braying glass banana machine curves of deliverance glow

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Sean Lovelace| 3 Comments

Deliverance, the book, is 40 years old. That’s older than Jesus C, in theory. Glow changing water to wine. Glow not-owning-a-damn-thing. [OK, sandals] Glow whitewater and the sound of a boat being sucked away/throat-down like meat from a bone. [Yes, I did almost drown canoeing, but I did return]. Glow spray. Glow eddies. Glow the human-face shape of a rock formed after years of river over its nose.

Glow Deliverance/James Dickey article here.

What do I think?

1. Glow movie. Best movie Burt Reynolds ever made. He could have been a contender, but he fucked it all up. He could have been an actor.

(And don’t give me some Longest Yard bullshit)

2. The James Dickey cameo is OK, but no backwoods sheriff would have that mouthful of crystal white choppers.

[Now they pay the writers to go away. Far away.]

3. The infamous “scene” should be infamous. It is the linchpin to the plot. It is integral and essential. Do you want to look away? Fine, but you must take the next step: why do you want to look away? It is the flame to the fuse to the whole damn explosion.

I actually knew a prof who would not show the rape scene to his class. Why show the damn film? He would pause the film, skip the scene, and then show the film. I did not respect this decision. I found it ludicrous, misguided, wrong. I found it the very thing a teacher should be against.

Yes, the scene is visceral. So what?

The blank face, the cut, the still, the silence, the “let’s skip this.” These are valid responses to life?

4. In the book and movie, the bow hunting deer scene is a contrast/setup later for the bow hunting human scene. It is a marker for change, protagonist change, and a smart structural device.

5. The book is a testament to why EVERY fiction writer needs to write/read poetry before ever starting on prose. The word, the line, the sentence is what writing is all about. Poets know. Fiction writers should. Plot/suspense and beautiful prose are not mutually exclusive.

The Sheep Child disturbing, as in amazing.

People, honest, smart people, keep talking about Deliverance and then saying, as an add-on: “Dickey was also a poet.”

Shows you something. But I digress. I was talking about words.

[To all those who have not read The Sentence is a Lonely Place.

Linking this makes me feel like a prof teaching "The Things They Carried"

Let it go.

But still Lutz...]

6. Deliverance, the movie, kick-started the canoeing boom in this country.

Huh?

That’s:  Jaws making you want to go for a swim. Or

Hey, I just saw The Ring, call me.

*

Robb Todd at PANK.

Seductive. Building to crescendo. Step by step, drink by drink. And next thing you know we are dreaming of Gordon Lish…

Glow.

I think the person-visiting-foreign-country is one of the most cliche lit mag stories in the whole damn galactic volcano world. So I respect this. Todd pulled it off. So dank beers to you, sir.

Here is an interview of Robb Todd.

*

The Boy in a philosophical moment. Moments later he would rod/reel in a clam the size of a thimble. He would say, “I didn’t get skunked, did I?”This clam was the size of a sigh.

[later some dude brought us a pizza we did not order. it was chicken. i would never eat a chicken--that's cruel. these are life-moments i enjoy.]

The waters were angry that day, my friend. The waters were profoundly urban. Chalky. Plucked on strings of gray and hot lunches of dry erase marker soup. I want to say bar-of-soap sky but I think I ripped that from Annie Dillard. I know DFW would call this sky the color of a faded cotton shirt. Half a million writers would say pearl, but we all would suck.

We mostly all suck.

*

The new semester has started. I am teaching fiction and fiction and graduate fiction. This is a glow life. The students are glow, honestly.

I’ll tell you what: students get quicker, smarter, better. Every year. Any teacher in the world knows quicker/smarter/better is what you want in a class.

And…

We have a new coffee machine at BSU and that makes me believe I am in the future. Feels like Sleeper but less satire, less dangerous. You can’t take the machine that seriously. Although it is taller than Us and impressive enough to see/feel that it could beat your ass in chess. Machine is tall and sturdy and earth-colored and feels like a robot, yes, but a kind, serious robot about to set you up with some quality Joe. So wary. I am wary. It claims to grind/brew the coffee a few seconds after you put in your 50 cents (regular) or 75 cents (premium). And it often does.

Good thing for Us, it often does not. I get what I “order”/punch in  about 17 percent of the time.

The coffee is oily coffee and makes me shiver some. It isn’t dregs, just keen, like turpentine or when you leap out a moving truck. I drink it and my mind is a hamster that has escaped and made its bed in the crinkly green grass of an Easter basket. You reach down and it bites you.

Blood.

If your coffee doesn’t have a narrative inside it’s core/bean, a story wanting to hatch with every sip, why in the hell are you drinking it? Coffee should make you shudder, should kill you as it glows–like any drug.

*

I made an evening of drinking mojitos and googling photos of the world’s tallest man and thought surely this giant will die soon, and he did the following morning.

This is from Steve Stringer’s excellent elimae.

The opening. Sets us up with realism and turns to magical, twists us up, quick. There’s a Murakami story where the man wakes and makes toast and he’s about to head to work and then the author writes something like, “He was on his way to the elephant factory.”

The man worked in the “trunk” division, but I think was later transferred to Ears. Later comes a dancing dwarf.

Stringer catches something here, the fumes/fuel mix of alcohol, and this “giant,” most likely a wound of some sort, most likely one of those ghosts that haunt every hotel and give them layers of glow.

Thank you, Steve.

Hotels can be horny. Or sometimes sad. It’s hard to get my head around hotels. People come and go. For some reason I feel hotels are like graveyards, but that makes little sense. Hotels have lots of clunks and down-the-hall sounds. You can lie in bed and listen all night. Sometimes a headlight will paint the walls. The bed always makes me pause. What a history! If you look behind the headboard, on the floor, you will usually find straw wrappers, bottle caps, child toys, other things…You can open a bottle of beer on the jamb of a hotel door. Any hotel door. There’s a tip for you. Do you tip the sad people who clean the rooms? They talk loudly so you know they are sad. Nothing is more sad than being loud. Sometimes I sit in a hotel and feel like a boulder, but a hollow boulder and that’s called a geode, I think.

May all our giants return, I say.

*

The Third Annual Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose ends very soon. So if this is what you do, do it now.

Prize is $1000. Or eighty-three (83) Zombie Undead Jesus Necklaces.

*

A fucking galactic supervolcano erupted a few days ago. This explains a lot of things. Like war, people who don’t tip bartenders, Nicholas Sparks, people who don’t let you play through in disc golf, some lady named Mrs. Rose who opened a CHRISTIAN THRIFT STORE near my house.

What in the hell is a Christian thrift store?

Do I need to worship a Christian god to get in the door? Does an alarm sound? Do I take an oath? Are you going to card me?

What do they sell? Like only Christian things? Like Mary on a piece of burnt toast or old pamphlets or ceramic apples or golf clubs or high heel shoes or tree limbs or dusty church pews?

1. Jesus key chain that makes people think you drive a Lexus (?), $1.95.

2. Jesus air freshener, $1.50.

3. Grow your own Jesus, $2.50.

Maybe they sell peacocks and Flannery O’Connor books. Here is the story where the devil is a hero for being honest and shooting a grandmother, Mrs. Rose.

[Yesterday I found a shotgun shell in a graveyard. Who shoots off a shotgun in a graveyard?]

grenadine?

*

I am in a book with Michael Martone, Jim Daniels, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Daniel Orozco, Kennebrew Surant, Rick Attig, Lolita Hernandez, Michael Martone, Matthew Salesses, Matt Bell, M. Kaat Toy, Billie Louise Jones, Lita Kurth, Anne Shewring, Dustin Hoffman, Tania Hershman, Nick Kocz, Michael Zadoorian, Steve Himmer, Pete Anderson, Pete Fromm.

This book.

I tell my students repeatedly one of the best subjects in the world is work, work, work, so I glow to be in this anthology. To walk the walk. Etc.

BTW, the anthology includes Matt Bell’s infamous Fried Chicken story.

You haven’t read it? Are you an icking fidiot? Here, dumbass.

Lord

Luase

Lollygag, you fucker.

fuck

*

*

I just had a great run. Almost spiritual. And I don’t say that lightly. Runner’s High is a bit of a pop term, and not so accurate, usually. But I did feel high today, floaty, yes, spiritual. So.

So I have no interest in the organized  religions of man. I believe in the religion of Motion. Of river. Of arrow/disc in flight. Of apple tumbling from tree. Of fish. Of the body, running.

Today was some weird flow. Runners know it. Tough to capture. Tough to figure. You feel like the runner and the run. Form=Function. Like you were born running. It doesn’t happen that often. You have to be thankful. You have to hope it happens again…

It felt like this:

corn, corn, golden kernels of hot sauce–my lunch

and

oh my, a mix pack. they do mix packs now, i drank the 6 quickly and my knees soared around the hotel room i was blue but sort of a deep-end blue with a tiny dime shimmering on the bottom

And

J is my mother

And…

possibly i need a haircut a need i possibly

And

dinner on Lake Michigan

And the run went exactly like this:

6:00 mile pace  X 800      6:00 mile pace X 800      5:56 mile (full mile)

5:52 mile (full mile)      5:49 mile pace X 800      5:49 mile pace X 800

5:24 mile pace X 800

Whew. But I felt like I could have just kept on running into South America, or maybe to that former planet, Pluto, poor thing, or maybe right into the heart of all of this confusion we call Our Life.

*

Pay attention to Caren Beilin.

I said pay attention.

I used to make out with the household iron.

I said!

I’d like to trample you in an old fashioned manner. A writer comes along, a writer comes along. You know, sometimes you read something exponential bad-ass:

At the zoo you can buy animal balloons, dead birds on strings given shots of helium into the rectum and they jounce overhead attached by the string for an hour.

Here it is. Go fucking read.

Oh my

S

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Quick Fiction 17 Review [sparklehorsemotherfuck!!!]

Posted on August 12, 2010 by Sean Lovelace| 1 Comment

The cover is a tightrope walker by Laura Niemi Young. The man appears to be holding an open bottle of wine. The clouds are indicative of a breezy day. The man is focused, but a tad bit worried. As far as metaphors for flash fiction, I will give this a Splinter Trumpet and  a Hell Yes! Also an Eat Broken Necklace Award. It is possible the man is about to fall. Or is he wanting his audience to believe so? Maybe he wants the audience to feel something they will never see–like all his internal bruising along the toes. His wife back home and their silent dinners. The sound of a life falling onto the roof. Possibly he owns a stupid, stupid dog. I will let you extend out the remainder of the metaphor on your own.

1. There are four types of stories. Man leaves town. Man comes to town. Man freaks out, steals beer, deploys emergency chute, and leaps out of an airplane. (I vote this one of the most badass job rages ever–I simply love this flight attendant.) Or, in the words of Susan Denning, Man maybe comes to town, forgets own quintessence, lies down in a river. This flash reminds me of when I think it’s Tuesday but it’s really Australia, circa 1999, and I sit up in bed and dress for my job as a spoon salesman and The Smiths on the radio and all my regret not making out more in graduate school and learning to SCUBA around whale sharks. Denning is a runner, and understands that movement is within/without us all, so we love her.

Slept by the river and the rocks sang hopeful

2. Anthony Luebbert writes about Bobby Kennedy. Do I glow persona fiction? You know I do. This reminded me a bit of the classic Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning. Both are smart, spot-on, a bit of Golden Head Cage. And Luebbert can drop a wonderful, flowing sentence:

Robert Kennedy returned from work, entered the front door of his large white house, Hickory Hill, kicked off his shoes, removed his suit coat, loosened his tie, walked over the black and white tiles of the hallway floor, past the enormous black Newfoundland named Brumus, five children, the governess, a nurse, three maids, past the open doors leading to the rooms all painted in bright reds and greens, unbuttoned his shirt, tousled his hair, walked out the back door past the iguana and the sea turtle, removed his shirt, his belt, his pants, headed toward the swimming pool where a young sea lion sat poolside, and he (in just shorts and socks) and the sea lion dove into the cool water.

Amen. All you kinds might want to learn from Luebbert: the sentence is a wonderful tool. This one escalators us as it informs, as it characterizes, as in engages in serious play. Complete text here.

3. Alexandra Salerno with an “Autobiography.” This felt like a Cheever flash, the hidden worlds, the whispers in the hedges, the hollow cigarettes–all of it drenched in alcohol. It captured the beetles beneath the lawn. Bruise behind the too-red lipstick. Ants in the kitchen of your brain. The swirl/gray pearl of adulthood.

4. Round Midnight is right here. Read it. The language just drifts you away, smoky, hot, beautiful. I liked every single word but sepia. Sepia sounds like someone is writing a goddamn poem.

[A bird has built a house in the bottom of a potted flower I have outside. To save the flower, I have to uproot the bird. To let the bird and its family live, I need to let the flower die. Advice?]

5.

“It’s the end of the world,” my father proclaimed at the breakfast table, rising in his bear-checked pajamas. “Not again,” my mother replied, emptying the scraps on the plates into the garbage and putting the dishes into the dishwasher.

I wish I had written that opening. I did not. Jeff Friedman did. There is a domestic paranoia he catches in his words immediately, a tight, sweating fist. I feel the linoleum sagging into a giant black hole.

6. Nicola Dixon knows that every object has an echo, a connotation. Cool name too, BTW. Glass menagerie, indeed, only this time it is soap. Seahorse soap. Cow soap. Soap cleans you but what cleans the soap? Etc. Quirky material, quirky language, undercurrent of anger, or frustration, the type that wonders why can’t humans ever tolerate one another, I mean for very long?

[Every rectangle I have been trapped in, I had the butter knife right there in my hand]

7. Amy Holwerda snags the clarity an illness will force upon us. Everything is brighter now. More violent in its immediacy:

juicy meat from the bones…

Indeed.

8. I get a Peter Markus feel from “Clean Dead Leaves,” the form/function, the layering of words/leaves, the need to clean and the moment you are not cleaning–more dead leaves arrive!! Also, uh, we are walking dead leaves. As you know. Munch. Mulch. Bye.

9. Flash fiction is a biology to capture the blur. Kirsten Rue cocoons illness. Illness is lonely and fantastic and real and odd and very similar to becoming air. Language is amazing in certain hands. Rue bends the words to form caterpillars. See the poison?

Her arm hurt and she could see why: a ribbon of pale green tubing connected to a bottle, dripping jewel by jewel.

10. Anna Anderson has a lyrical name. I just said her name aloud into my orange walls and up sprang an image of hot cocoa. Now sure why. Also lyrical are her sentences.

…tiptoed to the bathroom like a husband

…the bed I lowered to be closer to the ground

This work is tight, it shards off each sentence, each paragraph. It catches the oddness of things. Of objects. I think maybe every image has a bulb inside that glows and whenever we see or think of the object–violin, coat, mail, shoe–the bulb glows brighter.

11. Gary Young is not the founder of Young Living Essential Oils. He did found a press. I’d rather found a press than oils. I suppose you have to press something to get the oils, no? But it isn’t pages. If you drank the oil from pressed pages? I don’t know.

[A lot of weight loss herbal stuff is just straight-up speed]

This flash does what flash is allowed to do–poetry. It is an argument for art. It is an image, a narrative imagining, and I will say no more. I think spoilers are for milk left in cribs overnight.

12. Go ahead, read The Middle Distance.

13. Flare starts like this. It is an atmospheric piece of writing. I find it wonderful when writers can clutch how you feel when staring into flames and then unfold that idea into walls and bicycles. I suppose I mean to say this flash fiction is something that turns night into day into night into that moment before we fall into sleep and we thank your daily genius, Kathryn Scanlan.

[I have actually seen adult men bring acoustic guitars to bonfires. Even the sea groaned that day]

14. Thisbe Nissen uses the sentence, the connectors, the starts and halts of words and punctuation, to form a stuttering, shall we say muttering–death, death, death–sales pitch. Plots for Sale.

Ash.

Ash settled on leaves. Do crematoriums have chimneys?

[There is no fucking way anyone of putting me in a box, period. FUCK BOXES.]

15. Andrew Michael Roberts was or is a Juniper Fellow? What does that mean? I don’t know, but it makes me think he knows Robin Hood and can cast spells by mixing bark, newt tears, chewing gum, and the tail feathers of a dead crow.

sparklehorsemotherfuck is the best word I have read in two weeks of intense reading. It is the best word in Quick Fiction 17, so far. I would like to name my car, my kid, my house, my life, sparklehorsemotherfuck.

16. J.A. Tyler has this head and out this head flows words, daily. It’s like a Pumpkin Walk or a geyser. There must be a lot of pressure inside him, words and sentences and wondrous ideas screaming at his ears, eyes, mouth, ass, penis, fingertips–trying to explode!!

[I have yet to see my use of exclamation marks as anything but shabby]

Dude can write, I’m saying.

“The Mountain Lion” is a metaphor here, and this work gets me thinking: Why does every community claim to have spotted a mountain lion? Even the local liquor store, right up the road from my house, the guy will pull out this crumpled, folded photo of a blurry thing in a vast field of soybeans– “See, a mountain lion!”

[Same guy once said to me, "You look like one of Obama's boys." What does that mean?]

Tyler knows we have this deep need to believe in all that might be–like the mythology of family.

17. Anthony Varallo riffs on the word, collect. This is the type of thing you think you could do, and you could, but it’s tough to do well.

Done very well here, and I now have a new assignment for this semester. Give each student one word and let them write a flash riff on that one word. Show them Varallo’s work as an example. Thank you, Anthony. I think I met you once at a museum, but maybe I was drunk and am wrong.

[Sometimes I go to museums expecting to see a Warhol and they won't have the Warhol and I'll think Where is the Warhol and then think, Why do you need to see something so ordinary as a Warhol, what is wrong with the gold coins and the bird and the painting with the bathtub and the toaster and the one where they guy painted his wife to look like a wall?]

18.Thomas Cooper shows us that flash is organic. The entire world is a flash.

Interview answer:

I was drawn to flash fiction, honestly, out of frustration and impatience. At the time, most of my longer stories had turned out crappy, and just about everyone rejected the few I considered decent. They wrote notes like, “Why is this so long? What’s your problem?” So I figured I’d spend more time concentrating on smaller things, if only to reign in some of my prolix tendencies.

What in the fuck is a “prolix tendency”? That sounds so badass. I mean that’s damn near close to sparklehorsemotherfuck.

19.

How often do you get to eat a heart?

Add a knife.

I think you want to read the flash by now. So go buy the fucking magazine.

20. Who is Gabe Durham?

I guess a violently erotic reaction would be my top choice.

Gabe Durham, I owe you a beer. I consider “Intake Until You” one of the most glow flashes in this issue. Tight, tight. A camera flash caught in the chest of a live sparrow, I feel.

21. What in the hell is “Landwehrkanal”?

It is important to not Google just because you feel like Googling. It’s like cooking by open flame or opiates or holding a Sartre play in stereo. You should do it occasionally.

22.

A fly and I got on an elevator

This is the type of opening sentence that will lead to hair-snakes or roulette tables or at least a woman leaping from a gondola while aflame. Another lesson for my students? You could begin a universe with that prompt. A fly and I got on an elevator.

23. “The Feather” is one of those flashes that use an object as its core. And Loory does a sweet job with the tone, how a single feather can be meaningless, or the center of the world.

I got a real Danill Kharms from this piece. And that is glow.

24. We end with the essence of flash fiction? What is it?

It was the way the sun hit the stones sprawled across your lawn.

Is that enough for you? It isn’t?

Then you, sir or madam, are a “new Star Trek poster” or “a stray hair on the passenger seat.”

I mean lost.



sparklehorsemotherfuck!

sparklehorsemotherfuck!

Love,

S

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Lobster Video Game Sedaris Smallmouth Hobart decomP

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Sean Lovelace| 3 Comments

Life is oddly. You dream about car accidents and dappled nachos. You rub the eyes from your sleep. Stumble into a clutter and hate yourself. For a moment. Bills and printer ink and some cartoon where blue frog-people scream green things. Hi son. It is Sunday and I need to trim the shrubbery–would you like to go bowling? Shoes have wheels now. You go bowling and go to get a bowling alley beer (little plastic cups) and tumble right into a Lobster Zone game. A game with live lobsters. A bowling alley game with live lobsters.

Really, What-the-fuck?

Here is what we know:

1. It costs two bucks to play. You can use your charge card.

2. You use a claw to snag the live lobster. Or: “Unlike any other crane machine, we use a pneumatic system that allows the claw to close beneath the water surface in the tank – not before the claw meets the water. Electrical systems in other machines run directly into the water, risking electrocution of the lobsters.”

3. Here is that damn DFW lobster essay.

4. You catch the lobster and they cook it right there, in this bowling alley type of place most likely known for fries and toasted cheeses and chicken fingers. Possibly they deep fat fry the lobster? I ponder. Little crinkly cups of beer. Four strikes, four spares. There is a lady in here looks like a pumpernickel. Hi lady, my back hurts a lot lately. Hi, she replies, I’m about to smoke a cigarette because I am a fan of The Smiths. On the TV a man pushes another man down. Ok, bye.

5. Here is a video of a successful catch in Las Vegas:

6. There’s something creepy and wrong about this idea and machine, but who am I to say? As a reward for teaching CTY all semester, The Johns Hopkins folks use to throw us all a big-ass seafood party in Rhode Island. Clam cakes, clam rolls, clam chowda (red and white), lobsters. I once ate six lobsters for dinner. Six. I’m not sure the appropriate amount of lobsters you should eat, but it is not six. Don’t do that. OK? Pain. Echoes of. I wouldn’t do it again. I’m actually not sure I would eat another lobster, but I might. I eat some seafood. No other meat, naturally, unless I myself kill the animal, but I digress.

*

New August decomP.

I glow The Mysteries by Alexandra Isacson:

She tried to keep herself from blurring into watercolors. Lucent, her blue-violet eyes fixed on a powdered Tarot.

“Yeah, I cut lines with that card,” he said.

Jennifer Moore with Vegas poem. Great title, momentum, flow. You caught a shard there, Jennifer, and you held it to the neon light and it became a prism. We thank you.

Ambivalence is a mumbling groom, focusing his gaze on the bridesmaids;

none of these women are fathomable. Leave the open bar, the pool
tables, the girls willing to do everything.

*

I ran 12 miles at an incline yesterday, but who gives a shit?

This dude ran a half marathon (13.1 miles) and drank a beer for every mile! Whoa. Why didn’t I think of this? Yes, he vomited, blacked-out, was nearly run down by traffic, but no pain, no malt liquor or whatever. He says:

Perhaps even more problematic are the goddamned do-gooders and paramedics onhand in case of medical emergencies. They will take your swerving, stumbling, and vomiting as signs of delirium or fatigue, and then get all interventionny and try to take away your beer. That can not happen.

This guy is no “goddamned do-gooder” and you got to like him.

*

Lopped a Sedaris book yesterday. Engulfed in Flames. That’s a yell/hell of a title (and skull on the cover) but the book doesn’t really come across as dark and desperate as its possible aim. Sedaris isn’t so glow at titles anyway. The New Yorker often changes the titles of his essays, from book to magazine (or the other way?). The excellent (and truly funny, as in awkward and angry) “Turbulence” appears as “Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle,” a limp and obvious title at best. “Turbulence” has more metaphorical punch, more Clear Winner, and doesn’t force itself on us like a Barbed Bird.

The book took a day to read. This while busy. There were dark and funny pieces, and there was fluff. As usual, the pieces read cleanly–Sedaris obviously edits hard (over-edits at times, some essays so intent on wrapping up in a neat little bow). Sedaris, at his current age, works best when he gets deeper into the bone, into the gristle–his reflections on a skeleton that continually says, “You are going to die.” A sort of Bartleby riff. The cigarette/addiction essay. Or even better when he addresses homosexual issues, and his obvious anger on the subject, a real, earned, valid anger. I wish we could see more of it. I actually wish he would go blue more; he does at readings. He really does. He is in the a-reading-is-different-than-a-book camp. He’s more a stand-up comedian at readings. More a careful writer in his books.

Sometimes Sedaris loses that sympathetic narrator he has always controlled. In earlier books, Sedaris makes fun of everyone, but always includes himself. That’s his trick. Sometimes, in Flames, he comes across as too wealthy, too cosmopolitan, too, well, what he probably is: successful. It’s a tough line to walk. People laugh at fat comedians, etc. People like a narrator who is a bit down, especially in mini-essays. But Sedaris knows this. This genre is Sedaris, so he adds health problems and ineptitude and pratfalls and social errors and whatever mix to make himself a sympathetic buffoon. A smart buffoon. Yes. And I’ll read the words of a smart buffoon.

Sometimes the pieces have a whiff of bullshit, and Sedaris now claims in interviews, “They are 9o something percent true.” If you read enough Sedaris, you’ll respect him for how much is NOT bullshit, but you’ll also see how transparent he is when trying to fake something, an inconceivable coincidence (probably while he’s trying to tie aforementioned bow) or a forced stretchy of lengthy, perfect dialogue.

In the end, you respect the man. He do glow. He’s a bit of a magpie genius. He lives everyday taking little notes, writing them up, editing, then we get these little essays. And he does it again and again. Mostly they are worth reading. Sometimes even truly funny, as in humor laced with roiling clouds, anger, frustration–the real stuff of life, and literature. Sometimes you go: how did he do that? None of this is easy. As we know.

*

New Hobart bringing it all tongue of cigarette, hacking cough.

I glow Kristine Ong Muslim.

We figure the leaves will find a way back into the house, where they take more than their share of furniture. The smell of ruin and the lack of rain outside has not permeated the house yet. That must be what draws them to us, draws them indoors where we multiply when faced by extinction.

You take a thing, it expands. You freeze a thing, inspect closely, it expands. One purpose of writing. To see what falls.

I glow Matt Mullins.

Mutiny is the last I remember.  being pitched over.  only to awaken here.   drowning in an Aeron chair.  typing my own ransom memo for the corporate pirates who pay me in somnambulistic days.  unsure how I was fished out and tanked.

The man shreds some sentences here in a fascinating way. As I told him over D golf, “You let the sentences heighten the claustrophobia of the situation. Good job.”

*

I went cross-training. What does that mean? I took my brother fishing. We drank weak beer and caught strong fish. My brother kept catching sucker fish. Nasty. Suckers fight like submerged Cheetos. You just drag them in…

I reeled in the giant sporting fish, the smallmouth bass. It fought like a parking lot. A screeching tire. RAINBOW, RAINBOW, RAINBOW!!!

Then I let the fish go.

word.

S

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Jennifer Lopez Foot Lasagna Greg

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Sean Lovelace| 6 Comments

I wrote a story about an old man who likes to kick things. I then swept out my tool shed and I ate lasagna and fed my leftover lasagna to the creek today. I tossed it into one of the deeper pools. The creek runs through my property, along the woods, runs and gurgles and brains the air. The creek goes shattered jar in the sun, a beautiful thing. I love the creek. Water makes me glow. I have a chair next to the creek and I like to sit in the chair and read and drink beer and listen to the creek guffawing at how it was here before me and will laugh eons on after I am dead.

But how did the creek respond to my lasagna?

* Crawdads went after the large noodles. One of my favorite crawdads, a large blue one I have named Diane, bullied many of the younger ones, often approaching and ripping a lasagna noodle from their claws. I have noticed small crawdads will pursue a larger one to (I guess?) try to get the food back, but once they get close they never really try. They are just like, “I’m going to get my food back! I’m not scared.” Then they approach the reality of the situation and freeze.

* The smallmouth bass preferred the cheese (a mix of ricotta, mozzarella, sprinkling of Parmesan). They darted in on silver shadows and plucked the cheese away, then whisked back into mossy under-hangs.

* The small sunfish mostly went after the tofu sausage.

* All animals ignored the fennel seeds.

* I saw one small yellow crawdad pick at a leaf of basil, but it then moved on to a large noodle.

* An unknown minnow picked at both the onion and slivers of garlic. It was having trouble holding itself in the current. A smallmouth bass then darted out and swallowed the minnow. Bam. Knife flash. So I basically baited a minnow into deeper water with my Italian seasonings. There it died.

* Only the river rocks took the parsley.

* Ditto the crushed tomatoes.

* The salt returned to the earth.

****

This is how I drive a disc:

This is how Ander Monson drives a disc. He has a new book/site (he always has a new book/site!). Go read it and explode.

Damn. Pretty awesome follow-through, like he’s about to fly away. I would tell you more about my weekend playing disc golf in Wisconsin, but you would be bored liked corn and squash.

So.

This is how Mark Neely drives a disc!! You can find a new wicked Neely poem at Juked.

*

If you know much about my writing, you know I have a “Drug Series.”

Example, Cocaine.

So. Here is Psilocybin over at Metazen.

*

Rose Metal Press has an interview here, and they mention Eggs won a design award.

Holy shit. Very cool. If you want to buy Eggs, go click that link up top right and read some flash fiction or something, yo. Yo.

[I feel like a paper bag right now.]

*

New Word Riot, motherfuckers!! I myself enjoyed:

1. Desire Cafe Sutra by John Kuligowski because it was Beat as hell, and John says he is a boring guy.

2. The Beige Futon by Greg Gerke.

This flash fiction fucking rocks. Check out this little smidgen:

Sitting in the subway, he laughed aloud and a man with a picture of a taco on his shirt didn’t seem too happy and he thought, Why can’t I laugh on the fucking subway? The one time I do a massive soft shell of guilt envelops me? So he closed his eyes and went back to the first moments, but the moments had changed. He was alone with their futon and it was dark and rainy.

That’s how you’re supposed to do it. Scene to action to physical now to trigger to thought to flashback. Pay attention all you psychos who say you want to write. Here’s a technique for you. Read it ten times or stop trying/whining.

her saying she’d still love him forever though she was leaving him for someone less neurotic.

Oh man, situation and characterization. I’ll be teaching this one to the kiddies in the fall, and that means I like/like/like it, and it’s also lame for me to say so, because I am so academia, no? No. I liked it first because it moved me. I liked it 8 more times for the same reason. I liked it the 9th and 10th time because this flash fiction is technical as a green Cadillac and I will drive it all over my students’ desks and times and haircuts and lollygags of structural play/room/lives.

3. Peter Schwartz interview.

This collection took me a few years to write. During that time I spent most of my time in my room. I had no real (meaning not just online or voice) relationships and sunk into the loneliness that comes from being that alone. There’s also the fact that I’m a bit haunted (see: ‘ABCs of loss’) but the truth is that my astronaut training program is simply not complete. You were right, sometimes I am beaten, but I think ultimately I will overcome this shit.

*

I like to mow the yard. I like to see the grass fall in lines. To see a thing done. Sometime I feel black horses at my back, like alongside or gaining, but I have never heard their hooves while mowing the yard. So that’s something.

S

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casserole

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Sean Lovelace| Leave a comment

Washtenaw County Women’s Poetry Collective and Casserole Society sent me a book of poetry and it blew me away. I review it over at HTML.

*

Here’s a new flash fiction at Literary Buffalo. It includes disc golf. Hollar!

*

I wrote about the World Cup at Juked.

I will miss the World Cup. especial on HD TV. I think HD was made for soccer. Glow green glow. I will not miss the whiny players who roll around in fake grimaces/grabs at knees/silly scowls and I will not miss the Vuvuzela (OK, maybe  a little), but I learned a lot watching the game this year, a bit more about spacing and flow and off-sides and also I enjoy the clock not stopping, no commercials, game rolling on like diet 7-UPs of nitrogen flowers/rain. I like to watch Brazil play. Also the U.S. You watch and think, “American soccer a little clunky, herky-jerky. Brazilian soccer flow.” Oh, and the Brazilian players are better, even I can see that.

*

Mud Luscious 12 is here. I’m in there will something about rain.

*

A reporter writes an article about a man yelling about nachos.

The Distracted Housewife suggests nachos.

Microwave nacho recipe.

*

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How to Have a Good Reading

Posted on July 4, 2010 by Sean Lovelace| 2 Comments

Went to a good reading on Wednesday. A good reading: How do?

1. Employ a hip space.

The Irving Theater was exposed wood beam ceiling/dark corners/suicide/chandeliers drooping like mid-70s/various colors of paint I associate with dust cobras or deep scratches in vinyl cars or the time I jumped over a tall fence and wrestled a deer to the ground, cut its throat with a knife, etc. My head did the whoosh whoosh. I felt like maybe my house could have hardwood floors and a furtive cat, if I so wished. Naked woman painting!!!! I am so cool people wait in line to eat me. I think it’s funny when people say pass the time. Pass the gravy, pass gas, pass the time. There were rows of seats and maybe church pews someone stole from a church. The ceiling was tall as a tall ceiling. The lighting was dark. I felt a level 5 hipness factor, like maybe an ironic T-shirt or The Hipster Olympics.

3. The new summer JMWW is fucking nuts. Wow. I mean it is loaded like a pepper gun. A gun that shoots peppers.

I seriously want to thank the editors. Good work.

I glow Kim Chinquee. I said Kim Chinquee. I said Kim Chinquee. (Click on the links, dumbass. If you aren’t going to read Kim Chinquee, I can’t imagine why you are here at all.)

I glow Brian Evenson flash.

I glow Robert Coover.

I glow Terese Svoboda.

I think it’s funny when people discuss a magazine or whatever and they are actually in the magazine but pretend they sorta aren’t or something I don’t know. I don’t think that’s appropriate. Ha, ha. I’d like to ask myself to be my friend and tell myself to go to hell or just ignore the friend request altogether. Maybe when I get older I’ll call an ambulance to my house–like chest pain or maybe I’ll say my ears are made of Styrofoam–and none of that will be true, I’m just calling the ambulance to have someone to talk to, someone to visit me, another expensive friend.

Here you go, fucker.

Here you go!

Fucker.

Fuck.

Did I mention I love Ken Sparling and he is in the new JMWW? The more I publish in venues with Ken Sparling the happier I feel.

14. Have beer at the reading. Always have beer. I can’t tell you the amount of situations in my life that have improved just by the presence of beer.

[Sex in hot tubs is uncomfortable]

[I got a telemarketer calling me from Florida]

[Two bucks and a coffee mug]

[Salad I pretend to enjoy]

[Awkward greeting your dad]

[Accidents happen now and again]

[Tiny trees grow out my house gutter]

[A bunch of wasps just fucked me up]

[blar me]

Thank you Sun King Brewery.

9. Have Christopher Nugent show up. He is doing awesome Vouched Books. Good to see you, Chris!

11. Take shitty, blurry iPhone photos:

10. You could have nachos. Why don’t you people put rice on your nachos? Do I have to tell you how? Everyone goes beans, beans, beans, but think about rice. Think about rice. Think about it. Rice.

Or maybe you go to lunch by yourself and read the papers and feel like you are in a novel.

[Seeing the smoke rise]

[I am French today. I am action but thought, like mixed]

Weekend Nachos interview.

Nacho’s blog is confusing as all get-out. What the fuck does this even mean? It’s like some odd poem:

5. Fiction Daily interviews me. Interview me.

6. DC with an amazing Sad Keanu post.

2. Keep it short. I said keep it short. KEEP IT SHORT. Jesus Christ, you people that blather on and on at readings–you have lost us, your audience. Our minds are thinking about cleavage and the exposed wood and dust whorls and credit card debt and orange crows and man this fucking IPA is tight, light yet succulent and Old Spice who’s wearing Old Spice? and coffee shop down the block and sake, sake tastes like candy corn and are you supposed to drink it cold or hot, like maybe the tourists drink it hot but actual Japanese drink it cold it’s like in Mexico all the restaurants have two menus–one for the stupid gringos, one of real Mexican food–and I’d love to break some windows right now and a dark mass of blackbirds or maybe starlings in the sky, European imports and that dude is hot/that chick is hot/I’m hungry/need a promotion too and why is there a hole in my shoe are my toes too long is that the problem, are you saying my toes are like Appalachian or something?

So, you know, keep it short….

Andrew Scott (of Freight Stories, etc) read first. He did a persona screen-play/script type piece, and you know I glow any persona fiction. Then he read his Esquire flash. He kept it lively and short. Good work.

Donald Ray Pollock read next. Wow. He glowed it. You have heard of KNOCKEMSTIFF, right? He read about murder and huffing Bactine (!) and Kmart realism if Kmart was a fucking alleyway full of Appalachian whores and homeless killers and beer cans, etc.

I almost bought Pollock’s book but I needed to purchase more beer and I have too many books to read right now.

7. Persona piece Paul Bowles I wrote getting good run at Fictionaut.

77. OMG hole 5 is right up against the creek on R and that’s a headwind 90 % of the time–you are all fucked.

11. Or a pepper in the shape of a gun?

44. No joke, I was on the roof today and wasps fucked me up. I nailed down a shingle and this wasps jumps out and stings/stings/stings me. 3 times on the left side of my knee. I screamed, hopped, but I was on a roof. Calm down, Sean. OK. OK. But why is my right side knee swelling up like a balloon? Anyone had this happen? Fucking wasps.

2. I swerved to miss a squirrel and hit the damn squirrel–tha-thump. Well, fuck me. That’s philosophical and shit. I made a purposeful act to avoid harm and caused harm.

2.

At some future time, meet Lady Gaga for drinks at a bass pond. The idea is BYOB + fishing rods + some Hank Williams Jr. songs on your IPhone + whipping persimmons in the air with sticks + later frying the largemouth tails over a low fire + they taste like some form of potato chips + you have this summer heat/beer buzz pelvic stirring + you and Gaga wading into the pond, holding hands + frog thrum in the air + she says what did I just step on, it was like a smooth football made of marble and you say it’s only turtles, you stepped on a turtle’s back + both of your underwears sprawled out on the bank + warm currents and eddies and toe-sucks of mud + 14 geese over in a honking V + you and Lady Gaga slipping away into the torn tops/swaying reeds of the cattails…I don’t know how you’re going to achieve this but make an actual date. This is going to take some effort, some persistence, now that Gaga’s all famous and etc, but we are a tenacious people. I mean look what Nick Nolte did with his looks and talent. Check out Mandy Moore. So. So? Make the appointment with Lady Gaga. Do it. Today. Write down the actual time and date.

Now just wait.

This is the best formula I know to avoid depression.

8. you want me to shoot arrows at Blake Butler’s book, huh?

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Ace 814 Decent 5k Pancake Short Stories Creative Nonfiction Man Bitch Story

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Sean Lovelace| 3 Comments

Holy Shit Creative Nonfiction is arguing that blog is indeed a genre of CNF. I agree.

Holy shit they are trying to find the glow/glow blog. It’s  a big ol’ contest.

And the finalists are…

American Stories NOW

Angie Muresan

Charlie’s Chatter

First Person

From SoHo to Silo

Here and Far
Incidents and Accidents
Life in a Northern Town
Life Under A Rock
NGM Blog Central
Perceptive Travel
ResidentAlien
Sean Blog
She Sells Seashells
Somnambulist Zine
Terribleminds
The Silhouette
The Ugly Truth

ZYZZYVASPEAKS

That’s right, this very blog is a finalist. The others have cooler names, I feel, and now I have a lot of blog reading to do. Haven’t heard of some of these…but I will.

Hey, you, reader:

Do something lucky. Paint your door with an egg. Embrace gruffness. Scratch the top of your car ceiling. Try to avoid salt, I dare you, I mean avoid its very essence. Carve a tiny door into an egg. Tie a rubber band around your ears. Siphon off all your ability and place it into a capsule and feed a tiny bird the capsule. Throw a full bottle of Lorrie Moore at a gymnasium. Cross your fingers and kiss your wife and boyfriend at midnight. (You don’t have a boyfriend or a wife?–my email is right up there.) Eat ham hocks, collard greens, patches of hair, whipped hair, donuts, oversized comic book covers, Merton Lee, and nachos.  Remove the roof of your house. Fill your bathtub half full of water and drop a silver coin into it. Position the tub so that the light from the moon shines into the water. Gently sweep your hands just above the surface, symbolically gathering the Moon’s silver. Shoot an arrow into the house of your mailman. Hit a car with your dog. Blubber dryly–try to. Bake your cellphone into the center of a cake. When the phone rings, go fishing. Snort a crushed dream. Snort algae. Snort me. Kill a rabbit and chew off its foot and attach the bloody foot to your key chain. Slide your naked body over freshly cut grass. Take a photo of your photo self. Set all of your work on the east coast. Hold your breath when you pass Cracker Barrel. Take a green candle; dip it into some orange juice then light it.  Jump over the candle saying:

Blog, blog, dippety snog,
Now I feel like beery fog…

(Drink 14 beers)

Whatever.

What do I do for luck?

Holy shit I tie my hair off the side like that girl in Napoleon Dynamite

she be weird/cute

cute/weird

and I put on some underwear and a nice shirt and make my 814th ace and set my basket on fire, on fire, my lovelies, oh my, oh my, I feel like a flower blooming atop a gutter, you know, when you have not cleaned out the gutters and the plants trickle up, a little contrast, house and flora, man and nature…I dedicate this ace to vegetarian burgers and the Coast Guard.

*

Are you a Hollerado fan? You should be, I suppose. Why? They throw nacho parties!

*

Holy skull-rattle. Have you read “Man Bitch” by Craig Snyder over at Juked?

Man Bitch meets the girl with large shoulders outside Krispy Kreme donuts, in sunshine.  They talk and wait for the bus together standing 16 inches apart, with variations up to 24 inches.  Man Bitch notices the large shoulders and likes them.  Feelings of fullness, 33% manliness, and the idea he may be completely fucked, are generated in the Man Bitch brain.  Man Bitch starts to feel like he is on heroin or something and is going to die, but he doesn’t.  He has the sensation of becoming a large vibrating egg.  He smokes nervously and wishes he were taller.

You just read that opening and I know you want more. Go ahead, click the link and read more.

*

Ran a 5k last Saturday. It was held to raise $$ for cancer and both my parents have dealt with the big C and so I usually jump into races like that and I drove down there now, there now to New Castle (I like towns named after beers and beers named after towns) and I sat in the car all waiting for the race, all waiting, and what do I do when waiting, like dentist office, oil change, sitting in car??

1. Play my brother in iPhone chess. He has pretty much beat my ass and it makes me madly. I used to kick dino-ass in chess. My only excuse is I prefer an actual board, not a flat screen, but that is possibly a lame excuse. The fact is I have been losing in chess.

2. Drink coffee. (5k tip for you freak-os: many studies have shown that caffeine will improve your race performance.)

3. Read.

What’s that perched atop my 5k gear?

It is Trilobites & Other Stories by Breece d’j Pancake.

What do I think/know?

1. Cool name. The name was a typo by The Atlantic and Breece decided to clutch. This shows you a bit about his personality. He’s keen enough to not take himself that seriously, and when he sees serendipity, he snags it…I mean it is a glow name. You’re going to drink a beer with a guy named Breece d’j Pancake.

2. He can write, let’s make that clear. I mean on the sentence level. You can feel him whittling the sentence out of basswood or pine.

A gray ooze of light began to crest the eastern hills above the hollow and sift a blue haze through the black bowels of linking oak branches.

3. These stories are his only ones. He didn’t write many. Why? Because he carefully worked/chiseled/crafted his fiction. And he killed himself at age 26.

4. With just a bit of research, I immediately found that we (readers, critics, etc.) are to believe Pancake’s stories are holy, are whispered of, are the real deal, a flame too soon extinguished, a real man of American letters. His work is revered, usually by those who write realism themselves and most likely because he is very skilled (also the suicide).

5. I found the stories uneven. Almost all are good, OK, no doubt, but “Trilobites” and “First Day of Winter” (the first and last in the collection) are superior–perfect realism grounded in place, the voices spot on, the pacing, the atmosphere of fatalistic sadness, the individual caught in the reality of a larger, lower world. Two stories (“Hollow” and “The Salvation of Me”) came across a bit sloppy, a bit forced, both in situation and characterization.

["Hollow" does do an excellent job of using the jargon/terminology of coal mining to poetic effect: seam, glitter, clam crawl,  light-flash, bloom pile, "bucket tin buckled" ]

One of my favorites was actually a creepy, semi-mystery story: “Time and Again.” It’s the sort of trick story my students always try to pull off–the Ah-ha! Well, Pancake unfolds it expertly, and it shows his understanding of structure and craft. Edgar Allen Poe would have glowed this story.

6. If you’re going write fiction, you should read this book. You should know it, I mean. A fiction writer doesn’t need to glow all the previous authors, but she does need to KNOW them: Chekhov, O’ Connor, etc. Have them in your quiver. Pancake’s is a certain genre of fiction–soaked in place, shrouded in coal dust and hollers and runover snakes and 10 cent coffee and the screams of truck gears grinding. It has the loner protagonist in it (a genre all itself).

7. Two Pancake techniques I most enjoyed:

* Pancake often liked to open with a natural setting, usually juxtaposed to his character, their mind and situation:

Alena stepped under the awning of the Tastee Freeze and looked out at rain draining into the dust, splattering craters with little clouds. When it stopped, cars hissed along the highway in whorls of mist.

The roads curve tight, but around them is a sort of scar of clay, and the leaves have a purplish blight.

Now he could see the first blue blur of morning growing behind bare tree branches, and beyond them the shadows of the farm.

* Second, he does this cool thing where the writing eye jumps to an animal. The lens leaves our human characters and wonder/wanders off into the forest, the glen, the roadside shrubbery. I found this fascinating, the way Breece nods his head to nature, to its role, to its presence and destruction (most of these stories set in coal country). So many writers leave our fellow animals out. Breece knew them well and reminded me of Faulkner and his horses (Go read all of Faulkner and count the horses).

The opossum lay quietly by the roadside. She had found no dead farm animals in which to build her winter den; not even a fine empty hole.

Two miles beyond, an owl watched a meadow from the branches of a dead hickory tree. Hidden in the underbrush, the fox watched the owl and the meadow.

So, read Breece d’j Pancake. I did. Then I went and ran my 5k in 17: 57, for fifth overall, and to win my age division…

*

I just did 142 pushups. Time to broil some corn tortillas.

S

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Belly Dancer Toussaint Horse Track Vagina

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Sean Lovelace| 1 Comment

We went Egyptian. I like Egyptian. It makes my head go whoosh-whoosh. Sometimes I felt like a 45′ vertical jump. Sometimes I felt like oranges tumbling onto a wooden floor. Meaning: I like restaurants that will serve someone who does not want to eat cardboard or meat or industrial Bad Faith, but I repeat myself.

I went to The Nile.

[But not the actual Nile. The actual Nile is not the biggest river in the world. It is the longest. It is like Longplayer. Longest song in the universe (1000 years trying for), but not the biggest.]

The biggest song in the universe is most likely by The Smiths.

Last great crooner!

Would I sleep with Morrissey?

Does a bear leap in the hoods?

Helllooooooooooooooooooooooooo

{Mowed the yard drunk. Felt so productive…all those shimmering rows}

A belly dancer! OK. But personal boundaries, or like belly-too-close-to-my-food, or maybe the Bedleh (white) too flashy/flingy in my face while I try to eat Fool (lovely dish, fava beans and various herbs), while armband shimmer/castanet clapper-brains, and the dollar bills shoved in midriff, shoved in bra-like contraption/clothing don’t know but loud/close/OK now my beer is kicking in and I like you maybe but then she grabs a long dagger/whoa dagger and does things–not so nice to stare or possibly the opposite–I am expecting flames soon. Dagger, dagger, dagger, silvery blade.

{How to build a persimmon-whipper. Get skinny stick. Sharpen point. Put persimmon on end. Whip that persimmon into the sky!!}

All up in my table vapor!

Well, guess I’ll drink my first beer from Cypress.

Light yet succulent.

Cypress is a lovely island.

(Cucumber and tomato are used widely in salads.)

I would like to meet Lady Gaga on Cypress and play chess.

*

Over at Bookslut, Elizabeth Ellen is stalking Dave Eggers.

*

I write everything in threes now. If I write one thing, one idea, I then go and write two more. So I wrote a World Cup flash/poem thing. Then I wrote two more World Cup poem/flash things. I will kick them into the guarded goal of the world later.

Gggggggggooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

*

Just finished Camera by Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

I am so fucking smart I read French books! Ha, ha, my head is a fucking scrub pine all up in your landscape, all up in the banks of your mind-ponds, where you catch catfish and fry their tails into potato chips.

AND

I ripped the plastic splash-guard off my Subaru’s oil pan with my bare hands!

I’m fucking functional over here, Chief!

Then I read Some People by Chris Diken.

Whoa, chapbooks, eh? What’s next, you art-fart, an ironic T-shirt and brie?

crumbly, crumbly…I feel crumbly….

No.

But.

Both interest me as books of ideas, stories that ground themselves in place and objects (a urinal, a camera) but then use that concrete reality as a catalyst for introspection, as a T shirt launcher of thought. Diken’s book is a story (18pp) about a man standing in front of a urinal, but his character’s take/humorous situation/expansion of place into thought, etc. are exactly what Toussaint does in a larger form (Oddly, Touissaint even includes a long scene where the character is also using the bathroom), repeatedly, on a ferry, in a phone booth, in a bureau of driver’s license, and so on. Both books are playful, but both pick at real philosophy. Both are odd, odd in the way of ideas. Both take the story/book form and use it as a machine, to explore something else.

Both are worth a read, folks.

[Why does my brother beat me in iPhone chess? WTF!!!!! Am I getting slower, is that it?]

*

I won at the horse tracks. Who does that? Not me, very often.

Some lady stole my bar stool.

Man, lizards all over the bar. It’s awesome. You think, “What would be a cliche type of people at a horse track bar”? Visualize, visualize–that’s exactly what the bar looked like, yep. Smoke and skin and smoke and jaundice and scrawny me yelling, “SIMMER DOWN 8, SIMMER DOWN!!!!!!”

[My brother taught me to scream SIMMER DOWN! so I thank him here, in this space and time.]

Here is my WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER BLUE PLATE THOUSAND ISLAND PORKCHOP system. You can have my system, free of charge.

Always play a 3 horse exacta box. Let the computer randomly pick the first two horses. Then add the # 1 horse. I always, always play #1. If the computer picks #1, then play #9 or #5 or #4.

Or just play an exacta with the # 1 in second.

Now you are a winner.

“The track takes 15 percent, but what’s 15 percent of a dream?”

Charles Bukowski

*

Uh, KGM claims her vagina is a book. This link will take you to a photo of her vagina, so if you are into vagina photos go right ahead freak-o

*

Did I Miss Anything?

Tom Wayman

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people
on earth.

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren’t here

*

Email yourself and then refuse to answer.

*

elimae with Sara Levine with Psychic and We Have Everything We Need to Make the Journey Already.

Both of these are badass.

Go read.

Go read like clearing throat

like soaking back

like double-feature tumbling, oh my.

*

Waaa, waaaaaaaaaaaa I found a metal hook in my nachos.

Shut-up, lady. Just thank God you are actually eating nachos.

eating nachos

eating nachos

eating nachos

*

Blar me

S

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Consequences by Lincoln Michel

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Sean Lovelace| Leave a comment

Another wigleaf Top 50 would be Consequences by Lincoln Michel.

I read it 7 times, just to get the movement. This is a tight clock of movement, understand? I didn’t. So I read it 7 times. See, this piece jumps somehow, the way green darts of water frogs leap from the throb of my approaching push mower. Yet I can’t really tell you anything about frog-jumping. I just see this zip of jade.

I’m talking about movement:

I once knew a girl who’d been smothered with a pillow by her lover.

That’s a great opening line. And I think the girl is dead now. But then we get a quick reversal, we move back–the girl is alive, but now we are already into:

No one told me any of this before I saw her across the room at a party.

We just zipped from mythology to contemporary realism setting. We moved. It’s like a flashing light and there was something above the light and that felt very heavy on my face.

Zigzagging: producing tension by creating fluctuations of feeling to maintain a high degree of attention.

Thanks, Jerome.

The 1st time I felt I stumbled upon some guitar-riff licking fishing poles sort of thing.

The 2nd time I studied.

the 3rd time I noted many well-rendered sensations.

The 4th time I felt wonder and envy. Who is this Lincoln Michel? [Here u go]

The 5th time I was blotto.

The 6th time I felt like a waitress leaning and waiting to pick up the dishes. I mean I was ready to write my own flash.

the 7th time I exhaled and wrote this blog post.

I was angry and never talked to the girl again.

Cut.

I got a job moving boxes then lost it.

“What do you want, Mr. Lovelace?”

“Smack. To be smacked.”

WANT

OBSTACLE

ACTION

Thank you, Lincoln Michel, for the Consequences.

(all images by Shannan Lee Hayes)

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Canoe and Write and Run and Dan Chaon

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Sean Lovelace| 1 Comment

I took The Boy fishing on the White River. The water was high and rumbled like lips on a wine jug, or maybe a flight museum if all the planes came to life, propeller thrum, etc. After watching quite a few other fisherman just casting randomly, I made sure to teach The Boy how to read a river. While books and minds are important, a person MUST know how to read a river. It’s a masterpiece, this river, I said to my son.

I said, “Son, don’t spook the water you’re about to fish. Those fish will think this canoe is a killer whale.”

I said, “Son, feel this sand (I scooped a bit from a bank); isn’t is cool and marvelous in the hand?”

I said, “Son, fish eddies and riffles and pools. If you’re just going to throw the lure anywhere we might as well be in a Wal-mart parking lot or hell, but I repeat myself.”

I said, “Son, fishing is like the act of love. When you are older, you’ll regret days you didn’t fish, not the ones you did.”

I said, “Son, let’s go light line today. Everything is ten-fold with light line.”

I said, “Son, if you’re not getting hung up on the bottom, you’re not fishing in the right place.”

I said, “Son, pass me that massive, massive beer from the Igloo cooler.”

I said, “Look, son, fools!” Ah, Memorial Day weekend…

[He said, "Dad, why is that woman naked?"]

Drunk, wet, dumb, loud, naked, often underwater. No worries, though. I enjoy the people-watching and most likely these folks (and many others we passed) did not know what they just caterwhomped themselves into. As I said, the river was high. Anyway, no matter the chaos, we caught fish the way a hole in the ground catches the glint of stars. Good times, good times.

*

Wow, via HTML, look what Mud Luscious Press is up to.

Love it. Love it!

Everything here is way glow.

*

Dark Sky Magazine has a spotlight feature on this Sean Lovelace fellow.

*

I’m still in disbelief I signed up for:

The Toughest Road Marathon in the World
The Only Uphill Marathon in the US
6000 ft Elevation Gain

MOUNT LEMMON MARATHON

Man, fuck me. Pain…

This is Ander Monson‘s fault, basically.

OK, so I am IN TRAINING:

I am most worried about the altitude and the mountain lions. I can’t train for those factors. Anyway, I started my training today. I am going to try for primarily slow hills (I have a treadmill with grades) and LONG runs and also dark beer. I will also try to like tackle random dogs I see along the highways. Just pull over, run at the dog, and tackle the thing. I’d also like to eat at a mercantile exchange, like maybe takeout. I’d always had that urge. I’m not even sure what a mercantile exchange is, but fuck it. And I’ll be rattling more doorknobs than usual. If I see a doorknob, I will rattle that doorknob. So I warn you in advance. Are doorknobs slowly becoming extinct? I mean you see a lot of handles and metal bars and like little flippy things and electronic locks and so on, but what about a good old slobber-knocking doorknob? I wonder.

Also I will flutter my eyelids when appropriate.

Also I will AK47 my lungs in the late evenings, particularly Tuesdays.

Also I will tick.

Also I will magic rhythm my shins.

Today:

8.2 mph:

12 minutes at 2%

12 minutes at 3%

12 minutes at 4%

2 minutes at 2%

Not a bad start, good sweat. Legs should feel glow later.

*

Dan Chaon glows grief well here, a wigleaf Top 50. Grief as Things Fall Apart, things end (our own lives), and I can’t stop them, I can’t stop them anymore than I could stop rust or an ebbing tide or a crumbling log or a drunk and tumbling Lady Gaga or a sagging bedroom or a crumpled shirt or the moon carving itself into nothing. Look around: Things fall apart. Grief as resentment. Look at them. Look at them, in love, hobbling, hobbling, hobbling–but alive.

It’s a tone piece: shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

So many writers would fuck this up. But Chaon keeps it on keel, quiet, leaves rustling…falling, mulching, into the emerging buds of…

Spring, the season, as most rude reply to death. Most rude.

Late April.

Early May.

Tulips and daffodils and lilacs and budding trees.

I wonder if that would make her happy, to know that the Hobblers were still around. Down the block and back, down the block and back, getting a little exercise. Maybe—probably—she would like it. “Sweet,” she would say.

As for me, I don’t know what I would prefer. I sit at the window, peering out, and I don’t know whether I want to see them, or if I hope that they will never come.

The hurt isn’t that I am going to die, dear blog reader. The hurt is that the day I die you will have a need for low-fat latte, and you will make or buy low-fat latte, and you will drink low-fat latte, and it will be a good low-fat latte.

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What are you looking at?

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