In our current world “hipster” is a developing status term. Hipsters are cool, neat, fetch, and whatever else you want to call them. Even if you make fun of hipsters, you’re still talking about them. This new fashion and lifestyle has infiltrated many lives, especially those of young people. There are hubs for hipsters and products associated with this lifestyle. Hubs being certain restaurants, as well as clothing stores or internet sites. Products are toy fisheye cameras, Pabst Blue Ribbon, high waisted pants, and many other things. Certain products clash: while some hipsters go all leather and native others go with plastic rhinestone bra’s and shiny pants. Certain animals are popular on clothes like owls, and now foxes and back in the day it was cats. I’ll admit to wearing plenty of these things myself, because most of it is fun! Who doesn’t want to look like a shiny life-sized beta fish? I love it, and I am not being sarcastic.

What I do not get, is the arrogant personality associated with these haircuts with blunt bangs and feather earrings. So many people I meet often boast their intelligence, and maybe less these days with Madonna songs, and Diesel clothing advertisements about getting “stupid,” but when I was about 16 everyone I met boasted the Dostoevsky, Danielewski, Bukowski, Welsh, Burgess, or Salinger books they were reading. So I remember the first time I entered an often talked about store: Urban Outfitters. I expected cult classic books, books about up and coming movements or artists once I saw books at a distance, but I was wrong. They, to this day, carry a lot of picture books meant for coffee tables that I’m sure people look at once and then forget about. It isn’t that the contents are boring, some are very interesting, but they lack variety and find popularity out of suggesting that “this book is cool, you’ll really like it!”

I guess where my sadness comes from is that so many people spend time in clothing stores, and clearly many clothing stores sell books but they are mostly picture books and things that most can look at and retain while in the store. They aren’t even selling things that people necessarily want to buy. The books are interesting, yes. They show me things I didn’t know before, yes. They are often comedic and jokeful, which can be fun. However, I think they could use the space for some more writing filled pieces in addition to what they have, but I guess there needs to be a place for coffee table and bathroom books.

And the best part? Almost everything is low-cost or free! There is something for everyone with events ranging from film and video to food and fashion to… circus arts?? Yep. If you’ve ever wanted to be the “daring young man” (or woman) on the flying trapeze, your day has come! Fly City Circus School will take you up on a trapeze set up right on Broad Street (just a few blocks south of City Hall) for only $55 and you too can learn to swing through the air with the greatest of ease.

There will also be nightly events at the Kimmel Center where an 81-foot, 6100 light bulb-filled Eiffel Tower welcomes people to french food and wine tastings, performances and even a traditional crepe cart (and of course a full service bar to keep the festivities going…)

And if you’re an iPhone user, look in the app store for the PIFA app so you can search for events by location, type, day or cost.

For college-budget-friendly events, just click here

So, do you have any plans for the next three weeks?

I haven’t read any forums about KDP, but I did have a few conversations about it with people I know. My initial fear was that it is not a recognizable source for publishing therefore participants would look like they took the easy way out. I will choose to stick with the traditional way of doing things in order to build a stronger backbone: I’ve learned a lot from rejection letters. However, KDP seems like a grand induction ceremony to the world of literature and paid publishing, but anyone can self-publish now and the idea of quality work disappears. This process also distances writers from the complex process of publishing, and those submitting to KDP may only get that far. The problem is that Amazon gets a lot of traffic and the idea of money seems very exciting. Do writers choose instant publishing or work harder?

Broken Pencil’s Indie Writers’ Deathmatch is an annual writing competition that the magazine offers for a prize and publication. The magazine takes submissions over the course of a few months, and eventually eight stories are chosen to post on the website for reader votes. There are six voting rounds for the best story and the winner takes all! On March 14, 2011, Broken Pencil announced David Griffin Brown’s Brink as the winner for this year! Great Job!

The Literary Death Match is co-created by Todd Zuniga, the founder of Opium. It is a live literary competition split into multiple episodes. These episodes have occurred in New York City, Beijing, Toronto, and many other cities throughout the world. The live competitions include seven minute presentations from four famous and emerging writers. After two finalists are picked, the literary aspect of the competition is replaced by a comedic and action packed performance to determine the winner. Learn more at their website where there are tons of fun videos to watch!

Author Dani Shapiro, perhaps best known for the best-selling Slow Motion, her memoir of decadence and death, sits in as editor in the tenth entry in the Best New American Voices series: the 2010 edition.

How I am reading the best voices of 2010 while sitting a 2009 living room is beyond me. Perhaps the suggestion is that these time-traveling voices are the ones we ought to watch for in the new year. I was never much good at science.

At any rate, a leisurely 8-hour bus trek from Massachusetts to Philadelphia (including the obligatory breakdown at the side of the highway, but the extent of literature I could make out in the darkness were terse text messages) provided me with plenty of time to chisel my way through Shapiro’s selections, gleaned from writing programs and summer conferences such as Bread Loaf and Sewanee. So far the memorably named Boomer Pinches has underwhelmed, David James Poissant writes of broken father-son relationships with the same exterior grit and interior sentimentality of a Bruce Willis character, Claire O’Connor tackles cancer and great white sharks, and Christian Moody of the University of Cincinatti outdoes his peers with the truly original “Horusville,” a place where trees have eyes and record the lurid private lives of the town residents.

The Best New American Voices series first came on the scene in that dastardly year 2000 (remember stocking up on water and canned green beans? I know you do) and has since been edited by, in addition to the changing yearly guest editors, executive editor John Kulka and writer and critic Natalie Danford.

There are two types of Household Names. Strain A of Household Names are so pervasive that even a young Hellen Keller would have a hard time escaping them: Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Danielle “superfluous use of adjectives like ‘velvety’ or ‘dazzling”” Steele.

Then there is Strain B of Household Names, subtype Not-Really-Indie-Indies, the literary equivalent of films like I Heart Huckabees or Little Miss Sunshine. Hollywood? Not quite. But art house? I don’t think so. These writers are more often known by their works than their names — The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera), What is the What (Valentino Achak Deng), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers).

Then, we have those writers who are not exactly obscure, for no writer, published, in print, read by eyes not belonging to friends and family and exes who cock their heads and wonder, Is that character me? is ever really obscure. But they are not household names, not even in the homes of self-styled intellectuals who make lots of references to Camus or Colette.

Kate Braverman is one of these not-exactly-obscurities. Born in 1950 and based in L.A., I feel Braverman deserves a bit of applause for her ventures into experimental hybrids of prose and poetry. Her short story “Vanishing Acts,” featured in the Spring 2004 issue of the Mississippi Review, goes out on a limb — out on a tightrope — and dashes plot and character to the ground in favor of sheer atmosphere. How lazy, bitter aspiring writers may be tempted to think — but “Vanishing Acts” is anything but. Braverman successfully takes an abstract concept and manages to conjure up exactly what she means while never directly explaining herself.

“This is how to vanish,” her — story? poem? essay? — begins. “[Vanished women] wear boots because they prefer walking,” she writes. “It’s the only way to become intimate with a city. You must kiss each brick, each cobblestone with your feet.”

We are never allowed to know explicitly what a vanished woman is. But we feel it. The writing is heard with the bones, not the eyes.

Hailed as “inspirational” and “timeless,” by San Francisco-based writer  Robin Dutton-Cookston, and described as being “so much better than what I can describe” by Christine Zibas, a columnist for Associated Content, Bird by Bird is a hybrid of self-deprecation, humor, tough love, and flowery metaphors that all coalesce into colorful writing advice. You won’t find any straightforward exercises, prompts, or methodologies. What you will find is a shoulder to lean on in the darkest depths of writer’s  block. Lamott deploys an army of anecdotes to illustrate just how hard writing is. She offers empathy without coddling the would-be writer and demands that you sit, think, and write.

Sound easy? Try it. And when your 10,000 page novel is eluding you? Grab Bird by Bird. In the words of her father, Anne Lamott will tell you: “‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

• Average Guys: Impress your bleeding-heart girlfriends!
• Wannabe Poets: Get tips on how to darken your blacker-than-black wardrobe!
• Angsty Teens: Jot down lines you like and use them to protest your parents!

Furthermore, people who are — no! — legitimately interested in the simple pleasures of a nice, grandmotherly-cum-trendy cup of tea and/or fabulous poetry will enjoy themselves.

On November 10 — that’s tomorrow, for those among you who grope blindly at thin air like angry babies deprived of their Blackberries and iCal organizational tools — Painted Bride Quarterly is very pleased to present count ‘em 2! poets at Bubble House.

To get all the W’s out of the way in one fell swoop:

• What: Poetry reading.
• When: November 10, 7:30 p.m.
• Where: Bubble House, located at 3404 Sansom St. in good old Philadelphia
• Who: Lynn Levin, Ernest Hilbert
• Why: To spread great literature and all that good lofty stuff.
• How: Magic.