Sean Lovelace is running right now, far. Other times he teaches at Ball State University. HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS is his flash fiction collection by Rose Metal Press. His works have appeared in Crazyhorse, Diagram, Sonora Review, Willow Springs, and so on.
Tight Times is a children’s book about a kid who wants a dog. His mom says don’t talk to her because she is busy. She wears a bra around the house. The family makes the kid eat a cereal called MR. BULK. Dad gets laid off and comes home and smokes a cigarette and makes a stiff drink. Mom tells the kid to stay outside. Kid finds a cat in a garbage can. Some nosy aging hipster woman stranger says he should just keep the cat. Parents say, fine, OK, keep the damn cat. Kid does so and names it Dog. Kid feeds Dog lima beans.
Vivisection is the controversial act of operating on a living animal. People have performed vivisection on humans, primarily as some demented form of medical “experimentation” or as torture. Anesthesia usually not applied during these surgeries. The term is also the title of a poetry chapbook by Eric Weinstein, winner of the 2010 New Michigan Press chapbook contest.
You are in Bulgaria. You are a teacher. You are an American man seeking to meet men. To meet them in a certain type of bathroom, “…a chill room with its impression of damp…” “…having a single purpose only, any other use of them accidental.” You meet a young, homeless Bulgarian, Mitko. He tries to sell you drugs. You don’t want drugs, you want sex. So he sells you sex. A transaction. But you want to take this transaction further. Most would not—it’s a crazy idea, to confuse this form of transaction with something deeper. Unless you are torn, to the own self. Your wants, motives, and mind. Well. Here we go. And so it begins.
As you surmised, I’m a drug dealer. Example: Yesterday, a young man pedaled over to my house to trade beer for drugs. I gave him 75 tablets of ibuprofen, four packets of raw sugar, and 2.6 pounds of Starbucks Coffee House Blend Melange Maison. He loaded these into his bicycle basket and passed me a six pack of Harry Porter and the Bourbon Soaked Vanilla Beans Porter (Great Lakes Brewery). Dork. But I will say the beer pours a dark cedar with a spare diminishing marshmallowy light-auburn head.
Books by people named Garth. I rarely read them.
I once felt compelled to finish everything I began. Not sure why. The tendency can be just as foolish as admirable. Today I was on page 188 of Peter Arnettt’s Live From the Battlefield (Yes, I know, a certain classic) and I came across yet another scene that had me off my feed. Ever have that friend who only tells stories where they personally come out on top? Here, the young reporter Arnett confronts an older established journalist for writing a too optimistic account of a military operation during the Vietnam conflict.
I felt he had misrepresented the action.
“Son,” he grinned bitterly at me, “I was doing this long before you were born.”
“Tom,” I responded angrily, “I’ll be doing this long after you’re dead.” He looked at me in startled shock and mumbled into his Scotch. Reddy didn’t say much to me after that.
Everything about this exchange felt phony to me. The adverbs. The older journalist as “startled” by the exchange, the mumbling into Scotch, The John Wayne/Noir mix of the comeuppance Arnett is recalling 30+ years later. He lost me. I stopped reading. I give myself permission. Because written words were doing their thing long before I was born and will be doing it long after I’m dead. I only have so many books I can read in my lifetime. I now stop a book when I’ve read enough to feel I need to stop. And then pick up another.
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSnp9rYb7zE
4. The first issue of Stoked is here! Amber Sparks, Brian Oliu, Daniel Bailey, J.A. Tyler, Mike Young, Ryan Ridge, and Sarah Carson, as well as reprinting of stories by Roxane Gay (originally published in Gargoyle 56) and Matt Bell (originally in Drexel Online Journal). Hey now!
22. The number played in roulette, Casablanca.
14. LSU Press drops a new Hemingway craft book.
Art Matters shows exactly how Hemingway’s craft functions and argues persuasively for the importance of studies of articulated technique to any meaningful understanding of fiction and literary history.
I have the urge to read this book. And also to vomit. I might go ahead and do both.
Last week I had a slight buzz and randomly phoned 10 public libraries in 10 random states and asked to talk to a librarian. I asked the librarian if they would give me an email interview. Two hung up directly after the question. One woman coughed, and I heard her ask someone a question, and then she hung up. One said, “Quit calling me, Steven.” My name is not Steven. Six graciously said yes, and gave me their email addresses. Then, of the six, only one responded in full to the email interview questions. I have no idea why. These answers are from B. David. He manages a library in Mississippi.
The library seems to be one of the last places in America where no one tries to sell you anything. You can just hang out. Do you have an opinion on the library as a public space?
Absolutely. One of the great things about the library is that it is a place you can go and your privacy is yours. You can read what you want, learn about what you want, talk about what you want and know that your freedoms are not being tampered with. We hold these kind of rights pretty high. One thing that really scared the bejesus out of us library’s was the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act was basically trying to compel libraries to give up information about their patrons while at the same time preventing us from telling the patrons that this was going on. The libraries countered by deleting all patrons loan records so that there was nothing there for the government to look at. What does this have to do with public space? A public space is just that: a place where the public can gather and express their mind and their views. Most libraries come equipped with meeting rooms for this exact reason. Unless you are trying to sell something, or hold a closed meeting, we will allow most anyone to come in and use our room to peddle their silly views.
Does your library have a glory hole?
1. Amazing Herzog interview in GQ. You should read this:
I’ve always been suspicious. I don’t even look into my face. I shaved this morning, and I look at my cheeks so that I don’t cut myself, but I don’t even want to know the color of my eyes. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century. A major, major mistake. And it’s only one of the mistakes of the twentieth century, which makes me think that the twentieth century in its entirety was a mistake.
If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him.
I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.
11. Interesting thoughts on biography in this review of Avraham Shlonsky.
7. American Short Fiction short-short contest ends in 4 days. Send.
12. Photo montage of writers posing with their typewriters. What is a typewriter?
13. Cathy Day with an interesting post about linked story collections and how to teach such a thing.
What is a novel-in-stories? A linked collection? A story cycle? I find it hard to make distinctions between these terms. Instead, I think of it this way: On one end of the prose spectrum is the traditional linear novel. On the other end is the collection of disparate stories. Linked stories exist on the narrative spectrum between “novel” and “story collection,” and they are unique and valid formal artifacts.
Jane, Jane, tall as a crane!
Did I hear the word whiskey?
A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits
We will have beer for lunch
The final crumbling of the rusty triangle
Dead, the leaves that like asses’s ears hung on the trees
Huge glasses of sloe gin
Yellow, meaningless, and shrill
I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish
No liking but all lust
Old people do have falls
The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Karet has a blurb from Salman Rushdie on the cover which is major street cred with all of Rushdie’s hot ex-wives, leggy current girlfriends, not to mention the Rushdie sneer and the notorious fatwa, especially provocative in context, blurb on Israeli author’s book (this book translated from the Hebrew), book often about Arab/Israeli conflict, book often situations of paranoia, hidings, possible violence, also the cover a medical green/blue, but let’s return to contemporary Arab/Israeli situation possibly presented here as dreadfully fantastic, possibly absurdly horrific, possibly the hyperbole and horror of the prose/situation, warped looking glass, warped words, oh gods, just say it, OK possibly all Magical Realism, all creative counter-distortion, not here as detached, mystical, balloonish, Big Pictures KABAM!!, or/as magical at all/at all but or/as considered here by literary skill as true.
Kuhnhenn Blueberry Panty Dropper is one fruity beer. Those kind folks at Kuhnhenn Brewing Company used actual Michigan blueberries, I shit you not. This reminds me of a bar in Rhode Island where you can order beer with blueberries floating in the glass. Don’t do that. Only douches want fruit floating in their beer. So you want to start with the color? Fine, we’ll start with the color. Pours out a light pinkish purplish periwinkle saffron, with adjacent radiation regions of a dark European honey hue, flashes of chestnut and burgundy, coffee-like, Big Red in a glass. Oh, I’m fumbling a bit here. Not sure how to exactly pin down this hue. Have you ever seen the type of rust/blood stains a person will obtain on the fleshy parts of their palms while hand-drilling a water well (or even augering, sludging, or jetting)? Or like maybe the clouds of delicate almond petals you will see on windy days across the Island of Cyprus? Well, like that.
Like it was her Place by Kim Chinquee (Mud Luscious Press). The cover is a muted blue of soapstone clay. Kim Chinquee is a high-caliber writer of flash fiction. Many writers do not hold their own voice. She holds her own voice. Concern for verisimilitude, deterministic tone—this leads to this to this, narrator observing bemused or watchful or somehow self is outside of self, or narrating quietly, distance, a feel of floating, well, you know her voice, you have read Kim Chinquee I hope by now, by gods, by help yourself buy or find yourself to her words. Like it was her Place a floating “she” visits house of former ______, of former self, of former lover/hater/friend:
She was passing through now.
She wasn’t ready to go up yet, to his bedroom.
The key still worked.
XBOX 360 Instruction Manual: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2009. The cover is the glossy of lips. Tiger Woods in his green Friday shirt, in follow-though of an iron shot. It is all 2009 and a Band-aid on his finger from a broken hand mirror. His mind is a fluttering caddy-book of sticky pages, baby diapers, golden trophies, and ghost phones. Like many of us, I am self-disgusted by the allure of Tiger Woods while at the same thankful I learned the finer points of Ambien sex through media reports of his unraveling personal life. The XBOX manual is a helpful mix of images, charts, and technical jargon, but then often an unexpected glimpse of word-play:
IN THE BAG: Be as funky or smooth as you want to be by choosing your swing and purchasing animations.
or
Loft.
Flag Burn Attempt I Suppose I Guess
I read this article and watched this video and oddly did not think of the flag as symbol vs. flag as sacred, or really the entire flag desecration debate, or even a debate on the words, “Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech.” No, none of that was really running through my head. Why did I re-watch? Why did I find it intriguing?
May 13th, 2011 / 8:39 am