Omaha’s KXVO is showing a whole bunch of Simpsonses I’ve never seen before. And now I’ve got a new favorite quote:
If word gets out about this, Kwazy Klown Airlines will be a laughingstock.
Take that, “Are there any persons, spells, or critters to which you attribute this accolade?”!
It helps to have schtick when yer online, but Octopus Magazine’s schtick is handled better than one would expect. Every issue plays off the number eight in some way. Last time, or maybe the time before that, they had 88 poets featured in the journal, which is massive and great. This time they have only eight, but these eight are all introduced by eight other poets. Or people. Which I imagine would feel great if you were one of those featured eight. Like you’re in some kind of anthology.
There’s also reviews of other poets, one of which is written by yours truly. I’d never reviewed a poetry book before, and such is the result of a person reviewing a poetry book who reads maybe one poetry book a year. I shirked a lot of duties, I guess is what I’m saying.
Still and all: go read Octopus. It’s almost like the Internet was invented to increase poetry’s audience. Poems are so much more fun to read online than blog posts.
You can go grab just one and then get back to your other work.
I know it’s gauche to gush, as a small-press publisher, about the books you publish; best to let their brilliance stand representatively alone. But I want to take a minute to talk about how excited we were when Hagel’s story came to The Cupboard’s inbox, and to try to get you to understand why you need to read it.
First off: it’s a story about a new kind of superhero who sings in a cabaret act.
Second: isn’t this sort of a perfect reason not to read a piece of fiction?
Continue reading Caia Hagel’s Acts of Kindness and Excellence in Times Tables
Spent four days at the AMNH archives squinting at the atrocious scribbles of Clarance Ethan and Mary L. Jobe Akeley, where I found that these two (she was his second wife) were probably living together while Carl was still married. Then I found out that Penelope Bodry-Sanders (right) already had this info in her biography. Not that it’s a competition.
This exhibit displays full body cadavers as well as human body parts, organs, fetuses and embryos that come from cadavers of Chinese citizens or residents. With respect to the human parts, organs, fetuses and embryos you are viewing, Premier relies solely on the representations of its Chinese partners and cannot independently verify that they do not belong to persons executed while incarcerated in Chinese prisons.
ate eight friend dumplings at the Dumpling House (right) on the Lower East Side/Chinatown, which dumplings cost $2 total.
sat on a Sunday for an hour in McCarren Park (pictured, right) with Steve and ate sandwiches and counted fedoras—they averaged one on every tenth head.
For the last fifteen minutes, someone has been double-parked in what might a BMW outside with all windows and the sunroof open, playing top 40 hip-hop radio more loudly than I thought cars could. Just, like, so loud.
Were I an echt New Yorker and not some idiot housesitting for 10 days, I would have shouted “Turn it down ya jackass!” Instead I just stared from the three-stories-up window.
Then, just now, a nice older lady in culottes from across the street came out of her house and walked up to the car. She had a knowing smile on her face. All she did was stand next to the driver’s window and put her fingers in her ears. What else could she do, really, with all the noise.
The radio was promptly muted. I’d never get such results. Who can deny a senior citizen her quiet?
The semiweekly newspaper is the Virginia Gazette, out Wednesdays and Saturdays. The back of each “Limelight” section includes a universally popular feature called The Last Word. It’s like a blog’s anonymous comment section but antecedent thereto. Typical posts concern unnamed restaurants with bad service, or pleas for drivers to be more careful, or such acute political commentary as: “I agree that President Obama should be impeached. I think the Senate and Congress ought to look into this.”
Continue reading The Joys of Williamsburg (Va.)
I. Synecdoche, New York
For a long time while watching I wasn’t with this movie. Not like: I didn’t get it. I didn’t, but didn’t much work at it that way. But I wasn’t with it as it wanted me to be. The situation/drama/conflicts were too synthetic for me to move past the distance I was keeping. I know this is in line with the movie’s themes, but okay so Hazel’s house is just perpetually on fire. But then the movie kept going and Caden kept getting older and suddenly two things happened:
Shame about Catherine Keener though. Early on, N said: “See this is why I don’t like her, she always plays the same role.” I like C.K., but he’s right. We’ve seen her range with that other Philip Seymour Hoffman vehicle, Capote. Isn’t she tired of playing the sexy-smart-disloyal flake? Isn’t Charlie Kaufman ready to write another role for her?
II. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
N & I just finished watching it. It’s on Netflix streaming now, so you can, too. What I like best, this time around perhaps, is the easy way it makes cartoons and soft-rock ballads out of Aristophanes’ genderqueer creation myth. And of course the music. At last: a rock musical to expose the lack of rock in all previous rock musicals.
UNL once called its Intro to Lesbian and Gay Lit class, “Sex Roles in Literature.” It is, let’s admit, a far better name than what we have now, right? I’d try to teach it, if I could, and I’d totally show this movie on a day I didn’t feel like teaching.
III. The Chapbook Review
This is the new one. The inaugural issue of this useful resource just launched, and The Cupboard’s latest volume, Play, gets reviewed not just once but twice. Take that, Pocket Finger!
Except it was an ant and not a roach.
Does it make me look insufferable?
For Wednesday, May 27 -You can’t be helping other people all the time! Today, it’s time to help yourself. Add a few selfish acts into your good deeds and don’t feel bad about it. Don’t do anything too crazy — just put yourself first a few times when you usually would not. This isn’t an excuse to forget your manners — you should still say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and be a nice person. But you deserve a day when you treat yourself more like the star you are. There’s no harm in that.
I’m trying to come up with a list of what I’m belaboringly calling “deuteragonistic narrators”—i.e., first-person narrators who are not the protagonists in their own stories.
Some classic examples:
And that’s all I can come up with. Sorta-kinda DNs can be found in Heart of Darkness, A Good Soldier, and Lolita, though whether all those narrators aren’t pretty much the protagonists of those novels is I think up for debate.
There has to be more. (There have to be more?) Can you help?
NYC friends: rejoice. It’s looking as though I’ll be spending two weeks House-/cat-sitting in Brooklyn for my good friends Clay and Elaine as they honeymoon in Italy. Clay and Elaine are mathematicians, with PhDs and everything. I recently wrote something called “Go Pitt”. Clay recently wrote something called “Non-archimedean equidistribution on elliptic curves with global applications.”
Yes, I said cat-sitting. Yes, I’m allergic to cats. I’m coming armed with freshly refilled prescriptions for Fexofenadine and many reporter’s notebooks. I have a lot of (let’s hope) final research to do on the taxidermy book, and here are some things I hope to see on my trip:
And you, perhaps? It’ll be the end of June and very early July. “Let’s do lunch,” and by “lunch” I mean let’s see what five dollars will get us at the nearest bodega.