JonBenét Ramsey’s Pageant Rhymes
Last year at around this exact same time, Bambi Muse, the cute literary Tumblr corporation that is, in many ways, similar to Fox News, published their first ever “Tumblrbook,” and it was Nursery Rhymes by Baby Adolf .
Today, Bambi Muse has published its second ever “Tumblrbook” — Pageant Rhymes by JonBenét Ramsey — and it is, according to me, a delirious occasion. The commotion besetting JonBenét’s book might have a tad to do with the advance praise she’s been accumulating. Adrienne Rich spurted, “Even though I’m merely one of those dense, dime-a-dozen feminists, still, if I were a lesbian tulip and JonBenét were a lesbian tulip then I’d want to be planted right next to her (even though she probably wouldn’t like that too much.” After processing her copy, the girl-boy Gertrude Stein exclaimed “Yes!” so potently that she plucked dear Alice from her slumber (and dear Alice is no light sleeper!) Then the critic FO Matthiessen got his four cents in. “Punchy!” proclaimed FO.
In the coming days, there is supposedly going to be a book party so special, sweet, and spiteful that hardly anyone is invited at all; in fact, nearly no one even knows the chosen date or time.
Well, is all the fuss really formidable? Is JonBenét really the next Anne Bradstreet? Read, and discover for yourself!
A Baby George III Christmas as well as Two Links to Two Terrific Christmas Speicals
A couple of days ago, I met Baby George III, the fourth Bambi Muse baby despot, at the 9th Street Bakery for a chocolate treat.
“I want to publish a short story on HTML Giant,” snarled Baby George III, before I even had the opportunity to bite into my chocolate treat.
“But you’re a part of the cutest literary corporation ever. It’s built on the core principles of goth babies, bukakke babies, boy bunnies, and so on. Why don’t you publish it there?”
“No,” snapped Baby George III, firmly. “I want it to be on Blake Butler’s site. He’s so handsome and relentless. He’s sort of like Kurt Cobain, in a way.”
“Fine,” I sighed, since I did not wish to antagonize the future King of Great Britain any further. “What’s the name of your Christmas story?”
“A Baby George III Christmas,” sassed Baby George III. Then he added: “Obviously.”
Creative Writing 101
[ WORK DISCUSSED: Tuesday (9/22) – Adrienne Rich, five poems and an essay. Thursday (9/24) – “New York” by Tony Towle; “Texas” by Padgett Powell; “Babalu-Aye” by Eva Talmadge;” writing exercise.]
I never know how to start the class off. Or anyway that’s how it feels. I usually arrive in the room a few minutes early, and start chatting with whoever else is already there. If there’s a conversation already in progress I’ll try to join it, and if they’re all just sitting around quietly I’ll pick someone and ask how his or her day is going, or how the weekend was. If they throw the question back at me (“and how about you?”) I’ll tell them. I try to take attendance right at the official start time, not so much to punish the stragglers as to reward those who got there early. I want them to see me seeing the effort they’ve made. So we do that, and it’s like–now what? “Okay,” I often find myself saying, “what did we read for today?” It’s not that I can’t remember what we read. It’s just that I think there’s something useful about saying it out loud. I asked the class if they preferred to talk about the poems or the essay first. A few people kind of said “poems,” so I said okay, but then there was another choice to be made–which poem? One of the pitfalls of my teaching style (which strives to be dynamic, responsive, and rigorously un-structured) is that it’s hard to get off the ground. It’s like an old prop plane, where you need to start the propellers spinning by hand and then sort of guide it down the runway and hope everything is timed just right and take-off actually happens. Sometimes this takes a few tries. Nobody seemed to care where we started, and consequently we weren’t starting at all.