No news today - Guest Post - Alexandra Chasin

Literature is no news that stays no news is good news, my lord ain't that good news. And there's bad news. Which do you want first.

STUDENTS
No good news is welcome to me.
Bad news is also hell come to me.

CHEERLEADERS (Same time as students)
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!
Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah! Rah!

The no news is first the bemusement of Achilles and then the happy family - either way, nothing to write home about. But Achilles wasn't the first guy to blow a gasket and he won't be the last. And Anna Karenina's broken aristocratic-hearted suicide wasn't exactly news, no more or less than Emma Bovary's bourgeois version of same. The no news is the best of times that is not also the worst of times. The nowcast is that I am an invisible woman, and that Mother just keeps on hacking. One day maybe she'll die and an Arab will get shot on the beach.

Meanwhile, Rupert, tell me something the Arabs and Mother and the other invisible women and I haven't known since the origin of the family, private property, and the state. Rah! Rah!

If only Generalissimo Francisco Franco had died and were still dead.


Alexandra Chasin is the author of Kissed By(FC2). Her work has appeared in Agni, Chain, Post Road, Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, and various cetera. She is the co-chair of Literary Studies of Eugene Lang College, The New School

No news today - Guest Post - Ken Baumann

No news today, rather, or a, there's something in both A and B but not to be confused with see, it is an ing, see? (Don't tell him) Okay then. Keep the calm in mind and qualm in hand. (Don't knock it out of his hand) Are you with me? There's nothing. (Nothing) Going. On. (Nothing?) Do you. (He's) All right. Okay. There's none. Wait, it's, or. (God) Hear. See?

Ken Baumann is. For more information, see kenbaumann.com

No news today - Guest Post - Blake Butler

Dear Robert
There is yeah no news today again
America's been rubbing my hurt apart with its special evenings
Robert
Do you want to come over and let's go shirt shopping
I feel like I could start soon to look good
Handwiches and wandwiches, Robert
What do you think of peace
I think it's a bunch of serious malarkey, and that's coming from a guy who's never been to Costco
I'd drink some snatch but there's no geese
I'd have a special day all alone here but the woman through the wall won't look me in the eye
I don't really have an eye
Fuckin shit Rob I'm starting to like how beer sounds now
When I was 19 I would have punched me today in the O
Fuck it, I'm coming up where you are
Go ahead start saying the line from the movie we both like now
Dogs are really something dude

Blake Butler sells shirts to the blind.

No news today - Guest Post - Terese Svoboda

Auntie Blog

Where’s is that pointy thing that you hold over your head with ducks on it? Under the couch? Did I beat the postman with it? There—all splintery. We must’ve had quite a conversation. It must’ve been about Susan Daitch’s terrific post, about the zookeeper whose father (?) lets him keep a polar bear around the house and that makes him sensitive to animals in cages and there is this revolution in zoos. Talk about animal writes! Just like I was saying to the postman, do you think that my dog isn’t writing all over town, lifting his leg? Freedom of expression. Expressing freedom. Like my beau who spelled out my name that way in the snow. You don’t need Hallmark. He was an animal. And so was the postman, leaning in with beery breath to tell me I have to do something about my dog who had written on his pantleg a sort of cheery note Hello. I am sensitive to all kinds of writes is what I told him, and maybe a revolution is coming, especially in spelling. Lady! he said—I remember it clearly now because I haven’t been called Lady since I was a Little Lady—and he shook his pantleg and took a step into my house. That’s when the umbrella took a beating. How it looks like writing is going to fall out of the sky all afternoon.

Terese Svoboda's fifth book of prose, Pirate Talk or Mermalade, will be published in September a few days before Talk Like a Pirate Day.

No news today - Guest Post - Kyle Minor

Notes
(The Baptists Were Right, and Now I’m Dead and Everybody’s Watching the 16mm Film of My Life)

4,987,524,129 films have preceded mine.
Who knew eternity would be spent watching so many hours of sleeping?
There are not very many ways to have sex, but I have availed myself of so few of them, anyway.
The Lord is slumping so sadly in the Bemis seat.
Jaylynn perks up everytime she has a scene, like you would have expected.
The lesson of the afterlife films: Everyone’s adulthood preoccupation is the people they wanted to please who are now dead or soon will be dead.
I always worried what Mrs. Keneally would think of me when she saw me masturbating, but now I know about that thing with her and the stuffed chicken.

Kyle Minor (www.kyleminor.com) is the author of In the Devil's Territory, a collection of stories and novellas.

No news today - Guest Post - Paula Bomer

Today is a day like many other days at this time in my life – I woke early to get my sons off the tennis camp, I lost my temper with my teenager who was supposed to be fully prepared for a trip to Boston he’s making after camp, but he had no idea where his ticket was, I felt guilty and ashamed for losing my temper, I went back to bed and felt guilty and ashamed for smoking last night and having one extra vodka that was really not necessary, I stayed in bed until noon, I got up and read and wrote while drinking coffee and eating eggs, I felt very tense and jittery and afraid of having to lift weights with an ex-marine later in the day and contemplated taking an Ativan, I read and wrote some more after showering and listened to the phone messages-- so I suppose if there is nothing profoundly different about this day at all, then there really is no news.

The idea that there is no news reminds me of the book I just finished, called Marking Time. Throughout the book, the characters, whose lives are greatly disrupted by WWII, think of themselves as just marking time. This is in part because many of the characters are adolescents- between childhood and adulthood—and have very little power to do what they want to do, but are not young enough to not want to do more grown up things. So they are marking time- waiting- until they will be grown up enough to do what they want to do. But in many ways, everyone, including the adults in the book, is waiting for the war to end, so they are all marking time, waiting for the news to be good, so in that way, all the bad news isn’t news, because the only news they want, the only news that will free them from feeling as though they are marking time, is the news that the war is over. Sadly, at the end of the book, there is no news then, no news that will free these poor characters that is, no news that matters, as Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor.

Paula Bomer is the author of the forthcoming short story collection, Baby And Other Stories (Word Riot Press, 2010). Her fiction has appeared in Open City, Fiction, The New York Tyrant, The Mississippi Review and elsewhere. She's the co-publisher at Artistically Declined Press and the supervising editor of the literary journal, Sententia. Find out more at http://www.paulabomer.com/.

No news today - Guest Post - Donald Breckenridge

Fish Tacos for dinner.

Donald Breckenridge is the Fiction Editor of The Brooklyn Rail, Editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose Press, 2006) and co-editor of the Intranslation web site. In addition, he is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein (Red Dust, 1998), the novels 6/2/95 (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002) and You Are Here (Starcherone 2009). His novel This Young Girl Passing is forthcoming from Unbearable Books/Autonomedia.