Happy Bloomsday!

Living in central shoreline Connecticut, I have a feeling there are no James Joyce themed pubcrawls or public readings of Ulysses, but today is Bloomsday nonetheless. So if you have the ability, celebrate it. Hit up Ri-Ra if you're in Portland tonight and maybe i'll go to this creepy diner called McNulty's this afternoon. Somehow, i kind of doubt it. But today marks the oft-celebrated anniversary of the book (even though it was published on a different date), no matter how much of a pain in the ass it is to read, i gotta say the Ulysses is honestly just a gorgeous piece of work that manages not to lose the soul of good writing despite the extensive stylistic experimentation. If you've never read it before, why the hell not pick up a bit of it today? Nobody expects you to handle it all, just give the beginning of an episode a whirl. Might i suggest episodes 1, 6, or 2 for starters?

Celebrate with a pint of beer or a good old venus-in-furs freakout in a red light district or even a a graphic dump followed by a newspaper ass-wiping. i'll be sitting down a bit with a chapter or two this evening. deshil holles eamus. deshil holles eamus. deshil holles eamus.

irony

i got a netbook so that (among other reasons) i could blog more often. and all i've done is blog infinitely less. with that, i'd like to kick off a brief entry about a poet i really dig, Dennis Johnson. i've recently been reading his KICKASS short story collection "Jesus' Son" (oh yeah lou reed reference) and everyone need to read this book. it's not even an issue of time or effort because the collection is tiny and gorgeous and it flows so delicately and smoothly: his prose is poetry. and for an example of his poetry, take Heat:

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover
tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.
It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,
Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,
streaming with hatred in the heat
as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin
to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,
and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.
August,
you're just an erotic hallucination,
just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,
are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,
this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,
the bogus moon of tenderness and magic
you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

try reading this poem aloud. it's really musical. that gives you something of an idea about how his short stories sound, and the effect is enhanced by the brevity of it all. i started "Jesus' Son" yesterday and i'm over halfway through it. It moves quickly like a series of snapshots. anyway, mull on that!

Goodbye, Portland!

A Lighter of Fires is moving on, sadly. I hate to go but it's just time. Portland is a great place to live with a pretty cool little tight-knit community of writers and poets and kickass bookstores and I'm very sad to be leaving it all. I hope to return for more than a visit someday, but who the hell really ever knows about that.

The blog, however, marches on: in the utter abyss that is the local community of bookstores and readings, I'll be pretty dormant this summer. Let's hope Bethlehem, PA has got some great things to talk about and I'll do my best to feast on the juicy cactusmeat of the internet's poetry while i'm living in this desert for a while. You've been great, Portland.

being done

it's really weird. of course, i'm less done than some of my friends who just graduated and now they're floating about in their various nothingnesses, but maaaaaan am i in limbo. i'm about to relocate and then relocate again within the next three months. the thought of it just blows: spending my whole summer living in various states of discomfort and having my stuff packed away, &c. Still, i guess the payoff is good. New, clean slate in a new city and a great opportunity as far as education and career go... but this summer is going to be almost as weird as the past few days have been: waking up at erratic times and then realizing i have nothing useful to do.

HOLY WOW

I'm almost done... how fucked up is that?!

(but not actually done)

kay, back to work. THAT MEANS YOU TOO.

youtubes.

eeeek!

Come to the Words & Images release party tomorrow, nerds! 7pm. One Longfellow.