Media on Media: Cool Nerds’ Night Out

Indie Arts and Culture Blog Celebrates Its One-Year Anniversary

Brooklyn-based arts and culture blog Vol.1 Brooklyn (vol1brooklyn.com) celebrated its one-year anniversary and website launch with writers John Wray, Lev Grossman, Adam Wilson and Juliet Linderman entertaining a packed crowd at Bar Matchless in Greenpoint this past Thursday, October 29th.The delights of the evening were many: host Bob Powers’s “Horror Stories for Thirty Year-Olds” (sample titles include “The Serial Monogamist” and “Temp-to-Perm”), Adam Wilson’s sexually-explicit and surprisingly poignant story about the bad breath-stricken teenage stoner son of a cancer-ridden mother and ineffectual father (more than a few audience members gasped for air during particularly bawdy sections where the semi-autobiographical narrator mentions his dried expulsions on his father’s Frida Kahlo print, comparing those crusty stains to “tears on her cheek.”) Time Magazine senior editor and book critic Lev Grossman read an excerpt of his acclaimed fantasy novel The Magicians,while Juliet Linderman’s seasonally-appropriate tale of a woman stalked by a filth-mouthed apparition whose presence was “like some perverted cuckoo clock nobody wanted” held audiences simultaneously aghast and enraptured. Concluding the evening was Lowboy author John Wray’s engagingly animated reading of a story about a mysterious man named Parkinson, a pornographer with an eponymous publication: Parkinson.

The launch party itself was part of what is a growing trend in literature, the decline of mainstream publishing and the rise of new independent publications, books, journals, blogs and websites. You hear it everywhere: that literature is dying; that publishing is dying; even Philip Roth, one of America’s greatest novelists recently contributed to this sentiment, forecasting that, within 25 years, the novel will only retain “cultic” status. While it’s certainly true that publishers and companies like Random House, The New York Times and The New Yorker have undergone massive restructuring (i.e. bloodletting), small and independent presses have been gaining currency in both numbers and, it is only inevitable, influence. (Just a quick glance at your local bookstore or events calendar will provide evidence of countless readings, events, launches and debuts—consider The Rumpus, The Faster Times, Muumuu House, Electric Literature_and _Gigantic, all founded within the last year; which is not to include “newish” publications like n+1, A Public Space, The New York Tyrant and the book-publishing arm of Tin House, all founded within the last five years.) Although financially-speaking these operations remain, like larger publishers, tenuous, indie companies with shoestring budgets and generally all-volunteer staff havegreater flexibility in matters of the dollar—which is to say, they don’t really require it in order to exist. The operations are labors of love, with little hope for profit, only sustainability and community proliferation. Indeed, it could be argued that the future of publishing may well be through smaller, more DIY operations fueled by writers of a more versatile and interconnected breed: freelancers, bloggers, day-jobbers, former interns, fresh-out-of-college types and other less traditionally empowered individuals. Founded in 2008 by writers Jason Diamond, 29, of Park Slope (and formerly of Greenpoint), and Willa A. Cmiel, 23, of Bushwick, Vol. 1 Brooklyn is one of many to exemplify this newer, bottom-up approach.

“The idea was to approach it like Dischord Records, K Records, etc. did in the early 80’s with punk and indie albums,” Diamond told me over email. “Go out and be supportive of other writers, publishers, magazines, etc. While publishing people I like, and who I feel should be read. I take a lot of what I learned growing up in the punk DIY scene and put it into my philosophy.” Occupying a territory somewhere between—and also outside of—Slate and popular indie lit blog HTML Giant, Vol. 1 Brooklyn is quick, current, articulate, funny and addictive. The site features daily content, ranging from original essays, reviews and event write-ups,along with a stream of easily-digestible and well-filtered aggregations of content from The New Yorker, The Rumpus and The Onion A.V. Club, to name just a few.

At its heart, Vol. 1 is, in the words of Diamond, “a literary-minded culture blog.” However, its presence is not limited to the blog, or even the internet. The Vol. 1 “brand” has quickly become a fixture in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighborhood with its quarterly “Vol. 1 Storytelling” series at Bar Matchless, a series that has featured talented Brooklyn locals including, among others, Shoplifting From American Apparel author and Muumuu House publisher Tao Lin (Williamsburg-based), The Fart Party cartoonist Julia Wertz (Greenpoint-based), writer and editor Justin Taylor (Bushwick-based) and the band Soft Black (also Bushwick-based).

Looking ahead, Vol. 1 has several upcoming projects—most notably the imprint Julius Singer Press, which is releasing three titles this Fall/Winter, as well as publishing the debut of a quarterly zine, The Singer Reader. The next Vol. 1 event is a fundraiser for Julius Singer Press at Public Assembly in Williamsburg on Nov. 11th. The event will feature JSP writer, Franz Nicolay, author of the forthcoming Complicated Gardening Techniques and a musician (in The Hold Steady, as well as solo), and Girls in Trouble, who will be making the fundraiser their record release. The next “Vol. 1 Brooklyn Storytelling” will be on Nov. 19th with novelist Porochista Khakpour.

When asked to sum up Vol. 1 and what it is, Diamond replied, “Somebody told us we (as well as our circle of friends and acquaintances) are cool nerds, which is fine. That seems to be a big thing right now. Really, we are writers writing about things we love.”