Mean Boobs
This is my contribution to mean week. I hate being mean, but my boobs are very angry today.
Uncategorized / 35 Comments
October 17th, 2008 / 4:10 pm
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.
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October 17th, 2008 / 2:29 pm
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.
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October 17th, 2008 / 1:00 pm
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”.
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October 17th, 2008 / 12:12 am
October 17th, 2008 / 12:12 am
Sixth Finch
SIXTH FINCH is a new (to me at least) online journal, whose just published a new issue. It has work by Jason Bredle and Zachary Schomburg and several others.
In addition to poetry, they also feature a whole section of art, which is a nice twist on the usual poetry journal I think. More sites should vary outside of the fiction poetry land. The art in the current issue is weird and modern looking, I would look at it and stuff.
I feel really tired. Thinking about being mean has made me tired. I am ready for boobs friday to close us out and go back to the week of week.
Uncategorized / 9 Comments
October 16th, 2008 / 8:03 pm
October 16th, 2008 / 8:03 pm
Brandon Shimoda’s THE INLAND SEA
Now available for preorder from Tarpaulin Sky Books is Brandon Shimoda’s THE INLAND SEA, which is 40 pages of poem with a killer cover (covers, like teeth blood, do matter). I’ve always liked Brandon’s work I’ve seen around, and so am interested to see how this one comes together in palpable form.
Here’s the jacket description:
In remembrance of and in thinking through the grand and generative compromises of birth, migration, dementia, sacrifice and ancestor worship, The Inland Sea is a raveling entreaty for the life of both a family departed and a family spectrally present in both complex breath and body. Spiritually addressed to Midori Shimoda, as well as factually to the inland seascapes of his birth (Hiroshima, Japan, thrice, in 1909, 1910 and 1911) and death (Lake Norman, North Carolina, the United States, once, 1996), The Inland Sea navigates the substance between origination and departure, in an attempt to find a relic of responsible and radiant life outside of benighted time. Composed of doubts, dissolutions, laments and a widening circumference of water and hope, The Inland Sea is a soft, yet urgent, ceremony, through which the ruptures of the past might find celebratory echo, and keep—
I like TSky’s books, this should be no exception.
Next post is mean, promise.
National Book Awards 2008 shortlist
Meh. Hemon is pretty good, I suppose. And I saw Gibbons get into a pretty amusing argument with a couple of other poets during a Warren Wilson lecture.
Otherwise, why waste time? I think I’ll wait for Underwhelmed Week. When’s that one, Blake?
we interrupt MEAN WEEK to appreciate something awesome
Yes, friends, there’s a new issue of NO: A Journal of the Arts out. It’s #7 and it’s–as mentioned above–awesome. The first poem in it is “Treatment,” a poem by Heather Christle, which I was lucky enough to hear HC read at The Lucky Cat in Brooklyn last Friday. There are collages by Keith Waldrop, printed in glorious full-color; excerpts from Richard Foreman’s notebooks (“I make things so that I will have to explain–to myself–what I have done.”); and new work from folks such as Rae Armantrout, Ann Lauterbach, Kate Colby (with what I think is an erasure of Thomas Hardy), Thalia Field, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, and many more besides.
Here’s a short poem by C.D. Wright from the issue-
Back Forty Poem
a barn held up by a pitchfork
surrounded by field on field
of wildflowers, butterflies,
cow pies, beyond which,
the snake-infested woods
the high-voltage fence
the big-stripe inmates
+
And here’s two lines from Ann Lauterbach’s “Ants in the Sugar (Blanchot/Mallarme)”
arousal from stupor lifting its head
to be silenced and to begin again
+
And now since I can’t find any of Waldrop’s collages from the issue online, here’s an entirely unrelated one that he did with Clark Coolidge-
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October 15th, 2008 / 5:07 pm
October 15th, 2008 / 5:07 pm
Other Internet Writers, I’m Sorry For Making Your Beard Pee Itself
I just thought I’d remind everyone else how weak their fucking beard is.
I’d feel sorry for you, but I’m too busy looking like I’ve written nine books on the NYT Bestseller List and gone on permanent tour with Michael Chabon and the HarperCollins All-Stars. So, fuck you.