- Matthew Simmons

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WINNER: Sewage Treatment Technologies

Patricia Lockwood is a poet. (A poet. A very good poet.) She also uses Twitter in interesting ways. Earlier this year, her series of SEXTS got attention from Rhizome, and then The Huffington Post & The New Yorker.

And I look at those tweets and I wonder, “How does someone do that?” Not get attention, though. I mean write those. How? So I asked.

***

So, I was initially pretty dismissive of Twitter. And then, at some point, I noticed how funny it could be and found it to be a mostly worthwhile distraction. And then—probably while reading the fake Christopher Walken feed—I began to think there could be something kind of poetic about Twitter. That each little update could be a joke, a persona poem, a zen koan.

Did you sense the “poetic” potential in the Twitter post from the beginning or did your approach to Twitter change?

It took me about ten years to join Twitter because, like old men everywhere, I “did not get it.” What is the … where are your mentions … what is hashtag … who is a belieber? When I did join, I spent my first week livetweeting the movie Bambi, focusing specifically on the puberty of Bambi and Thumper, and was subsequently unfollowed with extreme prejudice by the few poets who had charitably followed me in the first place. (This still happens! A real writer will follow me and then four days later be like “what the freak is this” and it is goodbye. CAN’T believe you wrote a tweet about Jesus jelqing.)

OK, so scrolling back, I see that one of my earliest tweets was “I want to see the Beethoven movie where Beethoven finally manages to tear his way out of the dog’s body and play something good on the piano.” About two weeks later I sexted for the first time, like a teen. So it wasn’t so much that I saw the possibilities right away as that … Twitter is the perfect way to disseminate the kind of writing that comes most naturally to me.

When I first signed up, I was aware of a few accounts that I thought were really funny, like @gregerskine and @extranapkins. I followed them, and discovered a bunch of other people who were writing what could only be described as Literature. There was no doubt in my mind. Subjects were: toads, bogs, jorts, gender, Animorphs, Chingy, wasps, “im gay,” Kate Bush, crieing, and pizza; but the tweets themselves were Literature. I was writing in a separate aesthetic, but it dovetailed so prettily with what they were doing that it was easy to enter into conversation with these people, and begin writing the Communal Book of Twit.

You say that they are producing “literature.” Would you call it a kind of “poetry?” Or is that form a little too well-defined at this point? Does the tweet get its own category? (And, heck, is it the tweet that is the achievement, or the whole of the gathered up and examined feed that deserves the title?

WHAT IS POETRY. CAN SOMETHING THAT IS NOT POETRY … BE POETRY. IF IT IS POETRY, CAN IT NOT BE POETRY? In this interview I will answer the question so good that no one needs to answer it ever again! We will lay it to rest like a little baby … who … is dead.

I have no problem thinking of tweets as poetry, because the really great ones function in the same way that poetry does to me. They are clear and cubic thinking, and they repay obsessive thinking-about. 140 characters is just about the right length to get inside your head, so if I walk around all day chanting “apnews: an girl go back in time to shhot cow that start gret chicago fire . cow say “i expect you” shoot her an start fire with i’ts cigaret” to myself the same way I walk around chanting “The milkman came in the moonlight and the moonlight was less than moonlight,” I see no reason to make a distinction, because I’m not some sort of taxonomy psycho. Honestly, when I think of the question “what is poetry” I picture Linnaeus and David Lehman absolutely making out, hands up each other’s shirts, while everyone who participates in modern American poetry watches.

BUT at the same time, I like to call them tweets because otherwise it’s a big waste of the stupidest term that has ever been invented for anything. If we don’t call them tweets then what are we gonna call a tweet, a bird’s sound? Please. Let’s be reasonable.

(taxonomy psycho. heh.)

I understand the SEXT series came out of the Anthony Weiner situation. Did you see someone else post one? Or did you see a void and fill it? (The fact that that question appears to sound like a sext is purely coincidental.)

TAXONOMY PSYCHO, COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU, STARRING SOME GUY WHOSE NAME I DON’T KNOW

I wasn’t specifically thinking of Anthony Weiner when I first started sexting (no one, I hope, is specifically thinking of Anthony Weiner when they first start sexting.) I had a long-standing fascination with the media panic about SEXTING TEENS and MARRIED SEXTING and ARE THE OLD SEXTING, IN HOMES? Newsweek was losing its mind with terror. Stock photos depicted crazed sexual geezers* leaning against trees. Headlines were all things like: “Majority of Americans Now Getting Turned On by Misspellings of the Word “Pprenis?” Anyway, so one day I was on a long, long car trip to Key West and I was bored as hell, so I asked people on Twitter to send me sexts, “physically impossible sexts preferred.” I posted a few to start that established an absurd precedent –

Sext: You ask for oral. I get between your legs and whisper the alphabet repeatedly until you scream

Sext: I insert myself into a fog and thrust back and forth until I eject a small area of denser fog

– and then @gregerskine sent me some, including the incomparable “I HAND U A PANINI AND U OPEN IT UP 2 SEE THE COMMAND ‘ORGASM’ WRITTEN IN THOUSAND ISLAND” sext. From that moment forward the form seemed to be set, and other people took it up — it was simple, it was empty, it was elastic.

So yeah I stuffed that huge sucking void.

.
.
.

*Please note that if you like “shocked senior man gets a racy, sexy text message from his wife,” Shutterstock also recommends “shocked senior woman with a towel,” and “mature burned electrician.”

Do you draft your tweets or are they spontaneous? I’m curious about how much deliberation goes into them and if there’s a certain headspace one gets into to create, say, your Sext series.

I’ve noticed there is a certain dark, surreal tone that runs through your tweets and the ones of some of the other folks you follow and promote. DogBoner, say. Or FamousCrab. SPERGERS. Fart. Is there a certain Tweet Wiring in your brain? A path you follow? Is it a similar path to the Poetry Wiring?

I draft like crazy, because: I do most of my tweeting with my phone, and it is so so different to write with your thumbs. Have you noticed this? I often enter Thumb Fantasias where I just move my thumbs around for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, rearranging elements of joke and text and scenario with my stupid thumbs. It is a part of you that should never be writing — eight elegant fingers? Yes. A pencil in your mouth, or between your toes? Good job. Dictation? You are rich, and rich people are known for being good writers. But thumbs? No. Writing with thumbs means all rules about content are out the window; it’s such an unnatural physical act that it requires an unnatural vernacular. It is enormously freeing and enormously frightening, to be a modern thumb writer of the cyber age.

(I made all this up just now but it actually does seem plausible.)

Why the darkness? My eras are the 17th century and the apocalypse. So, elaborate conceits full of burning tires. Everyone is having sex, but so are their fleas? What a magnificent chestnut horse, let’s eat him. Ahhhhh, the gorgeous colors of the sunset are killing us. I believe that any skill that serves in the writing of poetry can serve also in the writing of jokes — the path is the same, but the vocabulary is different. The impulse too is the same: to create something symmetrical, something that shuts to or clicks closed, to make parallel forms with unparallel lines. To make the hugely unlike lie down together, as they must at the end of the world.

Why bring them together — the poem and the joke, or the joke and the prophecy? The hybrid is compelling, always and perennially. It’s the desire to make fucked-up dog breeds that live longer than either of their incest parents. Or if they don’t live longer, they breathe weird and are illegal. Both outcomes are interesting.

Do you have a favorite joke? Is it better than your favorite poem? Do you have a favorite poem? Is it better than your favorite joke? Do you have a favorite tweet? Is it the better than your favorite prayer?

Favorite joke is THE ARISTOCATS, a very funny movie about jazz kittens in France, they are a family and they do the FILTHIEST things to each other, it is almost too much to be believed.

Which is to say, I don’t like most traditional jokes because they seem calcified to me. I like jokes that present a form you can work within or distort or turn inside out. When people tell me jokes I tend to look at them like where the hell do you get your hair cut, Shear Genius? This is a failing on my part. I remember directing such withering looks at uncles who told me knock-knock jokes that I’m surprised they didn’t die.

I go back to “The Glass Essay” a lot. I go back to the Holy Sonnets. I go back to “Fresh Air” and “The Boiling Water.” They’re not better or worse than anything. They’re rocks, and stones, and trees.

This is the closest thing we have to a canonical tweet, and it’s probably the one I think about the most:

YO AALIYAH DONT FILL UP ON ALL DAT BREAD GIRL…..GOT A BIG MEAL COMING WHEN WE LAND Really makes ya think. Eat the bread everyone. Namaste.

When I think of this tweet my thoughts go like this:

Aaliyah is dead and that is fucked up. I loved her voice a lot, I love the light-touch singers best and she was the lightest light-touch singer. She had the ability to just barely land and still feel the note — she was Princess and the Pea with the note 8 mattresses under her! I think of her technique as being trusting, but I think of it that way in retrospect.

If you don’t want to look at tender huge graffiti of her face on big walls all day every day then I don’t even know how to talk to you.

The quieter, the sweeter, the especially intimate voices — is it natural to feel that they are more ours? That the people who own them have more to do with us? Is that why we feel the way we do about Aaliyah?

Why do I feel the way I do about Aaliyah, and if I feel that way about her then why do I laugh at this tweet?

Well, “laughing” is not exactly what I do. More like, “sit staring at it with a sort of appalled reverence, wondering what kind of person I am.”

The reason people like @graeyalien are funnier than “twitter comedians” is because their tweets operate in two more dimensions. They consider who is speaking the tweet, and they consider whether the tweet looks funny. They create a character, and they apply small systematic derangements of punctuation, spelling, and capitalization appropriate to that character.

The recognizable speaker of this tweet is … a white aunt in Manitou Springs?

It makes you picture an Olive Garden moment on a plane that has entered into myth. The dishonesty of myth is that it makes you forget that the Olive Garden moments ever took place — not on that plane, not on that day, not between those two people.

If I think of the people in my life who have told me not to fill up on bread, it is an intimate circle of people. In my life only the people who cared a great deal for me have told me not to fill up on the bread.

Who is speaking? Who is telling her not to eat the bread? The voice is … paternalistic, which seems right because that’s how I remember people treating her even when she was alive. She seemed to arouse more than usual feelings of protectiveness. Protectiveness, paternalism are complicated. But somehow it always sounded nice when Timbaland called her “baby girl.”

But Timbaland would’ve told her to eat as much bread as she wanted. Oh my God. Timbaland would have baked bread for her himself.

She didn’t seem like the type who would eat all the bread. Maybe she really loved the bread! Maybe her handlers didn’t want her to eat it! Maybe she didn’t want to eat too much of it because her stomach had gotten so famous at that point.

Remember when we were all showing our stomachs, and wearing like enormous cargo pants and sports bras outside in the daytime? What the hell was that?

Actually that was awesome and I wish that it would happen again.

But not at the cost of eating the bread.

At some point she got abs? Which because I am visual always made me think of her breath pouring and tumbling down inside her like a cataract of water, over and past the boulders of abs, and the notes having to climb up over them on the way out.

Wikipedia: “In 1998, she hired a personal trainer to keep in shape, and exercised five days a week and ate diet foods.”

I was not allowed to show my stomach, at that time. I probably wouldn’t have showed it even if I HAD been allowed, because stomachs seemed so vulnerable to me.

It is tempting to view a person who died in a plane crash as being entirely vulnerable, even in her lifetime.

Neither was I allowed to listen to hip-hop. Well, it wasn’t so much that I wasn’t allowed as that — hip-hop was seen to be somehow ridiculous, and as having nothing to do with us.

But that is what I loved the best. I could give a fuck about an electric guitar.

I was 18 years old, and she was 22, and for years her music had been everywhere, and I didn’t mind at all.

Not all of this information is present in the tweet, but the tweet walks arm-in-arm with all this information.

The art we like the best is generally the art that has the greatest access to us. So. This tweet has tremendous access to my feelings about Aaliyah. Aaliyah’s voice had tremendous access to me.

Aaliyah would have been on Twitter. It is fucked up that she is dead.

Eat the bread everyone.

Namaste.

Massive Novel Alert: Today marks the official release of Ryan Boudinot’s massive (in all senses of the word[seriously—it's going to create a gravity well]) new novel Blueprints of the Afterlife(Grove 2012). I got a chance to read this early on. I like Ryan’s work. I like Ryan. Ryan’s a solid citizen of literature in Seattle. And everywhere. I figured I would like the book.

I didn’t figure it would be as expansive, as imaginative, as powerful, and as quaking as it it.

Seriously. It’s awesome. Take a look. Here’s a sample chapter.

Over the next few days, I’ll be posting some Boudinot appreciations and a round-up. (And if anyone reading has something they’d like to add, feel free to get in touch with me @ giantblinditems @ gmail dot com.) Today, though, we begin with a long interview with the author.

***

You’ve written flash stories, short stories, a short novel, and a really long novel. Do you have a length at which you feel most comfortable?

You’re really wanting me to start this interview with a penis joke, aren’t you?

Heh. For the record, I think that no matter what is said in this email chain, we should use it in the interview. So, that line. And this caveat. We should just use everything said in here.

So, yes.

You’ve got a reputation as a hard-hitting literary journalist, so I would expect no less. But to non-flippantly answer your question, I like the commitment involved in writing a long thing. I fantasize about writing a 1000-pager.

The long novel is where you started, right? With a novel called Frozen Novelties? (Though, I guess “started” is a difficult thing to pin down. As I recall, you possibly “started” when, as a child, you wrote a story about lions.)

I guess so. I don’t know. Not really.

Well, let’s see if we can sort of chart out the growth of your creative impulses. Would you say your imagination is inclined to the “epic”? (And not the poetic form. Just “epic” as in, “of great size.” And possibly, also in the heavy metal sense of, “awesome and on a grand scale.”)

Yeah, I think I aim for that at least. I remember writing a series of stories when I was in sixth and seventh grade, all of which featured the same characters, and at the time I didn’t realize I was writing a novel, but that’s essentially what it was. I loved having these people I visited every day, month after month, and how I got to know them more the more I wrote about them. I like big novels, double albums, works that are ambitious in scope. But I do admire short stories a lot, and there are a lot of writers I admire (Borges, Saunders, Carver, Hempel) who are masters of the short form. I think the main thing for me is the amount of commitment over time with the same character—that’s what attracts me to writing novels.

When one studies the craft of writing, one tends to focus on short fiction because it sort of simplifies the process—you can have a complete piece of work to bring to a workshop, and all the other students will have time to read it, react to it, have insights about it. Had you spent any time on short fiction before you started at Bennington? Did you find the form alien at all at first? Have to train yourself to focus down a little?

No, I had been writing stories since high school by then. Took a couple writing workshops in undergrad. Writing short stories let me experiment with so many different modes, and when one of them was a complete failure, at least is was confined to ten, fifteen pages. Even if you’re not working in a novel you’re always working on your body of work and I don’t know whether it matters if that body of work is composed of chapters or stories.

If I might step aside here a minute. I’ve been thinking about interviews in general lately, about what and who they’re for. I have a few lined up to promote Blueprints of the Afterlife, and I understand that on one level getting interviewed is about getting people interested in the book. And then there’s another level, as I’m going back and forth with you, in that we’re friends outside the context of this interview, and I enjoy talking shop with you. But there’s a weird third layer that I’m starting to detect. Lately when certain people ask about what’s going on with the book and I tell them I have a tour lined up as well as reviews and interviews, I get the sense that they view these extraneous activities as some sort of “treat” that I get to enjoy. And don’t get me wrong—I enjoy talking to people about writing, doing readings, meeting people in other cities who’ve read my work. It’s rewarding to me. But it’s rewarding in a very, very fleeting way. What’s more rewarding is doing the actual work on the page. I’ve gotten the sense lately that sometimes people who don’t write think that I endure this kind of grueling process in solitude and that my reward for putting up with that is that I get my picture in a magazine. This is seeming more and more bizarre to me. It feels exactly backwards. And the trap I’m edging toward right now is that one where I could be seen as ungrateful for the attention. I’m confused about how I should be thinking about the promotional side of things. I’m looking at it as a way to ensure I get to go back to my notebook and bang out some more pages for another book.

Sounds good. When you get some more time, drop me a line and we’ll do a little more talking.

I’m not saying I’m not wanting to keep going with this (that’s not what I meant by “step aside”), just that I’m doing some meta observation about this process in general. Looking at the subtext.

Oh, gosh. Yeah, misread that “step aside,” but it’s clear now.

Writers are being handed more and more of the responsibility for the promotional side of what they do, yes? We’re both in our late 30s. Are we just on the cusp of the generation where the work on the page and the promotion of the work on the page are equally satisfying because the expectations are that they both go hand in hand?

Whose expectations? I’ll never look at those two sides of the equation as equal, ever. Even the best reading I’ve ever done is nowhere near those moments alone with my work, when it’s going well, when I discover something about a character that’s been eluding me for months. At the same time, I want to reiterate that a lot of the promotion stuff is fun. It definitely is. But nowhere near the soul transformative experience of writing itself.

I guess I think those expectations have sort of been internalized. Like, there’s a generation of younger writers for whom the creation of a text, the sharing of said text with an audience of readers, and the ongoing conversation they engage in surrounding that text seems like the natural life of the text. In a way that the word “promotion” maybe no longer sufficiently describes what they are doing.

But you teach young writers in MFA programs now. Do you see this sort of attitude in your students? Or has writing for an online lit blog narrowed my focus?

You’re right. I think what you’re describing is the culture of oversharing smashing into the solitary writing life. I’m old-fashioned in this regard. I don’t show anyone what I’m writing and rarely talk about it until it’s done. That means literally three, four years of total silence about certain things I’m writing. I’m the only one who knows the names of the characters, where and when the novel is set, etc. I find this lends a certain–and I know this word is going to sound pretentious, but I mean it–holiness to the process. I think a certain kind of writing requires one to be deeply alone.

As far as my students, and younger writers in general, the tendency that makes me cringe is when they post on Facebook how many words they wrote that day, or that they had a breakthrough with such-and-such character. To me, that’s like calling up a buddy while you’re having sex to report on what position you’re in.

I don’t know if you saw it, but a few years back there was this great interview with Cormac McCarthy and Oprah. At one point she seemed to be trying to bait him into expressing how wonderful it was to have an audience and be admired. And he would have none of it. He basically said that he didn’t care one way or another whether anyone ever read his work. That, to me, is utterly badass. Kafka reportedly had the same attitude. I think this attitude is about being so engaged and fulfilled at the process level, that everything else looks incredibly ancillary. I aspire to that sort of detachment from the material concerns of the work as it makes its way in the world. And of course I’m nowhere near reaching that ideal. The first step toward achieving that ideal is not reading reviews of your own books.

Is the work itself holy, do you think? The process, or the result at the end of the writing session? Both?

Technology does sort of seem to be demystifying the creative act. At least right now, right here, in this historical moment. And only for a (feels to me like large) percentage of the creative folks working today. At the same time, there seem to those who are working to re-mystify it. (An example, maybe: http://iwdrm.tumblr.com/.) And it seems to me like this is an issue in Blueprints. Does that feel accurate?

Maybe holiness is too grandiose a word. Maybe what I’m getting at is more about solitude, and the shared solitude of a single writer communicating with a single reader. And maybe what you mean by technology demystifying the process is that it’s easy to think about a work of art reaching an aggregate of readers instead of one at a time. When you look at metrics for a blog, for example, you’re looking for numbers of hits. So one day you post something and 10 people view the post. The next day you post again and 100 people view it. It’s easy to equate the value of your blog post with the number of hits it gets. But what metrics cant show you is how something you wrote actually influenced the person who read it. That’s something we can’t quantify, yet anyway, and I think it gets lost in conversations about literature’s evolving relationship with the Web. We’ve reduced our nuanced opinion of another person’s status update to a thumbs-up icon and the word “like.” I guess I’m saying technology makes quantitative evaluation easier and easier, but qualitative evaluation not so much.

I feel like I’m veering away from your question. Tell me a bit more about how you think this mystification process relates to my book, I’m not sure I understand.

No, I think I like “holiness.” Possibly, it’s my agnosticism. I can’t really find sources of holiness in the places a lot of others do. I find it in the weird act of creation.

With Blueprints, I think about DJing, of people giving over their free will to someone else, being controlled remotely, observing their themselves living someone else’s life.

I think what you’re talking about is the degree to which we approach art algebraically. There’s a certain “this equals that” kind of critical thinking that drives me insane. It’s what Sontag was getting at in her “Against Interpretation.” A repugnance at the idea that it’s our job to digest a work of art by compartmentizing it. What’s more interesting to me is when a work of art latches itself onto my brain like a parasite, requiring me to revisit it in my thoughts for years. I’m still revisiting The Cremaster Cycle, The Elementary Particles, In An Aeroplane Over the Sea, “The Girl in the Flammable Skirt,” and other works years after I encountered them. And recent works I know will occupy me for years to come are the poems of Swedish poet Aase Berg and Grace Krilonovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps (which I know you love , too). When you are entranced by a novel and aren’t able to simply stash it away as an example of some tradition, say, then you’re able to have a relationship with it. It keeps asking you questions, keeps providing the parameters of your inner life. That’s what I seek out in my reading experiences, and what I hope my books will provide to readers.

So, how did you approach Blueprints in order to make it something that allows for an a kind of plasticity, allowing a reader’s interaction with it to change or evolve over time? To resist interpretation?

Well the not so fancy way to answer that is to say I left certain elements unclear on purpose. I have an aversion to tying things up with a bow at the end. Here’s another way to think about it–every novel that’s ever been written has the same setting: the reader’s mind. I think I’m beginning to understand what that means, how to better engage a reader in the spirit of imaginative collaboration. In a sense, the content of a novel is really beside the point. It doesn’t really matter if it’s about wizards, adultery in the suburbs, or alien invasions. What’s happening under the skin of the content is a whole musculature of anticipation, curiosity, frustration, and payoff. You’re manipulating those things in a reader, not just words on a page. That’s why people tolerate artless sentences in commercial fiction. The best commercial fiction writers have a talent–and it’s no small talent at all–for getting into a reader’s brain and riding that curiosity/payoff system from one chapter to the next.

The trick, I think, is to work with that system while at the same time rendering beautiful sentences that honor the language.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about Kurt Cobain, and one cool thing he said was that he wanted Nirvana to sound like a cross between the Beatles and Black Sabbath. I love that. And I suppose, in my own haphazard way, I was going for something in the same spirit with this novel. Something with the catchy fun of science fiction with the moral and linguistic weight of literary fiction. I can’t tell if I succeeded.

Where do you think, in the end, the book belongs in the lineage of your work? And where in the world of contemporary fiction? Does it have companions? Fellow travelers? Cousins?

I ask because though I see you in the book—I recognize your language, your interests, and your humor—I also feel like it represents this shift for you. And I’m not sure how to explain it. It’s like something in the approach and process shifted—something in you shifted—and the product shifted, too. (Like, maybe you were trying to combine Black Sabbath and The Beatles.)

It did feel like a more authentic book to me than Misconception, more of how I’ve always wanted to write. Maybe part of the shift was just saying fuck it, I’m going to totally go for it with this one. It’s impolite to speak too directly about our ambitions in this society, but I sincerely want to become one of the greatest writers of my era. Whatever that means. It’s very, very possible that I’ll blow it, and there are sure to be many readers who think I’m an ass for even announcing such an ambition. I just want to push myself, and I’m getting a better sense of what I’m capable of. I want to reach readers around the world and a hundred years from now. Most days I feel totally stupid and not well educated enough, not well read enough, not whatever enough. But then I start thinking that if I felt otherwise, then I’d be really screwed. It’s about writing at a level where you make yourself feel stupid and scared, and feeling stupid and scared just means you’re pushing your own limit.

As far as a tradition goes, I look up to the postmodernist guys a lot. I look to George Saunders, David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon as upper classmen who can teach me something. Further back I look to Borges and Schulz and Babel. And then there’s Aimee Bender, who I’m lucky to have known for a long time, who models to me how to conduct my writing life and inspires me with her work. If I’m able to tag along behind these writers and be given a place at their table… Look, I grew up in rural Washington state and didn’t know a single writer personally until I got to graduate school. So to even be having this conversation strikes me as simultaneously preposterous and victorious, in a way.

The Crow Arts Manor—a new-ish writing endeavor in Portland that hosts readings and sets up workshops with Massive folks like Kevin Sampsell, Emily Kendal Frey, Zachary Schomburg, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Monica Drake as instructors—is gathering a library. Here’s a note I got from the director, Sid Miller:

Crow Arts Manor, located in a Northeast Portland, is a 501c3 non-profits writing center, that provides low costclasses and workshop. Over the last 9 months we’ve been hard at work assembling a literary library. Through donations we’ve been able to obtain a large amount of current literary journals, magazines, books of poetry, short fiction and criticism. But it’s been difficult to obtain the classics, from writers going back to Whitman reaching to the end of last century. So now we’re asking the public for help. We’re looking for folks willing to donate a title or more from their own personal library. Our library will be open to the public and will be a tool for local writers, as well as local schools and non-profit organizations. It will be a place to read, write, and engage with other writers. We will never charge a fee for use of the library. If you are willing to donate, we are happy to send you a present, a past copy of Burnside Review (our partner). Please e-mail me if you are interested in helping.
sid@crowmanor.org

Help ‘em out?

So, here they are. I love all 50 equally, and do not have them numbered. If you can think of any that deserve honorable mention, anything I have forgotten, leave the name in the comments section and I will maybe tell you why I didn’t include them, or apologize because I should’ve included them.

Verg by Necrolocust
Vreg by Locustcorpse
Turgal by Trugla
Groluck by Stunefier
Pigsssss by Setfier
Shantycock by Lipskinner
Turble by Ronjeremee
Fishpunche by Fistpastey
Crubmel by Leukemian
Ankleblud by Romaniania
Watch the Throne by The Shins
Mappylichen by Mappylichen
Duselreem by Intorgotten
Fantasineenfeld by Ruinnnnnnnnnn
Clubb Bonger by Sprunter 1593
Antsssinomen by Zallmill
Kaotiminy by Vendiloam
Yandelmin by Richard Flaaaaaaa
Blolforepety by Nim Tunnel
Workhaus by Banjo Loopser
Till the Livers by Hortchatans
Rung Gaz by Caustica
Ache File by Chinoverba
Clotted Anousses by Mediafier
Peeeeeepper by Hoontaga
Minochian Sensibility by Murdur Gull
Stamped the Prebrun by Hait
Underluk Defiaica by Pooz
Aunt Nancy by Weeveel
Cancerota by David Byrne
Muzz by Toocadence
NO by Yzzz
Ctulunchtime by Gluss Tophy
Whitey Noise by SS Flug SS
Shambleagra by Tossing Hunk
Angopreficy by Kite Runner Omega
Pleted by Pleted
Unbrag by Wormomen
Xalfall by Xapping Brine
Timonastery Maidenlump by Tristmantocious
Kali Flower by Dunresponsist
Yearballs by Pitchfiend Riley
Ung by Ung
Flemishist Favoration by Flannery O’Goner
Untell by Lyez
weordo rocksinging by l.c.k.m.p.w.y.t.r.y.h.s.q.
Lasst Missiah by Mistikle
Im Lou Tine Vagra by Such Such Such Then
Hungratti by Noose Papyrus
Fun Time Resolution Fire by Massripper

 [Matchup #32 in Tournament of Bookshit]

‘Lyric Essays’

Before he got married, my friend Michael couldn’t really be bothered to spend a lot of time cooking for himself. Or, well, he wasn’t really motivated to invest a lot of his precious time in the act of preparing food in a kitchen for his consumption. (I’m sure Michael would appreciate me telling you that once he began his long-term, now state/church sanctioned relationship, this changed.) Also, Michael didn’t really have a lot of money. So, not having the finances to go out to eat every night, and not having the inclination to spend a lot of time cooking—because he was instead inclined to read and learn banjo—Michael ate a lot of Banquet Turkey Pot Pies.

Michael and I were talking once, and he said, “Hey, so I used to eat a lot of Banquet Turkey Pot Pies, and one day while I was eating one, I kind of idly started skimming the box, and when I got to the ingredients, I sort of idly started reading it, and I found out that one of the main ingredients in the Banquet Turkey Pot Pie is chicken. Did you know that? That when you go out and buy a Banquet Turkey Pot Pie instead of a Banquet Chicken Pot Pie because you like turkey more than chicken, you are actually eating a lot of chicken instead of a lot of turkey?”

Sometimes I like to read ‘lyric essays,’ and I go find some ‘lyric essays’ to enjoy, but right in the middle of one of them, I realize that the ‘lyric essay’ I’m reading is actually just filled with chicken.

PROS: Chicken
CONS: Not enough turkey, Chicken

Daily Facebook updates on what you’re doing with your students

I was unpacking recently. I had to pack first. And then move a packed box. And then I was unpacking.

One of the things I unpacked was my MFA. It’s in a blue thing. Just sitting in there. I sometimes hope that it will start talking to me. It’s in a blue diploma cover, and I feel like it would be nice if the cover started to open and close like a mouth. I want my MFA to talk to me the way sandwiches talk to people in advertisements for mayonnaise. I think that would be fun—you know, just having a little chat with my MFA.

I worry, though, that my MFA would berate me for not having a teaching position of some sort. And that it would know that a lot of my other writer friends have teaching positions because they always update their Facebook statuses with cute stories about the conversations they have with their students. Or, like, mentioning the typos their students make. (Which are, you know, hilarious or whatever.)

(No, actually: They are hilarious. They really are. Kids type the darndest things.)

Anyway.

I guess I’m annoyed that a) I don’t have a teaching position, b) my MFA doesn’t talk to me but if it did, I assume it would berate me for not having a teaching position, and c) I can’t figure out why I would, if my MFA could talk, give it its own Facebook page. Also, why have all my writer friends become friends with my talking MFA?

PROS: Olives on toothpicks sort of look like eyes
CONS: My MFA doesn’t have any teeth and probably couldn’t make a sibilant

- Matthew Simmons

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WINNER: ‘lyric essays’ for reasons of jealousy