Every Wednesday in Spokane, local writer Mark Anderson hosts an all-ages open mic, known as Broken Mic (curiously titled, since the microphone works just fine, but no matter). 96% of what is read aloud is poetry, and in fact, host Mark Anderson calls the event Poetry Broken Mic when he goes through the introductory song-and-dance before welcoming the first reader to the stage. I write essays and not poems, though – ergo, I read essays at Broken Mic (typically essays that my thesis adviser has dismissed as too underdeveloped and sophomoric for my thesis). I read at Broken Mic every week because I like to practice reading aloud in front of an audience I like to have my writing applauded. (Oh, relax – writing is rarely a gratifying experience at the desk, and it’s nice to have some positive reinforcement, even if the audience is just being polite.) A few weeks ago, during the intermission of the two and-a-half hour long event, young and hot and up-and-coming local slam poet, Tim Johnson, came up to me and said something like, “Sam, your shit’s hilarious, but it’s never about anything whatsoever.”  I responded by saying, “Huh-huh – yeah dude, that’s how I roll,” or something boneheaded like that, but he did have a point – I hardly ever, at live readings, read anything that comes around in the end, or “accesses the heart of the human condition,” or whatever pithy clause I’m sick of hearing. The truth is, I rarely know what I’m writing about in essays, anyway, until like the third or fourth draft, and once I make that discovery, it’s usually depressing and full of sentences that work on the page but sound ho-hum when spoken aloud, and who wants to go to readings to be bored and depressed? What I’m trying to get around to is this: essays or short stories at readings need to be kept short and light, and don’t necessarily need to take the audience members somewhere new and unexpected in the same way print writing does.

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I haven’t posted in a fortnight.

You should read this graphic essay, recommended to me by Rachel Hartley-Smith. It’s rather funny and well done.

You should then visit this music blog, written by my friend/fellow music nerd Mike Shimmercore, and digest just how alarmingly similar Cut Copy’s “Take me Over” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere” sound.

You should then read these hilarious book reviews by Jimmy Chen at HTMLGIANT, written based on the covers alone.

You should then listen to the song below on repeat for two weeks.

More like 29 times, after proofreading. To make this relevant, it’s funny how whenever you have a good time writing, you know the prose sucks, or that it couldn’t possibly be published or taken seriously, that it’s destined for an open mic, or for someone who admires you, who you probably take for granted. Whenever I love a song, I know it’s probably too easy and digestible. Not challenging, like AIDS Wolf, or that shitty Lou Reed album, Metal Machine Music – like Lord Byron, or Gertrude Stein. (Not respectively.) Funny how one has to eat spiders, swallow barbed wire, and shit napalm to feel good about oneself. I think I’ve already written about this before, the repetition metronoming along with this damn jangly golden retriever puppy of a song, swallowing and shitting out its tail in two and-a-half minutes, gettin’ all dizzy and cute and catching candy Frisbees along the way. More like 37 times.

V V V

Craft Spells – Your Tomb

…can’t we lose all the Irish kitsch and just call it Drunk Day? This article is hilarious and relevant. Okay – back to spring break.

…here’s something to consider:

“…You learn about yourself. The deliberate, artificial crisis of the page reveals your spinal identity – who you are in the fire, in pain, in fear, in defeat, and more dangerously, in triumph. When you’ve seen into yourself that far and still come to the page the next day, there’s not much more to prove. And those you respect know it. Writing is so hard that anybody who ventures into it has demonstrated toughness. By coming back to the page, you earn the right to be kind.”

Here’s the original passage, written by Katherine Dunn, in regards to boxing, in her essay, “School of Hard Knocks”:

“…You learn about yourself. The deliberate, artificial crisis of the ring reveals your spinal identity – who you are in the fire, in pain, in fear, in defeat, and more dangerously, in triumph. When you’ve seen into yourself that far and still come into the gym the next day, there’s not much more to prove. And those you respect know it. Boxing is so hard that anybody who ventures into it has demonstrated toughness. By walking through the gym door, you earn the right to be kind.”

If you can write a closing paragraph to an essay like Dunn has, in which so few words can be swapped to convey the same meaning, you’re probably reaching your readers. Substitute writing/page or boxing/ring with, say, teaching/classroom, chemistry/lab, or care-taking/hospice bed, if you don’t believe me. Plus it’s kinda fun to ad lib around with the formula.

While I was changing clothes in my room earlier tonight, I stepped on one of my several flash drives. I’m not sure if I broke it – I haven’t plugged it in to check, or anything – but I immediately remembered what it holds: every album by Hüsker Dü, all of which I uploaded for a friend earlier in the week. The flash drive is smaller than a cigarette lighter and weighs less than a piece of Walker’s Shortbread. I stepped on nine years’ worth of music, which, along with music by Prince and the ‘Mats and Soul Asylum, went on to make Minneapolis one of the coolest cities in America. Hüsker Dü’s MP3 files are small – Warehouse: Songs and Stories, their longest and most thoroughly produced album, is only 63.9 MB, most likely weighing less than a word file of the complete works of Shakespeare. I’m not even sure where the flash drive is now; I think I kicked it under a sweater, but I’m too lazy to check. If I find it, I’ll probably erase the files and replace them with The Replacements’ discography, or everything written by Montaigne, or whatever the case may be. Or maybe I’ll just vacuum the flash drive up when I’m moving out of my apartment. I dunno. This is old news, data dissemination and all, but its kind of messed up that we can store entire legacies in something that can be stepped on, kicked away, and tossed out without thinking twice about it. What will happen when the new, cutting-edge, USB-equipped iPhone comes out and we can upload the souls of our spouses and children and parents onto flash drives? Will they pile up on the floor and be tossed away, or will we find a safe place to keep them? To what extent are we willing to outsource our memories? I’m cold. I’m gonna listen to Hüsker Dü’s discography on repeat all night and see what happens.

(Sorry for all the stupid ads on the YouTube screen.)

That little asshole on the far left is the reason unhappiness exists.

The first time I consciously became aroused by a member of the opposite sex was in fourth grade, during Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, an afternoon cartoon in which four rodents and a fly engender a detective agency inside a tree, in light of emerging crimes and mysteries too small in scale for humans to wrap their heads or hands around. The show stars classic Walt Disney chipmunks Chip & Dale, and introduces Zipper, a green housefly with globular yellow eyes, Monterey Jack, a morbidly obese Austrailian mouse with a mustache and an overwhelming addiction to cheese, and…sigh…sexy female mouse, Gadget Hackwrench.

Gadget is the voluptuous chief engineer of the Ranger Wing, the ballooned vehicle in which the five detectives fly across the world, meeting their objectives with cute and hilarious results. While Gadget is mostly an anthropomorphic ambassador of 1980s over-saturated sex appeal – long blonde hair, blue-eyes, a purple suit revealing her curves, known to say “golly!” at moments she deems appropriate – she’s also deft, intelligent. Unlike, say, the derivative and hapless Princess Toadstool of Super Mario Bros fame, forever captured and locked in King Koopa’s fiery World 8 castle, Gadget is instrumental in the Rescue Rangers’ pursuits of foiling chief antagonist Fat Cat’s schemes. Her father, Geegaw Hackwrench, a deceased inventor, passed his trade and strong will onto Gadget before he perished. The Rescue Rangers could not function as a unit without Gadget’s systematic acumen, not to mention her beauty, which fuels the motivation and tension between Chip & Dale.

Chip, based on Indiana Jones, is the alpha chipmunk, known for parading around in a fedora and a bomber jacket, often seen swinging across perilous gaps on a rope that he locks onto tree branches and clothes hangers with stunning accuracy. Chip takes himself too seriously, often hitting and yelling at Dale in tinny, discordant rage whenever the latter mucks about too much. Dale is sweet and laid back. He wears a red and yellow Hawaiian shirt and spends his free time reading comics, eating candy, and playing video games. Dale was the kind of chipmunk I could relate to, a lazy hedonist who leaves the hard work to others, but takes partial credit nonetheless. While neither chipmunk spends much time actively courting Gadget throughout the series’ two season run, as there is always crime and intrigue afoot, both long to win her over. I mean, who wouldn’t?

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I just started Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One and found a typo in the first few pages (around location 175, if you happen to be reading it via Kindle, on default settings). Brace yourself:
“This sentences goes fast.”
Now, I know firsthand that proofreading galleys can be an exhausting pain in the ass, since we’re used to processing and producing information with perpetual efficiency nowadays, and squinting at flimsy, stapled sheets of text for errors at snailpace may be akin to cleaning the cracks of a tiled floor with a mustache comb, but it’s nothing compared to finding a subject so severely disagreeing with its verb, especially in a reference book. A friend of mine recently released a collection of short stories, in which a typo inhabits the second clause of the first sentence of the first story. It’s unfortunate that such errors scrape the chalkboard with brass knuckles like this, but let’s face it – typos in a bound book (or e-book), for which we’ve paid money and to which we are devoting time, look like shit.
So why not pre-release terminal, digital copies of forthcoming books to the public at no cost, so the nerdy, observant, and obsessive of us can add a coat of gloss, via comments or email?

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Via therumpus.net

I know these text-to-animation things are getting kinda old, but so is my thesis. I’ll be back soon with something more substantial, I hope.