ToBS R1: middle age white male sex scene vs. middle age white male self published sci fi novel pt 1 of 4
[Matchup #31 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Holy receding hairlines! This is quite the week for middle-aged men, with no less than two new texts targeting the graying templed-set: Middle Aged White Male Heterosexual Sex Scene AND Middle Age White Male Self-Published Sci Fi Novel Pt 1! TJY and the Actionettes have made no secret of our fetish for hot, pot-bellied daddies – so this is the kind of news that has us sweating off our makeup, creaming our sequins and quaking in our stilettos! READ MORE >
ToBS R1: the Georgia Review vs dinner at Chili’s
[Matchup #30 in Tournament of Bookshit]
I’ve never read the Georgia Review. I have eaten dinner at Chili’s probably 50 times throughout my life. My favorite dish to get at Chili’s, the dish that has remained my favorite transitioning through all of the various eating habits I’ve had (being no-restriction to vegetarian to pesceterian to vegan), is the fajitas. The fajitas at Chili’s are exciting because they are a spectacle. Looking at the website for the Georgia Review, I see a complete lack of spectacle. Chili’s was my favorite restaurant growing up because it took me a while to develop any sort of palate for foods that are not ultimately mediocre. While it would seem that both the Georgia Review and Chili’s are ostensibly mediocre, Chili’s maintains a specific midwestern magic. Chili’s is, I guess, supposed to be “Tex-Mex” food, though that term really has no meaning whatsoever. READ MORE >
Now Showing: Goat in the Snow
Some people are unreasonably unselfish, and Emily Pettit is one of them. An editor for Notnostrums and Factory Hollow Press, she is also the new publisher of jubilat, which, under her thumb, just released a bad motherfucker of an issue (see: Julia Cohen, Michelle Taransky, James Tate, Rachel Glaser, Dara Wier, lots!). Her devotion to art is exemplary and climbs no ladder, but aims at making our anxious little world a bigger, bettered one. It should come then as no surprise then that her poems, too, are of the giving kind; and her new book Goat in the Snow, now available for pre-order from BIRDS LLC, gives and gives and gets it right. Im not one to blurb (ed note: bullshit), but when a wise old man once again feels the change coming in his bones and scrys the truth, you listen:
Her kindness is always ahead of us, anticipating the problems we will or won’t run into, and we always end up in a different, precise place than the one we started out from, as she reassuringly tells us: “You know/ you know you know. It’s all uncertainty/ and your neck. You walk slowly/ in a calm voice.” Goat In The Snow is multicolored, ever-changing, a delight to try to clasp. –
JOHN ASHBERRY
ToBS R1: Sewage Treatment Technologies vs. The Pulitzer Prize
[Matchup #28 in Tournament of Bookshit]
A corpus containing all Pulitzer Prize-winning books in the Fiction category from 1948-present and the Novel category from 1917-1947
vs.
A list of sewage treatment technologies, included below: READ MORE >
ToBS R1: trolling for spelling errors in blog posts vs. changing your facebook picture daily
[Matchup #27 in Tournament of Bookshit]
I don’t know.
I’ve never had a blog.
I haven’t been on Facebook in almost a year.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this, what the fuck “Trolling for spelling errors in your blog vs. changing your Facebook profile pic daily” means.
This would be so much easier if I’d been given something easy, like:
Jimmy Chen vs. every woman on HTMLGIANT.
Or HTMLGIANT 2009 vs. HTMLGIANT 2011.
Or being Matt Bell vs. not being Matt Bell.
Or telling Blake no vs. telling him yes.
(Is it possible for the gender with the vagina to tell Blake Butler no?)
Fuck Blake Butler. Fuck HTMLGIANT. Fuck “mean week.” READ MORE >
ToBS R1: horny middle aged balding poetry professor on campus vs. horny college age dude-bro poet on facebook
[Matchup #26 in Tournament of Bookshit]
internet vs. intellect
i’ll probably never get a facebook friend request from a dude or an email from a male professor again, but:
horny middle aged balding poetry professor on campus vs.
horny college aged dude-bro poet on facebook
starts talking to you about gender and offers you an independent study on Judith Butler
starts talking to you about gender and offers to publish you in his online journal
winner: if the journal is well put together with other impressive contributors, bro READ MORE >
POPULAR POST
This post yesterday was goddamn funny. I almost laughed my ass off. I laughed, and I enjoyed the laughing, because I am worn out, time kills you, existence is terrifying, laughing is the meds, it feels good to be included and not to be the one getting laughed at. The laughing is temporary shelter from bigger extinction, by way of smaller inclusion. I’m not alone. Someone else is alone. Not me.
The post made me sad too. I laughed, but I couldn’t laugh my ass quite off. Almost off but not quite. Like, I laughed my ass ¾ off but I also watched myself laughing and was like: You so stupid, gurl. That’s you he is making fun of. ALONE. You are up there alone. If one of us is up there alone, it is you. It is always you, in a Schopenhauer sense, nah mean?
I felt like a cog, too: cog-ish, cog-esque. I thought about “mean” and I thought about it as a hits-generator. Perhaps, first and foremost, mean is a hits generator. We are helping to generate hits! Hooray!?
The etymology of the word “mean”, according to etymonline, is:
ToBS R1: declaring ‘__ is dead’ vs. nationwide facebook invite to local reading
[Matchup #25 in Tournament of Bookshit]
DECLARING ___ IS DEAD VS. NATIONWIDE FACEBOOK INVITE TO LOCAL READING
-OR-
HOW I SPENT MEAN WEEK MAKING A POST SO STUPID THAT AFTER YOU READ THIS POST THE POST WILL HAVE A CHILD NAMED “GOOBER T.L.D.R” BECAUSE THE POST ISN’T EVEN GOOD AT COMING UP WITH NAMES FOR ITS CHILDREN
On the one hand, nothing really dies. Like I have this receipt from a movie I saw right here in my pocket. What good is it doing anybody? The movie was about the financial industry. We were made to feel sorry for people because they buried their dogs just like everybody else. In one scene, Snapple showed off its brand of bottled water. The best scene was when a guy who used to make bridges explained that money wasn’t a bridge, e.g. it didn’t save anybody in traffic. Adam and I saw the movie in NYC. Driving home, Adam and Joe and I got stuck in traffic. The reasons were mysterious. Adam’s chips were locked in the trunk. I wasn’t really hungry because I’d eaten two breakfasts and Adam’s tiramisu, which he gave me to shut me up after we argued about the relevance of the bridge scene. The tiramisu was delicious and sort of ridiculously conceptualized, just like NYC. -+-+-+-+-+- Listen: READ MORE >
ToBS R1: Chapbook blurbs vs Facebook-based political ‘activism’
[Matchup #24 in Tournament of Bookshit]
Facebook-Based Political ‘Activism’
Active is a funny word. Also the word, Like. You know Flannery O’Connor never asked a damn person to be a Christian, she just wrote these badass stories where all the phonies got their fucking heads blown off and their families slaughtered and then maybe some “Agent of Grace” would go and seduce a fat ass and steal their fake leg. That’s the way to do it. Seems to me you got a mirror problem. Or you spent sixth grade with an eye-blinking tic. (They called you Blinky.) Or photos of your own head or your severe-or-doughy offspring’s head all J.C. Penny glossy on the beige-ass walls. I bet your palms smell hot and funky. You’re white. Tuck in your shirt and have one of those little cases on your belt for the cellphone and a little ripple, a little soft, soft, soft fish-belly over the top of the waist of the jeans. Keep four pill bottles in a neat, black case stuffed in a Nike shoe, in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator. But what do I know? Nothing, except that to ask if I’m happy every day is a goddamn insult to the other 98% wondering why the light bulb keeps flickering off…Hey Slaw-Cheeks, Facebook groups, Pages and Events are as helpful for your enemies as they are for you. Only James Bond villains tell everyone their plans, and see what happens? Sharks, de-railed trains, suffocated by octopi, shot by Bond/shot by Bond/shot by Bond, oh my. Or: I keep getting this vision of sweaty you in the Toys “R” Us parking lot masturbating to a conjured image of a yellow cats, smiling yellow cats running circles along a Go-Cart track in Rhode Island…You don’t tip bartenders for shit, do you? That nagging feeling, it’s your head rolling about a black cart rumbling and clanking iron-wheeled down a dark road, to the dump, all of this an honest image of the shadowworld, your soul, a knobby goat (most likely pulled the cart—that’s called honest work, you Enormous Fuck) gnawing at your eye socket, then to the elbow, the pale, calloused index finger of your Liking. You hose. You greasy hose. READ MORE >