Click through to read the full review of 3^RD BED [2], the twenty-first in this full-press review of Calamari books.

3^RD BED [2] Contributors:

Maile Chapman, Matthew Derby, Jeffrey Encke, Brian Evenson, Robert Fludd, Michael Ives, Camden Joy, Fin Keegan, A. P. Maddox, I. W. Mallet, Hermine Meinhard, David Rossmann, David Tod Roy, & James Wagner

If you look back at my review of 3^RD BED [1] I talked a bit about where the name of this journal came from, and a little about how I wasn’t sure where that first issue tended, either thematically or in terms of stylization. With 3^RD BED [2], I am starting to see the kind of ambiance that was building, the mixture of classical lit with nicely forward-tilting texts, some of which I am able to sample out here.

from Maile Chapman’s ‘The Black Circle’:

When I stop there is a buzzing, a lifting. The empty sky presses down. The house is large in its bulls-eye of yellow grass, in the amphitheater of the black surrounding trees. I would be climbing my own panic if it rose at all, but everything is constant, everything is just the same. Upstairs I am still sleeping with the weight of this blue day audible against my eyelids.

from Brian Evenson’s ‘Garker’s Aestheticals’:

It were a word. It name were God.

It gangled my tongue. It were crawed up my throat. Word God were given me the choke.

Spatted it out all about the crackwood floor. Luppen and lappen it up all from the crackwood floor. Gangled it trussed with my mean slivered tongue.

Pulped it pasty atween my molar teeth. Gave it the swallow, did I. Word went down smooth, did it. There were mouthwater to helpen it down. There were a swaller of nonesuch to helpen it down.

This Evenson piece alone is worth the price of admission to 3^RD BED [2], and the work by Maile Chapman has me searching out a writer I’ve never read before (does anyone know where Maile Chapman is now? I’ll do some googling when I’m done here). Plus 3^RD BED [2] includes an excerpt in translation from the sixteenth century Chinese novel The Plum in the Golden Vase and a play in two acts by Fin Keegan – not a bad spread for 122 pages.

I want to say more about the direction or the focus of 3^RD BED when it was just starting out (this issue was released in 2000), but I honestly don’t know enough yet. All I do know is that reading these issues make me sad because their content is lovely and historic, and it is one more journal that we won’t see any new issues of. Major downer, but you can get sad with me by picking up a copy of this book here.

Next in line is Derek White & Carlos M. Luis’ ma(I)ze Tassel Retrazos then 3RD BED [3], then something else from the good shelves of Mr. White.

Holy Calamari.