Meekling Presents: Spring Reading Party!

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Saturday, May 11th, 7PM, @ Cafe Mustache

Come help us celebrate the fancy & fabulous new books by Meekling friends Evelyn Hampton and Julia Madsen, who are coming through town, by way of Denver!

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Evelyn Hampton is the author of Famous Children and Famished Adults, which won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction contest and was published by FC2 in 2019; The Aleatory Abyss (Publishing Genius 2017); Discomfort (Ellipsis Press 2015); and the chapbooks We Were Eternal and Gigantic (Magic Helicopter Press), MADAM (Meekling Press), and Seven Touches of Music (alice blue books).

Julia Madsen is a multimedia poet and educator. She received an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and is a PhD candidate in English/Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Her first book, The Boneyard, The Birth Manual, A Burial: Investigations into the Heartland, was recently published with Trembling Pillow Press and was listed on Entropy’s Best Poetry Books of 2018.

Popahna Brandes is the author of In An I, (Sidebrow Books, 2015); The Sea In Me/The Riddle We Heard (The Corresponding Society); and Reading Tests, in collaboration with Jack Henrie Fisher and a machinic interlocutor (Jan Van Eyck Academie). Works of translation, prose, film and music have been published by Belladonna*, The Encyclopedia Project, Sleepingfish, Ein Magazin über Orte, Tarpaulin Sky, and Pocket Myth. She has led classes in lyrical and impossible narrative forms for many years, runs an annual writing workshop in the book village of Montolieu, France, and has collected a few sticks in Chicago where she now lives.

Anne K. Yoder’s work has appeared in Fence, Bomb, and Tin House, among other publications, and was recently included in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing. She is the author of two chapbooks — Jungfrau Happy AHHHHH (Meekling Press) and Sigil & Sigh, with Megan Kaminski (Dusie Kollektiv). She is a staff writer for The Millions and is a member of Meekling Press. An excerpt of her novel, The Enhancers, is forthcoming in MAKE Lit’s Weird Science issue.

Announcing Our 2019/20 Books!

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Meekling 2019-20.png

We spent the fall reading the submissions from our open reading period and we were wowed again and again. It was a challenge to narrow our scope to a number our tiny but mighty press can work with, but we did it at last!

We’re absolutely thrilled to announce we’ll be working with the following authors to bring their books into the world over the next two years:

2019
Sarah Meyer, Shit I’ve Cried About(collected)
Marream Krollos, Stan
Willy Smart, Switchwish
Carrie Olivia Adams (title tbd)
2020
Suzanne Gold, ALLTALK
Rachel Linn, Household Tales
Kate Wyer, Girl, Cow and Monk

We’re excited! Are you? That’s SEVEN amazing books.

Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks and months. We’ll soon be selling subscriptions to the series, and we’re planning a party in January to raise some funds.

Happy reading, and mazel tov ya’ll!!

 

Q&A with C. Relkbi, aka Rebecca Nakaba

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Last September C. Relkbi gave a lecture based on her B-Movie creature analysis, featured in The Meekling Review. Her lecture touched on various forms of creatures and popular misconceptions, and included slides of their potential habitats including the one featured in the photo above (taken in a high school bathroom in Gary, Indiana) . In this interview we speak at greater length about Relkbi’s research, the genesis of her interest in these creatures, how they are often inaccurately referred to as “monsters”, as well a her favorite B-Movie creature of all time.

What first drew you to critical creature discourse and the genotypical and phenomenological study of B-Movie creatures?

I suppose what draws anyone to a field of study they are passionate about: childhood exposure. As a kid I watched a lot of B-Movies with my father, who is very talented at pattern recognition. I remember we had many discussions on the similarities and differences between the “monsters”: how they behaved when angered, frightened, surprised, or walking slowly through a marsh or forest. The humans were easy to understand, so I was always more curious about the creatures. I’d never seen one outside of films, so I started doing as much research as I could. Much of it tangential, as the field was and is small, but like my dad I’m pretty good at pattern recognition. My mom studied genetics for a little while, too, so I grew up knowing that in humans adenine pairs with thymine and guanine with cytosine. I wondered: what would B-movie creature DNA base pairs be? Of course we can’t know, but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it? Solving the mystery with the clues at hand.

I think the moment I knew studying B-Movie creatures was what I wanted to spend my career pursuing was when I first saw a B-movie that featured a desert habitat. I grew up in Southern California, and seeing one of those creatures roam my landscape was thrilling. I can’t recall the film, and I’ve searched for it my entire professional life.

For those readers unfamiliar with your branch of research, please describe what you do and the most important conversations happening in critical creature discourse at the moment.

As a B-movie scientist, I study B-movie creatures, or in colloquial (yet inaccurate) terms, “monsters”, in a way analogous to an astronomer studying stars. Both astronomers and myself have to contend with physical and temporal distance, and data that almost entirely comes from EM radiation (though astronomers have available to them the entire EM spectrum, and I must rely on optical and occasionally radio). Much of what I and astronomers do is modeling based on data, as things like control samples are mathematical ideals and our testing laboratories more computational.

I study these creatures to learn more about them, where they live, their peculiarities; what any biologist would say. Compared to the thousands of species of insects or birds or mammals, they are rare, and dependent on celluloid preservation methods. It is important to gather and accurately interpret data before their documentation—thus, in a way, their lives—is unsalvageable.

Some very exciting conversations in critical creature discourse have begun to separate analysis of the creature from anthropocentric psychology. In the past, creature motivation and even existence was all recorded under the shadow of human motivations. But my research and that of my colleagues has shown that, while the human drive must be accounted for in how the creatures are represented, a trove of unexplored data are presented when the creatures are studied as independentof the human psyche. Our hope is that after this more rational examination, the creature and human may be united again for a more complete understanding of each.

What are the most typical misconceptions of B-Movie creatures held by the general public?


The most common misconception I’ve encountered is that all B-movie creatures are violent or aggressive without reason. I believe this to be caused by selection bias and documentary techniques. The cases in which a creature has violently interacted with a human are much more likely to be documented than a peaceful encounter. And, it is much easier to document creatures that reside in habitats that overlap with those of humans. Close quarters will often lead to an interaction of some kind, though in my extensive research I’ve found it is more often the human that escalates the encounter.

Another misconception I run across is that the majority of B-movie creatures were created through nuclear waste. While it’s true that radioactive waste triggered mutations in some, it is mostly a convenient (though important) metaphor for humans and not scientifically accurate. Part of my job is to review documentation and data to parse when human intervention has occurred and when coincidence makes it appear that way.

What are your favorite B-Movie creature(s) and if you yourself could be a B-Movie creature, what would you be?

It’s hard to choose a favorite, but a recent creature I’ve studied and grown fond of is the “mollusk” in The Monster that Challenged the World. It presents a taxonomical difficulty I still haven’t entirely worked out. And, what can I say, I have a soft spot for California creatures.

To be honest, I don’t think I would want to be any of them. I’ve seen how their story ends too many times.

 

C. Relkbi is a scientist studying the genotypical and phenomenological characteristics of B-movie creatures. Her research focuses on human-creature interactions. She has published numerous papers in a variety of journals.

Rebecca Nakaba is a writer and multi-media artist studying the genotypical and phenomenological characteristics of humans and nature. Her research focuses on human-creature interactions. She has published in places.

FIND MORE B-MOVIE ABSTRACTS in The Meekling Review:

+ COPIES ARE NOW AVAILABLE AT POWELL’s BOOKS in PORTLAND, OR, for all you left coast folks +

B-Movie Abstracts by C. Relkbi, aka Rebecca Nakaba

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Role of Visible, UVA, UVB, and IR radiation in Aggressive Creature Encounters

by C. Relkbi

23 September 20XX

Abstract

It is a well documented behavior that many organisms (heretofore: creatures, historically “monsters”) present in major box office habitats (MGM, Universal, Paramount, ARC, etc.) have an extreme aversion to light in the visible spectrum (390 to 700 nm) and often themselves utilize light for defense or aggression in UVA/UVB (< 390nm) or IR (>700nm) wavelengths. Humans documented to be involved with said creatures are often noted to possess a flashlight, largely at night or in shaded environments—where, because of the lack of visible light, creatures preferentially inhabit and humans preferentially illuminate. Ideally, this would create equilibrium for violent human-creature interaction: close contact with a creature’s own UVA/UVB/IR radiation can be debilitating to many human functions, but the average flashlight emits a continuum of light in the visible range, providing adequate repellant of a creature. Therefore, human and creature may exploit one another’s weakness in uncontrolled environments and situations, keeping “the balance of nature” in check.

Why, then, do many humans rarely succeed at repelling the creature? This paper seeks to answer this question and to suggest improvements to the flashlight for human use in defense against aggressive creature encounters. We will first examine the comparative strength of the visible radiation of the flashlight to the strength of documented creature-emitted UVA/UVB/IR radiation. The efficacy of the laser, whose light is monochromatic and coherent as opposed to the flashlight’s incoherent continuum, will be examined against a smaller subset of relevant creature-emitted radiation data. Lastly, a new model of flashlight created from the results of this paper (see Tables 3.1, 3.2, and Figure 5) is proposed, and the benefits of its papier-mache body woven of continuum-spectrum LED nano-fibers is discussed. Future experiments involving tube length, casing shape, and shock absorption are discussed in the Conclusion section.

 

Correlation Between Chest Albedo and Frequency of Female-Creature Interaction

by C. Relkbi

3 October 20XX

Abstract

While the average movie set is habitat to a variety of B-movie “monsters”, each with its own unique behavior and drive, it has been noted first by Corman et al. (1991) and more recently by Birch et al. (2004) that, regardless of habitat, genotype and phenotype, creatures are preferentially drawn to exposed females. Additionally, creatures that are otherwise solitary are observed to disregard their “usual” behavior in pursuit of the exposed female—analogous to the moth that flies into the flame. This paper seeks to provide a scientific analysis of the phenomena in response to the highly philosophical, sociological, and psychological implications that have surfaced over the past ten years in critical creature discourse.

The common factor across the over two hundred data points synthesized was albedo as it pertains to the female’s exposed chest. Albedo was calculated using several skin-reflectance parameters from the Harvard MERL/ETH database. The area of reflectance was determined using the classical anatomical definition of “bosom”, and pixel sampling was performed with an n-Rooks algorithm. We conclude that a strong correlation (graphs 6.7, 6.8, 6.9) between magnitude of albedo and frequency of creature-(female) human interaction exists. While it is outside the scope of this paper to postulate the causality behind this correlation, several theories are proposed in a subsection of Conclusions, including the potentially hypnotic effect of the highlighted female bosom as referenced in scientific and popular literature for the duration of the Anthropocene.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: A significant constraint of the dataset used is the inescapable problem of film observation as opposed to direct sampling. Archival footage can only provide information relating to sight and sound, while more nuanced variables such as smell, touch, and chemical analysis must be inferred. However, given uniform high occurrence of creature preference for exposed females across a spectrum of female interaction, it can be concluded that individual-specific elements such as pheromone production and gland activity are insignificant (Methods 1.3). It can be assumed within an acceptable margin of error that the phenomena is ocular. For details on the control sample of covered female chests, see Methods 1.4.

 

C. Relkbi is a scientist studying the genotypical and phenomenological characteristics of B-movie creatures. Her research focuses on human-creature interactions. She has published numerous papers in a variety of journals.

Rebecca Nakaba is a writer and multi-media artist studying the genotypical and phenomenological characteristics of humans and nature. Her research focuses on human-creature interactions. She has published in places.

FIND MORE B-MOVIE ABSTRACTS in The Meekling Review:

+ COPIES ARE NOW AVAILABLE AT POWELL’s BOOKS in PORTLAND, OR, for all you left coast folks! +