Cycle Issue #2

Cycle Magazine, the physical offshoot of acycle.org, will soon (relatively speaking) have its second issue out.

This is exciting.

acycle.org and the magazine are creations of a friend of mine, Richard. (spawned, this is true, during an evening drinking Czech Republic absinthe on my porch). It's the truest form of a labor of love. There is no funding, there is no advertising, there are no sales (but he is working on that). This is all self produced, self distributed, self funded.

I have been critical of the quality of cycle. Specifically of the writing and the low standards for publication that it presents. Richard and I have argued about this - a big part of cycle is to represent the small press and to represent the aspirations of people currently involved in the act of creation for the sake of creation; people that may yet have developed all the skills nor accumulated the neccessary experience to truelly hone their craft. I understand this. So things that show up in cycle will be of a wider spectrum of quality. But there has got to be at least a spark, a twinkle, a little ember of talent somewhere in the pages and pages of cliched dribble that gets through. Richard, I think now, agrees with me, and the quantity of stuff that gets published has dropped dramatically. I'm not sure the quality has risen yet. But that's a matter of time.

Richard and others have been frusterated by my critique, the harshness with which I "reveiw" that which is produced. Understand, I love cycle. I really do. I love the labor, I love the desperation, the failures, the obscurity. Because it makes every little success that much more sweet. It is this love that makes me so critical. If I didn't care, then I wouldn't spend the little time I have so much as reading it, let alone allowing myself to be emotionally involved.

I want to be more involved, but I am stretched quite thin. For me, writing has always been this struggle between the desire and need to create and my complete inability to comunicate an idea to the world. I am, in short, a bad writer. (bad, like evil, like lock me up it's so terrible.) I would spend more time on writing if that time wasn't already spent writing mind-numbing research papers and brain cell suffocating reviews of other people's research papers for school. Doing that shit will take the soul right out of you and then strangle you with its corspe.

The second issue of cycle will so be out. I haven't seen it, not yet, but I have seen my contribution to it. Those bits Richard selected to represent my own output. You know what? It isn't bad. It's actually a little inspiring. I mean, I've made progress. It feels good.

I'm not sure how we're destributing this issue. The last one was free, and we placed it on some racks in independent bookstores. This one may be different.

acycle.org needs writers. And not just writers, but creators of any kind of medium that can be presented through a computer. The website is going through a rebirth (the servers it originally existed on went kaput, and Ricard got to learn a wonderful lesson about keeping back-ups of shit.) If you are interested, email me and check out the site.