After reading, and then listening to the recording of, Meghan Lamb’s gut-punching whirlwind “Girl” in the newest issue of the always excellent > kill author, I feel compelled to respond.

What is going on with that piece? It’s so absolutely mesmerizing, so uncomfortably pleasurable, so sick and disgusting and lyrically beautiful, so caustic and terrifying, so violent and raw.

In part, I think the appeal for me comes from the shock of becoming the text.

That voice echoes other voices I have become or other voices that have become me in the past, and when it gets inside it resonates in a particular way that simultaneously evokes both uncomfortable and pleasurable sensations.

Do you recall that scene in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart between Bobby Peru and Lula Fortune in the motel room?

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READ MORE >

An amazing resource is now available via the Burroughs Archive: complete scans of Ed Sanders’s Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts 1961-1965. I’m just now starting to peek into it…and wow!…its a crazy amalgam. Ginsberg, Warhol, Mary Mayo, Diane Wakoski, Artaud, the list goes on and on.

i’m not a writer. i make paintings instead. i’m perfectly happy making paintings – and i’m not a particularly jealous person – but since this is a literary blog, i thought i’d talk about a few things i like about books that don’t translate to paintings…

1. books involve big time commitments. on a few occasions, i’ve been the creepy guy in the art museum who won’t stop looking at a certain object. it usually takes about 90 seconds of oggling before i become self-conscious. by the two-minute-mark, my neck hurts, my friends are wandering off and i suspect that the security guard in the corner is quietly resenting my presence.

by contrast, books take HUGE amounts of my time. even short ones. i’ve recently begun listening to audiobooks, and they make this aspect of reading hilariously literal. wanna listen to middlemarch by george eliot? it takes thirty one hours and thirty seven minutes! nearly two days of my life are needed to apprehend its contents, let alone comprehend them.

i think there’s an inevitable intimacy that comes out of this. i have to trust a book more than a painting. there are people in my life that i genuinely care about who i wouldn’t want to listen to for thirty one hours and thirty seven minutes. books are like long-term relationships.

some paintings are like long-term relationships, but most are like quickies or unwanted advances. if someone looked at one of my paintings for a day in a half and decided the experience was worth the effort, i’d either marry them or bake them a pie or file a restraining order. READ MORE >

Here’s what I was preoccupied with while the city of Chicago suffered [last month].

1. Bonanno

“The ‘alternative’ ideal of a life based on the art of ‘getting by’ is also disappearing. Small-scale handicrafts, little self-produced undertakings, the street selling of objects, the necklaces… Infinite human tragedies have unrolled in dingy, airless shops over the past twenty years. Much really revolutionary strength has been trapped in illusions that required not a normal amount of work, but super-exploitation, all the greater because it was tied to the individual’s will to keep things going and show that it was possible to do without the factory. Now, with the restructuring of capital and the new conditions resulting from it, we can see how this ‘alternative’ model is exactly what is being suggested at an institutional level to get through this moment. As always, they see the way the wind is blowing. Other potentially revolutionary forces are now shutting themselves up in electronic laboratories and burdening themselves with work in dark, stuffy little premises, demonstrating that capital has won over them yet again.”
– Alfredo M. Bonanno, Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy ( available for free here )

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“A lot of it feels, to me, like a crisis of narrative. These stories basically follow the same model, often it’s the redemption narrative—a Christian redemption narrative of sinking low then rising above. This same narrative is repeated over and over, the culture can’t get enough of it for some reason. It’s not a bad story, but it’s crowding out alternative tellings, alternative versions, and this is very limiting, and basically false because it is limiting.”

(Read the rest, from the 2006 print interview newly posted at the Sycamore Review.)

Editorial Note: This is the third in a series of posts in which poets offer a reading of a favorite poem by a poet friend. Michael Meyerhofer is the author of three books, including Damnatio Memoriae, and five chapbooks. He teaches at Ball State University, in Muncie, Indiana. James Valvis is the author of How to Say Goodbye. He lives in Washington.

       1.

WOODWORK REDEMPTION
by James Valvis

I was eight years old
and my father forced me
downstairs to his woodshop
when all I wanted to do
was play baseball outside
like my friends were doing
and he backed me to a corner
this man who whipped me
with a brown leather strap READ MORE >

Looks like I did something similar in May of last year. Must be something about the season.

Anywho…

What follows this time is a showcase of ten good looking things I have piled around my desk in the ever-growing, ever-shifting, to-read pile: stuff I haven’t read yet, but am looking forward to…beginning with…

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Editorial Note: This is the second in a series of posts in which poets offer a reading of a favorite poem by a poet friend. Elisa Gabbert is the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). She lives in Denver and blogs at The French Exit. Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and the author of Oneiromance (an epithalamion) (Switchback Books, 2008) and the forthcoming collection Robinson Alone (Gold Wake Press, 2012). She lives in Chicago. Chad Reynolds is the author of Victor in the New World (Rope-a-Dope Press, 2008). He lives in Oklahoma City.

       1.

BUENOS AIRES
by Chad Reynolds

The widest boulevard, an opera house,

A restaurant built under an overpass.

I bought a Versace tie and went dancing in a t-shirt

I walked out of the club, it was dawn

There was a soccer parade READ MORE >

READ MORE >

1. Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, by Donald Antrim. It is not terribly later in the history of the universe than it is now. We’re on Florida’s west coast. Mayor Jim Kunkel has fired Stinger missles into the Botanical Garden reflecting pool. Picnickers have died. Our hero, ex-third-grade-teacher Pete Robinson, would probably make a better mayor than Jim Kunkel, and it’s not probably a liability that he creates a 1:32 scale model interrogation chamber (the Inquisition is what he’s mocking up) in his basement.

First sentence: “See a town, stucco-pink, fishbelly-white, done up in wisteria and swaying palms and smelling of rotted fruits broken beneath trees: mango, papaya, delicious tangerine; imagine this town rising from coral shoals bleached and cutting upward through bathwater seas: the sunken world of fish.”

2. The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker. Our hero can stop time, drop into “the Fold,” and do whatever he wants for awhile, while the rest of the world stays helpfully still. What he mostly does is check out what women look like, beneath their clothes. If this seems a premise too flimsy to sustain a book-length narrative, well, it is, and half the fun of the book is watching Baker find a way to make a novel out of a paper-thin conceit. When he does, it’s all the more thrilling.

First sentence: “I am going to call my autobiography The Fermata, even though “fermata” is only one of the many names I have for The Fold.”

3. Too Late, by Stephen Dixon. This is one of those lost Stephen Dixon books nobody ever talks about. It’s strange that it is, because it’s also one of the most approachable Stephen Dixon books. It’s also the rare Stephen Dixon book that flirts with genre (in this case, the procedural), and it comes early enough in Dixon’s publishing career (1978) to have Harper & Row on the spine. Here we don’t have the fractured narrative, the irreconcilable set pieces, or the Bernhard-esque paragraphs-without-end. But we do have plenty that is recognizably Dixonian–the snappy, talky dialogue; the tortured, tie-yourself-in-knots interior life of the speaker; the everything-turned-up-to-seven-and-a-half-but-not-eight-out-of-ten event machine. It also offers up the dark urban pleasures of the late ’70′s, which are hard to find anymore except in novels and on late-night proselytizing movies on Christian cable television (for starters–and for funny–I recommend The Cross and The Switchblade, shot on location in Hell’s Kitchen, in which the big gangland conversion scene involves a massive zoom-in on a picture of Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ. It also has the most “realistic” tie-off-and-shoot-up-heroin-in-the-stairwell scene I’ve ever seen in American cinema. But I digress.) READ MORE >

Editorial Note: This is the first in a series of posts in which poets offer a reading of a favorite poem by a poet friend. Ana Bozicevic is the author of Stars of the Night Commute.  Amy King is the author of three books of poetry, including I Want to Make You Safe, from which “Men By the Lips of Women” is taken. Together, they edit Esque Magazine and the PEN Poetry Series. They live on the Long Island Sound.

Ana Bozicevic

Amy King

        1.

MEN BY THE LIPS OF WOMEN
by Amy King

I’m in love with a man who doesn’t love me
with the pages of the book he sees from.
He makes love through his syllabic ink, a salted thunder,
leaves me to my own delirium tremens.
I gouge out his eyes, break the yolk across his shoulders,
disembowel the nectar from his liver.
His toxins become a cherry blossom wine.
He sounds in the brain’s eagled hollows READ MORE >