Today I read a book of poetry on an iPad. It was a book titled Stale Champagne, by Tyler Gobble. I’ve met Tyler Gobble once, and maybe you think that is impossible, but it is in fact possible. Did you know we spend 6 minutes of every hour in the dark, just from blinking? He lives in Indiana. I often disc golf in Indiana and also teach writing at a school with a name similar to a large, round object used in a number of sporting events. A long while back, maybe two days or eight years in the yonder, this young man shows up at my door. Tall, healthy looking young lad, wiry strands of head-hair, bouncy step, muscle shirt, a basketball under one arm and a cardboard box under the other, all of that. (I noted the cardboard box had several red and blue wires dangling from a corner.) It was Tyler Gobble.
“Hey,” he said, “I’m Tyler Gobble. One of the most frightening experiences for a writer is to have a pet squirrel stray away unnoticed in public.”
I said, “I’m not following.”
The clouds were in the sky like coughed steel.
“Well,” he said, “I have invented an invention, an innovative, FCC approved radio-frequency alarm system that helps writers locate pet squirrels or other exotic pets in a mall, park, school, school event like a Halloween carnival, poetry reading, store, or just about anywhere. Would you like to purchase the device?”
I said, “I’m not sure a squirrel is an exotic pet.”
“It’s exotic to the squirrel,” Tyler Gobble said.
I scratched my forehead. “OK.”
Tyler Gobble nodded to the box under his arm. “You want to purchase my invention? I do installment plans.”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t had a pet squirrel in years.”
“It’s for the arts,” he said. “I’m raising money for my own press.”
“Like a grape press, for wine? Now that glows.”
“No, no, a literary press. For words.”
“No thanks.”
“Your pet squirrel wears the receiver on a belt.”
“No thank you. I don’t even wear belts.”
“Or…or…or in the nylon waist pouch provided.”
(That’s crazy, sighed an acorn.)
“Nope. I do not have a squirrel. Have a good day.”
Tyler Gobble looked at me like I had a frozen turkey balanced on my elbow. “Listen, sir,” he said. “You carry the palm-size transmitter, OK? In the event that you and your squirrel are separated, the device I have invented gives you three options to help you find your pet: Locate, Search, and Alarm. The alarm is REALLY loud. Want to hear it? I mean it is LOUD.”
I said, “No, I do not. Do not set off that alarm.”
Crows were swooping all over the top of my house. Attacking an owl.
“This invention can be used indoors or out and has a range of up to 200 feet,” Tyler said, loudly, over the racket of cawing crows.
“Nope.”
“Well, OK,” Tyler Gobble said. “You sure you don’t want to hear the alarm? It’s at the decibel level of a small jet and that’s if you put your ear to the engine of the jet which I don’t suggest because people get sucked into jet engines more often than you might imagine.”
“Do not set off that alarm,” I said.
And then Tyler Gobble left. He bounced the basketball right up the road and away in the sunset melting like ____________.
But I digress. I just wanted to say I have met Tyler Gobble. Once.
Another first for me was to read a collection of poetry on an IPad, basically a big-ass smart phone. I thought:
1. Well, I can’t shoot this book. Sometimes I shoot at books:
Ok, I could shoot it, but launching arrows at an iPad just seems a bit too vodka. Anyway, destroying an iPad has been so done.
2. I am used to poetry coming in a book or chapbook form and smelling like paper, binding glue, lost shards of hope. This book smells like an iPad. An iPad smells like finger sweat and television and a conspiracy to distance people from people and them from themselves, then their selves spinning from, joining closer to sucker-punch, spinning out again from their other selves, a sort of painting of hummingbirds caught in a lightning storm only the lightning storm is the skin over your brain as it sits in the back of the cabinet and crumbles alongside the Pop Tarts and the plastic couplets you find at poetry keg parties or Salvation Army santa raves, etc. I was thinking what if I put my tiny carrots in a new running shoe box. My mind would think, Running shoes, while I munched on the carrots. Something like that. Synapses are bathtubs. Synapses are kites of despair caught in flowering knees. Also Oprah.
3. I did glow scrolling down with a flick of my index finger and seeing the brightly lit poetry flow. Tyler’s book is one of flow. It begins and pours forward, like a day cracking open, but not any day, but like every day when you are caught in certain frames of minds and certainly this book, this “stale champagne” if I might and I think I might since it’s the fucking title, is a capturing of frames of minds, these frames maybe traps or mirror edges but also then certainly an attempt at ordering something, or presenting it, or, hell, even maintain and/or controlling a thing, the way frames might function when working or when at work and I suppose a life is a frame, or trying to understand any life is a frame, or a refusal of the stony illusion of framing, and that’s all I have to say about frames, framers, framing, a damn shame, because I haven’t even mentioned the possible word play and connotations and Platonic allegories available to a mind open and willing to consider the term, frames.
A bottle is a frame. Or:
The thing about Stale Champagne is I think it’s sort of an elegy, or an urn, or an admirable unforced valley full of unforgiving ways turned to poetry (we call this a soul gulley) and the narrator keeps stirring the ashes (back to the urn now) with his finger and he’s looking down into the vortex, and, yes, he’s sad but also thinking, “That looks sort of beautiful, this vortex of ash.”
And the vortex is universal. The Milky Way and the water down your sink drain and the tip of a conch shell and the finger print, your own flesh, they are mathematically the same in their measurements, distances, way; and so one thing is everything, and the ordinary is more than extraordinary, it’s metaphysical, it’s everything…in this frame of mind, the elegy, where the GONE thing is always PRESENT. It is a strangely wired force! It has overtaken the persona!
Stale champagne…
A better question is why’d you/
leave before I woke up?
or
I’m dusty eyed with my head in the circles
your drool made on the sofa.
And here, on the opening page, you get two consistencies of Stale Champagne. One, Gobble knows the enjambment. This book could provide a fine lesson on when to cut–or not to crisply cut–the line. Jagged is a good word. Sharp. Two, as I allude to above, this imagery is of a thing lost. A thing lost is often more powerful than the thing here. How so? The thing here is one dimensional, in substance and thought, here with us, while the thing gone is more acute, multidimensional, the thing itself (now elsewhere but still thrumming) and the memory (physical [drool, for example] and in the brain-clouds of our neurons) of the thing. And here the poetic eye–exact detail, fine attention, NOTICING the stains of life, reiteration–doesn’t help the griever at all. This crush of compression. It causes more acuity. The writer’s sensitivity to the word and the world makes the rent edges of the elegy even sharper (and deeper cutting).
Her sheets I can smell myself in.
or
Flowers on the sidewalk someone lost.
Stale Champagne is an album by a band. There are quotes from the album throughout these poems. So there’s a lot of allusion here, and, you know what, I don’t give a blar. Because I don’t know anything about music. I’m one of the very, very few writers I know who doesn’t know music. I’m OK with that. And I’m really OK with that here, in Stale Champagne, because the words leading to the line leading to this thing, this larger situation, work perfectly fine without any allusion. honestly, I believe that’s how it should be anyway.
You know what I like about this elegy (my term). It’s something a lot of writers fail to do when they are writing similar material (similar material being the leavings and echoes of we will have in our lives). There’s the pop in here, this jar and pop of energy, these “twitch-twists” (in the term of critic, Calvin Bedient), sometimes simply kinetic, sometimes maybe sexual or borderline violent, and it’s an energy that says to me, “I’ll get over this moment.” Time moves both ways, back and forward. To wit: this elegy avoids a wallowing.
swatted the/alarm into side one
or
The people and their boogie/bodies
or
I heard a word cascade/through my floor and ring in a strange bed
or
The man in apartment 38 pukes/over his balcony. And breaks his/arm jumping off to clean it up.
Why not make a story out of ordinary, found incidents, the way some artists make sculptures out of wrecked cars or fabricate fabulous images out of dirt, blood, and rust?
Review of new Jim Harrison poetry. Harrison is nests of wheat or sand or Rilke magnesium and the bones of magnesium, fluorescent bird bones, Pop Tarts I feel 33 X 33 cents. Sometimes I glow orange to handful of Pringles orange as I read him. From a Harrison poem:
We are parts. What part are you now?
The shit of the world has to be taken
care of every day. You have to choose
your part after you take care of the shit.
I’ve chosen birds and fish, the creatures
whose logic I wish to learn and live.
I KEEP MY FRIENDS IN A BOX under the bed, categorized and separated, secured by blue rubber bands that originally held broccoli. One day I removed the lid and saw that they had all turned into little bones. I strung them together into a long strand that I looped around and around my neck.
My love looks at me and my heart breaks out of my chest. It jumps on the table and salsa dances with our salsa, mash-potatoes with our mashed potatoes, and cuts a rug with our butter knife. Joy is ours. Then my heart gets greedy: opens its veiny mouth, eats my love, and leaves us both for dead in the diner, dancing its eating dance out the door.
What you want to do is add layering, as in echoes or nachos. The form allows for boiled eggs hidden within the driftwood, maybe all of this in an abandoned cave or stomach of pizza delivery boy, below a shopping mall, on Mars. Layering. Why do we Facebook? What is status? What is like? To like or to be liked? Our culture will happily discard things, but for eons we keep telling stories. Isn’t a Facebook post always a story? What was the author’s intent? Friends, that’s a good term, too, especially in the Facebook usage of the word. Who? What do we say and why?
Like.
What a non-word. Similar to freedom or nice or Cracker Barrel. A nothing.
You go and teach workshop students to do a lot more than “like” something and then Facebook comes along…
*
Flash fiction is still/still/still here, folks. So? Sew. Quilts. Notebooks, scribble within them.
*
Chaco types furiously on her cell phone keypad, stopping only to take an occasional puff of her Seven Stars menthol cigarette. But she’s not sending a text message. She’s writing a novel.
Posted September 19, 2008 8:06 p.m.
One more time, folks. Does anyone know about the cage thing Molly mentioned?”The first quality that is needed is audacity.” —Winston Churchill
HelenDee
Posts: 111
Posted September 19, 2008 8:43 p.m.
I believe it’s called a tent bed. My father had one in the hospital after he fell and broke his hip. It zips around the bed frame (zippers on the outside so the AD patient can open it). He was always trying to get out of bed to wander and other restraints aren’t legal. At first I thought it seemed inhumane but the other option was to put his bed a few inches off the floor and I didn’t want him catching a draft and the germs off people’s feet. And in the end, it calmed him. The option to wander was taken away and that helped him to relax more, surprisingly.
RonS
Posts: 530
Posted September 19, 2008 8:45 p.m.
Do you know if you can buy them commercially? That might just work for my dad.
NatureNut
Posts: 13
Posted September 19, 2008 9:02 p.m.
Sorry it’s taken me a while to respond. I’ve been trying to think of a connection between moon (Moonie) and the bird’s name, and I’m fairly certain they’re nightingales.
Sunny_Day
Posts: 46
Posted September 19, 2008 9:19 p.m.
Ooh, that would make sense and sounds about right. Way to go, NatureNut. Molly, you have your answer!
DancerGirl
Posts: 22
Posted September 19, 2008 9:46 p.m.
Molly, I’ve been following your story and was so hoping you’d discover the name of the bird. My grandma has AD and doesn’t recognize me, which is bad enough. I can’t imagine a spouse doing that. Anyway, I’m so happy you found what you were looking for. I hope it offers some comfort.
11/21/2104 At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote:
Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler’s admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape artist! Brought back a few of his paintings as well, any buyers?
At 02:29:17, SilverFox316 wrote:
All right; that’s it. Having just returned from 1907 Vienna where I secured the expulsion of Hitler from the Academy by means of an elaborate prank involving the Prefect, a goat, and a substantial quantity of olive oil, I now turn my attention to our newer brethren, who, despite rules to the contrary, seem to have no intention of reading Bulletin 1147 (nor its Addendum, Alternate Means of Subverting the Hitlerian Destiny, and here I’m looking at you, SneakyPete). Permit me to sum it up and save you the trouble: no Hitler means no Third Reich, no World War II, no rocketry programs, no electronics, no computers, no time travel. Get the picture?
At 02:29:49, SilverFox316 wrote:
PS to SneakyPete: your Hitler paintings aren’t worth anything, schmuck, since you probably brought them directly here from 1907, which means the paint’s still fresh. Freaking n00b.
At 07:55:03, BarracksRoomLawyer wrote:
Amen, SilverFox316. Although, point of order, issues relating to early 1900s Vienna should really go in that forum, not here. This has been a recurring problem on this forum.
Ken Baumann with best photo of the week. A post at that rag HTML DWARF. Not sure its origin. I was thinking Iceland then Photoshop or maybe a lunar obligation? Who knows, but still very effective.
Poem thing kinetic by Keith Nathan Brown. Pop and slash. Well glow.
*
Ever received one of those stupid-ass emails that say FAILURE NOTICE, meaning your email bounced back, most likely due to some error on your part or the recipient’s. (With me, it’s usually my mailbox is full.) Anyway, Failure Notice can be a fictional structure, too.
216.219.254.203 does not like recipient. Remote host said: Do you want your copy of The English Patient? Unresolvable address: alexj@hottype.com. Giving up on: 216.219.254.203.
Hi alexj@hottype.com. This is the automated qmail-send program [68.142.199.112], at yahoo.com. Okay, so maybe I haven’t been completely upfront with you here. It isn’t just your address that is unresolvable. If only it were that simple. It’s just that joan@pja.com is looking for somebody with certain core attributes. A job, for example. Someone whose bed has made it off the floor. Someone whose life ambition is not just to own a crepe truck. Please try to understand. It’s not you, it’s joan@pja.com. I was unable to deliver your message. This is a permanent error. Sorry it didn’t work out. And no, she doesn’t want her goddamn copy of The English Patient.
And we all remember The Crystal Gavel, a literary magazine you can find at Amazon’s comments section. (As an editor of the magazine, I encourage you to submit. We are really in need of flash fiction and/or any really long poem you might have around the house or office. We love long poetry.)
Or a story might be an Ebay auction. Selling water sipped by Michael Martone. Well worth click. Go ahead.
To what degree does your personal experience influence your stories?
To no degree at all, practically. I suffer from E.D.—Experience Deficit. Not much has ever happened to me, and I have never had much luck in making anything happen myself. Anyway, my personal life seems off limits, even to me at the center of it. Somebody should sell pocket-size lifetime diaries with just a quarter-page for each entire year—I could surely get my money’s worth out of one of those.
Hi, Timmy, I’m Tom. I’m what they call a quarterback.
Back in the dark days I taught composition classes. I know quite a bit about composition, so I will now pass on 13 and one half tips. Consider this an early Christmas present:
1.) Golden coins. Do not offer students golden coins of praise. Once, as a child, Jeff Goldblum thought of herding. To begin, the village gave him one yearling lamb, as is the way. He met an Englishman out exploring in the glens near Posk. The man offered a golden coin for the lamb. On the walk home the coin melted in Goldblum’s pocket; it was chocolate. Jeff was never allowed a sheep again. Is this the way to face an empty sheet of paper?
2.) Do not strive to get a student’s goat. A goat is a great thing, like the wind. If the wind is in the house—flickering, whispering, singing above the stove—then do not fall asleep. Now is the time to compose! If the wind kneels at the doorway and stares at you, let the wind outside. Just let it go.
3.) An empty sheet of paper is like a watched pot in its boiling. Do not eat a soup of green potatoes. Do not eat a soup that will float rocks the size of a man’s fist. If you question a soup, and the soup itself answers—do not eat that soup.
4.) There are some roads not to follow.
5.) The tortoise gets a haircut but no one notices. Sad.
6.) Jeff Goldblum stands in the center of The Swinging Bridge. He is shivering in his shorts and sandals. Why? I can’t say. He kneels and stuffs his mouth with old snow. Why? I can’t say. He sways to and fro, fro and to. Why? The wind of Lon. Do not eat old snow.
7.) Hot tea will make them babble. They will speak of Composition as the raven speaks of rhinestones. Glitter, glitter. Why smash your own cooking pot? You ever tried to mix red wine with hot tea? Don’t, unless it is New Year’s Eve, a big party, you feel sleepy, and Mia Farrow is in attendance. To please the others, at midnight, you might leap from Confucius’ front porch, twirl in the air, and land sideways on your heel. It is broken. It still haunts you today. In the cold it throbs like an ember. A heavy clay textbook. This is what I mean of hot tea—serve in moderation.
8.) The tortoise asks his students: What change have I made in your life? Silence, but then front row girl raises her hand. “Well, I don’t try semi-colons anymore.”
9.) Why avoid quaffing clichés? Composition is a walk in the park. Yet Confucius says many parks have sand kept in cages, and dark secluded corners of shrubbery where unspeakable acts are the common way. Then as easy as pie. Yet legions are they who can not bake a pie worthy of eating.
10.) The tortoise knocked on Confucius’s door. His heart jolted; no one likes a sudden visitor. He grabbed a pitching wedge, and peeped out the window. “What do you want?” he asked. “A recipe,” the tortoise said. “A structure. A simple arrangement.” “Simple?” Confucius said. “Theconstellations are simply arranged, yet infinite.”
11.) Some teach the import of purpose. But who can say the function of another? Does the lemur know the microwave? What of popcorn? The bee makes a perfect hexagon of wax, yet requires no abacus or ruler. Why is my mouth so dry? My eyes glassy? I wish knew the correct technique for pushups, but I don’t. And never will. You ever seen a green blackboard? Even the raven wonders: When, exactly, is the best time to caw?
12.) An essay surrounded by block quotes with low-lying white space in the centre is called “Heavenly Well.” When an essay paragraphs through drafting and the Works Cited resembles a covered cage it is a “Heavenly Prison.” Sections where students can be entrapped in mountain gorges and cut off are called “Heavenly Nets.” Where the margin is sunken, the font grotesque, the corner dog-eared, it is called a “Heavenly Trap.” Dust spurting upward in high straight columns indicates concentration, revision of language, or possibly the approach of chariots.
13.) Much of this will not be understood. But that’s ok.
‘Why is hip-hop stagnant right now, why is rock dead, why is the conventional novel moribund? Because they’re ignoring the culture around them, where new, more exciting forms of narration and presentation and representation are being found (or rediscovered).’
David Shields
*
I love Meg Pokrass pretty much all the glow. She is the roar. Check out Holiday beers.
This Pumpkin Farmer flash at elimae is mojo glow. Well done, Rhoads Stevens. Screaming horses, indeed.
*
Tao Lin continues his drug-related Photoshop art. People dismiss Tao Lin because he is, well, Tao Lin. But I think this Photoshop/drug thing is often mildly funny to very funny. Well done.
I want to bother you with some recent nonsense; a classmate dropped dead, his heart was attacked at thirty-three. At the crematory they lowered his body by fire-resistant titanium cables reminding one of the steak on a neglected barbecue grill, only more so. We’re not supposed to believe that the vase of ashes is the real him. You can imagine the mighty roar of the gas jets, a train coming closer, the soul of thunder. But this is only old hat, or old death, whichever. “Pause here, son of sorrow, remember death,” someone once said. “We can’t have all things here to please us, our little Sue Ann is gone to Jesus,” reads an Alabama gravestone. But maybe even Robert Frost or Charles Olson don’t know they are dead. That would include you of course. It is no quantity, absolute zero, the air in a hole minus its airiness, the vacuum from the passing bird or bullet, the end of the stem where the peach was, the place above the ground where the barn burned with such energy we plugged our ears. If not, show yourself in ten minutes. Let’s settle this issue because I feel badly today: a sense that my teeth and body are rotting on the hoof. I could avoid the whole thing with a few drinks—it’s been over eight hours—but I want to face it like Simon Magus or poor Faustus. Nothing, however, presents itself other than that fading picture of my sister with an engine in her lap, not a very encouraging item to be sure. I took Anna who is two for her first swim today. We didn’t know we were going swimming so she wore a pink dress, standing in the lake up to her waist in wonderment. The gaucheries of children, the way they love birds and neon lights, kill snakes and eat sand. But I decided I wanted to go swimming for the first time and wanted to make love for the first time again. These thoughts can make you unhappy. Perhaps if your old dog had been in the apartment that night you wouldn’t have done it. Everything’s so fragile except ropes.
…when one abandons plot, one realizes that the structure of plot is simply an arbitrary collection of rules, suggestions, protocol. So you just find another set of arbitrary armature. Number. I often use numbers–the hours in the day, the weeks in a year. The number of planets. I am writing a whole book of short fiction now based on the number four. Fictions employing the four seasons, the four winds, the four corners, the four chambers of the heart, the four humors, the 4H Club, the Fab Four, the Fantastic Four, the four railroads on the Monopoly Board, Four Calling Birds.
*
Drugs? Someone tried to sneak crystal meth over the boarder. How? In their NACHOS.
Angela Woodward is an absolute glow-head. Have I mentioned this yet? Yes I have. Not many flash writers are writing in the style, tone, control of Woodward. Here’s another.
Recently ran this marathon. Sometimes it hurt, other times my thighs felt like a Pringle Picker (a picker of wild Pringles) jerked awake by the pleasant odor of nachos, a real chip, the corn tortilla. Ah, the Pringle Picker…I had my downs, my ups, my windless thuds, then my 2nd winds (I always do, and I am thankful) and my leaps and look-arounds. The key to a good marathon is to look around–you are on a journey! Experience it. And it’s sort of even better; you are on a journey while on opium (your opiate receptors going crazy train during a marathon). Who doesn’t want to travel while on opium? Oh, you don’t? Well, good for you. You annoy me.
Then there will be times you will not look around…pain. You will go tunnel. You will go way tunnel. Marathoners know of the tunnel I speak…the focus of pain.
My friend Mark ran a PR in the half, so all was good. I like to see runners run PRs, because I know how good that feels. Here is a poem of Mark’s where he mentions porn stars.
Speaking of, I am so happy Murakami made the short list for “Bad Sex” awards. Murakami has always written overly clinical and, well, bad sex scenes. His sex scenes are about as titillating as dropped cabbage.
Speaking of meta, can we blog about blogging? Anyway, this is getting a lot of run over at that listless dog, HTML GIANT.
It is raining. That’s very interesting, isn’t it. That’s just exactly the type of thing people are looking for in a blog, a comment on the fucking weather. What type of rain is it, Sean?
These are dark days for the weatherman, dark days…who needs them?
It’s rain. It’s like the blue fists of rain. laughing on the roof. steep rain leaning in the streetlight, across the pebbled face of a man selling jalapenos. pattering drops. hot slapping. hiss of heavy rain. black olive beads. at a solid pace. at a tall treble. endless toy onions of rain. a hollow roaring sheet. rain shaping the walls of lettuce. rain rattling down the gutters. silver salivas of rain. drizzling tongues. slick shoulder-rustling rain. chill rain falling. rain-mothered thunderer. hot sauce stains of rain. blinding rain. rain-gutted. how could i eat that many? rain splashing and ripping down from the wide-spreading limbs of avocado. sloshed about thick and sly. Lenses of rain. split peppers of rain. high-webbed satellite bowls of rain. afraid of what might be asked by the tortilla man. a wet sky, made tasks, deflated tomatoes of rain. broken knives of rain. i’m going to get somebody a hunk of cheese. kid browsing rain. lost headlamps. satiny sips, silver-fish, sheens of rain. licking as rain, gone through the ceremony rain. spitting against. sucked down gulps. rain-washed and rutted. balanced 90-degree toppings. daily appointments of rain. fight rain, flight rain. fall and fall. every drop of cream kept later like a detail. rain muzzling. a sound not unlike the rubbing of potatoes. a big man stumbling. and what do you see when you scan the menu and I’m not there? long arms of artichoke pearls or grains to slush. rain with a steady odor. rain fled rudely down the stairs. in spite of the rain. racks, napkins, ring tones of rain. 12 gauges of rain. mouth wetting. tell me something. rain into the Mexican beer. all rain simultaneous. the color of stone. the wind and the rain and the ticks and the clicks and the black running ink of a receipt. Lists of rain, passwords, grocery aisles. the night was dense then, the rain dark, and he went into the room. rent with rain. taxes of rain. stains of rain. ask me about layering. deftly with a rain-chilled face. snapping the rules of rain. as smite as the rain. meaning behind the fray. star-shaped pocks of rain, eyes watery. hold on to me, man. fall of glass. blue light swept of rain. rain-print. sneezed off, snapped, hacked into a salsa mist. OK?
I am teaching a class spring 2012 on the Appropriated Form. I am excited. I see the entire world, everything, spatially to otherwise, as a potential structure for creative texts. Now I get to put that sensibility into a class. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research, enjoyable research, meaning I’ve been reading a lot of literary magazines, hunting down forms. Examples, just from today:
But I like “Tests.” Because the title instantly has breadth, metaphorical, actual, the clattering space between the two. I like that it’s a community college test. I like that the community college puts its slogan atop its student tests, somehow this reads as community college, the fuck-off and gloss and put-upon self esteem I imagine (and know, having taken classes at several community colleges).
I like how Aldrich recognizes the form (an important step to Appropriation Fiction) and morphs/bends/riffs and plays off the form (the MOST important step to Appropriation Fiction).
Dr. Joy indeed. Sociology. Here’s excerpts from question one: In the past unit you read about family structure. What are some of the defining characteristics of the American family?
…a big, explosive wedding…
…enforced boredom…
…and requires a great deal of maintenance.
Indeed.
And then Aldrich takes things to another layer, another level. It’s damn funny, even ha-ha funny, though not really. Right? The teacher comments. This is not only a test, but a graded test. On the “explosive wedding” above, the teacher writes, in the rhetoric of RED INK…this note:
Jude, did you mean expensive?
She did not. She meant EXPLOSIVE.
It’s a brilliant example of why I am teaching the class on this concept, the form, the function. You get more echoes from appropriation. You get all the connotation of the original form, then your own imaginative layering–whether structural addition/change to or in language or in theme–and the two together become three, four, five or more echoes, rings flowing out from the throw rock of the splash. We are working terrain here. We are looking at new ways to do this thing. And it’s going to be amazing. Different. Better. Different, off-putting to some, but fuck some. This is a machine, this way of writing. We are going to try to steal parts, to weld, to kick gauges and gears right in their foreheads, and then to make something new. Weird, we hope. Odd. Odd is OK. We likes it.
Or as Dr. Joy scrawls in his bold, red ink:
DO YOU MEAN LITERALLY?
FOCUS NEEDED.
THIS IS NOT FROM YOUR TEXTBOOK.
I DON’T KNOW WHERE YOU GOT THESE ANSWERS.
I don’t know where you got these answers. I don’t know where you got these answers. I don’t know where you got these answers. I don’t know where you got these answers. I don’t know where you got these answers. I don’t know where you got these answers. I don’t know where you got these answers. I don’t know where you got these answers. I don’t know where you got these answers.
Sounds like a worthy code and mantra to me.
Well, swink me. No, sir, swink you.
How far down do we swink?
You mean this evening?
Yes.
Hey, did you people know Swink has a little collection of Appropriated Forms, as in letters?
I hope that wasn’t too long for you Bill, I know you thought my cover letter was lengthy, I guess it’s the novelist in me, and Alan, I hope you found your glasses so you could read this thank you.
You didn’t show up again. I wasn’t angry, despite my impatience having reached a feverish irritation that was hard to overcome. You’re being cautious, so you think, reducing everything to the penury of what might happen. I don’t like love disciplined by rules; I give myself over to the freedom of my emotions without fearing the consequences . . . Artists don’t feel themselves obliged to respect established morality . . . As you can see, my logic is completely sentimental. But, really, why didn’t you show up?
You big dumb stupid idiot. Why didn’t you come to my wedding?
It was an awesome day; you missed micro-brewed beer and goofy art made out of Dixie cups and the chance to see the best man fall on his face carrying a 5-foot-tall bridesmaid and land directly on top of her. Most important, you missed the chance to nail me with a pie in the face on my wedding day.
- Her favorite movie is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- She has perfect pitch
- She hosted a TV news program in high school
- She’s got very ticklish feet
- She actually has curly hair that she straightens every morning
- She’s got the Latin aphorism from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Talenolite te bastardes carborundorum [Don’t let the bastards grind you down] tattooed underneath her left breast
- She bites her nails to the cuticles
- She was C-sectioned out, because her umbilical cord noosed around her neck during birth
- She wants to keep her last name when she gets married (which is cool with me)
- She kisses without tongue, but with lots of lip biting
Wonder if my class will write any letters? You bet your ass they will write letters. Hey, here’s a letter I wrote about a failure in my shampoo:
October 18 2003
Nexxus Products Company
Santa Barbara, CA 93116
Dear Sir or Madam:
It is like 4:30 in the morning and I sitting here at my desk (my dachshund Flash snuggled below my feet) sipping Red Bull and writing this memo concerning one of your cosmetic/beautification products, a conditioner, specifically, Nexxus Phyto-Organics Nectaress Nourishing Conditioner. It is in a plastic bottle the color of a pack of Newport cigarettes, or maybe diet Coke spilt on a doctor’s office carpet, or maybe coffee just as the creamer is spinning within it—kind of off-white, liverish, with a tinge of cream of mushroom soup, and the bottle is ergonomically shaped and fits the hand of an average adult and is # 4010800/29060-V3 and is round and smooth and cool to the touch, like a 20mg Dexedrine tablet, which may or may not be relevant here. Hopefully, with my descriptors, you can identify this bottle/batch/industrial unit.
At any rate.
I am writing due to a failure in the conditioner consistency. Ever since I had to crash at my girlfriend’s girlfriend’s loft in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota (this was after several days and nights at the city’s semi-annual Jackalope Sundaes Insomnia Rave—looong story), I have always used Nexxus Phyto-Organics Nectaress Nourishing Conditioner in my thrice daily (sometimes more) washings of hair, and the product has at all times had a glossy, creamy, steamy, velvety texture, with just a thickening hint of coffee bean (my guess-timation), which I find refreshing.
However.
This time was different. On June 14, 2003, I first became aware of the problem. It all began with the conditioner delivery process, as I was up all night and washing/conditioning my hair repeatedly and suddenly I was forced to squeeze the Nexxus Phyto-Organics Nectaress Nourishing Conditioner bottle with excessive intensity, huffing and grunting and grinding my teeth and, yes, cursing, just to get the conditioner to exit the bottle and settle into my open palm. I found this alarming. Usually, this particular conditioner flows from the bottle, in an agreeable manner, like chocolate syrup on Sunday morning corndogs. Sir or madam, it did not flow. No. It slugged, yes, then spat, drooped, and congealed. There was no way I could apply, work through, or leave in for one minute this dusty nugget of conditioner. It looked like old phenylephrine paste, or rubbery caulk one would find in the bathroom corners of a rehab center. It reminded me of a dead slug, or crack-house mattress linen—I mean it was decrepit and dry and pinkish and gummy and altogether horrible.
Can you explain? I can’t. I have hypotheses, naturally. The conditioner might have been in some way dehydrated. My mind goes immediately to the coffee beans (again, I’m assuming Nectaress refers to coffee bean nectar), possibly inferior due the recent drought, number of devastating brush fires, and persistent political instability in central Columbia. Or maybe the bottle had a sealant failure? Like the shuttle with the O-rings, you know? That blew my mind when the shuttle exploded! I’d been up for like 34 days and I was all, “NOOOOOOO!” So, I checked out the bottle and even used a small magnifying glass I got from CVS pharmacy and I saw absolutely no failure of the exterior seal or casing. Next, I thought of sabotage. I mean, like anyone else, I have scores of enemies and bill-collectors, but who would tamper with a man’s beauty supplies? Oh god, I don’t even want to consider the implications.
As you can see, I find this dilemma worrying. Excessive worrying, you’re probably thinking, but all of us are different. We all have our little “thing” we worry over. For me, it’s my stomach. No matter how many Phentamine tablets, or how many crunches; I have to check my stomach in the mirror at least ten times a day. I don’t know why. I think fat will just appear, like a narcotics cop at my door, or something. My mom worries about The Bomb. Still! I told her the Cold War is so over, but she doesn’t listen. And there’s this lady, friend of my mom, Mrs. Gorman, who lives three blocks over and worries I won’t show up every two weeks to trim the dandelion shoots from around the post of her mailbox (a gaudy plastic thing in the shape of a chicken barn). I mean she sits out there in this old red porch swing waiting on me all day and I always show up (admittedly, sometimes late in the evening and/or early morning) and she always says, “I thought you weren’t coming.” Why? Why would she say that? For ten and a half years, every 14 days, I have trimmed the dandelion shoots from the post of her mail barn, even in the winter when not even one dandelion shoot exists. (Though she insists I show up, I don’t charge her in the winter.) Why, I ask you? Why does Mrs. Gorman imply I might not show up to complete a job I’ve been doing for over a decade? Who knows? Who can answer such questions? I mean why does God allow SUVs? Why do people take naps? How does Oprah gain and lose all that weight? And so on.
Well.
What I’m saying is I guess I know how Mrs. Gorman feels. I am comfortable with cosmetic sameness. Time and again, without fail, I want an excellent, excellent, excellent conditioner. Basically, I am conditioned to my conditioner. That’s a joke. But this issue is no joke. I really need to know the next bottle of beautifier will be like the last bottle. It’s important, a comforting routine, like morning Ritalin, running sprints in the driveway, cigars at lunch, Mountain dew at midnight, a neighbor boy dropping every two weeks to trim an old lady’s dandelion shoots . . .
Two days ago, I inverted my bottle of Nexxus Phyto-Organics Nectaress Nourishing Conditioner and I peered deep inside its opening (now clogged) and I squeezed and clutched and strangled, and once it finally released its grubby little chalky dab of conditioner in my hand, I have to admit my lips formed the words: “I thought you weren’t coming.” Yes, just like pitiful old Mrs. Gorman.
I want my old conditioner back. Please, please, please, don’t make me switch conditioners—the last thing I need right now is a big decision in my life. I’ve got all kinds of relationship problems and an ingrown toenail and MC Hammer-like credit card debt and an appetite problem and a small IRS situation and my girlfriend’s girlfriend keeps calling from Minnesota and…well, I digress.
Please reply with an explanation of your conditioner breakdown. I must know. I really must. For now, I’ll add Diet Dr. Pepper to the remaining product and do my best. That’s what I do, whether washing my hair or trimming dandelions or eating the cotton from inhalers or making a sandwich for my dachshund or seeing an out-of-state girl, my best. I expect the same.
Sincerely:
Sean Aden Lovelace
*
For example, a Contributor Note: (BTW, it pisses me off they had to add all that “April’s Fool” context to this piece. Poor form, HFR, poor form, though you know I love you [usually]).
Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up there, leaving, at seventeen, to work as a roustabout in the last traveling circus to winter in the state. He has held many jobs since then, including night auditor in a resort hotel, stenographer for the National Labor Relations Board, and clerk for a regional bookstore chain run by the associates of the Gambino crime family. For the last twenty years, Martone has been digging ditches. As a ditch digger, he has helped lay agricultural tiling, both the original fired-clay tile and the flexible pvc tubing, in the farm fields of northern Indiana, Ohio, and southern Michigan. He worked on the national project that buried thousands of miles of fiber optic cable along active and abandoned right-of-ways of North American railroads. He has often contracted to do the initial excavations at archeological digs throughout the Midwest’s extensive network of mounds, built by archaic pre-Columbian civilizations, where he would roughly remove the initial unremarkable strata for the scholars who followed at the site with hand trowels and dental instruments. Often when digging ditches, Martone would employ a poacher’s spade made in the United Kingdom by the Bulldog Company and given to him by the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, who ordered it from the Smith & Hawking catalogue and gave it to Martone as a going away present when Martone left Boston where he had been digging clams. It’s ash, “Y”-shaped handle still retains a remnant of the ribbon that decorated the gift. Martone has operated a backhoe, constructing drainage ditches, and he has used a DitchWitch when digging a trench for buried electrical conduit in housing developments around Las Vegas, Nevada. He has been certified to run a drag line as well as licensed to maintain boilers in obsolete steam shovels. He is proficient at foundation work, having been employed for four years in the area of poured form and precast concrete retaining walls and building footings. Briefly, he worked as a sand hog, tunneling a new PATH tube between Manhattan and New Jersey. Martone has mined coal and gypsum in Kentucky and repaired the sewers of Paris and Vienna. Honorably discharged from the SeeBees, he once helped fortify, through the entrenchment and the construction of sand berms and tank traps, the Saudi Arabian city of Qarr during the Gulf War. He has buried culvert in Nova Scotia and created leech fields and septic tanks in Stewartstown, Pennsylvania. Having installed irrigations systems on the Trend Jones designed golf courses of Alabama, Martone recently took a position as a grave digger at the Roman Catholic cemetery in his home town in order to be closer to his family. Using the newly purchased Komatsu excavator, he dug the grave for his mother who died unexpectedly in her sleep. He observed the funeral from the cab of the machine, waiting until the mourners had departed to remove the Astroturf blanket covering the spoil and then back-filling the opening and replacing the squares of real turf on the dirt. Since that time, on his days off, Martone digs, with the poacher’s spade given to him by the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney, his own grave, or, at least, attempts to dig his own grave as all of these efforts, so far, have been filled back in, as the resulting holes, to his professional eye, were never quite right.
Cover: Cover is by the artist Grayson Castro. Here is a photo (below) of Grayson since these days everyone just has to know what a person looks like. External appearance versus the inner significance of man. Grayson likes hot sauce. BTW, I like the name Grayson. Seems like a person who could tar a rooftop and cook a decent pizza on the same Tuesday evening.
Cover image is of a skateboard kid with lacerations and an edible candy necklace. Kid’s name is Worm, I’m sure. When you meet him he goes, “Yo my name’s worm.” He says it quickly. That’s his standard greeting: “Yo my name’s worm.”
He averages 111 at duckpin bowling. So? I sort of love Bingo and duckpin bowling and coming out of the deep woods on tiptoe. Wade upstream, that’s a safety tip, folks. For Bingo you bring your own little marker pen and a flask. BINGO! Sometimes the sound of water running over stones makes me believe everything will be OK, for a moment.
SCENE:
“Whoa. What happened to your face? You look like gummy Worm.”
Worm picks at bottom lip. (See how I mixed dialogue and gesture? Do that, could you? You. Writer. Could you?)
“Was front-siding a rail-stand off a jet yo at the airbase big ass blue jet with flames yowzers!”
This is a lie. No way Worm did a skate trick off a jet. The nearest airbase is military and you walk up asunder to a parked military jet and a soldier shoots you. That’s their job: to shoot anyone approaching the jet. They get a monthly paycheck to shoot your ass. That’s just reality, Holmes.
So.
[I utilized the term asunder incorrectly.]
[I will run a marathon tomorrow and I feel anxious. Why? Well, a week ago I sort of bruised or ripped some cartilage about my ribs and it feels like a glowing ember of coal in there and will this affect my lung capacity? Maybe. Who knows? Hey, I know let's WAIT AND SEE.]
[Here is a writing prompt, if you need a fucking writing prompt, you apothecary-pants. Who needs writing prompts? OK, here's a writing prompt, press your little fingers on those clicky little keys on your computer and start making black pixels on the gleaming white face of your computer mooning you for needing writing prompts.]
How did Worm get his face all huddle-muck?
[Why use the word, utilized? So affected. Let's use the word, use.]
Worm? How he got that face?
1. Installing ground effects on Ford Escort. Jack collapsed.
2. K-Mart manager hit Worm with a bag full of quahog clams.
How about when Teebow gets Tee-bowed? Hell. Yes. I saw it live and made me feel like I was wrapped in a blanket of steaming creamed potatoes. It also, for the first time, made me feel for Teebow. I mean he was dropped into an odd, odd play. And now he has to learn lines he doesn’t know how to speak. Drooping. Drooping. Well, at least he got paid. In God we trust, etc.
3. The glory of his mind flared up and charred Worm’s face.
4. Worm met a little group of writers and they workshopped his forehead over red wine in a living room with hardwood floors and framed sketches of flowers and a bowl of oxygen.
4. I do not know. Kids like Worm are flooded gardens full of dazes and lacerational faces. They are reflections in bowls of lunchtime corn flakes, misting away. We are all Worm, really, and really not at all. Ever had your bike stolen? I did twice. Wait. Three times.
Inside the Cover:
Here is a photo of Brian Oliu. I took this while we were at his house eating nachos and cracking open a Rubik’s Cube. Brian lives in Alabama but I was visiting his California vacation home, the one located alongside a fieldwagon standing in a darkly cobbled tunnel of summer’s long discontent, as you can see. Outside Brian’s door the sardines were once so thick you could actually walk across their backs to Hawaii. A sparkling mercury shiver-bridge. But not anymore. No. Not anymore. BTW, that couple in the background are my helicopter parents. They enjoy sit-coms and sexting.
Brian leads NANO Fiction Volume 4 Number 2 with “Tuscaloosa Missed Connection: bullseye-Target-m4w-22.”
I thought this piece glow because it appropriates form. He is a formalist, in this way. This structure is borrowed from a Craig’s List category. Three things I know: 1. Brian actually has an entire Tuscaloosa Craig’s List Missed Connections Project, and 2. The meaning of Brian’s work cannot be paraphrased, since content and form are inseparable, and 3. The 15th Street Diner in Tuscaloosa has damn good cole slaw.
SIMILE GIVEAWAY!
Ok, you have a character that is hungover. Write that their eyes… “were red lines on an atlas. No carrot slivers, in the cole slaw of his bloated face.”
There you go. You can have that one. Really, take it. Like most of what I pen, it is about as keen as a dropped soup. Enjoy.
Brandi Wells writes about someone’s hands falling off, and hey, we’ve all been there. Do you remember the time Brandi Wells wrote a letter to Grammar? I do. It happened to appear here the same day I started my hobby of shelling beans, a very painful hobby that led to callouses and foot-splinters and, yes, my hands falling off. (My habit was to shell them on the front porch, like my grandmother did back in the olden days of eating raw turnips with a nip of corn whiskey.) A person always remembers pain, always will keep those memories of pain clamped away in the purple bird-calls of the mind.
[One time a man and his son were watching a parade and Abraham Lincoln passed by in a tall carriage. The man slapped his son in the face! Why did you hit me, the son cried. The man said, I wanted you to remember the day you saw Abraham Lincoln.]
Dear Grammar,
I am always misspelling you. And you smile when you correct me, but it’s a hard smile. It’s a smile that looks like you want to murder me.
And remember that time I told you I was sick? You told me I could go home, not to worry about it, but you didn’t sound like you meant it. You voice was saying SIT IN YOUR CUBICLE AND CORRECT EVERYTHING.
Have you even sat in one of these cubicles? Sitting with my back to the opening makes me think that someone will come up behind me and hit me in the neck.
It is easy to die from being hit in the neck. Why do we have to sit in these little boxes? What’s so great about these goddamn boxes?
I get the feeling that no matter what I’m doing, you’re sitting right outside the cubicle listening. Probably taking notes. Later you will type it all up and send it to me via email. You will format your email in the form of PQP (praise, question, polish) and the polish will tell me where the wrong commas are and how then is different from than. When whan when whan when whan.
Whatever.
If you send this letter back to me with trackback comments about what I can do better, I quit.
Sincerely,
Brandi
[How Kim Kardashian turns the reality business into an art. Do read.
Andy Warhol, the original celebrity artist (who also painted celebrities) showed the way. ]
Here is a photo of Brandi Wells just whaling on some kid, probably Cher:
Widowers is a very effective meditation on grief it is an engine a quiet engine thrilling along below the skin the skin of verbs–slurps, chews, dreams–quiet engine like the shadow of a moth eating the final last cone of flickering French fries. French fries? What? Fail by me. But. Well done, writer and musician, Jaydn DeWald.
Janee Baugher writes well of the claustrophobia of a shitty relationship. The frustrating loneliness of the thing. The way a relationship makes you doubt yourself, since weren’t you the very guide that led us to this impasse? And time leaks away…leaks away. And I think this author has a good feel for when to use direct dialogue versus indirect and this wonderfully charged line of direct dialogue–”I met someone and we fucked”–is a fine turn, a fine mule-kick to start the unraveling leaving of an end.
Also. This about one of Janee’s books: Written during a six-week trip through Europe, COÖRDINATES OF YES marries nuances of travel (loneliness, restlessness, adventure, reverie, risk, discovery) with ekphrasis (poems inspired by the visual arts). Words.
ekphrasis sort of a glow word.
Here is a photo of Janee, because I know you have an inquisitive mind:
I like stories that put me in another person's life and make me feel what he/she feels. I don't think they have to be complete, or have resolutions. For the most part, life doesn't have fast or easy resolutions and I don't think stories should have them, either. As such, my stories are often called "slices-of-life" or "vignettes" and it still bugs me (because people mean it as an insult) but I don't really care. I like vignettes.]
But I digress…
Thomas O’Connell, in “Before and After,” reaches beyond the confines of realism and draws upon the energies of fable, folk tale, belches, and myth while maintaining a strong contemporary social relevance. That’s not easy to do, folks. Believe me. I’ve tried. I tried to go Magical Realism just last week and ended up losing my car, in a slice of cornbread.
Speaking of the metaphorical, have you read Meagan Cass over at SmokeLong? A lot of flash writers attempt the conceptual flash, the flash where the title is striving for metaphor, a controlling conceit: the egg is fragile but holds life, etc., etc. Here we have an example that absolutely works. This is the one I would show yourself or your students (along with others–Amelia Gray anyone?). Cass pulls the idea off, by controlling tone, level of realism, and structural integrity. The egg is form equals function here, not some forced and pressed idea. So. Take a look-see. Glow.
Fade in, fade out:
Cloudy Honey is one of those texts that takes language, sharpens the feet of its font, then lops your bloody arms off.
he pours whiskey into a smile
i keep mowing the lawns of these same mistakes
her beehives spin themselves in my closets.
These sentences made me want to reach for a bottle of ink, twist off the cap, and drink it right done. Think I’ll get online and see if I can find me some more Hafizah Geter.
Here you go. This one is a bright pool hummingbird blood.
Here yo go. This one is a prime-time orgy full of AA sponsors.
“There is a Time in Every Young Man’s Life When He Must Kill a Snake” is the best title in NANO Fiction Volume 4 Number 2. It is a flash by Adam Moorad. I know Adam well, since we both admire H. G. Wells, especially the earlier novels, and Adam and I actually co-wrote a grant that involved translating all of H.G. Wells’s earlier novels from English to French and then from French to Russian and then back into English, just to see how the process would affect the many forms and lengths and open, unlimited subject matters (from fantastic to stark realism) or conventions of narrative structure or grammar within those earlier works. Anyway, the grant was never funded. Here is a photo of Adam, naked:
[I ran a half marathon last week. I ran 1:24:10. The race REALLY made me blar. Mojo Blar! ARGGGHHHH! It made my head go taffy that has been eaten, spat out, and sculpted into horrible little Taffy Peoples. The race was organized by truth-twisters! They said finisher's medal but they gave us a refrigerator magnet! They said gels throughout the course and they had ONE gel station. They said aid stations EVERY mile and they were scattered about, water only. Water. The fucking age group prizes were a jar, one mason jar. I could go on, but I won't go on. I won't go on. I won't go on...What is the point? I did get in a good run for this week's marathon, so. Life...]
On page 25 of NANO Fiction Volume 4 Number 2 there is a acrylic on canvas artwork of a naked person. Here it is. Be sure to turn away if you are offended by the naked, human form:
We also get images of a teenage girl naked in front of a bicycle, a dog with three eyes, a woman vomiting blood.
Alina Gregorian’s “Seagulls” is endearingly odd. The ending line elevates it to that wonderful smile-land of imagination–which is to say it made me smile, thus releasing endorphins, thus bettering my day.
Miguel Morales writes from the perspective of Poland. The text is addressing American tourists. It is playful yet with an undercurrent of seriousness. Not so unlike Zippo tricks, sex, deep sea fishing, or opening and shutting a butterfly knife in church. I do not know Miguel Morales but here is a photo he sent me of his tennis court. I am a tad bit enviousness he owns his own tennis court.
Lena Bertone goes a bit Kafka on us. She adopts this stance in order to encompass the often phantasmagoric political realities of the 20th century. That’s understood. Also I like cheese.
Hell, they are everywhere. All the more impressive Molly pulled this one just glow. It’s the sentence work, the sentences–long, flowing set-up, transition internal monologue, dialogue doing something, turn and return.
Here is a photo of her book. It’s a memoir about her childhood spent laboring in an Army blanket factory (her cradle an iron trash-bin). Can you imagine living in a blanket factory?
Bradley Harrison drops beautiful language on us like stuttering, flickering leaves in the shower.
Coming slowly down the hillside, smoking dank and slamming the levee, the strange tongue turning the world full of birds in the deep breath.
There is an argument over lyricism in fiction. How much can be maintained? Does flash open itself to this type of squeezed shard versus the novel? Or can a work do both? Here, I just really admire how Harrison nods to poetry, crunks that form into the block, throws a dropped moments back into the air, its apex, caught there. CAUGHT there–this is one role of flash, to throw and catch and show a thing.
And that’s sad. If a critic isn’t shooting books, what, pray tell, are they doing? Where did “Pray tell” come from, you are asking as you pick the popcorn kernel from your pelvis. WTF did you thunk?
Shakespeare, The Tempest: “Heaven thank you, my dear father,” said Miranda “Now pray tell me, sir, your reason for raising this sea-storm?”
Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice: “The thoughts of others! Pray you, tell me this.”
OK, let’s shoot something:
The results, unimpressive. NANO Fiction Volume 4 Number 2 is VERY lucky it’s raining dats and cogs outside. I had to go indoors. So used the air rifle. Hmm. Well we do what we can. We do what we can. Life is hard.
Exit wounds here, the young lady on the back cover, obviously a pal of Worm’s.
Edward Mullany: Blank space is most interesting to me when the writer uses it as a canvas onto which the reader’s imagination is projected. In other words, it should only look blank. Really it should function as a kind of invisible arena in which the reader’s psyche produces some feeling that the writer, by doing his or her work, has elicited.
HELLO PEOPLE!! See that wonderful chapbook over there to the right (scroll up, go on), the one that says HOW SOME PEOPLE LIKE THEIR EGGS? Would you like your own? Would you, to use as a coaster or a weapon or to increase your gumption level or to help orchestrate a VERY public romance or for whatever your motives and needs for words? Yes, yes, you would. Your heart is God’s cycle clip. So. SO?
ROSE METAL SHORT SHORT CONTEST!!
ANNUAL SHORT SHORT CHAPBOOK CONTEST
Our Sixth Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest submission period begins November 1 and ends December 1, 2011. Our 2011 judge will be Randall Brown. The winner will have his/her chapbook published in summer 2012, with an introduction by the contest judge. During the submission period, please email your 25–40 page double-spaced manuscript of short short stories under 1000 words to us here with a $10 reading fee via Paypal or check.
Individual pieces in your manuscript may have appeared in journals, both in print and online, as long as the entire collection itself is unpublished.
Word
Here is an interview by the author of Pee on Water.
Watched a Kingfisher hunt the creek this morning, skimming down the alleyway of the creek channel at great speeds and then–PLUNK–diving into the water and out with a silvery flash of fish. I don’t know how you sit up high in a tree and watch that and not feel OK for a second. Just a little bit. Ah, the odor of hickory on the gray, morning air.
This atrementous guffaw: Twenty-seven years old is too young for dentures.
Indeed.
Hover glow.
Vallie Lynn Watson shreds the self. One of those you read and go thunk, you thunk, “Where can I get some more of this champagne fountain full of sighs and short-fuse flame-crackers?” Well.
or: you do some leg-work. Go seek, and you will rind, a red rind of a life-melon, most likely. Looking forward to seeing more Vallie Lynn Watson on the side doors of life and the gnash-throes of everyone’s faces.
I like the structural work of Bryan Grosnick. Numbering.
Kristine Heiney SHOWS us why the final line matters.
[This is EXACTLY how I wanted people to respond to Fog. Thank you. I mean that.]
Jen Michalski is a consistent glow-face. A person who will brush your brain-wires and scrub your thoughts all Barbie-wired. Flicker, Flicker. She will rock you like a Word-a-cane.
If you haven’t read Jen Michalski yet I fear for your head, your feet, your soles, your soul.
Andrew Bales sums up how everything is about to change. We are going to experience EVERYTHING, without moving ANYTHING, except a finger, on a mouse. See what he does is take “the relationship story” and add a layer, add a layer. You must add a layer, folks. Andrew is good at billiards. Here he is shooting pool in a dive bar in Kansas: Note that he drinks mojitos.
During a confusing time I lived for exactly one year in Michigan. I would like to thank Adeena Reitberger for capturing a move to Michigan. A move to and fro. I stumbled upon a black jewel here, an onyx tear. It moved me. The universal in the specific. Thanks, Adeena.
[Excellent Nyorker article on Reality TV, oh my. FUCK reality TV is my opinion. But then that's obviously obvious. And a reduction of...OH, Anyway, read the thing-un.]
Note!
[What is it about a beautiful sunny afternoon, with the birds singing and the wind rustling through the leaves, that makes you want to get drunk?
Yo. [Here's a new short story I wrote about Velveeta, but I don't care. I'm here to write about Kip Fucking Dynamite]
KIP Hi.
NAPOLEON Is Grandma there?
KIP No, she’s getting her hair done.
NAPOLEON[SIGHS]
KIP What do you need?
NAPOLEON Can you just go get her for me?
KIP I’m really busy right now.
Kip Dynamite is an existential hero.
If Kip went sheep hunting, he would shoot the entire cliff above the sheep and cause an avalanche and take out the entire herd. Like in this bizarre story by Geoff Kronik (sweet name) over at SmokeLong Quarterly.WTF kind of story is this? The way it is written, almost anachronistic, with that most excellent title, like Turgenev or some shit: A Disagreement Between Gentleman Hunters. Glow, dude, glow.
I mean the story has many layers. Then it avalanches. Almost like a story about story-telling, in its way. It’s very Kip, I’m saying.
But don’t you think that ending is a bit much? I do, I do. Maybe we should meet over beers and discuss? Sure, let’s. Let’s meet BY THE COWS BY THE CORN BY THE FERRIS WHEEL ON THOSE FLAT BOARDS. That’ll be great. I like when I meet people and make plans but then we never do those plans. It’s like a little death.
Kip Dynamite works in the kitchen. All day he makes nachos, nachos with sausage, paella, fried egg nachos, potato nachos, sometimes even plain, chips, you know, with cheese.
A kitchen. A kitchen. A Formica counter, possibly not even Formica, something cheaper. Maybe it’s made of sighs? If linoleum could speak, this floor looks like it could tell a tale or two, though the tales would turn out to be one and the same, ending with the same old lament (I’m never getting out of this place), about not just what happens in this kitchen, in southeastern Idaho, but in all southeastern Idahos, in retro 1970s style stained cabinet kitchens, in existential Mason jars of the soul the world over. We are, in other words, already in a realm of universal truth.
Kip is the priesthood of guacamole, green and spotted.
Kip is a python and a water snail!
[Laugh or weep? Parking lot or garden? Grain swilling in the belly of a horse.]
But Kip is making nachos.The nachos, like all nachos, are something larger, something epic. An indicator. A symbol and a sign. A life force. A key.
Kip is Superman.
Kip is overcoming the one person blocking his way to a larger destiny–himself.
Kip is no Uncle Rico. Uncle Rico eats raw cow and yearns for a dead illusion, The Past. While Uncle Rico has to inflate his own biceps with a series of tricks and even slightly bends the mirrors in his orange van (This, obviously distorts his image, since it is essential that the surface of a mirror is smooth, because light reflecting off of a warped surface would scatter the light, thus no clear image would appear. Think of when, after you eat Chinese food, how you take a moment to reflect on the relentless march of time and maybe what you have accomplished and certainly not accomplished with your life and so gaze at your reflection in the spoon. A blurred image, right? That’s because the surface is bent.), Kip’s mirrors are like his spine–straight. He’s a man of honor. A man who desires the beyond of himself. He’s sort of like nachos, if you think about it and I am asking you to think about it. We can all agree that chance and mischance are arranged in endless permutations, like toppings, right? Right. So what’s the center, the nail that holds the spinning arrow to the game board? Nachos.
[Sorry, I mixed metaphors there. I was sort of thinking out loud, though not really since No actual sound was created by my thinking. I read some The Paris Review today. Aren't I fancy? Yesterday I swam after an airplane, like in the wake of one reflected on a lake.]
Kip is a man of the future.
Kip is an epic, a saga.
[ "As with a parachute cord, he should at some point pull it loose, then steep in the calm reservoir wicking from his lungs." This is a lovely, lovely line. Thank you, Danielle Shutt, over at that sassy Diagram.]
Here is a poem by Sarah Levine. In Kip Dynamite’s honor, I have cut the poem from its rightful location in elimae magazine and I have pasted the poem here, replacing every instance of the words geese and puppy with the words, Kip Dynamite. I hope you enjoy:
1)
My God is dead. My furious big veined Kip Dynamite. Quiet as soap. Soap mothers use to soap mothers. Beside river where ant buries sister and children’s knees grow thinner than apple stems.
I am a terrible swimmer. All elbows and lungs. But you, forearms swifter than slide trombones, are song. Sweet boned Begonia. Wet yellow braid caught in wind. I know your noise. Belly full of fish.
I feel sorry for my shirts. Mother sewed my name into each one. On the tag. Herman. Herman. Her man. Could I be? Could I sew my name into your pocket? Let my fingers brood and gasp.
I am jealous of the air between your knees. The dropped stitch on your hem. Kip Dynamite squawks like donkeys and you turn toward him and his bugle throat, mesmerized by the unrehearsed choir of wings.
2)
I will pluck Kip Dynamite from the sky. Knock kneed in fields of mint and pepper. In rain when bones become spoons, a throb song. When the wings are quiet and smell of blown out candles. And you will kneel, feet bare, a wet prayer folding from your lips.
What is worth opening a mouth for? My cruel reminder of need. The honeydew, the flame. Enough breath to rustle flags. Let the shoe nearly sit. Let my lips listen into the shell of your ear. Bony roads scattered with elms and white churches.
3)
It is still raining and Kip Dynamite is still silent and mother here is Begonia. A beginning, a beckoning. Hair in knots, world in mouth. A river cold full of stubborn fish.
Now, in Kip’s honor I will stage a scene where I shoot Kip Dynamite. I will film this scene with my phone. It is raining, so I’ll need to stage this scene inside my garage. NEVER SHOOT A GUN INSIDE, kids. I’m a professional so am allowed to shoot a gun inside, for reasons of creative necessity and a prior record of safe handling, etc. Again, don’t ever try this at home. I am a thespian and a member of a nursing union and dabble in the avant-garde or whatever so am allowed. You are not. Got it? OK, here we go, this should be dramatic. Be careful with your life, OK? Don’t treat your life like a box of clams. Don’t watch this if you have a pacemaker or feel sort of pregnant or maintain a history of freaking out at zoos, that type of thing, etc. OK? OK, right, here we go: DRAMATIC SHOOTING OF KIP DYNAMITE AS A HOME INTRUDER!
That didn’t really work out too well. Stupid. I need a lighting person, a gaffer? Is that the word? I don’t know. I need a cameraman, and my voice sort of cracked. I think I was nervous because I was in the presence of greatness, Kip Dynamite. I wonder if Kip Dynamite ever gets nervous in the presence of himself? That would be such a paradox. Anyway, I feel better now that I made that little homage. (You can say homage with the “h” silent or not. I mean it’s acceptable either way. So don’t be worried when you say that word, homage, you’re not going to be looked down upon or have anyone roll their eyes or correct you. If that does happen, step right up and say to that person, “You can say the word either way. Fucker.”
Kip Dynamite controls the universe. Don’t believe me? Turn on the nacho scene of the Kip Dynamite movie (Napoleon Dynamite, Kip’s brother, also appears). Watch how the mound of cheese grows, shrink and grows, from cut to cut. Kip Dynamite controls the size of objects with his mind. His mind is a rainbow machine, basically. He squints rainbows into existence. Also eggs, he lays them, eggs that hatch into computers.
She asks me what the opposite of in the middle is. She’s desperate. Her little voice quivers. I repeat it to my friends. We marvel and laugh at the cleverness but she wants to know: what is the opposite of in the middle? If her vocabulary were more advanced, she would ask: what is the fucking opposite of in the middle? I don’t know what to say. I think about a parallel universe invisible and adjacent to our own; the inside-out of a potato chip bag; turning a mirror around and looking into its back.
Lovelace is the internet and independent literature’s biggest proponent of flash fiction (that and nachos), so it’s no surprise that Fog Gorgeous Stag is a collection of flash in Lovelace’s inimitable style, incorporating word play and association, alliteration, assonance and rhythmic flow, all tightly wrapped around brightly moving imagery.
Napoleon Dynamite, Kip’s provincial and boring younger brother, needs money. Kip Dynamite doesn’t need money. He has a career selling bowls. He is a professional. Napoleon Dynamite eats Tater Tots. Who does that? You have the makings for nachos in your house, and you eat tater tots. Jared and Jerusha (great name, dork) Hess have always been opposed to symbolic readings of the images in their films but one wonders about the significance of the tater tots: Has Napoleon finally understood that Kip is a mystic? Was this his opportunity to follow Kip into paradise? If so, too bad for Napoleon: The tater tots are soon destroyed by the stomping foot of a high school jock.
[My treadmill just stops. Stops while I'm running along at 6:10 mile pace. Almost throws me like a baby porpoise. I am going to paint my treadmill pink. Also my forehead. I feel like bees or mice.]
Note to self: Every time I see people eating nachos on film I have a sudden urge to eat nachos myself! Just a minute. I’ll be right back.
Well, the entire town is provincial. A cage made of mayonnaise, basically. That’s obvious. But not Kip. Just look at Kip’s girlfriend (and soon to be wife). She’s beautiful, she’s talented, she’s selfless, she’s got smarts and a hot body, she’s everything, basically, everything outside of the realm of southeastern Idaho. She is the anti-southeastern Idaho. Again, Kip is a superman. He has elevated himself into glory.
This, from The Paris Review: You know that expression “famous last words”? We are naturally curious about people’s last words, but it would be interesting to compile an exhaustive list of the first words—not just sounds, actual words—spoken in a film by actors while preparing or eating nachos, run them through a computer, and subject the results to some kind of processing and analysis. In this film the first words are spoken by Kip and they are: “Hi.”
Obviously, this is word play. Kip is in a state of higher consciousness than the other character throughout the film. He is literally “Hi.” He is the one eating nachos, making the money, marrying the heroine, winning the karate tournament, moving to Detroit, implicating us in the reciprocity of his gaze, etc. Kip is Superman. He has surpassed our failings as humans.
KIP’S NACHO RECIPE
1. Obtain Chips
2. Grate large block of American cheese over chips.
3. Zen out.
Notice that Kip soon says, “What do you need?” He’s open and gracious, though he obviously isn’t going to bring Napoleon any Chapstick. Kip’s too intelligent and caring to lead his own brother into a lifetime of addiction. Yes, Chapstick is addictive. Putting any moisturizer on lips tends to be habit-forming. Lips are very psychologically-sensitive areas. Just thinking about them makes them feel dry. Whenever a friend or even enemy of mine complains of dry lips, I have to force myself not to lick my own lips while they’re talking. (For some reason, those who complain tend to be short people, though sometimes tall friends do too.) A person starts licking their lips for no particular reason, then moisturizes, and then the cycle continues indefinitely, as saliva dries out the lips along with the act of thinking about it, and so on. But I digress. My point is Kip is a benevolent, caring soul.
Kip Dynamite designed the famous opening title sequence to the film. I’m not joking. Look it up. Kip Dynamite’s photography has been seen in nearly every major publication and a book of his photography titled, “Some Photos,” published by Nazraeli Press was released in February ’08. He was awarded “Best Advertising” for his work with Citibank and “Best Website” in the 2007 PDN Annual. He was also recently awarded “Best Book” in the 2009 PDN Annual. His work has been shown in galleries in: Paris, Milan, Buenos Aires and in the United States. So stuff it. Kip Dynamite invented unegoistic passion.
KIP I’m really busy right now.
KIP I’m really busy right now.
KIP I’m really busy right now.
[Here is a thoughtful review of my book, Fog Gorgeous Stag. I am grateful as a singing fish caught on a line of hope by Kip Fucking Dynamite.]
What am I saying? Just this. While Napoleon harasses animals (chickens, llamas, etc) and Uncle Rico drives a nostalgia van backwards and Pedro Sanchez goes into government and Deb falls into Chapstick addiction and Summer Wheatly does porn, Kip is actually LIVING. He’s eating nachos in the opening scene! Kip Dynamite is someone who in discovering himself also discovers that it is in his best interests to reject any outside notions about food values, trusting rather what he finds within himself (nachos). He creates his own good and evil, based on that which helps him to succeed or fail. In this way good is something which helps one to realize his potential and evil is whatever hampers or stands in the way of this effort. Since to Kip everything in the world is transitory, everything is being continually reinvented—again, clearly like nachos. Kip embraces this idea of change which to him appears evident, he understands the fact that since there is nothing in the world which is permanent (expect for nachos) whatever exists must eventually be overcome by something else which comes along. (Take a bean and fry it. Then REFRY it. For example.) Seeing himself and his values in the same light he knows that these aspects must also be overcome by something stronger if not by him than by someone or something else. So in order to keep up with the times he continuously reinvents himself over and over always building something stronger, more powerful, on top of what went before. Kip Dynamite therefore is the ideal of someone who has mastered the practice of overcoming himself.
That’s a damn fine opening scene. It’s so good I’m gonna close with it. I’m hungry.
Like when the moon is full and sharks are circling you (Jason Bredle)
Dark Side of the Moon is worth 100 dead kids. Because a lot of kids wouldn’t even be born if it weren’t for that album, so it evens out (Bill Maher)
Full moon that faces a horizon giggling like little sprouts and just now just now is crestfallen (Yi Sang)
The moon is always female (Marge Piercy)
Late, late yestreen, I saw the new moon/with the old moon in her arms (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
How thin and sharp is the moon tonight! (Langston Hughes)
And Selenography as a book is the same as the moon, tangible yet distant, carved in voice like a face on the moon, with a layered and uncommon look, a moment not-easily-defined (J.A. Tyler)
Moon-ships that climbed the storms and cut the sky (Vachal Lindsey)
Today The Sky is Blue and White with/Bright Blue Spots and a Small Pale/Moon and I Will Destroy Our/Relationship Today(Tao Lin)
Praising a forehead called the moon (e.e. cummings)
The curled moon (Dante Gabriel Rosetti)
As if some Archangel was grinding out the music of the moon (William Rose Benet)
The sky glows with the moon (Gary Snyder)
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass (Anton Chekhov)
Where moon-eyed idiocy, with fallen lip/Drags the loose knee and intermitting step (Anne Seward)
And the moon spun round like a top (William Butler Yeats)
We choose to go to the moon (John F. Kennedy)
In a mirror shines/The distant moon (Mark Doty)
They call him hatchet-head, spoon-nose, moon-face (Sarah Goldstein)
The moon tonight feels my revenge (Matthew Simmons)
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right/White as a knuckle and terribly upset (Sylvia Plath)
Shut out that stealing moon (Thomas Hardy)
Pressed by the moon (Charlotte Smith)
I thought of moon-juice juleps (Tony Harrison)
And by the moon, the reaper weary (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)
And I am hidden in the face of the moon (Mark Neely)
In the mountains of the moon, Uganda (Lorna Goodison)
O, your dazzling lamp, Lady Moon (Bob Rich)
The full-orbed moon with unchanged ray/Mounts up the eastern sky (Henry David Thoreau)
It was beautiful out and Elizabeth looked stunning and Aaron was over the moon (Amelia Gray)
The sum of the blood and the stone is a moon. (Ander Monson)
Stop throwing rocks at the moon (John Dermot Woods)
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land (Matthew Arnold)
And Fall, with her yeller harvest moon and the hills growin’ brown and golden under a sinkin’ sun (Roy bean)
Gray hairs seem to my fancy like the soft light of the moon, silvering over the evening of life (Jean Paul)
Drinking alone with the Moon
From a pot of wine among the flowers,
I drank alone with no companion.
Raising the cup I asked the bright moon,
Bring me my shadow and make us three.
The moon cannot understand my drinking,
My shadow follows silently where I go.
The moon accompanies temporarily the shadow,
Take the opportunity to have a joyous time.
Moonlight wandering around when I sing,
The shadow floats along when I dance.
Enjoying to be friends while I am awake,
The companionship ends while I am drunk.
Let’s have friendship forever,
We will meet again in the vast sky.
Tom Green’s flow here sort of kills. Meter. BUT. I think he rehearsed. Well, we know, right? A professional MAKES IT appear spontaneous. A reader might even read a story and the words flow, effortlessly, but the writer spent days wrestling with a washing machine of llamas and barbed wire to MAKE IT appear so. Set pieces. I might do blar things like grade papers on my steering wheel while driving or listening to sports radio (why?), but I know a set piece when I see it. A flash writer knows.
I don’t know. I don’t know. I get a little bashful.
Right, Tom. Bull. Shit. There is a quote by that Spaz Hemingway:
Develop a built-in bullshit detector.
Thanks, Papa. But I hate that quote. If I lived it, I’d have to ‘detect’ the smell of my own bullshit. Not sure I can handle that. However. Green will pull a punt/stunt on your ass. And he’s flailing a smidgen, though still treading water. Tread, Tom. Oh. He will mulch/mess with you, weakly (not like Kaufman) but OK.
*
You know, you could buy that fucking FOG book over there to the upper right of your vision. Please? I’ll give you a Plan Worth Sticking To in Life, if we meet (and you buy me a beer and let me buy you a beer).
[I keep trying to imagine the person who will dig this book. But I like challenges.]
*
Speaking of greens–mustard, collard, whatever–Tom does indeed flow. Yes? Flow feels so good. I mean it SPINES you, right? In your pelvis maybe? I guess that’s lower, lower spine. Maybe more the head, the lungs, the sparkles of butter inside the lungs, no the body drifting up and forward and away. Sway. Dopamine…Ever had flow? In writing, in athletics, in other ventures. I have. But I have had true flow VERY RARELY. Flow is magical. No, mystical. I can’t explain it. It’s a black magic, too. Crows and flickering blades in the sunset. Too much flow and you would consume yourself. Burn your own bones into kindling. Because flow is frightening. I’ve had it. I have, for moments. And it scared the baloney biscuits out of me. To MAKE all shots, to run THAT WELL. To get into THAT ZONE. It was rare and other-wordly and scary. But. I wish more of life had flow. Sometimes.
*
Par-boil those fucking potato shards 8 minutes before you roast them, friends. All shadow-shifting in the oven brown, like that time you robbed a store, walked outside, and got robbed. [Memphis]
*
I ran a 15 k trail race and my legs hurt after. They throbbed like anyone figuring out where they live. I liked it. Elevation changes. Hairpin switchbacks. TRYING NOT TO BUST ASS. People passed me early and I then passed them late. We call that pacing, homeys.
15k: 1:01:08.
After the race, they served nachos. I didn’t mind.
*
Thank you, Krystal Languell. You glow right here. You have that shoebox of things inside you we call lovely. You are that first/first/first/first taste of vodka. We thank you:
We move to Hattiesburg I go to beauty school we get rural I get licensed. My back hurts from bending over to wax women and departmental drama implodes as soon as he signs a contract our apartment has radical Southern bugs the unknowable you can be scared or you can be ready a false dilemma: beauty school or nothing he wants someone to take his name but doesn’t want to get married. I know a list of contradictions doesn’t add up to a poem of any substance but my temptation is great.
Burgeoning academic he throws in the term new historicism while we argue and snickers at himself abortion is new historicism. He’ll believe in anything his least reliable mentor tells him, obviously didn’t date me for the partner benefits. I choose getting neighborhoody while he gets all interstate highway I choose hair dye and lipstick but he’d rather sweat on someone new.
*
Have you ever impulsively taken someone’s personal items and thrown them atop the roof of your house? It feels awesome. Then that later day they see the things. Well, that’s another rush, I mean what you say. Right then. Conflict is my definition of a story.
I invented a game called Roof Ball. It’s fun. I’d tell you more about it right now but I need to go run.
You need to match the verb to the situation. To let the verbs walk [I hate the word walk] (or kick), talk, push and pull your text forward. Propel is what I’m saying. Verbs. Get kinetic with them, slow them down, go hard or soft or crazy…IT MATTERS. To work the verbs.
Why walk slowly, when you could lollygag. Who doesn’t love a lollygag? Why rain lightly when you could drizzle (that gorgeous double zz)? Quit fucking around. Pay attention to your verbs. IT MATTERS.
Thanks for this one, Meghan.
*
A thought: Our culture is happy to discard most anything. But we haven’t discarded telling stories.
*
Here’s yet another Bukowski hangover. Enjoy, Freaks. I like his jacket. Smart. I also like Velveeta poured from glass pitchers. I dislike a lot about him. Who cares what I like or dislike. In 100 years, what will we be doing? Don’t know. Is regret a bone or a melon?
–Simone, you need to open your eyes when shooting a firearm, dear. We’ve discussed this. The only reality is in action. And in balloons. I so admire balloons, sex with young strangers, solar panels, damp toast, pewter bunnies, Dan Rather, and Styrofoam. I’m feeling abandoned on this earth! I am, really. I am abandoned. There are no gods. Shit, I need to write a treatise and purchase some fudge! Oh, never mind. Simone, I’d prefer you open your eyes and get that prim little smirk off your face.
–Hey, Fuck you, Sartre, you power-hungry fuck. I’ll get existential on your ass. I’m smarter than you, anyway. That’s been documented. Why don’t you go pose for something. And get that stupid-ass pipe out of your mouthful of lie. The only thing you smoke is gibberish.
–BOOM! I’ll blow both your damn heads clear off! You want some of this? I’m old and cranky and barrel-chested and got three forehead wounds, four wives, and over 200 pieces of shrapnel in my knees. Both you intellectual fart-knockers can go explicate a falling piano for all I care. [Simone, you're hot, sext me now.]
–All of you, quiet down! I am Sean Lovelace and I am an idiot and I am shooting in the air (while wearing yellow shoes–style) and here are two new reviews of a book I suppose you might wanna, you know, pick up/threadbare with eyes/purchase/defend while drunk/all that flash bangers, roast potato breath, yellow fellow of gymnasium-of-the-mind-humpers, Etc.
A teenage girl catches an amazingly large fish. She pauses, allowing herself to gaze in wonder. It has a row of bent hooks and five broken leaders in its mouth. It has a history. The girl isn’t really a girl. She only plays one online. She is actually a grown man who works in a chemical company that combines corn husks with hydrochloric acid to create a polymer used in cruise missiles. He bashes the head of the fish on the gunwale and tosses it thrashing into an Igloo cooler.
I thank you. I am proud as a polar bear with a sneeze machine. [Hemingway, sext me. I love you.]
*
You are writing very well lately, Russell Jaffe. You make us happy with dance/lance/glance at glass words like:
The first lines of my manifesto are “stars, floods, red lights—alright / maps, bodies, bones—forbidden zones.” In reality, the idea of lights that sit next to your bed and feet that bunch up against the walls, hunched like a fetus in suspended animation flooding space, unfilled lightlessness with garages, overturned Bedazzler kits, glue specks from Creepy Crawler kits (I knew instantly that it was just an EZ Bake Oven for boys)—that’s romantic, that makes me want to cry.
Put three quarters into a soda machine today and just walk away. I’m serious. Do that, for me.
*
Have you considered Stoked Press? Submission guidelines here.
*
I made money last night betting on GB. But who cares? talking about bets AFTER the game is so banal and obvious. If you have any Glow in your Guts, talk about your bets BEFORE the game. Jesus.
*
I learned how to roast potatoes. That felt satisfying. Like when you replace the labels of your beer with nonalcoholic beer labels and go around drinking beer at a church picnic and they are all thinking, “Damn, he’s drinking non-alcoholic beer at a fucking church picnic; wow he has a problem.” And you’re all, “You don’t know the half of it.” No, that’s not correct. I didn’t feel that way about roast potatoes. Not at all. How did I feel? I felt exhilarated, like the time I brought the shoes to the zoo and gave them to the monkeys. Excuse me: What is the nutritional value of swallowing misery or a bug while bicycling backwards through the wreckage of your father’s pet store? Potatoes, roast them, yo.
There are many ways to make a cliche your own, to make it sing. Here, we have verisimilitude. Jargon. Words that growl to make a thing real.
[BTW, in a totally different vein (groan at pun), here is METH HORROR STORY site. It is clearly run by someone insane. Which I sort of like.]
Back to the Courtney story!
Johnny was standing under 100-watts of a single bare bulb, picking crank craters into his throat—whole constellations—with his thumbnail and index finger. He was in the late stage of meth mouth
And:
I was at the kitchen table cracking blister-packs of pseudoephedrine into a saucepan when the battery man rang the doorbell to show us how to strip lithium from 9-volt Energizers.
And:
Johnny came home after serving a nickel at the Fort Dodge Penitentiary for selling crumble cookies to a plain-clothed cop.
And so on. And on. Ground the thing. Grind it in the ground. I say well done. I say bring this text to those that need to cut their draft gritty, that need to push the original idea to its form, that need to get US CLOSER. Words. The secret language of any subversive activity, skateboarding or love or crank.
So many cliches. Beautiful cliches. Examples?
1. Short story about an South American family who comes from Peru to stay with another S.A. family in Muncie, IN; the daughter of the host family, Hemanka Jones, gets a crush on the son, Knock-Knock, and he confides in her that his mother is dying of Cheetos dust inhalation (orange lung).
2. Short story about a teacher assigned to an elementary school in a remote village.
8. Shooting a book. Shooting that damn book up! Look, I’m trying to teach children the importance of literature, OK, of reading literature. What are you doing for the children?
9. Eco-novel where a woman drives a car into an editor.
13. Quarterback controversies. I love a good QB controversy. I wish they would air the controversies, as opposed to the actual games.
14. WalMart as setting, as daycare/insane asylum/hospice.
(Quick story. Yesterday, at Walmart, this elderly woman walks INTO the door and sets off the alarm. She became angry and flustered. She started yelling at The Greeter. I thought three things:
One: How do you set off an alarm walking INTO a store.
Two: How can you get that upset over this incident? I mean life is hard. This upsets you?
Three: Oh gods, The Greeter at Walmart. Oh gods.)
15. Bourbon (especially if brand is named).
16. Sonnets about people in grocery stores telling people about their health problems.
23. Free verse where a young mother finds among some wadded balls of paper in the wastebasket of her ten-year-old daughter one which read: “Nachos.”
24. A clamor of wedding bells had followed her here. Hundreds of miles. Her head was ringed in pain as if in a vise. Shit like that.
25. Grocery lists.
26. Dame Shirley Bassey just rocking a Bond medley.
27. She already knew his dune-shack friend Blake Butler, knew the professors Kim Chinquee and Matt Bell from New York, knew everyone’s friend Tad the biker who lived on the pier or loose in the dunes, and old Sean Lovelace who gave parties. Stories that mention people you know. Anyone mentioning anyone, in a story.
37. Haiku sequence about couple who want to kiss/throw chairs/fight over whether to hang glossy photos (an industry of cliches) of small kids/not hang glossy photos (an industry of cliches) of kids on beige walls (obstacles like pots, pans, legal contracts, popcorn).
45. Short story about Paul’s Martian roommate Thark and her cheating boyfriend.
46. Italics.
47. I appear in my own story and that’s crazy.
48. Dogs.
49. Handing his nachos over to the doctor had taken almost physical courage.
50. Stories where people eat.
51. All its existence Nachos would struggle to reconcile these two divergent approaches to selfhood–the Victorian urge toward unity of toppings and layers it had inherited during its conception (Mexican chef on the fly serving gringos, 1943) as a subvert of the northern stomping dollar, and the Modernist drive for multiplicity and change that it absorbed very early in its career as a self-identifying member of the international ball park (thank Howard Cosell) /dive bar/homemade quick-ass meal. Indeed, by the time Nachos reached maturity, both had become so deeply embedded in its own being that neither could effectively be suppressed or jettisoned. The tactic Nachos ultimately arrived at for coping with this dilemma, most likely without being consciously aware that it was employing the tactic, was that of “compartmentalization,” in which, as The Queen of Nachos (Carmen Rocha) explains, “One confines the potentially conflicting components to separate spheres of one’s life.” Put simply, there would be two Nachos.
Three days ago wrote a story today about a Processed Cheese Product man visiting a town. So what? Fuck blogs.
*
*
Over atwigleaf, Emily Howarth charms us and informs us and makes us smile (After all, I am a southerner…). I’m not sure how to link exactly to the story, so here you freaking go:
What to Remember When Returning to Mississippi
Nobody locks doors there. So when you go to see your friends or your relatives, don’t just stand at the door knocking or ringing the bell: open the door, poke your head in, and say, “Hello, anybody home?” If nobody answers when you call, walk in, go to the bottom of the stairs, and holler again. Someone will call back. If not, remember to shut the door behind you when you leave. The A/C is on. Also: don’t let the screen door slam. And don’t open it by pushing your hand against the screen next time, you moron.
Bless your heart.
When people in Mississippi say, “It’s nice to see you,” it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve met you before. It could just mean they were in second grade with your cousin, or they heard about what your nephew is alleged to have done to those kittens at the skate park. Perhaps they know your grandmother from tax-free Tuesdays at the liquor store. Perhaps they’ve heard about the success of your father’s Night Blooming Cereus. And perhaps, just maybe, they really have met you, which is why you should always smile and say, “It’s nice to see you, too.”
When you go out, do not even think of checking your lipstick at the table. Do that in the bathroom. While you’re at it, straighten your skirt if the seams have jimmied. Keep your hair out of your eyes: you have a pretty face.
It will cool down in the evenings. Out on the porch you can light citronella candles and drink Gordon’s and tonic. Your cousin will say the thick air feels like being inside a mouth. The trees your mother swears smell like semen will drop blossoms onto the windshields of the Fords and Buicks parked along the street. Your friends will come over. They’ll cheat you at Trivial Pursuit and drink. When the streets are completely quiet, your friends may start singing, and you may even join them: flat Yankee vowels bending under their kinder voices in songs you would otherwise pretend not to know. Remember to find some comfort in being in a place where everybody cares what people think, and nobody says exactly what they mean.
On the highway, in your car pushing 100, no one will recognize you fast enough to do that hand-on-the-steering-wheel wave that’s so popular in town. On the highway you can listen to gangster rap loud. Even if it gives you a headache, sometimes an ache in your head is better than nothing. After a while all the kudzu-strangled trees will stop seeming like a hedge maze—and though you are making a big circle, it will be a relief to see the town from afar and realize it really is that small.
*
I need to go run. I’m already gone. I’m running. See me?
I of course remember the first time I met Vonnegut, off near that GM plant in Fort Wayne, on that state land, well we were deer hunting, a reduction hunt, shotgun only, and Vonnegut and I both clueless, hadn’t scouted besides a quick glimpse at a topo map and asking some lady Vonnegut knew at the plant, her name was Sheila and she had these very largy yet remarkably firm breasts and she just said, “I seen a big ol’ deer out there, size of a sandwich” and anyway Vonnegut goes and shoots a button buck, you know them teenager bucks, little buttons on top, dumb as boiled gravel, and Vonnegut just sort of gut-shoots it and it humps all up and then jumps over the fence, off into that GM land, clearly off-limits, and Vonnegut just unsnaps a little folding knife, maybe a Gerber or whatnot, off his belt and scurries up the fence and leaps off and onto that button buck and they’re all rolling and thrashing about and leaves flying and finally Vonnegut rares up and slits that deer’s throat! Damn, man. And then he just, I guess adrenaline and all, just heaves that deer right over the fence and climbs back up and over and Vonnegut all heavy heaving red-faced, all blood on his hands and arms and specks on his mustache whatnot and sort of panting and laughing and I go, “Damn, man, that was something” and he starts maybe laughing I don’t know and sticks his knife in the ground, wipes it clean on his pants leg, snaps it right back onto his belt, grabs the hind legs of the little button buck and says, “Yeh, it was something. How about giving me a hand here?”
And so we drug that deer out is what I remember and ate some of it over fire that night with cold cans of beer and a touch of hot sauce.
*
He enters a clearing with a small blue tent and a poodle tied to a picnic table.
*
Kraft sells off Velveeta, the sons-a-bitches. You dare doubt Velveeta!! I would like to introduce you, Kraft, to your brethren and their wise words. Your brothers are:
Variety Magazine, 1955. Here is their opinion on rock-n-roll:
It will be gone by June.
I also introduce you to another one of your mealy, doughy, half-baked brothers, Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943:
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
And so on…Oh, you will rue this day, Kraft. I will write documents so analytical, so bereft of emotion (seemingly), so rhetorically sound as to raise the hair on the backs of the necks of statues of grandmothers. I will raise an army against you…etc, etc. Hold up, my dog just ran out the door. And guess what? My dog does not react to verbal commands. Ha, ha! What a dog! What a jolly animal. Running among the jolly streets, the jolly screeching of tires, random curses, potential lawsuits, oh ha, ha, ha, living the dream of Man’s Best Friend…Listen: Velveeta is formless. Tabula rasa. A friend with cheese is a friend indeed. Something.
What’s my point? My point is take note. Click the link. The snow globes ARE flash fiction. Megadecahedron on your ass. Hey you: Stop eating pretentious lunches, like olives and shit, you flash haters, you Neanderthals of the long leg Daddy variety, you flashcists. Punks.
Oh, I bet you suck olives.
I bet you eat multiple varieties of olives.
Pretentious ass! (Lover of silver SUV with Jesus fish; long walks on the cooling bodies of superstars died early; wearer of black ski masks with mouths outlined in yellow; etc.)
*
I don’t know Casey Hannan’s work, but I am going to get to know it. This flash (over at wigleafis one of the best I’ve seen over there, and I have seen plenty of glow over at the leaf. It catches a moment, then collects the prisms of the moment, the multiple angles of split light. Interior, exterior, the cigarette and the ash, the lips and lungs (and heart). See, flash is light, a flashlight. It illuminates, captures a beaming moment, lets you listen to the scurrying right outside the beam, in the dark.
You love wordplay, so you howl until it transforms into a scissored cough, like your breath is caught in a rock tumbler. I realize this will be your last cigarette ever. You bleed your coughs onto the shoulder of your t-shirt in big, tacky blotches, and you say, “This is it, Case, my only chance to do something like this before I die. I’m dyeing, God, how I’m dyeing this shirt right in front of you.”
*
My lunch was all European, all junque cosmopolitan, olives and blue cheese olives and hummus and brick-bread and almonds (king of the nuts), and a little Fat Tire, Fat Tire, a beer on the cusp, the little shimmering cusp, of obnoxiousness. I see one more semi truck plastered in FAT TIRE and I’m going to get off my feed, going to chuck a lug, going to pour grape juice marinade on the cuticles of my…something. OK, we had people by last night and I now eat leftovers. This lunch made me feel like a normal human being. Or like the value of my house dropped yet another 10 grand or that Boeing launched a 787 Dreamliner
One time I was in Chicago and this woman approached me and I was all feeling inside like “wow I like when women approach me” and she got really close, sort of like artist-in-the-anticipation-of-needs close or like swans in a floral arrangements close (anyway), and she said in this sort of haltingly with an accent voice: “Do. You. Know this. Blake Boootttleerr?”
And I said, “Blake Butler? Yeh I know him.”
And she said, “Can youse. Show him. To me.”
So I walked her over to see Blake Butler and we both stared at the back of his head, from a distance. And she said, “Tank. You.”
*
Steve Stringer has a wonderful touch over at Juked, with Seaplanes. It’s a little Carver and certainly a shake of Denis Johnson, but he avoids the derivative, with crisp scene-setting, with an occasional jarring transition, and an oft memorable line. Don’t know much about Stringer myself, but will keep my antennae up.
He says he shoplifted gospel cassettes, says he filched from the collection plate, says sometimes he prayed to basketball players instead of God. He says when he worked in the morgue he was coming off a morphine addiction. When no one was around, he’d peel back the fentanyl patches off the bodies, prick a hole in the patch with a pin, and lick the gel. He says he’s sorry.
He just sits there frozen and dry like astronaut food.
The parade moved on, but not the elephant that collapsed in the city’s busiest intersection. People in their stalled cars watched a city truck arrive. The city men planted a sign in the asphalt: ASIAN ELEPHANT/ELEPHAS MAXIMUS
IN PROCESS OF NATURAL DECAY
FINE FOR REMOVAL
What? You want me to answer even more questions about Fog? That type of thing fascinates you, along with cockroaches and snorting Dexedrine off the top of church pews? Ok, then, I answer questions about Fog for NANO Fiction.
Here, I slap a canoe rack of my glow Outback:
Placing a canoe rack feels glow because I know I have done something. When I write, I am not sure I have done a damn thing. And it goes on and on and to thread one’s way unseen through the world must feel wonderful, so to speak…something.
Bill Murray’s face is on the cover, always a very good sign.
“R2D2 was a great guy and a fine actor.”
-Bill Murray
*
Would everyone please shut the fuck up about Shark Week?
*
Hill workouts. Are they effective?
1. East Africans have been traipsing up and down the steep slopes of the Great Rift Valley for millennia.
2. Hill muscles and sprint muscles are almost exactly the same.
3. While every other runner dreads hills, why not make them your specialty? Then you approach the hill and think, “I’ve got them now.”
4. Hills develops coordination, encouraging the proper use of arm action.
5. Hills are a grind. Every runner must grind. Must fuck grind, love grind, sweet milk of grind embrace grind. Know grind. Lick grind. Grind. I can’t even tell you how much of my running career has been built on grind, or as one coach told me way, way, way back in high school:
“Sean, you’re strength is your strength.”
Meaning I don’t stop. I grind.
6. Running hills make you better at…running hills.
Just did 9 minutes at 2% grade, 9 at 3%, 9 at 4%, 9 at 5%, 9 at 6%, 3 at 7%. I am now sweat-slicked and legs all undressed and winnowed Tree and sigh, sigh muscles and I need a beer.
*
I kind of dig this photo of Jesus.I ripped it from Vouched. Who knows where they ripped it from.
*
You people who hate flash are still here?You damn kite stranglers! You Shrunken Strunks & Whites. You baa, baa, baa haters. You postnasal lopper-gangers! You fountain pens filled with troll heavens. You mes! You memory hazers. You slap boxes! You TVs! You slow, slow cult. You Sheriffs! You tornado Sheriffs! You posh costumes of baleful asthma. You curds. Well.
Holy fuck this is glow! Watch it. Drink Canadian whiskey and eat 114 oysters raw and wack-off (or don’t wack-off, whatever) and watch it. What a human. A golden humpbacked whale. A walking lighthouse of thorn-bushes and vodka bras and poetry. I love the man.
*
A bird just flew into my window, but enough about me. Wearing ballet slippers to a funeral? I enjoy the feel of a half pint bottle in the back pocket of jeans, that smooth pressing. Wrist-bone, phone, sky. A boy carrying either a human head or a head of lettuce under his arm. Overpasses. Revision is more creative than the actual first draft. Is that true? Hot swatches on sun on the grass. Water the lawn only occasionally, but for long, long periods. Work habits. Dug out a tree, but have not replaced the tree. Big, empty spaces. Fuck. No, fuck you. No, fuck me. The treadmill is repaired! I keep running through my days. What are you running from, sir? That seems an empty and obvious question. The past is growing! Oh shit, that means the future is shrinking. It’s all, unfortunately, math. Staggering on spindly legs. Something like that.
The comparison to Stein is perhaps the highest praise I can offer for Fog Gorgeous Stag. The more I spend time with this new genre of Fog, the better I like it.
At first read, one might mistake Sean Lovelace’s hybrid-prose poem collection Fog Gorgeous Stag to be a magical manual, a book which reads back the conscious of whatever the reader is looking for, through glowing light pages.
Two comparisons to Gertrude Stein. I’ll take that, though it is a bit like comparing a golden crow to a chalky lump of bird splatter (myself as the bird shit, obviously). So, anyway. If you like Stein, maybe purchase my book. Eh, eh?
[boom!]
I’m sort of into the work of Laurel Nakadate (two pics above)
*
Went to a reading. Met cool people. Words all Gem bottles of Gin. Night a blur. Wish I could have talked to more of them, longer. Words all black-marketed moons. I mean to say, went/bent/went to a reading all Vouched-like, all hot glass tire service center, all sweet walking odor of tire, all sun off the windows like Ljosvallagata, all electronic sun, all Jesus Angel Garcia (dude’s on a huge-ass reading tour) rocking the Mr. Microphone, all words like fat slaps of friction,
[me and Jesus]
all religious comment on religion and shit, all barbaric sexual yawp, all Roxane Gay (she read a major glow story about anorexia bulimic fucking, etc.), words all oil barrels of light, all flickering halos, all FREE BEER, all free fucking IPA (thanks, Flat 12, I will be down there for some growlers soon), all Barry Graham (Monica Lewinsky crush), all Dogzplot in the house, all French fries and shards of hope, all trash fires of the pelvis, all words in ravines, words flying in the air like typhoids of sunlight, all grinding sunlight, all Matt Mullins (wicked poem here), all shadows and saw-blades, all
[Matt Mullins dropping words]
corned beef lickings of words, all Steve Himmer (we discussed garden gnomes and also I bought his book--I can tell it’s going to kick serious ass), all serpents and hermits, all Micah Ling (She is not Asian or a man. She is a runner!–see you at a race maybe?), all word filets of crunchy telescopes, all FREE Lit Pub T-shirt, all Laura Adamczyk (interview here), all Jim Walker (Cool guy. I met him at the last Vouched reading.), all John Clark, all Jessica Dyer (uterus as muse?)
Let me tell you about the rat I keep in my uterus. He stores cotton balls, faux feathers, and little pink beads in me to make the perfect nest. I use these in my crafts. My uterus is squishy, and he has a fun time in there bouncing around and sometimes I have to bang on my belly to make him stop. It tickles but is awkward in public. He is quickened by cinnamon, and plays tricks on all my sphincters. I call him my pocket protector. In the mornings there are little rat marks on my thighs; somehow he gets out, but I always let him come home to my beaded plush cave. I would let you pet him, but he has claws and a tail like a real baby, even little milk teeth!
all Kevin McKelvey (I got this in-touch-with-the-earth feel. I guess I’m saying I’d like to fish and/or canoe with the guy.), all words as parachutes of mud, as echoes of golden barbed wire, all Layne Ransom (hell yes CHICKLITZ!),
[Layne all literary]
all Bryan Furuness (Bryan read an amazing piece about tubes, life as, etc.), all that’s a shit-load of readers at one reading but it did glow. I then went to a bar and ate fried green beans.
How do you stay creative? What are your tricks to get “unstuck?”
Here’s one trick: get really drunk or stoned and fall asleep weeping on your keyboard. When you wake up, magical elves will have come in the night and turned your bitter tears into words and paragraphs, just like they made shoes for that shoemaker.
Actually, that doesn’t work most of the time, but I keep trying it.
Another trick, this one somewhat less self-destructive, was suggested to me by a teacher, and has worked on occasion: Make a list of 40-50 things that could potentially happen next in your story. Don’t worry if they are boring, or improbable, or stupid. Just make a list as quickly as possible. Then take 5-10 of them, and write one or two paragraphs for each one. Somewhere in this process, you are going to get unstuck.
Otherwise, I need to put the piece aside and start something new. I’ve never been at a loss for new material, for whatever reason. It’s never a problem to start something — finishing is always an issue.
*
Speaking of Meg Pokrass, her flash fiction continues to blend my bones silver. To make me actually glow. This, from elimae, the opening of “Albino.”
I deserved an ample scolding. I watched the sunset with an albino. We went to a thrift store, and joked about trying on hats and getting lice. “Miami Lice,” he said. Was he safe? I hoped not. Was it scummy and frivolous to hang out? My birthstone was emerald, I told him, and his chlorinated eyes said, “Well, that makes you not-simpleminded.” We both laughed. An albino laugh. Watery veins stood out and his forehead looked like a stolen woodpile.
*
Cathy Day blogs aboutMidnight in Paris. I am not going to read her post entirely because I am going to see the movie this week. Then I will read her post. Also I will tell you what I think. My thoughts now? Woody Allen used to make amazing, thoughtful, layered films. Then for a long, long time he made mediocre films. They depressed me with their earnest mediocrity. It made me sad. It made me feel like I was watching an aging Muhammad Ali get his ass kicked at the end of his career. I can’t watch that type of film, not from a genius like Allen. So. I am hoping. Hoping this film glows.
*
I am thinking about running the Big Sur (a haven for writers) marathon. California. Ander Monson already signed up! I must join him! Shit. Well. OK. Thanks, Ander.
Joyelle McSweeney on Herzog and the Sublime. Wow. I think McSweeney is one of our most perceptive, intelligent writers. I pretty much will read anything she writes, as should you. I’d also like to add that Montevidayo is one ugly-ass blog site. I mean the design is clunky as hell. They might also want to hire a copy-editor. I’ve never seen such consistent misspelling errors. But I like the site. Trying to be constructive. Anyway, all that is their own business. The content is consistently good.
But this solipsistic notion—that man is the measure of man- is itself a loop, a folding, a self-saturation that begins to gesture at the hyperbolic over-saturation and collapse of humanist project or portrait in Herzog’s films, yielding something so irrational, beautiful, terrible, and certainly out of control that it is less like a portrait of a man and more like an inundation with the Sublime.
*
*
I went to New York City and took many,many subway stops and walked, walked, walked, and found some nachos. These are grilled zuchinni and black bean and three cheeses. A solid 7.23 on THE LOVELACE SCALE OF GLOW NACHOS.They came from El Camion. Nacho review here.
*
Peter Tieryas Liu brings it over at decomP. What I like here is the language, how he knows us flash writers must–must!!–understand the way of the poet, the Word.
I experience four cyclical deaths every day; lavatory, office politics, televised Internet, and dreamless sleep.
*
[I swear to gods my book is cheesy. Order it here. ]
*
A letter from Mary Hamilton.
Dear Wigleaf,
I noticed today that one leg is longer than the other. That’s a lie. It’s more like I am unevenly distributed. One knee is placed higher than the other. One calf is slightly bigger. One shoulder is lower. One boob is larger. My right ear is smaller and set farther back than my left ear. One eyebrow is shorter and thicker. My left eye is basically sitting on my temple. My belly button is not centrally placed. Don’t even get me started on my elbows.
The walls of my apartment are crooked, making measurements for an aspired-to new couch difficult.
I think you should know that I’ve grown three inches since high school and all of it is in my left forearm making pancake flipping a difficult balance.
I went to Chicago to launch this fucking book, to read at the Beauty Bar, a bar that offers manicures and pastel walls and martinis but i had vodka and Oberon and then later Oberon and a quaff of Guinness so to speak, a dark, swirly, cloudy quaff so to speak, i cut my right index finger (and there blossomed blood) while opening a Fat Tire in my hotel room, as i ate a light dinner of Pepperjack cheese, French bread, an orange, and a tall, brown bottle of Fat Tire in my hotel room so to speak, this modern curves and colors hotel room in the winding spires and steel monoliths of downtown Chicago, the hacking and the coughing and the scissor-running streets, and my hunger forced me into the scissor-running streets where i was intimidated by the choices and the bustle and the sheer majesty/monstrosity of the place, and so i found a quaint local market and I handed my 8 dollars to a beautiful young lady (most of the young ladies of Chicago are stunningly beautiful) and she said, “Wrong side” like I suppose I handed the 8 dollars to the left of the cashier machine and so then I corrected and handed the 8 dollars to the right of the machine and the beautiful young lady gave me change and so I bought bread, cheese, an orange, a tall, hefty Fat Tire and went back to my room like some animal, like some scratching, burrowing animal so to speak, and i lay out my parcels, my freshly baked bread, my tightly sealed block of Pepperjack cheese, my wonderfully pebbly and fragrant orange, and this sweating bottle of Fat Tire and i had no opener or spoon or fork so ate with my bare hands, tearing ragged chunks of bread, ripping off crumbly crags of cheese, and opened the beer with the edge of a car key (i often carry car keys) and the key blade slipped and cut open my right index finger, as i have said. And so i bled.
People dig this fucking book, they do. The Chapbook Review goes all:
Tim Jones-Yelvington in the house! I have always wanted to meet, read with Tim Jones Yelvington because I enjoy his work (here, here, here) and I have seen his musings and revolution and advocacy and words on The Google but to have a meeting or reading or word association on The Google is naturally not the same as seeing someone in person, not the same at all no matter how much of this world is becoming an attempt to convince us all otherwise, this calculated devouring world, the devouring bit-by-bit of my mind, of my sense of self, on The Google, also anyway as I was saying Tim Jones-Yelvington is the type of person to talk with you while wearing a doll attached to his forehead and I need more people like this is my life, my daily meaningless life so to speak, to read with and to talk with while they wear dolls affixed to their heads and also naturally to write with as we launch this fucking book, this book, talked about, people do talk about this book, for example, Outside Writers Collective and Press:
Word. And then I got to meet John Jodzio at the reading, John Jodzio who I did not know, had not seen, had slightly read (here, here, here), and so I was wondering, Who is this John Jodzio? and then he gets up there, on that stage at the Beauty Bar, and he’s reading, reading rather well, and then he starts gearing up and killing it, killing because he’s very funny, very, very, funny, and I now have a new favorite funniest-writer-that-I-actually-know (the prior one was Peter Davis, a very funny man)
POEM ADDRESSING MY PAST, CURRENT AND FUTURE STUDENTS WHO ARE SUFFICIENTLY INTERESTED IN OUR CLASS ENOUGH TO CHECK OUT MY WORK
I hope you learn something from this poem and the powerful, mystical way it concludes!
and what a surprise, a surprising way to live life, where you show up in Chicago and all the taxis honking and scurrying about and the Beauty Bar vodka rolling through your veins and to read with fellow flash writers and stumble right into a new funniest-writer-that-I-actually-know, John Jodzio, a man whose words fill the room and ceiling like glittering mechanical horseflies, giant, cartwheeling, glowing, blinking horseflies that sting and buzz and sting again, who will read about hookers and chili and fog machines, all of this while gradually unclothed, with various “messages” written across his chest (he later said this was a pain in the ass to remove)
and this possibly brings me to a point of this post, a comment on what I consider the “best” type of reading, and an example was seen and heard and felt here during this launch of They Could No Longer Contain Themselves (most would or should go TCNLCT by now, just for the sake of brevity), the very thing I have argued with about with writer and internet and occasional “real-time” or “actually having a beer” friend Blake Butler, the idea of readings working best with HUMOR or SEX or something titillating along those lines and here we had myself reading with humor and sex and Tim Jones-Yelvington reading with humor and sex and John Jodzio one of the funniest reading of words men on this planet, I mean that I have heard read so to speak, I mean a true humor, not a cleverness or simple guffaw, but a human laughter of light and pain and mechanical horseflies, etc., and so all three of us (and also Davis Schneiderman–a dynamo of a man I am happy to have met; and Kathleen Rooney, a glow-force reading the other TCNLCT flash authors not in attendance) screaming out humor and sex, a sort of laboratory exercise in my theory, though with an understanding and respect by me of Blake’s point, Blake saying, I think, don’t write down to an audience so to speak, or read down, don’t go for laughs or sex when you could bring the audience higher, up to words and themes and areas of language much more involved and layered and so on, and I get that, I get that, but I also attend many, many readings and laughter releases endorphins as does various ideas of sex, and these things are not mutually exclusive, and truly funny is actually very hard and takes someone higher, as true humor has subtext, as true humor is really a recognition of our absurd existence, namely that we were born on this planet to die, and anyway I mean to say the audience was howling and the vodka was howling away, and then a hip hop artist showed up later and he really didn’t have much flow, not a great deal of flow, so we moved to another bar and someone sang musicals very loud and very well, and I took a taxi to the hotel eventually though I don’t remember the ride back, the swirling black ride back, a swirling black tornado that emitted from my eyes and head, a tornado with shimmering silver dots within, and possibly edges of purple, as is my way.
Audience enjoying humor. (James Tadd Adcox was there–good to see you again! Good to quaff many beers!)
Audience enjoying sex.
Before leaving Chicago, I walked down to the majestic/monstrous lobby of my hotel and found an empty table and chair. On the table, I placed a review copy of my new book, Fog Gorgeous Stag. Inside I wrote:
TO SIR OR MADAM
IF YOU HATE THIS BOOK, I AM SORRY. I SUPPOSE.
I then signed the book, walked away, and drove home.
