whiskey & fox

Parks & Occupation No. 2

2011-11-17T23:42:00.001-05:00

Zuccotti Park, No Zines Allowed.

1.
The second issue of the Parks & Occupation special series is out, and can be downloaded below or in our Issue Archive; and at least one more Parks & Occ. is on the way.

No. 2 features work by Joshua Zelesnick, Rebecca Mertz, Gloria Frym, Michael Farrell, Andy Spragg, Gracie Leavitt & RJ Maitland, Robin Clarke, Jeff T. Johnson, David Hadbawnik, and Jon D. Witmer [whose web comic at the Danger Digest we briefly reviewed back in February]. Again, another set of fantastic work. As (this time) Duncan writes, "No crow flies. It is not America./ From what we call Poetry/ a bird I cannot name crows."

Click here to download for booklet-printing.

Click here if you can't print double-sided, or just want to read electronically from the PDF.

2.

Unlike Parks and Occ. No. 1, print copies of No. 2 cannot be obtained for free at Zuccotti Park.

This is the first time that Whiskey & Fox has appeared electronically before appearing in some physical place, no matter how small the locale, in print. Parks & Occupation No. 2 was going to be more or less ready to go out for Wednesday, 18 Nov. 2011: to be delivered first in print form to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan and only then made available for free download. However, in the wake of the (military-ish) Police raid and eviction of the Zuccotti Park Occupation very early in the Tuesday am, a visit to Zuccotti Park no longer turns up a space into which books, periodicals, or other printed matter can be deposited for public use. Police would not even allow admission to the park with thick stack of printed matter in hand. While, certainly, the journal could place printed copies any number of places in NYC and elsewhere other than Zuccotti Park, in order to mark--even in some small way--this current seizure/attempt to destroy the people's library and the free-zine distribution center [which also offered a number of excellent anarchist primers on peaceful resistance, the currently-legal rights of demonstrators, and Modified-Consensus Democratic procedures], as well as the Occupation itself, Whiskey & Fox is putting this issue online before producing any print copies.

Parks & Occupation No. 3 is currently in production, and will be out soon.

Foley Square, 18 Nov. 2011

parks & occupation no. 1

2011-10-24T22:33:00.001-04:00

The first issue of Whiskey & Fox Vol. 5 Special Series, Parks & Occupation is out. They can be picked up at the Free Zine Station at Zuccotti Park in NY; OR you can download the PDF right here or under the issue archive tab:

Click here to download for booklet printing.

Click here if you can't print double-sided, or just want to read electronically from the PDF.

Contributors include: Robin Clarke, David Hadbawnik, Michael Farrell, Jeff T. Johnson, Sten Carlson, & Rebecca Mertz. This is set of really incredible poems. As Spicer writes: "Reading the poem that does not appear when the magician starts or when the magician finishes. A climbing in-between. Real."

The Parks & Occupation series will continue for at least a couple more tiny-format issues, and while we have some good material already, we will consider more submissions. So please, consider sending work in accordance with the call for work. We will make an announcement if we can no longer accept any submissions.

Make haste! Decorate the new democracy!

Parks & Occupation: a call for work

2011-10-18T21:05:00.002-04:00

First, production of the next full issue (this one titled ‘Lithic’) has not been abandoned. Production has been slowor on hold, but by no means stopped.

In the meantime, Whiskey & Fox is going to take up the torch of itsearlier hasty mode of production, making haste on a series of very short issuesin a special series dispatched specifically for the various radical occupationscurrently underway. What is meant by “for the occupations” is not “in tributeto,” perhaps not even “in solidarity with,” but as a foxing of theory andpoetry/poetics into the occupations/as part of the occupations. See thespecific call for work below.

A series of veryshort (4-6 pages) issues will go out over the next couple months. They will of course be made available as PDF downloads, as well as by distribution ofhard-copies to as many of the now growing libraries of the occupations asWhiskey & Fox can coordinate (of increasing importance as a researchresource and a source of intellectual energy as the occupiers evolve theirhorizontal governing structures, planning and theorizing for the future).Distribution to the Occupation of Zucotti park in NYC is already coordinated.If there is an occupation or any particular hub of related activity to whichyou would like to help distribute hard copies, please contact the editors ateditors [at] whiskeyandfox [dot] org.

So, now, Whiskey& Fox issues its own call to intellectual labor, hoping to provoke the kindof “short raids on the chicken ‘coup’ and snacks on the state” whichconstituted the early issues: pointed and productive paragraph-long essays, poems, images, etc.

Please considerthe call for work. Make haste! Occupy Language. Language language fordemocratic dwelling, for cosmicity.

Download the nice-looking PDF of the call for work here in order to circulate it, or just see below:

Parks & Occupation: a call for work
Vol. 5, Special series (dedicated to Denise Levertov & Robert Duncan)

Writing as the Office for Soft Architecture, Canadian poet Lisa Robertson asks, “what shall our new ornaments be? How shall we adorn mortality now?”—insisting that “this is a serious political question.” Whiskey & Fox wishes to provisionally believe this and calls for work that will function to ornamentally elaborate the current occupations of parks, squares, etc.

An editorial in the second issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal states, “For Wall Street and Washington, the demand is not on them to give us something that isn’t theirs to give. It’s ours. It’s on us. We aren’t going anywhere. We just got here.” But where are we; and how are we going to think, elaborate, and decorate this place? It is no surprise that the spaces currently occupied are parks. Park space in particular already ornaments, articulates the interfaces of our human affects with countless non-human ecologies. This is not a matter of aesthetic surplus. How we decorate a new kind of a public space will matter; it will determine the variability of its surfaces. As we continue to witness capitalism collapse in on itself it will become more and more urgent to elaborate parkspace, even in small hasty bursts; to decorate the spaces we already occupy as parks with/as the ornaments that will articulate the spaces of a new democracy. But how to decorate the new park? How does poetry occupy such a park? For example, is there room for the intimacy of the coterie in the new park, or must the ‘public’ projects of Duncan and Olson dominate?

Whiskey & Fox asks for paragraph-long essays, poems, images, et alia, to publish in a special series which will return to our short format issues (roughly 6 pages an issue). For this series the ‘Fox again requests hasty writing and will proceed with hasty publication of very brief issues to facilitate hard copy distribution. The libraries accumulating at the public occupations are of increasing importance and in need of, among other contributions, those pertinent to issues of the queer sexual politics which inhere in Whiskey & Fox’s function as a journal of poetry, theory, and queer-heterotopoi.

Whiskey & Fox asks you to ‘language Language for democratic dwelling,’ Make haste! Decorate the new democracy. Send contributions to parksandoccupation [at] whiskeyandfox [dot] org.

The fox “raids the chicken ‘coup’ and snacks on the state.”

friends of the fox: Punctum Books!

2011-02-27T22:48:00.000-05:00

Friends of the fox the BABEL Working group has announced the full unveiling within the next few weeks of a new books series to be called "Punctum Books" So far, their blog announces what promises to be an exciting press, in tune with the devices both of the Whiskey and of the Fox:

The BABEL Working Group is excited to announce the launching of Punctum Books, a new open-access and print-on-demand book series, directed by Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College, CUNY), that aims to promote radically creative modes of writing and inquiry across a whimsical para-humanities-assemblage. Spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion are encouraged. Vision statement, editorial board, forthcoming titles, and website currently under construction. Stay tuned.

On the In The Middle medieval studies group blog, Eileen Joy announces that a full vision statement, editorial board, and first forthcoming titles will be announced in the next 2-3 weeks. Keep watch for PUNCTUM.

Look out for LITHIC and a Chicken Coup Raid Review

2011-02-22T00:11:00.002-05:00

The next Whiskey & Fox is actually coming together presently, although it will again have been at the one-a-year schedule that this next issue will come out. But we're promising some great stuff. This time around again a funky editors' preface, an afterwords by Medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (whose current project is on the sex life of stones), a host of poems from a host of poets seen and not seen before in the likes of this journal, a score for music--as in yes, a poetry journal publishing a musical score, a nice essay, some lovely images, and possibly a neat surprise from the American Natural History Museum of New York City. The issue will be lithic. The journal will take its stand too with the lithic. Will like and lick the lithic. After all, it is the lithic which will teach us how to, in swaying, to hold sway and see the wall of the city Charles Olson proposes is built out of sound to arise from nothing more than a short cliff, a little ledge of rock. The poesis of heterotopic architecture in earthscience, geology, seismology, petrology, crystallography, lithography.

Keep a close watch here and we'll update you as to when the Whiskey wakes and the Fox pours out again--very, very soon.
So, to offer that little review, or raid...

On 'Pipe Dope' by Jon Witmer, at the Danger Digest
A report from the woods near the lair of the fox, regarding one of our past, early, and future contributors (although you will have to wait for the issue after this one mentioned above for his next offering): Jon Witmer--whose Comics blog over at Danger Digest has been great for a while--is drawing and writing a really stunning one-panel-every-weekday comic for the duration of a year. The thing is called Pipe Dope: Mostly True Stories About: David J. Witmer, General T. Dog, and many, many more. It's still only just started, so there's plenty of time to catch up and start keeping up. Its already really elegant. One is easily taken in especially by the textures insinuated by the simple edges of surfaces, which otherwise, indicated only by a bit of a black fill or a white zap-line (as in the shine of hair) might appear only flat. Witmer is giving us a tactilely fully textured world whose being is ready for the kind of nuanced sensory encounter that will multiply our pleasures, which, within the eddies of time pulled around by this variability of surface in each single panel, offer affectively substantial sites of texture to help elaborate our world heterotopically, radically, even perhaps--in those odd twists of black suggesting a comic character's hair-wisp--against the overly detexturizing and time-homogenizing operations of capital and the anthropo-hetero-normative logics of its erotics and its states. And after all, as the back of our very first issue suggested, as it appeared intentionally, not as a typo and with puns fully intended, "the fox raids the chicken coup and snacks on the state." Go read it at the Danger Digest.

Whiskey & Fox at Amazon

2010-04-05T21:45:00.002-04:00

Animals at Amazon

Although, feel free to buy from createspace as well (see below), which is better for our meager finances.

perfectbound politics with animals!

2010-04-01T16:32:00.000-04:00

Vol. 4 No. 1 is now available in a fancy format. A fancy format for a fancy fox. The schnazzy gloss cover features a very respectable looking fox nosing around the camp of an archaeologist in Alaska. No kidding.

For now, it's available for purchase here. And will be available within 10 or so days from Amazon. Check back here for that link, which we'll post as soon as it's available.

keep watching

2010-03-23T21:02:00.000-04:00

Keep watching for the fancy-version of the new issue soon to be for sale. It's almost ready, and it looks like this:

HUGE NEWS! finally, Vol. 4 No. 1: doing politics with animals AND PERFECT BOUND COPIES

2010-03-18T01:43:00.000-04:00

Missive from Whiskey & Fox: The new issue, available here:

for

electronic reading

booklet printing

&, coming very soon, a lovely, perfect-bound book

[see below]

It has been a long hibernation, more than a year, since anyone has heard any dispatch from Whiskey & Fox. It just took a long time to get the new format, the new editorial collective, and the whole new phase in the life of the journal, all up and running.

But, as of today, the hibernation is over. The fox is up and about. Below, are, as we have promised, two PDF's for free distribution: first, the 'electronic' copy, a PDF of individual pages suitable for reading on one's computer screen or printing as you wish--especially if you must print one-sided; second, a BOOKLET printing copy, in a file already set up for booklet-printing if you, like us, are committed to the remaining possibilities of a book or book-like object. Simply print double-sided, with pages oriented for 'short edge' binding, and then fold the whole thing in half into a book (staple, if you wish).

Perfect-bound books coming soon:

¶

The thing is, that since this issue weighs in at almost 40 pages, we thought it might be nice for Whiskey & Fox to be available in yet another format--one a little bit more durable, and fancy. So this issue is going to be, very soon, available for purchase as a perfect-bound book through Amazon. The book is print-on-demand, and promises to look pretty nice. Check back here soon if you love the book-object. We'll announce it as soon as they are available.

Future foxes

This issue's title as a call for work garnered a whole pile of submissions. Thanks to all who have sought fit to send us work. Keep checking back here, now that things are up and running, for more consistent updates. The fox is awake, and hopefully within the month we'll have info on the title of and calls for work for at least the next issue--which we'd like to see out by end of spring/summer depending on how the work goes.

Vol. 4 no. 1:

A Preface from the editors, and work (in order of appearance) from Robin Clarke, Jeff T. Johnson, Ross Gay, Gary Lehmann, Claire Donato, Rebecca Mertz, Nicola Masciandaro, Eileen A. Joy, Chris Miller, and Afterwords from Karl Steel.

Special thanks are due to Matt Lee and Meagan Manas, for their unique although otherwise hidden contributions to the issue.

download now [of course, these files are also available in out issue archive, along with Fashion]:

•electronic reading

•booklet printing

And remember, perfect bound copies available soon.

Fashion Available, new archive

2009-01-13T15:37:00.004-05:00

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

2009-01-09T19:28:00.002-05:00

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!

2008-09-08T22:28:00.007-04:00

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

2008-04-07T16:04:00.003-04:00

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

2008-02-19T10:31:00.004-05:00

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

2007-10-16T23:42:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-29T01:12:00.000-04:00

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.