Tidbits

I'm suffering acute pangs of deprivation because I can't buy Monica Youn's Ignatz yet. Cartoons are looming largely in the essays I'm working on right now, and I'm so curious to see what she's done with one of my favorite characters. I can't afford it at the moment because I just spent all my birthday money on Eula Biss, Sabrina Orah Mark, Tove Jansson, and Evan Lavender-Smith--note: if you write a commonplace book, I will just buy the guts out of it. I will buy it to death. Tuck that away in your mental files.

I came home to an acceptance from Zone 3, which made me very happy because it means that all of the poems in the second section of my manuscript now have homes. They took "Who Has the Whip-Hand over Aimless Animals," which is one of my favorites of that group--fitting that it was the last arm of the octopus to get tucked in.

If you travel to otoliths and read a poem by Ana Božičević called "About Mayakovsky," you will encounter, for the first time, the phrase "weight-of-forest male lard." This is necessary, and you will not regret it. Also, it goes without saying that if you haven't read Stars of the Night Commute yet, you must tiptoe down to the shipyard and steal a copy directly from the boat. It is so, so good; it is truer than the woof of a watchdog.

That Gulf Coast interview that I mentioned a few weeks back is now online!

Jiggety Jig

I am home I am home, my body is back in its regular home-hole! What I did was I flew to St. Louis, next to a woman who had the Olive Garden logo tattooed on her neck. Elegant Choice was with me, and on the plane he somehow won a bottle of wine by answering the question, "What is the name of a rock group whose members are all dead, and one of them was even assassinated?" Experiment: if you present this question to a group of twenty people, fifteen of them will scream, "The Beatles!" But the answer is of course Mt. Rushmore. "How did you know it?" I whispered to Elegant Choice. "I have eaten so many popsicles in my life," he whispered back.

Anyway, we landed safely in the Lou and were quickly installed in the rectory of St. Elizabeth. It gave me mad nostalgia for the rectories of my youth, the brick and the wallpaper and the little kitchen where crisis-people come to drink tea and the way the main floor meandered ranchily over the land. When I was little I lived in a rectory that was so huge that I only ever seemed to find my room by accident. One day I went into the basement and opened a door, and the room was filled with nuns who were sewing a quilt. I had never seen them before and I never saw them again. This rectory was a little like that. The priest who lived there previously was crazy--when my father and mother moved in, the walls were covered with collages that were scribbled over with amazing sentences like: "Jesus came on the fire truck and FROZE THEM OUT," and "There is a teenager inside me, and his name is RAGE." Such...unfortunate phrasing, priest. Never say it again!

My birthday was the 27th and I went creeking with my little nieces and nephews. Try to tell a baby what a fossil is, you can't do it! Say, "If you lie down in this creek and pull the mud up over your head and close your eyes, you will fall asleep and then wake up in one million years as a baby-shaped stone," and then watch the baby burst into tears. This is called Education, and a baby needs so much of it.

I flew home the very next morning at 6 o'clock, the hour of hell. A giant ball of fire sleazed up the sky as I watched through my window. (I have called the police about this.) I arrived home and fell into bed and slept for thirteen hours, and when I woke up I was back, a year older, a year closer to waking up as a baby-shaped stone! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME.

PROBLEM: Solved

I am growing strawberries and they are all named Jolene; "Jolene" is the only name a strawberry wants and all the other names are illegal (I asked Yahoo! about this). However, just before my Jolenes get fully ripe the birds swoop down and take little beakfuls out of them. How can they be stopped? Is it time for me to invest in a terrifyingly realistic owl statue?

Soooo true to life--it almost appears to be breathing! The birds will scream when they encounter its empty eyes and flowing breast-hair; they will grow faint at the sight of its tummy-scales and terrier ears. The beak is a duck-butt disappearing into a dog's face: too late for me, sobs the duck-butt, but not too late for you! And the birds will turn tail and fly and my strawberries will be safe.

Do It Now

You need to become a fan of Scrooge McDuck on Facebook. The status updates are indescribable. Today:

Scrooge McDuck: Anyone, who has something exciting to share about our great duck? :-)

Thomas W: Scrooge was my "invisible friend" in my childhood! :-)

Mary H: Even before I could read my Mom was reading stories about the greatest duck to me. Happiness was imagining sharing his adventures. Actually it is still happiness.

Giovanni V: something exciting to share about our great duck? Simple! HE IS GREAT!!!

Gregor F: Years are passing, perspectives are changing and yet this Duck always come along with me

EMERAC!

I should have seen this coming, but I didn't: computer nerds have opinions about the 1957 movie Desk Set. It is propaganda! From Wikipedia:

The room-sized EMERAC units (which is the size computers really were then) are portrayed as big, mechanical babies that need a safe environment (preparing people for the air conditioning requirements, both temperature and filtration, and other engineering considerations of real computers) and human beings, not only to program and maintain them, but to love them, too, for them to be able to carry out their intended missions. The explicit moral of the story, articulated by Sumner/Tracy so no one can miss it, is that a computer is not a monster that will take people's jobs away but a tool that will make their work easier and more enjoyable.

It's so clear to me now: the purpose of this "movie" was to subconsciously prepare people for the eventual necessity of air-conditioning their robots! Nerds why do you think so much? While I was watching Desk Set all I was thinking was OH GOD I WISH COMPUTERS ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE THIS.

Stats Wankery

On April 5th, I checked Duotrope and saw that Black Warrior Review was now accepting online submissions. I sent them a few poems, and yesterday I received an email accepting "As Many as Fill the Mouth of Flies" for the next issue. Warp speed, people. That's one of my fastest acceptances ever, which is especially surprising considering the fact that print responses from BWR were always on the slow side. I should know--I've been sending there for six years, on and off, so it's gratifying to finally find a place there.

It's worth mentioning, too, that both this poem and the poem Boston Review took had previously been rejected by at least twenty places each. I know some people retire poems after a certain number of rejections, but I've never done that; some styles of mine take years to click with editors, and then all of a sudden three or four will be accepted in a row. It's completely unpredictable. Moral of the story: don't put your horses down before their time, eventually you will encounter an editor who is a cat or a Frenchman, and that editor will eat your horse and consider it delicious. So put that in your gravy and...and chunk it.

Manga Meat and Cloud Watching

This is manga meat, an idealized cartoon meat that makes regular appearances in manga, anime, and video games. From Wikipedia:

In reality, animals do not have parts where flesh covers a significant-sized bone cylindrically and uniformly. Thus, the meats as depicted in manga (which can be held in the hands) do not exist. Because of this, some people would like to eat manga meat even more. And to better foster discussion of the subject, “that meat in manga” has come to be called “manga meat”. As characters devour the meat voraciously and viciously, it makes the meat appear very tasty.

Americans also have their manga meat. Consider the dinners of comic strips: a thick steak of no animal in particular, rubbery and oval, looped with fat; consider the three-billow vegetable cloud on the end of Beetle Bailey's fork. Consider Garfield's squiggling squares of lasagna. Consider the hors d'oeuvres, the little stacks of shapes, what might be olives on what might be crackers. Consider Dagwood's idealized sandwiches, which cannot be made in the world. Every viewer, on looking at the same cartoon sandwich, fills it in with different ingredients according to her own sandwich preconceptions.

The American phenomenon is epitomized in this strip of Mary Worth, which Josh Fruhlinger comments on here. Each bowl is an inkblot; the viewer supplies more than half the meaning. What does the butter look like under the empty angles of its butter dish? Like ass, probably. Because the difference between the Japanese phenomenon and American phenomenon is that mammoth legs look good, while the food-clouds of the funny pages are so simultaneously vague and disgusting that no one could ever develop a longing or a nostalgia for them. Way to go America!

Love

The latest issue of Gulf Coast looks so good that I burst into sweat when I saw it. All the people are inside--Sabrina Orah Mark, Dan Beachy-Quick, Heather Christle, Cal Bedient, Brandon Shimoda. There's a feature on collaborations and a brief interview with Eula Biss. There's a great poem by Josiah Bancroft called "Imagination Pig," good jorb Josiah. Best of all, though, there's a whole portfolio of Dawolu Jabari Anderson's work. Gullah Sci-Fi Mysteries!

I got a rejection from Lana Turner on Easter, which felt extremely disrespectful to Jesus, but the next day Notre Dame Review accepted two poems. I mentioned this on the phone to my mother, and she got more excited than she's basically ever been, and I couldn't figure out why until it occurred to me that she maybe thinks Notre Dame Review is an official Catholic magazine. That publishes prayers. Sorry mom!

Most Poignant Search String of All Time

"how to caught an ice cream guy that dosent listen to you with money"

Varieties of Birdseed

Colorful Bird Blend

Supreme Daily Blend Dove Food

Fancy Finch Bird Food

Finch and Small Songbird Blend

Lyric Wild Bird Mix

Cardinal Songbird Select

No Squirrels Just Birds Wild Bird Food

Cockatiel and Other Small Hookbill Gourmet Diet

Multi-Bird Suet with Fruit & Nuts

Cheese Jungle Parrot Food

Orange Oriole Liquid Nectar

Wild Bird High Energy Suet Value 8 Pack

Mealworms to Go Cranberry

Lifetime Parrot Granules

Birdwatcher's Choice Fly Larvae

Insect Suet Logs

Scenic Macaw Hand-Weaning Food

Harrison's Bird Bread

Crazy Corn Cooked Food for Bird Parrots

Orange Delight Suet Plugs

Critter Blockola

Critter Blockola

Critter Blockola

CRITTER BLOCKOLA CRITTER BLOCKOLA CRITTER BLOCKOLA. It looks like this.

YES YES YES

"The bartender's smile was like a rat that had just found a baby to chew on."

--Cynthia Voigt, Sons from Afar

Oh, Cynthia Voigt! That is not a good image. Although I do like the idea of rats having a Hierarchy of Delicacies, with baby at the very top. This changes everything. Charlotte's Web, why didn't you tell the truth? Templeton went to the Fair not to eat apple cores and cotton candy, but to snack on all the babies who had been left behind. That story is even sadder now!

My Cate Marvin Memory

I enjoyed this post by Cate Marvin over at WILLA. She made a little person, and now haters are hating. I saw Cate Marvin read once when I was about eighteen, in Cincinnati, Ohio--World's Tallest Disaster had just come out. I was accompanied by a guy who kept referring to her poetry as URGENT. "Read this poem! It's just so urgent." It made me laugh uncontrollably, inside. She talked to us afterwards and asked us if we were writers; I demurred, because of Situational Embarrassment, but the guy was like YES I am a writer I hope to be as urgent as you someday! Like she was a bladder, full of golden liquid. Sending signals to the nearest brain.

Your Arm Just Falls Down

I don't remember how I stumbled on this gem--I would like to believe it was by searching "inside-out kid's body," but that's just wishful thinking. This is my favorite page, but the rest is worth a look too, especially the Headstand page and the true-falses. There is a spring in the eldow joint!

ETA: Oh my god there is a whole website of these informational toons! Don't put the coat on the snowman, it will melt him.