this is the first thing i've done today that i could handle remembering

i wonder if i can ever feel like i've done something
the more i do the less i feel
there is a cyst on my back that has grown larger than the rest of my body
the cyst has a name a mom mustaches a bank account flush with cash
that i will never touch
i will never eat the correct ratio of food to make me pleased
i have felt the hunger of a nonexistent country
even just minutes after wolfing down several fig bars
i have taken the all you can eat option at restaurants
where the all you can eat option is not on the menu
and made myself realize the punctuation marks scored on the teeth of death
when the phone rings in this house it plays beethoven in synthetic tones
i am developing a rash
the names and numbers on my calendar seem enormous
whichever website i want to go to that is the website that won't load
i never have a problem logging on to amazon.com
i feel guilty shopping amazon.com but they have good discounts
sometimes i turn around and buy something i only mostly want
from an independent source immediately after buying from amazon
so that there won't be a flux in my conswerum
i made up the word conswerum but it seemed to fit
i am fat with flashes of sudden hysteria and/or hatred
followed by briefer swells of accomplishment and/or want
want can be a positive emotion if you are sitting at the correct angle
in the correct light
the light in this room feels like even it arrived to me through the internet
i don't know what i would do most mornings
the main reason i stop trying to go back to sleep
is because i want to check my email
i used to have to get out of bed to check my email
but now i have macbook pro
macbook pro improved my life quality by 59 percent
realizing that my life was improved that much by a machine
just reduced my life quality by somewhere between 8 and 12 percent
i just typed a few lines and deleted them
and looked for several minutes into the screen light
which is a sign that this should end
i am growing larger i can feel it
i want to eat someone alive

NEWHEAVY.COM

NEW HEAVY is live. Please look/link/bookmark/something. Daily updated bizarre and skronk shit crap babble net squeal. Those interested in assistance please inquire, though I don't know what I will do.

If you link or blog and email me, I will link you back. SWOLLEN FUCKERRRERERERS.

NEW HEAVY will also feature user submissions of a non-literary nature. Currently accepting human photo series(es). See 'CHASMS' on site for info.

This will continue to develop.


----


!ALSO!

Got my copy of GRAVITY'S RAINBOW/MASON & DIXON, a collaborative chapbook between Shane Jones and Chris Killen. A really fantastic concept squatting on Pynchon's monsters (I actually really love the real GR, though couldn't get into MR and still haven't come anywhere near AGAINST THE DAY) with a tiny dual sided zine I read both sides of in one shitting sitting. Weird little sometimes Edson-ish skronk of stroke your throat level. I am enjoyed both sides quite a bit, they were funny, interestingly written, fun, smart, cute, nice, good, something. I used Shane and Chris's chapbook to help me take the most satisfying shit of the new year. Thanks guys.

I think they gave away all the copies in their limited edition, but maybe if you email them they will make more.

DIAGRAM Innovative Fiction Contest

The results of this year's $5 Innovative Fiction Contest from DIAGRAM just got posted. I was one of 7 finalists who were then passed to Kelly Link. This year's winner is FC2 author DEBRA DiBLASI's "Quell the Mayhem Night."

The other finalists were:
* "And What of Boys? What Land Do They People?" by Elisabeth Benjamin
* "Four Secrets and Three Lies I Have to Tell About Love." by Kea Wilson
* "Girls Who Love Horses" by Amanda Goldblatt
* "The Many Forms of Rain ___ Sent Upon Us In Those Days Before the Last Days" by Blake Butler
* "Snow" by Mark Leidner
* "There Will Be Sense" by Amelia Gray (yay Amelia)

They will all be in the next all-fiction issue, which last year totally crushed my head, so I'm happy to be a part, and to have been read by Ms. Link. That story is also in SCORCH ATLAS.

Concurrently, I am now running parked content ads at 4 of my new URLs. When people click on the ads on these sites, I get moneys.

LINDSAYLOHANSTITS.INFO

GOOGLEINFO.INFO

SEEKMELIVE.INFO

MYGOOGLEME.INFO

DEADWINTER.COM (This is a URL I've had for almost 10 years, and I found out its estimated value is $800 due to the traffic and web rankings it now has. Auction time.)

LC / NOO / AVERY

Submissions for the next issue of LAMINATION COLONY are now closed. All further submissions and those who have not been answered yet will be considered for the next issue. In case you were looking at our old URL (lamination.deadwinter.com), that URL is now null. The new issue of LC should be out by mid-June and is full of all young writers. There are no editors of journals or people with several books published. There are only people doing things new. It is going to be nice.

Soon after the new issue LAMINATION COLONY will release an eBook by the megabadass LILY HOANG. I can't tell you how pumped I am about her book, which is full of magic and bizarre and titled THE WOMAN DOWN THE HALL. Just you wait.

Speaking of things done new, there is a new issue of NOO JOURNAL now online. It has new work by Ofelia Hunt, Noah Cicero, Mary Miller, K. Silem Mohammad, Claudia Smith, Benjamin Buchholz and Sean Kilpatrick, including a weird as hell little ebook from Kilpatrick, titled: SPURIOUS ONE-MAN LOBOTOMY WITH CLIPPED INQUISITION. Sean Kilpatrick is a killer.

Also today in the mail got my contributor copies of AVERY ANTHOLOGY 3 which looks so sexy with its slick glossy color cover I really want to lick it. The stories are massive and sick. Go do a buy.

URLs Purchasings

I just bought a bunch of URLs, like 8 of them.

I now own LINDSAYLOHANSTITS.INFO

One time I wrote SQUIRTERS.NET as a joke on here and lots of people have googled that keyword, but I couldn't buy SQUIRTERS.NET.

I also own GOOGLEINFO.INFO and GOOGLW.INFO

Google owns so many permutations of their site name, it's insane.

I almost bought INFODATAINFORMATIONINFORMATIONINFORMATION.INFO and several permutations of URLs involving the word DICK plus weird things after. DICKPALACE.COM is already taken. DICKCONGLOMERATE.COM and DICKBONANZA.COM are both free. I want to start a porn site for money but not do any of the work acquiring porn. Porn is boring.

Google, buy GOOGLEINFO.INFO from me, I won't charge much.

Oh man.

I'm not sure why I just did that.

Opium 6: Go Green!

The new print issue of OPIUM MAGAZINE is out, #6. I have a story in it, as does Aimee Bender, Benjamin Percy, Jensen Whelan, and others, plus there is poetry and short contest winners by Shya Scanlon, Dawn Corrigan, Darby Larson, Pedro Ponce, a bunch of others. It is designed by David Barringer and looks incredible, with interesting layouts on all the texts and tons of image. Opium is one of the best laid out print mags I've seen, and this issue is overflowing. When a publication spends this much time and attention, you can't help but want it.



Here are the first few sentences of my story, 'WEIGHT GAINER':

When Paul got back from powerlifting, he found his wife in the hall closet. She'd been knitting a Christmas scarf for their son, Juan, for more than a month now, well beyond the needed length, beyond the need itself. The scarf was twenty feet and counting. He'd tried to make a joke--what, was she dressing a giraffe?--but Marcy didn't grin. She never grinned. When she wasn't knitting, she wore the scarf everywhere--to bed, in the shower. It had begun to stink of mildew. Worst was she still talked about giving it to the boy.

Since Paul had found the baby blinkless on their bed, he'd been exercising three times a day for twenty-eight days in a row.

Buy the issue & read the rest, it's only $10.

To receive this publication I ate a child, threw the child up inside another child's mouth, ate that child, threw that child up into a puppy, raised the puppy to adult size, covered myself in peanut butter and let the dog eat me, swelled up inside the dog's stomach until I burst the dog and together we became air.

Things

New online journal: BEAR CREEK FEED, does long fiction, beginning with the longest piece of KIM CHINQUEE I've ever seen, and it is nice. The site looks nice. Glad to see a new site of new nature. Good job to Colin Bassett.

New issue of SLEEPINGFISH is out: I am holding it, have not read yet, it looks massive good and has more hair than your mother. Includes Miranda Mellis, Rick Moody, Dawn Raffel, Norman Lock, Kathy Fish, Elizabeth Ellen, Kathryn Regina, Brian Foley, John Dermot Woods, Eugene Lim and about everyone else you could ever want to hump.

PUBLISHING GENIUS reading in Baltimore was massive fun. Adam Robinson is a kingly host and lots of fun to hang with. Michael Kimball is super nice and has a sweet tooth that rivals mine. Great to have Ryan Call in the house. All the readers were entertaining and never induced distraction. It was nice to do a reading after several years of not. Hope to more now.

In a gas station on the way home I watched two redneck men and one woman arguing about how many condoms they needed to buy out of the bathroom vending machine in all earnestness. One of them bought 4. One bought none and harrumphed.

Got an oil change at a gas station that had a rooster walking around the pumps, eating out of its trough containing chicken tenders, white bread rolls and sliced zucchini.

I feel covered in muck from all the public restrooms.

Every mile looked the same.

America is scary.

Haruki Murakami blow me

I have lots to say now but first foremost I wanna screech loud at HARUKI 'I AM TRYING TO MEET OPRAH' MURAKAMI. I bought an audiobook of his recent 2nd-to-newest novel KAFKA ON THE SHORE for something to listen to on my drive, having read several other of his novels and liked them mostly w/o remembering why even right after I was done. The first 5 discs out of 15 in the set got me super-amped on the story. He had it so right. Several very compelling vaguely related setups all converging with this weird energy. Children fainting in masses, a woman bleeding out of her vagina after seeing some shape in the sky, a guy who can talk to cats and make leeches fall as rain, a kid living in a room in a library, other strangeness.

By disc 10 though, while driving home from Baltimore (more on that later), I was punching the dash and screaming obscenity at HARUKI MURAKAMI for absolutely blowing the dick off what could have been an incredible novel.

Around the halfway point in the book, he'd pretty much reverted to scenes of long discussion between the major characters, discussing psychological and philososophical ramifications of what had happened in the first third of the book. Long 'emotional' conversations rehashing thought on things that'd happened, who felt what about who, soap opera soap opera. Scenes with little to no development, no interest, just babbling on and on about what it means, what it could be, saying the same thing over and over in endless uninteresting ways, totally Oprah-izing the fucker. I swear, I literally could not believe how shitty the book turned into, how completely amateur and stunted and warmed over to the point of making me literally almost swerve into a truck carrying other cars because I was screaming at each line, asking why the line was there, why the fuck he couldn't stop saying the same thing over and over, using lines like 'Everybody is in a dream, aren't they?' and talking about the subtleties of Truffaut and how it relates to some jazz band, trying to draw thematic overtones and ending up just sounding like a jerk, all in the midst of what could have been a creepy, fucked story. I couldn't even finish it.

Every strand of the story that had power and image behind it was explained away, tied up with bows, placed on the reader's lap and then discussed what it meant. Fuck, HARUKI MURAKAMI, do you think all of your readers are absolute dogshit morons? Can we have any thread left to puzzle on our own? I have no idea why certain authors feel the need to explain to death the why and how of any mysterious elements in their storylines, though this happens most with prominent figures. Perhaps that's why their books sell. People don't like to not know. I don't like to know, or at least leave some of it undone! Otherwise the work has no purpose being a book.

HARUKI MURAKAMI is the new M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN.

KAFKA ON THE SHORE also is a great example of how pop culture references in fiction can take away from the story. I was cringing all through this thing. Mainly it was his references to music. Really, if all you know about is Bob Dylan and the Beatles, don't bother to name names of what your character listens to. No one cares. Murakami would talk about how the main character would put on Prince while he worked out. He'd listen to the White Album. There are ways that could work, even with obvious references, but here it just sounded like an insertion. A name drop for no other purpose than to name drop, though names that couldn't be more bland or overused. It added absolutely nothing, it involved no aura, it only made me groan and know that the author has a very limited understanding of modern music.

Someone could take this book and edit 75% of it out, using only the declarative sentences and no conversations, using only the scenes without all the surrounding description and resolution, and it would be 50 times better.

Shit, I might do that. Blacked out copies of KAFKA ON THE SHORE. But then I'd have to buy the shitty motherfucker.

Reading Thursday May 22

Tomorrow leaving for Baltimore with an audio book of KAFKA ON THE SHORE and my teeth. If you are in the area, do a show. Here's a listing on the event from Adam Robinson:

The Literary Salon
I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I’ve decided you should come to the first ever Publishing Genius Literary Salon. It’s on Thursday, May 22, and it starts at 7PM. It's at the 1818 Gallery and it’s Free.

When you’re there, you will hear these people do literate things in this order:

1. Michael Kimball, who wrote Dear Everybody as well as over twenty biographies once
2. Ric Royer, who did the greatest What Is It in Baltimore, according to the City Paper
3. Stephanie Barber, who just came back from showing films at the Portland Film Festival and sold many, many books
4. Chris Toll, whose book, Be Light, I read and re-read on purpose
5. Jen Michalski, who wrote Close Encounters and later directed the major motion picture starring Jack Kerouac
6. Joseph Young, who doesn’t take a lot of your time but takes a lot of your heart
7. Blake Butler, from Atlanta, GA, who just wrote a novel in ten days. Who does that not you not me, Blake Butler does who I said Blake Butler does
8. Dan Trask, from the Commonwealth of Massachussetts, who is touring 62 cities on the strength of his new novel, DMR and will sell it to your shelf

ALSO, I will play Verdi’s REQUIEM and Kathleen Ferrier sings Bach. I will play it quietly in the background during the literate things, and it should make it difficult for everyone to concentrate. Occasionally, you may change the volume up or down. I will limit my reflections on the personal printer. Are you allergic to cats? Then stay away from Ivan and Nelson!

Bring a sixer if you want. I know I will. Bring cash, too, because there will be tons of things you will want to buy and buy.

i dont go out often

Went to the emergency room early Sunday morning. Was at a friend's party. Bought a bottle. At the package store I walked around for almost 20 minutes, couldn't think of what. Went to the counter, asked for the blue one of Smirnoff. Didn't realize blue meant triple distilled. Didn't realize triple distilled meant strong. I drank the whole thing and blacked out and I guess kept drinking.

Guess that's the 3rd time ever I've blacked out, all this year. The first time was on new year's day, woke up in a bathtub with a girl pissing in front of me.

This time woke up with my head inside a CAT scan machine wearing someone else's clothes and an IV. Okay.

Yesterday I slept.

Nice bruise on my forehead and elbow. I was carried to a car by 4 men while yelling where did Brian Jones go.

I remember eating cake. I remember saying something about how I like 'bitch' drinks, and two girls I did not looking at me like they wanted to crush my head. Had to explain men are more often bitches.

I remember kicking a wall repeatedly. I remember screaming something about Three 6 Mafia.

On the other side of the partition from where I was laying when I woke up a foreign man was answering questions about his prostate cancer. He could not piss.

Beer from here a while I think.

Was going to start reading THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY by Zachary Mason today but then got in the mail IN THE BLIND by Eugene Marten, which I ordered after reading his thing in NEW YORK TYRANT, and started reading the first page and haven't stopped except for this. IN THE BLIND has blurbs by Gordon Lish and Brian Evenson and a comparison to SUTTREE, my second favorite book of all time. So far it more than lives up.

Good things are going to happen.

Fish Ryan & 3rd Bed

If anyone knows anything about the identity of FISH RYAN, please contact me. FISH RYAN is listed as the author of the story ETHNOLOGY in 3rd bed #8. His bio is vague and likely it is a pseudonym. ETHNOLOGY is one of the most perfect stories I've ever read. Perfect for me. There is nothing about this person's name on google, except via 3rd Bed.

I miss 3rd Bed. They were top notch. If there is an heir to their dynasty, perhaps it is Caketrain. I'm not sure if they run the 3rd bed store anymore, though you can still place orders. I need to pick up the issues I am missing. If anyone has issues they don't want please contact me also.

'The Changeling' & 'How Much of Us There Was'

Finished reading two books tonight. First, did the second half of Joy Williams's THE CHANGELING, forthcoming in 30th anniversary edition from Fairy Tale Review Press.



THE CHANGELING really is a bizarre wonderful book. If you've read any of Williams, the woman just punch-packs in every sentence with weird details and one liner jokes and bizarre juxtapositions of words that make you really spin, almost every paragraph has a sentence that wows. This book is no exception, and is even more up my alley than the others of hers I've read, in that it deals with magic and surrealist cloth, and it is very very fucking bleak, though done with an almost screwball method sometimes. Anyone who declaims bleak fantastical fiction, this is where I'm pointing from now on.

I can see why the book got panned a little in its first inception. It's definitely not a 'book' book, in that there is little resolution to things, there are a lot of weird mysteries that get cracked open, almost sentence after sentence of anecdotal weirdness, all that just gets layered as parts of the narrator's brain. In the end it really starts cracking up and going wild, but still under Williams's steady control, but I can see more standard 'literary' readers, people who read the big books and don't read smaller authors, could be like, shit dude she's not even telling a story. She's too good, she doesn't need to tell a story. This is magicmaking at its finest.

More formal review on that later.



Pretty much right after I finsihed THE CHANGELING, I picked up Michael Kimball's second novel HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS. This book is fixing to get a proper american release after having done well in the UK when released in 2005. Looks like NEW YORK TYRANT's forthcoming book press will be launching it stateside, which is killer and exciting. I'd read this a while back and wanted to go through it again, as I remembered being so bowled over by its subject that I reeled for a while. Kimball is a sick sentence maker. He has rhythm like no other, sometimes sticking little parts onto sentences that cause jumps and skits in your thinking. This book caused one of the more emotional responses in me I can remember, which is strange because for the most part the writing is deadpan and methodical.

I read part one in a hot bath and had to get out. It was filling me too much. This book will sting you and not bat an eye, but then it will touch you on the face. HOW MUCH OF US THERE WAS is basically about a man losing his wife to seizure in old age and the weird transportive struggle as she goes and is gone, but the way it is rendered focuses not on the aspects that other people would cling to, but the weird angular moments, the light in rooms, the hair left behind, employing weird methods to keep time in one place. I really got welled up and started wanting to call my girlfriend and my mother, and I never get like that from reading fiction. But it's also done in a way that's subtle and withdrawn and picking up textures as if in an alien or child's mind. Really, by the end, of this, which I read all in one sitting after leaving the bath, I felt like I'd experienced a whole long ordeal but been guided by a silent presence that knew exactly and did not know what to do with itself. If you haven't read it, get ready.

Also even more excited about his new novel DEAR EVERYBODY that will be coming out I believe in fall, excerpts from which will appear in the first issue of NO COLONY, which is still open and randy for submissions.

PS: If you're in the Baltimore area next Thursday May 22 I will be reading with Michael and several others for this.

Diode

I have two lists of 50 in the new issue of electronic magazine DIODE. Lists 12 & 16, written a while back, ELECTRIC JESUS & DEATH TOLL. Other people in it Noah Eli Gordon, Brent Goodman, Julia Cohen, Zachary Schomburg, etc. Thank you Patty Paine. I need to finish that set soon. My eyes hurt. No sleep.

This is me & electric jesus:



This is the man himself & Chocolate Jesus:

Auras or I am being retarded

Inundation is a day. I drank no coffee. There are 4 people gmail chatting me. I am getting txt msg'd. Phone sometimes rings but my voice can't go into it unless I hit it one certain way. My gmail tab is variating between inbox and the ___ says... of 3 different people. I am considering coffee at 11:30 pm because I feel like I got socked with a sock: sandwich eater.

Twice tonight I have posted a blog about Aura. It didn't feel right the way I had it and kept taking down. I am slurred a little. I don't think I can say what I mean the way I mean it and make sense to anyone even myself which would negate typing which would negate sitting in chair half-sweating because I took a bath and did not put on deodorant after and then began to sweat in the heat and put on deodorant and now feel disgusting in this weird shirt.

I am going to post parts of the earlier post of the blog to see if I can make sense out of it. My gmail IM is going nuts with the donk noise. I am going to mute it.

Oh I deleted the old one. Okay I'll try again. It is below. (I was going to edit and chop it up and fix things I'd thought but I feel removed.)

A thing I can't stop thinking about as I am putting final edits on this novel is how the presence of a popular and/or iconic entity effects the aura of a work. There are a couple of major instances in the book where well known names appear: not simply to be name-checked or made as a loose reference, but as a function in the book. For instance, these occurrences aren't used in a way like: "Jon went to Starbucks and bought a mocha Frapucchino." I think that kind of namecheck, brand insertion has been done and done to death. I wouldn't want to include that in new work. I am thinking more of the way an influence of other works colliding or being contained by other works and how that affects a work's reception.

For instance, I'm reading Michael Earl Craig's YES MASTER! right now. In it he has a poem where references are made to Tom Waits's ALICE and Klaus Kinski, and those images are used not as placeholders, but as things for the images in the poem to bounce off of. They accrue the energy or something. So there is the moment of recognition, and then the poem builds off that recognition, and molds it, and assumes the energy a little, rather than using the words to create the topography of the piece. The piece does not exploit the cultural reference, it rebends it. I think that's what I mean.

Another work that successfully uses these kind of ideas without exploiting them I think is Derek White's POSTE RESTANTE, which I have written about before. His book has figures like Johnny Rotten and Madonna and music references to bands like Love and Rockets, and they do not feel like sore thumbs, they seem to absorb the aura.

There are surely many books that also do what I'm talking about, but I can't think right now.

Though there are plenty of ways this kind of careering can leave a bad taste. The Starbucks example, for instance, where it serves no purpose except to be a place, or where it is done in a way that feels like a mimicry of what Delillo did in WHITE NOISE or what Bret Easton Ellis did, or what have you. I want to avoid these repercussions, but I think there is something still yet to be harnessed in the idea of what I've talked about on here a few times, and in the instances above, where you take a cultural figure and bend it to your uses, absorb its aura.

Culture worship, culture attention, culture look-at-me is ill-gotten, but we exist in this world and this world is made of these things, and these things have terrain, I think.

I'm thinking all of this now because the introduction to my novel, and another certain rather key section the book later on, includes a couple of these type things, where names of cultural icons are included (in my instance, they are people). In my instance they are important not because of topography, I think, but because of aura. There is a specific feedback caused by their presences, I think. And yet the majority of the book does not include these kind of terms, and stays in a more dreamlike, word-to-word kind of dreamlike rhythm. Does the introduction then throw the rest of the book off? As I'm getting close to finishing, I am starting to worry a little, though, that having those kind of things in key moments like an introduction could throw a reader off. Could put them in a mindframe where they are expecting these cultural references, and can not view the work on a word by word level, via which most of the book is built. (What's the difference between saying CREST and toothpaste? There is one. Sometimes I like one and sometimes I like the other. Even Cormac McCarthy says coke instead of soda.) I am wondering if I should go through and neutralize the elements so to speak, to render them more organic, though I know something would be lost if I did it. I still can't help but think about it.

Do I even care about this? I probably don't. I am overthinking, I know, because I worry, but I wonder what other people think about the function of these kind of energies.

I am sure in the end I will go with what I have created as it is, but I just want to continue to mull, and typing this out is actually making me feel better about it.

I will probably delete this post later, but if anyone has thoughts, think.

This is precisely why I do not sleep.