EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#6)
[NOTE: The launch party for SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS is at 7 p.m. tonight at Cafe Orwell in Brooklyn. – JT]
My Dog is a Little Obese
put the clif bar in your pocket from a florida gas station and walk away
put the entire box of clif bars from a duane reade in penn station in your bag and walk away
put two clif bars from price chopper into your pocket and walk away
this is CVS, there are no clif bars here
buy 4 clif bars from albertson’s and feel bad
there is 50mg of caffeine in your clif bar
cut the clif bar in half with scissors and eat one half and put the other half in a bowl
hide the scissors in the closet
there isn’t any caffeine in the lemon poppyseed clif bar
put organic green tea extract on your tongue and put your tongue in my mouth
there is 50mg of caffeine in my brain
Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.
Ellen Kennedy’s blog.
EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#5)
Green Toothbrush
the train leaves in 50 minutes
two people having sex to a lonely and frustrated person singing “I’ll probably never see your face again”
two people taking turns standing under the water in a shower
the hair is black and smells like lemons
two people using one green toothbrush
the train leaves in 20 minutes
one person standing, ironing a red dress
the train is leaving in 15 minutes
the slip is too long and sticking out of the red dress
the boots are loud and slow
two people on a train taking turns laying down on one person’s lap
the hair looks more brown than red when short
yelling “soccer” in secaucus station
waiting for the new york train
the new york train arrives in 3 minutes
two people buying two large organic coffees
caffeine making four eyes bigger and two brains faster
one person feeding a lemon to one pigeon
one pigeon walking away uninterested
two people sitting on a subway train with two coffees floating above
two people lying very close on a one-person mattress
Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.
Ellen Kennedy’s blog.
EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#4)
I Like Every Time We Have Sex
“I want to have sex with you.”
“Thank you. I want to have sex with you also.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“When I say I want to have sex with you I mean really.”
“So do I.”
“I mean really, I don’t just say that as a feeling. Do you understand? Did you really mean that you wanted to have sex with me when we were waiting on line at the movie theater before or did you just mean that as a feeling?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry”
AN INTERVIEW WITH AUDREY ALLENDALE FROM MUUMUU HOUSE
this person from muumuu house emailed me today and asked to be interviewed. her name is audrey allendale. here are the answers she gave to my questions:
EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#3)
Orange
I wish my life consisted only of
riding my bike with you
down a giant hill that never stopped
while listening to music
with no one else around
in the middle of nothing,
except a few shiny and relaxing lights above in the sky
like stars but a little brighter
and more orange
Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.
Ellen Kennedy’s blog.
EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#2)
Brighter and Clearer
After I have an orgasm my body feels like a sombrero-shaped galaxy slowly expanding in the eyepiece of a 4th grader’s telescope
After I watch a family of lions tear apart the body of a large deer on the Discovery Channel I feel a calming sense of inferiority
After I watch a horror movie I can’t go to the bathroom without you holding my hand while I pee
After I take my vegan dietary supplement my piss is brighter and clearer
After I kiss your eyelids my lungs squeeze out through my ribs, then through my belly button and slowly fly to your face and push very lightly on your cheeks
After I forget something I said I would remember my brain becomes a roll of vegetable futomaki that an obese chinchilla is trying to eat all in one bite
After I make you cry one of my organs melts into a runny paste that trickles down the inside of my body and collects at the bottom of my feet
After I make you feel indifferent towards me my heart turns into a small desert hamster running very quickly on an exercise wheel and then tripping and then spinning around in distress until the wheel stops and the hamster can get up and try running again, but in a more conscious and concerned way
Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.
Ellen Kennedy’s blog.
EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#1)
Florida
i had a dream last night about your parents and you
in your house in florida
your parents were dancing in the garage
and your mom was singing
and then the radio stopped for no reason
and she screamed ‘no’
and then walked away
your dad was pissed
then you went into your room and your computer had this program that you could make animations with
and you made like 5 videos of your dad
changing from a happy dad
to a pissed dad
then i woke up
your parents were dancing so hard
Muumuu House ‘Care’ Package and a Contest
not ryan call
I received today in the mail a ‘care’ package from Muumuu House and in that package were several books: you are a little bit happier than i am by Tao Lin and Distortions by Ann Beattie and three copies of Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy. Thank you, Muumuu House, for the ‘care’ package.
And last night a friend and I found a bar in Houston that has ping-pong tables, and we played ping-pong for three or four hours, and I defeated him twice. He did not defeat me. The rest of the time we just hit the ball back and forth and impressed ourselves with our amazing skills. I think I am very good at ping-pong. I think it is the one thing I’m allowed to be good at, maybe. That and washing dishes. I think there is something very satisfying about hitting a ping-pong ball just so, having it do exactly what you want it to do.
To celebrate our finding this bar with ping-pong tables, I would like to offer two copies of Sometimes My Heart Pushes Against My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy, which, sadly, has no poems/stories in it about ping-pong.
Please post your poems/stories about ping-pong in the comments section to be eligible for a copy of Sometimes My Heart Pushes Against My Ribs by Ellen Kennedy. Be sure to include a real email address in the field where it asks for an email address, so I can email you if your poem/story wins. If you are shy, you may also email a poem/story about ping-pong to htmlgiant [at] gmail [dot] com, but if I select your poem/story, then I will post it for everyone to see. This contest is open until 2:00pm CST, Saturday the 7th.
Good work, Muumuu House and Ellen Kennedy, on your first book. I enjoyed reading it.
UPDATE: Winners of the two Muumuu House books are Miles and Darby Larson. Miles and Darby please email your mailing addresses to HTMLGIANT so I can send you your prize.
Thank you to everyone who emailed and posted ping-pong stories/poems.
The Internet: Serious Business
The image is facetious, but I think we – you and me and everyone we don’t know – are onto something. The internet’s constraints and agilities are being used in wonderful and inventive ways. I’ve noticed writers and editors either reappropriating online aesthetics or its practical functions. Here are three examples that kind of show a spirit to this point:
I. Mark Baumer’s everydayyeah will post a 365 word story this year, running one word at a time. He chose Jesse Ball, who just published The Way Through Doors. [Blake Butler’s review forthcoming in The Believer, April.] One simply could not ‘distribute’ or publish in this form without the easy accessibility of the internet, made more so with the advent of RSS feeds and Google reader. Baumer seems obsessed with finding beauty in the redundancies of every day. True, it will take a devoted fan to check in every day, but let’s compromise: how about every week? We might even learn something about Ball’s structure.
II. Jillian Clark’s brilliant poem (haiku?) untitled under her “so i go in alone” blog post, wherein the entire poem is comprised of wikipedia picture captions.
an okapi cleaning its muzzle with its tongue
an okapi at bristol zoo cleans itself
okapi at chester zoo
an okapi reaches for some leaves
Tao Lin’s “All Purpose Promotional Video”: Reviewing the wrong one
Tao Lin offered me $2 to review an ‘all purpose promotional’ video which would be uploaded in 1-3 days, then said ‘just kidding.’ I was moved by the initial spirit behind the request and have done so (though I am reviewing the ‘wrong’ one. I will try to review the correct one too.) Please read this before viewing the movie. It will make you more excited for the movie, I hope. [I just spent five minutes trying to embed the source-code but it didn’t work, so what follows this review is a mere link.]
REVIEW: This review will not have a point, because I don’t think the ‘all purpose promotional’ video had a point, other than being an ‘all purpose promotional’ video. I will simply describe what I saw in the order of when I saw it, with light commentary. Also, I only watched the video once, taking quick notes, so I may be wrong at points. The ‘narrative’ might not make sense due to choppy avante garde editing. READ MORE >