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Watch the ALT LIT GOSSIP 2011 Awards Broadcast

HTMLGIANT — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:00:09 +0000

ALT LIT GOSSIP ran a live awards broadcast hosted by Steve Roggenbuck. Below you can watch the archive footage.

Laurel Nakadate’s Untitled : Pornstars reading poems

HTMLGIANT — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:19:30 +0000

We are very proud to house Untitled, a film of pornstars reading poems, directed by Laurel Nakadate, based on text by Dora Malech.

Following the break, an afterword by our own Jackie Wang.

Poetry readings. Whether you love them or hate them, they can sometimes be an uncomfortable or bland affair. Some contemporary authors are committed to reinventing the format of “the reading”—using vulnerability, performance, and other attention-grabbing techniques to pump a little life into these often humdrum happenings. But video artist Laurel Nakadate takes the “the reading” to a whole new level.

In the video Untitled, Laurel has porn actresses read poems by Dora Malech. The interplay between Dora’s poems and the premise of the video is brilliant. The poems grapple with the tension between corporeality and disembodied intellect—being pure body or pure voice, being of the flesh or of the mind, but they settle on neither. Laurel’s video project and Dora’s text collapses those distinctions, using the body itself to speak. “If you give me a dollar I’ll take my top off / and let you see my heart,” reads actress Robbye Bentley. The body is not that which is mute, but that which sings. Another poem speaks to the ecstasy of being an embodied human with the line, “Believe me / when I tell you I’m kept / awake by the light / from my body, splayed star.”

The porn actresses in the video were asked to come to the “audition” (the audition being the final video itself) wearing their usually business attire: lacy lingerie, bright color bras. One woman—Robbye Bentley—even delivers her poems topless, covering her breasts with the poem “script” about a woman taking her top off for money. In recontextualizing the poetry reading event by having porn actresses read poems in settings like bathrooms and bedrooms, the video also dashes another expectation: that the porn actress is somehow less intellectual than the poet. The pairing of poetry and porn initially seemed unnatural to me. On the phone I asked Laurel, “Did the actresses think it was weird to be asked to read poems? How did they react?” She said no, that they loved it, that they were excited to be a part of the project.

Dora Malech—who has a new collection of poems titled Say So out later this month—provides rich material for the basis of this video. Her poems use tongue-in-cheek sentimental clichés and idiomatic language in a way that is playful and trangressive. I read these poems as the type of “female” narratives that embrace messiness and the failure to properly perform femininity. In “Face for Radio,” she writes, “If I were an operation, I’d be fly-by-night / and very bloody.” The subject of the poem is unreliable (“late for dinner”), messy (“a regrettable houseguest, wet towel on the bed”), “poorly executed,” and flighty (“going going gone”). The title “Face for Radio”—essentially a colloquialism for “ugly”—conceptually plays with the notion of the disembodied radio announcer, but turns the phrase on its head by depicting a subject who speaks with her body: “the yapper, if you will—and I will—on the cusp / of bikini season.” Language—disembodied—can approximate the thing it speaks of, but it ultimately fails to capture the rapture of embodiment, the “miracle-cum-miracle.” In “Inventing the Body,” Dora writes, “We called the heart the heart / because we could not say its real name, / even to each other, even in the dark.”

What immediately struck me was the vulnerability of Laurel’s video. It makes you feel uncomfortable. But when I watched the video again, I thought about this question of vulnerability some more and realized that the discomfort I felt was located within myself, not in the delivery of the poems or the performers themselves. I’m not much of a reader myself—I stutter and ramble incoherently. Whatever endearing vulnerability people may find in my delivery could be directly attributed to my utter discomfort with physically being on display. But I realized that the women who were reading the poems were totally comfortable in their bodies, more at ease being physically present than I could ever be. The vulnerability lay within my expectation, as a viewer, that the actresses would feel uncomfortable reading poems, near-naked and visible. Kate Kastle, Stacey Dollar, Robbye Bentley, Lucky Starr, and Stacy Adams—the women that read the poems in this video—unsettle the viewer with their understanding of embodiment, visible in their physical comfort. Jointly, Laurel Nakadate and Dora Malech explore potential of the flesh made text and the text made flesh—not either/or but together, as bodies that sing.

Lynne Tillman Story

HTMLGIANT — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 19:52:10 +0000

[The following is a story originally published in Bald Ego magazine, and will appear in Lynne Tillman's forthcoming new story collection from Cursor in April 2011, titled Someday This Will Be Funny. The piece's title comes from Clarence Thomas's words in his testimony during the hearings, October 1991. Recently, Mr. Thomas's wife allegedly left Anita Hill a voicemail asking for her apology. The story makes interesting use of popular media snafu as subject matter, which made me wonder more about what other great books and stories are able to incorporate such into their bodies in a fictional sense fluidly. Thoughts? - ed.]

Give Us Some Dirt

On long, summer nights in Pin Point, the Georgia air hung still as a corpse, and they’d wait for a breeze to save them. The heat felt like another skin on Clarence. His Mother would say, Clarence, what have you been up to? Playing by the river again? Oh Lord, we’ve got to clean you up for church, but aren’t you something to behold? And his mother would clap her palms together or spread her arms wide, like their preacher. Oh, Lord, she’d exclaim. Sometimes she’d point to sister and lovingly scold, “She doesn’t get up to trouble like you, son.” Clarence scrubbed the mud off until his knuckles nearly bled, while his sister giggled.

These days she wasn’t laughing so much.

The dirt couldn’t be washed away, not after Clarence kneeled in their white church, and they slimed him with derision. They couldn’t see who he was, how hard he’d worked, what he’d had to do, but he knew how to act. Behave yourself, boy, Daddy would say. Clarence’s grandfather, Clarence called him Daddy, was a strict, righteous man, who never complained, not even during segregation times, didn’t say a word, so Clarence wouldn’t, either. Those days were over, and they had their freedom now. He set Daddy’s bust on a shelf near his desk in his new office.

The D.C. nights mortified him, the air as suffocating as Pin Point’s. Clarence couldn’t free himself of history’s stench. On some interminable evenings, he nearly sent that woman a message, made the call, because she’d dragged him down for their delectation. He would pick up the receiver and put it down.

The noise of the ceiling fan assaulted him like a swarm of bugs. Clarence’s jaw locked, and his strong hands balled into fists. Every pornographic day of his trial, Clarence’s wife, Virginia, sat quietly behind him. She barely moved for hours on end, didn’t betray anything, and he worried that, if she had, the calumnies would have spread even further. The sniggers and whispers would have ripped her and him to pieces. He rubbed his face, recalling her startling composure. Rigid, at attention, a soldier in his beleaguered army.

He didn’t tell Virginia what the senators whispered — if he’d tried to marry her, if they’d had sex before the Court decided Loving v. Virginia, they’d have been arrested, and wasn’t it ironic — the Court made Clarence’s dick legal in Virginia, in Virginia? The Capitol’s dirty joke. Their dry Yankee lips cracked into bloodless grins.

The room’s high ceilings dwarfed him. Clarence glanced at a stack of legal papers. His wife was unassailable and white, but under their vicious spotlight her skin looked pasty and sick. She clung to him through his humiliation, even when disgrace lingered like the smell of shit. And now she bore the tainted mark with him.

Clarence wouldn’t say anything. He’d absorbed Daddy’s lessons, he could keep everything inside, all of it. He watched his grandfather’s bust, half expecting it to move, but it only stared down at him from the shelf. Clarence picked the receiver up again and put it down again. He was in that weird trance, and breathed in slowly, to calm himself, and breathed out slowly, to stay calm, and then closed his eyes. Clarence would leave that woman alone, leave her be, and, anyway, what was the sense, what was there to say years later, and there’d be consequences.

He was weary of scrubbing.

When he won, when the seat was his, he watched his friends’ joy, black and white, and they embraced him, slapped him on the back — remember what’s important, what it’s for, our principles, it’s all worth it. Clarence was the blackest supreme court justice in the land, the blackest this country would ever see. He knew that and held that inside him, too. Nothing and no one could whitewash that.

Clarence patted his round belly. He liked to joke about his heft, his gravitas, with his friends and the other Justices. When he delivered his rare speeches, he occasionally mentioned his girth, which drew a laugh, since his body was a source of mirth. Sometimes his hands rested on his stomach during sessions, when he was courtly if mute. The court watchers noted that he never asked questions, they remarked on it until they finally stopped. Clarence felt he didn’t have to say a word. He’d talk if he wanted, and he preferred not to.

When his hair turned white, like Clinton’s, that other fallen brother, Virginia said he looked distinguished, not old. Still, she worried about his weight, she didn’t want to lose him. He hushed her. He intended to be on the bench as long as he could, at least as long as Thurgood Marshall. He looked at Daddy again, eternally silenced, and sometimes talked to him, telling him almost everything. Clarence could hear Daddy, he could hear his voice always. He knew what he’d say.

Clarence’s trial bulged fat inside him. He’d never forget his ordeal, not a moment of it. He closed his briefcase and felt the urge to push Daddy from his perch. He would never let anyone forget his trial. Clarence chuckled suddenly, and a harsh, guttural noise escaped from him like a runaway slave. He’d have the last laugh, he was color blind, and they’d all pay in the end.

Lynne Tillman has published novels, story collections, and works of nonfiction. Her novel No Lease on Life was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. Her most recent novel is American Genius: A Comedy.

Melissa Broder Poem

Melissa Broder — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:15:08 +0000

Supper

Everyboy comes to me at a church potluck
perfumed with frankincense and lasagna.

He believes I am a gentle bird girl
in my tulip sweater and raincoat.

I am not so gentle, but I act as if
and what I act as if I might become.

He says: Let’s be still and know refreshments.
Tater tot casserole is wholesome fare.
Let’s get soft, let’s get really, really soft.

I do not say: I am frightened of growing plump;
something about the eye of a needle
and sidling right up close to godliness.

Instead I dig in,
stuff myself on homemade rolls,
tamale pie and creamed chipped beef with noodles.

I eat until my bird bones evanesce.
I eat until I bust from my garments.

I become the burping circus lady
with meaty ham hocks and a sow’s neck.

Everyboy says: Let’s get soft, even softer.
We vibrate at the frequency of angel cake.

Our throats fill with ice cream glossolalia.
The eye of the needle grows wider.
There is room at the organ bench.

I play.

Melissa Broder is the author of the poetry collection WHEN YOU SAY ONE THING BUT MEAN YOUR MOTHER (Ampersand Books).

Tim Jones-Yelvington Short

HTMLGIANT — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 23:41:26 +0000

Clean Babies

While we fucked, I’d hold his baby. To keep the baby off the dirt. Clean babies are happy. I’d hold the baby out in front, and he’d fuck me from behind. The baby never cried. The baby wandered. I mean its eyes. The baby appeared unfazed. I mean by the fucking.

We fucked in the park, in the tall grass. When my arms that held the baby bounced, the baby laughed and laughed. And while I got fucked, while I was holding the baby, I’d wonder about the baby’s other daddy. This was what I assumed, that the baby had another daddy, because unlike his first daddy, the daddy who fucked me, this baby was brown. I figured the baby was adopted. Something about the daddy, I could just tell, he seemed like the kind of man with a man at home. Even though he never talked about himself, he didn’t seem like he kept any secrets.

I wanted to ask him, Bring the other daddy to the park! One daddy to kneel on the ground and take me in his mouth. The other daddy to fuck me. And me to hold the baby. To keep the baby clean. But I never had the guts to ask.

That was a few years ago. That daddy disappeared. Now that park has fewer babies. Now those babies toddle. Oh man, those babies are getting big.

Tim Jones-Yelvington lives and writes in Chicago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Sleepingfish, Annalemma and others. His short fiction chapbook, “Evan’s House and the Other Boys who Live There,” is forthcoming in Spring 2011 in “They Could no Longer Contain Themselves,” a multi-author volume from Rose Metal Press. He is editing the October issue of Pank Magazine to feature Queer poetry and prose. He contributes to the group blog Big Other.

Nicelle Davis Poem

HTMLGIANT — Mon, 24 May 2010 03:28:06 +0000

(click to enlarge)

Poem text first appeared in an e-chap published by Gold Wake Press.

Nicelle Davis lives in Southern California with her son J.J. Her poems are forthcoming in, Mosaic, The New York Quarterly, Two Review, and others. She’d like to acknowledge her poetry family at the University of California, Riverside and Antelope Valley Community College. She runs a free online poetry workshop at: http://nicelledavis.wordpress.com/.

Brendan Connell Short

HTMLGIANT — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 14:11:29 +0000

Tractate of Graceful Clouds and Gay Phoenixes

1.
Two sick moles lie under the surface, struggling for breath, thin and depressed, unable to root mountains down or hear lizards sing.
“Why?”
“Because people have found happiness in rushing around, have found beauty in withered things, and have found pleasure in killing even what they don’t see.”

2.
The final piece of ice on the Bernina Range cried too much.
“My time is up,” it said as it left.

3.
“When I was younger, I studied probabilistic turning machines and was confronted by the undecipherability of the halting problem,” jody2342 said. “Later, I learned to relax in the knowledge that my life value was 238,964 times that of Toño Vila the hat-maker in San Esteban Caterina (16P 307128 1513415).”

4.
No¹.

5.
After hauling the sea turtle up in their nets, cutting it into pieces and roasting it, Jai and Joi discovered that it was Vishnu.

6.
Wind dragon Great Fury, drugged on vinyl chloride and mirex, fell asleep at the bottom of the ocean; wind dragon Passive Charm, drunk on ethylene and propylene, ripped over the Northern Hemisphere, tearing up structures and destroying all life it found. Image of a bent palm tree, hair swept south².

7.
The sun, no longer worshipped, became angry at this neglect and burned up what was below, humans taking refuge in skyscrapers, huddling near air conditioning vents. The rocks have long beards.

8.
Each of the azimuths and the ecliptic divisions has its own affinity with the elements. Certain entities (huge bellies balanced on thin legs) smile in absolute contentment, being able to live out the Last Days in such style.

10.
A group of macaque monkeys on an island in Hainan beat their chests as the last leaves disappear from the sandalwood trees. The fire-keeping priests are long dead, but the animals will gather together dried up twigs for their own funeral pyres.

11.
The Rio Grande hangs itself from a big hill in La Cienega, New Mexico, plastic and experimental waste from Los Alamos spilling out its sides. Nearby an old cow lows.

12.
From atop a complex scaffolding of political systems and economic structures, men failed to see disappearance. A period of discord and calamity. The fortunate time for buying land has passed.

13.
The last tree in the Sierra Nevada, old Bristlecone Pine looks on.
“My body twisted and useless, so I survive.”

14.
Few Houses Mountain has many houses.

__________________

¹ Ralph was a man from Berkeley, stoutly Absent; Frederic from Paris, firmly Accurate. Neither could talk to rivers and lakes, neither understood the art of non-doing.

² During the end of the Dynasty, those in high positions will hurry about, never letting themselves or the people rest.

Brendan Connell was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had fiction published in numerous places, including McSweeney’s, Adbusters, Fast Ships, Black Sails (Nightshade Books 2008), and the World Fantasy Award winning anthologies Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), and Strange Tales (Tartarus Press 2003). His published books are: The Translation of Father Torturo (Prime Books, 2005), Dr. Black and the Guerrillia (Grafitisk Press, 2005), and Metrophilias (Better Non Sequitur, 2010). His forthcoming titles are: Unpleasant Tales (Eibonvale Press, 2010), and The Architect (PS Publishing, 2011).

His blog is at http://brendanconnell.wordpress.com/

Rauan Klassnik Poems

HTMLGIANT — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 21:13:34 +0000

To do it she sits on the floor, and presses a talon against her clitoris, and then rips upward. Tearing up through her navel. Up to her neck. It’s the most intense orgasm, brilliant and chic, and she just absorbs it—lying back, arms spread, like a crucifix. Her eyes brighten. Then close. She bleeds out. Hardening. Paled. A carnivorous flower.

The back of his neck’s red, and badly wrinkled, and I want to touch it and make him young again. We sit down in the living room. And we talk about nothing. Then about her. His daughter. My wife. And I can see me breathing down on her. To heal her. I breathed all over her. At the funeral I imagine us together. And, in my arms, she’s changed into a corpse. And I’ve entered her. And I’m fucking her harder and harder. And my tears splash down on her cold white neck. The light’s dazzling. A garden of statues throbbing.

In the Louis Vuitton storefront windows there are birdcages. And in each one there’s a shiny handbag. Or a glinting shoe. And, then, the maimed raccoon in the park—hunched over like it’s about to crap. It came towards us. Slumped over. And rolled on its back. This happened over and over. And the whole time it looked like it was smiling. I didn’t sleep well. I dreamed I shot you and ground you into powder—and the wind just swept you away. Elephants were chasing me, too, I think, and I woke up frantic, and horny, and you ended up having a tiny climax. The tiniest ever. A diamond stud. In a giant cage.

Rauan Klassnik’s book “Holy Land” (http://www.blackocean.org/holy-land/) released from Black Ocean in April 2008. Rauan’s currently working on a book of monsters, pacing back and forth in a fever, pitching up higher and higher: “slave ships moor inside me. And daisy rashes.”

Berger/Schneiderman Story

HTMLGIANT — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:45:46 +0000

Note: This is a collaborative short story. The authors produced it by sending work back and forth over email, based upon the authors’ experiences with the most ridiculous intellectual posturing of the academy. This story will be incorporated into a larger text called The Book of Methods, featuring a series of collaborations between Schneiderman and other writers, all powered by “machines” particular to each writer.

a matter of degree

Exhibit A: This book hurts. Like it’s made of sand. Coarse sand. I can’t finish it, because it hurts so much. Sand running over my gums. Emotionally, physically. A durian fruit lodged in my pyloric valve. I just have to stop reading and sit by myself all slugabed in the dark with a tumbler of ice-cold, mint-infused faux-Darjeeling listening to Charles Mingus’s Ah Um, no, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and whispering my oh-so-calming mantra.

The first time: Oh yes, the new Chair of Graduate Studies. Yes, him. Can’t you see that he’s a minion of the University’s privatization plan? I don’t care if he is a “Marxist” mother-fucking editor of Radical Teacher. I’ve written a poem where he appears around town: at the Laundromat advising you on how to get your whites even whiter while he fondles your unmentionables (I struck the line where he licks your undies); at the grocery checkout—no, not Shop N’ Save, but Aldi—bagging your generic navy beans, and there’s a good chance you’ll find cricket parts in there. It happened to the retired classics professor with the glass jaw. He found the whole thing strangely thrilling, and I kissed him at the Halloween party. Yes, him.

II. I went on this, like, really life changing journey to the Taos Pueblo and I could really feel the power of the land there. Everything was so colorful—like living inside of Frida Kahlo’s head if she was possessed by a really wise animal spirit. A Pooka. Like Harvey the invisible rabbit. I took this jar of dirt because it has magic healing properties. Every time I start to feel sick I just sprinkle some of this dirt in my water bottle and hold a swig in my cheeks until it mixes completely with my spit and then I drop a little into my palms and rub across my cheeks while swallowing the rest with my eyes closed.

Alpha: It’s like the end of Finnegan’s Wake, where the two women narrating the universe weep in their Guinness like children—turn to stone—and then feel like the calcium-rich lampreys running thick through the Liffey jump into the effluvia of language permeating their own experience. That’s what this book you’re reading now reminds me of in a weird way.

Item C: What do I find funny? Sometimes when I listen to Ravel, certain movements take on personalities. They just have this jaunty sort of persona that reminds me, for some reason, of certain Dostoevsky characters. Especially Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, or the father in The Brothers Karamazov, you know, the one whose serfs choke him with vodka passes through a funnel. I always imagined him as looking something like Julia Kristeva with Rosacea. When I hear those characters channeled through that music, I smile to myself a sort of knowing grin. I’m very content.

For consideration: I like to add Toni Morrison, maybe Song of Solomon, to the syllabus to spice things up a bit. It’s not as good as Deliverance with that piggy-squealing ream action, but hell, I’ve been teaching that one so long I can almost see Ned Beatty getting all glassy eyed. What’s that you’re humming? “One toke over the line”? Yeah, I like that (singing): “One toooke ooover the liiine…” Ok, my eager grad assistants, let’s get back to the lecture class. I think those kids have had enough time to talk among themselves.

4. At first I wanted someone to ask him to speak louder. But then, the musicality of his voice, I felt myself being lulled in. He spoke so softly I loved having to really focus, like I’m in a small cellar trapped by someone whose footsteps move so across the floorboards that they may not be there are all.

&: We’ve got to take a stand now, my brothers, my pistol-whipping mutineers, against the administration’s limits on our constitutional rights involving photocopying. Bullshit capitalist marionettes trying to squelch the free speech of our mimeograph machine. They are brainwashing the undergraduates by the omission of knowledge and withholding the symmetry of the dialectical materialist critique. We’ll strike, we’ll refuse to teach, we’ll write a strongly worded letter that begins, “Dear Sir or Madam,” but then, get this, goes completely hard-core anarcho-syndicalist on their asses. Fight the father-fucking powers that be….boooyeee!

Article E: I put his handouts on my fridge at home. I look at them every day, each time I go for the milk or to grab leftover coq au vin. He’s been to prison before. I really respect that.

6) I think I need a personal drummer, some sort of iPercussion section to really tie me into the spirit world. Cause I think I am—you know—tied in to a spirit world, but not this one yet. I’m riding with valkyries, doing the star-scattered two-step in the vaikunta with Ndjambi when I need to just be rolling a phat blunt with Manabozho. Right? A repetitive beat could really focus my energies towards the eightfold path the golden mean the middle way a sort of laid-back nirvana where everything is brilliant whiteness.

*: No, it’s not ‘hate’ on the other knuckle, it’s ‘true’. My knuckles ground me and remind me what’s important in life. They’re like gravity stabilizers for when I feel myself getting caught up in other pursuits. All I have to do is look down and see ‘true love’. That’s what it’s all about. What’s that? Yes, sometimes I do wear gloves.

**: When I read Blanchot, it really makes we wonder, why write at all? I mean, why fucking write? Why construct a sentence if it’s only going to get fucking deconstructed? Do you fucking understand what I am fucking saying? There’s like no fucking point. And reading? Well, I guess that’s a fucking steaming fucking load of shit too.

Exhibit H: You can choose what you want out of life. It’s true. Like her, see…she chose to have a huge ass. And it’s terrible, don’t get me wrong, but it’s all psychology.

///: That guy? He used to date the feminist studies professor who writes about body image in her leopard-print winter coat with buff arms like small machine guns. Heard he got smacked around quite a bit. I found a ball gag in the garbage the day they called it off. It was notable because usually I don’t find anything interesting in his trashcan.

%: And so, that’s why my syllabus ends with a space for your signature. You’ll notice it states that everyone must be respectful of the topic—queer studies—and that those expressing contrary opinions will be asked to drop the course. This is the best way to ensure fair and open discourse for all concerned.

IX: I had a girlfriend who was a little crazy, and Sylvia Plath was a little crazy, so that’s why I have a love/hate relationship with Sylvia Plath. It’s the same with Tolkien. I want to like hobbits,
but I can’t like hobbits, because Tolkien was a Catholic, and so was my father.

|||: Yes, it’s a trailer, and yes, the wood paneling reminds me of some pedophile basement from 1974, but the rent is dirt cheap and we are up-river a bit from the University and I can just, you know, chill out with myself here and watch pornos and think about some of the really good-looking girls in my discussion section and figure out if what I’m saying about Hamlet really makes any sense to them…I think they somehow know that I want to get into their pants more than anything in your philosophy, Horatio.

11. Mike Leigh’s film Naked. And then there’s this Tartovsky film that just changed my life. It just spoke to me, blew apart my world like a dirty bomb. What can I say? I guess I’m a sort of connoisseur of old and slightly obscure foreign cinema. I can’t abide that saccharine contemporary Hollywood shit. Films (if they can even be called films) with that chick with the hair or that guy with the eyes are the optic equivalent of a burst Pentontillar Abcess dripping down your throat while eating mashed pineapple. Vomit rises and your tongue is rammed up some dirty-hippie’s syphilitic asshole. I need a pallet cleansing sorbet.

Who? Fellini? I don’t know who that is. Ingmar…? I’ve never heard that name before. Kurosawa…didn’t he make that Last Samurai movie with Tom Cruise? Could you say that again? Jodorowsky?

@: It’s all metaphors really. Like in Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. She shows—and I think the next thing you should do today is buy this book, make yourself a hot cup of limeflower tea with some crispy Madeleine cookies and then read it straight through—how the tropes we use to describe something account for what that something is. We use all these war words for cancer, and we’re just militarilizing the thing. What if we used, I don’t know, animal words, like we have to “molt” cancer from the face of the earth rather than we have to “obliterate” it and shit? Yes, that’s it exactly. When your cousin dies from cancer, she’s really dying from a metaphor like a spotted owl whose been placed on the endangered species list.

Beta: It was an incredible day. I went to the park to find him, shirtless, there against the tree trunk. He was reading Nietzsche, the sun streaming through his hair, and I knew I wanted him. No, no, I figure that even if I miss him this time around, I’ll approach during the eternal return.

#: I just love Kay-mus. His descriptions are so rich and thick with the energy of the dripping Mediterranean sun. It’s a solar myth he explores on the hot sands of North Africa, that Kay-mus. What that? Really? It’s really pronounced Ca-moo? Now I’ve been here five years and no one has ever bothered to correct me. Shit. Next thing I know you’ll be telling me it’s not Der-i-da either. Did you ever see that movie The English Patient? You know? With Ralf Fiennes, Juliette Bin-O-shay, William Dafoe, and Keersten Scott Thomas? There’s sand in that, too.

Exhibit M: I feel like the two of us exist on this other-worldly level—a sort of advanced astral plane—where everything is white, and funky jazz like real funky Mingus maybe Mingus at Antibes, no, Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, plays from some invisible speakers positioned always just behind us, beyond our each, you know?

Or from each atom floating in the air.

(): I was sitting writing down quotes on a note card. I realized that highlighting wasn’t good enough. The language, is just so beautiful, so deep, it has to be rewritten. And then rewritten again. That’s why I’m transcribing my note cards onto a second set of note cards.

Epsilon: And then we have like some sort of TV monitor that we use to observe and discuss the less-meaningful lives of other human beings but the thing is stuck on like eternal mute and our comments are like director’s comments that we can’t even play back and sometimes it’s like we’re saying something really important and intellectual about a scene but the scene passes before we get it out and then it’s like there’s no way to sync the sound and image track so we just start making eyes at each other you know the eyes I mean, yes, those eyes, because no one really gets the things that we get or at least think we get and maybe it doesn’t matter anyway when we wink together the way only we can wink like the TV screen fading in and out as the tea wafts its steam over everything in this space.

Jessica Berger was born and raised in Chicagoland, where she is now a graduate student in UIC’s Program for Writers. She has worked as an illustrator and is especially interested in the coupling of text and her other great love: the visual arts.

Davis Schneiderman is a multimedia artist and writer whose works include the current or forthcoming novels Drain (Triquarterly/Northwestern), Blank: a novel (Jaded Ibis), Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader (Spuyten Duyvil), DIS (BlazeVox) and Abecedarium (Chiasmus, w/Carlos Hernandez); the co-edited collections Retaking the Universe: Williams S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto) and The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game (Nebraska, 2009); and the audiocollage Memorials to Future Catastrophes (Jaded Ibis). His creative work has been accepted by numerous publications including Fiction International, The Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He is Director of Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books, where he edits the series The &NOW AWARDS: The Best Innovative Writing; he also directs the NEH-funded Virtual Burnham Initiative.

James Davis Poem

HTMLGIANT — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 14:41:33 +0000

Spiritual Warfare

–for the Nintendo Entertainment System, by Wisdom Tree, Inc., 1991, unlicensed

Your enemies are not killed; they are converted.
Occasionally, a convert will leave behind Spirit Points,
which you can use to purchase things like fruits.

Each fruit has its own unique method of attack.
Pears, though weak, come in handy in the Slums,
since they can destroy large weeds and junk piles.

Vials of the Wrath of God: these are basically bombs,
purchased in groups of three or seven. Samson’s Jawbone
acts as a boomerang. You’ll need this to get the Raft.

To begin, enter the red door and receive an apple
from the Christian Helper. The basketball player
you come across in the Park is of no consequence.

Do not go into the Bar in the Shipyard; you will lose
the Belt of Truth and have to go to the Pawn Shop
in the Slums to retrieve it. Using the Raft, cross the lake

and search out the Grey-Haired Man in the Airport.
He is slow and weak; it takes only three Vials
to convert him. He will drop the Helmet of Salvation,

which renders you invulnerable to dynamite.
The Church is to the east. Here you can buy grapes
for 75 Spirit Points. Grapes travel through solid objects.

Once you have beaten the Man in Black Robes
and obtained the banana, pass through the Woods
and enter the Prison, under which lies the Demon Stronghold.

The demons are vulnerable only to the banana.
You will now be in a blue room (aren’t you glad
you brought that key?) with the Demon Master.

He can be defeated with persistence. You will know
you have damaged him when his color flashes from red
to a lighter red—an almost imperceptible change.

James Davis was Mr. December in American Short Fiction’s Pinup Series. His interview with Idra Novey will be up on the Subtropics website any second now. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Florida.