Ukulele Consultant and Ego Kabuki Critic.
Tapwater Jackson has been performing lobotomies with a broken ketchup bottle since 1953.
Occasionally, I am tapwaterj at gmail dot com. But, really, so what?
The Slaughterhouse 5
Jane Air
A Sixth Man is Hard to Find
Dunkle Tom’s Jammin’
Nineteen Eighty-Score
Kobe-Dick
The Shot-chucker’s Guide to the Half-Court Three
The Satanic Converses
Infinite Press
Gulliver’s Travels
BY DANIELA OLSZEWSKA, McSweeney’s
Train cases, blue lung, marines uniform underwear, correct pronunciation of caesura, suicide tree house cult, koi ponds, psikhushkas, doll with a head at both ends, how to defer student loan, yogurt mountain birthday club, Gwendolyn Brooks, can a penis literally break in half(?), circumstances under which you can sue your landlord …
More Here
[Timothy McSweeney is not responsible for the placement of the carrot on his snowman]
Although, both seem to deftly employ applied poetry to eff the ineffable within the rules of a closed system.
I like you, a twenty-year-old poet writes to me.
A beginning carpenter of words.
His letter smells of lumber.
His muse still sleeps in rosewood.
Ambitious noise in a literary sawmill.
Apprentices veneering a gullible tongue.
They cut to size the shy plywood of sentences.
A haiku whittled with a plane.
Problems begin
with a splinter lodged in memory.
It is hard to remove
much harder to describe.
Wood shavings fly. The apple cores of angels.
Dust up to the heavens.
by Ewa Lipska
translation by Robin Davidson & Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska
from The New Century
Northwestern University Press, 2009
Via 3 Quarks Daily
“I don’t want to read online,” Eggers said. “I don’t want to wake up and look at a screen. I feel like as a society, we try to put everything on that same goddamn screen, and pretty soon we’re going to be eating on the screen or, like, making love through the screen. It’s just sort of like: ‘Why does everything have to be on the screen?’
So: “I do think that it’s a time to make the paper form more robust and more surprising and beautiful and expansive,” Eggers concluded.
Alert: this is personal! Here is a piece I wrote for the Poetry Foundation about Bukowski, his letters, his bad bad influence on my grandfather, the storage shed…all of that.
“This was an odd way to meet a writer, and an odd way to meet a relative. From the book came admiring memories of Lafe; from my mother came tender and hurtful memories. She would mimic his lunges to the fridge for a beer. Her brothers were angrier. They wrote about the bloated face, the dribble of blood from the mouth, the retching.
Said Bukowski: “I hate to see them laying it into you down there … hope you’ve come out of it by now and are eating a little … but your family lays it into you because they love you, man; nobody understands an alcoholic… .”
Said my mother: ‘I wasn’t proud when Daddy found a man to befriend whose writing glorified an even-worse home life.’”
That’s not personal, Molly, that’s universal.
I will cook a quiche for us in my Easy-Bake Oven. It will be delicious and romantic. You will eat my Easy-Bake Oven quiche and say it is the most amazing fucking thing you have ever put in your mouth. We will eat at a tiny little table like the ones in pediatricians’ offices and we will set the mood with little, tiny fucking birthday candles that will probably melt before we finish eating.
