Hacked by Tiger-M@te
Regular readers of literary magazines (read: hopeful authors) were surprised this weekend to find their favorite literary magazines nearly completely destroyed by a vindictive and highly talented hacker operating on the other side of the globe. Most notably, Third Coast, Monkeybicycle, and La Petitie Zine were hacked this weekend, suffering from the attentions of infamous Bangladeshi hacker Tiger-M@te, who is responsible for many high-profile world wide web hacks. Earlier this year, he brought down Google’s Bangladeshi site, and now he is in the process of defacing popular, highly regarded websites like resellerproductlist.com and terrysdigitalproductstore.com.
wwword
The flash writer is a disciple of the poet. The poet a disciple of the word. How to say much with few. How to have a word echo, bloom, unlock or unhinge, shudder or pop, show or embrace itself as thing, expand or fall into something off the page, become or allow a potential to become, something much larger than itself.
In Damien Dressick’s “Four Hard Facts about Water,” the words are steak sauce. The turn, to get us to the bitterness, the banality/absurdity of death, to the god/godlessness of the event, the thing, the disbelief. Steak sauce.
In “Dulce et Decorum Est” the word is flung. A body flung, and we are in 1914-1918, the human mind/technology meets the human mind/our perpetual desire to kill one another. Enter flame throwers/gas/machine guns/tanks/all of the etc. of technology. Degree of killing. Attrition as strategy. Everything upside down. Flung.
In Raymond Carver’s “Little Things,” the word is flowerpot.
In “Survivors” by Kim Addonizio, the word is parrot.
In Dave Eggers’s “Bounty,” the words are curved chips. Curved chips get us off the page, into the philosophical, curved chips off that last line, off God. Yes.
Jolly Ranchers in “The Last Stop” by Jenny Halper. Sometimes one object can characterize and exposition, can show, can let us inside.
It may be useful to seek the word in all poems, all flash fictions, as an exercise of the writerly mind. And then of course to ask your own self (the editor one)—where are my words, the ones that if omitted, would leave such a hole as to let all the air out, as to have the entire text collapse on itself like a pierced balloon? It is one way of looking, the word.
Sunday Service: Joe Aguilar Poems
The Tiny Crown of Life
I lay in bed without makeup.
I lay my cheek on bible leather.
TV shows are waking life.
Commercials are dreams.
I steal Mom’s necklace.
We trip on down the road.
Hands on Dad.
I suffer the tiny crown of life.
I suffer my ponytail.
A locket keeps a small gas star.
Light moves all over my Jordans.
By the sea we all hug.
By the sea a hand sifts through mine.
Jellyfish boil in the spume.
My hair whips out.
We saw away my ponytail.
Captivity #1
How our temple brightens these young hills. We of Saxon strain. We of the Lord. We learn of heathens only when gunfire clatters the house. Out our window homes are burning in the snow. Our neighbor runs into the woods grabbing his organs in. The snow is loud with fire. They are so many strong even our dogs do not rise up. Still I wait on the Lord’s will in the kitchen with my child and my knife. Still the heathens shoot through the glass through my arm. I get dark with hate and pain. They come to us. They walk us gory through the rocks and ice. They walk most of us dead. They leave us in drifts where we drop. Still the angels feel thick around us in the half-light. My child fouls herself astride the pinto. She growls at me. The smell of us. Still I trust the Lord might set His hand to heal my wound. What they call their village but a strew of twigs. What they call their homes but errata. The swollen hole in me that leaches white. They guard us in a muddy hut. Still our nights and days full of the peace of the Lord. Overnight my child expires in the filth without a noise. Still the Lord says not to weep but keep an eye to His relief. Still the Lord says justice is mine. The pale horse. They wrap my bluing arm in oaken leaves. They grouse around their fire. They smoke a weed. I watch the hills for English steeds. I want their heads to break. I want the snow to dark. I want the Lord.
Joe Aguilar lives in Missouri. His work is in Puerto del Sol, LIT, Caketrain and elsewhere.
Tao Lin Tweets a Non-Meta Tweet
Earlier today, Tao Lin tweeted an entirely non-meta tweet.
in ~’93 in ~5th grade, i think, there was a ‘meme’ at my school of throwing things at (or ‘simply’ hitting) ppl then saying ‘ricochet’
Notice the lack of self reference or promotion, reference to the nature of said tweet, bracketed ambiguous/conceptual “thought[s],” esoteric ongoing commentary of [something] semi-contextualized via hashtag.
Last month, The New York Observer reported that, for his third novel, Lin was working in what he describes as “Lorrie Moore’s prose style and tone.”
This tweet seems to suggest that very notion. What I mean is, I could see a thought like this appearing in the inner monologue of a Lorrie Moore character, is what I mean. Or I guess even that it seems like something from Bed.
You guys got anything else to say?
Women Matrix
Thanks to Lorian for counsel, and deflecting any calls of misogyny.
Kristen Iskandrian—
Here is a beautiful book trailer for a beautiful new book by the multi-talented Kirsten Kaschock. Rumpus Book Club interview here.
Diary As Sin by Will Alexander
Diary As Sin
by Will Alexander
Skylight Press, 2011
172 pages / $18 Buy from Amazon
I. RAINBOW VORTEX OF THE ANIMATED BREATH
The Ancients, who believed in their dreams, believed in the meaning of their dreams, they did not believe in the forms they took. Behind their dreams and at varying levels, the Ancients sensed forces, and they immersed themselves in these forces. They had an overpowering sense of the presence of these forces, and they sought throughout their entire organism, if necessary by means of a real vertigo, the means of remaining in contact with the release of these forces.
– Antonin Artaud, “Man Against Destiny”
I think of myself, the poet sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal feces. I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness.
– Will Alexander, “On Anti-Biography”
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September 23rd, 2011 / 12:00 pm
September 23rd, 2011 / 12:00 pm