Mike Young—
now I am famished for peace
now I watch a 90 year old movie to
witness dead people talking singing
riding horses samsara
SAMSARA SAMSARA
I’ve been walking the border of sleep to find you
dreaming around the circumference of
a hole in the ground
the bravest thing sometimes is
how the morning is greeted
fight for the money or
fight for the soul the saying goes
but another goal is to
fight for neither
from CAConrad’s “I Loved Earth Years Ago”
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Presumptive Yet Likely Books
Brain Ramen and the Cattail Noose
by Haruki Murakami
Vintage, July 2013
345 pages / $22
One late afternoon, unemployed narcoleptic celibate Uno Moribundo, pensively awaiting the shipment of a real doll and some obscure jazz CDs, falls asleep in a large bowl of scalding ramen. Permanently disfigured with third-degree burns to his face, he wanders Tokyo’s underground wearing a Ringo Starr mask looking for blind children to bring home and love. With some weary repetitions, troublesome inconsistencies, and heavy-handedly overlapping plot points, it becomes apparent that Moribundo may be in a coma. “His pillowed brain resembled bloated ramen left in a bowl, the spilled broth grown tepid over the months as floor thought bubbles trying to remember something,” Murakami deftly writes. Enter Yoshi Yummimoto, a 14-year-old goth school girl whose Lorazepam habit may be seen as complicit auto-narcolepsy. She falls asleep in class, and on his face. Follow this unlikely pair through the mental labyrinths of memory, identity, intimacy, and self — to a climactic hot pot binge, which spilled, brings them to their knees.
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April 16th, 2013 / 10:56 pm
April 16th, 2013 / 10:56 pm
Dear II,
via Carolyn Zaikowski, who, like, actually writes about this stuff
web version POP SERIAL 4 is launching today
first up, Ben Brooks “future president.” more to follow. who looks at htmlgiant every day still? it was called a professional looking blog in the la review of book recently. idk, is it profesh? i recently described myself to someone with one word: unprofessional. idk what thats about. it is 2013. if anyone is reading this but not commenting and lives in brooklyn hmu, i am looking to drink and have a good time. hi
Dear White Race,
One dead white peoples equals how many dead non-white peoples?
Huh?
Huh?
Huh?
xoxo,
Baby Marie-Antoinette
***
— 14 April 2013: 30 children were killed in Syria.
— 15 April 2013: At least 37 people were killed in Iraq.
— 15 April 2013: 3 people were killed in Boston.
The icky white race says:
***
Baby Marie-Antoinette’s “Dear White Race” letter was first published 15 April 2013 on the cute literary corporation Bambi Muse.
25 Points: The Prodigal
The Prodigal
by Alexander J. Allison
Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2013
194 pages/ $12 buy from Amazon
1.
2. Allison’s novel “The Prodigal” explores the nature of a man born with a silver spoon, his relationship to his parents, to school, to his best friend David and most importantly, to Poker. The protagonist’s name is Martin and you will follow him through a series physical, financial and existential crises in this portrait/cringe-theatre/road-trip/gambling novel.
3. In conjunction with reading this novel, I started playing online poker.
4. This is a very helpful companion to The Prodigal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_poker_terms
5. Three structural features of the novel include:
a) varied text size. At times a word will or series of words will appear in large, irregular font to point out a particular emotion or event. I have seen Ben Brooks do this. Is it a British thing?
b) italicized asides like “Sad shadows saddows”. These are humorous plays on words or ideas hat break the text with an unpunctuated breath.
c) Flashback chapters which operate similar to Lost episodes, connective tissues are formed showing why Martin is fucked.
6. To start, I downloaded an App simply called “Poker” onto my Ipad. I started with 10,000 dollars. What endears one about the game is just how fucking simple it all seems at first. Each individual game consists of a few small choices. There is lying involved as well as the puffing-up of chests. This is a very inhuman way to play poker, it is fast-paced, difficult to read people, and deeply anti-social. There is no ‘chat’ feature in “Poker” and most of my opponents are faceless guests. My first day into “Poker” ended with a 45,000 dollar profit.
Diary note: This game is a joke. People who play it are morons/addicts.
Three days later, I would be swishing cuticle treads around in my mouth praying to god before the river of a shitty flop. I was hounded with insecurities and sleeplessness. Poker was no longer a joke but an insipid nightmare I continued to return to. I’d entered into the realm of pay-to-play online poker and my budget had been exhausted thrice over.
Diary note: I’ll do it for the novel.
7. Martin in a casino:
“This microcosm has its own language. It’s a living lexicon. The game’s language exists to keep some fools out and trap even bigger fools in You’ll have heard of donkeys and fish, but what of the rockets? What of the fishhooks and gay waiters? What of the suck and resuck, the gutshots and wraps and double bellybusters? What space is there for a beat jackpot? What is there left to be said of tilt? Who is durrrr to you? What’s an isildur1? How would you respond to OMGClayAiken? What is life before you’ve sharkscoped Spirit Rock, nanonoko, moorman1? This language is the soul of poker. Cards are but a blunt instrument. Cards are the messy, unpredictable side note to the sport. It is cards, however which force the drama of life.
Internally, Martin is humming the Pink Panther theme-tune. This makes him feel sneaky.”
8. On 7 alone you should read this book.
9. The book says much of what many books say about being 20 is like: the depressing vacancy one achieves when the last drop of innocence leaves you. But the metaphor of poker intermingled with this prodigal/rich kid presents the reader with the quandary of: how do I root for this guy? The path I took was not so much to root, but to sit down and enter Martin and ride from one catastrophe to another. The balance of sincerity and humor comes off sardonic, but the smiles feel earned and cringes unavoidable.
10. donk bet
1 A bet made by a donk, i.e. one that is generally considered weak or to demonstrate inexperience or lack of understanding of strategy.
2 A bet made in early position by a player who didn’t take initiative in the previous betting round. It was named because this move is often considered indicative of a weak player (since it is more often reasonable to expect a continuation bet). READ MORE >
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April 16th, 2013 / 2:33 pm
April 16th, 2013 / 2:33 pm
Finish line
Time may be a sedative, for it’s always harder to know who exactly the bad people were, yet so easy to tell — in the incessant now from which we cannot run — who the bad people are. Either moral clarity diminishes with time, or we simply stop caring, the euphemism being humility. Prisoner of war Lt. Col. Robert L. Stirm is greeted by his family at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California on March 17, 1973, about a year after Phan Thi Kim Phuc, aged 9, was photographed running from a South Vietnamese napalm attack on their own land after it had been occupied by the North. Richard Nixon, in his earnest paranoia loop, wondered to his Chief of Staff “if that was fixed,” upon seeing the iconic photo. Denial may be war’s greatest offense. The Strim girlfriend (wife, or sister) will come to know, understand, and to be forced to love, the dark PTSD crevices welled with ink inside Strim’s newly wired brain, as Phuc will be free to recount — with whatever pre-juvenile coping mechanisms she can employ — the senseless events of that day (June 8, 1972), its morning feigning repetition, on her little village road during her 14 month hospitalization slash 17 surgical procedures which returned her skin to human. Both enemy and kin run away from their personal and global hauntings, towards the idea of freedom, to a kind of endless finish line whose ribbons have already been broken by faster folks. And so, it’s not really a finish line, but a place to run away from something by running towards something else. Everyday we show ourselves how ugly and beautiful we can be, the shinny red inside us spilled out, touching others.
Guest Post: Greg Gerke on David Shields & Renata Adler
The Parable of David Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life
by Greg Gerke
My Mississippi writer friend gave me David Shields’s new book. Interesting, I said. I wasn’t sure I would read David’s new book—I looked at it askance, then I put it back in its wrapping paper. I was surprised they still made hardcover books.
THIS IS A PERSONAL REVIEW: 40 Points on Alex Dimitrov’s Begging For It
Begging for It
by Alex Dimitrov
Four Way Books, April 2013
96 pages / $15.95 Order from Four Way Books
1. I think fantasy is going to kill me and that is ok.
2. I want to fuck a beautiful thing and not get attached.
3. I want to be a twink getting fucked by a twink and the twink I am getting fucked by should be me.
4. Twinks can also get attached.
5. “Before I leave here, I want / to hear my name change in the mouth / of another animal.”
6. Sometimes I wish a boy was a dog so that being in unrequited love w/ the fantasy I create around him would be spiritual and not just a voracious attempt to fill a hole, which I know better than to try and fill with flesh, or worse yet, flesh coated in a fantasy to which the flesh will not conform.
7. At least then I would be feeding a dog.
8. Feeding a dog is spiritual.
9. Getting fucked in the heart is spiritual.
10. It is dangerous to get fucked in the heart, especially if you don’t let the fucker know he is fucking your heart.
11. This kind of omission serves to trick a fucker, who doesn’t want any hearts involved, into fucking your heart and/or tricks you into believing that your heart won’t get fucked.
12. Sometimes you genuinely don’t know you are getting fucked in the heart til it’s over.
13. Another thing that is spiritual is when a poet doesn’t try to bullshit you with language.
14. Alex Dimitrov doesn’t try to bullshit you with language.
15. Alex Dimitrov meets a conceptual poem in the street, takes it home, impales it on a cross covered in Sylvia Plath’s Daddy’s chest hair and says: Let me introduce you to your heart.
16. This review is not about Alex Dimitrov.
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April 15th, 2013 / 12:33 pm
April 15th, 2013 / 12:33 pm
A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims
A Questionable Shape
by Bennett Sims
Two Dollar Radio, May 2013
242 pages / $16.50 Preorder from Amazon or Two-Dollar Radio
This ain’t your granddaddy’s zombie-apocalypse. Everything in Bennett Sims’s stunning debut courts a topographical and invasive examination of the human condition through our inverse. The architecture of zombie-logic is rewired, and the undead become symbolic for what it means to exist in all its physical and existential, its beauty and brutality.
Post-Katrina. Docile shapes fringe the horizon of greater Baton Rouge. Hurricane season looms yet again, threatening the security of Mississippi barges that quarantine thousands of zombies. If the barges breach, a second epidemic is likely. A Questionable Shape follows Vermaelen over one week as he helps his friend, Matt Mazoch, search for his undead father, retracing “haunts” Mr. Mazoch might return to in his zombified state. But hurricane season is also dwindling the window of opportunity to find him.
Sims escalates the psychological state of the undead, giving them, essentially, purpose. Reanimated, these zombies pursue places from memories. Reanimation, thus, becomes a kind Resuscitation. What the genre formerly defined as a vacant shell of rudimentary desire, Sims infuses with recollection, humanizing the traditionally dehumanized.
“What we know about the undead so far is this: they return to the familiar. They’ll wander to nostalgically charged sites from their former lives, and you can somewhat reliably find an undead in the same places you might have found it beforehand. Its house, its office, the bikelanes circling the lake, the bar. ‘Haunts.’ … In fact, what it calls to mind are those homing pigeons, the ones famous and fascinating for the particles of magnetite in their skulls: bits of mineral sensitive to electromagnetic pulls and capable of directing the pigeons, like the needle of a compass, homeward over vast and alien distances. It is as if the undead are capable of ‘homing’ in this way.”
“…our ‘walking dead’ don’t simply walk: anytime an undead is walking, what it’s really doing is remembering. It’s retracing steps from its former life and moving blindly along a vector of memory. In this way, the tracks that it leaves (of rainwater, of dirt across a carpet, of blood) record more than a physical path: they also materialize a line of thought, the path of that remembering.”
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April 15th, 2013 / 12:00 pm
April 15th, 2013 / 12:00 pm