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failures: my new folder

i've created a new folder on my desktop called failures and in it i put all the files i've started and quit on because i got bored.


here is the starting of a story:

My friend destroys my friend. I fluff the bowl ears. I wait next to the television. It's shirtless teenagers. Ninth grade. Outside, dirt road, busy highway, clouds, my friend covered in mud, possessions in piles. Last night, perpendicular rain, I suppose, and we hid in the shed, enjoying the sharp smell of tools and steel racks, and later, when the tapping became hollow, we ventured out beside the highway and pelted passing cars with paint balls and toilet paper. I was transient and waterless. My friends were friends, or employees, and in each of us, the mission, or reasonable facsimile, a set of stairs, a picnic table.


here is the starting of another story:

Someone said, there's a place on the gulf where the desert merges with the sea. I am there, and wet. I feed myself. Do I have a wife? A car? I have a job. I have a television and many video games. I have a water filter.

The water is hard.

My domestic partner leaves me a message. This grocery store has been modified. Wood flooring, earth tones, black aprons. The food, no fresher.

I am driving my car. I am not an algorithm.

Analysis of each rule's frequency of occurrence, among individuals, in the three samples revealed highly significant differentiation for twenty-eight rules.

I receive a ticket for speeding.

At home, something is flickering.


here are two poem from a series of "love poems":

You fruit you will empty the beautiful dark emptiness
you will save the sacrificial penguins
you will plummet
so “Let them wear scarves!”
or “Abandon the museum!”
but don’t beware or be wary or wait whitely
for woe is no band-aid
like the Parthenon & strange or not
i won’t be gone in a minute.



2

i’m followed by fruit by earth by tentacles
or tedium, green plants & prairie dogs
our lonely raccoon scaling the lonely dumpster
& sporting his ontological t-shirt
a dream against a dream against the sun
a germ against the plan for fifteen plums
against nature against the sea against the sea
mis-waived or mis-saved or underscored
the letter i wrote i wrote un-wrote
O face O finger O feature
O shiny teeth little nose dimpled chin
tumble your tendrils, my pet
& arm what armchairs arm at the zoo.


Here are three memoirs:

One

My best friend chases his brother down Hwy 99 brandishing a large kitchen knife. His belly flops over his striped boxers, his only clothing, his luscious breasts (and they are luscious), brown nipples pert, flap like a flag on a windy day, his bare feet trod heedlessly over gravel and broken glass. No cars honk or stop, so Justin and I chase him down and ask him what people will think about a fat guy in boxers chasing his brother with a kitchen knife down a major highway in broad daylight. He doesn’t have a good answer so we go back to his house and watch cartoons.

Two

My best friend’s brother’s friend stops by to watch the basketball game. We admire his new car. He says that he took it from the car lot around the corner. Nobody asks him to leave. The Sonics win.

Three

My best friend tells me that he would like to pursue a career in law enforcement.


I don't know why I posted this stuff. I think I was sad that dimlab had been so lonely for so long. Anyway, those were the more recent failures (there are many more). Now I'm going to write something good. Maybe.

Or maybe I'll watch TV. I could watch Con Air. It is a terrible movie but is on TV right now.

Relationship Poem 2: Keychain

Your spine is dorsal,
like cala lillies,
in the morning.

Shark-toothed, when you
bite my thighs,
when you break the skin.

I was wondering how to
walk through doors

without you?

If our room
would always be this
fish-bowl prison.

Our mouths only opening
bottles and lies.

we have arrived

in v-town, just accross the river from p-town! we have a loft! it is all very exciting!

will & s.

Relationship Poem 1: Mechanical Pencil

I held you once
in the abrasive glow
of flourescent lights.

And we made a language
together
of lead and loops.

O, were I again a finger
upon such subtle ridges!

Combing your point across
oblivious whiteness, and

words like sugar on the
brittle tips of us

breaking into nothing.

i enjoyed

reading this post on WCW over at Samizdat

a note

hi all,

just a note: as something of an exercise (& to keep me going on the novella i started a very long time ago) i will be posting one chapter a week, give or take, as i go through the editing process at amputations which now also appears at the bottom of the sidebar. I'd appreciate any comments ya'll might have as i try to edit/finish writing the damned thing.

will

Oooh! Fall is here and that means the scarves are sliding out of trees and around our necks like...no not like snakes! Like scarves that slide out of trees and around our necks!

And there is the strangler!

As Project Runway seems to have run it's way out of ideas (oh that was poor), the Amish inspired spread in Harpers Bazaar makes me press my fingertips over a scandalized giggle in conservative glee. Oh for colorless garments, so slender, so shapeless. Oh for pinafores and bonnets that cover our shameful hair.

A prayer for the forty-year-old woman in a tennis skirt and teeny-bopper tank before me in the grocery store, telling her eight-year-old daughter to take back the pink-lip-gloss and come back with the peach.

ab

Well, I hate to use anything that detracts from the pure literary beast of our journal, but since we have artwork on the site, and, while I know everyone else is doing it and I hate to be like everyone else (except when I want desperately to be like everyone else), what if I could get a brilliant bandband like, say, growing, to contribute some ambient sound to our beautiful little rag. Hmm? What do you think?

PS: I'm also working on post card and t-shirt designs. Eventually I'll post those up to see what you think.

Read about robots

over at Juked.

thuglife

the legend meanders

a l i c e b l u e f o u r

alice blue four is up! check out poems from Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Jon Leon, Jennifer Firestone, Crag Hill, Della Watson, WB Keckler, William Allegrezza, Kristy Bowen, Louis E. Bourgeois, Edward Smallfield, & Miriam Pirone!

check out prose from Sara Levine, David Gianatasio, Kristen Iskandrian, Greg Mulcahy, Colleen Frakes, & Benjamin Buchholz!

David Meiklejohn's "Plots"

When I was younger, there were books I finished and wanted to carry with me till I died showing person after person till I found another kid who'd clutch it to their chest and carry it around with them till they died showing person after person. It's one of those. Effing Press. Effing awesome.

Zukofsky's "A"

I just started it. I'm about halfway through 8. I was really into it until 8. Communist Propoganda is not my favorite. But I look forward to 12, which is supposedly long, and all about his father.

I also saw this movie, Oldboy. Very good. And very disturbing. I think I spent ten minutes afterwards trying to process, and not cry, and not throw up. A challenging movie, I guess I would say. Challenged the way I looked at certain things, at least. I would recommend it.

That's about it.

i'm eating ice cream

& thinking about MY BUTTOCKS via miporadio.

Stephen Fry on Language

Not the best "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" sketch, but pertinent. I think you'll enjoy. I used to stay up late and sneak downstairs to watch this, Millenium, and Politically Incorrect. That is what Sarah was like as a child.Watch.

youtube yo!

watch this video yo!

stephen dixon interview

at failbetter. actual interview here.

this is my favorite part:

"Maybe I should elaborate, though often my elaborations end up as complications. But here goes. To show the range of my methods, I'll give examples. in the low 90's in June, in New York City, I finished a novel and started another. I'd write a first draft of each chapter in one day, though some took two days. I did about 30 of them in a month and a half. The thirtieth, we'll say, wouldn't content itself as a short chapter and became a short novel, Abortions, which I wrote the first draft of and then the final one. I sent it to Henry Holt and Co., who'd published Interstate and The Stories of Stephen Dixon, and they took it. Then, because I can be perverse in my methodology in this way, I started writing the final draft of the 29 other first-draft chapters, we'll say, and called the novel 30. But I started writing the novel in the opposite chronological order I'd written the first drafts in. No. 29 became chapter one, "Shortcut." 28 became [chapter] two, "Popovers." You get the picture. Working backwards, I came to 15, or so, and that started growing too, like Abortions, and became another short novel, Evangeline. Since the character in all of these was named Gould, I decided to send Holt Evangeline, bridge the two books with the title Gould, and add a subtitle: "A Novel in Two Novels." Holt liked the idea and published the book. Meanwhile, I was working my way back till I came to the final chapter (first draft), which became the final final-draft chapter. But I wasn't finished yet. I then wrote the final draft of the second part of 30, finished it in final-draft form, and wrote the first draft of the second chapter in the second part of 30, which was going to be called—this second part—Ends. So you see that I used two different methods, if not more, in writing 30: lots of first drafts at first and then writing the final drafts all in a row; and with Ends, first and then final draft of each chapter before I went on to the second. 30 became an enormous novel and is as good a work as I've ever done."

Good-ing and what-not...

So I had every intention of doing this essay thing, as well as all the finalizing of poetry stuff for the final showdown...but this house-sitting gig is taking up more of my time then I would have liked.

Ultimately I feel like the Gudding essay fails. I still feel like it reads more like a book report "this is what this person thinks and this is what that person thinks." Can't really disagree with the thesis that most of the poets from the 60's became more personal in their approach to poetry (with the exception perhaps of the Pacific Northwest Set...and even they pulled away some from nature and narrative). Also can't really disagree with the fact that a lot of poets have/do believe that there is some sort of "otherness" speaking through them.


However that has never been something that I have felt.

And while I do think that poetry continues to be personal, I also think that there has been a recent push towards skill, theory, and language. It's not enough to speak of your own experience. It must be interesting in terms of language and approach as well.

This is basically my thesis.
And my own personal approach in writing. I feel like we speak towards a common experience by speaking of personal experience. That as poets we must write in an interesting way in order to be successful, in order to have people want to read it, and to be able to feel the experience as concordant with their own.

I believe that often times we read poetry, and personal experience less because we want to see what other people's lives are like, than we actually want to see that their lives and experiences are like our own. That we are, in fact, not alone. That we are a part of something bigger than ourselves. (I mean this as my experience, and why I like to read poetry...and while I could never say for certain for other people, I still believe this is true for other people whether they recognize it or not).

I have written this without the aid of my notes so this may be general, and some of my assertions about Gudding's essay may be off. But it still expresses what I think.

That's all folks. Time to go run some stairs and punch a big red cushion.

Le Petit Good-ing

I finished Gudding's essay and found myself taking notes along the way. I figure, once I collect my thoughts and make sense of my opinions, I'll struggle through a "verbalizing" of said conclusions here.

First impression, however...a little incomplete...