“Every word was once an animal. – Emerson” – Marcus
Today, at Community Thrift on 17th and Valencia, I bought these books for $2.50. The first page of Dear Mr. Capote says “Ed Seifert” in pencil. Wonder if he’s related to George, who won the Super Bowl. Jaroslav won the Nobel Prize. My family farmed the rim of the Dust Bowl and nearly made it stinking rich off a bunch of black sand but didn’t. It seems “Seifert” comes from “cipher.” Encoding words is a form of mathematics. “Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.” – Michael Marcus
Tomorrow I’m reading at Amnesia, at nine o’clock, with Lindsay Hunter, Amelia Gray, and Aaron Burch. Wearing a coonskin cap and a corduroy suit, I will read from my novel for the very first time. The novel is called A Dog On Onondaga. I vow to never finish writing it, but to self-publish new handbound editions whenever I feel like it. Maybe you think that’s vain. Sometimes I stare in the mirror for oceans of time, for no reason. Your opinion of me is so much sand on the beach of yesterday. Three days ago part of me did something immoral; the rest of me has only begun to feel bad. Another part of me wants desperately to be lost in the desert with a backpack full of books; but that can probably wait until the winter of my content. I plan to go to the community pool tomorrow, so that my body will remember what it was like when it was a word. READ MORE >
Reynard Seifert—
Help Amelia Gray and Aaron Burch raise money for their High Emission Book Tour. (Just three days left!) Or go to a reading and buy a book maybe. Whatever, just give them some money if you have it because I totally don’t but you probably do. Tucson, San Diego, LA, San Francisco, and Sacramento.
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Some Sentences Recently Written In My Moleskine
“I saw the flag, and the sun slanting on the broad grass.” — William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
“Thank you for not walking your dog in this area.” — Sign at an RV park in Estes Park, Colorado
“Summer or winter, the shade of trees or their hard shadow, I never seem to get into my Rice Krispies until noon.” — Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
“Talk to LaRhonda: SEX” — From a notebook found on Southwest Flight 620, San Francisco to Denver
“When Haley Joel Osment thought about Dakota Fanning’s father he saw a normal-looking man sitting on the edge of a bed in the morning, standing in an office with a neutral facial expression, walking to his apartment at night, walking into his bedroom, quietly closing the door, screaming in agony, brushing his teeth, sleeping.” — Tao Lin, Richard Yates
“But then, why would I want a chick no one gives a shit about?” — Some guy walking near 16th and Dolores
“The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured Kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, ‘Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,’ and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.” — Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America
“I’ve handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.” – Josef Albers
Memes Will Be Memes
In this here book, Richard Dawkins coined the term meme.
I heard he doesn’t believe in gawd or something. I dunno,
How To Make Your Next Reading More Interesting (Even If Your Work Really Isn’t)
1) Wear a mask. We all do. There is nothing to hide but hide itself.
“PAY FOR SOUP / BUILD A FORT / SET IT ON FIRE”
If one were so inclined, one could buy The Whole Livery Line, 1987, by “Jean-Michel-Basquiat [sic] faithfully recreated by hand using the finest art quality linen canvas and Winsor and Newton oil paints” for just $255 from either of these companies – judging from the templates, presumably run by the same “on the fringes of legality ethics” mo-fos. I wonder if people will openly sell forgeries of Rammellzee pieces in ten or fifteen years, when people realize, maybe, that he was, like, really important, and dead. Probably not.
Tentacles Are Hair You Wear On Your Spleen, Ideally
“You might define the general trend in my work as a synthesis of aesthetics and psychology. Traditionally, in Japan, these are not two different things. Neither is aesthetics in conflict with realism. I believe this is unique to Japan.” – Yukio Mishima
Marvin On Style
“I hope to refine music, study it, try to find some area that I can unlock. I don’t quite know how to explain it but it’s there. These can’t be the only notes in the world, there’s got to be other notes some place, in some dimension, between the crack.”
“I sing about life.”