what I bought at AWP part 1

Billie The Bull by xTx // a Nephew of Mud Luscious Press (2012)

One of the (many) things I love about xTx is her knack for making small things so big. In perfect (67-page) Nephew form, she scalds continents, history, and embarks on a gruesome, anti-Hemingway dissection of bull fighting while recounting the absurd and beautifully rendered tragedy of an ever-expanding heroine. This one sinks roots, whether you want it to or not. Also xTx signed my book at the Dzanc/MLP table which was uplifting.

How Music Works by David Byrne // McSweeney’s (2012)

Some of the best stuff in this sometimes rambling and textbook-y ode to the musical process – recording it, making it, embellishing its history, looking good playing it – are the dozens of photographs both general and Talking-Heads related (puffy suit from Stop Making Sense). The cover feels like a Wendy’s booth, sadly minus the honey mustard residue. Byrne can write, but I’d rather listen to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts than know what drum machine Brian Eno used in the fifth minute of the third track. Maybe I’m selfish.

The Rumpus ‘Write Like A Motherfucker’ mug

At $10 this was a great purchase, a vessel equally suited for Emergen-C and Templeton Rye, both of which are in moderate-to-more-than-moderate rotation while stressing about not writing like a motherfucker or after the desire to write like a motherfucker has passed for the evening (or noon-ish). Thanks Rumpus!

Render / An Apocalypse by Rebecca Gayle Howell // Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2013)

If you’re going to go bleak, you’d better go all out and this book wants to stab you not just to see what it feels like but until you’re drained. Some of the most tense and stripped verse I can remember. I’m not sure what “truth” means but as I read these pastoral nightmares that inevitably involve animal slaughter the word scrolls through my brain again and again like a stock ticker on meth while I try not to flinch. “Let the black hard rock of want / tear the skin of your prized intestines / Squeal Squeal for more.”

This Semi-Perfect Universe by William Todd Seabrook // A Nephew of Mud Luscious Press (2012)

Not really into numerology but I’m into Nephews and this one is a good one. The number 100 is the culprit here and boy does it get messy. Quirk-laden factoids (“100 is a figment of our imaginations. It exists as much as a 100-key piano or a Buddhist dog.”; “In 1384 the number 100 disappeared for a month.”) transcend, tweak, rejoice, and obliterate, and make us want to throw another round of TP on the trees in front of that snarky 7^th grade algebra teacher with all his x and y and whatnot and hop on the next 100-car bus to one of the 243 as-yet-undiscovered universes – because after all, we can only perceive 100 of them. 27 pages I don’t want to take back.

Italian sausage-and-pepper sandwich and soggy ass fries by Jose the “chef”

The pleasant irony of eating something that tastes like tailgating amidst thousands of people in unisex jeans who used to skip gym class to cut themselves was great. Until I had to sprint out of the Don DeLillo reading two hours later in utter fear for my undergarments. Plus it was like 9 bucks.

something you won't like

McDonald's Grilled Onion Cheddar at McSweeney's Internet Tendency. 

Summary: get a McGangbang instead.

some things you might like

Reviews of Sam Pink and Scott McClanahan are up at Carbon-Based Lifeform Blues and The Lit Pub.

thanks, steve jobs

A story, Last Girlfriend, that originally appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn last year (and is part of my collection-in-progress, RETREAT), is in this week's issue of Paragraph Shorts, which is as far as I can tell is sort of a literary compiler of new and older stories from across the internet that pairs them with images and videos and is only available as an iPad app. I'm in this week's issue with people like Miranda July, Sam Lipsyte and Kurt Vonnegut. I don't have an iPad but if I did I would look at it.

are you down with the zest?

Living the LUNA Life at The Mugwump Corporation

I've never been to Coney Island

This is who I am. Someone scared. Afraid to fail. But at what? What have I done besides sit in my room feeling sorry and sick for no reason other than I like the comfort in sadness. This is stupid. I am 28. I have done some things but not enough. I am afraid of female inquiry. Why? Because I am not proud of myself, of what I have become in my twenties, what I haven’t become. And because I am unable to lie about this, in every question asked of me, I reflect the dirt I am too weak to scrub. I push away anyone and everyone who shows the smallest bit of interest. I am out of shape and unhealthy. Drinking would be a happy possibility if I was only able to have confidence around people and emote without fear of whiplash. To not care about their ‘successes,’ their ability to adapt to a world that in many cases seems horrific and gilded, but to care about them in a deeper way. To see if they are real enough to reciprocate this realness back. Marijuana is a crutch and the great amplifier. I have a novel with 5-star reviews on Amazon, which is nice, but I still find ways to tear down any accomplishment. Nothing is enough. I have done nothing else substantially writing-wise and need to start now. But I feel like I need to have ‘moments,’ too. I need to get out of my apartment. I have lived in New York for 5.5 years and done the same shit 99.5 percent of the time. I need to howl in the night of new neighborhoods and new possibilities. I need to see live music. I’ve never been to Coney Island. I make to-do lists for the sake of making to-do lists. My tweets are the most interesting things about me. I can’t remember the last time I ate at a nice restaurant when it wasn’t with my parents. I can’t remember the last time I felt real sexual intimacy. I long for what I despise in others. I should have been a bartender years ago, and that’s a whole other set of fears that are too disgusting to mention right now. I need to focus, focus, focus. What do I want? I want to finish the two books I’ve started this year and publish essays and things in the journals I’ve posted to my wall of my room. Next year, I want to read ~150 books and have articles published in bigger journals. That is the bare minimum. At 30 I will reconvene and take note of the situation. Maybe I’ll teach. Maybe I’ll help people. I want to help people. I need to save money. I need to find some way to make money that doesn’t involve me working at night. Or I need to fully immerse myself in the service industry and its colorful brand of chicanery. Either way, I need to have $--,--- in the bank by 2014 to make me feel like I have at least a little cushion. I need to stop taking cabs. I need to stop eating shitty food, especially the after-work binges. McDonald’s once a month is OK. Softball training starts now because who doesn’t want the Mel’s Burger Bashers to be champions? I need to take pictures of used condoms in natural settings with my 8-megapixel phone camera and write prose poems from those condoms’ perspectives. I need to find a better font than Perpetua. I need to make new friends and get in touch with old friends who can still be good friends. I need people. Everything is only as hard as I make it, which is stupid hard. That goes for writing, especially. I need to meet writers. To hang out with writers, to break apart my conception of being a worthless piece of shit to see if I really am a worthless piece of shit. I need to try. But I need to want to try, and wanting requires a desired direction, a sense of purpose. My apartment and especially my room needs a little more pimping out for it to really not suck. I need conducive workplace environments. I need to say hi to my neighbors. I need to relax and smile at children. I need to enjoy the subway. More immediately I need to get in the gym because my life does depend on it and sticking to a workout regimen for more than ~2 weeks is the most sure-fire way to curb self-hatred. I’m going to do a triathlon this summer whether I’m ready or not, and I hope I am. I need to do a reading of a story I wrote that I actually like. I need to find out what I actually like. Where do I want to travel? San Francisco, Iceland, and Miami all seem like short-term, viable options. I’m on pace to read 120 books this year which is probably what I’m most excited about. Paying loans sucks but is another reason not to take cabs. I am not dying. I want to be your friend. I want to find out about good music I’ve been missing. I want to find someone I can feel warm with and watch Game of Thrones and seriously discuss ancient alien theory, which doesn’t sound so hard to find but the catch is I’d like it if she read the Sam Pink and Joe Wenderoth books I’d let her borrow and report back to me and let me know that they or I or we are full of crap. I want to hold someone who pronounces the ‘d’ in ‘vodka’ but doesn’t drink it. If she does, it has nothing to do with calories. I need to step up my OkCupid game. Labyrinthitis has killed my ‘social life’ but maybe saved my actual ‘life.’ Panic attacks are stupid. Scandinavians are the blonde veneer of desperation. Not writing 500 words in a day should be punished by fingernail removal. Summer isn’t over. Summer is now. This is who I will be. I will struggle with words and struggle with running 3.2 miles and that struggle will unhollow me. I will buy a bike and a longboard. I will go to literary events in Brooklyn. I will go to Brooklyn and maybe even Queens for no other reason than public transportation makes it feasible. I will read so much. I will eat broccoli and fruit smoothies the way I want to eat McDonald’s: ravenously. I will use the awesome popcorn maker I got for Christmas. I will focus. I will not be afraid. I will focus on not being afraid. Possible outcomes of losing fear will include having ‘moments’ with people previously unknown and more interesting than those who are currently known, making out with someone whose tongue shares a mutual interest, having non-self-conscious good times. 30 means nothing but 30. I will figure out Instagram. I will fight for something. I will tweet. I will find balance. The rest of my life will be spent finding that balance. I will help one person find that balance. I will spin on the point of that balance until the shards of light created by that spinning glisten with the love I want everything to feel for me. The love I want to feel for everything. Today, I am spinning. I will go to Coney Island in the spring. The rest of my life will be spent.

relentless illusions of trendy opulence and meaningless technical drivel

My review of Eric Raymond's Confessions from a Dark Wood is up on the [PANK] blog.

the toads of the dead / in the forests of dung!

My Naked Brain by Leopoldo María Panero
(2011, Swan Scythe Press)
55 pages


Picked up Leopoldo María Panero's My Naked Brain because the photograph of the poet on the cover makes him look like a serial killer and I have to say I was not disappointed to learn that he currently lives voluntarily at a mental hospital on the Canary Islands. The poems, translated by Arturo Mantecόn, did not disappoint either. My favorite parts are Panero's descibing of bodies with equal parts disgust and reverence and the languages -- both physical and verbal -- they create: "Thus it is that the word, / so as to not die in another word, / disintegrates into ashes." Inundated with images of blood, semen, anger ("I will kill you tomorrow when the moon comes out"), the 25 poems give you the sense of a past transgression, something so sinister that it can't even be recounted directly. Maybe life itself is the transgression and Panero just wants us to wallow around in it with him to figure it out for ourselves. Maybe that's the way it should have to be. 

 I pray 
--because the empty words 
have flown without being heard
and only the prayer remains intact--
I pray that, 
even if it takes a long time for me to die
and have my name written, at last, 
on my tombstone, 
that they will be able to some day say
over that cold corpse
that I was not crazy.  

-- from "Correction Of Yeats"

mesmerizing morbidity

 

My review of Matthew Vollmer's Inscriptions for Headstones is in this month's issue of The Collagist.

discarded in moments

Almost Invisible by Mark Strand

(Knopf, 2012)

53 pages

I’d only read a couple of former Poet Laureate Mark Strand’s poems before rescuing his most recent collection from under a collection of booze-moldy umbrellas in a lost and found bin somewhere. The assumption for me was always that, for at least the last twenty years, one’s appointment to the position of Poet Laureate was the clearest indication of the embarrassing unreadability of one’s oeuvre (with the exception of probably only Charles Simic). Might have to quell the haterade because Almost Invisible’s 50 prose poems are for the most part on point. Disappearing  is the name of the game here, whether that means the past, the not-happened-but-will, into those weird spaces sandwiched between time, the darkness where “my freedom and my happiness” reside. The deceptively simple sentence constructions are embedded with a playful and beguiling elusiveness, something I’d compare to fellow septuagenarians James Tate, Simic, and even Tomaz Salamun, though Tate comes off as more sinister (and better) and Salamun delves much deeper into Rubik-like abstraction. Maybe 20 percent of Almost Invisible is nostalgic fluff – “those moments, so many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies in the perfumed heat of a summer night” – but the good stuff outweighs the meh, allowing the really taut 100-word jams to linger with a distinctive happy-sad luminosity:

It is winter and he walks hunched over with the collar of his coat turned up. When he gets to his room, he sits at a small table and looks at the book open before him. Its pages are blank, which is why he is able to gaze at them for hours.

At his best, Strand reminds me of an out-of-place, oddly genteel old dude at the end of a sketchy dive bar in a David Lynch movie doling out quiet wisdom expulsions that resonate in our world-bleary eardrums, even when they’re ungraspable. Which, in the end, is really nice considering the last hardcover major label collection I read was Billy Corgan’s fetid abortion of non-rhyming (and even worse when they occasionally do rhyme) Smashing Pumpkins outtakes otherwise known as Blinking with Fists. That book made me wish it would disintegrate. Almost Invisible makes the illusion fun.

condoms of riverside park #1

the world's relentless crappiness (SoberLife day 5)

whined about it

fact is, I mean everything I say

Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall by Ken Sparling
(Mud Luscious Press re-release, 2012)
166 pages

I was super stoked when I found out Mud Luscious was re-releasing Ken Sparling’s Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (originally published by Knopf in 1996) not only because Ken Sparling is the shit but because I already own a first edition of the book that I found more than a decade ago. Might sound like a douchey way of saying “ha ha already bought it, y'all small press ain’t getting no more of my PayPal funds!” but what I mean is that when a press like Mud Luscious puts out a book like this, it validates what I’ve thought for a long time: that the book is brilliantly unique (also I’m sure Mud Luscious will get more of my Monopoly money, don't worry). One of my English teachers must have been real cool because I remember being recommended Dad Says in high school and stumbling across a pristine copy soon after in the dollar bin at a library book sale and being like this cover art is dope or ill or whatever lame preppy gangsters said in 2001. I don’t remember any of the inside of the book though, just looking up and being like this is fucking weird over and over in a good way. Re-reading it now, I do the same. Everyone’s a flash fiction writer now and even though his book is a pretty much a non-linear novel, Ken Sparling feels like some awesome pale Canadian godfather of flash in being able to make the smallest moments like third trimester pregnant, revealing in a phrase a complex fear we all share but might not have known we had and what would have taken most people 200 pages to get right. An exercise in brevity and accumulation. Dad Says is comprised of the underlying and overlying fragments of a librarian’s life – not a particularly exciting one, wife and a kid, suburban condo – made unflinchingly and cleverly fascinating by the negative space, by what’s not said but can’t not be thought. A spiral of unraveling and uneasy memories, the need to matter and the futility of giving a shit, fleeting mundane self-slaps of modernity exposed with the dry wit we all wish we had to face them. The deceptively simple language that will make you yearn for a childish innocence but will crush your soul if you let it. Don’t forget about the sprinklings of doubt and extreme tenderness. There’s self-contained third-person vignettes thrown in for some good fun. Oh and jobs can be pretty stupid. God knows how depressing this might have been if it was not written during a time of relative peace and prosperity (were the 90s tight in Canada too?), and the title would have been Dad Says He Saw You on Amazon, but it’s stupid to keep talking about it you should probably just buy it (see, I’m supporting the small press community!). Anyways here are some good parts and by good I mean pretty much like how all of it is:

He lifts his face and there are marks on his face that were not there before. No one says anything. The angle of his head shears off the possibility of speech.

I think it’s the sound of it, “fish cakes,” and the way dinner comes along every night relentlessly, like a bomb.

They’ve drained all the swamps in Florida, just so you can sit by a pool and look at other people’s towels. On the way home it rains. We have to drive through Ohio. I hate Ohio.

It breaks my heart to think about my father. So I don’t think about my father. I think about my mother. It breaks my heart to think about my mother, too.

I died. I went to heaven. After a couple of weeks, I was given an apartment.

And there’s a part about Batman pogs that I highlighted in orange highlighter in 2001 that pretty much makes the whole thing worthwhile. Thanks Mud Luscious, for bringing this back to life.

Still Wet

at Outsider Writers Carbon-Based Lifeform Blues.

BOKKUS is Alive

BOKKUS is Dead
by No Regrets Coyote 

Spaghetti Spaghetti Records

released 15 May 2012

There’s something going on in Nashville. It has nothing to do with country music, thank jeebus. Young hard-ass rockers on small labels have begun making names for themselves, most hard-assly, JEFF The Brotherhood and Diarrhea Planet. No Regrets Coyote has stepped up and continues the next wave of the assault. These guys look like they’re 15 but I guess youth is good if you have it. I haven’t had it in a while, but I’m reminded by this band what it was like. Their debut EP, Bokkus Is Dead, is a five-song ear-scratcher that energizes as it destroys. The production is as rough as the guitar tracks are addictive, the Diarrhea Planet-like vocals gargling out existential quandaries (“I’m drunk and I can’t bum a cigarette”, “Is there any way you can get your shit together?”) amidst a splattering of minor-chord mayhem. I guess what I like most about Bokkus is that at its grungiest, it sounds like a much more raw, less introspective, sped-up and punked-out version of Superdrag’s seminal 1996 debut, Regretfully Yours (before they got all stupid-trippy and god-squady, respectively) especially the EP’s last and best track, “Slow Burn,” a song I have no idea what it’s about but have been playing it obsessively to the detriment of sleep and what little health remains in my later years. And dare I say that there are echoes in the guitar tones of early Pavement but catchier? I dare. Anything that harkens back to the MTV “Buzz Bin” era is a good thing and No Regrets Coyote is a great thing. Get on this ship and enjoy the sink. This band should be big, as long as they don't find religion. 

Monkeytown review copies. christopher.vola@gmail.com.

we’d have to be crazy not to know by now what to expect next

is up at Rain Taxi.