Titular Journal

I now have a piece up in the new online journal TITULAR, which is publishing work that takes its title from movies, books or TV shows.

My piece is for TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME and can be read here.

Check it out and submit. It also is looking awesome. There is also a piece by Eric Feezell from Opium Magazine. I am glad to see a small influx of high quality new publications online.

To receive this publication I sucked a whole hell of a lot of dick and prayed to God.

props

I got props today from Bookslut, via Jason B. Jones, for the NOO Journal piece. That is nice to see.

Today I received a copy of VAAST BIN by Michael Peters. It looks awesome.

Does anybody know of a good print journal that likes to publish work that is simultaneously ridiculous/funny/grotesque? I am about to finish a story about the beginning of a new apocalypse on the TV show Friends, but I have no idea who would want it. It is too long to be online.

Pineapple War

The new online journal PINEAPPLE WAR has just debuted with a short poem of mine titled 'INSTRUCTIONAL POEM FOR GRAND ENTRANCE'.

Check out the poem and the site and while you're at it, submit something. It looks like it is going to be nice.

To receive this publication I forced a screwdriver into my left nostril until I felt a puncture. I crawled along the floor and sniffed my brain up full with itch and I went to the white wall in my mother's kitchen and sneezed her portrait. For her hair, I used the darker blood. For her eyes, I kicked out holes. For her voice, I lay and waited and am waiting and will wait.

More Ben Marcus

Began rereading 'Notable American Women' today. I do remember that the opening letter from Ben's father is a bit slowgoing as an opening, but still made me laugh and/or amused and/or provoked.

Here is a quote I like from that section (pg 15), which is pretty definitive of the language used here (one of the main reasons I admire the book):

"A father is pleased anytime a son can regulate his busily superficial mind for the time required to command a book's worth of language to the page. Such a feat is particularly notable, given the aforementioned mental challenges of the son, when it can barely be expected that the son remember to bring potatoes to the underground area where his father waits to be fed. When his only task is to bring a potato to his goddamned father, or to let new air into his father's area, where the old air has already been used, because there is a living man down here!, or to to walk his father up above when his father has gone months, motherfucker, without seeing a house, a stick, a bird, a window, a road, the key objects of our time, when his father has no new air to clean his eyes and rid his skin of the language fluid poured in by the man with the tube, who speaks his Sentences of Menace, trying to burst the father's body with words. Let a man wash himself, and stride in the open air, for fuck's sake! Given his systematic incompetence and neglect of the one person he was born to live, how can a single word from Ben Marcus's rotten, filthy heart be trusted?"

Strange, yes, and non-narrative, but I think the passage is funny and works well, particularly leading into the surrealist text that follows.

While searching earlier today I found an interesting list of writing prompts Marcus used with his students while teaching at Brown. read here. some of them are clearly generative of Notable American Women itself, particularly #5: Design a religion. This could include a theory of creation (How did we get here? How did something come from nothing?), a system of rules and punishments, moral do’s and don’ts, clothing, architecture, prayers, etc.. You could instead write a story in which the characters practice a new religion — it does not have to be the subject of the story, but it can be used to generate interesting behaviors and ideas in your work. If you think of religion as a successful fiction — a set of provocative ideas that have satisfied the hardest questions of a group of people — you might better determine how to make a religion that might come close to satisfying you. When we consider the fiction writer as someone who provides necessary myths to the culture, we see that devising a religion might very well be an appropriate task.

I don't much like writing to prompts myself, but they can be useful for thinking sometimes, and interesting at least to apply to Marcus's thought process in his own work.

Whoops

Okay, I think I'm going to stop with the porn references intended to generate traffic. It's getting a little out of hand.

From today only, keywords that brought people to my site: shitting links, i fucked my butler, boy erection, boy erections, how does the rectum work and diagram, erections in showers, shitting, pamela porn, right tit bigger than left?

Can you get flagged by the government from people landing on your site looking for child porn when you were just kidding?

Perhaps some more appropo: Padgett Powell jumping jacks weight loss, Gilbert Sorrentino steak flavored bubble gum, Robert Coover sex scenes, The Tunnel William H. Gass, Omensetter's Luck, Donald Barthelme deathbed wish, Irreversible violence scenes, A Clockwork Orange sequel, Twin Peaks explained, cohesion between Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire as an exit strategy for the body, David Lynch exercise shorts, Mary Gaitskill autographed riding crop, Secretary with Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, Crispin Glover spoken word Chewbacca elegy, how to clean an invisible wound, Invisible Cities, adios.

Finished rereading Blood Meridian last night. What a champion book. Now I am going to reread Ben Marcus's Notable American Women and finally finish my Roy Kesey review.

Michael Kimball

I just read an excellent short piece by Michael Kimball in Post Road: Excerpts from the Suicide Letters of Jonathon Bender (b.1967-d.2000).

This kind of writing inspires me to write.

I feel somehow like I've learned a lot about myself in the past week. I don't know how to put into words what I've learned but I feel different. I feel it in my chest.

nonexistent novel excerpt

An excerpt from my unfinished and currently by the wayside novel INVISIBLE ERRORS is now live up at WANDERING ARMY. The novel is about an accused pedophile who is not really a pedophile. This excerpt is from somewhere in the middle. I don't know if I'll ever finish the novel. I don't know if I'll ever finish anything. Or that anything can be finished. Or that birds eat seed.

Read it here: What I've Been and Where I'm Going and Would You Like Your Sandwich Toasted?.

To receive this publication, I ruined everything else in my life forever.

Bleed Magazine & feces

A couple of my friends in Atlanta are starting a new art/literary magazine and are looking for submissions of all kinds of stuff. You should send them something. Check it out here. They are trying to get things together by the end of the month but there's still a lot they are looking for, so it'd be a good chance to see print without having to fellate or massage or stroke anyone or anything, know what I mean?

Today I got an email from the web journal Exquisite Corpse about a short thing I sent them in January 2006. I ended up withdrawing it a couple weeks later as it was published here. Here is what their 21 month-long reply said: Corpse is against feces. Sorry, eds

Cute, dudes.

I sent them back a brief rejection letter rejection letter: Blake is against responses for submissions sent more than 21 months ago and already withdrawn. Sorry, b

There is a new release from Calamari Press available now and it looks pretty cool.

I found I have an extra copy of Gordon Lish's PERU. If anyone wants to trade for it or just wants it for free, let me know.

NOÖ [seven] is live

The new issue of NOÖ Journal is now up: [seven]. It has a lot of excellent people in it including Robert Lopez, Mazie Louise Montgomery, Norman Ball and a bunch of others.

I have another list in it. List Prayer. You should look at it and leave comments there so I feel enabled and engaged. The print version is forthcoming.

I had a job when I wrote this. I wrote it in one sitting in my Gmail browser while answering phonecalls from people who could not afford to pay their bills.

Thanks to Mike Young for another excellent issue. Mike Young writes great emails.

To receive this publication I lay facedown in a field with seven children with cleft facial abnormalities (a cleft upper lip, a cleft nostril, a cleft ear and a cleft face) for 37 hours while listening to Rosie O'Donnell sing a cover version of 'American Pie' in duet with the fat guy from Stain'd on repeat over loudspeakers and chewing tacky glue.

boy scout erection

today i went to the grocery to buy ice cream and the guy who checked me out was a guy i remember from the years i was a boy scout. he was 5-6 years older than me and finishing his eagle badge when i was just getting started.

for some reason i vividly remember when we went on a camping trip to pensacola to sleep on a navy base. we went out and did some boy scout-ish type shit like rappelling or digging or climbing over dirt and then we were all dirty and supposed to shower. there were about thirty of us aged 12-15 naked in the navy base showers. the showers were large and wide and open and had no blinders and you could see into them even from outside where the lockers were.

for some reason i vividly remember this particular eagle scout, scrawny and pale and glasses-wearing and femininely voiced, standing near the front of the showers completely nude, without even a towel wrapped around him, staring wide-eyed and unashamedly straight on into the showers with a full ungroomed erection. he stood there while others passed by him coming in and out and he stood there with his hips slightly jutted forward and he stood there with an erection i can still for some reason vividly remember sticking straight up out into the air while he watched me and those other boys washing ourselves.

nobody said anything about it.

later he completed his eagle badge by building picnic tables for a homeless shelter.

now almost 15 years later, he works a register at kroger and is mostly bald and looks sixty years old.

he did not recognize me, or if he did, he did not show any signs of such.

every day is over before it starts.

church of the future

'Church of the Future' by Javier Morales and John Michael Boling

there is a new issue of Smokelong Quarterly now online. i am kind of confused by it. if anyone else looks at the stories published and understands what might have confused me and can explain it to me, please do.

i want to buy 'Angle of Yaw' by Ben Lerner but they didn't have it at the 'indie' borders or any of the mom and pop stores in town. i don't like ordering books from the internet because it takes too long. but i guess i'm going to do that.

i reread Tao Lin's story 'The Walking Wall' again today. it was the first story of his i ever came across back whenever. i still think it is one of my favorites.

i got a rejection from blackbird yesterday for something i sent them a year ago and eventually withdrew.

blackbird is doing really good work.

two nights ago i called the cops on my neighbor who may or may not have tourette's after he spent the whole day shrieking and yelping and going EIEIEIE and pounding on shit and yelling at his dog. finally his boyfriend came over and they started fucking at 3 AM with their windows open and the curtains up. he was screaming even more in his tourette's style plus the sound of getting fucked. i had been pounding all the walls throughout the day when his screeching got too much to handle and have done so in the past and he knows very well i can hear him and yet he still decides to make emotional screeching and gibberish sounds while he is getting fucked at 3 AM. it is likely that he likes me to hear him getting fucked. i called the atlanta police. the lady answering the police phone sounded like she'd been having an in-depth conversation with an attractive coworker and was irritated to have to take my call. she agreed to send a cop car. i left my house after calling because i didn't want to see what happened but immediately afterward, while at my parents house eating raisins, i wished i'd stayed to see the cops arrive and find them butt-ass naked on the kitchen table going EIHJROEIHROEIHROEHJ!

Robert Lopez interview

A couple weeks ago I interviewed Robert Lopez about his novel PART OF THE WORLD. You can read it now at Word Riot.

If you haven't yet picked up a copy of his book, you really should. It has short nice sentences and is funny and strange and you pretty much have no choice but to read straight through it. My full review will be coming soon in Rain Taxi.

You can find out more about the novel from at its publisher's page: Calamari Press, who I think is by far publishing more great work than any other small press around right now.

blabber

i am sitting in my loft with all the lights off because i am too lazy to turn them on. i have a cup of coffee that is getting cold. i ate a bunch of cotton candy that my friend bought for me. last night on cribs some kids in a rap group were talking about CITY PUNCH, which is water with sugar in it. they were very proud of CITY PUNCH. i would like to drink it. there are these windows along the back wall of my loft that let the sound in from the train rails that are right across from my front door. it often makes a sound like a sprinkler head ticking. or like something is itching. i hate friday night. friday night always makes me feel anxious because i am not a planner and yet if you do not go out on friday night there is some feeling of impending loneliness or isolation because friday night is the night people with regular jobs really feel special about being alive. i would like to eat watermelon at a short table with a tablecloth in the parking lot of my apartment with a napkin tucked in to keep watermelon juice from getting on my shirt though i would probably get it on my shirt somehow anyway. friday night makes me feel violent. i want to be violent more often but i do not have the proper mental configuration to allow me to commit violence. i have never been in a fight. i think i would like to be in a fight if it could be like when people fight in video games and i could hit reset if i really started to get my ass kicked. i like that movie STRAW DOGS. sam peckinpah knows how to make violence feel more volatile and jarring. watching that movie gave me genuine anxiety. it is probably one of the most anxious films i've ever seen. PUNCH DRUNK LOVE also caused that feeling, though it used sound and color to create the disturbance more than STRAW DOGS does. STRAW DOGS has DUSTIN HOFFMAN as a mathematician with a hot wife. they move out to live in a small town in a large house where DUSTIN HOFFMAN begins to feel strange and jealous about his wife being hot and the people in the town lusting after her and then strange things begin to happen. it is a movie full of jealousy and violence. there is a very famous rape scene. i often feel pangs of real guttural jealousy that are often attached to no credible real motion. my head creates a lot of trouble for me out of things that do not fully exist. it works often kind of like those MAGIC EYE paintings, where you're supposed to stare into the mesh of nonsense and see something iconic like a sailboat or a landscape. i think MAGIC EYE paintings cause emotional disturbance. i think MAGIC EYE paintings should not be allowed to be sold in malls. i think instead they should sell chickadees. all people should have the opportunity to live with a chickadee.



i think i'd always feel okay if i had a chickadee.
i am going to buy at least a stuffed one.

quick fiction #12

you can now preorder the 12th issue of Quick Fiction via their website. i have a piece 'Gravel' in the issue. it also features the work of awesome people like Chris Bachelder, Kim Chinquee, Girijia Tropp, Matthew Purdy and Seth Fried, among others.

it costs $7. look at it and who's in it by clicking here.



here are the first 55 words of my 415 word story:

The day the sky rained gravel I watched it drum my father's car. A Corvette he'd spent years rebuilding. He'd liked to watch his face gleam in the hood. He kissed the key before ignition. He read the owner's manual aloud. When he lost the strength to stand he left it uncovered in the street.

to read the rest, buy up the issue. i am excited about its arrival.

in order to receive this publication i photocopied my testicles and enlarged them using the resize function on my mother's HP PSC 500 printer until they were each the size of a small room. i then express mailed copies in pink leather valises to 15 regional senators and heads of state, who i promised i would tattoo their next campaign slogan on my scrotum if they agreed to write to jennifer and adam pieroni and demand acceptance of my story.

all members of the underground backdoor secret conspiracy writer's illuminati please meet me at pier 159 tomorrow evening at 8:15 to discuss our coming overthrow of our nation's more uncooperative editors.

thank you.