ALLHANDSON INTRODUCTION

by Jim Munroe

Mr. Todd Dills is a friend of mine, I should say that up front. If I was inclined to the vernacular, I’d say we were “buds.” We’ve toured both his country and mine, performed in warehouses and galleries and punk venues and bookstores, and drank together afterwards. But I don’t blurb friends, unless I have something to say -- it makes me feel like a phoney. Even though this Salingerian sentiment is a facile one -- for God’s sakes, as a novelist I lie for a living -- I have to deal with the mental consequences if I ignore it.

So if I rarely blurb people, what am I doing writing an introduction? Well, Mr. Todd Dills is a fellow mad scientist, and I respect the work he is doing in the field of alternate publishing methodologies. Most of the stories within were originally published in a double-sided 11” x 17” sheet of paper. This broadsheet, free to the public, might have been easily dismissed as an oddball artefact, except that the quality of the editing, design, and writing was not dismissible. It made a place between the fragility of the manuscript page and the credibility of the magazine. It’s an interesting place. And for people who trust their own instincts as to what they like, and don’t need to be reassured by the quiet whispers that indicate significance and importance, it’s an exciting one too.

Most readings are boring. There’s good reasons for this -- writers often become writers because they’re not terribly talented verbally. Consequently, readings are a ritual, like church, in which one reaffirms one’s faith in poetry, prose, etc. For people who are passionate about writing, this moribund and dried-up tradition bears no relation to the pleasure and excitement we get from it. The model of music, with its merging of populist poetry and dynamic energy, is a source of inspiration for Dills and people like myself that believe that writing should be performed.

The first time I saw Todd Dills was after a long train journey to Chicago from Toronto. He had invited me to read at a launch for the2ndhand at a bar called The Empty Bottle. I came in to the dark, crowded room and saw a Bo Duke looking character on stage, spotlit and sweating.

Todd, leather pants or no, was being mostly ignored by the hipsters crowding the tables in the back, and his performance was suffering. He was suffering. Later, when I went up, I too suffered nearly complete indifference to my golden words. Joe Meno, one of the best readers I know, heckled the audience, but deep down he was suffering too.

We suffered for our art, for our hubris of thinking we slapdash fuse a literary head onto a rock ‘n’ roll body, but it only spurred us on to more carefully considered hybrids. We experimented on ourselves, dipping our fragile egos into the audience to see what reaction we’d cause, not knowing if it was acid or base. Later, we hit the road together, performing in places like Ann Arbor, NYC, Cleveland, Montreal, Greenville (SC), Boston, New Orleans; now, after these years of tinkering, more often than not the performances work. People are entertained. People are touched. People are enriched.

This elusive balance we’ve struck is hardly something unique – people all over are fed up and violating the rules of reading out of exasperation and mischievous delight. It’s wonderful to see people not just pushing the envelope, but to see people realizing that there’s envelopes in all sorts and sizes.

Finally here’s one that can fit an 11” x 17” broadsheet called the2ndhand.

ALLHANDSON EDITOR’S NOTE

Welcome one! welcome all! for we are happy to have you, here, with us--we don’t know how we were ever able to do it, but we have, and here you are! --anonymous ape spotted at the corner of Noble and Augusta avenues, Chicago, IL, USA

THE2NDHAND was conceived some time in the spring of A.D. 1999, in Logan Square, Chicago, USA, as a space for the literary engagement of our time and place and, as is the case with any decent magazine, a tangible medium through which writers would engage their own creative processes and reach an audience all the while. Basic stuff. As it happened, I was a mere 22 years young and unemployed at the time, though working quite extensively myself on developing my own written work--the magazine space became (upon launch in February 2000 at the Angel’s compound in Chicago) a broadsheet with a guerilla network of distribution, co-conspirators spread out over the U.S. and in Europe in cities and who would lovingly drop THE2NDHAND in cafes and bookstores and bars. A singularly inexpensive endeavor, as it became, in a time of coin laundry, $30 hardbacks, outrageous U.S. war expenditures, and corporate tax breaks, conceived likewise along the lines of DIY record releases and medieval broadsides for raucous Brit ballad poetry. And so it went.

Later that year, the2ndhand.com was launched to complement the printed broadsheet, providing yet another space for storytelling and experimentation. The content of the magazine continues to straddle that line, its pages a little mini tug-of-war between beautiful, campfire-style storytelling and high-voltage experimentation. (These two main currents, further, characterize the work you will find in this book.)

The publication arrived with appropriately messianic fervor! Literate Apes Unite! was the slogan, and if we all couldn’t necessarily claim direct simian ancestors, we could certainly embrace the sentiment: we would be the nasty counterpoint to the prevailing underclass of literary defeatists, to our stodgy brethren at the other magazines out there as well. (As it turned out, I am grateful for the support of a variety of these very same publications, accrued over the years through helpful announcements, advice, and general camaraderie, though I will reserve thanks here in favor of one-on-one exchanges and likewise resist any urge to name-drop in favor of presenting, simply, the work of the authors as they came, as it’s they who have kept this endeavor alive. They come from Chicago, to be sure, and Boston and Charlotte, NC, and Nashville and Portland and Bellingham and Philadelphia and NYC and are expatriated in Japan and England and....) It’s been a fruitful four years; here’s toasting to at least four more.

This book is organized into five sections, and a brief explanation is in order.

THINK LIKE A MOUNTAIN: purloined from Paul A. Toth’s magnificent story of the same name, the title of this section refers to a tendency among the best of our prose to reach toward near-speculative extremes in content and dizzying heights in aesthetic. In this section you will find the best of features from the broadside and some exclusives as well.

ROCK ’N’ ROLL: wrapped up in the spirit of the mag was a certain approach a number of us had garnered from active involvement in the greater DIY (punk-) rock culture of the 80s and 90s, an approach that emphasized the content of the work over the method of its dissemination, essentially (a rare bird in our time, for sure: just think of those weapons-technology lessons we get on the evening news). In this section you will find our little paean to the culture, of a sort.

ITINERARIES: these schedule-narratives take the form of the pre-figured travel itinerary, detailed down to the minute, though the most successful of them constitute full story movements, all the trappings included. In the words of Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian futurist, “In the monkey economy...insults aimed at us can always be jotted down.... We prefer the Tower of Babel to Parliament. We play the fool in this world in order to be free. Routine we transform into anecdotes....”

A LIVE: so much of an emerging writer’s content is informed by his/her very sticky living. The stories in this section are part of a strong current of autobiography-in-fiction informing our ongoing work. From Solórzano’s very true-to-all-accounts dispatches from her family’s native Nicaragua to the imagined life of the alcoholic Shelly in Toth’s “The Village Idiot,” these stories represent the full range of this current.

THE TRYOUTS: this most heterogeneous of sections tells the tale of those who would tell it differently. Here Mickey Hess samples Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s impromptu speech at the Grammys (among other things), Eric Graf writes in the style of Gaddis’s J.R., Kevin Ripp engages a particularly coquettish online text generator named Esme, Amina Cain tells of holes in time and place, and....

THE APPENDIX: throughout the main text, you will find the bit of notation, with a number to its right. This particular bit of notation refers to a related item set in the appendix at the back of this book, the number to the page number on which you will find this item, anything from a piece by the same writer to a logic puzzle to a bit esoteric or otherwise obscure THE2NDHAND history. We’ve done our simian best in compiling the appendix for maximum enjoyment. So, enjoy.