effing blog

to blog, to post, to lean, to falsely enfranchise, to yeah

I spent the holiday working on some designs and some other stuff but managed to spend some evenings in the company of local poet friends and heaps of good food and drink.  Awesome.  Bourbon is a hammer to my head.

Speaking of head, I watched Jarhead last night and liked it pretty good.  I like a war movie that has no action.  I didn't mind the obvious nods to preceeding war movies either.  A bunch of buff young guys losing their minds in the desert.  Sounds right.

Saturday morning I woke up on the couch about 5am and it was pouring rain which hadn't happened around here in many weeks.  Floyd awoke at the same time as me, his sleepy face smooshed and sweet.  He lay in my lap and we had a nice time watching the sunrise and rain through the window. I felt in tune with all things and especially with the cat.  I suspect this was a religious moment I've heard other folks mention.

I'm having a hard time getting into the day job.  I've taken over editorship of my company's intranet magazine and am now covering the beat from Shanghai to Sunnyvale.  But there's not much to scoop, really, and what there is I simply don't understand.  It's not that electrical engineers and microprocessor marketers are boring, it's just that every one I have ever met or worked with is.  Just the facts.

I've put up quite a few new letters at the letters blog (see top right column for link).  I cannot remember what is authentic and what is bullshit anymore.  The way I like it.

There is some effing news I want to tell you about but that'll have to wait.  Now I teleconference with the west coast about more shit I don't understand nor care about.  Big smiles around the polycom. Big fuckin smiles.

Carl Thayler

1933 - 2005

it got cold here.  me likey.  time to blast the wall heaters and the space heaters on wheels.  i was thinking this year I'd wear a muff to keep my hands warm.  I'll bring the muff back to men's fashion, tho I cannot attest that the man muff was ever in fashion, other than with football quaterbacks. 

the sun setting behind me now is a particular pink not unlike a rare steak or a newborn's forehead.

juicing in Chapel Hill

Here's a few pictures and a very brief, incoherent video.  All from the first night in Chapel Hill.  All after a few more scotches than I should admit to.  All in good fun and good cheer.  But certainly we were not in our right minds, praise be.

Patrick Herron, Bartender, Myself

Girl at bar with no name, Myself, Ken Rumble

I told you I was cool with nipple play as a currency

And here is a video I made quite by accident. Guess I pressed a button. And I can't verify that that is me speaking (if you want to call it that) or what the hell I am saying.  Pretty sure that's my man Ken Rumble about to water that tree...

d a n g

Back in middle Texas with one foot into the work week.  I would have liked to've stayed in North Carolina a little longer, at least until the last colorful leaf fell from its limb, or by some other, perhaps slower, clock of nature.  Until the first snow perhaps...

Needless to say it was a very fun trip.  It's a warm, supportive, fun-loving group of poetry people over there and they showed me a good time each and every minute.  It was nice to meet people in the flesh whom I'd only corresponded with over the last year or so.  Ken Rumble, Tony Tost, Marcus, Slease, Patrick Herron, Todd Sandvik, Randall Williams, Brian Howe, Chris Salerno, and others.  It was fun too to sit in on Joe Donahue's creative writing class at Duke in which Sarah Manguso spoke and read poems and answered questions for the students.

The Desert City Series reading with Julian Semilian and Sarah Manguso was a treat.  I had the pleasure of getting to know Sarah a little bit as we hung out with Ken Rumble and co. in the cool village of Carborro Friday night and Saturday afternoon.  Always fun to make new friends, yes.  Ken's write up of the reading (the last DC reading of '05) and his impressive introductions for the two poets can be found here.  (Also, just posted is some audio of Julian here.)

I just have a few pictures to put up from the trip which I'll do later today (they're almost all from my first evening in town out at the bars with Ken and for a little while, Patrick.)  Though I took a friend's camera with me I was mostly nervous about losing it so I didn't bring it out with me much.  Those that know me understand my knack of losing things and leaving a debris trail behind me where I go.  I am what they call aloof? 

However, Marcus Slease has posted a few pictures from the readings.  Thursday night I went to Greensboro and Marcus and I embibed a little and had an interesting discussion that he recorded to post on MiPo.  I believe that and a recording of my reading will be posted in the next few days, I believe here but I am not sure.  You can already listen to the 45 minute long performance by Randall Pelosi and Crowmeat Bob that happened after I read at the Blue Door.  It's interesting to say the least.

The Blue Door party at Todd and Laura Sandvik's cool house was a lot of fun too.  It was the first time I'd uttered aloud the parts of Exploder and The Knife Alarm I chose to read and they felt okay in my mouth and it seemed they were well-received by the peoples.  It was a good motivator to get the poems finished and out the door.

I feel worse than when I left and the cold I went out there with is now lodged deep in my chest and lungs.  Bronchitis, undoubtedly.  But no rest for the weary of course.  There is a lot to do by day and night this week and I've a list a mile long.  I probably won't be blogging much though it's not like that's odd (but I'll update the Snapper Missives blog somewhat).  I'll be in the backroom binding and cutting books or I'll be at the computator laying out new stuff.  Also, I'm helping to push my grandmother's biography of my grandfather through the printing process and I am very behind on that and I don't want to disappoint the Nana.

There will be no Skanky Possum reading for November but there will be one in December though I can't remember who.  Perhaps Corrine Lee?  Dunno.  I'll post something here when I know for sure.

Effing orders placed last week will ship today and tomorrow.

breaking the door on my way out

tomorrow i fly to north cackalacky and i am excited tho i have a head cold moving down to the throat and chest region of my form.  crews are busy shoveling homeopathics and minerals into my face and i am upbeat.  raises for everyone.  a round of drinks for the house!

effing orders will ship upon my return, unless you are in the chapel hill / RD area in the next four days.  i'll be packin' so hit me up for your effing fix.  will trade for love and/or nipple play.  i ain't afraid of no ghost.

i know i'll be at Internationalist Books Saturday night for this and afterwards I'll read a few of these at The Blue Door.

Looking forward to meeting all you fine southern people and comparing bbq with you.

snapper letters

Like I was saying.  I put a blog up that I will fill randomly with letters from the last few years, some are real and some are imagined.  I've replaced names with initials which should get nice and confusing.  I've also removed dates.  Will try this for a while until I become bored or embarrassed or the original recipients (the real ones) get enraged.  I don't know many people that get truly enraged. 

http://osnapper.typepad.com/letters/

Allegedly the weekend just happened, whoa.  I take no comfort in the velocity at which time moves these days though it is becoming ever more apparent that time moves at one speed: this speed.  (That is, besides being a little song knife swinging in my mind right now, also a main trope of Tom Clark's latest book/poem Threnody, which will be published as an effing book within 2 weeks time.)  It's true too, that. 

Wanting it all can mean having nothing and critical paralysis is a real thing to consider.  I can be as still as you'll let me be.   

Are we ever anyone but who we've been and can that ever change?

Friday I gave up and gave in.  I broke myself down to the basic bits and crawled the floor with the dust bunnies and paper scraps with the songs of the new Broken Social Scene bouncing off the planks.  I've been refusing the night air.  There's been plenty of shows and stuff I've wanted to get out to but when I put on my shoes and get to the front door I forget what I want and find a chair and sit and think about it and then it's too late. 

Saturday the weather was fine and I opened all the doors and windows and let the breeze do its thing.  I bound World Jellys and Red Juices and Lyric Poetrys and filled some effing orders and printed a broadside.  Went to the Cross-Quarter-Day reading at Austin Yoga, was one of 6 people who showed.  I closed my eyes the whole time but did not sleep though I most certainly dreamed.  Went to a b-day party for Dale S afterward and sipped spirits, talked to peops, made nice.  Went home, went to bed but couldn't sleep.  Watched The Corporation and wrote some and went to sleep just after dawn.

I dreamed you were married to a BMX'er and your hair was twice as long.  I layed down beside you and trembled.

Think I'm gonna put out a new blog attached to this one within the next few days if I can find the time.  It will consist of letters I've written over the last couple of years. 

Still working toward getting something set up in March for unAWP events.  I've sent out many proposals and booking inquiries to venues around town.  I'm hoping something in the downtown area sticks so no one has to bother with driving.  Though it might mean a different venue each night.  Still working out what local presses will sponsor what.  We have a little planning committee in the works...

I read Dennis Cooper's The Sluts the other day and it turned me off of sex (for a few hours).  Reminded me somewhat of Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, a book I think about from time to time and highly recommend.  Cooper's book, whereas interesting for its fragmented narrative mode, felt very predictable and ultimately I was disappointed that the characters were not fleshed out as much.  I say fleshed as a pun of course because the book centers around a whodunnit of sorts discussed in a chat room/posting board environment.  All flesh and physical action is represented by testimony, often graphic and violent, but anyone who reads blogs and discussion boards will be reminded instantly that one should not always believe what one reads or even believe that people are who they are or that they exist at all.  Suffice it to say in that regard that Cooper's book does succeed to some extent as a reflection of chat room hyperbole and character switching and the art of fiction in itself.  It could have worked as a story about insurance salesmen too.  The sex and violence is the hook of course but that only has so much depth.  That or I am not as sensitive as I used to be.  (I mean after American Psycho what is left?)

Sunday I swept the floors and went for a run.  Edited on my grandmother's memoir of my grandfather who died two years ago.  It's running at just under 70 pages and I promised her I'd see it through printing by x-mas.  How could anyone say no to Nana (whose cornbread is righteous)?

I am more than ready to get to North Carolina Wednesday.  Going to pal around with Ken Rumble and Tony Tost and that lot of great people of the Lucipo list.  Going to see Sarah Manguso and Julian Semilian read Saturday for Ken's Desert City Reading Series which should be fun.  Afterward I'll read a a little at The Blue Door, hosted by Todd Sandvik.  There's a whole list of folks I hope to meet in person.  And just to get out of town is great.  I can seriously use the time away from this place.

This unusually long and meandering blog post is brought to you by:

This Saturday: WILL THERE EVER BE A RAINBOW?

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