i just read barry graham’s chapbook “not a speck of light is showing” and halfway through reading it i found myself motioning with both hands upwards, as if attempting to raise the roof from a lower altitude to one much higher. i suspect that was consequent to barry graham locking his chapbook in the basement and forcefeeding it awesomeness. i am being serious. it costs four dollars. buy it. you will laugh and feel a little sickened. when i was done reading it, i felt like barry graham was mr. miyagi and i was daniel-san and i was lying on my back and he was showing me how “paint the fence” could help deflect the shit that barry graham was shitting into my mouth. and i kept trying to swat the shit away, but at a certain point, i just stopped and lay motionless, eyes and mouth open, and there was no light.
Opium Literary Death Match #9 Grand Laser Finale
As much fun as this is to watch, it was even more fun to watch live.
Mean Week vs Puppies and Rainbows Week
Darby Larson has posted about Mean Week over at his blog. I like Darby. He is good at arguing things, and he thinks hard about things. Many of his comments on blogs are very thoughtful, and I usually read them and think I should make my brain smarter in order to respond to them.
Darby on Mean Week:
I don’t think mean week has been mean, by my definition of it. The problem is that if it were mean, then there would be consequences. Friendships would end, would have to be mended over time, would depend on a puppies and rainbows week just to heal.
Maybe we could learn a thing or too from Gridskipper, a travel blog, that had its own Mean Week back in 2007. Apparently, they traveled places and were mean to babies.
Where is everyone?
Remember When VQR Did This?
That is the first picture to come up if you Google image ‘fuck VQR.’
I have no idea if this is a dumb post or not. And I have no reason to post this, really, except that I like the idea that it will be out there on the internet as a record of VQR‘s momentary stupidity/craziness/awesomeness(?). I stole the information from the guy who runs Literary Rejections on Display, a blog that makes me feel weird.
Ok, so near the end of April, VQR made public on its blog a series of comments that submissions readers had made about certain awful stories, poems, essays in the to-read pile. Then people got mad. Feelings were hurt. Passionate speeches were made. And VQR took down the ‘hurtful’ things and replaced them with kind things. Well, the bandage didn’t work very well, so VQR took those kind things down and replaced them with a letter of apology (sort of?) from editor Ted Genoways.
This is what was originally posted on the blog:
Since I often get a laugh out of reading through some of the notes that our beleaguered readers provide for these particularly unfortunate submissions, it seems worthwhile to share them. Here are some of my favorites:
- The emotional problems of clipping fingernails. Actually the best of his submissions.
- OK, I’m just going to say it. This writing is plain ugly.
- “Soon he fitted his body into mine like a puzzle piece.” NONONONONONONONONO!
- Planet of the Apes fan-fiction! Have we no standards?
- Why does the speaker’s wife only want babies from Chinese shacks? This is the craziest poem. And the scariest. I feel like we should the call the cops on this guy. (There should be a category called “Inappropriate to Humanity.”)
- Unpublished Faulkner. Should remain unpublished.
- I can’t enumerate all the ways in which this is horrible
- This guy has either the best or the worst cover letter ever. As for the poem, barf-o.
The problem with these reader comments is that they aren’t mean enough. And they aren’t that funny, to me anyhow. The fact that VQR posted them is funny, I think.
Okay, the fingernail one makes me laugh a little. I want to read that poem/story.
I know I’m supposed to talk about small presses and online indie stuff. And it is still technically Mean Week, I guess, so I should be mean to VQR somehow. But I am bad at mean. All I really wish is that VQR would do something like this again, so hits rise. Then maybe more people would know about them, like Gawker:
And, finally: What the fuck is The Virginia Quarterly Review?
That is all.
October 17th, 2008 / 6:47 pm
elimae’s tits
Without Google, it would be impossible to bring Boob Friday and Indie Lit—two rather arbitrary associations—together, which is what I’ve done.
If one were to google “tits elimae,” one would find this and this. (Incidentally, Blake’s blog is the third domain result.)
This first one, Untitled by Aaron Winslow, concerns saying pick-up lines under the influence. It’s a gem: funny, unexpected, and a little sad:
last nite i had a dream that i was all liquored up and i was walking around this bar saying things to women like, “is your father a thief? ‘cuz i’d like to jizz all over your tits.” and “do you wash your clothes in windex? ‘cuz i want to put my thumb up your ass.” and then i would laugh and laugh. and the best part was that the ladies thought it was funny too. those are the only two that i remember, but i think i said a bunch of them.
The second one, Military Courtesan by Mark Yakich, is a strange poem I do not understand. I only know it fills me up with experiences that feel lived, which is why I think I read:
In the world of small arms,
She offers a pair of tits. And you
Put them on like epaulets.She offers milk with vodka.
She offers you Eve without
Ivy, and a red in tender
That doesn’t mean raw.
I chose elimae for two reasons: 1) they are one of my favorite journals, and 2) I knew the pieces wouldn’t be too long.
Speaking of things not being too long, everyday is Dick Friday for me.
October 17th, 2008 / 5:33 pm
Mean Boobs
This is my contribution to mean week. I hate being mean, but my boobs are very angry today.
October 17th, 2008 / 4:10 pm
Absent 3
ABSENT issue 3 is out after a long spell, including new work by Dorothea Lasky, Matt Hart, Jenny Boully, Leigh Stein, Chris Tonelli, and a bunch of other nice languageseseses people.
There are also a series of ‘MANIFESTA,’ which may or may be cringing, I don’t know, the word ‘MANIFESTO’ seems loaded and esp. in the world of poetry, but the taste of ABSENT has been strong in past issues, so I will feel okay with peeking after I finish going out into the rain today.
I really like the feel of the new ABSENT, design is strong, words, I like the way a tone bar appears to help you go back from a piece to the front page, good job.
Wanna eat a puppy with me? Puppies.
October 17th, 2008 / 2:29 pm
Inspiring Non-Erotic Tits
Um…isn’t it Boobs Friday? Come on people…
As part of Boobs Friday, I thought I might offer a different way to approach my favorite two palindromes: tit and boob. Gentlemen, remove your pacifiers from your mouths and put it somewhere else where it will fit. As for the ladies, I say this: What’s up bra? (Yah Blake, another pun.)
1. Yanni & Hootie and the Blowfish CDs
If there’s one thing less erotic than Yanni, it’s Hootie and the Blowfish. As a general rule, white and black people should not make music together. Often, the result is gray barf. Add to that Kenny G and I’m off to a gelding colony.
2. Venn Diagram
So like, Table A and Table B intersect, forming all hypothetically possible logical relations between a finite collection of sets or mutual population we shall refer to as cut off my balls right now I never want to jizz again.
3. Parasitic Fish Eyes
The sexiest a fish has even gotten for me was sushi, and that’s just because it felt like cunnilingus. She turned Japanese I really think so. As for glaucoma fins over here: love is blind, and so is that fish.
4. Jack Nicholson’s Manboobs
All play and no work makes Jack a fat man.
5. Colliding Planets
There’s a part of me that wishes this would happen to us, if anything, so that Sarah Palin would die. I’d cream my pants over that.
October 17th, 2008 / 1:00 pm
John Gardner followup which is also sort of a Writing Workshops followup
(via Small Beer’s Gavin J. Grant at the Bookslut blog)
Sci-fi fantasy person Jeffrey Ford answers three questions at How to Write Stories About Writers:
About studying with John Gardner:
We didn’t bother with the Moral Fiction bullshit when he was teaching me, he was trying to show me how to edit and talking to me about irony and suspense and the things that make a good plot. I have somewhere a sheet of paper on which he wrote out for me the rules of the comma. He told me his theory of teaching writing, he said, “I can’t make you a writer, but I can show you some of the pitfalls and problems you’re going to face in writing and how to get around them. This is stuff that if you stuck with it you would probably learn, yourself, but I could save you five or ten years.
the website “robot melon” is awesome and it’s like heroin and gay sex because it makes me feel so damn good
robot melon is a journal run by stephen daniel lewis, who may or may not be a real human being. every time a new robot melon comes out i read the whole thing and i feel excitement about it beforehand. like i roll my sleeves up and do a dramatic knuckle cracking thing and then say to myself, “it’s now or never chico” and then i click on the issue. i don’t read too many journals by name rather than accidentally through someone else’s work. but i like robot melon. i think i would be gratified if robot melon existed for another 25 years. and on the 25th year stephen daniel lewis just wrote a really long obscene and hateful post and was like “robot melon will never die homey”.
October 17th, 2008 / 12:12 am