No news today - Guest Post - Matt Bell

No news today, not for you or from you. No news today, despite the availability of newsmaking tools, despite your organs for hearing and seeing what has been made. No news today, but only if you refuse the offers of others, and also your own participation. Paste paper over your television, bend wrong your antennae. Watch now the ticker, silent in its unseen scrolling. Watch the flickering, still with faces. Stuff your ears with the unprinted parts of the paper, of magazines, then listen to the radio. There are disasters still, but you are unaware and smiling. Now stop smiling. Now start doing your own part. Now do it bravely, without flinches: Take down your content. Delete all your blog posts. Share their former addresses on Facebook and Twitter, then delete your sharing. Celebrate blanknesses, absences of opinion. Celebrate by saying nothing. Unlike everything you have ever liked. Unfriend everyone you have ever loved. Change your status to a question mark and then erase it as soon as someone comments. Swallow their news into your blankness, then blindfold yourself from that nothing, then be a nothing yourself, moving across the computer screen, and then off it, then out into the world. Now stand in the middle of the street with your ears plugged, your eyes bound, your hands tucked into your pockets to refuse contact. Now stand in the street and say nothing. Now stand in the street and get yourself empty right. Now all the cars swerving around you, and in your oblivious rightness all they are is wind, wind and danger, and what new news is that.

Matt Bell is the author of the fiction collection How They Were Found. He is online at http://www.mdbell.com/

No news today - Guest Post - Jen Michalski

No news today, except you. You are my old news, my new news, my groundhog’s day. I still see you in my dreams, a whisp, a shadow. You used to move once--you, a flaccid doll that disintegrated under love.

I wake every morning remembering a mole on your neck. It is not clear what I miss, it has been so long, a phantom pain that lingers. It glides through these corridors, wondering what it is it has lost and for what it now searches. But if I see you again, what will I find? I fear that the yearning in me has existed long before and well after you, a missing leg still desiring to bear the weight of me.

There’s no news in this. But I cannot un-name you, unlink you, and there’s no ability to absorb you anymore. You divide, divide, divide. There’s no news in this.

Jen Michalski is the editor of jmww. She is finishing a novel, and you can find her here: http://jenmichalski.com/

No news today

Elizabeth Taylor died today. Everyone knows this by now so it is not exactly news. The author of her New York Times obituary is/was Mel Gussow, who died almost six years ago. I missed Mr. Gussow's obituary back in 2005, so I don't know who wrote it or if they were alive at the time.

No news today - Guest Post - Kendra Grant Malone

"No news is good news." Didn't your mother tell you that? Maybe not your mother, but her mother told her that. Mothers' mothers used to say that all the time. Back then it was true. Back then if a man walked quietly to your door with a letter it meant Jason wasn't coming home. Yeah, that was when an unexpected phone ring was something that made you stop what you were doing. That was when mothers preferred not to talk about things because what really was the point of wondering, right? Oh now, now mothers talk way too much. Now mothers are indecent as children. Blah blah menopause, blah blah OK cupid, blah blah foreclosure on your childhood home. Now we get to let the phones go to message for us to check a little later and isn't that just nice? No news today isn't a good thing anymore. Now no news really just means you've been forgotten for a little while by everyone not giving you news. Oh but god, there is one exception. No news is still good news when you've recently been to the VD clinic. Oh why did I sleep with Kevin? God dammit, why do I drink so much when I'm nervous? No- I don't remember that cab ride home and for right now it's like the past because every time I don't see CHELSEA CLINIC on my phone I feel like having a cigarette.

Kendra Grant Malone lives with her cat Delores Grant Malone. Sometimes she is a hair model. Other times she is a poet, who's first collection, Everything Is Quiet, was released by Scrambler Books in 2010. She blogs at kendralovely.blogspot.com

No news today - Guest Post - Jamie Iredell

Fossilized Hadrosaur clavicles. Lack of Trilobites. Ancient news. The covers shrug away, slicked sweat cooling skin in the air rush that comes, and sudden awake. In the holly bushes remnants of snow and crickets' legs, the crickets themselves also long since fossilized. Coffee has become the new beer, even decaffeinated. A hangover looms at ten AM but for now the light is an oil spill. Speaking of oil: fossils. At Golgotha Jesus was offered wine mixed with gall or vinegar or myrrh or both, depending on who you listen to, those primary Gospels said to be eyewitness accounts. Translated from ancient Hebrew or Aramaic or both to Koine Greek to modern English, none of the gospels are consistent. But the Church presents this tenth Station of the Cross like a fossil: fossilized Jesus stripped of his fossilized garments and crucified on a fossilized cross. Burning god I light my way to work on a dew-slicked freeway passing fossils vaporized into free carbons themselves working to render us fossils. I'd have drunk that wine if it was mixed with with animal bile or piss or fucking arsenic it wouldn't have mattered much at that point to me.

Jamie Iredell wrote Prose. Poems. a Novel. and The Book of Freaks.

No news today - Guest Post - Lito Elio Porto

An act of reckoning that has spanned millennia, continents, myriad ethnicities and topographies has concluded: as it turns out, “empire is a waste of time.” As it turns out, time belongs neither to the very poor nor to the very rich – both are captive animals – and empire is a machine that specializes in the creation of the very rich and the very poor. The sterility of empire lies in this. Captivity. While the poor are simply captive – metering out their lives inside of the cage – the rich are captives of the order of captivity: the patenting, fabrication, distribution, maintenance, insurance of the cages, and the obligatory state of vigilance over all things trapped.

Who would’ve guessed that empire would be such a waste of time? But the proof is as indelible, irrefutable as its ubiquitous trademarks: insecurity and desolation. Is there any greater proof than this, the blinding contrast between a state of material repletion and a fully permeated sense of confusion and despair? Of an emptiness so complete that the entire empire moves according to the spasmodic, reflexive contortions of dry heaving?

Who would’ve guessed, among the rank and file, as country after country was being subdued by the awesome clench of hegemony, that with each pair of buckling knees and paid-off acquiescence those same emissaries, bureaucrats, negotiators and soldiers of the rank and file were actively depleting meaning, negating the warm and glowing auras of all of life’s simple exchanges, interactions, and objects themselves for all of the citizenry of empire … leaving life within the empire scentless, flavorless, spiritless, and perfect.

Is there any greater proof that time has, indeed, been wasted than when an individual, alone or in a group, is fundamentally more stupid than when he/she was born? That they literally know less, that they have been forsaken by their own deeds such that they are left with neither information nor instinct? Is there any further need of proof than this: that the daily chores of empire-building leave its technicians and magicians and heirs as not only profoundly stupid and instinctless, but with a distinctly imperial third characteristic: prideful of such stupidity and lack of instinct. That is the imperial condition. That is the most splendid, the most flamboyant, the most spectacularly homicidal wasting of time possible for the human race. And one after another, tribe after tribe, monarchy after monarchy, nation after nation, corporation after corporation, the sworn-in denizens of the world will get in line, hoping to someday embody an utter waste of time.

L. E. Porto's recent work has appeared/will appear in Black Warrior Review, Unsaid, Diagram, Sleepingfish, Action Yes, and The Collagist. Based in Austin, he teaches literature and writing, most recently at U.T. Austin and The New School in NYC. He can be reached at leporto.net.

No news today - Guest Post - Joe Wenderoth

TOMORROW, 4 p.m.

IN THE FAULKNER ANNEX
Dr. Michael Littlecock
(Director: Dartmouth Technocultural Prototext Initiative)
(Winner: Post-Human Award For Pre-Secular Excellence, 2006)

will deliver a new talk:

Plastic Interiorities: American Doorknobs of the Late 1980’s
or... How The Grown-Up Children Of The Upper Middle Class Are Currently Demonstrating The Appropriateness Of Their Authority To Describe The Future No One Has Ever Really Seen Coming Until Just Recently

wine and cheese reception to follow

Joe Wenderoth is a writer whose books are easily found. He teaches in the creative writing M.A. program at UC Davis.