No news today - Guest Post - Shane Jones

Right now I'm eating a Wallaby Organic Yogurt, Strawberry Banana flavored. I'm at work, sitting in a corner cubicle. Someone is playing John Mayer really loud. When I opened my yogurt today it did this thing where little blobs spat all over my shirt. The music just changed to M.I.A Paper Planes. Strange.

Shane Jones lives in New York. He's the author of several books and chapbooks. He blogs and updates things at www.shane-jones.com

No news today - Guest Post - John Madera

Though today is another day without news, it is a day without a noose, and that must be good news, for a day without a noose, without its loops burning a groove into my palm, without wondering where best to knot that boa constrictor’s uncoiled end, without figuring if said place could bear the heft, bear the kicking, the crazed tick tock, a day without worrying about a bungled attempt, about every consequent day being a brain dead day, is a day with no news about a noose, and a day with no news about a noose is good news since no noose is good noose.

John Madera’s work is forthcoming in Conjunctions, The Believer, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Corduroy Mountain. And he edits Big Other among other things.

No news today - Guest Post - Dawn Raffel

I have always enjoyed the ambiguity of the phrase "no news is good news." Do this mean that if there's no news, you should chill out because everything's fine? Or is it darker, as in: There is no news that could ever possibly be good?

Dawn Raffel's most recent book is Further Adventures in the Restless Universe.

No news today - Guest Post - Lily Hoang

Someone solved a crossword puzzle in two minutes flat today. Granted, it’s Monday, which makes the daily crossword easier. One is forced to wonder if this person could finish a Thursday or Friday crossword with such efficiency.

A careful inspection of the completed puzzle, however, revealed most of the words were incorrect. Although the letters reclined into the open white squares with graciousness and the words these letters juxtaposed to create were indeed real words that fit within the parameters of the clues, they were not the puzzle-maker’s intended words. As such, this person who solved this crossword puzzle in two minutes flat elided even the puzzle-maker.

Lily Hoang is the author of the novels, THE EVOLUTIONARY REVOLUTION, CHANGING (recipient of a 2009 PEN/Beyond Margins Award), and PARABOLA, (winner of the 2006 ChiasmusPress Un-Doing the Novel Contest).

No news today - Guest Post - Michael Kimball

Nothing much so far, though I am hopeful.

Michael Kimball’s third novel, DEAR EVERYBODY (which The Believer calls “a curatorial masterpiece”), is now out in paperback. His work has been on NPR’s All Things Considered and in Vice, as well as The Guardian, Unsaid, and New York Tyrant. He is also responsible for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story (on a postcard), I WILL SMASH YOU, 60 WRITERS/60 PLACES, and the 510 Readings.

No news today - Guest Post - John Domini

No news today, certainly not when I’ve wasted its entire evening in one of the many, many manifestations of that early-21st-Century American phenomenon, the wine bar. Rarely has killing time been so elegantly disguised. I doubt the wits of the Algonquin Round Table, whiling away the hours over gin and blather, kidded themselves that they were somehow gaining in refinement as they grew more swozzled. I doubt Dorothy Parker would treat the word “terroir” with any more respect than she accorded the others she so brilliantly spun into pun. Today’s bar happens to be in the Algonquin’s Manhattan, but it could be in any of the instant-yuppie pockets one tumbles into across the country: off State St. in Madison, WI, along the Alberta corridor of Portland, OR, on the square in Oxford, MS.... Then there are the sort-of-small plates, eats that extend the delusion, allowing an idler to believe he’s not shoveling on the calories. Yes, these grilled dates, stuffed with ricotta and wrapped in thick local bacon — a better match for the Aglianico, wouldn’t you say? I’m developing such sophistication just sitting here, I can taste how this bacon was free-range; I know it attended the college of its choice. Yet neither the drinks nor the food’s the defining anomaly of such places (anomaly, or travesty, or what the fuck). Their earmark is an earworm, an unrelenting soundtrack of bebop jazz. Monk and Miles and Mingus, that M-erald forest with roots and branches that extend everywhere from this same small island’s E. 52nd St.: it’s their vibrant and exploratory riffs and slurs and roundings that float down, unendingly, from the speakers in such places. It’s the same attack on straightforward melody and rhythm that half a century or so ago challenged a clubgoer, asking him to experience melody and changes in new ways, to reinvent musical satisfaction. To call such an artist “easy listening,” whew, that would've invited gunplay. But that’s just what Monk’s “’Round Midnight” or Miles’ “So What” has become, these days, down in your thronging local wine bar. History has sprung a hellacious surprise, on these crazy cats; it’s turned them to fat and lazy tabbies.

But then again, who am I to play the Old Curmudgeon? To sit and cry crocodile tears for a former cutting edge turned to taffy? Who’s more willing than I to kill first Happy Hour and then dinner and then as long as it takes in a well-stocked wine bar, gabbing across a scrumptious sampler plate while Dexter Gordon’s Ballads cycle through on shuffle? Yes, the pesto bruschetta, please, with parmesan. And now seems a good time for that Falanghina, yes. And — indulge me here, oh, indulge me — do you have Miles and Cannonball doing “Autumn Leaves?”

The Emerging Writers Network called John Domini's novels from '07 and '08, Earthquake I.D. and A Tomb on the Periphery, "back-to-back stunners." Tomb on the Periphery also made the '09 short list at the London Book Festival for "the best of international publishing," and Earthquake I.D., in Italian translation, was runner-up for the Domenico Rea prize. He extends a warm and wine-rich welcome to anyone stopping by Des Moines.

No news today - Guest Post - Catherine Lacey

1. What we have here is more of the same: more floors and ceilings, more lines out the door and more press releases that let us know that more of the same is on the way.
2. Then the news will come that there is no news and we'll pocket it and wait.
3,4,5 & 6. And I'll have the thicker skin on the soles of my feet, and she'll have the same patch of grass in the same park except now the grass is thinning out, in the same way it always does.
7a. And we will all have it
7b. and have had it
7c. and then have it again.

Catherine Lacey is opening a Bed and Breakfast in Brooklyn this summer and yes, your folks should stay here when they come visit in the fall. Also she writes for a variety of outlets and is trying to sell a book. www.catherinelacey.com