New in the Horns: "Potential"
Posted: March 30, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
The Major League Baseball season has just about arrived, which means summer can’t be far off. While you’re waiting for the chilly spring air to give way to warm breezes at the ballpark, we offer a preamble to that first pitch — Chad Simpson’s “Potential” — a story about baseball’s Number One Draft Pick.
On Pant-Wearing
Posted: March 23, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
No post this week, gang. We’re too busy wearing our pants, or at least assembling an essay for the contest, and wearing pants while doing so. Back next week for baseball season. See you then.
BULL is moving on!
Posted: March 21, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentBULL has made it through to Round Two of the Dockers “Wear the Pants”Contest! Your votes put us among the Top 50 who now have to make a case by essay to be chosen as a Top 5 finalist. Cheers to all who voted, and to those who for some reason didn’t, we’ll be counting on you in the finals…
Thanks again!
New in the Horns: "Communication with Distant Life Forms"
Posted: March 17, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
You know how it is with aliens–sometimes you get abducted, sometimes you just wish you were. We’ll let you decide the case in Josh Peterson’s “Communication with Distant Life Forms”, our print bonus in the new Lonesome Issue. Single issues are available here, and subscribers should have it by the weekend. And in the words of our Alien Encounter Support Group moderator: keep looking up.
Editor’s Note: On Loneliness
Posted: March 9, 2011 Filed under: Editor Notes Leave a commentWhen I first thought of adding editor’s notes to BULL I anticipated that writing this intro to our upcoming “Lonesome Issue” would be easy. It is not. Most worthwhile writing is never easy, though the same could be said for that which is not worthwhile too, and as to where this falls on the spectrum… we’ll see. But composing this note on loneliness is made especially difficult now, given that the past two weeks have brought me more daily interaction with people than I’ve had in the past two years.
You may know that BULL is currently in the throes of a contest, one that takes place on everyone’s favorite social network. It is there that I’ve been living and lobbying for support and votes throughout much of every day. While it has been a welcome means of procrastinating this essay, now that the time has come I must say it’s hard to write on loneliness while exchanging daily messages with thirty some-odd people. Granted, these messages are brief and contest-based: a vote here, a vote there, everyone watching and willing their ticker to go up. But there is an almost subliminal effect in receiving these notes and seeing these familiar faces every day, even if that note is really just a number, and even though that face is just a profile picture. Because the fact is that there are people behind those pictures, and they are people I would never have had the occasion to “meet” if not for this strange, addictive, and overall infectious effort we’re all involved in.
I’ve never really understood how relationships can be made online, but over the course of this Facebook fiasco I think I’m starting to. It begins with repetition, which gives way to a slightly more sincere familiarity, and finally lends an odd sense that you can really count on someone to be there, wherever there may be on the web. The whole thing has even made me question the scare-quotes I tend to put around the concept of “meeting” someone online. I give ‘em a year more, at the most.
Ah, forget it. They’re ugly. They’re gone.
BULL was begun in large part as a means of meeting people, and as such, preventing loneliness. There were other, more professional reasons touched on here, but personally, in January of 2009 I was facing a protracted period of solitude in which nearly everyone I knew had left town, my neighbor and closest remaining friend had died, and I was expecting my first child, who I would care for while my wife started a new job. I knew some kind of interactive outlet would be necessary or I’d go off my homebound, bottle-feeding rocker. What I sought to do was meet other writers, read and respond thoughtfully to their writing, work closely with them on their stories and present those stories to a kindred audience.Looking back, well, it worked. 2 years, 8 generous volunteers, 57 authors, a few thousand submissions and all you readers later, we’ve come to this: the first time I feel compelled to get as sappy as I can in an editor’s note. All I really want to say here is this: I do appreciate everyone BULL has ever put me in contact with. It’s because of you that I’ve managed to keep more marbles than I’ve lost.
Not so for some of these fellas in the Lonesome Issue. Our offering this season is populated by men going it alone, and examines how they deal with it and what it drives them to. Next week we’re privileged to kick it off with a fine story by BULL’s very first author and perennial movie reviewer, Josh Peterson. From there we’ll see the springtime horns full of work by Chad Simpson, Paul Weidknecht, Jacob White, and Todd McKie. As this is the first issue prepared in advance, and arranged with a concrete theme in mind, I’m happy to feature a broad span of sentiment—stories wry and comic, abstract, heartbreaking as well as heartwarming. It all starts next week. We’ll see you then.
— JH
BULLshot: John Warner
Posted: March 2, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentBULL: Have you ever been attracted to a monkey? Or vice-versa?
JW: The Tim Burton version of Planet of Apes is a pretty terrible movie, probably one of the worst ever when weighed against the potential to be good, but I will admit that Helena Bonham Carter, as Ari, doesn’t look half bad, mostly because the chimp version of Helena Bonham Carter looks a lot like Helena Bonham Carter. On the vice-versa, I’ve never had a monkey attracted to me, but I have had one who was attracted to my stuff. My wife and I honeymooned in Kenya, and at one of our stops, the camp was essentially run by vervet monkeys who would sneak into your tent and ransack your things if you didn’t make sure to zip the opening completely closed. When we returned after dinner one night, the tent flap was open and once inside I saw one of the vervets holding my Discman (pre iPod days) above his head, shaking it like he was trying to jar something loose. When he saw us, he dashed it to the ground and sprinted from the tent. I think that incident probably became an inspiration for this particular story.
A Salute to Arnošt Lustig
Posted: March 1, 2011 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment
by Tim Chilcote
Czech author Arnošt Lustig died last week. Lustig was a renowned Jewish writer, teacher, friend of Czech authors and dignitaries, and a Holocaust survivor. During his 84 years, Arnošt witnessed the worst of men, yet chose to defy sadness and anger by living as happily and humbly as he could. His fiction and his life teach us to live better. I recommend his books Lovely Green Eyes and Darkness Casts No Shadow, and Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary film, “The Fighter”, about Arnošt and his friend Jan Weiner.
I had the good fortune to study with Arnošt in Prague, and serve as his teaching assistant during the summer of 2002. Arnošt’s spirit and positive outlook completely altered my worldview. He tackled life with a pleasure and vigor I had never witnessed and have not seen since. Arnošt appreciated life’s beautiful details, and he looked for the good in all people and situations. If he couldn’t find good, he’d invent it in his fiction.
Arnošt considered a good dirty joke to be the highest of narrative forms, and told wildly inappropriate jokes to anyone who would listen. He methodically stacked and shaped his food into square piles and cleaned every last crumb from his plates, a habit he picked up in the camps. Arnošt tenderly held hands with old friends as they walked together for coffee and pastries, and he flirted with girls young and old on subway rides. His spirit and humor put everyone at ease. He was at once a genius and a ham.
Arnošt took great pride in his ability to assess people quickly, a skill he learned out of necessity in the camps. He knew as soon as he met someone whether he would have liked to have been imprisoned with them. Arnošt gave me the greatest compliment of my life when he told me he knew on the first day of class that he would have liked to be with me in Auschwitz. That’s a lot to live up to. I intend to do so—happily.
Na zdravi, Arnošt, and thank you.
Tim Chilcote is BULL’s Managing Editor.
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