While I’m not sure how to create a new blog on our wordpress website I’ve nonetheless decided that we will be starting a new blog/publication at Diet Soap at the end of August.   How to Write Stories About Writers will feature Stories about Writers, Stories about Writers Writing Stories about Writers, Advice from Writers on How to Write Stories About Advice From Writers, interviews with Writers Who Write about Writers, recipes, and limericks.

The first edition will feature the fiction of Electricvelocipide’s own John Klima. So look for How to Write Stories about Writers on August 31st right here at Diet Soap.org.

Our second internet edition of Diet Soap is also due to arrive that same day, so look for it also.  It will feature fine work from Ross Lockhart amongst others, and will appear in its usual webpage.

Our Sabotage issue will be coming out in, oh hell, I don’t know.  Maybe October?  It will be published like a paperback book…or at least that’s the current plan.

We are still taking submissions for the Sabotage issue, but your work will only be considered for that issue if it is actually about sabotage.

Future issues of Diet Soap will be on these themes:

• Life after Capitalism
• Claustrophobia
• Mania, Panic Attacks, and Every Day Life
• and How to find Edible Grubs

 

Ben Segal, the author of From Georges Bataille to Jesus Christ in Four Moves (which appeared in the first issue of Diet Soap) sent me a copy of his first book about a month ago, and I spent a good amount of time trying to solve it. “78 stories” is much like life in so much as the sequence and thereby the meaning of events has to be deciphered. Of course this book presents itself as a crossword puzzle and since it is in fact the story of a solver whose goal is to complete the unusually difficult puzzle of his own life and death as he fills in the spaces in a newspaper crossword this is entirely appropriate.This is the kind of book you might want to frame and hang on the wall, or alternatively fold up and stick in your back pocket to solve during your commute.Congratulations, Ben! And congratulations to No Record Press for picking out such an interesting and fun writer to showcase.

Diet Soap Issue #2 (Sex and Gender) was recently reviewed by David Hebbelthwaite at “The Fix.” He had this to say:

Diet Soap’s website—and, indeed, the magazine itself—suggest that it’s meant as a provocative publication. Well, I have to admit that I didn’t find issue #2 to be quite that; but it does have some good stories that make telling points about the subject of sex and gender. It may not be as provocative as it hopes to be, but it is thought-provoking.

O.K., fair enough. But we certainly do want to be provocative as well as thought-provoking, so keep those subversive submissions coming in! Our upcoming issues are “Sabotage” and “Slavery.” What’cha got for us? Send it to douglain@dietsoap.org, or if it’s poetry, send it to poetry@dietsoap.org

Hi everyone!

So the Diet Soap Team has been working hard to get a head start on Issue #3, which is scheduled to hit the streets in late October 2008. The theme for issue #3 is “Sabotage” and we need fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and art.

Send us stuff! We pay $5 per piece, plus a contributor copy. And for this next issue, we’re going to be moving to Lulu for our printing and doing the magazine up as a perfect bound with a full color cover! So it’s going to be gorgeous.

Send your submissions to douglain at dietsoap dot org. You can also send poetry directly to our poetry editor Camille Alexa at poetry at dietsoap dot org.

We look forward to hearing from you!

New Poetry Editor: Camille Alexa joins Diet Soap

Camille Alexa has joined Diet Soap as poetry editor and first reader.  A fine writer her work has appeared in such publications as Escape Pod, ChiZine, Space & Time Magazine, A Thousand Faces, and more. 

Her email address is poetry [at] dietsoap [dot] org.  She has requested that future submissions contain the word “submission” in the subject line, and that I falsely attribute a quote from Karl Marx to her. 

Camille says, “The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but she cannot of course create it. ” 

We’re glad to welcome Camille to Diet Soap, and look forward to how she’ll influence the future of this little journal.  

Review by StePHANie hoLmes  

Diet Soap #1 (November 2007)

“This author is the most paranoid person ever,” I blurt within reading the first two pages.  But the trick is that I cannot put this down, and I end up reading the surveillance issue from cover to cover.  DIET SOAP, with its headlines including the brief history of cakes and cake-making that is more about covert listening devices and surveillance measures and less Betty Crocker happy homemaking, is the equivalent of reading the well-written diary of the neurotic person you have a raging crush on. Recommended.   

I am moving several long-overdue projects out of my inbox, and one of the longest and most overdue is the layout of the second issue of Diet Soap.

This is an incredibly kick-ass issue, as evinced by the table of contents:

Fiction

• Dream Date by Chelsea Martin
• Be the Bomb You Throw by Katherine Sparrow
• Peach by Ginnetta Correlli
• Stitching Time by Stephanie Burgis
• The Growns by Maxwell James

Poetry

• Shopping for a Husband by Aurelio Rico Lopez III
• Pro-Life Patter by Rachel Swirsky
• How to Walk in Heels by Tina Connolly

Art

• Collages by Jen Light

I am so excited to send it off into the world, which we will be doing with a launch party at the Writer’s Dojo on May 10. Portland folks, please mark your calendars and please come to support the ‘zine if you’re able! There’s going to be pizza and beer and readings and an open mike and lots of enlightened earnestness. Watch this space for more info as it develops.

Check it out. Ross Lockhart reviews Sarah Layden’s story from our online edition: http://lossrockhart.livejournal.com/342737.html

After many delays the first of our online editions is now live.   Be sure to note Sarah Layden’s story “The You You’ve Wanted to Become,” and her interview after.   I’m planning on continuing to highlight one story from the internet edition and interview the author in future editions. 

Please check it out and let us know what you think.

In the US at least, the word is often misunderstood. Libertariansim was originally synonymous with left anarchism. Most libertarians are socialists, and most are egalitarians.

Right wing Libertarianism is a relatively recent phenomena. For instance, I was born on December 22, 1970, a mere 354 days before the creation of the US Libertarian Party. The party of pro-capitalist libertarianism and I are roughly the same age, and, strangely enough, we both spring from the same city, namely Colorado Springs, CO.

The central questions that distinguish US style Libertarian Capitalism from all other forms of Libertarianism revolves around the high value the capitalist “Libertarian” places on property, and the faith the same places in the system of market capitalism. While “Libertarians” view the right to property at foundational, other libertarians tend to view the question of property and its importance from the opposite perspective. For instance, Proudhon wrote:

” If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: What is property! may I not likewise answer, It is robbery, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?”
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/ProProp.html

To clearly understand what Proudhon is saying one must distinguish between the ownership of personal objects and ownership and control of the means of production. Despite what the advertisers tell us, owning a personal item, this or that trinket, or even a bed, house, microwave, car, doesn’t bestow much power or influence to a person. Only the ownership of the objects, lands, or ideas that are needed to produce and sustain life are at issue here, for the owners of these gain real power.

Libertarians and “Libertarians” have a great deal in common. Both cherish freedom and the rights of the individual, but I agree with Noam Chomsky who wrote that “a consistent libertarian must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer.”