I have stuff and things in Coconut 12 and Thieves Jargon.

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time reading and re-reading the Chekhov story “Mire.” It’s one of the most bizarre and exciting stories I have ever read and I can’t believe it’s not in many Chekhov anthologies. “‘How unusual this is! How strange!’ he thought, utterly amazed, hardly able to believe his senses, and feeling rather sick from the scent of jasmine.” I think I have talked about this story here before, but I feel claustrophobic when I read it and that there is a scary situation. I am thinking about reading Stephen King’s Night Shift so I can learn more about how to make scary situations. I am frightened easily and avoid thrillers, but maybe that is a mistake. Maybe it would be fun to read Stephen King to try to learn how to write a scary story like “Big Bear, California” by Rebecca Curtis.

A brand new stove is being installed in our apartment right this minute.

I am sick and fighting back with Chinese medicine.

Things I’m looking forward to:

Kiki Smith is talking at New School today at 3:15PM. We are going to see ENDGAME tonight at BAM.

TUESDAY, MAY 6th: an FSG Reading featuring RIVKA GALCHEN (with New Yorker music critic Alex Ross) at THE RUSSIAN SAMOVAR 7PM.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 7th: Columbia Journal reading with Diane Williams, Victoria Redel, Thomas Sayers Ellis, and Laura Esther Wolfson at the Bowery Poetry Club 6PM.

Poem from dialogue in MSCL Episode 18 “Weekend”

I think I got a couple of doobies in here somewhere
I love sex in a different bed
You’re right

Are you coming out with me tonight?
All right Graham
Patty, I’ve been bad

There’s this really incredible frozen pond that we can hike to
We should have a really nice fun day
You’re so athletic, you’ll be great

I can’t believe that you actually run your own company
There are so many paths I could choose every single possibility of life is like open to me
We are adults do we really need to have alcohol to have a good time?

Is this the way we’re going to spend our weekend, hunting for liquor?
Maybe we better cancel that spelunking reservation
They’re like a toy a toy a toy

Look I made a swan
I need to talk to Angela alone
I can’t believe you

This is pretty embarrassing
When Camille brought over that negligee she also brought over some handcuffs
I am telling you those handcuffs do not belong to my parents

I hate to say it, but you know who could actually be like capable of figuring this out?
Oh my god when he walked through the door part of his arm touched my shoulder
All we need is wire shears

Any dad has them
Not my dad
But a normal dad

I just think this place is beautiful
We can have 7 full hours of daylight tomorrow to have fun
Fine give me that hooch

There is this place called the pleasure center that might have that kind of stuff
I don’t even know where the pleasure center is
You think that I’m drunk?

Mayday Mayday, play it cool
You would not believe who we ran into around the corner from the pleasure center
Oh Kyle

You can’t come in
Kyle no, down
Krakow stop it’s too big it won’t fit

Oh it’s Mr. bed and breakfast man
I want an ice cream sundae
Come on Warren, how about one little scoop

You have a real miserable side to you, you know?
When I look at myself I see everything in slow motion and i think something has to happen only it never does so I have to make it happen

Good morning sunshine
Cheryl, I’d like to say that i didn’t give you a fair chance
Cheryl and I decided to keep things casual for now

I’m really having second thoughts about you taking apart my parents’ bed
Hey, hey, hey, Mom’s gonna be home in 20 minutes
I would really prefer it if you all didn’t watch television in my room.

I bought books recently and will list them here like a certain collector I know: Watt and Three Novels (Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable) by Beckett, the collected short stories of Jean Rhys, Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev and The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme. All Souls by Christine Schutt. I also got Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton and I’m probably the most excited about that one because I had been reading about her for so long (here and here and here). Another writer that is new to me is Amina Cain. I’m getting really interested in the fiction put out by Les Figues Press. So much so that I just subscribed to their email newsletter!

- Now that the semester is winding down I’d like to be in a book club, ideally a Beckett book club. If you would like to read a lot of Beckett this summer, tell me or comment.

- I finally found out where the expression “canary in the coal mine” comes from and what it means.

- This is gross.

- Bill Nye the Science Guy is cute:
“Comfort food: A single slice of organically raised bacon, from the froufrou hippie grocery down the street. Fry that with a few leaves of my homegrown chard. That’s living. You get the bitter with the fat and the salt.”

1.) I want this book: Dies: A Sentence by Vanessa Place

2.) and this one: All Souls by Christine Schutt

3.) I’ll skip All the Sad Young Literary Men. What reader can stomach the phrase “the bitterness of my Harvard years?” From today’s review: “Next up is Keith. At least, I think he’s Keith. At first I thought it was Mark again, in the first person, but now I’m almost pretty sure it’s Keith. He has lots of girl trouble, too, and he hungers for status and sits around at Harvard worrying about ‘the roundedness of his character.’ Yet there is a kind of intellectual propulsion behind him: ‘My forefathers,’ he says, ‘had been huddled over Talmuds, then Soviet literary journals, for many generations.’ Keith’s roommate, Ferdinand, seems dedicated, in equal measure, to sleeping with women and to working out who is an idiot and who is not. Keith leaves Harvard and starts writing for some of those coveted liberal magazines. ‘Quickly I found some of the bitterness of my Harvard years dissipating, and the rest of it going straight into my prose.’ ‘A space of some sort had opened up in the universe,’ and he slips right into it, with a belief in his own ‘moral purity.’”

4.) “How to trivialise women’s poetry” in the Guardian: “Male poets grappling with life and death issues in their writing are dragon-slayers. Women embarked on such odysseys are rarely granted similarly heroic status. Instead, they’re victims, a less noble assignation which handily renders them more vulnerable to any criticism embedded with ulterior motives, and more susceptible to being undervalued and misunderstood, except in the context of a tragedy and/or their role as mother. Is this an avoidance of any serious examination of Plath’s work? Sadly this lack of critical engagement is how most women poets are viewed, or are not viewed, as is more the case. It’s no doubt naïve to want ability and talent to be the king-makers’ main criteria.” This is the best comment. Here again.

Secret Reading and Party
Please R.S.V.P.
Call 212.755.6710
NOONNOON2008NOON
The Mercantile Library
17 East 47th Street
April 14 at 6:30
Clancy Martin
Dawn Raffel
Christine Schutt

Christine Schutt is the author of two short-story collections, Nightwork and A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer. Her novel Florida was a National Book Award finalist. Her second novel, All Souls, will be published in April 2008. The recipient of a Pushcart and two O. Henry Prizes, her fiction has also been anthologized in The KGB Bar Reader and The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. She is a senior editor of NOON and lives and teaches in New York.

Dawn Raffel is the author of a story collection In the Year of Long Division (Knopf) and a novel, Carrying the Body (Scribner). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous magazines and anthologies, including NOON, O, The Oprah Magazine, Conjunctions, The Quarterly, The Mississippi Review, The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review and The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. A new collection, Further Adventures in the Restless Universe, is forthcoming in 2010.

Clancy Martin, a Canadian, formerly a jeweler, is now a philosophy professor at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in NOON, McSweeney’s, Philosophy and Literature, Ethics, and elsewhere. His translation of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra was published in 2006 by Barnes and Noble Classics, and he is presently working on a translation of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. His novel How to Sell is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2009), as is an as yet untitled philosophical work examining the nature of truth and deception in love.

that bourgey fuck
that bougey fork
fat buggery frock
fat boogity truck
hot diggity frog

“Don Quixote could not help smiling at the affected terms in which Sancho delivered himself, tho’ what he said of his own improvement was actually true; for, at certain times, he talked to admiration; and yet; when he attempted to argue, or speak in a polite stile, his efforts always, or for the most part, ended in precipitating himself from the pinnacle of simplicity to the depth of ignorance; his chief talent lying in his memory, which never failed to furnish him with proverbs that he lugged into his discourse, whether they were pat to the purpose or not, as may be seen and observed thro’ the whole course of history.”

A lesson in Yod:

- Father Yod
(A large group of former commune members recently held a reunion.)

- Florence MA’s Ecstatic Yod
(Faer Yod/Ecstatic Yod Collective/Glass Eye Books)

The Ten Commandments For The Age Of Aquarius:

1. Obey and live by the teachings of your earthly Spiritual Father.
2. Love your earthly Spiritual Father more than yourself.
3. Harm not one of your body parts either by neglect, food, drink or knife.
4. Allow each vibration to complete its own cycle without interference.
5. Possess nothing you do not need and share all that you have.
6. The man and his woman are one - let nothing separate them.
7. Squander not your creative force in lust, but come together only when the three vibrations of the physical, emotional and mental are in harmony with spiritual love.
8. Each morning join your vibrations with the ascending currents of universal life energy using the method your earthly spiritual father has taught you.
9. Do every act energetically, intelligently, truthfully and lovingly.
10. When these commandments have been mastered, leave the house of your earthly Spiritual Father and do the work of your Heavenly Father.

me: yes what is it

Richard Price to Leonard Lopate:
“Talented people are like asparagus, there’s a whole bunch growing out in a field.”

Instead of unpacking, I spent some time hitting “next blog” today and that’s how I found that cutie to the left, but it can’t top this.

Also this.