Sep 02
ValerieLiterature, Review, promotion, writing sam pink
sam pink has a manner of courting obscenities, portraying human transgression as consolation. this appeals to me, i had to get a copy. sam pink is nice and sent me one. i finished Frowns need Friends Too and didn’t know where to start. i tried to put my finger on the sense of deja vu i took from his detached style: like irregular thought, irregular thought, irregular thought, bombshell and/or sinker! amusing/awkward title, irregular thought, irregular thought, bombshell and/or sinker! awkw..you get it. i mean, you’ve read sam pink around, right? his patterns are present and sometimes broken but the general output is ‘things you think but do not say and things you’ve not allowed yourself to think because you never had the words to correctly come off abhorrently wrong in the appropriate manner.’
after a couple weeks (yeah i’ve been putting this off) the deja vu feel clicked. i hadn’t read sam pink’s style elsewhere so much before per say as i had actually known sam pink’s writing, personified. back in high school, around ‘95, we had named him sloth. sloth was obsessed with gg allin, murder junkies, all things porn, which sounds normal for a young outcast coming into adulthood (pun intended). sloth’s prized possessions were three black and white printouts (1) a girl fucking a horse (or vice-versa, how is that properly stated?) (2) a girl fucking (again, ?) a coke can (3) a ‘normal’ deep throat closeup. sloth kept those three papers folded lovingly in his back pocket for an entire summer. he would enthusiastically shove them in anyone’s face who happened to approach our derelict crew. of course, this was before the entire world had access to the intranets and such porn was passé by kindergarden.
sloth had an extreme slouch, moved super slow and twisted his unkempt hair constantly with steady twists and pulls until patches of bald appeared all over his head and his parents decided he needed professional help. the day sloth announced he was officially schizophrenic we were all walking to steal beer from the anheuser-busch factory just past the main thruway of town. sloth was his normal quiet self, walking with our pack, occasionally laughing his signature crazy cackle laugh – sometimes at something someone said, sometimes at nothing any of us could actually hear. we passed the autoparts store (on the main thruway, constant steady traffic) which had a picnic table for employee breaks and sloth said ‘so guess what? i’m fucking schizophrenic and my entire life is going to be shit!” he jumped atop the empty picnic table, pulled down his pants and began to give all passersby a masturbatory show.
we all laughed at first then fear of impending cop doom set in and we coaxed him down and ran for the shelter of the train tracks. unfazed or maybe he had already forgot his public wanking, he stopped on the tracks to have a smoke. most of the guys, tired of his antics, kept going onward toward the beer factory. a couple of us stopped to have a smoke with sloth, weary to leave him behind alone. he began to chain weeds together into a crown of sorts while absently talking about his little sister and how he would watch cartoons with her and wonder what her tiny face would look like if he cut off her oxygen. we were used to sloth saying horrible things and figured it purely for attention. now we wondered if he had always been serious, letting us in on darker things we had yet to accept as real. at the same time we felt like we knew him well, some in our group had known him since preschool. he was a good/fun guy but at the same time we couldn’t ignore the explicit raw insanity coming out of his mouth.
reading sam pink is much like hanging out with sloth. his words are uncomfortable, a little horrific but at the same time familiar – somehow chummy so you’re never quite sure if you should be only a little embarrassed or totally appalled at yourself by enjoying them. in all things i say fuck it, don’t over think such matters. go buy frowns need friends too and/or check out sam pink september 11th at dit fest. get in touch with your obscenities, take them for a stroll to the beer factory, steal a case off an unlocked van, take a seat on the train tracks and drink till you forget how normally rotten we all are.
(one of my personal favorites below for your eyeball pleasure)
neanderthal clitoris
The worst position to be in is to have someone care about you more than you care about yourself.
The worst position to be in is to be that person.
The worst position is to be a person.
Everyone needs to hate someone else.
Being that someone is as good a goal as any.
You are my favorite failure and I am too destroyed to get off the couch, I guess I will sleep on the couch without brushing my teeth.
Everyone needs to hate being a sleepy-failure with a goal but I want to be buried in a coffin, holding another human that died on the same day as me, both of us wearing crowns made out of construction paper with plastic jewels glued onto them.
Ouch, this is hurting me.
I made the sign of the cross and vomited on my feet.
Ouch.
The worst position is the one you began with, and then continued to make worse.
Aug 28
Mather SchneiderFree Books, Literature, Review, books, poetry, promotion
If anyone would be willing to review my book of poetry DROUGHT RESISTANT STRAIN I would gladly send them a copy. Negative reviews are absolutely acceptable.
Jun 29
Nathan TyreeReview, books, philosophy, science
The Selfish Gene By Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins is a Zoologist, and one of the greatest voices for evolutionary theory. In his books The Blind Watch Maker, River out of Eden, and Climbing Mount Improbable he argues beautifully, and eloquently for the truth of evolution. He (along with the late Stephen Jay Gould) has helped to bring understanding of evolution, and natural selection, to the common man.
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Jun 22
Khakjaan WessingtonCraft, Literature, Review, Uncategorized, philosophy, poetry, writing Shitbots on the web
http://wordplay-kmweiland.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-no-writer-knows-what-hes-doing.html
I wrote a comment on there, but wanted to copypasta what I wrote on Twitter as I was still in the throes of outraged nausea.
“@KMWeiland the whole argument is predicated on the fallacy that mastery is a set of immutable traits. You measure literature by the metrics of other disciplines, rather than as the thing in itself. There are so many errors in that essay, the only thing that shone through was a willingness to subordinate coherent thought & method to the essay format. I don’t care if I alienate a bunch of ppl for saying this, because that essay is literary poison & the position it represents is my mortal enemy. Learn some basic logic!”
There’s more on the comment page; but I wanted to take a moment here to remind you cats that form is the platform, but the content has all the components. You can build a jet out of balsa wood, you can paint it so it looks real, but the motherfucker will not fly. If you do not have anything to say, it doesn’t matter how you say it. If your writing lacks engines, machine guns, an ejection seat and the like, buy some fucking books and quit breathin’ my ink!
Jun 11
ValerieLiterature, Review anne carson, ben brooks, mud lucious, new directions
small things we can witness
pay attention
we cannot affect their
effect, small things they
build slow into much
More.
i read yesterday of a boy, hung in the streets of his village, alleged spying.
having just turned fresh pages and absorbed, i thought of ‘olive drab’
and ‘acacia’ drawing angels in the sand.
i thought of al gore’s (grown) children in the midst of a publicized divorce and laughed out loud a little.
i thought of one of our life’s blood types spilling over us all as we twitter to fundraise a defense. laughed some more.
i thought of this boy, the fragile flesh around his neck and the terror of ‘desert tan’ roping shut his tiny airways.
We are as clean as the mind of Jesus, white skin and pulsing blue veins, we are alive, this is success. Now your lips know it: we are clear. Do you feel clear? We could swim for years now poppies and timber. Burn the fuel to warm your blood. Everything we feel now is progress
that boy, dead somewhere in the all forsaken middle east, is a small passing pain to me. you.
is he a world? a whole civilization exploding? to someone, right? a mother? father? or
suppose the opposite could be. boy born of struggle, constant hunger or something tragic, died quick, a bit terrified animal, but still quick, and gone.
tyranny flourishes regardless. what can we do but see. watch small things build.
notice the
‘dirt in the dream’
but dreams still are.
lives are composed, small things, consequences. a
brother. a sister. a box of pictures, letters – few but so much to the one remaining. beginnings, turning points, holidays, expiries : mourning requires looking back on the build of small things.
I wanted to fill my elegy with lights of all kinds, but death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he’s dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain odd history. So I began to think about history.
snapshots. flashbacks.
lifetimes. empires.
taking the whole of a memory, a witnessing, and chewing it down, to roots, showing cause. true authors of life give our eyes mirrors.
‘nunc ipsum’ at this very moment
is a little thing, building upon another very little thing. culminating
a downfall, a death.
the vigilant consume to know.
money means nothing, throw it toward something of actual use. the knowing.
May 31
Matt DeBenedictisLiterature, Review dennis hopper, Johnny Cash, Rudyard Kipling
Dennis Hopper is no longer with us, but here he is dressed as a cowboy reading a Rudyard Kipling poem.
Though I cannot confirm whether Hopper was an actual cowboy his love of poetry was never in doubt.
May 26
Nathan TyreeComics, Review amphigory, cartoons, edward gorey
Edward Gorey is probably best known for the animations that precede Mystery, on PBS. His cartoons have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, and he has published a massive number of books. His Amphigorey series (Amphigorey, Amphigorey Too, Amphigorey Also) collects his works in omnibus form.
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May 23
Tracy LucasReview amelia gray, cure all, daily s-press, diagram, goodreads, kim parko, matt bell, Review, smash cake magazine, tracy lucas
I wanted to like Cure All ($8 USD, Caketrain, 2009). I waited eagerly for it to arrive in the mail, marveled at the killer cover artwork and aqueous feel of the book flesh in my hand, and expected great things.
What I found was at best flitting. At worst, disjointed.
Cure All is a bizarre, surreal mix of images and wordcandy thrown together and stirred with some mysterious, floppy utensil that didn’t quite hit all the dry spots at the bottom.
No one can say this work isn’t original, I’ve got to grant Parko that. It’s gutsy, and that’s something. But more than any cohesive flavor, her compilation just feels jerky and pointless. Nothing tasted the same for long enough to reach any better conclusion. Only five pages into this sleek volume, the reader in me started keeping mental score. Two cool lines, four I wished I’d skipped. A solid paragraph, a runny six pages. The score became so distracting that I couldn’t let go and ride along. Every time I tried to liberate these words and let my emotions take over, a fresh dose of “what the hell are you talking about?” rose up and slapped me in the face.
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May 09
Nathan TyreeLiterature, Review, poetry anger, gordon massman, poetry, tarpaulin sky, the essential numbers
The Essential Numbers
by Gordon Massman
Tarpaulin Sky Press
I cannot fucking review Gordon Massman’s The Essential numbers. This collection of prose poetry came in the mail over a year ago. I had been waiting for it and was quite excited when it showed up. That night I read the book in a single sitting. My reaction was one of shock. I felt numb and dazed by what I had experienced. I had to believe that the book was something other than what I first perceived.
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