Your Momma’s so dull, she thought hair dressers had a cut and paste job.

Your Momma’s so out of shape, she runs out of room evens when she sets.

Your Momma’s so dirty, her writing has to be gone over with a fine-toothed comb.

Your Momma’s so cheap, she plagiarizes from Project Gutenberg.

Your Momma’s so simple, she always asks if it’s copy edit, copy-edit, or copyedit.

Your Momma’s so repetitive, she dittos quotation marks.

Your Momma’s so old school, she thinks the Chicago Manual of Style is the Marshall Field’s catalogue.

“I am sorry to be the baron of bad news, but you seem buttered, so allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies, and are more than just ice king on the cake. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite.

So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality.

I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go.

Make my words, when you get down to brass stacks it doesn’t take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once. It’s clear who makes the pants in this relationship, and sometimes you just have to swallow your prize and accept the fax, instead of making a half-harded effort. You might have to come to this conclusion through denial and error but I swear on my mother’s mating name that when you put the petal to the medal you will pass with flying carpets like it’s a peach of cake.” Read more »

“The mint leaves, fresh and tender, should be pressed against a coin-silver goblet with the back of a silver spoon. Only bruise the leaves gently and then remove them from the goblet. Half fill with cracked ice. Mellow bourbon, aged in oaken barrels, is poured from the jigger and allowed to slide slowly through the cracked ice.

“In another receptacle, granulated sugar is slowly mixed into chilled limestone water to make a silvery mixture as smooth as some rare Egyptian oil, then poured on top of the ice. While beads of moisture gather on the burnished exterior of the silver goblet, garnish the brim of the goblet with the choicest sprigs of mint.”
-from Henry Clay’s diary

May your Derby weekend be decadent and depraved.

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Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman sounds like an interesting book:

“Drawing on decades of research in psychology that resulted in a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Daniel Kahneman takes readers on an exploration of what influences thought example by example, sometimes with unlikely word pairs like “vomit and banana.” […}Thinking, Fast and Slow gives deep—and sometimes frightening—insight about what goes on inside our heads: the psychological basis for reactions, judgments, recognition, choices, conclusions, and much more.  –JoVon Sotak

Thinking, Fast and Slow received some good press (selected as one of the best books of 2011 by New York Times Book Review, Globe and Mail, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal), which means more people searching Amazon for the book. Except they might find something else by accident.

Thinking, Fast and Slow was published on October 24^th, 2011, the same day that Fast and Slow Thinking by Karl Daniels became available on Amazon. Read more »

Last year, music downloads exceeded CD sales. Netflix took a step toward stopping its red envelope service. Even my grandfather bought an Ipad. E-book sales exploded into a billion-dollar market. The “cloud” became an important word in software update reminders.

I saw an ad for app called “Shoebox” that allows you to take photographs of those old-fashioned Kodachrome photographs and store them in the great warehouse in the sky. The idea being that you could remove that nasty clutter—in this case, family memories—from your home.

Some articles discussed the birth of the cumulus, death of materialism. One interviewed an employee of Powell’s Books, the world’s only used bookstore where you need a map. The employee once owned an impressive collection of 3,000 hardcovers. Then he bought a Kindle and parted with all of his books except the first editions. (Did he sell them back to Powell’s I wonder.)

“I missed flipping pages for about a day,” the employee was quoted saying. “I don’t have CD or DVD racks anymore. Having things stored in the cloud just fits my lifestyle.”

“Take a look around,” the articles urged, “Your stuff is disappearing!” Millennials are a self-obsessed generation, according to every psychological report covered in the news. At the same time, Millenials aren’t interested in collecting things, because the cloud takes care of it for us. It seems like a contradiction because what are collections but an excellent way to define yourself to the world. In self-broadcasting terms, there’s me and then there’s who I want you think I am. A good collection can navigate and reinforce both of those identities.

As I thought about what a confusing lot Millenials are to perform premature studies on, I remembered an old roommate. In our old apartment, she had a massive collection, one that came by chance. She had one of those unfortunate names that rhymed with an animal, and so for the duration of her childhood, the panda was forced upon her as a favorite animal.
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Gnawing on a Thin Man
By Ray Amorosi
Acme Poem Company: Willow Springs Editions
37 pages, $10

Today, I will take a walk, and I will observe the loose black dog, children choreographing a dance, the cardinal in the redwood blossoms, the fire truck driving in circles, the blond woman weeping on her porch. If the sky unfolds for me, and I begin to question the invisible forces controlling my life, I will not think about them in a tense, collegiate way. I will forgive them. I will forgive them because today is actually a startling, nice day, and I’ve picked up a renewed appreciation of the present while reading Ray Amorosi’s new book of poems, Gnawing on a Thin Man.

After twenty years of not publishing poems, Amorosi has been back in full force with his second book out in three years. As he tells it, he moved to a place of “marshes upon marshes,” and he couldn’t write about himself—he had to record what he saw. His poems are grounded in this observation the natural world, rich with startling imagery from Marshfield, Massachusetts, or from the distant past, perhaps Italy is there, perhaps Amherst or one of the other towns where Amorosi has taught, perhaps our eyes linger on a still life instead, and we move with the poem from the exterior to ekphrasis to a cracking, inward moment.

“They were all written here in Marshfield,” Amorosi said in an interview with Micah Flores at Gatehouse News Service. “I’m about a two-minute walk to some of the most beautiful areas you would want to see. [That beauty] drives you out of your soul.”

He presents his observations so that they reader may follow along on a journey that often leads to a surprising conclusion. In the tradition of many poets, Amorosi walks each evening with his dogs. When he returns, he simply asks, “Ray, what did you see today?”

The poem answers; we repeat the walk: Read more »

Years ago, I heard a beautiful story on This American Life. It was the tale of two brothers and their pet armadillo, and it moved me. Even though I seem to remember the armadillo described as purple, for years I thought that the story was nonfiction. In my defense, I had never seen an armadillo before (perhaps in certain light they looked purple, as bluegrass appears blue?), and I grew up in a place where people kept raccoons and squirrels as indoor pets and placed housecats outside to live in barns. When I finally looked the radio essay up, I found out it that it was, in fact, a beautiful short story.

I felt a little foolish, but not foolish enough to question the veracity of a story I heard the first time I listened to Wire Tap and thought that the show was the Canadian version of This American Life with an open phone line. For weeks I told people about this guy who got addicted to eating rabbit food. By now you might think me gullible. But I had witnessed many improbable things and heard the wildest of confessions, so I didn’t doubt for a second the plausibility of someone needing timothy hay pellets—any dietary deficiency could have been the culprit.

Several weeks ago, I listened to a podcast about Apple factories in China. China has never sounded like an ideal place to work—all those stories come to mind about the production of flip-flops that give people lead poisoning, the quick big dam that destroyed whole villages, the creation/selling/inflation of World of Warcraft gold. Not to mention everyone was still touting Steve Jobs as some kind of bandit hero, forgetting that quintessential bandits give back to their communities. There is no “Jobs Foundation.” The Apple monopoly on beautiful design and good hardware needed to be knocked down a level with some nice, hard-hitting expose.

The hexane poisoning, underage employment, capitalism, globalization—the story felt right, down to the timing. David had become a Goliath, the story confirmed it. It’s rather un-American to like a Goliath; progressive people talked about boycotting Apple.

Last week, of course, This American Life aired a retraction.
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I’m taking a twelve-hour tour of airports across the country today, so here’s a little game.

First, pick an author: Donald Barthelme

Using only story/poem/essay titles from the author you picked (multiple collections are okay), answer these questions:

1. Are you a male or female: The Captured Woman

2. Describe yourself: The Sandman

3. How do you feel about yourself: A Shower of Gold

4. Describe your ex boyfriend/girlfriend: The Dolt

5. Describe your current boy/girl situation: Nothing: A Preliminary Account

6. Describe your current location: At the End of the Mechanical Age

7. Describe where you want to be: On the Steps of the Conservatory

8. Your best friend is: The Phantom of the Opera’s Friend

9. Your favorite color is: Views of My Father Weeping

10. You know that: Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel

11. What’s the weather like:  The Rise of Capitalism
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Aside Magazine is something to get excited about: created entirely in HTML5, it’s an app-like magazine that can be read on any tablet.

Since it’s only HTML5, there’s no App Store, no approval or 30% commission necessary–it can be download straight from the web. The designers explain: “We love the AppStore. But in our world, magazines are press content, not software. And we don’t want a big company to decide whether our content is allowed to be published or not. Also, it makes it much easier to publish on other platforms such as Android Honeycomb.”

It’s fully responsive with all the touch-patterns we’ve come to learn, like flip, swipe, and drag, and the design supports multimedia content without Flash.

The prototype is in German, but regardless of your language skills, you should check it out for the awesome design.

With 80 million tablets sold, I wonder if coding if the future of typesetting, and before long all small publishers and lit mag interns will be adept at writing commands like <blockquote>.

After the jump, there’s a video of someone browsing though Aside for those of you who don’t have tablets yet (do you exist?). Read more »