Melissa Broder

I receive an email from the “Senior Interviews Editor” of “Snatch Haus Review” (a blog that gets 4 hits per day) (which is more than my blog) (but still).

He asks if I’d like to “give an interview.”

I know full well that the “interview” I’ll be “giving” really consists of me fbooking the link to the “interview” and ppl quickly “liking” it and not “reading” it. The most eyes this “interview” will ever get will be on the link I post to fbook and when I say the link I mean the link itself and not the page the link leads to.

“Absofuckinlutely,” I say. “Thank you for asking.”

Sometimes I feel left out.

Events / 22 Comments
February 21st, 2012 / 4:36 pm

Reviews

important information garnered from The Silhouettes by Lily Ladewig

1. Wild women are still writing in cafes. They worship Le Creuset. They speak la langue Francaise et la langue chandelier et la langue Manolo Blahnik.

2. Telephones weigh a lot.

3. One girl is two girls.

4. Men are Russia.

5. Sometimes it all comes down to Orange Julius vs. a tall styrofoam cup.

6. Beware: Mercury retrograde.

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5 Comments
February 16th, 2012 / 11:26 am

La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims are tweets. Pascal’s Pensées are tweets. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are tweets. Wittgenstein kept his tweets in a box. “It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle,” says Wittgenstein. Would you retweet that?

Sunday Service

Sunday Service: Tim Earley Poem

from The American Folkways Series

Spring placed its finger on my spine. I am not some kind of zombie with a surfboard and ham. I am not some kind of pigeon cooing itself to death. The engine of my flatbed truck cuggles on the hill. The neighborhood wyvern sits alilt on the berm of its own brain. I am ready to have some babies. I am ready to be a bellicose producer and have some babies and toss them into the air for years until the Lord strikes them with the gift of speech and their tales turn the mountain’s insides out into the meat I eat for breakfast. Until then I will watch my squash grow and pine for the cleft of some long lost beauty’s historical chin. The daily path is riddled with deceits, dresses, yellow hems. We were merry once. We hung curtains. The Lord brought us together in a shallow pool, the water beaded on her fur. I loved and despised both her vicious and enduring parts. She could not get on with my mother and left for the insolvent side of Jacksonville, Florida. The blue mouth killed my mother. Her head-wrap. Her incessant dusting. The hymnal contained eternal springs and she sang over it, her thick ankles and periwinkle eyes. The spard-misted clouds of March reached inside us. Walking to the church was terrifying. Walking into the church felt like walking into your own mouth. Inside the church Jesus was hairy with milk, laments, and there was a copperhead swimming in the baptismal. The blue mouth killed her. Do not put your mouth on the spigot, dear Lord, do not insert into your mouth a hickory twig, Sweet Peter James. I suspect my children will not exist or else become legendary in their silences, mute puttocks scrimmed from the sourmash. And yet the mountain rain, all kinds of spectacular dying, Biblical black leather, going to town, hair that won’t stop growing, a mosquito stealthing blood, the asylum inmates buried vertically. I shall play my toothpick. I shall eat yonder cabin. I shall ride yonder donkey. I shall ho yander cake. I shall be wrought from my own particular orality. I shall wear the yellow dress in private. I shall smoke my mother. I am not some kind of zombie with a surfboard and ham. I piss upon your digital age and your perfumes rent from dog eggs. I am wrenched into this mountain. It is airish out. Aroint my crotch with your killing gun. Scoop out my scrotum like a pumpkin’s entrails. Remove my potato eye and shove into its gulch the caché-bearing fury of your Quaker cock. Break my spine, silver rain, a bait of ruined teeth and quick-feckled lies. She remains in Jacksonville, still, and in my dreams tiny dobros hang from her firm and too large ears. My warped singing shovel hangs in the barn. I have never heard a more vatic rooster. Some bright morning. A song more dead. That dazzle. Oh, Twila.

Tim Earley is the author of two collections of poems, Boondoggle (Main Street Rag, 2005) and The Spooking of Mavens (Cracked Slab Books, 2010). His poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, Conduit, Typo, Hotel Amerika and other journals. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

MLA ON ICE

Vicarious MFA / 17 Comments
February 6th, 2012 / 11:27 am

Is it the fall of the roman empire for litblogs? Has the empire already fallen? When did it fall?

Three ways to get a free poetry MFA

1. THE DICKINSON

 

 

 

 

 

 

Instructions:
* Never leave the house.

The downsides:
* Psychic fracture (this could happen at Cornell too)
* Your boo marries your brother (this could happen at Cornell too)

The upsides:
* Hot letters
* Yellow ribbon

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Vicarious MFA / 12 Comments
January 30th, 2012 / 12:16 pm

kiddies, need 2 steal a paper on Moby Dick?? u can have mine 4 free!!!

The Multivalent God of Moby Dick

by you!!! <3

Herman Melville’s complex renderings of god convey the influence of a dichotomous religious upbringing. On Melville’s mother’s side was the Dutch Calvinist church, with its focus on man’s sins and damnation. From his father, he gleaned the more liberal values of Transcendentalism and Unitarianism: a faith in man’s essential goodness.1 “We incline to think that God cannot explain his own secrets,” he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1854, “and that He would like a little information upon certain points himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us.”2 In Moby Dick (1851), Melville employs multiple symbols, including the ocean and the whale, to illustrate a god in flux. God is portrayed as an entity, which, like the whale, is not completely visible or knowable to man in its entirety. God’s existence, the shape it takes, depends on the perspective of the human who perceives it. Each character’s view of god is molded by his own innate attitude or constitution, as well as the external events of his life. In turn, a weave is created, wherein god and man are both contributors to the shape of a man’s destiny, as well as his perspective of a supreme being.

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Technology / 25 Comments
January 27th, 2012 / 9:51 am

Blurbs

 

 

 

 

“This grilled cheese is a sandwich that depicts hope, and the absence of hope, in modes that are simultaneously personal and universal. The surface of the sandwich may appear simple, but one is always engaged by a deeper fullness, richness and multivalence. A triumphant debut.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“At times both funny & heartbreaking, these three emotionally rich & incisive musketeers weave the remembered with the present. A postmodern classic.”

 

 

 

 

 

“If there’s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new muffin than the blueberry…well there just isn’t.”

 

 

 

 

“A dill pickle continually engages and surprises. In its rhetorical honesty, emotional lucidity and lyric vivacity, it captures the simultaneous joy and dejection of young men caught in the ‘industrial pull’ of our time.”

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I Like __ A Lot / 1 Comment
January 20th, 2012 / 3:59 pm