Customer response to "How sad if this is one of the great books from the 80's"

Yeah, DeLillo doesn't rely on gimmick and shock value to pull in the mongoloid readers like Palahniuk does.

One-star reviews of White Noise from Amazon.com

Verification, others

Warning--just stay away

I just a read a short story of his in the latest New Yorker and was reminded of this book, and it struck me how much he hasn't changed in 20 years. Fist of all academics writing about academics is as bad as writers writing a book about a writer writing a book. In general the book is condescending, obvious with characters who I had absolutely no interest in.

Infuriatingly Self Important

It is rare that I have a reaction of violent dislike to a book, and even books that I do not especially like I can find something respectable or interesting about the text, but I hate this book. This is the sort of literature that gets first-year philosophy majors to cream themselves because it is oh-so-insightful and important, and allows all the armchair intellectuals of the world to feel a little bit more superior because they assume the cleverness of Delillo's writing is lost on lesser minds. This isn't a novel, it's an extended postmodern manifesto that exposes the philosophy for the empty, whiny system of nihilism that it is. This novel has no characters, only insufferable stereotypes who can't walk through a produce isle at the grocery store without disappearing up their butts with lengthy, obnoxious monologues that somehow equate buying apples with death (exemplified by the single most unbearable character I have ever come across, Murray); it doesn't have drama, only histrionics. What makes this a thoroughly unenjoyable and ultimately uninteresting is that it is a work that sags under the weight of its own importance; it is so persistently self-conscious that I can't take it seriously as a work of literature--it spends a couple hundred pages trying to convince me how great it is without actually being great. What's more, if this novel were a failure as a novel but still offered some genuine insight into the experience of the individual in a post-modern world, it would still succeed as a work of philosophy. But it doesn't; every sentence feels like a catch-phrase rather than a substantive statement.

The difficult thing about criticizing a novel like this is that defenses of it are always predicated on the notion that disliking it reflects a misunderstanding of postmodernism itself--that is, those who dislike this novel obviously are not sophisticated enough to untangle the dense threads of philosophic intent that make it what it is. But, I do understand postmodernism (don't like it but still understand it) and still feel this is a failure. While reading it I was reminded of the infinitely superior Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut), and thought that this is what that great work would read like if stripped of all its originality and craft. That is a successful postmodern novel; this one is several long hours of my life I will never get back.

God Did I try

For years I heard what a wonderful book this is. Finally I bought it to read. And read, and read, and read, even though my wife, a brilliant engineer said she hated it when she read it ten years ago and that I was wasting my time. It took me a month to finish, and every night it put me to sleep after about three pages. The Hitler studies concept was brilliant (except Mel Brooks had already done it) and there were indeed some amusing parts, but pretentious does not begin to describe this book. Thank God for... readers because I thought surely something is wrong with me if I'm the only person in the world except for my wife who doesn't like this book. Then I found out I wasn't alone--there are a lot of us on the sidewalk who see that this emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Not only that, he's butt ugly besides. I absoulely recommend this book. You will, like many, either love it and join the cult, or like many of the rest of us, be utterly amused that so little can be taken for so much by so many. One way or another, you are going to feel good about yourself, and so much smarter. In my case, I decided I am much too smart for this book. Definitely decide for yourself; it's a litmus test of intelligence, and you can't fail.

Boring as Hell

Books like this (and for the most part, many works of Pynchon and Vonnegut) provide social commentary and overblown allegories of life in the modern age. White Noise is trying so hard to teach lessons and issue warnings that the message comes across as subtly as a teacher holding up multiplication table flash cards. Along with Breakfast of Champions and The Crying of Lot 49, this is the kind of book that I will no longer feel guilty about not liking. Boring and unrealistic, with a plot that wanders like a donkey lost in the desert, this self-important book provides me with absolutely no reading enjoyment. It's like listening to a 20 minute guitar solo by some bored jazz musician who turns his back to the audience. I've left the concert, see you at the bar. Read William Vollmann instead.

absolutely unreadable - no, unless your teacher insists,

I'd tried to read White Noise a number of times, thrown it across the room each time. But this time, with a couple of transatlantic plane flights in my arsenal, I couldn't fail to finish, right?

Wrong. White Noise is terrible. It's full of dialogue that no one would ever say, precious, precious, gimicky, and gimicky. Every word is too clever by half, including "and" and "the." I take it the grating serial monologs making fun of consumerism (oooh - how unprecedented!) are meant to emphasize the disconnectedness of modern life. But instead they show only the consequences of writing an arid echo chamber of a piece drained entirely of humanity or anything remotely resembling any claim at accuracy. It is, however, tremendously effective at annoying its readers.

Fear not DeLillo haters. This will be off the syllabi before too long. And how we will celebrate!

Horrible read, weak characters, bad writing style.

Biggest problems with this book is the overuse of quotations to tell a story. The author might as well have writen a screenplay. The result is a confusing and choppy read. I would have prefered he reserves quoting his characters only when it would add something to the story. The prose itself is also weak. The author's descriptions of the characters' relationships with each other, the surroundings, the events are clumsy and weakly staged. He is also inept at pacing the events to keep the reader intrigue and hungry to read on to uncover the plot. Lastly, this book fails to draw the reader into the events taking place because we don't care about any of its characters. The writer would have created more believable characters we can sympathize with if he had taken us into the secret recesses of their souls where emotions like fear, happiness, self-doubt etc. reside. A writer should write for his reader in mind and not for himself. For a good book try Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, Ms.Rowling's Harry Potter books or Memoirs of a Geisha.

How sad if this is one of the great books from the 80's.

I read an article comparing Don Delillo and Chuck Palahniuk's writing style. What an awful comparision. I have read two Delillo books and both have been dreadfully boring.

In White Noise the characters are annoying and the conversations are awful. The book seems to have very little purpose and goes no where. If this is one of the great books of the 80's, I will not be reading any more books from the 80's.

The Beginning of the End of the Novel

Delillo's disese has been spreading ever since this novel was published. The redundent fragments, the uncomphrehensable descriptions, and the false meaning that is being controlled by his illiterate notions of the dreaded "conspiracy".
Delillo's attempt to debase literature and humanity is praised which makes it that much more ironic and ultimatley a pathedic sign of the power of publicity.

Sonically, Mall Cop sounds better than Mall Ninja, but I still like Mall Ninja more

I read my winter reading list before I left for home, so I bought Robert Coover's Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? for one dollar off Abebooks. The copy has this inscription:

March 2, 1989

To David,

Love and have fun with this!

Happy 19th birthday!

xxx [illegible, could be Mom or Lauren]

I feel like this inscription, if written on March 2, 2009, would appear in the opening page of I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell.

Tony Tost posted a link to HTMLGIANT's 25 Important Books of Poetry of the 00s. I've read work by most of the poets listed, but only owned one book--James Tate's Return to the City of White Donkeys, which I brought with me. Jennifer told me about the book my first year in grad school and gave me xerox copies of poems. Every time I try to read here in Dayton I get sidetracked by ESPNEWS HD.

Darrell and I watched Browns-Chiefs at Clancy's on Sunday, and he mentioned a state-owned gun range in Xenia. He wants to take me there--he owns an AK-47 and I said he could probably start his own dictatorship in Africa. He said maybe, but his gun is wussified, unlike the guns of Ugandans. His model does not hold semi-automatic clips, is not defined as a gun by the ATF. We may fire the AK-47 anyway and we may have Mall Ninjas ask us questions. He explained a Mall Ninja is what gun guys call the gun guys who work security jobs--the ones who dream of taking down terrorists in food courts. They know the most Darrell said.

I will read with Fred Kirchner and Dave Nichols on January 2 at the Dayton Dirt Collective in Dayton, Ohio.

I finished my prose class, taught by Whitney Terrell, last night. We had an informal gathering at Minsky's, a gourmet pizza place in KC. I ate there the night Obama won the election. Whitney called us "the young intelligentsia" of Kansas City. It was cool to hear something like that.

I am applying to other programs now and so is my friend Lewis. Last night he said he sent his first few applications out. I said I just the same on Wednesday. He asked me what applications of ours "crossed-over"--both of us talked about UNC-Greensboro as an option. I told him I did not apply there, but I might since the date is farther off than the others (March 1st).

He has been my closest friend since I moved out here, and I wouldn't mind going to same place again.

My friend Marc Keinath is in a band called the Revilators

I read Robert J. Baumann's Man About Town earlier

I am excited about writing again.

Winter Break Reading List

I'm taking these books back with me to Dayton:

Euonia, Christian Bok
Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems, Noelle Kocot
Shoplifting from American Apparel, Tao Lin
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
Paper Lion, George Plimpton

I never read Kurt Vonnegut in high school. He seemed reserved for 6'0, 160 pound boys who play guitar and have minds for math. Bukowski was more the speed for 6'4, 275 pound boys who watch Nicolas Ray and Sam Peckinpah films. Robin had a lot of Vonnegut. Last Christmas, she lent me Jailbird to read on the plane--she thought the way Vonnegut connected all of his ideas neatly together could be a good resource for my work. I liked it, and finished it quickly. As a 6'4, 236 pound man, I feel better about reading Vonnegut. I like his imagination and I like the ginger smell and the feel of the greened archive paper of Del paperbacks--they help his sentences. An hour ago, I bought the Del paperback of Breakfast of Champions over the hardcover version at Half Price Books in Westport.

If I get anywhere with my own stuff, I want my first book, at least the cover, to look like a Kurt Vonnegut Del Paperback from 1979--san-serif font, with a lot of reds, oranges, and yellows. A smooth painted drawing of a green skinned Don Quixote riding a donkey with no eyes and mouth.

Vonnegut supposedly always wanted to be a poet, but didn't feel up to snuff. I think, if he was around now, he could be considered an above-average prose poet simply based on his ideas and their general strangeness. Cats Cradle's chapters short chapters remind me of prose poems I see around the internet, or in small journals--inventive titles, short scenes. "The Girl Pool" (33-34) and "Vice President in Charge of Volcanoes" (23) come to mind.

I tried to teach Ball Four in my composition class--it did not go well. I've always wanted to read George Plimpton's Paper Lion, and I found a copy for $4.48 at Half Price Books.

I feel unhip in cheap bookstores.

I think I can read all of these this break.

Expect poems about the death of psychocars by plastic bats

Instead of working on PhD applications and prose from the perspective of Pete Rose, I have played Earthbound Zero, or Mother, most nights.



For those unfamiliar with NES era RPGs, you can change the default names of your heroes to anything you want. For instance, in Earthbound Zero, the main character is named Ninten. I have renamed him Phil. His friends Loid, Ana, and Teddy have become Lewis, Robin, and Jason--my friends. Two nights ago, Lewis and I explored Duncan's rocket factory before an Old Robot murdered him.

The landscapes in Nintendo games appear so clean. No one leaves crushed Bud Light Lime cans in the grass or fuck in the street. The closest place in reality must be Singapore.

I saw Bukowski shrink in size, in perfect proportion

Steve Richmond died--I never really read his work, I only knew of him through Bukowski's letters.

Silliman's blog, where I found out about the death, posted a link to an interview over at 3 AM. The interview at times is hard to follow, it seems to be a transcript of a recording, but there's some cool stuff about the Cali scene.

Working Words or Workin' Words

Last Friday, I drank a bit at Chez Charlie's with Marcus Myers, a new MFA student in the program. Near the end of the night, I started to yell into his ear from all the noise of other people enjoying themselves. He's a cool guy. He's one of four cool guys reading at Working Words tomorrow, in the Plaza Library. Other cool guys include Glenn North (poetry), Eric Scott (fiction), and Scott Ditzler (fiction). Ditzler won AWP's student writing award in 2008.

you shall die by your own evil creation

My friend Brandon showed me Fletcher Hanks' work in June 2007, shortly before both of us left Dayton, Ohio. I moved to Kansas City, he moved to White River Junction, VT to study at the Center for Cartoon Studies (comics college as he calls it). Brandon worked at a Donato's Pizza down the street to make money for his move--he banked most of it save petty cash for cigarettes, High Life, and the occasional book. He had bought I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! and I only leafed through it, thinking the art and language was crazy. It looked great--Hanks worked in solid lines (partly due to production costs) with saturated colors. I bought I Shall Destroy... months later, after I moved, and read it more. Hanks language and images are great--I ripped off a golden octopus and invisible chemical men with pink day-glo claws for a poem. When I brought Hanks back up to Brandon, he said "Oh yeah, that's stuff is pretty fun. There's not much you can learn from it though." He's right. Sam Pink, Russell Edson, and James Tate (at least Tate's prose work) seem to be the poet equivalent of Hanks--it's crazy, it's weird, it's intense, but you can't learn much from it. They're all their own forces.

A new Hanks collection, You Will Die By Your Own Evil Creation came out at the end of July. I got my copy last Friday. It's a good collection--just as odd as I Shall Destroy--but what's strong about this new collection isn't so much the work itself, but the supplements. You Will Die features an essay providing background info on Hanks--the first collection does not have one, instead featuring a "comic essay" by editor Paul Karasik at the back of the collection. The intro works better than Karasik's own comic essay from the first collection--we see examples of Hanks' correspondence school assignments, we get a better gauge of the man personally, (he's still painted as an abusive drunk and scoundrel, but we have more corroborating evidence) and professionally (we get an idea of Hanks artistic process in the early days of the comics industry).

We also get a bit of context of the work. Stories collected in I Shall Destroy are certainly vivid, wild, and colorful, but they're also displayed in a vacuum--it's hard to imagine Hanks' comics and characters come from 1939. The stories still have an element of the underground comics of the 60's and 70's (or at least my perception of them--my interest in comics stems more from Brandon's passion for them). What I find interesting with You Will Die is the intrusion of advertisements geared towards kids--these ads creep in at the end of some of the stories. These ads--"EARN YOUR OWN BICYCLE!/GET STRONG WITH THIS SUPPLEMENT/SPY WATCH AND DECODER RING"--put Hank's work in context. Ten year old boys, not hipsters or academics in theirs 20s and 30s, bought and read his work. There was nothing chic about it, no comics culture to counter, which makes it that much more significant and interesting. Whether Karasik intentionally leaves these ads in the stories isn't clear--I gather these were probably the best versions of the story available and the ads were kept in to keep the design of the book consistent.

You Will Die By Your Own Evil Creation's stories lack the weird punch of the ones in I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets. Stardust fails to fling gangsters into the clutches of golden octopi, Fantomah doesn't punish rich white hunters by making them giant green aliens and send them home on planes. The stories, while still drown in broad strokes and saturated colors, aren't as interestingly weird. Kind of like James Tate's Return to the City of White Donkeys.

I recieved Tomas Salamun's Poker in the mail, but I am watching Around the Horn on ESPN

Tony Reali: "You wear ties mailed to you?"
Tim Cowlishaw: "It happens."

Gary Sullivan's Pet Peeves

They are valid.

Process Article Excerise for Whitney Terrell's ENG 537

The bits in a processor works like dots and dashes in Morse code--think of the zeroes as dots and the ones as dashes. I have never accurately described the dots and dashes, even when my Grandfather threatened explained the process. Ones and zeroes string together in pulses to create messages similar to code--they both communicate by rhythm. The messages are relayed to the processor, who notifies the monitor. TURN ON THE MONITOR. STOP. DOWNLOAD KANYE WEST. STOP. SWITCH THE BROWSER FROM EXPLOITED BABYSITTERS.COM TO YAHOO FANTASY FOOTBALL. STOP. THE USER'S MOTHER COMES DOWN THE HALL, SHE CARRIES HIS LAUNDRY AND IF SHE CATCHES THE USER SHE WILL CLOSE THE DOOR QUICKLY, PRAY TO MARY LATER. STOP.

If you live near Oxford Mississippi

Tonight is the Kitty Snacks #2 release party. Check it out.

I should not make fun of other poets.
I have not written much lately.
I pay to much attention to fantasy football.

When in Japan, in 2005, I was compared to a Bulgarian sumo wrestler

Writing is slow and terrible right now. When I teach sometimes I have moments of fear that I will become what I don't want to become one of those white, middle-aged male poets who write narrative poems--descriptive purple prose non-stories with line breaks. I think that this fear is created because I am narrative. At least I will never write about fly-fishing. This comment should not apply to B.H. Fairchild, who I think is excellent.

Working Words went well--I read poems from my project about a suicidal minor league basketball player. I don't know how well they were received. We all bowled afterward, I rolled a strike during a 70. My second game was only 46. By this point I had stop paying attention, drank a lot, and talked to Michael Pritchett in between turns. I played air hockey with a new student from Charlotte, NC--her fiancee works as a mechanical engineer.

"Jesus Christ is the only true literary critic"

I don't how often people wikipedia John Berryman, but in the outside sources at the end of the page someone provided a link to an interview that appeared in the Paris Review after his death in 1972.

As long as I live in the Canada part

So if the U.S. does break up, then Ugly Duckling Presse will start producing cool looking American poet anthologies and books of Dean Young right?

I watched "The Big Bang Theory" last night and still lack a simple knowledge of science

A panda suggested to a white middle-aged couple they eat Wanchai Ferry frozen Chinese food as opposed to going to a buffet. The panda eats sour chicken with them says, "I'm glad we decided to stay in."

Tony Hoagland enters the house and approaches the panda. "You lack the screen presence of Ling-Ling. All pandas who have ever appeared on TV are mere imitations of Ling-Ling--you are a part of the cult of Ling-Ling." Tony Hoagland takes a bite of the panda's sour chicken.

The largest outburst of mass violence in Canadian history involved box lacrosse.

One would susepct the larget outburst of mass violence in Canadian history would involve either Louis Riel or the Banjo Bowl.

In The Big Bang Theory last night ended with the scientist played by the actor better known for his role as David on Rosanne and the blond in the first role that I have ever recognized her in eat Chinese take-out together. They secretly love each other in the show's overall arc. In the episode, the blond goes on a date with the scientist's friend--a guy who works at a comic book shop. The scientist gives the comic book guy bad advice on how to treat the blond, because he is in love with her. The comic book guy goes on the date. The next day the scientist asks the blond how the date went--she stands in her doorway in pink boy shorts and a bathrobe, tells the scientist it's none of your goddamn buisness what goes on between me and the comic book guy. The scientist runs to the comic book store. The comic book guy says the date went well--they shared two bottles of wine and made out in his car and the blond got wet but shouted out the scientist's name, not the comic book guy's name. At the end of the episode, the blond asks the scientist to pass the orange sauce. She says scientist, pass me the orange sauce. He asks her what she called him--she says I called you the scientist. That's right, the scientist says.

Possible titles include "Spring Break Shark Attack"

My friend Amy, she lives in Cincinnati, said I sounded pretty down on KC.

I hope I didn't sound too harsh. The women I know are pretty great--what I mouthed off about are women I don't particularly know very well or ones I don't interact with now. I don't think I would've learned anything about writing if I didn't come here.

Kansas City is still not what I thought it'd be.

My friend Greg Lamer made a chapbook of my work called Gem City/Fountain City for an Echos show I read at in Dayton in May 2008. He plans on making another edition--same poems, all older stuff (poems that appeared in Origami Condom and Feathertale) and a new poem or two, with a new cover. I'll give another update when Greg gets together the proof. It'll be available through this blog and his. It will release under his new Rabbit Catastrophe imprint.

I'm also working on a new chapbook that I sent to a press already and might send to contests.

How to avoid huge ships

From Abe Books' Weird Room.

An Actual Kansas Reading Series

An Actual Kansas Reading series returns Friday, September 18 with Stacy Szymaszek and Megan Kaminski.

Working Words, UMKC's graduate student reading series, also kicks off on Friday, September 18 at the NW corner of the Kansas City Public Library Plaza Branch. This month's Working Words will comprise of an open-mic format, with several graduate students showcasing their work.

Choose wisely.

I have realized that just because a city has multiple major-league sports teams, they are not a major city

I've lived in Kansas City for two years--moved July 2007 to 40th and holes--and the only bar I ever felt comfortable in has been Dave's Stagecoach Inn on Westport Rd., east of Broadway. Their founder died in December 2007. They contested the smoking ban and recently just got a 3 a.m. liquor license to stay open. They might have a photograph of me on their wall soon--my friend Greg takes photographs. Now there's an ordinance proposed by the city to revoke liquor licenses of local bars, and to force people to come downtown to Power and Light if they want to drink past 1 am.

Kansas City has not been what I hoped. This is probably why I have been able to write at the clip I have the last two years, and why I have any publishing credits at all. My personal life has been minimal beyond a small group of friends. There's very little time to dick around, or very little opportunity to dick around--I just stay inside and read. The Kansas side, where the money is and where people don't pay city taxes, controls KC. Most come into town in their Escalades and party at Power and Light then go back across the border. Then, when the city--residents of Jackson County Missouri and KC itself--shoots down proposed taxes for upgrades to Arrowhead or Kaufman, the Kansas-side asks why they do it. Kevin Kietzman yells and almost cries on air. It's also a tough town to get laid in.

People in their mid-30s ask me about Dayton, Ohio--usually about Guided by Voices and The Breeders. They lived in Kansas and decided to move to Dayton in 1996--like my hometown was a proto-Portland, Ore. That, of course, has not lasted. There are moments, like this Pitch article, where I get kind of nostalgic for the rust belt and where I lived. When the economy fucks you, and GM fucks you, you soften up and become a better person in some ways. People in Ohio know that other shit matters--not to get too raw with it. You try to be better to other people and you go from a red state to a blue state. This doesn't happen all the time, but I feel it more when I'm back in Dayton. Also, the women in Dayton, like the men in Dayton, want to get out. They think beyond material availability sometimes. Girls in KC, and Kansas, seem content. They get enough of everything--KC has decent shows come through, has a lit scene based around poetry about cows and jazz (by old people--this does not apply to the people I've met from Lawrence since they're young and also not from KS), has college towns nearby, and bars made out of plastic in a downtown district that looks like the set of Pluto Nash.

There are good things here--like New Letters, and UMKC faculty, and the friends I've made. If I saw him again, I'd probably strangle my old poetry professor from undergrad. It's just not enough. This is not a cool town. No wonder Zach Greinke went insane and no wonder no Major League Baseball free agent in their prime wants to come here.

Pretty Head Football Coaches, Humorous post

810 AM out of Kansas City has a hard-on for new Chiefs coach Todd Haley. On Monday, Kevin Kietzman, a guy whom George Brett is convinced doesn't go to Royals games even though he's supposed to cover them, played NFL edited--corporate recored, edited, and distributed online--audio of Chiefs training and proceeded to say "I love this coach." He then suggested buying season tickets. "You know I'm not a corporate schill, but there are plenty of good season tickets available at good prices."

I'm not convined Todd Haley will be very good because he's too handsome. Lane Kiffin bolted for the University of Tennessee after a 5-15 record in Oakland. Steve Spurrier went 12-20 in Washington even after he lost his looks. Steve Mariucci works as a talking head for NFL network after going 17-31 in Detroit. Mike Nolan looked too good in a suit and went 18-37 with the Niners. My friend Lewis proposed the only one that does not follow this trend is John Guden--but followed that by pointing out that Gruden won a Super Bowl with Tony Dungy's team and against his old football team. We call this the "Jon Gruden exception." Sort of like grandfathering.

Guys who are successful, and won a Super Bowl, seem pretty curmudgeon or have a chip on their shoulder because of a lack of/or only possessing a respectable amount of handsomeness. See Bill Parcells, Geogre Seifert, Chuck Noll, George Halas, etc. Dick Vermeil had to age before he won one with St. Louis. Tom Landry was respectably handsome with a chip on his shoulder. We call this the "Tom Landry factor."

Kietzman seems like the sort of Kansan/midwesterner to deem Tom Flores too "exotic" and "passionate," which puts Flores in the latter camp--his looks unconventionally handsome when compared to the former group. This is the "Tom Flores factor." Kietzman also seems like the type of Kansan/Johnson County guy who spends most of his day worrying about dying.

I wonder if this is true

Because if it is, it's a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Why Your Stadium Sucks

Deadspin's Why Your Stadium Sucks features are always hit and miss but I like their take on Fenway. As someone who grew up watching a team in a multi-purpose stadium, a team that beat the Red Sox in a World Series (and the Yankees a year later), I don't get old baseball stadiums in big markets.

I feel like an asshole every time I google myself.

I'm one of Blog of a Bookslut's highlights of the current issue of NOÖ Journal. Like Michael Schaub says, though, it's all great. I liked Ron Padgett and Jason Bredle's stuff quite a bit.

Today I went to Half Price Books in Overland Park and looked around. They had old copies of Look from the early 1970's and a December 14, 1971 issue had a Doral Cigarettes ad. The best part of the ad was the picture of the new Doral filter with this text:

The new filter delivery system is so complicated
it would take an explanation by a scientist,
but Doral explains it in just two words:
"taste me."

I've been watching HBO's Rome. I'm near the end of the series with a few episodes left. Joni used to wear gladiator sandals, she probably still does, and I thought they were hot. I thought about her sandals in the history section of Half Price Books and about how Mark Antony ordered his assassins to cut Cicero's hands off and nail them to the doors of the forum. They also mounted Cicero's head and Antony's wife stabbed a hack-pin into his tongue over and over again.

I choose to use the pronoun We when talking about my alma mater's basketball team

I graduated from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio later than most--2007 at the age of 26--and I covered Wright State basketball during their 2006-2007 Horizon League championship season for a paper out of Xenia, Ohio. We had a really great point guard named DaShaun Wood who was the reason that we beat Butler and made the NCAA tournament for the first time in 14 years. Pittsburgh stomped us in the first round. The Panthers had current Chicago Bulls back up center Aaron Gray on the roster. Wood plays for Benetton Treviso in Italy's Serie A--one of the top leagues in the world.

I think found his Twitter today.

PTI talked about Shaq's new reality TV show on ABC and its premier Tuesday night. Michael Wilbon talked about how funny and comfortable Shaq was and how in basketball, more than in any other sport, personality and the ability to articulate one's self matter as much as athletic ability--to be successful, one has to cultivate a personality. It's why Larry Bird and Tim Duncan seem like cold fish compared to Magic Johnson and LeBron James. Wood seems to be a part of the latter crowd, telling from the tweets. That may not be a fair assessment--you only get 140 characters to express yourself.

The semester at UMKC starts Monday and I finished my syllabus for 225. I'm using poems in the class for multi-genre projects--ones that use research. I got Albert Goldbarth, Lawrence Giffin, and Joe Wenderoth.

Maybe I could use the same prompt as Playgirl's requirements for their fiction (via Duotrope):

Be creative, wild, and uninhibited in your writings. Write what turns you on, not what you think turns other people on. All submissions considered must be sexually explorative fantasies that empower, enlighten, and entertain. Any fantasies that involve pain, degradation, or extreme negativity will not be published. Fantasies need to be in the first person, and from the female perspective using "I".

That might go too far.

Twitter.

I don't have Twitter for one offs.

People in Olive Garden advertisements smile and laugh so easily.

My friend Greg Lamer's photograph appears with Kim Chinquee's story in NOÖ Journal [10].

NOÖ Journal [10]

NOÖ Journal 10 is up. My poem is also on the right hand side under the publication link.

Yeah.

Really?

The first time I ever got drunk with my dad occured in May at Bw3s in West Carrollton, Ohio. At one point he said:

"I don't give a fuck what you with this country, just give us free healthcare and affordable University education."

This image is for my friend Darrell

Three poems in FRiGG

FRiGG Magazine's Summer 2009 issue is out. I have three poems in it. I have an affection for the first poem--I worked on it a long time and I love the comics of Fletcher Hanks.

You know it's a Jean Luc Godard movie when a couple commits an act of violence at a gas station

Barnes and Noble has a 50% off sale on Criterion DVDs and I bought Pierrot Le Fou for $20 on Friday. My sister would say I had an "Artfag weekend." She is not homophobic. Artfag and scenester interchange in her vocabulary--the biggest difference between the two is that the former is more endearing than the latter and almost comes off like a nickname. What makes my weekend an artfag weekend is that I bought Pierrot Le Fou and Poetry Magazine's Flarf/Conceptual Writing issue.

I am suseptible to Criterion and any movie they put out--I mean I'll give any film a chance. My dad joined the Air Force in 1967. They stationed him in Okinawa for 18 months and he spent a good chunk of time in the local movie theaters--he saw a lot of spaghetti westerns, Japanese gangster films, stuff similar to the Nikkatsu stuff Criterion puts out, and Kurosawa films. He saw Planet of the Apes with Japanese subtitles along the left side of the screen. Ditto The Good, The Bad, The Ugly. I grew up watching Janus Film releases on videotape--Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ugetsu, Ran, Kagemusha Seventh Seal, Virgin Spring, Solaris, Andrei Rubelev, etc. The rift with my father involves French cinema. My dad likes Jean Renoir, Jean Gabin, and Jean-Pierre Melville, but never really got into the French New Wave. He liked Breathless, Godard's first film, but didn't like the narrative experimentation and Brechtian shit in Band of Outsiders, Weekend, and others. These are the things fathers and sons bond around when the father was tortured by basketball players in a rural Indiana high school in the from about 1962-1965. Hence, my personal interests and interests fostered by my relationship with my dad become inverted--sports the guilty pleasure I don't really share with him. My dad tends to mock sports and identifies it with non-intellectualism--like how most dads mock/fail to understand/question the sexuality of their sons for reading Larry Levis and watching 400 Blows.

Jean Paul Belmondo plays Fernando, an upperclass Parisian disenchanted with his life. Anna Karina plays the babysitter, actually a former lover of Fernando's, who convinces him to run away with her. We learn quickly she's a gunrunner chased by gangsters. I will not give a full synopsis of the film--you can watch it for yourself--but I will say I liked it a lot and identified with Fernando/Belmondo and the tendancy for Frenchmen who feign art to destroy themselves. Karina impassions Belmondo, drives him nuts. She also inspires him--on the lamb in South France and living on an island with little money, Belmondo reads copious amounts, fishes and is inspired to write a novel. Karina is bored by books and wants to listen to records. She wants Belmondo, at times, to fuck her too. There's an exchange, I can barely paraphrase, where she complains he thinks too much and she feels too much. They end up destroying each other. I didn't have this complete experience lately, I didn't destroy the person and she didn't destroy me, but I tend to sympathize with French cinema post-relationship. It's pretty awesome.

The issue of Poetry is pretty good too--I liked the flarf stuff, particularly K. Silem Mohammad's, "Poems About Trees" and Nada Gordon's "Unicorn Believers Don't Declare Fatwas." Kenneth Goldsmith's essay Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo gave me a better idea of what flarf consists of. Goldsmith's opening--"Start making sense. Dysfunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building"--resonated greatly with me, even though the author, as Ron Silliman pointed out a while ago, might've built a reputation on the fragment. Robert Stewart, the editor of New Letters, has always emphasized the poet's need to learn syntax and grammar. The need to write prose first before poetry. He refused to let us write in fragments in workshop--only complete sentences, the poem must be grammatically correct. I like this idea. I write, and think, in complete sentences when it comes to writing poetry. I don't write flarf, though, I don't think.

If there's a big hoopla around flarf, what about conceptual writing? I think flarf should get a little more cred because it knows not to take itself seriously. Conceptual writing shouldn't be so serious. When I read Christen Bok I feel like an idiot and I feel like he wants me to think of myself as an idiot. One person in the blogosphere--I found through Silliman's daily lists but can't find now--noted Fitterman's "Directory" was better commentary on consumer culture than Hogeland's didactic "At the Galleria Shopping Mall." I don't like either poem. Hogeland tells us what we already know--shopping can serve as a drug/sport/activity that diverts us from reality--in a way that isn't interesting. Fitterman's poem is just a collection of stores, a play around with a mall directory. It doesn't resonate with me. If saw old mall directories--ones from the structure's peak--I'd get chills of nostalgia, not thinking about consumer culture. It doesn't work either. Where's the work in "Directory"? I don't see it.

I'm still new to this stuff, and I'm trying to hone my poetry. As I've written more, and have studied the process, what makes poetry art, and not play-time, is the work involved. I don't see a lot of work in Hogeland's poem either--it seems too easy--but I don't see a lot of work in "Directory," or Craig Dworkin's "Fact," which consists of the ingredients required to print the poem. I understand the idea--"It’s a self-reflexive, deconstructed meditation on the act of writing and of publishing, with an emphasis on the materiality of language." Other than pouring over science documents for the ingredients of the material, what else is going on? I don't see the process. I guess that's my problem with conceptual writing. Where are the other drafts of "Directory" and "Fact"? Do they exist? I understand the desconstruction of narrative, the need to find a new way to communicate, but it feels like this goes too far in the other direction.

I see what flarf is doing sometimes--what Mohammad and Gordon are doing. It makes more sense. I'll figure this out at some point probably. That's when I'll die.

None of this is meant to be academic.

I miss seeing baseball diamonds on football fields early in the NFL season.

Rejected by McSweeney's: Other potential arcade game nicknames for athletes in wake of the release of Pac-Man Jones' "Make It Rain" stripclub video

Asteroids Rodriguez
Dig Dug Wilson
Joust Reynolds
Mappy O'Neal
Time Pilot Meyers
Q*Bert Rose
Burgertime Thompson
Bump 'n Jump Simpson
1941 Davis
Space Harrier Bouton
Yie Ar Kung Fu Sabo
Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting Sosa
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Matsui
The Typing of the Dead Kosar
Mike Tyson's Punch Out Canseco
Simpsons Arcade Game Richardson
Mario Andretti

by Jason Frisbie, Robert J. Baumann, and I

Kitwana Jones, defensive end of the Edmonton Eskimos, on stopping a purse snatcher

I just see this guy running with, like, two purses
in his hand. And I seen this little old lady,
she’s just running behind him and screaming
for dear life, yelling ‘Help, Help, Help.’
So I was looking and said, ‘Oh man,
is this woman really about to chase this guy?

Nobody was going to stop this guy.
It was just women and old people out.
So it was just like Hey KJ, you gotta do
What you gotta do. I just took the initiative,
jumped out of my car, ran him down
and tackled the guy.

It was mad early in the morning.
I was upset. Fort real,
I didn’t even get a good stretch in
or nothing. I had to chase this guy,
and I’m mad, and I’m like Why you out here
trying to rob old women who are really trying
to make an honest living going to work?
And he just laughed. I gave him another arm
to the head, and kick to the side.

(found poem)

My favorite Sin Fang Bous song

Yeah.

Here there's nothing! D'you remember Dan Forest?He wore a black headband. He had found magic markers,That he sent to Las Vegas, because we'd always talked about that.About the Chevy Convertible we wanted to drive until the tires fell off.ln one of these barns a kid came to us with a kind of shoe cleaning box.
''Shine?''

I still don't know how to use blogs

Daniel Silliman has a really cool post about hyperconsciousness in relation to David Foster Wallace.

This makes me re-think my last post.

Is it still viable to write poems about Delta Burke?

I realize certain cultural commodities must brandish "best if used by" dates.

For instance, Snake Plissken is still viable--as are Marcus Aurelius and Hadrian's wall.

Rain in Kansas City right now, maybe like this all day--happy birthday America

My friend Greg Lamer has a show tonight at First Fridays here in KC. "Species of Spaces" will be from 6-9 pm tonight (7/3) at the Keyhole Gallery at 1903 Wyandotte. He has a chapbook of photographs that will be on sale as well.

Responses from journals have been positive--encouragement to send more work. Hadara says to send out 30-40 a month. Kerry Evans, a recent Southern Illinois-Carbondale MFA graduate, said to me once he tries to have stuff out at 80 places at a time. Work feels slow, I have revised a bit. I daydream I live off royalties sometimes--this causes increased depression and my work doesn't become work, but some bullshit device to drive idleness. Not that this daydreaming is horribly self-involved. Writing poetry is a bit of a sickness, like I have to do it. I think that's accurate of most people I admire. The rain helps with productivity.

I don't know how many people read this stuff.

When I hung out with Rob last weekend he showed me a draft of Chicken Boa: Notes on Skrilla. The format of the anthology will use different paper I think. I liked the poems in there--they read well, like poems do. K. Silem Mohammad's and Mo Burford's especially. I liked Zac German's too.

Everyone is beautiful.

Autobiographies about non-famous people

Feathertale has published "I have not had several women, never flew them on jet planes" on their website. The poem is rough, like how I like to write.

Bill Simmons' podcast has a good two part discussion with Chuck Klostermann. Klostermann constantly constructs arguements through the conversations--my friend Lewis has considered using Klostermann in his composition rhetoric classes as examples of assembling a thesis.

You can search for an older Simmons/Klostermann podcast about print culture and the NCAA tournament. Also good stuff.

I sound artifical right now I think.

Sorry.

Quick shots, like how twitter works

I'll be in Dayton twice in less than two months. There is a flarf issue of Poetry.

Inspector vs. Evader is pretty good--Rob let me borrow it while I was in Lawrence this weekend.

Bon Jovi sang a song in Farsi.

The effects of the revolution maybe greatly diminished.

That's it for now.

I thought everything might be okay but then I saw ductape on the car

The prose poem draft's title is a line by Mark McKee from his poem "Jalopy Bellicose" from his chapbook What Apocalypse?

NOÖ Journal has their lineup posted for issue [10]. My poem "Junichiro Koizumi Doesn't Care About White People" will appear in that issue. Also, my friend Greg Lamer (that's his real last name, that's how you say it too) has a photograph in the magazine.

I met Robert Olen Bulter today. He's a very nice guy.

Sometimes we are fantasm vendors, a prose poem draft

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) allowed ghosts inside him--this achieved automatic writing. If I lived and died before Yeats and he opened his mouth, waived his hands and said "come in, incantations, come in," I'd jump down his throat. Then I'd make William Butler Yeats draw penises all over the walls of his house and if he sat down with his pen and paper--or typewriter, however famous Irish writers write things--I'd still taunt him. "This is no country for old penises. The young/In one another's arms, birds in the penises". Napoleon (1769-1821) and former National League outfielder Mike King Kelly (1857-1894) would see what's going on. "I'm fucking with Billy, you guys should join in." It would be all right to make William Butler Yeats draw penises, mock the struggle for Irish independence, mock the convergence of art and death, until the ghost of my father would get involved. My father would wonder why I reverted to dick jokes in this prose poem. I don't have anything, to write about, I'd say. It's been a tough two weeks. He'd ask about King Kelly. I'd explain he was the first $10,000 baseball player and the first to be paid by an owner for his face and image, the first licensing deal in history.

My father and I are alive now though.

Calling this post No Country for Old Men may cause confusion. This is not about the movie or book. Sort of about Yeats, though.

I've had an ear infection in my right ear since last Monday. On Tuesday, I took 6 ibuprofen in less than 24 hours--the box says that's the maximum you should take--and then I drank sake and beer with Joni that night. We walked a little bit and I felt high, like I existed in dream sequences from Save By the Bell. The little pink border surrounded by the scene. I guess with ibuprofen and alcohol your stomach lining can bleed.

Me and Joni ate at Blue Koi on 39th street. That's were we had the sake. We walked north, for a little bit into the neighborhood then came back to 39th and we crossed state line toward KU Med. I had the beer at Jaywalkers on their patio. She said she went out with her roommates last Saturday to a bar in Overland Park called Kite's to dance. Kite's had a UFC match on and the bar was packed with "duders." Joni's word for guys with buzz cuts and polo shirts. They all left after the fight. I said I didn't get MMA. She said it's kind of interesting, more interesting than boxing, which is legit since the only boxers people talk about haven't been relevant for 15-20 years (Mike Tyson, Evander Hollyfield, Ali, etc).

I went to the health center on Wednesday about my ear. They gave me ear drops and pills. The nurse practitioner thought I might have hyper-tension--my blood pressure was 130/90, then 142/90. She thought it might be from the pain in my ear. But it could be hyper-tension.

Writing has been tough. I've written about dog-men with giant scrotums and professional basketball in Turkey. It's been mostly miss with me. Though I have gotten positive responses from places on work that's currently out.

I only found Ron Silliman's blog recently--I know of the name, but it wasn't until I met Robert Baumann that I started looking at the blog. I always feel pretty lower-middle-class when it comes to poetic theory. That might be because of my background (only the third person in family history with a college degree, dad works as a librarian, in student loan debt up to my ass). During a night with people from Mizzou's program, at their favorite bar, I made a joke about how the hand dryer looked like the sex machine Sandra Bullock and Sylvester Stallone use in Demolition Man. The dryer consisted of white plastic and had a blue light that flicked on when I put my hands in the machine.

Sorry, this is all to show my lack of confidence when talking about poetics.

Silliman's blog has links to conversations about accessibility in poetry. How do we open this stuff up to people outside of, or without access to, colleges and small press scenes. Blogs kind of function like that right now I think.

I read John Gallaher's post on accessibility. At first, I didn't like what he was saying. To identify being "accessible" with "crass commercialism." The second time around, as I read, I liked what he was getting at. We need to be "clear." Clear needs to be the term. This allows difficult work to be difficult, and doesn't create an economic term, or marketing "buzz-words" for poetry.

Bob Stewart always pushes for clearness and conciseness in writing poety. We need to learn how to write a sentence before we break it all down. Hadara says the same thing. I think a lot of the poetry I don't like doesn't think about that. The people who I don't like write guys like B.H. Fairchild off as conservative or boring (Gallaher does not). I don't know what poetry needs to be. I know if it isn't "clear" to me, it seems like a fucking put on.

There does, however, needs to be greater access to contemporary poetry, or the development of poems that could hit with a wider audience quicker. Get people to stop thinking of Shelley, Woodsworth, or Yeats and they rolling their eyes into the back of their head (no offense to the dead guys). I'm thinking of a poetry equivlent of the French New Wave. Or a movement outside of the academy. This going on right now, though, with poetry blogs and small press. The breakdown of old media meaning more people have access to audiences. Yeah.

I will say this about Gallaher's blogpost. I don't care about jazz, and I don't know why one brings jazz up. I think it's because I'm 28 years old and jazz seems old to me. Also I think it's funny when other white people try to talk about jazz to black people to make themselves seem cool. I probably do this with the NBA subconsciously. The NBA is cooler than jazz right now, though. I also like to think my love is genuine. I guess people who love jazz think the same thing.

I don't know what I'm talking about.

This could also count as a tweet if I tweeted

My friend Aaron djs at the premier gentleman's club in Dayton, Ohio. He made a Dylan Thomas reference last night I guess:

Members, last time I checked it was Sunday. I know, I know. The weekend is almost over but do not go gently into that good night. Rage, Rage against the dying of the light by getting two fully nude performances for the price of one.

I don't really read Dylan Thomas. I probably should. I still think that's funny.

You have left footprints on the internet

My parent's Dell fried at the hands of a hacker a couple of years ago. There is no Microsoft Word on this computer anymore--the computer wants to boot CD if I open a Word file. I have not written much and this was a terrible excuse.

When I'm bored, and have no access to word processing, I play the Wikipedia game. I call it the Wikipedia game. I read entries and click on links to other topics. For instance, I read about Pompeii yesterday and the secret rooms of the Naples Museum--the erotic artwork they found in the city. People fucking in various positions, Priapus with a giant penis.

Under the "rediscovery" section of the Pompeii Wikipedia page there's a story about people in the 16th, 18th, and 19th centuries burying or hiding the erotic art of Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum--one is a statue of Venus called Venus Kallipygos--"Venus of the Beautiful Buttocks." On that particular page there's a story about the buttocks thing:

"The people of those days were so attached to their sensual pleasures that they even went so far as to dedicate a temple to Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks, for the following reason. Once upon a time a farmer had two beautiful daughters. One day these girls, getting into a dispute as to which one had a more beautiful backside, went out onto the public street and by chance a young man was passing by, the son of a rich old man. They showed themselves to him, and when he saw them he voted in favor of the older girl. And in fact, falling in love with her, when he got back to town, he took to his bed and told his younger brother everything that had happened. And the younger brother also went to the country and saw the girls, and he fell in love with the other daughter. And so when the boys' father tried to get them to marry someone of the upper classes, he couldn't persuade his sons, and so he brought the girls in from the country, with their father's permission, and married them to his sons. And so these girls were called fair-buttocked by the citizens, as Cercidas of Megalopolis says in his Iambic Verses: "There was a pair of beautiful-buttocked girls in Syracuse." And so these girls, when they got wealthy and famous, founded a temple of Aphrodite and called the goddess the Fair-buttocked, as Archelaus of Chersonesus tells us in his Iambic Verses."

Hyperlinks in the text exist on the page.

My friend Brandon graduated from the Center of Cartoon Studies in Vermont this month. He has no real internet presence. His work can be found here and here and in a few other places if you google him. I sent him a link to the story and wrote an email about how it reminded me of a classic Hollywood film from 30's. Sans the buttocks. I say that this sounds like a film starring Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins and directed by Preston Sturges, or maybe King Vidor, because the story is about beautiful farm girls and rich city boys falling in love. "You should draw a story based on this, set it in Syracuse, Indiana," I wrote him.

Brandon hasn't read the story yet, but we talked about basketball some--like how the Cavaliers have melted down. How getting caught watching NBA D-League webcasts by other artists is worst than getting caught watching porn. Brandon's theory no one likes the NBA is that kids who draw/write/perform etc. don't appreciate role players like Anthony Johnson or Daniel Gibson. We all want to think we are auteurs. I agree with him, but I still fantasize my work sells in Brazil and Australia.

I wonder how many rejections I have received from journals since I have been in Dayton. My friend Robin has keys to my place, so she can water the plant. I hope she has. I don't think she checks my mail. I didn't ask her to do that anyway.

Jason and disagreed that the story re-telling of the Venus with the fair buttocks should take place in Indiana. "There's a Syracuse, New York, already." I said they don't get it, but I was drunk.

Joni is in Ireland with her friend Erica.

Journals

Kitty Snacks debuted their cover for issue #2. My poem "Desk Hours" was recently accepted and may appear in that issue or issue 3.

Abraham Lincoln #4 has been out for a couple months but I got my copy earlier in the week. K. Silem Mohammad read some cool work at a Fence-sponsored reading during AWP. He took the letters of a few Shakespeare sonnets and re-arranged them to make distinctly new pieces. They were excellent and stood out to me from the reading. I liked the work by Mel Nichols, Sharon Mesmer, and Elizabeth Bachinsky best.

Things to do in Dayton when you are not dead, but feel somewhat melancholy

I will return to my hometown of Dayton, Ohio on May 19 and will visit until June 2. It maybe ambitious, but I will try to read three books during my trip:

The Public Burning Robert Coover
Yiddish Policemen's Union Michael Chabon
The Novel: A Poem Paul Hoover

Probably what will happen will be I am going to get drunk every night at Clancy's and watch playoff basketball and Hockey.

Hoover's name came up when I met C.D. Wright in March. She also suggested John Weiners, Jack Spicer, John Yau, and a few others. The University library only had Weiners and Hoover. I checked out Weiners Selected Poems, from Black Sparrow, and Hoover's aforementioned book. I also got two books by Stephen Dunn, who Hadara Bar-Nadav has mentioned in class, and Robert Pinsky's An Explanation for America, because I should've bought the $4.48 copy at the Westport Half Price Books and failed to do so.

Poetry Midwest 23

My poem "Golden Baby" appears in the new issue of Poetry Midwest. Here. Stuff looks good in it.

Hawks-Heat game 6 tonight. I like Atlanta sort of. I like Joe Johnson, Josh Smith, and Al Horford. I want Cleveland to gut them still, though. My favorite time of the year is the NBA playoffs--it's spring time and my birthday (5/13). Lebron carries us all into competitive baseball.

I will use the line "to create the two most enduring battle axes in television history" one day. I'm not sure what the context would be just yet.

I share my birthday with Bea Arthur and I swear to God I am only 27 years old. My sister is probably not happy right now.

Feathertale has a new poem, or an old poem, in this month's Egregious News Letter. I had a poem in the previous newsletter as well and have another poem forthcoming on the site. I am a hit in Canada.

Things, right now, seem all right. I always wait for a Kimera, or the ghost of Steve McQueen, to come shut her all down when things go well.

I am not a Kansas City native, but that's fine.

AHHHHHH

I need to find new poets to read.

Ha-Ha

Michael Prichett asked me if I was "twittering" yesterday. I don't exactly know what that means.

You don't have to twitter, though, to check this shit out.

When I was bored during winter in Ohio, I watched Cavs games on FSN. When I'm bored during winter in Missouri, I watch Blues games on FSN.

Now the Blues are in the playoffs.

Hockey playoff TV schedule.

My Grandpa Lee loved St. Louis--he lived part of his childhood in the Ozarks before his father moved the family to Winchester, Indiana during the depression. He loved the Cardinals and drove to Cincinnati to see the Cards play the Reds in the 50's and 60's. He loved the gashouse gang. He didn't care about hockey.

That's all I got.

I read submissions at New Letters today--part of my graduate student duties, which I haven't been on top of the last six weeks. One person wrote in her bio:

When I was 16, I was published in the New Yorker.

I'm stealing that line for something.

Easter in Cowtown sucks

It's raining and 45 degrees, maybe colder. One Easter back in Ohio, maybe in 1997, we walked out of the vestibule at Our Lady of Good Hope into snow. My mom credited it to a work of God.

I'm tired and have no options for today.

We read in the Green Chapel at Mizzou Friday. It went well, I think, but I need to work on my endings. I tweaked one poem--I gave Josephine, this girl in some of my poems, Joni's legs. Joni is a real person.

The only other time I've been to Columbia was 2007 for a Mizzou-Iowa State game with my friend Zac, his uncle, and aunt (she was referred to as "my uncle's wife," I think because the marriage was recent). The tickets were split--two in the alumni section, two in the student section. We sat with alumni. One guy asked "what year are you?" I said, "I've never been here." Zac said "'05." The guy said "'68." I must've been safe. Tigers won 52-28 or some such score. Gary Pinkel has pretty offenses, ugly defenses.

Both times have been fine.

This weather is getting to me.

Lewis just told me the Chiefs signed Zach Thomas.

I should talk more about poetry

My hometown of Dayton, Ohio, is dying. The AC-Delco plant in Moraine shuttered in December and CNN ran a special report on the city. They compared us to Flint, Michigan circa 1989.

This post is mostly to say Dayton's hockey team will fold after 18 years. I wanted to write more about that, but lost interest.

Instead, because everybody loves Charles Bukowski and motherfucking babies:



I bought my friend Darrell's kid this baby t-shirt. It says BUKOWSKI 1920-1994: "Sometimes You Just Have to Pee in the Sink."

I'll be reading in Columbia, MO Friday, 4/10 with Piper Abernathy, Katie Clark, and Nicole Higgins.

That's all I got right now.

All the young dudes carry the news

My friend Jason Frisbie, the subject of my friend Aaron's fiction, came into town. What Aaron writes about Jason is very accurate. Right now he's on the floor, filled with Pepto.

Thieves Jargon published my poem "Romantic Assault" in their latest issue.

I need to sound more humble in my bio.

I'm taking an antebellum crime fiction class--I think I've mentioned this before. We've been reading a lot of work by George Thompson, whose stuff has been termed "porno-gothic." You can find his stuff at Wright American Fiction. I highly recommend Gay Girls of New York and Catherine and Clara, or The Double Suicide.

My favorite moment from the franchise was when Reggie Miller told Spike Lee to sit his ass down

this was also one of my grandpa Lee's favorite Pacers moments.

I grew up in Dayton, Ohio--I seem to remind everybody who knows me in KC to the point of clear annoyance--but I was a Pacers fan as a kid. My Grandpa live in Parker City, IN, and was a basketball nut. We watched a lot of Pacers games in the mid to late 90's and that weird period earlier in the decade when they should've been winning the East every year--those teams with Reggie, Jermaine O'Neal, Ron Artest, Jeff Foster, Johnathan Bender (to a lesser degree certainly--the guy must've been a Yugo since he broke down so much), Jaylen Rose, Austin Croshure, and Brad Miller (pre-Sacramento Kings). A rare balance of white and black talent (rare the state of Indiana has a balance of anything). Grandpa Lee died in May 2007, at the end of a disastrous season and an eight player deal that fucked the team.

I've found myself sort of following the Cavs much more--mostly because of LeBron and close friends from Cleveland who deserve a sports championship. Plus the Cavs are awesome.

Now just as this team looks like a young, pretty good, squad under the salary cap comes word that they're bleeding money and may have to relocate if the Simon Brothers don't get out of paying $10 million a year in operating costs of Conseco. That's what I've gathered.

Things like this have happened before. My Uncle Doug told me about how, in 1977, after the Pacers' first year in the NBA, they ran a telethon on channel 4 to save the team--they sold 8,000 tickets that year.

I mentioned this all to my friend Greg and he said "Bring them to Kansas City." No man. I don't want that to happen. They'd have some generic name, Lightning, and gay uniforms. Also, I don't know if I can trust the KC sports market. The Royals and Chiefs appear

I do like OKC's unis, and that team, but it's weird seeing that club on the floor.

Every year, UMKC brings a guest faculty member coming for a week in March--they alternate by genre every year. Last year Edward P. Jones (fiction) visited and this year C.D. Wright came. On Tuesday she gave a reading, Wednesday she came out to drink coffee with us, and Thursday I was one of a few students to meet with her individually.

Wright said the best poetry out there is online and recommended a bunch of writers I should check out. She also mentioned Ugly Ducking Presse. I ordered a couple of books--Lawrence Griffin's Get the Fuck Back into that Burning Plane, a collection of Slovene writers, and issue #17 of 6x6.

She helped a lot.

That's all I got right now.

Top City Poetry Series

I'll be reading this Saturday, March 7, in Topeka with Piper Abernathy, Katie Clark, and Tim Volpert as part of the Top City Poetry series put together by Dennis Etzel. Info can be found here. Directions from KC/Lawerence or Manhattan.

Tim Volpert's blog is here.

An Actual Kansas Reading Series features Magdalena Zurawski, Aaron Kunin, and CA Conrad this Friday, March 6. You can find more info here.

Yeah, that's all I got.

Yummy Phase

I read the first 50 pages of Bob Woodward's Wired today--I found a copy at Half-Price books in Westport. Yeah. I like Belushi a lot and tried to write elegies for him, which have failed.

When Jeff and the Mizzou people were here last Friday I talked to him about how I was in my "yummy phase" with poetry--at least in terms of subject matter. Jeff's work seems much more sophisticated in structure, language, and content--what he read last Friday dealt with his brother's suicide. I write a lot about movies I like and blonds I want next to me in bed.

When Adam Carolla was on Loveline he'd talk about guys going through a "yummy phase" when they're young--they like to eat candy, they drink excess amounts of soda. They like sweet things. Then, at some point in one's twenties, a guy gets out of his yummy phase and starts to like complex flavored things--cigars, brandy, whiskey, even beer. Their tastes in women change. It's a sophistication of sorts.

Bukowski is, to a certain degree, kind of yummy phase. So's Russell Edson and James Tate. Larry Levis and John Berryman less so. Maybe I've got it all wrong. Sometimes I wonder if my stuff is particularly immature. Maybe it's just raw.

Shit, I don't know.

Update: Canada is awesome because of universal healthcare and hockey, other things.

Feathertale, out of Canada, has the first of a couple of poems in this month's Egregious Newsletter. It's cool to be accepted in the Great White North.

Friend and fellow UMKC grad student Zac Gall has a blog--he's had a blog for a while, longer than I have. It's been added to the things you should try out. Over there, to the right.

UMKC hosted a group of current and former PhD students from Mizzou. I met Jeff Pethybridge. His work is excellent and he bought me breakfast on Saturday.

I feel burned out as of late. When this happens I read Bukowski, which I probably shouldn't read since he's bad for me. I read him for energy, but not for craft, and only his poetry and collected letters.

My roommate Robin's sister, Katie, got me a nice Buk haul from Half Price Books. I, at the very least, recommend Shakespeare Never Did This. Sometimes I dream my work is popular in Europe. Yesterday I ate at Golden Wraps with Joni and I told her about the book, how I daydream I am popular in Europe. First I described the book:

"This guy photographs Bukowski with his girlfriend all over Germany."
"Yeah? Is this the same girlfriend he kicked off the couch?"
"Yeah, but this is from a happier time--two years before all that. I daydream that I'm popular in Europe sometimes."
"And then you can have a book called Bukowski Never Did This."
"Yeah and maybe I can kick you off the couch."
"Huh?"
"Sorry, I didn't mean that. I'd never kick you off the couch."

I'd never kick her off the couch.

Tired, avoiding work. Thinking of Jet Airplanes

I feel bad about my last post.

AWP was wild and exhausting. I spent most of my time at the book fair and got a big haul of journals. My favorite stuff so far is the recent issue of Court Green, the dossier: Letters, and Sam Pink's I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT. I have other shit I haven't looked at, like the first issue of No Colony.

I stayed in the Essex Inn with my friend Lewis--next door to the Hilton. I checked my email once and saw that Ben Tanzer has my poem up at This Zine Will Change Your Life.

I'm a little sick and need to work on my stuff.

A bit down

I wrote a poem were Larry Levis is a werewolf and lives in the bayou. He wonders what I'm doing there, in the Bayou, and decides to drive me back home where we I invite him to a bar. I then think about Josephine, this woman that's mostly unattainable and has shown up in all of my poems. This sounds more interesting than my most recent draft probably. I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I don't know what the hell I'm doing at all.

The weather is like spring in KC right now--rainy, kind of warm. I saw lightning earlier.

Shit dawg, Part 2

Front Porch 9 is live.

I got "A New Map of America" in the mail from The Cupboard. I started reading it last night--it's pretty solid.

Yeah.

Oh

I'll be at AWP. I'll be hanging around the New Letters desk and probably have to wear a name tag.

Quaker City

I have to read 243 pages of Quaker City by Wednesday. I've made progress but have taken a break and added a graphic to the top of the page (thanks to my sister, Miriam, who made it)--Jean Paul Belmondo from Pierrot Le Fou. I got depressed about my writing this weekend and tried to write about the final scene. Video Mania, this great video store in Westport, does not have Pierrot Le Fou on their Criterion wall. Unless it's rented out every time I go.

Front Porch sent me a proof of my poem "Roy Rodgers Never Laughed at Domestic Violence." It'll appear in Front Porch 9, which looks great and has poems from Sherman Alexie and Christopher DeWeese.

Thanks to Miriam, my sister, for the graphic.

I have not seen all of Pierrot Le Fou. Just that scene.

I don't know what to do with this thing. Or thang.

quote of the day

"The future is so bright I have to wear a strap-on dildo."

I'm all about him

I did not see the inauguration. I worked on campus and the network bogged down under lots of young girls trying to watch the speech. My friend Joni and I ate at a bar in Brookside, a nice neighborhood south of campus. Priest Holmes lives there, or did. My friend Zac saw him in 2007 at the Constantino's Price Chopper a month after his failed comeback. I saw some of the coverage at the bar. Obama waived his hand behind what looked like bullet proof glass--kind of like the same glass Pope John Paul II had in front of him at times. I guess you do that for the good people.

Google chat with Jason:

Jason: I watched it with David Bringhurst and a room full of strangers. It was elating and important to witness here. People were either seriously engaged or absorbed in their own worlds. Some of those passer-bys were obnoxious

4:03 PM me: yeah?

4:05 PM Jason: yeah. I mean, these white girls in tight fitting jeans and carrying sorority bags crept through the are to talk to the people at the desk (this was in University Hall's guidance offices common room) and they woudl just resort to their text messages once they were done.

4:06 PM It was weird hearing this white girl whisper "let's get out of here" to her male companion, with a room full of black students watching this historic and signifcant moment.

some people are embarrisingly selfish

4:07 PM me: I guess so

4:08 PM Jason: I know you don't care, man.

what've you been up to?

me: hey

sorry

Jason: it's fine. what've you been doing today

me: on campus all day

4:09 PM sorry I've been in my own hole

I sat in on a film class that grade for

we watched "Public Enemy"

and I had to do an APA workshop for a Nursing class

sorry

I'm glad Obama is in

I voted for the guy

4:10 PM I'm all for WPA projects and big gov't

its hard to get excited about politics

4:11 PM Jason: i know. I just thought people's responses were weird to this historic event.

4:12 PM *Surprise*: rich white kids don't give a shit about the first black president

4:13 PM me: yeah

Jason: it's bizarre what people focus or don't focus on. I wonder what the difference is, sometimes.

Jason and I talked a little bit about the scenario of Obama as President kind of reminding me of something out of a Vonnegut novel--especially the bulletproof glass part. I don't know.

How can anyone get so excited about anything. I don't know, I can't get that excited.

I started reading Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing in Odessa. He gets the line down sometimes and he has his moments, but he's not messy enough. And he plays the foreigner card a bit too much. That's what it feels like so far.

We'll see. I'm terrible.

Friends and Family

James Brubaker has a pamphlet, A New Map of America, now available from The Cupboard. He is not 61 years old but, in fact, much younger. My dad, on the other hand, is 61 years old.

I have had a series of dreams were I yell at family members. On Saturday I yelled at my sister for never moving out of the house and for not going to art school. We stood around in a delipadated car lot--the bulding was all glass and rotting. The lot was vacant.

Last night I yelled at my Aunt Elisa and my mother. They bought my Grandfather's house from him and wanted me to live their with my Aunt. I said, "I'm not 20 years old and scatterbrained anymore. I'm almost 28."

My Grandfather was not in the dream, but I could hear him in the laundry room.

Yeah.

Shit dawg

I'll be reading with Piper Abernathy and Katie Clark in Topeka on March 7th as part of the Top City Poetry Reading Series. Piper recently had poems published at Word Riot

One of my poems will be in Mitzvah's Chicken Boa: Notes on Skrilla you can find more info, including other poets who'll be featured, here. The poem is based on my friend Marc Keinath. He has a radio show Thursday nights 10pm-midnight (eastern) on WWSU FM 106.9 in Dayton, Ohio. He occaisonally live blogs during his show .

Nothing ever happens on Fridays

I found Sam Pink and his chapbook Yum Yum I Can"t Wait to Die in a book review at NOÖ Journal. Then I found his blog. I tried to get a free copy, he offered free copies as of October 11, but he had none left. He wrote back to me quick, though, and was quite nice. Then I found this. It's pretty great.

I've ate Pop-tarts, Combos, Salsitas (I think it's a regional thing), Taco Bell, and Jack's brand Mexican pizza. I walked for a long time with my roommate Robin up 39th near State Line and back down to Westport then took a nap when I should've went to hear William Trowbridge read.

Miriam: "Every Asian in this movie has a white woman"

I have written only a few drafts in the past month. I keep a notebook with daily entries--not like a diary, I write the date down (1/4 for instance) then work on a draft of something. On 12/22 I tried to write a poem about actor Powers Booth. My sister loves movies, particularly action movies from the 1980's, and I watched Rapid Fire with her. Booth plays Mace Ryan, this hard nosed Chicago cop who befriends Jake Lo, played by Brandon Lee's character, an art student who witnesses a mob hit. They have a love-hate/father-son relationship that parallels Lo's relationship with his father. Lo's father was a CIA operative who died during Tienanmen Square. Booth runs around the movie with a shotgun and yells "son of a bitch" a lot. He works out of a bowling alley too, which is irrelevant I guess.

Anyway I thought about Powers Booth and this line from Sudden Death, where he threatens Van Damme's daughter in the film. She's one of the people Booth and the terrorists hold hostage. "My daddy is a fireman and he's going to come and save us," she says, more or less. He says back to her, more or less, "I'm going to put spiders in your mouth little girl."

I told Miriam, my sister, that I liked that line a lot and wished Mace Ryan would same something similar in Rapid Fire. He does not, just says "son of a bitch." The villains Jake Lo and him take on are Heroine dealers from Hong Kong. All the villains have blonds with big bright hair as opposed to Asian girls--no Joan Chens or anything.

Anyway, I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

Nexus submissions

Nexus, the literary magazine I was assistant editor for in my undergrad at Wright State University, has been resurrected as an online publication. They are looking for submissions. They pay too.

Also Bama just scored to get back into the Sugar Bowl--it's now 21-17, Utah still leading.

Trial Run

I'm originally from Dayton, Ohio, and I've lived in Kansas City since July of 2007. I came out here to start the graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City at the same time my buddy Brandon Elston, sometimes he goes by the pen name Bernie Kosar, left for The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction Vermont.

I have seen my friend twice since moving here--both times around Christmas. We hang out either in his parent's basement or at Clancy's, a bar that looks a bit like a VFW hall. If we're in the basement we sometimes drink 40s (they're illegal in Missouri and Vermont) and talk about artistic processes. I talk about trying to write and he talks about trying to draw and write. Last time I saw him, this past Christmas Eve, he talked about the increased pressure for self-promotion. As of this time he has no electronic presence. Neither does Bernie Kosar. I've thought about this too--I met a couple of people in KU's MFA program who are doing exciting things (poetry readings, chapbook publishing, etc), and have blogs. Hence, this post is to give a reason for why I've started this. I'll see if I can keep it up.

Also this post is to tell people I know that the winter issue of the Portland Review is out with two of my poems. Both seem rough now that I've read them. I want to edit them again. There's good stuff in there too, from other people, and the issue looks great despite typos. You can order it through Powell's Books if you don't live in Portland, Oregon.

When Brandon and I go to Clancy's we don't talk about anything other than the NBA.