Bay Area locals please join us at a reading in support of The Really Funny Thing About Apathy with our own Chelsea Martin, Reynard Seifert, and myself; and introducing Alese Osbourne, this Sunday November 14, 6 p.m., at Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland, California.
Tree of Nowledge
Odd how the leaf in Apple’s logo nicely plugs up the bite, as if it were ashamed of its mark. The empty arc, short of being a design curve, may point to the consumerist endless hunger for Now. The prophetic bible story “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” is of course misogynist, as the anonymous authors (talk about a raw deal; imagine the royalty checks) made Eve the dumb broad who fucked humanity over until eternity, and all for a lousy apple. (For a Faustian contract, consider at least a filet mignon.) The serpent, I suppose, is brand marketing — western idol worship without all the hairy rules. Yin and Yang is the Taoist assertion that equal yet contrary forces, while seemingly antagonistic, are not only connected, but mutually dependent on each other. Drop the good and evil and throw in Yin and Yang; without judgment, we’d all be in a better place. May our revised Apple logo be a kind of iYin and iYang of the iChing. iOnce tried to meditate, per the advice of my then therapist, and fell so deep into the Holism that every atom in my buttocks buzzed, as if slipping through the universe’s sieve. It was my phone on vibrate.
Untitled Sunday Evening
If Plato’s Allegory of the Cave gives us shadows on the wall, the residual simulacra of light as farce of being, then Allegory of the Popcorn may be light’s emanation into the butter-scented theater, the one-sided cube of the silver screen into which we go dumping our dreams. Or, this Allegory of the Retina, light’s retarded power point presentation in the mind, one redundant slide at a time, our wavering arms in front of us grasping at the punctured sack of the outside world, the world we share.
A Socratic question is an arrogant passive-aggressive one; didactic, with presumptive maturity, an ostensible “instructive” question. For example, mother asks me when was the last time I washed the sheets, an answer which in a couple of months can be described in years. “One year Ma, lay off me”; and so her nightmare of bed bugs laying eggs is hatched in her mind. The last Socratic question I asked was this morning: wtf I said to the brand new day. Philosophically, we all live in Greece.
Blurb watching
An initial cover version of Freedom showed an orange sky, evocative of sunrise or sunset; the “final” version has a cooling blue swath in the sky (and its lake reflection) which broadens the time-line to a more general dusk or dawn. It’s as if the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, whose air-conditioned offices are a balm for those successful enough to work there, weary of the humid “southern” light, wanted to Yankee it up and “cool it down.” The blue, visually, plays off the bird; and painterly, is the compliment of the orange. As a rule, I don’t like birds, nature, or rasterized font in perspective on covers, but I actually like this cover (I guess three wrongs make a right). The pictured lake is undoubtedly the Minnesotan lake at which the novel’s most manic drama occurs, and I’m transported there, the vector of my sad literary Updikian erection pointed at an awesome fuck scene, careful not to get any paper cuts.
Expired Domain Girl
(c. 2005 - 2008)
When I couldn’t find a website, I would often find her, which judging by the mission architecture and soft golden light, puts her somewhere in California. You may have seen her too, Expired Domain Girl, most likely at her college campus between classes, the weight of Econ 101, Art History, and some granola on her shoulders. The trace of red on her backpack suggests an enrollment at Stanford, a fine university nuzzled in the south bay with Google, Apple, and other centers of the virtual world. Of course, she’s a model, though a “modest face” model; not a high society model to make you feel bad, but one whose common features serve to ingratiate with the regular folk, meaning, you. Her blondness is “dirty blonde,” an odd phrase considering the assertions of Aryan purity, as if the sequence of her hair’s low- and high-lights is a slow corruption over time, the cross-breeding American Pâté of Europe’s liver. I’ve always found the benign placation of her half smile saying “sorry, that website is dead” arbitrary, yet prophetically sullen; for she too, now, is a thing of the past. I went searching for her, paradoxically looking for dead sites, hoping to come across her. In failure, I googled “expired domain girl” and found her, still there, the same locked pose, like a slice of inertia on a slide. I hope she got that B.A. or B.S., maybe then a Master’s or PhD. She probably has a ring on her finger, a more relaxed labia through which two craniums transgressed, and maybe a few wrinkles on her face. Her favorite painting in that 2 lbs. art history book is now a $25 print in her kitchen, which is how art is both beautiful and sad. Life happens like Proust: meaningful in theory, most of the time boring, and then we find out it was all gay. On my death bed, propped up with the bloated surrender flag of my last pillow, may my nurse look just a little like her. We’d talk about the weather, and she’d say it was nice out that day.
2 Obituaries: Narrative and Opium
Narrative (September 21, 1995 – October 29, 2010) Longtime literary magazine Narrative, a nonprofit profit organization dedicated to storytelling in the digital age, finally succumbed to a rare enormous cyst, having suffering from Being So Full of Itself. Narrative will be remembered not only for its contemporary “lit lite,” but for their colorful array of contests, to which slush-pile fated folk tirelessly submit; and most of all, they are remembered for the awesome mug (w/ logo) provided to “Patrons” upon a $5,000 – $9,999 donation. Their “Backstage VIP access” allowed donors to read unpublished work, but (to mitigate such sadism) only by accomplished writers. Contributors were either attractive, or were friendly with professional photographers, pointing to a glossy cosmetic tragedy of sorts. Please join us as we celebrate their passing this Sunday at 11am at the Alpha Smegma Pi House. If you would like to submit an elegy, please include a submission fee of $15 at the door. All manuscripts should be in 12 pt. type, double spaced with one-inch margins, sequentially numbered pages, and contain exactly four metaphors, three similes, two foreigners, and one tear drop stain. If applicable, an editor will condescend with you.
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Opium (October 19, 2000 – October 29, 2010) Opium Magazine died of exhaustion during its most recent Literary Death Match tour, on whose behalf editor and MC Todd Zuniga (clearly with independent financial means) perennially traverses the world betwixt London; New York; Beijing; San Francisco; Oxford; Edinburgh; Boston; Los Angeles; Toronto; and inexplicably, Kansas City. Zuniga’s enthusiasm for life (and frequent flier miles) was not just conventionally conveyed with the exclamation points adorning almost all of his descriptions of said events, but more notably, with hair gel purposefully rendering his look “chronically just woken.” Remembered as the first online literary journal to publish more event announcements than actual fiction, Opium is survived by approximately two thousand participants and audience members who must now find something else to do tonight. Of the occasional story that was published, they provided their trademark “estimated reading time,” assurances for their fickle readership that not too much time would be wasted. Opium is heroin’s main constituent, which may explain how publishing there can collapse a vain. Condolences may be offered at your nearest International Airport, Concourse B (Gate B7), where Zuniga’s apparition, on layover, will be briefly seen sitting by an outlet recharging his iPhone and hair.