No news today - Trailer for Asunder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.