Today’s poem is titled “Recurrent Curse” by Christine Hume, and is covered by Ryan Vaderhoof of the band Akron / Family. Hume is the author of three books and a chapbook: Musca Domestica [Beacon Press 2000], winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize; Alaskaphrenia [New Issues 2004], winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic’s 2005 Best Book of the Year Award; Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense, a chapbook and CD [Ugly Duckling Presse 2007]; and most recently Shot [Counterpath Press 2009].

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Kirby Gann is the author of the novels Ghosting [Ig Publishing, 2012], The Barbarian Parade [Hill Street Press, 2004] and Our Napoleon in Rags [Ig Publishing, 2005]. He is also co-editor (with poet Kristin Herbert) of the anthology A Fine Excess: Contemporary Literature at Play, which was a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Anthologies). His short fiction has appeared in a variety of magazines and journals, most recently in Witness, The Crescent Review, American Writing, and The Southeast Review.

You can hear past episodes of InDefinite Podcast here, or you can subscribe to the podcast for free on iTunes. This podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. Listeners of the InDefinite Podcast get a free audiobook download by going to AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. Also, InDefinite Podcast is now on Stitcher, Smart Radio. You can listen on your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and WebOS phones. More about Stitcher at the app store or Stitcher.com. You can also keep up with InDigest at our Facebook and Twitter.

Today’s poem is by Leigh Stein, whose work has previously appeared in InDigest. Leigh Stein’s debut novel from Melville House is titled The Fallback Plan. Her new collection of poems Dispatch from the Future is out in July.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

By David Atkinson

I would be baffled as to how anyone could not love a book that starts with the line: “Mozart walked into the sex-change clinic on a cold, snowy July morning, intending to have his sprouter snipped off.” Just to clear up any possible confusion regarding any other novel that might begin similarly, this week I read Mark A. Rayner’s The Amadeus Net.

And, as one might expect, this is a mind-blowingly bizarre tale. I mean, Mozart contemplates a sex-change operation in order to hide his immortality (literal and musical) in a dystopian-utopia (or utoptian-dystopia). The setting is an automated utopian city located in a futuristic Earth that has been largely decimated by a natural cataclysm (the Earth being smacked by an asteroid) and the subsequent man-made cataclysms (various nuclear meltdowns, bombs, and such) that inevitably follow. The rich nations that remain are about to implement Reagan’s old Star Wars program so the poor nations will no longer be able to bomb them. The poor nations, who happen to have most of the nukes, are about to bomb the rich nations before the tech goes live if the rich nations don’t share their accumulated wealth. Hint, the US, China, and Japan are not among either side and places like Israel are still uninhabitable.

In the midst of this utopian city, which is in the midst of all this potential catastrophic, is Mozart. Various people have figured out that he is still alive (due to him selling “original” compositions accidentally written using modern inks and stained with dust from Cheesy-O’s). Some want to reveal his existence. Some just want to sell him for any hint his DNA might have for immortality. Regardless, Mozart is on the run…as well as in love with a sex-change clinic worker who happens to be a lesbian (and who doesn’t consider post-surgery men to be women). Of course, that might not matter too much if the poor nations bomb the planet back into the Stone Age.

Either way, the book is strange, imaginative, and suspenseful. It really pulled me in. Additionally, the story (wild as it is) holds some interesting reflections on the state of the world of today. Rayner really does an admirable job in making me think of the world around me when I’m pondering a world that is so completely different. A good look at The Amadeus Net is seriously advised.

***

Enter Classic Hits: New York’s Pioneering Subway Graffiti Writers [Dokument, 2012]. It seems that the authors and storytellers behind this new book on the street car street art culture in the Bronx and greater New York City is giving something of a complete vision of what was happening at this particular time and place. It’s not on this writer’s bookshelf yet, but I’m hoping it’s there soon. Classic Hits is in bookstores today.

Below, you can take a look at the trailer for the book complete with archival footage, photos, and an interview with artist Ale One.

There’s also a release party and signing in New York on June 1st at Greenlight Bookstore.

Vanessa Place reads from “Statement of Fact” on May 2nd, as a part of the “Protocols of Literary Listening” event at the Whitney Biennial. This is just an excerpt that posted to the Pennsound YouTube channel.

Monday: Author Rosecrans Baldwin discusses Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down with blogger Jason Diamond of Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Introduced by Ron Hogan of Beatrice.com at Greenlight Bookstore, 7:30pm

Tuesday: The Moth StorySLAM. Theme: Human Resources at Housing Works, 7pm

Thursday: The Bushwick Book Club does The Great Gastby at Goodbye Blue Monday, 8:30pm

Friday: Word presents David Rees (How to Sharpen Pencils) and John Hodgman at Public Assembly, 6:30pm

Saturday: Lit Crawl Brooklyn at various locations, all day
[This is going to be great. Be at this.]

Sunday: Coffee House Authors in NYC w/ Ben Lerner, Dylan Hicks, and Brian Evenson at KGB Bar, 7pm

Unknown Language Found Stamped on Ancient Clay Tablet

The Nine Circles of Hell, As Depicted In LEGO

Is There a ‘Fifth Force’ that Alters Gravity at Cosmic Scales?

Go ‘Behind the Wall’ on the Seven-Year Effort to Make A Game of Thrones Video Game

Report: Apple to Start Selling $800 MacBook Air

iPads are so user friendly, apes use them to communicate

In Praise of The Antikythera Clock

Never Before Seen World War II Fighter Plane Recently Found in the Sahara Desert After Crashing 70 Years Ago

A Stunning Minecraft Rendition Of Final Fantasy VI

“Creativity is just connecting things.”

Dark Matter vs. Modified Gravity: A Trialogue

Did the Germans launch a crewed rocket into space in 1933?

Mars’ Volcanic Eruptions Point to an Ancient Atmosphere Dense With Water

Does An Old Map Reveal the Fate of The Lost Colony of Roanoke?

Post-apocalyptic paintings of abandoned buildings

*****

Today’s poem is taken from issue #23 of InDigest. Jeff Alessandrelli lives in Lincoln, NE, where he co-curates The Clean Part Reading Series. He is the author of the little book Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound (Ravenna Press, 2011) and the chapbook Don’t Let Me Forget To Feed the Sharks (Poor Claudia, 2012). Recent work by him appears in Gulf Coast, Sink Review and Verse Daily.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

By David S. Atkinson

There is a chance that this review may not matter much. I felt that I should acknowledge that right at the beginning. After all:

America died that afternoon while everyone looked the other way, distracted by thoughts that concerned moving somewhere else, maybe where it wasn’t so crowded, wasn’t as polluted, and plentiful were still the possibilities.

*****

What is a heart attack?

The heart attack was a localized apocalypse. The end of world was sold in a number of installments. People thought it was fiction.

It was unexpected, but it stuck, and anything that was once there suddenly wasn’t. America’s body was no longer a temple. It had become a wasteland.

As I’m an American, I might not be concerned about much (such as book reviews) if America has died. There might not even be any Americans left to read such a review, and people from outside America might not care much what someone from a dead country has to say. However, the rest of the world may still be out there and may still care, so I will continue with the review even if America might be dead, just in case.

At the very least, America has died in the The Sky Conducting. “America smelled of liquor and vomit as the dial turned to zero.” In the wake of whatever has happened, a nuclear family (’the nuclear family,’ defined by their roles as the daughter, the father, the mother, the son, and such) wander in the wreckage in an attempt to escape. A mercenary (from somewhere else) may help them sift through the rubble and escape, but then again he might not:

The Father steps through into the Market, out of sight.

Johan turns to the daughter and begins talking: So this is when you get to talk to me without your father here. You will want to know about me. You want to know about Johan.

I am Johan but I am not really Johan. Johan is just a name.

It is a name I have chosen for this land.

Every land I am a new person. I come from over the seas. I am just like you I have seen my country die.

Many countries have died. Countries are people too.

They grow old. They get sick.

They die.

Even the big countries. America has been sick a long time.

I know where you come from and I know what you are thinking.

I know everything about you because I know where you come from.

Where you come from says everything about who you are.

I am Johan on this rock.

I am Johan and I am here to help but I mean I am here to –

Help yourself? The daughter finishes Johan’s sentence.

Now, that might not sound all that unusual in and of itself in the canon of post apocalyptic literature, but reading this the way that The Sky Conducting presents itself is something else entirely. It is a new animal. I’ve heard people say that certain books teach you how to read them, but The Sky Conducting actually does so explicitly, right at the beginning:

Picture each grouping of lines as a moment in an era that lacks any definition if placed out of position. Things pass but they certainly don’t pass the same way twice. Not like the clouds skimming across the sky. With death, there is a stop and the only artifact of time spent is found within these groupings. It’s in the skipping and silence of the white space between each grouping that we get to exhale and ponder what has passed and won’t be passing us again.

Really, this is a perfect encapsulation of how it felt for me to read this book. I could think of no better explanation. The form is inventive; chillingly rolling over the reader in a relentless yet unhurried pace. The lines are sparse, but filled with urgent necessity and careful reveal. Just consider this passage as an example:

The daughter tiptoes around the aisles readying herself for any and all danger.

When she finds the go-cart it site there unobstructed.

At first the daughter is relieved. She doesn’t see what the father fussed about but when she sits behind the wheel she sees it hanging from the high ceiling of the Market.

They were people. Some of them, they were friends.

For a book that felt so unusual in form, I still found it highly readable. As haunting, though tender and loving in a way, as it was, the process of reading was still enjoyable (as well as a number of other things). As strange as it feels to say it, I had a good time. I’m not sure I should be saying that about the death of America, but I have to admit it nonetheless.

Certainly, The Sky Conducting is very different from other post apocalyptic fiction that I’ve read, but I’d be enthusiastic to see more like it. America may not really be dead, but if it ever dies The Sky Conducting would be a place to look for insight. It’s in there. Believe me, its in there.

Emily St. John Mandel was born on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. Her new novel is The Lola Quartet. Her two previous novels are Last Night in Montreal (an Indie Next pick and finalist for Foreword Magazine’s 2009 Book of the Year) and The Singer’s Gun (winner of the Indie Bookseller’s Choice Award and #1 Indie Next Pick for May 2010.) She is a staff writer for The Millions, and her short fiction will appear in the forthcoming anthology Venice Noir. She is married and lives in Brooklyn.

You can hear past episodes of InDefinite Podcast here, or you can subscribe to the podcast for free on iTunes. This podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. Listeners of the InDefinite Podcast get a free audiobook download by going to AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. Also, InDefinite Podcast is now on Stitcher, Smart Radio. You can listen on your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and WebOS phones. More about Stitcher at the app store or Stitcher.com. You can also keep up with InDigest at our Facebook and Twitter.

Adam Moorad is a poet, salesman, and mountaineer. As well as Oak Ridge, he is the author of I Went To The Desert (Thunderclap Press, 2010), Oikos (nonpress, 2010), Book of Revelations (Artistically Declined Press, 2011), and Piñata (propaganda press, 2011). He lives in Brooklyn.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

By David S. Atkinson

Everything seems to need to be revolutionary these days. Most books that come out seem to want to totally change the landscape of the novel, or at least totally change the lives of readers through the gravity of the events inside. That’s great and all, but sometimes I just want to read a good story and have a few laughs. It may have been done before, but there still seem like so many different new ways to do it. That’s exactly why I picked up The Three Fates of Henrick Nordmark by Christopher Meades when I was at the Tattered Cover in Denver the other day.

Consider poor Henrick Nordmark. He realizes one day that he has absolutely nothing distinguishable about him. Henrick’s life is loosely connected to a man who has abandoned his entire life because he won the lottery, only to realize that a woman took his ticket by mistake. The woman, also loosely connected to Henrick, is trying to kill her husband who she fell passionately in love with due to destiny and then eventually came to despise with the same passion. She is trying to kill her husband, and he her, but both keep failing because of the attempts of the other. Further, due to some mistake of other loosely connected lives, decrepit octogenarian assassins are tying to kill Henrick. Yup, Henrick leads a pretty humdrum life.

Honestly, I had a lot of fun reading this book. The characters are all hopelessly bumbling boobs, but they are believable hopelessly bumbling boobs. The odd connections between all these fools and Henrick stretches believability a bit, but it really works as another current of the humor. In short, the book made me laugh.

Really, I had a good time. I enjoyed the story and got a lot of good laughs out of it as I read. Sometimes that is what I want, and that is what I wanted today. I picked up The Three Fates of Henrick Nordmark hoping to have a good time and the book came through in spades.

We’ve published a number of engaging poems about parenthood in this column, and we keep finding more. Here’s Wendy Videlock, who lives in Colorado, taking a look into a child’s room.

Disarmed

I should be diligent and firm,
I know I should, and frowning, too;
again you’ve failed to clean your room.
Not only that, the evidence
of midnight theft is in your bed—
cracked peanut shells and m&m’s
are crumbled where you rest your head,
and just above, the windowsill
is crowded with a green giraffe
(who’s peering through your telescope),
some dominoes, and half a glass
of orange juice. You hungry child,

how could I be uncharmed by this,
your secret world, your happy mess?

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry Magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2003 by Wendy Videlock from her most recent book of poems, Nevertheless, Able Muse Press, 2011. Poem reprinted by permission of Wendy Videlock and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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Monday: Internet Friends IRL: Mark Doten, Greg Howard and Justin Taylor at WORD Brooklyn, 7pm

Tuesday: Robert Pinsky & Wendy Lesser in Conversation at Strand Books, 7pm

Wednesday: Lit Mag Night: harlequin creature, Agriculture Reader, and 6×6 at Housing Works Bookstore, 7pm

Thursday: Are You My Author? Mothers on the Writing Life w/ Rebecca Land Soodak, Jillian Lauren, Kaylie Jones, Sheri Holman, Martha Southgate and Rachel Zucker at Strand Books, 7pm

Friday: Ari Bania and Evan Kennedy at The Poetry Project, 10pm

Sunday: Poets on Painters Kenny Goldsmith and David Shapiro on Keith Haring with Darrel Alejandro Holnes at Brooklyn Museum, 2pm

Awesome Game of Thrones Travel Posters for Your Next Trip to Westeros!

Nintendo’s legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto chimes in on why he feels the PS Vita is struggling

The first teaser trailer for Elder Scrolls Online is here!

iPad drag-to-edit keyboard prototype shows Apple how easy it could be

Amazon’s new Kindle terms require eBooks priced 20% lower than print in order to get 70% royalty

A discussion of Voltaire’s Candide on BBC Radio 4’s “In Our Time”

In New Quantum Experiment, Effect Happens Before Cause

10 Podcasts for Writers

Jonathan Franzen on Adam Levin’s Hot Pink: compares it to a bowl of Froot Loops

The most beautiful bookshelves. Ever.

“Stylometric” formula charts the evolution of writing styles in literature through time

How Critical Thinkers Lose their Faith in God

New “Beauty Baryon” Particle Discovered at Large Hadron Collider

Slackers’ brains are “wired to under-achieve”

On writing, memory, & forgetting: Socrates and Hemingway take on Zeigarnik

What are quarks, and why do they have colors and flavors?

The 10 best first lines in fiction?

“Exits Are” with Mike Meginnis features InDigest’s Joseph Michael Owens in: “I Was a Dead Red-Shirted Ensign“.

An analog quantum computer made of cold atoms used to simulate electrons’ spins

over the ocean / thought I heard voices / reflected voices / satellite message / isn’t it something, the realizing / silver dots marking, endless horizon / over the ocean, we’ll have a vodka / your card is left open so nothing can stop yah / so far so good so far so good / I am not worried, some have a fear / the captain has comfort, his voice in my ear / what are we doing when we are standing? / your life may be bumpy, more so than the landing / over the ocean….

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Here We Go Magic started as the Brooklyn-based project of songwriter Luke Temple. Their third album, A Different Ship, will be released by Secretly Canadian on May 8th, 2012.

By Forrest Wu

New music champions Brooklyn Rider break astonishing new ground in 2012’s Seven Steps. Still basking in the critical glow of their interpretation of Phillip Glass’ complete string quartets, the ensemble’s innovative spirit moves in unexpected new directions on this release. Unexpectedly, the group (who are violinists Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen, violist Nicholas Cords, and cellist Eric Jacobsen) focuses their unique approach to nuance on one of Beethoven’s momentous String Quartet No.14 in C# minor, Op. 131. Paired with a work written for the group by NYC-based composer Christopher Tignor and, most interestingly, the quartet’s first foray into creating their own music, the album braves uncharted territory with heart-rending results.

Beethoven is often interpreted with a heavy hand, and a heavier bow arm. Molto vibrato, confusing and disproportionate rubato, and inattention to balance often characterize the way works like Op. 131 are performed, even by the most seasoned ensembles. By bringing the same intricate, plaintive, and absolutely tuned sensibilities to Beethoven as Glass, Brooklyn Rider in turn breathes new life into one of the great masterworks of the western canon. Rather than complicate the composer’s decidedly dense writing further, the ensemble interprets the score with an ear to an evolving music culture. If not for the delicate dynamic hairpins and light touch of vibrato that betray the recording’s humanity, the incredible sense of intonation that the quartet displays could easily be mistaken for a very expensive synthesizer. Beautifully balanced textures trump the top-heavy recordings of other quartets, and more effectively communicate Beethoven’s meticulous chord spelling.

Most indicative of Brooklyn Rider’s unique sound is their careful, subtle use of vibrato. In conversation with Nicholas Cords, Brooklyn Rider’s violist, I inquired about the ensemble’s iconic attention to vibrato and, more often, its omission.

Forrest Wu: “Your collective sound is very precise in terms of vibrato placement. It’s at once a very contemporary and very old concept- how did that translate into Beethoven, which is often interpreted so heavily?”

Nicholas Cords: “Yes, the vibrato thing. It is definitely one of the things that bind us together as a quartet. We actually vibrate a lot of the time, but it is mostly very subtle. We try to keep two things on our dashboard constantly- harmonic thinking and rhythmic thinking. These are the driving forces behind most any piece of music, and excessive vibrato can obscure both seriously. We are slightly against the grain here, but I think this was similar to the way the older generation (pre-WWI) thought about vibrato, and I think it is also informed by a lot of the rock/alternative music vocal styles that we love as well. There is so much more to say about the vibrato thing- it seems to be a very contentious issue out there- some people think that it means that we are lazy and emotionless string players! The thing is, there are other engines that drive the complex relationship to human emotions- we like exploring those with a concept of group sound while allowing the composer’s voice to be heard without too many layers of patina.”

In Op. 131’s sixth movement, marked Adagio quasi un poco andante, this removal of typical convention also removes the pretense. A pristine and tearful hymn, the movement cries with added despair as the air is cleared around the score. The sparse usage of vibrato lets Beethoven’s pensive voice leading speak for itself.

By no means does this effect take the fire out of Op. 131. The bombastic work was, at the time of its completion, far beyond the breadth of any Beethoven’s previous quartets. This was, after all, the work that exemplified, for Schumann, “the extreme boundary of all that has hitherto been attained by human art and imagination.” The quartet is a big deal, for musicians and academes alike, and Brooklyn Rider repaints the masterpiece with a palette both as severe and as cool as it deserves.

Cords also had much insight on ‘Seven Steps,’ the track from which the album draws its name. This piece is the group’s first publication of their own music, half composed and half-improvised, and reflects the ensemble’s myriad influences.

FW: I’d like ask how ‘Seven Steps’ is constructed. It seems to be constructed of some tonal themes connected by more abstract material. Is that the improvised stuff?

NC: Roughly speaking, yes. We really did start the whole process with a series of simple improvisation games, little tidbits we picked out of Op.131 that were interesting; hocketing figures, layered chords, pairs of instruments, etc. Even the written parts were informed by improvisation, and moreover by Beethoven.

FW: Did that affect the way you rehearsed Op. 131 in turn?

NC: Yes, it allowed us to enter the piece with a more composerly and creative approach. In no way are we trying to equate ourselves with Beethoven (far from it,) but it is quite debilitating to only look at this music as a monumental challenge or summit for a string quartet. I think the process made the music seem fresher to us, it shed some of its clothing that Op. 131 has accumulated over the years by string playing traditions. We are all a product for better or worse of those traditions, but getting in touch with the score and the creative impulse was one way we thought of doing this differently.

FW: Could we double back to ‘Seven Steps’ for a minute to talk about composer influences?

NC: I think the range is super wide- I think names that were mentioned as reference points along the way ranged from Beethoven to Gubaidulina to Ljova to Kurtag to Kayhan Kalhor to Sigur Rós to Deerhoof to whatever. And yet, none of this was terribly explicit in the process or the result. It is mostly just what came to the surface for the four of us, all of whom listen to and love a really big range of music.

It seems counterintuitive that such a varied range of influence contributes to such a unified sound, but it’s come to define Brooklyn Rider’s signature style. More than an amalgam of inspirations, Seven Steps as an album reflects four artists helping shape a rapidly progressing musical society by imbuing great work of the past with the visceral emotion of the present.

Here’s Brooklyn Rider playing the last movement of Op. 131 for you to watch and listen:

Dana Gioia, who served as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, did a marvelous job of bringing the arts to Americans, arguably the best job that anyone in that position has done. He was a fine poet before he took that job, and he is a fine poet after. Here’s an example of his recent work.

Pity the Beautiful

Pity the beautiful,
the dolls, and the dishes,
the babes with big daddies
granting their wishes.

Pity the pretty boys,
the hunks, and Apollos,
the golden lads whom
success always follows.

The hotties, the knock-outs,
the tens out of ten,
the drop-dead gorgeous,
the great leading men.

Pity the faded,
the bloated, the blowsy,
the paunchy Adonis
whose luck’s gone lousy.

Pity the gods,
no longer divine.
Pity the night
the stars lose their shine.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry Magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Dana Gioia, whose most recent book of poems is Pity the Beautiful, Graywolf Press, 2012. Poem reprinted from Poetry, May 2011, by permission of Dana Gioia and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
******************************

Tuesday: Hatchet Job w/ Jon Leon, Jennifer Tamayo, Dan Magers, and Sophia La Fraga at Public Assembly, 7pm

Wednesday: Brooklyn Book Launch: Nell Freudenberger reads from THE NEWLYWEDS at Greenlight Bookstore, 7:30pm

Thursday: Ian Tattersall discusses MASTERS OF THE PLANET: THE SEARCH FOR OUR HUMAN ORIGINS with Will Harcourt-Smith at Greenlight Bookstore, 7:30pm

Friday: Poets in the Playhouse: Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah at The Little Theater at Queens College, 7:30pm

If you haven’t supported us, please consider giving a couple dollars to help us keep doing what we’re doing. We’re going to be adding some great new features to the site, and we hope you’re already enjoying the things we’re providing. Thanks for giving a little to help us keep this thing going here in the InDigest Offices. We appreciate it. And, as always, thanks for reading.

H.P. Lovecraft Answers Your Relationship Questions

When black holes shoot their jets directly at Earth

How The Universe Works (According To Larry Niven)

A shadow falls on the ice geysers of Enceladus… and leads to some very cool science.

Verizon—Profits: $19.8 billion. Taxes paid: $0.

Hubble Captures Incredible New Panorama of Tarantula Nebula

Earthbound, The Trippiest Game In RPG History

Next-Generation iPhone to Use Thinner In-Cell Technology for Multi-Touch Display?

Don’t Tell Anybody What Your Book Is About

Why Booze Makes Some People Belligerent

See All of Ocarina of Time’s Overworld Remapped in A Link to the Past’s Style

Intel releases Ivy Bridge: New Mac models coming soon?

Cocaine abuse may actually accelerate brain aging

InDigest’s blog editor, Joseph Michael Owens, gets interviewed over at Art Faccia

Hiding in the Higgs data: hints of physics beyond the standard model

Can literary fiction survive the ebook age?

10 Gorgeous Buildings Made Out of Books

And don’t forget that we’re doing a Kickstarter project as well. Only a couple of days left to help us make this a successful project.

Hey Everyone!

Thanks for your support so far, we hit our goal, and we’ve only got four days to go. But we’ve got a new goal. We want to get to $3,000 by the deadline to help us launch another new project with our podcasts and to help offset the cost of the rewards we’ve picked for you. We hope you’ll share this with friends and family and frenemys who owe you money and help us hit this new goal. Or maybe you’ll see our new perks and want to up your prize level. Is it prize? I haven’t figured out if they’re prizes or perks or what they are. I’ll just keep changing what I say every time, then I’m right some of the time.

We’ve added two new perks to the project. We’ve got copies of Hell Yes Press’s love poem anthology on cassette and blog editor Joe Owens is making podcast mixtapes on cassette. Rejoice, owners of 1994 Accords. Poetry is about to hit your tape deck. We’ve also got a few final copies of InDigest Broadcards #6, designed by Zan Emerson. We gave these out for free at our Issue #23 Launch Reading, and it went great. In fact, we ran out of copies. (There are photos at our Facebook page.) But, ol’ Dustin was thinking ahead and set aside a few, so we’ve got a very limited number of these little chaplets which feature writing from Christopher Salerno, Monica Wendel, Stephen Massimilla, Alethea Black, and Robb Todd available as perks right now.

You can see all this in the video. But….in case you didn’t watch the video, I’m writing it down.

Thanks again for your support!

Dustin and the InDigestions

The InDigest Offices are completely biased on this one, but that doesn’t mean we’re wrong. The InDigest Offices believe this is a great thing and you should have one, and love it, and play it on your 1992 Corolla or on the “vintage” boombox you bought at a garage sale thinking it’d be great to carry around all the time, but then discovered that it takes those giant batteries, and you never have any, so it just sits there in your closet…well, now’s a good time to use it.

The cassette features poems by Masin Persina, Isaac Sullivan, Adam Fell, Ryan Collins, Jess Grover, Matt Hart, Alexis Orgera, Nick Sturm, Dan Rosenberg, Ada Limón, Gregory Lawless, David Bartone, Elizabeth Spackman, Patrick Kiley, MC Hyland, Tyler Gobble, me, Scott Abels, Dina Hardy, Steven Karl, and Monica Wendel. Not bad, right?

Oh, and there are a few videos of some of the poems. I’ll post a few of those after the jump.

Here’s a fine poem about family love and care by Janet Eigner, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. You can feel that blessing touch the crown of your head, can’t you?

Isaac’s Blessing

When Isaac, a small, freckled boy
approaching seven, visits us for Family Camp,
playing pirate with his rubber sword,

sometimes he slumps in grief,
trudging along, his sacrifice and small violin
in hand, his palm over his chest,

saying, Mother is here
in my heart. Before he leaves for home,
we ask if he’d like a Jewish blessing.

Our grandson’s handsome face ignites;
he chirps a rousing, yes, for a long life.
We unfold the prayer shawl,

its Hebrew letters silvering the spring light,
hold the white tallis above his head,
recite the blessing in its ancient language

and then the English, adding, for a long life.
Isaac complains, the tallis didn’t
touch his head, so he didn’t feel the blessing.

We lower its silken ceiling
to graze his dark hair,
repeat the prayer.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2009 by Janet Eigner, whose most recent book of poetry is What Lasts is the Breath, Black Swan Editions, 2012. Reprinted from Cornstalk Mother, Pudding House Publications, 2009, by permission of Janet Eigner and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
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People are kind of pissed about the lack of a 2012 Pulitzer fiction prize. Apparently, the judges just couldn’t come to agreement between David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!

Now, I have to say that I decided long ago not to second-guess any prize awarding body. They get their say — for their reasons — and I have no plans to criticize them for their decisions; I think it kind of diminishes the prestige of the award to do so. I have to wonder if the fact that I haven’t managed to get a book published yet is any factor in my ability to remain calm regarding such things, but if the Pulitzer people couldn’t agree, then I’m just moving on. I do, however, sympathize with the people who are upset.

As such, I thought I’d take the time here to give my own award, the first non-annual (perhaps to be awarded whenever a Pulitzer for fiction is not awarded) Puhleezitzer prize for fiction. There will be no prize money or anything official, particularly since I have no claim to any kind of authority or reputation, but I thought it could at least settle things between The Pale King, Train Dreams, and Swamplandia! Well, I suppose it settles nothing. . . since this will just decide who I think should have won, had a winner been determined (though, I confess that had I been the Pulitzer committee, I probably would have chosen other finalists since I saw some amazing writing over the past year, and the Pulitzer finalists might not be the ones I would have selected as the top three).

Anyway, proceeding thusly, I have to say that The Pale King doesn’t get the first non-annual Puhleezitzer prize for fiction. David Foster Wallace acolytes may now begin to plot my demise (ed note: we’ve begun. . .). Don’t get me wrong; there is some extremely impressive writing there. I just don’t think that the book is anywhere near as finished as rumors indicated (particularly since the paperback edition adds four additional sections to the hardback release, indicating to me that we can’t even decide what the final version of The Pale King is). This actually hurts the book for me, since I can start to see the beginnings of the David Foster Wallace magic, the connections and threads that were going to connect and build into something truly amazing, but it just doesn’t happen. I’m sure this would have been a life-changing book for me when finished, but as it stands it seems more like something for Wallace scholars to spend their years chewing on as opposed to the final crowning jewel in Wallace’s brilliant writing career.

Train Dreams had a real shot with me. The writing is tight, elegant, and evocative. It has a subtle beauty to it that I cannot help but acknowledge. Really, it is a damn fine novella. However, graceful and elegant as the novella is, the beauty of Train Dreams is perhaps a little too quiet for me to think merited the award. . . particularly after I read Swamplandia!

I really got into the kooky feel of the characters and story in Swamplandia! It reminded me of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on. I mean, the characters aren’t freaks, and they don’t get into the same kind of insanity, but Russell definitely creates characters here that are all her own. At the same time, the characters come alive as people and not oddities. I was drawn into them, I cared about them, and I had a good time reading.

As such, I hereby award the first non-annual Puhleezitzer prize for fiction to Swamplandia! I think there were some absolutely amazing books released in the last year and you should definitely take a look at least the three of these, but if I were going to take over where the Pulitzer people left off then Swamplandia! would be my choice. It’s too bad no one asked me.

Tuesday: Belladonna* Collaborative Hosts Wendy S. Walters and Albert Mobilio at Dixon Place, 7pm

Wednesday: C.K. Williams on Robert Frost at Poet’s House, 7pm

Thursday: Poem in Your Pocket Day Celebration at The Winter Garden, all day

D. A. Powell, Useless Landscape, with Matthea Harvey at Strand Books, 7pm

Friday: Flash / Bang w/ Anna Moschovakis, Jeffrey Yang, and Corina Copp at Culturefix, 7pm

1. Sorry for the erratic-ness of the podcasts the last two weeks. They’ll be back to a normal schedule soon. It’s not a sign that we’re giving up on it. We’ve been busy in the InDigest Offices with some major changes to the site, the Kickstarter project, and a few other things we hope to share soon. All will be normal again.

2. Toward that end, if you still haven’t given to our Kickstarter project, we’d love you real hard if you did. We were picked today as Kickstarter’s Project of the Day! We’re at the top of their homepage. Help us use this as a good reason to put us over the top on our goal! The InDigest Offices loves you who have already supported us. Hope you’ll share the project with a friend or family member as well. Thanks!

E.B. White, one of my favorite writers, used to say, “Simplify, simplify, simplify,” but that doesn’t mean that writing has to be simple, which is a different matter. Here’s a fine poem by Laurel Blossom of South Carolina that’s been simplified into a pure, clean beauty.

Red Balloon Rising

I tied it to your wrist
With a pretty pink bow, torn off
By the first little tug of wind.
I’m sorry.

I jumped to catch it, but not soon enough.
It darted away.

It still looked large and almost within reach.
Like a heart.

Watch, I said.
You squinted your little eyes.

The balloon looked happy, waving
Good-bye.

The sky is very high today, I said.
Red went black, a polka dot,

Then not. We watched it,
Even though we couldn’t

Spot it anymore at all.
Even after that.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry Magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Laurel Blossom, whose most recent book of poetry is Degrees of Latitude, Four Way Books, 2007. Poem reprinted from Pleiades, Vol. 31, no. 1, 2011, by permission of Laurel Blossom and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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Paul Legault is the co-founder of Telephone Books and the author of two books of poetry: The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010) and The Other Poems (Fence, 2011). Author photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Today’s poem comes from the most recent issue of InDigest. We’re presenting one Nick Sturm’s poems titled “What a Tremendous Time We’re Having!”. Nick Sturm is the author of the chapbook WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING! [iO Books, 2012]. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aesthetix, Catch Up, Dark Sky, Forklift, Ohio, Jellyfish, Ilk, Sixth Finch, TYPO, and elsewhere. His reviews and interviews can be found widely in places like Coldfront, HTMLGIANT, and Bookslut. He is associate editor of YesYes Books and curator of THE BIG BIG MESS READING SERIES.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Oh, Light

Also, don’t forget that InDigest has a Kickstarter project going right now.

Japandroids – “The House That Heaven Built”
Japandroids inspire a strange, intangible reaction in me. Their sound doesn’t strike me as distinctive or surprising, but what they do, they do well. There’s an emotional intensity to their songs that makes an oft-tested sound come out as something remarkable. This track is being featured in the latest of the Japandroids 7″ seriesM.soab< that will be featured on the other side of their Nick Cave cover that we featured in last week's mixtape.

Black Eagle Child – “Early to the Roads”
A mellow guitar and banjo number from the Milwaukee-based songwriter. I really love the ambiance and flow of this one.

Tronics – “They’re Talking About Us”
Tronics was recommended to me by Jason Diamond as a must own re-issue of 2012. Based on this song, this is definitely a band I’ve overlooked and I’m working on fixing that. This is a great song.

Lost in the Trees – “Neither Here Nor There”
On a list of Lost in the Trees personnel you’re likely to find Ari Picker listed first and, in addition to the singer and guitarist credits, find a credit for composer. This, while it might initially seem pretentious, is apt. Picker is a composer. Lost in the Trees songs flow through so many genres, including rock, americana, classical, pop, and jazz, that the title starts to make more sense as you get familiar with his music. Picker really is a composer of furious pop melodies and intricate song structures. This performance of “Neither Here Nor There” from The Alternate Side in-studio session demonstrates that with verve.

Careful – “Between the Bars” (Elliott Smith cover)
A really beautiful cover of the Elliott Smith song by Careful (Eric Lindley).

There’s a stretch of road in Wyoming across a timeless interstate
You can drive a hundred miles and not see a Wyoming license plate
Just some truckers and some hard luck bands on tour
In stormy weather
Nobody actually lives there, they’re all just passing through

I had a woman who collected airline blankets all her life
One day while she was out I tied them all together tight
And repelled out of the window down to the street
I ran for cover
I guess I gave the wrong impression but I was only passing through

Abandoned semis on the prairie, cars piled under dire
Maybe at the end of days we’ll figure out how to make it work
But we both know it’s too little and too late
When we cross over
Nobody actually stays here, we’re all just passing through

We’re only passing through
We’re only passing through
We’re only passing through

We’re all just passing through
We’re all just passing through
We’re all just passing through…

By Forrest Wu

This Tuesday kicks off the 2012 MATA Festival, a celebration of young and innovative composers from around the globe. Four days of concerts serve as both a think tank for compositional progress and a launch pad for music’s next great minds, having helped launch the success of too many ensembles, performers and composers to list here (but they are listed here.)

I spoke with Argentinean composer Cecilia Lopez about process, intent and her involvement with MATA. Lopez’s work deals with exploring the sonic capabilities of resonant materials. The soundscapes she creates defy traditional tonal or structural analysis, yet she is able to notate her works with surprising detail. A score for one iteration of her latest project, Música Mecánica para Chapas, is a heavily pictorial representation of the performance, structurally echoing the notational techniques of Xenakis or Cowell, with lovely colorful accents. The work is an exploration of piezoelectric microphones and metal sheets, and the way they interact aurally as a unit and with other performers.

Click: Chapas (fragmento) 27/12/08

Forrest Wu: Your work is very fascinating. I’ve been perusing some YouTube video fragments of ‘Chapas,’ and although I understand the basic setup of microphones and sheet, I don’t fully understand the audible result. Are we hearing amplifications of the metal bending, or sound translations of electric currents? Or something else?

Cecilia Lopez: I’ll try to explain the way that the instrument works, but it has some indomitable and obscure aspects that are part of its nature. The “chapas” device works as an acoustic feedback and filter machine. I use some piezoelectric microphones attached to the metal sheet and as a result the whole surface becomes a microphone.  This signal is amplified by speakers that give body to the feedback that we hear. The curvature of the metal sheet or the velocity in which you change its shape determine the resulting sound. When filtering and acoustic instrument we hear that sound filtered by the metal and its movement. The performing space ´s characteristics (material, dimension, etc.) are also fundamental for the audible result.

FW: What brought you to the materials you’ve chosen? How does one evaluate the resonance of an object, or are they simply resonant or not? What other materials have you experimented with? Any surprising results?

CL: At some point in my composition work, I became interested in working with acoustic structures, focusing in composing with live resonant objects in space.  The connection with the metal sheets was kind or fortuitous; I was working on another project, what lead me to a metal junkyard. I bought four metal sheets and I’ve been working with them since then.  At the beginning I didn’t think of their technical resonant characteristics but I found that in combination with piezos the results where very interesting. When working with the metal sheets as a resonance object I like to thing that I’m making the space audible somehow.  I’ve worked with some other objects (goblets, a spinning metal machine, small amplifiers with piezos) but the metal sheets are quite effective in bringing the relation between sound/space and time/movement to light.

FW: To what extent does your work exemplify indeterminacy, as in the style of Cage and New York School? Are you developing a reliable “technique” for generating certain effects, and is that a part of your goal?

CL: I don’t think of my device as effective for generating some specific sounds (actually, it never works the same) but as a spatial set up that, when playing with it, makes you listen and react in a very aware way. Concerning performers and parts, I usually work with improvisation. I invite the performers to listen and try to interact with the sound logic that the instrument generates. Not just to improvise, bringing their individual background, but trying to be a part of this big acoustic machine.

There is for sure an indeterminate aspect of the piece because you never know what the sound will be like. I think of the piece more as a question than as an affirmation, or perhaps as an affirmation of a question. I’m very fond of the New York School composers and I guess that there is some of Cage’s “Let the sounds be themselves…” that I’m really influenced by.

FW: Does notated music exist of any of Música Mecánica para Chapas? If so, what does it look like? I can’t imagine this fits neatly into classical notation. If not, is it possible?

CL: I always work with scores. For each presentation of the piece with its variables (instruments, number of sheets, time length, etc) I make a new score. I try to structure in time the different sonic materials and techniques and the improvisation parts. Paradoxically I write lots of improvisation parts.  Usually the score consists of actions or movements in time, in which I determine speed, intensity or duration but the result is certainly indeterminate.  I sometimes work with classical notation but for this specific project I like to let things happen and let the sound and the musicians be.  I don’t see the point right now in determining a sound for an unknown feedback tone. I prefer to invite the musician to play and interact with that specific sound.

(Here’s that score for a version of ‘Chapas.’ The combination of graphic notation and traditional dynamic markings makes the chart unbelievably precise, even if improvised.  –FW)

FW: Right now I’m looking at this video of ‘Chapas.’ Can you explain in your words what’s going on at about 6:05?

CL: In that moment the speaker system of the machine changes. The sax is no longer filtered by the piezos that are attached to the chapas and the big speakers but by the piezos and little amplifiers that myself and the other performers have in our hands. The sound is much more distorted and dirty and you can make very clear effects to the saxophone sound and interact with it in this way.

FW: What’s going on at the switchboard? What levels are being manipulated to affect the sound?

CL: In Música Mecánica the mixer is used to structure this complex sound flow. I think the set up, the wiring, and the signal path as part of the composition. I usually use the mixer to equalize the signal and bust different frequencies of the feedback tone.

FW: Who influences you? Do you consider yourself at all a nationalistic composer?

CL: My range of influences includes musicians from many cultures and styles. I really wouldn’t know where to start.

I don’t consider myself as a nationalistic composer, but I’ve realized there is something very local in the “chapas” as an object of my culture. The word “chapa” carries diverse colloquial meanings in Argentinean Spanish. Fist, any piece of thin metal (usually the ones that are used to make the roof of a humble house) is called “chapa”. It can also describe a person that is crazy, to be fast, the badge of a policeman, keyboards, a weird hair and lots of other local meanings.   I can see something about the third word in working with some object you found in a junkyard, some unspecific piece of metal that could be someone’s roof.

FW: How about MATA? Are you able to get to New York to see the festival? What/who else are you interested in seeing while you’re there?

CL: I’m very happy to participate in the MATA festival. Luckily I was able to get to NY to take part in the performance of my piece together with loadbang ensemble and Facundo Gómez. I think I’ll try to attend every concert, it is very good opportunity to have a feeling of what other composers from different parts of the world are doing.

Tuesday: InDigest Reading Series presents HEAVY SUMMER READING w/ John Reed, Rebecca Wolff, and Christopher Bollen at The Gallery at LPR, 7pm

Wednesday: Sarah Manguso reads and in conversation with Meghan O’Rourke at 192 Books, 7pm

Thursday: The New Salon: Writers in Conversation – George Saunders (with David Lipsky) at Lillian Vernon Writers House, 7pm

Saturday: Stanzas in Meditation: A Gertrude Stein Celebration – Panel at The Poet’s House, 1pm

Saturday: 826NYC presents Scrabble for Cheaters w/ Peter Dinklage, Michael Showalter, John Hodgman, and more, a benefit for 826NYC at The Superhero Supply Store, noon

Sunday: An Evening with Edgar Mystery Writers Bruce DeSilva, Ritchie Narvaez, Kira Peikoff and Sheila York at KGB Bar, 7pm

Short and sweet this week!

8-Bit Wedding Invites for You and Your Bride/Groom to Be

The Unicorn Constellation is just as beautiful as you’d expect

TV’s best show about women: Game Of Thrones

D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace due out in August!

The Best Video Game Glitches

What’s In a Number: Unravelling a Multiversal Paradox

Finally. A good reason to hate Microsoft Word

Physicists have created a long-distance quantum link
(So if you haven’t seen Scott Bakula lately, now you know why)

How Physics and Neuroscience Dictate Your “Free” Will

Atari illustrations predicted Wikipedia in 1982

Data from 1976 Viking mission indicates potential life on Mars

***

Check out these broadsides that we are giving out for free tomorrow. This set, InDigest Broadcards #6, is bound together into a mini-chapbook and features the work of the authors who are reading at our InDigest Issue #23 Launch Party tomorrow night, including Christopher Salerno, Alethea Black, Robb Todd, Dana Rossi, Monica Wendel, and Stephen Massimilla. That’s the set at the top of the post. They were designed by guest designer Zan Emerson. We’ll be giving these out for free to the first 25 people to arrive tomorrow night.

The reading is taking place at The Gallery at LPR at 7pm, and it’s free. Take a look after the jump for a few more quick preview shots from the InDigest Offices of this great series of broadsides.

By David S. Atkinson

After all the stories I’ve read by Etgar Keret, I keep thinking that there is no way he can keep this up. There is just no way that he can keep writing stories that are so unlike anything else I read, stories more full of compassion, tenderness, and absurdity than I’ve ever seen before. At some point he has to run out of tricks, things have to start repeating.

But then, Keret goes and writes Suddenly, A Knock On the Door. He just had to go and prove me wrong, or at least that he is nowhere near the point of exhaustion yet.

Frankly, I loved each of these stories as much as I’ve ever loved any Keret story before. Mind you, Keret is one of my favorite authors writing today. There is just no way to describe the child-like wonder I feel when I read an Etgar Keret story, but I definitely felt that for the stories in this collection.

I’d even seen a few of these stories before, either in recent journals or when he read the title story at the AWP convention in Denver a few years ago. It didn’t matter. I enjoyed the old ones just as much as the new, perhaps even a little more so because they felt like such good old friends.

What else can I say? I don’t want to talk about any of the stories because I want you to be able to discover them on your own. All I can say is that this collection is everything I hoped for. I can’t wait for his next.

Today’s episode of the InDefinite Podcast features John Jodzio, a writer whose stories are funny, strange, and somehow incredibly familiar emotionally. Jodzio’s newest collection is Get In If You Want To Live [Paper Darts, 2011]. It’s a must read, and, as you might have noticed, we at the InDigest Offices are really fond of it. In the most recent issue of InDigest poetry editor Brad Liening interviewed Jodzio for our InDigalogue series. For this episode he reads the story “Javier” from the new collection.

John Jodzio is a winner of the Loft-McKnight Fellowship. His stories have appeared in One Story, Opium, The Florida Review and a number of other places, both print and online. He’s won a Minnesota Magazine fiction prize and both the Opium 500 Word Memoir competition and Opium Fiction Prize. He’s published two short story collections If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home [Replacement Press, 2010] and Get In If You Want To Live [Paper Darts Press, 2011].

You can hear past episodes of InDefinite Podcast here, or you can subscribe to the podcast for free on iTunes. This podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. Listeners of the InDefinite Podcast get a free audiobook download by going to AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. Also, InDefinite Podcast is now on Stitcher, Smart Radio. You can listen on your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and WebOS phones. More about Stitcher at the app store or Stitcher.com. You can also keep up with InDigest at our Facebook and Twitter.

Today we have a poem titled “A Thousand Levels” by Thom Donovan on the podcast. Thom Donovan lives in New York City where he edits Wild Horses of Fire and coedits ON Contemporary Practice with Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger. He is a participant in the Nonsite Collective and a curator for the SEGUE reading series (NYC). He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo and teaches at Bard College, Baruch College, and School of Visual Arts. For an overview of his current projects and links to his poetry and criticism see Wild Horses of Fire.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Also, check out Brad Liening’s interview with John Jodzio in the most recent issue of InDigest.

My mother kept a handwritten record of every cent she spent from the day she and my father were married until the day she died. So it’s no wonder I especially like this poem by Jared Harel, who teaches creative writing at Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey.

Numbers

My grandmother never trusted calculators.
She would crunch numbers in a spiral notebook
at the kitchen table, watching her news.
Work harder and I’d have more to count,
she’d snap at my father. And so my father worked
harder, fixed more mufflers, gave her receipts

but the numbers seldom changed.
There were silky things my mother wanted,
glorious dinners we could not afford.

Grandma would lecture her: no more garbage,
and so our house was clean. The attic spotless.
In fact, it wasn’t until after she died

that my parents found out how much she had saved us.
What hidden riches had been kept in those notebooks,
invested in bonds, solid blue digits
etched on each page. She left them
in the kitchen by her black and white television
we tossed a week later, though it seemed to work fine.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Jared Harel, whose chapbook, The Body Double, is forthcoming from Brooklyn Arts Press. Reprinted from Cold Mountain Review, Volume 39, no. 1, Fall 2010, by permission of Jared Harel and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
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Sun Kill Moon – “Sunshine in Chicago”
Mark Kozelek is a songwriter who I’m always happy to hear new music from. He transcends what we normally think of when talk about singer-songwriters, and creates lyrically and musically complex and engaging work.

Helios – “Bless This Morning”
This beautiful ambient track from electronic renaissance man Keith Kennif — he also performs as Goldmund, Keith Kennif, and Mint Julep — comes from his album Eingya.

Suckers – “Chinese Braille”
Suckers will be releasing their follow-up to <em>Wild Smile on April 24th, and this is a quick taste of that new album Candy Salad. The song is more polished than the tracks you’ll find on Wild Smile, but features their low-key orchestrations of pop songs with catchy harmonies and a punk edge driving the sound.

A Place to Bury Strangers – “You Are the One”
Some great noisy rock from the new album A Place to Bury Strangers is about to put out. I love their feedback-y throwback sound overall, and it sounds damn near perfect on “You Are the One.”

Noveller – “We Will Be At Sea Again”
This track comes from the ethereal guitarist’s forthcoming double LP through Saffron Recordings. It’s a swaying blanket of tremolo and reverb. Sarah Lipstate (Noveller) is also crowdfunding a commissioned piece she’s written for the The Low End String Quartet, who will be premiering the piece alongside a new work by cellist Zöe Keating (ex-Rasputina) at Center Stage in Reston, Virginia.
Play

Pygmy Jerboa – “tact”
Pygmy Jerboa is a group I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while. Not for the faint of heart, their eclectic compositions range from noise, to a found-sound feel, all the while maintaining a strange sense of order that keeps it somehow tied to a classical tradition while always looking ahead.

Father John Misty – “Nancy From Now On”
This is just a really well written pop song. It sounds like a collaboration between Rufus Wainwright’s timbre, Andrew Bird’s melodies, and a gigantic pop explosion.

Japandroids – “Jack the Ripper”
What’s better than Nick Cave? Well, no, it’s not Japandroids covering Nick Cave, but it’s damn close. Really killer cover.

Here’s a poem for today from the current issue of InDigest by Ellen Welcker. Ellen Welcker’s first book, The Botanical Garden [Astrophil Press, 2010], won the 2009 Astrophil Poetry Prize. She has poems and critical writing in Leveler, H_NGM_N, The Quarterly Conversation, Capitalism Nature Socialism, and Shampoo. She lives in Seattle.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

I remember her white teeth, Yeah her crooked teeth,
crooked teeth and they dance with me
they danced on my first kiss.

She was the gold and I was white,
And they took me to the ledge and said close Your eyes
and I closed my eyes hoping You would be found.

CHORUS

And I know I shouldn’t think those thoughts,
but I’ve gone ahead and fought those thoughts and I’m fine. 2x

V#2

I was a mangled mess You see,
I said promise all Your time and in my brain
I would hold the phone, hoping You would come home.

Laying on the bed thoughts would hold You down.
and the christ is on the mind and I hope there would be
A better way to deal with this grey.

BRIDGE

Waiting for the time to pass and heal a broken heart and You will shine so bright, brighter than the stars, You will see.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Sea of Bees is the musical project of Julie Ann Bee, or Jules as everyone calls her.
She sings, writes the songs, and plays lots of musical instruments. “TEETH” comes from their new album Orangefarben.

Monday: NPR’s Ask Me Another Live Taping at The Bell House, 6pm

Tuesday: Volume 1 Brooklyn presents the Greatest 3 Minute Punk Stories Ever w/ Kid Millions (of Oneida), Tobias Carroll, Justin Taylor, Eric Davidson, and others at Public Assembly, 7:30pm

Wednesday: God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut: A Celebration of Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Work at Housing Works Bookstore, 7pm

Thursday: Fence Magazine Issue Launch Party w/ Fiona Maazel, Paul Lisicky, Elizabeth Koch, and James Yeh at Housing Works, 7pm

Friday: Largehearted Lit with Will Boast and Eleanor Henderson at Word Brooklyn, 7pm

Sunday: Gavin Bryars’ “The Sinking of the Titanic,” performed on the centennial anniversary of April 15, 1912 by Ensemble LPR and The Wordless Music Orchestra at (Le) Poisson Rouge, 6:30pm and 10pm

Mark Twain’s obsession with Joan of Arc has to rank among most baffling & lesser known enigmas in American lit

How Game of Thrones scratches Lost’s television mystery itch

The World’s Most Sensitive Scale Can Weigh Single Protons

Behold, an X-ray of Hitler’s head

Inside Burrough’s bedroom and his letters

Dark Energy Confirmed: How ancient sound waves shaped the entire universe

While the LHC Hunts Higgs, the Jefferson Accelerator Looks to Illuminate Mysterious ‘Dark Photons’

In Soviet Russia, secret Cold War submarine base hide YOU

Some of the Coolest Future Cityscapes We’ve Seen in Ages

Vladimir Putin Confirms Russian Zombie Radiation Gun – No, seriously

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We’re thrilled to have Freya Manfred on the podcast reading her poem “The Blue Dress.”

Freya Manfred’s sixth collection of poetry, Swimming With A Hundred Year Old Snapping Turtle, won the 2009 Midwest Bookseller’s Choice Award for Poetry. A longtime Midwesterner who has also lived on both coasts, her poetry has appeared in over 100 reviews and magazines and over 30 anthologies. Her memoir, Frederick Manfred: A Daughter Remembers, was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award and an Iowa Historical Society Award. Novelist Philip Roth says, “Freya Manfred always startles me by how close she gets to everything she sees. That’s her tough luck, but it makes her a wonderful poet.” Poet Robert Bly says, “What I like in (her) poems is that they are not floating around in the air or the intellect. The body takes them in. They are brave. The reader and the writer meet each other in the body.” Freya lives west of the Twin Cities in Wisconsin, with the screenwriter, Thomas Pope, and their artist sons, Rowan and Bly.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Today we’re featuring one of our favorites, Ada Limón, who reads a poem titled “The Truth.”

Ada Limón’s first book, lucky wreck, was the winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize and her second book, This Big Fake World, was the winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize. She’s won the Chicago Literary Award and fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her third book of poems Sharks in the Rivers, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2010. She is at work on a novel and a book of essays.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Here’s a fantastic poem by Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé that we originally published in issue #19 of InDigest

Dividing his time between his art and teaching, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has edited more than 10 books and co-produced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. Desmond also works in clay, his commemorative pieces housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. Trained in book publishing at Stanford, with a theology masters in world religions from Harvard and fine arts masters in creative writing from Notre Dame, he has recent or forthcoming work in Escape Into Life, Pismire, Prime Number, qarrtsiluni, RED OCHRE Lit, Smoking Poet, and Whale Sound.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

This interview with Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov (Death and the Penguin, The Case of the General’s Thumb) by InDigest Editor Dustin Nelson for John and Molly Knefel’s Podcast The Radio Dispatch on March 5, 2012.

I’ve lived on the Great Plains all my life, and if I ever left this region for too long, I would dearly miss it. This lovely poem by Carol Light, who lives in Washington state, reminds me of that.

Prairie Sure

Would I miss the way a breeze dimples
the butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings,
or nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms?
The leaning gossip, the half-alive ripple
of sunflowers, sagging eternities of corn
and sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellow
in all directions, the windowsills swelling
with Mason jars, the blue sky bluest borne
through tinted glass above the milled grains?
The dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen door
slapping as the slat-backed porch swing sighs,
the hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains,
and how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure—
the rote grace of every tempered life?

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Carol Light, whose poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Poem reprinted from The Literary Bohemian, Issue 12, June 2011, by permission of Carol Light and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
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This is our second time featuring Annabell Yeeseul Yoo on the podcast, but I think it’s worthwhile as both “International Film Class Essay” and “No Riddle” are varied poems and reveal different aspects of her writing and it reveals something a little different about the reader.

Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo is from New York City. She is the recipient of the 2009 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a 2010 fellowship from the Saltonstall Arts Colony. Her poems can be found in such venues as drunken boat, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, LIT and Western Humanities Review.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Today’s poem comes from the newest issue of InDigest, which was just released on Thursday. You can read the full text of Courtney King Kampa’s “Bella Figura” in issue #23.

Courtney King Kampa is from Virginia, and holds an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has received awards and distinctions from Poets & Writers Magazine, The Atlantic, North American Review, and elsewhere.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Tuesday: Poem. Body. Planet. Need. a reading with Juliana Spahr and TC Tolbert at Dixon Place, 7pm

Wednesday: Release Party for Adam Levin’s Hot Pink sponsored by Vol. 1 Brooklyn and McSweeneys at Powerhouse Arena, 7pm

Thursday: McSweeney’s presents Adam Levin, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, and Diane Williams, Hosted by Ethan Nosowsky at Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 7pm

Saturday: Couplet #3 hosted by Leah Umansky with DJ Ceremony w/ readings from Ashley Mabbitt, Liz Axelrod, and Amy King at The Delancy, 7pm

Sunday: Annual Easter Comix -Graphic Novelist Night w/ Ellen Lindner, Leela Corman, Jon Lewis, and Sean Ford at KGB Bar, 7pm

They’re hosting a release party on April 14 at Boneshaker Books. Be there. This cassette is going to be excellent. There will be readings from the mixtape, and there will be public humiliation of anyone caught making out in a closet.

With Siinai: Heartbreaking Bravery

Mark Armine – “Hegel Pattern”

Belle & Sebastian – “Crash”

Erik Satie’s “Gnossiennes 1 – Lent” performed by Pierre Laniau on nylon-string guitar
Laniau’s complete recordings of Satie’s work are available for free over at Ubu Web.

The Lisps – “Steam Brain”
“Steam Brain” is a track from the new album from The Lisps called Futurity. The album is the soundtrack to their Civil War themed, steampunk musical that they’ll be performing at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge through April 15, and then at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Sigúr Ros – “Ekki múkk”

John Maus – “No Title (Molly)”
A little bit of a new wave throwback, but darker.

Cage: “The Void” F. Sherry St. Germain (Prefix Premiere)

Navy: We’re 4 Years Away From Laser Guns on Ships

George Saunders has a new short story collection coming out in January 2013

October 8, 1871: The Night America Burned

George R. R. Martin reads 8 minutes from Winds Of Winter

Apple begins production of new 15-inch MacBook Pro next month, 13-inch in June

The U.S. government is losing the war against hackers

Hot, crowded, and running out of fuel: Earth of 2050 a scary place

A previously unpublished scene from DFW’s The Pale King

How will we get around in the post-apocalypse?

Is Human Impact Accelerating Out of Control?

Evidence is piling up for surface water flowing on Mars

How to Write Like a Scientist

Photos of empty cities capture the silent first days of the apocalypse

***

By David S. Atkinson

Last time I did one of these columns I thought I’d be all smart and compare Richardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Shamela. I have to admit, I did have fun with it. In the end, I preferred Fielding over Richardson because I felt that Pamela was really much more of a moral tract than a novel, full of unneeded repetition, shallow characters, and various other worse offenses. However, and unfortunately, one of my friends then challenged me to give Richardson another chance and read Clarissa.

Now, I do think it bears mentioning that this friend has himself not finished reading Clarissa. At fifteen hundred pages, it is one of the longest books in the English language. Not many people think it worth the time to get all the way through. Still, having apparently more time than brains, I actually took six days and read Clarissa.

Now, I have an incredible surprise to report. Richardson actually put together an amazing novel when he wrote Clarissa (even more amazing since he was the guy who wrote Pamela). The characters are actually human beings and the story is engaging. It isn’t easy by any means, but it is really moving if you put the work into reading. Further, though it is approximately three times longer than Pamela I wouldn’t cut a hundredth of the material. As much as I fault Richardson (though recognizing that he was writing in the early days of the English novel and was pioneering quite a bit) for the triteness of Pamela, I have to recognize the beauty of Clarissa.

What can I say? Apparently I owe Mr. Richardson an apology. Clarissa has really redeemed my opinion of him. Of course, I doubt he cares since he has been dead for a couple hundred years. Still, for what it is worth, I take my hat off (or would if I wore one) to Mr. Richardson. I actually enjoyed reading.

No new episodes Thursday and Friday, because we launched a Kickstarter project, a new issue, and announced some new readings. The InDigest Offices have been buzzing. We’ll be back next week with brand new episodes from the Poem of the Day Podcast and InDefinite Podcast.

Hope you can enjoy the photo above instead of a poem or a story today. Do you remember the show “Street Sharks”? I do. This photo reminds me of “Street Sharks.”

Please check out the perks and help us work toward a better InDigest. Thanks!

Beautiful birdsong but flourished

off-kilter, half-askew,

so the dead hijack the ground

with not their bodies

but their still-resilient lips.



Flirty at a campfire,

tucked in by a half-believable ghost

story is how we first come to realize this

until we barely listen

or don’t. And later− alone and cold

in our too-light sleeping bags−

it’s the same way we learn to memorize

the fire, fire that was ever-so-recently,

so long ago, extinguished:

embers still crackling,

so all night

we listen for the dead.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

A Lover’s History of Nevada

This is a workbook
You can write in it

You can watch a cruise ship slide by
While stuck in the underpass

You can watch a man left open
He is a hand-crank music box

You can see an email left open
The subject is mother love

The subject is penguins
The subject is pink dots, wild

It is an earthquake that happens
While you are talking about nothing

But not a bit of placenta that hangs on and
Eventually lets go of its scar

It is her thinking that stars are little moons
It is the monster telling her no, suns

Everyone holding the hostess
And pressing their navels together

Tell yourself to be careful
Then do the thing that’s danger

That’s an example of a conversation
Between executives

Introduction

The Pillsbury-Larkin Match is a hypermodern game, in which control becomes the real necessity. These grandmasters have studied the games that their parents had played and refused to play by the classic rules and general principles. In other words, love would be relegated to the background, inappropriate for the type of struggles and ends of behavior manifested by wholehearted faith in flanking moves. What gains importance throughout the match is each player’s dependence on deft psychological moves (for example, using the other player’s moves as their own, in a sense showing that every move has its opposite reaction). Another aspect of the “flanking game” in Pillsbury-Larkin manifests in brilliant opening moves.

As per all matches vis-à-vis marriage, the amount of games played is undefined. Death of both spouses, in many cases, has not terminated a match. Due to the demands of spectators of the marriage-sport, primarily a demand for a winner, the first participant reaching twenty points

(2 points for a victory; 1 for a draw), will be declared the winner, although the games will continue. Pillsbury-Larkin satisfies many requirements: first, the last possible game in the match brought forth a clear victor; second, the match went back and forth for the entire twenty games; third, many seemingly inconsequential moves determined the ultimate victor; and, last, the pure psychological brutality would have satisfied the patrons of the Roman Colosseum.

A Final Note: in this Marriage Games textbook, the editors have chosen to illustrate all nine games whose outcomes were clear and one draw that many contemporary commentators have suggested really decided the match. Below, we have a sample of clear outcome.

Game 14 (1980-2001)

The Political Game

This was a battle that went back and forth. Perhaps more brilliant moves in this games than any other. Some have called this the “Exclamation Point” Game. This also could be called the Eternal Game. It started before they met and continued after they divorced.

Cynthia Larkin: White Bill Pillsbury: Black

1. (White) If she could have voted in the 1980 election, Cynthia would have chosen President Carter for another term.
1. (Black) He never liked Carter, especially after he made the comment in Playboy about lusting after women in his heart. What was so goddamn wrong with lusting?

Some may have wanted an (!) beside Black’s first move, just as twice as many critics of the Match wanted a (?) beside White’s. It should be remembered that Black was skeptical about beginning this game with “Ronald Reagan would make a great President.” Although a previous game’s first move had won the plaudits of this Chess Mind, one still refrains from assigning the positive (!) and negative (?) insignia to Pawn moves! Moreover, those who want to give an (!) to Black, or even to White (and this was before Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 – this Game had ended by then), possibly have forgotten that the candidates themselves were not openly embraced and a general feeling pervaded that Carter and Reagan represented no choice for the electorate. Neither considered John Anderson seriously.

2. (White) “Carter told the people they were being selfish,” she rationalized later. “It might not have been smart politically, but he was always honest. His Human Rights campaign is something Americans can be proud of for many generations.”
2. (Black) “America has never been less respected around the world than when Carter has been President. Giving the canal to the Panamanians is folly. And the Ayatollah returned the hostages as soon as Reagan became President. Khomeini was afraid what Reagan might do to Iran.”

3. (White) “His own Vice-President called Reagan’s low taxes, more defense spending plan ‘Voodoo Economics.’”
3. (Black) “Seventeen percent inflation. Ten percent unemployment. Your boy and the Democrats have driven this country into the ground.”

4. (White) “You never said that you liked Reagan.”
4. (Black) “He brought America back to respectability.” (!)

The key aspect of Bill’s move, the first great move of the game, is to show that his commitment to the Democrats and the Republicans is contingent upon their respective strengths. Bill will not be swayed by arguments or advertisements. In fact, in the recesses of Bill’s vote are the potential moves: “I don’t give a fuck,” “Politics is shit,” and “It doesn’t matter who wins.” Now the importance of their first moves is revealed. They are split for the first time politically and never again will find agreement. Had they never voted, we might not have seen their expertise displayed in this area. Best (!) for Black would have been 4…“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

5. (White) Reagan fires the air traffic controllers and endangers all passenger flights in the U.S.
5. (Black) The air traffic controllers were federal employees and not allowed to strike.

6. (White) “When did you ever care for the law?”

Better 6. I thought you were a union man. Black probably would not be able to resist a dissipation of energy by replying: 6…Actually, I have never belonged to a union in my whole life. And then White could have answered 7. Your father was. His father was. I have never heard you say anything good about business people. And Black would have further mired himself with 7…I think it is ridiculous for teachers to form unions.

6. (Black) Reagan is nearly killed in an assassination attempt.

7. (White) “He should have supported gun-control legislation after that.”
7. (Black) The combination of the assassination and the whole sacking of the air controllers gained Reagan enough support around the country to pass his tax cuts and defense increases.

8. (White) David Stockman’s article in The Atlantic.

This move should have halted Black’s momentum and provided White with an (!). All onlookers, professional and amateur, assumed it would.

8. (Black) “What do people care about the inner workings of the administration?” asked Bill. “Yes, it’s embarrassing. But they are toning down inflation. The Carter economic nightmare is over.”

9. (White) Reagan produced the worst recession since the Great Depression.
9. (Black) The Equal Rights Amendment did not pass, even with a seven year extension. (!)

The genius of Black’s move could be examined for several pages. First, he turns from the bad economic news to one of the great conservative triumphs of the decade. No, the anti-Amendment sentiment was not great, just enough in a few key states. And should White have responded: 10. Phyllis Schlafly launched a campaign of fear and misinformation about ERA to stop it, Black could have moved 10…Women are already protected under the Constitution and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and bogged her down with valid information but a kind which proves superfluous to the issues brought to the fore by the ERA. The strength is in the secondary assault of the move, the personal way White took the defeat.

10. (White) Two hundred and forty-one Marines killed in a suicide attack in Beirut, Lebanon.
10. (Black) The invasion of Grenada drives out a Communist regime.

11. (White) El Salvador is about to become a new Vietnam.
11. (Black) The Contras are freedom fighters worthy of the respect our nation gives to our own freedom fighters of 1776.

Probably 11. (Black) Supporting the Contras to overthrow a potentially totalitarian regime would have been preferable. But one has to admire the brazenness of the move.

12. (White) Archbishop Romero assassinated.
12. (Black) The Soviet Union declared the Evil Empire.

13. (White) The Boland Amendment prevented aid to be used to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.           (?)

White’s aggressiveness comes a little late. Weak argumentation in terms of getting public support. Black does not return fire with 13…The Reagan administration interpreted the Boland amendment as applying to the intelligence agencies and let the National Security Agency handle the funding of the Contras. Although White could offer the plausible countermeasure: 14. Why did Poindexter and North handle the funding secretly? The public did not care about the constitutional technicalities.

13. (Black) The economy is getting better every day. The Dow Jones just passed 1000.

14. (White) The “sleeze factor” clings to many Reagan appointments, including the Cabinet, with the likes of Ray Donovan and Ed Meese, and lower level appointees, many of the latter indicted for influence peddling.
14. (Black) “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” The election is so deeply in the bag that Bill does not bother to vote.

15. (White) Reagan visits the graves of the S.S. soldiers.
15. (Black) “The media distorts everything he does. The President was honoring all the soldiers killed in the D-Day fighting.”

16. (White) Nancy Reagan consults an astrologer and determines her husband’s schedule according to the alignment of the stars.
16. (Black) “You consult the astrology page every day in the newspaper.”

17. (White) “I don’t run the country. It proves he is manipulated not just by her but by his advisors. He doesn’t have a thought of his own. He just wants America to be the way he thinks it was thirty years ago.”

White sums up very well the general opinion of her fellow Democrats. It also looks like the right move to make. Its relative ineffectuality will always bug White’s fans, who seem to have never understood that what they hated about Reagan was the same thing that made him popular. The same will be true later in the game, perhaps not for exactly the same reason, when Black’s moves during the Clinton years do not have the effect Black’s fans think they should have. The alternative 17. “He understands the governing function of the Presidency” seems so distasteful and, worse, could provide Black with the future countermove in a critical situation: “Didn’t you admit, once, Reagan knew what he was doing?”

17. (Black) Reagan meets Gorbachev at Reykjavik.

18. (White) The Iran-Contra Scandal.
18. (Black) Bill wears an “Ollie North for President” tee shirt.

19. (White) Admiral Poindexter, North, and others are indicted; the Secretary of Defense and Vice-President are under suspicion.
19. (Black) Ninety million dollars spent by the Special Prosecutor and no convictions. Republicans call for the diminishing of the Special Prosecutor’s powers.

Republicans did not get what they want, which allowed them to get what they wanted in the future. Does this make Black’s last move good or bad? Some expert commentary escapes the expert’s expertise.

20. (White) The Stock Market Crashes. Wall Street Closes for a few days.
20. (Black) The Pillsbury-Larkin family portfolio remains relatively untouched.

Better than the abstract 20…More people became billionaires in the 1980s than all the previous decades in the history of the world. Black knew that the family mattered most, although the move hinged on the favorable circumstance that Bill’s broker did not gamble with his clients’ life savings.

21. (White) These men were not weak men, but they permitted themselves to grow short-sighted and selfish; and while many of them down at the bottom possessed the fundamental virtues, including the fighting virtues, others were purely of the glorified huckster or glorified pawnbroker type–which when developed to the exclusion of everything else makes about as poor a national type as the world has seen. — Teddy Roosevelt, Autobiography [Cynthia found the quote in an old paperback book found at Library discard sale, Eight Essays by Edmund Wilson.]
21. (Black) We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him….But we can not have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving change in our social structure… — Ronald Reagan, “The Time for Choosing” speech, 1964

22. (White) “What we have to do is bring back the recognition that the people of this country can solve its problems. I can still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people. I believe in state’s rights and I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. I believe we have distorted the balance of government today by giving powers that never were intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment.” — Ronald Reagan, speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, 1980.

Using a politician’s words against himself can prove bountiful; however, using those same words against a supporter of that same politician, even a tepid supporter like Bill, might not produce the desired defensive tizzy.

22. (Black) Russians pull out of Afghanistan, after losing fifty thousand dead, their nine years there being called “their Vietnam.” America supplied many of the groups there with sophisticated weaponry.

23. (White) After the Democratic convention, Dukakis leads Vice-President Bush by ten to twenty percent in the polls.
23. (Black) Michael Dukakis is a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

24. (White) Garry Trudeau represents Bush as the invisible man in Doonesbury.      (?)

So pleasing, so gratifying to the Doonesbury readers. The feeling that the entire country feels the same about the Republican candidate will be belied by the November polls. White does not realize it now, in 1988, how her contempt for Reagan, Bush, and the Republican conservative agenda would leak into her respect for her husband as a marriage-chess player. She could not understand how Black’s candidates could win when Pillsbury had nothing near her passion for politics and the results of the presidential elections. Long gone are the Pillsbury – Hutton, Larkin – Walsh days when the wives seemingly voted the husbands’ ways. Larkin’s dad fervently wanted Stevenson over Eisenhower because Nixon was running as Vice-President. Walsh had secret fantasies about Nixon, which may explain her propensity for paranoid reconstructions of events (the Couch Gambit, for example). Indeed, Larkin’s game against Walsh suffered when he realized fully the extent of his dislike for Walsh and, ultimately, caused his defeat. Working for Walsh was her distracting paranoid episodes at inappropriate times (parties with other professors at the University Club) and the distinct possibility her behavior induced his fatal heart attack at age fifty-one.

24. (Black) The Willie Horton and Boston Harbor ads.

25. (White) George Bush cannot avoid the “wimp factor” despite being a Navy pilot during World War II.
25. (Black) Democrats refuse to counter Bush attack ads or confront the Republican accusation that Dukakis is the “L” word.

26. (White) “I knew Jack Kennedy and you are no Jack Kennedy.”

Too little, too late. Few experts can explain why nothing White tried worked. Even fewer gave her little chance in the game at this point, down three pieces. How White could have responded: 24. “There is nothing wrong with standing up for the rights of reprehensible individuals because the strength of our Constitution lies in its application to all people at any time.” Likewise, in response to Black’s reckless attack on the 24th move, White could have countered with 25. The death penalty is a shortsighted solution to violent crimes in our society or some other rationalization in response to the theoretical question posed by Bernard Shaw at the start of one of the debates.

26. (Black) Berlin Wall comes down.

27. (White) “Burning the flag” and “anti-abortion” amendments to the Constitution do not pass through Congress.
27. (Black) Invasion of Panama and the surrender of Manuel Noriega to American custody as the rightful leader is elevated to the Presidency.

28. (White) Almost all Latin American nations protest the U.S. invasion, while many people in the United States wonder about Noriega’s affiliation with the CIA.
28. (Black) Iraq invades Kuwait, and President Bush virtually alone calls for intervention: “This will not stand.” (!)

29. (White) Democrats call for sanctions and many experts fear a prolonged war and heavy casualties, invoking the specter of the war in Vietnam.           (?)
29. (Black) Bush, Cheney, Scowcroft, and Rumsfeld secure a multi-nation coalition, including Syria, and launch Operation Desert Storm and what is called the 100-Hour War.

30. (White) Saddam Hussein is not removed from power.

After the “100-Hour War” move, it seemed that not only could the pit not get any deeper for White but that there would be no way to salvage respectability. All seemed lost. There had been neither resolution in her moves since 18 and 19, the Iran-Contra gambit, nor anything resembling a strategy, save for fighting on her heels. The Dukakis repositioning, we understand, was not the first option; however, when the Gary Hart thrusts never materialized, she could have shown greater enthusiasm and guts. White would learn from these mistakes, but it begs the question: why must we reach the abyss before we can tell ourselves what is the right move? But she had help. Black’s prosperity (the overwhelming approval ratings for Bush) bred overconfidence, which meant underestimating what the American electorate really worries about. Perhaps Saddam’s own escape from the abyss itself did not affect Black’s future moves, but it would be foolish to think that his death would not have greatly helped seal the game.

30. (Black) President Bush scores the highest favorable rating ever in the Gallup poll.

31. (White) Bill Clinton gains the Democratic nomination despite several setbacks, most notably the Gennifer Flowers incident, although he seems to have created real enthusiasm within the Democratic Party.
31. (Black) The Bush re-election campaign aims at Clinton’s lack of military service, his attempt to use Senatorial influence to avoid the draft, his lame story about smoking a joint, and his joining a protest in England against the Vietnam War.

32. (White) “It’s the economy, stupid.” (!)
32. (Black) Bill votes for Perot. (!)

A great move followed by one’s opponent’s best move. Could Trudeau’s “invisible President” hold the basic truth of that President’s fall from power? Namely, the man inspired no loyalty because few truly believed he was his own man. Revenge of the Wimp Factor!! What White did not factor was Black’s ability to recognize a stagnant presidency (Bill read Doonesbury!!) and bail on it. But not even in the voting booth will Black descend to the depths and pull a Democratic lever. In the latter stages of his parents’ Match, Pillsbury – Hutton, Pillsbury deviated from his lifelong straight Democratic voting to vote for Nixon against McGovern. Hearing his Dad’s confession about this must have had a lasting impression on the young Grandmaster.

33. (White) Despite having trouble mobilizing his Presidency, Clinton creates initiatives in domestic policy not seen since the late 1970s.
33. (Black) The Vince Foster suicide, the Paula Jones harassment suit, and the dogged attacks by conservative media critics.

After White’s weak move at 33., Black responds with a ferocity not seen since the political games of the McCarthy Era. Capturing the King does not seem enough, only annihilation of White’s political beachhead will do. Some commentators believe this game perfectly reflects the overall relationship between Cynthia and Bill because, in the 1990s, their relationship devolved to the most bitter of contests: the post-divorce potshots. Also, White’s inability, earlier in the game, to understand and appreciate Ronald Reagan’s abilities Black now echoes when conservatives wonder why everyone does not see the Bill Clinton they see. At least, Black will show more creativity, however superficial, in its next response to a relatively weak move.

34. (White) Hillary Clinton is the most politically involved First Lady since Eleanor Roosevelt.
34. (Black) The Contract with America and Newt Gingrich’s ascension to Speaker of the House during the off-year elections.

35. (White) Clinton hires Dick Morris as a consultant to manage his comeback after flirting with political extinction, and wins a relatively easy victory to gain a second term.

An ugly, ugly move from all perspectives. Instead of playing for outright victory after making the greatest comeback in any of the ten games of this Match, White plays a game of attrition when she is at a decided disadvantage in manpower. White is flush with the prospect of winning the game in the wake of a resounding victory over Bob Dole, an absolute overestimation of the power of winning. Did the Democrats not know that Bob Dole was NOT Richard Nixon or even Gerald Ford? Nor will the Republicans stop pressuring President Clinton after the adrenalin rushes of potential scandals within the Oval Office itself, to the point of nearly kidding themselves that Clinton could be removed from office before his term is up. The remainder of the contest tests which side’s illusions will outlast the other’s.

35 (Black) Continuing Whitewater investigation and the appointment of a Special Prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, to hunt for wrongdoings before and during the Clinton Presidency.

36. (White) The deficit is reduced to two trillion dollars; meanwhile, Wall Street continues the longest Bull Market in history.
36. (Black) The Paula Jones case is renewed; Ms. Jones retains new lawyers (paid for by a conservative think tank) and Bill Clinton testifies on videotape for the grand jury.

37. (White) Moderately successful interventions in Haiti and Bosnia.
37. (Black) Monica Lewinsky does not take her blue dress to the cleaners, then calls up a friend to ask for advice.

38. (White) Serbian forces eventually leave Kosovo; Milosevic leaves power in Serbia and will be tried for war crimes.
38. (Black) “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”       (!)

Just as good: 38…“It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.” Again, nothing beats the use of one’s opponent’s words against one’s opponent.

39. (White) The Clinton administration works hard to negotiate agreements between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and between Jews and Palestinians in Israel.

White believes Clinton’s legacy will start from these maneuvers and obscure all scandals and legislative failures.

39. (Black) House of Representatives impeaches President Clinton.

40. (White) The Senate acquits President Clinton.
40. (Black) “This is a campaign about character.”

Black’s move is a variation of its gambit in 31. Why it works here—more strikingly, why it works against a different candidate— might perplex the amateur. Remember, fewer pieces are on the board and White has clearly lost momentum.

41. (White) Cynthia campaigns for ex-Senator Bill Bradley despite not caring that he was once an All-American Basketball player and a leader on two NBA championships for the New York Knicks.
41. (Black) Bill likes John McCain because he was a POW during the Vietnam War and an American hero.

42. (White) Al Gore defeats Bradley on Super Tuesday; Cynthia joins the Gore campaign in June.
42. (Black) McCain wins the New Hampshire primary but George W. Bush wins all the primaries on Super Tuesday.

43. (White) Gore wins Florida.
43. (Black) Fox News declares Bush the winner.         (!)

44. (White) Gore cuts Bush’s lead in Florida to two hundred votes.
44. (Black) Bush sends James Baker to Florida to prevent a Democratic victory.

This move insures that Black will not lose unless (although it would not definitely spell victory) White decides to play: 46. Democrats immediately ask for a recount for the entire state of Florida.

45. (White) Gore campaign fights for and wins from the State Supreme Court the right to recount votes in Dade County.
45. (Black) Supreme Court asks the Florida State Court to reconsider its decision.

46. (White) RESIGNS

Black’s superlative 43^rd move forced White into an inferior position out of which it could not claw.

On Saturday you killed twenty-one chickens and two full-grown geese. You had never killed anything before. You said it was difficult, upsetting, that you were not sure you were doing the right thing, that you hadn’t meant for things to get to this point, that you had regrets.

The slaughter took all afternoon and into the evening. Your wife told me you got a late start.

You and I had been up drinking again the night before. We came back from the bar and sat in my kitchen until sunrise, slurping white wine with ice. I had my legs stretched out, my feet resting on a chair. You kept looking at my toes.

I didn’t believe you’d actually do it. There was pressure, yes, from the lady next door, from the city, to, as they put it, ‘thin the population’ in your backyard. But I expected a loophole. I expected it to blow over. I expected things to remain status quo. I expected no surprises.

All of us good neighbors had been excited about your small urban farm. The birds were well taken care of and the coop you built was stylish and sturdy. We all came over to see it. We took photographs. You looked wonderful standing among them, those black-eyed skittish things scurrying around your planted feet. There would, eventually, be fresh eggs for everyone, and the geese had a little pool to swim in. Your wife chose a favorite chicken, a white one with black spots. She named some of them. She enjoyed the way the geese would follow her when she jogged across the yard. She would jog back and forth in the sunlight. The geese were clumsy and funny. She would smile and her eyes would be bright.

On the day of the slaughter your wife came to my house, and when I opened the door she cried. She looked very beautiful. Her lips were pursed and her eyes were squeezed and wrinkled and she bowed her head. “The chickens,” she said mournfully, “the geese,” and I was obliged to wrap her in my arms. Your wife is very thin with narrow shoulders and I felt enormous, menacing, hell-bound. I took her into my kitchen and gave her water and wine. I talked with her until she was laughing, which is one of my many terrible gifts.

Neither of us ever meant for it to grow as big as it did. In the beginning, we practiced strict control, clipping its wings, removing its beak, shoving the bewildered, struggling thing into a cage. But the argument was exhausting, and, by degrees, we got used to the noise, the chaos, the persistent stench. We got used to waking up early to sweep up the mess we allowed to accumulate, got used to shoving it into corners, under rugs, throwing it over the fence. We became sloppy and, therefore, afraid of – disgusted by – the thing we had created.

Lest the thing take over, you said, it had to be put down.

When the ugly business was finished everyone dined together in your living room. The geese were served in delicate silver cups, the shards of meat hovering grotesquely in a light cream sauce. Candles were lit and wine was poured. You said a prayer as your wife dressed herself in a ceremonial shroud she had woven from the feathers of the deceased.

You both received compliments, condolences, well-wishes.

I choked on my meal.

by Dana Rossi

I miss videos.

I’m sure everyone who remembers MTV playing them misses them. I recently read Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s I Want My MTV—their love letter to the 1980s and the history of MTV’s Golden Years (’81-’92) as told by the people who ran MTV, worked at MTV, appeared on MTV, loved MTV and hated MTV. In the first part of the book, different celebrities are discussing their first encounters with MTV. Bret Michaels says that at that time MTV was new, he would go to parties, put on MTV, and just park it in front of the television. For hours. Girls would ask him why he was just watching TV, and he’d dismiss them (Dismiss. Girls. Bret Michaels.), saying that he was waiting for Van Halen to come on. So he’d sit there with some weed, not socializing, not getting laid, just patiently waiting in front of the television, because “Hot for Teacher” could be on next and he didn’t want to miss it. And if I had to name the thing I miss most about videos on MTV it’s exactly that—the waiting and anticipating your song, and the thrill of victory when that video actually played and you actually got to see it. It’s so easy to forget that there used to be something really exciting about that, since now our favorite songs or videos are only ever a thought and an Internet connection away. But the waiting was always my favorite part.

I especially loved overnight MTV, waiting up all night for my favorite videos, and for a while when I was 14, I was really only waiting for one video in particular. The rest was just filler to wade through. I practiced my Roger Rabbitting to the DNA remix of Tom’s Diner, blissfully unaware that it was originally an a cappella song. I called and responded to myself—“Warm it up, Kris” “I’m about to” “Warm it up Kris” “Cause that’s what I was born to do.” I counted all the butts in “Baby Got Back” (133, including the real butts, the plastic butts at the center of the DJ’s scratch records, the fruit he makes look like butts, and the giant butt whose crack he spends most of the video sitting in). And after what always seemed like the longest (but breakin’-est) commercial ever, I’d see the video, my video, the one I’d been staying up way past my bedtime to see.

The title, artist, album and record label appear in the lower left of the screen. There is a scruffy looking but familiar man in his bed, taking a few pills then turning in for the night. The wind is blowing through the open curtains. The thunder is rumbling, the rain is pouring, the teenage girl watching from my couch isn’t breathing, then finally the wind and rain track fades and gives way to:

The year is 1992 plus I am 14 years old equals, “November Rain” is the best song ever. Like, finally, here’s our “Hey Jude”! I was obsessed with this song, and not because I had a particular connection with it, but because I really think it was specifically designed with a teenager’s erratic, over the top emotions in mind. “November Rain” is a nearly 9 minute opus with distinct movements, orchestral sweeps and swells, raspy vocals, multiple guitar solos—including but not limited to a two minute coda that layers Slash’s shredding over urgent, almost demonic chanting—and lyrics that explored every possible way to say “I’m leaving, but only because you want me to.” How was a teenage girl not supposed to love that? So I did—I couldn’t get enough of this song, and then naturally, I couldn’t get enough of the video. And during my precious overnight MTV sessions, every time it came on, I’d be glued—trying to read each and every clue being given as to what happened in this story. But no matter how many times I watched that video—whenever I watched that video—I never had any idea what the fuck was going on.

Which had never really happened before.

“November Rain” was the first video that I remember being really confused by.

Other videos were so easy:

“Beat It” – MJ’s tense, because he knows that at any minute, he’s gotta roll out of bed to stop a gang fight. But first he has to change out of his piano keys and musical notes PJs, and put on something more threatening—black high waters and a red leather jacket festooned with unnecessary zippers. Then he walks right into the middle of the Martha Graham knife fight and gets the opposing gangs to dance together, instead of interpretive dance together. Anyway, gangs—bad. Got it.

“Puttin’ On the Ritz” – Taco, who would very much like to be Tim Curry, struts among some garbage fires and the homeless who surround them, letting them know they could all use a little glamour, and a better life is only some eyeliner and a cane away. Easy enough.

“I Ran” – A Flock of Seagulls have insane hair. From all angles. Roger that.

“Whip It” – Yes, even “Whip It!” The band is wearing shorts and flower pots, I’m pretty sure one of them is playing a keytar, and they’re surrounded by happy-go-lucky cowboys and girls and a clapping, cross-eyed Asian lady. What’s not to get? It’s not supposed to make sense—so it did. I wasn’t supposed to “get” it, and by not getting what I was not supposed to get, I got it.

But with “November Rain” I got the feeling I was supposed to get it, and still didn’t. And the harder I tried to find clues and read into them, the more it confused me and the more I was just stupid. I mean, for the most part I got it—Axl has a girlfriend, they get married, she dies, and he’s upset.

But I didn’t get it—how did she die? Why did she die? Who made her die?

And that’s the big, important thing I was supposed to understand. Especially since I had some help—this song was rumored to be part two in a three part series, the first part being “Don’t Cry”—which showed both Axl and his lady as mentally unstable—and the third part being “Estranged,” which I had yet to see, but supposedly had all the answers, and would explain “November Rain” outright, once and for all. But at this point, all I had to work with was “November Rain.” And while they were making the video cryptic on purpose—not showing her death, only that she had died—I still had that gnawing feeling that I wasn’t picking up on the obvious clues. The video was awash in clues from which I was supposed to glean a deep, resonating meaning of the video and possibly figure out who killed Axl’s lady.

But I was so stuck. And by the same things every time.

2:21 – This is the cut to the flashback in the bar, when Axl and his girlfriend arrive to meet his friends, and she sits between him and Slash. About ten seconds later, Slash lights her cigarette, which I always thought was a very intimate gesture. Then at about 2:40 she tries on his hat. Who wears Slash’s hat but Slash? Nobody. Especially considering the likelihood of exotic, microscopic life forms existing in that thing. So the whole thing is pretty flirty. Was something going on? Were the three too close for comfort? In my mind this was very possible—especially years later, after I read Slash’s autobiography, and he tells a story about an instance where he and his roommate were fucking the same girl at the same time, and just as his roommate was about to finish, he pulled out and came on Slash’s leg. To which Slash just sighed and said, “Dude, we have GOT to get a bigger apartment.” Slash? No stranger to sharing. So maybe Axl knew about his woman and his best friend and so he killed his woman, or maybe she couldn’t take the pressure that comes with loving two long haired but very distinct men, and killed herself.

But I’m not sure.

3:39 – This is during the wedding scene itself, just as Slash decides it’s time to walk out of church and solo in the desert, spreading his legs as wide as possible to do so—because a life spent playing guitar with your legs closed is a life not really lived. I get that, and I get that it was time for a guitar solo, which is as good a reason as any to bust out of church. But he did it kind of angrily, which is not like him. Slash has always come across as aloof and above it all—remember, this is the guy who got another man’s sperm on his leg and all he did was quietly comment about his limited apartment square footage. So was this it, was the marriage of his best friend and the woman he couldn’t have just too much for him to take?

Maybe. But I really don’t know.

5:59 – The reception. The guests, all in conservative dress, loafers and strings of pearls, are dancing, clapping, and eating, but I couldn’t help but wonder why, at a Guns n’ Roses wedding, did not one guest look like Nikki Sixx and at least 23 should have. Does Axl Rose even know any old people? And if so, why?

7:10 – Now we’re at the funeral and we’re seeing her in the casket. And this is the part I always focused very closely on, because the “mirror effect” was used in this shot (which I couldn’t really see until I’d watched it a LOT). Apparently, when a person dies violently and their face is damaged beyond repair, undertakers sometimes use a mirror in the casket which is placed perpendicular to the remaining half of the face, right down the center of it. This creates the illusion that the corpse still has a whole face. But the thing is, when I was finally able to tell that they did use a mirror, I saw that instead of it just being on her face, it went down the entire length of her body. Which means she only has half a body. How does someone die at a wedding that leaves them with only half a body? So now that really only leaves me with two logical explanations—either there is a FOURTH suspect—Axl, Slash, the girl herself and now Leatherface who chain sawed her in half at her own wedding…or that was one lazy, shitty mortician.

Or it could just be that the director thought the full mirror “looked cool.”

8:41 – The bouquet is tossed, it changes from white to red, and the flowers land on the casket for Axl to discover in the final shot. The final clue. Those roses must mean something, or they wouldn’t be in the final shot like that. This is the point in the video where I’d always feel my most inadequate. Because this is the end, and the lingering shot on the roses would taunt me, as if to say, get it? Geeeeeet it? Is it clear now? Do you know what this means? No. I don’t.

Again.

And now the video is complete, and I, as a frustrated fourteen year old, have no other choice but to start the entire process over—sitting on my couch, glued to the TV, toughing it out through nineteen videos that contain or allude to women humping cars while I wait for the next time “November Rain” might come on.

I miss it every day.

John Jodzio is a winner of the Loft-McKnight Fellowship. His stories have appeared in One Story, Opium, The Florida Review and a number of other places, both print and online. He’s won a Minnesota Magazine fiction prize and both the Opium 500 Word Memoir competition and Opium Fiction Prize. He’s published two short story collections If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home [Replacement Press, 2010] and Get In If You Want To Live [Paper Darts Press, 2011].
………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Brad Liening: Hey, John, I’m ready whenever you are…

John Jodzio: Oh man, almost totally spaced this.

BL: Ha. I’m glad you remembered. I know you had a reading last night. Sorry to have missed it—I was getting ready for school. How did it go?

JJ: It was good—we got a couple of hundred people there and the gin was flowing.

BL: It was a battle-type reading, right? You were representing Paper Darts versus the people at the Tangential?

JJ: Yup. 5 readers a side. The Tangential people are funny, but in the end Paper Darts was funnier. Not really sure what we won by winning though.

BL: The respect of the people in attendance? How did you get that many audience members into that tiny bar, anyway? [The reading was held at Nomad World Pub. –Ed.]

JJ: There was a lot of backslapping, but maybe that was because it was so crowded. Sort of crazy that people showed up when the wind-chill was like -90 or whatever.

BL: For our readers, both John and I live in Minneapolis where the weather is often conducive to not going out. Did you read selections from your new book, Get In If You Want To Live?

JJ: I read a story from the book called “I Only Have Sex With Ladies Named Jean.” I was hoping that there were some Jean’s in the audience to offend, but no one came up to me afterward. Also I was not propositioned by anyone named Jean. Too bad.

BL: Well, there’s always the next reading. The law of averages is in your favor.

JJ: Most people named Jean are around 70 so if I am looking for some action maybe I should go read that one to some grannies.

BL: They’re a captive audience, that’s for sure. Other stories from Get In If You Want To Live include “The Hookers in My Neighborhood Love My Chili” and “My Codpiece Smells Like Soup.” I was wondering, do you ever get tired of writing about yourself and your personal experiences?

JJ: Yes, it’s tiring. The codpiece I’m wearing today is giving me an awful rash. Or I got something from a hooker.

BL: Your stories are obviously concerned with humor, but they’re frequently larded with arresting images and sometimes surprising bursts of sincerity. Is it a hard line to navigate, or is this balance something you only think about late in the process?

JJ: I am usually concerned only with plot right away. If I can figure out what happens in a story then the character’s reason to be telling the story usually prompts the sincerity and humor. A lot of my stories are pretty strange, but they are always grounded in a plausibility that makes that strangeness able to work.

BL: Your characters do seem to inhabit strange/marginalized places in society or have problems that no one else seems to have. Is there some underlying pathology at work or do you simply write on what intrigues you in any given moment?

JJ: Whatever intrigues me. It usually starts with one line and then everything flows from there. That one line always has to be great for me to actually write the story. The story I am working on right now, the first line is, “It is chicken taco day at William Howard Taft High School and everyone takes our lunch trays out to the parking lot to see the Principal and the Vice Principal fight over my mom. ” I need to be interested in the story from the jump otherwise I won’t write it.

BL: They traffic in brevity, too—they’re rarely very long. I gather that form follows from that storytelling impulse?

JJ: I like to make each sentence earn its place and purge anything superfluous from plot and character. That usually means things end up pretty short. Plus I have a pretty short attention span.

BL: I understand completely—that’s one of the things that I like about poetry, actually.

JJ: So what’s your favorite Whitney Houston song, anyway?

BL: That’s a hard question. Probably “How Will I Know”…What’s yours?

JJ: Probably “Saving All My Love For You.” Big fan of that background sax.

BL: Good answer. That Whitney Houston zine [referencing Brad’s ‘zine Are You There, God? It’s Me, Whitney Houston [Hell Yes Press, 2009] –Ed.] has a lot of illustrations in it, as does your book. Paper Darts and the various illustrators really did a lovely job putting it together. Has the response been good?

JJ: It’s been good. The book is really fucking pretty and the ladies at Paper Darts did a great job with the design. Think this is probably the future of books in some way, giving them a large art/design component, making something that you want to frame after you finish reading it.

BL: Right. Something would be totally lost if you were just reading these on your e-reader or whatever.

JJ: Totally. I think they were originally going to try and figure out a way to do some version of the book with an e-reader, but we realized pretty early on that it wasn’t going to work all that well with the art.

BL: Yeah, losing the tactility of the reading experience would be sad, to me, and I think it would make the strangeness of your stories in particular less real in some way. Are you looking ahead at all to a third book right now?

JJ: I’m working on another collection of short stories that will be pretty traditional, probably closer to my first book, If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home. I’m about 50% done now.

BL: That’s impressive considering the fact that you’re also doing readings, working, and also being a new dad…do you just squeeze the writing in whenever and wherever you can?

JJ: The writing is been pretty slow going in recent weeks. A lot of the stories I’ve finished lately were things I’d almost completed and I’m just tweaking now. Also, my son has given me license to be sort of absent in his life during his infant years—at least I think that’s what he’s saying.

Speaking of Theo—he’s starting to get pissed that I’m not dangling his favorite toy over his head with my foot anymore, so I gotta bust.

BL: All right. Good talking with you. Tell Theo InDigest says hello.

When I am drunk I feel globally positioned
I stagger into Denmark like a choir of swans
I awaken smelling vaguely of confusion & quinoa
My moist visage stares back at me The landscape
trembles & is covered in complex math
I remember to forgive myself for being
the opposite of correct Denmark is so lovely
I text my friend & say Hey man you should
really check out Denmark & he says Dude
these tacos have changed my heart forever
& then I say Potential apothecary bonnet
& he says Real people full of real birds
& then I drop my cell phone into a fjord

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!

All morning I linger in the courtyard
thawing amidst the knots of luminous weeds
I feel like an air conditioner emitting
a kind of stupid music for you but all I want
is to not be invisible In the courtyard
the sun acts like it is having a party
It is a small cathedral smeared
with intelligence I begin to ripen & know
I am a mammal lucky to have a mouth
So I will use it I open the door I step
inside & fall apart at your feet like a hand-
made piñata It is sad but also amazing
The way the light becomes drunk against
the architecture of your body The way
we use our mouths against one another

by Franz Nicolay

I’ve been an accordion player, among other things and with varying interpretations of the word “professional,” for a little over ten years. I’ve written at some length about the specific baggage that comes form identifying with that particular instrument, so I won’t rehash that particular rant at the moment. This is a story not about a specific instrument, but musical instruments in general, what it means to play music with another person; it has the feel of a story about giving, but in the O. Henry sense in which to get something special sometimes you need to take something special away from someone else. It’s going to sound like some kind of fable, but I swear it’s true; in the way that life sometimes sounds like a movie script you’d roll your eyes at if you saw it on a plane.

I’d picked up the accordion under the influence of the cover of the “Basement Tapes,” on which a small group of modern Americans managed to look like an ahistorical band of carnies with the addition of some wide-brimmed hats and some unfashionable instruments including an accordion, a sousaphone, and a mandolin. I duly bought myself a mandolin as a high-school graduation present, and, when I left for New York for college, brought my dad’s little red Hohner accordion.

My father’s German grandfather had brought the accordion from the home country in the mid-century, so his grandson could play him polkas and waltzes. A good child of the sixties, my dad despised it, to the point of taking a steak knife to the bellows to avoid a lesson. (It didn’t work. Duct tape worked as well then as it does now.)

I made a few half-hearted attempts at learning the thing, but mostly moved it in and out a succession of dorm rooms and increasingly remote apartments, an effective filler of under-bed space. It wasn’t until I joined a nine-piece circus-punk orchestra that it came in handy: I’d joined as a piano player, but after a rehearsal or two I said, “I’ve got an accordion at home. Should I bring it?” They responded enthusiastically, and thus began my life as an accordion player.

It was a life based, initially, on an ambitious lie. I didn’t know how to play. As a piano player, I figured, I was halfway there already – literally. But in an unexpected development, the glasses I wore at the time were narrow enough that when I looked down at the piano keyboard now oriented vertically under my right hand, I looked under my glasses at keys too blurry to see. In any case, the band’s rehearsals were loud enough that I could fuck up in a protective haze of incipient tinnitus, and by the time I got a pickup for the thing I had more or less figured it out – enough to play the handful of songs I needed without obvious wrong notes.

I didn’t have a deep knowledge of accordion world. I knew the Band, I knew the Pogues, I knew Tom Waits, and I knew old men of indeterminate nationality on subway platforms. I started working in concentric circles of influence and connection, through 16 Horsepower, the Tiger Lilies, through Taraf de Haidouks, the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars, Jacques Brel, Clifton Chenier, and the No Smoking Orchestra. It was the range of accordion music from Mexico to South America to Ireland, France, Italy, Eastern Europe, and beyond — an instrument that has few peers, the violin, maybe — as one identified equally with raucous dance music as sentimental weepers.

But there were two that really got to me. One was a Bulgarian band of wedding musicians led by a clarinetist named Ivo Papasov. One of my friends, who worked at WNYC, had gotten ahold of a cassette of the band that some friends and I had burned to a disc and were passing around with sheer “you gotta hear this” enthusiasm. They were, literally, a wedding band, for functions and overnight dance parties, drums, electric bass, sax, cheesy keyboard pads, clarinet, and accordion; playing a frenetic and otherworldly jazz.

Then there was Piazzolla, the tango composer you know if you only know one tango composer; and in a way the mirror image of the Papasov band. Where the Bulgarians were playing virtuosic and elite music in the service of weddings and social events – music for use in the most mundane sense — Piazzolla had taken a popular dance style and elevated it into the concert hall, out of the world and into the vacuum reserved for art consumed in isolation. Schmaltzy, sentimental, but still classy, just the way I like it.

Anyway, point being I realized I was going to need a better accordion. This being 2002 or so, I went to Yahoo classifieds while at work, and found a two or three-line ad for an instrument up in Queens, asking price $700, which was at least 500 bucks more than I had to my name at the moment, but no matter. I called the number, spoke briefly to a guy with a thick accent named Sergio, and made plans to go to Forest Hills after work.

I’m pretty sure that at that point in my life, despite having five or six years in New York under my belt and having at that point moved to Brooklyn, I’d never been to Queens, in the way that New Yorkers have a tendency to look at any water crossing the same way 15th-century Europeans did: hazardous, possibly life-threatening, and with a better than average chance of meeting monsters. In my memory, getting out to Sergio’s place involved a couple trains, a bus, and possibly fording Newtown Creek, but a quick look at a subway map just confirmed that I basically sat on the E train for an hour.

Sergio was probably in his late 50s; dark, hairy, polite, and melancholy in a cardigan and khakis. He invited me in and offered me a cup of coffee. It was a nondescript vinyl-siding house and the kind of interior decoration and not-unpleasant scent I associated with peoples’ grandparents: brown shag, fake-wood panelling, a record player, some ceramic knick-knacks. He led me to the basement, a standard 70s-issue rec room, and pulled out a black suitcase. He opened it and pulled out a silver accordion that looked, compared to the one I’d been playing, the size of a file cabinet.

He strapped it on and played a bit of a thing. “Wow,” I said, and meant it — he was pretty good. “How long have you been playing?”

“Thirty years,” he said, and told me his story.

He’d escaped Cold War Bulgaria in the late fifties, with his older brother, by a convoluted route including sneaking over the Greek border, working a few years in Italy, and, well, I don’t remember exactly how he got to New York, or he didn’t say. He and his brother got blue-collar jobs — Sergio as a plumber, his brother drove a truck — they bought this house, lived there together, never married. They got home each night, cooked dinner, watched TV, and came down to the basement and played accordion duets until they got tired: Eastern European favorites, Sinatra, “La vie en rose,” then goodnight and up in the morning for work.

And then, the month before, his brother had died suddenly of a heart attack. And, he said, he couldn’t bear to play by himself, so he’d decided to sell the accordion.

“My brother’s is over here,” he said, gesturing to another case. “It is not as good as mine though.”

“How much?” I said.

“For this one $700. For my brother’s, I can sell for $200.”

“Uhhh,” I said, and looked at the silver accordion. “I’ve only got about $300.”

He paused, and looked at me, and looked at the accordion.

“Listen,” he said. “I can tell you’re a musician, and that you’ll really play it. I’ll sell you this one for the cheaper price if you promise you’ll give it another life.”

We shook hands, he drove me to an ATM and then to the subway. I took the thing home and then around the world for most of the last ten years. It’s a duct-taped wreck now — accordions aren’t built to travel well; anything that’s an piano crossed with a typewriter is destined to be in a near-constant state of disrepair — but I like to think I’ve held up my end of the bargain. There’s a duality in the way music is used and the way it’s perceived, between the transcendent and the mundane. The Piazzolla tangos I wanted to play are sentimental in the way that deeply serious expressions of romanticism and desire can be; and the music Sergio and his brother played may seem sad and small compared to that grand canvas. But in their dailiness, in their routine, in their pragmatism, they’re shared expressions of suppressed desire and unspoken longing.

And for me it’s somewhere in between: if you choose to build your life around something, of course you want to aim for the transcendent, but you’re still going to work every day — just in my case, work is getting up in front of a bunch of strangers with a live microphone every night and trying to not make them walk out of the room.

by Brad Liening

Bloodland is a thriller written for the summer-movie circuit. This is not a criticism, but merely a description of how the novel operates. Bloodland is all fast-paced plot, the characters are all powerful men with something to hide or prove, and our protagonist is an underemployed journalist out to get at the truth. Cue the determined underdog music.

The plot is roughly thus: Jimmy Gilroy is a familiarly underemployed journalist who’s writing a book about a starlet who died in a helicopter crash, but he aspires to the high-minded political journalism practiced by his dear departed dad. Jimmy’s investigation begins to take unexpected turns — said unexpected turns are actually totally expected, since this is the catalyst that kicks the book into high gear — and he eventually uncovers a web of intrigue, of which that helicopter crash and dead starlet are only a part. The bigger pieces involve corporate imperialism and private military contractors in the Congo, an opportunistic run for the Oval Office by a smarmy Senator good at nothing so much as self-promotion, a secretive titan of industry, a washed-up real estate mogul, an ex-Prime Minister of Ireland falling off the wagon, and a couple of other things better left unwritten about here for the sake of preserving mystery.

The reader meets a lot of these people in quick succession, and the characterization is often pretty thin; it took me about halfway through before I could match all the similarly masculine-sounding names to their jobs. Part of that, though, is intentional: these men identify so completely with their jobs that their very selves are subsumed into a maniacal professional drive and will to power. It’s not a stretch, then, to acknowledge that such determination comes with a certain human cost. The alert reader can spot some of these costs coming: when one guilt-ridden character begins desperately spilling his guts to Jimmy, for instance, you know he’s not long for this mortal coil.

If the characters are a touch thin and some of the plot developments telegraphed, that’s ultimately just fine. Bloodland shares a bond with other paranoid thrillers like Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View, where the audience is supposed to guess at what comes next—sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong. And while you’re guessing you zip about the globe to exotic locales: Dublin and New York, Paris and Verona, London and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s intrigue and adventure and all rather swashbuckling.

Part of the fun of Bloodland is allowing it to soothe and reinforce every suspicion you have about the extraordinarily wealthy and powerful—namely that they operate at a fantastic, corrupting remove, they act purely out of self-interest and greed, and they probably hate you, if they think about you at all. And with corporate hubris and malfeasance continuing to shape the lives of ordinary people in ways both recognized and not, I, for one, am content to allow Bloodland to stoke the fires of my righteous indignation. Cue the determined underdog music.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Kate Casanova: Your paintings examine the idea of utopia as problematized by Western society. You draw on imagery from video games, advertising, and animation to create larger-than-life worlds. Could you break down one of your paintings for us and give us some specific insight into the imagery?

Melissa Loop: In the painting The Patagonia Re-imagined I started with a collection of low resolution pictures that I gathered on Google Image and then developed a composition where everything is a sort of impossibility. A building on top of a waterfall that doesn’t seem to have a back, mountains that are too small. I like using degraded imagery so the pictures have gone through all of these processes and each time the image loses more and more information until I am forced to make up the parts that have become completely unreadable. I enjoy doing that because it relates to the way that we accept so much fractured information in our day-to-day life and we just kinda fill in what is missing. I think of these paintings as utopia advertisements so abstract shapes in the sky are there to call attention to the scene enticing you to look and be seduced by it. Also, the pattern work on the bottom is a stand-in for a slogan. For the dripping, I make the painting, turn it upside-down, and apply enamel with old brushes that are more like sticks then anything. So, it becomes this process of destroying what I’ve made, not wanting to be seduced. None of the paintings have contained any living beings so they are incredibly exclusive as well as lonely.

KC: The paintings are hyper-idealized images that reflect back to us that which we desire. As a viewer, I enjoy the bright colors and seductive imagery. It leads me to question desire itself, a thing that is not inherently destructive, but the consequences of what we want could be. What thoughts do you have on the idea of desire?

ML: I think that in our culture of instant gratification, and fake consumer need, it is hard to tell what desire is even authentic, what will really make you happy. It becomes easy to lose yourself in the bombardment of seduction. It then seems like so many people are left not even knowing what will makes them happy anymore. It’s really kinda tragic since desire is a basic human impulse that is built in for survival. Desire then becomes a paradox where it is necessary for continuation, and success, but is also extremely destructive and wasteful. In my work, I enjoy bringing out both sides of my own desire in various ways. For example, I find these really exotic locations that I would love to visit but doing so will accelerate their decline since many of the most beautiful places are extremely delicate eco-systems that can no longer tolerate their popularity. Plus, in order to bring a lot the most luxurious desires into fruition—I’m thinking of all of those swanky shoreline hotels owned by American companies—a person, place, or thing has to be exploited or subverted to make it all happen.

KC: What holds your interest and/or keeps you busy outside of art? Of course, much of what one does in their everyday life often influences their art. Regardless, what else are you into?

ML: My husband works in advertising so we end up having a lot of conversations about authenticity, the power and role of advertising, the seduction of products, and the ways that everything is manipulated. I’m not sure that it is something that I’m super interested in but it has a huge impact on my work. As far as what I like to do, I always love to be outdoors, explore new places, and learn about places and people that seem completely foreign to myself and where I come from. I’ve also gotten into gardening and learning how to become a better steward of the planet. It has made me appreciate the amazing amount of energy that it takes to make our food. Also during our few warm months in Minnesota, I can be found on or near a beach as much as possible.

KC: What does the future hold for you?

ML: Right now I am working on a couple more comprehensive projects. The first one is a more side project where I am documenting amazing places that will disappear with climate change. The other is a project on the French Polynesia where I am creating a whole series of work around this one place and it will be accompanied by a zine that will contain the Google Image research. I am really excited about the French Polynesia project because it is the kind of place that is most connected with all of the ideas that I have been using in my work. It will be extremely impacted by climate change, there is a love/hate relationship relationship with tourism and the locals, and it is still an occupied country that whats its own independence but is such a desirable location from a military stand point. The latter is extremely interesting because it touches not only on this idea of continued Colonialism through through the big tourism industry but it is an actual example with it’s strained relationship with France.

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Nothing binds you to
this garden, to this sky. Blue
shadows swell creeks, plunge

past the sundial. On the verge
of stone nails, a smell of ice
behind the cellar door

which held back your volume
of obligations. In that case,
on that page, one was being

an inch too poetic. Faded,
like shifts of your weight
against my leg. You’d lifted

yourself and left the scrap-
book room, its glossies of wars,
electrical storms: It was not

and did not matter, was time
to leave. The house inched closer, leaned
to follow and eaves-

drop under cover of memorial elm,
murmur of innumerable bees.
The chaise—if it remembered correctly

the dream-fable of the dog
swimming in pools mirrored in windows—
was dismembered in a yard too small

to contain all the emptiness there.
In my still-retrieving hand,
forgetful liquid, your glass

in its last wink.
Blue ink in storage. Still thirsty,
you’d left the gloss of your lip on the rim.

is being performed tonight at The Wang,
a blend of redsilk skirt and sudden
nudity, each ballerina’s breasts completely bared,
startling pretty much everyone here
including the conductor—his concentration shot
to smithereens, coattails shivering, his arms a gate
in ruin swinging by the hinges. Whoever said
wondering at flesh meant putting off the heavens
hasn’t seen this conductor’s shoulder blades:
gestures Gabriel might have made, frantic
with his news of what a woman’s body
could contain. There are loaves and fishes
inside us. There are whole vineyards
we’ll never see. There is a man beside me, neurotic
fingers knotting and reknotting his tie, rating
each dancer’s nipples on a scale from one
to ten: ten being an absolutely perfect
set—numbers murmured low
and to no one, and according to the program
any minute now my sister steps
onstage, and he will score her as he has the others
and I’ll hear it. My sister’s half-bareness
is everything I know and don’t know
about love. There is probably a different word
for that but there is also one for the way
he’ll see their color, shape, and I’ll see Thursday
in Raleigh, trying to boil pasta on a hotplate,
our youngest sister thirteen, arms folded
over her chest, her new bras hidden deep in her closet
where she hoped we wouldn’t see. So we stood
in front of her, our shirts off
watching the pasta soften. Areolas spiked—ash rose,
peach— you’d hardly guess we were related, as the man
beside me hasn’t, his number noisy with itself,
my sister now emergent from the wings
smelling so strongly of hairspray and wedgie-guard
the scent pulls itself up the center aisle.
She moves slowly. The light has yet to notice it’s been torn
in half behind her. Her aloneness never so willing,
or sudden, or soft.

“If I’m going to be staying here, Hijos,” Mitedio said, watching the crew of boys, their bare feet and stained t-shirts, “then we need to get the ground rules straight, no?” The boys marched through the living room to their beloved uncle and laughed at his wide, bald scalp, how he flattened across the last remaining hairs. “And, sabes que, Mihijos,” he said, “the rules are we must attend the dog track in the morning and earn enough money to attend the Mexican movies. Those are the rules.”

The boys, Relles and Neto, and even the crew of fosters, yelled and agreed. He told them their Jefe and Jefita had abandoned them for the week. He did not explain that their Abuelita in New Mexico turned up dead-meat and buried. Instead he pulled a bottle from his coverall pocket and took a long, passionate kiss. He called for the youngest Ortiz boy.

“What, Tio?”

“Are you getting smaller and smaller?”

“I’m growing, Tio,” little Neto said, and the boy held his arms up to show the tiny mounds that would one day be biceps.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The next morning the boys ate a breakfast of fried bologna and fried potatoes before climbing into the bed of the Ranchero. They headed for dollar bills owed from Joey Aguilar’s house. He wasn’t home, but a fat, ancient hand served the cash through a window.

Next, the crew drove out to the fairgrounds and the swap meet, and Mitedio had a conversation with a woman, her long, black hair parted down the center and eyebrows drawn in an arc. She stared and shook her head, threw her hand onto a corduroy hip. “Jesus. What you doing, Mitedio? You stealing kids now?”

“My brother’s kids.”

She asked, “Your mama?”

“Dead.”

“What happened? I’m sorry, Mitedio.”

“She’s just dead.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

“You see, Mihijos,” Mitedio explained from behind the wheel, “at a casino you bet against the house. And when you bet against the house, the odds are pretty bad. You know that? Any man has to know that.”

“Yes, Tio.”

“It’s all French. You know French? ‘Pari-mutuel’, Hijos,” Mitedio explained. “It’s French. It’s a wager and not a bet. What do they teach you in that school?”

The boys said nothing. Their mouths were open wide until the oldest, Relles, finally asked, “What does that mean?”

“Mean?” Mitedio said. “Well, it means you win better. It means you are not playing the house, but you are playing the betters. Los Agents. That’s what it means.”

“Es eso Agents?”

“Agents. You know agents. Here you make your own luck. Here a man can know his numbers and know his runners and win. And we’re men who win, no?”

“The Jefe says you can’t win gambling. He says you should focus on a paycheck and earn your way.”

“Oh, Mihijo!” Mitedio said, grinning. “Your father has mouths to feed and cannot bet. But we have no children. Neto, do we have children?”

Neto shook his head, dumbly.

“We have no children, Relles. And that means we can take our risks,” Mitedio answered. “We can go to the daily double with our ten dollars and triple our money if we know the runners. I don’t have a house to take care of. I am independent and free from all of those, Mihijo. Once a man has a paycheck and a job he loses all his freedoms.”

“But a man needs to work, right? Tio?” Relles insisted. “It’s not right to do this in the middle of the week.”

“Oh, Hijo,” Mitedio answered.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The daily double started promptly at noon, and Mitedio and the crew were the first in line. Children must be supervised at all times, was what the ticket agent told Mitedio as he talked and talked. He purchased candy bars and sat to study his Race Program.

Mitedio explained: “Gotta find a runner, Mihijos. Gotta find the right one for us.”

And it took him nearly five minutes of study, but he found a runner called Juanita’s Boy. He decided to pass on another called Short Nothing.

“He’s won at this time slot every day last week,” Mitedio said. “This is the time for him. This is the time.” He grinned and ran to the betting agent with the boys. He waited and staggered across the betting lines, and he threw down all of his dollar bills, saving absolutely nothing for the day or for any amount of “in-cases” or “what-ifs.”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

“The start don’t matter none,” Mitedio instructed, gathering the boys around. “It’s the stretch, Hijos, that matters. The stretch call is what matters. That’s when we’ll see if Juanita’s Boy is the closer we’re looking for. The last stretch.”

“I don’t think you picked the right dog, Tio.”

“Shut it, Relles. You’re just like your old man. You gotta trust the handicap. You gotta trust it. It’s about following the numbers, boy. It’s about watching the dogs and the races closely. Whether the dog is a closer or a breaker. It’s about watching positions and the first three dogs that cross. That’s all it is. Goddamn it. I’m wasting my words.”

The boys got the Tio’s buzz. They began whooping and hollering. They screamed out the dog’s name.

“What’s the stretch, Tio?”

“Shut it, Neto,” Mitedio said. “Shut the hell up when a man is concentrating and thinking. Go, son! Go! Now’s the time, son! Go, son!”

As he drained his beers and spit at his own feet, Mitedio did not confess to the crew of boys he chose Juanita’s Boy because his mother’s middle name was Juanita, and so he had to put the money down on this day of her funeral. That was his duty as a son.

“What happened, Mitedio? What happened?” the boys said in another minute after the booming voice announced a “no-race.”

“It seems,” Mitedio said, “the dog has done up and died, Hijos. Ran into the pinche rabbit and then the fence and had to be put down. That’s what it looks like. Sometimes it happens. The races are not for soft dogs.”

One of the fosters began crying over the dog, crying for lost Juanita’s Boy.

“Don’t cry, Hijos,” Mitedio pleaded. “No-race means our dollar bills will be returned to us. It means we’ll get our money and we’ll go to the Mexican movies. First, though, we’ll put more money down. A man always puts more money down so quit your damn crying. You want the money out there, don’t you? For the movies?”

“But what about our dog, Tio?”

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

After the third race the crew miraculously had money for the Mexican movies over on 4th Street. Mitedio weighed his bets more carefully, saving dollar bills for admission, hot dogs and RC Colas.

Mitedio liked the Riverside Drive-In or the Mesa Drive-In, but mostly he liked The 96 downtown because they allowed little mocos in the truck bed.
Mitedio directed Relles to place the speaker on the driver side window and control the volume, and the crew was jealous.

“Why does he get the front?” Neto and the fosters asked.

“Because I say,” Mitedio answered, “and because he is the oldest. Now, pay attention, boys. They show your people’s movies. You have to learn your language. Español? Tu sabes? It’s a damn shame in the garage you boys speak such shitty Spanish. Your great grandfather would be rolling in his grave to know his people couldn’t follow what he said.”

And that was how Mitedio saw the Mexican movies, as school for the boys.

“These movies are about life, Hijos,” Mitedio lectured. “You watch them close and you’ll learn a lesson about your lives.”

Mostly they liked the classics, puro classicos, the westerns of Pedro Infante with his singing, his partying and his womanizing, his charro crooning. The crew couldn’t follow the plot, but they liked the action of Los Hijos de Maria Morales. Mitedio liked the cornball jokes.

“You know I met him in California,” Mitedio said before he downed his hot dog and drained his rum and RC Cola.

Relles asked, “Who, Tio?”

“Pedro Infantes.”

“You never met him.”

“I swear I met him,” Mitedio claimed. “In California. I swear. I was with my Tio working in the fields and he came to talk to the workers. We all saw him.” Mitedio was in love with those songs and those movies, reminding him of growing up in New Mexico. Reminding him of his people and of his dead family.

The concessions saved the crew of boys, Relles and Neto. The foot longs and the hamburgers. Arms full of RC Cola bottles and hot buttered popcorn. Soft pretzels, sno-cones and pizza slices. Endless strings of rope licorice alongside boxed candies.

“Rich, flavorful and satisfying,” little Neto repeated from the intermission trailers.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

After the first feature, just before the end of the second, Mitedio took off his boots and put his stinking feet up on the dash. His body ached like a cavity so he banished Relles to the back of the Ranchero with his brothers. And, finally, when the crew, wrapped up in Mitedio’s old horse blankets, had pulled off their sneaks and snuggled up next to the tire wells, Mitedio could think without bother or question. This was the time Pedro Infante crackled through the speaker and wailed Las Mananitas, and the time Tio sobbed for Juanita’s Boy. He held the speaker, turned up the volume to maximum, until the warm voices were all the boys heard.

Jenny Harmsen: They were taken along the Laugavegur, a 34-mile trail from Landmannalaugar to Þórsmörk.

DLN: Where does the impulse to shoot come from? Is there spontaneity in the way you wind up somewhere, or is it more calculated?

JH: I’d say it is pretty calculated… I almost always go to places I’ve researched beforehand. However, when wandering locally, my impulse to shoot tends to be more dulled than when I’m, say, somewhere like Iceland. New England is nice, but I prefer simpler, less fertile landscapes.

DLN: In shooting landscapes you can see so much more with your bare eye than through the lens. How do you start to trim away at the edges of your vision when looking at landscapes as vast as the ones in your photographs?

JH: As frustrating as that is as a traveler, as a photographer it can be very helpful. The lens does a great job of cutting out noise that may be interfering with what I’m trying to frame. There’s less room for debris or questionable content, and that’s important to me.

DLN: How do you decide on a place to start researching? Do you travel a lot to find that place first?

JH: There’s not really much to it. It’s usually a matter of coming
across places on the internet.

DLN: What is a perfect landscape to you? Or, rather, what is the perfect landscape to shoot? What makes something natural interesting to you? It doesn’t seem that you’re going for the flashiest landscapes, but something more full of life and, somehow, natural. Whereas some photographers might go for a striking waterfall that somehow seems mystical through the glamour they attribute to it with their lens. I see these photos as beautiful, and of beautiful spaces, but honest. Is there anything to that assessment at all?

JH: My taste is pretty narrow. The structure of Iceland’s landscape, for example, isn’t something you come across very often. It’s very spare and unassuming, not trying to convince you of anything. The
preferences I have for every other aspect of my life are the same as the
preferences I have for photographic subjects. In a way, it’s very personal. So, I suppose there is something to your assessment.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

by Anna Marie Shogren

Stepping regretfully away from a re-reading of Anne Of The Island in sitting down to this response, it is sure that I have been enjoying a moment of escapism in art. Socially irresponsible I may be, at least for this time being, spent at Green Gables. Though, sometimes a dip into a world where feminist triumph equals a lady’s choice to go to college instead of marrying immediately can be a revitalizing retreat. Or, that reset can be delivered in another, most uncomfortable way. New York/Seattle/France based choreographer, Heather Kravas, presented her work The Green Surround, January 7-9, 2011, at P.S. 122’s Coil Festival. It began beautifully enough, this piece of compounding repetitions, yet it veers into a less than gentle route.

In a small dark theater, 9 dancers, all women, lean against the wall, nonchalant and delicate; wearing iconically glamorous sunglasses, headscarves, and lipstick, and straight away referencing an idealized feminine perfection that won’t quit. Are they Jackie O. or a Vanessa Beecroft piece? Stepping out into the space, hands lifted as if freshly washed, their faces tick back and forth, alternating focus from counting hand to counting hand. They articulate each finger with the phrase “Lick boot” repeating on one side and “Boot lick” on the other. The crisp white nurse-like dresses beckon Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. The to-do list established, the repetition accelerates and the voices finally clutter. The canned sounds of a harp announces relief, or at least momentarily until the next physically grueling and sexually humiliating section begins. And on it goes.

Shedding the dresses, they are all in classic, black, short-sleeved leotards. Bob Fosse or Beyonce? Or Jane Fonda? White gym socks are added for a not-so-coy ballet bar against the contrasting black and white wall. Blank faces ride above exaggerated hip circles. The counted perfection of the enduring phrases last plenty long for the audience to compare and contrast every detail between each woman’s displayed body. Trusting the keen intelligence already demonstrated by the casts’ capabilities with the precise and complexly varied reiterations, I participate readily in the degrading evaluation. There is a pre-pubescent boy sitting next to me, so I switch to imagining his assessment.

After taking a short, or long, piss against the back wall, the group adds a doll-like crinoline to the uniform ensemble for a section of rapid and forceful hip thrusts that file through further hyper-feminized images of blow-up dolls, Lady Macbeths, and the damsels of silent films; all overly familiar references even behind the rather violent energy. And before the ladies leave for a high-heeled march around the building, they set the metronome for extra assurance of perfection.

While kneeling on all fours, with a service bell just below each face, the dancers whip between arching and curling their backs, in yogic cat and cow poses imprinted with Marquis de Sade style posturing. The individuals take turns popping up with their hair flinging back, making quilt-like patterns that blossom through the grid formation, and they shout, “Boo … Boo hoo,” with the cadence and volume of a drill squad. I laughed, coolly, here at this intense amplification, even while noting the seriously unhealthy physicality of the material, such that is sure to leave a reverberation. Each mistake is punished by the sounding of a bell and a return to the beginning of the sequence. The ten-year-old beside me is rubbing his brow, as though he’s had a long day at the office, though he is probably just wishing for an escape. The women on the lit side of the space must be needing the same. I wonder if my empathy for the performers in this live situation would be so strong if Kravas had chosen more innovative movement over these, so tiresomely common and generically sexualized.

The piece finally turns its last lap as the dancers, in a row downstage, clutch their clothes and a single shoe over their naked vulnerability, together reciting stock phrases. The words, signify both submission and countering hostility, are structured like guidance toward feminine grace and manners. The group leaves and returns to bow and I wait for the person in the performer to emerge, but they are only emptied, reeling in their real human exhaustion.

Though, I am continuing to unspool my thoughts surrounding this show, and continuing to feel the pull of sweet Anne, at the curtain call I clapped my best, sounding my support. I wanted only for those nine women to know that I was sorry for all that had just happened and, still, impressed with their generosity to the choreographer and this content. Or, maybe, I was only hoping my compassion looked as good as that of the other girls in the crowd.

first photo by Ryan Jensen, second by Erin Baiano

Dreams received via text message:

“Did we ever drive in a forest at night and then fight our way through an abandoned church? Did I already describe this happening in a dream? I think I saw a ghost last nite.”

“Are you sure? Never like a church full of bushes and mannequins? While we were sort of being menaced by maniacs? I feel like we did this at some point.”

“No apocalypse – just desolate and a scene urging escape. Long winding forest road dimly lit and then a grotto in an overgrown but not abandoned church lobby. Then I woke up and think I saw a ghost with a beard and a malevolent look.”

“You could come get in bed too! = I thought that was very exciting last time. (Don’t think I’m supposed to say this – feeling a bit priapic this morning). Yeah sleeping late – both symptom and cause of depression.”

“Come over and I’ll make us coffee here while getting up? I’m just waking up.”

Dobby Gibson – “The First Billion Years”
Rachel Zucker – “Please Alice Notley Tell Me How to Be Old”
Paul Siegell – “And the Astronaut in the Airport Piano Bar Sings
Ander Monson – “SHORT SERMON ON/FOR THE SERIOUS NUMBER”
Ben Mirov – [untitled]
Jackie Clark – “The Boat to Shore is Still Arriving at Shore”
Scott Abels – “Anxiety”
Laura Sims – an excerpt from “Post”
Steve Peacock – “Commuters”
Kyle McCord – “Love Poem in San Antonio with Mythical Animals”
Nathan Hoks – “Voice of the Interior”
Bart Schneider – “Monk’s Salt”
Adam Fell – “Reckoner”
Lily Ladewig – “Free Diving”
xTx – “Last Place”
Matt Mauch – “Think of these awful years softly, as a lacy time preceding the water wars”
Matthew Daddona – “Poem of Leaving”
Christopher Salerno – “ATM”
Allyson Paty – “At Variance”
Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo – “International Film Class Essay
Gregory Lawless – “People Need to Talk Less on Planes”
Bradley Paul – “What Kind of Mythopoeic Measurement Are You?”
Kate Durbin – “The Hills”
Christie Ann Reynolds – “No Ponies for Failures”
Bianca Stone – “You Were Lost in the Delta Quadrant”
Matthew Pennock – “After Shooting the Texas Chupacabra”
Brandon Shimoda – “Rainbow”
Matthew Savoca – “i wrote a poem about our e-mails lately”
Wendy Xu – “You Are Not Who They Wanted You To Be”
Sommer Browning – “The Beers”
Ricardo Maldonado – “The Project of the Hands”
Daniel Khalastchi – “Dead Hear (Summer Ode)”
Noah Eli Gordon – “Four Allusive Horses”
Mark Leidner – “Pearls Before Swine”
Lightsey Darst – “Catatonia”
Maggie Evans – “How Not To Need Someone”
Kathleen Rooney – “Robinson’s Hometown”
MC Hyland – “Strange Rock Shapes Behind the Highlighting of Leaves”
Natalie Eilbert – “Machine Machine”
Kate Greenstreet – “Bad Ring”
Heather Christle – “The Spider”
James Cihlar – “Twin Cities”
Elisa Gabbert – from “The Self Unstable”
J. Bradley – from “The Bones of You”
Laynie Browne – “September Shall Never End
Jeannine Hall Gailey – “Anime Girl Delays Adulthood”
Eric Gudas – “Poem With Words by Jules Supervielle”
Michael Ogletree – “Anything Goes, I Guess”
Michael Robins – “Anne Kepler Come Home”
Eric Lindley – “Sometimes It’s Painful Even to be Awake”
Ish Klein – “The Garden”
Maureen Thorson – “For the Long Haul”
J.A. Tyler – “[the fourth house /// re-burned]“
Robert Ostrom – “A Dedication to the Rich is in the Ark”
Cara Benson – [“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine,"]
Becca Klaver – “B®and Loyalty”
Henri Cole – “Away”
Andrew Durbin – “The Buffalo”

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Episode #42: Alethea Black reads from I Knew You’d Be Lovely

Episode #41: Amelia Gray reads from THREATS

Episode #40: Alexander Maksik reads from You Deserve Nothing

Episode #39: Matt Hart reads from Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless

Episode #38: Helen DeWitt reads from Lightning Rods

Episode #37: Jesse Browner reads from Everything Happens Today

Episode #36: Leigh Stein reads from The Fallback Plan

Episode #35: Ben Marcus reads from The Flame Alphabet

Episode #34: Tyler McMahon reads from How the Mistakes Were Made

Episode #33: Daryl Gregory reads from Unpossible and Other Stories

Episode #32: Héctor Tobar reads from The Barbarian Nurseries

Episode #31: Vanessa Veselka reads from Zazen

Episode #30: Bruce MacHart reads from Men in the Making

Episode #29: B.J. Hollars reads from Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence, and the Last Lynching in America

Read “Diving Into the Wreck” and hear it read by Anne Waldman over at poets.org.

“A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you…where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.” – Adrienne Rich

Today we’re bringing you a great poem by Laura Mullen titled “Ghost Mist.” Laura Mullen is a Professor at Louisiana State University. She is the author of six books: The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject and Dark Archive [University of California Press, 2011], The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, and she has been awarded a Board of Regents ATLAS grant, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships and is a frequent visitor at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her work has been widely anthologized and is included in American Hybrid (Norton), and forthcoming in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. Recent prose has been collected in Civil Disobediences: Poetics & Politics in Action, and published in Ploughshares and The Fairytale Review. Undersong, the composer Jason Eckardt’s setting of “The Distance (This)” (from Subject) premiered in New York and Helsinki and was released on Mode records in 2011. New work is out or forthcoming in Action Yes!,Cerise Press, Ghost Town, the Denver Quarterly, Viz Arts, OR and New American Writing. Mullen is the special interest delegate in Creative Writing for the Modern Language Association for 2012-2014 and a contributing editor for the on-line poetry site The Volta. Her seventh book is forthcoming from Otis Editions in 2012.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Weds. March 28
10am-1pm and 2-5pm
Hands-on Chapbook Workshops: Binding and Printing
With Barbara Henry and Karen Randall
Registration required: 212 481-0295

6:30pm
Panel Discussion: Community and Publishing
MC Hyland, Minnesota Center for Book Arts
Guy Pettit, Flying Object
Chuck Stebelton, Woodland Pattern

Thursday, March 29
Noon-7pm
Book Fair: Day 1
C Level
For a full list of participating presses, visit our Publishers page!

12–3pm
C Level
Lunch Poems–marathon poetry reading

12pm-1pm – PeopleHerd’s Readings at Milk&Roses:
Brandon Downing
Guy Pettit
Montana Ray
Bryan Beck

1pm-2pm – Stain of Poetry:
Paige Taggart
Sasha Fletcher
Alina Gregorian
Cori Copp

2pm-3pm – Triptych:
Nat Otting
Elizabeth Clark Wessel
Nate Pritts
Krystal Languell
Adam Robinson

3pm
C Level
Workshop: Nuts and Bolts for Publishers
Ryan Murphy, Reservoir Editions
Iris Cushing and Elizabeth Clark Wessel, Argos Books
Organized by Poetry Society of America

Free registration required for all workshops.
To register, e-mail ksullivan@gc.cuny.edu.

5pm
C Level
Workshop: Digital Chapbooks
Adam Robinson, Publishing Genius
Martin Rock, Epiphany
Lucy Ives, Triple Canopy
Organized by the CUNY MFA Affiliation Group

Free registration required for all workshops.
To register, e-mail ksullivan@gc.cuny.edu.

7pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre
Panel Discussion: State of Translation: Trends in Innovative Publishing
Ammiel Alcalay, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Esther Allen, Baruch College
Susan Bernofsky, PEN Translation Committee
Ivan Herceg and Damir Šodan, POEZIJA Magazine, Croatia
Anna Moschovakis, Ugly Duckling Presse
Eliot Weinberger, translator
Moderated by Ana Božičević, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Organized by The Center for the Humanities

Friday, March 30
Noon-7pm
Book Fair: Day 2
C Level
For a full list of participating presses, visit our Publishers page!

12–3pm
C Level
Lunch Poems–marathon poetry reading

12pm-1pm – Popsickle:
Steven Karl
JD Scott
Angela Veronica Wong
Saeed Jones

1pm-2pm – EOAGH:
Ana Bozicevic
Filip Marinovich
Andrew Levy
Christopher Schmidt
Jennifer Bartlett
Mina Pam Dick (aka Hildebrand Pam Dick)
Suzanne Wise

2pm-3pm – Earshot:
Farrah Field
Niina Pollari
J. Hope Stein

3pm
C Level
Workshop: Nuts and Bolts for Writers
Jean Hartig, Poets & Writers Magazine
Cara Benson, Dusie Kollektiv and Belladonna*
Nathaniel Otting, minutes BOOKS and Agnes Fox
Nate Pritts, H_NGM_N BKS
Organized by Poets & Writers

Free registration required for all workshops.
To register, e-mail ksullivan@gc.cuny.edu.

5pm
C Level
Workshop: Chapbooks Saved My Life
Brian Teare, Albion Books
Organized by Poets House

Free registration required for all workshops.
To register, e-mail ksullivan@gc.cuny.edu.

7pm
Proshansky Auditorium and Lobby
Reading: PSA Chapbook Fellowship
Sarah Arvio, Timothy Donnelly, EJ Garcia, Deborah Landau, David Lehman, Marni Ludwig, Alison Roh Park, Gerald Stern, and Angela Veronica Wong
Introduced by Alice Quinn

I don’t think we’ve ever published a poem about a drinker. Though there are lots of poems on this topic, many of them are too judgmental for my liking. But here’s one I like, by Jeanne Wagner, of Kensington, California, especially for its original central comparison.

My mother was like the bees

because she needed a lavish taste
on her tongue,
a daily tipple of amber and gold
to waft her into the sky,
a soluble heat trickling down her throat.
Who could blame her
for starting out each morning
with a swig of something furious
in her belly, for days
when she dressed in flashy lamé
leggings like a starlet,
for wriggling and dancing a little madly,
her crazy reels and her rumbas,
for coming home wobbly
with a flicker of clover’s inflorescence
still clinging to her clothes,
enough to light the darkness
of a pitch-black hive.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry Magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2010 by Jeanne Wagner from her most recent book of poetry, In the Body of Our Lives , Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010. Poem reprinted by permission of Jeanne Wagner and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2012 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
******************************

Today we’ve got a poem that was originally published in InDigest, Andrew Durbin’s “The Buffalo,” which you can read in Issue #22 of InDigest.

Andrew Durbin co-edits O’clock Press and its journal, CLOCK. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in Antennae, >kill author, Spiral Orb, Washington Square, and elsewhere. “The Buffalo” is from a sequence of poems titled Birthday. He is currently editing a short anthology of essays on contemporary poetry titled Our Beautiful Century (O’clock 2012). He lives in New York.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Today we’ve got a poem by Henri Cole titled “Away,” which comes from his most recent collection, Touch [Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011]. Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1956. He has published eight collections of poetry, including Middle Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has received many awards for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lenore Marshall Award. He teaches at Ohio State University and is poetry editor of The New Republic. He lives in Boston.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

photo of Henri Cole by Susan Unterberg

Tuesday: Chapbook Release Party w/ Jackie Clarke, B.C. Edwards, Steven Karl & Angela Veronica Wong, and Amy Lawless at Public Assembly, 7pm

Wednesday: Kadija Sesay, Margaret Diehl, Victoria Lynne McCoy, and Niina Pollari read at Cornelia Street Café, 6pm

Thursday: Mark Leyner discusses his new novel The Sugar Frosted Nutsack w/ Sam Lipsyte at Greenlight Bookstore, 7:30pm

Friday: Issue Release Party for Bright Pink Mosquito w/ readings by Christopher Rizzo, Debrah Morkun, Russell Dillon, Tracey McTague, Ben Mazer, Michael Peters, Jess Mynes and more at the Poetry Project, 10pm

Saturday: The Enclave Reading Series 5-Year Anniversary Extravaganza w/ Jim Freed, Jason Napoli Brooks, and Scott Geiger at The Cake Shop, 4pm

Sunday: Writers Read w/ Kim Powers, Alan Herman, Laura Kelly, Odette Heideman, and Andreé Lockwood at The Gallery at LPR, 6pm

June 13, 2012
InDigest Issue #24 Launch Party
at the Gallery at LPR
7pm | Free

July 22, 2012
InDigest Reading at the New York Poetry Festival
w/ Amaranth Borsuk, Mark Leidner, and Ronaldo V. Wilson
at Governor’s Island
3:30pm | $5 for the entire day.

August 09, 2012
InDigest presents An Evening of Flash Fiction
w/ John Jodzio, Robb Todd, and more
at the Gallery at LPR
7pm | Free

For updates on future readings sign up for our e-mail list e-mail newsletter @ InDigestMag.com. For more information on supporting InDigest 1207 or reading at an InDigest 1207 event please e-mail editors [at] indigestmag.com.

Previous readers at InDigest events:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sam Apple, Meakin Armstrong, Angela Ball, Julia Bartz, Matt Bell, Amy Bergen, Alethea Black, Christopher Bollen, Sarah J. Bridgins, Melissa Broder, Stephen Burt, Peter Bognanni, J. Bradley, Giao Buu, Michelle Cheever, Kim Chinquee, Jackie Clark, Deborah Clearman, Evan Commander, CA Conrad, Michael Czyzniejewski, Matthew Daddona, Nick Demske, Paul D. Dickinson, Natalie Eilbert, Meggie Elder, Adam Fell, Joshua Ferris, Sasha Fletcher, Seth Fried, Zachary German, Autumn Giles, Adam Golaski, Noah F. Grossman, Jess Grover, JC Hallman, Jim Hanas, James Hannaham, Paul Harding, Lech Harris, Matt Hart, Geoff Herbach, Paul Gregory Himmelein, Nathan Hoks, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Laird Hunt, Lauren Ireland, Marlon James, Jessica Francis Kane, Steven Karl, Becca Klaver, Jennifer L. Knox, Lily Ladewig, Krystal Languell, Dorothea Lasky, Gregory Lawless, Paul Legault, Brad Liening, Ada Limon, Robert Lopez, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, Emily St. John Mandel, Stephen Massmilla, Monica McClure, Wayne Miller, Ander Monson, Aaron Michael Morales, Daniel Nester, Franz Nicolay, Jena Osman, Sam Osterhout, Elsbeth Pancrazi, Matthew Pennock, Arthur Phillips, Helen Phillips, Niina Pollari, Andrew Porter, Nate Pritts, John Reed, Martin Rock, Dana Rossi, Christopher Salerno, Robyn Sara, Matthew Savoca, Charlotte Seley, Kim Gek Lin Short, Paul Siegel, Laura Sims, Neil Smith, Leigh Stein, Bianca Stone, Darin Strauss, Justin Taylor, Robb Todd, Rodrigo Toscano, Deb Olin Unferth, Monica Wendel, Ronaldo V. Wilson, Rebecca Wolff, John Wray, Erica Wright, Rachel Zucker.

Cataclysm Baby
Matt Bell
118 pages
Mud Luscious Press

By David S. Atkinson

For me, thoughts of fatherhood are never far from thoughts of cataclysm. However, most people do not hold this particular view. I understand that my odd reluctance regarding fatherhood is probably the result of immaturity that still lingers (if not dominates) my brain at the age of thirty-five. Either way, examining aspects of fatherhood within the context of a strange and vaguely defined cataclysm did not seem a completely insane idea to me when I picked up the apparently baby-name-book-formatted Cataclysm Baby by Matt Bell. In fact, it seemed rather interesting.

Just take a look at this haunting opening portion from the section titled “Hali, Halle, Hamako”:

The day came when we could no longer hide the glistening sight of our daughter’s flippers, nor the secret of her skin, its oils and fur.

Like the other parents afflicted before us, we took her to the lonely end of the island, to the cliffs hung high above the breaking surg. There my wife kissed our daughter’s wet nose, after which I bound tight her swaddling, stilling her wide limbs to her sleek middle, and then together we let our baby tumble from our hands, through the tall air, into the swallowing sea.

If this isn’t the perfect picture of fatherhood in the apocalypse, then I have no idea what such would be.

I literally, without exaggeration, love this book. As seems pretty self-explanatory from the section above, this book impressed me on a sentence-language level, paragraph-flow level, larger-scope concept level, and more. The tales inside Cataclysm Baby are dark, yet tender at the same time.

Frankly, analyzing facets of parenthood in an apocalyptic setting is interesting enough simply in its imagining. Beyond that, though, it also seems to be a reflection (definitely projected through a warping lens) of how all parents raise their children in a world that is constantly changing. I mean, the parents in Cataclysm Baby are torn between ideas of the parental roles they were taught before the cataclysm and the reality of the world they now live in. At the same time, that seems (to me) to be a magnified version of how all parents formed ideas by watching their own parents and then have to try to apply those in a world where it doesn’t always make sense anymore.

For example, consider this queasily unsettling bit from “Justina, Justine, Justise”:

For the first crime my daughters took only my thumb. They refused to apologize for their aggression, even after I confronted them, after I tossed their bedroom and confiscated the hatchet hidden in their toy box, beneath their miniature gavel. When lined up and accused beside her sisters, all the oldest would say was that my trial had been fair, their court complete even without my presence: One daughter for a judge, one for the prosecution, one for the defense.

My middle daughter, she spit onto what was left of our thread-worn carpet, said my defense had been particularly difficult, considering my obvious guilt.

She said, Perhaps you should tell our mother you cut your thumb at work, so that she will not have to know why we took it.

Whatever this unnamed man did against his wife, though we can certainly speculate, I’m sure this sort of child-dispensed parental punishment was not a routine feature of his childhood household.

Or, in the additional or alternative, consider this downright disturbing section from “Beatrice, Bella, Blaise”:

The older was the first to show us the scars, the archeology of her sister-scribed history, hard-written by their cutting, their stabbing, their sawing. The younger better hid her sister’s handiwork, bore well the bands of reddened flesh and puckered scars beneath shirt, beneath sleeve, beneath shorts and underwear.

Even in the bath we barely noticed.

Even when the younger found trouble standing, even then we refused to believe.

Always the younger had limped, we argued. Always she had struggled to balance. Always her ears had been notched, her fingers a crooked nine.

What trust we had in the older then! What light touch she had, what blinding perfect smile made to answer out questions!

It had taken the younger’s retribution to reveal the older’s now-avenged crime, took the continuing destruction of that first body for us to discover the slower attrition of the second, and so afterward what right to anger did we have toward the younger, even t the shocking sight of the diminished older, our beloved eldest?

After all, what parent could have had a childhood that would prepare them to even conceive of, much less detect and prevent, this kind of sibling mutilation?

I’m certain I am rambling, but I’m sure that the idea of what I am trying to say is pretty evident. Really, Bell is the only one who can speak to all of this this, and the way that he speaks to it is through the words, sentences, and paragraphs of Cataclysm Baby.

Just read it and you’ll get what I mean.

***

Watch the full trailer for Prometheus! http://on.io9.com/QlfB

Video of that B-52’s low flyby http://t.co/mB8df7WR

The abandoned Hollywood bunker built for Hitler http://pulse.me/s/7913F

How a Particle Accelerator Works: Explained With Donuts and Chocolate Bars http://pulse.me/s/76z5N

Six writing tips from John Steinbeck http://j.mp/x6tKtW

Hipster logic problems http://j.mp/xRH0n5

“The fact The Lorax is a ‘hit’ and John Carter is a ‘flop’ makes me want to stab everybody.” http://pulse.me/s/7aRI8

Your Brain on Fiction: “Reading produces a vivid simulation of reality.” http://ow.ly/9LFp9

Agents intercept 11 lbs. of pot headed to St. Martin’s Press http://mbist.ro/GFi60Q

Air Display update makes iPad a Retina monitor for Mac, enables HiDPI mode http://j.mp/GCSujy

“Brains [of introverts] are sensitive to overstimulation,” Jon Ronson on Quiet by Susan Cain http://bit.ly/GGFNCD

Maryland’s Enchanted Forest is like Candyland after a neutron bomb strike http://on.io9.com/EPNB

Book Series That Started Out as Trilogies http://on.io9.com

A slice of the Universe with *200,000* galaxies! http://is.gd/FzYeFn

“I’d Rather Play a Boring RPG” http://dlvr.it/1LzVWN

***

We’re bringing you a poem from issue #17 of InDigest today. “B®and Loyalty” by Becca Klaver. You can read this poem along with another in the issue archive.

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal [Kore Press, 2010] and the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape [greying ghost press, 2009]. She’s a founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books and a PhD student in the Literatures in English program at Rutgers University. She holds previous degrees from the University of Southern California and Columbia College Chicago. Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, she now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

Cara Benson’s poem we’re featuring today is a great example of a poem that’s able to grow and bloom in an audio format. This is why it’s worth hearing poetry out loud. You will never take her poem on a cold read and read it the way she is able to. If you’d like to give it a shot, you can read the full text of this poem at Summer Stock, where it was originally published.

Cara Benson is the author of (made) with BookThug and Protean Parade forthcoming with Black Radish Books. “The Secret of Milk,” her treatise on the possibilities of lyric advocacy within the tainted world of agribusiness, is out with eohippus labs.

InDigest’s Poem of the Day podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. You can get a free audiobook download at AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. You can also get the podcast for free on iTunes and on the Stitcher, Smart Radio app. For more updates you can also become a fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Go here for past episodes of the Poem of the Day Podcast.

The festival will feature performances from Quartet New Generation, JACK Quartet, loadbang, Kathleen Supové, and the fantastic SIGNAL, all performing some of the most interesting new composers from around the world. Take a look after the jump for the full schedule.

This years festival will also be recorded by WQXR’s Q2 for audio streaming after the performances.

Tuesday, April 17, 6:30 PM: Opening Night Party and Salon
Free with a Festival pass, the opening night party and salon at the Paula Cooper Gallery kicks off the 2012 Festival with drinks and live music, featuring live re-mixes of music from this year’s Festival by Preshish Moments’s Michael Carter, and loadbang.

Wednesday, April 18, 7:30 PM: Quartet Face Off: Jack Quartet + Quartet New Generation
For the first night of the Festival, MATA pits the “exceptional” and “thrillingly vital” JACK string quartet against Quartet New Generation (QNG), Berlin’s “mind-blowing” recorder collective, First Prize Winners of the 2004 Concert Artist Guild International Competition. The cosmopolitan program features two of MATA’s three Festival commissions — 2011 Rome Prize-winner Huck Hodge’s new work for the JACK Quartet, and Shanghai-based Yi Qin’s new piece for QNG — along with Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri’s (Greece/Germany) motorized piece for QNG, and fresh pieces from composer/pianist/improviser Gordon Beeferman, Hugi Gudmunsson (Iceland/Denmark), José Luis Hurtado (Mexico), Oscar Bianchi (Switzerland), Yotam Haber (Israel/USA) and Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri (Greece/Germany). Each night begins with one part of Jacob Cooper’s newly-created hypnotic video series, Triptych.

Thursday, April 19, 7:30 PM: Responsible Parties II: Composer/Performers Today
The second evening of the Festival goes hands-on with performances by a diverse collection of today’s vibrant composer/performers, anchored by two large-scale installations with sculptural elements and massive hand-constructed instruments. Cecilia Lopez (Argentina) presents Mechanical Music for Sheet Metal and Eli Keszler mounts a monumental collection of piano mechanisms taken apart and re-organized as a motorized, whirring, machine for Cold Pin. In both cases, live musicians resonate and play against these giant structures. Matt Marks presents a sneak preview of his new pop opera on love and religion in America, The Little Death: Vol. 2, with Mellissa Hughes; Kate Soper presents her psychoneurotic ten-minute microdrama, Only the words themselves mean what they say; and Lesley Flanigan performs Snow, for speaker electronics and voice. New music’s mixed quartet loadbang serves as house band for the evening. Jacob Cooper presents the second installation of his newly-created video work, Triptych: II. Black or White.

Friday, April 20, 7:30 PM: Signs and Signals
The Festival closes with a tour-de-force of new works for large and small ensembles featuring SIGNAL, called “one of the most vital groups of its kind” by the New York Times, and led by the phenomenal conductor Brad Lubman. MATA presents the final commission of 2012: a large-scale work by Francesco Filidei, a Paris-based Italian composer who is taking Europe by storm. Also featured: the vicious, heart-stopping Viola Quartet by Eric Wubbels, David Coll’s Position, Influence for soprano and electronics based on the speeches of Charles de Gaulle, Alex Freeman’s gorgeous work for solo Kantele (the Finnish plucked zither, played by Finland’s Eva Alkula); and the Spanish-based Mexican composer Ivan Ferrer-Orozco’s glittering, salsa-influenced work for player piano and live pianist, performed by the inimitable Kathleen Supové.

This week on the InDefinite Podcast we have Alethea Black reading a story from her new collection I Knew You’d Be Lovely, about a songwriting team trying to get back together for the sake of a friend. This episode, like a couple others we’ve done, was read to me over the phone, which is always fun for me. I feel closer to the story. You, however, hear the story in a bit of a tinny fashion. I’m a fan of that kind of retro-esque sound, but if you are not, I’m sorry that the audio quality isn’t super high on this one. But, it’s a great story, and that’s all that really matters.

Alethea Black’s work has won the Arts & Letters Prize, has been cited as distinguished in The Best American Short Stories, and has appeared in numerous literary magazines. Her debut collection of short stories, I Knew You’d Be Lovely [Broadway Books/Random House, 2011] has been called “smart … full of heart” by Joan Silber and “downright brilliant” by Robert Olen Butler. LOVELY was a Barnes & Noble ‘Discover Great New Writers’ pick and an Oprah.com book-of-the-week. You can read an excerpt from her new collection here.

You can hear past episodes of InDefinite Podcast here, or you can subscribe to the podcast for free on iTunes. This podcast is sponsored by Audible.com. Listeners of the InDefinite Podcast get a free audiobook download by going to AudibleTrial.com/InDigest. Also, InDefinite Podcast is now on Stitcher, Smart Radio. You can listen on your iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and WebOS phones. More about Stitcher at the app store or Stitcher.com. You can also keep up with InDigest at our Facebook and Twitter.