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Ella Sweeney: How important is the idea of the collective in the work that you do?
Lucy K. Shaw: I would say that it’s completely vital in the sense that I don’t feel sufficiently interested in myself or in my own work to spend all of my time thinking about it. But I do have an incessant compulsion to be involved in the process of creating something.
Working with others, and by that I primarily mean editing other people’s work but also crucially finding a way to work constructively and harmoniously with other editors, for me, is much more consistently rewarding than writing, publishing and showing my own work. I think personal successes and accomplishments, while important, can often feel ultimately kind of lonely. But the thrill of completing and presenting something you’ve worked on very hard with other people can really be a beautiful and fulfilling feeling.
ES: What kind of impact do you think collective practices have on a movement such as feminism?
LKS: I can only really speak on this from my personal experience. Until I met Sarah Jean Alexander and Gabby Bess, who were also pretty much completely unknown at the time, I hadn’t ever really felt like there was a place for me or for my work.
But once we started supporting each other, we were able to build Shabby Doll House and Illuminati Girl Gang into these bold, far-reaching magazines and to publish the work of so many other writers and artists who we believed in. And one of those people was Samantha Conlon, who later went on to form Bunny Collective. Another was Luna Miguel. Another was Mira Gonzalez. Another was Stacey Teague. Another was Ashley Opheim. I’m not trying to take credit for other people’s successes here, but rather to demonstrate that it’s all cyclical. We have all helped and supported one another unquantifiably, and often merely by existing at the same time.
So I think, in terms of how these types of collective practices can advance a movement like feminism; I was probably quite convinced for a long time that if I was going to succeed in writing or art or actually any type of field, that I was going to have to become an exception to the rule. That I would have to be the only successful woman in whatever it was that I was doing, and that I would have to do all of this on somebody else’s terms, as part of a landscape which already existed.
But now I know that just isn’t true.
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Editors Lucy K Shaw, Sarah Jean Alexander & Stacey Teague SHABBY DOLL HOUSE READER
Shabby Doll House
'You can now subscribe to receive the brand new Shabby Doll Reader direct to your inbox on the first Sunday of every month. This new, downloadable .pdf is the perfect companion for the Shabby Doll House super fan, with exclusive features, interviews, reviews, news and even more of whatever else we feel that we need to show you. It's time for us to take this up another level. The first issue was released on February 1st, 2015. You can subscribe now to receive it. Your $4 a month membership fee allows us to bring you the highest quality in poetic entertainment. Thank you for supporting Shabby Doll House.'-- SDH
Excerpts
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Trailer
Oblivious
Pretend
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'Mark Doten’s debut is the most audaciously imaginative political novel I’ve ever read. It’s also very “literary,” though couched in a sci-fi premise: In an alternate reality, a Christ figure (“the Akkad boy”) has been attached to an information-extracting machine (“the Omnosyne”) that will feed his soul (“information”) into “the Cloud.” We are to be presented with transcriptions of the stories that have poured out of this boy over the course of a four-day interrogation. But it turns out that he speaks in other people’s voices — voices from our own reality — and what we actually get is a burlesque of monologues and stories that rewrite our own fraught cultural narratives.
'Most of these pieces are too weird to be easily described. Osama bin Laden tells us about feeding his followers into the mouth of a mechanical bird. Dick Cheney learns to love himself. Mark Zuckerberg tries to survive an eschatological video game. “Mark Doten” discusses race politics with Barack Obama — along with about 10 other story lines by characters famous and not. They are by turns hilarious and disturbing, often shifting into surrealism or Kafka-style absurdity. There are traces of Beckett’s influence, and David Foster Wallace’s, and, perhaps most obviously, of Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning,” but overall the sheer poundage of originality is remarkable.
'The Infernal takes place at a junction of aesthetics and politics. Doten starts from the essential premise that reality is not inevitable, that the world we have is one we’ve made, which he ferociously disassembles, remakes and feeds back to us as twisted gospels for dark times.'-- NY Times
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Mark Doten The Infernal
Graywolf Press
'Doten has written a ravishingly mad post-Bust riposte to the collaboratively written Internet text— the Wiki, which doesn't document facts so much as it documents the process by which 'facts' are generated and then perpetually overwritten.'-- Joshua Cohen
'In Doten’s artfully deranged debut novel, the 'war on terror' is revisited as a feverish science-fiction odyssey. . . . Doten frames his post-historic 'memory index' in virtuosic, antic prose, but his goal is neither purely satire nor surrealism for its own sake. Rather, [The Infernal] constructs a new language to confront atrocity and becomes in the bargain a story that truly thinks outside the cage.'-- Publishers Weekly
'Mark Doten has fashioned a thrilling, idiosyncratic attack on the mytho-historical madness of our time. The Infernal is a brave, crazy, magnetic debut.'-- Sam Lipsyte
'The Infernal is insane. Mark Doten turns his war criminals into the lecherous cartoons they might really be, as if the Warren Report were a drugged-out musical. From now on I want all of my novels this brilliant, this crazily pitched, this original.'-- Ben Marcus
'Serious, future-altering genius.'-- Dennis Cooper
Excerpt
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(cont.)
Trailer: 'The Source'
UNPRINTABLE with Mark Doten, Ned Beauman, and Simon Critchley
Soho Press Editor Mark Doten
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'One of the most important poets of contemporary Japan, Hiromi Ito's impact has been summarized by fellow poet Kido Shuri as follows: “The appearance of Itō Hiromi, a figure that one might best call a ‘shamaness of poetry’ (shi no miko) was an enormous event in post-postwar poetry. Her physiological sensitivity and writing style, which cannot be captured within any existing framework, became the igniting force behind the subsequent flourishing of ‘women’s poetry’ (josei shi), just as Hagiwara Sakutarō had revolutionized modern poetry with his morbid sensitivity and colloquial style.”
'The 140-page narrative poem Wild Grass on the Riverbank (Kawara arekusa) represents Hiromi Itō’s dramatic return to poetry after several years of writing primarily prose works. First serialized in the prominent Japanese poetry journal Handbook of Modern Poetry (Gendai shi techō) in 2004 and 2005, Wild Grass was published in book form in 2005. ... The critic Tochigi Nobuaki has said that in Wild Grass, “We, Ito's readers, are witnessing the advent of a new poetic language that modern Japanese has never seen.” Wild Grass explores the experience of migrancy and alienation through the eyes of an eleven-year old girl who narrates the long poem. In the work, the girl travels with her mother back and forth between a dry landscape known in the poem as the “wasteland,” a place that resembles the dry landscape of southwestern California [where Itō now lives], and a lush, overgrown place known as the “riverbank,” which resembles Kumamoto, a city in southern Japan where Itō’s children grew up and where Itō still spends several weeks each year.'-- Jerome Rothenberg
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Hiromi Ito Wild Grass on the Riverbank
Action Books
'Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles. Set simultaneously in the California desert and her native Japan, tracking migrant children who may or may not be human, or alive, Hiromi Itō's WILD GRASS ON THE RIVERBANK will plunge you into dreamlike landscapes of volatile proliferation: shape-shifting mothers, living father-corpses, and pervasively odd vegetation. At once grotesque and vertiginous, Itō interweaves mythologies, language, sexuality, and place into a genre-busting narrative of what it is to be a migrant.'-- Action Books
Excerpt
from Jacket 2
By late summer, everyone on the riverbank was dead,
Not just the once living creatures, but the summer grass, the rusted bicycles, the summer grass,
Cars without doors or windows, the warped porn magazines, the summer grass,
Empty cans with food stuck inside and empty bottles full of muddy water,
Girl’s panties and condoms, the dead body of father, and so much summer grass
The riverbank meant only to control you
The summer grass touched our bodies
The seeds falling down onto our bodies
Recently, on the bank, I noticed a kind of grass that multiplied conspicuously
It is about one meter high and stands like some kind of rice
It has ears
It is everywhere
It glimmers white in the dim evening light
Sticky liquid oozes from the ear
The dogs get sticky
The dogs smell terrible
The dogs agonize and rub their bodies onto the ground
The man from the riverbank appears in the evening
Every evening he appears, sits in an arbor
Completely alone
Aged, unpolished and shabby, pale as a corpse
When his penis rises up
A smell rises like the one from the rice-like grass on the bank
The penis in his hands shines and shines
The flowers of the kudzu also rise up, I notice the arrowroot flowers rising up here and there, one day, we became tangled in the tendrils of the kudzu plants, I heard something slithering along abruptly, no sooner had I heard this when a tendril trapped my heel, it hit me, and knocked me on my back into a bush, there the Sorghum halepense rattled in the wind, an unfamiliar grass shook releasing its scent, then the tendril stretched all the further, crawling onto my body, getting into my panties, and creeping into my vagina, I… I inhaled and exhaled, I exhaled and the tendril slid in, I inhaled and the tendril slid out, I exhaled again and it slid further in, like the leaves of the kudzu my body was turned this way and that, my body was forced open and closed over and over, and Alexsa watched all of this, Alexsa was watching, watching and smiling, I became angry, so angry, I got up and shoved Alexsa away, she fell down on her back, the tendrils clung to Alexsa too, Alexsa also turned this way and that, the tendril also went inside her vagina, deep inside, and she started to cry
Everyone was dead
Father
Brother
Mother and me
Ahh…I think to myself
Think I'll pack it in
And buy a pick-up
Take it down to L.A.
Find a place
To call my own
Or maybe a hot sprint
One that heals eczema, dermatitis, neuralgia
Menopausal disorders, diabetes, infectious diseases
A hot spring in a hot sprint to fix you up right away
To soak yourself, open your pores, scrub your body, swell up
And then start a brand new day
Hey I’m itchy, so itchy, my younger brother cried, I told him not to scratch, but he did it anyway, the place he scratched soon turned into a blister, I didn’t scratch it that much, only a little, brother cried, but even if he only scratched a little, the place he scratched turned into a blister, all over his body were blisters, after they ruptured, they got inflamed and full of pus
My little brother no longer seemed like himself, he was horribly swollen, he rolled all over the house, mouth open, wheezing, crying,
Crying,
I want to take him to a hot spring, Mother said I’ve heard of a hot spring good for your skin, if we’re going, why don’t we take our dead father and dead dog along to put in, so just left everything as it was, dirty dishes, old clothes, wet towels just as they were, then we carefully laid my wheezing brother on the rear seat, and we stuffed some other things in the car, my little sister, spare clothes, dead bodies, dogs, plastic bags, pillows, food and drink (even some flowerpots), so much stuff, and then we took off, as I stared at the road from the passenger seat, I asked, how do we get there? Mother replied as she drove the car, it’s over that mountain
That hot spring is
A hot spring that fixes you up right away
Soak yourself, open your pores, scrub your body, swell up
And fix your eczema, blisters
Skin infections, ringworm
Dermatitis, infectious diseases
Atopy, allergic diseases
Dead bodies, death, dying, and having died
Try to fix you up and
And start a brand new day
Anyway
Let’s go over that mountain, Mother said
The back seat was full, no space left
As for space, the car was old and rickety from the start
But still we stuffed it full with
Things, garbage, food
People, dogs, dead bodies
So there was no space
The dogs stunk
The dead bodies stunk
My brother was wheezing in the back seat
My sister sometimes cried out as if she’d just remembered
She’d left something back at home
Please go back, I forgot something
No, we never go back
We just go further
Beyond that forked road
Isn’t that Toroku?
Isn’t that Kurokami?
Isn’t that Kokai?
The Jyogyoji crossing
Through Uchi-tsuboi
Up Setozaka slope
Shouldn’t we go
All the way over there?
I know the way to the big tree
Where the samurai-turned-monk used to live
At his big tree, we turn right at the three-way intersection
We see the huge treetop of his big tree
From here, it looks so huge
If you go under and look up, it blocks out the whole world
There’s a path only for tractors and pick-ups
Turn right at the three-way intersection
There’s a small stone bridge, we cross it
Then another three-way intersection
Go straight
Go straight
Go up the road
Go through mandarin orange orchards on both sides
And when we come out
We come to mountainous roads
Where it’s dark even during the day
The road meanders through a forest with shining leaves
The road meanders
Comes close to a cliff
Then separates from it
Ahh… I think to myself
Think I'll pack it in, and buy a pick-up, take it down to L.A.
Mother started to sing in a key way too high for her
Ahh… Think I’ll…
A tangle of karasuuri flowers and fruits
Ahh, Think I’ll…
A flourishing bunch of worm-eaten leaves
A scarlet flower is blooming
It must be a garden species that escaped somebody’s terrace
In the shade of the plants, a large white flower is blooming
A flower pale and white
That can’t be a garden species
It’s so pale because it’s in the shade
Another car comes
We pass each other
That car must be coming back from the hot spring
All fixed up, the driver must have fixed his skin trouble
And come back, thinking this, I try to get a good look
But it disappeared into the distance in a flash
Much further and we’ll be at the seashore
The seashore facing west
Doesn’t look like there is a hot spring
Beyond this is the pure land, Mother said
The dog noticed the smell of the sea
It stuck its nose out the window, howling for the sea
We should’ve crossed a large bridge, Mother said
I forgot the name, but it’s a large bridge
There were big floods there late in the nineteenth century
And again in the mid-twentieth century
Lots of earth, sand, and drowned bodies caught on the bridge
‘Cause of that bridge, the floods downstream were even worse
We screwed up when we missed that bridge
All the water we’ve seen has just been small streams
We’ve definitely gone the wrong way, Mother said
We’ll never get there if we keep going like this, Mother said
The dog howling for the sea rose up in the rear seat
And walked across my little brother
Alexsa shouted
We’d better start all over, Mother said
She must have given up
My brother let up a sharp cry
You can’t give up
Is that the only option?
Shut up, Alexsa shouted
I told you, I told you, my little sister wept
The dog barked
Lots of dogs barked
Alexsa shouted, I can’t take it anymore, I can’t, I can’t
No one ever listens to me, she said
She sunk her face into her thighs, curled up, started to sob
Her voice grew louder, more childish than brother’s
More infantile than sister’s
Cried on and on, on and on
Nothing else
On and on
On and on
We should have turned around
But if we did, we’d just get more lost, mother said
Let’s keep going down the hill to the sea
Then go home round the cape
So that’s how we got back home
Nothing fixed
Nothing found
Nothing
We failed
It’s no good
It’s all over
Trailer
Ito Hiromi 伊藤比呂美 "The Maltreatment of Meaning"
Hiromi Ito, 10-19-10
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Most Swedish poets have built their reputation in Sweden and remained. You seem to be doing so in reverse, your repute growing sizeably in the US before Sweden…
Johannes Goransson: I don’t think I have much of a reputation in the US, but yes it is probably bigger than it is in Sweden.
Did you publish a lot of poetry in Sweden before you left? Is there an audience of your work in Sweden now?
JG: No, I had barely started to write when my family moved to the US. I’ve published Swedish translations and some interlingual poems in a few places, but mostly I publish in American journals and with American presses. It is true that I have found a lot of writers with aesthetic ideas in common with me in Sweden. And in many ways I feel as in tune with them as I do with most American poetry. But then I feel very in tune with Korean poet Kim Hyesoon and I’ve never even been to Korea.
You often work in prose poems, blocks of texts that seem to be craving out aberrant, at times playful, surreal chunks of image led poetry. Do you enjoy maintaining the epithets of a narrative throughout your work so that in its detail and language it can be aggressive and innovative?
JG: I like your suggestion that the “aggression” and “surreal” are at odds with the “narrative.” It certainly feels at odds to me when I write it. Many of my books are “novels” but they are hardly written with a narrative arch in mind. I write on a very much more micro-level: I have a sensation or sentence in mind and then I try to exhaust everything using that kernel (and with everything I primarily mean myself, but also our entire culture, it’s a futile idea no doubt).
And yes, there are a lot of “images” in my books, though often they are involved in a kind of near-montage-like series that do not on the whole come together (like the synthesis of Eisensteinian montage) but tends to keep moving until I and the poem are exhausted and we stop. Images do tend to be considered kitsch in American experimental poetics, a poetics that tends to be skeptical of the kind of absorptive, spectacular quality of images. But I’m very much interested in the spectacular and absorptive, in affect and poetic effects, in the visceral and fantastic.
I’m not all that interested in “innovative” poetry. To me it usually denotes a kind of high culture, high taste label. And also a sense of linear futurity that I think is not only boring but oppressive. I’m far more interested in the degraded and anachronistic, the trashy and the melancholic. Even “the poetic.”
But it’s true that my poems are very “aggressive” or violent, Joyelle [McSweeney] wrote an article on the “ambient violence” in my work a while back. That seems true. In my mind art is very violent, but that’s not separate from the narrative. It’s in the very conflict within the artwork. I’m always at odds with myself, with my books.
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Johannes Goransson The Sugar Book
Tarpaulin Sky Books
'We live by breathing oxygen, but we also die because of oxygen. We live feeding on nature, but we also die because of nature. But, Everyone, do you realize, as you live, the fact that you are citizens of Nature, citizens of Earth? We drink silver, and we are just those who have immigrated to a movie that features Nature. Immigrant is the Observer. Observer is the poet. Poet has several bodies. I that acts and I that observes the I that acts. I that follows the I that observes. I that records and condenses. Johannes Göransson’s poetry is a bang bang – art of these I’s. A film of the Earth’s paths seen through the eyes of someone with an out-of-body experience. And poetry that has smashed the boundaries of genre. Like the mandala of Potala Palace I have seen in Tibet, Göransson condenses within a single poem the inside and outside of Nature’s and Earth’s time. It’s as though his poetry takes us to the forest in Lar Von Triers’ Anti-Christ, where it’s filmed, but then suddenly we find ourselves standing in front of a vanished movie theatre of our home. Göransson’s poetry is a film that Death peeks at, the scene of shooting the film, the film shot on a roll of film, the movie theatre, the Arcadia. A single poem is the world’s interior and exterior, it convulses wildly like an animal that has eaten the poem’s interior and exterior all together with silver. bang bang.'-- Kim Hyesoon
Excerpts
The Law Against Foreigners Involves Mostly The Body
I should know. I’m a foreigner and I want to live in Los Angeles but Los Angeles just wants to take photographs of my body when it’s all dank.
That’s the weird part.
It’s also interested in my body when dogs bark at my genitals but it pretends that’s just evidence of it’s social conscience. It wants to find the human in me, even if it takes ripping this lamb mask into a thousand shreds and hanging it up on the wall.
And feign outrage when I go numb.
I leave good “teeth marks” I’ve been told.
I take a bad photograph because the model was hurt.
Poetry is like a bad photograph because the camera doesn’t work. Or a child is caught stealing from the candy store. Caught fucking a homeless person.
I have a social conscience too and it makes me want to burn the sheets after sex. It makes me scared of lice.
Poetry is so beautiful when it involves gasoline. Or when it gives you a gun that clicks. A dead woman is the most poetical topic in the world.
The Rotten Heart Of Sin Is Exquisitely Mannered
Homeless people are good for images, photographers love them. I find them disgusting when they get killed and when they fuck they smell really bad on your dick.
Swans on the other hand are beautiful when they burn in crime movies.
In this crime movie, we’re at the shooting range again. Imagine all that apricot mess, all those ridiculous ornaments. All that pork. We can’t leave. We don’t have the proper documentation.
Images get in the way of dignity, the poets tell me. Poetry gets in the way of money, the whores tell me. I fuck both and I don’t even have to pay. I’ve got that card: Get out of jail free. Exterminate the brutes yeah.
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I write about spectators and use the same rifle on sick animals.
I love movies and my son’s body ticks like a movie.
I hate the movies because it is cold in here.
I have cancer in the movies probably.
A woman gives me a scorpion and children give me cancer.
I really only live at night, I’ve been told by the movies,
which is ridiculous because I use my hands to make the signs: wrecks, chandeliers, hotels, decades, ownership society.
It’s ridiculous because nobody can drive a stake through a sack of locusts.
Part of me wants to be paid for the meat but part of me wants to give it away like a whore.
The whores wear oriental robes, it’s all the rage.
Everyone is angry in the movies.
Everyone is scared in the corridors.
I tell my son to stop ticking but he can’t hear me because the whores are laughing too loudly and the plague makes tokens of itself.
I love movies and perfume.
It’s the new double, made from tiger blood.
It’s the new breakthrough, made from tiger blood.
Milk is the weirdest when you’re having sex.
I’m having a milk heart and that’s why I can’t watch the movies
without getting scared. The milk gets all over. The deer gets all narrative.
I turn on the surveillance, the heat.
The effect is ominous: the reverse wound.
I look horrified in the image and also “satanic” due to the milk.
You spumey fuck.
My Sperm Gets In The Flowers
I woke up from the girls tearing apart orpheus dolls and spitting the seeds out the window. The prostitutes cheered. Now I’m wearing my Orpheus head like an illicit sign from the underworld.
The whores think I’m a pornographer and that I would tear their heads off.
I probably would.
What’s the war with my wife and I? We lay killed-like in our den, our bodies covered with sugar and sperm. Who are we at war with? Baghdad, of course.
Baghdad of silk and ceremonial daggers.
Baghdad dolls with limbs that burn safely and with smaller dolls without heads.
Baghdad porn: We watch it until we vomit and then we watch it some more. We’re embedded in art. We close our eyes and let the light wash over us.
Everybody is always talking about “gratuitious violence” and “gratuitious sex.” It’s the only kind.
It’s like when people say “Porn hurts everyone” ... But most of all I’m eating another dripping burger.
Flowers are the most violent props.
The Starlet would not have approved of us killing butterflies with cigarette lighters.
It’s Christmas Eve.
I’m writing a novel, my wife is listening for the words “pionees” and “lillies” on the broadcasts from the underworld.
Instead the broadcasts tell us that they birds are “thrashing around the hole.” It’s of course Hollywood speaking in tongues. Mother tongues and moth tongues. Tongues that tell me to name our next child Nico after the underworld. After Baghdad. After our favorite actress who is totally shaven and nameless.
Maybe we consume by looking but if so, consumption is a very fragile thing.
I color my hair red as blood.
I cover the street with dead girls.
They are all ready for war.
I’m already famous.
10th Annual SLC Poetry Festival [Johannes Göransson]
Rabbit Light Movies -- Episode #7
Bonk! Sept 26, 2009 Johannes Goransson
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p.s. Hey. ** Bacteriaburger, Hi, N! Cool, you're back! And very cool about the launched mss. Fingers heavily crossed that they find wise guys. And then further coolness about the fellowship. Really nice to hear that things are active and good with you, man. I'm really good, finishing a film I co-made, working on a new theater piece, novel, blah blah. I have absolutely no complaints. Take really good care until next time, Natty! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D! Oh, excellent: a new piece by you, and a new doc with my old pal Kirby half-behind the wheel, which I didn't know about. Thanks! I'll read it greedily. Everyone, that great finesser of the film-related thinking and writing gig, Mr. Ehrenstein, has a new piece up at Keyframe about the newly new documentary 'The Hunting Ground', co-directed by the very fine Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, whom he interviews with his consummate smarts, etc. Sounds like a pretty must-see film, and the must-ness of reading Mr. E's take/queries re: it goes without saying, naturally. Get in there. ** Kier, Hi! No, I don't eat seafood. I didn't even eat seafood back when I was a very young meat-eating lad. I've always hated the taste of fish and seafood for some reason. The chocolate was gross, and I came home brushed not only my teeth but my tongue too. I liked your quiet-ish day. Mine was kind of too. Let's see ... well, I ordered new glasses. I don't really like the frames. For some unknown reason, something about my eyes or something doomed me to choosing between only about 25 possible frames, and the ones I chose were the least offensive but still not very flattering. But they were really cheap: 40 Euros including new lenses. I'm picking them up almost as soon as I finish this. Right now I'm still looking through a collage of glass and scotch tape. So, I did that. Zac stopped by to pick up his mom's chocolates on the way to seeing her off. I think I finished the revision of the new theater piece script, but that's up to Gisele, and I guess I'll hear her verdict today. I found three, maybe four new apartments that seem like possibilities, and today I'm going to try to schedule a chance to look at them soon. One's near here around Republique/Canal St. Martin, and that one's my favorite in theory vis-a-vis the location. Another one is near Centre Pompidou, which is okay. And the last is by Bonne Nouvelle, which might be okay, but the location isn't exciting. I worked on blog posts. We uploaded the promo reel of our film to private Vimeo, and we'll see what the powers-that-be think. We're starting to stress about the fact that we haven't yet nailed down the post-production people because time is getting short, but we were promised news today. Talked to some people. Not much else. Today we start trying to get the sound of our film as polished as we can within our means to hopefully save us time and money when the pros take over. Now, let's talk about you. Did last night surprise you, and, either way, how did Thursday treat you? ** Keaton, Aren't they symbolic? I mean they're just a little lukewarm plop, so it seems like it's about what the plop symbolizes. Sex is weird. I did like the Emo post! I mean, are you serious? I loved it even. I'm no fool. That would have been a good blurb for Blake's novel. ** Steevee, Hi! Stuff by you to read and to be influenced by, cool. Everyone, Steevee, whom you all know, has written about Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov's new film 'The Lesson' under his official name Steve Erickson @ The L Magazine, and that's your cue to go experience/learn something under his guidance, so ... do. Wow, your description of 'Jauja' makes me really excited to see it. I love and miss the '70s "acid Westerns" genre. Very cool. I'll see what possibilities there are. Thank you a lot for that tip! ** Misanthrope, That 'gay is a choice' thing is about that Tea Party weirdo Ben Carson, right? He seemed to be Facebook's outrage ignition yesterday. ** Rewritedept, Thanks again for the Timony shebang, man! I really liked Wild Flag. I'll have new glasses in exactly 1 hour and 11 minutes from the moment I am typing this. No, the West Coast trip got delayed because we need to finish the post-production on our film first, and we still haven't been given the green light to start, so I'm not sure when the West Coast is going happen. Take care, buddy boy! ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, Mr. M! Bon and, more accurately, beyond bon day! ** Okay. There are four books, except in the case of SDHR, which is a journal, that I got under my belt and loved a bunch lately. As always, I highly recommend every last one of them to you all. See you tomorrow.
Ella Sweeney: How important is the idea of the collective in the work that you do?
Lucy K. Shaw: I would say that it’s completely vital in the sense that I don’t feel sufficiently interested in myself or in my own work to spend all of my time thinking about it. But I do have an incessant compulsion to be involved in the process of creating something.
Working with others, and by that I primarily mean editing other people’s work but also crucially finding a way to work constructively and harmoniously with other editors, for me, is much more consistently rewarding than writing, publishing and showing my own work. I think personal successes and accomplishments, while important, can often feel ultimately kind of lonely. But the thrill of completing and presenting something you’ve worked on very hard with other people can really be a beautiful and fulfilling feeling.
ES: What kind of impact do you think collective practices have on a movement such as feminism?
LKS: I can only really speak on this from my personal experience. Until I met Sarah Jean Alexander and Gabby Bess, who were also pretty much completely unknown at the time, I hadn’t ever really felt like there was a place for me or for my work.
But once we started supporting each other, we were able to build Shabby Doll House and Illuminati Girl Gang into these bold, far-reaching magazines and to publish the work of so many other writers and artists who we believed in. And one of those people was Samantha Conlon, who later went on to form Bunny Collective. Another was Luna Miguel. Another was Mira Gonzalez. Another was Stacey Teague. Another was Ashley Opheim. I’m not trying to take credit for other people’s successes here, but rather to demonstrate that it’s all cyclical. We have all helped and supported one another unquantifiably, and often merely by existing at the same time.
So I think, in terms of how these types of collective practices can advance a movement like feminism; I was probably quite convinced for a long time that if I was going to succeed in writing or art or actually any type of field, that I was going to have to become an exception to the rule. That I would have to be the only successful woman in whatever it was that I was doing, and that I would have to do all of this on somebody else’s terms, as part of a landscape which already existed.
But now I know that just isn’t true.
Shabby Doll House
'You can now subscribe to receive the brand new Shabby Doll Reader direct to your inbox on the first Sunday of every month. This new, downloadable .pdf is the perfect companion for the Shabby Doll House super fan, with exclusive features, interviews, reviews, news and even more of whatever else we feel that we need to show you. It's time for us to take this up another level. The first issue was released on February 1st, 2015. You can subscribe now to receive it. Your $4 a month membership fee allows us to bring you the highest quality in poetic entertainment. Thank you for supporting Shabby Doll House.'-- SDH
Excerpts
Trailer
Oblivious
Pretend
_______________
'Mark Doten’s debut is the most audaciously imaginative political novel I’ve ever read. It’s also very “literary,” though couched in a sci-fi premise: In an alternate reality, a Christ figure (“the Akkad boy”) has been attached to an information-extracting machine (“the Omnosyne”) that will feed his soul (“information”) into “the Cloud.” We are to be presented with transcriptions of the stories that have poured out of this boy over the course of a four-day interrogation. But it turns out that he speaks in other people’s voices — voices from our own reality — and what we actually get is a burlesque of monologues and stories that rewrite our own fraught cultural narratives.
'Most of these pieces are too weird to be easily described. Osama bin Laden tells us about feeding his followers into the mouth of a mechanical bird. Dick Cheney learns to love himself. Mark Zuckerberg tries to survive an eschatological video game. “Mark Doten” discusses race politics with Barack Obama — along with about 10 other story lines by characters famous and not. They are by turns hilarious and disturbing, often shifting into surrealism or Kafka-style absurdity. There are traces of Beckett’s influence, and David Foster Wallace’s, and, perhaps most obviously, of Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning,” but overall the sheer poundage of originality is remarkable.
'The Infernal takes place at a junction of aesthetics and politics. Doten starts from the essential premise that reality is not inevitable, that the world we have is one we’ve made, which he ferociously disassembles, remakes and feeds back to us as twisted gospels for dark times.'-- NY Times
Graywolf Press
'Doten has written a ravishingly mad post-Bust riposte to the collaboratively written Internet text— the Wiki, which doesn't document facts so much as it documents the process by which 'facts' are generated and then perpetually overwritten.'-- Joshua Cohen
'In Doten’s artfully deranged debut novel, the 'war on terror' is revisited as a feverish science-fiction odyssey. . . . Doten frames his post-historic 'memory index' in virtuosic, antic prose, but his goal is neither purely satire nor surrealism for its own sake. Rather, [The Infernal] constructs a new language to confront atrocity and becomes in the bargain a story that truly thinks outside the cage.'-- Publishers Weekly
'Mark Doten has fashioned a thrilling, idiosyncratic attack on the mytho-historical madness of our time. The Infernal is a brave, crazy, magnetic debut.'-- Sam Lipsyte
'The Infernal is insane. Mark Doten turns his war criminals into the lecherous cartoons they might really be, as if the Warren Report were a drugged-out musical. From now on I want all of my novels this brilliant, this crazily pitched, this original.'-- Ben Marcus
'Serious, future-altering genius.'-- Dennis Cooper
Excerpt
(cont.)
Trailer: 'The Source'
UNPRINTABLE with Mark Doten, Ned Beauman, and Simon Critchley
Soho Press Editor Mark Doten
_________________
'One of the most important poets of contemporary Japan, Hiromi Ito's impact has been summarized by fellow poet Kido Shuri as follows: “The appearance of Itō Hiromi, a figure that one might best call a ‘shamaness of poetry’ (shi no miko) was an enormous event in post-postwar poetry. Her physiological sensitivity and writing style, which cannot be captured within any existing framework, became the igniting force behind the subsequent flourishing of ‘women’s poetry’ (josei shi), just as Hagiwara Sakutarō had revolutionized modern poetry with his morbid sensitivity and colloquial style.”
'The 140-page narrative poem Wild Grass on the Riverbank (Kawara arekusa) represents Hiromi Itō’s dramatic return to poetry after several years of writing primarily prose works. First serialized in the prominent Japanese poetry journal Handbook of Modern Poetry (Gendai shi techō) in 2004 and 2005, Wild Grass was published in book form in 2005. ... The critic Tochigi Nobuaki has said that in Wild Grass, “We, Ito's readers, are witnessing the advent of a new poetic language that modern Japanese has never seen.” Wild Grass explores the experience of migrancy and alienation through the eyes of an eleven-year old girl who narrates the long poem. In the work, the girl travels with her mother back and forth between a dry landscape known in the poem as the “wasteland,” a place that resembles the dry landscape of southwestern California [where Itō now lives], and a lush, overgrown place known as the “riverbank,” which resembles Kumamoto, a city in southern Japan where Itō’s children grew up and where Itō still spends several weeks each year.'-- Jerome Rothenberg
Action Books
'Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles. Set simultaneously in the California desert and her native Japan, tracking migrant children who may or may not be human, or alive, Hiromi Itō's WILD GRASS ON THE RIVERBANK will plunge you into dreamlike landscapes of volatile proliferation: shape-shifting mothers, living father-corpses, and pervasively odd vegetation. At once grotesque and vertiginous, Itō interweaves mythologies, language, sexuality, and place into a genre-busting narrative of what it is to be a migrant.'-- Action Books
Excerpt
from Jacket 2
By late summer, everyone on the riverbank was dead,
Not just the once living creatures, but the summer grass, the rusted bicycles, the summer grass,
Cars without doors or windows, the warped porn magazines, the summer grass,
Empty cans with food stuck inside and empty bottles full of muddy water,
Girl’s panties and condoms, the dead body of father, and so much summer grass
The riverbank meant only to control you
The summer grass touched our bodies
The seeds falling down onto our bodies
Recently, on the bank, I noticed a kind of grass that multiplied conspicuously
It is about one meter high and stands like some kind of rice
It has ears
It is everywhere
It glimmers white in the dim evening light
Sticky liquid oozes from the ear
The dogs get sticky
The dogs smell terrible
The dogs agonize and rub their bodies onto the ground
The man from the riverbank appears in the evening
Every evening he appears, sits in an arbor
Completely alone
Aged, unpolished and shabby, pale as a corpse
When his penis rises up
A smell rises like the one from the rice-like grass on the bank
The penis in his hands shines and shines
The flowers of the kudzu also rise up, I notice the arrowroot flowers rising up here and there, one day, we became tangled in the tendrils of the kudzu plants, I heard something slithering along abruptly, no sooner had I heard this when a tendril trapped my heel, it hit me, and knocked me on my back into a bush, there the Sorghum halepense rattled in the wind, an unfamiliar grass shook releasing its scent, then the tendril stretched all the further, crawling onto my body, getting into my panties, and creeping into my vagina, I… I inhaled and exhaled, I exhaled and the tendril slid in, I inhaled and the tendril slid out, I exhaled again and it slid further in, like the leaves of the kudzu my body was turned this way and that, my body was forced open and closed over and over, and Alexsa watched all of this, Alexsa was watching, watching and smiling, I became angry, so angry, I got up and shoved Alexsa away, she fell down on her back, the tendrils clung to Alexsa too, Alexsa also turned this way and that, the tendril also went inside her vagina, deep inside, and she started to cry
Everyone was dead
Father
Brother
Mother and me
Ahh…I think to myself
Think I'll pack it in
And buy a pick-up
Take it down to L.A.
Find a place
To call my own
Or maybe a hot sprint
One that heals eczema, dermatitis, neuralgia
Menopausal disorders, diabetes, infectious diseases
A hot spring in a hot sprint to fix you up right away
To soak yourself, open your pores, scrub your body, swell up
And then start a brand new day
Hey I’m itchy, so itchy, my younger brother cried, I told him not to scratch, but he did it anyway, the place he scratched soon turned into a blister, I didn’t scratch it that much, only a little, brother cried, but even if he only scratched a little, the place he scratched turned into a blister, all over his body were blisters, after they ruptured, they got inflamed and full of pus
My little brother no longer seemed like himself, he was horribly swollen, he rolled all over the house, mouth open, wheezing, crying,
Crying,
I want to take him to a hot spring, Mother said I’ve heard of a hot spring good for your skin, if we’re going, why don’t we take our dead father and dead dog along to put in, so just left everything as it was, dirty dishes, old clothes, wet towels just as they were, then we carefully laid my wheezing brother on the rear seat, and we stuffed some other things in the car, my little sister, spare clothes, dead bodies, dogs, plastic bags, pillows, food and drink (even some flowerpots), so much stuff, and then we took off, as I stared at the road from the passenger seat, I asked, how do we get there? Mother replied as she drove the car, it’s over that mountain
That hot spring is
A hot spring that fixes you up right away
Soak yourself, open your pores, scrub your body, swell up
And fix your eczema, blisters
Skin infections, ringworm
Dermatitis, infectious diseases
Atopy, allergic diseases
Dead bodies, death, dying, and having died
Try to fix you up and
And start a brand new day
Anyway
Let’s go over that mountain, Mother said
The back seat was full, no space left
As for space, the car was old and rickety from the start
But still we stuffed it full with
Things, garbage, food
People, dogs, dead bodies
So there was no space
The dogs stunk
The dead bodies stunk
My brother was wheezing in the back seat
My sister sometimes cried out as if she’d just remembered
She’d left something back at home
Please go back, I forgot something
No, we never go back
We just go further
Beyond that forked road
Isn’t that Toroku?
Isn’t that Kurokami?
Isn’t that Kokai?
The Jyogyoji crossing
Through Uchi-tsuboi
Up Setozaka slope
Shouldn’t we go
All the way over there?
I know the way to the big tree
Where the samurai-turned-monk used to live
At his big tree, we turn right at the three-way intersection
We see the huge treetop of his big tree
From here, it looks so huge
If you go under and look up, it blocks out the whole world
There’s a path only for tractors and pick-ups
Turn right at the three-way intersection
There’s a small stone bridge, we cross it
Then another three-way intersection
Go straight
Go straight
Go up the road
Go through mandarin orange orchards on both sides
And when we come out
We come to mountainous roads
Where it’s dark even during the day
The road meanders through a forest with shining leaves
The road meanders
Comes close to a cliff
Then separates from it
Ahh… I think to myself
Think I'll pack it in, and buy a pick-up, take it down to L.A.
Mother started to sing in a key way too high for her
Ahh… Think I’ll…
A tangle of karasuuri flowers and fruits
Ahh, Think I’ll…
A flourishing bunch of worm-eaten leaves
A scarlet flower is blooming
It must be a garden species that escaped somebody’s terrace
In the shade of the plants, a large white flower is blooming
A flower pale and white
That can’t be a garden species
It’s so pale because it’s in the shade
Another car comes
We pass each other
That car must be coming back from the hot spring
All fixed up, the driver must have fixed his skin trouble
And come back, thinking this, I try to get a good look
But it disappeared into the distance in a flash
Much further and we’ll be at the seashore
The seashore facing west
Doesn’t look like there is a hot spring
Beyond this is the pure land, Mother said
The dog noticed the smell of the sea
It stuck its nose out the window, howling for the sea
We should’ve crossed a large bridge, Mother said
I forgot the name, but it’s a large bridge
There were big floods there late in the nineteenth century
And again in the mid-twentieth century
Lots of earth, sand, and drowned bodies caught on the bridge
‘Cause of that bridge, the floods downstream were even worse
We screwed up when we missed that bridge
All the water we’ve seen has just been small streams
We’ve definitely gone the wrong way, Mother said
We’ll never get there if we keep going like this, Mother said
The dog howling for the sea rose up in the rear seat
And walked across my little brother
Alexsa shouted
We’d better start all over, Mother said
She must have given up
My brother let up a sharp cry
You can’t give up
Is that the only option?
Shut up, Alexsa shouted
I told you, I told you, my little sister wept
The dog barked
Lots of dogs barked
Alexsa shouted, I can’t take it anymore, I can’t, I can’t
No one ever listens to me, she said
She sunk her face into her thighs, curled up, started to sob
Her voice grew louder, more childish than brother’s
More infantile than sister’s
Cried on and on, on and on
Nothing else
On and on
On and on
We should have turned around
But if we did, we’d just get more lost, mother said
Let’s keep going down the hill to the sea
Then go home round the cape
So that’s how we got back home
Nothing fixed
Nothing found
Nothing
We failed
It’s no good
It’s all over
Trailer
Ito Hiromi 伊藤比呂美 "The Maltreatment of Meaning"
Hiromi Ito, 10-19-10
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Most Swedish poets have built their reputation in Sweden and remained. You seem to be doing so in reverse, your repute growing sizeably in the US before Sweden…
Johannes Goransson: I don’t think I have much of a reputation in the US, but yes it is probably bigger than it is in Sweden.
Did you publish a lot of poetry in Sweden before you left? Is there an audience of your work in Sweden now?
JG: No, I had barely started to write when my family moved to the US. I’ve published Swedish translations and some interlingual poems in a few places, but mostly I publish in American journals and with American presses. It is true that I have found a lot of writers with aesthetic ideas in common with me in Sweden. And in many ways I feel as in tune with them as I do with most American poetry. But then I feel very in tune with Korean poet Kim Hyesoon and I’ve never even been to Korea.
You often work in prose poems, blocks of texts that seem to be craving out aberrant, at times playful, surreal chunks of image led poetry. Do you enjoy maintaining the epithets of a narrative throughout your work so that in its detail and language it can be aggressive and innovative?
JG: I like your suggestion that the “aggression” and “surreal” are at odds with the “narrative.” It certainly feels at odds to me when I write it. Many of my books are “novels” but they are hardly written with a narrative arch in mind. I write on a very much more micro-level: I have a sensation or sentence in mind and then I try to exhaust everything using that kernel (and with everything I primarily mean myself, but also our entire culture, it’s a futile idea no doubt).
And yes, there are a lot of “images” in my books, though often they are involved in a kind of near-montage-like series that do not on the whole come together (like the synthesis of Eisensteinian montage) but tends to keep moving until I and the poem are exhausted and we stop. Images do tend to be considered kitsch in American experimental poetics, a poetics that tends to be skeptical of the kind of absorptive, spectacular quality of images. But I’m very much interested in the spectacular and absorptive, in affect and poetic effects, in the visceral and fantastic.
I’m not all that interested in “innovative” poetry. To me it usually denotes a kind of high culture, high taste label. And also a sense of linear futurity that I think is not only boring but oppressive. I’m far more interested in the degraded and anachronistic, the trashy and the melancholic. Even “the poetic.”
But it’s true that my poems are very “aggressive” or violent, Joyelle [McSweeney] wrote an article on the “ambient violence” in my work a while back. That seems true. In my mind art is very violent, but that’s not separate from the narrative. It’s in the very conflict within the artwork. I’m always at odds with myself, with my books.
Tarpaulin Sky Books
'We live by breathing oxygen, but we also die because of oxygen. We live feeding on nature, but we also die because of nature. But, Everyone, do you realize, as you live, the fact that you are citizens of Nature, citizens of Earth? We drink silver, and we are just those who have immigrated to a movie that features Nature. Immigrant is the Observer. Observer is the poet. Poet has several bodies. I that acts and I that observes the I that acts. I that follows the I that observes. I that records and condenses. Johannes Göransson’s poetry is a bang bang – art of these I’s. A film of the Earth’s paths seen through the eyes of someone with an out-of-body experience. And poetry that has smashed the boundaries of genre. Like the mandala of Potala Palace I have seen in Tibet, Göransson condenses within a single poem the inside and outside of Nature’s and Earth’s time. It’s as though his poetry takes us to the forest in Lar Von Triers’ Anti-Christ, where it’s filmed, but then suddenly we find ourselves standing in front of a vanished movie theatre of our home. Göransson’s poetry is a film that Death peeks at, the scene of shooting the film, the film shot on a roll of film, the movie theatre, the Arcadia. A single poem is the world’s interior and exterior, it convulses wildly like an animal that has eaten the poem’s interior and exterior all together with silver. bang bang.'-- Kim Hyesoon
Excerpts
The Law Against Foreigners Involves Mostly The Body
I should know. I’m a foreigner and I want to live in Los Angeles but Los Angeles just wants to take photographs of my body when it’s all dank.
That’s the weird part.
It’s also interested in my body when dogs bark at my genitals but it pretends that’s just evidence of it’s social conscience. It wants to find the human in me, even if it takes ripping this lamb mask into a thousand shreds and hanging it up on the wall.
And feign outrage when I go numb.
I leave good “teeth marks” I’ve been told.
I take a bad photograph because the model was hurt.
Poetry is like a bad photograph because the camera doesn’t work. Or a child is caught stealing from the candy store. Caught fucking a homeless person.
I have a social conscience too and it makes me want to burn the sheets after sex. It makes me scared of lice.
Poetry is so beautiful when it involves gasoline. Or when it gives you a gun that clicks. A dead woman is the most poetical topic in the world.
The Rotten Heart Of Sin Is Exquisitely Mannered
Homeless people are good for images, photographers love them. I find them disgusting when they get killed and when they fuck they smell really bad on your dick.
Swans on the other hand are beautiful when they burn in crime movies.
In this crime movie, we’re at the shooting range again. Imagine all that apricot mess, all those ridiculous ornaments. All that pork. We can’t leave. We don’t have the proper documentation.
Images get in the way of dignity, the poets tell me. Poetry gets in the way of money, the whores tell me. I fuck both and I don’t even have to pay. I’ve got that card: Get out of jail free. Exterminate the brutes yeah.
*
I write about spectators and use the same rifle on sick animals.
I love movies and my son’s body ticks like a movie.
I hate the movies because it is cold in here.
I have cancer in the movies probably.
A woman gives me a scorpion and children give me cancer.
I really only live at night, I’ve been told by the movies,
which is ridiculous because I use my hands to make the signs: wrecks, chandeliers, hotels, decades, ownership society.
It’s ridiculous because nobody can drive a stake through a sack of locusts.
Part of me wants to be paid for the meat but part of me wants to give it away like a whore.
The whores wear oriental robes, it’s all the rage.
Everyone is angry in the movies.
Everyone is scared in the corridors.
I tell my son to stop ticking but he can’t hear me because the whores are laughing too loudly and the plague makes tokens of itself.
I love movies and perfume.
It’s the new double, made from tiger blood.
It’s the new breakthrough, made from tiger blood.
Milk is the weirdest when you’re having sex.
I’m having a milk heart and that’s why I can’t watch the movies
without getting scared. The milk gets all over. The deer gets all narrative.
I turn on the surveillance, the heat.
The effect is ominous: the reverse wound.
I look horrified in the image and also “satanic” due to the milk.
You spumey fuck.
My Sperm Gets In The Flowers
I woke up from the girls tearing apart orpheus dolls and spitting the seeds out the window. The prostitutes cheered. Now I’m wearing my Orpheus head like an illicit sign from the underworld.
The whores think I’m a pornographer and that I would tear their heads off.
I probably would.
What’s the war with my wife and I? We lay killed-like in our den, our bodies covered with sugar and sperm. Who are we at war with? Baghdad, of course.
Baghdad of silk and ceremonial daggers.
Baghdad dolls with limbs that burn safely and with smaller dolls without heads.
Baghdad porn: We watch it until we vomit and then we watch it some more. We’re embedded in art. We close our eyes and let the light wash over us.
Everybody is always talking about “gratuitious violence” and “gratuitious sex.” It’s the only kind.
It’s like when people say “Porn hurts everyone” ... But most of all I’m eating another dripping burger.
Flowers are the most violent props.
The Starlet would not have approved of us killing butterflies with cigarette lighters.
It’s Christmas Eve.
I’m writing a novel, my wife is listening for the words “pionees” and “lillies” on the broadcasts from the underworld.
Instead the broadcasts tell us that they birds are “thrashing around the hole.” It’s of course Hollywood speaking in tongues. Mother tongues and moth tongues. Tongues that tell me to name our next child Nico after the underworld. After Baghdad. After our favorite actress who is totally shaven and nameless.
Maybe we consume by looking but if so, consumption is a very fragile thing.
I color my hair red as blood.
I cover the street with dead girls.
They are all ready for war.
I’m already famous.
10th Annual SLC Poetry Festival [Johannes Göransson]
Rabbit Light Movies -- Episode #7
Bonk! Sept 26, 2009 Johannes Goransson
*
p.s. Hey. ** Bacteriaburger, Hi, N! Cool, you're back! And very cool about the launched mss. Fingers heavily crossed that they find wise guys. And then further coolness about the fellowship. Really nice to hear that things are active and good with you, man. I'm really good, finishing a film I co-made, working on a new theater piece, novel, blah blah. I have absolutely no complaints. Take really good care until next time, Natty! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, D! Oh, excellent: a new piece by you, and a new doc with my old pal Kirby half-behind the wheel, which I didn't know about. Thanks! I'll read it greedily. Everyone, that great finesser of the film-related thinking and writing gig, Mr. Ehrenstein, has a new piece up at Keyframe about the newly new documentary 'The Hunting Ground', co-directed by the very fine Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, whom he interviews with his consummate smarts, etc. Sounds like a pretty must-see film, and the must-ness of reading Mr. E's take/queries re: it goes without saying, naturally. Get in there. ** Kier, Hi! No, I don't eat seafood. I didn't even eat seafood back when I was a very young meat-eating lad. I've always hated the taste of fish and seafood for some reason. The chocolate was gross, and I came home brushed not only my teeth but my tongue too. I liked your quiet-ish day. Mine was kind of too. Let's see ... well, I ordered new glasses. I don't really like the frames. For some unknown reason, something about my eyes or something doomed me to choosing between only about 25 possible frames, and the ones I chose were the least offensive but still not very flattering. But they were really cheap: 40 Euros including new lenses. I'm picking them up almost as soon as I finish this. Right now I'm still looking through a collage of glass and scotch tape. So, I did that. Zac stopped by to pick up his mom's chocolates on the way to seeing her off. I think I finished the revision of the new theater piece script, but that's up to Gisele, and I guess I'll hear her verdict today. I found three, maybe four new apartments that seem like possibilities, and today I'm going to try to schedule a chance to look at them soon. One's near here around Republique/Canal St. Martin, and that one's my favorite in theory vis-a-vis the location. Another one is near Centre Pompidou, which is okay. And the last is by Bonne Nouvelle, which might be okay, but the location isn't exciting. I worked on blog posts. We uploaded the promo reel of our film to private Vimeo, and we'll see what the powers-that-be think. We're starting to stress about the fact that we haven't yet nailed down the post-production people because time is getting short, but we were promised news today. Talked to some people. Not much else. Today we start trying to get the sound of our film as polished as we can within our means to hopefully save us time and money when the pros take over. Now, let's talk about you. Did last night surprise you, and, either way, how did Thursday treat you? ** Keaton, Aren't they symbolic? I mean they're just a little lukewarm plop, so it seems like it's about what the plop symbolizes. Sex is weird. I did like the Emo post! I mean, are you serious? I loved it even. I'm no fool. That would have been a good blurb for Blake's novel. ** Steevee, Hi! Stuff by you to read and to be influenced by, cool. Everyone, Steevee, whom you all know, has written about Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov's new film 'The Lesson' under his official name Steve Erickson @ The L Magazine, and that's your cue to go experience/learn something under his guidance, so ... do. Wow, your description of 'Jauja' makes me really excited to see it. I love and miss the '70s "acid Westerns" genre. Very cool. I'll see what possibilities there are. Thank you a lot for that tip! ** Misanthrope, That 'gay is a choice' thing is about that Tea Party weirdo Ben Carson, right? He seemed to be Facebook's outrage ignition yesterday. ** Rewritedept, Thanks again for the Timony shebang, man! I really liked Wild Flag. I'll have new glasses in exactly 1 hour and 11 minutes from the moment I am typing this. No, the West Coast trip got delayed because we need to finish the post-production on our film first, and we still haven't been given the green light to start, so I'm not sure when the West Coast is going happen. Take care, buddy boy! ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, Mr. M! Bon and, more accurately, beyond bon day! ** Okay. There are four books, except in the case of SDHR, which is a journal, that I got under my belt and loved a bunch lately. As always, I highly recommend every last one of them to you all. See you tomorrow.