June 2010
2 posts
"Travel Elegy"
by Wislawa Szymborska
Everything’s mine though just on loan, nothing for the memory to hold, though mine as long as I look. Memories come to mind like excavated statues that have misplaced their heads. From the town of Samokov, only rain and more rain. Paris from Louvre to fingernail grows web-eyed by the moment. Boulevard Saint-Martin some stairs leading into a fadeout. Only a...
“Outside, the temperature, which had been below freezing for the past week, had...”
– From “Extreme Solitude” by Jeffrey Eugenides, The New Yorker
May 2010
1 post
“Sullivan’s reasoning is so naive that I have to wonder if there’s...”
– Richard Kim, The Nation
March 2010
4 posts
The Two Times I Loved You the Most In a Car
by Dorothea Grossman
It was your idea
to park and watch the elephants
swaying among the trees
like royalty
at that make-believe safari
near Laguna.
I didn’t know anything that big
could be so quiet.
And once, you stopped
on a dark desert road
to show me the stars
climbing over each other
riotously
like insects
like an orchestra
thrashing its way through time itself
I never...
The Girl With the Extremely Well-Modulated Voice
I am referring, of course, to Girl With the Extremely Well-Modulated Voice. It’s uncanny at first—like getting a cup of coffee from Katie Couric, if Katie Couric were a vaguely sad 26 year-old in an Amherst Crew t-shirt who, whenever no one was in line to buy coffee, slowly undid and redid her ponytail and then sighed heavily. I am concerned that she is using her extremely well-modulated...
Nervous System
by Michael Dickman Make a list of everything that’s ever been on fire – Abandoned cars Trees The sea Your mother burned down to the skeleton so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk around the house again, exhausted in slippers What else? Your brain Your eyes Your lungs * When you look down inside yourself what is there? You are a walking bag of surgical instruments shining...
August 2009
6 posts
"God Hates Fag Hags"
“I didn’t particularly understand what I had to offer as a confidant to anybody, much less straight women with endless romantic problems and a passion for trying on Capri pants.
As I moved away from home, to bigger and bigger cities, I discovered that there were lots of scruffy and poorly dressed drone-rock-loving gay men in the world — especially of my age group — who had...
Cintra Wilson on JC Penny
A good 96 percent of the Penney’s inventory is made of polyester. The few clothing items that are made of cotton make a sincere point of being cotton and tell you earnestly about their 100-percent cottonness with faux-hand-scribbled labels so obviously on the Green bandwagon they practically spit pine cones.
William Logan on Tony Hoagland
You meet a lot of Tony Hoagland’s friends in Tony Hoagland’s poems.[3] What Narcissism Means to Me names more names than you can shake a stick at—there’s Alex and Greg and Boz and Rus, Susan and Margaret, Kath and Peter and Mary, Neal and Sylvia and Ann and Ethan, Carla and Jerry and Peter, and these just in the first half-dozen poems (it would be easier if they were all named George, like George...
Clancy did not like the place. He felt that Mr. Rowantree was wasting his time. It troubled him to think of the energy in a man’s day being spent in this place. A narrow trail, past tables and desks, urns and statues, led into the store and then branched off in several directions. Clancy had never seen so much junk. Since he couldn’t imagine it all being manufactured in any one...
In her unapologetically subjective readings of literature and culture, Nehring goes in for a certain amount of melodrama and overstatement — “I embrace generalization,” as she puts it — but in many ways this is the appeal, the freshness of the book. “A Vindication of Love” takes itself more seriously than does its distant cousin, Laura Kipnis’s clever but coy manifesto “Against Love.” Nehring is...
June 2009
3 posts
Tonsorial
ton·so·ri·al
(tn-sôr-l, -sr-) adj. Of or relating to barbering or a barber.
[From Latin tnsrius, from tnsor, barber, from tnsus, past participle of tondre, to shear; see tem- in Indo-European roots.]
“The one exception was the dining room set my parents bought shortly after they...”
– David Sedaris, “This Old House”
I keep playing this on loop. →
May 2009
2 posts
“Fungus may well have given rise to human culture, or at least the comedy of...”
– Natalie Angier, NYTimes
Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet
by Tony Hoagland At this height, Kansas is just a concept, a checkerboard design of wheat and corn no larger than the foldout section of my neighbor's travel magazine. At this stage of the journey I would estimate the distance between myself and my own feelings is roughly the same as the mileage from Seattle to New York, so I can lean back into the upholstered interval between Muzak and lunch, a...
April 2009
4 posts
“More than fifty years ago, during the Truman administration, Sharon Olds’s...”
– William Logan, The New Criterion
“In other words, I’m not sure I’d use Twitter if I were rich. Swampy, boggy,...”
– Virginia Heffernan, The Medium
“One way to understand social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to...”
– Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker
After the Service, the Widow Considers the...
by J. Allyn Rosser
This morning began like anyone’s: coffee. Mine a bitter roast too weak for the daytime that keeps me up half the night.
When I got where there was no point really in going, I had to hold every hand but the one.
After negatives against a backlight of Before. I feel I am missing the correct chemical.
Back home, I liven things up by microwaving popcorn: an edible jazz...
March 2009
4 posts
“Prosthetic limbs today are light-years ahead of where they were 20 years ago —...”
– Very Short List
Crimble of Staines
You’re back in motherbickered England dumb with brick — viper typists. Such organized fear: rigidity as fetish Sphincter sphunct filthiness in wainscoted ways. Jolly ‘ol brims with againstness “Anti-clockwise” — “Ante-natal” if you will — The crumbling masonry of Your “anti-relationship structure” you once called it before You went away. Such...
A desk chair
Solicitous of its own business. Not chewable, and never mordant. How to say a chair as I would say a hand? One looks out from the brows: wooden, unaltering. Perhaps a chair is more important. Perhaps you cannot have a sentence without a chair, more pepper than salt, more voilà. Perhaps in life one does not discover a chair enough—its cruelty and trousers—
There is no delightfulness in...
* Guillermo's Sigh Symphony
Do you hear sighing. Do you wake amid a sigh. Radio sighs AM, FM. Shortwave sighs crackle in from the Atlantic. Hot sighs steam in the dawn. People kissing stop to sigh then kiss again. Doctors sigh into wounds and the bloodstream is changed forever. Flowers sigh and two noon bees float backwards. Is it doubt. Is it disappointment. The world didn’t owe me anything. Leaves come sighing in the...
February 2009
3 posts
“Watching this episode was like watching an elephant bleed from the eyes atop a...”
– Re: The L Word 0606, Automatic Straddle
English Sonnet
by Chelsea Rathburn London returns in damp, fragmented flurries when I should be doing something else. A scrap of song, a pink scarf, and I’m back to curries and pub food, long, wet walks without a map, bouts of bronchitis, a case of the flu, my halfhearted studies, and brooding thoughts and scanning faces in every bar for you. Those months come down to moments or small plots, like the bum on the...
January 2009
10 posts
Hotties and Notties
by Henry on January 22, 2009
There’s been a serious debate at the other place where I blog over whether academia in general, and political science in particular is a sexy profession. I’m glad to say that we actually have Real Social Scientific Data1 that we can bring to bear on this topic. In 2006, James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson conducted research that sought to...
“Under the guise of “irony,” hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates...”
– TONY, “Why the Hipster Must Die”
Green Dreaming Phosphorescence
“For centuries, nobody knew just what the aurora borealis — a.k.a. the northern lights — really was.
Last year, a consortium of scientists used NASA satellites to monitor conditions 70,000 kilometers above the earth and found that the green lights are really pent-up electric currents racing across the ionosphere. (They’re caused by massive eruptions of magnetic energy set off when charged...
“The drink caught on within the American hipster community, which has been known...”
– wikipedia entry for Sparks
What a Relief! New Space Toilet Being Designed
New space toilet? Credt: Pink Tentacle
The International Space Station’s toilet has had its troubles, and Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has decided they want to “eliminate” this problem for future astronauts and procure a new way to deal with human waste in space. They formed a space toilet research group and came up with an idea that is sure to...
Artist paints portraits of every grad in a found...
In “The Altruist,” artist Laurie Munn documents her adventure in found portraiture: working from a 1965 yearbook from Emerson High in Union City, New Jersey that she found in the trash, Munn painted portraits of all 220 members of the class of 65. Then she returned to the Emerson High and tracked down the subjects of her portraits to show them the great work — discovering the...
December 2008
4 posts
Is Urban Outfitters homophobic?
Urban Outfitters recently yanked a t-shirt from it’s shelves that simply said, “I Support Same-Sex Marriage.” Their reason, “because we received too much bad press” says one buyer. However the designer of the shirt, Tara Littman, could only find one blog that had anything negative to say. Richard Hayne, the CEO of Urban, is a notorious right winger who financially supports politicians that are...
“God Help Him, But Area Man Loves That Crazy Bitch
RENO, NV—Despite her...”
– —The Onion
November 2008
6 posts
“The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while...”
– Kevin Kelly, “Becoming Screen Literate.” New York Times
Night Waitress
Reflected in the plate glass, the pies look like clouds drifting off my shoulder. I’m telling myself my face has character, not beauty. It’s my mother’s Slavic face. She washed the floor on hands and knees below the Black Madonna, praying to her god of sorrows and visions who’s not here tonight when I lay out the plates, small planets, the cups and moons of saucers. At this hour the men all look...
WatchLegs with Brains.
“Vanessa is not for everyone. Clinical tests show that she may cause nausea,...”
– My generated status.
Honesty is the best policy
from MyMomIsAFob.com
“I saw some pictures that is we took from Bao-Bao’s wedding party. You looks very, very fat especial your arm and leg. I will e-mail you when I figual out how to e-mail you. I know you don’t like to hear that but I think you really need to do weigh watch out and stop to eat any sweet foods. When you age go up that will be very difficult to do diet. Trust me. ...
October 2008
9 posts
The Shampoo
The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading, gray, concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed. And since the heavens will attend as long on us, you've been, dear friend, precipitate and pragmatical; and look what happens. For Time is nothing if not amenable. The shooting stars in your black hair...