Although there is news somewhere everywhere nowhere, I’m still thinking about hitchhiking. This particular hitchhiker I observed while waiting for cars to get out of my way, was filthy, greasy, as grimy as taken-a-bath-in-engine-oil. His hair, I suppose was black, at least then it was. His shirt, a sort of football jersey with 07 on the back, soiled. The 07 may have once been white, but dark gray now. He was there when I passed on the way, there on the reverse trip, there at lunch, there again. While I waited impatiently at the stop, there was something, something about how he stretched, how he rotated his neck when he set down his backpack; I felt this knowledge: there was a physically strong man underneath, but a man about to give up. Okay, that’s an assumption, like assuming a koala bear is snuggly and a hummingbird is gentle, but it is the body language I watched, therefore, I thought this. I wanted to say something to him, to give him some sort of hope, some sort of wisdom, some sort of rescue, some sort of something that would veer his path toward better, but on the other hand, maybe his path was just that, on its way to damn good. Maybe he already had all of the hope in China and I was just making an ostentatious asslike moment out of my assumption. Later, I drove past again, this time, stopping, holding back my dog by the collar, and the man squatted at my window in the rain looking at me with eyes clear of drugs, clear of judgment. A look that I rarely see – no expectation. Of course, I am making all this up in my head, but this is what I think I saw: a man who had seen it all and the only way to survive was honesty. Okay, so I’m a fiction writer and all that melodramaticness was my own projection: I hear you say this in an accusatory tone while pointing a rigid claw. I said to dude, “I can’t give you a ride, but I can give you something to eat - if you need it.” He said in a tenor of appreciation, “That would be great.” I handed him an energy bar out of a box on my front seat. He took it, backed up. End of big moment. This week I’ve been studying hitchhikers. I look at the scary people, I think of the creepy people, the crazy people that could do something bad to a hitchhiker or to the vulnerable, especially the chick hitchhikers, and I want to stop it all, but what I can I do, I’m a woman with a dog and later I discover, a box full of energy bars that say “energy lite”. I didn’t realize the “lite” part and this is news to me. My big heart-opening rescue of the downtrodden is “lite” and perhaps he just threw the wafery-thing into the bushes. This is it though - I’m hoping Mr. 07 will run into a sandwich or something and his journey will be safe and well. Next time I went by: a corner of wet grass and a curb, here and there, a little bit of litter.
Stefanie is the author of the short story collection Feeding Strays (Lost Horse Press) and the flash fiction chapbook MOTEL (Bannock Street Books). She is the Fiction Editor of the Los Angeles Review. www.stefaniefreele.com
Monday, December 27, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Brian Allen Carr
I was waiting for a massacre, but it seems that none will come. I was asked to deliver no news, and against my greater instincts I’ve no news to report. The call came Thursday and I truly figured that the weekend would yield some great fire-fight in the state of Tamaulipas. I thought I’d tell you about that. I’d tell you about the cartel members carved up by bullets, their bodies dropped like bruised shoulders on streets dirtied with shards of glass. The location of a celebration was moved in fear of violence, a rich kid was shot three times in the back while on a golf course, white-haired Midwesterners arrived in RV’s to once again make thick the trailer parks of the Rio Grande Valley, but there were no gunfights—the action of them Twittered by the younger cartel members—that erupted. No kidnappings called to attention. No politicians beheaded. The Mexican Navy did not storm Ciudad Mier, a town thinned out in the wake of a Los Zetas siege.
No white people were shot off jet skis by fledgling members of a pirate force. Busted brains did not drift in the brown waters of Falcon Lake. Though $4.4 million dollars of cocaine was seized at Anzalduas Bridge.
I’ve not done cocaine in some time. The summer of my 18th year I did a mess of it. We had a friend named Fast Eddy who was awarded $22,000 in a lawsuit after having fallen from a diving board at a municipal swimming pool and splitting his head open. He got $11,000 of it the day he turned 18 and the remaining $11,000 was to be awarded on his 21st birthday. We spent a summer drawing lines the length of baseball bats across kitchen tables owned by out-of-town parents. I saw the sun rise 30 times in two months and lost a taste for it.
I’ve not crossed a border bridge for over 200 days, but I drive by the river often, the green water still, wide as a motor home between the waist high grass. It’s thicker further west, but it’s siphoned off here to feed the citrus groves. William S. Burroughs used to own one of those groves a couple miles from my home. His wife would set grapefruits on her head, and Burroughs would shoot them off. He wasn’t as good at aiming at Martini glasses. I read Queer and don’t recognize his Mexico. Now there are soldiers in the squares, automatic machine guns around their necks. They searched me once, “Drogas? Drogas?” they screamed and rifled through my wallet, placed their barrel mouths against me. Their faces clean and steady. This was many years ago. The let me go unharmed. Didn’t even take my money. I’ve been across many times since then. Most likely those men are dead.
Brian Allen Carr lives on the Texas/Mexico border. Short Bus, his first collection, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press. He can be found online at www.brianallencarr.com.
No white people were shot off jet skis by fledgling members of a pirate force. Busted brains did not drift in the brown waters of Falcon Lake. Though $4.4 million dollars of cocaine was seized at Anzalduas Bridge.
I’ve not done cocaine in some time. The summer of my 18th year I did a mess of it. We had a friend named Fast Eddy who was awarded $22,000 in a lawsuit after having fallen from a diving board at a municipal swimming pool and splitting his head open. He got $11,000 of it the day he turned 18 and the remaining $11,000 was to be awarded on his 21st birthday. We spent a summer drawing lines the length of baseball bats across kitchen tables owned by out-of-town parents. I saw the sun rise 30 times in two months and lost a taste for it.
I’ve not crossed a border bridge for over 200 days, but I drive by the river often, the green water still, wide as a motor home between the waist high grass. It’s thicker further west, but it’s siphoned off here to feed the citrus groves. William S. Burroughs used to own one of those groves a couple miles from my home. His wife would set grapefruits on her head, and Burroughs would shoot them off. He wasn’t as good at aiming at Martini glasses. I read Queer and don’t recognize his Mexico. Now there are soldiers in the squares, automatic machine guns around their necks. They searched me once, “Drogas? Drogas?” they screamed and rifled through my wallet, placed their barrel mouths against me. Their faces clean and steady. This was many years ago. The let me go unharmed. Didn’t even take my money. I’ve been across many times since then. Most likely those men are dead.
Brian Allen Carr lives on the Texas/Mexico border. Short Bus, his first collection, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press. He can be found online at www.brianallencarr.com.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Clark Knowles
On the Anniversary of the Assassination of JFK
Yesterday was the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but there is no news today. Yesterday, a blue moon filled the night sky. Yesterday, a bomb fell, a door opened, a soup cooled on the table. Yesterday, power was seized and relinquished in coups both bloody and peaceful. Yesterday, food was abundant/scare and we feasted/starved. Yesterday, colonists dressed as Indians dumped tea into the harbor. Yesterday, a mighty civilization ended and though it went nearly unnoticed, one family thoughtfully left a group of tools and clay pots arranged around a fire pit for posterity. Yesterday, a pair of feet stepped onto a new continent for the first time. Yesterday, a species diverged; one group climbed down from the trees and moved into an uncertain savannah, the other stayed in the branches, near the food. Yesterday, there was no awareness, no blurring of the lines between the known and the unknown. Yesterday, the Earth’s surface bubbled and roiled, the atmosphere a vast swirl of sulfur and methane. Yesterday, in a segment of time so infinitesimal, the big bang banged out all that is and would ever be. Yesterday was a good day, certainly, but there is no news today.
Clark Knowles teaches writing at The University of New Hampshire. He writes short stories that can be found in Glimmer Train and Pank. He has a novel, The Aurora Project, that is patiently awaiting a home. He can be found at www.clarkknowles.com
Yesterday was the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but there is no news today. Yesterday, a blue moon filled the night sky. Yesterday, a bomb fell, a door opened, a soup cooled on the table. Yesterday, power was seized and relinquished in coups both bloody and peaceful. Yesterday, food was abundant/scare and we feasted/starved. Yesterday, colonists dressed as Indians dumped tea into the harbor. Yesterday, a mighty civilization ended and though it went nearly unnoticed, one family thoughtfully left a group of tools and clay pots arranged around a fire pit for posterity. Yesterday, a pair of feet stepped onto a new continent for the first time. Yesterday, a species diverged; one group climbed down from the trees and moved into an uncertain savannah, the other stayed in the branches, near the food. Yesterday, there was no awareness, no blurring of the lines between the known and the unknown. Yesterday, the Earth’s surface bubbled and roiled, the atmosphere a vast swirl of sulfur and methane. Yesterday, in a segment of time so infinitesimal, the big bang banged out all that is and would ever be. Yesterday was a good day, certainly, but there is no news today.
Clark Knowles teaches writing at The University of New Hampshire. He writes short stories that can be found in Glimmer Train and Pank. He has a novel, The Aurora Project, that is patiently awaiting a home. He can be found at www.clarkknowles.com
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Jill Leininger
Hey. I’m reading Donne. In pre-digested bits, sure, but someone’s made beans of it all and the lines, once inside me, gurgle and spit. Have you ever seen a woman chew up a grape for her teething child? More than one woman in more than one park has done this. I am grateful.
In Chile, they’re loading straws full of poems into the ground. And food capsules. NASA and Neruda, dense as shit. But you don’t want to hear that.
Today I did my duty: filled bubbles with a ballpoint pen; peed on a stick; took five types of pills and rubbed spearmint on my neck. Also ate the seeds of an apple. Also waited. Also wrote it down.
Yesterday, the microwave beeped at the same time I should have left the house--or stirred something or flipped something or put whites in the dryer. It beeped but I was tiling and dirty. I was making something. Churning sand into the color of my wrists and pressing it into place. Listening to Beckett. And remembering that time in college when I thought I was pregnant. Meanwhile, something was sticking to the bottom of a pan.
Back then, Steve would use anything to roll a joint, the Book of Mormon or a Chinese menu. Religious texts are best, he said. God, I get itchy just thinking of that van.
I’m itchy in general. My pulse is 116. You want nothing to happen? Here’s a vein of paper that cannot be mined. Something charred no one will eat. A scattering of seeds on my mid-term ballot. Here: everything’s small so you can swallow it.
Jill Leininger's poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Crab Creek Review, Seattle Review, and are forthcoming in Harvard Review. She’s currently mutating stories, battening down the hatches, and not writing a play in Johnson, Vermont.
In Chile, they’re loading straws full of poems into the ground. And food capsules. NASA and Neruda, dense as shit. But you don’t want to hear that.
Today I did my duty: filled bubbles with a ballpoint pen; peed on a stick; took five types of pills and rubbed spearmint on my neck. Also ate the seeds of an apple. Also waited. Also wrote it down.
Yesterday, the microwave beeped at the same time I should have left the house--or stirred something or flipped something or put whites in the dryer. It beeped but I was tiling and dirty. I was making something. Churning sand into the color of my wrists and pressing it into place. Listening to Beckett. And remembering that time in college when I thought I was pregnant. Meanwhile, something was sticking to the bottom of a pan.
Back then, Steve would use anything to roll a joint, the Book of Mormon or a Chinese menu. Religious texts are best, he said. God, I get itchy just thinking of that van.
I’m itchy in general. My pulse is 116. You want nothing to happen? Here’s a vein of paper that cannot be mined. Something charred no one will eat. A scattering of seeds on my mid-term ballot. Here: everything’s small so you can swallow it.
Jill Leininger's poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Crab Creek Review, Seattle Review, and are forthcoming in Harvard Review. She’s currently mutating stories, battening down the hatches, and not writing a play in Johnson, Vermont.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Kathryn Regina
No News Today
If I call, don't think someone has died. That's not the only reason I call. Oh but guess what is dying? The universe. The universe is more than halfway through its lifespan. I would have called you if this was news.
What kind of news is death to you. If the universe is dying, then everything in it is dying. This death is not news. Look how the sun droops, it's dark at 4:30!
Oh but guess what's good for depression in the winter? Cat videos. There has never been a cat that has not had dying on its mind while being hilarious on YouTube.
I would have called you if there was news of the cat. I didn't have anything to report is why I didn't call.
What I have been doing is watching television and cat videos on YouTube. If you wanted to call you could have called. But if you call you will wake the cat.
The cat is dependent on the sun the same way as you. When the sun is gone, the cat sleeps under the radiator. The radiator is not so hot, don't get hysterical. The radiator will not hurt the cat the way it hurts cats on television. You shouldn't believe everything you think.
I would have called you if the cat had news. If I call, don't think someone has died. That's not the only reason i call. But look how the sun cools, it's dark at noon! This death is not news. If you want to talk to me, you have a phone.
But the cat is sleeping is why you shouldn't call. The cat is contemplating its death through sleep which is a rehearsal of eternal blank. Guess what else is eternal? Nothing. I would have called you if this was news.
Kathryn Regina lives in Chicago and blogs at http://this-is-not-poetry.blogspot.com/.
If I call, don't think someone has died. That's not the only reason I call. Oh but guess what is dying? The universe. The universe is more than halfway through its lifespan. I would have called you if this was news.
What kind of news is death to you. If the universe is dying, then everything in it is dying. This death is not news. Look how the sun droops, it's dark at 4:30!
Oh but guess what's good for depression in the winter? Cat videos. There has never been a cat that has not had dying on its mind while being hilarious on YouTube.
I would have called you if there was news of the cat. I didn't have anything to report is why I didn't call.
What I have been doing is watching television and cat videos on YouTube. If you wanted to call you could have called. But if you call you will wake the cat.
The cat is dependent on the sun the same way as you. When the sun is gone, the cat sleeps under the radiator. The radiator is not so hot, don't get hysterical. The radiator will not hurt the cat the way it hurts cats on television. You shouldn't believe everything you think.
I would have called you if the cat had news. If I call, don't think someone has died. That's not the only reason i call. But look how the sun cools, it's dark at noon! This death is not news. If you want to talk to me, you have a phone.
But the cat is sleeping is why you shouldn't call. The cat is contemplating its death through sleep which is a rehearsal of eternal blank. Guess what else is eternal? Nothing. I would have called you if this was news.
Kathryn Regina lives in Chicago and blogs at http://this-is-not-poetry.blogspot.com/.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Barry Graham
No news today. I didn't mind at first because news lasts thirty seconds and the cheesesteak and wings taste pretty fucking good and that should be enough. Why isn't that enough? There was no news yesterday either but some kid near me set himself on fire to prove some point that wasn't his to make and really he seemed like such an asshole for doing it, but my skin still looks fine and I will have the good fortune of still attracting the opposite sex. I really wish he wouldn't have done that. Now I have nothing to compare myself to except for my father but he's dead and I'm so fucking tired of doing that anyway. I don't even know why I'm thinking about him right now. I haven't done it in so long. Maybe because it's Thursday. Fuck. There was; however, news the day before. I didn't know what it meant at first because it wasn't for me. My box was empty. But I saw the pretty brown package with my neighbor's name on it sitting outside his apartment door and I shouldn't have taken it but why not. He won't miss it. His son is getting ready to burn to death and he won't be missing anything anymore. I was hoping for CD's or DvD's or hardcover books from some shitty bookclub, but it was none of those things. It was news. Nothing substantial, nothing worth remembering now, as clearly I have forgotten, but it was news and that's something isn't it?
barry graham is the author of the national virginity pledge and nothing or next to nothing (atlantic city blues), look for him online at www.barrygfunk.blogspot.com
barry graham is the author of the national virginity pledge and nothing or next to nothing (atlantic city blues), look for him online at www.barrygfunk.blogspot.com
Saturday, November 20, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Jesus Angel Garcia
Record temperatures in our hood. The ice on your eye will be water again soon. I saw a baby bunny nibbling pork fried rice from a styrofoam bowl. The picnic’s at the park behind that school where they found that girl in the dumpster. Burned alive, they said. Luddite thug sending a message. Of course, you’re invited. Text your neighbor, the one with the Ice-Nine tattoo. But please don’t talk about Triple-A ball or slugs in your orchid bed. Mom and Pop tire more easily now. Robert says, Caring or not caring is no reason to not vote. Potlucks are false advertising unless the brownies come from Pam. When everything is free, poets will be bakers. There’s a thick ball of fuzz purring beneath the trundle bed. Cyrus drove his Prius into a DSL box early this morning. He had just drunk-dialed his ex and her daughter picked up. In Mexico, they found traces of cat in a popular brand of all-natural dry cat food. It was recalled for excess vitamin B. Now trending on Twitter: #EverythingIsFree. No news today. We’re still hungry.
Jesús Ángel García is the author of “badbadbad,” a transmedia novel (forthcoming in May 2011 on New Pulp Press). 3xbad stories, songs and a trailer for the first in a five-part series of interconnected short films based on themes of the book can be found here: http://badbadbad.net/.
Jesús Ángel García is the author of “badbadbad,” a transmedia novel (forthcoming in May 2011 on New Pulp Press). 3xbad stories, songs and a trailer for the first in a five-part series of interconnected short films based on themes of the book can be found here: http://badbadbad.net/.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
No news today
There is no news today.
Within the last couple of days, entirely newsless as they were, Asunder was published.
Until next time, hoping your news is no news.
Within the last couple of days, entirely newsless as they were, Asunder was published.
Until next time, hoping your news is no news.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Roy Kesey
No news today.
Today is Veteran's Day and I wish there was no news. Or if not no news then some news other than that which we have: today, Veteran's Day, and the news is that more veterans are committing suicide than ever before. That they are twice as likely as non-veterans to commit suicide. That in 2005 (the one year for which we have relatively solid data, data that the VA has been very careful never ever to compile and release) at least 6256 veterans killed themselves.
That's 521 per month. 120 per week. 17 per day.
My family is rich in veterans, my friends and acquaintances richer still and I love them and do not want this to happen to them, or to anyone, and do not misunderstand me. I know that Once more unto the breach, dear friends, et cetera, and I also know that i sing of Olaf glad and big, et cetera, and I know of the pit between them. I know that defeat brings worse things, et cetera, and I believe that, I do, but I also know that that's what Dick Cheney sang to every kid headed to boot camp, not those words exactly maybe but that same song, and it was the wrong song, and Dick Cheney knew it, and those kids went to boot camp and then on to Iraq, and came back, and knew, too, that it had been the wrong song.
So maybe instead of no news or current news we could instead today have the news that someone accidentally waterboarded Dick Cheney while raping him to death with a rusty bayonet.
That's some news I could get behind.
That's some news I could drink me some coffee over.
Roy Kesey's debut novel Pacazo will be published by Dzanc Books in February 2011. His work has been widely published and anthologized, with stories appearing in Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and New Sudden Fiction, among other places. He currently lives in Peru with his wife and children. (www.roykesey.com)
Today is Veteran's Day and I wish there was no news. Or if not no news then some news other than that which we have: today, Veteran's Day, and the news is that more veterans are committing suicide than ever before. That they are twice as likely as non-veterans to commit suicide. That in 2005 (the one year for which we have relatively solid data, data that the VA has been very careful never ever to compile and release) at least 6256 veterans killed themselves.
That's 521 per month. 120 per week. 17 per day.
My family is rich in veterans, my friends and acquaintances richer still and I love them and do not want this to happen to them, or to anyone, and do not misunderstand me. I know that Once more unto the breach, dear friends, et cetera, and I also know that i sing of Olaf glad and big, et cetera, and I know of the pit between them. I know that defeat brings worse things, et cetera, and I believe that, I do, but I also know that that's what Dick Cheney sang to every kid headed to boot camp, not those words exactly maybe but that same song, and it was the wrong song, and Dick Cheney knew it, and those kids went to boot camp and then on to Iraq, and came back, and knew, too, that it had been the wrong song.
So maybe instead of no news or current news we could instead today have the news that someone accidentally waterboarded Dick Cheney while raping him to death with a rusty bayonet.
That's some news I could get behind.
That's some news I could drink me some coffee over.
Roy Kesey's debut novel Pacazo will be published by Dzanc Books in February 2011. His work has been widely published and anthologized, with stories appearing in Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and New Sudden Fiction, among other places. He currently lives in Peru with his wife and children. (www.roykesey.com)
No news today - Guest Post - Elizabeth Ellen
File this one under obituary. Well, it’s happened again, Robert. Another plant has committed suicide. As I was telling you when you were here last, I can’t seem to keep one alive. It’s hard to say the exact number I have carried out to the garbage can in the middle of the night (I avoid undertaking such exercises during daylight hours when a neighbor might see and make the sort of judgment for which I could not fault him or her, nor offer a defense) since I moved into the house four years ago. Suffice it to say, it is not a small number and that my lack of memory may be serving to protect me against the knowledge of my own bad deeds. That said, you should know these deaths are not premeditated (on my part). I spend an inordinate amount of time picking and choosing each plant fully intending it will live out its full life expectancy with me. It is only after I bring said plant into the house that something seems always to go terribly wrong. And recently things have been going terribly wrong at a staggering rate. There have been four such deaths so far this year (and those are just the suicides). And this latest one, the one that fell (jumped?) tonight, taking a much smaller, healthier plant down along with it, belonged to the newest batch, purchased at Home Depot only a month ago. It would seem, if I am to be honest with myself, Robert, that I have become an example of the worst sort of American, the sort who can’t be bothered to water and feed and fertilize a plant, but who allows it to wither and fade with neglect and mistreatment until it topples headfirst over the balcony where it was sadistically placed in the same spot as the plant that preceded it, then, without sufficient pause, goes and buys another one. It’s wasteful is what it is. And I’m afraid this is just one such example of my wastefulness, a wastefulness that flourished along with my nihilistic tendencies (leanings?) last year as a result of what I self-indulgently refer to as my “year of heartache.” I was bitter, Robert, and in my bitterness waste and wasting seemed not to matter to me. I bought food I knew I would never eat, clothes I would never wear. Plane tickets purchased during periods of lighter moods went wasted as well as I chose to lose money on the unused tickets rather than take the necessary steps (i.e. talk to another human being) to change them (and using them once the lighter moods had lifted seemed inconceivable). And let us not even delve into the area of my squandered talents (i.e. I let another year slip by without producing a book!). All this reminds me of a story my mother once told me about my father (this is another of our American faults – tying everything back to our parents), a man I knew mainly through her stories, most of which were marked by inebriation and violence. It seems that on their honeymoon, which was, I want to say, to Mexico or one of the Caribbean islands, somewhere with a beach, to be sure, my father tucked a twenty dollar bill into his swimming trunks each morning and each morning, without fail, he lost the twenty dollar bill in the ocean. I think at the time she told me this story (I was quite young, six or seven) it was my mother’s intention to teach me something about my father or money or both (previous stories had taught me about violent, alcoholic, mama’s boys, how best to recognize and avoid them). Recently, however, I have been thinking of that story, of my father, and wondering if wastefulness isn’t an inherited quality (the old nature vs. nurture question, Robert). Certainly there are similarities between a man continuing to place a twenty dollar bill in his pocket each morning when history has shown him it will be lost if he does so and a woman continuing to purchase plants and bring them into her house despite a lack of will or knowledge for taking care of them. It’s something to think about, Robert. (Or something for me to think about at least.) You probably think me a dreadful person upon these admittances, and you would be correct in your assessment. I am a dreadful person. I was prepared to say something here about how I want to change or how I will change, how we don’t need to be enslaved to the qualities we may have inherited (or learned) from our parents. But I think such a statement would be misleading. The truth is I likely won’t change. I will likely continue to purchase these plants and continue to tell myself I will be better, that I will remember to water and fertilize and repot them, but who’s kidding who, Robert? I won’t remember shit. I will continue to be dreadful. And the question then is: will you love me anyway? Don’t get hysterical, Robert. That is all I have come here to say. That and this: there is no news today.
elizabeth ellen never really graduated college and thus has no idea when really it is appropriate to use things like "i.e." she does her best with her limited knowledge of the english language. don't hate.
elizabeth ellen never really graduated college and thus has no idea when really it is appropriate to use things like "i.e." she does her best with her limited knowledge of the english language. don't hate.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Douglas A. Martin
New paintings by someone will be at some gallery. I bought new shoes. I was considering the Chewy Adidas and would have gotten them, if not for the sort of silver side-spikes or studs. SoHo Security Guard came in, high. Everything all right in here? You sure? You sure?
When we get home next from some UNIQLO Realism, Bobby gets an e-mail, someone calling him a homo. This after the deterritorializing of housecleaning. The doggie won’t stop peeing in the house. So no more runner in the kitchen. Carpet Men Stretch What They Lay, says one t-shirt not sported today. Rather, Heather Gray: On My Way to Movies & More. He’s pouring red wine. I’m not purring or ready for it yet, being an asshole trying to get this thing writ at kitchen table. Tonight we’ll watch Episode 520 of Dark Shadows--get as far as we can before falling to sleep. By this point, Adam has been taught to speak. (If Adam lives, then B. does too, but if Adam dies...) First, Charlie is coming over for dinner. If that’s OK with me. You know what 10/11 is? I mean, besides Bill Clegg’s birthday.
*
Douglas A. Martin is the author most recently of a novel, ONCE YOU GO BACK (Seven Stories Press), and a lyric narrative, YOUR BODY FIGURED (Nightboat Books).
When we get home next from some UNIQLO Realism, Bobby gets an e-mail, someone calling him a homo. This after the deterritorializing of housecleaning. The doggie won’t stop peeing in the house. So no more runner in the kitchen. Carpet Men Stretch What They Lay, says one t-shirt not sported today. Rather, Heather Gray: On My Way to Movies & More. He’s pouring red wine. I’m not purring or ready for it yet, being an asshole trying to get this thing writ at kitchen table. Tonight we’ll watch Episode 520 of Dark Shadows--get as far as we can before falling to sleep. By this point, Adam has been taught to speak. (If Adam lives, then B. does too, but if Adam dies...) First, Charlie is coming over for dinner. If that’s OK with me. You know what 10/11 is? I mean, besides Bill Clegg’s birthday.
*
Douglas A. Martin is the author most recently of a novel, ONCE YOU GO BACK (Seven Stories Press), and a lyric narrative, YOUR BODY FIGURED (Nightboat Books).
Friday, October 29, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Christopher Higgs
No News Today
Awoke. Kissed wife. Whispered, “I love you. It’s 8:02.” Removed covers. Grabbed glasses from bookshelf and put them on face. Stepped out of bed. Walked to kitchen. Fed kitty. Returned to bedroom. Entered bathroom. Urinated. Showered. Dried off. Put on underwear and white t-shirt. Returned to kitchen. Poured glass of water. Started coffeemaker. Drank water. Went to dining room table. Turned on laptop computer. Checked email. Checked certain websites. Checked site counter for Bright Stupid Confetti. Returned to kitchen. Poured coffee, added sugar and cream. Opened cupboard, reached in and retracted box of oat squares. Took coffee and oat squares back to dining room table, back to laptop. Ate breakfast of oat squares and coffee while checking Facebook. Finished coffee. Returned oat squares to cupboard. Returned to bedroom. Returned to bathroom. Brushed teeth. Applied lotion to face. Styled hair. Brushed beard. Put on dress shirt, tie, and slacks. Whispered to wife, “I’ll see you in a little bit.” Kissed wife on forehead. Put on shoes. Returned to dining room. Put Italo Calvino book and green notebook in backpack. Grabbed wallet, keys, and cell phone. Unlocked front door. Opened front door. Stepped out front door. Exploded.
Christopher Higgs gave authorship to a belletristic novel entitled The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, available now from Sator Press.
Awoke. Kissed wife. Whispered, “I love you. It’s 8:02.” Removed covers. Grabbed glasses from bookshelf and put them on face. Stepped out of bed. Walked to kitchen. Fed kitty. Returned to bedroom. Entered bathroom. Urinated. Showered. Dried off. Put on underwear and white t-shirt. Returned to kitchen. Poured glass of water. Started coffeemaker. Drank water. Went to dining room table. Turned on laptop computer. Checked email. Checked certain websites. Checked site counter for Bright Stupid Confetti. Returned to kitchen. Poured coffee, added sugar and cream. Opened cupboard, reached in and retracted box of oat squares. Took coffee and oat squares back to dining room table, back to laptop. Ate breakfast of oat squares and coffee while checking Facebook. Finished coffee. Returned oat squares to cupboard. Returned to bedroom. Returned to bathroom. Brushed teeth. Applied lotion to face. Styled hair. Brushed beard. Put on dress shirt, tie, and slacks. Whispered to wife, “I’ll see you in a little bit.” Kissed wife on forehead. Put on shoes. Returned to dining room. Put Italo Calvino book and green notebook in backpack. Grabbed wallet, keys, and cell phone. Unlocked front door. Opened front door. Stepped out front door. Exploded.
Christopher Higgs gave authorship to a belletristic novel entitled The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, available now from Sator Press.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Leigh Newman
My news today is that I missed the filing deadline for having no news. My other news is about tofu, firm vs silken. Tonight, I am going to deep fry it. I have no fryer, but I'm going to try all the same. Once, when I was kid, I went over to Dina Dimitri's house. Her mother had a little chubby, black plastic, electric kettle that boiled oiled. Her mother made doughnuts in there. Her mother made french fries. I am going to be Mrs. Dimitri when I grow up, I thought to myself. The woman had nails and a beautiful elongated station wagon. These were in the days before tofu and blogs. I am still not her. I am still me, wanted to be her and Eleanor Roosevelt and John Denver, fishing for soy bean cakes in soup pot bubbling with grease.
leigh newman's work has appeared in Tin House, One Story, New York Tyrant, Fiction and the National Public Radio's The Sound of Writing. Her memoir about growing up on the Alaskan tundra is coming out next year from Dial.
leigh newman's work has appeared in Tin House, One Story, New York Tyrant, Fiction and the National Public Radio's The Sound of Writing. Her memoir about growing up on the Alaskan tundra is coming out next year from Dial.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Alex Samets
There is no news today. Just as there was no news yesterday and just as there will be no news tomorrow. Just as there has never been any news. Nothing to report. Nothing to remark upon. Ladies and gentlemen, if I could just have a moment of your time, I'd like to share with you--Nothing. Nothing to share. For that matter, no ladies and gentlemen. There are no ladies and there are no gentlemen, just as there have never been and never will be any ladies and gentlemen.
What remains? What predates? What will come to fill this yawning chasm? The Internet. Boys. Empty barstools next to no one. Robert Lopez, not a gentleman. The books that line these walls, the shade of purple she painted her bedroom. The cat, obese and dying.
No veterinarian. No Hudson River. No implements for cleaning the wax from your ears. We are doomed to deafness. We are doomed to abandon our bridges and walk across silt to New Jersey. Our animals will suffer. We, too.
Alex Samets rocks, steady. She holds an Irrelevant Degree in Something Intangible from Sarah Lawrence College. Actually, two. As she is from Vermont, one ought never offer her a sweetener pretending to be maple syrup, as humans from colder regions can taste falsity--it's something in the down, the fleece, the wool they have to wear. Alex Samets protects herself. Publish her work, if you want. Someone should.
What remains? What predates? What will come to fill this yawning chasm? The Internet. Boys. Empty barstools next to no one. Robert Lopez, not a gentleman. The books that line these walls, the shade of purple she painted her bedroom. The cat, obese and dying.
No veterinarian. No Hudson River. No implements for cleaning the wax from your ears. We are doomed to deafness. We are doomed to abandon our bridges and walk across silt to New Jersey. Our animals will suffer. We, too.
Alex Samets rocks, steady. She holds an Irrelevant Degree in Something Intangible from Sarah Lawrence College. Actually, two. As she is from Vermont, one ought never offer her a sweetener pretending to be maple syrup, as humans from colder regions can taste falsity--it's something in the down, the fleece, the wool they have to wear. Alex Samets protects herself. Publish her work, if you want. Someone should.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Lindsay Hunter
At work I listen to the old man with the pipe pouch heave his internal organs around just by breathing. The air smells like cloves muddled in anus. There’s a calendar on the wall featuring graphic images of cows at pasture, fleshy udders and green fields and lemon suns and goddamn it. A befreckled woman shrieks about hoagies and salad dressings. A man disguised as another man in disguise flexes and points his toes, writes the words “These are my new shoes” in an email to himself. Out the window I see a crow that is actually a plastic bag from the liquor store jerking and whirling, but I convince myself it is a crow before looking away. A man with a brain like a bowl of smooth Jiffy types 1,0,1,1,0 into a white document. Someone close by is quietly laughing to themselves. In the fridge a Tupperware of pasta is carbonating. The tap water is the temperature of blood. Robert, what do you do when you can’t tell if you are the only human or if you are the only non-human? There is no news today.
Lindsay Hunter lives in Chicago, where she co-hosts the flash fiction reading series, Quickies! Her collection of stories, Daddy's, is out now from featherproof books. Find her at lindsayhunter.com.
Lindsay Hunter lives in Chicago, where she co-hosts the flash fiction reading series, Quickies! Her collection of stories, Daddy's, is out now from featherproof books. Find her at lindsayhunter.com.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Nadxieli Nieto Hall
No news today is how I make my coffee. No news today is how I fuck in the morning. (No news.) No news today is what I say to the dolphin parading down the side of the street. To the fucking dolphin I say, “No news today” and “You need a fucking permit to parade.” No news is how I make my lunch. No news is how I smear on the mayonnaise (mayonnaise). No news is the music playing in my head, and I’m not too happy about it.
Other news in No News Daily: Zilch.
Nadxieli Nieto Hall is a writer and visual artist. She is the co-author of Carteles Contra Una Guerra (Gustavo Gili, 2004), and the former editor of Salt Hill Journal. Her work has most recently appeared in New York Tyrant.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Laura Minor
Superhuman
I call for the appetite, the destruction of all.
I don’t want to know what we have in each other; we are animals.
Someone threw a man face down in a lime pit today and no one seems to care
And later, somewhere down Kumquat Lane, a forgotten kid
Will pull off a round in an old oak tree
Producing funeral processions of Spanish moss
Hanging death and the spooky mortality of insects.
But we don’t care about moss.
We are humans whining ourselves back to life
And songs we haven’t written haunt us
And one day, we will all be tortured
With want of more and the constant crow
Of people that can’t see beyond their own suffering.
But then, there is always a superhuman road to God that binds us
Young with dust and round in fear.
Just to put it in context, a toothless suicide is always
Across the hallway from your mother’s apartment.
Drinking turpentine, compiling the world around him.
Maybe he stopped using his toilet, used bags.
And one day that’s it. No mystery.
Just the living and the dead.
And we go on and even when we can’t as Beckett said.
We go on itching the grid with our whiskey-sharp perfume.
We live for hands and eyes
We are the webbed parts that gather in words
We are connected like the far hues of sun and sky
The rapture of all those exiting the swell of cloth and moon.
The notes we play together, the notes we first sing
When half-awake, the terribly rough suckling of a babe at tit
The fire-black broken heart of desire surviving another day
Eyes pressed to the ear’s never-ending grass.Laura Minor lives in Brooklyn as a poet, professor, and singer/songwriter. Her work has most recently appeared in Sixers Review, Lungfull, JMWW: A Journal of Quarterly Writing, and Mantis. She has released two critically acclaimed records, "Salesman's Girl" for Hightone Records (2002) and "Let Evening Come," (Ocean of Sound Recordings, 2009). Her second solo record is forthcoming spring 2011 on Ocean Sound Recordings. She is currently finishing her first manuscript of poems.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Brandon Hobson
True story. I remember a record store in metro OKC that had an overwhelming enthusiasm for a large, five-foot-by-five-foot bulletin board; it was immediately filled with fliers, photocopies, business cards, etc.,: home-based massage services, interpretive dance instructors, guitarists, amateur photographers, dog groomers, acupuncturists, tattoo artists, madrigal groups, organic gardens, exercise palestrae, recipes for gazpacho, homemade jewelry, mimes, chiropractors, nutrition specialists, Scientology enthusiasts, spirituality guides, etc. and etc., insidiously cluttered and viewed by nearly everyone who passed by. The board attracted, at some point, members of The Great Awakening, a sort of 80s, hip band that I went to see one night at Club Spit on campus corner in Norman. They played an aggressive cover of a song I immediately fell in love with, The Cult’s “Love Removal Machine.” Eight months later I saw The Cult with Billy Idol in OKC, and someone threw a beer bottle that hit Billy Idol in the head and drew blood. Idol cursed at the crowd and swore he’d never come back to Oklahoma. Sure enough he hasn’t. True story.
Brandon Hobson's fiction has appeared in NOON, New York Tyrant, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. His book, The Levitationist, is available at Ravenna Press.
Brandon Hobson's fiction has appeared in NOON, New York Tyrant, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. His book, The Levitationist, is available at Ravenna Press.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Alexandra Chasin
Literature is no news that stays no news is good news, my lord ain't that good news. And there's bad news. Which do you want first.
STUDENTS
No good news is welcome to me.
Bad news is also hell come to me.
CHEERLEADERS (Same time as students)
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!
The no news is first the bemusement of Achilles and then the happy family - either way, nothing to write home about. But Achilles wasn't the first guy to blow a gasket and he won't be the last. And Anna Karenina's broken aristocratic-hearted suicide wasn't exactly news, no more or less than Emma Bovary's bourgeois version of same. The no news is the best of times that is not also the worst of times. The nowcast is that I am an invisible woman, and that Mother just keeps on hacking. One day maybe she'll die and an Arab will get shot on the beach.
Meanwhile, Rupert, tell me something the Arabs and Mother and the other invisible women and I haven't known since the origin of the family, private property, and the state. Rah! Rah!
If only Generalissimo Francisco Franco had died and were still dead.
Alexandra Chasin is the author of Kissed By(FC2). Her work has appeared in Agni, Chain, Post Road, Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, and various cetera. She is the co-chair of Literary Studies of Eugene Lang College, The New School
STUDENTS
No good news is welcome to me.
Bad news is also hell come to me.
CHEERLEADERS (Same time as students)
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!
The no news is first the bemusement of Achilles and then the happy family - either way, nothing to write home about. But Achilles wasn't the first guy to blow a gasket and he won't be the last. And Anna Karenina's broken aristocratic-hearted suicide wasn't exactly news, no more or less than Emma Bovary's bourgeois version of same. The no news is the best of times that is not also the worst of times. The nowcast is that I am an invisible woman, and that Mother just keeps on hacking. One day maybe she'll die and an Arab will get shot on the beach.
Meanwhile, Rupert, tell me something the Arabs and Mother and the other invisible women and I haven't known since the origin of the family, private property, and the state. Rah! Rah!
If only Generalissimo Francisco Franco had died and were still dead.
Alexandra Chasin is the author of Kissed By(FC2). Her work has appeared in Agni, Chain, Post Road, Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, and various cetera. She is the co-chair of Literary Studies of Eugene Lang College, The New School
Friday, September 10, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Ken Baumann
No news today, rather, or a, there's something in both A and B but not to be confused with see, it is an ing, see? (Don't tell him) Okay then. Keep the calm in mind and qualm in hand. (Don't knock it out of his hand) Are you with me? There's nothing. (Nothing) Going. On. (Nothing?) Do you. (He's) All right. Okay. There's none. Wait, it's, or. (God) Hear. See?
Ken Baumann is. For more information, see kenbaumann.com
Ken Baumann is. For more information, see kenbaumann.com
Monday, September 6, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Blake Butler
Dear Robert
There is yeah no news today again
America's been rubbing my hurt apart with its special evenings
Robert
Do you want to come over and let's go shirt shopping
I feel like I could start soon to look good
Handwiches and wandwiches, Robert
What do you think of peace
I think it's a bunch of serious malarkey, and that's coming from a guy who's never been to Costco
I'd drink some snatch but there's no geese
I'd have a special day all alone here but the woman through the wall won't look me in the eye
I don't really have an eye
Fuckin shit Rob I'm starting to like how beer sounds now
When I was 19 I would have punched me today in the O
Fuck it, I'm coming up where you are
Go ahead start saying the line from the movie we both like now
Dogs are really something dude
Blake Butler sells shirts to the blind.
There is yeah no news today again
America's been rubbing my hurt apart with its special evenings
Robert
Do you want to come over and let's go shirt shopping
I feel like I could start soon to look good
Handwiches and wandwiches, Robert
What do you think of peace
I think it's a bunch of serious malarkey, and that's coming from a guy who's never been to Costco
I'd drink some snatch but there's no geese
I'd have a special day all alone here but the woman through the wall won't look me in the eye
I don't really have an eye
Fuckin shit Rob I'm starting to like how beer sounds now
When I was 19 I would have punched me today in the O
Fuck it, I'm coming up where you are
Go ahead start saying the line from the movie we both like now
Dogs are really something dude
Blake Butler sells shirts to the blind.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Terese Svoboda
Auntie Blog
Where’s is that pointy thing that you hold over your head with ducks on it? Under the couch? Did I beat the postman with it? There—all splintery. We must’ve had quite a conversation. It must’ve been about Susan Daitch’s terrific post, about the zookeeper whose father (?) lets him keep a polar bear around the house and that makes him sensitive to animals in cages and there is this revolution in zoos. Talk about animal writes! Just like I was saying to the postman, do you think that my dog isn’t writing all over town, lifting his leg? Freedom of expression. Expressing freedom. Like my beau who spelled out my name that way in the snow. You don’t need Hallmark. He was an animal. And so was the postman, leaning in with beery breath to tell me I have to do something about my dog who had written on his pantleg a sort of cheery note Hello. I am sensitive to all kinds of writes is what I told him, and maybe a revolution is coming, especially in spelling. Lady! he said—I remember it clearly now because I haven’t been called Lady since I was a Little Lady—and he shook his pantleg and took a step into my house. That’s when the umbrella took a beating. How it looks like writing is going to fall out of the sky all afternoon.
Terese Svoboda's fifth book of prose, Pirate Talk or Mermalade, will be published in September a few days before Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Where’s is that pointy thing that you hold over your head with ducks on it? Under the couch? Did I beat the postman with it? There—all splintery. We must’ve had quite a conversation. It must’ve been about Susan Daitch’s terrific post, about the zookeeper whose father (?) lets him keep a polar bear around the house and that makes him sensitive to animals in cages and there is this revolution in zoos. Talk about animal writes! Just like I was saying to the postman, do you think that my dog isn’t writing all over town, lifting his leg? Freedom of expression. Expressing freedom. Like my beau who spelled out my name that way in the snow. You don’t need Hallmark. He was an animal. And so was the postman, leaning in with beery breath to tell me I have to do something about my dog who had written on his pantleg a sort of cheery note Hello. I am sensitive to all kinds of writes is what I told him, and maybe a revolution is coming, especially in spelling. Lady! he said—I remember it clearly now because I haven’t been called Lady since I was a Little Lady—and he shook his pantleg and took a step into my house. That’s when the umbrella took a beating. How it looks like writing is going to fall out of the sky all afternoon.
Terese Svoboda's fifth book of prose, Pirate Talk or Mermalade, will be published in September a few days before Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Kyle Minor
Notes
(The Baptists Were Right, and Now I’m Dead and Everybody’s Watching the 16mm Film of My Life)
4,987,524,129 films have preceded mine.
Who knew eternity would be spent watching so many hours of sleeping?
There are not very many ways to have sex, but I have availed myself of so few of them, anyway.
The Lord is slumping so sadly in the Bemis seat.
Jaylynn perks up everytime she has a scene, like you would have expected.
The lesson of the afterlife films: Everyone’s adulthood preoccupation is the people they wanted to please who are now dead or soon will be dead.
I always worried what Mrs. Keneally would think of me when she saw me masturbating, but now I know about that thing with her and the stuffed chicken.
Kyle Minor (www.kyleminor.com) is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of stories and novellas.
(The Baptists Were Right, and Now I’m Dead and Everybody’s Watching the 16mm Film of My Life)
4,987,524,129 films have preceded mine.
Who knew eternity would be spent watching so many hours of sleeping?
There are not very many ways to have sex, but I have availed myself of so few of them, anyway.
The Lord is slumping so sadly in the Bemis seat.
Jaylynn perks up everytime she has a scene, like you would have expected.
The lesson of the afterlife films: Everyone’s adulthood preoccupation is the people they wanted to please who are now dead or soon will be dead.
I always worried what Mrs. Keneally would think of me when she saw me masturbating, but now I know about that thing with her and the stuffed chicken.
Kyle Minor (www.kyleminor.com) is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of stories and novellas.
Monday, August 23, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Paula Bomer
Today is a day like many other days at this time in my life – I woke early to get my sons off the tennis camp, I lost my temper with my teenager who was supposed to be fully prepared for a trip to Boston he’s making after camp, but he had no idea where his ticket was, I felt guilty and ashamed for losing my temper, I went back to bed and felt guilty and ashamed for smoking last night and having one extra vodka that was really not necessary, I stayed in bed until noon, I got up and read and wrote while drinking coffee and eating eggs, I felt very tense and jittery and afraid of having to lift weights with an ex-marine later in the day and contemplated taking an Ativan, I read and wrote some more after showering and listened to the phone messages-- so I suppose if there is nothing profoundly different about this day at all, then there really is no news.
The idea that there is no news reminds me of the book I just finished, called Marking Time. Throughout the book, the characters, whose lives are greatly disrupted by WWII, think of themselves as just marking time. This is in part because many of the characters are adolescents- between childhood and adulthood—and have very little power to do what they want to do, but are not young enough to not want to do more grown up things. So they are marking time- waiting- until they will be grown up enough to do what they want to do. But in many ways, everyone, including the adults in the book, is waiting for the war to end, so they are all marking time, waiting for the news to be good, so in that way, all the bad news isn’t news, because the only news they want, the only news that will free them from feeling as though they are marking time, is the news that the war is over. Sadly, at the end of the book, there is no news then, no news that will free these poor characters that is, no news that matters, as Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor.
Paula Bomer is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, Baby And Other Stories (Word Riot Press, 2010). Her fiction has appeared in Open City, Fiction, The New York Tyrant, The Mississippi Review and elsewhere. She's the co-publisher at Artistically Declined Press and the supervising editor of the literary journal, Sententia. Find out more at http://www.paulabomer.com/.
The idea that there is no news reminds me of the book I just finished, called Marking Time. Throughout the book, the characters, whose lives are greatly disrupted by WWII, think of themselves as just marking time. This is in part because many of the characters are adolescents- between childhood and adulthood—and have very little power to do what they want to do, but are not young enough to not want to do more grown up things. So they are marking time- waiting- until they will be grown up enough to do what they want to do. But in many ways, everyone, including the adults in the book, is waiting for the war to end, so they are all marking time, waiting for the news to be good, so in that way, all the bad news isn’t news, because the only news they want, the only news that will free them from feeling as though they are marking time, is the news that the war is over. Sadly, at the end of the book, there is no news then, no news that will free these poor characters that is, no news that matters, as Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor.
Paula Bomer is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, Baby And Other Stories (Word Riot Press, 2010). Her fiction has appeared in Open City, Fiction, The New York Tyrant, The Mississippi Review and elsewhere. She's the co-publisher at Artistically Declined Press and the supervising editor of the literary journal, Sententia. Find out more at http://www.paulabomer.com/.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Donald Breckenridge
Fish Tacos for dinner.
Donald Breckenridge is the Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose Press, 2006) and co-editor of the Intranslation web site. In addition, he is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein (Red Dust, 1998), the novels 6/2/95 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002) and You Are Here (Starcherone 2009). His novel This Young Girl Passing is forthcoming from Unbearable Books/Autonomedia.
Donald Breckenridge is the Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose Press, 2006) and co-editor of the Intranslation web site. In addition, he is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein (Red Dust, 1998), the novels 6/2/95 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002) and You Are Here (Starcherone 2009). His novel This Young Girl Passing is forthcoming from Unbearable Books/Autonomedia.
Monday, August 16, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Jess Walter
True story: When I was twenty I was sent to see about a dead woman on some railroad tracks. I’d only been at the newspaper a few weeks. I drove out to an industrial area between downtown and the suburbs, my wire-bound reporter’s notebook jutting from my back pocket. The intersection with the railroad crossing was cordoned off, traffic was stopped. The woman’s body was between the rails, under one of the cars of the train, except for a bruised leg, which was draped over the tracks. Some firefighters had laid a body bag next to the tracks, and as I watched, they counted to three and then lifted the woman off the tracks. That’s when her back gave out, like an old grain sack, and she sort of … dissolved into the bag.
All afternoon, I interviewed people about what had happened. Drivers had seen the woman pacing by the tracks for at least an hour, as if she was waiting for a train. She let one train pass. The engineer of the second train saw the woman pacing and thought: Oh no, don’t do it. Because you can’t stop a train, he said over and over. Not like a car. Right before she stepped in front of the train, the woman looked up and made eye contact with the engineer.
It turned out the woman lived in a little house near the tracks. She crossed that intersection nearly every day to walk to a grocery store, where she bought food for her husband, who couldn’t work because of a bad back, and her son, who was developmentally disabled. There was a fabric store next to the grocery store and after shopping, the woman went into the fabric store sometimes but she never bought anything. She just fingered the bolts of fabric and then left. However, on this day, on the day she waited for an hour to step in front of a train, the woman bought several yards of material. No one asked what she was making. The fabric was in a bag next to the tracks.
Back at the newspaper, I organized my notes, imagining I was writing a small but vital story—tragic, ordinary, inexplicable. I planned to write it matter-of-factly, to avoid making judgments and connections. My editor came over and I told him what I was working on.
He said, Forget it. We don’t do suicides.
Why not, I asked.
He said, because it’s not news. I just stared at him.
Look, he said, people who commit suicide want desperately to share their misery with the world. If newspapers published the morbid details of suicides, it would just make other people want to kill themselves, too, to share their misery with the world.
Looking back, I think it was probably a good rule. But it seemed kind of insane to me at the time: we don’t do suicides. Later I became a novelist. Misery is big news for a novelist; for a good suicide, we’d stop the fucking presses.
Jess Walter is the author of five novels, most recently 'The Financial Lives of the Poets.' He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best novel in 2005 and was a National Book Award finalist in 2006.Friday, August 13, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - J.A. Tyler
The no news today is that two boys played near an open well
deep in the ocean and none of them fell in. The no news
today is that there was no explosion. The no news today is
that instead of falling in, these two boys fell up and
broke their heads on the sky. The no news today is how
it hurt, the clouds coming slowly down and spilling, the
land a mess of white in the shape of all these animals.
J. A. Tyler is the author of eight books including the
recent INCONCEIVABLE WILSON (Scrambler Books, 2009) and the
forthcoming A MAN OF GLASS & ALL THE WAYS WE HAVE FAILED
(Fugue State Press, 2011).He is also founding editor of
Mud Luscious Press.Visit: www.mudlusciouspress.com.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Lucy Corin
Sometimes when I’m trying to find the microsoft word icon to pull up a new document I do get it mixed up with what it feels like to scrounge around for a piece of paper. I’m going to have my own website, soon, and I have seen the mock-up or whatever you call it for the blog page. (Mock-up is a technical term I don’t feel qualified to use.) When I imagine my voice in the blog it’s a little stiff and anxious (like this), the blog is a confessional (the world of the internet is my priest) and it is a diary (the world of the internet is my projected self). I might post a few entries from my actual childhood journals, which I addressed after a great deal of thought, to “?”. I think I’m finally old enough that nothing from childhood is embarrassing, because it’s from childhood, the pod of me—it’s not embarrassing because of the way things are turning out. A babysitter saw that I wrote in journals and bought me one that said on the cover in iconic bellbottomed 70’s font “I’m okay and getting better!” (I did not use it but I had a hard time getting rid of it even though I did not like that babysitter.) A writer horrified me at a reading I went to a few months ago by saying that “autobiography is the quest literature of our time.” The incredible journey up my ass. Can I say that on this radio?
Lucy Corin is the author of the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2) and the short story collection The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books). She's working on a novel and an assemblage of 100 apocalypse stories, currently strewn about the web.
Lucy Corin is the author of the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2) and the short story collection The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books). She's working on a novel and an assemblage of 100 apocalypse stories, currently strewn about the web.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
No news today
There is no news today. An 86 year old former senator from Alaska, who survived a plane crash in 1978, seems to have perished in a plane crash. At the same time, readers of Publisher's Weekly named all kinds of writers as part of an extensive underrated list, including Donald Antrim, Deborah Eisenberg, Brian Evenson, Richard Ford, Mary Gaitskill, Michael Kimball, Sam Lipsyte, etc. There is no appropriate reaction to being included on such a long list, I don't think. Still, there is a certain amount of appreciation and comfort in knowing that this certainly qualifies as no news.
Monday, August 9, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Christopher Kennedy
Inception is a very thought-provoking film. Here are some of the thoughts I had while watching it:
The beard’s not working for Leonardo.
Ellen Page annoys me. I hated Juno. And Smart People.
Hey, Leonardo is driving a Hyundai Genesis. No one’s dream car is a Hyundai Genesis.
Shouldn’t Leonardo’s wife be standing on the ledge of their hotel instead of the one across the street?
I must be deep in my own subconscious, because these two and a half hours feel like two and a half years.
Did Tony get whacked? Oh wait; wrong black out ending.
That was the worst Batman film ever.
Christopher Kennedy's fourth book, a collection of prose poems, Ennui Prophet, is due from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2011. He is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
The beard’s not working for Leonardo.
Ellen Page annoys me. I hated Juno. And Smart People.
Hey, Leonardo is driving a Hyundai Genesis. No one’s dream car is a Hyundai Genesis.
Shouldn’t Leonardo’s wife be standing on the ledge of their hotel instead of the one across the street?
I must be deep in my own subconscious, because these two and a half hours feel like two and a half years.
Did Tony get whacked? Oh wait; wrong black out ending.
That was the worst Batman film ever.
Christopher Kennedy's fourth book, a collection of prose poems, Ennui Prophet, is due from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 2011. He is an associate professor of English at Syracuse University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Susan Daitch
I had some characters who needed to go to the Berlin Zoo in 1933. It’s a place I have visited, but not in 1933, and I wanted to make sure, to the extent I was able, what the zoo was like about eighty years ago. In the process I got sidetracked by the story of Carl Hagenbeck, animal and human impresario. Hagenback was born in Hamburg in 1844. I imagined him living in the quaint folkloric Germany of Clemens Brentano or the fairy tale middle European constructions of Ghislain de Diesbach. His father, a fishmonger with a side business in exotic animals, gave Carl, when still a child, a seal and a polar bear cub as presents. Hagenback displayed them in a tub and charged a few pfennigs to spectators interested in watching arctic mammals splash around. These early entrepreneurial endeavors eventually led to a career capturing, buying, and selling animals from all over the world, destined for European and American zoos. Hagenback, known as “the father of the modern zoo” was a pioneer in the concept that animals should be displayed in some approximation of their natural habitat. Acknowledging little difference between human (at least some humans) and animals in terms of questions of captivity and display, he also exhibited human beings: Eskimos, Laps, Samoans, African, Arabs, native Americans, all stationed in zoos across Europe in reproductions of their native environments. Creating panoramic fictional spaces for his creatures, Hagenbeck is often credited was being the originator of the amusement park. How these captive people felt about the peculiar dress, language and eating habits of the spectators has not, as far as I know, been recorded. European emissaries, whether propelled by diplomatic missions or for purposes of trade, went into the world and brought back artifacts, instigated the concept of collecting for those who could afford it. German museums would come to display the Gate of Ishtar, vast Chinese temples, Assyrian fortresses, and other treasures. Hagenbeck, a hybrid figure: ethnographer, zoologist, showman, anthropologist, capitalist, but also the son of a fishmonger was not of this class of adventurer. A populist, ok, but also the question hangs in the margins: when did the Berlin Zoo stop displaying humans? 1931, I think, but I’m not sure.
In a Berlin bookstore I found a copy of Gerald Durrell’s Zoo in My Luggage, a long lost book from my childhood. In 1957 Durrell and his wife traveled to Cameroon to collect endangered animals and bring them back to England for his private zoo with the intension of re-introducing species back into the wild whenever possible.
Susan Daitch is the author of two novels, L.C.(Lannan Foundation Selection and NEA Heritage Award, The Colorist, and a collection of short stories, Storytown. Her work has appeared in Tinhouse, Conjunctions, Guernica, Bomb, Ploughshares, failbetter.com, McSweeney's, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction and elsewhere. Her work was featured in The Review of Contemporary Fiction along with William Vollman and David Foster Wallace. Her fourth novel, The Dreyfus Book, will be published by City Lights in Spring, 2011.
Susan Daitch is the author of two novels, L.C.(Lannan Foundation Selection and NEA Heritage Award, The Colorist, and a collection of short stories, Storytown. Her work has appeared in Tinhouse, Conjunctions, Guernica, Bomb, Ploughshares, failbetter.com, McSweeney's, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction and elsewhere. Her work was featured in The Review of Contemporary Fiction along with William Vollman and David Foster Wallace. Her fourth novel, The Dreyfus Book, will be published by City Lights in Spring, 2011.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Joshua Furst
We got the news, when it came at all, weeks after it had occurred, and—though by then, it was meaningless, useless, a fading dream, to the rest of the world—we read it, when it arrived, like it still mattered. The outrageous claims of political hucksters, the baroque tales of intrigue and violence in the cities, announcements of bills passes or stalled in the Senate, of inventions and slaughters and weddings and sporting events, all so crucial, so bloated with change-making implications, we’d read all about these goings on, nodding, stroking our chins, exclaiming, “Well, who woulda thunk that could ever be?,” pondering how the news would affect our lives, or if it already had, and if so, how, when?
We’d mosey out to the porch and look across the fields—the fresh cut alfalfa, the stream, the old oak tree—all the same old same old we knew so well. That stray tabby had given birth to a new litter; they were hobbling around now, their eyes still half glued shut. We’d feel just the same as we had the day before, and the day before that, and last year and so on. But different too, a little less sure of whether to believe the story of the land sloping out before us or those tales that had floated in from the capital, a bit more resentful about being told, so long after the fact, what was real and what wasn’t. Like we didn’t have eyes. Like we couldn’t see for ourselves.
Storms were brewing in the sky, tornado season was on its way again.
Joshua Furst is the author of The Sabotage Cafe and Short People. His work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Conjunctions, the New York Tyrant and Esquire, among other periodicals.
We’d mosey out to the porch and look across the fields—the fresh cut alfalfa, the stream, the old oak tree—all the same old same old we knew so well. That stray tabby had given birth to a new litter; they were hobbling around now, their eyes still half glued shut. We’d feel just the same as we had the day before, and the day before that, and last year and so on. But different too, a little less sure of whether to believe the story of the land sloping out before us or those tales that had floated in from the capital, a bit more resentful about being told, so long after the fact, what was real and what wasn’t. Like we didn’t have eyes. Like we couldn’t see for ourselves.
Storms were brewing in the sky, tornado season was on its way again.
Joshua Furst is the author of The Sabotage Cafe and Short People. His work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Conjunctions, the New York Tyrant and Esquire, among other periodicals.
Monday, August 2, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Shane Jones
Right now I'm eating a Wallaby Organic Yogurt, Strawberry Banana flavored. I'm at work, sitting in a corner cubicle. Someone is playing John Mayer really loud. When I opened my yogurt today it did this thing where little blobs spat all over my shirt. The music just changed to M.I.A Paper Planes. Strange.
Shane Jones lives in New York. He's the author of several books and chapbooks. He blogs and updates things at www.shane-jones.com
Shane Jones lives in New York. He's the author of several books and chapbooks. He blogs and updates things at www.shane-jones.com
Friday, July 30, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - John Madera
Though today is another day without news, it is a day without a noose, and that must be good news, for a day without a noose, without its loops burning a groove into my palm, without wondering where best to knot that boa constrictor’s uncoiled end, without figuring if said place could bear the heft, bear the kicking, the crazed tick tock, a day without worrying about a bungled attempt, about every consequent day being a brain dead day, is a day with no news about a noose, and a day with no news about a noose is good news since no noose is good noose.
John Madera’s work is forthcoming in Conjunctions, The Believer, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Dawn Raffel
I have always enjoyed the ambiguity of the phrase "no news is good news." Do this mean that if there's no news, you should chill out because everything's fine? Or is it darker, as in: There is no news that could ever possibly be good?
Dawn Raffel's most recent book is Further Adventures in the Restless Universe.
Dawn Raffel's most recent book is Further Adventures in the Restless Universe.
Monday, July 26, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Lily Hoang
Someone solved a crossword puzzle in two minutes flat today. Granted, it’s Monday, which makes the daily crossword easier. One is forced to wonder if this person could finish a Thursday or Friday crossword with such efficiency.
A careful inspection of the completed puzzle, however, revealed most of the words were incorrect. Although the letters reclined into the open white squares with graciousness and the words these letters juxtaposed to create were indeed real words that fit within the parameters of the clues, they were not the puzzle-maker’s intended words. As such, this person who solved this crossword puzzle in two minutes flat elided even the puzzle-maker.
Lily Hoang is the author of the novels, THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION, CHANGING (recipient of a 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award), and PARABOLA, (winner of the 2006 ChiasmusPress Un-Doing the Novel Contest).
Thursday, July 22, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Michael Kimball
Nothing much so far, though I am hopeful.
Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”), is now out in paperback. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), I WILL SMASH YOU, 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES, and the 510 Readings.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - John Domini
No news today, certainly not when I’ve wasted its entire evening in one of the many, many manifestations of that early-21st-Century American phenomenon, the wine bar. Rarely has killing time been so elegantly disguised. I doubt the wits of the Algonquin Round Table, whiling away the hours over gin and blather, kidded themselves that they were somehow gaining in refinement as they grew more swozzled. I doubt Dorothy Parker would treat the word “terroir” with any more respect than she accorded the others she so brilliantly spun into pun. Today’s bar happens to be in the Algonquin’s Manhattan, but it could be in any of the instant-yuppie pockets one tumbles into across the country: off State St. in Madison, WI, along the Alberta corridor of Portland, OR, on the square in Oxford, MS.... Then there are the sort-of-small plates, eats that extend the delusion, allowing an idler to believe he’s not shoveling on the calories. Yes, these grilled dates, stuffed with ricotta and wrapped in thick local bacon — a better match for the Aglianico, wouldn’t you say? I’m developing such sophistication just sitting here, I can taste how this bacon was free-range; I know it attended the college of its choice. Yet neither the drinks nor the food’s the defining anomaly of such places (anomaly, or travesty, or what the fuck). Their earmark is an earworm, an unrelenting soundtrack of bebop jazz. Monk and Miles and Mingus, that M-erald forest with roots and branches that extend everywhere from this same small island’s E. 52nd St.: it’s their vibrant and exploratory riffs and slurs and roundings that float down, unendingly, from the speakers in such places. It’s the same attack on straightforward melody and rhythm that half a century or so ago challenged a clubgoer, asking him to experience melody and changes in new ways, to reinvent musical satisfaction. To call such an artist “easy listening,” whew, that would've invited gunplay. But that’s just what Monk’s “’Round Midnight” or Miles’ “So What” has become, these days, down in your thronging local wine bar. History has sprung a hellacious surprise, on these crazy cats; it’s turned them to fat and lazy tabbies.
But then again, who am I to play the Old Curmudgeon? To sit and cry crocodile tears for a former cutting edge turned to taffy? Who’s more willing than I to kill first Happy Hour and then dinner and then as long as it takes in a well-stocked wine bar, gabbing across a scrumptious sampler plate while Dexter Gordon’s Ballads cycle through on shuffle? Yes, the pesto bruschetta, please, with parmesan. And now seems a good time for that Falanghina, yes. And — indulge me here, oh, indulge me — do you have Miles and Cannonball doing “Autumn Leaves?”
The Emerging Writers Network called John Domini's novels from '07 and '08, Earthquake I.D. and A Tomb on the Periphery, "back-to-back stunners." Tomb on the Periphery also made the '09 short list at the London Book Festival for "the best of international publishing," and Earthquake I.D., in Italian translation, was runner-up for the Domenico Rea prize. He extends a warm and wine-rich welcome to anyone stopping by Des Moines.
But then again, who am I to play the Old Curmudgeon? To sit and cry crocodile tears for a former cutting edge turned to taffy? Who’s more willing than I to kill first Happy Hour and then dinner and then as long as it takes in a well-stocked wine bar, gabbing across a scrumptious sampler plate while Dexter Gordon’s Ballads cycle through on shuffle? Yes, the pesto bruschetta, please, with parmesan. And now seems a good time for that Falanghina, yes. And — indulge me here, oh, indulge me — do you have Miles and Cannonball doing “Autumn Leaves?”
The Emerging Writers Network called John Domini's novels from '07 and '08, Earthquake I.D. and A Tomb on the Periphery, "back-to-back stunners." Tomb on the Periphery also made the '09 short list at the London Book Festival for "the best of international publishing," and Earthquake I.D., in Italian translation, was runner-up for the Domenico Rea prize. He extends a warm and wine-rich welcome to anyone stopping by Des Moines.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Catherine Lacey
1. What we have here is more of the same: more floors and ceilings, more lines out the door and more press releases that let us know that more of the same is on the way.
2. Then the news will come that there is no news and we'll pocket it and wait.
3,4,5 & 6. And I'll have the thicker skin on the soles of my feet, and she'll have the same patch of grass in the same park except now the grass is thinning out, in the same way it always does.
7a. And we will all have it
7b. and have had it
7c. and then have it again.
Catherine Lacey is opening a Bed and Breakfast in Brooklyn this summer and yes, your folks should stay here when they come visit in the fall. Also she writes for a variety of outlets and is trying to sell a book. www.catherinelacey.com
2. Then the news will come that there is no news and we'll pocket it and wait.
3,4,5 & 6. And I'll have the thicker skin on the soles of my feet, and she'll have the same patch of grass in the same park except now the grass is thinning out, in the same way it always does.
7a. And we will all have it
7b. and have had it
7c. and then have it again.
Catherine Lacey is opening a Bed and Breakfast in Brooklyn this summer and yes, your folks should stay here when they come visit in the fall. Also she writes for a variety of outlets and is trying to sell a book. www.catherinelacey.com
Monday, July 19, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Paul Agostino
From the Barnyard to the Back Page
The news is: George Steinbrenner died.
The no news is: Revisionist historians are flooding the media with stories about how kind and "colorful" he was. And "determined," of course.
The facts are: Steinbrenner was a convicted felon.
The facts are: He was convicted of trying to illegally sway a federal election of the United States by making illegal campaign contributions to a U.S. president's re-election campaign and for obstructing justice.
The facts are: The president was Republican Richard Nixon.
The facts are: Steinbrenner was pardoned by another Republican president, Ronald Reagan, 15 years after his conviction.
The facts are: Steinbrenner never spent one minute in jail and never served parole.
The question is: How does a convicted felon stay out of jail for 15 years until he is pardoned and never even serve parole?
The answer is: Obvious.
The bullshit is: Steinbrenner was some kind of winner.
The opinion is: Steinbrenner was an asshole with a lot of money. He was a bully who often humiliated his employees, then threw money around to smooth things over and ease his conscience.
The opinion is: Hey, George: money can't buy everything.
The homily is: "Mussolini was a good man," my grandmother once said to me. And a lot of Italian peasants at the time would have agreed. He did a lot for the poor. But they're not holding a minute of silence for him anywhere I know. What if George Steinbrenner--or, for that matter, any of us--were given free reign over a small country? How many of us, including Steinbrenner, would set up democratic elections and insist on freedom of the press? The only difference between global tyrants, and petty, everyday tyrants is opportunity. And revisionist history belongs on the barnyard floor.
Paul Agostino is in the Whiffle Ball Hall of Fame in Holbrook, NY.
Paul Agostino is in the Whiffle Ball Hall of Fame in Holbrook, NY.
Friday, July 16, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Sasha Fletcher
It is sunny. It is cold. It is cloudy. Last night the wind would not stop whistling out there in the dark. It howled. It screamed. It knocked down trees through power lines out by the bridge. Last night it rained like it’s been threatening to since May and I can’t even remember when May was anymore. We were sitting on the porch drinking. Sweat had dried to our bodies three times over. The sky seemed to split open with light and loud the rains came down. The river’s been acting up. This is the news with the weather. Hope you are well.
Sasha Fletcher's novella WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS AND WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS is out now from ml press. He too lives in Brooklyn.
Sasha Fletcher's novella WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS AND WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS is out now from ml press. He too lives in Brooklyn.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Molly Gaudry
There is no news today. However, there is a word. It is "yen" and can be used as a noun or verb. If used as a noun, yen has two meanings" first, it is "a desire or craving;" second, it is "an aluminum coin and monetary unit of Japan, equal to 100 sen or 1000 rin." If used as a verb, yen is "to have a craving," to "yearn." The nouns are interesting. So disconnected, yet so related. Here's a useful tidbit: "The use of yen to signify a desire, as opposed to Japanese currency, is an Americanism that probably derives from Chinese dialect, yáhn or yin, 'craving.'" Thank you, Dictionary.com. I think we've all learned something today.
Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious, 2009) and the editor of Tell: An Anthology of Expository Narrative (Flatmancrooked, 2010). She is Googleable.
Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart (Mud Luscious, 2009) and the editor of Tell: An Anthology of Expository Narrative (Flatmancrooked, 2010). She is Googleable.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
No news today
There is no news today. However, in today's Huffington Post there is this .... which lists Kamby as one of their top 15 indie books, currently #2 in the voting.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/independent-books-huffing_n_636977.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/independent-books-huffing_n_636977.html
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Paul Agostino
Weekend Edition: It is often difficult, while traveling, to find something beyond a local newspaper, so you have to settle for USA Today, with its bubble-brained headlines and idiotic bar graphs, if you want something with a bit more scope. My friend picked up a USA Today on a Saturday somewhere on the border of South Carolina and Georgia, glanced at it, and said, "Hey--this is yesterday's paper." I told him that USA today puts out a "weekend edition" on Friday that covers Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. He looked over the front page of the paper, then said, "What's the matter--nothing happens in Sandra Bullock's life on the weekends?"
Paul Agostino is a writer living in New York. r living in New York.
Paul Agostino is a writer living in New York. r living in New York.
Monday, June 28, 2010
No news today
There is no news today other than this - I tried to post earlier - a guest post - and it didn't work. I'm not sure why. I tried several times. So this post amounts to a test.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
No news today - Guest Post - Samuel Ligon
There are reports of startling news from the recent or distant past. Something about oil or a flood somewhere. Something about a military leader being dismissed or named emperor. Something biblical, maybe, involving slaughter and men lying with beasts. Nothing has been confirmed by reliable sources. It's all very unclear, people, and shaded by gossip, rumor, innuendo. Therefore, and as always, there is no news today.
SAMUEL LIGON is the author of DRIFT AND SWERVE, a collection of stories (2009), and SAFE IN HEAVEN DEAD, a novel (2003). His stories have appeared in The Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, New England Review, Noise: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth, Post Road, Keyhole, Sleepingfish, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He teaches at Eastern Washington University's Inland Northwest Center for Writers, in Spokane, Washington, and is the editor of WILLOW SPRINGS.
Monday, June 21, 2010
No news today
There is no news today. Soon there will be no news from various guest stars. Stay attuned.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
No news today
There is no news today. This has been a newsless week, in fact. Except that there has been a run of comments for the last post, which Molly and I both agree is news.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
No news today
People, I've got to speak about something. And when I say People, I mean Molly, Kathryn, Sasha ... maybe Toni, Megan, and Matt. What I have to say is this, People - There was no news today.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
No news today
There is no news today, nor was there news on Friday. Yesterday, though, we learned that David Markson died. He was a great writer.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
No news today
There is no news today. There was no news yesterday. I used to watch the evening news years ago, but haven't in a very long time. I liked Peter Jennings best. Dan Rather could be funny sometimes because he's from Texas, but he wasn't as good as Peter Jennings. I never watched Tom Brokaw. Not once. But he's always seemed like a good man to me.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
No news today
In 1954 Elvis Presley recorded Good Rockin' Tonight at Sun Studios in Memphis, TN. The first line goes, "Well, I heard the news - there's good rockin' tonight."
This was big news in 1954 and it still is now. Such is the news of the day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_r1drXn0I
This was big news in 1954 and it still is now. Such is the news of the day.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO_r1drXn0I
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
No news today
Today there is no news. Nor was there news yesterday. Over the weekend I spent time in Michigan. Since this had been planned months ago this also does not qualify as news. What was news to me, however, were how the women of Michigan behaved. How they treated people. Not only the women of Michigan, but also, women from other parts of the country, who, like me, found themselves in Michigan over the weekend.
Perhaps this isn't news to anyone. Perhaps the people of Michigan have known this for years. Perhaps they don't spread this particular news because they want someone to come and rescue them. Or else they want others to experience it for themselves. Either way, this is why Michigan is kept in Michigan.
Perhaps this isn't news to anyone. Perhaps the people of Michigan have known this for years. Perhaps they don't spread this particular news because they want someone to come and rescue them. Or else they want others to experience it for themselves. Either way, this is why Michigan is kept in Michigan.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
No news today
What constitutes news? The question seems fluid, elusive. In some ways there was news today, in other ways perhaps not. Same goes for the last couple of days. Everything depends on context. This statement, of course, is not news to anyone.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
News today
Splendid new review of KBMR up at Dark Sky Magazine.
That is the news of the day.
Yesterday there was none.
That is the news of the day.
Yesterday there was none.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
No news today
Today was a return to form. After two consecutive days of news, today there was none. Order restored.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
News today
Contest to win special copies of Part of the World over at HTML Giant.
Other than that there is no news today.
Other than that there is no news today.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
News today
There is news today. However, there was no news yesterday or the day before. Likewise, there was no news the two days before the day before. My internet connection was compromised, severed. But that does not qualify as news. Today, though, today there was news.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Monday, May 3, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
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