some things that i ate this week and a review of how they tasted
slapshot (starring Paul Newman): I was the coolest guy that ever lived and you were a hair stylist and the goalie in our love was from a foreign country and would yell at us and then the factory closed down which made everyone in town sad because people would soon be really poor and they would have to kill themselves, but it was okay because I was still really cool and this guy from Princeton was good at hockey even though he had dad issues and then the owner gave birth to three retards that liked to punch things so the team started winning again and I slept with the wife of the other team’s goalie and then someone said ‘Faggot’ and another guy said, “This one time I was in Florida and the snatch was crawling out my boobs.” And the guy from Princeton became in touch with his feminine body which made you raise your eyebrows and I raised my eyebrows and then we looked at each other long and hard and you said, “New York City,” and I said, “Minnesota,” and our love was still a goalie from a foreign country but it had grown into a shape that smelled like three retards born out the ass of a nation of absurdity that sometimes laughs when people say, “Faggot.”
the external combustion engine by Michael Ives: Some kids were in the park doing bad things. I yelled at them. You told me not to yell at them. There was something interesting in our shared thoughts, but the afternoon didn’t quite go as planned. I think you went into the movie business and I went into education. Someone either you knew or I knew got me a job at a school where someone I knew once went, but I think it was only temporary. The world is going to end. This makes me upset because I can’t do anything but watch it end and I wish that instead of doing this I was looking at you as you watched the whole thing end.
the box man by Kobo Abe: I was homeless or maybe you were homeless and at some point we decided to be naked and homeless together in a box, but another person wanted the box so you gave me some money and I gave the box to him, but he wasn’t who he said he was because someone had paid him to be them and they just wanted to smoke morphine all day so they kept paying him to be them so they didn’t have anything to do but smoke morphine and he was tired of being them so he decided he was going to be me which is why he made you pay me to be me and then I was no longer homeless and didn’t have to live in the small box but instead I lived in a really large box with you until you got tired of me and moved out of my large box.
babyfucker by Urs Allemann: A man was in a room that was the worst place to ever be and that man was me and maybe the room was me too but I was afraid to look at where I was even though you might have been in the room. I was very much in love with you or maybe you were on the balcony, but I just couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes because I was afraid I was doing the worst thing that a person could ever do and you would not be able to help me because I was touching the things that were bad to touch in the way I was touching them.
4 Things
Bill Knott will dedicate a book as you (yes, you) please.
Ryan Call and Christy Call’s 2008 story, Pocketfinger, at Everyday Genius.
NYTimes 100 Notable Books of 2010. I’m not on there. Are you?
What, a NOÖ Journal? Yep, great poems, great reviews, great stories and this WHAT WAIT A SECOND comic from John Dermot Woods (from which I clipped this roundup’s leading image).
becrazed pickle pickle pickle 5!
11. Paula Bomer book. Mike Young book. Word Riot. Pre-order special ends Dec 1. I reckon you better.
14. From Paper Cuts.
Audience Q: How do you know when you’re getting better?
Lorrie Moore: Maybe you don’t.
Audience Q: How do you know when you’ve found the right ending?
One of the Brooklyn guys named Jonathan: Maybe you don’t.
5. internet stunts versus blurbs: is there a difference? (Or how do I get Tao Lin’s name into this post?)
77. My computer crashed two days ago. Do you back up your writing? How and how many times? Any horror stories like when Hadley lost all of Hem’s stories on the train, etc?
7 bleed him poppers and coke and tell slim fey shouldn’t possibly lop at brother nervous vacation
- I didn’t even glow/know there was such a dang as “Geography Thursday.” WTS? (What the Suck?) OK, I’m game.
- Is it true you have to be removed from a location to write about it? Because that smells like dung beetle dung or someone reading A Moveable Feast while sitting in a coffee shop looking at eyes or maybe a conference answer to a hang-tongue/clam-eye question.
- Ever wrote in front of a mirror or a large window? Do tell.
- What is Southern lit? I don’t know. You get knocked down. Black holes burnt into a map. There is moss and gonorrhea. You scramble back up but don’t know your mind. What you were was it worth reaching fer? You can’t tell your Bad Faith actions from your authentic mind. It’s all a low fog, over soybean fields and the jawbone of a deer. You get knocked down. Why scramble up for something you might hate? Why return to your own spent virus/kudzu vine? Oak limbs. Several doors, later plated in gold and writing. A speech. Your home is a hole. There are other definitions aloose I spose. I couldn’t answer. Add cathead biscuits.
- Do you like to read first at a group reading or last or not at all or more like: who cucking fares, dude?
- Ain’t many links in this post, but fuck it.
- A friend of mine in MFA/grad school said she enrolled for one reason: “To get laid.” (Her words) Is grad school a great location for getting laid? I mean more than working at Chili’s or enrolling yourself in law or culinary school? Why/why not?
- 7
Forecast Peggy Cthulu Issue
1. Shya Scanlon’s Forecast has been launched at Flatmancrooked. “The year is 2212, the weather is out of control, and Seattle is being rebuilt with electricity generated from negative human emotion.”
2. Lindsay Hunter has a rad new freakstory at 52 Stories: Three Things You Should Know About Peggy Paula.
3. At Comics Alliance, “The Monsters of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos, As Drawn by Children”
4. New issue of Notnostrums.
Cambodia Fence Sasquatch Talk
1. Metazen is putting together an ebook that will then be sold for Christmas, with all proceeds going to an orphanage in Cambodia. Check it out, submit, and consider picking up a copy in support when it arrives.
2. Fence has just unveiled their 3 newest titles: Nick Demske by Nick Demske; The Network by Jena Osman; English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul by Martin Corless-Smith; all of which look quite excellent and are available as a package now for $30.
3. Mike Topp’s Sasquatch Stories is out now from Publishing Genius, with cover art by Tao Lin.
Miró Killer Joke Peaks Open Low
1. At Burnaway, an Atlanta arts blog, I’m curating a new column of “writers on art,” which today features Heather Christle on Joan Miró: “I wanted secrets, and I wanted to laugh, so I snipped letters from my head and sorted them by shapes: those which slant, those which curve, those which face left or face right.”
2. At Thought Catalog, Christian Lorentzen writes a long screed for the nonexistence of hipsters, with reasoning including that our generation has never had a good serial killer.
3. At The New York Times, Joshua Cohen turns in a take down on the brand new 1,000 page book from McSweeney’s, Adam Levin’s The Instructions, calling it “a very long joke.” Other readers: yay, nay?
4. At Montevidayo, Johannes Göransson writes about the “ambient violence” of Twin Peaks.
5. Submissions to New York Tyrant are now open.
6. I forgot about this great old music video from Low:
5 vanish cat and countercat
11. The “Star Whackers” are a group of assassins who hunt down and kill Hollywood celebrities. Q: Where do we donate?
2. Before her cure, she was holed up in her château dictating one much-worked-on line a day to Andréa, who would type it up. Then they would start uncorking cheap Bordeaux and she’d drink two glasses, vomit, then continue on till she’d drunk as many as nine liters and would pass out. She could no longer walk, or scarcely. She said she drank because she knew God did not exist. Her very sympathetic doctor would visit her almost daily and offer to take her to the hospital, but only if she wanted to live. She seemed undecided for a long time but at last she opted for life since she was determined to finish a book that she’d already started and was very keen about.
1414. Soft Skull Press is sort of dead, I guess.
9. The correct number of beer (s) to drink before a public reading? (You are reading.)
5. I didn’t know The S.C.U.M (Society for Cutting Up Men) manifesto was online. It is. Here you go:
It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so.
Women, in other words, don’t have penis envy; men have pussy envy.
SCUM will couple-bust — barge into mixed (male-female) couples, wherever they are, and bust them up.
Rule of Threes {Morning Edition}
1. It is very early. My dog has decided to ignore her bad hips, and she’s jumped into bed with me. My coffee’s lukewarm. My head is swimming. I’m definitely skipping capoeira practice this morning. BUT last night’s reading at New College (thank you Mr. Niedenthal) featuring Chloé Cooper Jones and Megan Boyle was fantastic! The crowd was so receptive! I’m pretty amazed when people can be downright funny in their writing. Right? Someone once said my first chapbook was playful–that’s as close as I’ve come. I think I have a pretty good sense of humor when it comes to appreciating funny, but it sure doesn’t come naturally to write funny. I’m always way more concerned with the way the words are bumping up against each other, maybe? I don’t know. So, anyway, I have these lovely and talented writers at my house for the weekend; maybe I’ll pick their brains. How can I be funny, Chloé? What’s your secret, Megan? They’ll be polite about it and secretly roll their eyes.
2. There are WAY MORE sections of The Equalizer available for download. I have some poems in 1.10, and I mention this because I went back and rewrote one of those poems backwards in revision a few weeks ago. Have you ever written something backwards? I learned this in a workshop with Sarah Maclay. She wrote one of my poems backwards for me and BAM! it was a fucking great poem. I do this with select poems from my students all the time. I think it has something to do with the finding the poem as you’re writing–sometimes that doesn’t happen until the end, but the early stuff has the perfect seeds of working-up-to-ness. So, I did this with a poem that Michael published in The Equalizer. Does that mean the old version is null and void because I say so? Does it mean there are two poems with the same title? How many of you revise after publication?
Here are more Equalizers: [share ’em with your friends]
Lonely Octopus Response
1. Fantastic new story by Lonely Christopher at Fanzine, “That Which,” from his forthcoming book The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, out next year on Little House on the Bowery.
2. The 14th issue of Octopus is out, and brimming. Also congrats to the three selected works for publication from their recent open submissions: The Black Forest by Christopher DeWeese, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find by Jenny Zhang, and Conception by Rebecca Farivar.
3. At Montevidayo, Johannes Göransson wrote an interesting response to Daniel Nester’s ‘On Bullshitting,’ which apparently really pissed DN off. Why are people so touchy about online interaction? It seems like eating pizza without the calories. There are lots of other rooms.