ok hi

long time

read chilly scenes of winter, felt like that guy but without a house of my own

***

A drunk man was on my porch when I came home from work today. He scolded me for not having the time and for being late. I said, "Who wears watches anymore?" He got near my face and smelled a vodka-stink. I thought I might have to uppercut/hyduken him off the porch. Instead I asked him what house he was looking for, told him that house was a block away, and he fell off the porch on his own. He left a bad smell.


***


my friend Robert Baumann has been periodically posting good poems on his blog.

***


I seriously can't get a third person to recommend me for colleges. I was a good student but I think I slumped too much and took too many art history classes in dark rooms to really remain in professors' memories. A third recommender is important because

a) once I finish these applications, robot melon will exist again

b) increased chances that I will not be making goddamn chopstick food next year

I'm considering asking my boss, even though he is Chinese and doesn't write English well. But I'm sure he likes the written word. He likes Transformers and Magic Johnson.

I like The Thing and John Stockton. If white men can't jump, they can be NBA assist record holders.

Saw Amiri Baraka read some stuff. The room was too small. Moved to a room with real seating, harsher lighting, and armrests. He read an essay about monopoly capitalism and then read some poetry, people couldn't stop the clapping. Some sorority girls next to me texted during the first part of the reading, studied biology the second part. I felt bad for them, these girls were missing this amazing thing because they wanted to get an A in Bio 100. If you have to study to get an A in Bio 100 then maybe you should have been in high school once. Baraka said, "I'm a socialist, I'm not up here pretending to be anything," and garnered the most hand and mouth noise of the night. Didn't feel like we were in Kansas for a few minutes, I thought we were scared of socialists, hmm.

Is it really going to cost me $450 to apply to schools and maybe not get in? Ass.

I can't find my old professors. Disappeared. I think a few are in Korea. Anyone want to recommend me?

Umm. Ok. In my car's cd player: Jay-z, Sleater-Kinney, Bone Thugs. Is that right? I feel weird about that.

Hey, listen to Baraka read Someone Blew Up America if you haven't yet. Ended the Poet Laureate position in NJ with that poem.

Having trouble writing sentences.

Has anyone read The People of Paper and would like to have a conversation about it? I have email if you don't live in Kansas.

I'm also reading Invisible Cities by Calvino if anyone wants to explain that to me.

I have picked up the reading part, now the writing is back to shit.

Are nails worse than screws in most situations?

I went to borders the other day and read a story from Kevin Wilson's Tunneling to the Center of the Earth and didn't realize it was this Kevin Wilson from Melonland. Swish.


That Lish story in The Collagist, wow.

I used to have little interest in reading poetry, and wrote a lot of it. Now that I am reading more of it, I can't write it. Albert Goldbarth I think is tops. He teaches at Wichita State, but I don't think I could make myself live there for two years (if I were to even be admitted to the program [see that? split infinitive. these sentences are crumbling like mold bread]).

Went running tonight, the ground was murdered by my long legs.

Books that might be labeled fairy tale or fable are my favorite right now. PoP, Light Boxes, Motorman. When will that damn Molly Gaudry book come out?

I read a Newsweek review of Loorie Moore's new book that said Moore tortured the protagonist too much. Too much suffering. I'm going to buy it because of that.



Going to start labeling posts "worth reading" and "not worth reading" and put that on the sidebar so people can navigate my blog better.




I feel that fall is going to be a good part of this year. I live in a huge room with metal supports and white lights. Four woks and buckets of corn starch.

Fall of Troy is a little hyper on the guitar, found it on my computer

Still on a Mcsweeney's kick, read Zeitoun, Maps and Legends, Icelander, and now on The People of Paper

I bought The People of Paper a few years ago, why did I not read it until just now? Mistakes. I keep trying to tell people how much I'm liking this book and then they ask what it is about and I just look at their faces




Is there some insane hatred for art, writing, whatever that doesn't make money? I'm getting scared when I meet people and tell them I work in a grocery store and want to go to grad school and teach after that. People are all like, "Well I guess that is all you can do with something like that." Like teaching people things you know isn't relevant to what actual people do. The education system I crawled out of seemed pretty bad. A lot of people from that system quit early and had babies before they were 18. I just wonder if the same people telling me "well I guess that is all you can do with something like that" also think procreating between the ages of 12 and 18 is better than someone being a teacher. And I just want to tell these people, "hey, I'm just trying to hold a damn conversation. I really want to sell ditch weed in Missouri for a living."

Some guy in our living room the other day was shitting all over the idea of making flash cartoons without getting $$$. Saying, "What do you plan to do with animation? How are you going to make money with that?" I wasn't in the conversation, but wanted to say, "you make money by working inside a grocery store."

I seriously feel like people will not believe you are serious about something if you are not making a lot of money doing that thing.

Someone stole my notebook and wrote rude things in it and put it back.

Does anyone want to do something with me? My brain is dulled.




The Drunk Sonnets is going to be the shit. Sonnet 45 ($%) makes me love poetry. (Scroll a little).

Keep rereading this one by Ani Smith at Piffle also.

fdg

Big Stupid Post: Fantasy Books

I have that Michael Chabon book, Maps and Legends, and read the essay "Fan Fiction." He talks about how lasting writing (such as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books) has gaps or untraveled areas that allow the readers imagination to explore on their own. It reminded me that months ago (or has it been a year now?) I received a message from a friend that Robert Jordan passed away. He wrote fantasy books, so what. Fantasy books with the gaps and maps spoken of by Chabon.

My friend mentioned his passing to me because there was a period when a group of eight others plus myself read the Wheel of Time series diligently. It was exciting. We would count down days until the release of the next in the series (I remember doing this for Path of Daggers, eighth in the series). Once, when between four or five of us there was less than the $14.95 cost of a book, the youngest in the group stole A Winter's Heart from the big green corporate bookstore in our town (not that there were any other bookstores). Copies were passed around, and we read them during Physics and during Kansas History and during Psychology. Most of the books spanned over one-thousand pages; I think I never spent more than four days reading one.

I spent many years of high school and college forgetting that I read these books, or acting like I had not. Tried reading "literature" literature. The thing was, I could not get through most of these books. It took me two months to get through The Scarlet Letter the first time. Catcher in the Rye was fairly easy, but I couldn't even finish Silas Marner. I understood that these books were revered as art; they had relevance in history (our history, not a fantasy-based history), could evoke long conversations, and were fine examples of craft. But, I just could not get through these fucking books.

So I thought, what is the point. I wasn't enjoying Hawthorne, so why not just read fantasy books? But then I thought, why is everyone else enjoying Hawthorne? I was just missing something. I felt like, when you let your face go slack and someone sees you and it is pretty embarrassing and the person who caught you knows that something is wrong with your face, but doesn't say anything.

Maybe I just thought something with historical legitimacy was boring.

But, ok let's look at this another way. Robert Jordan's books are, in a way, similar to early art. Art was largely born from religion, for worship (I'm thinking Shinto torii and the 93 ton Great Buddha in Kamakura), and religion is based on collections of ahistorical events. So Jordan's books are the art, sort of, I guess, and everything occurring within are the ahistorical events.

Then Hawthorne is more like the origin of an "art piece," meaning the connections are relevant to the artist instead of just seeming pulled from somewhere in the sky and left to the community at large. First, Hawthorne (in The Scarlet Letter) is dealing with human vices, human emotions, all happening in a Massachusetts colony. A few themes: guilt, persecution. Hawthorne's life is connected to this book by a rope (his great grandfather was the presiding judge of the Witchcraft Trials in Salem).

Then Jordan's connection to his book. I admit, I don't know much about him biographically, although wikipedia mentions Vietnam and a job as a nuclear engineer. But really, if you read Eye of The World, with all the swords and magic, doesn't Jordan's bio seem quite interchangeable?

I feel that religious art is created with a certain purpose. Other art is created, then sent into the world, and its purpose develops after.

But this doesn't make sense. I feel that Jordan's books are just set out into the world, while Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter with a particular reason for doing so, which is the opposite of how I just described each book (by purpose, in this case, I am thinking solely of the books as art objects, ignoring issues of money or anything tangible, really). So in this sense, doesn't the story of Hester and Pearl become more like the big Buddha? More purpose-driven? I think so.

I think this happens because art mimics art, and whichever is there first becomes the object of derivation. So taking into account art up until 1850 when The Scarlet Letter was published, in an abstract enough space, Hawthorne's book could be part of anything's art-relevance family tree. So I guess in this way, neither piece is really separated that much from the other.

How the two authors are separate: Once something deviates far enough, it becomes something else, and the relation is looser and thinner, strings and yarn instead of rope.






So I didn't really get anywhere with that. What is the point? I guess the point is that it would be all right to have A Crown of Swords on my bookshelf next to Kafka in nice alphabetical order because, shit, they are both a little weird anyway. And what else am I going to do?