This is Joe Martinez here, from the board. I was lucky enough to get the Halloween blog (I apologize in advance if this gets put up after Halloween. If that’s the case, you can read this as a way to look back on the Halloween celebrations of 2009.)

Anyway, I want to pose a question to you guys: Is it just me, or is Southern California getting less into the Halloween spirit every year? I feel sad when I think back to my childhood and remember whole neighborhoods covered in cobwebs, plastic orange and black spider rings, and glowing pumpkins. Now, you’re lucky if a couple of the houses on your street have lights. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s what I’ve noticed over the years.

So I wanna bring back the Halloween spirit. Here’s a couple links to some fun oldies Halloween songs:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0thH3qnHTbI –This video has a montage of clips from the old pre-slasher/crapper film era.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orNpH6iyokI Screamin’ Jay Hawkins is a legend of freaky character driven monster music. You may recognize the Hocus Pocus version of this.

Finally, I have a challenge for you who like to spook yourselves. Go onto you tube to this link– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIVo_QyiZhw and pause the video. It’s a song by Alice Cooper called “This House is Haunted.” Close all the lights and make it as dark as you can in your room. Sit in the darkness for a while on your back and imagine you’re in a a dark, decrepit, haunted house. Play with this idea for a while, then play the song and either turn off your computer monitor if you have a desktop, or turn you laptop toward a wall so it doesn’t cast too much light. Listen to the words of the song and imagine you are in that haunted house. I promise on the legitimacy of the Journal, this is not a prank video, just a fun challenge if you want to scare yourself. You can also bring a friend along too so you can be scared together.

I did this with my cousins and we all got really freaked out. So, I know from experience that it can be very fun if you do it right. Anyways, that’s all I got for you Audeaminions. A domani, ciao!

–Joe Martinez

AUDEAMUS. We dare. Or better yet, Let Us Dare!

How…how…What’s the word? Daring? No. Enticing? Partially. Fated? Perhaps. Compelling? Instantly. What drew me to Audeamus was the name. It was something I had overlooked many times while reading the short stories and research within its thick glossy pages. “Never judge a book by its cover” is how the saying goes…but one should at least read and ponder on the cover, the title, the meaning, the symbolism and so and such.

I knew I wanted to be a part of this process; This process of “editing.” It has been an interesting journey getting to this point. Though, I have much admiration for what the journal itself stands for. By this I mean, I believe people see this journal as merely as a tool for a resume, grad school, or whatnot. Though, it is so much more than that. It is a chance, an experience, an…opportunity to allow the mind’s endeavors, whims, personal excitement take to paper and produce works of awe. Perhaps I praise too much, but I find Audeamus allows the young scholars of the UCs to take flight in their passions and put no restraints on how high or far they can venture. It is remarkable when one takes a moment from the busy world and consider this. That this journal is more than a tool or resource, it is academia from spirit to form..it is a renaissance man on paper…it is unlike anything before. So, to be a part of something like this is wonderful and honoring, and yet humbling.

I don’t mean to be deep here or to sound corny…never my intention ( the corny)..it is simply how I feel about being part of this journal. Though, one could say it is my mother’s influence. Always telling me pursue whatever fuels the “ Fire in the Mind.”

Although, I have been mainly speaking of the journal; I should like to add one thing on the account or behalf of Mr. Bumbledeer. He should change with the seasons and holidays; it could be an extra PR relationship with the readers, viewers, and honors students, and should he have his own facebook? Become a Fan of Mr. Bumbledeer? Side Note: Does he have a first name? What’s his back story? HA HA. It would be an interesting at least UCR located kind of symbol to make people aware and strangely curious of whom exactly is the man in the bowler with the monocle and more over what does he represent. HA. Just a thought.

I am madly in love with you. I love the way your moustache bears resemblance to your bowtie; how it is ever so furry. I wish you to grow your moustache, so I can braid it while you tell me stories about buffalo mating rituals. I want to giggle at everything; giggle at the twitching of your eye-glass chain, giggle at the eye-glass, giggle at your eye. I want to twitter and grow dragon wings; eat salmon while riding your hat to the laundry mat, where we’ll do our laundry. Together. Let us be together, my darling, my snookums, my muffin beef-cakes, my pumpkin numkins, my goochie-goochie-goo-ums. I love your thick eyebrows. I love to imagine making a uni-brow with my fat permanent marker. I just want to draw all over your face. Take me now. Just take me. OHH BUMBLEDEER! BUMMMMBLE DEEER! BUUMMMM BLE DEEEEER. OHHH! By the power of the almighty desert cactus and water chestnut cookie mixed with hummus deep fried in buttermilk chocolate with raisin lamb-chops sautéed in magic pesto drumstrick chicken wing juice salted and beat down to the pulp…I command thee to take me…

to get boba.

KK thanks. T2yl. Laterz, LOL. LMAO. zOMG zors. Pwn!!!!11!11!11one.

Kicks and sexy giggles,
Your secret admirer.

The National Endowments for the Arts reports that the number of Americans who claimed they read novels, poems, or plays has increased by 3.5% since 2002; granted, the vast majority are not necessarily reading “high literature,” but the fact that more people are putting down their copy of Us Weekly and actually reading something instead of looking at photos of Brittany Spear’s new babybump is something of an improvement.

President Obama, who not only represents much needed change in the administration, reads––and not only that, he reads what many experts consider falls under the high, glittery parasol of literary fiction. If people fawn over what Michelle Obama wears, consider then what the effect of Obama’s literary bully pulpit can accomplish. Hopefully (and there’s a lot of hope when speaking about the Obama presidency), the guy can catch a break and find the time to read amidst two wars, climate change, and the economic crisis.

The current economic crisis has also affected the publishing world. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has indefinitely stopped new acquisitions. The little-talked about Black Wednesday (of course literary people will be so dramatic about their Wednesday) consisted of firings in Random House, Simon and Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Thomas Nelson all. And yet, publishers can find the money to give million-dollar advances for celebrity books; giving $7 to Seinfeld, $14 million to the aforementioned Ex-Mrs. K-Fed, and $11 to the Caribou Queen, Sarah Palin. The current major publishing model doesn’t work and literary-conscious people are now turning their eyes to independent publishers. Susan Straight, in her undergaduate fiction workshop, urged her students to submit their work to independent publishers because, as she said, “Not only are you chances a lot higher, but those other guys aren’t going to be around for much longer.”

And where does that leave Audeamus? Hopefully writers in the UC-system can find some refuge in Audeamus, because as our pool of submitters are slightly smaller, we can devote more time to submissions than say suits in a board room. And we don’t only publish literature either, because it’s out mantra to consider accepting “anything reproducible on paper.” So within the covers of an issue of the journal, there will be not only fiction and poetry, but also research, essays, and artwork. In effect, we’re luring the literary-minded person to read the paper on the development of genetically modified crops and the scientific to read about the origin of butterflies. Audeamus likes to stand a few centimeters too close to people’s bubble of comfort, in order to be able to offer something new and unexpected. That would be nice right now, something new and unexpected, to match the times.

Let me clear up a few minor details, first:

No, we didn’t start three years ago. We started three billion years ago.

Contrary to popular belief, we have no official affiliations with pirates, cannibals, or children.

We are adamantly opposed to the nefarious schemings of all three of these groups.

And we don’t practice ritual sacrifice, except of board members we have no use for.

Anyway, we can start in one of two places, to trace the birth of the journal. One has to do with Mr. Bumbledeer, formally known as Cornelius Albert Bumbledeer, infamous failed oil baron of the Southern Province of China. Or we can go back to well before the Dinosaurs even had a clue, and the real dominate species were large predatory birds who invented, among other things, saddles and paper (made out of the crushed up bones of various baby mammals).

Where do these two time periods meet? The Inland Empire.

So, a truncated version: The birds invented time travel. Then everything went downhill, the most intelligent of the birds managed to escape through the Time Travel Device (which was a lot like a ten storey ipod), and ended up in the year 2005. Meanwhile, Mr. Bumbledeer, drunk on the intoxicating fumes of constant failure, hopped a whaling ship from Beijing to Long Beach, rode on the underbelly of a train further into the meat of California, and found himself sleeping at the doorstep of UC Riverside’s honors office.

Then he was arrested.

A hunting party was formed, and successfully downed the only time-traveling, literature-loving bird, who had been attacking private 4-seater airplanes across the IE’s skies.

Around its neck was found an envelope: “Deliver to C.A. Bumbledeer”.

What was contained was the first issue of Audeamus.

What happened to Mr. Bumbledeer? Sent to country. The truth is that he never wore a bowler, that was a filthy exaggeration. The monocle was really a permanent scar he had received from venturing a bit too close to the guy they called “the guy who brands you to make it look like you have a monocle”. He doesn’t even know that the eighteenth century existed— as far as he is concerned, Time is an erroneous conception of reality, and the only thing that exists is the moment, whereas the past is like steam and the future is like unformed clouds. His only suit is orange, and has the numbers 6730231 on the front.

And the mustache? Mr. Bumbledeer was forced to shave off his beard, but allowed to keep it. He doesn’t even like the way it looks.

So, we’re on our third issue of the journal now. We’ve recovered a bit from our rocky starts, managed to find some sort of system which we can rely on in the creation of the journal. And we have yearly banquets. We’ll probably be serving barbequed… bird… for a few more years yet. The honors office has a huge freezer in the back.

****
So today was a meeting.  We were stuck in an office for it, so we all crammed in there.

We have a better mood in there, anyways.

So, we pulled apart plastic frogs, talked about Patrick and Kevin’s play, talked about AJ beaming the internet up on the wall through his eyes, talked about programming and amazing poster design, decided we had different levels of quirk, put up a bunch of information, decided on phase 2 of the audeamus website, named “prettydeamus”, talked a surprising amount about theater, got three quotes on cost for making audeamus while in the meeting, and obsessed about Mr. Bumbledeer.

I love that group.

The best part about being in Audeamus is our massive reading session. It’s a great bonding time where we all get the chance to spend far too much time together reading over all of the awesome submissions that we get each year. When we were prepping for this massive reading stretch we were joking that we would need to bring sleeping bags in order to get through the amount of submissions this year. It sounded like an exaggeration, but almost wound up being true as we spent eleven hours in the honors office pouring through entry after entry. After the initial reading comes one of the loner parts in the decision making process, deliberating about what can and cannot be put in the journal. Naturally this is followed by rereading the entries and many more arguments as everyone fights over whether or not to publish pieces. At the end of the day we were all feeling rather zombie-like as we left the office into the dark of night in search sleep, or possibly brains, you never know.

However, there is some justification behind the whole process. You go to class, suffer for an hour or so, suffer through another class, and another, and another. And it doesn’t stop there. You finally get back to your room, your bed, your couch, wherever, and you have homework to do. You have studying to do. Writing essays, flipping through textbook pages (and I know you all hate the super fine print. We all do). So, in order to escape the reality of school for a while, you sit down at your desk and zone into your computer for a bit. You let the monitor’s white light drench your face as your eyes widen, pupils dilate…and you’re hooked. Just like that.

So, to fuel the fire, I’m giving you three of the most captivating videos I’ve seen this week. You don’t want to feel left out when all of your friends are talking about them in class, right?

Have fun, and happy watching!

The year of Audeamus’s inaugural issue, I took it upon myself to create the Audeamus “design philosophy.” This was a term that I had been throwing around after becoming interested in contentious commercial design that previous summer; meaning I didn’t really have a clue what it meant. Determined to procrastinate on reading, I drew up a few sketches (in pen, which made my tie dye-shirt-wearing high school art teacher sob in a corner, accompanied by one of the many skulls he owned) and came up with a few ideas. I still have the things hidden away in storage in my parent’s garage, and as long as the rats haven’t gotten to them, perhaps I will post those scraps on the blog someday; however, if the little guys have gotten to the sketches, I hope the inevitable indigestion those sketches caused didn’t kill the poor rodents. Not to say the things were horrendously bad, they were ideas, which is what were were grasping for in those early days; whether they were good or bad was not in question. Quickly shifting through them at a board meeting, the editors came upon something that they liked.

This is where memory serves to liven things up a bit.

The previous night, one of the board members, Kevin (who has been chosen this year to be one of the editor in chiefs after it was found that he possessed over sixty-five-percent of the eighteen marks that denote a future editor in chief as foretold in the Audeamus Sutra, which is not to be confused with the Amadeus Sutra) had a dream in which he and his tug boat had been swallowed by a leviathan at sea. Typically the dream would end there. However, this night, while in the black belly of the beast, a shining light appeared, dissipating the darkness of the whale’s digestive tack. The source of this light was a being in eighteenth-century dress, whose face wielded the power of both a monocle and a mustache, and whose head was crowned by the fanciest of bowlers. Kevin, compelled to ask were one would obtain such a chic fashion sense, approached the figure. The mustachioed man then lifted his bowler and, like a magician or neu-age shaman, called forth two spirits. The first sprit was clothed in stripes of goldenrod and ebony, she wielded a poisonous rapier, had the ability to make flowers bloom, and––despite whatever laws of aerodynamics dictated––could fly. The second figure wore what seemed like giant branches, and whose demeanor said “Hey dude, don’t get up in my grill or I will be forced to pop a cap in you,” but whose eyes like headlights said, “Worry naught, for I eat plants alone.” Thus the man spoke:

My name is a chimera forged from these two spirits. Utter this name in time of need and you will be blessed with a cornucopia of gifts.

That was when Kevin woke from his dream.

TO BE CONTINUED

Sylvia Plath Reads “Daddy” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM
Billie Holiday Performs “Strange Fruit” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs
But Does It Float (design ephemera) http://butdoesitfloat.com/

This is a painting I made of Audeamus’ consciousness. It reminds me of my childhood, and my unrequited love, both of which are constant sources of sorrow to me.