Epic Flying Object Raffle: Win Lots of Sweet Shit For Not Much $$$
If you want a pumpkin donut at Dunkin’ Donuts, your window is limited, and you’re in it. Ditto for your opportunity to win crazy awesome books and records and whatnot and help out an amazing space a parking lot away from the Dunkin’ Donuts on Route 9 in Hadley, MA. Yes, I’m talking (as we’ve talked before in this starscape) about Flying Object.
Flying Object: a poetry mecca, an old firehouse, a place where you can play ping-pong in the rain, where you can smell at a first edition Blood Meridian, where you can drink lemon seltzer and wine and eat olives and cheese and cookies as fast as you can while secretly fuming at me for eating way more than my share of olives and cheese and cookies, where 300+ artists/writers/musicians have done their thing, where there are giant green mechanical things that cut shit and letterpress very impressively—and now where you can win prizes from 50+ presses and places for basically drinking money.
On October 13th, Flying Object is celebrating two years of being alive. Is there a party? Yes, there is a party featuring performances from CA Conrad, Ben Hersey, and Dorothea Lasky (who will be telling fortunes). As part of the celebration, they’re raffling away a shit ton of prizes. From so many presses. So much good stuff. You can see not even all of it in the picture up there, so after the jump is an insane list of donors and even more pictures. (Uh, a lot of pictures).
Award winning poets have gone on private record as being concerned that their partners went overboard in collecting donations for the raffle, and said partners have concurred that they probably went overboard—but what do you care? What you care about is there is so much cool shit to win. And all you have to do is donate $5, $10, or $20 and you have a really good chance to win a lot of cool shit.
It doesn’t matter where you live. FO will distribute your raffle tickets evenly among the prizes. Then they’ll mail you what you won. How about that for a party? Read the list of donors under that READ MORE. Look at the pictures there too. Dude, you’re going to win something. Don’t let me stop you. Happy birthday, Flying Object. We love you. READ MORE >
“The camels’ smell was also a bone of contention”
The stupendous fictioneer and performance artist Ben Hersey was just telling me about some forgotten camels. Apparently, back before he was President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis was Franklin Pierce’s Secretary of War, and he was convinced by some camel enthusiasts in the U.S. Army—veterans of conflicts with those nasty Native Americans in Florida—that camels would be a badass idea for soldiers in the Southwest. So Davis ordered some dudes off to Tunis to buy some camels. You can read more about the camel episode, but just imagine the spectacle of these pre-Civil War American soldiers bumbling around Northern Africa, haggling with camel dealers. It makes you want a Drunk History episode at least. It makes you wonder what other excellent narratives are floating around out there, recessed from canonical history for being too ridiculous or convoluted to explain. To fit. What are some of your favorite offshoots from history? After Google buys history, will this era be known for its “narrative neutrality?” Do we have nook and cranny concerns? Isn’t it fun on any storytelling level to break “history,” exposing everything as the subjective, harebrained, non-narrative shitstorm that experience really is? How long will it take someone to say “rhizome” if we talk about this? Should we take a shot when someone says it? Are histrionics truer than history? After the camels turned out to be a bust as military equipment, they were sold to zoos, circuses, and private ranchers. Why didn’t they work? Why didn’t camels become part of the military glory we call History?