Hey wow, did my last post, “How To Be A Critic (pt. 6)” just get deleted? Sure looks like it did. Will be curious to hear the reasoning behind that.

This is the first time anything I’ve written for this site has been tampered with.

Which books (if any) have had a noticeable effect on your behavior?

I heartily encourage you to read Virginia Konchan’s newly published story “Welcome to My Harem” (at Joyland), as well as her other stories and poems, linked to here.

Who’s got the worst author photo?

Why does this scare you?

Young ones, can you tell me when pizza came to be emblematic of all that is free & joyous & alive in American (and perhaps Canadian) culture? I mean, ppl always loved pizza. Pizza was v big in my day too. But there is such a proliferation of pizzapoems & pizzatweets & pizzaposts & pizzamemes & pizzagifs & cyber pizza rolls, that this momentum: 1. Eclipses the potential for any other food (say, Oreos) to gain any footing (which is fine) (but interesting). 2. Leaves me to wonder if everyone who claims to be obsessed w pizza is truly obsessed w  pizza or if they are obsessed w the idea of pizza/the pizza movement/pizza as symbolic of something higher, a utopian ideal, anarchy, an eternal youthful freedom. I feel abt the pizza insurgency the way I did when I had to google the word “trill.” Same with the whole “Dad” thing. Help me.

I read THE MOON’S JAW by Rauan Klassnik and first felt pissed and then I read harder and now I can’t get the book out of my head. It’s out now.

What do you think of this “review” of American Psycho, suggesting that the violence in it can be skipped over? Anything?

“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)

porn for the blind lol (via ubuweb)

via EW’s Shelf Life

The 2013 award for sheer chutzpah, for hope, goes to Lorem Ipsum books in Cambridge, MA. The innovative bookstore fell on rocky shores and, in two days, is trying to raise $30,000 so they can stay afloat. They seem cool. Do ‘em five bucks? Oh and then read this short thing about losing your job at a bookstore that I saw via Hobart’s Tumblr.

Brian Allen Carr, from Texas, is awesome. Somebody gave his book Short Bus a 1-star review at Amazon, but he says it’s a crappy review. So he’s doing a “Lone Star” contest: write the best 1-star review of the book by the end of February, and he’ll give you all three of his books, including the newest, Edie and the Low-Hung Hands (Small Doggies Press).

MY PET SERIAL KILLER giveaway winners: M Kitchell, Cara Giaimo, David Peak, Rauan Klassnik, and Roger Dudek! Nice creeping. Email your addresses to fieldsandfractures at gmail dawt calm.

Video of Peter Sotos presenting “Mine, Kept” at Le Nouveau Festival at Centre Pompidou.

Mark Baumer tried to get funds on Kickstarter to write 50 books in one year. It didn’t get funded. He’s writing them anyway and releasing them one at a time. You can read them online and you can buy them. I love Mark Baumer.

“You can feel good about your wave cap when it’s tied just right … You feel good about showing your exit wounds because of what you’ve held onto”

Are you a liar? About what? Be honest now.

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.

Jake Adam York (1972-2012) (via Noah Falck)

writer?