Robert Lopez

No news today - Guest Post - John Reed

2012-01-30T09:24:00.000-08:00

ERGONOMIC ARMAGEDDON: INTERNET PORN

Robert,

John Reed here. I stumbled across this article in the “Asia Pacific Coalition on Male Sexual Health” (don’t ask), and it seemed to me that the disclosure, a rather significant one to all men with testicles, warranted more attention than academic publication, and the oblivion of a subscription wall. Maybe we could post until they ask us to take it down? See if someone picks up the story?

Admiration, John

Title: Self-Stimulation in a Seated Posture, Effects upon the Male Sexual Organ

Author: S.S. Eleman.

Abstract: Humanity faces an evolutionary crossroads, as the male of the species adopts an upright, as opposed to a prone, masturbatory position. The repercussions are not just chiropractic, but genetic.

With recent statistics citing a dramatic decline in reported cases of Carpal Tunnels Syndrome, the threat that RSI (repetitive stress syndrome) poses to the digital age has been seemingly neutralized. Preventative medicine and improved factory conditions are to thank for a 70% drop in statistical reportage of carpal tunnels syndrome, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But all is not well in the computer age, says Dr. Theodore Lamb, who reports in the June 2011 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that: “male computer users who spend more than four hours per day in front of the computer show a 17% decrease in their active sperm count.” The study followed 400 subjects in the Massachusetts area. The study went on to cite a startling statistic: “Men, who on a regular basis sit at their computers while they self stimulate to the point of ejaculation, have a sperm count 79% lower than men who masturbate in a reclining posture.”

Critics of the study point to the geographic limitations of the subject pool. “All Dr. Lamb has proven,” said Dr. Padmajai Jaine, who leads a genome research team and instructs graduate students at Harvard University, “is that inactive American men have low sperm counts.”

Dr. Regina Koch, of the Spine Institute of New York’s Beth Israel hospital, viewed Dr. Lamb’s findings as correlative to trends in spinal injuries. “If you look at the physics, of sitting in a chair and arching the lower spine and reaching for the genitals, you’ll see it’s just a very awkward position. We’re getting a lot of lower lumbar trauma and sacral dislocation that I believe is related, at least in part, to this type of spinal insult.”

Dr. Lamb is now researching the possibility that seated onanism in the human male has a negative impact on not just sperm count but chromosomal stability. Dr. Lamb contributed to research featured in the New York Times, 2/27/2007, which concludes that as men get older their chances of fathering a genetically abnormal child increase. “What we’ve been finding so far,” said Dr. Lamb, “is that environmental stresses, such as seated ejaculation, accelerate the aging process. We’re talking about a 20% elongation of the entire seminal delivery system. Normally, the ductus deferens, for example, contracts 2-5%. And the testicles themselves are under pressure equivalent to two pounds per square inch.”

While Dr. Koch would not comment on Dr. Lamb's pending studies, she did echo his concerns. “The testicles are designed to move freely, to regulate their temperature for the optimal production of sperm. Anything that interrupts that cycle, tight underwear or Internet porn, is likely to damage the organism.”

According to Dr. Lamb, male prison populations, who are denied access to computers that may be employed in the pursuit of sexual gratification, have significantly healthier sperm than their wired counterparts.

“People have the attitude that porn is free,” commented Dr. Koch, “but nothing in life is free.”

Author of the novels, A Still Small Voice (Delacorte), Snowball's Chance (Roof, an SPD Bestseller), and The Whole (MTV Books/Simon & Schuster); author of the play All the World's A Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare (Penguin/Plume), and the illustrated, non-fiction cult story collection, Tales of Woe (MTV Press); Senior Editor at the Brooklyn Rail; published in Rain Taxi, Open City, Popmatters, the Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, Artforum, Paper Magazine, the New York Press, Time Out New York, Bomb Magazine, the Rumpus, the Believer, Art in America, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, Playboy and many other venues.

No news today - Guest Post - Chiara Barzini

2012-01-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

Dead Prime Minister

The news arrives: “The Prime Minister is dead.” We scramble to mourn him. As a public figure, his corpse is on display for all to say goodbye. The casket is on a stage in the chapel. Benches placed asymmetrically in front of the altar accommodate a disordered crowd. The people are puzzled by the empty casket.

Instead of resting in peace, the Prime Minister sits on the steps beneath the altar slumped over like a limp puppet. Journalists whisper about how he got caught with a transsexual prostitute, how his sweet wife had no idea he had such preferences.

He is brownish and flaccid. A trace of his stoutness remains in between the folds of his skin. Though he is dead he can still speak and move in small measures. His arm lurches forward as he raises his index finger begging to be heard.

“I am here!”

Nobody else in the room takes notice that, though he is dead, he is also partly alive.

“Excuse me,” I say to the Prime Minister, “please understand we don’t quite know how to look at you. You’re a corpse but you’re moving.”

The Prime Minister is impressed, “That’s correct! Thanks for noticing”

I rejoice over my accurate assertion, and shake him.

“Hey! I’m dead," he says. "If you shake me I’ll be deader and will have no more words to speak.”
His voice is barely audible and he has stopped all movement except for a slight nodding of the head. His skull bares a long scar.

I hold his hand. “What happened with the transsexual prostitute?”

“I like chicks with dicks,” he admits.

The journalists in the chapel note his statement. “Finally, a real piece of news!”

“And what about your wife? There are rumors of spicy trysts with an underage girl!” someone else blurts out.

“None of that matters anymore. When you’re dead you don’t even know you’re married.”

His mother, slightly ashamed, steps forward and leads him back to his casket. The crowd sitting on the benches is ready for the ceremony to begin. The Prime Minister lies down, but his arm keeps creeping back up out of the coffin.

“Don’t worry,” says the mother. “These are the last little bursts. It’ll take years before he can move again.”

Chiara Barzini is a screen and fiction writer. Films written by her have been distributed in Italy, Spain, Japan, and Latin America. The most recent one, “Into Paradiso” premiered at the 67th edition of the Venice Film Festival. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Noon, Bomb Magazine, Sleepingfish, Or, The Encyclopedia Project, The New Review of Literature, The NY Tyrant as well as The Village Voice, Rolling Stone Italy, Flair, Italian Vanity Fair, and Marie Claire. For samples of her work and more information please visit www.chiarabarzini.com.

No news today - Guest Post - Daniel Long

2012-01-16T10:00:00.001-08:00

The smoking truck beside the fruit stand says “organic.” My wallet is shot, and I don’t got that kind of money for preserves. What I’ve got is a landlord upstairs who will slip the classifieds under my door the first of every morning, scrawled with minor sidebars about eviction and how my darned-up socks are really stinking it up about now. The ads are wet from a shellfish or a gruel, some immigrant soup of the day, and my whole life is framed beneath that stark, fragrant message.

All the dummy work has packed up and dug a hole to China, but my landlord has his time of the month, and it’s the first. I don’t hold it against him. A man without work is nothing but slow songs and time—part nostalgia, part harmonica, with a dusty can of tuna stowed back for rations. You haven’t lived until you’re ducking rent and living out of a can, until you’re wearing the kind of clothes that smell like what you’re about. Until you pace around the house smoking cigarettes in your overcoat, trying to restate the main points of yourself. So here mine go.

I know that in some ways my mother must have been just like any other woman. In the end, I don’t recall even one of those ways. There was a rattle and a crib, sweet milk upon the hour. Jesus was like a lamb chop, and the turning leaves were like flecked salmon, but my mother was like my mother. Let’s leave it at that.
My father spent twenty years sweating over the same forty acres hoping to own it proper. He toiled and slogged, toiled and prayed. He put in his time and did all the things, labored and toiled and collected his chits, but when the winds rolled through and leveled the field, the bank cashed in and took it all away. Broke, broker, broken, sure…but maybe life don’t conjugate so easy. There’s flesh and blood and little bits of hope tucked here or there. Give us this day our daily bread. Or weekly bread. Or monthly. Give me a fair sum of bread per annum, and we’ve got a deal.

What I mean is, could you spare some old bread about now?

What I mean is, we’re fighting the dust.

We’re fighting the dust, and by God I will keep something for myself. You let me up in a card game, and I’ll bring the whole house down. You give me an inch, and I’ll take it all. What I’m about to do is shoot my way out like the Old West, roving and killing and bursting out hearts, and if God don’t forgive me, he’s not a working man. Scramble the posse and tack up the posters, hoist up the planks like a gallows. Fix the needles and give me the chair—trap me in the soliloquy of indelible hours, long nights spent in one-bunk cells with solitaire and a harmonica and the old, feeble prison guard snoozing beyond care.

One night I dreamed I sold my heart back to Jesus. But there was trouble with the receipt, and all the original parts were not there.
I miss East Coast/West Coast rap battles. I miss cornrowed brothers who would kill in cold blood for their art. I miss death-row madrigals in prison tats and gold chains, hardknock motherfuckers spinning rhymes out of bullet holes because there’s jungle in my blood, and I’ve got that ching-ching-ching like old money. A wanted poster looks the same as any folded bill, given proportions and linear perspective and if all the soft lighting is there.

They say a singer works the same as any other man. He hammers and scrapes and copies the rhythms of his greatest lovers. He is a riveter rutting himself against the double-iron back of time, spilling his seed into the dark places where the mold can’t grow and the dust can’t reach, hoping to trap the world in his stain. I saw the best minds of my generation die in my own head—but now that’s done. Stick around. They said, “A puncher’s chance is the poor man’s trick, so set your feet and make it a gorgeous one.” And I’m engorged. I’m shooting in you now. My dreams will be your babies.

Sometimes I forget what it was like to grow up on the outskirts of a wilting country town. I forget the coyotes mewling hungry outside the chicken coop, my little brother wheezing in the other room. This was back before my brother got screwed up with a kid and before I punched my mother over young love…back before my old man got prattled on drugs and went to take it easy in a sanitarium. This was before that war that got turned into a ribbon and before that girl I kissed at last call—back before my little sister got forgotten for doing everything right.

This is one last song for my road dogs, Buck and Wee-Wee and Prefontaine. This is one last shout-out for Big Mick and Pettybone, O-Jeff and Chicken George, singing and living off white bread in the old county jail. Can you hear me, old Gordon? My beard has gone gray, and my hair is so thin, and I’m typing and typing and
why don’t you love me by now?

There are crawdads snapping dark tunes deep into the creek bottoms. There’s a whole bucket full of stars spinning and decaying up there in the manner of cold angels, goldfish set loose on a silver pond to bloat up and burst upon the sound. The whole universe is hatching an escape plan out of the sky as it shoots itself past Pluto, but what we say is I’ll survive because the soup is cooling off and my old overcoat is hanging up at home.

There are statements about no news and its relative merits. There are wives’ tales about mermaids and fishwives and the fish that got away. Well I guess I don’t give a damn about that.
What I care about is the landlord’s feet against my ceiling, the smell of his dinner wafting down as my old stomach growls. I care about songs and hunger and what I remember in the meat of my bones: the rattle of my old father’s truck skidding across the dust in the somber yellow of early evening, wending through the cutbacks of a dark country road. I miss that song of the revving engine, the barking dogs, the rattling of tools. The dust of the road billowing behind as he returned from the farm, cresting the final hill pulling diesel and pesticides…and my little sister in her sundress would get up from her sandbox. And my mother would look up from the window. And I would see my brother in her arms. And all the dogs were happy in their steps and made their magic circles and did follow along. This was before the coyotes were awake and all honest people had gone to bed.

We changed our shirts and washed our hands. We said our prayers, and with trembling we came to the table. There was chicken and gravy and lots of potatoes. Collard greens with bacon and lots of preservatives. We were stuffing our mouths with cornmeal and nitrates, but what we hoped was that some taste of it all would rot on our tongues like forever. Our blood swelled with poisons and heartbreak and the great Midwestern diabetes and we were killing ourselves with each bite, but what we hoped was that some bit of ourselves would hold and metastasize, would petrify our intestines against the dust for a thousand years. We crawled into our father’s lap as the setting sun burned its slow hole deep into the west, organs grinding to a halt beneath our skin. The music was playing. And the landlord was at bay. And we laughed. We told stories. We hunched in front of the television box, chewing our toxic meal, and we were all very happy.

Daniel Long is an Oklahoman living in New York. His fiction has appeared.

No news today - Guest Post - Iain Haley Pollock

2012-01-09T07:56:00.000-08:00

Snow in Wartime

It's warm for Syracuse in deep December--
but still cold enough for snow, snow made
light and fat by a sweep over Lake Ontario,
the flakes like down from a split pillow.
We're walking on the western shore of Onondaga,
hand in hand, the few towers on the skyline
visible through spare trees. The path runs
between dense beds of common reeds--
invading marshy ground around the lake--
and tumbledown docks of ruined resort hotels.

Before the snow I was thinking what a rabbit
punch, this month. Painkillers and chemotherapy
thinning your uncle's voice. Granddad gone
a second winter, again no Lancashire hullo.
Our friend's pickup rolled off an icy road--
his neck snapped. The list of more boys,
from whistle-stop towns in Texas, Pennsylvania,
Ohio, dead. Car bombs in Baghdad
and Kufa ending six-dozen unnamed lives.

But while the lake effect falls, I stop worrying
about illness and accidents and war, and stand
with you to watch the slow drift. Years from now,
we'll forget that I hardly talked with you,
that Mack trucks growled nearby, that death
choked at our thoughts. I'll remind you then--
faced with dope-addicted daughter
or father's congestive collapse--that once
there was a lake where we walked together,
fingers intertwined, the sky hushed to snow.

Iain Haley Pollock lives in Philadelphia and teaches English at Springside-Chestnut Hill Academy. His first collection of poems, SPIT BACK A BOY (University of Georgia, 2011), won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Elizabeth Alexander, President Obama's inaugural poet, selected the manuscript for the prize. Pollock earned a bachelor's degree in English from Haverford College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University. He is a Cave Canem Fellow.

No news today - Guest Post - Polly Bresnick

2012-01-04T07:36:00.001-08:00

SEEING GEORGE CLOONEY

She hears a warm voice say, "That seat is available. You're welcome to sit." Over the clunk and whoosh of the train slamming around on its tracks, he sounds handsome. The accent is the square-jawed drawl of Southern California. She is good at placing voices. He sounds tan, with salt-and-pepper hair. He sounds like he might know he's handsome. He sounds kind. He is a backlit shadow mingling in front of her.

He can see that she is blind, and he thinks of himself as a helpful person. He stares at her wandering eyes. "How are you today?"

She smiles. "Oh, just fine. Thank you for asking." She keeps smiling, her face turned up towards his voice. She asks him back and he answers.

He smiles, then realizes he doesn't have to, then thinks she can probably hear a smile in a person's voice, wonders about all sorts of subtle things that seeing people can't hear. He folds his newspaper and folds his hands and lets it all rest in his lap. He looks out the window. Maybe their conversation is over.

"Beautiful view out the window, isn't it?" He turns to her, surprised. She laughs and slaps her knee. "That was a joke. It's polite to laugh when a stranger makes a joke." He smiles and lets out a generous chuckle with the breath he'd been holding in. She reminds him of a female actor who always plays the funny roles, only she, the blind woman, is quite pretty.

"Don't worry," she says. "I won't ask you to explain to me what cathedrals are by moving my hand to draw the picture." He frowns. He can't tell if this is another joke.

"Sorry?" He means it in all kinds of ways.

"No need to be. I'm not." She keeps smiling towards him, while her dull eyes wander all over the place. She's fastidiously dressed. He thinks someone must dress her, or assist her. "I'm OK with sitting on a train with someone who doesn't read, as long as you're OK with sitting on a train with someone who's blind as a bat." Her smile is completely still.

He nods, his face friendly. Then remembers he should say something, "OK."

She sticks her hand out towards him, "Kate. Kate Brandt."

He hesitates, looks around even, then leans forward to take her hand in his, "I'm George Clooney."

His hand feels firm and warm and, she senses, honest. There is hair on the knuckles but not a vulgar amount. His hand feels clean. He smells like a man who dresses well. He does not, however, smell like the famous actor, George Clooney. "Well, what do you know! It's a real pleasure to meet you, Mr. Clooney." She asks him to do a few of his characters. He does pretty well. They move together through space while sitting perfectly still.

Polly Bresnick writes about accidents, loves Moby Dick, and hosts a monthly reading series with a conceptually palindromic name. You can find her writing in The Brooklyn Rail, Weave Magazine, The Boogie Woogie Flu, decomP magazinE, monkeybicycle, and here: http://sayingitjustright.tumblr.com/.

No news today - Guest Post - Vesper T. Woods

2011-12-28T07:49:00.001-08:00

NEXT BEST OCCASION

On my fortieth birthday, when the lights went, my wife Sitchie said, “Sweetheart, my heart. It’s stopped.” Mine had gone too.
The news didn’t care where we were this time. They would say three lightning strikes did us in, three power lines gave up on New York, and a generator named Ravenswood 3 finally died and took the rest of us with it. That’s about all I remember them telling us.
Sitchie was never afraid of it, that pitch-black kind of love. In fact, she preferred it, wished on it, called after its shape: suspense love, a medieval kind of loving. She had them all ready: candles, cassettes, dusting bottles of wine above the fridge, forgotten till they were old enough to be worth it. But outside our apartment, the world was ending, and that night I said, “How could anyone have a beating heart in all this mess?” Then she left.

Nine months later, a million babies were born. I think we both knew it would happen that way. Those who weren’t running for their lives, or smashing up glass, or pointing at the stars for the very first look, or silenced in Shea Stadium, or stealing back what should have been theirs in the first place, or whispering holy vespers, or tagging the 2 train with spray painted love letters, or lighting their anger ablaze, or bleaching their hair for the Son of Sam, or strapping bra straps around bruised arms, were all probably fucking for humanity instead. We had seen the couple across the way fall to their bed, strip each other clean, the shadows of their bodies kicking like a pulse. And really, we knew it would all happen that way.

We had also tried to make a baby in that year of ‘77. But Sitchie had problems on the inside. My Sitchie, Sydelle to those who knew her better. She ate all the right foods for an easier conception, studied the moon so our son would be a Virgo. His name came from the tallest tombstones in Queen’s Calvary cemetery. Sydelle, oh Sydelle, who peeled away the skin of her lips when the Doctor said, “I’m sorry.” My wife, who had said: “I bet he would have had your eyes, anyway.”

I sat on a stool by our window that night. I listened to the melody of sirens, stolen cars booming through storefront windows. The night guards with their nightsticks. The organist at the Mets game, Here is your music to die by. I listened to my wife twisting open the wine, her voice saying, No better occasion, and my own, No thanks. She had a sing-song pitch when she was sad, my Sitchie. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

My heart really had begun to quit earlier that summer. I lost my job and my head. I found girlfriends. I thought about their sex-wet stomachs when I went to sleep. I dreamed dreams of Howard Hughes and Hollywood. I sold everything sacred or shiny in the crash. My watch was the last to go. A man named Freddie at East River Pawn pinched it between his hangnails, dropped it into the mouth of a cigar box, said, “Even without timing, you’re still a man.”

Nine years later, I left New York. A woman named Dolly brought over a casserole when I arrived in the country. It was too dry to eat. Everything about her bored me. I married her. I have a cat and an analyst these days. I live down low and watch my face disappear on hubcaps. My new wife cries at night. She says, “Tell me about her.” The news says, “Where were you the summer of ’77?”

I think I’ll write to them:

There once was a boy and a girl who played telephone with a cup and a string. A boy and a girl who played spin the bottle with a hairbrush and only each other. There was a boy who got gone at 18 years old but sent his sweetheart postcards from around the country, a girl who had answered the door in one sock when the boy came knocking and said, “Well, well. If it isn’t you.” A boy who became a man when he asked the girl’s dying father for her hand in marriage. A man and his woman who moved to the city of no sleep three years before the world was ending. The young woman who gave up smoking and red meat and long-distance running in hopes of a new boy or girl. The young man who never gave a damn thing. A bottle of wine unpacked from their wedding day, saved for the next best occasion. A suitcase snapped shut by a woman fumbling blind for her things. And a slamming door, on a fortieth birthday, when both their hearts had stopped.

Vesper T. Woods is currently an MFA candidate in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in 12th Street Journal, Conveyor Magazine, and received an Honorable Mention for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award. She is the coordinator of a creative writing workshop for women inmates at the Valhalla Correctional Facility in Valhalla, NY. She is currently the Fiction Editor of LUMINA magazine. On the weekdays, she is T Kira Madden.

No news today - Guest Post - Shelly Oria

2011-12-23T07:29:00.000-08:00

Following the News

Do you follow the news?

An incident occurred, and it involved ships. I am not delivering breaking news here; this happened a while ago. And yet in all likelihood, I am telling you something you don't know. If you followed the news, you'd know about this incident. If you don't that's fine, but please accept responsibility. Accepting responsibility is the first thing to know about following the news.

An incident occurred, and it involved ships, and it also involved the military. Please don't assume that I'm referring to the U.S military, because you'd be wrong, and being wrong is the worst thing you can do when it comes to following the news. I am referring to a Foreign Military; one thing you absolutely need to remember in order to successfully follow the news is that there are militaries around the world that are not the U.S military. These are called Foreign Militaries.

I happen to be extremely qualified when it comes to reporting this piece of news, and possibly I am the most qualified person to be reporting this piece of news, and that is due to the fact that I once belonged to that Foreign Military. Please note my grammar, my use of the word 'that.' You need to know your grammar in order to successfully follow the news. You don't have to be advanced, but you do need basic grammar skills, and you need to pay attention. If you possess basic grammar skills and are paying attention, then you have probably already figured out that not only did I belong to a Foreign Military, but that I belonged to this particular Foreign Military, the one involved in this particular incident, which involved ships.

Being the most qualified person to report this piece of news means that I understand about details; I understand the general unimportance of details, and I understand, too, that sometimes certain details are in fact important. Therefore, you can trust that I will only provide you with the absolutely necessary details regarding the incident which involved ships, and that I will spare you any details which are not, or are less than, important.

When I heard about this incident, I immediately decided to continue reading House and Garden. Shortly after, I ordered a slice of carrot cake. These are important details. Both the reading of House and Garden and the eating of carrot cakes are of insurmountable importance when it comes to following the news. If this is not yet clear, I assure you that it will become clear very soon.

In the incident in question, which involved a Foreign Military and ships, nine people were killed, or perhaps eighty. Alternately, it is possible that a total of four (4) people died as a result of this tragic and unfortunate incident.

Now, this is not my first time reporting this incident, and in the past every time I reached the part in my report which addresses the casualties, many people would leave the room. Some, on their way out, would even ask me for my e-mail, so they can later send a letter of complaint. (I have learned that people in the U.S prefer to complain in a way that doesn't require their presence.) So please don't leave the room, and whatever you do, do not ask me for my e-mail. Due to my past involvement with the Foreign Military, very few people have my e-mail, and I would like to keep it that way.

But moreover, and more importantly-- the first thing to know about following the news, is that you don't complain. Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that there's nothing you can do. I am not at all evoking a discussion about passivity, not even mentioning the word 'passivity.' There certainly is a lot you can do. You can take your dog for a run, for instance, if you have a dog. Upon your return, you can put fruit in the blender and make a healthy shake. (I recommend mangos for their excellent antioxidant value). A man who goes for a run with an animal and subsequently drinks a healthy shake is not a passive man, and the same is true if you're a woman. Anyone knows that. But one thing you can't do is complain. Please believe me, and even if you don't believe me, accept my advice, and even if you don't accept my advice, don't complain.

Now, asking you not to e-mail me is different from saying I did not read the e-mails in question. Please note that I said no such thing, made no such reference. Reading e-mails is probably the most important thing to do when it comes to following the news. I read each e-mail several times, out of respect for the sender, whether he or she followed the news or not. In respecting the senders and reading the e-mails, I made the e-mails a News Source, and that is why e-mails are important.

I learned many things from the e-mails, once they became a News Source. The main thing I learned was the reason behind people's departure from the room whenever I discussed the casualties. If you are from the U.S then you may already know the reason, but I am not from the U.S and it took a lot of e-mail-reading for me to understand. I initially assumed the reason was death, that people didn't want to hear about death. I made that assumption because where I come from people take great joy in the telling and retelling of death stories, but part of the joy is pretending that there is no joy but rather suffering. This may sound complicated if you are from the U.S but it is simple. Please understand: Where I come from, it is considered untoward to take joy in the telling of death, and so in order to truly take joy, one must pretend not to be taking joy. And so, for a long time I assumed that the people leaving the room were only pretending to leave, while in fact not leaving at all. Thank God for the e-mails, because they were the News Source that taught me that things in the U.S are different.

As you might have gathered if you are from the U.S, all these people did in fact leave the room. I know that now, and know also that they left not because they glorified in the stories of death, but because they found the numbers I was reporting “confusing,” “inconsistent,” or even “inaccurate.” (It is important to note here that I found these claims quite presumptuous, considering this was an incident these people had never heard of before). Moreover, and this too is important: these people assumed, as people from the U.S often do, that my confusion, inconsistency, and inaccuracy were in fact signs of disrespect for the human life.

How could they think that I, a former soldier of a Foreign Military, would disrespect the human life? If I could share my anguish with you, I would—believe me—and you would know then that I have suffered. But sharing my anguish with you would of necessity include several unimportant or less-than-important details, and that is no way to conduct reports. Despite the temptation (which, I might add, I feel because I have a deep respect for the human life) I am proud to tell you that I have never discussed my personal anguish in any of my reports to date.

The next detail of importance is that the victims were from different countries. In all probability, that is what people mean when they use the expression 'citizens of the world,' although there is no conclusive data supporting this claim at the date of this report.

Please understand: I am a critical thinker. That is part of what makes me the most qualified person to report this piece of news. My being a critical thinker is evidenced, for instance, by my use of the word 'victims.' Had I not been a critical thinker, I'd have believed every word of the military I once belonged to, and none of these words are the word 'victims.' There are plenty of ways to believe the military's every word where I come from, and a common one is reading the paper. Where I come from, if you're looking at a man reading the paper, what you're looking at is an uncritical thinker, and the same is true if it's a woman. That is because where I come from, when people read the paper they forget to disbelieve. Even I, a critical thinker, often forget to disbelieve when reading the paper. Other times I remember to disbelieve, but can't remember how to disbelieve.

Therefore, if I read the paper, I could not report the incident in question to you. I wouldn't know who attacked who and who is whose victim and who is less or more at fault because of something having to do with weapons. Additionally, I would not know whether or not ships were involved. This confusion would quickly become so exhausting that I'd be forced to read House and Garden and order a slice of carrot cake, only to stay awake. If you're astute, you may point out that either way—with or without reading the paper, with or without critical thinking—the result is the same, and involves cake. You'd be right, but being right is of no consequence when it comes to following the news.

Allow me to report to you now the last detail of importance about the incident in question. Once you hear this last detail, you will know everything you need to know about the incident which involved ships. You may take a moment to celebrate your achievement; that is only natural. But I do have to ask that you refrain from reporting this incident to others; you are not a qualified person when it comes to reporting this piece of news, and possibly you are the least qualified person to report this piece of news.

If you do not feel comfortable with my request, I would have to ask that you leave the room at this time. If you choose this course of action, please know that I will harbor no resentment toward you, but you are to make no further attempts at following the news.

Now. The last detail of importance is a detail you may have already surmised from the fact that the victims were from different countries: I did not know the victims personally. This detail is incredibly important. Reporting the incident in an objective manner might not have been possible otherwise. But more importantly: the reading of House and Garden and the eating of carrot cake would certainly not have been possible otherwise. That is what I keep explaining to anyone who would listen, and that is the reason I started reporting this incident to begin with, long ago.

You now know everything you need to know about the incident which involved a Foreign Military and ships. I thank you for listening.

Shelly Oria was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Israel. Her fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Quarterly West, cream city review, and fivechapters among other places, and won the 2008 Indiana Review Fiction Prize among other awards. Shelly curates the series Sweet! Actors Reading Writers in the East Village and teaches fiction at Gotham Writers' Workshop and Pratt Institute as well as privately.

No news today - Guest Post - Ira Livingston

2011-12-12T09:09:00.000-08:00

The News from Poems: Reading and Refuge

Reflection does not withdraw from the world . . .; it steps back to watch the sparks of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals the world as strange and paradoxical. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception)

. . . sometimes I have been seized by the childish desire never to return to the burrow again, but to settle down somewhere close to the entrance, to pass my life watching the entrance, and gloat perpetually upon the reflection—and in that find my happiness—how steadfast a protection my burrow would be if I were inside it. (Kafka, “The Burrow”)

In the artist of all kinds I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate, and the still more urgent need not to be found. (Winnicot, “Communicating and Not Communicating”)

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” (William Carlos Williams
, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”)

1.

Frankenstein’s monster, in Mary Shelley’s novel, is rejected by his creator and by everyone he meets.

He finds a hideaway in a shed attached to a cottage. The shed is too low to stand up in, but it’s dry, and a chimney provides warmth.

The monster gets water at night from a nearby stream, and he sneaks food from the cottage’s pantry.

Unseen, he can watch the residents of the cottage through a crack in a boarded-up window.

He discovers language as they talk and read books aloud to each other, and he learns to speak when they teach English to a foreign guest.

Curiously, the monster’s situation in the shed resembles that of the reader in the act of reading.

Alone, withdrawn from public space, and virtually immobilized, the monster, like the reader, can direct his entire attention

to eavesdropping on the interior scene that keeps unfolding, in language, before his eyes.

In this monstrous image of the reader, there is some sense of escapism. Of course, the escape may be protective and restorative.

(I think of someone I know who as a child found refuge in the public library from a crowded household and an abusive parent.)

And there is also some sense of the reader as a parasite. In the largest sense, this may evoke the notion of vampiristic leisure classes

laying around reading while others toil, or even the more general notion that our so-called higher faculties—

consciousness and civilization themselves—parasitically hitch a ride on the back of our animal natures.

Writers no less than readers can easily be cast as vampires, not only because everyone they encounter is potential prey

from which material for their next novels can be extracted, but because to commit oneself to live through the posterity of books

(rather than through living offspring) might mean, at some level, never quite being alive at all.

Anyway it is here in this twilight world that reader and writer meet.

Once you get the idea that the eavesdropping monster works as an image of the reader, it’s easy to see that his situation

also matches Mary Shelley’s account of her own lifelong engagement with written and fantasized stories.

Growing up with a famously depressive, distant father and a famously narcissistic stepmother, Mary wrote stories and spun daydreams

that provided her constant “refuge” and “dearest pleasure.” Thus the “blank and dreary” countryside she visited as a girl

became for her a “pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy.”

The refuge of fantasy is the fantasy of refuge. But sometimes even survival may depend on this tenuous tautology.

2.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man withdraws from what Ellison calls the “existential torture” of living as a black man

in mid-20th-century America. He finds refuge “in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement

that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night.”

Here he is able to live rent-free and to tap into the main line of the “Monopolated Light and Power” Company to illuminate his refuge.

It is from this position that the rest of narrative-- of his life up to the point of his withdrawal—is offered.

The narrator’s position resembles certain particulars of Ellison’s immediate situation as he was writing the novel.

Ellison lived in a basement apartment in Harlem, where his writer’s hours (especially in contrast to his wife’s regular job)

made him a suspect and hypervisible character in the predominantly working-class, black neighborhood.

During this time he also wrote in a friend’s office on Fifth Avenue, which ironically enabled him “to find sanctuary

in a predominantly white environment where that same color and vagueness of role rendered me anonymous and hence beyond public concern.”

Of course a writer inevitably incorporates aspects of his immediate situation into whatever he’s writing, and as in Ellison’s case,

his immediate situation may be intimately a part of what he is writing about anyway. But my point here is the ways in which being a writer

and being a reader resonate with each other as ways of being simultaneously in and out of the world, and (in this case)

with the experience of being black in America, of being both invisible and hypervisible.

This is not to assert that being black is like reading or writing a book-- or that all writers have “the souls of black folks”--

only that we may recognize resonant points of contact.

3.

When I read Frankenstein and Invisible Man, I was reminded of an old science-fiction fantasy of my own. In my fantasy,

the scene is a post-apocalyptic cityscape at night, something like what might have been painted by a latter-day Hieronymous Bosch.

Here and there among dark ruins and ramparts, sparks crackle up from bonfires attended by skulking shadows.

Off in the distance, guard-towers loom over lurid, floodlit fortifications and barb-wired compounds.

Uneasy silence-- in which one can make out the low hum of generators-- is punctuated by sounds of gunfire and ambiguous cries.

In the middleground of this hellish tableau, a solitary traveler picks his way, like the lone pilgrim in a Chinese landscape painting.

You can imagine what horrors our traveler has seen, what privations he’s endured, how many times through cunning or luck

he has managed to cheat death. One night, pursued by brutal cyborg police (or wild dogs, or zombie mutants), he stumbles

onto a concealed opening in a wall and slips inside to safety, into a forgotten, cavernous, trapezoidal enclosed space between buildings.

From this point, you can continue folding in assorted elaborations: the piles of hoarded canned goods, the fresh water source,

the heat and the hum from giant machines on the other side of the wall.

This is as far as my fantasy goes, but if you want to spin more of a narrative around it, you could throw in another refugee

who stumbles in with her tattered clothing, flashing eyes, and cleavage. Our hero wins her over, but then her mutant ex-boyfriend shows up,

and ultimately everybody dies, or at the very least, the refuge is compromised and our traveler is thrown back into his wanderings.

Perhaps you can see him again, in the distance now, a tiny figure trudging alongside the wall of a floodlit fortification.

4.

All this takes us back out of the fantasy of refuge, which is, of course, a temporary state. You must always rejoin the world.

But the opposite is no less true: you can never quite rejoin the world-- or as Bob Dylan put it, “you can always come back,

but you can’t come back all the way.” And the opposite of both of these opposites also applies: you never left.

And the opposite of that: you were never quite of the world to begin with. The coexistence of all these opposed conditions

is precisely the point. Reading is a practice that puts us in touch with withdrawal and aloneness as both temporary and permanent states,

and the ways in which we are always paradoxically both a part of and apart from social being-in-the-world.

Post-apocalyptic fantasies are classic images of depression, marked by the sense that something terrible and irrevocable has happened

just as anxiety involves the sense that something terrible is about to happen.

What has happened is usually something like the loss of a world, at least of a world characterized by warmth and human connection.

Such a world is sometimes called, using the terms of psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicot, a “holding environment.”

You might think, if you’re going to be fantasizing anyway, why not conjure up a whole heavenly world

—like the Big Rock Candy Mountain in the old folk song-- instead of a relatively comfortable hovel in a bleak wasteland?

If whistling through graveyards (commonly known as denial) is your dominant defensive coping strategy, then go ahead.

You’ll have lots of company. But remember how, in the movie The Matrix, the machines first create an illusory idyllic world

to pacify their human slaves, only to discover that most humans can’t handle it. As Gertrude Stein said of Mallorca,

“it’s paradise, if you can stand it.” Most people can’t.

Depression can bring a starkly accurate assessment of things-as-they-are, a phenomenon known as depressive realism.

The depressive part of the realism is a tendency to discount things-as-they-could-be in favor of trying to make one’s way

in the ruins of a world one cannot hope to rebuild.

But do I have to point out that this stance is only in its extreme forms a pathological condition?

If you, dear reader, didn’t already know something about depressive fantasies as coping strategies,

I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t find you here, scavenging for god-knows-what in this out-of-the-way text--

I mean, instead of being out somewhere, with a sparkle in your eye and a martini in your hand, making friends and love and money.

5.

So why are you here? What made a reader of you? Why have you crawled up, alone, into this out-of-the-way nook?

What could this text be for you-- what kind of refuge, pantry, pharmacy? What goodies could you get here? What are you getting even now?

Ellison went so far as to assert that “a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope”-- one “that might help keep us afloat

as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.”

The most that could be happening between you and a text is that it is keeping you alive,

will be part of what keeps you alive, what you live for. You were fortunate indeed to have stumbled into these words!

Look up for a moment. There may be others around, and they can see that you are reading. But they cannot really see

the web we are weaving, the secret psychological sustenance you are getting from this reading.

“Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies.”

It’s a physical thing, the visual scanning of the lines of type, like smoking a cigarette.

The hands hold, the eyes scan, the brain lights up. Put it down, pick it up again and read: again the eyes scan and the brain lights up.

A voice in your head reads the words aloud; it is your voice but not your voice. If you are attentive,

you can feel it being echoed in your adam’s apple and the muscles of your tongue and lips, like the shadow of a voice,

as when your mind mirrors the emphatic gestures and passionate inflections of a speaker with whom you identify,

as if you were saying the words yourself, as if you were watching someone you love perform in a play you had seen many times.

The thing about reading is that it’s like and not like interacting with another person.

It’s like it in the sense that you don’t know what will come next. The text seems to have some sovereign agency.

It seems to be different than sitting around thinking or spinning out fantasies of your own.

The reader can even be characterized as deplorably passive: all I can do as a reader is scan the text, and nothing I do can change it.

I cannot act on it. And the text, in turn, also seems almost inert. It cannot respond to me. It cannot look back at me.

But the text can do something that may even be a matter of survival.

It holds me.

Ira Livingston is the author, most recently, of Between Science and Literature: An Introduction to Autopoetics (Illinois, 2006) and co-editor of Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader (Illinois, 2009). He is Chair of the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

No news today - Guest Post - Kim Chinquee

2011-12-05T08:18:00.000-08:00

Crib

Listening to the rain thrumming on the windows, knowing her husband had probably had a backslide, she grabbed an orange from the bowl and peeled, imagined the wheels of the car somewhere in a ditch, or in another woman's driveway. It was past two and, being that they only had one car, she had no way of going anywhere herself, unless she took the bike out.

She turned on the porch light and looked out, at the tree weighted by the week of constant rainfall, the blanket of pecans on the ground below it. The phone in her robe pocket. She heard the baby singing from the next room, to a song of lambs and losses, and she went into the nursery, where the baby sat upright in his crib, said hello, as if he were six, or ten, or twenty. "Hello," he said. He was almost two now, too old for a crib, probably, and he hardly cried, ever.

"Your dad is gone," she said to the baby. She sat in the rocker and told the baby that his dad was out making millions so he could take them to the tropics. The baby stood in the crib and put his hands up to the rails, like the men she saw in jail those times she had to pick up her husband from the drunk tank. She lifted the baby, spun him, said maybe she'd call in sick in the morning, where she held babies in sizes of vegetables like eggplant, sticking them with needles, administering doses, telling truths and lies to loved ones. Now she told her baby it was time. The baby perked and called her dada then squirreled his way down and ran across the carpet to his stuffed bear in the corner.

She already had a bag packed. Two months before he'd stumbled in with blood on his chin, a bruise shaped up like a daisy, and when she tried to fix him, he gave her bruises of her own and then she went away until he came back for her the next week, saying he was clean and sorry and sober.

Now she did what she knew she was supposed to, speed dialing the number she'd gotten from the shelter, remembering what the woman had said about being home at times like these, when and if he got there. "It's time," she said to herself. “It’s time,” she said to her baby, toddler, son. She got dressed and she sang. She found a step and rocked there.

Kim Chinquee is the author of the collections Oh Baby and Pretty. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Henfield Prize and has been published journals and anthologies including NOON, The Nation, Huffington Post, Conjunctions, Wilow Springs, Denver Quarterly, New York Tyrant, Fiction, American Short Fiction, The Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, Best of the Web 2010, The Florida Review, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill and others. Her website is www.kimchinquee.com

No news today - Guest Post - Matthew Simmons

2011-11-28T09:22:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking a little about politics. Politics are, it seems, all around us these days. (These days sitting over here near us as opposed to those days sitting over there next to other people.) Here are some things that I’ve been thinking about politics:

/ Rick Perry looks like a baseball glove sitting on a kid’s desk with rubber bands around it and an old baseball in the pocket. And the kid will never play with that ball or that glove.

/ Michelle Bachmann looks like an iced tea pitcher on blond wood sideboard filled with that light green flavor of Crystal Light and a couple of lemon slices.

/ Tim Pawlenty looks like a really far away comet seen through some sort of high-powered space telescope, it’s tail really small because it’s not all that close to our sun or any sun.

/ Herman Cain looks like a man made entirely by hyper-intelligent, blind frogs who have had men described to them but have never touched the face or body of a man with their webbed hands.

/ Newt Gingrich looks like the sun exploded and we all went underground, and we all learned to live without sun, and we all learned to live together, and we all found out living together wasn’t terribly fulfilling, so we all stopped eating.

/ John Huntsman looks like Mitt Romney looks like.

/ Mitt Romney looks like John Huntsman looks like.

/ Ron Paul looks like a tree falling in the woods and everybody hears it because everybody lives in the woods together in a house made of gingerbread. And we’re all witches waiting for kids. And the tree falls outside, and we stop stirring the pot. We wonder about that tree that fell. Wonder, also, when the kids are going to show.

/ Rick Santorum, for all the world, actually really does look like the frothy mix of lube and fecal matter that is the byproduct of anal sex. That poor man. That poor, poor man. Looking that way. For all the rest of his life.

Matthew Simmons is the author of the novella A JELLO HORSE (Publishing Genius Press, 2009) and the short collection THE MOON TONIGHT FEELS MY REVENGE (Keyhole Press, 2010). He lives in Seattle with his cat, Emmett.

No news today - Guest Post - Tanya Whiton

2011-11-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

Weird Animals

No longer a subscriber to my local paper, an ever-thinner tabloid of familial violence and budget cuts (we are too poor here to do anything but murder our mothers and fathers), I recently turned to Google News. It is the first time I’ve had to publicly declare my interests, news-wise; my local rag features fishing accidents and disappeared girls, and national concerns are relegated to a few front page items. The rest is AP wire service (Tajikistan? Where is Tajikistan?) and columns by writers who trend toward the heartwarming —perhaps to counter the alarming number of matricides.

But I am uncertain about which stories to follow, and worse, concerned about what the threads I do pursue might reveal about my intellectual acuity, good citizenship, and taste. What will people try to sell me, based on my preferences? Am I an ugly American, more concerned with U.S. news than World news? No, I determine. I slide the preference bar to “always” next to World news and “often” next to U.S. I will learn Spanish. I will get a better grasp on geography. I will work magic with just a little olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Next decision: Do I really care about Business news? How about Technology? Do I ever want to retire? I should know more about Business. In the subcategory of finance, I learn that the average American is over $4,000 in debt, and being ranked among average Americans, when I have just signaled my concern about global issues, irks me. I move the fader back and forth between often and sometimes. But wait. Is Business more important than technology? I like robots, and if I set my interest in Business higher than technology, will stories about robots be buried at the bottom of my personal news feed? I settle for Business sometimes, and Technology sometimes, and leave off any fine-tuning in the personal finance department.

I haven’t even read the day’s headlines, and already I’m exhausted. Once again, I see that the clamoring masses, the jersey-wearing, ball-catching, cheer-shouting horde are insisting that I must consider Sports. I move the Sports preference bar to “rarely” and then click on the little trashcan. I can throw Sports into the trash, all of those humiliations, my complete lack of spatial coordination, my only child’s perplexity over team dynamics, right into the rubbish with one click.

Then a story catches my eye: Kobe Bryant is failing. I’m interested in failure. For Kobe, I add Sports back to my list, and in an unabashed display of my true enthusiasms, I bump Entertainment up to “always” and fall into a forty-five minute long Google-a-thon that gets me stuck like shoe goo on Rolling Stone Magazine’s web site looking at photos of Juggalos, so joyful and hideous, indulging in their annual tribal ritual.

Health I leave at “sometimes” since I am a hypochondriac, and it’s better to not even consider the subject, and then I discover that Science news is dedicated largely to the Mars Rover (we love you, Mars Rover! Keep on trucking!) and to weird animals. I spend some time among the weird animals, lamenting their disappearances, and wondering at their interesting defense mechanisms. In my quest to adapt, I find myself motoring in a curiously oxygen free environment, my attempts to mask my true nature inadequate.

Tanya Whiton has published stories and poems in literary journals including Western Humanities Review, Northwest Review and Crazyhorse. Her short story “Giving Her Away” was included in the 2006 anthology The Way Life Should Be: A Collection of Stories by Contemporary Maine Writers. She was recipient of the 2009 Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship for Poets, and the 2000 Martin Dibner Fellowship for Fiction Writers. A resident of Portland, Maine, she has taught for the Lesley Seminars, Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference, and the University of Southern Maine. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program.

No news today - Guest Post - Amy Albracht

2011-11-13T16:45:00.001-08:00

My middle term memory is the only one worth a damn.

God grant me the ability to remember some of The Serenity Prayer. I know wisdom needs to come into play and saying that combination of words used to make me feel lighter. Somehow I managed to not tell off the social worker that said, “Anyone who has been sick for X amount of years is going to have some depression.” Sister, you are not going to pin denial on me.

It’s coming back to me now. Finding out what I can change and what I can’t change has used me up and I have burned like a seven-dollar tip on a table of twelve just to still be here.

When you are living on the old homestead people advise you on what kind of birdseed to buy. They push the songbird mix. My aim is to feed the guttersnipes and catfish birds so I just grab whatever is cheapest. I have a long list of errands to run, to get by the post office box and buy some more birdseed.

I’m so dried out that I’ve mashed up all my ex’s in my mind and I act like we’re all on good terms. And I don't exist to even a single one.

I heard a joke you would like. If you invite a Baptist to go fishing with you, why do you have to invite at least one more? There’s no point bothering with the punch line because you understand it better than anyone. You also know that I don’t like people watching me cook. I always get cuts and burns, but they are more serious when I am being watched. Turns out, no matter how big the kitchen, I’m still a messy cook. And if I’m a cook, then I might be a tax expert too, because I file those forms from time to time.

When I go to a potluck, I want my casserole to be popular because I know that all eyes will never be on me when I enter the bar. But that doesn’t stop me from making the rounds, alternating tequila and OJs and whatever light beer is on tap. Sometimes I prefer to bar hop during the day. In one of my regular spots the light breaking into the dusty stained glass flatters me. Jimmy tipped me off to this and it keeps me coming back. He said, “Your eyes are so blue today.” So I looked at him and saw that his Irish stubble was blazing red and I told him so. That was it. He returned to his position near the register and propped up a foot on the speed rack as I finished my Grasshopper.

But the best thing in that bar happened at night. I was sitting with my back to the wall and I saw all of it. A young woman with a face better than money stepped down from her bar stool. She was dressed in the fashion of her day. No. Her clothes ventured out in front of that dateline. Her costume came to a close with yards of pearls that looped around her neck and swayed to her little waist. She broke into a perfect Charleston that cancelled out the garbage coming from the jukebox. She had made her point when one of her perfectly crisp yet devil may care hands caught on a strand of her necklace. The string gave and the pearls went separate ways, filling the air like electrons are said to stake out solid objects. They hit the checkerboard tile floor all at once and jumped back up, head-high with the single crack of a thousand billiard racks being broken. From there, each pearl followed its own path. The crashing and bouncing and dribbling took an hour to die out. Her friends scattered to gather up the beads but some only leaned close to the floor and laughed.

The other benefit to drinking early is that by the time you are heading to check on your mother-in-law it’s dark out. You don’t have to look at the Jesus paraphernalia filling up the birdbath in front of the house at the turn. I guess it’s true that birds neither sow nor reap and make out fine, but clogging up their bath with propaganda seems like overkill. Hang in there, pigeons. Let’s everyone hang in there.

Amy Albracht is the author of countless e-mails. You can find other work by her at www.amyalbracht.com.

No news today - Guest Post - Nelly Reifler

2011-11-09T10:15:00.000-08:00

Five-Star Review.

I love this product!!! Ever since I first heard about it, I’ve been excited to try it! I ordered it ages ago, but as everybody knows, they ran out of it really fast, and then it was out of stock forever. I was soooo worried that I’d never get it! I was also worried that maybe the new version wasn’t going to be as good as the classic—and of course the classic was what everybody was raving about. But it finally arrived this morning, and let me tell you, I was not disappointed!!!
I waited until the UPS truck drove away (I’m always a little embarrassed to see the UPS guy—I get SO much stuff delivered, but if you’ve read my reviews before you know that’s because I leave the apartment pretty much NEVER, which he doesn’t know). I ran down, grabbed the package off the stoop, and high-tailed it back upstairs.

I ripped open the box and tried it out right away! It stung a little at first, but I was prepared because all the reviews mentioned the stinging. Also, I have to say, if you’re very sensitive, like M. P. in SC, you might want to do a patch test first. *I* didn’t *bleed* per se, but there were these little beads (I mean really just dots!) of blood. They went away pretty fast. I wouldn’t call it “bleeding.” Same with the “cramping.” I did what everybody said to do in the reviews: take deep breaths while it’s absorbing and DON’T stand up too quickly! The only place where I had numbness was in my thumbs and big toes (I know—weird, right?). Make sure you’re in the bathroom the first time you use it, because like a bunch of people say, it might make you need to “go”. General note: I’d recommend being at home when you try it out.

It took a little while to work, and I have to admit, there were a few moments when I thought nothing was going to happen. I thought I might be in that small percentage of people (like, on this site, J.T. in NV and A.L. in MN) who see no effects from it. I was sitting there on the toilet lid for what seemed like forever. Some of you will remember from other reviews of mine the unusual setup of my bathroom, with the big window across from the toilet...? At night I always put the blinds down, but during the day, when nobody can see in (and, I mean, who would *want* to, anyway--haha) I keep them up. So, I was nervously/excitedly waiting for something to happen and watching the neighbors go about their business, when one of the nuns came out into the convent garden. I love the nuns, but I *hate* it when they look at me. I’m always like, can they see my sins? I leaned back a little, even though (duh) I knew she didn’t even know *I* was looking at *her*. She put a foam pad thing down on the stone patio. Then she kneeled on it—really flexible for an elderly lady!— and took some gloves and shears out of a little basket, and she started to trim what were I guess dead branches off the lower part of a shrub. Nuns prune! She wasn’t wearing an official *habit*, just a gray smock, and her head was bare and she had short gray hair like a lot of them. I kept glancing in my hand mirror it to see if anything had changed. It hadn’t. (Sigh). And then I’d go back to the nun. I wondered if nuns care about *this* kind of thing. Do they want to *feel better* about themselves? Or is that not part of the experience of being a nun? It’s not about them, but about serving God? Or Jesus? What IS the Trinity, anyway? But really—and I don’t know if any nuns visit this site, and if you do, maybe you can answer my questions—it seems like nuns wouldn’t *need* a product like this! They might be some of the only people who don’t. The nun was gathering up her twigs into a paper bag when I started to feel it. It was HAPPENING!!!

I was so, so, SO happy! I immediately got up and went to the sink and looked in the vanity mirror, so I could see three views at once. That was this morning. I CAN’T STOP looking in the mirror!!! I haven’t felt this gorgeous in years. Actually, I haven’t ever felt this gorgeous! In high school, nobody noticed me. I was so drab and blah, and I was always wrapped in this shell of shyness and insecurity. And there were other factors like my mother, the hurricane, stepfather (and his whiskey), half-brother, the belt, sleeping in the station wagon, tilt-a-whirl accident, etc. etc. In college, I *did* get noticed, but—like so many people—it was just because I learned to give blowjobs (I know, tell me about it, I was a late bloomer!) and I turned out to be good at them. So, anyway, suddenly, here I am, years later, parading around my apartment naked, ADMIRING myself!

For the first time, I feel like ME! I keep touching my own skin and kissing myself! I keep thinking about my bones and the way they’re put together with joints! I keep thinking about my lips and how they stay wet, how I lick them without even consciously noticing they need lubrication! There’s an electric charge between my eyes and everything I see! I can’t stop moving—even now, typing this review, I’m dancing inside my brain! I always thought I was less than a person! I always thought that because of EVERYTHING that happened I could never fall in love! I always felt like I was about to die of loneliness! I always felt like my flesh was going to turn into cinders and drift away on the air currents! But I can fall in love! I know this because I AM in love with my new me!!!

I highly recommend this product.

-L.G. in PA

Nelly Reifler is the author of See Through, a collection of stories. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and Pratt Institute.

No news today - Guest Post - Catherine Foulkrod

2011-11-02T09:39:00.000-07:00

He becomes public. Our man breaks world record, becomes a statistic for hope. Trapped between aging and dying, he is made a Newsprint Baby, deemed a sage, captioned as the oldest man living, given a Goddamn plaque. We draw near with quiet desires for longevity, and listen.

“I sleep like a dog,” he says.

Catherine Foulkrod lives/writes in Brooklyn.

No news today - Guest Post - Edward Mullany

2011-10-30T09:24:00.000-07:00

No News Today

The streets are quiet, the park
too, the squirrels

and the acorns the squirrels
hide.

Edward Mullany is the author of If I Falter at the Gallows (Publishing Genius, October 2011)

No news today - Guest Post - M Thompson

2011-10-25T07:28:00.001-07:00

In the final months before his death, the editor, long after his publishing career had reached its disgraceful, well-publicized end and who, afterward, worked briefly as a solicitor of advertisements for the city phone book before relocating nine hundred and ninety one miles west to become a night manager at a twenty-four hour bookshop outside Hammond, Indiana that sold, exclusively, used technical manuals on circuitry and electronic device repair before that business, too, became insolvent, and he, after seven lost years in which no discernible trace of his activities has been discovered – during which time his first wife, Edie, legally changed her name back to Dalrymple and the last of his remaining relatives passed away in their sleep – reemerged quietly as a part-time assembly line worker in Paw Paw, Wyoming, fabricating inspirational refrigerator magnets from the busted apart, gray-yellowed keys of obsolete keyboards, where, on his lunch breaks and after work, at home, at the table, in his Caligari-ceilinged apartment above Jane’s Luck-O Laundromat, began composing, in notebooks and across scraps of loose-leaf paper bound together with wire, an uninterrupted, unpaginated, unindented “We Regret These Errors” -style article in which, it appears, the editor, whose influence had once loomed so largely over the publishing world and who, during what many now refer to as the Golden Age of Ink, famously declared, “When print dies, so does this, so do we, so do I,” produced approximately six thousand and fifty six separate entries worth of corrections.

Addendums are still being discovered. At the time of this pressing, pages have been found taped behind drawers, beneath the belly of a radiator, stuffed inside mugs like packing material and folded neatly into V shapes, upturned and arranged as rows of paper teeth across the smudged glass shelves of a locked medicine cabinet.

Unsurprisingly, the corrective article refers to the editor’s own periodical, Zum. The issue in question, called the “August Issue,” would have been his one-hundredth publication had he and his publishing imprint not collapsed so completely in the months leading up to its release.
Each entry follows an identical format, the number to each line changing, seemingly at random, though, so far, never repeating: “In line [x] of our August Issue, the Editor failed to adjust the following error”

And, so far, each entry apologizes for the same misspelling: “Yefterday’s fish.”

M Thompson was born in northern Michigan and now lives in Seattle. His work has previously appeared in places like Unsaid, Everyday Genius, Monkeybicycle, and Spork, among others. He is concerned primarily with fiction writing and running long distances.www.m-thompson.net

No news today - Guest Post - Meredith Walters

2011-10-20T06:17:00.001-07:00

The Scribe’s Umbrella

In such a season as recalls the sun, an ashtray full of pennies,
a visit to a widow leads you to wonder:
virtue and integrity, the effort to be a great man
among bouts of neuralgia, neurosis, the rum someone slipped in your soda for which you do not remember asking,
to take suitable decisions—
where is it true to say you live, when lions pace elsewhere, terrific
and recalled from memory? A river of wine, a river of honey,
a river that sings: do not ask what is suffered elsewhere.
A bridge over the river to the Bronx.

In such a season,
two kids in a sort of strange song and dance in the vestibule
of their mother’s bank lead you to wonder
how a tune might begin that praises a widow who never touches her
dead husband’s books. A sculpture unearthed
again depicts a scribe with his case and absent stylus but does not mete
the hours that passed from task to task.
What sign to make among disbelievers? You have been called
by a singer unseen and such is your nature
that even the spaces between questions calls to you.

An apocryphal lion roams the Venetian landscape.
It roams St. Petersburg, it roams the Bronx.
Your advisors despite the distance of an era awaiting
excavation only suggest what it might be like
to leave and not to abandon yourself. Apprentice the hands to the violin
to forge a memory,
to strike a path, to be your passage from uncertainty, like building a wing
on a building.

In such a season as a woman in furs puts her poodle in a cab
the scribe amends the story to end:
“And they were terrified.”
The effortless gesture, the trained arm, the hand is a voice.
The hand enthroned.
Fear and fearfulness. What you know to be
your left ventricle, where a violin awaits the accompaniment
of a provisional composition, as compassion
—what is suffered elsewhere.
What the river is like, what the war is like, what doubt is like.
The bravery to say happiness in a dark age.
We are merciless in our regrets.

Thought and thinking.
A table of friends who do not know where to begin their renditions
of all they fear they allowed to let pass.
The time spent thinking, time wasted being afraid,
knowing and responsibility, idea and mind,
thought and unknown, an actual umbrella.
Friend, have you too been abandoned?
And if so by what?

Should you, a scribe among contemporaries record them as heroes
of mystical texts?
Their fingers aren’t god.
The great permissions, the great restraints. First the songs,
then the theories.
You recover your questions:
How can the water of a lake be both clear and blue?
Have you dreamt the white flag?
To make distinctions in darkness.
A song whose only words are every way to say no.
An involuntary memory.
You praise the clear darkness.
To say no to every question is triumphant.

A great man once said, “Fresh Kills is a collage.”
A great man once said, “The mind is a mechanized Atlantic.”
To call on the widow of a great man
to be an apprentice, a scribe, to be a great man,
to be unable.
How you are seen by someone with your back toward her
in a bath of sunlight
you would be too shy to accept should you realize its presence.
And instead you turn your son’s attention to his shadow.

When the widow utters instructions for surviving a war
and likens death to bread thrown into the sea,
you understand that you do not yet know.
When your god waves from a bridge
from which he will not be talked down, the sky unravels
into a forged Venetian twilight
where you recover first one idea, then another.
The river shall gather its skirts and journey across the lion.
You are forgiven.

Meredith Walters curates art and culture programs for the Brooklyn Public Library. Her book, All You Have to Do is Ask, won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry in 2006. Her poems have appeared in Conduit, Spout, Jubilat, Crowd, and Subtropics.

No news today - Guest Post - Richard Chiem

2011-10-12T07:02:00.000-07:00

WASTE A LITTLE SHAVING CREAM

In the space ahead of her, there seems to be something. In another room the noise is more muffled and less revealing. Her identical twin sister is close to climax a few feet away from her through the walls behind a David Bowie poster. Chloe walks barefoot on the wooden floorboards back and forth in her own room in pale movements. She regrets knowing her own face so well and feels a need to shave or cut something. She wants more from her refrigerator other than subdued light and loose condiments. She says Ketchup and Dijon mustard. Because she owes so much money she stays inside her house on nights and weekends. Lately, she has been reading more stories of people trapped inside their houses voluntarily. She says, Did you know there is a man in Tokyo who has never seen the city of Tokyo. He only knows the inside of his apartment dozens and dozens of pizza boxes, a broken empty telephone. Finally her sister orgasms arms outstretched knocking the wall between them like a door in brief parched momentary pleasure. Both sisters are quietly transported, now laying motionless on either side of the wall. Although she knows better Chloe does not feel deep significance anywhere. She goes and answers the front door and of course no one is there. She says, Why hello person.

Richard Chiem (b.1987) is the author of two e books WHAT IF, WENDY and OH NO EVERYTHING IS WET NOW (with Ana C.) He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has appeared in Monkeybicycle, Magic Helicopter Press, and Everyday Genius. His first collection of short stories YOU PRIVATE PERSON is forthcoming from Scrambler Books (2012). He blogs here: http://richardchiem.blogspot.com/

No news today - Guest Post - Kathleen Ossip

2011-10-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

The Perfect Day

Every
penetrating
warm

I
that
pokes
is
thrilled

uproarious
August
other

like
commercial
splashing

fizz-water
white
if
spilled
of
me

the
cloud
heap

and
looks
can
like
the
smell

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Cold War, just out from Sarabande Books; The Search Engine, which won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. She teaches at The New School, where she was a co-founder of LIT, and she’s the poetry editor of Women’s Studies Quarterly. Read more at kathleenossip.com.

No news today - Guest Post - Peter Markus

2011-09-27T09:46:00.000-07:00

What a Bird Can’t Say

It happened when it happened.
It happened like this.
It happened near a church.
It happened on a Wednesday.
It did not happen in the morning.
It happened in the night.
Doesn’t it always happen in the night?
It did not happen in the day.
It did not happen in the daylight.
I am telling about what happened on the train.
I am writing this all down while sitting on the train.
I would say while riding on the train but when I say riding that makes me think of riding as in I am riding on a bike.
I am not riding on a bike.
I am sitting on a train.
I am writing on a train.
The sky outside is blue.
When what happened happened the sky outside and above us all was black.
It was not blue.
The sun it wasn’t shining.
Somewhere I am sure the sun was shining when what happened happened.
The sun is always somewhere shining when things happen like they did.
What happened happened on a night when the stars in the sky were shining bright.
Each star in the sky is a burning sun.
What happened did not happen in the sky.
But the sky that night was watching when what happened did.
A bird in the sky might have seen it happen.
But since birds can’t tell of what they’ve seen since birds can only sing, I am here to tell it.
To say what a bird can’t say.
It’s not what is said that’s important here.
What’s important is how I say what I saw when I say what happened did.
I saw what happened happen.
It happened in a town.
When I say it happened in a town what I mean to say is in a place that is smaller than a city.
Things like this, like what I saw happen, always seem to happen in the city.
Things like this, like what I say happened happened, don’t usually happen in towns.
At least not in a town like ours.
It’s time for me to come clean.
What happened happened when it happened like it did because of me.
What happened happened, is what I’m trying to say, because of what I didn’t do when I saw what I say did.
What happened happened because I was there.
I was there to say what I saw.
It’s not what I did but what I didn’t.
I was near the church when what happened did.
I was there that night, is what I am saying, when I saw what I’m saying about did.
Outside my window right now the world is passing by me fast.
There is a lake right now outside this window.
This window that is the train’s.
There is a factory right now outside this window that makes me think of the town where what happened happened did.
May this train on its track stay on its track.
I do not want to be derailed or to be run off of this track.
In our town there is only one side of the tracks.
There is the tracks in our town and then there is the river.
The church where what happened happened is somewhere in between.
The price of gas right now is a few cents shy of four dollars.
I remember when the price of gas was forty-seven cents a gallon.
When I was a kid, I used to think if I was the one selling the gas I’d sell it for fifteen cents a gallon so that cars would line up for miles to buy their gas from me.
This must’ve been back in like 1973.
I was like seven in 1973.
In 1973 the A’s of Oakland won the American League pennant.
Ten years later I could throw a baseball eighty-four miles an hour.
In 1984, a year later, my right shoulder made a sound that shoulders aren’t supposed to make.
It wasn’t so much a sound as it was a feeling.
I might have made the sound that it made up.
When I went with my shoulder to our town’s local doctor, this doctor said I should take up running track.
I ran myself away from this doctor and went down to the river.
If I said I know of a man who lives on the river, would you believe that this was true?
The back of the church where what happened happened looks out onto the river.
When a train runs through town and runs its whistle up against the sky the preacher in this church has to raise his voice up to be heard.
I like to sing nursery rhymes to myself when I am supposed to be sitting in church.
A rhyme is its own religion.
The smoke in the sky makes it hard for me to sometimes breathe.
When things burn, where does what they turn into go?
Smokestacks, when they raise up all rusty against the sky, they make the sky seem human.
Rust is both a color and a state of being.
There is a book that I know called On Being and Nothingness.
About this book I like its title but the words inside put me to sleep.
I sleep on the side and with the lights in the hall burning.
I am not afraid of the dark.
What I am afraid of at night is what I might see looking back out at me from inside of the dark.
It was dark out when it happened.
It was night.
It was night and the night is always dark.
When the sun at night sets like it does like it is doing outside right now the sky loses hold of its blueness.
What would happen if I’d just said right now that when the sun sets the sky loses hold of its balloon-ness?
What does a balloon lose hold of?
What a balloon loses is the breath that we blow up inside it.
When we blow out the candles on a birthday cake, we can’t forget to make a wish.
I wish right now I had a cake with candles on it for me to blow out.
The balloon I am picturing, it is always blue.
A balloon that is blue when it’s held up against the sky it’s hard to tell which is which.
The blue of the balloon, it blends in with the blue of the sky.
The balloon becomes the sky.
And the train conductor says what he says, what he says, what he says he says in a song.
I cannot say what was said on the train but I can beat time with my hand upon my head.
It takes some time for the sky to turn all dark.
It takes a while for the blue of the sky to give up the sky to black.
It takes some time too to set the record straight.
I am doing my best to do what I am doing, to say what I saw when what happened did.
Take your time, I keep telling myself, and the story of how so and what did will get told.
The night is not yet entirely dark.
Streetlights, traffic-lights, buoys on the river.
Each one does battle against the dark.
The church at night is as dark and quiet as a bible.
In the Bible it says, Let there be light.
But it also says that the darkness is what came first.
A fire burns bright in the back of the yard.
In the woods four boys with sticks raise their arms up against the dark.
The husk of an army tank sits rusting out in front of a house.
The church where what happened happened has a name.
The Rock of Christ on the River.
The preacher inside The Rock of Christ on the River is a man named Bob.
I once knew a man who lived out on the river in a boat and this man and his boat were both named Bob too.
In the woods behind the church as boys we used to build bonfires at night and piss out beer into the flames.
One night I believed the end was near.
We stepped out of our clothes in the starless dark and ran ourselves down to the river.
The sign at the edge of the river said, Do Not Swim and another sign said to us, Do Not Eat The Fish, but us boys we knew not to listen.
We swam out into the dark waters.
We found a fish washed up on the muddy shore and we stuck a stick up through its mouth until it came out the side of its belly.
We held this fish over the fire.
We held it like this, over the fire, until its tail curled and blackened and we knew it was ready for us to eat.
We ate the fish.
We took turns eating the fish.
I ate its eyes.
I ate its eyes so that I could better see.
So that I could see like a fish.
I shut my eyes.
I did not see.
I did not want to believe.

Peter Markus' newest book We Make Mud is out now from Dzanc Books.

No news today - Guest Post - John Dermot Woods

2011-09-19T10:02:00.001-07:00

The main story is that I lost at tennis today, 6-1. The back pages would suggest it was unseasonably cool, and my experience would add that clouds covered what sun there was. That’s good weather for midday tennis in June. A 6-1 loss is less than ideal, and, frankly, not even competitive. A set like that isn’t worth much mention. The fact that gives a loss like that some kind of import is that it stands at the beginning of what I expect to be a regular summer regimen. This is a regimen that couldn’t have been predicted, based on the facts that I had assumed all NYC public courts were full as long as the sun is up (assuming that, especially in Brooklyn, irregular work and work schedules and a preponderance of academics such as me and my partner would keep them full regardless of the day), and that I didn’t realize I had a friend with a beard (not the kind you’re thinking of) one neighborhood over who was also interested in a regular tennis regimen and available weekday in the midday. Also, I didn’t have a racket. But a friend from Massachusetts visited last week and helped me find a serviceable one at a fair price at the local sporting goods store. A HEAD racket. The hope is to win one or two more games this week and soon take a set. The prudent choice would be to work on ground strokes before focusing on improving my abysmal first serve percentage.

When summer began my intention was to start surfing again. It’s been a decade since surfing or tennis. Skills atrophy over time so I expected I would resort to longboarding. It’s been cold in New York, trips to Long Beach have been delayed (and surfboards cost more than tennis rackets). Tennis is more than a substitute.

Another likely result of tennis is playwriting.

John Dermot Woods is the author of The Complete Collection of people, places & things. He has books forthcoming from Awesome Machine, Jaded Ibis, and Double Cross Presses. He edits Action, Yes and is a professor of English at Nassau Community College.

No news today - Guest Post - Andrea Kneeland

2011-09-12T09:22:00.000-07:00

There is no news today. Were there news today, many people would be drinking and dancing in the streets. There are not many people drinking and dancing in the streets. The people I know are not the type of people that wait for news to dance and drink in the street. The people I know are drunk by 11 am on Monday. The people I know steal half-wasted party balloons from the stop sign on the corner and take them to a dive bar to barter for Stoli. The people I know dance on the bus. The people I know accidentally piss in a one-night-stand’s closet. The people I know break their phones on street corners. The people I know hitch rides from the Domino’s Pizza car so they won’t have to pay for a cab. The people I know wouldn’t know that there was news today, even if there was news today. The people I know will hear about the news a few days later and then maybe eventually watch a clip of it on YouTube after no one else cares anymore. The people I know will already be drunk and maybe crying when they watch the news clip anyway so whatever emotion they feel won’t be about the news since there is no news to begin with. The people I know fuck each other in bathroom stalls before realizing they have lost their keys. The people I know never find their way home. If there was news today, it would be about the people I know.

Andrea Kneeland's first collection, the Birds & the Beasts is forthcoming from Cow Heavy Press later this year. Work has most recently appeared in Vinyl Poetry, Barrelhouse, mud luscious press, FRiGG and NANO Fiction. She's also a web editor for Hobart.

No news today - Guest Post - Amelia Gray

2011-09-06T09:58:00.000-07:00

Sandy one-two, the floor's so dull it looks lined with feathers. It looks sandy like the beach. Is there anything as dull as determining the dullness of a floor? I've got a sinus pressure, my head is a shell. The sound of the ocean is inside. There's a throb of water between my ears. If it started leaking onto the floor, the water, there is nobody here who would be surprised. I'm saying, if there was anybody here, they would not be surprised. Nobody is here, I'm saying. Come over.

Amelia Gray is the author of AM/PM (Featherproof Books) and Museum of the Weird (FC2). Her first novel, THREATS, is due Winter 2012 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

No news today - Guest Post - Gina Myers

2011-09-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

Once, no news was good news & we enjoyed
our perpetual waiting. The longer we waited,
the better it was. Now, no news is bad news
& the only news we know. Like that month in college
where all I ate was ramen noodles & I was able
to whittle my intake down to two packages a day.
I remember reading a line in a poem that said something
about cleaning yesterday’s mistake from the stove
& underlining it—that seemed like news, the kind
of news you can free yourself from. Just wipe it clean.
The daily paper is gone & with it the comfort
of community notes & box scores. There have been no
engagements, no birth announcements, no weddings,
no deaths. The weather report no longer forecasts
the week, instead breaks down the past 24 hours
for those of us who remained indoors & forgot to look
out a window. My morning routine, obsolete.
The post-breakfast analysis coming at the top of the hour.

Gina Myers is the author of A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and several chapbooks, including False Spring (forthcoming from Spooky Girlfriend). She lives in Atlanta, GA.

No news today - Guest Post - Imad Rahman

2011-08-26T07:39:00.001-07:00

There is some news today, but you already knew that. What you didn’t know is that in the today of this story that is also not-story, I threw a tantrum splattered with woe and intrigue live and in-person, you know the emotional kind of blackmail that you throw because you have the courage of your convictions like a kidnapper with a social agenda, and betrayed myself for the child I really am, the kidnapper demanding of the kidnappee, ‘Why don’t you love me?’ and lost perhaps a friend but gained a Greyhound trip back to Cleveland from The City, before which, after lager and ale and pilsner and whiskey consumed at a pace that would seem romantic were it not, come on, masturbatory, and in a place where I had to punch in a code to get into the bathrooms and the code did not work, threw yet another series of tantrums remotely via text message, tried to lose said friend yet again, a kind beautiful generous soul with legs that I wish would wrap themselves around my neck for a second time but that are now and perhaps forever another city, and who really has no business trucking with the likes of me and my Mountains of Unresolved, realized I’ve been taking the Greyhound a lot recently like someone in a Denis Johnson novel, someone named Fuckhead or Houston, got to thinking that if I can’t write like Denis Johnson I can at least live like a character in one of his novels, that being what some people call living deliberately, if that’s news to you, started jonesing for the hound days from the 90’s, the coke, the weed, the booze, the cigarettes, all gone now in this today but the booze, and the clarity that should accompany the quitting has quit, although there was this guy who, at the trucker rest stop, one of those rest stops that looks like an outtake from the Maximum Overdrive set where the semis go bananas and try to kill Emilio Estevez and conquer the world, and where today on the set of my life there is beef and turkey jerky everywhere and sleek, dangerous knives for sale behind glass, anyway, this guy, who looks military-jaded, face crumpled under his hoodie, he says, ‘Do you smoke Marlboros?’ and I go, ‘I used to,’ and he says, ‘Well you can again,’ and he hands me his pack and I say, ‘I think I’ve quit,’ and he says, ‘I don’t need them any more, I’m going home,’ and I was in the moment heartbroken, not because someone gets to go home and I don’t really know what that means other than the country, Pakistan, that I grew up in and have not returned to for fifteen years or this place I rent where the dogs wait patiently on the chewed-up couch after the dogsitter leaves, but because what do you say to a friend who you want in that desperate way you’ve wanted someone who you want more like a lover but who you only get to keep in your life as a friend, and what do you say when you’re angry that all you’ve got is a friend and what the fuck is wrong with you, with her, with the world, that there can’t be more, more, more!, and then you’re terrified that once you have your barbaric yawps all texted you’ll be left with no friend at all, no gray eyes so contact-friendly that pierce and linger like that shard of glass that once got stuck in my finger for weeks and stung until I learned to love the way it stung and then if you were me you’d get to thinking about that moment in the bus when at eleven, nighttime, grimy windows, grainy world, someone announced, ‘He’s dead! They got him! They killed Bin Laden!’ and there was cheering, and the bus driver with the accent that is Poland but not precisely, he was cheering, and the dude to my left who is wearing a sweatshirt that looks like it has belonged previously to five different dudes from five different cities, he’s cheering, and the woman up front in the frayed everything, she’s cheering, and the whole bus, this motley crew that now feels like family, they’re all cheering, and my friend-not-lover, she was perhaps cheering, though she isn’t that sort of person, cheering back in her apartment, but not from the back room where I broke that jar of organic sauerkraut and where I’d spent the night, and I was cheering, but with that sliver of dread, because, you know, I’m petrified by death, by the death of things, and here I am back in this moment I’m writing about and so I take the cigarettes from the guy with the home and I put them in my pocket and I don’t smoke them and I’m thinking if this was something more substantially desperate in my pocket I would, I would, I would, because I am after all a child, and then I get a text from my friend who is still, despite my best efforts, trying to be my friend, that reads, ‘Are you okay? You seem really manic! Did you take some meth with some Greyhound people? And if so, can you please write me a short story about it?’ so while there’s no meth here, there should be, there should be that scene where this guy who, come to think of it, looks a little like Emilio Estevez circa Repo Men, behind the stubble and the stain of war, this guy and I, we’d go behind one of those monster trucks with snarling decals that’s about ready to roar alive and take the whole parking lot hostage, and we’d smoke something that will do something untenable and rotten to our teeth with protracted use and then there are those knives back behind glass at that truck stop counter, and they, the knives, they got to go off by the third act, right, because for that dude, in that story, a punch in the face is really just a handjob, and there are monster trucks to hallucinate and battle, there is glass yet to be broken and hearts yet to be stabbed, although none of that happens, yet, not to this me-dude who can’t even in this hollow time smoke a cigarette, and then finally here, now, in this no-longer today moment, if she’s reading this, this is the best I can do, this apology that is not-apology, this not-story story, this piece of sweet and bitter, this is for you if you’ve made it this far, and this is to say that all I wanted to say was please don’t leave me lonely and that is all the news I have for you and for everybody.

Imad Rahman is the author of I Dream of Microwaves, a collection of connected stories. He teaches at Cleveland State University & directs the Imagination Writers Workshop & Conference.

No news today - Guest Post - Laird Hunt

2011-08-21T14:53:00.001-07:00

Poisoned Waters

In the late summer of 1990 I spent a week trying to learn to surf in a fishing village not far from Sendai on the eastern coast of Japan. There were five or six of us in an old wooden house – three or four Japanese guys, me and my friend Mike. We had been invited by the son of one of the English teachers in my school. The school was in Kumagaya, a few hours away, far from the sea. At the school I taught seven classes a day in windowless rooms the size of large closets. These were not necessarily always dreary sessions but the memory — here, now — of being on the coast, with those guys, in a large, airy old house is a good one.

We slept on the floor, it goes without saying. One of the guys ground his teeth all night. Another of the guys, Koji, was a looker and spent a lot of time talking to his girlfriends. The third guy, whose nickname was Skeleton, was very tall. The fourth guy, if there was one, I can’t remember.

The guys were well-equipped for their surfing labors. They and all the other surfers on the beach had good gear. Good gear was important for sporting activity in Japan. Waves were important, too, but there weren’t a lot of them that week. Enough though that Mike and I, who had never been on surf boards before (or since), got smashed repeatedly onto the hard sand. We also got scraped up, lacking wet-suits, by the wax on our boards. What the fuck, right? It’s pathetic, grotesque even to talk about surfing in those waters, I know that, but there the memory is, there is sits, bobs, attempts to stand.

So, anyway, we tried. Koji and crew were okay. They caught waves. Mike and I may eventually have caught a wave or two as well. Mainly though I remember the hard sand stuff and a bunch of guys in good gear bobbing in the water and the blue sky and the warm sun.

Then we played beach volleyball. I think I got a little aggressive and wacked the ball into someone’s face. That wasn’t nice. Then a typhoon struck. We spent days in the old house. I think we may have played cards. Poker for yen. Certainly we drank beer. Conversed. Told jokes. One day we ventured out to a bathhouse. Some of the local Yakuza were there. One had a missing finger. All were tattooed. We laughed and pointed at each other. You know. The hottest bath was hot enough to make you cry. “You” being me and Mike. There had been some horsing around before the bath part. During the spigot part. But during the bath part everyone just sat still and tried to keep it together.

Generally, we ate a lot of rice and fish and seaweed. Ramen too. At night the guy who ground his teeth ground his teeth. Or is that grinded? I wish I could remember what Skeleton was like when he was sleeping. Actually, I can. Only I don’t know how to write it. Koji probably slept handsomely. The years go by. Mike and I probably snored.

A few days ago someone asked me to write something featuring water that has been poisoned. They meant write about Japan. The rain from the typhoon has grown very warm in my memory of it, but quite possibly we were shivering a lot during that so-called week of surfing. I wasn’t much liked, but Mike was popular. I was just starting to try to write and was already a little distant. Now, radiation from the Fukushima plant is leaking into the ocean. Some of the leak is deliberate. Part of a strategy. According to some international experts this is not a problem. It is hard to know what they could possibly mean by this. Or what they think they mean by this. People say stuff. I think of the scientists in all those Japanese nuclear horror monster movies. Saying stuff. What are they saying? What can they mean?

Meanwhile, Skeleton is kind of curled up in my memory of him sleeping. He is smiling too. That kid is still grinding his teeth. The Yakuza guy’s finger is still gone. We are all still bobbing in the waters. Much of Sendai was wiped out by the tsunami. I’m sure that little wooden house we spent those days in all those years ago now was too.

Laird Hunt is the author of a book of short stories, mock parables and histories, The Paris Stories (2000), originally from Smokeproof Press, though now re-released by Marick Press, and four novels, The Impossibly (2001), Indiana, Indiana (2003), The Exquisite (2006) and Ray of the Star (2009) all from Coffee House Press. His translation from the French of Oliver Rohe’s Vacant Lot is recently out from Counterpath Press.

No news today - Guest Post - Zach Dodson

2011-08-15T08:11:00.000-07:00

I avoid the news. In winter I only read the section where they spin research reports and lab results into press releases. The New York Times Science section. This week they had an article entitled "Reptile’s Pet-Store Looks Belie Its Triassic Appeal". The creature staring out from the page like any old lizard. But it's not a lizard, is the point of the story. I can't tell you how this makes me feel. I take my gloves off. The creature is called the tuatara and it lives in New Zealand.

They call it a 'living fossil', essentially identical to specimens unearthed from before the age of dinosaurs. The tuatara can live well over 100 years, maybe as many as 200, they don't really know. They're nocturnal, they're endangered, they're cannibalistic. The Maori tribes who named them believe they are messengers of the God of Death, that no pregnant woman should eat them. They have a prehistoric third eye on their forehead, the legendary pineal eye, a light-sensing node. It helps them know where the sun is, what season it is.

We melted over 40,000 pounds of snow today. The mound is almost gone. The men here don’t like the dark that lasts all day. I don’t mind. The shifts are over before I know it. Time seems to disappear in the dark.

Despite the popular belief that I adhered to until reading this article, most reptiles aren't really cold-blooded. When the temperature drops too low, they die. Not the tuatara. It can survive at just a few degrees above zero, a temperature at which any other reptile would freeze. Or not 'any other', because they're not reptiles. They are a different thing. A distinct creature.

I used to think I was smart. People told me I was smart as a child. I was put in the training camp called 'Gifted and Talented'. My particular gifts or talents were never enumerated. While the other kids memorized spelling lists we made creative things out of papier-mâché. I can't spell papier-mâché.

Take the Neanderthal. They weren't just another step in human evolution, they were a different branch entirely. They existed side by side with Homo Sapien Sapien. Modern humans like you, sometimes me. Neanderthal tools, Neanderthal language. We interbred with them. And then we probably killed them off. Or they died of cold. This is all speculative. And controversial. I encourage you to look it up when we get back to the station.

The crux is that a Neanderthal was fundamentally different than a human. They were another human-like creature living at the same time as humans. As I walked over with lunch just now I kept thinking: What if they hadn't died out? Imagine it: bigger, different, hairy human-creatures living right along side us. Forget conflict over religion or race or nationality. Slide science to the front page. They had bigger brains than we do. It wasn't Harry and the Hendersons. They were smarter, less violent. Your laugh is disgusting. They were like prehistoric Europeans, cultured.

You see, I wanted to say something at lunch about how I feel now: that I matter less, that it's less important who I am. Just anyone, checking my reflection in the side of this glacier, frowning at the sea. But it doesn't matter to you either… no, I know it doesn't. And it's OK. It doesn't matter to the world. It does not feel important. Does not feel important to say it to you, does not feel important to say it to myself, does not feel important to set it down for posterity. What does posterity consist of? No Neanderthal, maybe tuatara, but only for a blink, for a breath of time, back at work with 780 pounds of snow on the news truck, you calling out some stupid joke while locking up the hatch. I don’t laugh. Ever. This is death’s country and we’ve got a pet store to build.

Zach Dodson’s hybrid typo/graphic novel, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, came out in 2008 under the nom de plume Zach Plague. He has also launched such experiments as Featherproof Books, Bleached Whale Design, and The Show N’ Tell Show. He enjoys pleasant weather.

No news today - Guest Post - Carmen Gimenez-Smith

2011-08-08T14:37:00.000-07:00

Today in Celeb News

by Carmen Giménez Smith- Hollywood’s Deep Insider

In today’s celebrity news, Kiera Knightley slid out of the sheets of her fluffy bed at New York’s premiere W Hotel’s to curl up with her new iPad from which she’s reading the new Mark Twain biography. She was lamenting the days in which it was de rigueur to read great books while sitting in one’s canvas actor’s chairs, Marilyn Monroe reading Joyce’s Ulysses, etc., so she decided to buy herself a proper copy as a ruse. She had to change out of the same sweats she’d been wearing for the last two days, and put on a pair of Balenciaga gladiator boots just to go down the hall to knock on her assistant’s door—its more polite that way—and send him to buy her a copy of the book. She hates hotel hallways.

On Johnny Depp’s private island, trouble is brewing…between his children. Lily-Rose Depp refuses to let Jack Depp play with the Wii in the screening room, which forces little Jack, named after Depp’s groundbreaking role as Jack Sparrow in the film, Pirates of the Carribean, based on the 1967 Disney ride that terrified this journalist’s 3-year old son who insisted on riding the ride despite this journalist’s apprehension about the skeleton parts. The journalist’s child was indeed traumatized by the experience, and this journalist vowed to not return until the boy was of age, but in addition, recognized the inanity of buying food at Disneyland, what with the exorbitant prizes, and felt a profound sense of grief at having nagged her working class parents to buy burgers, even when she wasn’t hungry. At any rate, the Wii debacle led to Depp, age 47, to send both his children to frolic on the fine sand of their private island. He has since vowed to prohibit his children from using the Wii in the screening room. Actors-just like us?

Back in Hollywood, Jennifer Aniston, age 41, our favorite spinster, is frantically insisting that her staff do something about the strange smell emanating from her refrigerator. The assistants have already thrown out the doggie bag from Eva Longoria’s restaurant Beso as well as some undated protein shakes delivered by her personal trainer without dates on their lids. Insiders say she’s holding on to the last jar of yogurt that Brad Pitt ever ate from, but friends say that’s “patently offensive, she’s been over him for years.” Did she and Eva exchange divorce lawyer phone numbers? We’ll see soon!!!!

George Clooney, 49 and his beautiful new arm candy, Italian television presenter, Elisabetta Canalis, 32, attended a matinee screening of the new hit film, True Grit, at the Century 8 in North Hollywood. Fans only recognized him when Elisabetta left the screening to use the bathroom, and returned to the darkened theatre and yelled, “George! George! George Clooneeeee!” Luckily, there were only seven other attendees as most people have been downloading Oscar contenders as torrents, so a potential riot was averted. The couple was reported to have consumed a large Sprite, a bag of peanut M&Ms and a medium popcorn, no butter. Clooney graciously signed one fan’s bosom, which she promptly had tattooed at famed tattoo parlor, High Voltage Ink, owned by 28-year old tattoo icon, Kat Von D who was not present during the tattooing of this unnamed Clooney fan. Perhaps she was busy with her new purported secret beau, Chicago mayor contender, Rahm Emmanuel.

Guess Who? Which A-list celebrity still argues with his B-list wife about who should take out the garbage each week? Mr. A insists that it’s the responsibility of their housekeeper, but Ms. B, with her working-class upbringing (and TV show role, hint,hint), feels that Mr. B should assume a more traditional role and take out the garbage himself. Hint: It’s not Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith.

Newly uncovered records reveal that Daniel Radcliffe, age 21, has not always been the star pupil he played at Hogwarts. A recently released history paper he wrote for an on-set tutor was practically drenched in red ink with language such as “redundant!” and “where’s the bloody thesis?” In 2001, this journalist once had dinner at a restaurant in Paris where Daniel Radcliffe and his family were having dinner. The only celebrity this journalist had ever had proximity with was Jack Klugman, at the Santa Anita Horse Races when she was a child. This journalist was absolutely transfixed by the boy and his celebrity and couldn’t stop staring, which made Daniel Radcliffe’s (alleged) sister very sour. Radcliffe left the restaurant wearing a NYPD hat, this being 2001. His representatives insist that this history paper was out of keeping with most of his studies, and that Radcliffe was “a diligent student of British history on and off set.”

Oh wait, this journalist saw LaToya Jackson at the Galleria in the late 80s. She looked like a tiger. And in the late 80s, Neil Patrick Harris was purported to have stopped at the men’s boutique two doors from the Eyexam 2000 where she worked at the time, but she missed seeing him by moments. That day, however, hearing that he had gone to this particular boutique, she began to wonder about her dream marriage to this actor, that is, if it would pan out, as one of the shop boys had mentioned a certain flirtation with said shop boy.

Guess Who? One tween music and television star is in hot water with his/her literary salon after using the word “volumptuous.” This super-exclusive literary salon, said to be attended by literary luminaries such as Ally Sheedy and Suzanne Somers is metaphorically “up in arms” at the faux-pas. Will this young up and comer survive this pronunciation predicament? Find out, next week, in the next installment of Today in Celeb News!

Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of three collections of poetry -- Odalisque in Pieces (University of Arizona, 2009), The City She Was (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), and Goodbye, Flicker (University of Massachusetts, 2012) -- and a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds (University of Arizona, 2010). She is the recipient of a Juniper Prize for poetry and a fellowship from the Howard Foundation for creative nonfiction. She is the publisher of Noemi Press, the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, and an assistant professor in the MFA program in creative writing at New Mexico State University.

No news today - Guest Post - David McLendon

2011-07-30T07:52:00.000-07:00

You did what you did.

You drank short blindful drinks and held your body too close to the world.

You lost your sleeves and showed up with wounds.

You cropped what you could of the sun's unappeasable light.

You grappled with nothing.

You made no revisions.

You addressed the battered odors of others by inhaling them as your own.

You pleaded the Fifth.

You pleaded no contest.

You repeated the names of American outskirts for any number of irretrievable reasons.

You leaned against the chotch.

You watched the other daily irregulars choke without song on what they imbibed.

You imbibed.

You found the flimsiest of heights insurmountable.

You felt on the verge of something climactical whenever entering a public stall.

You found the difference between "eventual" and "occasional" nothing less than bewildering.

You were devastated by women with crooked teeth.

You were beaten as a child.

You were beaten as an adolescent.

You were beaten as an adult.

You bruised easily.

You accepted most beatings with an ambiguous sort of cheer.

You took little comfort from the tidal mechanics of the moon.

You did what you did.

You were less fearless than indifferent to fear.

You crumbed years into minutes.

You preferred chin music over bullfighting.

You grew tired most days and veered headlong into seasonal fevers.

Your body was aggrieved by hearsay.

All you coveted of the world was a small Victorian toy.

David McLendon is a Fellow of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. He is founder and editor of Unsaid.

No news today - Guest Post - Alexandra Leggat

2011-07-22T10:15:00.001-07:00

On the television a clean shaven man with a yellow tie rattles on about devastation. Behind him a film of black water and floating homes. He changes his tone. An airplane drops a bomb on a dirt street. People in headdresses run. His smile lights up. The prince is to marry his princess. The man on the television's up and down. Sombre,. gleeful. A yellow tie. I make tea and eat an Arrowroot biscuit, think my hair could use a trim and outside the street is quiet. The sun moves west, taking the heat with it. The phone rings, my mother says, not much to report, just wanted to say hello. Dad thinks he sees a snake on the living room floor. She heard on the television a cobra escaped from the Bronx Zoo. She lives by the Niagara Falls/Buffalo border. The snake only escaped yesterday, Mom. It wouldn’t have made it that far yet. The man on the television says there is radiation in the water. With the phone in one hand, I head to the kitchen and turn on the tap. I don’t know what I'm hoping for but there’s nothing visibly new in the water. My husband says it’s coming from Japan. It won’t have made it this far yet. I nod and fill my glass. My mother asks if I know anything about cobras. She wants to know what to do if it reaches the house. Do you think dad had a premonition? I ask. She says she hopes it’s a premonition then they can prepare themselves. When I was young I remember overhearing a man on the television say that Charles Manson had escaped from prison. I had no clue who ran the new country we'd moved to, what the provinces were or the words to the national anthem but I was aware of the serial killer Charles Manson. I couldn't sleep because I was convinced he was hiding in my town, that he was coming to my house. Mom said, don’t worry dear. California is a long way from here. He won’t have made it this far yet. My Mother says if she doesn’t tell Dad that the snake he thinks he sees on the living room floor is the one that escaped from the Bronx Zoo then he won’t go to bed. He won't sleep. Then just tell him it is. Well, she says, he wants the reward. There's a reward? The man on the television says a snow squall warning is in effect. That's all, my mother says, not much to report. I put down the phone. Head to the closet and take out my boots and my hat and my down coat and mitts that I had put away for the season – it’s spring. My husband says, don’t worry, it's coming from the East, it won’t make here. It’s already gone down from a storm warning to flurries, by the time it hits the lake it will have dissipated. I turn off the television and say to him, God, we’re so lucky nothing ever happens here.

Alexandra Leggat is the author of the short story collections Animal (nominated for the 2010 Trillium Book Award), Meet Me in the Parking Lot and Pull Gently, Tear Here. She teaches writing classes at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies.

No news today - Guest Post - Laura van den Berg

2011-07-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

Nine Ways Not to Start a Novel: Discarded First Lines

1. We were lying in the dark.

2. We were lying in the dark—it wasn’t like city darkness, softened by streetlights and houselights and headlights, but like the bottom layer of the ocean, where nothing lives and nothing grows.

3. We were lying in the dark—it wasn’t like city darkness, softened by streetlights and houselights and headlights, but thick and black as paint.

4. Lights Out was at ten o’clock and it brought the darkest night I’d ever seen.

5. It was dark.

6. Today the Hospital was going to look inside our minds.

7. After the pilgrims, life in the Hospital changed.

8. We never understood what they could have wanted from us.

9. Everything was a story.

Laura van den Berg’s first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us (Dzanc, 2009), was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, longlisted for The Story Prize, and shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor Award. She lives in Baltimore and is revising a novel, which, thankfully, no longer begins with any of these lines.

No news today - Guest Post - Meg Pokrass

2011-07-11T12:59:00.001-07:00

Cow Chewing

On our walk, when he asks, I say, "Sure, I like burgers sometimes." Well hell -- I do sometimes. I don't say how I think too often about why we humans like to eat cows. The fact is that I feel excited about the idea of an organically raised one-pound beef burger on a baguette with cheddar, and that he is paying. The warm, mouth-filling popping experience of protein and carbohydrates and a place to sit and rest and talk to my friend who has no news. My friend and de-caf and cow chewing -- what could be better really? That means someone is cooking for me, not hating me or mad at me at all... in fact the person cooking may be wearing an adorable look on his mouth, as though he just smooched a womanly cow instead of frying one up. If they made a scene in a movie of this cute (let's make him cute) Berkeley cook doing up a burger he may have a long, velvet smile. Movies lie. Nobody cute cooks burgers for a living, but if they made a movie about it, there would be a bottle of cheap brandy underneath the steam table, the cook obsessed with a waitress called "Fizz" and really just wanting to fuck her. Fizz would be played by an actress with a baby face and huge, fake tits. The actor playing this cook would be striking if not tall (most actors aren't) and heavy-lidded thinking about Fizz's tits while frying up my one-pound burger, his gentle eyes moving from rare to medium-rare.

Meg Pokrass is the author of "Damn Sure Right" (Press 53) a recently released debut collection of 88 flash fiction stories. Frederick Barthelme says "Meg Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body. Wonderful, dark, unforgiving". Meg’s flash fiction, poems and animations have appeared in Gigantic, The Rumpus, Wigleaf, PANK, Smokelong, FRIGG, Big Muddy, Gargoyle, The Pedestal, Keyhole, Moon Milk Review, Annalemma, Mississippi Review, elimae, Monkeybicycle, Everyday Genius, Keyhole, 3AM, and other places. More about Meg here: http://www.megpokrass.com/

No news today - Guest Post - Gina Frangello

2011-07-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

We Are Complicit: Meditations on a Twenty-Eight-Year-Old Gang Rape and That Little Girl from Texas (originally appeared in The Nervous Breakdown)

News moves fast. Bombs in Libya, radiation in Japanese food, but I’m stuck. Still stuck on that case that broke earlier this month, about the eleven year old girl gang-raped in Texas.

I know, I know: a whole bunch has already been written about that. It’s been reported on all the major news stations. It’s been covered by the New York Times. Then there was all the outrage against the Times’coverage, including over at The Rumpus, and Zoe Zolbrod’s piece questioning our own complicity here at TNB.

Complicity. Yeah, I want to talk about that. I just don’t know how yet.

See, I can’t get this case out of my mind. For those of you who haven’t followed the fracas, the basics are that an eleven-year-old girl was raped by a large number of men back in October, but the case broke only recently. All the men brought up on charges (who range between age 14-late 20s) are African-American.The victim is Hispanic. Much of the media focus has been on how their town is being torn apart, racially, because of this. Some black activist groups have focused on the fact that black men are more readily and vigorously persecuted for sex crimes than other men, with one leader essentially saying that all men who have sex with children should be sent to prison, but that he doesn’t believe these (black) men were the only men to have sex with this child. Other media focus has centered on the fact that many in the community seem to either feel sorry for the accused boys whose lives could be ruined by the allegation, or to be so focused on blaming the parents of the young girl (for inadequate supervision, etc.) that they almost seem to be excusing the rapists, as in, “Well what did her parents think would happen?” Still others take this a step further and blame the way the eleven-year-old was dressed and claim that she lied about her age.

Needless to say, such coverage has caused a righteous shitstorm of rage among the many who find the victim’s attire, her mother’s parenting skills, or the color of the accused men’s skin entirely beside the point, and who demand to know why nobody seems to be thinking about the victim—the little girl—who was gang raped. Where is she in all this, they ask?

I want to be among these askers. I am among these askers. I agree with every single thing they say, and I have built my adult life largely around wanting to be counted among their feminist, progressive numbers.

And yet there is a small voice inside me that comes from another place and another time. A voice that keeps saying, “Where is she? Well, she’s in the goddamn New York Times, that’s where she is. That’s progress!”

Let me back up here. That may have come out wrong. I mean, I realize that we live in an era where sometimes people get famous because awful shit happens to them (i.e. a man becomes a porn star after his wife cuts off his dick; i.e. James Franco gets an Oscar nomination because some poor guy cut off his arm), but that’s not remotely what I’m talking about here. What I mean isn’t “she’s famous.”

What I mean is, “This crime isn’t invisible.”

I grew up in another world.

Logistically, the world I come from still exists. We were blue collar working poor, as many people are today.Our streets were seeped with gang violence and low-level organized crime, as many neighborhoods still are. Misogyny was open and casual, and many men beat their wives, girlfriends, daughters (and sons), because a man’s family was regarded as his property, and it was bad form to interfere in “family matters.”Many of the mothers in the neighborhood had gotten married and had children when they were as young as fourteen or fifteen, and although marriage at that age was uncommon by the time I was coming of age in the 1980s, sexual relationships between adult men and girls as young as 12 were still common and largely viewed as “affairs” or even “dating,” rather than “statutory rape.” Drug dealing was usually a pretty open matter, and many adults partied with their own kids (or other kids), with older brothers dealing to their kid sisters and moms sharing their stashes with their daughters’ friends. Not only do many neighborhoods like this still exist, but of course many neighborhoods are far worse. We didn’t have homeless people in our neighborhood—everyone had a place to live, even if their apartment was roach infested. Nobody was starving to death, even if most people ate cheap, unhealthy food. The elementary school, while somewhat substandard in that it didn’t actually offer . . . uh, science for example—or have a counselor on the premises to address all the kids who came to school with bruises, though it did have one teacher who infamously chain smoked in his classroom and tended to put kids upside down in the garbage can when they misbehaved—was not a “dangerous” place to be. It did not require a metal detector to enter, as many schools do today. While we had quite a few murders in the neighborhood—from my former classmate who was beaten to death by her downstairs neighbor because she tried to stand up for her disabled brother whom the neighbor was mocking, to gang shootings like the one in which my friend’s pregnant sister was accidentally killed when a bullet went through her gangbanger boyfriend straight into her body—I cannot say that I ever felt my life was “in danger” or that I was unlikely to survive to adulthood, the way many kids in truly hardcore violent neighborhoods do. What I mean to say is that, while we were not middle class or privileged, we were entirely ordinary. Our poverty and violence was in no way Epic. Millions of children in American cities and towns live lives exactly like our lives every single day, right now.

Yet the way in which the world I inhabited no longer exists is this: in 1983, we were invisible to the media.

On the most basic level, whereas some of the Bozo rapists who attacked that eleven-year-old girl in Texas apparently decided to film the gang-bang on their cell phones, such options were not available to the shit-for-brains rapists of my old neighborhood. There was no YouTube.

We were, to put it in contemporary terms, something like Las Vegas, as in, “What happens in the hood stays in the hood.”

1983. I was fifteen and a sophomore at a prestigious high school across the city, to which I rode the bus each day. I was one of very few kids in our neighborhood who had tested into this school, and of the few peers from my old neighborhood with whom I’d started freshman year, one had already OD’d and dropped out, and another—whose father was in prison and whose two brothers would soon be murdered and who would later rape my best friend—had just transferred out, unable to hack the academic load. My longtime best friend and I, though, were holding firm. We had Ambitions. We were busy riding the bus to and from school; we were busy trying to figure out what science was, since we’d never had it in grade school. We were busy trying to reinvent ourselves.

Amidst this, word on the street leaked out that a girl we used to go to elementary school with had just been gang-raped by a bunch of guys we all knew. The girl was fifteen. Some of the alleged rapists were her own age, but several were older—much older—and esteemed members of the community, which in my community meant they had ties to organized crime. The story on the street was that the girl had been lured to the apartment of her “boyfriend,” who was in the local gang. When she arrived, it turned out he had a bunch of friends over who all wanted a piece of the action. When she refused, she was gang raped and beaten with coat hangers. For good measure, when they were finished with her they threw her down a flight of stairs.

I was out of the neighborhood loop at this time, busy thinking I was “too good” and going to my smarty pants high school. By the time I heard the story, it was no doubt already somewhat old. My mother, who is not Italian and wasn’t Catholic and hadn’t grown up in our neighborhood, had an ongoing joke about how we were always the last to know everything.

What I mean is: by the time the story reached me, let’s just say it was safe to assume that the New York Times wasn’t gonna be appearing on the scene anytime soon.

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here. I feel like I need to back up. I feel like I’m treading in some kind of dangerous water, where it sounds like I could be trying to make a deranged argument that the little eleven-year-old rape victim in Texas is one lucky stiff to have the NYTimes swoop in to give shitty, biased coverage to her case. How she should feel privileged to have the entire nation arguing over whether or not her outfits, or where her mother was at the time, or the color of her assailants, should be factored in or reported on. I feel like there is a danger, in talking about this case at all, of becoming “part of the problem.” Part of that little girl’s problem, which is already an ocean big enough to drown in. Part of her pain, which is already incomprehensible to most of us, with our normal adult lives, who have never been pinned down by eighteen men larger than ourselves and stabbed and assaulted by their man-sized, vicious dicks, tearing our little girl, private orifices while being threatened that if we resist they will have us beaten up or have our family harmed, and while others merrily film the event on their goddamn cell phones. And what I want to say about that is that I’m not sure I can bear the guilt of being part of that problem. Not only because my own daughters are on the verge of eleven, but because I already have a mountain of guilt upon which I don’t think I can stand to heap one more thing. Because I’ve already been carrying my own guilt since 1983.

After the New York Times failed to come knocking on our neighborhood’s door—after any local news failed to cover the rape allegations and the Chicago Sun-Times and Tribune failed to even remember that our neighborhood existed (mobster Joe Lombardo being temporarily in prison at that time, hence the only thing that ever gave us presence on the media stage having been removed from our midst), there was still the small matter of the fact that the rape victim had apparently had the gall to file charges with the police.

The police. You know, those guys who were around before YouTube, before The Rumpus, before cell phones.

She and her family had gone to them, which could not have been any easy decision given that in our neighborhood we were taught not to trust police and to fundamentally think of them as the Enemy. Yet they had gone to the police with her bruises and her list of names, and they had dared to ask for justice.

And so, the police “investigated.”

I was fifteen and busy turning myself into a new, more palatable person. I was losing the blue eyeshadow and the “Italian jacket” with my surname on the back surrounded by stars. I was trading that in for thrift store “alternative” clothing and a new bobbed haircut, for my thick Science textbook and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. What did I know of police investigations?

Word on the street went like this: that every man accused of the rape had produced an alibi instantly. That most of the alibis were women—including some old ladies. The alibis were apparently things like, “Oh no, X couldn’t have been involved with anything like that. He’s such a good boy—at the time of that awful crime, he was helping me build some shelves in my basement.”

The case never went to trial. Soon after, the victim and her family moved out of the neighborhood.

I want to be one of the Righteous ones. I want to be pissed off at the New York Times, because you know what: they did do a shitty job reporting that Texas story. I want, even more, to be outraged at all the victim’s heartless, horrible neighbors, who have blamed her mother, who have blamed her clothing, who have said she lied about her age and that she was always hanging out with older boys. I want to feel outraged and indignant and make the case to the world of how unequivocally wrong that all is, because it isall unequivocally wrong. I want to say that any world other than one in which an eleven year old girl can make stupid mistakes and still not end up gang raped by nearly 20 men is not an acceptable world, and that no blaming the victim or her parents or hypothetical white/Latino men who may have touched this girl before the accused black men did will ever take us any further towards making this world a better place.That only a world in which men are expected to not rape can ever get us anywhere.

But this argument exhausts me. Because we don’t live in a world like that. We live in a world where rape is almost casual. Celebrities rape, as Zolbrod pointed out in her piece. One of my best guy friends from grade school—after the imprisonment of his father, the murder of his brothers—turned out to be a rapist himself.You get a group of women in a room, and it can feel almost impossible that one or more of them haven’t been raped or molested at some point. My mother was molested as a child. Turns out, my mother-in-law may have been too. Sexual violence is a human legacy that plagues almost every family on the planet at some point or another. For years, I was a counselor for battered women and foster girls, who down to every last one had been sexually abused. Some of them had histories that made Precious look like a fucking Disney cartoon, and I can promise that I am not being hyperbolic about that. The thing is, what we pass off as “atrocious” in the media is simply “life” for much of the population. Prostitution, sexual slavery, child porn, incest, date rape, gang rape, rape rooms, domestic violence, child abuse, rape glorified in the “entertainment” of my youth from General Hospital to Flowers in the Attic. The thing is, it almost makes more sense to go up to every man in this world—and there are many; it is almost a miracle how many—who have never raped or hit anyone and study them as the anomalies . . .
But that’s not what I mean to say either. That’s bullshit too, because there are more of them—more of the sane, nonviolent, non-raping men—than there are of the other kind. And that fact is almost enough to make me climb up on the pedestal of Idealism, of human goodness, and extol how we can never demand anything less than perfection. It is almost enough, but not quite. Because I understand a thing or two about complicity.

For a heady while before the rape victim fled our neighborhood, she provided an exciting topic of gossip for everybody. Her misfortune was a break in the usual monotony of places like that, where most everyone figures the life they have to look forward to is exactly like the life they already have, like the lives their mother or father had. Dreams didn’t run terribly large. If you were a teller at a bank or a manager at a grocery store chain, you were a success story. If nobody was beating you up or selling drugs out of your house, you were lucky. There was only so much to talk about. Everyone had known everyone else forever.We were much like a small town that way—much, I imagine, like the small Texas town in which that recent rape occurred. A large, semi-public crime was much fodder for conversation.

Most of the discussion revolved around what a fool and a slut the victim was. What had she been thinking, going over there? Did you know she used to sleep with A and B and C? What a ho! I do not recall any conversation about what Assholes the alleged rapists were, or how other girls should be afraid of them or hate them. I do remember that one of the accused, a guy I’d gone to school with too, had always seemed like such a nice guy, and that there was occasional speculation that he’d been pressured into doing something like that by his older friends, or that he must have really “changed.” That was as close as I recall anyone coming to admitting that the rape was actually something “bad.”

Complicity is a loaded thing. Germans during World War II claimed not to realize that millions of Jews were being executed in the concentration camp down the road. Neighbors in Texas tell reporters with disdain how that little rape victim dressed like a twenty-year-old. They roll their eyes and ask, “Where was her mother?”

And in Chicago, in 1983, my best girlfriend and I took to singing a song about our neighborhood rape victim. It was basically “Keep away from runaround Sue,” only substituting in the victim’s name. We sang this to one another while studying for exams at our prestigious new high school and we got the giggles. I want to stipulate here that if you had asked me, I already would have called myself a "feminist." I used to argue equal rights with my teachers, my dad--I was a real pain in the ass about it. And yet, I was utterly unaware of any hypocrisy or paradox here. Because you see, my best friend and I were not like the victim.We didn’t sleep with those gangbangers! We didn’t do drugs! We planned to go to college! We were smart girls! We had nothing to fear.

At one point, we’d been in the same classroom as the victim. I remember her telling us, in my basement clubhouse, about the first guy she slept with. I remember her getting her tongue caught on the ice inside her freezer on a dare once at a sleepover. I remember the way the other kids in school made fun of her for being fat, and because I was fat at the time, too, I was always relieved, because she was fatter than I was and it took the heat off me.

She was our peer. We had known her all our lives. And yet the propaganda of Slutdom had infiltrated us like anti-Semitism infiltrated old German women down the goddamn road from Dachau. We stared into our Science textbooks and we forgot we had vaginas too. We forgot that women were human beings. We forgot that our good grades would protect us from nothing. We forgot that we had any responsibility. When the rape victim moved out of the neighborhood, we forgot about her. We went off to college, to our shiny new futures. We felt nothing like shame.

Four years later, my best friend would be raped by our old friend from grade school. She would never even try to bring charges. She blamed herself for going to his house, for being drunk. She gained weight, stopped dating, didn’t answer her phone.

In the late 80s, in a squat in London, I would fend off an Australian man who believed my body my cost of admission if I wanted to sleep on his mattress on the floor instead of in the park all night. I would leave the squat a 5 a.m. and wander around London. I had no money for food, although I do recall managing to buy cigarettes. The next night, I would not go back to that squat, but I would go to another, to another man, and one after that.

A decade after the rape in my old neighborhood, I would watch a circle of girls—my clients at a foster care agency in rural Vermont—hold one another sobbing for the things their fathers had done to them: for the gangbangs at which they’d been offered up when they were six or seven, for the ways their mothers abandoned them and sent them off to live with strangers rather than leaving the men who had harmed them.

Nearly 3 decades after that 1983 rape, my daughters will be thirteen years old, entering a world I cannot control—that I could never control. A world in which I have been complicit in driving a fifteen year old girl from her home because the world—the only world she knew; the only world that gave a shit since the New York Times wasn’t calling—believed she was worthless and deserved what she got.

What if, instead of singing that song, my best friend and I had called her on the phone and said we were sorry for what had happened to her? Sure, that might have changed nothing at all. Probably she didn’t even like us. But we’ll never know now, because it never even crossed our minds to do something like that.

It is interesting to note, too, that none of the dissenters of the New York Times’ coverage seem to be asking how many of those opinionated neighbors, in that dead end Texas town, have been raped themselves, as they stand there idiotically jabbering about the young victim’s outfits. It is interesting to wonder how many of the young rapists in that case watched their own fathers beat their mothers, or how many may have been molested and never told anyone, or if they tried to tell were told that nobody gave a shit.

Sometimes, I don’t believe that we’re all in this together. Some days, I believe that the New York Timesreporter and that little girl in Texas have nothing in common, that things are fucked up and always will be because that’s just how they are. But other days, I can feel it in my fingers, the way we are all the same. TheNew York Times journalist, the writers of The Rumpus, those Texas neighbors, that young rape victim, my old grade school friend who is now raising kids of her own, my daughters. Maybe some rapists are born—a chemical deficit, who knows? But most are made. Most days, I remember that "Rape Culture" refers to the ways in which rape is made possible by a continuum, from those who hold the victim down to those who provide alibis to those who fail to report the story to those who report it irresponsibly to those who feel immune and make up songs to assure ourselves of our safety.

And so, though it is not the popular opinion in my circle, I want to take my hat off to the foremost newspaper in the country for reporting this story, even if they didn't do it perfectly. I want to bow down and kiss the ground in gratitude that, for all the idiocies of contemporary media, we no longer live in a world defined by silence. I want to thank all the brave feminist writers who have spoken out on how this issue should have been handled better in the news, and for their idealism in fighting to uphold standards of decency that sometimes feel impossibly out of reach. I want to tell that little girl in Texas that no matter what she hears amid this media glut, what happened will never be her fault. I want to slap those neighbors who blame her for her fate--and I want to tell them that I understand, that I too have been complicit. I want to say that they believe there is only one way to see the world but that they’re wrong, and if they care, they can change. That every single thing that matters in this world is riding on them.

I want to say to my grade school friend, twenty-eight years too late: I’m sorry.

Gina Frangello is the author of two critically acclaimed books of fiction, Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010) and My Sister's Continent (Chiasmus 2006). The longtime editor of Other Voices magazine, she co-founded and is the current Executive Editor of the all-fiction press, Other Voices Books (www.ovbooks.com), an imprint of Dzanc. She is also the Fiction Editor of the popular online literary collective, The Nervous Breakdown (www.thenervousbreakdown.com). She can be found online at www.ginafrangello.com.

No news today - Guest Post - Mel Bosworth

2011-06-29T13:53:00.001-07:00

Somewhere a pigeon is pounding over a McDonald’s. White paper bags with soggy bottoms are shoved through a rectangular window. Somewhere a man is receiving too much change at a convenience store. He won’t say anything but his ears will turn red. The clerk won’t notice, distracted by summer skin in the candy aisle. She thinks maybe a Snickers no maybe a Twix. Caramel. Somewhere a baby is kicking the back of a driver’s seat. If it could think it would think I like applesauce better than peas. Somewhere a girl is smearing vanilla ice cream across her cheek. She’s thinking about her freckles and whether boys like to kiss them. Somewhere a cowboy is shitting behind a cactus. He’s trying to keep the shit off his boots. Don’t hold the cactus. Soon, a scorpion will sting his asshole. He’ll cry out, then look around to make sure no one saw. Somewhere a homeless man in a Perry Ellis jacket is burping Doritos. Nacho Cheese. Somewhere a hand is moving toward a greasy lever. Somewhere a hand is holding a greasy face. Somewhere a husky is snoring in the sunshine, chin resting on paws. Somewhere a clean window stops short another pigeon’s flight. No one will see its wind-ripped fall, only its wet landing.

Mel Bosworth is the author of Freight (Folded Word Press, 2011) and Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom (Brown Paper Publishing, 2010). Visit him at melbosworth.com

No news today - Guest Post - Amber Sparks

2011-06-24T08:28:00.001-07:00

The news today is dreadful, is dreadful every day, is a time loop of humanity tumbling down the sewer hole again, again, again. We are news impresarios; we are sleight-of-hand and slight of substance.

Perhaps the news before was not so dreadful, or at least not such a sledgehammer kind of bad. Wikipedia tells me that on this day in 1882, a German physician announced that he'd discovered the cause of tuberculosis. A bacterium. That must have been awfully good news for everyone, except for all the consumptives with holes already punched all over their lungs. They were screwed, obviously. But finally! A cause! A cause could lead to a cure!

They were always curing things before, but now it seems like new diseases are replicating faster than we can name them and there is never any cure. The virus, it might be in my computer or in my blood or in my head and can I use a cream or an ointment or a pistol to get rid of it? Can I set the dogs on it? Can I listen to it, can I ask forgiveness for it, can I dream about it and when I wake there it will be, shiny and sweet and cloying under my pillow, marinating in its own juices and ready slither into my ear and push my cells/self out the other side? Will there be an massive explosion, a vomiting out of the world's insides? Will the whole universe finally burn with fever? And if it does, who will report the fact of it? Who will Tweet it, Facebook it, blog it, chart it, graph it, analyze it play by play and type it up in cold black ink for the internet to drink up and splat back out?

I suppose there will be no news that day.

Amber Sparks's work has appeared in all kinds of spaces, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Lamination Colony, the Collagist, Wigleaf, Annalemma, and PANK. She is also the fiction editor at Emprise Review, and a contributor at the literary blogs Big Other and Vouched. She lives in Washington, DC with two beasts and a husband, and most days you can find her on the intertubes at www.ambernoellesparks.com.

No news today - Guest Post - William Walsh

2011-06-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

Flowers of Idleness

From Lotus Eaters, Episode 5 of Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)

Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Flowers of idleness.

Henry Flower Esq,
c/o P. O. Westland Row,
City.

A flower. A yellow flower with flattened petals. He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume.

Henry Flower.

The bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing together, winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy pooling swirl of liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.

O, no, she's not here: the flower: no, no.

Flowers, incense, candles melting.

—Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin, Mr Bloom said, and then orangeflower water…

That orangeflower water is so fresh. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

William Walsh edited the new anthology RE:Telling (Ampersand Books). He is the author of Pathologies, Questionstruck (both from Keyhole Press), and Without Wax (Casperian Books). His stories and texts have appeared in Caketrain, Quick Fiction, Annalemma, LIT, New York Tyrant, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

No news today - Guest Post - Kevin Sampsell

2011-05-31T07:27:00.000-07:00

There were about thirty people on the train and half of them had newspapers. Some people held them up in front of their faces and some kept them rolled up like a weapon. They had inky fingers.

At one of the stops, a drunk man came on. He wore a jacket that was too big for his body and his hair looked like a small beat-up hat on his head. It wasn't even noon yet. He sat next to a young college dude and wrestled with a plastic bag full of items. Plastic bags could become illegal in Oregon soon. It said that on the front of one of the newspapers.

The man's breath was liquoring the air of the train. He pulled an old baseball glove out of the bag and said to the dude, "Look what I got here." It was like he was speaking to a child. The dude was wearing cop sunglasses and wore a small, uncomfortable smirk on his lips. The drunk started singing, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and then laughed. He found a ball of some kind in the bag and said, "It's almost the same weight as a baseball." It was blue and looked like a handball. He put on the glove and handed the ball to the dude and said again, "Almost the same as a baseball!" The dude held it for a second, as if gauging its weight before playfully tossing the ball up in the air. It landed in the drunk man's glove and he started singing the song again.

The drunk pulled two boxes out of his bag. They were jigsaw puzzles. "You wanna see a party?" he asked the dude. "Take a look at this. These Indians know how to party. Wanna buy one of these from me?"

The dude looked at the box and laughed a little. "That's the most racist Native American puzzle I've ever seen," he said. The box showed a cluttered cartoony mess of tents and fat Indians dancing to cowhide drums.

"Look," said the drunk man. "There's a Christmas tree. A God damn Christmas tree."

A couple of people moved to different seats.

"I'm the first mobile yard sale," the drunk man stated. "I don't have a yard. I come to your yard!" He found a few other things in the bag but looked at them like he couldn't figure out what they were. They looked like broken toys or parts of electronics.

The dude gave the man a charitable laugh and said, "You have fun, man. Party on." And then he got off at a downtown stop. An older man got on and made his way over to the freshly vacant seat.

The old man started to read his newspaper but the drunk nudged him and began his show-and-tell again. "Look at this puzzle," he said. He showed him one with a painting of an angel holding a baby. "One thousand pieces!"

"That might take you all day," the old man said. He seemed good natured, patient.

The drunk thought about this and seemed lost in thought for a moment. "It might take me forever," he said soberly.

Kevin Sampsell lives in Portland, Oregon and works at Powell's City of Books. He is the author of the memoir, A Common Pornography. His small press, Future Tense Books, can be found at www.futuretensebooks.com.

No news today - Guest Post - Lynn Crawford

2011-05-19T08:10:00.000-07:00

Compiling Information, My Way
by George Shankus

Yesterday my sister in law Meg (yellow, v-neck dress, gladiator sandals) and I talk.
She tells me my twin brother, her husband, Dino is not communicating with her.
I say I want to help.
She says she does not want help, just facts.
I wonder, can I learn what I need to know if I simply ask Dino the facts? Will he answer me, up front?
No, I decide, he will not. My approach, like some of my best business deals, will require a combination of subterfuge and face to face conversation.Today he travels north to his gal Ily. Her meat, customers, hoop earrings. Her restaurant with its tasteful, rustic, interior: logs, linen, fireplaces, heavy cutlery, thick legged chairs and tables. I trail him. See him stop for an egg roll at a breakfast cart on his way to the station. Watch him enter the station, bite into his roll. Catch my reflection in a store window. Predatory, heaving. I am not proud of my behavior. YET, yet: I am practical. Sometimes, assessing movements of a family member (with the close history, the past and present interaction), muddles, distracts. Establishing distance helps a person, me anyway, collect reliable data.
Less than twenty-four hours later, I drive north in my car.
The last time Dino and I spoke it was about a movie. The restaurant keeps him busy, he has little time for film, and there is only one theater in his new town. It shows block busters. I suggest Netflix but he does not have a DVD player. Just a television, with cable, and a music system. The movie he saw, on cable, was a romance. Ily fell asleep. Dino called, complaining, not about Ily falling asleep but about the romance. He wants to see a romance about a regular guy. Not about a guy who falls for a woman with chunky ankles and a good personality. Who sends that woman flowers (regularly). Whose idea of a romantic evening is filling a bathtub with bubbles and surrounding it with candles. That is some female idea of a guy. What Dino wants from a romance is this: a guy falls for a tall, gazelle legged, big breasted woman. Sexually voracious. A lingerie wearer. The big breasts are really important. She falls for him too. She is not vain, psychotic, anorexic, dizzy, or cocaine addicted. He is tired of movies about hot women who are nasty, conniving, sick, mentally simple. Tired of movies where unattractive women get men to see through to their inner beauty.
“Guys don’t see through any damn thing. We either feel it, pow, or we don’t,” he says.
“Dino you are such an asshole I cannot believe we come from the same family.”
“Hey, I say what I feel, not what I mean. Listen, I am just talking about what I want from a movie. Not real life. I mean, it is not as if Ily’s ankles are tiny. She stands in croc’s all day, her ankles puff up, you know. And it is not as if her breasts are, I mean it is not as if ....”
“Shut the fuck up Dino, just shut the fuck up.”
I get to their place early. Park my car, take a walk in the woods. Reluctantly. I am uncomfortable in forests. And aware this attitude is un-american, un-masculine. The fact is: I do not like density in nature. In a city it is fine. I enjoy jam packed streets, subways, theaters, bars, lobbies, diners. That density is not static, it always moves at some sort of pace. But trees just stand still, hiding who knows what. I am not anti-nature. I am at home in and near water, any water: lakes, streams, oceans, rivers. I am at home sailing, diving, rowing, fishing, swimming. And I enjoy spending time on a mountain, high up, looking down, out, skyward. It is just woods I have a problem with.
I walk for a nervous half hour, enjoy, admittedly, the smell: fresh, clean, piney. When I return to the driveway, thankful to be going indoors, even if it is to Dino’s trailer, a pick-up truck brushes the mailbox, and almost me right next to it. It stops. A man, long hair, psychedelic print t-shirt, thong sandals, steps out. He is not tall and he is not good looking but then he is not short or ugly either. Just a guy, dressed like an old hippie, with a chin beard in rimless glasses. He shakes his head from side to side, “Man, man I am so fucking, man...” He cannot finish the sentence. I take a deep breath not, as I expect, of pine but of pot. He gestures to the joint in his hand, says he is taking his prescription medical marijuana and that he comes by Dino and Ily’s in the morning, for informal breakfast munchies like potatoes, eggs, mushrooms. He has no problem talking now. I nod my head, remember never liking anything about pot, the smell or the high. Beer is different, I like both the smell and the high, the taste, the fizz, I am thinking along these lines when I feel dizzy and fall, bam, on ground. Turn my head to the side, see his toes, peeping out of the sandals. They are clean, even toes, not gnarled or dirty the way you might expect from an old hippie. That is the last thing I remember before blacking out.
I wake up, feeling as if I am in outer space.
A face, red, puffy, under eye bags, cracked lips, carefully groomed blond hair breathes down on me. I can see but not move.
“What happened?” the face asks.
“She just went down,” says the pothead.
“He, I am a he. He, named George,” I try to say but cannot yet speak.
“This is a man, not a she,” says the blond. Wearing a striped shirt with the name ED above the right pocket. I see there is a bus behind him I guess he is the driver.
A load of well dressed, well fed people surround me.
“Stand Back! Here comes the Doctor,” says ED to them.
“Do you mind if I examine you?” asks a brisk voice. A head, also blond haired, is over me. ED is gone.
“No, I do not mind at all,” I try to say. But I cannot speak so no words come out.
She pulls out a joint, asks do I want some.
“NO.” I badly want to say, to yell. And add I have not seen this much pot since college. But I just close my lips tightly together.
She looks at me, puffs her joint.
“Historically, I make my most accurate diagnosis when I have a quick toke.”
“Historically, I do not go to doctors who are potheads.” I want to respond but am unable to.
“She puts the joint out by pinching the end together with her fingers, tucks it in her pocket.
“Ok. Your pupils are not dilated. That is a good thing.”
She runs her hands along my skull, neck, shoulders. She kneads my neck. Something releases.
“There. You are fine,” she says.
I feel better.
“Listen,” I can now talk, even rise up on one elbow, and feel an urge to share with someone the bizarreness of what happened. Speech flows, ”Listen, doc, I think I got a contact high. I drove up here, a long drive. Got here before anyone was up. Took a walk. Came back to my brother’s. This guy came up, smoking his medical marijuana after almost ramming into me with his truck and I took one whiff and fell--”
“Contact high is a myth,” she interrupts, authoritatively. “It is scientifically proven to be impossible.”
It hits me like a ton of bricks: this woman, in crystal clarity, encapsulates why I hate doctors. Arrogance, drugs, rigidity. Their knowledge base is lousy. I was not wrong, after all, to miss all those annual physicals. My way to health: eat and drink well, have sex, work out does more for my longevity than any physical with a moron. I close my eyes, feeling good, feeling right.

Wake up on my brother’s couch. Still feeling good. Ily stands in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water. She wears her white chef top with loose fitting blue pants, yellow Crocs. The color makes me think of Meg’s yellow v-neck dress. That is not true. I do not need a color to make me think of Meg. Ily walks toward me, offers a sip from her glass, asks how I am, runs her palm over my forehead. This is the first person, besides ED, I meet here not toking a joint. I breath easy. She tells me Dino is at work, that I slept for an hour and that we have an appointment with a doctor later this afternoon. My mood shifts from relaxed to heated, want to express myself: Doctors are assholes and unimportant. I will not go to a fucking doctor this afternoon. No Way. This is all on the tip of my tongue until she gestures to a table laid out with a colorful lunch: sweet breads, lemons, arugula, tomatoes, pumpernickel. The smell pulls me in, helps me realize I am not thinking clearly because I am starving.I enjoy this food immensely. The sweetbreads melt in my mouth; the salad is fresh, crisp, the pumpernickel is soft but has heft and a balance of sweetness with a good rye seed taste. I wash the meal down with a glass of iced tea mixed with a raspberry lemonade. I feel good, very, very, good. Even consider going to see that doctor.
Ily sits down, spears a tomato, lets me eat in silence. This is something I appreciate, someone who understands when you just want to eat, when you have reached that pitch of hunger, and you just want silence. I finish, take a deep breath. Ily pours me a second glass of iced tea, and one for herself, and. starts talking. I sit back, sleepy, pleasantly full, ready to listen.

(Excerpt from novel, Shankus, by Lynn Crawford)

Lynn Crawford is an art critic and fiction writer based in Detroit. Her criticism has appeared in Art in America, Tema Celeste, Metro Times, Zing, Parkett, Modern Painters, American Ceramics and The Brooklyn Rail. Her books include Solow, Blow, Simply Separate People and Fortification Resort, a collection of sestinas responding to the work of visual artists. Her new novel, Simply Separate People, Two has just been published by Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. She is a Kresge Literary Art Fellow and a founding board member of Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD).

No news today - Guest Post - Sean Lovelace

2011-05-16T07:30:00.000-07:00

No News about my Sex Life

Most days crows perch on the curtain rod and ignore The Velveeta. Dogs treat The Velveeta in one of three ways: 1. Stare it down snarling. 2. Sniff, wait, sniff, sniff, wait…lick away. 3. Slumber.

Two hundred and fifty catastrophes. Touching a sore spot, for example. Unflattering noise. Locks that do not lock. Protesters hiding in armpits and various throats. Multiple passwords. Multiple aftershocks. Never enough salt, for the triangles. My ex-wife who kicked The Velveeta while dying. People who refuse the dying, who play coy.

Silverware says in pearly clatter, “Looks like this is going to take all night.”

The pebble and the water and the grit. The brick. Power shortages. Audacity while the television smells of suffering. Twitters of toilet paper.

Hung in the shape of Q, these other ones. The Makeup Man. The cookbook. My new girlfriend. The curious reporters (see dogs above). The woman who wept about airstrikes while eating Ramen noodles. The man who closed his eyes. The man who blogged The Velveeta, live. The slippery phone. What to make of this buzzing? Kicking left and right and backwards simultaneously. EXIT signs. The boss and the boss’s wife.

The brick oven. Slatted oval windows and vents. Mudslides of air and light. Joint statements.

Example: I show up spectacularly drunk with a video camera and throw it hard into The Velveeta. We pull and we pull, but we can’t pull it out.

Just another conversation.

The cleaning of the oven and the dirtying of the oven.

The man I bring home says, “I see already this room has many rooms.”

If you squint your eyes…

Yawning crows. They suggest, Kill the lights.

Sean Lovelace is dropping two books in June 2011, Fog Gorgeous Stag (Publishing Genius Press) and, with fellow flash authors, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves: A Collection of Five Flash Chapbooks (Rose Metal Press). He has decided to write only about Velveeta for the remainder of 2011. He likes to drink beer and to run, far.

No news today - Guest Post - Ras Mashramani

2011-05-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

we can watch but it's not ours.

it is such a live stream, it is like you can almost feel. you can almost touch every brown [but not too brown!] body and smell his arms linked his stranger his nothing left to lose but anger and his national heritage. you can click refresh. heritage is losing, dear god they got the mummies and you can think i am really a part of something like history. you can think especially if i leave an embittered comment. you can be like no solution is easy be sensible cynical humanistic. now they know i'm on their side and i agree that they are people and complex in a complex world.

wonderful angry something we gave up for softcore youth.

angry something you are almost jealous. our streets are for walking and our texts are for guarded jealous irony. you say because there's nothing left to throw rocks at and they don't count because i recognize the ecology i've read about got an A in it but i don't see it cause i stay on my side but tell my married friends i don't. you say i have [oppressed ethnicity most likely Native American] in me. you say listen. i know all the names of the Philly bums west of the river. and not just their descriptive epithets. wheelchair bridge bum his fucking name is Ezra.

YOU WOULD NOT TAKE TO THE STREETS FOR ANYTHING BUT BASEBALL.

because there is no news, there is only pixel and light. there is a fiction on a foundation of narrative—which you rejected, i’ll admit—but you can’t make a life story out of a character from that movie Almost Famous. you can’t live fiending for the blue and glowing rage and clicking pause to heat up your shwarma iron out your peace scarf so you can party up in Fishtown. you can’t simultaneously attempt to embody the whatever and the scream of punk and feminism without BEING THE WHATEVER AND THE SCREAM. you cannot blame this on the patriot act. you cannot giggle fuck the police but talk about wu-tang like no actually there is good rap music just. listen.

[you can’t even superimpose the neighborhood west of 50th st. you shudder. if shoulder to shoulder were a choice you'd choose your parents' spare room and abandon every part of them [of me!] we gentrified]

you have to feel your cheek to the concrete. no, you have to get up spitting because we are young and that’s what kids do.

if only we could abandon our degrees and feeds.

working within, integrating, consuming, forgetting that what i am needs bricks to defend.

glued to the fucking screen

yes, yes i fit in here too.

Ras Mashramani lives in Philadelphia and blogs at motherwap.blogspot.com.

No news today - Guest Post - Gabriel Blackwell

2011-05-09T08:08:00.001-07:00

Already a disarticulation (for it was stella nova before it was nova): a “discovery” in even its etymology, the new is not new, never new, always only previously unknown. In the framework of a recycled and recycling universe, a closed set stretching to infinity, the nova —not newly created, only newly noticed—was a star only in that instant brought to light. Suddenly we could see what had been there all along. In this, as in all things, the nova has turned on itself. Better to have been lit with an unspectacular illumination. The everyday: not old, but not news.

For we now believe it is not light but explosion, cataclysm of nuclear activity, a chain reaction that ends in void. A birth of state, then, not material; in truth, a death, the eradication of existence, the erasure of creation. What to make, then, of today? The sudden flare of politicians, pop stars, killers, movie stars, freaks growing in brilliance in proportion to the emptiness inside, really only the winking out of so many lights. Having turned themselves inside out, they glow and warm until they disappear completely: “Teens should be banned from tanning booths, doctors say.”

The teen in question tanned until cancerous. Cancer: a freak of the DNA, a sudden discovery, a stella nova of the double helix, a chain reaction. Finally, a void. “UVA rays give customers a glow without sunburn.” Our sun—never once a stella nova—thus bypassed, the teen in search of skin like the stars zooms out into the firmament while reclining in space-age comfort, infused with radiation leaking into the sense that creation makes of her, her particular genetic sequence. It glows, but it also ravels, becoming ragged. Somewhere, a spark. Then, melanoma. Our special ignorance: blindness to the brightest lights, our skeletal visible spectrum. Tomorrow it will have disappeared, another matchhead struck. This was the news.

Gabriel Blackwell is the reviews editor for The Collagist. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Puerto del Sol, and DIAGRAM among other places, and will appear in Uncanny Valley.

No news today - Guest Post - David Hollander

2011-05-05T10:02:00.001-07:00

It wasn’t as if the young man knew right out of the gate that he’d be making news. In fact, his intent was solely to “follow his bliss,” to paraphrase Joseph Campbell (don’t worry, it doesn’t matter who he is), though of course for those of us gathered here today in this conference room situated in the seldom-seen-or-visited Borderlands of our so-called city, “following” is as impenetrable a word as “bliss,” given that both tend to lead to news, and we have of course taken the blood oath. God grant us the detachment and so on and et cetera. But the young man was—oh, you’ll see the topless girl coming around with the cigars now, gentlemen, real Guatemalans I’m told, though I’m not sure if that’s meant as a boast or an apology, as I myself have never acquired the taste—but so the young man was determined to live a life of meaning, a rather dusty endeavor but one he was uniquely suited to pursue, given the highly newsworthy pursuits of his parentals. His father was that zookeeper who ran off with the world’s last white rhino and was shot dead in a very newsworthy attempted bank robbery inspired by the Eroll Flynn Robin Hood film in which (i.e., the robbery, not the film) the rhino was used—unsuccessfully, but with great savagery—as a battering device. Those vaults are thick, gentlemen, 36 inches of tempered steel. The poor animal died of concussive trauma, perhaps yearning to know what existed behind that impregnable wall, imagining some stash of edible razor grass or other sustenance remembered vaguely from its wild youth. The young man’s mother, meanwhile, was a defense lawyer known internationally for representing the persecuted human rights defender Liu Ko against charges of treason, plied in response to his efforts to demarginalize farm workers rounded up and executed to make way for urban expansion. It was in all the papers, gentlemen, though we of course acquired most of those papers and heated our facilities with their combustions rather than allow them to “hit the newsstands,” if you’ll pardon the expression. But the point being that the young man had multiple examples in his own nuclear unit of what we might call “empathy,” or what we might otherwise call “spectacle,” but that we must call “news,” according to the bylaws.

And so the young man did not intend to make news himself or to attract our attentions, for like most of his newsmaking compatriots he did not know of our existence, and was only made aware when our agents arrived at his solar-powered green space situated (ironically) in the underserved inner city, where he would often go to manufacture his various responses to the world’s indifference to all things of import, the cultivation of which indifference has in fact been our Shared Project ever since we each of us individually took the blood oath. Perhaps had our envoys arrived by white rhino the young man would have taken us with greater seriousness. As it stands, his dismissals forced our hand, and we have him in custody in a pale room in which he is being exposed to heinous doses of the most absurd iterations of reality television we could dig up from our admittedly limited database. The young man may not have set out to make news, but after the recent report on his cult-like following—organized around his slogan, “Fight for the world you want”—went viral, threatening to bring much of what we have fought to keep out of the news, into the news, we had no choice but to nip his humanitarian stupidity in the so-called bud.

At times I almost believe, friends, that the instinct toward caring can not be doused any more easily than it can be reliably incited. The whole thing is an enormous crapshoot, isn’t it? No, no… don’t boo, gentlemen. I only mean that our efforts remain vital precisely because there is no endgame. News is destroyed, and that is good friends, but The News itself goes on. We fight its iterations, but have no access to its ad locum root. We could take the next step and eradicate the entire news-sensitive population, but where would that leave us? Do we not also require those who require news? What would we be without the comfort and company of these zealots and fools?

So yes, the young man is here and we’ll bring him out in a moment, but first I hope to elicit from each of you a brief written response—please use the lined yellow paper that you’ll find taped to your chests, there beneath your smart gray sportscoats—to the following question: What news is most newsworthy? And yes, this is relevant gentlemen. Because your answers will help us in our reprogramming efforts with the young man, who by the way goes by the name “Henry,” though I’ve taken to calling him “Bob.” Your efforts here will help advance our cause, or else we could just stone the young man to death according to the common method. In fact, forget the paper. Forget this entire diatribe, lest you leave this room feeling somehow edified or entertained. We’ll just execute the fucker and be done with it. Personally, I like a good rhino story. I am weak, like all of you. It is good to have no news, but even better is to need no news. Let us never forget our goal, gentlemen, of total and complete detachment from the world around us. And let us never fail to punish those who would stand between us and the Nothing that brings down mountains and also raises them up and does a bunch of other stuff too, none of which I can presently recall, thank you Jesus.

No news for now, gentlemen. God grant us the detachment and so on and et cetera. Is it hot in here? Would someone please open a fucking window or something?

David Hollander's work has appeared in McSweeney's, Post Road, The Collagist, New York Times Magazine and many others. He is the author of the novel, L.I.E. and lives in upstate New York with his wife and two daughters.

No news today - Guest Post - Steven Gillis

2011-04-29T07:21:00.000-07:00

I read the news today, oh boy. Every fucking country is at war. Internal strife. Egypt, Iran, Libya, Bahrain, hell even Wisconsin. Wild times to be sure and yet what do we know about any of these conflicts really? What the papers tell us? All the news that's fit to print. What the hell does that mean? Isn't that a cute way of saying All that I feel like reporting, that suits a certain paid for agenda. Am I a cynic? No. A realist rather. Having been around the block enough times to wear a groove my naivete has given way to a matured form of wistfulness. I know what I would like to see happen but have no way of pretending it will. There are pirates in Somalia and the FBI is 8,000 miles away from the States getting people on board sailing ships killed. What the hell is the FBI doing in Somalia and what did they think would happen when they locked up the pirate king? I don't know anymore. Have people just gotten more stupid? I doubt it. The truth about war - yes isn't that where I started? - is that these uprisings of late are totally predictable. Say what you will and there is a buttload to say but Saddam Hussein - as freaky crazy and sick and delusional as he was - he knew how to keep the factions from killing one another. In these other countries - and even in America - it's one thing to mess with the poor. The poor have no leverage, it's like kicking the crippled kid in his bad leg, he's going to fall over. But fuck with the lower middle class, or worse the actual middle class and you can damn well expect a riot. It's all so sadly predictable. Jefferson said the best way to insure democracy is to have a bloody revolution once every 30 years. Well, mostly the countries of the world under fascist regimes or political potentates like here in the States have found ways to suppress revolution. Until now. The fan has found the shit. What will the upshot be? Democracy? We can only hope. Damn, there I did it. I said we can hope. Is that naive? I don't know. Last week here in Michigan we got 13 inches of snow in Ann Arbor overnight. The papers did not predict the storm. I went out 4 different times to shovel our walk and drive. I had the flu, was running a fever. The snow as it hit my cheeks melted as, well, as snow hitting something hot. I watched the snow fall. The moon was halfway full and the flakes in the night glistened. It was beautiful. I felt I was on to something. Each time I returned to my driveway there was more snow which I cleared and stacked higher. The snow has stopped now but the residue is there, the accumulation of what I piled so high to the sides during the storm.

Steven Gillis is the author of 5 books of fiction, most recently the novels Temporary People and The Consequence of Skating. He is not the author of some 3,000,000 other books. He is the co-founder of Dzanc Books www.dzancbooks.org

No news today - Guest Post - Will Eno

2011-04-25T09:31:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from Middletown

COP: All units in the vicinity: see the man. See the man. See the woman. See the streets and houses, the shadows, the words that don’t rhyme. All quiet here, over. No News is Good News, over. But there’s no such thing as No News, over. Try to see my point. Just look at yourself, over. See the Universe. See a tiny person in the middle of it all, thrashing. See the bright side. Try to look at the bright side. (Brief pause. To audience) Sometimes I’ll talk like this, over the wire. Just to see if anyone’s listening.

Will Eno is a playwright and lives in New York.

No news today - Guest Post - Matthew Vollmer

2011-04-21T10:57:00.001-07:00

No news today—and no news the next. None. The world, it appeared, had run out. News, finally, was done. There was no longer anything to report, nothing of note to relay. For as long as anyone could remember, the general consensus had been that no news was tantamount to good news. But now that there was no news, those who had grown so accustomed to it—those who had depended it on it, for entertainment, for educational purposes, and to feed the illusion that they were staying informed—didn’t know what to think. No news? Really? None whatsoever? This sudden depletion was itself newsworthy, was it not? Yes and no. “No news” was not really news—at least not for long—and it certainly couldn’t stand in the place of what people had thought for eons as "regular" news. So, once the news of the news’ disappearance had been reported and heard, it was final: there really was no more news.

These early newsless days were characterized by suspicion and doubt. People, being people, wanted to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, nothing—or very little—had changed. Yes, they admitted, it was strange, this lack of news, and sure, they were worried, as any normal person might be, but they expected to hear—any day now—some sort of, well, update, as it were, about how news was doing, where it had been, what had happened to it during its absence. What, in short, was the news about news? Nobody knew. News—being no more—made not a peep.

Time moved forward; nothing of note continued to occur. In the meantime, everybody seemed to be getting along fine. Wasn’t this—this unprecedented harmony —a good and wonderful thing? Hadn’t this newsless age been what everyone, deep down, had wanted? Perhaps. And yet… something seemed to be missing. Something felt “off.” It wasn’t just that the deficiency—the gaping maw that news had left behind—proved palpable; it was also that people had a sneaking suspicion that news had not gone gently into its good night, that perhaps instead it had been kidnapped, murdered, or otherwise done away with in some inauspicious and decidedly horrific manner. Such hypotheses were, of course, unfounded, and turned out to have been a sneaky way of attempting to manufacture a new kind of news. But speculation, no matter how cleverly it got spun, was not—nor would it ever be—news.

Eventually, people had to come to terms with the fact that news, after a good long life, would have to be declared—officially!—dead. And perhaps it was for the best. No news gave people a chance to reflect on and re-assess the news of the past. “How manipulated we’d all been!” they cried. “How shallow! How like woebegone addicts we’d gone about our days, hungering for the next bit of news, in whatever form it took!” The new news, if one could call it that, which one couldn’t—not really—was that people hadn’t needed news nearly as much as the news had wanted them to believe. In fact, it appeared—according to those who studied this kind of thing—that news had not been essential or vital in any way at all. Therefore: “To hell with news! Good riddance! Sayonara!” Everyone was, then, in agreement: they would all would dedicate themselves anew to a new, optimistic, and newsless era. Never again would anyone allow the news to rear its dragon’s head, to breathe its demonic fire, which, as mesmerizing as it had been, also had a tendency to scorch straight through to one’s soul. In this new era, people would return to their homes, to their families and neighbors, their gardens and gazebos. And, for the most part, they would forget about news, although a few—collectors mostly, and nostalgia-freaks—would occasionally take a peep at the old news, which now that it was old, was but a phantasmagoric—if not laughable—representation of what news had been. And during this fabled era—this time before news returned, with a heat-seeking vengeance—everyone was truly happy, and lived sincerely in the belief that they had nothing whatsoever to fear.

Matthew Vollmer is the author of a collection of stories titled FUTURE MISSIONARIES OF AMERICA. He teaches at Virginia Tech and is at work on a novel.

No news today - Guest Post - Joanna Howard

2011-04-17T08:31:00.000-07:00

In mixed martial arts news last weekend Ryan Bader was trounced by Jon Jones in an explosive light-heavyweight bout. Jon Jones is a spinning, springing, elbow-striker with high kicks and a ridiculous reach, and he choked out the enormous Bader, for whom I have always had a serious soft-spot. While Jones jogged about the cage after his victory, they announced he will get the title shot against Shogun Rua. Shogun was in the audience, looking impossibly smooth and solid at the same time, as if he had been cast from some sort of space-age polymer, something that can withstand an earthquake, but which is satiny to the touch. A material you might use for countertops in a really fancy kitchen. The cameras hit him and he smiled before popping up the short staircase. He stepped into the octagon. Did he look intimidated? He did not.

Two months ago, Quebecois superhero George St. Pierre shattered the orbital socket of Josh Koscheck in a 5 round flurry of brutal striking. It was later revealed that GSP had broken his eye socket with the first punch, and his opponent had to ride out the fight taking blow after blow to the damaged area from the impeccable and fierce welterweight world champ. GSP ended the fight with his characteristic triumphant back flip, then his corner men wiped him down, shirted him up, and slapped a logo beanie on his head. He made a few deeply humble statements in his French-accented English, working a slight Zen koan into his endnotes. Within the hour he would be tooling around Montreal in an Armani suit eating a sweet potato. Who will be the next to fall before the elegant and merciless George St. Pierre? Even more than Shogun, he seems cast in obsidian and coated in high-grade caramel.

What good of all this news? Three months ago was the last time I heard from the retired fighter I’ve been sending fan letters. (He’s a serious legend of the sport. He nearly invented sprawl and brawl. ) Even then he only sent a few words in a very large font, but that was news. God, was that news. I don’t need much encouragement. A slight nod in my direction and I will flood a man’s inbox with pages of baroque, flirtatious prose. So from my perspective, there is no news these days in mixed martial arts.

We all know what no news is supposed to be. I’m sorry to say it’s not. Here’s the bottom line: it’s been 86 days of waiting. 86 days of nothing to report. 86 days of sorrow. 86 days which will go on and on, and soon I won’t be able to count in days, and I’ll need another measurement of duration and endurance. Who could blame the guy? He had no idea what he was getting himself into. And he made it clear to me he could barely read my letters, anyway; they are ‘seemingly infinite lines of barely visible words’ as my friend says, and he does not see so good due to blows to the head, a crushed disc in his back, arthritis, etc. Hearing from me is a headache, a pain in the neck.

He is barely my age. In my field I am considered a bright young thing, just getting started. In his field, the body breaks down much more quickly. For this guy, no news from me would be a relief. He has written me off as too much fine print.

Joanna Howard is the author of On the Winding Stair (Boa editions, 2009) and In the Colorless Round, a chapbook with artwork by Rikki Ducornet (Noemi Press). Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Chicago Review, Unsaid, Quarterly West, American Letters & Commentary, Fourteen Hills, Western Humanities Review, Salt Hill, Tarpaulin Sky and elsewhere. Her stories have been anthologized in PP/FF: An Anthology, Writing Online, and New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills. She has also co-translated, with Brian Evenson, Walls by Marcel Cohen (Black Square, 2009) and, with Nick Bredie, also co-translated Cows by Frederic Boyer (Noemi, forthcoming 2011). She lives in Providence and teaches at Brown University.

No news today - Guest Post - Christina Rumpf

2011-04-13T09:21:00.001-07:00

Tramps have overrun the county. Sheep raided, horses missing. A girl is dead in the river. The widows howl like mountain cats. This town is quiet and wanting.

All day we cut and swamp and snake the trees. In summer, it is vengeful beetles or the hotel on fire. We go looking for a bride in the poor house. This one lost her teeth in a railway accident. This one wears wig of horsehair.

On Main Street a machine pumps morphine all night. We wait to see who can stand it most. The boy who wins sets his head in a barrel of water. Thought suicide. Thought to have been in love.

Christina Rumpf received her MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing from Columbia University in 2009. She is currently at work on her first book.

No news today - Guest Post - Debra Di Blasi

2011-04-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

Nothing to Report From Africa

The child who died last night when the rain came to fill her mouth with mud and needles whispered your name. Yes. I heard her. Your name: the last kiss of her splintered lips, the final roll of her tongue swelled indigo.

She doesn’t even speak your language, yet the idea of you were with her at the end when the skulking-skinny pye dogs rose up off their hinds and lowered their gaze and wanted above all else the poor meal of her. Imagine that! Your name spilling the precise moment as dog saliva.

Don’t misunderstand: I love you.

Her brown eyes blued like skim milk. One rolled away from the other. A wasp trod the sclera and sank its eggs. When I pinched it off, the fore wings tore from the thorax. I put the wings in the girl’s ear, the pedaling body in her mouth. She spoke.

She whispered your name and reached for you. Yes. I saw her. Her brown fist a chestnut roasted open. I stuck my finger inside. Something bled. I think it was you.

Debra Di Blasi (www.debradiblasi.com) is founding publisher of Jaded Ibis Press and president of Jaded Ibis Productions. In addition to her publishing role, she is a multi-genre writer and artist whose books include The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions; Drought & Say What You Like; Prayers of an Accidental Nature; What the Body Requires, and Skin of the Sun (forthcoming). Awards include a James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Thorpe Menn Book Award, Cinovation Screenwriting Award, and Diagram Innovative Fiction Award. She teaching and lectures on 21st Century narrative forms.

No news today - Guest Post - Shya Scanlon

2011-04-06T07:37:00.001-07:00

No news today, because everyone already knew that Obama was an alien. When the starship came down and hovered above the Whitehouse the cameras turned to watch a single stubborn leaf fall into the newly fallen snow. The last leaf of autumn! they all cried. The first leaf of the apocalypse! All the cameras watched one another carefully plod toward the downward escalator, not running, not running, infinities of static spiraling on their screens. Underneath the First Lawn, golden worms squirmed half-exposed, then disappeared one by one as, the camera’s imagined, they were sucked up and used to fuel the President’s journey home.

No news today, because laughter had already filled the air, and choked those of us still trying to breathe. Fortunately, the new apparatus kept our dead bodies productive. They had use for the motion, but there was no use for the heat, so it just rose. The cameras watched it escape, recording this on blank tapes, and broadcasting it into the stars. The stars, knowing something about heat, were not impressed.

No news today, because the war had already gone on forever.

Shya Scanlon is the author of In This Alone Impulse, and Forecast.

No news today - Guest Post - Joseph Riipi

2011-04-01T08:14:00.001-07:00

No News Today

His car buckled, broke down.

Choked up its radiator fluid, sputtered brief oil slicks at the sun.

Door metal screeched and the man spilled out, squinting then collapsing. Tired weeds and mud bury his face. This is how I find him, spilled from his car, glanced from the highway. I'd thought he was an animal, maybe a sack of them. I kick and my shoe comes back sticky.

I turn to the road, keep walking, run.

The highway is made of heat and ocean, wavy, delirious splashing against my face; it soaks my shirt and hair. I run until the gas station, where my wife is sucking soda from a straw and sweaty men pump our car full. Did you find the ring? she asks. I shake my wet head, don't tell her about the body. She sips her soda and stares at my finger. I wish you wouldn't play games like that, she says, and turns away.

I drive us back to the motel because it’s my day to drive, and then we fuck because it's been three days. The fucking is her idea, Something a real married couple would do, she says, A real couple would do it just like this, like an engine in neutral, no gear-grinding or danger, do it to keep ourselves running is all, sensible maintenance. After, she goes to the bathroom to pee; I pull on my shorts and switch on the television. She comes back wearing my t-shirt and parks herself on my shoulder. She falls asleep there, face in my arm pit--her nook, she’s given it as name.

I watch the news for our pictures and then a prison movie while she sleeps. I think about my boyhood dog; how he slept the same, oblivious to endings. I think about tomorrow, where we’re headed, how much we have left, what we’ll do if we never get there. In the morning, I know, we will eat continental breakfast and steal extra lunch for the road. My wife will fill her purse with fistfuls of bottled water, fruits and cookies. She’ll say to me, Someday our car will die in the desert and you'll be glad you married a thief. She’ll say to me, I’m driving today, it’s my turn. She’ll say to me, Keep your hands inside the window, and I will wonder about the man whose body was in the ditch, and maybe we will keep playing this game or maybe not.

Joseph Riippi is author of the story collection THE ORANGE SUITCASE, forthcoming March 2011 from Ampersand Books. His first novel DO SOMETHING! DO SOMETHING! DO SOMETHING! (2009) will be reissued in a new edition later this year. He lives in New York. (www.josephriippi.com)

No news today - Guest Post - Matt Bell

2011-03-28T14:16:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-25T07:46:00.001-07:00

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

2011-03-23T17:02:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-21T08:24:00.000-07:00

"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

2011-03-17T07:32:00.001-07:00

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

2011-03-08T09:42:00.000-08:00

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

2011-03-03T10:27:00.000-08:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Evan Lavender-Smith

2011-02-27T08:06:00.000-08:00

iPad Opens World to Disabled Boy*

1. iPad; iPad Opens

iPad. Neither iDevice among iDevices nor device among devices—no more or less rabbit than cell phone—but rather the emblem and embodiment of a new contiguity between human and device. The headline refers us to a relation within a relation. The first, proceeding without us, is interior to the device: a rendezvous of circuitry and fleshiness to which we are always already late.
iPad Opens. The second relation, constituted by holding the first relation in your hand. The fact that you are holding a device does not constitute the primary (interior) relation between human and device, but rather the secondary (exterior) relation. What you are holding in your hand already has a relation embodied in it, thus the experience is wholly different from holding a "regular" device in your hand. What distinguishes the iPad is its presentation of a human–device contiguity even before you grasp it. It has approached the human–device relation from the other end, so to speak—from the perspective of the device. Even when the device is alone, it is already sticky, already becoming fleshy.

2. iPad Opens World vis-à-vis iPad Opens [the] World contra iPad Opens [a] World

a) iPad Opens [the] World. The phenomenological "world" (Heidegger): iPad as complementary prosthesis granting its bearer access to the/his world.
b) iPad Opens [the]2 World. The logical-positivist "world" (Wittgenstein): iPad as complementary prosthesis granting its bearer access to the/our world.
c) iPad Opens [a] World. The modal-realist "world" (Leibniz/Lewis): iPad as supplementary (auxiliary) prosthesis granting its bearer access to a/another world.

3. Disabled Boy

a) Disabled Boy vis-à-vis 2a. World more open than closed. The disabled boy is lacking an access point (or multiple points) to the/his world (e.g. a left arm) and the device serves as a substitute (e.g. a prosthetic left arm), or serves to augment an extant access point (e.g. a second hand for his right arm; a smarter brain; wings). It is unnecessary to think the iPad as multiple (i.e. relationally) in this scenario; the iPad needn't be more than a device among devices. E.g. iPad Teaches Dyslexic Boy to Read.
b) Disabled Boy vis-à-vis 2b. World more closed than open. The disabled boy is lacking access as such (e.g. he is largely sensory deprived, etc.) and the device serves as an example—via its interior human–device relation in correspondence with its exterior human–device relation—of the comportment of a/the human to the/our world.
c) Disabled Boy vis-à-vis 2c. World more world than world. The disabled boy is granted access to a possible world in which an encounter between the interior and exterior relations occurs such that the concept of relation is thought along the infinitesimal boundary between its interior and exterior manifestations. The boy's spirit is now free to delve into the device, and his disability is rendered insignificant, thus:

iPad Opens [Another] World to Disabled Boy

*Apple.com Hot News Headline, 11/01/2010.

Evan Lavender-Smith is the author of From Old Notebooks (2010) and Avatar (2011), the editor of Noemi Press and the prose editor of Puerto del Sol. He teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University.

No news today - Guest Post - Greg Mulcahy

2011-02-23T08:14:00.000-08:00

RADIO

10 below zero.
Where the hell had his watch cap gone? Instead there was nothing. Instead he would freeze.
Cap from the dollar store.
Somebody—maybe his nephew—left the hat in his car—tan knit cap with a skull on it. Something like something a snowboarder—some extreme sport kid—would wear.
All he had.
Time running. Work waiting.
He put on the cap.
Somebody dead on the car radio. Not the person, the notice.
He would not be on the radio. Not his notice. But then what did he care.
He’d care for nothing at the time.
Thought he’d heard vaguely a woman he once knew had died. Hadn’t seen her for years. Did not know where he’d heard. Did not know if it was true. Maybe. Someday maybe he would look.
Walked into the office.
Hey, your skull’s showing, Hooten said.
Confused. He realized.
Fuck you, Hooten.
Later, he told her. Hooten always on his ass. Hooten deliberately referencing the fact his sister had had a tumor.
He said, He wanted to find any way to bring it up.
He wasn’t referencing that, she said.
You don’t know him, he said, how he is.
Hours later he woke.
She awake.
Why did you wear that stupid hat, she said.
I told you.
No, she said. That’s not it.
What difference does it make, he said.
You’re always doing things like that, she said. Testing people. Provoking them. A hat with a skull.
It’s not a skull, he said. It is a death’s head.
Oh, you know everything about the hat. You knew. Then somebody took the bait.
Did you think, he said, I was trying to catch something?

Greg Mulcahy is the author of OUT of WORK, CONSTELLATION, and CARBINE. He lives in Minnesota.

No news today - Guest Post - Angela Stubbs

2011-02-18T09:08:00.000-08:00

Dear N~

There’s no news today. I’m telling you now for fear you might not read this ‘til later. I’d be none the wiser to missing declarations that come with conducting roll call. The northwest is predictably quiet, sitting on her hands, unable to choose x’s over why but this is nothing new. No silent victories to report. Did you know a plastic blue tarp can prevent use of pots and pans at the highest heights? This is not news but useful information if you feel damp on the inside. I could give you my ideas on a myriad of topics if you prefer painful eagerness to that of a clinical breakthrough.

I have an idea; let’s make our own news by breaking rules with two-sided conversation.

Quid Pro Quo, but you go first.

I’m taking you to the place where Robert named you ‘Dakini’ and you ate plantains

you know how to

sew it

all

up

because thimble and thread need no running shtick.

Maybe there we discuss our collective knowledge of Pakistani writers, bad dates and what happens sometimes to those who don’t know the first thing about field-speak. Pencil me in. Hold the hold.

I feel like we could have our own headlines: BookeyJane Breaks Through Armor, Physician Heals Thy Self!

You think I’m kidding but it’s true.

No strange accounts of the everyday will take place so

shoes stay off.

However, I’m whispering the secret news if you can hear through the static.

You must walk 1000 steps to the left when you go outside.

There are directions on what comes next so you don’t need a ticker, just wait and see if you overhear over here.

The best performances are given via satellite on preset channels but yours is via invitation only.

Will you won’t respond so new news can be known in a world where various hats wait to be worn.

You’re up in ten with some kind of wonderful. Please be sure to wear the fuzzy. The girl in the other room will listen, glass to wall for your words, straining to hear you. Thirty years will speed right past the trachea, between two lungs, thus accelerating the pace with which you produce groundbreaking news, should you choose to exhale, allowing a multitude of outcomes, all in your favor.

No one is taking notes, don’t worry. The news is just news when it exists but it doesn’t and that’s what it means to trust red.

Angela Stubbs is a writer whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, Marco Polo Quarterly, Elimae, The Collagist, The Rumpus, Astrophil Press, Bookslut and others. She has a column at The Nervous Breakdown and is an MFA Writing and Poetics candidate at Naropa University.

No news today - Guest Post - Mike Meginnis

2011-02-13T07:25:00.000-08:00

Many birds fell from the sky and the newspaper said it was normal. We believed it. This was after the bees. He had to look it up to find out they were turtle doves. They don't really come in pairs. Turtle doves. They look like if pigeons were pretty and brown instead of ugly and the color pigeons are. The turtle doves had blue marks on their beaks, which were also normal.

This was before the dogs.

He believed once that newspapers were required to report everything, more or less, which was why they were so thick. Then he learned about ad revenue, which declines steadily as the ads themselves grow, and its importance. The revenue. There were rumors of a missing black girl. These were only rumors. He looked for her without a picture for reference, and so felt only sharp pangs of concern for every black girl. In the Pic Quik, in the Hardee's.

This was before the snakes.

The newspaper offered nobody any catharsis. It only wound him up more tightly. The newspaper said this was normal. It was also normal, they said, to live in fear. It was normal that year to stay in on weekends. This was after the crabs.

He found a bird on his windshield. Its wings were open not because it fell that way but because the wind was of that mind. If you can imagine the sound he made then you must know how it feels. The Google people had just released a program that let you take a picture of an object and search the internet to find out what it was. The program could recognize a resemblance. Because he didn't have the program to find out he couldn't know for sure what kind of bird. No one could say he didn't try to pull the feathers from his wipers.

Mike Meginnis has stories published or forthcoming in The Lifted Brow, Hobart, The Collagist, Booth, Smokelong Quarterly, elimae, and others. He co-edits Unanny Valley (uncannyvalleymag.com) with his wife, Tracy Bowling.

No news today - Guest Post - Jessica Anya Blau

2011-02-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

No News

It started with asbestos. Something to think about when I hammered a nail into the baby’s nursery to hang an old floral painting I bought at a yard sale. And then there was toxic black mold. According to the papers, you had to tear the walls apart to really find it. Lead came next: in the water, the pipes, the windowsills, the dirt in the back yard where my not-yet-born child might play. When truck treads started flying off tires on the freeway, smashing through windshields and killing drivers, I really began to worry. How was I ever going to survive a drive to the hospital where my child would receive her possibly HIV-tainted blood transfusion to reduce the lead in her poisoned body?

I couldn’t eliminate any of these terrors—like bad plastic surgery, each fix presented a new problem. So I eliminated the newspaper. And the news on TV. And everything, almost magically, just disappeared.

Jessica Anya Blau's second novel, DRINKING CLOSER TO HOME (HarperCollins) will be out on January 18. Her first book, THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES (HarperCollins) was chosen as a Best Summer Book by the Today Show, the New York Post, and New York Magazine. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Rocky Mountain News and Barnes and Noble all chose THE SUMMER OF NAKED SWIM PARTIES as one of the Best Books of the Year. Currently, Jessica lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College. For information go to www.jessicaanyablau.com

No news today - Guest Post - Eugene Lim

2011-01-30T17:36:00.000-08:00

ON NEWS TODAY = http://twitter.com/on_kawara

Eugene Lim is the author of Fog & Car.

No news today - Guest Post - Hannah Lilith Assadi

2011-01-26T08:47:00.003-08:00

The country never tires of plot or character. Not the way I am sometimes tired. The way sometimes I cannot push a story past the first sentence or cannot work backwards from the last sentence. Perhaps my desire is not ignited by character or plot, but by the dance, the music, that harnesses the beginning to the end. The beginning, like a virgin bride, girdled up and trembling, prepares for a ceremony that has little meaning other than that it delivers her to the conjugal bed, in which she is revealed, or as it were, fulfilled. All that’s in between are wedding guests: transitory, drunken, flailing about in the limping tent of my narrative.

This is never the case in the news. Admittedly, the news tells better stories than I. Certainly better tragedies. In the news, there is always a protagonist and her antagonist. There is a setting. There is exposition. There is the barren desert land in which the two have met. There is the sound of gun shots which will (temporarily) rival the (permanently) muted sound of bombs exploding in that other barren desert land, once the womb of Eden.

Then there is the back story. The elusive parents of the antagonist, who raged to neighbors about the trash. There is the ever intoxicating provision of detail, more detail! we scream: a shrine in the yard of skull and blackened oranges. There is a kindly foil, a freak classmate with magenta hair. The more they give us, the more we want. We do not want to understand the tragedy. We want to understand our antagonist. We want to understand him so much that the congresswoman lying nearly brain dead in the hospital pales in comparison to this effort. She is not the protagonist. We are the protagonist. It is Jared Lee Loughner vs. US.

We are addicted to Jared, this college dropout beefhead Mein Kampf toting loser turned murderer from Tucson, Arizona. We want to read his journal, we want to know his old friends, we want to know his every intimate excursion the way we want to know a lover who has thwarted us. A murderer of six has become the hateful beloved of every news channel. I wonder this evening of the girl or guy in their bedroom who stole his virginity, if it ever was stolen. He or she should be interviewed next.

They are printing stickers. The stickers say stand with Arizona. Arizona United. I should say I am from Arizona. I should say I drove through Tucson with my parents (and stopped) to get gas around half past 11 Saturday morning. We did not hear any sirens. My father bitched in the backseat that we were getting too close to the border. That they would stop us for looking Mexican. My mother wanted to drive on to see an old mining town turned artist’s colony named Bisbee. I looked out over Tucson from the window, its dull pastels, the endless flat sky, the low buildings, and thought, as I’ve always thought of Tucson (my apologies to its natives) that it was the ideal setting for suicide.

We arrived in Bisbee and they shut the gallery doors on us. Quietly. My father cried racism. We turned on the radio. A woman was shot. Her name was Gabrielle. A 9 year old was shot. A suspect was arrested. We did not hear any sirens. The trip had gained new purpose. There was a story. There was news. And this might be the intractable problem at the root of it all, of storytelling, of the news.

Jared, in his tiny jail cell, has had his victory. I should say this nauseates me. I should say that it is still true. Now everyone is listening to Jared’s ‘conscious dreaming’, his fucked up fairy tale that after 22 pathetic years in dull pastel and barren desert, put him on the news. Everyone is ravenous with listening.

Hannah Lillith Assadi lives in Brooklyn, New York but was raised in Arizona. She is working on her first novel and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

No news today - Guest Post - Darlin' Neal

2011-01-21T10:57:00.000-08:00

The report brings news to me. El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States. I click off the screen. I try not to think of my brothers in all that trouble living near the border. I try not to think about how sick my mother is, but instead how she still laughs and takes in discarded children. How she talks of all the problems our country might solve if they’d just legalize marijuana. At least it’d be a start. I am thinking of visiting, dropping down in El Paso and driving on over to La Luz. If you know where to look you can see all the crosses honoring all the dead women. I think someone told me they’ve stopped with the crosses. There are too many and it’s not just women any more.

There’s a restaurant in Mississippi where you can sit and watch raccoons and cats eat scraps of fish and leftovers beneath pine trees. There are windows all around. I like to go there and watch them getting along. There is so much food. In the restaurant I’ve heard people come in after church and talk about the aliens crossing over the border. Everyone’s heard all that hate. That’s not news. Mississippi is where my life began. Mississippi doesn’t contain that hatred. It is all over the country.

In New Mexico where I grew up the sky is something else. You should see how a comet blisters down through the sky. Coyotes call and scavenge, trick. What silence when they’ve killed their prey. I lost a kitten like that once.

But I can’t stop thinking about El Paso. All those hundreds of young women’s bodies, many just children, strewn in the desert. Someone saw innocent dark eyes, full lips, long hair. There was a type for a long time. It made them think of mutilation. Cops mocked the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of dead little girls. Mira! Mira!

In that restaurant after church, a Mexican man throws more scraps from the backdoor. Someone wonders whose job he has stolen. On the television up high in the corner, there's hatred, fear fanned by talking heads rejecting hardworking people who don't speak the language, were born just beyond a dividing line, coming here hungry, just like they come to Juarez since NAFTA to work in those factories making American products for pennies, where someone waited outside for a young woman, a little girl to be sent away from work. It's not the same hatred that leaves them dragged through the dirt, pummeled, and brutally raped, nipples bitten off, breasts severed from their tiny bodies, almost all of them around ninety pounds, but here it is the same disregard for the poor and voiceless that leaves them ignored in their own country.

I’m thinking shanty towns you can see from the highway, of cardboard houses, of girls who won't eat if they ride the bus, tangled electrical cords so you can't find the stolen source.How the horror would be too much to believe and you might walk home from the factory to save money, how no one maybe had ever really hurt you before, and you might walk home anyway because who would believe something so unspeakable could happen to them, looking up at that giant Christ on the cross where Mexico, Texas and New Mexico meet, because you would see that giant crucified Christ as you prayed for mercy while suffering to death among hundreds of dead girls in the desert.

You might even take your shoes off to save them for later. You wouldn't want to ruin what would cost so much to replace and you'd think there'd be a later, no matter how hungry you are, how long you've been helping your mother, carrying babies on your hip, walking to work so young and faking your age.

And the man in the restaurant at another table calling over, saying don't you, don't you think these people should stay in their own country and you've been to the border that really isn't much of a border at all if you're going the other way into Mexico and he's telling you that you've got to think about what's being stolen from you, and it's over fifteen years since those murders began and nothing, nothing has been done about it, and it's more than fifteen years we've been profiting from the work of those tiny girls in the factories. No one talks about the bravery. At least it’s not much news. The brave women who are becoming police officers. The courageous parents dreaming of just one step over into another world where there are safe cities.

Darlin’ Neal is the author of the short story collection, Rattlesnakes and The Moon (March 2010). Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Puerto del Sol, Smokelong Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, The Rio Grande Review and dozens of other magazines. She has fiction and nonfiction included in the Best of The Web 2009 and has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an assistant professorship in the MFA program at The University of Central Florida, and is Fiction Editor of the Florida Review. She also serves as faculty advisor to UCF's undergraduate literary arts magazine, The Cypress Dome, and for The Writers in The Sun Reading Series for which she brings in writers of national caliber each semester.

No news today - Guest Post - Dan Wickett

2011-01-17T09:04:00.000-08:00

No news today. This brought cheers from the many that wondered how those plastic motherfuckers on the local channels could so easily segue from the horrible stories of 7 year old girls shot in drive-bys to chuckling about the monkey playing peek-a-boo at the zoo. No sports today either, which made the true sports fans happy that they didn't have to watch some bozo with cheesy entrances to his pieces going on and on about something he knew little about. No weather either. This worried a few, especially those that were fans of Ohle, of Derby, of Scanlon, of McCarthy.

Dan Wickett began the Emerging Writers Network in 2000 and co-founded Dzanc Books with Steven Gillis in 2006. He edited the anthology Visiting Hours (Press 53) and has had one story published, in Quick Fiction.

No news today - Guest Post - Rebbecca Brown

2011-01-11T13:30:00.001-08:00

Oh clear and just contained, how you whittle the world with every step and prosper, turning foot to meter, speaking word to pitter, patter moments of minutes. These places, photographs the wind once bore with a wisp and spin, a flash of light and lens, captured in a box with holes made out of pins. Sometimes bustled, sometimes light as a kiss, making images of book, the bird, a steeple. Somewhere in between, these are all the people.
What to say to the world when there’s no there? Every shush and sound a lisp? Once I walked the surface. Sat on sand and said oh you beautiful and was greeted with a shift.
I want to touch a mouth and meaning. I want to worry the words from one to another, vine them round, illume a bright green bloom inside. Where there are no hows or whys. Where there are no whos or whats. There there are no heres there there.

Rebbecca Brown teaches at Hunter College.

No news today - Guest Post - Justin Sirois

2011-01-10T07:45:00.000-08:00

YCSRTWYW

the best news you’ll hear all day is

you can stop reading this whenever you want. Hey,

Ahmedinejad just reviewed his new Kindle on Amazon:

… most disappointingly is that users cannot scribble

notes in the margins – lines of poetry that, if discovered

by the next reader, create a secret community, untraceable

and free…

he goes on for a while, the way Ahmedinejad can sometimes

*

it’s the condition when you can identify more than five

movie directors by their photograph – it’s the one place on

the internet that’s never seen a cat – it’s like being extradited

on surprise sex charges – they are eye drops that make all

red lights turn green – it’s the fact that if you are trying

to be clever too often, people will resent you – it’s the

Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 –

it’s a retirement plan that takes spent wages from your

previous jobs & invests in the earning potential of the

new surprise sex industry

*

free space, anywhere in the world, is potential ad space. Like

here [ ]

& since no one has purchased that ad yet I’ll plug the

new Publishing Genius title

[ http://www.publishinggenius.com/ ]

*

hey, the best news you’ll hear all day is Ahmedinejad

returned his Kindle & Ahmedinejad took a 45 minute nap &

Ahmedinejad prayed & Ahmedinejad’s slippers! & scowling

at the television & ate some toast with marmalade &

Ahmedinejad smoking & obtaining & loving

& if you hold a Wikileak mirror up to another Wikileak mirror

you will see Ahmedinejad investing your previously

spent wages on secret communities

Justin Sirois is a writer living in Baltimore, Maryland. His books include Secondary Sound (BlazeVOX Books, 2008), MLKNG SCKLS (Publishing Genius, 2009) and Falcons on the Floor (forthcoming, Pub G.) written with Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy. His novel DMBSTRCK will be finished soon. He also runs the Understanding Campaign with Haneen and co-directs Narrow House. Justin received individual Maryland State Art Council grants in 2003, 2007, and 2010.

No news today - Guest Post - Danielle Blau

2011-01-02T09:15:00.000-08:00

NO NEWS TODAY

No factories burn. No jets crash. No natural disasters of epic proportions. A man’s pockets are not filling with silver fish, and, above, there are no waves, hardly even a ripple. A woman once again does not remember to call the boiler repairman, who isn’t chewing on a toothpick beneath a bare lightbulb. He does not hum the tune of a song from Les Miz or stop as soon as he realizes he is doing it. His name is not Robert. No one is watching. The playground no one uses, rising from the trash-strewn weeds and gravel behind Mickey Tires & Auto Parts, is not a prehistoric mastodon skeleton, where a lone swing is not creaking your name or anyone else’s. There are no runaways in the gazebo, and one of them, a debonair redhead who, at fifteen, can pass himself off as early twenties, did not just whisper something into the ear of another — a jittery, baby-faced girl, completely bald under the oversized wool beanie she never takes off — causing her to let out a quick, astonished laugh.

Danielle Blau's poems, short stories, articles, and interviews have appeared and are forthcoming in The New Yorker Book Bench blog, The Atlantic online, Black Clock, Brown Literary Review, Perigee: Publication for the Arts, Minetta Review, The L Magazine, and multiple issues of Unsaid, among other publications. Blau is an MFA candidate in poetry at NYU's Creative Writing Program. She currently lives in Ridgewood, Queens.

No news today - Guest Post - Stefanie Freele

2010-12-27T10:41:00.000-08:00

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

No news today - Guest Post - Brian Allen Carr

2010-12-20T10:52:00.001-08:00

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 news today - Guest Post - Clark Knowles

2010-12-11T10:06:00.001-08:00

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

No news today - Guest Post - Jill Leininger

2010-12-07T12:03:00.001-08:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Kathryn Regina

2010-12-01T10:03:00.000-08:00

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/.

No news today - Guest Post - Barry Graham

2010-11-24T10:29:00.000-08:00

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

No news today - Guest Post - Jesus Angel Garcia

2010-11-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

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/.

No news today

2010-11-18T14:34:00.000-08:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Roy Kesey

2010-11-11T12:31:00.000-08:00

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)

No news today - Guest Post - Elizabeth Ellen

2010-11-11T09:42:00.000-08:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Douglas A. Martin

2010-11-03T10:12:00.000-07:00

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).

No news today - Guest Post - Christopher Higgs

2010-10-29T09:02:00.001-07:00

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.

No news today - Trailer for Asunder

2010-10-25T09:12:00.000-07:00

ASUNDER.mov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xNOOP31fzM

Animation for ASUNDER, a collection of short fictions and a novella by Robert Lopez (DZANC, 11.16.2010). Music by Sin Ropas Art and animation by Luca Dipierro

No news today - Guest Post - Leigh Newman

2010-10-19T11:46:00.001-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Alex Samets

2010-10-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Lindsay Hunter

2010-10-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Nadxieli Nieto Hall

2010-09-30T13:07:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Laura Minor

2010-09-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Brandon Hobson

2010-09-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Alexandra Chasin

2010-09-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

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

No news today - Guest Post - Ken Baumann

2010-09-10T14:48:00.000-07:00

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

No news today - Guest Post - Blake Butler

2010-09-06T10:54:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Terese Svoboda

2010-09-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Kyle Minor

2010-08-25T11:50:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Paula Bomer

2010-08-23T09:24:00.000-07:00

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/.

No news today - Guest Post - Donald Breckenridge

2010-08-19T11:44:00.001-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Jess Walter

2010-08-16T07:42:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - J.A. Tyler

2010-08-13T07:20:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Lucy Corin

2010-08-11T07:47:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today

2010-08-10T10:26:00.000-07:00

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.

No news today - Guest Post - Christopher Kennedy

2010-08-09T08:02:00.001-07:00

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.