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.

Listen Up!

Words & Images, your neighborly neighborhood literary journal, is being let outta the cat's bag soon. Very soon. Thursday, to be precise. So yourblogs truly is going to the release party at One Longfellow Square on Thursday at 7:30 PM, because it's going to be a spectacular thingy. Importantly, Gibson Fay-Leblanc (my former poetry instructor and head of Portland's own The Telling Room) is going to read some poems as well as a whole bunch of the contributors including Mark Melnicove and Melissa Crowe. AND (unimportantly) i'm reading, too. Eeps. How did that one happen (cue old groucho marx joke about clubs willing to have me as a member)?

OH YEAH and there are going to be three bands playing too. So it's not some nerd-ass nerdparty. It's a nerd-ass realparty. So come and see yourblogstruly (who will write up the whole thing for you assholes who don't come) and buy Words & Images and see Marie Stella, Huak and The Scrapes. This Thursday. 7:30 PM (that's half an hour past the number under the ampersand on your keyb'd).

YEAH YEAH YEAH (UPDATE): no cover, you bums! & One Longfellow is right near the fucking statue of Longfellow at the corner of State & Congress, so if you're on your nightly walk from Video Expo to Treasure Chest & back to Video Expo and you DON'T stop in for this shits, you're a total asshole. But wash your hands first, eh? Nobody needs to catch Video-Booth-Peepshow-Semen Flu.

Yesterday I Saw

a guy on forest ave. with a big black trashbag that kind of looked like it might be full of body parts.





just sayin'.