Internet Lovelies

photograph by Carla C. Waldron.

our bruises have become warm places.

another morning in shivers, but my happiness feels like strawberry milk or hopscotch or warm book pages.

I like the rain when it's coming down into purple, slicing up the train window with cat whiskers, all of the light against all of the speed.

fuck sadness. you are goddamn brilliant. and you're a freak. and they hold the best half-smiles.

Death of a Typewriter, Link

Until recently, this Maple Grove Farms product has been blissfully unaware of the implications of the word “Real” before “Mint Jelly.” None of its neighboring products advertise their “realness.” Google searches have verified the realness of Real Mint Jelly’s ingredients—“a little too easily,” it thinks. Information is being withheld. Most of its ingredients are water-based, but it’s not quite a liquid. How does anyone know what chemicals are? Is water real? What is real? Real Mint Jelly has watched The Matrix trilogy over 20 times and has shrunk from 14 to 10 ounces in the past week. 

Megan Boyle, The Secret Life of Objects on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Link

Tolstoy is NOT afraid to use 100 words where 10 would suffice. I notice that men are often very comfortable doing this, writing these ridiculously long books that simply do not need to be as long as they are.

Roxane Gay, Link

It's a symptom of anxiety. A series of developments – e-books, piracy, and endless discounting – means that publishers no longer know how to sell books or make money. In desperation, they've responded by pushing authors as if they were baked beans.

There's never been a time so hard as now for writers to make a living, and even best-selling authors worry about lukewarm customer reviews on Amazon. Success feels random, as much to do with good PR as anything else, and could evaporate overnight. That Brontë woman, whatever happened to her? Never wrote a sequel, did she? Pity, I gave her three stars on Amazon. 

Joan Smith, Link

Dear Rachel Maddow circa 1998,

I would have totally crushed on you from afar in our Women in Media: Visibility Equals Power class in college. I would have followed a couple steps behind you in the annual Take Back the Night march through downtown. And then I would have sat as close as I could without being creepy in the local coffee shop while you talked with other short-haired girls wearing combat boots about oppression and empowerment. In short, I would have totally stalked you. Good thing we went to separate colleges.

Love,
Ms. Snarker circa 1998 and 2012 

Dorothy Snarker, Link 

I have a crush on 1970s Bill and Hillary.

An under-read respected journal in which you were published:

Your great 6,000 word story that was finally published in print (pgs. 22-29, Issue No 17, Vol. IV) by a respected journal which nobody read. Well, god damn it, these people are going to sit through this. Where there is lack of readership, there is also being stuck in a plastic folding-chair in a literary city somewhere between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m., that genius fuck-up-dinner-plans mound of time. Short of the fire alarm going off, these 15-17 people will come to understand exactly that horrible yet retrospectively sacred thing that happened in your childhood, through the haze of lightheadedness and needing to pee.

Jimmy Chen, You Are What You Read From, Link 

Do you recall education? I remember the swift way our interests became jobs that carved us into weird working shapes, not machines, totally human, just degraded to the point of blind roles and and dark alliances and revenge projects. It was my hope to understand how to support myself and others with ideas and sweat. But the system I endure has nothing to do with labour.

Erik Stinson, Link 

Happy Friday, I guess? 

some short things

Here are some passages I liked from poems/short stories I've read recently.

From the collection Life is Precious and God and The Bible :

 "Every terrorist has a demand", Kelley Irmen

realize this: you are trapped anywhere you go and routine induces
anxiety but there is routine always
realize this: you will go somewhere new and the stimulus will give you a
few months of relief
realize this: relief has shown it has teeth because once relief recedes --
you are left where you began
I have no beginning because I just relay stories and prose never has a
true beginning
I have no center because I only relay events and situations (r)evolve --
they are not circles

From "1992", Elizabeth Taddonio

A week after my Monday night ballet classes started up, my CEO told me he was concerned that I was leaving so quickly at the end of the work day to get to my ballet and yoga classes. 8:30 to 5 gave off the wrong perception of my priorities. I cried and muttered about never wanting those things to be taken away from me. I told him the thought of having those classes taken away from me broke my heart. Then I promptly went into the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water. There were no paper towels and I put my face under the hand drier and thought, "This is a bigger moment than I want to admit."


From Jim Behrle's chapbook Succubus Blues :

From "Fugue State Bird"

But how does one coolly remove
The fascinating woman in the
Polka dot top from her long-
Time douchebag beau and still nail
The landing? I like girls
With boyfriends, nuns / I
Like dead girls like Zelda
Fitzgerald / I'm a big fan
Of the crazy and the really
Crazy / so why are relation-
Ships so hard to master?


From the June 2012 issue of Everyday Genius :

From "Pastoral Seasonale", Bryan Beck

Fall again, and all morning
was much too bright to even believe
in such a thing as sadism.

From "Dishonest", Stephanie Barber

Bill didn't snap, he just raised his eyebrows as if to say "well, that is something that you said." Not "something" like "well, that is really something," but "something" like "some thing." Like "you said something," all flat and evident and Icelandic.

From "Hopscotch", Lesley Yalen

Seventy-six across was Dixie Drink. Five letters were needed, fourth letter E. Makela thought not of Dixie nor of Drink. She thought of no words at all, only letters, swirling, hurtling, filling every empty space. She watched them combine and recombine, lay down in squares and peel off. The alphabet narrowed, hollowed, released, was math. To recollect but not remember, to associate but not feel: this was the crossword's light. A light to let go in. To let go of small k's that leapt in king and kite; to let go of people who, when approached, were not themselves. Now, she saw only letters, stripped of sound and use, micro sculptures made of circles, planes, and hooks. They floated around her and she slowly dismissed all but five, and then she laid those five down in their only order, a single line in a network of intersections, in a pattern with no other message than itself. In this way, Makela jot julep, and felt kissed.

From "Some General Instructions", Sampson Starkweather

taking a saltshaker into a tomato patch is never a bad idea,
do not underestimate the gravitas of sandwiches,
one should make a sandwich with great care and love and imagination
sure, you could say that of all things, but it's not true, you don't need much imagination
to take out the trash or love to do the dishes, sandwich-making is on a higher plain
similar to the holiness of jumping, science and experience cannot explain why, for no
apparent reason, humans will jump, however it appears to happen less as one grows
older, my advice is to make it a habit to jump every now and then, imagine what people
will think seeing an adult just jump, imagine the surprise and joy you can enact inside
people merely by a random jump, poetry does this, poetry is constantly jumping, which
is one reason those of us who love it, love it, and probably not one of the reasons
that those who don't love it, don't love it, people who don't love poetry jump less
than people who love poetry, and that's a fact

New Blog

Welp, I think it's ready. My new film adaptation blog is at www.cinemadaptation.com. It's another blogspot blog, so if you're interested in the subject of lit-to-film (or comics-to-film, stage-to-film, etc) feel free to follow.

I was going to do a tumblr, but quickly realized it's just not set up for the kind of thing I want to do. It's set up for Ryan Gosling gifs and instagrammed pictures of farmers market vegetable stands. And that's fine. But I'll stick with something that's not neck-vein-burstingly frustrating.

But anyway.