I have noticed a lot of writers now have glow-wicked names. Nina Feng sounds pretty cool. Like a weapon or something. Like maybe a blue weapon you would store under the neon cash register.
“Commander, bring me the Nina Feng.”
Or maybe some orchid?
Or maybe the minute before midnight. Like we have names for times. People will say, “It’s noon.” So why not: “When do we meet for the drop?”
“Set your watches. We meet at exactly Nina Feng.”
I’m not sure. Possibly I am foolish, all radio, static-eater, etc.
Who is Nina Feng. I don’t know. wigleaf says, “Nina Feng is a candidate in the MFA program at the University of Iowa. She has work forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly Review and upstreet.”
What does it mean to be a candidate?
Doesn’t matter. What matters are her words:
I worked behind the meat counter at the grocery store. Soft curlicues of ground chuck swung together, depressed a breath and squeezed; steaks lounged in casual sheets, lipping one another’s firm bodies. The light was watery and stinging and spit pools into the meat.
Word
She put me there. I am there. Now she can take, her words can take me, whatever her whim. Strong.
Be sure to read the entire piece. The sentences are re-dunkulous glow. Lutz-like.
I’ve seen him read these before and it kills. The delivery, the subject, the meta. I don’t find that many poems truly funny, as in layered funny. Davis does that. Get the fucking book is what I’m saying. It is and is not poetry. That’s the thing to me. It is wonderful. It is odd.
*
So I get take0out nachos but they come in aluminum tray/pan and you know, you know the dog slips her leash and is running, running across the lawn, into street, up street, out into highway, possibly to Kansas the land of grasshoppers and eternal highways (Are we there yet?) corn/corn/corn/splat! (grasshopper)/corn and I’m out dog-stumbling, dog-stumbling with a 2.5 beer buzz and the whole time I’m clambering the highway shoulder I am thinking of my nachos back home. They are in the oven. I put them in the oven to retain their heat. I found my dog, alive. My dog had a look like, “Brain cell, one.” My nachos were mashed. That’s the point. My nachos looked like a soup. What to do? Here’s what you do:
Get fresh tortilla chips. Layer until they look like your forehead.
Pour “nacho soup” on top, circular, concentric pooling.
Now you have created a double layer of nachos. You have refreshed your nachos, I say. You should be happy like inflatable coffee.
*
What in the hell is an odometric wheel? I don’t know. But that’s why we read poems. Thanks David Sharp!
I’m going to use that word. I’m going to use it soon.
I begin teaching summer class next Monday. Introduction to Creative Writing.
“Class, my name is professor Lovelace. We are going to study odometrics this semester. We are going to get odometric. What do I expect from you, odometrically speaking? Well, that’s a manner of odometrics. Let us begin.”
*********
“If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is odometrics.”
“The odometric is not that there are odometricss. The odometric is expecting otherwise and thinking that having odometrics is an odometric.”
*
Spring has sprung. I put a 1970s filter on this photo. Not sure why.
KGM sent me a letter today. Wait, a letter arrived today from KGM. Wait, the return address is Amy Berkowitz, from Mondo Bummer Books.
[I need to cut my yard but there is a certain luxury to looking out at an unruly yard and not cutting said yard. For a moment I forgot determinism and poured four cups of coffee. For a moment I thought about the sky nothing but the sky.]
Letter as chapbook? I might have been drunk and ordered this online, not sure. I have been laying off the Drinking & Ebaying habit, so maybe have leaked a bit into Drinking & Buying Literature. Anything is possible at this point.
Sometimes my brain feels like an aquarium.
Look, I’ll tell you this: KGM wrote a letter. It begins:
Laura had a dream about being a potato. She sat on a table, being a potato. She could feel her fibers, and skin. She was surprised to find that the eyes of the potato didn’t see anything at all, not even something surreal and magical, as she would have guessed. Laura woke up slowly that morning, remembering her dream, and feeling a little upset that she could never dream anything more exciting.
The remainder of the letter is a ceiling light or blinds you peek through, waiting for someone at the drive, the way sun on walls will become an itinerary, I mean the ways words are like days as they move you. I mean to say beautiful. Often KGM writes in beauty.
*
[You can actually mix Merlot and Guinness. Free tip right there, kids.]
I liked Other Electricities. It was an elegy. I don’t think this was written about enough. It was a prayer to some lost thing. Sometimes I will see the word snowmobile and think of a tombstone. Or I might be trapped in a stairwell and start thinking about snow. So, that’s how that machine works.
Neck Deep, I loved. It could be because I also enjoy baths. Or it could be the disc golf essay. It could be because Ander is a good friend but I doubt it. A lot of my good friends have books I like less. Also one time Ander hit me directly in the back with a disc golf drive. But I digress.
I Glow Vanishing Point. The other day I was crouched over a black beer and I told someone, I said, “I really think Vanishing Point is better than Neck Deep.” They said, “Really?!” I could tell they didn’t agree at all. So I disagree with their disagreeing or some kind of math thing. And I knew the buzz on that book would go Boat Flips and Grits. Since the pages bleeds into the Internets, the Googles. Yep.
The man is doing things, folks.
[This bar you can lift up framed photos and the walls are white behind the photo. The wall is yellow from nicotine. I thought it was a yellow wall. You should probably use that detail in a story. Details in stories will make the reader less aware of the teller of the story, maybe. I have no idea what picture will be in the frame. Look, it's your story but God please don't see your reflection in the glass frame and start describing your protagonist's bangs and shit.]
Worried is how a dove coos when you hold it real tight.
That’s actually true. Also a dove’s breasts contain white and dark meat. Also it’s considered bad form to shoot a dove from a wire or off the ground. I see that from someone on like a Tuesday in Mississippi and I think, “Douchebag.”
I tried to get into the Hobart Outside issue. I mean to say I submitted. I thought, “An outdoor issue? That’s made for me.”
No it was not made for me. Fail. Aaron sent a really nice rejection.
{It was this story published soon after at Superstition Review. Beware the author photo. They ripped it from my BSU work site. I look sort of creepy or maybe like I tan [I do not]}
I saw Aaron at AWP and someone STOLE HIS LIQUOR!!
OK, they “confiscated” it. But, look, you can use the word “confiscate” all you want, but you still took a man’s whiskey and, yes, you will go to hell.
Speaking of my life, the Indiana Review kindly emailed me about sending them a story a while back. I was pleased as a pair of sweatpants to send them a story. Actually, I didn’t really have a story. So I wrote one called “The Thing.” (Sort of a dumb title, now that I reflect on it.) They emailed me yesterday with Fail. In the spirit of Jac Jemc’s excellent REJECTION BLOG I will include the letter for you. I thought it professional and kind:
Sean,
Our apologies for the delayed response; we wanted to give your work its editorial due.
After much discussion we have ultimately decided not to utilize your submission, however, you have certainly made fans of our staff. Please feel free to submit in the future.
Thank You and All the Best,
The Editors
Indiana Review
Does any magazine out there want “The Thing?” Come on, I took the time to write an actual short story and you know I’m into micro-fiction and flash and all that hybrid thing like when you get a bird and fly it into a ramshackle. Or sit out in a storm, out in your shed. I was about to write about the rain sweeping the roof but God that sounds so like a writer. The rain should saw the shed or pith it. The rain pithed the shed. What the fuck is a pith helmet? I mean I see the thing.
But pith?
Here is a sample paragraph from “The Thing” to help you nap:
While asleep he sweats. While awake he occupies himself. Finds all the strands of hair—corners, bathtub O, eyelids of doors—and spins them into tangles and lines and decahedrons of light. The yellow teeth of the window. There coughs the Cat’s Cradle, frantic fingers, clacking nails, hands unhinged and flailing, gummed-out in the elbows of a clattering machine. Or he might walk room to room and identify objects. Green lotion, cigarette husk, open drawer. Fact: A kitchen knife is a computer. Fact: You program the thing. Or back to the dancing fingers. Effigy of music, with the hands and the splitting/shimmering hair, blurring some stringed instrument, the greasy hiss of bones.
A blue humming, veins.
Touching of the Starbursts? To alternate flavors, to maintain an equality of each, but he suspects they try to fuck people with the yellow (lemon). Today all is right with the Starbursts. He unwraps each candy, inhales, mashes them together into a little man (cuts four pieces in half for arms and legs), and props the Candy Man in the freezer, alongside the vodka and the burnt tots of tator.
He names the Candy Man. He says, You are empty like _______ I will call you Empty. You are the day I was drowning and realized the universe. I will name you Palms, Palms Up, Open Hand of the Universe.
He bathes and pees in the tub and keeps on bathing.
…staggers naked into the kitchen…stuffs the whole hard, cold, dumb Candy Man into his mouth. Jaws mashing, tongue pebbling up, maw swollen with sugary drool.
*
I need to revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise and revise.
Look there goes James Thurber and he’s running after the mail truck. “Come back here with my fucking essay!!”
As he drank gin dude would change out his glass eye and replace it with a series of increasingly bloodshot eyes.
Dude had one glass eye that was an American Flag. You wanna get laid? Put a fucking glass eye with an American flag into your skull. Like excuse yourself from the conversation, go to the bathroom, return with American flag eye.
Hell, I’d sleep with you. I’d sleep with before you could sneeze.
*
Oh look, Cubby tells all of us how to tape our fingers for disc golf! Thanks, Cubby! Cubby! Cubby! Cubby! Cubby! Cubby!
*
Wait. Who in the hell is B.C. Edwards (this my mind thinking out loud now)? Sometimes I will read a writer and the hooks in and I’ll float away into the ribs of a washboard stomach and I’ll go get on The Google and hunt that writer down. I suppose it is a good thing when your words make my synapses move my fingers move my time on this planet move my earth my blood so here we go:
I think he’s involved in Literary Death Matches, a term that always bothered me when I would show up and not one person would die. Or they never died when I was in attendance. I did see a poet punch a teacher-of-forms once. I guess all in attendance will eventually die, now that I reflect. So I guess it is–in a way removed–a death match. Wait, life is a Death Match. Are we really going to go down the We-Are-Born-to-Die route? Sometimes my brain reminds me of a teenager and I just feel sad about that.
[So I cook this huge pasta recipe {this one} and buy all these ingredients and cook it all and when I'm done I put it all into Tupperware and in the fridge and I make nachos and eat the nachos.]
Well, now I know B.C. Edwards. And I’ll keep a look out for B.C. Edwards.
*
What we need is more stories that begin with one word: Gorgonzola.
A green arrived yesterday. A sickly sort of green. It was square, bound in six strands of string, and clutching another square, tall, arthritic letters on a milky patch of bled skin. But then the longer I stared into this green, its vibrancy, the more my mind seemed to float. I thought of moments of flu, the cursing of birds within my eardrums, and often I will drink white wine during flu (the best thing to do when sick is to ignore the entire reality of the situation [maybe]) and then stumble out into the field behind my house, to fall, to sprawl there and wait, for the vomiting, the slosh and wrack and upheaval, and then those long, hollow seconds afterward as I fold back against the prickly grass, as I feel a bit of earned self-pity (See? I told you I was fucking sick), the drool pooling off my lips, as I let go, down there with the soil now at head-level, and I will feel, well, yes, completely peaceful.
The Scary Mare Filled You With Night. No.
The You Filled With Mare Scary Night. No.
Bear with me. I lost six pounds in two days. Sometimes my knees slosh like honey and walnuts.
Bear with me because I think this book is an illness. I read it four times and my stomach boils in its own wandering juices and I feel the fanning of heat across my forehead, pink tips of ears, and I know I am moved now, I know words move me (miraculous forces and rhythmic etchings), I know this book is a world and I dipped my eyes into this world and almost cried, almost cried but when I want to cry I do anything but cry, so I drank 7 beers, climbed a small elm, descended, went back inside, built a tiny house from couch pillows, drank 5 beers more, went back outside and granted every single dandelion amnesty. I will no longer kill the dandelions! (I raised my arm to the sun in some sort of awkward, dramatic salute.) They are plants, too. They are alive. Who am I to choose?
Bear with me. Not two days ago I sat in a bed-cave and screamed out hallucinations and identification papers of sweat.
So bear…
I mean to say I am moved to empathy. All Shane Jones (I have read) moves me to empathy. Technique? Is it characterization? Oh, dialogue. Oh, visualization. Oh, write a list of things in the character’s glove compartment. Oh, a character sketch where we get an index card and we list every…
Shut the fuck up!
Sorry, sorry…Bear with me.
I have this fever. It’s like a huge child in my head. It is the huge child of Shane Jones’s imagination. It’s his world we get from accumulation, the way the borders of Shane Jones shape themselves, the “foxes on the red leash,” not in direct, descriptive lines, not in simple telling, but in stumbling upon cottages and candles and nursery rhymes and navy pea coats and potions and knives.
And always children (some as adults) inside the belly of the huge child.
The brilliance of Shane Jones and his characters are that he needs no more than brushstrokes, name (Avery, Anna), possibly gender, and then, the large thing, the large sympathetic thing, the reason we follow them—THEY ARE ACTED UPON.
That’s it.
Such as?
Such as the sheriff. He places a note on the front door. The note says if you fall asleep you will Night Mare. You will meet Avery. (You do not want to meet Avery, trust me.) So you must remain awake. But how?
How can I remain awake, in this odd and clattery world?
Kill yourself. Kill yourself. Kill yourself over and over.
“When I come back outside I tell Anna it’s happening again. She pulls a knife from her coat pocket and cuts my wrists open.”
“I take the knife from Anna and slit her throat.”
“Henry jumps into a bear’s mouth.”
“How’s the baby.”
“He’s good.”
“Has he slept today.”
“No.”
Bear with me now.
Like with tornadoes and tsunamis, even the animals know (in Shane Jones’s world, the animals always know, as it should be).
“A group of sleeping deer drowns in a puddle, turning blue, eyes bulging.”
“When I’m walking back home I see a cat impale itself on a sharp rock.”
Interesting the reversals in Shane Jones’s work. In this book. A boy playing a trumpet is not the hero. A motorcycle gang might be. Kill yourself to live. Sleep. Not restorative. Not restful or an escape.
Sleep as portal for Avery.
And what is Avery?
Avery is the one who wants all of us to kill the dandelions. An industry—pamphlets, prongs, products and pesticide pumps–to kill the dandelions. But why?
Because they are not of lawn.
Because they are intensely beautiful.
Because they gnarl in glow.
But now I speak in metaphor again. I cough in metaphor. And, no, I will not kill the dandelions. This is always the impact of reading Shane Jones. You are going to value sleep less, because sleep might just be obedience. You are going to do tilt to something else, a tumbling gesture toward something else.
The new thing is where I add poetry to the Google but I also crowbar my own line to like, like maybe add even more zest-birds to the Internets. So I will begin with Adam Robinson. I met him at AWP. We met for four minutes. I thought he would have bigger, chunkier eyeglasses because everyone talks about his eyeglasses. He might have been wearing a back-up pair or a pair especially made for indoor book fairs, etc. Here is a poem from his book:
THE SKEPTIC
I’m looking for a balance
between not God and God
like fruit
or feet
or nachos
or all the little birds
on Jaybird Street
*
I will write a big-ass AWP post soon. Hang in there, my little shrieks.
I caterwhomped at 5:30. The air was blue. Like the blue of juxtaposition. Outside no crickets did _______. I might have sensed a bird but is this a Murakami story? No. What if I threw in a talking monkey? No. Juxtaposition. What is that? Clive, tell us.
Clive: “You throe one thing than another you end up with a third lose thing that is different that the first two things once the right time passes. Like when I make beer at the house.”
Thank you, Clive.
Mark picked me up to go try the 10k. We drove to Indy.
I said, “Mark, you used to always get lost but now you have GPS and never get lost.”
(Mark’s GPS voice is this sexy Australian. It made me want to meet her and play Scrabble in some cafe in Guam.)
I said, “We are going to run this motherfucking 10k.” Or something like that. Something from the throat and heart and left foot.
The day dawned sunny/cold, little wind. I would say the day was like a bleeding fish.
Why did the Indiana State Museum charge us for parking? You don’t charge runners for parking. I felt bad since I didn’t have any money and so Mark had to pay $4. That breaks a driving etiquette rule, folks. The person NOT DRIVING pays for parking. That’s obvious. So I felt badly about that one.
ON YOUR MARKS GET SET GO!!!
I tucked into some fast ones, dropped hammer at 3-5, reeled in some folks. Finished arms pumping like a goat.
After I finished I cheered Mark home. I yelled, “Come on, Mark!” He finished strong. I like to see a runner finish strong, that attitude, like, “Not only I am going to finish this race, but I OWN this race!”
Mark ran his first 10k. He finished 235 out of 1700. I am/was proud of Mark. He ran the race in 50:40.
I ran my many-teenth 10k. I finished 11th out of 1700. I am/was proud of me. I ran the race in 38: 07.
After the race we played Disc Golf.
Then I went with some friends and ate a metric ton of Japanese food and drank a metric ton of sake. Here the debris. I like photos of debris. Wait, the debris photos were lame like dog collars. Ok, what about during the glutton?
I look at this and think:
1.) I need a haircut. I look scruffy and/or freakish.
2.) My two year old is on an iphone. At two years old!!!
WTF?
(Hi, I’m two and cannot interact with humans, la-de-la….)
I’ll throw one like Tim Donaghy. I mean throw it FAR.
[My favorite sushi was the yellow tuna. I can't explain that color of yellow. Uh, Clive...
Clive: "Mee maws hands. They shake like that the sky this man painted. I remember the highway said they would buy so much of maws land for the big Dysberg out there to the airport and needed dirt would make her a pretty pond but she said go strait to hell. Then they just come back anyway. Grandpa said they had domane. They never built that pond neither."
The Red Room is out. I am in there. It be sweet like Book Fairs and muddy shoes.
Red Room full of Bill Kushner, Jayne Pupek, Maurice Oliver, Lewis Warsh, Changming Yuan, Ruth Altmann, Stephanie Gray, Nicole Cartwright Denison, Leonard Gontarek, Andrew Mossin, Lydia Cortes, Lynn Levin, Meg Pokrass, Elizabeth Thorpe, Miriam Kotzin, John Grey, John Vick, others.
*
Odd little story by S.H. Gall over at decomp. Good work with tone, with wistful thought, with brick lodged in the head. Also S.H. Gall is a cool name.
The man references the Zippin Pippin! Well done, sir. (Alex blog here)
“You’ll buy a funnel cake,” Jessica says, “take two bites, say it’s too sweet like you always say, and throw it away like you always do.” She’s mad about last night, when I microwaved a hot dog wrapped in tinfoil; it left a blur of electric blue and a trail offlames.
*
I have these business ideas. Like today, I was thinking, “Singing corn dog.” A singing corn dog. People like corn dogs and they certainly like music. It would be like a corn dog ipod or something. You would carry it proudly like a torch, all the while your favorite song drifting on the air like corn dog essence, like fried oil or fried pig or fried corn flour tunes of glow. I think it’s a winner idea.
*
Late at night I watched Amy Winehouse London 2008 in HD. Never do that. She was drinking beer and slurring songs and picking her nose and wrecked out her wonderful mind. I couldn’t imagine being in that audience. Most interesting were the looks of all the professionals dancing and playing instruments behind her. It was like the loud kid in class who sits on the front row and shouts out all these crazy answers and the kid never gets that EVERYONE BEHIND YOU IS STARING AT YOUR HEAD IN A WEIRD WAY.
The musicians has this look like, “Play your instrument, smile, don’t notice the slurring, stumbling singer. Don’t notice. I need this paycheck.”
You want some of me?
*
Clive, what do you think of farming?
Clive: “He says a farmer gets it bad both ways. A farmer sells the beans and corn for what people say . The farmer buy the seed for what the people say. Thats how he means both ways. Aint no reply my grandpa says. A man can’t punch a big system. Grab it down to normal size.”
How is it going? Oh, fine, just dandy. I am a pink boom box of icecream truck muzak, caught in a loop. I need an axe and a bathroom door, etc. This is what my disc basket in the backyard looks like…
I understand winter like I understand death. I am a southerner at heart. Where are the bocce balls and the V & Ts? I must move my legs and heart, the gristly muscle. If I don’t move I will tumble into profound sad. My head will go knuckles gripping a wheelchair wheel. Resigned. So luckily I have a treadmill. Put in a nice tempo run today. I am training for the Nashville marathon in April, then I am officially running a race so difficult the conditions are repeated nowhere else in the planet we call Earth. Seriously. More details later.
*
I was thinking I might have the Seinfeld large wallet thing (script here) going on…but see I don’t want leather because of the cow thing and those hemp wallets are for stoners and they fall apart in 14 days and so I had to go with Kavu, a real company, an outdoors way, I mean not as flaky, a rugged thing. But it feels like I am carrying an unabridged thesaurus in my back pocket. It hurts my ass sometimes. Well, we all must sacrifice.
(quarter used for reference to size)
*
I had some wriitng stuff to talk about but think I put it all recently on HTML Giant. So go there, I guess. I told some people I know to go there recently and they said, “I am scared of that site!” I mean it intimidates them, the comments especially. I get that. Some people who comment on that site are scholars and way-readers and seriously know their shit. They are pretty aggressive at times, but I kind of enjoy the play. I certainly enjoy their minds. But you got to just wade in, is how I feel. I’m no scholar, not in the real sense, a funny thing to say for a prof, no? But I try. I’m a scholar of pedagogy more than writing, I suppose. I mean I want to be the best teacher I can be, that is serious. The writing is so mysterious. I learn every day. That is the good thing. I hope I can say that forever.
(Update: The more I think about this, the more I think I am wrong, about scholarship. Years of teaching CW, of reading CW texts, of watching others, this is a form of scholarship in a discipline. I suppose I mean a literary scholar, a true critic. Then again, I am not a literature prof, and remember that my undergraduate training was in nursing–I am also an RN. So. I suppose I mean I view a text from its basement, not from above. I try to see its wiring and whatnot, its craft, maybe to carry into the classroom. I am certainly one of those who have trouble just “reading” a book, because I’ve been teaching too long. I stop and take apart. I have heard movie people (in whatever job in the industry) do the same things with movies. They are watching the film, but one part of their mind if already predicting the structure, labeling the shot, etc.
*
Hey, William Carlos Williams–shove it!
*
Have been reading a ton. Now onto Lucy Corin book. Very good stuff, and Flash mixed in, what I like. Report later…
glad to be on a reading jag.
blizzard!
Makes me feel like a rolled down stocking. Or a cheekful of claw.
