Curbside Splendor

CASEY: Okay, so [Jessa sneezes]…bless you. We’re watching The Future by Miranda July.

JESSA: I really liked the first one—You, Me, and Everyone We Know. But I think it’s one of those things where people look down at you like it’s pretentious or you’re a hipster if you like that movie. You know what I mean by that?

CASEY: Yeah. But she’s well liked, isn’t she? I get she’s quirky and people might think that could overshadow a good story or something. Why does she do that little baby voice thing? She does it like when her characters are making art or something.

JESSA: Oh. I don’t know.

CASEY: What’s the next thing we talk about? How do I transition here? So beds.

JESSA: We can talk about how I want to get on a better sleeping schedule but I can’t.

CASEY: Yeah, you want to get to bed earlier so you can get up early for work. But the main problem is really that we both want to go to the gym and I keep saying that I’ll go the gym in the morning at like 6am. But I don’t have to get up that early so I don’t, plus I’d rather go to they gym with you because I’m very loving and I like spending time with you.

JESSA: But then you don’t get off work until 6pm while I’m done at 4 or so and I have to wait and then go to the gym until like 8 and then try to have dinner which is too late and then that’s like the end of the night because to keep the schedule I’m crashing at around 10.

CASEY: Oh, is it the cat? The baby voice is the cat narrating I think. So that’s all true.  But we’re working on the schedule. It would be healthier. Let’s talk about what sort of TV we like on while going to bed. When we do put on TV then. Which happened more back in our apartment in Rogers Park because we had another TV but we gave it to one of the moving men when we moved to Memphis. Even though they were awful and showed up three hours late with like two sixty-year-old guys who smoked cigars the whole time and one guy who had, literally, a broken arm.

JESSA: Yeah, we just ran out of room in the U-Haul. I would like to say that if we were to switch to a policy of watching TV while we’re trying to fall asleep I would get way better sleep. And I know that’s contradictory to everything everyone says. You’re supposed to shut everything off and have like a cool down time. So no food after a certain hour. You’re not supposed to watch the news or read any books. You have your nighttime ritual—wash your face, brush your teeth—and you’re supposed to turn off the light and close your eyes and that’s it. But I don’t know anyone who operates that way. When I was a teenager I would put big headphones on and sleep with those playing. The cord reached across the room and I’d wake up with the headphones all twisted around my head. I guess I could’ve killed myself, but I never did. So that was good.

CASEY: That is good. I’m glad you didn’t. I used to do the same thing sometimes when I was a kid, like in elementary school. But I had those flat like padded earphones that just sat on top of your ears. And I would listen to my Walkman to like the Raiders of the Lost Ark soundtrack or the Home Alone score. I’d do it when I woke up to, like to start the day, for 15 minutes before I got up to get ready for school.

JESSA: Yeah, exactly. So I still do that but with my laptop I’ll fall asleep to a quiet talking podcast like This American Life or Radiolab. Or any documentary on Netflix.

CASEY: Yeah we watched pretty much all of The Presidents while falling asleep. I kinda like how when you watch it that way there are always parts you miss, like new facts that get filled in so it’s a totally rewarding experience when you watch it again. Sometimes you just wanna fall asleep watching Little Mermaid though.

JESSA: I wanna do that right now. I should wake up around 4 tomorrow so I can finish things for the week. That would help me fall asleep quicker. I don’t know what’s going on in this movie now that we’re talking over it. Hey, according to the internet in the US in the year 2011 there were five girls born named Moo. M-O-O.

CASEY: Why?

JESSA: I don’t know why like how something like that becomes a thing that happens, but I know that I know because of Pinterest and it is a fact. I also know that there were five boys named Swayze. And six boys named Draper. That one I know the why is because of Mad Men. Six girls named Tomorrow. And that’s a nice name. Tomorrow is cute. And yet there’s only one more parent in American that would name their kid Tomorrow than they would Moo?

CASEY: This says there were seven boys named Tron.

JESSA: M’hmm. And Onesty with an O or how’s this—Aunisty. People are stupid.

CASEY: Someone named their kid King Solomon. And Princecharles . One word.

JESSA: Well my daughter’s name is Clementine. So…

CASEY: None of this has to do with sleep. Except that baby-making does occur mostly in beds. And we do mess around on our laptops in bed a lot. So I think we’re still on task here.

JESSA: I’m on Buzzfeed now.

CASEY: [reading over shoulder] Who is that?

JESSA: Okay, now I don’t remember exactly what it is, but I think Pappy DreWitt draws a little character and teaches you how to draw it. Like, “Here’s a dog on a motorcycle. I’ll teach you how to draw it.”

CASEY: And what’s that?

JESSA: The Aggro-Crag from Guts. It was a physical challenge show on Nickelodeon for kids and they have challenges for jock kids and they have to like swing on a thing until something hits them and then at the end they have to crawl up this mountain.

CASEY: Crawl it?

JESSA: They have to scale the, well it’s a not a mountain. It’s a Styrofoam thing. So they don’t scale it. And they drop rocks on your head and you have to get flags to collect points.

CASEY: See, so relating this to a point about beds: we never had cable as a kid.

JESSA: Neither did I.

CASEY: Wait how did you know those things?

JESSA: I didn’t know that first thing and then I only got to watch the second at my grandma’s house.

CASEY: Well anyway, I had a black and white TV in my room, so in the summer or when I was sick, because otherwise it was too late, I would fall asleep watching Conan, like when it first started in ’93 or something. And now we have Todd Levin, a writer for Conan, in our book. Our book about beds.

JESSA: It all comes full circle.

CASEY: Indeed it does.

JESSA: Which means we should go to sleep.

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The Way We Sleep is published by Curbside Splendor in a handsome 10 x 10, glossy coffee table style layout and filled with short stories, interviews, and comics all dealing with the way we sleep, which is sure to delight readers everywhere, particularly those who sleep, and especially those who sleep in beds. You can purchase it by clicking here.

C. James Bye is the co-founder and Arts and Media editor of Knee-Jerk Magazine. He insists on being the little spoon, despite his six-foot three-and-half inch frame.
Jessa Bye was the web editor of Monkeybicycle for three years. She kicks off her socks when she sleeps, and her husband has to pick them up. Like, every single morning.

Check out the rest of The Way We Sleep’s Blog Tour below. Keep up to date at thewaywesleep.com.

I am a Chicago enthusiast. Evangelist, you could say. This city is my birthplace and I came back for college and it was like finding a new home, really my first true home. I have a special section on my shelf for Chicago-related books, and I’m studying geography because I love cities, but mostly this one. So I picked up Michael Czyzniejewski’s Chicago Stories (Curbside Splendor, 2012) with special interest and high hopes. Chicago Stories is a collection of 40 “dramatic fictions”--flash fiction, you could say--based off of famous and infamous local luminaries like Barack Obama, Dennis Rodman, and Rod Blagojevich. Czyzniejewski doesn’t limit himself to human figures, including pieces inspired by the Water Tower and Italian beef sandwich.

Maybe this is obvious, but this city evades description. Chicago is just teeming. It contains multitudes. And the way I encounter Chicago is intimately mapped to my personal experiences, my associations. Yet there’s some general essence of Chicago, some spirit, that we can maybe draw a fuzzy outline around. Before the fact, I would have expected Chicago Stories to explicitly try to pin down the city’s soul, to capture in its own way how Chicago is “stormy, husky, brawling/City of the Big Shoulders” or the way it’s “an October sort of city even in the spring.” Something in the grand tradition of Sandburg and Algren and Bellow. Man, Chicago goes hard. Yet these touchstone writers portray a Chicago that’s resolutely different than the one we’re living in now, and one that is richly textured but almost two-dimensional at times. It’s a very particular Chicago, but only one Chicago.

Czyzniejewski, on the other hand, delves deeper into the essence of this city, looks at a different one of its many dimensions. He’s concerned more with showing than with explicitly telling of the city’s spirit. And crucially, Czyzniejewski has a wider scope than Algren or Bellow, sweeping from Chicago’s earliest days--Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the city’s earliest settler--to Mrs. O’Leary and Leopold and Loeb, all the way up to Oprah Winfrey. It’s an open question whether his representation is faithful, though, or whether he successfully encapsulates at least some of the many Chicagos.

I’m not sure if the answer to that question is unequivocally yes. Czyzniejewski looks at a different dimension of the city than those famous Chicago authors, but it’s one that anyone who’s familiar with the figures his stories center around could “get.” In my mind, that nod of resonance and gut recognition would be less prevalent in a general audience that’s reading Algren. Like Algren’s speaking a language that rings especially true to Chicagoans, whereas Czyzniejewski can be heard by all. I wonder if this is a byproduct of the fact that by and large each fiction is based off of people, and not so much off the physical form of the city (cue my “As a geographer...”). I was going to write that he doesn’t much focus on my native South Side, but he really doesn’t talk much about the North Side either. The Chicago of Chicago Stories isn’t the “city of neighborhoods.” By and large it’s a city of historical figures and larger-than-life characters.

I don’t mean to say that this is entirely a bad thing. We should show people a Chicago that’s not the industrial hardscrabble one of last century (though I’m sure as heck not discounting that that’s still a part of our heritage). Taken together as a whole, these stories do give a sense of Chicago’s essence that’s distinct from the representation given by Algren and his ilk, yet a cousin to that. Czyzniejewski draws a circle around the city’s soul that relays a broad understanding of it to the reader; someone like Algren breaks your nose with more of a pinpoint representation. They’re just different methods of conveying what Chicago is.

I enjoyed many or most of the dramatic fictions in the book. They seemed to draw a picture of a Chicago that sits comfortably in a dim bar, clearly a regular, elbows back, feet up, gesticulating confidently and passionately about politics and sports. There are a crop of figures, like David Hasselhoff, that should be familiar to non-Chicagoans, making the book more appropriate for a general audience. This is probably good, at least for Czyzniejewski. It’s just a different fictional Chicago than what I had hoped for.

So after all this hand-wringing about faithful representations and the soul of the city, what’s the verdict? Ultimately, I don’t think it’s fair to measure Czyzniejewski against the standards of my Chicago. I should just go write my own stories or poems if I don’t feel he captured the Chicago I know. Because that’s the thing that Czyzniejewski has made me realize, shaking me out of my solipsism--there are infinite Chicagos, and they’re all legitimate. Czyzniejewski puts forth a fresh, creative perspective on my city. I’m glad he didn’t go the Algren route. There’s too much else out there.

Rachel Hyman lives in Chicago and edits Banango Lit and Banango Street. She went to poetry camp when she was 13. Find her at www.andserenading.com.

Come to our April Fools' Day Party at Beauty Bar this evening! We will be officially releasing volume two of our Chicago Issue, and many of our talented authors will be reading. Doors open at 7, and the reading will begin at 8.

The fulsome visages of the collected fools are as follows:

Chris Bower is a playwright and the host of the Ray's Tap Reading Series. You can find him at:holdmyhorses.com

Paul Durica is the founder of Pocket Guide to Hell tours and Reenactments. The Chicagoan and Poetry have published his work recently.

Andrew Farkas' Self-Titled Debut is available through Subito Press. He is currently a gentleman of leisure.

Jac Jemc's first book, My Only Wife, is out later this month from Dzanc Books. She is also the poetry editor of decomP.

Tim Jones-Yelvington has fashioned himself indie lit's first pop star.

Francesco Levato is a poet, translator, and filmmaker. Author of four books of poetry he holds an MFA in Poetry, and is working towards a PhD in English Studies.

Joe Meno is one bad mother, who also happens to be a father.

Writer/novelist and editor and blogger and academic and prankster and father of two and department chair:davisschneiderman.com

Yvonne Strumecki’s finally getting PAID to do what she loves, travel the country & sing. Published bc of bacon. How is her life even real?

Ben Tanzer is the author of the books 99 Problems, You Can Make Him Like You, My Father's House and So Different Now among others.

Steven & Maja Teref translated Assembly, the selected poems of Novica Tadić (Host Publications, 2009).

Michael Zapata is a writer and educator living in Chicago. He is a founding editor of MAKE. He works as an editor at ANTIBOOKCLUB.

Our second volume of the Chicago Issue is now available to pre-order through the independent publisher Curbside Splendor. This edition of the magazine is a continuation of our 50th issue featuring local Chicago writers, including the work of Ben Tanzer, Tim Jones-Yevington, Zach Dodson, Fred Sasaki, Joe Meno, Natalie Edwards and Chris Bower, among others. The cost of each issue is $12, and will be mailed in February. Order your copy here now!

On the cover of Curbside Splendor Issue 1, Spring 2011, there are soft white lights from blurred black streetlamps. An allusion to the cover art as well as the content, it is simple yet alluring. This newly developed literary magazine publishes fiction and poetry. It hails from the Chicago neighborhood, Logan Square. Edited by Victor David Giron, this semi-annual magazine brings to light urban (and sometimes sub-urban) settings.

Photography is intermixed within the text. The black and white images capture urbanization¾ through photojournalistic city landscapes, abstraction, and close ups. All photos are taken either by designer of the magazine Karolina Koko Faber or by photographers: Garrett Holden, Michael San Filippo, and Eirik Gumney.

This magazine can be defined from a poem entitled, “What We Talk About When We Talk About the End,” in which Ally Malinenki writes, “It goes in different directions. I try to stay away from the panic.” Each story or poem takes the reader in some new direction while exploring the "panic" of life, whether it is meeting your death somehow on Rue de Nil in opening story "Second-Hand Blue," meditating on city streets in Frankie Metro's poem "Kingsley Ave.," or living as children struggling during the month of Ramadan in Farah Ghuznavi's story "Waiting for God."

These different directions also take us into fiction winners of Curbside’s 2010 Winter Short Story Award Opportunity. Brandon Jennings “Doc the Fifth” is the first place story of a soldier in the Iraqi War. Second place winner Yovani Flores introduces us to a Puerto Rican father’s kitchen habits in “El Lloron.” Third place story “Onida” by Michael San Filippo takes us through young adult's troubled relationships.

Everything in this issue begs to have the reader understand what it means to share stories (tragedies or successes) with people that are close to us. They also show how strangers can influence our lives. That's what being an urbanite is all about, lives intersecting other lives. The casualness of the issue gleams what all of us are looking for: meaning in the obvious, the routine, and the fascination in the behavior of people. Curbside Splendor focuses on appreciating the substance of what it means to be urban.