Kendra Grant Malone Poem
All The Ways I Have Failed You
1.
finding him under the piano
was not the most alarming part of
the day, that day
finding his waifish
six year old body
in my underwear and
costume jewelry was not
the most alarming part
either
what worried us all the most
was his inability
to pronounce the syllables
that didn’t really
exist anyways
2.
various things are real
the cloak he wears while
walking down lake street
the antipsychotic pills
i’ve seen them,
they are pink
his inch long finger nails
humming birds that move very
fast, yes we saw that together
your arch angels
the ones that tell you
that you are beautiful
okay okay
yes I will always believe you
they are real
and that time you
stabbed me
hysterical
screaming in tongues
that was real too
3.
hey juan?
where is zack?
did you leave him
in the courthouse
again?
but its christmas!
he needs to be here
for christmas
so we can
sit in front
of the fire
and build the alamo
together one more time
4.
the rainbow wallpaper
was mine
but we all knew
that all the rainbows
made of light
belonged to you
everyone could see it
especially father
because the secret
was hiding in your teeth
Kendra Grant Malone lives in Brooklyn with her cat Delores Grant Malone. She has been widely published in web and print magazines and has an assortment of e-books and chapbooks including Conor Oberst Sex, Rape Children, and Love Your Friends And Not Your Lovers. You can go to her website, www.kendralovely.blogspot.com, to read more about her, her cat and her work.
33
Happy Birthday, Dennis Cooper!
Today we celebrate the birth of the inimitable, incomparable, and indispensable Dennis Cooper–one of our absolute favorite writers and a true brother-in-arms. How will you celebrate Dennis’s big day? You could:
– Order yourself a copy of his most recent book, the story collection Ugly Man.
– Pre-order yourself a copy of Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback & Obituaries, his forthcoming nonfiction collection, which according to Amazon will be published on 6/29, which happens to be my birthday. Neat, right?
– See if there are tickets left for any of the remaining performances of JERK, Dennis’s latest collaboration with Gisele Vienne, starring Jonathan Capdeville. JERK is running through January 17th as part of the Under the Radar Festival. I saw the show last night, and it was just stunning–unlike any other theater-going experience I’ve ever had. (See above photograph.)
– Visit Dennis’s blog, which this weekend has an incredible feature on the Winchester Mystery House.
– Blast some Guided by Voices. Here’s a fan-made video for “Smothered in Hugs” the nonfic collection’s namesake song. Happy Birthday!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlvn9LfRETM
PS- Here’s a live version that has the embedding disabled for some reason, so you have to watch it on the Youtube site.
Lucy Corin Glow
This is my day in the sun and I’ve got my arms in the air, my head tipped back like the hinged lid of a lighter. Contrary to popular belief, I am not alone. Everyone’s listening. All I see is the bulging gas above me and I’m shooting my mind at it. I’m as close to God as I’ll ever be. The people are tiny. They’re buckshot around my ankles. I could kneel and run my fingers through them.
Lucy Corin, from The Entire Predicament.
Everyone says Lucy Corin creates worlds, so I am going to pass on that one. Lucy Corin creates Cornish hens, light yet succulent on the gray tongue of my brain. That’s better than worlds. It might be metaphor, magic realism, or everyday life, I will let you decide. Corin has this light touch, this light touch with her prose. It is mysterious like Japanese dolls. I like it.
Round Up, Round Down
Things are really heating up (also freezing) here in NYC. My boss is in town–and staying at my place no less, so it looks like I’m working through the weekend. Last night Old Man Butler made me have some serious party-catch-up time with erstwhile Giantess Kendra Grant Malone, and I think the plan for the day is to hit MoMA with Shane Jones and Ken Baumann, then tonight we’re going to see Dennis Cooper’s JERK. God, when did my life become such a Dilbert cartoon? Anyway, here’s some stuff. I’m cranking it out while Old Man Butler is in the shower–before he drags me off to another @*&#(@*ing “team-building” exercise.
Over at The Rumpus, Joshua Mohr has an interesting essay about the fraught experience of reviewing one’s peers, in this case, Ron Currie Jr.
Also in Rumptown, Funny Women #12: Destroying Angels, a How-to Guide by Susan Schorn.
Something called Go360 has written a big piece on Terese Svoboda. It popped up in my Google Alert because it mentions her story, “80s Lillies,” which appeared in The Apocalypse Reader.
There’s lots of awesome going on at Chance Press, including new and forthcoming titles, and directions on how to make your own cloth-covered bookboards. Hurders! Way to go again!
Also, here’s the regular weekly NYTBR roundup: ______. No sex-charts this week, just Elizabeth Gilbert and Douglas Coupland.
Uncategorized / 10 Comments
January 9th, 2010 / 12:34 pm
January 9th, 2010 / 12:34 pm
Justin Taylor—
Check this out- Gawker’s got copies of a whole bunch of paperwork related to the Herman Rosenblatt fake-Holocaust memoir that Oprah made a big deal about back whenever. It’s a nifty little peek into publishing.
Friday Afternoon Mindfuck: Hot Chicks Smiling at Ground Zero
A little browsing on this site suggests that the proprietor seems to think “hot” means either “any” or else “high school.” Or possibly “any [chick in] high school.” So that’s a little whatever, but dude still gets points for being an absolute genius and an absolute asshat at once. I want to throw this guy an awards dinner and crown him with an ass-shaped hat that has the word GENIUS scrawled in glitter across the cheeks. And be sure to check out the (markedly less interesting) sister sites, the best of which seem to be “Hot Chicks with Fists in Their Mouths,” “Hot Chicks Plunging Their Toilets,” and “Hot Chicks with Stubbed Toes Making Sex Faces.”
Oh, the minor but very real discomfort! Oh, oh, oh!
Idol worship
There’s something about Samuel Beckett that makes photo- and/or bio-graphers want to take black and white photos of him. Things are more serious in black and white, a kind of pre-industrial grimness overlaid with existential severity. (Metallica’s Unforgiven video also capitalizes on this aesthetic, or “old dude in dark room.”) His predecessors (Kafka, Joyce, etc.), having lived during the time of black and white photography, are remembered that way for good reason — but it’s interesting when others promote irrelevant aesthetics which seek to implicate some underlining value of an author.
I often experience idolatry when looking at author photos. In this business, they are the gods. Readers need a “way inside,” and as evocative as words are, pictures of the buggers don’t hurt. I love it when a moderately famous and respected author is clearly depressed and struggling to hold a reasonable face, for it somehow makes me feel better. When the author is content, or worse, self-satisfied and (god) attractive, I feel passive yet distinct anger towards the author. This, of course, is stupid, but I am human, and humans are good at stupid.
I learned a new word this morning
in⋅stau⋅ra⋅tion
[in-staw-rey-shuhn] –noun
1.
renewal; restoration; renovation; repair.
2.
Obsolete. an act of instituting something; establishment.
Origin:
1595–1605; < L instaurātiōn- (s. of instaurātiō) a renewing, repeating.
Related forms:
in⋅stau⋅ra⋅tor [in-staw-rey-ter] , noun
+
…Thanks (yet again), Harold Bloom!
Odd Books for Sally
Stephanie Barton, managing director of Penguin Children’s Books, says publishers in 2010 will go with “very traditional, no-risk purchases.”
(Does this mean no more, “Joined at Birth: The Lives of Conjoined Twins”?)
Oh come now, I don’t believe you, Steph. Somewhere sits a sneaky MSS, as in smart, as in subversive, as in prepping the soil to grow not turnips, but psychotomimetic unicycles.
Alt books for kids? Weird books, strange books, honest books–books you read as a child (or to your child) and then went, “What the fuck?”
“After a fall from an experimental aircraft, Cris Molina is stricken with an unusual brain malfunction: He sees everything wrong (shoes look like books and a shirt looks like a fifth century Ming vase).”
Or, for your 12 year old…who may or may not be Doing It.
“Okay,” said Jonathan. “The choice is this. You either have to shag Jenny Gibson—or else that homeless woman who begs spare change outside Cramner’s bakers.”
Your selections?