An Open Letter to Carl’s Jr. from Mark Baumer
[Mark Baumer, of the Brown MFA Blog sends word of his current project, a consummation with the Carl Jr’s of the US. He also recently wrote to Chic-fil-A and got a response. He’s a slut. — BB]
Dear Carl’s Jr.,
There are a little more than 1,000 Carl’s Jr. restaurants in the United States. I would like to visit each one this summer. Please give me one-thousand free meals to Carl’s Jr. If you do I will only eat Carl’s Jr. this summer. You know how sometimes old people talk about the ‘summer of love’? Someday, when I grow old, I would like to talk about ‘summer of carl’.
I have a friend. His name is ‘Karl’. I think I will ask him to change his name to ‘Carl’ if you give me one-thousand free meals to Carl’s Jr.
If you don’t give me one-thousand free meals to Carl’s Jr. I think I will kill a Chinaman. I just read this Hemingway book, To Have and Have Not, and a guy named Johnson stiffs this fisherman named Harry Morgan $800 and Harry doesn’t have any money so he kills a Chinaman. If you don’t give me one-thousand free meals to Carl’s Jr. I will be hungry and I will kill a Chinaman and eat him.
I’m looking at the Carl’s Jr. Wikipedia page. There is a picture of the Carl’s Jr. in Rancho Cordova, California. That sounds like a cool place. I’m glad you put a Carl’s Jr. in that town. I look forward to eating at Carl’s Jr. in Rancho Cordova.
The other day I was reading this book by James Baldwin about a black man who is in jail. It made me pause. I started thinking, “If Carl’s Jr. can afford to give me one-thousand free meals then they can afford to give some black man who just out of jail one-thousand free meals.” I think you should give me and a black man who just got out of jail one-thousand free meals each. The two of us will then drive around and eat at every Carl’s Jr. in the United States this summer. I will write a book about the experience. It will probably be a #1 best seller. Tyler Perry will buy the movie rights. The book will be called Summer of Carl. I think the black man will be named Carl. Tyler Perry will probably change the name of the book when he turns it into a movie. Maybe he will call it: Angry Black Woman Mouthing Carls.
Anyway, I think this is a good business proposal. I want to win a million dollars. Give it to me.
Sincerely,
Mark
Alexis Orgera—
“Verse is everywhere in language where there is rhythm, everywhere, except on posters and page four of the newspapers. In the genre which we call prose there is verse of every conceivable rhythm, some of it admirable. But in reality there is no prose, there is the alphabet, and then there are verse forms, more or less rigid, more or less diffuse. In every attempt at style there is versification.”
–Mallarmé, “Réponses à des enquetes”
Prose-as-verse. Yes? No?
Is all poetry poetry? (I’m not asking about bad vs. good.) And are verse and poetry the same thing?
22
Sean Lovelace—
When was the last time you read a book you didn’t really want to read? How did that go?
Sam Pink—
new ROBOT MELON up. issue ten. (click on the N in ROBOT MELON when you get to the main page (i didn’t put the link for issue ten up because now the link will take you to the main page and you might decide that you want to read all of the issues)).
In Praise of Modesty
The writer was a tumbler. If not, then a tinker, carrying a hundred pots and pans and bits of linoleum and wires and falconer’s hoods and pencils and…you carried them around for years and gradually fit them into a small, modest book. The art of packing. — Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
I think of this quotation a whole lot. I think a whole lot of this quotation. Blake’s interview of Andrew Zornoza made me think of it, the 14 years in the making part. My friend working around the clock on what will be a short non-definitive but brilliant biography made me think of it. Avatar and not wanting to see a movie that proposes to break new ground, that promises to change the way I think of the movie experience, made me think of it. Immodesty is dishonesty. To think we’ll never read another book after this one. To think we’ll never see another movie, or that ever after we’ll see movies differently. To think we won’t amend and mend and expand and retract our thoughts about art-making because this time we’ve gotten it right. What hubris.
This is not to equate modesty with small physical size. This is not to equate modesty with lack of ambition. To pack, select, winnow, whittle, fit, shape, pat, balance, attend, await, and weigh the materials of life and art to make a book is honest hard work–backbreaking, eye-straining, near-impossible work, and the reward always comes too late.
A quote like this gives postmodernity a good name. To admit to sweeping up shards, gathering scraps of broken meat, to allow that one book can’t hope to contain the Whole, or even any one whole. The days of circumnavigating the globe, the days of the brave frontier have passed. Foreclosed. We have now vaster materials, but smaller places to put them in. What possibility, what call.
Matthew Simmons—
It took Sean McCarthy from Popmatters seven years to sell his copy of REM’s Monster to a used record store because a ton of people bought it and then half that ton tried to sell the damn thing back. I asked one of our used book buyers what the Seattle used book equivalent was. Care to try to guess what title every person with a box of books tries to sell to us? An envelope full of galleys to anyone who can nail it before I update this post with the answer at 7pm Eastern Pacific Standard Time. ANSWER (guessed by Lance and Jack at pretty much the same time): SEABISCUIT.
Blake Butler—
Brian Foley’s Sir! 3 is alive and feeding piggies. Do a know about Sam Starkweather, Andrew Michael Roberts, Kathleen Rooney, Luke Bloomfield, Chris Deweese, Chris Salerno, Rebecca Favier, Peter Davis, Garth Graeper, Karyna McGlynn, Cattalus (trans John Cotter), Claire Donato, and Kate Doughtery.
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January HOBART live
From HOBART email:
Happy New Year one and all!
As is pretty much our way, we’re running a little late, but the January issue of Hobart web is online now. We’re kicking the year off strong, including:
* Fan Fiction in the voice of Kobe Bryant, by Karl Taro Greenfeld
* Sad, Sad, Sad, by Stace Budzko
* Three Stories, by Amy L. Clark
* The Turtle, by Matthew Lansburgh
and the first half of an interview with Laird Hunt, by Jim Ruland.Dig in and enjoy and thanks, as always!
http://hobartpulp.com/website/
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January 5th, 2010 / 5:52 pm
January 5th, 2010 / 5:52 pm
Writing/Editing Prompt: Kill Yr Narrator
Basic: Take a first person story, new or old—one that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Go to the bottom of the story. Press return twice after the final bit of punctuation on the final paragraph. Add a little section sign. This one:
(On a Mac, it’s Option+6.)
Hit return two more times. Let another narrator take over. Explain somehow that the first narrator is dead. Reassess the story from the second narrator’s perspective.
Advanced: Take a third person story, new or old—one that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Go to the bottom of the story. Press return twice after the final bit of punctuation on the final paragraph. Add a little section sign.
Hit return two more times. Let something else take over. Consider: if an omniscient narrator “dies,” what happens to the world of the story? Does another omniscient narrator fill the vacuum? Consider: God is dead. What now? Does the world end? Does the narrator’s creator decide to step out from behind the corpse and speak? Does the world remake itself?
Face by Sherman Alexie
Face (Hanging Loose Press, poetry) is ax/not ax/poleax, as in still S. Alexie. His personae (will contain biographical elements of the author) have one leg stuck in White Batter (all connotations) of mainstream academia/book/laugh at nothing/muttering $peaking tours and one shakily afoot “the rez.” The third leg is a ghost leg. Tear ducts in its toenails, Andrew fucking nebulous Jackson. Like a man standing in two canoes (never try this), sway and suffer consequences. The question—in the words of another poet noticing Halle Berry dragging along the Very First Oscar (2002!) like a battleship anchor—is whether speaker will crust and sugar over, sag like a heavy load, or, well, explode. I celebrate the men who preceded me. Face has numbers in a burlap sack (math, as history, as stat, as in right now. As in statistics): 1492, 15 million Native Americans. 1892, 750,000. 2002, 1.8 million. Look up Pamunkey, an odd word. Face, do you feel yourself rowing against the current/into the past, like White Fitzgerald? Hypothermia. Face, blanket, and not blanket. Mask. Shroud. OK, speak.
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January 5th, 2010 / 3:11 pm
January 5th, 2010 / 3:11 pm