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Knee-Jerk – 2010

Offline Volume 1

2010

Annual

Julie J. Nichols

From its Facebook page: “An online literary journal devoted to experimentation, humor, and the crossbreeding of the arts, featuring stories and essays by established and emerging writers, interviews with writers, and reviews of just about anything.”

From its Facebook page: “An online literary journal devoted to experimentation, humor, and the crossbreeding of the arts, featuring stories and essays by established and emerging writers, interviews with writers, and reviews of just about anything.”

What I’m reviewing here: the first ever offline issue of said online journal.

From the website:

Think of Knee-Jerk as a dinner table filled with friends and family. We’re all sharing ideas, stories, laughter, and a whole lot of corndogs. The table is round, everyone is facing each other; everyone is enjoying the company. Next to the published writer is an emerging writer, a person who’s searching for a home for his or her first story. Sitting across from them is a musician who finds time to squeak out a story between studio sessions. Also at the table, the casual reader of literature. And the guy who’s read Infinite Jest twice.

We invite you to pull up a chair and contribute to the ongoing dialogue. Like any good discussion, we’ll venture beyond that knee-jerk reaction into what [important name] called [quote about venturing beyond knee-jerk reactions].

At Knee-Jerk we hope to evoke conversations that bring everyone a little closer together, that make the literary world a little smaller. And a little bigger.

I totally like (I totally thumbs-up!) Knee-Jerk Offline 01. I wish I’d known their submissions deadline was August 31—I’d have sent them something. I want to be in their pages. Those pages make me smile, big time. They have a worldview that’s street-smart, chortle-worthy, wry and dry. I might say my favorite thing about this first offline issue (they reproduce in their very hold-able-sized paper volume some of what’s been published already in their year-round online mag, including new work, never, I presume, before seen anywhere)—my favorite thing is the “Reviews of Things.” These are not like this review. If I were to write this review the way Knee-Jerk “Reviews” “Things,” I would do something like this:

Well, you could be a writer, or you could be a bull rider, whoopin’ it up on the back of a studly four-ton Australian named Chainsaw with horns and a rep—only nine cowboys ever made it to eight seconds on his back—and the point is, just watching him makes your knee jerk, your tongue cleave to the roof of your mouth, your popcorn fly—what does that mean, knee jerk? Doesn’t it mean reflex of gut? Not acid reflux (which is painful and unpleasant) but reflex action of the best and least-occult kind—my knee jerk reaction to Knee-Jerk is, unlike my reaction to bull riding, settle in! Read some more! Laugh again!

If I wrote that, you’d get the idea. Knee-Jerk plays with the oddities and juxtapositions of real life by mashing up everything from “Man of the Year” by Michael Czyzniejewski to “Academics” by Joe Meno to Greg Fiering’s comic strip Migraine Boy and the color insert—but you’d also get the tone of the entire issue, and you’d have to make a sort of snort-whoop of hilarity because the thing reviewed is approached from a side angle that shows it not exactly as it is or was but as it might be seen by someone with a very specific, very individual pair of eyes. Aye of pears. You’d say “aye,” I promise.

In this first offline issue (whose very subtle cover shows a knee, which just might jerk if you tap it in that sexy little depression under the cap, and whose logo looks just like a knee-jerk feels), we get Jacob Knabb’s review of his pathetically typical freshman experience in “My Freshman Experience, A Year in Review,” Adam Drent’s reviews of the vagaries of closed-captioning and the 2000 movie Child’s Play as an eight-year-old child might have viewed it (“the most terrifying movie ever made”). Also a review of the entire Dan Fogelberg oeuvre as remembered by Alison Powell.

We get (non-bylined) “polls” inviting your opinion on such things as “the most versatile kinds of pants” and “the best Sue Grafton novel never published” (I couldn’t decide between T is for Title and I is for I Wrote Another One!).

We get “Notes” on politics, fanaticism, insomnia, and money (“Just dress up and go shake hands. Fake it till you make it. It being money”), by the charmingly observant Kathleen Rooney and Elisa Gabbert.

And we get terrific, grab-you-from-the-first-line stories like “Clover” by Billy Lombardo, “Believers” by Jerry Gabriel, and ten others.

Plus “Talks” with Harold Ramis and Glenn David Gold.

And if you do buy the offline issue (which I think you should), you’ll find arty surprises I haven’t even mentioned—images to keep you on that studly demon Chainsaw way longer than eight seconds, I promise.
[kneejerkmag.com]

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