Mike Young is the author of Sprezzatura (poems), Look! Look! Feathers (stories), and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (poems). He designs and publishes NOÖ Journal and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.tumblr.com. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.
“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.
