image courtesy of Big Media Vandalism

Here’s the latest installment of Baltimore writer Joseph Martin’s Ivy Bookshop-sponsored column for the Baltimore Fishbowl, “The Lit Parade,” a celebration and thoughtful examination of the epic local lit scene that too often goes unreported, unread.

In the world of academic analysis, few things madden quite like trying to treat an artist’s entire oeuvre.  And that goes double for movie directors: even amongst the most stylish and singular of moviedom’s “auteurs,” like David Lynch or Quentin Tarantino, there are head-scratching incongruities (Lynch’s The Straight Story), conceptual clunkers (Lynch’s Wild at Heart, the Tarantino-scripted From Dusk ‘Til Dawn), money-grabs (Lynch’s Dune), or simple toss-offs (Tarantino’s smug addition to Four Rooms) with which to contend.  Unlike a painter or a writer, a director’s vision is subservient to cast, crew, funds, marketability, etc. — he or she is in a true artistic bind: a movie has to be sellable, critically viable, and a financial “hit” in order for a director to even keep making art.  What gets made is, ultimately, what can get made, a problem that’s led to many a messy, difficult-to-parse film corpus. Read More →

Here’s the latest installment of Baltimore writer Joseph Martin’s Ivy Bookshop-sponsored column for the Baltimore Fishbowl, “The Lit Parade,” a celebration and thoughtful examination of the epic local lit scene that too often goes unreported, unread.

Located somewhere between a short story’s brief epiphanies and a book-length manuscript’s meaty heft, the novella — a strange, pidgin form of fiction — has always defied clear rules or expectations. As an unsurprising result, its greatest lit-historical examples tend to whip along with an odd, enticingly elliptical push-pull, jackknifing between the sorts of mysterious characters (Gustave Flaubert’s “A Simple Soul”) and purgatorial plots (Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”) more common types of fiction tend to abhor. At its all-too-rare best, a novella can trick a reader into caring less about a story per se than its aura, so to speak: a persistent state of grace (or lack thereof) whose inevitable burnout allows for a unique fictive torque. A bad novella, by contrast, can feel perverse, coming on like rambling short fiction or, worse, a novel caught in utero; even at its most inspired, the novella’s liminal existence often demands a bit of literary MacGuyvering to come off. Read More →

John Barth

We’re pleased to present writer Joseph Martin’s The Ivy Bookshop-sponsored column for the Baltimore Fishbowl, “The Lit Parade,” a celebration and thoughtful examination of the epic local lit scene that too often goes unreported, unread.

Once again, we’re at the (briefly) snow-covered tail end of a year’s worth of reading, and this particular annum has been a doozy – from brainy juvenilia revisions to collections of darkly funny riffs, serial novels about truly killer apps, small-run poetry chapbooks, and at least one sorely needed history of Charm City’s booze trade, 2012 has given fans of local lit a veritable Santa’s sack of new, distinctive writing.  That in mind, this month’s Lit Parade is devoted to excavating some stuff you may have missed and giving some Baltimore Fishbowl favorites another round of praise.  Let the lists commence: Read More →

Just in time for Halloween, the second installment of writer Joseph Martin’s column features bloody true-crime fiction by local authors, WORMS, and more frightfully cool lit scene news.

Much as we tend to play up our Hon Blievers, Book Things, and park-laden, neurosis-free psyche, few towns teem with morbid curiosity quite like Charm City.  From Mr. Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade up through David Simon’s “The Wire” cast and The Sun’s exquisite police blotter, Baltimore has long produced fictive body exhumers and, perhaps more, an audience smitten with the dusty, matchlit corners of criminal activity.  White flight, abandoned neighborhoods, and a lately discarded status as America’s murder capital underpin residents’ understanding of home; unsurprisingly, a rabid local market exists for true crime and its clinical, fact-bearing explication. Building on its author’s near-decade in the local police department, Michael A. Wood, Jr.’s Eliot (self-published) honors that curiosity, hitting very Baltimorean forensic notes even as it serves up a shaggy genre thriller. Read More →

We’re pleased to present writer Joseph Martin’s new Ivy Bookshop-sponsored column for the Baltimore Fishbowl, “The Lit Parade,” a celebration and thoughtful examination of the epic local lit scene that too often goes unreported, unread.

“For my dead dad” reads the dedication to local novelist Michael Kimball’s excellent new book, Big Ray (Bloomsbury) – a heavy, final-sounding thud of a phrase if there ever was one.  And why not?  After four novels stuffed with death, familial friction, and an almost scientific interest in the protocol for (and detritus of) relationships, Big Ray feels like the end product of a long, difficult birthing process, a merger between the post-suicide bricolage of 2008’s Dear Everybody (Alma Books) and the slow, procedural mortality of 2011’s Us (Tyrant Books).  Like those books, Ray presents a precise catalog of mourning; skipping their likeable victims, however, the novel instead turns its fictive eye on an unsympathetic corpse – an abusive, selfish father – allowing Kimball to write with a previously untapped range of emotion and intimacy. Read More →