The inaugural issue of Whiskey & Fox is out and available, taking a cue from a medieval bestiary:

The fox is crafty and deceitful. When it is hungry it rolls in red earth to look as if it is covered in blood. It feigns death by holding its breath. Birds come to sit on the body whereupon the fox jumps up and eats them.

Contributors include Sten Carlson, Blaire Zeiders, Dan Remein, Robin Clarke, and Sarah Bagley.


Below is an image of the cover.