I started a Facebook group for those realize that the greatest ill facing our society today is neither terrorism nor AIDS nor lack of affordable health care. It is the Global Hit feature on Public Radio International’s program The World. Below is some background on the menace. If you’d like to join, visit the Global Hit Must Be Stopped! page. Read the rest of this entry »
Since I got laid off, I have done the following.
What I haven’t done.
I’m fucking Picasso, man.
Looking at my list of the 20 most popular posts on this blog since I started it five years ago is instructive. Of what I have no idea. But what I think is important among those things I’ve written and what the blog’s (largely accidental) readers do is worlds apart.
Wow. Check out what I just did.
Writing is formal, so I just got sucked into a form (the hoi polloi will never understand the hoidy toidy). But although what I just said is true in places, now that I look again and more carefully, My Adoring Public and I are not really that far apart. The Romantic notion of the artist’s worth being measurable in direct proportion to his distance from public understanding is a pernicious and enduring one, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »
Helping a friend brainstorm entry of her marketing and design firm into social media consultancy without coming off all claim-jumpy or bloody-turnip-squeezy. It goes without saying that I have no idea what I’m talking about. But this is a blog and I am me, so talk I shall, har-char-aiee. Read the rest of this entry »
Because I am still in the process of publishing my poetry – sonnets, lyric poems, translations – in other people’s magazines, including online publications, I have deleted all the poems I could find that I’ve posted here. The posts I’ve written announcing publications and linking to them I’ve kept. Posts about poetry I have also retained. Finally, I’ve kept those poems by the greatest poet the world has ever known, Bob Folder. Read the rest of this entry »
The ladies and gentlemen of Full of Crow have published my sonnet, “Our ship shivers and splits on black rocks,” in their latest issue. Marvel at it, why don’t you?
Photo courtesy of Terry Reis – Surf Shooter Hawaii
My lungs rebel against the burning cane
As lightning splits the power pole across
The field. Oahu starts to steam with rain,
A silver ship, all wrapped in moonlit floss.
My father walks its deck, the sailor’s gait
That keeps him steady on the rolling ocean
Does precious little to keep his heart from breaking
Looking down at me, his ailing son,
A little boy, as fragile as a kitten,
Whose storms cannot be ridden like the sea.
No hero’s worth of courage makes a difference,
He cannot battle what he cannot see.
Then suddenly my labored breathing eases,
The latest storm to hit Hawaiʻi ceases.
Published in the Bakersfield, CA, sonnet magazine, SPSM&H, in 2003.
The following books are all memoirs, written by the people in them, set exclusively or overwhelmingly in Paris. These are not books about Paris but about a life in Paris. These are, by and large, not autobiographies covering an entire life. They are about a person’s life in Paris. Nor are they novels. Oh, and the list contains no “epicurean” memoirs, which are, without exception, execrable.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
The Awakening Twenties by Gorham Munson
Being Geniuses Together by Robert McAlmon Read the rest of this entry »
It’s my great pleasure to read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast again. I read it every year, usually in the Fall, perhaps as an unconscious result of the opening lines of the book.
Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. We would have to shut the window in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe.
“(T)he cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe” is a perfect sentence. Read the rest of this entry »
Monsterball dish, church and camerlengo. This photo shows the church filled with water and a sculpture in the dish. Ideally, the dish has water but nothing else and the church is dry.
Monsterball, also called 1913, is a new craze that’s sweeping the nation, and also other nations, as well as two principalities. Although adaptability is a hallmark of Monsterball, the rapid growth of interest in the game has made it necessary to establish rules and scoring for league play.
MONSTERBALL | Rules for the League of Unusual Players
Having a background in literature, it is my pleasure to go all meta on your asses, by quoting a post extensively featuring a quotation by BL Ochman on her blog of my email.
You Need to Hire Curt Hopkins or Help Him Get a Job
People! This is inexcusable! Curt Hopkins, experienced communications professional and journalist, needs a job. And you need to hire him or help him get one! Get busy.
This post is inspired by an email I got from him today, and L Eiseley’s allegory, “The Star Thrower“. Read them both and then contact Curt with work.
by Bob Folder
In the pulp industry
Success has a very distinctive perfume
The perfume of Eucalyptus globulus
Nurtured and expertly grown by Portucel
In its vast forests
In Portugal
These special trees
Provide the best of white pulps
The extraordinary efficiency
Of Portucel Industrial’s factories and methods
Does the rest
Ensuring not only the highest standard of quality
But also making us
One of the leading suppliers to Europe
And to make sure
That our unique performances
Are environmentally friendly
Every year
We invest in cleaner and safer facilities
COMMERCIAL
Opening shot:
Long shot of tree tops, golden sunlight filters through the Appalachian pine tree forest as camera pans down to Woman in long 19th century dress, she is bent over the railroad tracks. Birds can be heard chirping. Hillbilly music swells.
Voiceover: (think of “The Waltons”) “I remember the way breakfast smelled, the way Ma used to make it…”
Camera: pans around to the front of “Ma” to reveal a hideous crone with no teeth, running sores on her face and a thick halo of buzzing flies. She cackles softly to herself, absorbed in her work. An outhouse shimmers in the gathering heat of the day.
Voiceover: “Ya know, they tell me now that The Japanese are makin’ some new-fangled toilet bacon…”
Camera: Pans to reveal “Ma” scooping ladles full of indefinable black goo from a steaming, fly-covered bucket onto the railroad ties in the sun.
From: Curt Hopkins
Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 1999 2:27 PM
To: Everybody at Ask Jeeves
Subject: for the new folks
Let’s not forget Hans, the recently paroled weird old janitor guy who’s recently jumped on the Jeeves team! Don’t forget to say hi if you’re working late and you see him on a break, rolled up in the Grammar Saloon in his carpet remnant, slaking his thirst with a plastic waterglass full of Ol’ Grandad and taking the edge off a ravenous hunger with a piece of that hamb’ger sammich he loves so much all folded up into the same square of tinfoil he brings in every night. Read the rest of this entry »
As I hardly need to tell you, the greatest poet and dramatist the world has ever known is not Shakespeare or Edmund Spencer. It is, instead, Oregon’s own Bob Folder. Although Bob is super old, he has never stood still. He goes with the flow. Man. And the flow is down the urinal trough of the Internets. Bob exists in a number of places in the Internets. I’m going to list them here so you can look at them and love him more.
Chiliphone. He was Director of Communications for this enormously successful the Internets company.
Dada: Profile of Bob and poems. This Italian magazine couldn’t get enough of Bob. And for good reason.
Dada: Poems by Bob. What’d I tell you?
Exquisite Corpse: Bob is mentioned. He is a presence. Read the rest of this entry »
Two of my poems, “The Sod House” and “Two Visions of the Infinite in Seattle” have been published in Issue #104 of the Anglo-Texan publication Gloom Cupboard.
Marvel at my poetryness.
One time, not long ago, as an exercise, I wrote a biography for a fictional poet, Roberto Butterick. A few of us had created Roberto, and had written a handful of poems to be attributed to him, as an exemplar of everything unappealing to us about contemporary poets and published poetry. He was unfamiliar with the history of his art and with poets of other countries and cultures, he had not mastered any of the technical tools of prosody, he was academic, uninventive and obsessed with the niceties of his own life. He proclaimed a vague political radicalism and was intoxicated by the notion of ethnicity, which he claimed rather unconvincingly for himself.
Although it might seem lazy and anachronistic to do so I do so. I have condescended and deemed it necessary. I have wheedled and cajoled, bullied and pleaded. I have come to no conclusions. The jury is still out, to return momentarily, hung. In the meantime I dangle, undecided, before my very nose, unwilling to back down.
I am jumping up and down inside my skin, full to bursting, as the toilets whizz by overhead.
I walk hand in hand with the jellyfilled donut of apprehension. Squeeze my hind-end.
The Internationalist is a group of poets, painters, novelists, historians, sculptors, scholars, designers, stylists, trade-paper sub-editors, interior decorators, wolves, fairies, millionaire patrons of art, sadists, nymphomaniacs, bridge sharks, anarchists, women living on alimony, tire formers, educational cranks, economists, hopheads, dipsomaniac playwrights, nudists, restaurant keepers, stockbrokers and dentists who have banded together in a loose confederation for the purposes of pissing on the door-handles of what passes for art and society in this sub-human rookery of modern life.
I am very relieved to be able to tell you that the CPB has found a person I believe to be a capable new leader in Andrew Ford Lyons. Andrew has the decency, self-respect and common sense to be from the Pacific Northwest and the sense of adventure to live and work in this “United Kingdom” we hear so much about. Andrew has a background in web design (the new CPB site is sharp) and activism. Despite the latter, I believe he is the guy for the job. (You can read my farewell post on the redesigned site.)
Andrew is adding a focus on technological tools of use to bloggers in dangerous countries, as well as on building out from “blogger” to “social media user.”
My reservations regarding Andrew – I would have reservations about anyone talking over something I’ve spent four and a half years on, something I made out of whole cloth, something that has been imitated more and more as the years go buy and the threats to bloggers increase instead of decline – are about the nature of the beast. I have written elsewhere, in a post called “The Me Speech Movement,” on the reality of free speech campaigning.
The Paris- and London-based magazine 3:AM recently published three of my poems. They were “October,” a sonnet about my friend Jon Easley, “In Liguria” and “What Is Existence.”
You can read my poems in 3:AM here, as well as poetry, essays and interviews by and about people scattered around the globe.
People keep requesting a copy of my satirical science fiction novel, Ainadamar. It makes sense. It’s sensible. That is, it’s not unreasonable someone should want to read about a vampire, lady barbarian and giant kitty going back in time to save Federico Garcia Lorca in order to arrest entropy and save the world. Is it? No. It is not. So contact me at curthopkins|@|gmail|dot|com if you’d like a copy.
Happy Independence Day, You Filthy America Lovers
IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
I deleted my translations from Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Poema del Cante Jondo.” The editors of online magazines get their panties in a bunch when something you’ve submitted is on your two-bit blog. *shrug*
I’ve left up the non-Cante Jondo Lorca translations along with “La guitarra,” which was used in Menocal’s monograph (and the Asian American Times!)
The CPB is blocked in Iran. For that and other reasons, I’m pasting in the list I created there of links to proxies and other tools that you can use to reach, read and post to the Internet. These tools allow the user to do things like circumvent filters and anonymize sessions. Please read the materials at each site to understand what the tool does and remember that nothing is fool-proof.
Safer blogging tools
Access Flickr plugin
Al Kasir
Global Internet Freedom Consortium Solutions
Peacefire’s Circumventor
Proxy Servers
Tor onion routers
Although I can’t sell a book to save my life, it looks like I can get in them easily enough.
First, I was quoted in Naked Conversations, then an abortive idea for an open-source Israel-Palestine peace proposal was included in Wikinomics and now Abby Schonenboom, a professor at the City University of New York, has discussed, and included a screenshot of, my post, “Statistics on Fired Bloggers” in Hiding Out: Creative Resistance Among Anonymous Workbloggers, an upcoming book based on her doctoral thesis.
The sampans rust into a slight nod
Feel the black shine lantern boom and Bob
Crusts against the ancient King of time
that shines and oils down a rebar rod
“I want you Bob, yes, I’ll make you mine”
Quoth she, spammed to touch the knob
fidgeting and relaxing to black the tab and sawed
blast like figs, leveling the garbage can
sings spud frogs to a healing man
he slipped and gained eight or more who ran.
You don’t get all poety without an almost sexual affection for proportion, inflection and interrelationship. So when I was producing video podcasts at a game company where I worked, I remember this discussion I had with their head of game development. I didn’t leave that place with a lot of new information – the currency, aside from currency, that I value the most. But this discussion gave me something very new, a new way of regarding the world, or of apprehending information anyway.
[Cross-posted from OR318]
The two main arguments governments, and their supporters, make against free speech are these. First, that the outlawed speech is immoral. An example of this might be a blogger in Egypt who claims that Islam is a false religion or a blogger in the United States who maintains that killing people involved in overseas military operations is justified.
The second, and I think more common, argument is that allowing unfettered speech creates chaos that would significantly harm, and possibly ultimately destroy, a nation or society.
Neither rationale justifies the prohibition of speech because both are specious. There is, in fact, no legitimate justification for such a prohibition, because freedom of speech is not a cultural artifact, but rather a human right. By human right I mean that the need to express oneself, both on an individual and collective level, is a function of the human psyche, regardless of culture, subculture, geography, religion or even time. Try to think of a group or an era in which mankind did not attempt to express what was within its minds and hearts.
Although it might seem lazy and anachronistic to do so I do so. I have condescended and deemed it necessary. I have wheedled and cajoled, bullied and pleaded. I have come to no conclusions. The jury is still out, to return momentarily, hung. In the meantime I dangle, undecided, before my very nose, unwilling to back down.
I am jumping up and down inside my skin, full to bursting, as the toilets whizz by overhead.
I walk hand in hand with the jellyfilled donut of apprehension. Squeeze my hind-end.
I know the Pope toys with me, as does the Turk, the Hun, and the President. But they are on my side. None of this will stop me from taking refuge in the crates full of broken-off golf club heads.
My friend, Kelvin Holland, who works as an editor for a history publisher near DC sent me this account of the first U.S. Memorial Day. It’s from by David Blight on Common-Place via Kevin Levin’s blog, Civil War Memory.
After Charleston, South Carolina was evacuated in February 1865 near the end of the Civil War, most of the people remaining among the ruins of the city were thousands of blacks. Read the rest of this entry »
[Re-posted from CPB.]
I have some very bad news. I was laid off at the end of January but always thought I would find new work. That has not happened. I am now face-to-face with the reality that if I do not spend every single waking minute in the pursuit of a new job we will wind up living on the street. I wish that were a poetic exageration. It is not.
As much concern as I have for people I don’t know, far and away my most important commitment is to my wife and our family. The Committee to Protect Bloggers, this blog, all the rest of it, is of distinctly secondary importance. From now until after I am re-employed, I cannot spend a single second on anything but my search for employment. I should have realized this before but “thinking positively” can sometimes function as simple delusion. Today things happened that brought it all home.
I hope that this hiatus on my part is temporary.
BlazeVOX, the well-regarded magazine from upstate New York, has published three of my poems in its Late Spring issue.
You can visit via the cover page or read the poems directly (in .pdf form). They published three: “Night and the Body,” “A Desert Place” and “San Bruno.”
You can read the contributor bios here, including mine.
Several years ago, I conducted this interview with the Brookings Institution’s Dr. Susan Rice, formerly Undersecretary of State for Africa in the Clinton Administration, now the United States’ Ambassador to the United Nations, for Newsweek International. The commissioning editor then told me that the incoming editor, Fareed Zakaria, had decided only to the feature “newsmakers” not “specialists” on the back page and so the article was rejected.
Failed States and Super-Failed States: An Interview with Dr. Susan E. Rice of the Brookings Institution
Americans are used to powerful enemies. During the Cold War we grew comfortable facing off against strong, antagonistic states, bristling with weapons, across defined borders. But in the past decade a new type of threat has taken shape, the “failed state.” Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and now Liberia have taken up residence in that hole where the USSR and East Germany used to lurk. The Bush White House, following the lead of the Clinton administration, has recognized and defined the danger of failed states in its National Security Strategy.
Dr. Susan E. Rice of the Brookings Institution, however, believes that strategy lacks comprehensive measures for neutralizing those threats, measures that include international cooperation and nation building. In a Policy Brief titled “The National Security Strategy: Focus on Failed States” Rice credits the Administration with recognizing the importance of these states and the threats they pose but faults it for neglecting to face up to the policy implications they demand.
One of the problems with having both a devotion to serial fiction and an inability to read poorly written books, regardless of how high concept, is a paucity of choices. Recently, however, I came across a series set in a time period I had, prior to this, very little interest in, Victorian England. With the exception of Sherlock Holmes and Elizabeth Peters (whose series is set largely in Egypt), it just wasn’t a world that captured my attention. I don’t care about Queen Victoria, don’t like tea and hope to live my whole life without having my chest hair ruffled by Romantic breezes while astride a white charger. Like most situations where a whole new world swims into my ken, however, it turns out Victorian England, London in particular, and the seedy side of that city in still more particular, had far more of interest than I expected.
Will Thomas’s Barker and Llewelyn series stars an English detective and his Welsh partner. Comparisons with Holmes are inevitable, perhaps, but I’ll let you make them, with one exception. If I were a criminal, I’d be terrified that Holmes would catch up with me. Without Watson, however, I’d feel reasonably certain I could hand him his own ass. Barker, who grew up as an orphan on the streets in Foochow, where he learned Chinese martial arts, well, not so much.
The books are full of streetlife and nightlife, the Chinese, Jewish and Italian minorities opening up like flowers behind clear and compelling prose, the thieves’ cant and cops argot and prostitutes’ calls all blooming in the odd corners.
Of course, I’d like to tell you the fact that the main voice in the books is Welsh does not alone justify its existence. But we both know that’s not true. Cymru am byth!
***
How did you start writing?
I worked for five years on my first book, SOME DANGER INVOLVED. I had been a fan of the Victorian Era and Sherlock Holmes and wanted to incorporate the history I had been studying into a novel of my own.
You’re Soaking in It
Mashed Clusters
Borg 9 from Outer Space
Die, Monster
The Soy Maidens
Go Out and Get Another Chair
The Eternal Moist
It’s Raining in My Pants
Flying Wedge
Absofuckinlutely
Esau the Verb
Chicks Dig It
Goodbye Eyes
Benign Nodule
Circumambulating the Stupa
Circumambulate the Stupid
Open for Dumbness
Your Secret Weapon’s Gone Now, Earth Boy
Union with the Infinite
Union with the Indefinite
Shooting Smack with the Party Girls
Youth, Inc.
I Would If I Could But I Can’t So I Won’t
Head Full of Bugs
Super-Super-Ultra-Mega-Swanky
Magically Delicious
Absofuckinlutemundomente
Whisky-Voiced Infant
Mother Teresa the Monster
Attention Goatherds
Although it might seem lazy and anachronistic to do so I do so. I have condescended and deemed it neccesary. I have wheedled and cajoled, bullied and pleaded. I have come to no conclusions. The jury is still out, to return momentarily, hung. In the meantime I dangle, undecided, before my very nose, unwilling to back down.
I am jumping up and down inside my skins, full to bursting, as the toilets whiz by overhead.
I walk hand in hand with the jellyfilled donut of apprehension. Squeeze my hind-end.
I know the Pope toys with me, as does the Turk, the Hun, and the President. But they are on my side. None of this will stop me from taking refuge in the crates-full of broken off golf club heads.
God help you if you do not follow my demands. They are as follows. There are no demands. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to scratch your own ass if it itched.
I am as follows:
1. Raise the slim metal pole to the microbe!
2. Wash the raisins off the slimy piling!
3. Probe the dinky and hop to it!
4. I realize the neccesity of clattering headlong flat-out down the stairs like a plank!
5. I condemn the bathroom for its hidden lemony tang and jungle of white powders!
6. Careful, the concrete planters are uprooting like sweet potatoes in a cyclone!
7. Do all the bongos congregate at midnight to be burned on a pyre by a man in a large coat?
8. Unbutton the flute and, tooting, push the walls down, chuckle at the rubble!
9. Forget about dark rubber valley where the bimbo leaps like gleaming u-joint!
10. The policeman’s flashing patch solves an equation in my forehead which I renounce and feed to the rainforest of the andiron!
11. Likewise I’m sure.
I have untied against the exponential acre of concrete dust, against the fine how-do-you-do of Morgan Fairchild, against being against and against being against being
a gaunt bean
a haunting bing from the crazy machine.
I am Bob Folder. Se obedece pero no se cumple! Say, “oh, but they say ‘pair of nose’; they come play.”
Leer knowingly at each other and nod toward an object isolated from its context. Big smile. Thank you. Don’t mind if I do. Still. Quiet. Did you hear it? My pleasure.
We, the Mythorealists and obtuse rodent armbones, demand:
1. delux ladies to lambast me
2. to skate methodically and to be allowed to wiggle like gasoline
3. that revolutions be staged against polyhedrom Sammy-boy
4. furtive pool-side chat
5. to breast feed our own poplars and free them from wild breezeways
6. the right to stand naked in a pool of our own verbs
7. a hair-dresser named Queenie
8. to be given a song for Costa Rica
9. that the octagenarian sectarians be replaced with a gaggle of nitwits
10. frocks of bubonic dog-head triple spiral, concuspicent meat-leaders and sinkers, drapery sex, and a pulpy syringe rocketing into the crotch of a tree
11. the right to sing in a forest where the mosses clank
12. haircuts with zippers
13. juicy peer-groups
14. weasel anus greetings
15. a premature brocolli bib
16. a pancreas hootenany
17. underwear noise confessions
18. riboflavin singalongs
19. intimate butt chili
20. sphincter reconnaisance
21. salmonella pate
22. Big Bird’s wiener
23. carolling dishwater
24. the right to assemble all our aching baubles
25. a pal named Frank/ who works in a bank/ after six/ on Friday
26. the right to reconstruct our personal histories out of a thousand Armageddon
lizard parts
27. the right to hang Barabar Streisand from her ears and instruct her to run in
place
28. to wrestle the Pope away fromthe tremblin glintel and whisper carpet fibres
into his open cupboard
29. a tall glass of onion juice in every town near normal voices
30. the last one, then it’s yours
31. pussylips in the fog
32. that nonsense be regarded as some kind of eternal subconscious verity
33. that all irked wads be lathered
34. THAT YOU SAY A PRAYER TO OUR POLLUTED SKIN FROCK
OMNIA MUTANTUR, NOS ET MUTAMUR IN ILLIS
1. Cripled pope parade
2. dumpster relish
3. Nice girl bellows lap
4. fortunate foreskin
5. amniotic French dip
6. Burgeoning concrete sex factor
7. artifical gattling gun
8. Nepalese cracker songbook
9. fingering horn cud
10. Presbyterian lipshit syntax
11. Diabetic alphabet sex
12. bolivian pocket swuirrel
13. Hope chest tailbone collection
13. stapled nipple method
13. waxed penile butter ducts
13. spleen buggy
13. barnyard monk
13. Banjo mortician
13. shelf barf
13. I am my own butt cheese…Jesus?
13. bangledesh gardening storage tin prick
13. Germanic swingset lunchplate
13. ferocious ambiguity seminar
13. hang-nail nun
13. slingshot squid stain
13. the angry nun’s nut clippers
13. Fenian earlobe file cabinet
13. sporting fag hairs
13. cast statue precipitate
13. Monk bang
13. Tropic of Carmelcorn
13. Fruit dish Nazi portrait
ALTERNATES:
13. homogenized elephant blister wallow
13. homosexual mongoloid funbarn shenanigans
13. eventual cattle plea
1. Peloponnesian grunt truck
2. Toenail barter
3. Technical jello snatch
4. Wily persimmons
5. Marshmallow toilet paper
6. The stain on my lightswitch
7. In Marm’s way
8. Insecure pig thighs
9. Nietzsche’s breakfast treats
10. I jimmied the lock on the rainbow trout
11. Genius margarine plate
12. Uncle Fester’s goo-bag
13. Margarine’s own little somebody
13. Lipstick racist
13. Stamp the meat
13. Anasazi vegetarian head-dress
13. Whole lotta cake walkin’
13. What the tapeworm said
13. Coffee whizz in a thimble
13. Gap-tooth plebicite meat squeezer
13. Hey, the kumquats make really swell eyeglasses!
13. The Bithynian dirt scroll
13. Piss like a racecourse
13. Second knuckle once removed
13. Squeal like an ashtray
13. Return the genius to his crawlspace
13. Sincere nostril
13. Low quality nostril too
1. illuminated twister-berry freak out
2. Cacophonic malais of premeated tendrils
3. Anglo-Saxon water-pic
4. spunky but press newspaper clipping
5. forced plastic crumbcake
6. Typogrpahical filopian postcard
7. Forgetful porthole
8. The chucklin’ Mary
9. rectal handlebars
10. Carbunkles
11. Daily orange rind
13. post-tractor agreement
13. smoked scrotal gouda
13. primal scream therapy in a thimble of concentrated hydrochloric acid
13. sweat sock punch
13. invincible ink
13. sad, flaccid little rodent specialist
13. Pricetags on Mars
13. Lutheran earwax
13. compromising Munchkin bookmobile day
13. Let’s play Hide-the-Mayonaisse
13. Please Lord let me die without this eggplant
13. Born to chum
13. Chumley’s dork is removed albeit accidentally
13. Slipped and backed into a cucumber, which rammed itself (accidentally) up my
ass
13. Pachouli scented plaid
13. tie-dyed prostate
13. Pumpkin, Pumpkin, whose got the pumpkin?
1. Klondike Druid Farm
2. Unlikely Negroes
3. Rooty-tooty fresh and headless
4. Mixing up the arm bones
5. California disarmament jamboree
6. Launching some butt chocolate
7. Renegade monkey with some fish sticks
8. Swamp Thing backwash
9. Bursting titty symposium
10. Boner of the century
11. Bozo hangs himself and gets a boner
12. Newt boner
13. Sinister hair-chunk poloroid scalpel
14. Supernatural beet snack
13. Antiseptic skillet formation
14. Ominous squirrel perimeter
13. Pocket triangle numerology for the damaged
13. Mon Dieu! I have eaten my own foot!
13. A tall glass of onion juice and kitty whiskers
14. Malibu Barbie in a drum
15. Abdul’s hairy butt twat
13. The pot calling the negro black
12. Portentious nine iron
13. Petroleum jelly donut
13. Scallopini daydream
13. Lamborghini extract
alt: Keebler elf damage (level)
A is for ACCUMULATIVE FETAL CREAM
B is for BRASH PICKLING FEATHER
C is for CARNIVOROUS MACE HANDICAP
D is for DIONYSIUS NOSE MATTER
E is for ELEPHANTITUS SCROTAL JUICE HAPPENING
F is for FUGITIVE BUTT CHEESE
G is for GOOMBAH RHETORIC
H is for HORATIO HORNBLOWER BREATH
I is for INDUSTRIOUS FLOAT BOTTOM
J is for JAMBOREE MUSH CARESS
K is for KNOB EXRUCIATION
L is for LICORICE BUTT SAMARITAN
M is for MULTIFOLIATE PUPIL EXTRACTION
M is for NODE GUMMING
M is for OTAMATAPAEIC ACTION FIGURES
M is for PREPUBESCENT ANEMIC DETENTION
M is for QUINTESSENTIAL PROBE DELIGHT
M is for ROBOT WIGGLING
M is for SALT LICK DEMEANOR
M is for TWIT SOCCER
M is for UNITARIAN LYMPHATIC NERVE DISPENSER
M is for VETERAN PEZ COUNT
M is for WALLY’S BIG GOODBYE
M is for XAVIER’S STICKER BUSH
M is for YALTA MUSCLE
M is for ZIRCONIAN SCREE ITCH
NOW I KNOW MY A, B, C’S . . .
TELL ME WHAT’S THOUEST THINKS OF ME.
Sam Waterson is the devil, really
Ham samitch lovely lovely ladies
Buffalo George’s we called him the Jewish Danny Glover
Spoon-fed quadriceps bar-b-qued noodle factory
Fortinbras was a fag Sally O’Malley was a pretty little fillie
C-R-A-Z-Z-E-E Pop pop pow!
Weeping in my jello Thomas Edison chased me with a wire
Ball lightning I was gagging
Smelt or Atlantic anchovy? SMELT Jesus
Lice big eyes Herman Wouk
Bauhaus—ribs—paniers
Greek mythology Melvox lummox
Mt. Adams left the state
Grant shrubs Sherrif of Notingham
Ice cream the rope Buzzy—Shirley
Some friend of Jon Easley heroin
Sum-up Kitty-Kitty Club Dennis Weaver
Cello mirrored shoes ostrich eggs
The problem with Henry the bow & arrow barn
Ex-wife Micronesia scallops go to Rhodesia
Rocketship gold medal for flour
Oscar the Grouch vegetables in my water
Santa Claus fax machine
Simple Queen of May liquor
Happy face Steve Perry of Aerosmith
Richochet Rabbit Guy de Maupassant
Scared mask werewolf here comes trouble
Glass blower bowler hat
Mario Cuomo’s lips art deco churchgoers
Filapino patooties bread sticks
Tina from Gilligan’s Island with the electricity
Bathtub filled with ice cubes
Spanking the Jewish neighbor lady
Squeak squeak squeak
Chant How much wood would a woodchuck have had had a woodchuck wood?
Shining Path
Following my fortune telling regarding the fate of French immigrant policy, I discovered that my otherworldly ability to see into the future soldiers on. Five years ago, in a post I titled “Shine On, You Crazy Diamond,” I asserted that Peru’s Shining Path guerillas, though proclaimed to be on their last legs, were most assuredly not. I attempted to query this but no publications were interested. Within the last week, multiple news organizations have begun to report on the Shining Path’s resurgency.
What’s the point that I’m trying to make? Just this: I see all, I know all.
Dear Flan Iliescu,
I called you last night but you were out selling werewolf costumes to Albanian immigrants freezing tripe in garbage bags in horizontal freezers to vend at dawn to an unsuspecting alphabetic public heavy on sentimentality and low on milk.
Ballard echoes with revolutionary enthusiasms.
Clients of Kidder Peabody donate nine-irons and statues of themselves to poor snowmen (or so they conceive them) who buy kids licorice ropes with them and print and distribute booklets on decency self-respect and common sense which are gaining ground in the whorehouses.
To no avail, however, as the Albanians, thanks to your werewolf outfits, sitting there talking to people in their sleep and making the machinery of information degrade into music, find solace and profitability in the replacement of materialism with violin music, sausages, huge marriage ceremonies, chuckling, boobies and limericks the length of the Odyssey.
I guess we owe you an apology or apoplexy or an apothecary or dromedary, depending on which huge plume of ash you stand on in a coma or corona of light or in a functioning or disfuntional dairy on the Arizona-Deleware border, where, rightly, you are praised as a matter-of-fact dictionary, or visionary.
Suffice it to say, serious gastrointestinal arpeggios squat in supermarket parking lots with your name on it. We tip our hats to your rubric-enhanced mini-wheats and say, “Thanks—Albanian werewolves the size of squirrels get mad in our pants.”
Love,
Bob Folder
1. Grease up a 5-quart sampan.
Into this pan put the following ingredients:
2. With a sturdy mixer, blend into a simple disgusting paste.
3. Garnish with lizard heads and serve over ice.
Makes 12 servings.
Happy St. David’s Day for the fifth time on this blog. I am sorry that you are not Welsh. But I send you best wishes anyway. Chew on a daffodil and ram a leek in your hatband like the Welsh do, in honor of the saint we did not ship off in pity to Ireland. 
Llao Rock and Wizard Island: it was the stillest day we’d ever seen at the lake
My dentist, the first Klamath Indian to become one, was talking about Crater Lake the other day, in the moments before the panicked shrieking began.
“We get free entrance to the park,” he said, speaking of the members of his tribe. “A trade-off, I suppose. We give them the lake and they let us visit.”
For millennia prior to its “discovery” in June of 1853, the Klamath Indians had used the lake as an open-air cathedral, of sorts. Climbing up to the rim to see the lake was allowed only on religious pilgrimage and only with a reverential cast of mind.
The lodge
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Facebook changed its terms of service stealthily on February 4. Now, if you cancel your account, it will still keep all your material and may try to sell it even. I never cared much for Facebook anyway, and would cancel my account altogether except that the Committee to Protect Bloggers has almost 1,100 members on their Facebook Causes page.
Also, due to Facebook being so anti-intuitive, I can’t even figure out how to post a “Wall” application to make this announcement on the page itself and am having to do it on my personal blog.
So, here’s what I’m going to do and what I encourage you to do.
If anyone has an alternative to Facebook, please speak up.
I was watching a Brazilian claymation version of a performance by Hugo Ball in a metal suit at the Caberet Voltaire reciting one of his nonsense poems.
I was interrupted by a knock at the door. It was the mail lady with got a registered letter from the IRS. When I opened the letter, it turned out it was an official communication from that agency announcing that a refund I applied for when I did back taxes was denied. The refund would have been for $13.00 and arrived today, on Friday the 13th. There were two copies of the multi-page paperwork. Generating this denial had to have cost hundreds of dollars.
So.
DADA IS REALISM.
When the slow decay of the universe starts suddenly speeding up and the eventual end of creation is looking more like, oh, say Sunday, messengers decide to reveal the location of a long-lost sacred text to a space-faring vampire.
In my satirical novel “Ainadamar,” Prince Ivan Stratsimir of Krăn’s family motto — one which has also functioned perfectly well as the motto of the Madrugada, the ship he commands — translates roughly as “It’s All About the Benjamins.” So a divine charge to find and employ the Enchiridion is met with some ambivalence, especially since it may mean his death. Again. With the help of a crew of fellow temporal refugees — the chain mail-clad Red Mona, a mountebank, a cowboy named Slim, a feline engineer, a cephalopodan ship’s surgeon and Stanislaus, the Madrugada’s shape-shifting chef — Stratsimir must make his way across half a universe and a handful of centuries to find and use this cross between a scripture, a spell-book and a computer operating system and fix the form of the created worlds. Along the way, they have to fight, avoid, trick and bribe everyone from religious extremists who believe sin can only be destroyed by reversing the Big Bang, a galactic empire that makes those chumps in Star Wars look like a Canadian provincial transportation subcommittee, super funky space banditos and an army of zombies.
If you’d like to read Ainadamar, let me know and I’ll email you an .rtf version of it for your intellectual delectation. (Or any number of other formats – see below.)
I only found out tonight that Lux Interior died last week. Lux was very cool to me, a young journalist and punk rock fan, when I interviewed him for a profile on Miami New Times. I wondered if it were still online and found out it was. I think Psychotronic Reaction is the best story I ever wrote. I meant every word. The world is not as good now that Lux is gone.
To quote Lux…KILL ALL SQUARES!
PSYCHOTRONIC REACTION
by Curt Hopkins
For the Miami New Times
March 5, 1998Currently being posited as an alternative to the mournful noisy rock out of the suddenly loathed Northwest are all kinds of Good-time Joe’s Toe-Tappin’ Jug Band-type nonsense — as though the opposite of morbidly paralyzing introspection were witless grinnin’. Well, there’s another option that has yet to be seriously considered: kicks.
Kicks can be innocent and beautiful, they can be ugly, creepy, or dangerous, but they have no place in the Mall of America and they don’t belong in city hall. Kicks are where you find them and you often find them underground. That’s where the Cramps live.
As some French guy said (can’t find the source of the quote though I thought at one time it was Nerval), “I want to die a ridiculous death.” I sang the Brady Bunch Theme on a particularly hairy drive down narrow, rain-lashed roads through the Coastal Range in the hopes that, should I die, as it most definitely seemed I would, any survivors would mention that the last thing I said was “…they youngest one in curls…”
As the great and powerful Fishmortal once so sagely said, “I wish I were suicidal.” Well said, Fishmortal. I have reached a point in my life where I can’t figure out how I’m going to lie to myself anymore. I mean “be positive.” All the things left me to do are just a long list of precisely those things I am not going to be able to. The rest of this is just going to be marking time, and that’s something I’ve always been just terrible at.
Wish me luck. This is going to be a long fucking wait.
You guys a wrestler?
You can get two or more grapes it’ll be alright
You know a guy Nixon?
Marie Marie bumblebee two spoons, tomato and a
How do you make any money Smirnoff and beer
Excersize and sushi but
Elisha’s miracle on the Astroturf
We should bum some spam and rice
Through two people’s heads honest to God
It’s a live metaphor
Yeah do me a favor
You get two or more grapes it’ll be alright
Sights in space, that is space
I was thinking of jokes to play on the
glass bits. It goes like this:
the dirty little knucklehead ransacked
the claymation, ran back to the
ramshackle hovel. What does this prove?
Only that gazebos are gazelles
that have had their horns removed.
Pumkin pie has itself been removed.
I removed it. Someone thought it was
a zipper on their jacket and tried to
pull it down. That’s crazy.
Any dirty claymation gazebo with its
jacket off knows my name is Bumblebee
Static. I lit up the sky with my
jokes and the Pope made
tacos appear in my cigarette lighter.
Capitulate why don’t you? Dos figuratives
met in the garden of my villa at Caesarea.
Speak softly to the applesauce in my lumberjack boots.
She dealt her dark sticky card on the white
table of the sheet: Van Sant traps, she thinks.
Wo doggies! My buttcheeks are twitchin’ like
3 sheep in a rain storm—
Bellbottoms are my mom.
The ocean broke loose from its sockets and
bent us like coathangers. Phonecians.
Fetch me my monk frog, Donate my liver,
the potted meat plant rang me like a
windchime. Guatemalan lunch bucket
Snip the erasers off of 500 #2 pencils
and put them in a milk crate. Now
spill them onto your bed. That is how
this poems will sound. Milk grater.
Self-referential. Dumb as all get out.
Hi Mom, sign that says “send money It’s
a college football item. Say something stupid
for the camera. Fuck nuts. Look, hi,
I’m in a poem. Neat. Well, jeez. I don’t
know what to say. What?
What did you mean by that, I mean the wrenching beet
your culture is a backyard tinkling soon
so know the meathead out from sparrows
customary caution, important Rolaids
Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod crumpled my feet like beer cans
So this is what it’s like in the ferryslip shoelace—
unlock that quotation mark, it’s buckling my mice
like an automatic pine cone: click, click, click
the ludicrous, licroice potty gagged up a candy cone
Kiss my pimple-free behind
I was sitting in my little-boy suit in the limestone bird bath
I can’t believe the geneology of my shirtsleeves
cram it in my butt
How can the frontal lobe dichotomy?
Quit sulking and unleash your face
I can’t believe my own barstool.
I have no choice but to invent you
a blanket for the bindlestiff alone
rye-crisp with a hint of the flu
singing in the mess-kit of my bone
spin off the transducer, Pietro,
crank up the metallurgical day
and remind me why it snows
when the large sound comes my way
the tiny rumble and squeak off the dry chair
is no surprise when you drive there.
I have been accused of
hydroponics in the night
a wimpled tart in stained glass
to the naked anvil and the bitter ripe
lentils of the neutered paired to last
rank on my squishy and I’ll launch goulash
chalk up the old piano, blistered and rum
rocketships are a bitter herb
granted, there are some rings
that creak Appalachian stairs modestly
my love is like a bathtub in a rodent crew
a smell you’ve never smelled,
severed, released, the bus fare is crying
let down your stained sky blue pants
dimpled, squash, tang. I am alive.
Fill ‘er up you squeaking feeb
snot-nosed Baxter barked at the cardboard Bob
Mewling sphincter, butt-diddy-do-bop
Send your Bishop-splash piddles through breathing storms
Scallop-foot leaping to Patagonian hordes
Liver monger trace in my Paradise.
Bah Bah Bah bellbottom procreation tactics mom
double dee bone, it’s the music of zippers
that wiggle in time to the sound of cement
and the howling of rubber things.
This is what I hear when I am meeting Juan’s lovely rubber lawn
all humming lip-lash, a tonguing of bleeding evil.
This is the ceramic frog that is my life
sitting in the garden of Hell where the Devil picnics.
Dippity Dippity Doo!
Little Weedy frightened the berry-wad
into a likeness of the civil war.
Quatro! Noodleroni! Spengler!
Look,
the little Russian is in his foot!
Advocate the blind end of a backwards bat.
Station Wagon! Apertif!
Worms are god’s little wigglies, utterly buttressed
(something about swelling).
Rain is they master’s pitchfork
—bent and in a butt.
What is fishing anyway
but a spacesuit
made randomly
of satchels?
Columbus discover the new world and
he put him diaper on. Laxative comfort
in dark, forbidden jollies holding
hands with the jelly-filled donut
of apprehension. Latex gumbo rant
in a dirty ditch and a stairwell
choked with bathtubs hums with flies.
Pop, pop, plunk! The dirty angel exits
spinning wings in poop ballet. Oh!
Melon god! Oh! You glass of pee
disguised as lemonade,
rinky-dink certainty glade:
polish Tammy’s cork.
If a scalp might tingle like a lotion jockey
roughly, pale like a lantern maw,
then how will foreigners learn to play hockey
or assemble the fuzzy proctologist’s jaw?
Cream corn in caves is quilted now
Honey like toothpaste brimming stew
is like electric ham somehow
or the coolant delicious hominy brew.
Come, my epileptic kneecaps, come
for all we can rummage, cantaloupe knob,
for though the pretty girl’s heinie leaks and runs
we sing petaled cornflakes to sneaker-face Bob
And sing, my martian pillows, sing the urine
Put on your make-up, this tightrope is turnin’
Felt me under the udder an adder dancing
Elton Parrish, the lonesome lady necromancing
began a weird hi-jinx, shenanigans of jawbones
art fags, tyrant hags, Land-O-Lakes a-prancing.
Like a lake of lolly-pops the old sawbones
peeled the flea-bag daintily from the wrong clones
Then, allergic to their home-spun grimace
craftily, like Pharaoh, left the claws alone.
Trap me in a projected completion date
Brave the Bantu’s miser plate
Then gulp me down a barnyard pope
Be the best at what you are, you dope.
Kneeling in the soft carcinogens of your cellophane vase,
I shall vacuum up your up your svelte chowder
As Pab’s mom sticks jelly to her mace
“I am Chinese, I am, I am,” says she, louder and louder.
Your dribbling nose paste nails my heart to thine.
“Well Doctor, it seems he’s choking to death on your own patella.”
“Apply salt lick to injured area and whine
‘I’m just a turd-bird with salmonella!’”
“Do not divorce my loaf, sell it to the birds.”
Sotto voce, sotto voce, adagio and pulsing dong
To whet my lyre and sing pepper ear wax turds.
sing: “Weepy weepy Love Jones, birdaloupe Bong Bong.”
“Only love is capable of grating you a happy life.”
Who ate all the blistex? Is that your paring knife?
Love lip trippingingly swan dive to
secondary motions in chandelier skin
—I think of Marxism as a sexist joke on myself—
“Scrumpdillyishus!” quoth she chucking down my wrinkled sack
to the delicious toad drippings of her snack,
T-shirts stuffed with scribbles in black.
Isaac the Cossack is the buff chick about town;
“Nice bag of marbles, Bobby,” he promised, withdrawing the baguette.
“Nick, Nick, my Pincers of Bagwan,” stealthily—
Hey-wann-ah, hey-wann-ah ho,
you’re the waxpaper Santa of my wandering toes.
Alert the pirates, my desk is round
It all started when I couldn’t shave the Cuban
Instead mayonnaise plastered my gums as I smoke
Buttering me up in the home of ex-president Truman
Fuck the begonias, Save your land!
He then began to sort the anal beads
as crystal cottonballs snap! I stand naked from the waist down to your song
watching 9 one-minute managers humping a bar-b-que
Toilet poster! Toilet poster!
Forget lithe spleen habits in song
decorate the garrulous limb with homicide
can you peel lost pulpmeat so long?
Sure I can, imam, stoney peach part
it’s hard to angle rods and cones and start
pilfer petticoats scratching rheumy time
forward to part, coalesce in King Kong
twist me up a dooby, Cal, drink insecticide
Hand me a poodle, I want to feel aligned
to the Axis, split, ballpeen is fine
Gilgamesh has lunged for the twister mat
Slap, apparently, look to nibble and long
in my heart for a steamed milk enema lied
ten minutes ago I touched a hamster and cried
Ibbly: beveled morphology and a snack tuna on cables.
Smack me so it leaves a mark. My interior is pox-ridden
and smooth of squeeze it reheats the dusty chops.
One warm breast spills out of a turtle neck.
Click shut the refrigerator door, cleaving the soy patty,
falling limp as tissue into the freshwater mainstream squirming
from the crinkled tube.
Watch on the freeway the tires unravel into sparks and ha ha death:
30 ballpeen shots to the noggin.
If politics is the art of the possible, blogging is the alchemy of the impossible. In the four years and two months I’ve been blogging I have seen Americans talk to Iranians, Palestinians talk to Israelis, Japanese talk to Chinese, FMLN Salvadorans talk to members of ARENA and more. We have not paid attention to what is possible and so very little has proven impossible. So today, on which the first black president of the U.S. is inaugurated, we should acknowledge that this is our day too. On this day what should be possible is become actual.
What will happen next? Will we have a Mexican-American woman as our president? An Asian? A Jew? And in a decade or two, will the U.K. have an Anglo-Indian Prime Minister? Will France’s presidency be held by a Maghrebi Arab? Will Russia elect an ethnic Mongol as its Prime Minister?
Yesterday was a day of criticism. Tomorrow should be a day on which we exercise our skepticism. But today we fought for and it is ours. We dreamed it into being. Some of us did a great deal more than that. Don’t be credulous, but today, don’t be cynical. Not out of habit, which is the reverse image of a dream. It is easy, and safe, to engage in cynicism. Because rest assured, Obama will fuck up. He’s the president of the United States. When the president screws the pooch it is an operatic mess. So it’s no testament to your “realism” to march about acting smug to those who have been elevated on the wind of a dream-made-real. Today, put it aside. Making things better is a disappointment-strewn journey. The safest thing to say is that you can’t. But we can. Every now and again.
I started an inaugural poem. It isn’t finished but then neither is this “dream” we keep hearing about. Here it is. So far.
We thrum, vibrating like the words we are.
God has spoken us; he speaks us still.
Stilling as unwillingly as stars,
Each word is water, drawn from an endless well.Like a colony of cells, we join, adhere,
A charge moves through us and we grow,
As meaning flows through aggregated tones,
Or cities rise when stone is stacked on stone.But poets sometimes rearrange their words
And builders disassemble what they’ve built,
Our bodies will repurpose broken roads
And gardeners will tend the seed they’ve spilt.Approach the verge and opposites align.
We are both pilot and the vehicle we drive
.
Scraping by by me something along the tracks,
a gelatinous grouping in the shape of a TV personality,
ochre eye shadow cascading grim red tie
punt like pool-shark lampshade cookie-poodles
paddles soap pining gimpy nuts soccer for free
siccing the dog on the sick limpy nut vendor
laying soaky bun blisters over the side
Fall like a leaf from the sea.
Eve of St. Agnes—they swam the platter like a log
Ding-dong, the poodle baron. A day-care center Thursday
and I am standing on the back porch facing sideways
Macreasa inside, dollop in the bean pot
Crispy chitlins—they sell bananas like a freeway
And spin a sweatshirt from plum juice and ocean
Saddled like a midget’s buttocks this life of ours
is really important and conforms to my warm insect
Bring me forty streetsigns, fire me a gross
of beetle sympathy and tired pancakes, to
the rictus of my emotional heartstring ruptures
and floods Macreasa’s dress with our first child
Lastly sinful like a magpie on vacation,
How many rabbits can hide in a desk-clerk’s hair?
holding two lizards like drumsticks or music
clogs and clots the plain ham of our life together
And like Jesus at the cycle-barn, and Pharaoh eating stone
I bought a shirt with a timber locket stolen from a telephone pole
Ruptured rubber gadgets sprinkled on my neck and
pulled-out backbone lay down on plastic
hairpiece dreamed especially for Mother Earth
Last night on our way to see our grandson wrestle in Shelby, North Carolina we stopped at Alston Bridges Bar-B-Q. We had been looking forward to eating here as its one of the few Western Carolina barbecue restaurants influenced by Warner Stamey. Our disappointment ran high. The barbecue slaw was good as were the hush puppies- – - (shaking my head) alas alas the pig is on the grass – the barbecue itself was middlin’.
Nice people working there, very crowded… what.
Yale Professor Maria Rosa Menocal delivered a lecture at St. Mary’s College. This lecture, which focused on Cervantes, was subsequently turned into a monograph, which was recently published. Menocal, the author of “The Ornament of the World,” is an expert on the interplay of cultures and religions in medieval Spain. I’m a huge fan of “Ornament.”
I loved the essay, which used Cervantes to talk about the interdependencies of culture in the Iberian peninsula and, by association, the world. I loved it even more, I confess, because she used my translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem “La guitarra” (from the “Poema de la Siguiriya Gitana” in his “Poema del Cante Jondo“).
The essay is, unfortunately, not available online. I hope they post it eventually.
By P. Queneau
Throughout the mystery of life and love there has been a single common denominator. A nocturnal one, to be sure, but a denominator nonetheless. One suggests that we think of Bob Folder as the point where the ideal relationship meets: a ritual bonfire of simultaneous message and meaning. All of our real or purported knowledge, whether of the natural world, of the standards of right conduct, of the criteria of beauty or of the existence and attributes of a divine creator, is expressed in Folder’s prepositions. He’s lost his head. Actually, he’s lost his poems. Left them in a bar, he did, and now they are melting into the rainforest of the andiron.#
Propositions, prepositions. Is there a correlation between general personality traits and preference in modes of writing? Aristotle may have thought poetry a preparation for death, but most poets have seemed intent upon putting it to death. This bit of jargon has the virtue of suggesting simultaneously things about carelessness and inattention alone. Folder, in his first publication, appeared to be on the trail of a metaphoric appoggiatura: the calm before the storm.# With his “Sonnet For a Landlocked Numeral” and the enduring “Bacon Critters,” Folder had stepped over the bounds of what Van Wyck Brooks called “The Wine of the Puritans” (London, 1908). But what, then, do Ruskin, Carlyle, Coleridge or Hegel mean to the composer of The Savage Butcher of Carnale? He cries “Give the rhyme crank a hearty foamy Calvinistic dot;” he implores us to “skate methodically.”# Yet the dog threw his work away.
By P. Queneau
The salvation of the poetic sensibility is in our state. With the discovery of Bob Folder we have, unleashed upon us, the semantic equivalent of the Gatling gun at the Battle of Syracuse.
One instantly recalls Professor Creasy’s third-favorite slaughter for its metaphoric pronunciation of the fundamental hypothesis that events of controversial importance are rarely earthquakes, wildfires, revolutions or Acts of God, but often of a more antebellerophontic nature, a synchronal choice: the drawing of water from a tainted well, the starboard toss of a boomerang, the carbon-chain reaction of yeast rising.
To wit: “Epimenides says that Cretans are liars. But he is a Cretan. Therefore he lies. Therefore Cretans are not liars. Therefore, he speaks the truth. Therefore, Cretans are liars. Therefore, he lies….” This distillation of skeptic sophistry is roundly transcended in Folder’s work. With the line “Fall like a leaf from the sea,” (Poemland,) Folder has effectively negated and substantiated all absolutes. He has brought to light the insufficiency of eschatology, torn down the Berlin Wall of moral disorder, given us the victorious and irresistible element of humor in expatience. The seemingly flippant titles, expectorant references, religious opprobrity; all belie a deeper organic methodology: not just the divergent tasting of, but an unconditional swallowing of DeQuincey’s “latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite.” Laugh and the world laughs with you.
By Bob Folder
WC: 1,316 (not counting sideways)
Quarters the size of snowflakes filed the hair of breasts and bears feted the assy hills with sizzling white beans. Nudity, Shakespeare said, mirrors the ass-end of a man and this bacon was no exception. For a mole, the hole of the town was as still and breathless as a winged hermaphrodite.
The Organ Shakers Fiesta has monkeys with large cargo capsules in the world. It smells like more than 350,000 seasonings. The station is surprisingly long lasting, plastering from late February to teachers. It employs 500 stiff and operates on a budgie for $22 million in 2006.
Lead for the last 14 years by an autistic Davenport, a “lily of apples,” the SOB has built a log cabin begun by Cornelius Anus Beauregard in 1849. It has gained a reputation for world class ass in Prstina.
Ass land is located 15 miles north of the California border. Stuffed deep in a slot between meat wobblers, a gown of 20,000 staples is a decades-long experiment with pain. There are just enough Elizabethans touching tarts to force a toe through a Stetson. Wild rivers, hysterically rushing lie with 20 pounds of tongue three ways from the main thoroughfare and solid state.
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BANDS
All-Guy Party
Attention Goatherds
Benign Nodule
Catameringue
Chicken Shape
Death Mint
Die, Monster
Dismal Vibes
Duodecimal System
Ernest & The Borginines
Esau the Verb
Flying Wedge
Form of a Question
Herculisa
Hog the Monkey
Incredibly Breath Mint
Insecticidal Maniac
Lolitapalooza
Meat Boner
Mother Teresa the Monster
One Mahatma Two
Prisoners of Sinus Pain
Pumpable Meat
Single-Wide
Subsequent Farmers
The Eternal Moist
The Secret Manoevre
The Soy Maidens
Whisky-Voiced Infant
Youth, Inc.
1. Klondike Druid Farm
2. Unlikely Negroes
3. Rooty-tooty fresh and headless
4. Mixing up the arm bones
5. California disarmament jamboree
6. Launching some butt chocolate
7. Renegade monkey with some fish sticks
8. Swamp Thing backwash
9. Bursting titty symposium
10. Boner of the century
11. Bozo hangs himself and gets a boner
12. Newt boner
13. Sinister hair-chunk Polaroid scalpel
14. Super natural beet snack
13. Antiseptic skillet formation
14. Ominous squirrel perimeter
13. Pocket triangle numerology for the damaged
13. Mon Dieu! I have eaten my own foot!
13. A tall glass of onion juice and kitty whiskers
14. Malibu Barbie in a drum
15. Abdul’s hairy butt that
13. The pot calling the Negro black
12. Portentous nine iron
13. Petroleum jelly donut
13. Scaloppini daydream
13. Lamborghini extract
alt: Keebler elf damage (level)
A suction cup is as gentle as a human hand
but strong enough to grip
almost anything.
Most of PIAB suction cups can be used
together with accessories such.
To get the Facts&Figures for the Suction Cups please
download the file. Reader, SUCTION CUP WITH CLIP:
Many uses on any smooth
non porous surface.
Vacuum & Suction Cups.
Seal Science offers a broad line
of vacuum c
from 4mm to 50mm in diameter.
Specially formulated Elastomer compounds
for high. Exclusive Features.
Suction Cups and Non-Skid Rubber Feet
provide maximum stability
on almost any work surface while dispensing
film or foil.
Travellers smoke dirt
knock my damn drink over, simp
—yes, frogs hibernate
Underwater chums
Plink nocturnal digits lightly:
Unleash winter’s bun
Into the old pond
from out of the sky it fell,
a loaf of bread—plop!
Ten tiny swans swim
(at reasonable prices)
the river of death.
Trilobites are like
all the Zeuses at the steakhouse
—filthy little slut.
1. Klondike Druid Farm
2. Keebler elf damage-level
3. Malibu Barbie in a drum
4. Wily persimmons
5. Marshmallow toilet paper
6. The stain on my lightswitch
7. Ominous squirrel perimeter
8. Antiseptic skillet formation
9. Nietzsche’s breakfast treats
10. I jimmied the lock on the rainbow trout
11. Rooty-tooty fresh and headless
12. Renegade monkey with some fish sticks
13. Lipstick racist
13. Mixing up the arm bones
13. Vulcan Fun truck
13. Whole lotta cake walkin’
13. What the tapeworm said
14. The Bithynian dirt scroll
15. Second knuckle once removed
16. Squeal like an ashtray
17. California disarmament jamboree
13. Return the genius to his crawlspace
1.
Yun-yen was making stew for the noon meal.
Tao-wu said, “You are talking to yourself about pantsuits again, aren’t you?”
Yun-yen said, “You should know that there is one pantsuit which bubbles up through the linoleum.”
Tao-wu said, “Is that so? Do you mean to say that that Tolstoy was the fifth Beatle?”
Yun-yen held up a pork chop and said, “How many fingers am I holding up?”
Tao-wu said nothing.
2.
Gavin MacLeod scratched out the Diamond Sutra on a matchbook cover. He gave it to Wu-tsao.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“It is my dirty ass,” he replied. “Why don’t you clean it?”
3.
Shih-huang Ti was traveling in the wilderness. After one week of travel he spotted a monastery on a cliff. He rode his horse up to the monastery and dismounted. Entering the Great Hall he was met by a monk holding a bowl of rice.
Shih-huang Ti said, “I have traveled very far. I must relieve myself. Please show me your toilet.”
The monk did not speak but thrust out the bowl of rice.
Shih-huang Ti said again, “Please show me your toilet.”
Again, the monk thrust out the bowl.
Shih-huang Ti shouted angrily, “Monk! Is this how you treat your guests? I have told you twice already, show me your toilet!”
The monk replied compassionately, “The toilet is here.”
Shih-huang Ti took down his riding breeches and loosened his bowels into the bowl.
4.
Karl Malden.
5.
What is the sound of one Jed Clampet?
Mainstream journalism falls down on the job more often than not in giving context to news stories. Perhaps it’s the fear of slant that leads writers and editors to refuse to analyze and frame the news events they’re reporting. I’ve been thinking about that again due to the recent attacks by Israel on Gaza. The what, where, when and how is almost always on offer, but the why almost never is. So, I read about these attacks and I say, “Fine. But why?”
So, Israel has been shooting rockets and dropping bombs on Gaza. Now, they’ve sent troops in. But in none of the articles I’ve read has it said why. I don’t expect journalists to unequivocally know. But surely motivation should be part of the story. And it would be safe enough to report it if they did nothing more adventurous than interviewing a decision-maker or an academic, or something.
This is what I’ve figured out. The Hamas organization, who, as a political party, won the last Palestinian election and took over the running of Gaza, have a long history of killing Israelis, based on a political platform avowing the physical destruction of the country of Israel and all the Jews there. The group recently broke the latest cease-fire, lobbing missiles into Israel, killing some, and creating a great deal of, well, terror. So, the decision-makers of the Israeli government decided to put the frighteners on the Hamas government by bombing them in return, focusing on Hamas members. Between killing Hamas members in authority and thereby decapitating the organization and making Gazan life dangerous and miserable – or moreso anyway – Israeli government decision-makers hope to destroy the reputation of the organization as well as its ability to materially effect Israel in the future.
