[matchup #51 in Tournament of Bookshit]

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[matchup #50 in Tournament of Bookshit]

I don’t have specific thoughts regarding either of these things. I imagine that working at Best Buy is similar to many retail jobs? You deal with a lot of odd customers, coworkers, and supervisors? Maybe that is an unfair assumption. See, the only retail job I worked was at a used book store in Virginia when I was in graduate school. I stocked the shelves and I also purchased inventory according to a massive buying manual that the owners had seemingly haphazardly created full of random rules regarding what sorts of books we should take in and what we should not. We bought a lot of mass market paper backs and children’s books. My following these rules at the buying table often meant that I turned down a lot of great books, fascinating and interesting books, that the owners had deemed a waste of shelving space. Probably, from a business standpoint, they were right: they knew their customers, and theirs were customers who were not interested in Fowles’ The Maggot, nor were their customers interested in Barnes’ Nightwood. Both of these books intrigued me when I held them in my hands at the buying table, and even as I turned them down, I wanted to know what was between their covers (I later read Nightwood in a class; still haven’t read The Maggot). Another terribly weird part of this job is that we threw out a lot of books. Like, shitloads of books. And the owners required us to rip the covers off these books because a few years before I worked there, a customer had pulled books out of the dumpster that they had trashed and resold those books to the store several times. So there I was, tearing covers off books like O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, simply because these books had ‘been on the shelf too long.’ After that, I began to take the discards and put them nicely in a box and hide the box in the store until my assigned closing night, and then I would take the box to my car. At one point I had five boxes of books in my car, books the owners had deemed a ‘waste of shelf space,’ and these I distributed to my friends in order to make room to save more books. Eventually, the store closed because the owners couldn’t pay the rent, and I spent my final weekend at that job boxing up books to save from the dumpster in between breaking down shelves and stacking the book carts in a moving van.

- Ryan Call

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[matchup #49 in Tournament of Bookshit]

The year was 2012 and we were all under the assumption that, in some way or another, the world would end soon. We knew that the Mayans had nothing to do with it because, as we all know, when one calendar ends we just buy a new one, we don’t assume the worst. Capitalism might collapse, geotraumatic insistence might just find us no longer rooted on the earth, it’s too bad NASA itself is gone. All that’s left to feel is our own collective solar body moving through time and space.

We find our bodies in bars, we find our bodies consuming alcohol, we find our bodies consuming more alcohol, we find ourselves going outside for a cigarette, we watch stars plummet and all make the same wish; that we can sustain, that the world won’t end, that our accelerated reality stops, calms down, pauses for a second. READ MORE >

Click here!!!

The Cupboard is a quarterly prose chapbook series that has published volumes by Jesse Ball, Mathias Svalina, Caia Hagel, Andrew Borgstrom, and Joshua Cohen—among other great writers.

I have an extra copy or two of Daniel Bailey’s brand new and very excellent Hallelujah, Giant Space Wolf, now out from Mammoth Editions. Leave a comment and I’ll randomly select a winner to receive.

“I don’t know how many poets could write a book bringing together meth, Barney, racecars, black metal, God, and the Lakers in one massive feral hymn, but Daniel Bailey is the only one I’d trust. Water into wine is fine but this man can do it to dogshit. Hallelujah Giant Space Wolf is hilarious and true and beautiful. Hail holy spazzlord Bailey.” —Blake Butler

“If Daniel Bailey’s poems were people, they would be the kind of people that you love to get drunk with but you’re always a little afraid that they might try to slit your throat. When you tell them about Emily Dickinson feeling the top of her head come off, they reach for a saw. Still, you can’t help but love them. They’re a blast! They’re always a step away from going to jail or running into your parents or causing you to rearrange the furniture in your loneliest apartment. Daniel Bailey’s poem-people are in a gang called The Space Wolves and they are really, really excited about learning something from this terrible, amazing, gigantic world, even if that means that we’ll need a mop for all of the blood.” —Peter Davis, author of Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!

[matchup #46 in Tournament of Bookshit]

Coming off their tedious win over those posting constant facebook photos, those Trolling for spelling errors in blog posts were feeling self-important & in the zone going into their game against Sewage Treatment Technologies. Little did Trolling for spelling errors in blog posts know, Sewage Treatment Technologies had a secret weapon they had not revealed in their win against The Pulitzer Prize, in the form of the lanky Roman center, Chiara Barzini. She quoted a passage from her forthcoming book:«If you attack, make sure you say things that really creep under the skin. A threat that always scares Romans off is: “Your sewage goes into pipes laid in 735 B.C. You are shitting into the past.”» And then she preceded to divulge the intricate inner-workings of Rome’s sewage system. Trolling for spelling errors in blog posts were thrown into confusion—not only was this sequence of words unseen previously in any blog post, but by self-revealing such vulnerabilities in the Roman sewage system, Sewage Treatment Technologies took away the sense of discovery from Trolling for spelling errors in blog posts, rendering them mute. Taking a cue from the movie Brazil, the all-purpose guard-forward Harry Tuttle (played by Robert Deniro) rerouted the online sewage pipes to flood all blog posts, leaving Trolling for spelling errors in blog posts to drown in their own shit. READ MORE >

[matchup #44 in Tournament of Bookshit]

I’m pretty sure that Chili’s is really fucking gross. In fairness, I don’t think I’ve been there in over fifteen years or so. I’ve been riding that wave a lot of us are on, where I justify my lack of actual political actions by my worldly, educated decision making and feeling like it is something akin to “personal protest.” I eat organic kale often, and I feel superior packing it in my reusable tote, is what I’m saying. However, Chili’s has one thing that self-congratulation does not– the Awesome Blossom, which, for the sadly uninformed, is a “bloomed” and deep fried sweet onion with a dipping sauce topping out at 2,710 calories that often sparks large waves of passion and controversy. The texture is oddly light and easy to digest, a hint of spice in both the breading and the sauce. It finishes on the palate as a well-balanced dish, surprisingly light on the acidity. Once, when I was about ten, I remember my sister attempting to order an Awesome Blossom as an entrée for herself. It left the family with disturbing questions to answer. Will she also be eating her fair share of the Awesome Blossom ordered as its proper course, an appetizer for the entire family? Could this possibly sustain her for the rest of the night? Etc. etc. etc. READ MORE >