Dragonfly on a Dog Chain

baltimore vs. northampton vs. self promotion

2012-01-25T18:14:00.000-05:00

I have figured out the definitive difference between Baltimore and Northampton, which comes in the form of two opposing bagel prosciutto sandwiches. Northampton's bagel prosciutto sandwich comes with slice green apples and sharp cheddar and dijon mustard and is on a wheat bagel. Baltimore's comes with cream cheese and tomatoes and is on a seasame bagel that somehow tastes like an onion bagel. Also the two visions of prosciutto are a little different: Northampton's is very thin and lean, while Baltimore's is thick and marbled. I don't even need to tell you about where to eat these bagels, the crowd in these eating places, or the streets outside, because simply telling you about these bagels tells you all that other stuff. These differences represent themselves without value judgments.

And speaking of Baltimore, PGP is doing a $5 Book of the Month January special on All Good. There are only a few January days left, so go spend a little bagel money there if you're not hungry right now.

dead auxiliaries in heaven, opportunistic comedians in the basement

2012-01-21T17:04:00.003-05:00

So I've got a whole trove of stuff to catch up on, which means I need to wear my special pink skull power wristband to type it all. Actually nevermind I took it off immediately after I took that picture because it's too small for my wrist and I was about to pass out.

—The last Glitterpony for now is out, very bittersweet. A fine swamp of poems up in there. All the faves and new faces too. Sampson Starkweather says "light is awesome! / there should be a mind Olympics" and in so saying invents a new school of poetry called The School of Poetry That's Impossible to Disagree With. I have a couple poems in the issue, with 2/3 saucy-mouthed titles: "Why Fuck Around?" and "You Must Motherfucking Change Your Life" and "Know and Make Known." These are from a new school of poetry that involves taking chickpeas and pouring some masala paste on them and cook-stirirng things in a pan of warm olive oil until your dinner is evenly coated and easy to have made.

—Back on December 9th I did this "New Voices in Fiction" thing at Brown University with a great bunch of folks: Matt Bell, Rachel B. Glaser, Lily Hoang, and Matt Salesses. It was kind of a trip to read and have my work taught at Brown. Deep thanks to all the organizers and coordinators and cool Brown MFA students we met, especially Evelyn Hampton and Sarah Tourjee. One kid came up to me and aggressively grilled me about changing the ending to "The Peaches Are Cheap," which was exciting. Here is what else happened, according to my text message draft notes: "Hometown jigsaw and orbitwheels. The keep-yr-distance-bug-vaccuum. Jimmycake benedict." I only remember what the last one means, because the last one is about food.

—Then around Christmastime I went back to California, and within California went to the Bay Area to eat burritos and visit cool people like Chelsea, Jimmy, Mike K, Lorian, and Elliot/Erin. While there I did a reading at SF's hippest new tweegoth secret spot, the 851 Squat, beautifully decorated by Janey Smith and friends. Thanks to Mike K and Janey for inviting me. There were some interaction opportunities ("C'MON!") and some sexy stories. Here is a video of my reading (thanks to Evan Karp for recording), which is 13 minutes long, so you know, get a samosa or something (I mean to eat instead of watching it, not to eat while you're watching, geez, what do you think I am, aggro or something):

—Some thanks to bow at faces: thanks to the big DC for including Look! Look! Feathers in his list of favorite 2011 books, and thanks to Michael Fillipone for mentioning We Are All Good in his list of every book he read in 2011 and saying that when I open my mouth, "America comes out." Which, geez, I know my stomach's been weird since I got back from Thailand, but I hope MF doesn't have any information I don't. I still need to do my Every Book I Read in 2011 list for HTMLGIANT. There are around 92 books, so less than last year, but hey, I had to figure out the Baltimore bus system, gimme a break.

—The super cool Carrie Lorig asked me to make a playlist for the University of Minnesota MFA blog, and how could I say no to that? My playlist is called "A POETRY ADVICE THEMED PLAYLIST THAT IS SINCERE AS A JAR OF SWEET PICKLES BECAUSE I DIDN’T LEARN THE WORD GHERKINS UNTIL I WAS 23 AND BY THEN IT WAS TOO LATE." Sources inform me that gherkins aren't actually always the same thing as sweet pickles, so be careful about taking any of my advice. But do listen to the songs, which are really good.

—A long time ago Gene Kwak asked me some very sharp questions about place and place's role in my writing, and in January that back-and-forth went up on Hobart. Some of the stuff I say is a little gherkins-y (see above), but at least one true thing is when I say that I feel at home whenever I visit somewhere.

—For January I've been guest editing Everyday Genius, and I felt like the most genius thing I could do was acknowledge my own lack of genius and farm the selection process out to some actual geniuses, so I asked Gene Kwak, Evelyn Hampton, Nat Otting, and Carolyn Zaikowki to harvest some content, and they did an amazing job finding stuff. January isn't quite over yet, so check out what's there and stay tuned for more.

—In a few weeks, Mark and Laura and I are driving up to New Hampshire, where I'm going to do a guest workshop/reading at their alma mater, the Chester College of New England. I'm very excited, as New Hampshire has a very endorseable weirdness that floats over its entirety. Also we're going to stop in Northampton on the way back, so it will be cool to see friends and do snowy high fives there.

—Finally, the 2012 Magic Helicopter Press catalog is up! Do the checking of it outness! Especially the April 2012 forthcoming book of Jordan Stempleman poems No, Not Today. Speaking of how I'm unable to publish a book that doesn't have "today" in the title, major props to Ofelia Hunt's Today & Tomorrow for winning the Alt Lit Gossip 2011 Best Debut Novel award. Keep the channel on Alt Lit Gossip's Tumblr for all your alt-lit gossip needs. I wish the rest of life were so accessible. Like I could go to cheapindianfood.
tumblr.com for all my cheap Indian food needs. For now I guess I will have to yell at the microwave.

sunburns and monkeys and buddha and coconut milk: the very long thailand post

2012-01-19T17:57:00.000-05:00

Hey guess what: I just dripped some beet smoothie on my blue jeans. Action figure Spock is doing push-ups next to the Hanakuh guy toy Rachel gave me. Turns out I'm Polish on my mother's side, not Russian. Joe Montalex is a nickname I invented for Niners quarterback Alex Smith. One of the people who invented the essay was a Sumerian flood survivor. Nobody is ever going to fix the water in this apartment. One thing I probably won't ever be able to say sincerely is "Smoke 'em if you got 'em." One thing I can and do say sincerely, if only occasionally, is "Consider the source." Also: I went to Thailand!

That's right, I went to Thailand to visit Carrot Cake Zaikowki. We had a grand time. I will now recap our time in a hella extensive blog post I've been kind of dreading because I know it will get very long. For once the pictures are really pictures I/Carolyn took. Gross! There's also a whole other blog post in the wings full of misc. writing related stuff. I will inhale the jet fumes of this blog post to follow up with that one. First let's see how much I can remember about Thailand.

My flight from San Francisco to Beijing was eleven hours. The only movie I got really into was Source Code, which was one of those Hollywood movies that's full of amazing scenes to look at but once you turn the sound on is incredibly stupid. Also I ate like six Cliff Bars. To get the internet in the Beijing airport I had to scan a copy of my passport, so now my face is in the Chinese ether. Finally I got to Bangkok, hugged Carolyn for a million minutes, and then we went to our guesthouse and I ate some chicken-on-a-stick and learned how to use Thai toilets. The next day, we visited some temples and saw how high the river had risen. An old lady lavished approval on Carolyn's tattoos and command of Thai language. At some point I ate delicious things in curried sauces with coconut milk. Also I drank some fruit shakes because coconuts, mangoes, bananas, and other such fruits are all fresh in Thailand, which is amazing to experience in a mouth way.

One thing that happened in Bangkok—though I can't remember if this was the first time we were there or the second—was we went to a temple where we had to take our shoes off. There was a place you could buy candle things to light a thing, and Carolyn bought one. But she dropped the little foil wrapper of the candle stick on the ground, and a monk came by and said something in Thai and picked up the foil and dropped it in a large communal foil pot.

Even butter tasted like coconut. I got some mosquito bites and freaked out about them for no reason. Boxing is very big in Thailand, as is the King. The King, in fact, is literally big on all the posters he's on. Tourists in Thailand have completely demolished the credibility of that Red Bull shirt with Thai lettering, the pink version of which I own and used to think was cool before I went to Thailand.

After Bangkok, we went to this island called Ko Phi Phi. It's where they made the movie The Beach with Leonardo DeCaprio, which is a movie I've never seen and now strangely feel like I must resist, like it is somehow an enemy of me, like it will try to find me and make me watch it randomly and I'll have to carry a special tigerskin blindfold for such occasions.

We took a boat to get to Ko Phi Phi, and the boat was filled with bro-ish Australians, but that might not be fair because every time I saw somebody do something bro-ish or obnoxious I nudged Carolyn and said "Look at that Australian" without checking whether they really were Australian or not. Ko Phi Phi was insanely beautiful, like the beautiful level of the video game, the one everybody on the team is like "Let's let Carole design this level because she's more attractive than any of us and she knows what the deal with attractiveness is." We saw monkeys on Monkey Island, and some jerks fed them instant coffee. One of the people at the guest house we were staying with said he was born in Stockton, California. We asked him if he ever got tired of how beautiful Ko Phi Phi was and he said "Yes." He said Alaska was more beautiful, but I dunno.

We tried to go to a mosque, but it was closed. At the highest point of the island, a gardener kept trying to speak Russian to a Polish lady, even though he knew she was Polish, which I and everybody else thought was hilarious. I drank coconut stuff out of a huge coconut! We ate twice at this place called Papaya, which had amazing massaman curry that took apparently eight years to make. The place is ran by a former Muay-Thai boxer who seems super gay in a good way. There is some spice that happened during some of the pad thai frying that caused everybody in the room to cough. An Asian mother filmed her pantsless child peeing on the Monkey Island beach. The child peed for like ten minutes straight I swear. We met a Norweigan lumber speculator who said he'd always wanted to go to the redwoods. On a boat Italians and Spaniards talked together in halting English about how fun it was to vacation in some island off the North African coast. In the Phuket airport, there was a store that sold cashews, and there was a huge video in the store of how hard it was to work on the assembly line in the cashew factory, but this seemed like it was intended to impress you into buying more cashews.

Back in Bangkok, we saw a dude with a lot of face tattoos at Carolyn's favorite Thai vegan restaurant. We talked a lot about whether you choose to get all those face tattoos or you get addicted to tattoos. Speaking of skin, I got an infected sunburn on my leg and had to visit a pharmacist. The pharmacist said it was okay to let my pants down. She gave me some antibiotics and patches that cost under $30. "You will take care of him, be his doctor," she said to Carolyn. Later I thought she'd said "nurse" but Carolyn firmly corrected me. We took a cab to the bus station and the cab driver laughed at a passing train.

We took a bus to Ayutthaya, which was the capital of the kingdom of Siam for 400 years. Back in the early to mid 1000s. It used to be called the "Venice of Asia." Was allegedly one of the most beautiful and bustling cities of the ancient world, and I believe it. Nowadays it's very weird because it's sort of a working class/factory/university city whose infrastructure and city blockage is occasionally interrupted by these amazing and crumbling ancient temples.

We saw a three story golden Buddha and somebody sat in the Buddha's lap, which you're not supposed to do. We took a boat ride, and fishermen made their kids wave at us. We walked around a lot and met some Germans and Carolyn posed with some giant chickens. We refreshed ourselves after our walk at a Hello Kitty themed coffeeshop where one glass table was decorated with a bunch of cell phones under the table top. We played trivia in an ex-pat bar sort of against our will because the owner kept aggressively giving us questions like "What are all the American states that start with New?" When we forgot something or got something wrong, he'd say "Don't you speak English? I was born in Seattle. Just kidding." We met a very nice middle aged Thai man who said Carolyn would make a beautiful Thai woman. He said that in Thailand women are rated from 1 to 4 (this doesn't seem corroborated by, like, anything else anywhere, but let's roll with it) and that Carolyn was definitely a 4, even though she didn't seem as tall as other Americans. He also said Carolyn's style would make her a beggar if she were Thai, but because she's American it made her a cool hippie.

After Ayutthaya, we went to Kanchanaburi, which was my favorite. I made up a song that went "Baby baby don't you worry. Come on down to Kan-chan-a-burry." Kanchanaburi is where the Bridge Over the River Kwai/Kwoi/Kwahe is. At sunset the bridge lights up in a disco way, even though hundreds/thousands of prisoners of war died to make it. Just one of those things. In the nice museum with the nice bathrooms, the wax statues were very graphic and scary and depressing and informative, and so was the overall experience, even though there were cool lights you could press to make different areas of the mine shaft model light up. Mostly Kanchanaburi was a river town, and I know river towns. For example, we went to a restaurant owned by a guy who probably owned the coolest pair of eyeglasses in Kanchanaburi, and he was very anxious to please us, and meanwhile some teenager was playing guitar there for what looked like the debut of an open mic series, and the teenager had brought his two friends with him, one of whom was very dopey and encouraging, and the other of whom was a girl who looked bored but also kind of like she had a crush on either the dopey kid or the guitar kid, not sure. River town drama, y'all.

Also we saw some Russians making muscle arm poses under a waterfall. We got involved in a three act play at a Portuguese restaurant where I ate some cake and a husband said "Spicy women they make the sweetest food" and a wife yelled at the husband for being drunk and turning up the music and she yelled "What are you, drunk with power?" There were kids and dogs and motorcycles and a long lost friend from Copenhagen and sangria and chess. This episode merits a lot of discussion, actually, and Carolyn and I agreed we would each write our own version at some point in our lives. Mine will be a three act play, definitely, and hers will be something more interior monologue-ish.

In Kanchanaburi I finally broke down and bought a souvenir: a t-shirt of an elephant playing soccer or "SHOWING OFF" as the shirt says. I ate some cashews flavored with coconut cream, some mango with sticky rice (actually, wait, I didn't eat that until I got to the airport, but I kept wanting it the whole time I was in Kanchanaburi) and the best pad thai of the trip at a place where the waitress was like the Thai Janis Joplin: she swayed around and kept trying to read her own handwriting through white sunglasses that clearly didn't have corrective lenses. I ate some red curry that came with rice in a heart shape. Some old British guy had a bookstore with very anal policies. A toothless dog gummed my ankle. I ate fried bamboo. I drank a kiwi shake made by a woman who Carolyn accidentally called beautiful even though she was trying to call the town beautiful, or she did accurately call the town beautiful but the woman misunderstood, but nonetheless the woman demurred and said "Oh no you are beautiful" in Thai. Some things I learned how to say in Thai, spelled phonetically, are "Sa wah dee krap" (Hello), "Kap gun krap" (Thank you), and "Arroy maa" (Very delicious). At some point I ate a fried banana, but I can't remember where. I never ate a grasshopper, but the cart for fried grasshoppers in Bangkok charged you 10 baht to just take a picture of somebody else eating one. Luckily it's like 30 baht per dollar, but you know what they say: "smoke 'em if you got 'em."

But my favorite part of Kanchanaburi by far was the crazy Thai museum they called a WWII museum but was actually a hodgepodge castle maze of amazeaballs. This museum seemed to have a joyful lack of organizing principles. Some ceilings were illustrated proverbs. Some walls had cutouts from fashion magazines. One wall had a bunch of kitchen equipment. Elsewhere there were a million guns under a glass case. A Korean War soldier corpse in one room. One hallway featured very unrealistic wax statues of key WWII players, all described in very weird ways. The Mussolini statue had an extra placard that was actually just a note to revise the original placard. Among the items up for revision: "Make sure to mention his time spent working in a chocolate factory." In the middle of the "courtyard square" area of the museum was a 1970s looking space age Buddha temple capsule. On the tops of the towers the views were amazing. At one point there was a train engine with an old Rolls Royce on top of it. Carolyn said "This must be what it looks like inside your brain." In a basement room, a placard explained that the museum itself was protected by earthquakes by a specific mysticism. There were a lot of signs with hilarious English translations. One of the outside areas just had some clothes drying. One of the inside murals was of fighting elephant gods. All in all, this museum was probably my favorite thing humans have ever got together and done.

We took an amazingly harrowing van back to Bangkok, and Carolyn and I had a tearful re-departure goodbye at the Bangkok bus station after I was too afraid to eat the bus station food and Carolyn forgot to disinfect her fork in the boiling water station. It was awesome to hang out with my lovely and amazing and talented Carrot for two weeks, especially after having not seen her since September, and it was very sad to have to leave her again. After we parted, she took a sixteen hour bus to the far northern reaches of Thailand where she now lives in a grass hut with snakes.

In Beijing I couldn't meet up with my friend Luke because I couldn't leave the airport. The authorities kept telling me it was "too late." I thought they meant proverbially, but really they just meant it was 2AM. So I paid too much for a bed in a weird airport hotel place, telling myself it was worth it for the experience. I guess what I meant when I told myself that was the hotel clerk picked her nose in a really interesting way right in front of me. On the plane back to San Francisco, a kindly Chinese grandmother type tried to speak to me in Chinese and helped me find my pen when it fell between our seats. Back in the Bay Area, my first re-acclimation impression was everybody in America has too much space and quiet to themselves.

That was Thailand! Let me know if there's something I left out that you really wanted to know. Most people want to know if I ate anything weird, which I guess I didn't, in the common sense of what might be weird to put in your mouth and think about digesting, but Carolyn at one point bought a bag of potato chips that came with a packet inside them of weird sugar and chili flavored ketchup. Now I will end with a quote from Baudrillard's The Transparency of Evil:
"Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality—a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.”

i was really holding out for this last little one by your thumb

2011-12-04T00:30:00.002-05:00

Whoa, is this thing on? Been a while since we've waved. Awhile is an adverb and "a while" is a noun phrase. That's how you tell them apart. We can wait awhile or be there for a while. Plus there's the wilderness. Let me tell you a few of the things I've done up in this here Autumn:

—Read at the Last Rites Baltimore series thanks to Pat King and Nik Korpan. Read w/ Sid Gold, Eric Goodman, and Wayne Hoffman. Mans hoffing and good. Nik gave me pizza out of his car, like the time I was in the cab to the Greyhound station and someone on Howard tried to sell me and the cabdriver some heroin. The reading was at a hostel and I think I stole the communal water drum. The other readers read things about some pool flirtation and reading periods and and and. I read about the ultimate holla back and tried to explain weakness exotically.

—Then I read again in Baltimore for the WORMS w/ Joe Martin, Chris Mason, and Lola Pierson. Hosted by the delightful R.M. O'Brien, who made a really old monk hilarious. The reading was at the Metro Gallery, which I have fond feelings for because they didn't lose my hoodie when I left it there for two weeks—they just let the hoodie comfortably hibernate on the floor of their walk-in freezer. I read a poem that was bad so I crumpled it up and threw it away onstage, and everyone cheered. Also I read about every weird person I've ever met in a piece entitled "Yo Whatever Happened Yo." Also I read a piece called "C'MON!" where everybody shouted out "C'MON!" after lines like "What kind of beautiful weather doesn't know it's September 11th? What kind of personality trait is a preference for ginger ale?" and so on. Chris read amazing sly poems like an old pro, Joe read a long story where a limo full of prom dates crashed and got bloody, Lola read some hilarious and touching stuff. Then later in the month on the street I met R.M O'Brien's baby and wife while I ate a samosa. That's what friends are for.

—Then I read for Artichoke Haircut's You're Allowed series w/ Kendra Kopelke. Kendra was everyone's teacher and much beloved and belovable. She had some Hopper paintings that stared at us as she read. The crowd was big and feisty. Someone knew what Belchertown Road was. The crowd elected to have the Jewish action figure talk to the ladybug football instead of the other way around. Thanks to Adam Shutz & Melissa Streat of Artichoke Haircut for inviting me and Justin Sanders for being an exuberant ham of a host.

—Then I read in Philly for Tire Fire! Philly is great. I will say what I said on Facebook about it, but I want to add "thanks to Wes for the accordion dance party" to the list: "awesome time in Philly! there was fried chicken next to indian food in Reading Terminal! thanks Christian TeBordo for being a great accordion player and host & Sarah Rose Etter for threatening to murder me within 15 seconds of meeting me and then later giving me a cookie & Karl Taro Greenfeld and Anna Louise Neiger for being lovely co-readers and everybody who came out to sit in bumper cars and watch us read."

—Then I read for the Five:Ten Reading Series, hosted by Michael Kimball & Jen Michalksi. This was at a fancy gallery and there were fancy Oreo type cookies to eat. I was nervous about reading the beginning of the one-balled coach/horse defecation story, but people laughed, especially when I shamelessly yoked the story's searing critique of masculinity to contemporary coaching scandals. Who says relevance never protected a room. I read with amazing human dreamcatchers Stephanie Barber and Ben Loory, who were both gripping. As in their voices and stories were like those little burrs you find in your sandals months after you walked in the woods.

—Oh em gee that's a lot of readings holy geez. Next weekend I'm going to read at Brown University for a New Voices in Fiction event with Matt Bell, Rachel B Glaser, Lily Hoang, Joanna Howard, and Matt Salesses. Lots of goodie gum drops. It'll probably be too cold in Providence to find the coconut milk ice cream truck I found the last time I was there, but I will cry and weep and thrash and get over it.

—Guys let's recap: gender is a performance, identity is a performance, a blog is a performance designed to make you think the only thing I care about are readings and people's names and eating things. Except when I care about frozen zones and, you know, "the slow and rusty American amusement-ride-like descent into feudalism/fascism" thing. The truth is I like eating things and forgetting names. The truth is out there. Somebody lick the dahl off my elbow.

—Things online! A poem in an awesome issue of H_NGM_N called "If the World Is Crazy We Will Be Crazy Too." That's something Gaddafi/Gadhafi said before I did, but at least he got to say it before he died. Probably my favorite line in the poem is "Any exit’s / an emergency once you can’t tell how fast you’re leaving." Lots of other great folks and UMass buds in H_NGM_N 13, so be sure to click that link before it gets outdated.

—The suave and spindly-haired Peter Jurmu interviewed me for Redivider's November spotlight. We talked about invisible friendship, laundry change, Frank Stanford, batty like knock around, and navigating sacks of breath. Thanks, Peter! Peter is pretty much the only person these days besides Bryan Coffelt and my girlfriend to randomly GChat me at uncannily cozy times, for which I am endlessly appreciative.

—Four prose poems from my ongoing train trash thump project No One Sleeps Beneath the Train Except the Light went up at The Fanzine. Thanks to Casey McKinney and Amy Herschleb. And sweet damn, thanks to Danny Jock for some totally killer illustrations. This is the second time "The Dan Man"—as I just now a second ago nicknamed him—has brought my twisted shit to pixelated life, and that is pretty cool. Do the gawk to see his bowling alley fire, chugged V-8, harassed rickshaw, and Ishi hackey sacking fish guts.

—Dark Sky and Big Lucks both nominated a few things of mine for the Plushcart Pies. Fist bumps to their kindness.

—"War and domination are the opposite of room." — Carrot Cake Zaikowski wrote an awesome piece on Kenneth Patchen for The Rumpus!

—Some sweet new issues of NOÖ Weekly guest-edited by Ani Smith and Laura Eve Engel. Gobble them all up while you can still gob. While you're doing that, I will finish my semester by cajoling my students to write crazy essays, find some way to buy Christmas presents for people instead of neurotically indulging in the story I've built for myself about being terrible at buying Christmas presents, and get ready to say "where do I go to blog about eating things and forgetting names" in Thai.

fun with words

2011-11-15T17:05:00.003-05:00

how do you say "

2011-10-30T23:21:00.000-04:00

A couple quickies:

—Very excited that I'm going to Thailand in late December to visit Carrot Cake Zaikowski! Thanks to everybody who signed up for my Barrelhouse poetry workshop or spread the word about it, and of course thanks to Barrelhouse! How about poetry, huh?

—NOÖ [13] is out! You should read NOÖ [13] if you like dance-offs, Russian salads, laundromats outside of burnt down malls, people who give you their ADD medication for your birthday, Ivan Lendl nostalgia, Hawaiians with machine guns, fake boyfriends, people who marry houses, confused police, sisters who are boxes of snakes, sisters who threaten you with ginsu knives, pummelhorsing social compromise, meat screams, oysters collected by widows, letters to jailed Lil Wayne, hearts too full of apples and wind, slut bags, triangle booth sandwiches, fucktrys, lung balloons, the bicycle in the wrong part of the neighborhood, the fast snapping motion of a neck during the fickle stages of a swan-dive, whiskey & chocolate, roller hockey coaches, furniture apocalypses, people who swallow entire friends, and eerie floating underwear.

—Speaking of NOÖ, Juan Carlos Reyes very kindly interviewed me about it for a profile on Zine Scene, which you can read by clicking here. Thanks, Juan!

—Dark Sky 14 is new on the website and Dark Sky 13 is available to order. Both are the best supermarket dolce de leche cake you've ever eaten, which I know seems like a paradox (both?!) but trust me. I wish I knew how they did that 3D book looking thing.

history is a made thing. it doesn't just happen. it's made and recorded, and that record is part of its making. history is made of subjects and objects. to witness is to be a subject in history. to witness is to not allow others to make the story for you. let's say Oscar Grant's name and know what we mean when we say it. let's say Scott Olsen's name and know what we mean when we say it. let's stay peaceful and know what we mean when we stay.

2011-10-26T18:40:00.003-04:00

Oakland Police Critically Injure Iraq War Vet Scott Olsen During Occupy March: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/26/iraq-vet-oakland-police-tear-gas_n_1033159.html

WOMAN IN WHEELCHAIR GASSED BY OAKLAND PD:

SHOT IN THE HEAD WITH A TEAR GAS CONTAINER:

October 14th 2011

2011-10-14T01:31:00.005-04:00

** UPDATE: Bloomberg hoses can't power wash democracy. "Cleanup" cancelled thanks to the work and presence of 3000+ people in the square and 300,000+ people all over. This is what happens when it's the people who are too big to fail. ***

Of course you've seen the We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr (in fact I'm plagiarizing my own post from HTMLGIANT for the rest of this paragraph!), but here it is again. It’s PostFrankness instead of PostSecret. Camwhore angles repurposed for a who’s-there roll call in the deep effed.

Now I'm going to plagiarize myself from Facebook, and I'm not even going to add capital letters!

*** new york friends: drink some coffee, stay up late, roast some marshmallows, tell some ghost stories, save a populist uprising, and annoy your future grandkids when your great-grandkids beg you to tell them on the 3D iDingle chat how you were sitting in the park on that same October 14th their favorite history teacher talks about: http://occupywallst.org/article/emergency-call-action-prevent-forcible-closure-occ/ (seriously, of course: PLEASE STAY SAFE IN CA Conrad CAPS LOCK SERIOUS TIME, and READ THE STRATEGIES FOR NON VIOLENT RESISTANCE) — i feel like kind of a pringle for not being there myself right now, but i hope this here echo on this blue website means itself in the right direction ***

And look at that, my blog is blue too! Synchronicity. Seriously, yo: if you support the movement, please make sure to let your NYC friends know what's going down and know the seriousness of this. Jim Berhle is going to be there dressed as Santa. I will be waking up at 6AM to watch the Livestream: http://occupystream.com/. 10/14 isn't a cute looking date, but let's hope we learn what it will be there to mean.

And heck, since the rest of this is me catching this blog up with what I've said elsewhere, let me end by saying what I said to someone who said the following on HTMLGIANT: "I don't understand this. I live in the Bay Area. I am a dirty punk. oi. All my friends are dirty punks. We all have jobs and places to live. So are we the 1%?"

(Which is not at all an unreasonable testimony of lifestyle and experience, and a sentiment I think understandable by not only those who self-identify as DIY dirty punks but by all who aren't sure whether they can "relate" to the Occupy movement).

This is what I said: "sounds like you have made decisions in and about your life that make it hard to relate immediately to some of the stories on this tumblr, and i'm with you on that.

personally i make a choice not to have a car, not to have kids, etc. the dirty punk/gypsy lifestyle can be joyfully sustainable and always has been. carl sandburg loved the accordion players by the river. of course: it helps to be young and able-bodied and healthy in an urban place like the Bay Area with lots of cool cultural resources, excellent public transportation, and america's breadbasket for a babushka. but not everybody wants to (or is able to) live in those contexts, and that's not unreasonable.

i think a project like this 99% thing is about recognizing a large-scale collapse of the ability to lead certain kinds of lifestyles that shouldn't be unreasonable: lifestyles that enable raising and feeding children and caring for the rest of your family and living in your own house and taking care of your body without the entire social infrastructure stacked against you like some impossible video game puzzle where a handful use their cheat codes to make it harder for everybody else.

it's totally cool if you don't want to play the game—neither do i—and it's even more reasonable to point out that the game represents a pretty elevated level of privilege compared to the rest of the world. but neither of those things really negates the fact that it kinda sucks to watch so many people around you get the GAME OVER over and over."

how snoop hair look? / hair look good, girl

2011-10-14T01:25:00.001-04:00

Pretty exhausting few weeks, but good stuff. Stuff is good. Stuff is stuff. Your stuff isn't you, whatever that stupid Norton commercial says. Your you is you, and your stuff is just there to hide your dandruff in.

Thanks to Ryan Call and Matthew Salesses for running "Mosquito Fog" at the Good Men Project. It's a long story about driving a mosquito fogging truck and eating fajitas and being sad and how sadness is a see-through ghost and dawn looks really pretty on the needles of digger pines but doesn't prevent sadness, and it's basically too long to read on the web and too sad to read, period. So have a look!

What's not sad is that I am teaching an online poetry workshop for the awesome folks at Barrelhouse. It will be 8 weeks long, full of multimedia and fun. Tentative and seasoned poetasters welcome alike. Poem-tazers, even. Anyone in the world can participate, and no one will make fun of your accent. If you could spread the word to interested friends, I will love you forever and build a tiny action figure of you that highlights all your best features and obscures your trouble spots. Along with the workshopping, part of the plan is i will look at full poetry manuscripts for people and offer suggestions, places to send the poems/manuscripts, other poets who might be interesting/helpful to read, all that good stuff.

I am really trying to do this whole thing in as non-skeezy and helpful a way as possible. The cost of it is to cover the time spent and (full disclosure) to help me be able to visit Carolyn in Thailand, so if you support love and/or airplanes, you can factor that in. I feel like this is something I am genuinely good at and passionate about, and I know a lot of people in this world rarely get the opportunity to get paid to do they love, so I feel excited and grateful that Barrelhouse is presenting me this opportunity. The workshop starts October 24th, costs $175, and there are 4 seats left.

Speaking of places to sit: pretty exciting few weeks, right, world? I mean, isn't it exciting how I Skype with Carolyn and put my legless Admiral Kirk action figure in front of the camera? Oh, wait, I think there's more? (This is the cliffhanger ending of this blog post to highlight the important blog post I'm about to make that isn't just about me and Admiral Kirk but is actually about most of us and our ability to do that living stuff) ...

bodymore, body less, either way i ain't skipping breakfast

2011-09-17T15:18:00.006-04:00

One exciting way a cockroach gets to enter your home is through your bathtub drain. I feel like this would be such a fun way to visit friends! But I am too big to fit. So instead I watch The Wire and tweet that I can’t tell whether the sirens are from the show or the world. In other words, I am a white person living in Baltimore. The farmer at the 32nd street market showed me a photo of a tree base he’d painted to look like an elephant foot.

Besides living in Baltimore, what I've been doing is looking at the time and thinking "if it is 5PM here, it is 4AM in Thailand." This is fun because you don't need any special uniform to do this, just something that tells you the time and someone in Thailand you love and miss a lot. Been talking to Carrot Cake on Skype and it's very futuristic! She's in Bangkok, where the travel clinics are open weird hours and one whole floor of a seven floor mall is a food court with directions like: "For Islamic vegetarian food, see C4. For Brazilian liquid-based desserts, see H9." I miss her, but I am excited for her adventuring.

In criticism news, Mark Cugini's students think I'd be a miserable relationship partner based on their reading of "Is That It's You." One of them said "It sounds like Mr. Young does not approve of love." Which is strictly untrue: I prove love all the time, with a beaker and a stylish bevy of equations.

More thanks are due this week to the champ-ass* (*like bad-ass except better) Barry Graham for his review of Look! Look! Feathers at The Collaigst. I haven't got the chance to read the rest of the new Collagist yet, but I am really excited for something called "In the Time of the Blue Ball." Here is the first paragraph of Barry's review:

If Mike Young told me he grew up in a suburban castle full of lawyers and lion tamers and medicine men, or that he was raised on the edge of the ocean, the adopted son of a snake charmer father and truck-driving mother whose real parents escaped a cult and left him on the front porch of an orphanage, I would believe him. If he told me he grew up the son of uneducated peasants who drank and gambled and whipped their pets and their children equally, I would believe that too. That how's convincing his prose is. Young writes with authority. His voice and his words and his sentences feel earned, authentic.

Barry, you were so close. I grew up in a castle made of tamed lawyers on the edge of an uneducated snake. My parents were a front porch and a whip. Together we drove every day in a truck to an orphanage, where we gambled away children in exchange for medicine and shares in authoritative cults.

Speaking of cults, I read part of a long thing I wrote called The Age of the Tire Boat in NYC (this was in the Center of Fiction, which had beautiful balustrades) and here is me reading the whole thing for Peter Cavanaugh's awesome audio mag Tulip: http://tulipparlor.com/issuetwo. Thanks, Peter! Other cool peeps in the issue include Gian Ditrapano, Eylsia Smith, Galen Dekemper, Tyler Gobble, Sam Edmonds, Eric F Johnson, and Ted Barrow.

Warning: my thing is long to listen to, thirteen minutes and forty-two seconds. 13:42. But I have conference called with Table Mountain and Mt Shasta and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the ghost of John Sutter, and together we have concluded that "The Age of the Tire Boat" is the definitive Northern Sacramento Valley poem-ass thing. Now that it's written, no one else has to ever write about the Northern Sacramento Valley ever again, especially not me. So, yeah, we'll see how that works out. In the meantime, I have tokens in my pocket that will allow me to go back to the 32nd Street Market next weekend and buy Old Bay flavored hummous.

sometimes i live in the country / sometimes i live in the town

2011-09-04T14:16:00.004-04:00

So Irene kept us inside with our beans and bottled water. Only some minor flooding in Northampton, but we missed calamity by a whisker. Very bummed for Vermont, which is full of strange antique barns buried behind weird rivers, and might not be so full of dry ones right now. One story I remember about Vermont is a few activists drove to the woods in search of chupacabras, but one of them was a diabetic and started getting insulin withdrawals, so they had to stop at some strange house and knock on the door. Nobody answered. The diabetic began scratching himself. Then a truck pulled up, and this guy got out carrying a cage with a parrot in it. The activists tried to explain the situation to the guy, but he just held up the parrot cage and grinned. He went inside the house. A few minutes passed. The diabetic was kneeling in the driveway controlling his breath. Then an old woman opened the door and invited everybody in. She led them into the living room, which was full of Nestle crunch bars. "I was just watching my programs, which is why I couldn't hear y'all," she said with a Texas accent. The guy with the parrot was in the kitchen still grinning, still with the parrot cage. Someone told me this story at breakfast one time, but it might as well be a story I made up because I didn't eat enough for breakfast. Good luck, Vermont.

In other news, hoo doggie, so much change. Took my last shower on Orchard Street. Moved to Baltimore. Taught my first class at UMBC. Seems good. I'm very excited to ride the 35 back and forth between UMBC: when I first rode it, there was a new father covered with IT'S A BOY STICKERS and everyone congratulated him/joshed him for having too much sex. There was a jovial mass battle over whether to turn the A/C on. There was a man who gave up his seat for an old man and he sat down next to another man and said "If you don't respect yo elders you ain't got no mowls" and they became friends.

Next Saturday, I'm seeing Jeff Mangum in Boston with my carrot cake as a nice climatic-type event before she goes to Thailand. Kind of can't believe we're doing this. Then we're having a big Bye Bye Have Fun in Thailand party on the 10th anniversary of September 11th, which is much better than a lot of other things to do on the 10th anniversary of September 11th. Kind of weird to think my UMBC students were eight years old when Nine-Eleven became more famous than Seven-Eleven. I remember the first thing I heard about it that day was my mother told me the Weather Channel told her that all planes in the country were grounded.

So speaking of hearing and telling, it turns out I am doing a lot of readings this September! There is one stretch where I'm doing readings three days in a row: three readings and one panel discussion. Kind of nuts. I've made a thing on the right side of the blog to keep track of it all. If you live in NYC or Baltimore, I would love to give you a high five.

Thanks Barry Graham for putting Look! Look! Feathers on this list of his favorite books he's read so far this year. And thanks to him also for this Fab 5 feature he did, where I picked my 5 favorite of my online published stories and also 5 other stories online by others that I really like. Also Tyler Gobble and Layne Ransom's ultimate enthusiasm magazine Stoked just put out Volume II, which is full of great stuff from Matt Hart, Daniela Olszewska, Carol Guess, Nate Pritts, Adam Moorad, Joshua Helms, Thomas Patrick Levy, Christopher Newgent, xTx, Len Kuntz, Parker Tettleton, Nick Ripatrazone, Ryan Rader, Ashley Farmer, and J.A. Tyler. I have a little piece in it talking about how much I was taken by the book Sayonara, Gangsters by Genichiro Takahashi. Do do the checking out if you do that sort of thing.

Wow, hard to believe how much is in the pipeline right now, and that's not even counting the pipeline that people are sitting down about. Let's end on a sad and happy thing and thing: sad is that my sister's dog Sasha is gone. =( My best energy and love her way. The happy thing is this:

i put an ultimatum on your cut off khakis

2011-08-12T17:12:00.006-04:00

WARNING: FOR ONE REASON OR ANOTHER, THIS POST HAS A LOT OF NAMES IN IT. IF YOU HATE NAMES, YOU SHOULD REPLACE THE NAMES IN YOUR HEAD WITH THINGS YOU LIKE, LIKE TINY PHOTOS OF TATER TOTS YOU CAN LICK AND TASTE.

Summer's got a basement full of blow-up dolls. Summer takes a nap in a lake of dry Froot Loops. First there is the weather and then there's the plan, except when there's no weather. White people in the park playing Ultimate Frisbee. Where you move to have kids is where your kids will be from. As in accents. The real life basis of the biopic is flattered when the actor visits to perfect his impression. The nerdy teenager greets strangers the way he  saw NPCs do it in his sandbox video game. You know your town's special when it's got a Presidential library. Certain kinds of infrasound can produce what a show on FX would call a ghost.

Here is a video of me reading some poems in March at the Collected Poet Series with Polina Barskova. My collar is effed the whole time, but there is an uncouth laugher who really and continually asserts herself starting about 60% of the way through. So, you know, win/lose.

In other news, I had an awesome time at the Boston Poetry Marathon. Friends new and old. Cuban sandwiches. Billowing white pants that reminded me of traders riding camels through lots of sand, probably, is where they would ride them. Much respect to everyone there, and especially to Jim Berhle for inviting me in the first place and to my Western Mass car companions Emily Pettit, Ish Klein, Greg Purcell, and Lewis Freedman. Also got the chance to meet Andrew Hughes and pick up the journal project he put together with Whit Griffin, Bright Pink Mosquito. Some lovely buzz in there. Also Dana Ward is as cool as everyone says he is, so don't worry if you were worrying.

In September, as Thailand increases its imports of rare and amazing carrot cakes, I am moving to Baltimore for a while. Got a job teaching at UMBC, which architecturally resembles UMASS except, hmm, let's see: UMBC is Crystal Pepsi and UMASS is when the soda machine messes up and starts ralphing everything inside itself plus some sarsaparilla no one realized was there. Basically what I mean is UMBC has less buildings, and they actually look like each other. UMASS you know I love you, don't throw your library at me, please. Because your library is tall and ridiculous and made of bricks. Anyway, I am excited to live in Baltimore with Mark Cugini and eat soul food and Old Bay seasoning and see Orioles games and take any and all mustache advice from Adam Robinson. Plus there are a lot of other cool Baltimore people that I will list one by one eventually, except I will do it secretly, like when I say "softball" I will actually be talking about Michael Kimball, and when I say "bachelor pad" I will be talking about Justin Sirois, and when I say "campfire" I will be talking about Laura van den Berg, and when I say "Baltimore is a city in which he used to drive around wasted in the car from Back to the Future," I will be talking about Glenn Beck, and when I say "Mad Men" I will be talking about Jamie Perez, and when I say "willow tree" I will be talking about Joe Young. Shh. It's a secret.

but now i can't use the curbstomp line as the post title

2011-07-21T23:24:00.000-04:00

Totally zonked on Sherlock and word origins, but here is a spray of em dashes to consider:

—Players by DeLillo: amazing. Running Dog: not as good, very fun.

—Dobby Gibson is doing Poetry Crossfire and it's better than guaranteed financial collapse of the world's grooviest superpower. Ben Mirov and I faced off over Bei Dao's "Morning."

—30 Under 30, an anthology of words by folks who barely know how to shave—edited by Blake Butler and Lily Hoang—is now out. You should put it in your DVD player to express your outrage over Netflix's policy changes. You're welcome.

—Carrot cake conspiracy in the Advocate, which is something I advocate. What she says is "My actual songs don't seem political, but they are; they're about oppression and liberation of bodies—and not just human ones—and mourning, witnessing and healing at both political and personal levels."

—Speaking of carrot cake, the new Dinosaur Bees is a blast, and the new NOÖ Weekly is a blast of scuff-eyed soul.

—Finally, thanks to Tyler Gobble for reading my poem "Is That It's You" for a big audio thing on Small Doggies. Beat the heat. Curbstomp the heat until its teeth fall out.

if you really want to write the great american poem, you have to realize that Redbox killed Blockbuster, not Netflix

2011-06-30T15:03:00.001-04:00

Just a quickie to say thanks for some new LLF reviews: In the Emprise Review, Nathan Huffstutter has an insightful, evenhanded, and well-written look at the book. He also seems fairly familiar with the territory of the stories, as he says of I-5: "In this corridor, Red Bluff to Yreka to Talent, the weeds and speed give way to off-ramp drags of greasy spoons and grizzled beards, canned greens and un-ironic curios, potholes and slush." I can't even feel annoyed at his criticism of a few stories because he understands them so well and so eloquently. Kudos, Huffstutter! Which I've italicized because it sounds the title of a TV pilot Saul Bellow might've written in the bathtub during a fever, but here is Nathan Huffstutter saying eloquent things:

Make no mistake, this isn’t participation-ribbon or up-by-your-bootstraps trying; in these dozen stories, Young exposes character after character who are trying to trust. Trusting themselves, trusting adulthood, trusting the internet, trusting the people they just might love, all while suspecting the very suckiest, that with both sides predisposed to fuck things up, maybe the best they can do is try. These are the same twitching, fragile moments Jim Shepard engulfs in avalanche and flood and Young dares them au natural, in high school gyms and tribal casinos and Pollard Flats. And if you’ve never stopped for the restroom in Pollard Flats, let me be the first to tell you, that mannequin in the tub will haunt you way longer than any old rockslide.

Also in the eloquence department, Kimberly Ann Southwick has a review of LLF in the new Gigantic Sequins, wherein she says "Young's characters are hunter-gatherers of the fiction world, trading any normal identification of themselves or their possessions for something both more interesting to us and more useful to them." Sweet. Also she says some of the people in the book have green hearts, which is a smart thing to say. The whole issue of GS is full of poems, stories, and illustrations of naked ladies with dinosaur heads. Some of my favorite lines from the issue include Leigh Phillips's "You stole my song / by dying into it," James Caroline's "We were 14 when I tried to give him my winter coat," Adam Atkinson's "Months pass. Mongolians pass," and Michelle Cheever's "We ate our pancakes on opposite sides of the room."

In tennis news, Tsonga the butterfly defeated Federer the napper. A major upset in this riding lawnmower of a summer.

pioneer auto body iced coffee: some thoughts on the english tennis tournament i've been watching alone in my kitchen in between jags of crying softly while staring at the garage

2011-06-28T14:54:00.000-04:00

What? You wanted to hear about a new sea star that feeds exclusively on driftwood? Oh, okay.

Jay-Z was at Wimbledon. He sat in the corner like a vacuum you thought you'd lost.

Nadal's foot is hurting because it also makes the Nadal face, which is the face your little brother makes after he's spent months practicing his carnival horse race skeeball game on a homemade sock-based skeeball machine, and finally the carnival rolls around and he beats everyone by like ten "leagues" or whatever the fuck they measure horse races in but all he wins is a headband and a beautiful Spanish model, and as we all know beauty is fleeting and death arrives like the death of your favorite musicians after they've spent the ends of their lives putting out one embarrassing album after another.

Mardy Fish is the last American, just like John Wayne and Barack Obama and that girl who murdered her mom or daughter or stepped really hard on her inflatable pool or whatever.

If Andy Murray were a real conceptual artist like everybody keeps saying he is, he would retweet every article suggesting he shave with the hashtag #yourmomneedstoshave. Alas Andy Murray is just some guy who will lose to Nadal in the semi-finals unless he hires those dudes at Wimbeldon who stopped shooting pigeons to shoot Nadal's bum foot.

Feliciano "Delicioso" Lopez is attractive to old British ladies. Congratulations! Unfortunately, my grandmother is more into pickleball these days.

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga looks and plays like Mohammad Ali. That is, he turns into an actually butterfly and carries the ball on the back of his wings while the other player chases him around and swats at him, never catching him, before finally Tsonga the Butterfly drops the ball right on the white line, which isn't even chalk anymore, it's some kind of weird titanium spraypaint, but at least the grass is 100% rye, and what Tsonga doesn't tell anyone but you can see in his face is that butterflies don't want to do something as inconsequential as win at tennis because they'd rather be losing themselves among the trippy patterns—hedgerows, garage roofs—you don't appreciate because you're too big.

When David Foster Wallace killed himself and my mother (who hadn't previously heard of him or read anything by him) emailed me an article about David Foster Wallace's documented mental illnesses, it was Federer who I found sleeping on my couch. And I don't even have a couch! When I walked through the door, I saw Fed's dozy Swiss I-used-to-be-a-fat-kid face and I followed his footprints (which were tiny cities of tinier bluebirds) back to the window he'd flown in through. Then Fed woke up and took me into his arms and bought me a custom-tailored white blazer and assured me that, when you get down to it, 1) nothing in life is documentable, 2) there are still whole tribes of uncontacted people living in dense jungles, no matter how many times helicopters take photos of them and some of them look exactly like people you went to high school with, and 3) there is in life, finally, only the way we avoid or don't avoid the smoke produced by inexhaustible contests of human desire, which is of course a conceptual smoke, which is a concept he demonstrated with his wrists.

Bernard Tomic is an eighteen year old Australian in the quarterfinals. He doesn't so much play tennis as do your dishes without telling you. He doesn't so much play tennis as replace your doors with automatic, Star Trek style sliding doors.

Djokovic plays tennis like someone who discovered that when he bought a can of Pringles it was only 3/4 as full as it should be; so he goes back to the store and tries to get his money back; but they tell him to talk to the company; but the company has a robo-operator no matter how many times he punches 0; so finally he rents an SUV with tinted windows and drives to the Pringles factory in the middle of "Nebraska" or whatever and crashes his SUV into the SUV parked in the spot reserved for the owner of Pringles; then he walks inside and steals Pringles from all the assembly lines; even after the alarms are going off and the lines have stopped moving; he even steals the half-done Pringles; the unsalted Pringles; the Pringles that don't hold their shape; the rejected Pringles; the raw potato and oil mash that is begging and pleading for its life (I'm not even a Pringles yet!) as Djokovic stuffs it in his cheeks like chewing tobacco; until finally Djokovic has eaten all the Pringles in the factory and set Pringles back an entire day in Pringles supply; and as the police are arresting him and his stomach is bleeding and his face is shining from all the oil, he turns to the security camera and makes that self-satisfied fuck you, world, ha ha, up yours face that I actually like and appreciate and respect a lot despite conclusions you might be reaching from estimating the tone of this analogy because tones are fleeting and tomorrow Pringles will be back on track and we are but measly sacks of willpower set against everlasting tides of progress and comfort equipment and dizzying economic inequality and faraway stars exploding in tremors of terrifyingly un-self-aware star gas.

lover's just another word for cough syrup in the snow

2011-06-21T14:31:00.001-04:00

The spontaneous and endearing Mark C of Big Lucks is staying with me this week for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, so we are doing things like eating pineapple salsa and buying bike pumps. Today I'm going to get my tennis racquet restrung at the sports store that's so right next to the liquor store that people often get the two confused.

I asked Twitter if there's an emoticon for "that thing where you're writing a book about the internet but it turns into a book about trains?" Two suggestions, which I dutifully retweeted: ಠ_ಠ & :000000000000. It's the first day of summer and I can hear things so well I don't know how far away they are.

Some exciting things that happened in my hometown recently are 1) someone stole a tractor from a high school, but no one knows what they looked like 2) someone stole a wedding dress and a trailer, but they looked like Colonel Sanders.

People have been saying kind things about Look! Look! Feathers of late. Diana Rickard had a nice write-up on her blog where she said: "There is a strong sense of community within these small towns and cliques, a sense of belonging even while there is simultaneously a strong undercurrent of alienation, isolation, and twenty-first century futility." Thanks, Diana! Postitbreakup, whose name I've seen in comment sections a lot but I just now figured out (Post-It Breakup) posted his review of the first two stories, wherein he talks about violence and endings. Thank you! Also he posted a video of Bo Burnham doing a cool piano song about self-loathing and art. Bo Burnham looks like a dentist's son I once knew. The dentist had an office caddy corner from a tackle shop.

Finally, Michael Goroff reviewed LLF for the Barn Owl Review, and it's a very enthusiastic and articulate review. He says the voice behind the stories "is like the debasingly articulate Jiminy Cricket I seem to hear whispering at me on my shoulder every time I open Firefox or pull up to a Taco Bell drive-thru window or simply walk around in the haze of a world that’s mine but that I don’t understand—an ontological cocktail that’s one part disembodied techno-juice, one part actual, physical, real, beautiful, natural living." Gracias, Michael! He also compared the book to E.M. Forster's 1904 Matrix-y sci-fi story "Machine Stops," which anticipates online culture in an amazingly prescient way. "There were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends," Forster says. Probably a lot of people—especially hardcore sci-fi fans—already know about this story, but I didn't because I have been too busy changing my Google background to a picture of a breakfast sandwich.

the 44 books i've read so far in 2011 not counting chapbooks and anything i forgot to put on the list, i finished all of them except I AM A STRANGE LOOP, feel free to ask me about any of them or harrass me if i misspelled someone's name

2011-06-15T16:27:00.000-04:00

1 - Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
2 - Coffee Coffee - Aram Saroyan
3 - Fancy Beasts - Alex Lemon
4 - And Then There's This - Bill Wasik
5 - April Galleons - John Ashbery
6 - Neighbors - Thomas Berger
7 - I Have Touched You - Gregory Sherl
8 - Nick Demske - Nick Demske
9 - The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
10 - Couch - Benjamin Parzybok
11 - Plants Don't Drink Coffee - Unai Elorriaga
12 - Monster Party - Lizzy Acker
13 - The Universe in Miniature - Patrick Somerville
14 - Hush Up Stinky Poo But - Ken Sparling
15 - Cardinal Numbers - Hob Broun
16 - I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter
17 - I <3 Your Fate - Anthony McCann
18 - Odditorium - Hob Broun
19 - Abbot Awaits - Chris Bachelder
20 - Bobcat Country - Brandi Homan
21 - I Is To Vorticism - Ben Mirov
22 - Inner Tube - Hob Broun
23 - Selected Poems - Ted Berrigan
24 - Normally Special - xTx
25 - Campfires of the Dead - Peter Christopher
26 - Await Your Reply - Dan Chaon
27 - About a Mountain - John D'Agata
28 - jPod - Douglas Coupland
29 - There Is No Year - Blake Butler
30 - The Girl With Brown Fur - Stacey Levine
31 - Veronica - Nicholas Christopher
32 - Cowboy Maloney's Electric City - Michael Bible
33 - Us - Michael Kimball
34 - The Book of Interfering Bodies - Daniel Borzutzky
35 - The Disinformation Phase - Chris Toll
36 - Triggermoon, Triggermoon - Julia Cohen
37 - The Exile: Sex, Drugs, Libel in the New Russia - Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi
38 - Casino Moscow - Matthew Brzezinski
39 - Masters of Atlantis - Charles Portis
40 - Madame Bovary - trans. Lydia Davis
41 - Culture of One - Alicey Notley
42 - Three Letter Poems - Josh Brandon and Chelsea Martin
43 - The Financial Lives of Poets - Jess Walters
44 - They Could No Longer Contain Themselves - Elizabeth J. Colen, Mary Miller, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, and Sean Lovelace

video of poem "Is That It's You" and some banter from NYC June 5th Disinformation Party

2011-06-07T18:14:00.003-04:00

Thanks Adam Robinson for the video! You can read along with the poem in Dark Sky magazine: "Is That It's You"

people keep hugging their giant hamsters

2011-06-07T13:51:00.001-04:00

Back from NYC safe and sound. Spilled some wine on my shoe. Random rooftop statues. Lucky streak included finding a Mexican restaurant in the middle of nowhere. Someone had a stroke then petitioned people on the subway for benefits. Had quite a time catching the bus to the city; had to jump out in traffic while stopped behind the bus at a red light near a church and pound on the door. The driver said "This is a first." Thanks to Francesca Chabrier for due diligence. If you were a lawyer making a pickle joke, the phrase "due diligence" would come into it somewhere.

In NYC I read at the Disinformation Party, a party for Chris Toll's new book The Disinformation Phase, which is like a pop sci-fi Lorca. Lots of fun. Day after that I biked around Prospect Park on a Japanese mom bike with my friends John and Lincoln, then I gave John tennis racket advice and we speculated about the logo of the Brooklyn Nets. Why didn't they call them the Brooklyn Ballers? You really effed that, Jay.

What else in NYC? I went to the Brooklyn Flea Market and bought an expensive artisan grilled cheese sandwich. Just kidding I bought a cookie. Not kidding: I bought a cookie and Ben Fama's chapbook New Waves, which I read on the Megabus back to Western Mass in the very considerate orange twilight, which Fama suggests is one of the only two colors that exist. Also in NYC I asked someone what their favorite food was and they said "I don't like rap or country." Also in NYC the subject came up "Does Chainy live like this every night?" but that subject also probably came up outside of NYC. Also in NYC the L wasn't running so I walked around the Hasidic part of Williamsburg for a long time and thought about how the school buses looked normal except for the writing on the side. Do you want a payot? I do not want a payot. I mean, it's like, you buy one thing from Gardners Supply Outlet then they won't stop sending you emails. Tornadoes suck. People carry strollers up/down subway stairs and through emergency exists. There's a store somewhere on the way out of Manhattan called Insomnia Cookies. How do people blog about anything without giving up and talking about cookies the whole time? Your guess is as good as a mime.

Many thanks to Matt Margo for reading "The Peaches Are Cheap" and "WTF Is An Electroylte" from LLF on his Cormac McCarthy's Dead Typewriter Anniversary Ustream Event. He soldiered on during a storm. He asked his audience if they wanted him to read the whole long story and they did. Matt really nailed the dialogue during the garage rehearsal scene.

Have you seen The Lit Pub yet? You should see it!

Sometimes people enter into relationships and sometimes they then turn around and think about them, which is the subject of my poem "Is That It's You" up at Dark Sky. Thanks to Kevin Murphy for publishing me, and gawk all those other fine soulja boyz/girlz in the contents of this fine summer issue, which will be online only for a short time. Love is when you take someone more seriously than you take people. Not sure what else to say, but this is already too long of a blog, so here is a part I cut from the thing I'm working on because nobody cares about Y2K philosophy:

"Is it even worth saying that Y2K mongered its scares because no programmer in 1970 imagined their code would still be afloat thirty years later? Not in 2000, land of star-clogged obelisks and robot maids. Should we admit that even late as the mid-90s, the idea of civilization making 2000 seemed mildly bonkers? Like God was bound to punch his way out of the Sphinx’s nose, sand crumbling and God flicking sand off his ponytail, stepping mincingly on hot sand underfoot. Then He’d clear His throat and call the whole show off, tell us to find a ride home and try not to trip on the gila monsters. This seemed more likely than one big computer bug. Ten years. Goes where?"

when will the long-play video community embrace this adventure game i'm making by breathing on you when you can't see me

2011-05-23T12:25:00.001-04:00

Went to the attractive Salem, MA the other weekend to participate in the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Ate a delicious sandwich with pickles in it. Androgynous old people played bluegrass in overalls. There was a statue of the attractive Samantha from Bewitched. No statues of the attractive Darin. Free antipasto, lots of cobblestone. Cold because of the attractive ocean. I could see why you'd dress up in black and put things in a cauldron. Ambiguous suggestions on the train platform. Spoke on MFAs, encouraged people who wanted alternatives to MFAs to just find people on the internet who like to write and read the things they like to write and read. Made an impassioned argument about the absurdity of all writing/reading and its roots in a peculiarly egotistic form of loneliness, a broom knocked against the wall between the soul and the world, blah blah blah. People raised their hands and asked about summer writing camps. A woman in a wheelchair asked, during the Q&A, if we knew that her first book was coming out. A bee played the piano. I told the story of how the attractive Chris Cheney tried to run me over with his car, and how MFA programs encourage this overly romanticized disengagement with the world, but my fellow panelists provided welcome dissenting maturity and stressed that, don't worry, the pursuit of an MFA can be a very adult activity indeed. Later the attractive Gene K. asserted that I was obsessed with cars that have red spoilers. As usual, he's right. Many thanks to the attractive Danielle Jones-Purett for inviting me to the festival/panel.

Before I left Eastern Mass I ate some Indian food. Cold coconut chutney, very refreshing. Friendly cops came in and talked with the dishwasher. Orchids floating in tall glass cylinders. Boxes of copper pots, a sign that says DO NOT OPEN THE BOXES. WE ARE WATCHING FROM CAMERAS. YOU OPEN YOU BUY. Bollywood music videos that rival mid-90s MTV: sexy, corny, so much spent on the video there was no budget for good beats.

Someone where I am just said "The bleeding edge or the leading edge?"
Then she said "It's magnetic. You can take it off or leave it on."

The attractive Gabe Durham visited Northampton mostly while I was away, but we got to hang out a little bit and eat couscous. We talked about plagiarism and American Idol. Recently Gabe interviewed the attractive Chris Bachelder for The Rumpus and then followed up with him on his blog. Lots of terrific probing about wives and dogs. On the bus back from Eastern Mass, it was raining very hard and I was reading the attractive Lydia Davis's translation of Madame Bovary and thinking about doing something called ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WRITING LAVISH "REALISTIC LITERARY FICTION" YOU CAN LEARN BY ATTENTIVELY READING THE LYDIA DAVIS TRANSLATION OF MADAME BOVARY, but maybe I won't do that.

The attractive Dennis Cooper recently and very generously included Look! Look! Feathers in one of his 3 Recent Books I Loved posts. He included a video of me in 2006 in Ashland telling a story about Tom Waits murdering me. Thanks, Dennis!

On June 5th I'm going to NYC to read in celebration of the attractive Chris Toll's new book from Publishing Genius, The Disinformation Phase. Click here for details on the reading. I will post again about it before June 5th gets closer. Gawd there are so many things to post! And here I am just waiting for Massachusetts to realize it's spring. About The Disinformation Phase, I wrote a note in my reading log that says: "Pop sci-fi Lorca waiting in line to mail Tom Waits some tom tom drums and muttering invocations while he waits." So that's two mentions of Tom Waits, which means I should put a picture of him in this post, but I decided to put a picture of Dennis Cooper instead.

america looks at itself in the cough

2011-05-06T15:03:00.001-04:00

Heard a song in KFC the other night whose hook goes "That's not my name. That's not my name." This is preceded by "They call me Jane, they call me her," etc. A sort of feminist dancehall rally, which is great, but also kind of amazing to remove the song from that context and think about all these people in the KFC just soaking in this very decisive mantra of disorientation. What is it doing to them, what is it doing to their fiesta bowls (it's a KFC/Taco Bell). When I looked up the video for this song, I discovered 1) the people who made the song are very conventionally attractive, and 2) it was used in some sort of Victoria's Secret show, which like most of the world is its own joke.

Where is the boogyman and why is my chair orange? Why are there pipes mysteriously falling on our desks when we're not there? One student told me how kids climbed on top of the cafeteria when Osama died and asked each other to show each other their boobs. Another student told me how kids were printing out pictures of Osama's face just so they could throw them into a bonfire, which makes me think of a lot of thinks, including the way the university ID card website encourages you to ask a "friend or relative" to send you money as often as possible. It also makes me think of those "news organizations" that misprinted Osama as Obama, which is actually pretty forgivable, considering the insanely pat shadow/empty mirror narrative space Obama occupies in the national psychology. If America were a workshop story, people would be like "Come on, the president is named Obama?" But all the workshoppers want to do is eat fancy cheese, so whatever. Also I think of how Yahoo is listing bullshit articles from its "contributor network" in the same "top stories" space they list actual news stories, which makes me feel like I will need to drink a lot of iced coffee and stare at a lot of beautiful bodies of water if I'm going to make it through the weekend.

Onto good news! We Are All Good was voted as #18 in The Believer's Top 20 Poetry Books of 2010. Very honored and surprised. Kudos to other awesome writer-friends listed in the Poetry & Fiction lists: Rachel B Glaser, Alex Phillips, CA Conrad, Ben Mirov, and Nick Demske. Thanks Believer readers.

Over at the GIANT, Gabe Durham wrote a really generous and comprehensive breakdown of "The World Doesn't Smell Like You" from Look! Look! Feathers. Why don't I go ahead and quote at length the most flattering thing he says! Self-esteem! When self-esteem's on a bagel, you can have self-esteem anytime! Here we go: "Mike’s stories, poems, and songs, taken together, form an America thatdoesn’t know that its beating heart is the hungry cluttered small townsof the Pacific Northwest. It’s the fiction, though, that for me doesthe most at once: Language, character, plot, place, inventory,experiment, emotion, and ambition are inextricable from each other inthis book. Look! Look! Feathers does the old things and the new things.We can have it all, and should." Holy goddamn, Gabe Durham. You are a sky pie. Come back to Massachusetts but force your kids to have Southern accents anyway.

Final item of business: the beautiful Carolyn Zaikowski and I recorded a version of Chelsea Hotel: I play guitar and she sings. Carolyn has written two novels that are as beautiful as her singing voice, so someone should up and put those out already. When that happens, I will celebrate by taking her to a bed in the Chelsea Hotel and making sure it's unmade.

piano players are more interesting songwriters than rhythm guitar players

2011-04-29T11:59:00.001-04:00

This is something I reached while walking home today with my first icedcoffee of 2011. It is based on watching American Idol do Carole Kingnight, which taught me surprises like: Carole King wrote "I'm IntoSomething Good." Further research has now taught me that "I'm Into Something Good" was in one of the brave little toaster movies.

In other news, a story from L!L!F is up at The Fanzine: "Same Heart They Put You In." The story is about Napa Valley 90s weird kids and features krill, nintendo, Rottweilers, cannibalism, and writing 80085 on your calculator. Thanks Casey McKinney and Benjamin Bush for publishing it, and Danny Jock for the badass dog art. This story was one I almost cut from L!L!F, but I'm glad I didn't because several people have told me it's their favorite story. I guess I'm reminded again that people are weird, which is always a huge relief.

Very stoked to announce that Ofelia Hunt's Today & Tomorrow is available for pre-order from Magic Helicopter. Read more about it with a clickity on the title. Blake Butler said on FB: "it really rules hard. it gives no fuck about how fully it gives a fuck. big." Also some other magic people said things about it, like Stacey Levine, Amelia Gray, and Matthew Simmons. I approved the final high-res zamboni line art today. Very eager to get this hunk into the world and see it do a little melting of brains and such.

Finally, I'm going to be at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival on May 14th in Salem, MA, doing a panel about MFAs at 3PM. This will be in competition with Steve Almond's Bad Poetry presentation, so you know [insert any joke ever]. If you're around Salem, let's hang out! I've never been to Salem. I will wear a pointy hat.

cleaned my house and now netflix has one more copy of annie hall back, congratulations annie and netflix

2011-04-18T13:28:00.001-04:00

So down in the nation's capitol again this weekend, and Baltimore, to hang out with great folks and talk about sentences in poetry and finally eat chili dogs at the famous chili dog place. They have pictures of Ghostface Killah and Larry King eating chili dogs. The chili dog girl was dancing along with the radio and asked me if I wanted anything to drink with my half-smoke, and I said, okay, yes, a glass of water, and she pointed her spatula at me in a very authoritative way. Thanks to Mark C and Laura for shepherding me toward chili dogdom. And thanks to the ever wizardly Adam Robinson for long conversations into the night, gracious hosting, and driving me to Royal Farms very late at night to buy fried chicken and smoothies. And to Michael Kimball and Barrelhouse and Joe Young and Stephanie Red Shawl and Birthday Justin Ukulele National Anthem Jasper Johns Cake.

Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Review did a really nice little write-up about All Good for National Packing Tape Month. He understands my holistic life philosophy when he says: "The list of things that get brought up, again seemingly randomly,throughout this collection is immense: Craigslist, MySpace, emoticons,antelopes, NyQuil, The Decemberists, and the list just goes on and on. But each of these is important to somebody or they wouldn't exist, orco-exist with each other." Co-existence is all there is. Birds keep choosing or not choosing my window. Garage doors open for no reason. Presidents steal pens. Engineers design machines to shrinkwrap things, and during the troubleshooting process something funny inevitably happens. Someone who works at your favorite restaurant steals steak knives from the discount store and robs the bank across the street, but he's tackled. People do or do not understand your personality based on the subletting ad you post on Craigslist. My stand is for replacing my shrunken, over-focused subjective experience of the world with the world itself, and also for spicier pickles.

sure there's a year it's right here

2011-04-05T14:06:00.001-04:00

Just kidding, there is no year and never has been. Blake is on the scene with a microphone in the rain. By rain I mean dreams, by microphone I mean dreams, by scene I mean ham. Get a copy: There Is No Year by BB.

Meanwhile, I talked about some things at Fix It Broken with Steve Roggenbuck. Click for stuff about Ric Flair and the exclusive story behind that weird prop poem I'm always doing. Speaking of that poem, Dylan Little made a sweet and weird collage video version of a reading I did of that poem, which I'll embed right now (my favorite part is the dancing near the end):

oatmeal helps reduce cholesterol, new england helps reduce spring

2011-03-24T13:47:00.000-04:00

1) Over at the Powells blog, for their Small Press Conversation series, Jamie Iredell and I talk volcanoes, M-40s shoved into apples, Black Bart, peaks made of quartz, burly soufflés, Cormac McCarthy, belt loops in the crosswalk, and other tongue wagglers and heart glops. Many thanks to Kevin Sampsell for inviting us to yak.

2) Our radio show reading from San Jose with JP Dancing Bear is up and podcasted. Check it out here: http://outofourminds.posterous.com/. You can listen to us talk about what colors which flowers are. Thanks due to JP Dancing Bear for his cool name and radio-voiced generosity.

3) In a stunning novelty juke, I talked to the very smart and curious Frances Dinger over GMAIL CHAT. Maybe you have heard of it. It's this new thing. It's like bottled water or something. Frances has been talking to a lot of people about the internet and literature thereon.

4) Barry Hannah in Tuscaloosa, bombers in Detroit ("It was the cheapest flight"; I know how that feels!), Steven Segal helps police capture a bunch of chickens with a tank.

5) I read at the Soda Series last Sunday. It was fun and the couches were soft as promised. Now I have a standing invitation to Chilean food, which is exciting. Thanks to everybody involved with Soda, and especially John Dermot Woods for his really kind intro in which he elected to talk about all of my better qualities and none of my bad ones, keeping the intro nice and short.

did i find this tabasco or did someone leave it for me

2011-03-16T15:09:00.005-04:00

A smattering of cool things from around the web:

1) You can listen to the reading from Skylight Books on their podcast: check it out. Jamie wins the crowd with his smack talk, and if you want to hear my Lemurian lager story [again], well, it's in there.

2) Tommy Pico and the awesome Birdsong zine asked me five questions. I talk about heroin addict advice, kimchi edit wars, and fantasy worlds on the back of multiplication table tests.

3) I bought an iPod from Bryan Coffelt. I am frightened. What will it do to me? I plan mostly to not use it and to stare reproachfully at it as it follows me around and learns my habits and waits for me outside the shower and one night kills me and redecorates my skull.

4) Matthew Simmons is doing this gracious wonderful thing where he writes about each story from Look! Look! Feathers on HTMLGIANT. He's kicked things off with the first story about canned peaches and violent malaise. Thanks, Matthew.

4.5) If I had an agent, they would tell me to ask you to write Amazon reviews for LLF. Some people don't even need agents for this kind of asking; they have agents inside themselves, already, whispering gurgles of energy that slowly push these people toward mirrors and things that could pass for mirrors. Maybe you could write Amazon reviews for LLF or you could write messages to me in the form of Amazon reviews, since I am always looking on my Amazon page anyway. Probably there isn't anything you want to send me a message about, so maybe you could just write recaps of exciting sports events you've seen and post them as Amazon reviews.

5) Totally stoked to send out galleys for Ofelia Hunt's forthcoming (May) novel Today & Tomorrow. Gonna write up a press release and get the show on the road.

6) What about you? What is your new thing? What did I miss while I was on the Best Coast? Has anyone conceived of a good miniature nuclear reactor suicide method yet? Have you seen Trash Humpers? Even if I'm not a girl, can I do that thing where my shirt droops at one of its shoulders? I feel like that is the sexiest thing in the history.

world of litcraft part 3

2011-03-15T10:48:00.002-04:00

Well, it's all done. Jamie has done a great job recapping the final bits of the tour HERE and HERE. And I have nothing substantive to add, except to echo Jamie's gratitude to everyone who hosted us and came out to see us. And thanks to Matt and Nicole for rescuing me for a few hours from LAX, taking me whale watching and skeeball tossing. Also worth noting is that Jamie's first book, Prose. Poems. A Novel, which is great and which NOÖ reviewed, is now available as an e-book, with a portion of the proceeds going to Global Giving's Japanese tsunami relief fund. Jamie is a slam of a writer and a really solid dude. I feel lucky to have had so much experience and antipasto with him.

Now it's off to New York next Sunday for SODA Series #6. Also you can read two new poems in BOMB: "America Is America's Most Prominent Homosexual Sci-Fi Author" & "Keystroke Your Face." Thanks to Peter Moysaenko for putting those up. Meanwhile the nuclear reactors are melting and the vans are being swept against the bridges and everything is fucked. Have a good one.

world of litcraft part 2

2011-03-10T14:24:00.000-05:00

What I've got in my dead ahead is a windmill, tiny, outside, rooted among a very well landscaped delight of Central California garden paraphernalia. We're at Jamie's parents' house down near Monterrey. The last time I checked in, we'd just checked out of Ashland, where I was so stoked to eat the best omelet in the history of the form. At Morning Glory, which would be funny if that were the only thing I linked in this tour blog, but I'm sticking to a strict too-lazy-to-link policy. The omelet in question had Applewood smoked bacon, Fontina cheese, and caramelized red onions. Yeah. Yeah.

After Ashland, we drove south through the Siskiyous, peppered by snow, beautiful, Shasta strange and looming as ever. I told Jamie about Lemurians and people who have emotional attitudes one way or another about the mountain. Mr. Mountain, you have to call it. It's a high school principal of a volcano. We managed to make it to San Francisco in 5 1/2 hours because the Sac Valley is a warp zone. In SoMa we read about homeless people who have opinions about the internet. The place where the reading was, Rancho Parnassus, made a great turkey pesto sandwich. It was awesome to read with Patrick Duggan, who read some poems about walking around. Jamie and I have been talking the whole tour about a philosophy of overarching aesthetic and ideology, in which nothing anyone does doesn't factor into everything they are. Patrick's an inclusive, generous, democratic poet: ipso imp pasta, he's those things as a person. It was great to see him and great to see Elliot Harmon, who put on the reading and was as tall and gregarious and warmhearted as ever. Plus other Bay friends: Chelsea & Ian, Jimmy C, bearded Jesus. I read the tiny baby story and some advice for babies. Jamie read about San Franciscans, dreadlocks, and other thicknesses of hair. Afterwards, we tried to eat at a laundromat, but all they had was detergent, so we went to a diner, and then we drove uphill very fast with Jamie's friend Todd.

We backtracked from San Francisco to Davis, hanging out with Jamie's bro Bryan and Bryan's fam in Elk Grove. Bryan and his wife Julie have very cute kids. The daughter, Torie, invented a new kind of baseball with lemons. Dylan, the baby, has a zen language of grunting. Jamie and I waved and said we'd meet up with them later and then had dinner with my parents at an Italian restaurant. We talked about celery pills and Russia and tenant trials. It was very kind and supportive of them to drive down and listen to us read. We read at a gallery with a lot of great art up, like a man wearing his shirt for a turban and doing a still life Watusi. Jamie did his best reading yet, I think—he really nailed it and railed on hippies—and I read the beginning of a long sad story about dead wives and R/V roaming. Afterwards, we found out that Davis doesn't really have any bars, just pizza places that serve liquor. Jeremy Spencer, of Scrambler Books, is like some shining polar cherub of niceness. He is a really fucking nice guy. If the world were full of Jeremy Spencer, nobody in the NCAA would make officiating mistakes.

After Davis we drove down to the home of Jamie's uncle and aunt (we're both from Nor Cal, so this is very much the family tour) who were totally ridiculously cool and fed us cake. No joke. Jamie's Uncle Dave talked about engineering and all the history he knows, which is a lot, and Jamie's Aunt Liz was hilarious and kind and made a really great joke at the end about all of us living together in a compound when the apocalypse comes. She made a finger gun joke, which is one of my favorite kinds of jokes. Also their house looked like a mission.

Then it was off to do a radio show with JP Dancing Bear. He talked about consulting with many countries on how to superconduct. Jamie and I read poems, and Bear was very kind and even had poems pre-picked he wanted us to read. I read about not owning a door, and Jamie read about orange carnations. Bear said it would be up as a podcast at some point, so I will link to that when it's live. Beer Run Bobby, a sign let us know, is not allowed in the KKUP station.

Last night we stayed with Jamie's parents, I saw some embarrassing childhood photos, and this morning we ate delicious artichoke omelets. The tour of omelets. Tonight it's off to Cal Poly and craft talking, and then sunny Los Angeles to sun-set ourselves. Jamie and I just washed our clothes together. What a trek, what a grandfather clock, what a beautiful way to eat so much trail mix.

world of litcraft

2011-03-07T11:28:00.003-05:00

Right now I'm on a sleeping bag in Ashland, Oregon, and there's a giant blue exercise ball before me. Or after me, if I roll it. Outside is Valentino, the neighbor's very fat cat who climbs your face when you're considered company.

Three stops down in this tour. Going really lovely so far. Lots of great faces and kind movement. Flew into Seattle on Friday, read at Pilot Books. We read in the middle of a circle. I read the tiny baby story and did the love play. Jamie read about football announcers and blurbs. Great folks, some who also recognized Jamie's shirt as looking like a throwback Dale Earnhardt pit crew shirt. After the reading I ate a sandwich called "Spicoli's." People talked about Boise rest stops and other experiences of showstopping. Some other notable things about Seattle include fish on the floor of the airport and smooth countertops made out of salvaged bowling alley wood. Seattle, you're a good kid.

Then Jamie and I and wingman Matthew Simmons drove down to Portland, where we got to hang out at Kevin & B Frayn Masters's wedding reception. Lovely music and deviled eggs and banana peanut butter cupcakes and a giant mural of Harry Dean Staunton keeping a lovelorn but compassionate flock-watch over all of us. Afternoon was Powell's pilgrimage. Then we read at Ampersand Vintage, which was an amazing place, and we read to an amazing crowd, who totally packed the joint. I read the immature gym coach story, and Jamie read about not parking on the sagebrush. People hooted and snickered and drank free beer (thanks Ampersand!). Later people bought a lot of books and I asked them where they were from. Later still I ate pasta salad. (As with most of my day-to-day reckoning, this tour update is basically a food diary). Some people were from Colombia and some asked me to draw a duck in their copy of LLF. It was great to meet a few internet friends in person and to hang out with old friends from SOU who'd migrated to "the couch of America." Deep thanks to everyone, especially Kevin Sampsell (of Future Tense) and Michael Schaub (of Bookslut) and Bryan Coffelt (of Bryan and Caroline and Felix). Portland has now officially won a piece of my heart the size of those oversized black ear studs people wear there.

One bummer was that Jamie hit a bout of insomnia in Portland, but he's feeling better now. We switched off the driving duties halfway to Ashland, and I pulled into my college town in the droopy-eyed rain I definitely remember. Had some fusion Brazilian food with his Kaseyness the Kaseinator, and then we had a cozy, chatful reading at the library. Retired to the Kasey Residence and mapped out an exciting new way to understand the road novel. Kids seem to be alive and well in Ashland. Good work, everybody. Keep the dream alive. Dream team. One day you will be on the basketball team of whatever nationality you think of yourself as, whether it's the nation of smooth operators or the nation of people-who-dance-very-well-wearing-only-socks.

Right now we're getting ready to visit Morning Glory, which is my favorite ______ (<--- everything). San Francisco tonight. How insane to be privy to this much kindness and intelligence from so many people. So much thanks to friends new and old. And to Jamie for proving to be a tour partner even cooler than his very cool beard tufts. What is there to do but hug this giant blue exercise ball?

FREAKS & FEATHERS

2011-02-26T18:44:00.015-05:00

So listen, me and sweet friend and burly cook and beautiful sentimental drunk Jamie Iredell are westward bound. We are flying next Friday to Seattle to do a week of readings, to see friends and suss Spring and pound the blowtorches for our new books. Jamie's book is The Book of Freaks, a new Devil's Dictionary of unsullied America, by which I mean sullied, by which I mean America in actual. Mine is Look! Look! Feathers, which you're probably tired of me jittering about. If you're on the grizzlier coast, come hang out with us one of these days at one of these places (click for more info, addresses, etc):

FREAKS & FEATHERS TOUR

* Pilot Books, Seattle WA (3/4/11 7PM)
* Ampersand, Portland OR (3/5/11 7:30PM)
* Ashland Public Library, Ashland OR (3/6/11 7PM)
* Rancho Parnassus, San Francisco CA (3/7/11 7PM)
* John Natsoulas Gallery, Davis CA (3/8/11 8PM)
* KKUP 91.5 FM, Cupertino (3/9/11 8PM)
* Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo CA (3/10/11 Time TBA)
* Skylight Books, Los Angeles CA (3/12/11 5PM)

he said "i locked you in this body / i meant it as a kind of trial"

2011-02-21T23:03:00.006-05:00

Some items of local note: I interviewed the shadow cluster Frank Hinton for the"Youth Is Write" series on Fix It Broken. We talk about the difference between being a person and having feelings (spoiler alert: there probably isn't one), processes, sick thoughts, staple guns, and puking. Thanks to Frank for being a fascinating person and thanks to Greg Dybec for putting together this project.

Other items: "Burk's Nub" is live at Route 9, the new-ish online journal of work by UMass MFA students edited by Sarah Malone. Tons of other great stuff in the new issue by other sexy UMassers, some bandmates, some alumni, some transplanted Spaniards, some interviews of translators, some dream detection, some videos, some echo brothers, some chemical mist, and Deepok Chopra. Read around.

Burk previously appeared in the now sadly defunct Backwards City Review. I remember sitting in my friend Nick's apartment in 2007 in NYC and Nick telling me he'd read the story in BCR and really liked it. Then we walked to get elaborate sandwiches through the dead Wall Street night, where in day people patrol with major firearms, and the bodega featured obnoxious young money nerds blatantly ignoring the basic humanness of those they were ordering sandwiches from. "Burk's Nub" is about loneliness. One time about this story I said "Loneliness is the primary mood of visionaries." The story has band nerds and pimples in it. It has fast food restaurants that point their vents at the street to make you hungry. It has a racist uncle.

In less local news, people from Egypt have been sending pizzas to Wisconsin. How beautiful is that? Sometimes I read the comments on internet news articles, especially on Yahoo, and feel some weird new kind of catharsis about how hopelessly ridiculous and dangerous most people act when they post anonymous comments on the internet. It is not a "good" feeling but feelings don't work like that anyway. I just remembered that the Burk story has pizzas in it too! Continuity!

P.S. Oh yeah, follow-up on the style stop: homeless dad indeed.

electronic facial hair

2011-02-15T22:35:00.001-05:00

By the way, you can now get Look! Look! Feathers on your Kindle and Nook. Future reading for you futuristic people. Drink some fortified wheatgrass clam juice and read some e-lit. To the left is what L!L!F looks like at Powell's in Portland (thanks, Kevin S), which is the place you should visit to buy all your old fashioned edible books.

go thaw yourself

2011-02-15T15:27:00.003-05:00

Stopped today at the grocery store by local reporters, young, doing a man-on-the-street fashion segment. Felt ridiculous but bragged about my scarf, which my sister made out of t-shirts. Said my style icon was Dale Earnhardt. The photographer said it was his first day at the paper, and he looked around in wonder at the grocery store, so maybe it was also his first day inside a grocery store. (He was nice, he was nice, lay off, I liked him and we talked about HANS braces).

Some things to rattle about: Michael Filippone did a very gracious video review of We Are All Good. Thanks, Michael! I should write a sequel called We Are Al Good, all about the adventures of poor Al. Do people write sequels to poetry books? Somebody do this research. Somebody mispronounce some names on NPR. Some invent a new artisan multivitamin. Riley Michael Parker asked me to write a story called "The First Time," so I wrote a story called "None of Us Would Meet Her in the House of Mystery." It's up on HOUSEFIRE with a brother story from Saint Maurice Burford. Thanks, Riley! Also that food thing I read at the National American National Shut-Up-About-the-National-Anthem Animal Gawkery is up at Everyday Genius: "You Are Not the Food." Thanks to Adam Bearderson. But enough about me! What's up with you? Did you do your taxes yet?

it's the thing that makes the other noise

2011-02-09T18:32:00.013-05:00

Whoa, man, hey, ugh, whoop, so much. Went to the National Anthem and re-wrote the lyrics. While I was there, I attended the Alienated Wombats Parade. Hung out with so many lovely people that I got a cold. What I posted on Adam Robinson's Facebook is what I believe: the cold virus was the most successful networker at AWP. It got published in all of our lungs.

Really, so many things deserve a recap: foremost, Mark Cugini and Laura Spencer were the most stupendous, generous hosts ever, and Kim Ann Southwick and Chris Sumner (secret captain of the Tippuh) were great fun to share crash space with. Then there's all the other shit that was far better for my National heart than the Nationals record: zoo readings, Ethiopian food (first AWP meal tradition with Molly Gaudry), drinking from a tower of multiple highball glasses at the Big Lucks reading, me and Joe Hall trying to sabotage PBS, Gene Morgan's robot, riding the train both ways with Gale Thompson/Anne Holmes/Brian Foley, having a heartfelt drunkersation with Scott Garson, having a heartfelt drunkersation with Brian Carr, Tim Jones-Yelvington being in costume the whole time and me not realizing that until the end and thinking Man, Tim has a lot of events to do! I feel bad that he never gets time to change (the lesson being, of course, that everything is an event when you are an event, as Tim is), meeting so many awesome people for the first time at the Bookfair, seeing so many awesome familiars at the Bookfair (including a strong Boston showing! Brooks S! Johnathan Papas and Molly! Peter J!), having the HTMLGIANT table be caddy corner from Kasey Mohammad and having a miscommunication with Kasey over whether we were saying "beau" or "boo" to each other before realizing that they mean the same thing, Brandi Wells threatening to kill me unless I took a journal she didn't want off her hands, meeting Jen Gann and having her accuse me of being Tim Allen (hopefully not the last time that happens in my life), all the people who volunteered to be lion food for my zoo poem, Chloe Cooper Jones and Adam R who brilliantly organized the zoo reading, man I am running out of breath and I am typing, typing isn't even breathing, the hilarious West Wind Review/Abe Lincoln/Edge Books reading (probably the best overall reading I saw), the hilarious crew I ate with at that reading, including the 80s Weird Science Punk Rock impressiveness of Shaun Gannon, Amelia Gray at the Literature Party having an audience of 900 people in the palm of her hand as she bellowed threats from behind her razorwire grin, see there are so many people I'm forgetting already, Blake Butler of course and forever being his rambunctious Blake-in-public in-public self, and being cuddly normal Blake in private, Justin Sirois delivering the Understanding Campaign swag and being as warm as ever, Sam Ligon leaning conspiratorially over the GIANT table as if he were trying to buy a gallon of unlicensed ham (I forget what we were really talking about), Lincoln Michel and I trying to pull people from the audience onto the stage in what felt like the Lost in Space version of dancing, Matt Hart humping the microphone stand and completely demolishing the Megareading audience with a wow-sauce of a closing act to a background of sirens, all the awesome organizers behind Megareading, Jason Bredle's crowd-zonking hilarity at Megareading, Dan Bailey's emotional three pointer from mid-court at Megareading, Jen Gann's spellbinding gym bomber at Megareading, standing in the corner at the Table X reading while Sasha Fletcher's friend in a fedora made fun of everyone except Adam Robinson of whom he said "Every now and then some asshole gets up there and shows everybody how it's done," Ben Fama's steamrolling wizardry of Supermachine omnipresence, walking and talking with Melissa Broder about meditation and how much we missed Ryan Call, the text message sent to my new-friend-of-scarf-trading Christie Ann Reynolds by Christie Ann Reynolds's mom, who said (I might be summarizing a little): "You look like Anne Hathaway. It's going to snow. R u alive?", a Saturday night Poets Invade DC dance
party at some place I can't remember, but a girl named Trinny (from Trinidad) told me "You can actually dance, that's amazing," dancing with Lily Ladewig like The Basement '08, giving brotherly advice-of-the-heart to Lina Makdisi as she smoked cigarettes, which was funny because I only see her once a year at AWP, but she was very nice and gave me a free anthology of airline fiction so I traded her some advice—hmm, let me back up—eating bland Indian food with a bunch of smart people before the Table X reading, including Jackie Wang, Tim Y, Mike Kitchell, Andrew Weatherhead, Jackie Wang's punk house friend whose name sadly evades me, and Lily Hoang, who was perhaps my official AWP 2011 Buddy in that I feel like she often steered me away from oncoming headlights and also she was good for pointing out Joe Biden's swingset, um, telling many, many people re: Andrew Weatherhead's 600 page bolt-bound autobiographical novel that "when I first heard about it, I thought he was joking"—hmm, feel like I'm either running out of stuff or getting exhausted—Tao Lin and Megan Boyle liveblogging the green room goings-on of the Black Cat at Literature Party, Timothy Sanders telling me awesome stories about Europe and Southeast Asia, meeting xTx, getting a lunch in with Gabe Durham before things got really crazy, Joshua Marie Wilkinson yelling my name as we were packing up Saturday at the Bookfair then running over to give me a hug, Jennifer L. Knox and Jason Bredle being the funniest people on their Funny Poetry panel, the weird coincidence that Chris Sumner goes to school with Ian Denning, briefly seeing Sean Kilpatrick and Donora Hillard sometime after I'd eaten an Oreo ice cream sandwich I bought from a vending machine at the National Zoo with my credit card, talking with Jesus Garcia about poetry and enjoying how I always feel like he is about to bust out a guitar solo wherever he goes even if he doesn't have a guitar, congratulating Aaron Burch and Elizabeth Ellen on their upcoming knot, trading a copy of Look! Look! Feathers with Zach Dodson for a copy of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature by Patrick Somerville, Jamie Iredell touching everyone the way only he can, Ben Segal giving me a copy of the awesome book of imaginary blurbs he co-edited—hmm, now I feel like I'm inevitably going to leave someone out and they're going to feel bad; I come from a long immature imagination of left-out feeling and am sensitive to such shit—calling Carolyn Zaikowski very tipsy outside the tattoo parlor Wednesday night to tell her how much I missed her, that seems like a good place to end. Very sure I left people out, for instance I just realized how integral Jamie Perez was in helping me find the aforementioned food scale at the zoo. I apologize to everything and everyone forever. Sorry and thank you for always.

Mike Young (Zoo Reading) from Paul Cunningham on Vimeo.

innovation is an act of zombie conjure

2011-01-28T11:20:00.002-05:00

Want some stuff to read? I answered some questions that might lead you to stuff over at Ravi Mangla's great blog and archive Recommended Reading. Books discussed/mentioned include Cloud Atlas, Nineteen Knives, Motorman, Moby Dick, The Weather Stations, Zereos and Ones, and a bunch of books with three letter titles. If you tried to put all those together you would get a motorman who finds nineteen knives demarcating different pages of his cloud atlas, all of which lead him on a journey to different weather stations, where he finds a man named Moby with tattoos of binary code on his member. We're all members of something, folks. Love is at the back of the crowd until it finds you. In the eyes of the universe, it's not that airports charge exorbitant prices for burritos, it's that death doesn't charge you anything.

it was over before you woke up

2011-01-18T22:41:00.002-05:00

Had a killer time in Boston, even as a decidedly non-"local boy," flattered apologies to Time Out Boston. Carolyn and I trekked the three hours from Northampton, got swamped in traffic, and Carolyn explained the intricacies of every showtune we could find on the rental car's XM radio, intricacies I promptly forgot in favor of staring in terror at Carolyn's enthusiasm. Then we showed up and read and had a good time. Carolyn read a story about the Boston Molasses Disaster on the anniversary thereof, the audience was full of smart laughers and occasional bowties, and Gene Kwak was a dashing host. Reports indicated that people bought Look! Look! Feathers because I read the beginning of the baby story, and the people wanted to find out if the baby was "okay." Old fashioned suspense: I didn't mean to do it, but there you go. The next morning Gene's housemate John got everybody pastries. Carolyn and I drove home and listened to different decades of music and confidently diagrammed the progression of American pop in relation to American hair gel.

Some internet news: I went beserk participating in Largehearted Boy's respected and much-loved-by-me Book Notes series, matching every story in Feathers to a song and writing way too much and way too obnoxiously "skittery-do-dah." Check it out here, and thanks very much to David of LHB for letting me play.

Also, I wrote a blurb for a nonexistent book called Now They Turn Left, which is about a NASCAR driver named Hank Reckon dying on the last lap of the Daytona 500 and getting immediately replaced by a zombie version of Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and inventor of computer programming, who goes on an epic American roadtrip in Reckon's #00 car, which somehow turns into a #69 car as the blurb progresses. Why the hell did I write this ridiculous blurb? Why, for a conceptual anthology put together by Ben Segal and friends called The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. In this Catalog, you'll find descriptions of "wished-for and ideal books" by a host of awesome folks, like Aimee Bender, Bhanu Kapil, David Ohle, Lance Olsen, Vanessa Place, Diane Williams, and a bunch of yuk yuk factories like yrs truly. Or falsely, as the project entails. Do your projects have tails? Are the manes of your projects destined for best-in-show? Do your projects demand expensive shampoo?

p.s.

2011-01-12T00:17:00.001-05:00

Come to the Boston launch party for Look! Look! Feathers at Brookline Booksmith this Friday @ 7PM. More details here. I will be reading with my lovely carrot cake. Thanks to Gene Kwak for setting it up. Friday is also National Forest Conservation Day (only observed in Thailand) and Anaïs Nin's birthday. Rumor has it we'll talk the paint off cars, so don't bring your car.

can't sink what you can't coax

2011-01-11T23:44:00.000-05:00

Stuck in California thanks to snow. What the news media is calling a "winter bomb." If I can walk through the snow but planes can't fly through the snow, obviously someone needs to invent an intercontinental giant I can just ride in the back pocket of. In the meantime, I will invent a trashy fusion restaurant concept. The name of the restaurant will be HOW BOUT. Some items on the menu will be chicken tikka masala tacos, nacho quiche, hot dogs with kimchi instead of sauerkraut, and toquito egg rolls. Please give me more ideas for my trashy fusion restaurant. In other news, there were lotto tickets in the napkin dispensers of the Asian doughnut shop. There was a young man in a condo overlooking the Bay who smuggles vodka to his sister overseas, hiding it in contact solution bottles. There is the legend of KD Station in Sioux City, Iowa, with its cattle elevator, its costume shop. There was an archery range inside. There was a bowling alley fire. There was even a butcher shop, a glutton for nostalgia.

feathers in the fro

2011-01-03T16:28:00.005-05:00

Hey eager beavers, some peeps have contacted me about ordering Look! Look! Feathers for themselves or their bookstores. Just to keep you in the loop: its official release date was December 31st, but it got delayed at the printers, which is messing up information with the distributor/Ingram/etc. The books arrived today at Word Riot, and Jackie from Word Riot will take care of all the distribution stuff. Thanks for ordering if you've ordered! Sorry about the delay!

I am thinking about recording a special CD of homemade songs to accompany LLF. Then I can bring this with me when I'm doing readings with Jamie Iredell in March. I will let you know if I make this and then you can email me and I will send CDs to people who order the book. In the meantime, if you've ordered the book and you haven't received it yet, just let me know your phone number and I will call you up and tell you an exaggerated story from my life in a Russian/Southern accent.

make sure it spins

2010-12-31T15:44:00.005-05:00

Today's the official release date for Look! Look! Feathers, which I celebrated by cooking some eggs. A really insightful and generous review of the book by Chris Vola went up yesterday at The Rumpus: check it out.

Today of course also closes 2010. It's been a busy year in this camp. I keep starting and erasing epic summations of the year. But it's too much for me, yo. Maybe at the end of 2011 I will be ready to talk about everything that happened in 2010. Suffice to say, I went up and down both coasts and then some, doing the sunset coast with a girl-carrot I love very much, and along the way I hung out with so many upstanding, beautiful, generous people. We played music and ate burritos and ate chocolate and ate breakfast and saw movies and rode trains and braved a lot of weather. You know who you are. One of the best years of my life, to be honest. Tell me your most secret ambition for 2011 in the comments section and I will make up a barbecue sauce recipe and name it after you.

thanks

2010-12-27T17:37:00.001-05:00

Thanks Dennis Cooper for putting We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough on your list of favorites from 2010!

obviously janelle monae is better than both of them

2010-12-27T15:30:00.002-05:00

Hey, have you ever imagined the William Penn drawing from the Quaker Oats box getting into a anamorphic romantic and activist relationship with a tiny Santa Christmas ornament? So have I! Luckily Metazen was kind enough to collect my enactment of this imagination with many other strange and delightful Christmas-themed stories for their second annual Charity Christmas E-Book, which you can download for free here: http://www.metazen.ca/?p=6141. Metazen raised a few hundred dollars with this e-book to donate to a small business through Kiva. Great work, Canadians. Canadians are also good at curling, sheetrock, and waving vigorously.

slightly stranger versions of what you already know

2010-12-20T14:37:00.005-05:00

A person named Emily Temple wrote a nice little crinkle of columns about L!L!F for the Dec/Jan issue of Nylon Guys. Check out a screenshot on her blog. She says: "The collection is a lesson in opposites, in both its push-pull between youth and age and its juxtaposition of sentimentality and irony. It's fresh and weird—and it tugs at the reader in all the right places."

What's more, the forever awesome Michael Schaub included L!L!F in his list of 16 favorite books from 2010, which was imperviously lovely of him (I don't know if that's a real modifier for lovely; it's the first thing that came to my head). Check out his whole list here on the Bookslut blog.

Also, Ryan MacDonald's art class at UMass read poems by Jordan Stempleman and me, and then they made amazing stuffed pillow-like objects. The popcorn to the left is maybe my favorite. In other news, popcorn is a Christmas tree decoration, and life is the bowl of stale leftover popcorn that didn't fit on the tree.

mastadon in a tar pit

2010-12-15T13:42:00.000-05:00

A story from Look! Look! Feathers is newly live at the lovely Collagist: "What the Fuck is an Electrolyte?" Thanks to Matt Bell for publishing this. This story features VHS workout tapes (stomped), checkerboard Vans, a cockroach running away from milk, purple sweatpants, a racist tennis coach, an "old Indian on a mountain bike, wearing a studded cowboy hat and hauling a rickshaw full of canned yams," and so much more, friends, so much more. This story is different from other stories in L!L!F because the protagonist doesn't want to feel anything. Other protagonists in L!L!F have issues with feeling, but they appreciate the opportunity to do so, at least. Not so much with Monty. This makes WTF flat and weird in tone and uncomfortable next to the other stories, which is like when there is a weird guy at the party who won't stop asking you if your fireplace is real. This is the sign—as we all know—of a top-notch party.

score one for the home team

2010-12-14T10:32:00.000-05:00

Though I dispute the way the origin story excludes how Cheney and I made up doo-wop songs on the balcony outside the apartment, the rest of Rachel B Glaser's intro to this conversation is factual in spirit and zest. Check it out for our thoughts on everything from misspelled last names to huge-smelling stars.

If you're in New York on Friday, the Word Riot Press book release party for Look! Look! Feathers and Paula Bomer's Baby will be at KGB Bar this Friday the 17th at 7PM. More details here or on Facebook.

Other relevance involves day-old coffee. Someone with two adams-apples who was too restless about the snow to nap on the bus. Birthday pizza for my favorite lady. Cookie party in historic mansions. Sketchy kennels. Assigned reflection. My doppelganger Australian cricket coach has apparently been demoted. I wish him the courage to carry on in his stunted capacity.

we predict a seasonal suspension of suspicion spit

2010-12-07T19:37:00.005-05:00

Sky too stubborn to snow. Has decided to shave our faces via wind. What else is new? I did an interview as Ada Lovelace. Feel like I might be the only fan Dale Earnhardt and Ada Lovelace have in common. Like I want to wear practical shoes and fancy umbrellas. Made a new RAD Poetry video for Christy Crutchfield with Carolyn and her cat Maude. Exhausting number of links. Had a computer conversation with a student. Hardware troubles. Feel like computers are the new cars in terms of the lay person always knows just enough about them to get themselves in hot water. Some interesting things I've seen lately include two old Puerto Rican twin ladies on the same bus and a Marine with a poodle. Two positive new reviews in decomP: L!L!F and All Good. Thanks, Spencer. Feel like my blog secretly aspires to be a parody of a Larry King parody. Not so secretly, I guess. What should I get you for Christmas? Should I get you a pictographic representation of the way my drowsy minutes before sleep always seem to slough memories of random overheard conversations like one between a street flutist and a meter maid? Should I get you a Rin Tin Tin costume? Should I get you Brazil? Should I get you gotten?

NOÖ [12]!

2010-11-23T13:55:00.001-05:00

If I haven't already told you about this somewhere else, check out the new NOÖ. Lots of awesome stuff.

keeping busy like a gift i can't give back

2010-11-17T23:20:00.001-05:00

Hey y'all, three weird and never before seen little pieces are online at Used Furniture Review, a new online lit mag. Thanks to David Cotrone for asking me to send him stuff. Subjects include tennis, cigars, cake bully God figures, and fair rides. In other words, par for the course. Other pretty cool stuff up at UFR right now includes an interview with Tom Perrota and some poems from Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz.

Vitamin D for darkness, Publishers Weekly for self-esteem

2010-11-09T17:18:00.002-05:00

Here's Publishers Weekly's review of Look! Look! Feathers:

'Young hits the mark in this smart, quirky debut collection, where base humanity—like the macho behavior of a high school gym teacher who is revealed to have only one testicle in "The World Doesn't Smell Like You"—is juxtaposed against a crushing swell of technology and pop culture. Social media, brain-Internet browsers, and reality television all feature in Young's stories, and institutions like the 24-hour grocery, the "old hotel on Mason Street," and Facebook are venues for Young's twisted tales. In "Mosquito Fog," two online companions arrive at an awkward moment when widower Russell discovers his online confidante, contrary to her online profile, is not his contemporary but a teenage girl. The couple at the center of "Snow You Know and Snow You Don't" slowly reveal in a letter to their unborn child the strange way they cope with a domestic tragedy. Meanwhile, in "No Such Thing as a Wild Horse," the transformation of a local fun park "from something rinky-dink into something grand" is held up, albeit wryly, as a beacon of inspiration. This is a slick collection—relevant, wise, and immensely enjoyable. (Dec.)'

reformed turnpike bully

2010-11-06T14:03:00.000-04:00

Hey, the cool and enthusiastic Tyler Gobble interviewed me for Small Doggies and included a review of We Are All Good. I talk about Christmas bags and know-what-I-mean versus no-I-don't, and also I nonsensically talk shit on Tony Hoagland. Check it out. Thanks, Tyler!

2010-11-05T14:56:00.002-04:00

Let's recap: gypsy Halloween singalong, Pet Semetery, cheap gyros, matching b/f, g/f taco costumes, blue jumpsuit, motherboards dangling from neckties, parties of social coincidences, a perilous van ride singalong.

Then the Barry Hannah tribute on Wednesday, hosted by Gene Kwak. Really well-lit time at Newtonville Books, lamps and early release copies of Barry's posthumous selected-and-new collection, Long Last Happy. Joy-stuffed reflections and remembrances, guns with popcorn in them, lots of gut shots and gut laughs of prose. Folks from all over to celebrate a fine man of Oxford, the Southern one. I was humbled to have an opportunity to yak a little about my relationship to the work of Barry Hannah, who was a heart wrangler, a soothsayer, a white hot pilot of knowing why stories are worth it. And humbled especially to read in such company: Askold Melnyczuk, Amy Hempel, Sven Birkerts, Jennifer Haigh, and James Parker. I read "Coming Close to Donna." I wore my best shoes. Later I ate some Eggs Benedict Pizza, and I was a little drunk when I ate it, so I didn't realize until now that such a dish is like something invented as a Christmas present by my kindest dreams.

Next day, I guest-lectured about theft and verbal storytelling in Gene's UMass Boston class. Sharp folks, all ages, creased by experience. Gene was sick and I convinced him to eat some ginger chicken soup. Rain fell on the lake and the UMass Boston campus looked like a prison movie before the redemptive part. Later we got fried chicken, black-eyed peas, and wonderful clove-tasting sweet potatoes delivered to Gene's abode, which was very brave of the delivery people, because I guess Gene likes to shoot them. Or wait, maybe that's his neighbor. That night I read at Lorem Ipsum books (thanks to the kind Pete and Kate for setting things up), which had recently moved into an old refrigerator store. I read with Mark Leidner and Elisa Gabbert. Leidner was hilarious and Gabbert was genius, though each borrowed liberally from both afflictions. I ate some salt and vinegar chips. Gene alas was too sick to read, but he was missed. People made eye contact in wonderful ways. Mark and I stopped at a convenience store on the way back to Western Mass, and then we wondered what would happen if America were one big corporation, and all the billboards just had ads for specific products like: APPLES! CHAIRS! BRACELETS!

Now I am home and working on getting shit together. Some linkage news includes two new reviews of L!L!F, an enthusiastic one in the Brooklyn Rail and a lukewarm one on the blog Glorified Love Letters. Over on the NOÖ Journal blog, Gabe Durham talks about James Robison's 1988 novel The Illustrator, which I want to call a punt-return-for-a-touchdown book because that's the kind of damn good I think it is. And, you can win a free copy of Dennis Cooper's new essay collection Smothered In Hugs by just posting a comment about your dreams or making up a dream and posting a comment. Super easy. Win a free book. Stay tuned for more NOÖ blog content, including long overdue RAD Poetry videos, as I try slaphazardly to hype the run-up to NOÖ 12. The trick is getting past the kicker, who's always a better tackler than he should be.

the name of my shower is the road

2010-10-29T13:01:00.000-04:00

The great thing about waking up at 6:30AM is the fog and the fact that the people who take 7AM buses tend to do things like juggle random breakfast foods or play chess on their laptop while resembling the guy from Entourage. The shitty thing about waking up at 6:30AM is that waking up so early probably means you didn't sleep much, which gives you ridiculous anxiety, so when you have minor upper back pain, you think "Oh no, my lung is collapsing."

All that aside, I have been waking up early and having some good treks. Went to Providence on Tuesday. Ate pizza with Mark Baumer, who owns my favorite kind of coffee maker. Hung out with Evelyn Hampton and hired her bicycle helmet to help me perform a thing. Saw a man talk about how he'd like carriages to come back in fashion. Ate a gyro and watched foreign music videos in the restaurant. Saw Dan-Beachy Quick read and talk like someone who can scoop up a handful of river water and tie the water into shapes like a balloon maker. Basked in the terrific hospitality of Mairead Byrne, who told me some Irish history about the color orange, served blackberry ice cream, and hosted Rachel and me at a fun and brisk reading.

Then went to Boston yesterday and did another reading with Matt Salesses and Nicolle Elizabeth. We held the mic like wrestling announcers. I ate some overpriced chili. The venue served all its alcohol with complimentary potato chips. Macho Man Randy Savage worked there. There was a cloud outside that kept dipping down and asking everybody for Susan B Anthony coins. Inside the venue was a tissue box where you could speak to a random sad person from the past, but legally they were required to be vague about their identity, but really you could always tell from their accent.

After the reading, I hung out with Peter (who I called Keith at one point; sorry Peter), an Emerson MFA fiction writer dude, and Gene Kwak. We ate overpriced nachos and drank whiskey and talked about fly fishing and Michigan and Omaha and moving places and trying not to romanticize a storyteller's suffering as the gangplank for their storytelling, which is kind of impossible not to do. Gene gave me this awesome book 19 Knives by Mark Anthony Jarmon, which is a self-flagellating beast of sizzle. I read half of it on the early bus. The early bus drove by some Autumnal mansions. The early bus hulked past some very self-confident trees.

essay on loneliness with line breaks based on a dream i had about the phrase "rollerblading through mashed potatoes" that starts out full of stupid jokes and ends full of stupid sentimentality; in conclusion i am stupid and i am going to eat pizza tomorrow with a talented walker

2010-10-25T23:51:00.008-04:00

WRONG KING OF FOG

All my friends are swapping coasts on me. They ask for audiobook
suggestions. Why not occupy a trip with a trip? I know I’m being
annoying. Silence is the worst little brother. O witnesses, oblivious
to mustard stains below. Rollerblading through mashed potatoes.
Fingernail injury is a common problem with astronaut gloves.
If I can guess somebody’s dance moves before I’ve seen them
execute, I know they have a greater chance of murdering me.
Tonight I walked home behind a couple telling ghost stories.
Their tales starred floating chopsticks and sleep apnea. Boo
hoo. What I did wonder was how to scare them, and I thought of
friends I could call who might have the best ideas. Note: not
necessarily my scariest friends. An honest-to-God wall phone
in the house I can see from my window just rang, and all I
know is that it’s not me. Today the weather felt like a tourist.
Tomorrow I am going to eat pizza with a man who walked
service roads, mostly, from Georgia to Los Angeles. On the
way, a Dairy Queen marketing campaign interviewed him for
their show. They made a big deal of giving him coupons that
didn’t work. One group we never follow up with is gameshow
winners. One thing my heart has never tried is the most obvious
anything. Still rollerblading through mashed potatoes. Embodied
everything, such as “below you” involving how high your head is.
If I can guess somebody’s injuries before I’ve starred in their
ghost stories, I am one more no one calls their scariest character
reference. Yes, we do know what time it is, so don’t answer the phone
that way. One day I want to sneak up on myself with someone else’s
dance moves. Maybe record an audiobook for a marketing campaign
that details the daily chances of someone below my head murdering
my head, all dependent on factors like how many gloves float discarded
up there, way up, up near the way you're saving your best jokes for trips
you make up. Meanwhile, I could call out for a friend in any night that is
happening right now, and be answered by those still rollerblading through
all they know would be there for them if they knew enough to be alone.

brett is back

2010-10-20T17:08:00.001-04:00

Brett Gallagher, who a few days ago wrote a review of my poetry collection, has now written a review of Look! Look! Feathers, my story collection. Again Brett has immersed himself in a cool way, for which I am grateful. He says that I "write from the vantage point of Frank Zappa's mustache: a superhero of finely trimmed hairs, crisscrossing 'mericuh with jet-pack and endless locally brewed beer, notetaking TI-83+, writing underwater in hotel pools or upside down on the eaves of small town bridges, yes." Thanks, Brett! I hope you never retire. In an interesting coincidence, the current quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, Aaron Rodgers, is from Chico, which is right next to where I grew up.

eastern residency

2010-10-18T15:55:00.001-04:00

I'm all over Providence and Boston in the next few weeks. Doing readings, ~~saving lives~~. Maybe you would like to come hang out?

OCTOBER 26th: Tuesday 10PM, in Providence, RI, with Rachel B Glaser, Mairead Byrne, and someone else. at Mairead Byrne's series Couscous at Tazza, 250 Westminster Street.

OCTOBER 28th: Boston launch for Matthew Salesses's Our Island of Epidemics. Reading at Trident Booksellers and Cafe, 338 Newbury Street, 7PM with Matt, Nicolle Elizabeth, and me. Afterparty at Otherside Cafe

NOVEMBER 3rd: "RIDE, FLY, PENETRATE, LOITER: A Barry Hannah Tribute." Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street, Newton, MA, 7PM. Featuring readings and remembrances by Askold Melnyczuk, Amy Hempel, Sven Birkerts, Jennifer Haigh, Blake Butler, James Parker, and me. Come celebrate a night in honor of one of the greatest American authors in recent memory. Included will be one-off broadsides to commemorate the event as well as readings in the stead of some of Barry's admirers and former students.

NOVEMBER 4th: A reading at Lorem Ipsum, Inman Square, Cambridge. 8PM. With Elisa Gabbert, Mark Leidner, Gene Kwak and me.

don't point that thing at me

2010-10-17T02:35:00.007-04:00

Brett Gallagher wrote an awesome and zany review of We're All Good I Swear Come Here Where Are You Going. When I first skimmed Gallagher's review, I thought it was impenetrably bebop, but then upon closer reading I realized he'd burrowed into the poems like a really insightful but still very idiosyncratic squatter. So this review is like what would happen if you lived inside the poems for a while, but you didn't sleep the whole time you were living there. Or the review is like you live where you normally live except you just took a small blue pill version of the book and now you're walking around like that. In the review is also a clever picture of a philosopher I'd never heard of named Kripke, which sent me on an interesting goose chase. I don't know if I enjoy Kripke's philosophy, but I like the way Gallagher used his picture. His review reminds me of a friend I had in college named Ryan, whom a lot of girls slept with, and who always said that he thought I was really attractive and if he was a girl he'd be attracted to me. Specifically, the review reminds me of one Halloween when me and Ryan went out to find girls who would sleep with both of us at once, but our bonding experience was interestingly obliterated by all the strange costumes and fire hoop stunts. Thanks to Brett Gallagher for squatting in the poems in such a lovely way.

In other news, the only male bank teller complained about his feelings. All his female co-tellers made fun of him. Then he began to play with a yo-yo. "What am I doing right now," he said. "What is this called." "What do you mean what's it called," they said. "It's called yo-yoing." "Oh," he said. "I thought that was just the name of the thing." "That's also the name of what you do with the thing," they said. "Duh."

astronaut bath

2010-10-14T11:10:00.002-04:00

If you're in Northampton/Amherst and didn't already know about this, it's tonight! Come hang. 8pm at Flying Object in Hadley on Route 9. There will be surprises.

all beauty stands before the world and before the world

2010-10-08T18:34:00.000-04:00

I have some new work in Kill Author. Strangest/strongest feeling responses. Check them out, and check out the rest of the issue, which is full of good stuff. Kill Author is edited anonymously. Each issue is fairy godmothered by a different dead author. Vonnegut is the patron saint of this new one, which is cool: "Because we are readers," Vonnegut says, "We don’t have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next – and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis – at any time of night or day."

For example: there is no such thing as anything that isn't aesthetics. We can smoke by ourselves in the parking lot of KFC, in a truck with the bed missing. We can hang Christmas lights up days before Halloween. We can race with Kirk Cameron in our dream and somehow remember the exact number of the Seavers' house in Growing Pains. We can think the clouds look like ripped up prom dresses. We can tell someone we're fine in an ambulance on the first day of Fall, or we can drive the ambulance, or we can claim that we invented apples, and we can move to the woods where no one will disagree, and where the first day of Fall will look very crisp indeed.

Lonely astronaut face-to-face feelings that flip language pancakes by flashlight.

2010-10-05T10:58:00.001-04:00

Over at the flatmancrooked blog, Bl Pawelek asked me ten playful questions about We Are All Good If ~~You Come Out In the Next Five Minutes~~ They Try Hard Enough. Play is serious too. Play MacGyvers the sadness of language's meaning disabilities. Bl is not short for Bill but for Byline, which one of Pawelek's old editors accidentally wrote for his first name. Seems fun to accept this and make it your own. Embrace the public construction of self. Don't let the public construct for you. And so on. Topics covered in the question-fest include: a one paragraph breakdown of how Levinas/Buber are behind all my poems, stuff about recognition of love and human carrot cake, burnt chili, pop rocks, mirror neurons, thank-you notes, Q-bert tattoos, colonies of chest bats, and the future. Thanks to Bl. Thanks by line. Thank you line by line.

right and good and interesting that they're moments

2010-10-02T17:04:00.004-04:00

Erin McNellis wrote a fun and smart review of We Are All Good If ~~I Drink Enough Coffee~~ They Try Hard Enough over at her blog. Some things she talks about include: quirky sincerity, Frank O'Hara pants, coy symbology, mustard gas hyperbole, and sidelong glances. Also, McNellis mentions books about codes named after famous painters. Also she talks about the long prose poem "Now You Try" in the middle of the book, which is full of things that are supposedly telling and which is maybe my personal favorite artifact in the book—if not favorite poem—because it is a huge mess of text that repeats and repeats one sentence structure with only minor jiggles.

In other news, the left side of my stove doesn't work. Don't worry: I know why!

In Other news, here's an idea: how about let's stop fucking harassing people to death over who and how they want to love.

In even other news, my mood increases amazingly when my boots can withstand anything.

In odd other news, the word "stuff" used to only mean a quilted shirt worn under chainmail. Everybody put your stuff on. The world is coming for you, and the world has a sword.

advance reader copy

2010-09-25T21:42:00.001-04:00

"there's a ground invasion / (with complete color coordination)"

2010-09-22T15:49:00.007-04:00

If I had been born in suburban Australia, I would have been born Darren Hanlon. I used to buy a lot of new albums a year, but Hanlon's new one is the only one I've been excited about in a while.

what did you say / i said watt digs lute sales

2010-09-22T12:03:00.000-04:00

So I had an awesome time in Ann Arbor. Elizabeth Ellen is the best host in the history of hostage. J.P. is all of us. Raviolis are good. Strawberries are a potato substitute. Plus, the reading went very well, big crowd, lots of young people. A teenage poet named Allison opened for us, and she was clever and inventive and did a terrific job. A lot of the architecture in Ann Arbor reminds me of the 1930s. A lot of the plates in the restaurants are yellow and purple. There is a fun arcade named Pinball Pete's. Sometimes it is hard to find a game in that arcade where two people get to shoot at once, but it is easy to find a game where two people get to row a boat.

In other news, there is a new giveaway opportunity for We Are All Good. Adam Robinson is hosting a miscommunication contest on HTMLGIANT. All you have to do is post a story of miscommunication—good or bad, funny or sad—and you can win one of three copies that Adam is giving away. Check it out: http://htmlgiant.com/contests/mike-youngs-all-good-for-free/.

My favorite miscommunication is Ms. Communication, because I do not want to know if she is married or not.

hey are you in michigan

2010-09-16T23:31:00.001-04:00

Well, I'm going to be in Ann Arbor, Michigan soon, and so in the UMass football team apparently. What I'm going to pretend is that the football team is there for me and not to lose to the Wolverines. Why am I there? Why for the sake of Serious Literature. Duh.

Rachel B. Glaser, Tao Lin, and I are all reading at Elizabeth Ellen's awesome Great Lakes Great Times reading series. If you happen to, you know, live in Ann Arbor, you should stroll out to see us Sunday @ 5PM at The Neutral Zone (310 E. Washington St).

gettin up earlier, gettin burned faster

2010-09-15T09:27:00.000-04:00

Before cell phones, the Bible was probably the most mainstream association with "texts." "Body of work" seems totally a wrong and gentile phrase. When I think of a "body of work," what I really think of is that lady they found under a pile of her own hoarding. Body didn't do her much good. Unbearably sexy thoughts will always make me sneeze. Did I just Google "sexy thoughts" sneezing to see if this was a common experience? Welcome to my faith. Have you heard of the game where people surround a huge sheet and hold it up, Ouija-board style? And then someone climbs on the sheet and the people bounce this person, trampoline-like, in a miracle of collective will? Well, usually the person falls off, but people fall off anyway, and everyone might as well be helpful until they do.

i would hit you again but i need time for my rhetoric

2010-09-04T01:54:00.014-04:00

A roofer is whining for a saw, a skill saw, a hand saw, in the most annoying way I've ever heard. People seem to have saws but seem disinclined to give him one because of his whining, more out of confusion than anger, as if his whining is so exaggerated they fear they're on a secret documentary.

God is picking from between different stars with an older God behind him saying "You should get that star, that's a Reynolds star, they're a good brand." God thinks, "I have no idea what that means." Then he thinks, "Wait, all he means is that the company doesn't sound Japanese."

We went to get ice cream at Sundae School, and they had their own cop monitoring parking lot traffic. His moves seemed FAA-regulated.

Fromm the Department of Indignation: Grade the following instances of Indignation on a scale of your choosing: What kind of farmer's market doesn't have free samples? What kind of a personality trait is a preference for ginger ale? What kind of beautiful weather doesn't know it's September 11th? What kind of parent teaches their kid to ride a bike in the parking lot of the funeral home?

second place gets a set of knives

2010-09-02T10:24:00.004-04:00

Hey, Publishing Genius is giving away 5 copies of We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough on Goodreads. Check it out: http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/5542-we-are-all-good-if-they-try-hard-enough. Also check out the giveaway for Rachel B Glaser's awesome book Pee On Water: http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/5543-pee-on-water.

she was forty years old and her daddy still called her baby

2010-08-31T15:01:00.001-04:00

Skateboarders at the crepe place. "I enjoy crepes," says the one with the hair that makes him either a girl or David Cassidy, "because they fit my habits and temperament." A parking ticket person helps a British man who's fallen off his bike. He brushes off the British man's knees. In so doing, he complicates the reputation of his profession. If the mother is very pale, why not guess about the kids? On the bus a woman is reading a magazine with an ad that says "Limos at both ends." Of all the people who invite me to things without realizing I don't live where they live, I am most often invited to New York. It's gotten to the point where I forget I don't live there. Below the FREE sign is a fancy mop. Below the FREE part of the FREE sign is this message: "yes, the water works." The kid behind me on the bus insists that every truck is a fire truck. When the auto repair shop is open, they put out a sculpture of a gorilla hoisting a fish. One of my compulsive internet reading tics is EPSN.com. Because of this, I feel I have a breadth and depth of sports knowledge that would startle a large crowd of my friends if they were gathered together and quizzed on what I know.

i know, mike, but your "ideas" are just that

2010-08-28T01:45:00.006-04:00

"Squares and circles are the same." "Really? Have you heard of wheels?" A man crosses the street at night clutching a tiny bowling trophy. There is a giant poster with pictures of a tire-less car and the text: "Who stole my shoes?" One store sells phone cards, fax services, and imported melon sodas. A woman even changes her profile picture from a picture of limes to a picture of herself walking her cat on a leash. It still doesn't help. A guy's sister crushed her hand while she was working on his race car. He told her not to work on it, but he was in Wisconsin. Now he waits in the Emergency Room waiting area with his sister's boyfriend. He looks at the snack machine that sells vegan jerky. "It's not that I'm against the earthy crunchy stuff," he says. The boyfriend is eating Doritos. "I don't even like Doritos," he says. "It's just I'm so bored." The race car driver is missing his bottom teeth but he smiles a lot. He is asking everyone if they're okay or they're just waiting. "Do you want a lap dance?" he asks his sister's boyfriend. Two women discuss the secret downstairs of a clothing consignment store. A third woman joins the conversation. When a stranger jumps into a conversation with vigorous affirmation, I feel a holy feeling. "Oh yes," the stranger says. "They sell beautiful aprons." Someone in Vermont is using a Clydesdale to haul wood, and someone else decided to put a picture of this into a magazine about Vermont. "But if say you were here for a chopped off hand," the doctor says. "Well, then I'd know what to do." After all the tests, the partner of the patient across the curtain peeks into our area and says we should advocate more. She is or was a rugby player. In the gas station across the street from the hospital, the attendant suggests I put a plastic container of fried chicken in the microwave. "Plastic? In the microwave?" When I eat the chicken, it tastes like Indian food and carpet. One cab driver talked a lot, and all the other cab driver said was "Good timing" when he made a green. I didn't notice he had a mustache until I tipped him.

we've gone from do your worst to do your thing

2010-08-24T23:37:00.000-04:00

"We had people that play normal tennis, do you believe it. Those people. Those miracles." "Yeah, I'm just saying, our number is the summer of love." "We'd eat squirrel! We'd eat Tyrannosaurus Rex!" Shaving your neck always feels vaguely suicidal. An employee on his smoke break explained things to a customer using his right hand. "The oh shit bar? You grab it? With your hand?" "Oh. Oh, why do they call it the oh shit bar?" There was a long pause. What if trains had no lights? Cars? Streets? And this was ho hum? Sometimes I am compelled to call something by a pet name, out loud, even if no one else is in the room. Such as earlier when I ate the blueberries and said "Blubes." It is very important when you help someone with something they don't know that you explain what you did and help them try to know. Even if they're not paying attention. This is maybe the only thing I would add to Kurt Vonnegut's "There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind." The blind man was riding a bike. His guide dog was like a chariot horse.

please contact the White House for all questions about my daily habits

2010-08-22T07:00:00.002-04:00

One of the tellers at the credit union says: "Well, I know the songs. I just know the old ones better." Dusty and discontinued licorice. He was tall enough that he looked taller than he was. Replicas of sporting instruments—steering wheels, putters—for use in video replicas of the parent sport. Sold separately. Baskets of yarn on the sidewalk. A gaggle of bros, stiff-limbed from a day at the half-pipe, carrying a huge pizza all together like EMTs, like acrobats with a landing pad, like a giant Ouja board, etc. The possibilities are daunting. "The cult of conspicuous busyness." A tattoo of Mr. Rogers and a rainbow that says TAKE BACK THE NEIGHBORHOOD. A police car from the next town over pulls up to the spaghetti factory. It is vaguely terrifying to see someone sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car. But it is slightly worse if the parked car is also in a parking lot. Give yourself a walking route that cuts over the railroad. This is like letting the cake think it's baking itself. Very important.

saturday solomon day

2010-08-21T18:37:00.006-04:00

This is Valley of Tears by Solomon Burke. I changed the song quite a bit, mess up a couple times, and also maybe the mixing is eh, but maybe now this song will not be stuck in my head so much and I will be a more positive person (ha ha).

some things on my floor include a maraca

2010-08-20T07:00:00.000-04:00

One of my strongest memories is watching Christina Aguleria asked, on MTV's Total Request Live, if she wrote "Genie In a Bottle." No, she said, but I did come up with that part that goes Come come, come and let me out. Just punched a van in the parking lot of the funeral home across the street. Except it was out my window, which means I was punching via the "I'm squishing your head with my fingers" perspective trick. Even bread was invented accidentally. Most satire does not respect the idea that someone else's loneliness might be incomprehensible to you. My sister bought me a mug shaped like a face. Sort of an Easter Island face. When people are creeped out by it, I am always surprised to remember that it always creeps people out. Headphones are something I always forget to pack and always regret not packing. When will they invent a TV show where you get to switch places with a piece of bacteria living inside your body?

trip someone nude

2010-08-18T08:00:00.001-04:00

Writing a novel is not that different from lying about your age on the internet for several years. At the grocery store, the grandfather was distracted. His grandson was very tall. They were near peaches. "The thing to remember about fruit," said the grandfather, "is, um. The thing to remember. About fruit, when you have—buy more fruit. The thing to remember is to buy enough fruit." For a few minutes yesterday, my life was entitled Is There Anything Better Than Fried Chicken and Iced Coffee? A woman walked down the street doing birdcalls the same way ~~some people~~ I publicly sing. I wonder if the birdcalls were stuck in her head? Here's some instructions: get GRACE, AFTER A PARTY tattooed on your wrist, so you can forever after speak quietly into your wrist: "You do not always know what I am feeling." We guess wrong about someone's personality if their face tends to excel at expressing certain emotions. That doesn't mean that's all they're feeling. It's just what their face is good at.

good? good. good? good. good? good.

2010-08-17T16:34:00.000-04:00

Casey Mensing wrote a little bit about We Are All Good If The Try Hard Enough on his blog. Check it out here. Here is something he said: "The poems in the book are of their time—the immediate present. The lines flow, the images shift with such fluidity and nonchalance they fit perfectly in the technological daydream we live in. But Young also borrows a style and use of imagery that recalls the cultural heroes of the 50's and 60's." Thanks, Casey!

"did you go to warren wilson? no i just look like a hippie"

2010-08-16T17:20:00.003-04:00

Opera glasses hung on a street sign. Crumpled box of cold syrup in the gutter. Is there a So-And-So's Law for the idea that you can always imagine a better example of what you're talking about? Like say I'm talking about the way Pancho and Lefty lands on that minor sixth at the end of each verse, and how I believe this musical move is more seamlessly connected with the song's lyrics and overall structure than any other drop to a minor sixth I've ever heard. But at the same time I concede that probably there is a better example out there I haven't heard yet. Or might never hear. Is there a law for that? Eating more makes my muscles look more accessible. If I were homeless and did my hair like that, hell yes I'd shoot up in the bathroom of the hippie coffeeshop. So would you. Everybody roots for the other people with their name who show up on their Google Alerts. Go Texas Rangers. Even when people are in committed relationships, they seem to enjoy hoping they will find a Missed Connection about themselves. It is annoying to get Pavement's "Cut Your Hair" stuck in your head, because there's that part that goes "Darling don't you go and cut your hair, do you think it's gonna make him change" which overlaps on "change" with "I'm just a boy with a new haircut" etc. How do I execute this overlap by myself? With no audio technology? Just these throat muscles?

if james madison wrote your daily constitutional, you'd brag too

2010-08-14T17:21:00.005-04:00

Pane of glass next to a grill. Makeshift speaker system in a milk crate, sideways in a window. Mutton chops on a tiny bicycle. A hipster carries flowers and tomatoes. Mother is wearing a baseball cap and so are both her kids. They stand at the edge of the driveway, and Mother spreads her arms like Kate Winslet in Titanic. "This is the sun, the only one!" she says. "Show me where the sun is." One of the kids points to a moth. "Not yet," Mother says. Would I that be humbled before this world like a fucking way-back Chinese poet or some shit. Gmail chat conversations about the realities of NAFTA and logging. Often I class my friends according to older friends. So-and-so is a Travis-type friend, and so on. Does this make certain friends a priori? Now that DFW has died, should we retire the term a priori like a jersey number? No matter what you ask us to show you, we will probably point to a moth.

"I achieved absolute belief, and it had nothing to do with politics or humanity or any of that shit" — Sampson Starkweather

2010-08-14T12:41:00.001-04:00

Hey, I have four chunks from MC Oroville's Answering Machine in the new Action, Yes, along with really cool stuff from other people whose last names fall near the end of the alphabet, including Sampson Starkweather, Matt Reeck, and Jared White. Thank you to John Dermot Woods and Emily Hunt and the whole Action, Yes team. These are some of my favorite MC O chunks. I would consider them "representative." They are all very wild west, but one of them someone told me one time reminded her of growing up in Kansas.

"it was actually funny because i thought it was people"

2010-08-12T07:00:00.025-04:00

I like it when the audience camera accidentally catches the kid who doesn't care about the home run. Carolyn says you need to wait ten seconds before CPR, which is a delay never depicted in movies, I feel. Imagine living as a rollercoaster critic. Some people like certain frozen meals so much they learn how to make real versions of them. A Pop-Tarts restaurant opened in Times Square. You can buy Pop-Tarts sushi. When you read a lot of news stories about these kinds of things, you realize that only one kind of humor is allowed in contemporary journalism. This humor is like the word "sardonic" plus high fructose corn syrup. The world suggested by this humor is something distant, like a card trick you get in the mail. Do you ever take overheard advice? Like if one stranger swears by coconut water to another stranger, will you try coconut water? What can it hurt? Aren't there many people you have failed to thank? One of my stronger memories is sitting in a diner booth, realizing Dustin made his living off poker. There is one girl who works at Blockbuster who is always negative. Even when I saw her excited about something the other day—maybe a coupon for paper towels, maybe a new kind of bat—she seemed to be more anti-complaining than actually expressing happiness. Speaking of bats, the father insisted they weren't real and tried to get everyone in the car. One time Chris said he had nothing to do on Christmas Eve and he was planning on driving by my house, but he didn't. He told me this around March, I think.

unfortunately, we can't take the boat out at night

2010-08-10T07:00:00.007-04:00

The email is so long but I am reading it sideways so it looks like those text waterfalls in The Matrix. "I can't even begin to say what it says," she says. A woman—I believe the word is "swathed"—is swathed in a white sheet, only the face peeking out, sheet billowing behind her, navigating the on-ramp near Whole Foods. She steps carefully over a railing, holding the sheet up so it doesn't catch. A man sits at his laptop, staring at a tent for sale. He sits like this for hours. He didn't enjoy karaoke last night. You only need to buy a muffin and you can sit there all day. A very old woman wrote a column for the paper about how much she enjoyed reading a child's guide to Ramadan. If you do a good impression of someone, you will be asked to do that impression over and over again. It is more than a little erotic to do an impression of someone right in front of them. Remember when it was important to snap up the same handle in all the different online services? Last night I had a dream where I was in a very epic community theatre production, except we never seemed to rehearse, we seemed only to engage in buffets in large banquet halls. No one was planning on telling you what's in the hot dog, silly. The deer tick is rarely photographed at its happiest moment.

WHAT'S THE STRANGEST THING YOU'VE EVER FELT / WHAT'S THE STRONGEST THING YOU'VE EVER FELT / WHAT'S THE STRANGEST THING YOU'VE EVER FELT / WHAT'S THE STRONGEST THING YOU'VE EVER FELT / WHAT'S THE STRANGEST THING YOU'VE EVER FELT / WHAT'S THE STRONGEST THING YOU'VE EVER FELT

2010-08-08T21:17:00.004-04:00

17

Sometimes I really like those STAFF shirts. But sometimes I don’t. This is what makes me feel strange. Like do I like or don’t? Should I click like? Make a shirt about the shirts I like? Maybe I should do more research? Before you like things should you know them? Like what are they staffing? Will they build a statue of me? Do I feel more important than last week? Do you realize I stole your toothpaste? If energy is never really created or destroyed, why do we expect feelings to go any different? When you think of energy changing, do you think more of a werewolf or a costume party? Or a girl’s soccer team? Should I just ask? Do the people in the STAFF shirts feel important or helpful? Whatever they feel, aren’t they still obligated to help? Should we feel shame to want them near us? I mean, can they help me? Like right now? Who are they working for? Shouldn’t I admit the distinction between the person wearing the STAFF shirt and the shirt itself? Can I wear one? Do I turn here? Will I be on TV? Can you imagine someone being shaken as I ask these questions? Do you imagine yourself? When will I appear before everyone who knows me but whom I fail to know? Do I mean “before” or “before?” Wouldn’t it be nice to walk beside someone, khaki shorts, a dog maybe, and in silence? And the only way you know what I am thinking is by the way our hands go?

have you ever eaten so many cookies that you become afraid of the cookies

2010-08-07T20:33:00.013-04:00

Had a swell time at the Brookline Booksmith reading. Deep thanks to the stylishly tattooed Gene Kwak for putting it on. Lovely readings from Sasha Fletcher, Carrot Cake Zaikowski, Jonathan Papas, Anne "Oboe Cinnamon" Holmes, Blake Butler and Rachel Be Cool Glaser. If you are reading this and you came to the reading, thank you for coming. You were, as Mitch Hedberg once said, a smart crowd. Several folks have asked where they can find the thing I read between a napkin dispenser and a blue Christmas bow: it's in Glitterpony and it's together with a bunch of poems in that We Are All Something Something Something book to your right, kind reader.

On August 6th, Carrot Cake's picture was in the Celebrity News section of the Boston Globe because she is the newest member of the Celtics. Her picture was right next to Shaq's, who was in the paper I guess because he read some poetry at some weird bookstore or something. Whatever! Go Carolyn!

After the reading, we ate some Thai food. Fried pineapple. The next day Carolyn and I did the commuter rail shuffle to rendezvous with Carolyn's friend Siri, then we all drove off to Maine to hang out with the saints of generosity, Ben and Vanessa, at their honeymoon island cottage. Astoundingly idyllic. That's not a picture of it in the corner of this post, but that picture gives you the right idea. None of their hammocks gave me a rash. Floated on the Aqua Thunder. Bruce Willis maybe lived on a nearby island. Many small and well-camouflaged frogs. Other things in Maine include a place where you can learn Brazilian jujitsu and places where you can eat dagwood sandwiches. On the way back to Massachusetts, we stopped at the Portland Whole Foods. I had a lot of good Southern barbecue, go figure, including delicious cilantro corn fritters. Something called "picnic fried" chicken. We saw fisherman beards. Portland's warehouses looked a little like the other Portland's warehouses. Now I am back in Massachusetts with a lot of work to do. There I was, in the cocked hat of America, and now I am back somewhere near the harmonica.

i don't know if you keep the horses blind in the rain but i know someone who does

2010-08-03T18:15:00.002-04:00

Today a young man wearing surgeon gloves wanted only to walk across the lawn and sip from his plastic cup. He looked around to make sure he could. A woman told me to be careful on the sidewalk because she'd recently swept a bat out. The bat thuddumped, injured, no take off, and reminded me of a fragile TIE Fighter. "Bummer," I said. DJ Dan was wearing a colorful shirt of the 80s persuasion. Colors were different in the 80s, and many of them happened on a black background. What's the strangest thing you've ever felt? What's the strongest thing you've ever felt?

barometers

2010-08-03T00:54:00.001-04:00

Patrick Trotti has written a very exuberant review of We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough over at JMWW. I read it when I woke up and it made my day very much the opposite of dreary. In other news, We Are All Good is again available for pre-order at the Publishing Genius website. If you go to that Publishing Genius web page, there's also a deal afoot where you can buy both We Good and Look! Look! Feathers for cheaper together than if you bought them separate! Click here and scroll down to get the package deal. I know, I know, Jesus, what am I doing here, selling sham-wows? In all seriousness, it is heartening to work with independent publishers who like working together. Together is good weather. What else is new? I ate some pita chips and some pasta. I stared in horror at a dentist bill.

reading wednesday in boston area @ 7PM

2010-08-02T03:40:00.005-04:00

Yo, I had a killer time at the LIT reading. Deep thanks to Ben Mirov and Jackie Clark, and all my fellow readers. Met some really gentle and terrific persons. And then we all became friends on Facebook, which is what happens after your face makes friends. There was a cocktail made especially for the event. I made a water bottle talk to a tape dispenser. A manhole exploded next to the building where I was staying. I ate a Cuban sandwich in a little joint and read an AM Homes book (Things You Should Know) while the proprietors of the joint smelled the perfume samples in fashion magazines with much admiration. Later I watched "Rear Window" in Brooklyn's new park and laughed with other people at things I do not think people laughed at when the movie first came out. What else? I read The Day of Creation by JG Ballard in Union Square and ate quoinia salad from Whole Foods and listened to some white boys with nice shoes talk about fantasy football. Then I came home. In the Department of Sitting-By-Yourself-And-Watching-Movies-Everyone-Else-Saw-Seven-Years-Ago, I watched "The Saddest Music In the World." It was terrific. I liked the dialogue, the giant veil, and the glass legs filled with beer.

This Wednesday! I am headed back out on the road! To, yes, read again, for Gene Kwak's lovely We Are Champion, this Wednesday, August 4th, 7PM @ Brookline Booksmith (279 Harvard St, Brookline, MA). Will be yakking for seven minutes tight with these fine freaks: Jonathan Papas, Carolyn Zaikowski, Blake Butler, Rachel B. Glaser, Anne Cecelia Holmes, and Sasha Fletcher. That's 7 x 6, which is 42 minutes, which means a dizzying hour or so of literary hoedown. You should come! If you do I will give you a secret handshake.

After Boston, I am going to Maine for a weekend! Damn, yo. In other news, this clip is a spitfire summation of my artistic philosophy.

reading tonight in brooklyn @ 6:30 PM @ powerHouse arena

2010-07-28T13:16:00.000-04:00

Hey, if you're in Brooklyn getting pizza, like the dude next to me on the bus is going to do when he gets to Brooklyn, you should consider stopping by Powerhouse Books (37 Main street, Brooklyn NY, take the A/C/E to the Brooklyn Bridge stop) to see the LIT launch party at 6:30pm. Details at LIT's blog. I will be reading a few poems and there will also be readings from Eduardo Jiménez Mayo (on behalf of Rafael Pérez Gay), Traci O Connor, and Nate Pritts. W00t.

Late capitalism tastes like your fingers after Doritos

2010-07-24T12:09:00.009-04:00

My apologies if you already saw this elsewhere, but I am stoked to announce that pre-orders are now open for my book of stories, Look! Look! Feathers, which is coming out in December from Word Riot Press. The pre-order price is a few dollars cheaper than the list price will be, so it's a bargain. The stories will appeal to people who like 57% or more of the stuff on this list: magic cysts, peaches, gameshows, electrolytes, necklaces made of bluebird bones, broken armchairs, two-father families, mosquito fog, murals, drivethrough redwoods, and cardboard banditos. Stories from this collection have or will appear in American Short Fiction, Washington Square Review, Hobart, Keyhole, The Collagist and elsewhere. Thanks to Bryan Coffelt for working with me on the cover design and for designing the interior of the book, and to Jackie Corley of Word Riot for all her tireless publishing know-how.

So this means I have a book of poems out in September and a book of stories out in December, which is crazy, and which makes me feel very lucky and grateful to everyone kind in my life. I really would like to blog in a way that isn't just links to other things, but my life is not that interesting besides what happens where the links go. For instance, all I've done of note today is eat grapefruit. Last night I dreamed I was in the castle level of a video game. Someone is wearing boots inappropriate for the weather.

these are the days of lasers in the jungle

2010-07-19T14:06:00.001-04:00

I wrote about clutter and ear wax for HTMLGIANT. A quarter of my way through life, I have resolved to tackle the important issues.

"hello little one i no longer glue / the starfish together with direct & / understandable sadness"

2010-07-15T17:18:00.002-04:00

The other day I hallucinated that my apartment had central air. I called my landlord and he straightened me out. I've been cataloging answers to the questions "WHAT IS THE STRONGEST THING YOU HAVE EVER FELT? WHAT IS THE STRANGEST THING YOU HAVE EVER FELT?" by making answers up and making people up to have these answers. If you would like to participate, comment with your answers and I will alter them deviously and appreciatively.

The title of this post comes from a poem by M.A. Vizsolyi in the new Sixth Finch. I also have two poems in the new Sixth Finch. Sixth Finch is one of my favorite online poetry magazines for a few reasons. The first are cosmetic: there is a menu of pieces, but there is also a secret order you can enter by clicking the arrows above any individual piece. This means Sixth Finch aids in the feeling that there is a secret order underpinning everything in the universe, which is a comforting and ridiculous story we tell ourselves, similar to eating ice cream for breakfast. I also like how there are no bios in Sixth Finch, only poems and art. The fact that Sixth Finch has such terrific visual art "alongside" the poems is another reason I like it.

But these reasons, friends, as mentioned, up there, already, you saw it, don't pretend, are cosmetic. The big reason I like Sixth Finch is that I like almost all the poems in every issue. That is rare! Rob MacDonald is doing something right, and by "right" I mean what people always mean when they mean right, which is "I like it." In this issue are really good poems and art from Adam Davis, Andrew Myers, Anthony Zinonos, Ben Mirov, Beth Heppenstall, Chloe Early, Daniel McFarlane, Daniela Olszewska, Harris Johnson, Hollis Brown Thornton, Jacob Whibley, Jennifer Moxley, Jessica Fjeld, Jordan Davis, Leslie Murray, Mark Todd, Martin Rock, Mary Carmack, Mary Mattingly, Masin Persina, Meredith Dittmar, Michael Homolka, M.A. Vizsolyi and Trey Moody.

The two poems I have in this issue are some weird poem about what you should do when you've done things and a very long poem about Massachusetts slash New England, which was fun to write. If you would like me to write probably too long of a poem about your state, please comment with one or three interesting things about your state, and I will do my best.

if a book falls in the forest is that a family reunion

2010-07-05T14:02:00.005-04:00

At the Vouched Books blog, Chris Newgent has written a review (the second official review, after his cat Brisby's) of We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough. Thanks, Chris.

i want kevin costner to make a machine for my funeral too

2010-07-04T14:54:00.007-04:00

I wrote a poem after looking at this list of the "top" seven worst man made disasters, and then I sent that poem to Amy King when she put out a call for work to post on the Poets For Living Waters initiative. You can read the poem here. This poem is most likely to appeal if you are secretly impressed by epic man made disasters and counteractively ashamed of your feeling impressed. Please do check out the Poets For Living Waters project: "The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else."

In other Gulf Epic Phail news, Carolyn Zaikowski organized a public mourning walk in Northampton, MA yesterday. We put together this video of the event, which is annotated by a statement Carolyn wrote. The statement is very lyrical and thoughtful: unmired by temporary political myopia or static visionary illusions, and instead concerned with acknowledging timeless facts of people living among other people, on a world, and trying to know—in public and private ways—how to allow ourselves to feel and reckon with tragedies we inflict on that world.

chris newgent's cat brisby has the first review of WE ARE ALL ETC.

2010-07-02T14:47:00.002-04:00

Also check out Chris's new venture, the very cool Vouched Books, a project where Chris sets up book tables at concerts/flea markets/etc, and these tables are full of independently published books he can vouch for, thus spreading indie lit in an organic and communal way. Very sweet.

"My real life is here, and I’m not sure whether that will always be the case"

2010-06-28T21:26:00.000-04:00

Now that I'm back from tour, I can get back to the real world, e.g. the internet. On that front, I interviewed Justin Taylor for the June 2010 Word Riot. Justin says a lot of interesting and worldly things. Check it out.

so a water bug isn't a cockroach? no it's just slower and other poems

2010-06-28T21:14:00.002-04:00

TOUR DIARY PART 5

In Charlottesville, Sam and Noah (Josh's brother) hosted an awesome reading for us at their house. Their friends were all architects. The dog didn't like Seth's beard. Rachel's story had immature goth girls and a mature consideration of death. Natalie introduced her poem about Otto Frank by alluding to her interest in time travel, which opened up the poem for me in a new way that felt awesome. We slept in a basement. Rachel demonstrated her weird mouth sounds. In the morning, I ate a corned beef hash thing that I couldn't really eat because of a cold sore. Josh and I watched Slovakia defeat some listless Italians. The drive to Baltimore was a slop of heat, traffic, sorethroatedness, and freeway construction. We stopped at a gas station in rural Virgina, fifty miles outside of D.C, and there were a lot of flies. Rachel and I couldn't find anything good on the radio.

In Baltimore, I ate perhaps the most interesting dish of the whole tour: some kind of pork shoulder thing with a strawberry salsa and a sweet potato cake. It was amazing, but I recall that you're not supposed to eat fruit and meat together for digestive reasons. Baltimore almost rained but didn't. We heard about a tornado in Charlottesville. Sorry, Charlottesville. We met up with Adam Robinson, who took us to the Hexagon for the reading/performance. The night opened with a YouTube open mic. There were fishing accidents and someone with exploding bananas on their face. Natalie, Rachel, and I all felt very emotional reading because it was our last stop. I read a long poem I hadn't read the whole tour, a long poem about eating a bagel and dying before all of my friends.

We stayed with Adam at a three story gingerbread crackhouse he was house sitting for Stephanie. Alec called the number off a lawyer billboard, and Rachel said "Alec's going to make Mike's tour blog!" A self-fulfilling prophecy if I ever heard one. There were enormous water bugs in Adam's backyard, which Adam said he sometimes raced. He and Stephanie did an amazing amount of work to their place, which used to be a Chinese grocery store. Joe found some saltines, and we ate them. We talked about rationality and irrationality. Later we talked about barmitzvahs and ghosts. Two people who'd recently gone to William and Mary were there, and they were very nice: they fed me some garlic and managed to open a pickle jar I couldn't open. That night, one of Adam's cats peed on my blanket, I think, but I felt both embarrassed and not entirely sure that's what had happened, so I didn't tell him. Until now, I guess.

The next day I took two buses back to Northampton. Feels good to be home. Going to see the dentist tomorrow.

Many thanks to all who hosted us, listened to us, cooked for us, gave us high fives, helped or attended kindly to us in all the noticeable and unnoticeable ways of human betweenness on this tour. All told, it was a lovely adventure, and I was honestly touched to be able to share my poems with so many interesting people, and to tour with such talented roadmates (Rachel and Natalie) and magis (Josh Bolton and Seth Landman). Much love.

puttin your own child in that car and other poems

2010-06-24T10:59:00.001-04:00

TOUR DIARY PART 4

My apologies for the tour diary delay. We took a weekend break in Atlanta. I drove around with Blake. He lives in an old mill. His mailbox is a thresher. We invented a domestic post-apocalypse survival real-time strategy video game. Later, Natalie and Blake invented a cereal restaurant called Cereal Killer, which is also a Method Man track. Jamie Iredell made amazing food for all of us the entire weekend: chicken liver pate, homemade ice cream, excellence all around. Jamie said hanging out with Blake all the time is like listening to the same part of the same rap song over and over. Blake said "not like—is," but this is mostly because Blake and Jamie have disagreements about figurative language. Atlanta also marked the arrival of Seth Landman, would later turn out to be quite a savior.

The reading at the Beep Beep Gallery went amazingly well. Amy McDaniels's dog looked like a pillow and kept sitting gracefully in my lap. One of Blake's childhood friends who never comes to readings came to the reading. He had a good time. The air conditioning didn't work, but Blake, Jamie, and Amy gave very generous introductions. We sold a ton of books in Atlanta. Later we had breakfast at a Flying Biscuit. They had some very nice raspberry jam.

I rode with Seth Landman to Raleigh. We listened to the Wu Tang Clan and James Taylor. It's hard to remember what the drive was like, but I do remember stopping at a Bojangles and seeing interesting road signs, such as Dinwitty County, maybe. It's interesting how the roadsigns get more embellished in the South, like the signs say "THERE IS FOOD AT THE NEXT STOP" instead of just "FOOD." I might be making that up.

Chris Tonelli met up with us in Raleigh, and we had Lebanese food with him, his wife Allison, and their son Miles. Miles was very cute, but he tried to drink Chris's whiskey, which was funny. Many of Chris's students came to the reading. One of his students asked Natalie what a stag is. The same student asked me if I have more action figures at home. I stayed up late with Chris talking about publishing and poetry, and I felt we had a very good conversation. Chris made an excellent point about the difference between humor that disappears like balloon gas and humor that is a form of rescuing from silence.

The next morning is when all the fun started. I wish time machines were real! Rachel asked me if I wanted to drive the first shift or the second. First, I said. We were driving out of Raleigh when suddenly a two lane road turned into a two lane road with cars parked in the right lane, which was the lane we were in. So I tried to get over to the left, but there was a car behind me and no one was letting me over to the left, and I got too close to the truck parked in front of me. When I tried to veer over into the left lane, I clipped the truck. Rachel's light got messed up; her bottle of washer fluid broke. The truck's bumper fell a little. We got out. We discovered that there were two plumbers sitting in the parked truck. They were very nice about everything. "I've been saying for years people shouldn't park here," said one. We asked them if they were okay. "We're fine," they said. "More shook up than a hooker in church, but we're fine." The police came. We took Rachel's car to a body shop. It was drivable. We kept driving to Charlottesville.

Background: my family did not have a car growing up, and I only learned to drive in 2007. I hate driving, and now I feel like I never want to drive again in my life, but Natalie says that these things happen to people all the time, and that the solution is to drive more, not less. Seth Landman pointed out that Barack Obama would not find this "fender bender" that big a deal.

The drive to Charlottesville was beautiful, and I saw a toy boat full of kudzu.

ATLANTA READING @ 8PM

2010-06-21T15:26:00.000-04:00

Rachel, Natalie, and I are reading at the Beep Beep Gallery tonight @ 8PM! Don't come at 7PM unless you want to hang out for an hour, which, okay, sure, whatever, cool, cool.

the only catch is murder and other poems

2010-06-20T11:01:00.004-04:00

TOUR DIARY PART 3

Richmond is a beautiful city. They seem incapable of building a house that isn't beautiful or doesn't have a balcony. We hung out with Tim and Stephanie, friends of Josh. They took us to The Black Sheep, which marks Richmond as the third city I've been in to have a cool restaurant called The Black Sheep. I ate a pulled pork sandwich with apple coleslaw, and I also ate some deviled eggs. There is a pyramid in the Richmond cemetery under which eighteen thousand people are buried. Tim/Stephanie told us a story about a dog giving birth in the cemetery. Tim told us The Philadelphia Gun Story. Here is an excerpt: Tim running down the streets of Philadelphia, wearing a mitten, holding a ceramic gun high in the air, appearing to chase two girls. The gun was real. In Richmond, there was a sign that said "SORRY, WE'RE OPEN." Bojangles bought the first stoplight for Richmond.

Liz hosted the reading at Chop Suey—which I wish I'd had more time to browse, for it is a terrific bookstore—and did a very good job. She read introductions off her iPhone. Rachel read a story about life being a cover of other lives. Natalie read a poem about pandas that went over very well. Rachel and Natalie both reported later that they enjoyed a poem I read concerning a man who buys cookies in a Cumberland Farms. You can read an account of the reading by clicking here (thanks, Karen). After the reading, we went to another restaurant, Mamma Zu's, where Josh's friend Maya hooked us up. We passed around pasta and pizza dishes like a traditional Italian mobster movie. The Philadelphia Gun Story was told again and embellished further. I ate some tiramisu that did more things to my mouth than I've ever had done to my mouth. We hung out at another beautiful house, this one with a garden. Everyone in Richmond is friends and works at the same three restaurants. On the way home, we avoided the block were someone had been stabbed. Earlier we'd seen a fight where a woman appeared to both be talking on a phone and completely unaware of the world's existence. Richmond has a lot of interesting Civil War statues.

The next morning, we drove to Atlanta. It was a ten hour drive. We stopped in Greensboro, North Carolina for lunch. Even though we just wanted to learn about lunch, we learned about Elsewhere, which is an awesome antique museum/artist collective. We also stopped at a gas station on the South Carolina/Georgia border. We had to drive a little off the highway to get to the gas station. There was a whole Cheerwine soda case. One woman was smoking cigarettes and eating vanilla wafers at the same time. The air had a feeling of boiled peanuts.

We got to Atlanta, which, for those keeping track of analogies, is the Los Angeles of the South. I am staying with my friend Blake. There are trains that seem to run directly above his roof. It reminds me of my childhood home. Blake can eat French fries extremely fast. We are going to spend the weekend in Atlanta, then do a reading on Monday. Happy Father's Day!

tomaž is rooting for the other team and other poems

2010-06-18T10:47:00.004-04:00

TOUR DIARY PART 2

Rachel, Natalie, Josh, and I ate brunch with our friend Michelle at a place called The Gold Standard. Rachel was hoping there would be someone paid to sleep in a window. Instead, our waitress had a mustache. I was called upon to finish whoopee pies. We made a new friend named Aaron, who was sitting at another table reading one of CAConrad's books. There was discussion of putting breakfast in champagne flutes but not for drinking the breakfast, which was probably what you were thinking.

We drove to Washington D.C. I talked with my favorite girl, Carolyn Carrot Cake, on the phone. When we got to D.C, there was a friendly employee at Starbucks who implored us to use many of their bathrooms at once. Natalie called me the J-Lo of UMass. We walked to the White House. I stuck my hand through the gate. We saw Michelle's garden. The police closed the street. We figured it was because Michelle was coming out to garden. Someone was grumbling about the closure, and their wife said "There must be a reason!" in a bright and incredibly frightening tone. There were a lot of egg rolls for sale.

Many kind people from Baltimore came to the Narrow House/Publishing Genius reading, including Justin and Jamie of Narrow House, and The Mighty Joe Young. I met many interesting folks, including Alec Niedenthal and his friend Roz, and Mark C of Big Lucks. Dan, of Barrelhouse, was an awesome host. Ric Royer had a white noise machine, and he was an event. Natalie's stigmata poem went over well. Rachel read a condensed version of "Pee On Water" which was still very epic. Adam Robinson worked the crowd like an elegant sailor, and he also bought me a whiskey. I drew two hockey goalies having a sad fight in the copy of my book that Roz bought.

Josh, Natalie, Rachel, and I drove to Josh's parents house in Reston, VA. They have a sign in their garage that says "I worked hard so I could make a good life for my cat." We watched the Celtics lose to the L.A. Rapists. But I ate many terrific foods, such as goat cheese wrapped in berries and homemade salsa. This morning I ate a tiny scone. We are watching the U.S/Slovenia soccer match. The U.S. coach looks like a cross between a police instructor and a soccer ball. We are off for Richmond! Thank you for reading.

jillian gillian and other poems

2010-06-17T10:40:00.006-04:00

TOUR DIARY PART 1

Rachel B Glaser and I drove to her parents' house in New Jersey. The Glaser dog, Rocky, tried to catch a chipmunk, but the chipmunk was too fast. Rachel's dad is growing eggplant in his garden. Later, the Lakers blew out the Celtics with the help of a fly that kept darting across the TV. Rachel's mom does not like Roger Federer. She baked us some potatoes for the road. We drove to Philadelphia, took the Ben Franklin bridge, listened to Devendra Banhardt's first CD, and met up with Natalie Lyalin and her husband Josh Bolton. I ate a Cuban(o) sandwich. The cook came out to tell us how he'd put mint and triple sec in the strawberry shortcut. We made "And Other Poems" jokes, but I can't remember any of the good ones. Natalie and Josh talked about how people in Israel can't form lines, so they shout a lot. Natalie's friend Juliette had a nice birdhouse made from scrapwood. We saw a busted TV and two human statues. Someone outside a convenience store said "Gonna kill somebody, gonna get killed." Juliette and Natalie bought each other socks. It was very windy, but it didn't rain until much later. A man without a shirt was directing people into Bookspace. He looked like the guy from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, a little bit. Bookspace was amazing. It is a giant warehouse full of books. It used to be an elevator factory. They had an in-tune piano and an air hockey table. I found a book called The It's Just Lunch Guide to Dating in Phoenix, but much of the advice seemed unspecific to Phoenix.

We did our reading. There was a semi-dramatic lamp. Natalie read from her book, then read new poems about birds and minor stigmatas that were very good. Rachel read "The Magic Umbrella," which was good and funny with such lines as "Growing up, her best friend was a spoon." After the reading, I talked with people about sincerity, and Brian—Natalie's and Juliette's friend—made an interesting well-digging analogy. Rachel and I stayed with Rachel's cousins. They took a zany route home. We talked shit about Apple. We ate some organic Cheese-Its. Their cat, Henry, has paws that look like cookies'n'cream ice cream. I slept under the record player. Now we are off to the "nation's capitol." Thank you for reading.

my lt. data action figure has somehow come alive

2010-06-14T17:42:00.002-04:00