http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com
Mike Young is the author of Look! Look! Feathers (Word Riot Press 2010), a book of stories, and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (Publishing Genius Press 2010), a book of poems. He edits NOÖ Journal and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.blogspot.com. He lives in Northampton, MA.
“I get so very tired of having to talk about literature. I didn’t begin writing because I wanted to sit in a room and discuss the subjectivity in Wordsworth and Ashbery; I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back and say yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no, maybe, never, forever.” — Mary Ruefle (via Amber Sparks)
Fun Camp has the skinniest low voice. Fun Camp has the most earnest eye width. Fun Camp is tall and kind and stalwart and genuinely funny, sweetly so, like the difference between a blackberry and corn syrup. If I could compare Fun Camp to a season, it would be early May, which is a problem, because most summer camps take place after that, and Gabe Durham wrote a novel about summer camp. It’s called Fun Camp.
The novel is made up of little frosted mini wheats of prose—”monologues, speeches, soliloquies, sermons, letters, cards, and lists”—thereby marking Fun Camp a deconstruction of a genre (the summer camp genre) that (let’s admit) is kind of addictive no matter how you shoot it. I mean, there are parts of this book that are literally better than Wet Hot American Summer. Yeah. For real. I’m not blowing watermelon relays up your ass. It’s not hard to read this book at all—this book is fucking entertaining. It’s sticky with zingers.
Gabe is someone you are like: how did that sweet young man just make it so funny? Because real funny is never sweet. Forget what I said earlier. It’s not even laughter we mean, exactly. Real true funny is the thin cotton sheet with the eye holes poked out that we wear over our totally freakiest cruelties.
In Fun Camp, there is free time, pig’s blood, sucky trees, Satanic goats. There is that tentative adolescent insanity we’re still getting over. Don’t take my huck for it. Get the book. $9 at PGP, early bird special. It’s the book of the summer. PeterBD, in fact, says it’s the “book of 2013.” Below the jump, I will shut up and hand over the sharing baton to some of what’s actually in this lovely young book. READ MORE >
Hey, have y’all seen and heard this Story Tapes project that Eliza Smith and Faith Gardner have put together? They have a sweet logo, and they post interviews/audio/video of writers reading their own stories, or swapping and reading another writer’s stories, and it’s all really nicely produced and soundtracked.
Stories by people like Scott McClanahan, xTx, Delaney Nolan, Dylan Nice, Alissa Nutting, Mary Miller, Sarah Rose Etter, Amber Sparks, Matt Rowan, Lauren Becker, Casey Hannan, Tania Hershman, and some cool new-to-me people like Alicia Mountain, Sean Schlemmer, Josh Denslow, Owen Poindexter, Molly Laich, Megan Kruse, Berit Ellingsen, and more.
More people should do stuff like this. Is this a thing? Are lots of people doing well-designed and steady video/audio reading series things like Story Tapes? Can you post some links in the comments?
now I am famished for peace
now I watch a 90 year old movie to
witness dead people talking singing
riding horses samsara
SAMSARA SAMSARA
I’ve been walking the border of sleep to find you
dreaming around the circumference of
a hole in the ground
the bravest thing sometimes is
how the morning is greeted
fight for the money or
fight for the soul the saying goes
but another goal is to
fight for neither
via Carolyn Zaikowski, who, like, actually writes about this stuff
“In between surviving multiple point-blank-range assassination attempts and a failed kidnapping in which he emerged alive from the burning wreckage of a battleship his own air force had just bombed, Pibulsongkram decided that Thailand needed noodles that would advance the country’s industry and economy.” — Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s brief history of pad thai (and accompanying recipe) in The Morning News is the best writing criticism/advice I’ve read in months.
Someone grabbed me the other day. He wanted to talk about Rap Genius/Poetry Brain. He wanted me to talk about Rap Genius/Poetry Brain. I am good at talking—so I figure, why not? I mean this guy who asked me, he knew Barry Hannah, and I started right off the jump writing about Barry Hannah, and Hannah’s hospital visitation from Christ—which is just gorgeous and I would like to experience someday before my brain pops:
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201010/?read=interview_hannah_tower.
But then I had to cut the stuff about Hannah.
If this article were up at Rap Genius I could make the words “Hannah’s hospital visitation from Christ” into a link and when you clicked on it, then it would open directly to the part of the interview in The Believer where Hannah talks about Christ appearing in Hannah’s room at the old hospital.
Since it’s not, you have to go to the link and then scroll through the whole interview between Deep Water Hole Tower and Barry Hannah to find that moment of CHRIST appearing in Hannah’s hospital room, and the mountains behind him.
I don’t know much about Rap. I used to smoke Oregon marijuana and drive around as a skinny pale shit listening to my brother’s tape of “Too Short” in my brother’s old red Honda stick shift, driving through the hills of Portland, already making up crazy voices in my head to tell stories with, but not telling any of them, just listening to them making me crazy in my head. So stoned, and driving, and everything like a song. The whole world singing. Which was probably the best. The not telling them and just having them. I definitely didn’t believe Too Short and guessed he was just playing with voices in his head too. I didn’t think of any of it as factual, or having any larger implications, or that there was anything real to find out about. Which was my fault. I was dumb about rap. I was just another freaky weird kid driving around in a brother’s car, cologne in the console, getting drunk and stoned and looking at the sky. I don’t know why, but I want to put this link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uee_mcxvrw. If this were Rap Genius I could put this in as a link in the word freaky up above. You’d just click on freaky and the video would open in a little window and you would still be looking at this thing I’m writing and you’re reading. I was dumb about life. I thought it was always going to sing and that I wouldn’t have to find out about life in order to use my voices. READ MORE >
If it’s real sprang sprung where you are—I mean like pensive warm midnight donut strolls with cicadas under your Keds—then you are feeling all refreshed and full of light, which means your brain is in good shape to read some new online magazine releases.
Sixth Finch is bubbling. RIYL science, river walks, cake under bridges, kids doing science on public television, bodies saying something when they’ve had enough of fighting, paper animals, the counterculture of silence, singing into bottles, oxen who think they are cotton, aliens with crew cuts, poison mandrake roots, qualities, the dress you woke up in, car insurance company slogans, felon hearts, intergalactic surfboards, holy slobs, the way every surface can be a cradle, or water in the open knees.
NOÖ Journal is into [14] after a year’s hiatus. There are book vouchings and a list of every book some chucklehead read in 2012. Read NOÖ [14] if your back feels like a shipwreck, if you ever coated Omega 3 capsules with peanut butter, if your body used to like swings and probably still does, if you’ve ever eaten Doritos at breakfast, if it cheers you up to think of Benjamin Franklin inventing electricity even though he lived alone until he was dead, if you like staring up at things that can’t see you below them, looking for a man who tells three lies a day, cooking when you get nervous, gazing spiritually toward the Macho Man, taking turns letting and being let down, afraid to fall asleep on buses, your car on fire in the snow, the screen a scroll, kissing like confusion at the supermarket, Treat Yo Self, (feeling you get in a ball pit), talking in a flashlight lit pool, talking later about creepshots, talking about keeping each other when storms come, tracing dead mouths, selling that brain painting, parabolas the shape of manic depressives, your Soul a scrap of lightning, crappy knowledge, searching the floor for a diamond four, stepping into the rain like a film, dying in a fortlike structure, or the infinite pi of sun.
The beautiful lumberjack Mel Bosworth—with Christy “Peach Cinnamon” Crutchfield—has started a terrific archive of small press reviews from over the years, with new ones to come, elegantly called The Small Press Book Review. The blog is retro and easy to navigate, and the reviews are clear and concise. A great new resource if you’re curious about some of those books you’ve heard about but haven’t yet plucked.
You can do that. You can also win a copy of The Minus Times Collected (I’ve got one, it’s amazing) signed by three of its authors: Hunter Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Jeffrey Rotter.
What, what’s going on. What’s going on is: The Short Form—a site that stylishly celebrates good-ass stories by excerpting them and asking guests to talk about their favorites—is giving away these books in its first ever short story contest. Three finalists will get featured on the site and all will win a copy of Stanford’s Conditions Uncertain and Likely to Pass Away, which is pretty much just as good as his poems except it’s stories, so—I was about to do that Gawker thing where they just end a sentence with “so” or “because” but then I wondered if Frank Stanford would do that and I decided he would probably beat me to death with all the empty Smartwater bottles littering my carpet if he showed up, like, in my living room, reincarnated, risen, made of carpet dust.
The point is one grand prize ultimate winner will also receive The Minus Times Collected, signed. I like The Short Form, they’re good in people ways, this contest seems fun, do it if you like contests. Deadline: March 31st. Details: this is the third time I’ve linked to the same link in this post which can’t be good for SEO. Also above us there is a picture because pictures!
“What we are left with is bodies that are confused: incapable, on a molecular level, of maintaining the basic boundaries that are constitutive of self.” — from Carolyn Lazard’s “How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity” in Cluster Mag, a brilliant essay about illness that is really an essay about everything. (Thanks to Anne Boyer and Danielle Pafunda for the link)
Dear stunning axe, the sad Alexander, the scores
of life, the life that will probably be, the life
of the biggest thoughts, to have found the pizza
faultless, to have noted, in the mountains, the fitting
thing about being in the mountains, that you feel
upheld, the 99th part of 100, only lonely in the house,
on the street, through the turnstiles, in the stadium,
the held beer and the beer that is in the cup holder,
the I am thinking about the suits of the travelers,
prodigious coffee, enraptured pop, the guitars
that sound like bubbles and the ones that sound
like lasers, the I have met trees, two or three
times, that made me cry, sad about injustice, sad
about environment, by all means, gravely, with great
concern, without being flip, the I am trying to be
honorable, to be all right again, to overlook
when I am at an overlook and at no other time,
the I have accepted it, I of the friendlier memories,
I of the best love to your mother, I met her, she
liked me, the young man, the polite, the I am writing
that there may be a pencil rubbing, some borders
to the epoch, the foghorn I heard, the breakfast,
the here I am, hours early, as always, mid-winter,
pelagic, the tyrannosaurus of popularity, the burgeoning
truth arrived at upon further consideration, a diamond
cutting the blank, blank, blank, much as we might
choose to skip over it, the part of life that is bracketed
off, sorry how sudden, sorry and sorrier, quiet
to greet you, quiet as an airport when life is over.
Ghost Ghost
You can’t find the strands
of your lover’s hair
if you never said yes or
hum in the relative minor
if you never had a blood
to call your own. Later
is all the used to be
I ever wanted, after
some after I’d call down
if I had had breath.
You can’t haunt, haint,
if you hadn’t had
a have. If you never
had nary a name.
One thing I can recommend without even needing a kickback is coconut milk ice cream. It’s pretty easy to make on your own, it’s good if you don’t eat dairy for whyever, some companies that make it have hilarious videos of their hippie-ass founders on their websites, and one time on the phone with Comcast I actually bonded with the person from Comcast over it, over coconut milk ice cream. Another thing I can recommend is Coconut #15, the newest issue of an online poetry magazine, which is back after a hiatus. Way back in 2005, I used to get Coconut mixed up with Shampoo, so now you know whether you would ever want to take a shower with me.
I don’t get Coconut #15 mixed up with anything, which is because the old old old universe is shaped like a saddle. And also because my love for you is not a coin operated washer/drier or that type of orgasm (Spectateur, -trice, n) that watches you, as if from above. Instead I am a vibration as hard as a living creature, and I am always on the lookout for officers of light. Instead I keep finding ”history” in mornings and quotation marks. The prisoners keep hitchhiking and waving soap box guns. You keep puking in your mother’s mouth, which doesn’t help Dorothea any, because she already expects all the witches. Galaxy-sheep can count every time they’ve cried in a hole in the wall piano bar. They know they don’t need to count anything to know that everyone’s a hero or fooled you. Imagine sleeping in a canoe or as a toy whale in a gutter. Now imagine everybody as a 
feather on a child with a bird’s head. If that feels annoying, let your eyes wander to water. Try to understand those kids who hide in abandoned refrigerators and want shoulder blades to replace knives. If you are lucky you’ll be able to see the turnip fields from here, glowing and torpedoed from the rain. You’ll see yourself downing your fourth energy drink and hating how not tired you are. People who play video games don’t sleep. People who don’t sleep watch commercials. Don’t comfort it out in the middle there. We will absorb these rules like a saltbath. We check out the list of demands and it’s filled with things we like but never used to like. In what you once famously referred to as my earlier, bullshit life, the clock on the bed and the white horse sad as the island both failed to tell me what time it is because time is a mirror made wrong. How many times have you wandered beneath the dark only to emerge into darker? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my cloud to understand anything. You tell yourself your bones are too fat to fly and a tree tells you otherwise. The tree tells you it was beautiful to hold boys who wanted to make girlfriends out of paper or stones, and the fiddlehead fern—with gunshots of light in the leaves?—it high-fives you in your face.
“She comes to a rest in shadow. Above her is an overhang of chickenwire and tins. She freezes. Above her is a terrible shape, a jagged many-limbed thing, a tree tangled from the composites of aerials and tv innards, plastic extrusions like growths in its multipart trunk, thorns of glass and shattered plates. Its branches splay – finger after finger of tubing, and intricate wicked ribbing. Dangling from them like dirty dank foliage, like the skins of victims, are dish clothes, and umbrellas’ countless ripped canopies. Nylon in dinged colours.”
— from “The Flies That Bind” by “Jacques Francis,” The New Inquiry
“I used to compare everything in poems to metallic sheets of mica, the transparent fragments that flake off so easily. I never say I’m a poet; I just say “writer” and no one ever asks “a writer of what?” Once a man told me he was in the business of prosthetic limbs and I was speechless.”
— Stephanie Balzer, The Destroyer Vol 1.2
“We had a president living here once,
After he was president.
A famous animator lived here too.
We’d see him feeding the ducks.
This used to be a big duck town.
Ducks had a real voice.
Then one night they left for New Haven.”
— from “A Little Background” by James Haug, Connotation Press
><><>> Calzones, collaborations, and fogbound techniques of waiting gracefully for nothing at the new issue of red lightbulbs
><><>> Astronaut brothers (or not), paradoxical undressing, and interviews about $$$ at the new issue of Gigantic
On Thursday, we talked about Dear Dawn: Wuornos in Her Own Words, a collection of letters that Aileen Wuornos wrote from prison to her childhood friend Dawn Botskins. As a follow up to that post, which includes a conversation between editors Lisa Kester and Daphne Gottlieb, we’d like to show you some of the letters in the book. Our selection spans from the early 90s to the early 00s. Enjoy.
“Can you remember time!” Do you remember the fight me an greasy haired Penny Dole and I had at the front steps of troy Union Grade School . . . Do you remember when Lori, + Ducky got in that car accident . . . Do you remember a guy with real long jet black hair. Named “Black sheep” at the high school.? Well one day. Him and I went under neath a stair well near the new section they built that had swinging doors that head outside. Once you hit the bottom of the steps. Well he had a 4 finger lid of “Acapolco Gold” . . . we went under there to roll a big one and smoke it there. We heard footsteps coming down. But we figured that was just another kid on his way out to somewheres. So we finished rolling it. And started to lite it. And Low and Behold. It was the Principle. He looked at us both and said “Report to my office now” . . . . . Black sheep. Gave me the lid. And he started up the stairs. I said to the Principle. Bullshit! I aint reportin now where. Matter of fact. I quit school. Right now. He said. Then you get off of these school grounds right now wuornos. And if I ever see you on them again Ill call the police. You understand. ha ha ha! I walked out the double doors with the pot. And that was the day I quit school. What was really strange was that the principle knew I wasn’t living at home. But in the woods. I guess he admired me, for having the guts to still go to school, as a runaway, and living in the woods near your house. A trip huh!
Well last page. Gotta close er up. Take Care Dawn . . . I’m still surviven. A little crazy but still comin through. 4-now Love Lee
Imagine you are shown a picture of yourself walking along a highway you have never seen. And now you are asked how you got there. Obviously you have to start running. As in running out of what you remember. Or running out, like losing it. And they want you to talk and talk, so immediately you’re talking back through hell. Talking back to hell. Or taking back hell. Maybe sing, you could call it, like hell. Whatever you want to call it and others call it for you. Insanity is a community decision, heroism is a community decision. Violence is the opposite of space. Everything I know about violence is also the nothing I know about violence.
The principal admired her for living in the woods, she wrote. She remembered all the cool black light posters, she wrote. God had it all recorded, she wrote. “Every women,” she wrote, “even adulesent, should learn Self defense, Also carry guns and know how to use them., when reaching a certain age. Like 21…” Some of the other advice she wrote was “just pretend I’m still around” and “ride through it all naturally” and write to keep the wrist from “stiffening up.” There were details she didn’t want to go into. She remembered which days the rain came down hardest. All of this she wrote in letters to her friend. She called the letters kites, which is a pretty common word in prisons. The prison only let each letter be a few pages, so she wrote more than a few letters. If you can still see a face on the other end of the wall, you can fill the wall.
In 1956, Aileen Wuornos was born Aileen Carol Pittman in Rochester, Michigan. Her father was in prison for the rape and attempted murder of a seven-year-old girl. They never met. He hung himself in prison when she was 13. At 14, she was raped while hitchhiking home from a party. She gave the baby up for adoption. By 15, kicked out of her grandparents’ home, she was living in the woods and sleeping in abandoned cars in the Michigan winter. She survived by way of herself. Her body was involved. She did have friends, and she spent most of the money she earned from sex work on them. Two of the movies made about her are called Damsel of Death and Monster.
While in prison for the murder of seven straight white men, whom she shot and killed in remote Florida locations, she told Phyllis Chesler “I raised myself. I did a pretty good job. I taught myself my own handwriting, and I studied theology, psychology, books on self-enhancement. I taught myself how to draw. I have been through battles out there raising myself. I’m like a Marine, you can’t hurt me. If you hurt me, I can wipe it out of my mind and keep on truckin’. I took every day on a day-by-day basis. I never let things dwell inside me to damage my pride because I knew what that felt like when I was young.”
READ MORE >
