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My friend and former college roommate Mark Mellon has been getting quite a few stories published lately. He took fiction writing courses at the University of Virginia with John Casey (An American Romance, Spartina), although he's never been particularly interested in writing Casey's brand of mainstream "literary" fiction. Mark writes stories that could be characterized as "intellectual pulp fiction," torquing up the raw material of war stories or science fiction with his own unique mix of anger, violence, and erudition. I'm posting his bio, to give an idea what he's up to, but also to give the "lay of the land" for an emerging writer at the turn of the millennium.
"Mark Mellon is a novelist who supports his family by working as an attorney for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. His life has been checkered, with past experience as a mover, lifeguard/swimming instructor, door-to-door salesman, carpenter's helper, Russian translator, soldier, phone solicitor, collections counselor, and teacher. He has had the following short stories published: 'Harry's Car,' in issue no. 1 of Retard magazine; 'Trophy of the Hunt' in issue no. 32 of Aberrations science fiction magazine; 'Conversations With an Old Man' in issue 2, vol. 2 of Chasm magazine; 'The List of Caliban Cade' in the Jan. 1999 issue of Gothic.Net, an Internet e-zine; 'Where Will We Bury Them All?,' in the July 1999 issue of the e-zine Of Ages Past (this last story will appear in 2001 in an anthology, Twilight Antiquity, put out by Dark Star Publications); and 'The Old Man and the Sea Ate Me' and 'Partisans,' in issues 3 and 6, respectively, of Gauntlet! The Magazine of Heroic Tales. Three other stories have been accepted for magazine publication: 'That Summer on the Moon" (by Albedo One, an Irish science fiction magazine), 'Viva La BigAss' (by Terra Incognita), and 'The Brave Little Cockroach' (by Anthrolations, the Magazine of Anthropomorphic Dramatic Fiction). Mark has also written two novels, The Empire of the Green, and Hammer and Skull (respectively a science fiction novel and a novel about World War II) and a fantasy novella: Escape From Byzantium."
The image below is an 18 x 18 inch piece of mine called Aggregating, 2001. The spherical elements are drawn with MSPaint and Paintbrush and printed on an EPSON 2000P on archival matte paper; the flat areas of color are also printed on the EPSON. The paper is cut into fragments, rearranged and patched together with strips of linen tape (on the back). The whole thing, slightly rumpled and bowed, hangs with pushpins on the wall. This piece will be on view in the Momenta Art benefit exhibition, 72 Berry St, Brooklyn, from April 1 - 22, and will be reinstalled at White Columns and raffled off on April 24. (And assuming your computer will stretch it to fill an entire screen--as opposed to just tiling it--the jpeg makes dandy desktop wallpaper!)
Please note that I have expanded the criticism section of my web site. The "Thread" exhibition essay now includes installation shots; I have included a link to my recent Sculpture magazine article "Secondary Structures"; and I've reproduced the text of my essay on Carsten Nicolai's video-jamming piece Telefunken. I've also included my "critic c.v."
There is an excellent piece in The Nation this week by Win McCormack titled "Deconstructing the Election."
His argument, in a nutshell, is: (1) French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida say there are no fixed meanings, only spin, and those with the power control the spin. (2) Conservative writers such as Lynne Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza say these ideas are a threat to the Republic and our way of life. (3) By asserting, during the recent election standoff, that machine counts were superior to hand counts and that judges could not be trusted not to vote their party affiliation, James Baker essentially argued that there is no meaning, only spin. (4) Therefore, by the Republicans' own logic, Baker (and his boss) are a threat to the Republic and our way of life. Working within this framework, McCormack gives a good recap of the GOP's ruthless power-grab during the standoff.
I have recently launched a website documenting my artwork and writing. What I hope to do is put the work in context, through installation shots, critical texts, and discussions of the work of artists I've been showing with. Soon there will be more images and reviews. I welcome all comments and feedback.
In last week's Slate, David Edelstein reviews the movie Pollock, poking fun at what he considers its pretentious artspeak. He makes an annoying, perhaps willfully obtuse error about critic Clement Greenberg, referring to him as an "Artforum poo-bah" when in fact, back in Pollock's heyday of the '40s and 50s, Greenberg wrote for Partisan Review and The Nation (Artforum didn't appear until the '60s). I posted on The Fray to comment on this, and got an "editor's pick." I'm pleased about that, but they really should revise the review.
Joanna Pataki and I recently launched a web site devoted to the writer Doris Piserchia. She (Doris) labored in the salt mines of science fiction from 1966-1983 (although her work was actually too quirky and fascinating to be so easily pigeonholed) and then dropped out of sight after a family tragedy. She denies it, but several of her books were aimed squarely at precocious teenagers (girls in particular), and she acquired some lifetime fans as they grew up to become teachers, software writers, and--judging by some of the writing I've found--feminist book critics. Other of her novels might be described as sociological or biological horror, addressing issues of urbanization, dehumanization, and science-run-amok in a droll, "black comedy" style. As an artist, I was drawn to her writing because of her incredible visual imagination: if Bosch were a writer rather than a painter, this is what he might produce.
Toward the end of her string of 13 novels, she published two books under a man's name (Curt Selby). One website we link to (Strange Words) makes a big deal of this fact, like she had to conform to the male standards of the Science Fiction Publishing Conspiracy or else get kneecapped, or something. In the interview we conducted with her, Piserchia refuses to play the victim--she says "Don Wollheim [of DAW Books] published four of my books that year. He wanted another name." According to Piserchia, she was on a roll in '82, scouting for new markets; she chose the name "Curt Selby" (an ancestor), and the books she wrote under it are just as eccentric and uncompromising as the rest of her production. With 20/20 hindsight, it might look like she was caving in to an adolescent-male-driven market, but if she had continued writing under her own name (as she apparently had every intention of doing) and eventually pushed through to broader recognition (with a movie deal or whatever), who's to say how history might have viewed the Selby decision?
In any event, the site is a work-in-progress; we'll be adding to it, to give a better, fuller picture of the writer than what's there now. We welcome all feedback. With the advent of online bookselling, used copies of Piserchia's books aren't that hard to come by: I recommend Doomtime, The Spinner, Earth in Twilight, and Selby's I, Zombie for starters.
Once again, here's the link to the website.