THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF TWEETS – vol 1
Another “journal” dedicated to the criticism (not really) and recognition of excellence in tweeting.
TWEETUS ILLUMINATIO MEA, TWEETAMS EST LITTERAE
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@WarmCigarette by Chimney
Genre: prosopopeian mise en phlegm
Since the late 90s and early 00s, following the demise of smoking in bars, cigarettes have become demodé. The waning of smokers has left four estranged islands in its wake: losers in their 20s who will never try a cigarette, exiles huddled together outside in the cold, those of us who have been addicted to nicorette for ten years (i.e. the editor of this journal) and the iron lung. Chimney’s feed reconnects with more philosophical concerns, embodying both substantialist and metonymous voices of the Marlborbo at various points in the feed. What’s more, Chimney applies solipsism to the act of smoking—to exist is to only know one’s own smoking— and then projects it onto the identities of its followers. Editorial favorites include: “7 steps to happiness: 7) cigarettes” “Aquarius: You know-it-all piece of shit. Your busy cigarette smoking schedule will make you late for everything this week, as per usual.” “Virgo: If everything needs to be perfect how come your life is always in complete disarray? Fuck off and smoke cigarettes.” “Registration plate ideas: BL4CK LUN6”. This is an awesome feed.
@retsoor by Jason Sebastian Russo
Genre: subtweeting at god
Russo’s feed thrives on tension and surreality, all set against a bloody backdrop of either the great mystery of life and/or a hot girl with tattoos and probably bangs. Through mixed metaphors, Russo transports us deeper and deeper into longing with each turn of the tweet. Smell the acidity of a box of white wine or the love lurking deep within the ball pit of a McDonald’s on rt 9, Poughkeepsie. “the typo in my genetic code compelled me to try to email your shih tzu w a microwave” he tweets. “just sat back & let karma ravage your face “ he tweets again. “bathed you in healing enzymes under a kaopectate sky” “made love to you under a giant warm crepe” “the two of us in an inverted arms race of low self esteem” he tweets again and again and a-fucking-gain.
23 Comments
August 1st, 2012 / 1:44 pm
August 1st, 2012 / 1:44 pm
select comments on “Zen Garden” and other youtube meditation videos
As the title of the post suggests, here are some comments I found on Zen Garden, Simple Meditation and other youtube videos I enjoy:
i’m a wolf, my criminal background says it all, fuck sheep. i eat them.
When I went to the warm hole there was no left up down right.
no need for ‘great longing’ when we are already the ocean we just need to remember.
what the fuck are you talking about srsly
thinking of turning my back porch into an “asian bath house” now…paper lanters bamboo curtains…candles lit…whos with me? lol :)
So he’s saying eat my body and live forever.
that buddha looks like my wife…
The Pleiadian star system is in fact our core essence, our ancestral home.
Is it wierd if I wack off to this ?
God is _________fill in the blank!!!!!
2012 marks the beginning of a global Golden Age of Peace and Oneness. Please check my channel for more.
so like crouching tiger hidden dragon sword fight to the death or some memoirs of a geisha type shit…
my true self is stillllll innocent…i think i am not and telll others I am anything but innocent but i realise now that i am in fact a child…
Satan is very happy with you
Melissa Broder—
There is a new tumblr called Poets Touching Trees. Frankly, I am disturbed to discover that all of the trees being “touched” are male. While Bernadette Mayer and I enjoy seeing male trees objectified, we all know that female trees are way underrepresented in the production of paper for major print publications. Here’s hoping the creators of this tumblr can “turn it around”.
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Sunday Service: Sean Edgley Poem
Réka’s Dream
She dreamt that I was living
in the basement of a cathedral.
To visit me
she had to climb through a window
and then through an air duct
with Rabelais’ catacomb bones.
The church was actually
a monastery in the Tatra mountains
where the monks made
ale and goat cheese.
No, that’s not right.
I was being held
against my will
in the basement
of a megachurch in France
and I was getting
the Hansel & Gretel treatment.
One day during her crawl
she overheard
the women in the laundry room.
They speaking in English badly.
They cackled in French.
They were anti-Semitic in Hungarian.
They got tricky and discussed my fate
within the cult in Slovak.
She saw one hooded auntie open
the washing machine door
but what the woman dragged out
was not laundry.
Angelology is the study of angels
she said, lowering herself
into my cell.
But those women are not angels.
Sean Edgley is a native of the San Francisco area currently getting his MFA at City College of New York. He has spent several years working and traveling in Europe and Asia, and these experiences inform much of his writing. This spring he has poems appearing in Literary Bohemian, Lyre Lyre, and Promethean. He is currently working on translations of contemporary Korean poetry, as well as a futurist screenplay set in China, inspired by Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading.
Lit Scene Tarot
The Hanged Man is suspended, upside-down, by his still-incomplete thesis. Given the calm expression on his face, it appears he hasn’t been on any academic job-search boards yet. Around The Hanged Man’s Head is a yellow halo, depicting the fondness he feels toward his Freshman seminar students. This fond feeling will soon cease. The Hanged Man’s number is 12, reflecting the number of years he has spent in grad school thus far.
The High Priestess is high. She sits at the gate before the great mystery of experimental literature, passing beneath a narrative arc on ionic corinthian pillars. She no longer goes from point A to point B, but from point B to point J. She sits between darkness and light, half enlightened by the experimental text on her lap and half not knowing what the hell is going on. The tapestry hung between the pillars keeps punctuation out.
The Knight of Wands is an impulsive type of dude who frequently posts his rough drafts to Fictionaut. He provides status updates about his divorce roughly every four – six minutes. Drawing The Knight of Wands card in a tarot reading may foreshadow an unexpected event in one’s life, such as being cornered by The Knight of Wands at a “literary reception” and forced to talk with him about Bolano for over an hour. The Knight of Wands is the patron saint of open mic nights.
Sunday Service: Gregory Sherl Poem
Pre-Genesis
These are my words. Press them against your gums.
In the beginning God Sr. made God Jr.
because everyone needs to come
from somewhere.
That means God Sr. just appeared
& that wouldn’t make any sense.
Know this book doesn’t make any sense,
but neither did the first one.
Still, follow me.
Tucking God Jr. into bed, God Sr. tells him
I hope you dream about stupid zombies
instead of martyrs being eaten by lions.
God Jr. is scared of lions because thoughts
of the future are worse than thoughts of the past
when the past is just beginning, like fourteen
lines ago beginning. READ MORE >
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.”
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.
5 Comments
February 16th, 2012 / 11:26 am
February 16th, 2012 / 11:26 am
Melissa Broder—
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: 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.
Melissa Broder—
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
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.
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.”
