i don't think i'll be posting here anymore, for a bit of time at least, i think.
i want to use this site as a reference, where links to stuff i get published or publish myself can be found. i'll try to remember to update new shit of mine which gets posted, if it happens, because i don't submit much stuff to places anymore.
If anyone might want to publish writing by me, gustavo rivera, feel free to hit me up at gariverasantiago@gmail.com, and i'll send you stuff.
If no one wants to publish stuff that i write, well that's cool, i don't need you.
Take care, much love, and fuck the world.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Thursday, January 13, 2011
How to be happy
So right now I'm making a long due post. I'll try to include everything that I think has been important to me since the last post I made, but I'm sure I'll forget something.
Right now I'm at work, and Boston has been shut down by the blizzard, and I'm bummed because I was hoping to give class. I've realized that other than doing hard drugs and dancing to my friends' bands, the only thing that makes me happy and want to stay alive is teaching.
My classroom is set up. I have all the parts of my lesson ready. There is pretty hipster music, the Ruby Suns, playing on the radio. The room is warm. There are no students in it.
I'm teaching myself Haitian Creole. Mwen bien, mon amie. Li fe nevez treinte di maten. That's supposed to say "I'm well, my friend. It is nine-thirty in the morning."
Poems of Sam Pink which I translated have been published by a webjournal in Chile name Cinosargo. You can download the pdf version of the journal HERE. You can read the original blog post they did with the pieces (with a really cool-looking pic of Sam Pink) HERE. Some other pieces of his which I translated are going to be published in an anthology of "escritores del norte," meaning "writers from the north." What really pumped me up about getting published by Cinosargo was that we were considered from "North America," instead of being considered "American," which is awesome because I have ingrained resentments towards the U.S.A.
After trying a bunch of times to do the proper thing and get official rights to translate poems of José María Lima, meaning I called people in Puerto Rico everyday for about a month, and have continued to send them emails, I decided to say fuck it, and have posted up again all of the translations of the man done my myself, and my dearly good friend, Alfredo Perezjurado. You can check out mine HERE and Perezjurado's HERE.
Another dear friend of mine, Marc Hennessy, makes beautiful music by using looping mechanisms. You can check out his new website HERE.
I've learned of another Puerto Rican poet who I have been enjoying much recently. His name is Salvador Villanueva, and I have been translating his stuff too. Once again, I have no rights to this, but nonetheless I am posting the translations on my Facebook page. You can out one of them, "Status Update," HERE.
And some other friends I made thanks to have being been a part of St. Dad is the band White Lung. They are going to tour the East Coast in April of this year, and I have organized my life around being able to be there for that. That means I have made sure that my classes and jobs will not interfere with my ability to be in New York City to fuck shit up while they are there too. I have also told everyone I know to go. I will continue doing this till the moment has passed. They have a really good album which came out last summer, and it is being streamed at what seems to be a big-time hipster music rag. Check out their album, "It's the Evil," HERE. Check out their webpage, which can be quite entertaining at times, HERE.
***UPDATE***
So it seems that the White Lung tour dates has changed, so I guess I'm not exactly sure when I'd be fucking shit up in NYC. They say they need help booking the tour. You can check out their tentative schedule HERE. They're going to be on tour with Nu Sensae, who also rock it. I don't believe in hype, so all I will say is that I saw them play live once in Gainesville, FL, and enjoyed it, and have listened to them on recordings, and also enjoyed that.
Some poems of mine will be included in this nice-looking journal put out by friends of mine, Ben Larson, from Farms, and Michelle Chrzanowski, whom I met because she works with Ben on these zines. Check out the zine HERE. I had a poem about my last roommate published in the previous zine they came out with, Dragon Slutz. I posted about this already but did a bad job of scanning and uploading, so I'm including that poem in this post.
My roommate, Kenny, the ghetto-dragon
Kenny is my roommate. He is a dragon.
He is a half-Puerto Rican, half-Costa Rican dragon.
Sometimes he connects me with bags of weed.
He calls it “Green” or “Haze,” depending on the quality of the moment.
These are the moments in which you can truly notice his state of being a dragon.
He inhales and blows long trails of smog from out of his snout.
The smell is not that of cheap or expensive marijuana, but of the digested bodies of white people.
We live on the lowest level of an underground lair off Dragon Lair Blvd., three stops from the train station.
The fact that it was three stops away from the train station is why I moved in.
Desperation and necessity are why I moved in.
In his cave of our lair Kenny hoards many valuables.
He has a large flat-screen TV, a queen-sized bed, a pimped-out sound system, and a water cooler.
He has weapons of fallen knights, which he shows off when he is drunk on pints of white people’s blood.
I asked him why he had so much gold under his bed yet was living here off Dragon Lair Blvd.
“This is the ghetto,” I said.
“You know me. I’ve been doing this since I’m fifteen.”
He then told me he let female dragons believe he was a mad money-making dragon.
“I be fucking all these bitches.”
I’ve yet to find out where Kenny works. He told me he did security.
I would feel secure if a dragon like Kenny were watching over me.
Sometimes Kenny, my roommate, the dragon, wakes me up with reggaeton at ten AM.
At points like that I need to leave the house.
I'm going to have a new Mr. Potato Head story published soon at Girls with Insurance. Until then you can check out the real Mr. Potato Head making an appearance on a video Madore made promoing his upcoming issue of Dispatch.
**UPDATE***
The new Mr. Potato Head story, "Mr. Potato Head decides to move to a city in the northeast," has been published. Check that out HERE.
Napolnariz, a band with whom I have a lot of history with, good and bad, the band which probably means the most to me in context to my definition of punk rock, and punk rock is what I use to define a lot of things in my life, reunited to play some shows in Puerto Rico this past month. It looks like it went wild. I have spoken to Jonpol, living in Toledo, OH, on the phone, and he has confirmed that it was a wild time. Some really rad person, a person who is keeping a video diary of their sex-change process in an extremely conservative patriarchal society like Puerto Rico, has posted a video of one of my favorite Napolnariz songs, "Mariela."
***UPDATE***
I wrote an essay about what happened between me and No Bunny sometime last year. You can read that HERE.
Other than that, fuck the world!
Right now I'm at work, and Boston has been shut down by the blizzard, and I'm bummed because I was hoping to give class. I've realized that other than doing hard drugs and dancing to my friends' bands, the only thing that makes me happy and want to stay alive is teaching.
My classroom is set up. I have all the parts of my lesson ready. There is pretty hipster music, the Ruby Suns, playing on the radio. The room is warm. There are no students in it.
I'm teaching myself Haitian Creole. Mwen bien, mon amie. Li fe nevez treinte di maten. That's supposed to say "I'm well, my friend. It is nine-thirty in the morning."
Poems of Sam Pink which I translated have been published by a webjournal in Chile name Cinosargo. You can download the pdf version of the journal HERE. You can read the original blog post they did with the pieces (with a really cool-looking pic of Sam Pink) HERE. Some other pieces of his which I translated are going to be published in an anthology of "escritores del norte," meaning "writers from the north." What really pumped me up about getting published by Cinosargo was that we were considered from "North America," instead of being considered "American," which is awesome because I have ingrained resentments towards the U.S.A.
After trying a bunch of times to do the proper thing and get official rights to translate poems of José María Lima, meaning I called people in Puerto Rico everyday for about a month, and have continued to send them emails, I decided to say fuck it, and have posted up again all of the translations of the man done my myself, and my dearly good friend, Alfredo Perezjurado. You can check out mine HERE and Perezjurado's HERE.
Another dear friend of mine, Marc Hennessy, makes beautiful music by using looping mechanisms. You can check out his new website HERE.
I've learned of another Puerto Rican poet who I have been enjoying much recently. His name is Salvador Villanueva, and I have been translating his stuff too. Once again, I have no rights to this, but nonetheless I am posting the translations on my Facebook page. You can out one of them, "Status Update," HERE.
And some other friends I made thanks to have being been a part of St. Dad is the band White Lung. They are going to tour the East Coast in April of this year, and I have organized my life around being able to be there for that. That means I have made sure that my classes and jobs will not interfere with my ability to be in New York City to fuck shit up while they are there too. I have also told everyone I know to go. I will continue doing this till the moment has passed. They have a really good album which came out last summer, and it is being streamed at what seems to be a big-time hipster music rag. Check out their album, "It's the Evil," HERE. Check out their webpage, which can be quite entertaining at times, HERE.
***UPDATE***
So it seems that the White Lung tour dates has changed, so I guess I'm not exactly sure when I'd be fucking shit up in NYC. They say they need help booking the tour. You can check out their tentative schedule HERE. They're going to be on tour with Nu Sensae, who also rock it. I don't believe in hype, so all I will say is that I saw them play live once in Gainesville, FL, and enjoyed it, and have listened to them on recordings, and also enjoyed that.
Some poems of mine will be included in this nice-looking journal put out by friends of mine, Ben Larson, from Farms, and Michelle Chrzanowski, whom I met because she works with Ben on these zines. Check out the zine HERE. I had a poem about my last roommate published in the previous zine they came out with, Dragon Slutz. I posted about this already but did a bad job of scanning and uploading, so I'm including that poem in this post.
My roommate, Kenny, the ghetto-dragon
Kenny is my roommate. He is a dragon.
He is a half-Puerto Rican, half-Costa Rican dragon.
Sometimes he connects me with bags of weed.
He calls it “Green” or “Haze,” depending on the quality of the moment.
These are the moments in which you can truly notice his state of being a dragon.
He inhales and blows long trails of smog from out of his snout.
The smell is not that of cheap or expensive marijuana, but of the digested bodies of white people.
We live on the lowest level of an underground lair off Dragon Lair Blvd., three stops from the train station.
The fact that it was three stops away from the train station is why I moved in.
Desperation and necessity are why I moved in.
In his cave of our lair Kenny hoards many valuables.
He has a large flat-screen TV, a queen-sized bed, a pimped-out sound system, and a water cooler.
He has weapons of fallen knights, which he shows off when he is drunk on pints of white people’s blood.
I asked him why he had so much gold under his bed yet was living here off Dragon Lair Blvd.
“This is the ghetto,” I said.
“You know me. I’ve been doing this since I’m fifteen.”
He then told me he let female dragons believe he was a mad money-making dragon.
“I be fucking all these bitches.”
I’ve yet to find out where Kenny works. He told me he did security.
I would feel secure if a dragon like Kenny were watching over me.
Sometimes Kenny, my roommate, the dragon, wakes me up with reggaeton at ten AM.
At points like that I need to leave the house.
I'm going to have a new Mr. Potato Head story published soon at Girls with Insurance. Until then you can check out the real Mr. Potato Head making an appearance on a video Madore made promoing his upcoming issue of Dispatch.
Welcome to dispatch 3.1 from disproductions on Vimeo.
**UPDATE***
The new Mr. Potato Head story, "Mr. Potato Head decides to move to a city in the northeast," has been published. Check that out HERE.
Napolnariz, a band with whom I have a lot of history with, good and bad, the band which probably means the most to me in context to my definition of punk rock, and punk rock is what I use to define a lot of things in my life, reunited to play some shows in Puerto Rico this past month. It looks like it went wild. I have spoken to Jonpol, living in Toledo, OH, on the phone, and he has confirmed that it was a wild time. Some really rad person, a person who is keeping a video diary of their sex-change process in an extremely conservative patriarchal society like Puerto Rico, has posted a video of one of my favorite Napolnariz songs, "Mariela."
***UPDATE***
I wrote an essay about what happened between me and No Bunny sometime last year. You can read that HERE.
Other than that, fuck the world!
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
How make yourself known in a new city
I will not be posting monthly nor every other month updates. I will post when I feel I have something worth talking about. This may be more frequent or less frequent. I do not know.
Yesterday I received a package from Ben Larson, who plays in Farms. I met him at the Total Bummer fest in Gainesville, FL this past summer 2010. At the Endless Bummer, Farms was my favorite band to play. I danced with a girl. I left my hand on her butt. She danced with my hand on her butt. My hand went up and down and around in circles. It was a good time.
He invited me to write a not too serious poem loosely based on dragons. I wrote one about my roommate in Boston, as a dragon.
Here are pics of the zine's cover, of my poem in it, a drawing of roommate as a dragon, and of other poems and drawings I liked.
Ben and Michelle send me a lot of other cool stuff which made me happy. Stickers, their university's literary/arts journal. A magazine clipping with photos I plan to use with my English learners' class.
I am very happy. They are maintaining a blog about it. Check that out HERE.
Photobucket's being a bitch and I can't figure out how to make this work. So click on the pic and maybe you can see what's not cut out.
I've also been doing reviews of books I've been reading on my Tumblr. Check that out HERE.
Thank you for reading. Have a nice day!
Gustavo
Yesterday I received a package from Ben Larson, who plays in Farms. I met him at the Total Bummer fest in Gainesville, FL this past summer 2010. At the Endless Bummer, Farms was my favorite band to play. I danced with a girl. I left my hand on her butt. She danced with my hand on her butt. My hand went up and down and around in circles. It was a good time.
He invited me to write a not too serious poem loosely based on dragons. I wrote one about my roommate in Boston, as a dragon.
Here are pics of the zine's cover, of my poem in it, a drawing of roommate as a dragon, and of other poems and drawings I liked.
Ben and Michelle send me a lot of other cool stuff which made me happy. Stickers, their university's literary/arts journal. A magazine clipping with photos I plan to use with my English learners' class.
I am very happy. They are maintaining a blog about it. Check that out HERE.
Photobucket's being a bitch and I can't figure out how to make this work. So click on the pic and maybe you can see what's not cut out.
I've also been doing reviews of books I've been reading on my Tumblr. Check that out HERE.
Thank you for reading. Have a nice day!
Gustavo
Sunday, August 22, 2010
How to recover your lost ID
Hello, Reader,
The following words regard my decision to no longer use the identity of “Andy Riverbed.” I say use, because if you, or any, were to choose to direct yourself towards me with a “Hey, Andy,” “Yo, Andison, what’s up?” “Andrew Riverbedian Constantinople,” I will respond. I will not ignore you. That would be tasteless.
But I plan to no longer submit my work or ask that my work be published under the pseudonym, “Andy Riverbed.” Like I already said, if you were to call me “Andy,” I will not be offended. It is the price I pay for following my misguided (I like that word a lot) whims of youth. I will respond civilly and rationally, dealing only with the aspects that have us interacting. I will not correct you, but I will sign off as “Gustavo Rivera.”
“Gustavo Rivera” is my real name. It is the name my mother chose for me. Many people know me personally by this name and are aware that I use “Andy Riverbed” for my writings. My mother despises this fact. Some only know me as “Andy Riverbed.” Some even know me a “River Head.” Some as “Gestapo Santiago Santiago.” Some as “…y la rivera.” I hope this change does not cause confusion or annoyance (one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to make this change), but if that were to happen, it would quickly pass, because this whole change is pretty insignificant.
Interiorly, I have always been the person I am. The only aspects of my self that have changed are my habits and outward persona given to those I interact with. These changes have nothing to do with “Andy Riverbed” or “Gustavo Rivera,” but with the experiences and life circumstances that have come to affect me.
This change, to using my real name in context to my literary output, may seem a meaningless occurrence, because it is, but nonetheless, I feel it deserves an explanation. The following is a “history,” or something like that, explaining how I came to use “Andy Riverbed,” and why now I choose not to.
I first used a pseudonym when getting published when I got my first poem put up by an online journal at the age of 19, as “…y la rivera.” Why? As a kid in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I spent a lot of my time hanging out on the streets at night with punk kids, hip-hop kids, and graffiti kids. Some of my friends were graffiti artists. I’d tag along with them as they went tagging walls of the city, and I eventually created my “tag.” Back then my “punk name” was “gustavo huele huele,” which literally translates into “gustavo sniff sniff.” I used to tag “HUELE” on walls. I found that to be funny. Then I had a pop punk band called “Mostro Verde” (the name of a local brand of heroin sold en Santurce), and I made a little design to represent that, and I would go around the streets tagging that. Then I went a little crazy. I had spent a summer drinking too much rum (about a bottle each night), and one night I blacked-out and fell a really high distance to the ground. At the emergency room they injected steroids into my brain to cease its swelling so they could sew up the gash on my head. After that I was put into a few mental hospitals and was diagnosed as bi-polar. What had actually happened was that those steroids had sparked me into a manic trip. I was like that for a period of about four to six months.
I had already gotten into writing poetry then. Sometimes I would go to the Nuyorican Café en Old San Juan on Sundays and read during the open mic. After I had been released from the hospitals, I continued to hang out, which was a terribly bad idea, but one I went with. Because I found myself so clever and wanted to emphasize that I had been diagnosed as “bi-polar,” when asked my name at the open mic, I told them to call me out as “Gustavo y la rivera.” This was supposed to represent me as two people in one. I guess it works, but now I look at it as totally pretentious and another misguided youthful whim. Eventually, I knocked myself completely out of the picture and just kept the name, “…y la rivera.” Then I went around the streets tagging that. This brings me to ask myself if I was maybe in denial of my self.
Eventually I moved to the States, and when I would get stuff published, that was the name I used. One day I was playing a boxing game on my roommate’s game system, and when I tried to name my created boxer “y la rivera,” it would not fit in the cells I was allowed to use. So I “translated” “y la rivera” to “Andy Riverbed.” How does that work? It’s weird, but works too. “y la rivera” literally translated into English means “and the riverbed.” Then I started thinking about how certain dialects of English pronounce the phrase “and the” as [æn di] (phonetic spelling), which spells out: “Andy.” So I named my created boxer “Andy Riverbed.” That was about four years ago. Since then I changed up my Myspace, made a blog, got stories and poems published, got a poetry collection and two eBooks published, all under “Andy Riverbed.”
I no longer want this. I no longer feel “pumped” when I think about “Andy Riverbed,” but I’ve gone with it because change seemed complicated and messy. And aren’t we constantly being scared out of possibly new and glorious decisions due to fear of complications and dirty hands? Well, fuck it, I thought. Now, I just don’t care. I have a new email using parts of my real name (gariverasantiago@gmail.com). And if you want to call me “Andy” or “Riverbed” or whatever, that’s cool too. But for the mentioned reasons I will no longer publish my shit as “Andy Riverbed.”
Thank you for reading,
Gustavo Rivera
St. Dad is over
And in honor of its memory I am releasing Side B of our upcoming twelve-inch which will remain nameless because we were so unable to work together that we couldn't even name the thing. So to me this is Side B of the S/T St. Dad record. All these are new reocrdings of older songs that had been previously released in earlier St. Dad recordings. Despite the band break-up, from what I have been told, this record will still be released. Side A are all completely new songs.
Side B of S/T St. Dad Record
Living in the northeast
Right now I'm in Queens, NY, and on Friday I should be driving with Popcorn to Boston, MA. Popcorn has suffered a lot this past week since I left Florida. Sunday night, at around 12AM, Popcorn, Matty, Rilly, and I followed Owen and Denise from Lagues towards Orlando, FL. I woke everyone up at 6AM, and dropped off Matty and Rilly in Gainesville, FL, and started off on my mission to make it to the northeast. Popcorn has been living in a small portable cat cage since then. We made it to Newark, NJ by Tuesday afternoon. I stopped in a few rest stops and slept in the space between the two seats of the Uhaul truck I had rented. I'd leave the air on until it got cool in the space, then turn off the engine, and sleep until it became too hot again and I was sweaty. From Newark I went to Queens, NY, to pick up Dru. We made it to Boston that night and slept at Joshua's. The next day Dru and I got all my shit into a storage space in Malden, MA, and then spent the day trying to get rid of the truck I had rented. Popcorn had been left in Queens, with Lily, and I had to return to get him "home." So until today, I wasn't sure what to do to get Popcorn to Boston. The public commuting services do not allow pets other than service-pets. Today I found someone looking for a ride to Amherst, MA, and he is willing to pay gas and toll expenses till there. So, then, I've reserved a car that will cost me a little over a hundred dollars for the day. Add that to all that has been spent getting me here in Queens so far. I don't have a place to live yet. Poor Popcorn's stuck in a little cage, and he can't understand when I tell him, "Popcorn, it's just temporary. I promise."
Before I left Gainesville, I had been sending out emails with the manuscript of my upcoming collection. The response to it got me thinking about this collection. One specific review that got me thinking about the state of this collection was written by the Puerto Rican ghetto-cat, Theodore Puertoriquez'. You can read that HERE.
Now before you read Puertoriquez' review and take his words at face value, take into consideration the following factors:
(1) Theodore Puertoriquez is a "Puerto Rican ghetto-cat," and therefore is extremely homophobic.
(2) Theodore Puertoriquez is in actuality Mather Schneider's Mexican girlfriend, that short bucket of hot sauce Mather's always writing poignant and heart-wrenching ballads for people who believe in the fallacy called "love" about. And if anyone remembers the last Manual update, in which I reviewed Mather's latest collection, I assure you she's looking to get back at me. And it was difficult for me not to notice that the style in which Puertoriquez reviewed my collection was obscenely similar to how I had reviewed Mather's.
And if you don't believe that Puertoriquez is Mather's Mexican girlfriend, well, check out this pic:
[The purpose of this note is to make sure that all can visualize the image contained above. Due to Photobucket's policies, the above picture may have been banned. It is an image of a man penetrating a woman from behind, and in it, the face of the male has been cropped to be the face of Mather, and the female's face has been cropped to be Puertoriquez.]
***UPDATE***
Like I was sure would happen, Photobucket banned my image of Mather fuckiing Puertoriquez up the ass. So I've uploaded the pic onto my Tumblr, so you can check it out HERE.
But regardless of the reasons why Puertoriquez may have ripped my collection, his review sparked thoughts and questions in me. One major question was this:
"Does my poetry suck?"
I began wondering if I had turned possibily vital words into shit through my having stared at them, worked on them, moved them around, for too many hours. Maybe there was once a vitality present in this collection, but I smothered it.
See, Puertoriquez writes these poems to be my "new poems." But they aren't. I have been carrying all of the poems of this collection around with me for over a year. What I believe I have done is that by working on this collection for so long, I have ruined it. It had been sucked dry into boring.
I had sent out numerous emails regarding the collection, and only two people have posted anything concering it, (1) Puertoriquez, and (2) Scott Steinhardt, whose blurb you can read HERE. He seemed to enjoy the collection, but his reasons are quite worrying.
When asked for something said about the collection, Matt DiGangi had this: "If I must provide a quote, it’d go like this: Gustavo Rivera says it better than I can: “Small men baked pizza inside my chest.”
Well, what's that? That means nothing, really. I love you Matt, but that blurb is meaningless. Unless its meaning lies in the fact that it is saying nothing for a reason. I had a linguistics professor, Brent Henderson, talk in class about the meaning of not-saying. I think one of his examples was something like: "I would recommend X person for the job because he or she will not be late." But other than saying that X person will be there on time, it doesn't saying anything about the person's qualifications. Maybe because the person sucks, just like the poetry in this collection might suck.
So then due to the responses (or lack-there-of) I have received about the collection, I have come to the following conclusion: In general, the poetry contained in the collection I wanted to be my second, "We act agngry and apathetic because there's too much noise," sucks.
But I can't admit yet that my compulsion to write things I call "poems" to be a waste of my time. I recently submitted a few of my real new poems, poems from the past month, to the online journal BEATNIK, and a few days later, Bruce Hodder, the journal's editor, wrote to me this:
"Hi Gustavo,
I think the poems are great! Accordingly, I've been a greedy so-and-so and posted all of them at BEATNIK this morning. Hope that's okay.
I'm getting such great material from people who aren't the names you see on page after page of other journals I feel really lucky."
You can read those poems HERE.
What I must have happened with this collection, the one I planned to be my second, is that I worked on it way too much and for way too long, and I destroyed it. That now it's a futile attempt. I do not belive it is pointless to continue writing poetry, or to try to compile a second collection. But this one just won't be it, I think. Basically, this collection proves that what I needed was a roommate who was aware of the process of self-sabotage that I was comitting, and as a gift to humanity and a favor to me, he or she would have decided to drop tiny traces of arsenic poison into my daily morning coffee so that I would slowly wither away, instead of being able to "finalize" this collection. But that didn't happen, so I did finalize the thing, and have now come to this point: I have realized that I am capable of working on my own shit for so long that I can kill its life.
You must understand, this collection has taken quite a journey and has changed a lot. It began as a collection of pretty much everything I do in terms of "literary" output. It contained Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish translations, a lot more poems, and up-to-one-page pieces of prose. It was more than forty pages long. The ordering of the pieces was supposed to "maintain a theme" throughout, but never become boring because it was constantly changing from form to form. A few months later I got rid of some of the poems I felt were weaker. I got rid of the translations, telling myself that one day I'd just do a collection of translations. I also eliminated all commas and semicolons. A few months later I put back some of the commas, and where I had semicolons, I used periods. I got rid of all of the prose peieces and of a few more poems. I was finally left with just poems. I worked on these for a while, trying to make them as "clear" as possible (probably why Puertoriquez says the collection is so "conversational"). Then I rearranged the poems into four seperate series, and that's where I had left it. To sum it up, my collection went from a monster manuscript containing translations, prose, and poetry, to eighteen pages of very simple poems, seperated into four series of no more than four poems each.
I have a publsiher for this collection. A small press from Puerto Rico, which publishes beautiful-looking books, but right now I don't want this thing to come out. I rather wait a bit and take my time and maybe do something better. I enjoy the collection. It makes me happy, but it doesn't drive me crazy either. I feel that it should do more than it does. So then I guess I'm agreeing with the avereage response: this collection isn't alive, it's dead.
News shining a more positive light on my writing
New Mr. Potato Head story, in which Mr. Potato Head enters the hood of a city in search of heroin and ends up in a parralel dimension, has been published at Girls with Insurance. Read "Mr. Potato Head cops dope while on tour with the Vegetables": HERE.
My friend Marc Henessey from Gainesville, Fl, is in a contest for live looping, and if you go to his video on Youtube and leave a comment he might win. I have seen him play the song he used in the competition a few times. It's much more impressive that way, under the slight light of a small D.I.Y. art venue, under the influence of a few bottles of tasty beers. Check out his video HERE.
I think my friend, Jamie Garvey, also from Gainesville, and vocalist of the hip-hop group, Scum of the Earth, has two of his tattooes in the book, "Word Made Flesh," which compiles pictures of literary-inspired tattooes and the stories behind them. Jamie's stories include apperances by Harry Crews, e.e. cummings, and a broken heart. Check that out HERE.
Based on my understanding of the emails I've exchanged with Sam Pink, I am his "official to-Spanish translator."
The following is the first ever (I believe) Sam Pink play translated into Spanish. Another thing to take note on is that I'm publishing this translation without having received proofs by one of my better-in-Spanish-than-me female friends. I think Lola is really busy and has had trouble getting computer access. So there might be some spelling errors and missing acentos, but nothing that I believe should make it unreadable. I can understand it, and right now, coming close to two months without a Manual update, that's enough for me.
Una obra sobre dos personas
De dos hogares adjecentes salen dos hombres. Cortan por sus patios y se paran frente a frente a una distancia de tres pies. El aire entre ellos los aprieta. Un foco sobre la entrada de vehiculos de uno de los hombres alumbra. El aire sugiere el fin del verano.
Uno: Que bien verte. [Sonríe.]
El otro: [Volviendo la sonrisa] Si, me siento igual.
Ambos alcanzan dentro de sus bolsillos. Las miradas de sus ojos juntos. Con precision lenta, ponen cuchillas de filetes con mangas negras contra la garganta del otro.
Uno: Creo que se ha hido el verano. Siento el enfrío.
El otro: Igualmente, me siento asi. Pronto cerrare mis ventanas.
Uno: Si, cuando llegue el frío, es mejor cerrar las ventanas. Así mantienes la casa caliente.
El otro: Gracías por la sugerencia. Eres un buen amigo. No como el sol, cual esta muy lejos.
Uno: Gracías. De eso trato. Me da felicidad.
El otro: Observando fotos de mi mismo me da felicidad. Aveces me hace bien recordar que una vez fuí una persona distinta.
Uno: Los retratos me asustan. No dejo que me tomen la foto.
El otro: Gracías por decirme eso. Ahora se más de ti.
Uno: Por favor, no lo menciones. No es nada.
El otro: Me gusta ser tu vecino. Eres humilde y eso me hace sentir poderoso por que te podría golpear hasta la muerte y no harías nada. Dirías, “No es nada.”
Uno: Estas abusando de nuestra amistad.
El otro: Si no cortas la grama de tu patio periodicamente, los insectos y animales lo infiltraran.
Uno: [Lamentando] Lo se.
Una hoja es spolada entre ellos. Uno le pone un poco de presíon al cuchillo. Le pellizca una vena del cuello de el otro.
Uno: [Brincando los pies para evitar el calor del suelo] Es bueno verte.
El otro: Si, es bueno verte a ti tambien. Creo que ya hemos tocado este tema.
Uno: Cuando no te veo por mucho tiempo se me olvida que existes.
El otro: Hay, que gracioso eres.
Uno: Estaba siendo sincero y ahora me has ofendido. Y que hicistes eso me deberias golpear hasta la muerte por que ya no me queda nada.
El otro: Si, mis brazos son fuertes. Mi mandíbula tambien. Te podría comer cuando estes ya muerto—huesos y todo. Mi esposa dice que soy capaz de comer piedras. Aveces, cuando duermo, ella pone piedras dentro de mi boca y me mueve la mandíbula hacia arriba y abajo para poner en prueba su teoría. Usualmente estoy despierto, pero me hago el dormido.
Uno: Eres una persona buena y un esposo bueno y es bueno verte.
Comienza una larga pausa en cual los dos tratan de presionar las cuchillas, cada uno con miedo de ser detectado y que haiga retaliamiento. Pasa un carro y sigue por la cuadra y se convierte en nada.
Uno: El fin de semana pasada estaba cocinando y sono el timbre de mi puerta. Luego, sono otra vez. Mantuve mi cabeza sobre la estufa con mis ojos abiertos. Mis pestañas se derritieron y bajaron bajo mi cara y mi cara se sintío apretada. Me quede quieto hasta que finalizo el timbre. Me quede parado hasta tener la opcion de sentirme comodo otra vez. Cuando escuchó el timbre de mi puerta sé que es porque todo el pueblo me quiere asesinar para mejorar la comunidad y se han hecho voluntarios. De esto estoy cierto. Una porción de mi quiere ayudar al pueblo mejorarse, pero otra parte naturalmente le tiene miedo a la muerte. Especialmente si fuera de una muerte de manera horrible, como ser golpeado repetetivamente sobre la cabeza con un bate de beisbol. Me imagino que eso haría el voluntario. Asumo que todos aportaron dinero para comprar el bate de beisbol, asi ahorrar en mi asesinato.
Un camion de helado pasa y su cancion se distorciona al que su distancia incrementa. Carillones de la brisa gotean notas y las susurras de las hojas las devoran.
El otro: Tambien disfruto del mantecado. Pero aveces me preocupo que en lo que me como la barquilla, el mantecado entrara algún boquete de mis dientes y un diente se pudrira, convirtiendose de color a gris, y el diente se caira en mi barquilla y me lo comere, pensandolo un nuez. Fuera de eso, verdaderamente disfruto del mantecado. Muchisimo.
Uno: Aveces, tarde en la noche, te veo nadando en tu picina. Sé que crees que estas escondido por que tu picina esta en la esquina de tu patio, y ahí esta debajo unos arboles. Pero como quiera te veo. Subo el arbol de mi patio y me siento ahí y te miro, y a tu esposa tambien, nadando. Ella se ve bien con el pelo mojado y flotando hacia atras. Tu te vez bien tambien. Pero la manera de tu esposa de verse bien es mejor que tu manera de verte bien. ¿Eso te hace sentido?
El otro: [Arrastrando su cuchillo un poco, de manera como si estubiese usando una sierra. Una mancha de sangre roja pasa lentamente sobre la navaja.] Si, eso me hace sentido. Me hace sentido por varias razones. La primera razon es por que me siento igual sobre mi esposa y la segunda razon es por que he estado tratando de entender porque había un gato enorme, que se parecia a ti, sentado en tu arbol todas las noches que estabamos nadando. Agradezco que me hayas clarificado esta curiosidad. Tambien quiero que sepas que cuando dije varías razones, hablaba de dos y te las he proveado y ahora he terminado mi discurso.
Uno: [Tragando. El sangre se rompe en riachuelos de sudor y luego cae lentamente bajo su cuello.] Una vez cuando estaba arriba en el arbol viendolos, había comprado popcorn y me decía a mi mismo, “Betty, vamos a ver el espectaculo de imagenes,” aunque sabía que no era un espectaculo de imagenes y aunque la frase “espectaculo de imagenes” es un anacronismo y aunque no conozco a nadie llamada Betty.
Uno gira la navaja y corre su punta sobre el cuello de el otro hasta que la punta esta puesto directamenta sobre el nuez de Adán de el otro.
El otro: Aunque tienes amigos imaginarios y comes popcorn sentado en arboles, te acepto como ser humano.
Uno: Gracías. Pero enverdad que he sido un burro cualquiera contigo. Por favor, dígame sobre usted. Quiero saber todo sobre ti.
El otro: Pues—anoche estaba pelando manzanas y accidentalmente me corte. Me quede observando la herida. Alumbraba de color purpura bajo la luz de la cocina. Había un ciempies fijamente mirandome desde la pared. Solamente me miraba. Le volvi la mirada—hasta que se hizo de día. A ese punto la manzana estaba cubierta de moscas. Cada par de minutos, levantaba la manzana para que las moscas se vayan volando. No soy el rey—solo observo al reino.
Uno estrecha sus ojos. Un conejo cruza entre sus patios. El conejo entra una mata. Una mata es la madre de un million de brazos.
El otro: Ya viene el enfrio.
Uno: [Casi riendose] Lo se. Lo puedo sentir.
El otro: Esta noche, ¿cierraras tus puertas y ventanas?
Uno: Es la unica manera.
El otro: Si.
Ahora el cielo es de color azul marino. El foco de uno esta rodeado por insectos. Bajan sus cuchillas y caminan por sus patio, sus zapatos cubiertos por la humedad. Sienten el enfrio. Cierraran sus ventanas. A sis mismos, menearan sus puños en silencio. Los digitos de sus relojes cambiaran. Ellos miraran—para asegurarses que las cosas se estan moviendo y cambiando. Ellos se veran otro y otra vez.
- Sam Pink play translated from English by Gustavo Rivera
The following words regard my decision to no longer use the identity of “Andy Riverbed.” I say use, because if you, or any, were to choose to direct yourself towards me with a “Hey, Andy,” “Yo, Andison, what’s up?” “Andrew Riverbedian Constantinople,” I will respond. I will not ignore you. That would be tasteless.
But I plan to no longer submit my work or ask that my work be published under the pseudonym, “Andy Riverbed.” Like I already said, if you were to call me “Andy,” I will not be offended. It is the price I pay for following my misguided (I like that word a lot) whims of youth. I will respond civilly and rationally, dealing only with the aspects that have us interacting. I will not correct you, but I will sign off as “Gustavo Rivera.”
“Gustavo Rivera” is my real name. It is the name my mother chose for me. Many people know me personally by this name and are aware that I use “Andy Riverbed” for my writings. My mother despises this fact. Some only know me as “Andy Riverbed.” Some even know me a “River Head.” Some as “Gestapo Santiago Santiago.” Some as “…y la rivera.” I hope this change does not cause confusion or annoyance (one of the reasons it’s taken me so long to make this change), but if that were to happen, it would quickly pass, because this whole change is pretty insignificant.
Interiorly, I have always been the person I am. The only aspects of my self that have changed are my habits and outward persona given to those I interact with. These changes have nothing to do with “Andy Riverbed” or “Gustavo Rivera,” but with the experiences and life circumstances that have come to affect me.
This change, to using my real name in context to my literary output, may seem a meaningless occurrence, because it is, but nonetheless, I feel it deserves an explanation. The following is a “history,” or something like that, explaining how I came to use “Andy Riverbed,” and why now I choose not to.
I first used a pseudonym when getting published when I got my first poem put up by an online journal at the age of 19, as “…y la rivera.” Why? As a kid in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I spent a lot of my time hanging out on the streets at night with punk kids, hip-hop kids, and graffiti kids. Some of my friends were graffiti artists. I’d tag along with them as they went tagging walls of the city, and I eventually created my “tag.” Back then my “punk name” was “gustavo huele huele,” which literally translates into “gustavo sniff sniff.” I used to tag “HUELE” on walls. I found that to be funny. Then I had a pop punk band called “Mostro Verde” (the name of a local brand of heroin sold en Santurce), and I made a little design to represent that, and I would go around the streets tagging that. Then I went a little crazy. I had spent a summer drinking too much rum (about a bottle each night), and one night I blacked-out and fell a really high distance to the ground. At the emergency room they injected steroids into my brain to cease its swelling so they could sew up the gash on my head. After that I was put into a few mental hospitals and was diagnosed as bi-polar. What had actually happened was that those steroids had sparked me into a manic trip. I was like that for a period of about four to six months.
I had already gotten into writing poetry then. Sometimes I would go to the Nuyorican Café en Old San Juan on Sundays and read during the open mic. After I had been released from the hospitals, I continued to hang out, which was a terribly bad idea, but one I went with. Because I found myself so clever and wanted to emphasize that I had been diagnosed as “bi-polar,” when asked my name at the open mic, I told them to call me out as “Gustavo y la rivera.” This was supposed to represent me as two people in one. I guess it works, but now I look at it as totally pretentious and another misguided youthful whim. Eventually, I knocked myself completely out of the picture and just kept the name, “…y la rivera.” Then I went around the streets tagging that. This brings me to ask myself if I was maybe in denial of my self.
Eventually I moved to the States, and when I would get stuff published, that was the name I used. One day I was playing a boxing game on my roommate’s game system, and when I tried to name my created boxer “y la rivera,” it would not fit in the cells I was allowed to use. So I “translated” “y la rivera” to “Andy Riverbed.” How does that work? It’s weird, but works too. “y la rivera” literally translated into English means “and the riverbed.” Then I started thinking about how certain dialects of English pronounce the phrase “and the” as [æn di] (phonetic spelling), which spells out: “Andy.” So I named my created boxer “Andy Riverbed.” That was about four years ago. Since then I changed up my Myspace, made a blog, got stories and poems published, got a poetry collection and two eBooks published, all under “Andy Riverbed.”
I no longer want this. I no longer feel “pumped” when I think about “Andy Riverbed,” but I’ve gone with it because change seemed complicated and messy. And aren’t we constantly being scared out of possibly new and glorious decisions due to fear of complications and dirty hands? Well, fuck it, I thought. Now, I just don’t care. I have a new email using parts of my real name (gariverasantiago@gmail.com). And if you want to call me “Andy” or “Riverbed” or whatever, that’s cool too. But for the mentioned reasons I will no longer publish my shit as “Andy Riverbed.”
Thank you for reading,
Gustavo Rivera
St. Dad is over
And in honor of its memory I am releasing Side B of our upcoming twelve-inch which will remain nameless because we were so unable to work together that we couldn't even name the thing. So to me this is Side B of the S/T St. Dad record. All these are new reocrdings of older songs that had been previously released in earlier St. Dad recordings. Despite the band break-up, from what I have been told, this record will still be released. Side A are all completely new songs.
Side B of S/T St. Dad Record
Living in the northeast
Right now I'm in Queens, NY, and on Friday I should be driving with Popcorn to Boston, MA. Popcorn has suffered a lot this past week since I left Florida. Sunday night, at around 12AM, Popcorn, Matty, Rilly, and I followed Owen and Denise from Lagues towards Orlando, FL. I woke everyone up at 6AM, and dropped off Matty and Rilly in Gainesville, FL, and started off on my mission to make it to the northeast. Popcorn has been living in a small portable cat cage since then. We made it to Newark, NJ by Tuesday afternoon. I stopped in a few rest stops and slept in the space between the two seats of the Uhaul truck I had rented. I'd leave the air on until it got cool in the space, then turn off the engine, and sleep until it became too hot again and I was sweaty. From Newark I went to Queens, NY, to pick up Dru. We made it to Boston that night and slept at Joshua's. The next day Dru and I got all my shit into a storage space in Malden, MA, and then spent the day trying to get rid of the truck I had rented. Popcorn had been left in Queens, with Lily, and I had to return to get him "home." So until today, I wasn't sure what to do to get Popcorn to Boston. The public commuting services do not allow pets other than service-pets. Today I found someone looking for a ride to Amherst, MA, and he is willing to pay gas and toll expenses till there. So, then, I've reserved a car that will cost me a little over a hundred dollars for the day. Add that to all that has been spent getting me here in Queens so far. I don't have a place to live yet. Poor Popcorn's stuck in a little cage, and he can't understand when I tell him, "Popcorn, it's just temporary. I promise."
Before I left Gainesville, I had been sending out emails with the manuscript of my upcoming collection. The response to it got me thinking about this collection. One specific review that got me thinking about the state of this collection was written by the Puerto Rican ghetto-cat, Theodore Puertoriquez'. You can read that HERE.
Now before you read Puertoriquez' review and take his words at face value, take into consideration the following factors:
(1) Theodore Puertoriquez is a "Puerto Rican ghetto-cat," and therefore is extremely homophobic.
(2) Theodore Puertoriquez is in actuality Mather Schneider's Mexican girlfriend, that short bucket of hot sauce Mather's always writing poignant and heart-wrenching ballads for people who believe in the fallacy called "love" about. And if anyone remembers the last Manual update, in which I reviewed Mather's latest collection, I assure you she's looking to get back at me. And it was difficult for me not to notice that the style in which Puertoriquez reviewed my collection was obscenely similar to how I had reviewed Mather's.
And if you don't believe that Puertoriquez is Mather's Mexican girlfriend, well, check out this pic:
[The purpose of this note is to make sure that all can visualize the image contained above. Due to Photobucket's policies, the above picture may have been banned. It is an image of a man penetrating a woman from behind, and in it, the face of the male has been cropped to be the face of Mather, and the female's face has been cropped to be Puertoriquez.]
***UPDATE***
Like I was sure would happen, Photobucket banned my image of Mather fuckiing Puertoriquez up the ass. So I've uploaded the pic onto my Tumblr, so you can check it out HERE.
But regardless of the reasons why Puertoriquez may have ripped my collection, his review sparked thoughts and questions in me. One major question was this:
"Does my poetry suck?"
I began wondering if I had turned possibily vital words into shit through my having stared at them, worked on them, moved them around, for too many hours. Maybe there was once a vitality present in this collection, but I smothered it.
See, Puertoriquez writes these poems to be my "new poems." But they aren't. I have been carrying all of the poems of this collection around with me for over a year. What I believe I have done is that by working on this collection for so long, I have ruined it. It had been sucked dry into boring.
I had sent out numerous emails regarding the collection, and only two people have posted anything concering it, (1) Puertoriquez, and (2) Scott Steinhardt, whose blurb you can read HERE. He seemed to enjoy the collection, but his reasons are quite worrying.
When asked for something said about the collection, Matt DiGangi had this: "If I must provide a quote, it’d go like this: Gustavo Rivera says it better than I can: “Small men baked pizza inside my chest.”
Well, what's that? That means nothing, really. I love you Matt, but that blurb is meaningless. Unless its meaning lies in the fact that it is saying nothing for a reason. I had a linguistics professor, Brent Henderson, talk in class about the meaning of not-saying. I think one of his examples was something like: "I would recommend X person for the job because he or she will not be late." But other than saying that X person will be there on time, it doesn't saying anything about the person's qualifications. Maybe because the person sucks, just like the poetry in this collection might suck.
So then due to the responses (or lack-there-of) I have received about the collection, I have come to the following conclusion: In general, the poetry contained in the collection I wanted to be my second, "We act agngry and apathetic because there's too much noise," sucks.
But I can't admit yet that my compulsion to write things I call "poems" to be a waste of my time. I recently submitted a few of my real new poems, poems from the past month, to the online journal BEATNIK, and a few days later, Bruce Hodder, the journal's editor, wrote to me this:
"Hi Gustavo,
I think the poems are great! Accordingly, I've been a greedy so-and-so and posted all of them at BEATNIK this morning. Hope that's okay.
I'm getting such great material from people who aren't the names you see on page after page of other journals I feel really lucky."
You can read those poems HERE.
What I must have happened with this collection, the one I planned to be my second, is that I worked on it way too much and for way too long, and I destroyed it. That now it's a futile attempt. I do not belive it is pointless to continue writing poetry, or to try to compile a second collection. But this one just won't be it, I think. Basically, this collection proves that what I needed was a roommate who was aware of the process of self-sabotage that I was comitting, and as a gift to humanity and a favor to me, he or she would have decided to drop tiny traces of arsenic poison into my daily morning coffee so that I would slowly wither away, instead of being able to "finalize" this collection. But that didn't happen, so I did finalize the thing, and have now come to this point: I have realized that I am capable of working on my own shit for so long that I can kill its life.
You must understand, this collection has taken quite a journey and has changed a lot. It began as a collection of pretty much everything I do in terms of "literary" output. It contained Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish translations, a lot more poems, and up-to-one-page pieces of prose. It was more than forty pages long. The ordering of the pieces was supposed to "maintain a theme" throughout, but never become boring because it was constantly changing from form to form. A few months later I got rid of some of the poems I felt were weaker. I got rid of the translations, telling myself that one day I'd just do a collection of translations. I also eliminated all commas and semicolons. A few months later I put back some of the commas, and where I had semicolons, I used periods. I got rid of all of the prose peieces and of a few more poems. I was finally left with just poems. I worked on these for a while, trying to make them as "clear" as possible (probably why Puertoriquez says the collection is so "conversational"). Then I rearranged the poems into four seperate series, and that's where I had left it. To sum it up, my collection went from a monster manuscript containing translations, prose, and poetry, to eighteen pages of very simple poems, seperated into four series of no more than four poems each.
I have a publsiher for this collection. A small press from Puerto Rico, which publishes beautiful-looking books, but right now I don't want this thing to come out. I rather wait a bit and take my time and maybe do something better. I enjoy the collection. It makes me happy, but it doesn't drive me crazy either. I feel that it should do more than it does. So then I guess I'm agreeing with the avereage response: this collection isn't alive, it's dead.
News shining a more positive light on my writing
New Mr. Potato Head story, in which Mr. Potato Head enters the hood of a city in search of heroin and ends up in a parralel dimension, has been published at Girls with Insurance. Read "Mr. Potato Head cops dope while on tour with the Vegetables": HERE.
My friend Marc Henessey from Gainesville, Fl, is in a contest for live looping, and if you go to his video on Youtube and leave a comment he might win. I have seen him play the song he used in the competition a few times. It's much more impressive that way, under the slight light of a small D.I.Y. art venue, under the influence of a few bottles of tasty beers. Check out his video HERE.
I think my friend, Jamie Garvey, also from Gainesville, and vocalist of the hip-hop group, Scum of the Earth, has two of his tattooes in the book, "Word Made Flesh," which compiles pictures of literary-inspired tattooes and the stories behind them. Jamie's stories include apperances by Harry Crews, e.e. cummings, and a broken heart. Check that out HERE.
Based on my understanding of the emails I've exchanged with Sam Pink, I am his "official to-Spanish translator."
The following is the first ever (I believe) Sam Pink play translated into Spanish. Another thing to take note on is that I'm publishing this translation without having received proofs by one of my better-in-Spanish-than-me female friends. I think Lola is really busy and has had trouble getting computer access. So there might be some spelling errors and missing acentos, but nothing that I believe should make it unreadable. I can understand it, and right now, coming close to two months without a Manual update, that's enough for me.
Una obra sobre dos personas
De dos hogares adjecentes salen dos hombres. Cortan por sus patios y se paran frente a frente a una distancia de tres pies. El aire entre ellos los aprieta. Un foco sobre la entrada de vehiculos de uno de los hombres alumbra. El aire sugiere el fin del verano.
Uno: Que bien verte. [Sonríe.]
El otro: [Volviendo la sonrisa] Si, me siento igual.
Ambos alcanzan dentro de sus bolsillos. Las miradas de sus ojos juntos. Con precision lenta, ponen cuchillas de filetes con mangas negras contra la garganta del otro.
Uno: Creo que se ha hido el verano. Siento el enfrío.
El otro: Igualmente, me siento asi. Pronto cerrare mis ventanas.
Uno: Si, cuando llegue el frío, es mejor cerrar las ventanas. Así mantienes la casa caliente.
El otro: Gracías por la sugerencia. Eres un buen amigo. No como el sol, cual esta muy lejos.
Uno: Gracías. De eso trato. Me da felicidad.
El otro: Observando fotos de mi mismo me da felicidad. Aveces me hace bien recordar que una vez fuí una persona distinta.
Uno: Los retratos me asustan. No dejo que me tomen la foto.
El otro: Gracías por decirme eso. Ahora se más de ti.
Uno: Por favor, no lo menciones. No es nada.
El otro: Me gusta ser tu vecino. Eres humilde y eso me hace sentir poderoso por que te podría golpear hasta la muerte y no harías nada. Dirías, “No es nada.”
Uno: Estas abusando de nuestra amistad.
El otro: Si no cortas la grama de tu patio periodicamente, los insectos y animales lo infiltraran.
Uno: [Lamentando] Lo se.
Una hoja es spolada entre ellos. Uno le pone un poco de presíon al cuchillo. Le pellizca una vena del cuello de el otro.
Uno: [Brincando los pies para evitar el calor del suelo] Es bueno verte.
El otro: Si, es bueno verte a ti tambien. Creo que ya hemos tocado este tema.
Uno: Cuando no te veo por mucho tiempo se me olvida que existes.
El otro: Hay, que gracioso eres.
Uno: Estaba siendo sincero y ahora me has ofendido. Y que hicistes eso me deberias golpear hasta la muerte por que ya no me queda nada.
El otro: Si, mis brazos son fuertes. Mi mandíbula tambien. Te podría comer cuando estes ya muerto—huesos y todo. Mi esposa dice que soy capaz de comer piedras. Aveces, cuando duermo, ella pone piedras dentro de mi boca y me mueve la mandíbula hacia arriba y abajo para poner en prueba su teoría. Usualmente estoy despierto, pero me hago el dormido.
Uno: Eres una persona buena y un esposo bueno y es bueno verte.
Comienza una larga pausa en cual los dos tratan de presionar las cuchillas, cada uno con miedo de ser detectado y que haiga retaliamiento. Pasa un carro y sigue por la cuadra y se convierte en nada.
Uno: El fin de semana pasada estaba cocinando y sono el timbre de mi puerta. Luego, sono otra vez. Mantuve mi cabeza sobre la estufa con mis ojos abiertos. Mis pestañas se derritieron y bajaron bajo mi cara y mi cara se sintío apretada. Me quede quieto hasta que finalizo el timbre. Me quede parado hasta tener la opcion de sentirme comodo otra vez. Cuando escuchó el timbre de mi puerta sé que es porque todo el pueblo me quiere asesinar para mejorar la comunidad y se han hecho voluntarios. De esto estoy cierto. Una porción de mi quiere ayudar al pueblo mejorarse, pero otra parte naturalmente le tiene miedo a la muerte. Especialmente si fuera de una muerte de manera horrible, como ser golpeado repetetivamente sobre la cabeza con un bate de beisbol. Me imagino que eso haría el voluntario. Asumo que todos aportaron dinero para comprar el bate de beisbol, asi ahorrar en mi asesinato.
Un camion de helado pasa y su cancion se distorciona al que su distancia incrementa. Carillones de la brisa gotean notas y las susurras de las hojas las devoran.
El otro: Tambien disfruto del mantecado. Pero aveces me preocupo que en lo que me como la barquilla, el mantecado entrara algún boquete de mis dientes y un diente se pudrira, convirtiendose de color a gris, y el diente se caira en mi barquilla y me lo comere, pensandolo un nuez. Fuera de eso, verdaderamente disfruto del mantecado. Muchisimo.
Uno: Aveces, tarde en la noche, te veo nadando en tu picina. Sé que crees que estas escondido por que tu picina esta en la esquina de tu patio, y ahí esta debajo unos arboles. Pero como quiera te veo. Subo el arbol de mi patio y me siento ahí y te miro, y a tu esposa tambien, nadando. Ella se ve bien con el pelo mojado y flotando hacia atras. Tu te vez bien tambien. Pero la manera de tu esposa de verse bien es mejor que tu manera de verte bien. ¿Eso te hace sentido?
El otro: [Arrastrando su cuchillo un poco, de manera como si estubiese usando una sierra. Una mancha de sangre roja pasa lentamente sobre la navaja.] Si, eso me hace sentido. Me hace sentido por varias razones. La primera razon es por que me siento igual sobre mi esposa y la segunda razon es por que he estado tratando de entender porque había un gato enorme, que se parecia a ti, sentado en tu arbol todas las noches que estabamos nadando. Agradezco que me hayas clarificado esta curiosidad. Tambien quiero que sepas que cuando dije varías razones, hablaba de dos y te las he proveado y ahora he terminado mi discurso.
Uno: [Tragando. El sangre se rompe en riachuelos de sudor y luego cae lentamente bajo su cuello.] Una vez cuando estaba arriba en el arbol viendolos, había comprado popcorn y me decía a mi mismo, “Betty, vamos a ver el espectaculo de imagenes,” aunque sabía que no era un espectaculo de imagenes y aunque la frase “espectaculo de imagenes” es un anacronismo y aunque no conozco a nadie llamada Betty.
Uno gira la navaja y corre su punta sobre el cuello de el otro hasta que la punta esta puesto directamenta sobre el nuez de Adán de el otro.
El otro: Aunque tienes amigos imaginarios y comes popcorn sentado en arboles, te acepto como ser humano.
Uno: Gracías. Pero enverdad que he sido un burro cualquiera contigo. Por favor, dígame sobre usted. Quiero saber todo sobre ti.
El otro: Pues—anoche estaba pelando manzanas y accidentalmente me corte. Me quede observando la herida. Alumbraba de color purpura bajo la luz de la cocina. Había un ciempies fijamente mirandome desde la pared. Solamente me miraba. Le volvi la mirada—hasta que se hizo de día. A ese punto la manzana estaba cubierta de moscas. Cada par de minutos, levantaba la manzana para que las moscas se vayan volando. No soy el rey—solo observo al reino.
Uno estrecha sus ojos. Un conejo cruza entre sus patios. El conejo entra una mata. Una mata es la madre de un million de brazos.
El otro: Ya viene el enfrio.
Uno: [Casi riendose] Lo se. Lo puedo sentir.
El otro: Esta noche, ¿cierraras tus puertas y ventanas?
Uno: Es la unica manera.
El otro: Si.
Ahora el cielo es de color azul marino. El foco de uno esta rodeado por insectos. Bajan sus cuchillas y caminan por sus patio, sus zapatos cubiertos por la humedad. Sienten el enfrio. Cierraran sus ventanas. A sis mismos, menearan sus puños en silencio. Los digitos de sus relojes cambiaran. Ellos miraran—para asegurarses que las cosas se estan moviendo y cambiando. Ellos se veran otro y otra vez.
- Sam Pink play translated from English by Gustavo Rivera
Sunday, June 6, 2010
How to motivate yourself to start again
A woman makes her own nation. Before, she was a stripper, but now lives on a farm that is distant from the main population of her town. She is less noticed for this reason. The last time she worked as a stripper, she saw a young girl, too young to be there (but does that mean anything, because isn’t all relative?), being slapped around, and then pulled into a room. When the woman of our story approached the poor, young girl, she was beat up, and had obviously been forced upon. On this farm, she has a printing machine, and each night she prints out flyers, and sends out letters as propaganda for her new nation on this farm. “Join my nation,” the flyers say, with only an address. Sometimes she receives correspondence. She responds to them, and people are invited to her world. This farm is her nation. She does not need society, and soon neither do those who join her. They now have her. And they bring her gifts. Each time another person joins her nation, the farm is replenished.
So it’s definitive: I have been slacking with the Instruction Manual in 2010. Let me explain. Shit’s been tough for me since I’ve graduated and remained in Gainesville. I hardly make enough money for anything. I got fired from a few jobs for a variety of retarded reason. I’ve been a lonely motherfucker. I’ve been through some intense bouts with depression while trying to do everything that would prevent this from happen (mini-workout routine since returning from tour with St. Dad; herbal meds for depression; a healthy diet). I’ve been doing more drugs. I don’t have a personal workspace. If I want to type anything, or update this blog, I am forced to be on campus, which I am utterly sick of.
But for optimism’s sake, shit should get better. I’ll probably remain broke as hell throughout the summer (summers in Gainesville have fucked me up each year I’ve lived here), but come September, I will be moving to Boston, where I was accepted into UMASS-Boston’s MA in Applied Linguistics program. I already have two potential jobs doing what I’ve been studying for for the past four years: one is as a writing tutor for urban youth; the other is a program which helps immigrants with their citizenship process and learning English. I am very excited. I feel as if this move to a city is what will give me all I’ve been working for since I started studying again here in the States.
I’ve just explained myself, but I don’t know if it even matters. Is anyone even aware that until this year I was making at least monthly updates to the Instruction Manual? I don’t think so. Maybe if someone were to tell me something about this shit, I might realize someone actually cares, and then I’d work harder to keep this as consistent as it once was.
Anyway, on to the content.
My cousin, Yamil Corvalan, has had some poems published. Check them out HERE and HERE.
There’s a student strike at the University of Puerto Rico. This happens every four years, like our presidential election. Last time it happened, I was studying again at the UPR, after having been through a few detoxes and mental institutions, and was doing pretty well in all my classes. Then, the strike occurred, and I had an entire month without school to keep myself occupied. So what happened? I shot up a lot of dope, and by the time classes renewed, I was strung-out, and eventually dropped out of school, again, and ended up in druggie boot-camp. For a long time, I blamed my returning to hard drugs, or at least the fact that I had enough time to get a habit, on the stupid-ass student strike. Check out details on the current strike HERE.
I got some poems published at NewWaveVomit. Check that out HERE.
An essay I wrote about playing dice was published by PostMortemPress. Check that out HERE.
New Mr. Potato Head story, “Mr. Potato head goes on Tour with the Vegetables” published at GirlsWithInsurance. Check that out HERE.
I made a Flavors page. Check that out HERE.
Check out drawings of my pet ferret, Fatboy McPopcorn, HERE.
I’m in the process of getting the official rights to translation of the poems of José María Lima, but until then, I’ve removed all of the ones I had posted (done by either me or by Alfredo “Cofre” Perezjurado). I am currently working on compiling a collection’s worth of translated poems of María Lima, but until I can obtain their rights, I can do nothing with them in terms of publication. Check out details HERE.
HERE’s a D*Holidey song
St. Dad at the TotalBummerFest, which occurred in late April in Gainesville this year. St. Dad is at time 3:24, but feel free to check out the other acts.
Review of St. Dad seven-inch at PostMortemPress HERE.
Review of St. Dad seven-inch at Maximum Rock n Roll HERE.
Lame review of St. Dad seven-inch at KidsLikeYouAndMe HERE.
A few words about the St. Dad seven-inch at TheKidsAreGonnaStickTogether HERE.
St. Dad is currently recording songs for an upcoming full-length album, which will be put out by AmnesianRecords. Check them out HERE.
Review of Mather Schneider’s Drought Resistant Strain
Note to reader: the following critiques of this collection are in majority personal attacks on Mather. To the careful reader, in between these attacks on Mather’s self, there will be genuine critiques, but for this review, I chose to mostly focus on the degradation of the being that is Mather. Another point to make is that when analyzing a poem, one should not assume that the narrator is the same as the author. Well, in this review, I am assuming that the narrator of the poem and its author (Mather) are the same.
First off, I don’t really get the title. Does Mather mean he never goes dry, despite that he’s a drain? In general, throughout the collection, Mather maintains a journalistic deadpan voice. So if he’s trying to say that his verse is moist, humid, or flavorful, he’s lying.
For the rest of this review, I will mention selected poems with their individual page number, and critique them. Then, I will have a conclusion with my overall opinion of the collection, and with a suggestion on how Mather could improve his existence.
p. 23: “Old Timers”
A poem about his grandparents, how their living together is just a ritual with no love to it. They don’t sleep in the same bed or room. It ends with the punch-line: “Each morning/whoever wakes up first/gets out of bed/and shuffles across the house/to see if the other/is still alive/before starting the/coffee.”
The idea of “Starting the coffee” only is the other is alive is the focus of the poem. I like Mather’s moments of real people he knows, but sometimes his “punch-lines” are his petty philosophies delving into the poem. I don’t know about that.
p. 32: “After Crossing the Border at Nogales”
A poem about stealing a Mexican’s wife. She’s going to be with the narrator (Mather), but they can’t talk, which of course helps Mather keep a woman, because any woman able to listen to what he has to say would run away.
He writes this bit: “So what if love/is a lie/where we agree to meet?” Yes, this was awesome. Love is a lie where we agree to meet. Love is about convenience, and Mather has a wife who won’t leave him because she can’t understand what he’s saying, and she gets a tool included in the package deal. Isn’t that convenient?
p. 57: “Bonita Familia”
A poem about Mather’s neighbors, about how the immigrant wife almost lost her child due to immigration laws when she crossed the border to get away from her husband. The impact of the poem is in what the mother did to get her child back. She smuggled herself through the border, more than once. Dedicated, a mother’s love. But Mather ruins it by including himself. The poem ends: “everything’s bueno./She called my girlfriend yesterday/to see if she wanted to have lunch/at the mall.” Though this is a good hit at assimilation (their meeting ground is the mall), I think Mather smothers the poem’s previous focus, the mother’s love, with his implication that it is important that he knows these people. Like Mather is saying that knowing these sacrificed Mexicans gives him an excuse to be alive.
p. 58: “Wash”
Mather paints a splendid picture of his boring life. “There’s the viscera,/swirling,/turtlenecks and underwear/calmly bombarding the glass.” This is very nice. Mundane, quaint, all that poetic bullshit that makes poetry. But then Mather has to talk about himself: “There’s my reflection./At the end it is a whole lot/of nothing.” Okay, Mather has just told us he’s a boring-ass douche. Thanks for the lesson. I couldn’t figure that one out on my own. He’s enlightened us. I liked the image that was initially presented, but, fuck, why did he have to go on and talk about himself? I fucking hate him.
p. 65: “Sharon”
A poem about a worn-out hooker who is going to go “straight” by posing nude for drawing students. It’s set in a bar, Mather’s verse moves quickly, brings the joke, the punch-line, the irony, that she’s still whoring herself out, just in a more acceptable manner. He writes, “She admits she’s getting older and fatter anyway/so maybe it’s about time she turned/her life around. She’s getting drunk/before she goes in to her first night/at her first real job in her entire life:/posing nude for the figure drawing class.”
At first I was thinking the poem was in third-person omniscient, and I liked it, until the penultimate line: “and I can’t help it,/it touches me.” Fuck, Mather ruined the poem again. A perfectly good poem, but Mather has to tell us he’s a real person with thoughts and feelings and shit. He knows this human (the hooker), and I should care about him (Mather). Well, no, I don’t, because Mather makes me vomit.
p.67: “Early/Late”
A poem about a homeless man Mather sees in an alley he takes to work. He writes: “His small dark/head looked/so peaceful,/I tried/to walk/without/a sound.” So what? Mather writes a sad poem which touches on human frailty and the fact that we have no control over anything in our lives; that we are victims of circumstance; that inside each of our heads is a chalkboard inside of a low-income public school with the phrase “Existential Despair” written with lime-green chalk. But then he wants us to indulge him, give him importance in the poem. Well, I don’t want this poem to have anything to do with Mather. The poem’s about the miserable bum. Is Mather worth reading about because he didn’t disturb the fucking bum? Oh, Mather’s so sweet. That bum probably hates Mather as much as I do. That night, the bum was awake, and when Mather’s stinky ass passed by him, the bum swallowed his puke out of consideration to Mather’s feelings, and immediately regretted it because he realized that Mather wasn’t worth the sacrifice.
p. 72: “At the Park”
Starts out in third-person, but then Mather starts thinking within the poem, and I got a belly-ache. The poem is about some lady at a park, who brings dogs with her and cages them in a playpen. Mather’s, like, thinking why she would do that, but then notices that the dogs don’t care, and he writes: “so I really don’t know why the whole/thing depressed me like it did, or why/I bother to go out into the world at all.”
A poem on the absurdity: the lady in a park imprisons her dogs in the face of freedom, which is a cool idea, but then Mather has to tell us how much of a loser he is. Mather does not need to tell us he’s a loser in each poem that he writes. This is obvious. How? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just an unspoken truth, like his poems, until he sticks his stupid face in them.
p. 73: “The Last Will and Testicle”
A guy’s at a bar complaining about becoming old. Mather’s listening to him. The guy bitching is thirty years older than Mather. The guy tells Mather about an impotent friend of his who got an implant to inflate his penis, and then went to Tijuana the fuck the brains out of some whore. The old guy made the implant part of his will, to pass down to his heirs.
This poem was pretty funny. I liked it a lot. The punch-line is fucked up and a surprise. It’s solid, except that Mather does some lame shit to be more “real” or something. To make the dialogue as “real”-seeming as possible, when the drunk bitching at the bar says shit about not wanting to get old, Mather writes: “[someone] has to hold a spoon of pre-masticated/gruel of lima bean/out in front of yer face saying/here comes the choo-/choo train fer chrissakes.” The “yer,” “fer,” and “chrissakes” as an attempt of noting how “real” this drunk is is a shitty technique. Mather fucked everything up once again. Mather thinks he’s so real because he notes on some drunk-ass bitch’s peculiarities. Well, would Mather be so “real” if I shot his face in with a shotgun?
p. 76: “Bill Collector”
I think this is part of a mini-series of poems about the collection-agency experience. Honestly, these few were my favorites from this collection. This poem in particular completely refrains itself from entering the first-person, meaning that when I read it, Mather’s butt-ugly, pimple-ridden, shit-stained face did not appear inside my mind. I really appreciated that. Mather should stay off the page unless he’s being mentioned in the local obituary column, and his loved one wants the three people who give a damn about him to show up at the funeral procession.
This poem’s about a “heartless” guy who gets money covered in shit mailed to him by the people he’s collecting from. It seems Mather wants us to see this guy as cold, but the guy’s just doing his job, and seems to be good at it. Mather thinks he has soul, but he’s dead, so whatever.
p. 77: “The Bell”
Another collection-agency poem, this time focuses on a bell that’s used to foment competition and exploitation. I feel this poem’s solid. I didn’t even mind that Mather used the first-person. Maybe it’s because I’ve experienced jobs such as these. Corporate jobs which look at its employees only as units and their emotions are insignificant. All that matters is productivity.
Conclusion
This collection is way too long. Mather sometimes will drop in a really good line, something that will stroke a limp dick into erection, but those lines tend to be muddled with a lot of bullshit, mostly when he’s mentioning his own existence.
Mather has a lot of “poignancy” in this collection, or what should be poignant if you give a damn. What Mather is missing is silly. Mather, the should-be-silly fuck.
New Sam Pink Translations
Múdate conmigo
Múdate conmigo. Estoy solo. Juntos podríamos ver tele. Nos reiríamos de las personas quienes hacen observaciones graciosas. Cuando tengas hambre, te cocinaré. Dirás, “Hacho, tengo unas ganas para…” y te lo preparare. Pondré pedacitos de vidrio en la comida. Tu boca se inundará en sangre. Me dirías algo que te paso durante el día, y cada palabra sonara patético saliendo por tus labios y lengua, hinchados y cortados. Te diré, “No hables con la boca llena. Te vez grosera.” Luego de comer pondrás tu cabeza sobre mi falda y pondré mis manos sobre tu cara. Nos bañaremos juntos y te tocare las nalgas. Te reirás. Me deslizaré hasta el suelo de la ducha. La agua vagara bajo tu espalda y caída de tus nalgas y me dará contra la cara. Tragare el agua antes de que entre el desagüe. Habrá mucho pelo tapando el desagüe. Lo sacare y pondré sobre mis labios como una perilla y actuaré como un tipo de mediana edad quien tiene una perilla. Tendré puesto sandalias y una camisa de algún pueblo en Méjico. Te besare en los labios con mi perilla. Cuando salgas de la ducha, harás que el agua salga frío y mi corazón hará hipo. Tendré miedo. Te perseguiré en lo que entras mi cuarto. En lo que te estés secando, le pondré seguro a la puerta y diré, “Rézale a tu dios, que es hora de sufrir. Quiero que estés ojo a ojo con mi pesadilla.” Hare una pausa antes de decir, “Es broma.” Saltare, desnudo, en la cama. Dirás, “Tus bolas se ven graciosas.” Responderé, “Graciosas, ¿como el ‘Family Circus?” Luego haremos el amor. Acabados de tener sexo, me limpiaré con papel de seda y el papel se quedara pegado contra mi cuerpo. Brincare por el cuarto como un venado de cola blanco. Te pondrás una chaqueta anaranjada y te pintaras la cara de color camuflaje. Dirás, “Ven aquí venita. No te hare daño,” y me dispararas en el cuello y habrá un gran hoyo y sangre entrara mi garganta. Nos sentaremos porque entre cada acción hay un incomodidad social silencioso. “Píntame los dedos de los pies,” eventualmente me dirás, tu voz sonando demasiado de alto contra el silencio. Aguantare tus pies en mis manos y los pintare. Tendré ganas de aplastarte los huesos. Diré, “Tienes pies lindos. ¿Te molestaría si los aplastaba con un martillo o una pesa?” Te reirás y me dirás que apague las luces para podernos acostar. Apagare las luces y me acostare al lado de ti. Te dormirás antes que yo y afuera estará lloviendo. La lluvia dará contra la ventana. Abriré la ventana y aguantare un vaso afuera por la ventana. Cuando se llene el vaso me beberé el agua. Me pondré tu pintalabios. Le daré un beso a la pared y golpeare la mancha que deje en ella. Tendré deseos de arrasarme. Tendré ganas de salir hacia afuera y ahogarme en un charco de lluvia. Solamente por acostarme y descansar. Pon hojas antiguas bajo mis párpados. El peso del cielo me aplastara hacía el descansar. En dolor silencioso deseare por esto. En dolor silencioso deseare que te despiertes, así ya no estar solo. Pero dormirás y yo esperare con la esperanza de ser aliviado, si por solamente un segundo, del peso siempre aumentando, cual se sacuda los pies frente mi puerta todas las noches.
- Translated by Andy Riverbed with proofs by Lola Pistola
Move in with Me
Move in with me. I am lonely. We can watch television together. We'll laugh at people who make funny observations. When you get hungry, I'll make you food. You'll say, "Man, I could go for..." and I'll make it. I'll put little pieces of glass in the food. Your mouth will flood with blood. You'll tell me something that happened to you during the day and every word will sound pathetic coming through your swollen and cut lips and tongue. I'll say, "Don't talk with your mouth full; it makes you look impolite." You'll put your head in my lap after we eat and I'll put my hands over your face and touch it. My hands will feel heavy on your face. You'll get really uncomfortable and ask to take a shower to clean the feeling off. We'll take a shower together and I'll pinch your butt. You'll laugh. I'll let myself slip to the floor of the shower. The water will roam your back and slip from your ass and hit me in the face. I'll drink the water before it enters the drain. There will be a lot of hair clogging the drain. I'll take it out and put it on my lips like a goatee and I'll act like a middle-aged man who has a goatee. I'll wear sandals and a shirt that says the name of a town in Mexico. I'll kiss you on the lips with my goatee. When you leave the shower, you will turn the faucet to cold and my heart will hiccup. I'll feel afraid. I'll follow you into my room. While you're toweling off I'll lock the door and say, "Pray to your god it's time to suffer. I want to make you level-eyed with my nightmare." Then I'll pause before saying, "Just kidding." I'll jump on the bed naked. You'll say, "Your balls look funny." I'll respond, "Like 'Family Circus' funny or what?" Then we'll have sex. When we're done, I'll clean myself with some tissue paper and the tissue paper will stick to me. I'll hop around like a white-tailed deer. You'll put on an orange coat and paint your face with camouflage. You'll say, "Come here little deer; I won't hurt you." Then you'll shoot me in the neck and there will be a huge hole in my neck and the blood will leak into my throat. We'll sit back down because between every action there is quiet awkwardness. "Paint my toes," you'll eventually say, your voice sounding way too loud against the quiet. I'll hold your feet in my hands and paint them. I will feel like crushing the bones. I'll say, "You have nice feet, would you mind if I crushed them with a hammer or a dumbbell?" You'll laugh and ask me to turn off the lights so we can sleep. I'll turn off the lights and lie down next to you. You'll fall asleep faster than me and it will rain. The rain will beat the window. I'll open the window and hold out a glass. When the glass is full, I will drink it. I will put on some of your lipstick. I’ll kiss the wall and punch the lipstick stain. I'll feel like obliterating myself. I’ll feel like going outside and drowning in a puddle. Just lying down and resting. Put old leaves underneath my eyelids. The weight of the sky will crush me into rest. I will wish for this in painful quiet. In painful quiet I will wish for you to wake up so I won't be alone. But you'll sleep and I’ll wait, hoping to be relieved if only for a second of the mounting weight that wipes its feet at my door every night.
- Sam Pink
So it’s definitive: I have been slacking with the Instruction Manual in 2010. Let me explain. Shit’s been tough for me since I’ve graduated and remained in Gainesville. I hardly make enough money for anything. I got fired from a few jobs for a variety of retarded reason. I’ve been a lonely motherfucker. I’ve been through some intense bouts with depression while trying to do everything that would prevent this from happen (mini-workout routine since returning from tour with St. Dad; herbal meds for depression; a healthy diet). I’ve been doing more drugs. I don’t have a personal workspace. If I want to type anything, or update this blog, I am forced to be on campus, which I am utterly sick of.
But for optimism’s sake, shit should get better. I’ll probably remain broke as hell throughout the summer (summers in Gainesville have fucked me up each year I’ve lived here), but come September, I will be moving to Boston, where I was accepted into UMASS-Boston’s MA in Applied Linguistics program. I already have two potential jobs doing what I’ve been studying for for the past four years: one is as a writing tutor for urban youth; the other is a program which helps immigrants with their citizenship process and learning English. I am very excited. I feel as if this move to a city is what will give me all I’ve been working for since I started studying again here in the States.
I’ve just explained myself, but I don’t know if it even matters. Is anyone even aware that until this year I was making at least monthly updates to the Instruction Manual? I don’t think so. Maybe if someone were to tell me something about this shit, I might realize someone actually cares, and then I’d work harder to keep this as consistent as it once was.
Anyway, on to the content.
My cousin, Yamil Corvalan, has had some poems published. Check them out HERE and HERE.
There’s a student strike at the University of Puerto Rico. This happens every four years, like our presidential election. Last time it happened, I was studying again at the UPR, after having been through a few detoxes and mental institutions, and was doing pretty well in all my classes. Then, the strike occurred, and I had an entire month without school to keep myself occupied. So what happened? I shot up a lot of dope, and by the time classes renewed, I was strung-out, and eventually dropped out of school, again, and ended up in druggie boot-camp. For a long time, I blamed my returning to hard drugs, or at least the fact that I had enough time to get a habit, on the stupid-ass student strike. Check out details on the current strike HERE.
I got some poems published at NewWaveVomit. Check that out HERE.
An essay I wrote about playing dice was published by PostMortemPress. Check that out HERE.
New Mr. Potato Head story, “Mr. Potato head goes on Tour with the Vegetables” published at GirlsWithInsurance. Check that out HERE.
I made a Flavors page. Check that out HERE.
Check out drawings of my pet ferret, Fatboy McPopcorn, HERE.
I’m in the process of getting the official rights to translation of the poems of José María Lima, but until then, I’ve removed all of the ones I had posted (done by either me or by Alfredo “Cofre” Perezjurado). I am currently working on compiling a collection’s worth of translated poems of María Lima, but until I can obtain their rights, I can do nothing with them in terms of publication. Check out details HERE.
HERE’s a D*Holidey song
St. Dad at the TotalBummerFest, which occurred in late April in Gainesville this year. St. Dad is at time 3:24, but feel free to check out the other acts.
Review of St. Dad seven-inch at PostMortemPress HERE.
Review of St. Dad seven-inch at Maximum Rock n Roll HERE.
Lame review of St. Dad seven-inch at KidsLikeYouAndMe HERE.
A few words about the St. Dad seven-inch at TheKidsAreGonnaStickTogether HERE.
St. Dad is currently recording songs for an upcoming full-length album, which will be put out by AmnesianRecords. Check them out HERE.
Review of Mather Schneider’s Drought Resistant Strain
Note to reader: the following critiques of this collection are in majority personal attacks on Mather. To the careful reader, in between these attacks on Mather’s self, there will be genuine critiques, but for this review, I chose to mostly focus on the degradation of the being that is Mather. Another point to make is that when analyzing a poem, one should not assume that the narrator is the same as the author. Well, in this review, I am assuming that the narrator of the poem and its author (Mather) are the same.
First off, I don’t really get the title. Does Mather mean he never goes dry, despite that he’s a drain? In general, throughout the collection, Mather maintains a journalistic deadpan voice. So if he’s trying to say that his verse is moist, humid, or flavorful, he’s lying.
For the rest of this review, I will mention selected poems with their individual page number, and critique them. Then, I will have a conclusion with my overall opinion of the collection, and with a suggestion on how Mather could improve his existence.
p. 23: “Old Timers”
A poem about his grandparents, how their living together is just a ritual with no love to it. They don’t sleep in the same bed or room. It ends with the punch-line: “Each morning/whoever wakes up first/gets out of bed/and shuffles across the house/to see if the other/is still alive/before starting the/coffee.”
The idea of “Starting the coffee” only is the other is alive is the focus of the poem. I like Mather’s moments of real people he knows, but sometimes his “punch-lines” are his petty philosophies delving into the poem. I don’t know about that.
p. 32: “After Crossing the Border at Nogales”
A poem about stealing a Mexican’s wife. She’s going to be with the narrator (Mather), but they can’t talk, which of course helps Mather keep a woman, because any woman able to listen to what he has to say would run away.
He writes this bit: “So what if love/is a lie/where we agree to meet?” Yes, this was awesome. Love is a lie where we agree to meet. Love is about convenience, and Mather has a wife who won’t leave him because she can’t understand what he’s saying, and she gets a tool included in the package deal. Isn’t that convenient?
p. 57: “Bonita Familia”
A poem about Mather’s neighbors, about how the immigrant wife almost lost her child due to immigration laws when she crossed the border to get away from her husband. The impact of the poem is in what the mother did to get her child back. She smuggled herself through the border, more than once. Dedicated, a mother’s love. But Mather ruins it by including himself. The poem ends: “everything’s bueno./She called my girlfriend yesterday/to see if she wanted to have lunch/at the mall.” Though this is a good hit at assimilation (their meeting ground is the mall), I think Mather smothers the poem’s previous focus, the mother’s love, with his implication that it is important that he knows these people. Like Mather is saying that knowing these sacrificed Mexicans gives him an excuse to be alive.
p. 58: “Wash”
Mather paints a splendid picture of his boring life. “There’s the viscera,/swirling,/turtlenecks and underwear/calmly bombarding the glass.” This is very nice. Mundane, quaint, all that poetic bullshit that makes poetry. But then Mather has to talk about himself: “There’s my reflection./At the end it is a whole lot/of nothing.” Okay, Mather has just told us he’s a boring-ass douche. Thanks for the lesson. I couldn’t figure that one out on my own. He’s enlightened us. I liked the image that was initially presented, but, fuck, why did he have to go on and talk about himself? I fucking hate him.
p. 65: “Sharon”
A poem about a worn-out hooker who is going to go “straight” by posing nude for drawing students. It’s set in a bar, Mather’s verse moves quickly, brings the joke, the punch-line, the irony, that she’s still whoring herself out, just in a more acceptable manner. He writes, “She admits she’s getting older and fatter anyway/so maybe it’s about time she turned/her life around. She’s getting drunk/before she goes in to her first night/at her first real job in her entire life:/posing nude for the figure drawing class.”
At first I was thinking the poem was in third-person omniscient, and I liked it, until the penultimate line: “and I can’t help it,/it touches me.” Fuck, Mather ruined the poem again. A perfectly good poem, but Mather has to tell us he’s a real person with thoughts and feelings and shit. He knows this human (the hooker), and I should care about him (Mather). Well, no, I don’t, because Mather makes me vomit.
p.67: “Early/Late”
A poem about a homeless man Mather sees in an alley he takes to work. He writes: “His small dark/head looked/so peaceful,/I tried/to walk/without/a sound.” So what? Mather writes a sad poem which touches on human frailty and the fact that we have no control over anything in our lives; that we are victims of circumstance; that inside each of our heads is a chalkboard inside of a low-income public school with the phrase “Existential Despair” written with lime-green chalk. But then he wants us to indulge him, give him importance in the poem. Well, I don’t want this poem to have anything to do with Mather. The poem’s about the miserable bum. Is Mather worth reading about because he didn’t disturb the fucking bum? Oh, Mather’s so sweet. That bum probably hates Mather as much as I do. That night, the bum was awake, and when Mather’s stinky ass passed by him, the bum swallowed his puke out of consideration to Mather’s feelings, and immediately regretted it because he realized that Mather wasn’t worth the sacrifice.
p. 72: “At the Park”
Starts out in third-person, but then Mather starts thinking within the poem, and I got a belly-ache. The poem is about some lady at a park, who brings dogs with her and cages them in a playpen. Mather’s, like, thinking why she would do that, but then notices that the dogs don’t care, and he writes: “so I really don’t know why the whole/thing depressed me like it did, or why/I bother to go out into the world at all.”
A poem on the absurdity: the lady in a park imprisons her dogs in the face of freedom, which is a cool idea, but then Mather has to tell us how much of a loser he is. Mather does not need to tell us he’s a loser in each poem that he writes. This is obvious. How? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just an unspoken truth, like his poems, until he sticks his stupid face in them.
p. 73: “The Last Will and Testicle”
A guy’s at a bar complaining about becoming old. Mather’s listening to him. The guy bitching is thirty years older than Mather. The guy tells Mather about an impotent friend of his who got an implant to inflate his penis, and then went to Tijuana the fuck the brains out of some whore. The old guy made the implant part of his will, to pass down to his heirs.
This poem was pretty funny. I liked it a lot. The punch-line is fucked up and a surprise. It’s solid, except that Mather does some lame shit to be more “real” or something. To make the dialogue as “real”-seeming as possible, when the drunk bitching at the bar says shit about not wanting to get old, Mather writes: “[someone] has to hold a spoon of pre-masticated/gruel of lima bean/out in front of yer face saying/here comes the choo-/choo train fer chrissakes.” The “yer,” “fer,” and “chrissakes” as an attempt of noting how “real” this drunk is is a shitty technique. Mather fucked everything up once again. Mather thinks he’s so real because he notes on some drunk-ass bitch’s peculiarities. Well, would Mather be so “real” if I shot his face in with a shotgun?
p. 76: “Bill Collector”
I think this is part of a mini-series of poems about the collection-agency experience. Honestly, these few were my favorites from this collection. This poem in particular completely refrains itself from entering the first-person, meaning that when I read it, Mather’s butt-ugly, pimple-ridden, shit-stained face did not appear inside my mind. I really appreciated that. Mather should stay off the page unless he’s being mentioned in the local obituary column, and his loved one wants the three people who give a damn about him to show up at the funeral procession.
This poem’s about a “heartless” guy who gets money covered in shit mailed to him by the people he’s collecting from. It seems Mather wants us to see this guy as cold, but the guy’s just doing his job, and seems to be good at it. Mather thinks he has soul, but he’s dead, so whatever.
p. 77: “The Bell”
Another collection-agency poem, this time focuses on a bell that’s used to foment competition and exploitation. I feel this poem’s solid. I didn’t even mind that Mather used the first-person. Maybe it’s because I’ve experienced jobs such as these. Corporate jobs which look at its employees only as units and their emotions are insignificant. All that matters is productivity.
Conclusion
This collection is way too long. Mather sometimes will drop in a really good line, something that will stroke a limp dick into erection, but those lines tend to be muddled with a lot of bullshit, mostly when he’s mentioning his own existence.
Mather has a lot of “poignancy” in this collection, or what should be poignant if you give a damn. What Mather is missing is silly. Mather, the should-be-silly fuck.
New Sam Pink Translations
Múdate conmigo
Múdate conmigo. Estoy solo. Juntos podríamos ver tele. Nos reiríamos de las personas quienes hacen observaciones graciosas. Cuando tengas hambre, te cocinaré. Dirás, “Hacho, tengo unas ganas para…” y te lo preparare. Pondré pedacitos de vidrio en la comida. Tu boca se inundará en sangre. Me dirías algo que te paso durante el día, y cada palabra sonara patético saliendo por tus labios y lengua, hinchados y cortados. Te diré, “No hables con la boca llena. Te vez grosera.” Luego de comer pondrás tu cabeza sobre mi falda y pondré mis manos sobre tu cara. Nos bañaremos juntos y te tocare las nalgas. Te reirás. Me deslizaré hasta el suelo de la ducha. La agua vagara bajo tu espalda y caída de tus nalgas y me dará contra la cara. Tragare el agua antes de que entre el desagüe. Habrá mucho pelo tapando el desagüe. Lo sacare y pondré sobre mis labios como una perilla y actuaré como un tipo de mediana edad quien tiene una perilla. Tendré puesto sandalias y una camisa de algún pueblo en Méjico. Te besare en los labios con mi perilla. Cuando salgas de la ducha, harás que el agua salga frío y mi corazón hará hipo. Tendré miedo. Te perseguiré en lo que entras mi cuarto. En lo que te estés secando, le pondré seguro a la puerta y diré, “Rézale a tu dios, que es hora de sufrir. Quiero que estés ojo a ojo con mi pesadilla.” Hare una pausa antes de decir, “Es broma.” Saltare, desnudo, en la cama. Dirás, “Tus bolas se ven graciosas.” Responderé, “Graciosas, ¿como el ‘Family Circus?” Luego haremos el amor. Acabados de tener sexo, me limpiaré con papel de seda y el papel se quedara pegado contra mi cuerpo. Brincare por el cuarto como un venado de cola blanco. Te pondrás una chaqueta anaranjada y te pintaras la cara de color camuflaje. Dirás, “Ven aquí venita. No te hare daño,” y me dispararas en el cuello y habrá un gran hoyo y sangre entrara mi garganta. Nos sentaremos porque entre cada acción hay un incomodidad social silencioso. “Píntame los dedos de los pies,” eventualmente me dirás, tu voz sonando demasiado de alto contra el silencio. Aguantare tus pies en mis manos y los pintare. Tendré ganas de aplastarte los huesos. Diré, “Tienes pies lindos. ¿Te molestaría si los aplastaba con un martillo o una pesa?” Te reirás y me dirás que apague las luces para podernos acostar. Apagare las luces y me acostare al lado de ti. Te dormirás antes que yo y afuera estará lloviendo. La lluvia dará contra la ventana. Abriré la ventana y aguantare un vaso afuera por la ventana. Cuando se llene el vaso me beberé el agua. Me pondré tu pintalabios. Le daré un beso a la pared y golpeare la mancha que deje en ella. Tendré deseos de arrasarme. Tendré ganas de salir hacia afuera y ahogarme en un charco de lluvia. Solamente por acostarme y descansar. Pon hojas antiguas bajo mis párpados. El peso del cielo me aplastara hacía el descansar. En dolor silencioso deseare por esto. En dolor silencioso deseare que te despiertes, así ya no estar solo. Pero dormirás y yo esperare con la esperanza de ser aliviado, si por solamente un segundo, del peso siempre aumentando, cual se sacuda los pies frente mi puerta todas las noches.
- Translated by Andy Riverbed with proofs by Lola Pistola
Move in with Me
Move in with me. I am lonely. We can watch television together. We'll laugh at people who make funny observations. When you get hungry, I'll make you food. You'll say, "Man, I could go for..." and I'll make it. I'll put little pieces of glass in the food. Your mouth will flood with blood. You'll tell me something that happened to you during the day and every word will sound pathetic coming through your swollen and cut lips and tongue. I'll say, "Don't talk with your mouth full; it makes you look impolite." You'll put your head in my lap after we eat and I'll put my hands over your face and touch it. My hands will feel heavy on your face. You'll get really uncomfortable and ask to take a shower to clean the feeling off. We'll take a shower together and I'll pinch your butt. You'll laugh. I'll let myself slip to the floor of the shower. The water will roam your back and slip from your ass and hit me in the face. I'll drink the water before it enters the drain. There will be a lot of hair clogging the drain. I'll take it out and put it on my lips like a goatee and I'll act like a middle-aged man who has a goatee. I'll wear sandals and a shirt that says the name of a town in Mexico. I'll kiss you on the lips with my goatee. When you leave the shower, you will turn the faucet to cold and my heart will hiccup. I'll feel afraid. I'll follow you into my room. While you're toweling off I'll lock the door and say, "Pray to your god it's time to suffer. I want to make you level-eyed with my nightmare." Then I'll pause before saying, "Just kidding." I'll jump on the bed naked. You'll say, "Your balls look funny." I'll respond, "Like 'Family Circus' funny or what?" Then we'll have sex. When we're done, I'll clean myself with some tissue paper and the tissue paper will stick to me. I'll hop around like a white-tailed deer. You'll put on an orange coat and paint your face with camouflage. You'll say, "Come here little deer; I won't hurt you." Then you'll shoot me in the neck and there will be a huge hole in my neck and the blood will leak into my throat. We'll sit back down because between every action there is quiet awkwardness. "Paint my toes," you'll eventually say, your voice sounding way too loud against the quiet. I'll hold your feet in my hands and paint them. I will feel like crushing the bones. I'll say, "You have nice feet, would you mind if I crushed them with a hammer or a dumbbell?" You'll laugh and ask me to turn off the lights so we can sleep. I'll turn off the lights and lie down next to you. You'll fall asleep faster than me and it will rain. The rain will beat the window. I'll open the window and hold out a glass. When the glass is full, I will drink it. I will put on some of your lipstick. I’ll kiss the wall and punch the lipstick stain. I'll feel like obliterating myself. I’ll feel like going outside and drowning in a puddle. Just lying down and resting. Put old leaves underneath my eyelids. The weight of the sky will crush me into rest. I will wish for this in painful quiet. In painful quiet I will wish for you to wake up so I won't be alone. But you'll sleep and I’ll wait, hoping to be relieved if only for a second of the mounting weight that wipes its feet at my door every night.
- Sam Pink
Friday, April 2, 2010
How to make up for your mistakes
El mañana está en llamas y soy muy joven
El mañana está en llamas y soy muy joven. Mañana presionaré tu cara contra la ceniza del viejo puente. Mañana, emplegostaré la ceniza del viejo puente en tus ojos. Mañana odiare a todos quienes he conocido o he escuchado de. El día de mañana está en llamas y todavía soy muy joven. Mañana volveré y no soy una persona vindicativa, pero repetitivamente apuntaré a tu cara con mi dedo, y mi uña hará lunas diminutivos sobre tu cara. La presión creará moretoncitos, nubecitas, alrededor de las lunas. El día de mañana está en llamas y soy muy joven. No tienes que acordarte de nada de esto porque seguiré diciéndolo.
- Translated by Andy Riverbed with proofs by Lola Pistola
Tomorrow is on Fire and I am Very Young
Tomorrow is on fire and I am very young. Tomorrow I press your face into the ash of the old bridge. Tomorrow I push the ash of the old bridge into your eyes. Tomorrow I will hate everyone I’ve ever heard of or known. Tomorrow is on fire and I am still very young. Tomorrow I will return and I am not a vindictive person, but I will point my finger in your face repeatedly, and my fingernail will make little moons on your face. The pressure will create little bruises around the moons, little clouds. Tomorrow is on fire and I am very young. You don’t have to remember any of this because I will keep saying it.
- Sam Pink
A New Proofer for my to-Spanish Translations
Lola Pistola, who made the Instruction Manual look so nice, is now proofing and helping me out with my to-Spanish translations. She does a lot of stuff back home in Puerto Rico.
Check out her shit:
GlamScam
GlamScum
Cereal de Piratas
Mr. Potato Head has a column
at Girls with Insurance.
Don’t believe the hype. Mr. Potato Head exists. It only says that Andy Riverbed is the author of the Mr. Potato Head column because Mr. Potato Head felt that nobody would publish anything by a writer named “Mr. Potato Head.” So I’ve been sending out his stuff under my very prestigious and respected name.
I met Mr. Potato Head about five years ago on my road trip around the south, which landed me at Asheville, NC, for three weeks, after I graduated from rehab and was living at the half-way house in Riviera Beach, Florida. At that point, I had gotten very angry with the girl who would eventually become my ex-girlfriend, and I had taken all my money and bought a Greyhound ticket out of the state. I then bummed around until it was time to return home, a month later. While in Georgia, I met Mr. Potato Head at a restaurant. He was eating barbeque. He gave me some. I was broke. I was very appreciative of his kindness. We spoke. He told me he was a memoirist. That he had the strangest stories to tell. All autobiographical. I was interested, and since then, Mr. Potato Head and I have been corresponding. That day I met Mr. Potato Head, he could not finish his barbeque. From out of his butt, he pulled out his pen and notebook, and ripped out a sheet of paper. He gave me his contact information. The rest of his barbeque, he placed into his butt. Then he walked away without saying bye.
I am only an outlet. I do not know where Mr. Potato Head currently resides, for he is like the wind, with no outlined destiny. The stories that are to appear in the GWI column are true happenings that Mr. Potato Head experienced. Believe it.
Read “Mr. Potato Head Votes for the First Time” HERE.
Read “Mr. Potato Head Visits his Mother” HERE.
Keeping it Tropical during the Snowpacalypse, the St. Dad / Shreds February 2010 Tour
Updated St. Dad blog HERE.
Download “Keep it in your pants,” the debut St. Dad tape HERE.
Download “Do as I say not what I do,” the St. Dad seven-inch HERE.
Read a review of “Do as I say not what I do” at VinylRites HERE.
Download St. Dad side of the St. Dad / Shreds split tape HERE.
Watch a video of the final tour date (unfortunately without the Shreds) in Miami, at Sweat Records HERE.
Listen to multiple unreleased St. Dad songs at the St.dad Myspace HERE.
See pictures taken by Andrea Knight of Orlando (penultimate) show 3/2/10 (Facebook):
St. Dad
The Shreds
Lagues
Permanent Nap
Slippery Slopes
Listen to an audio recording of St. Dad at Pensacola HERE.
David Fishkind wrote of the St. Dad / Shreds experience in New York. Read that HERE.
Video of the Chattanooga Show
Photographic selections by Byron, drummer of the Shreds (Facebook), HERE.
Before we (St. Dad, the punk rock band I sing in, and the Shreds, from Orlando) went on tour this past February, I bought a bunch of cheap notebooks at a local bookstore, Goering’s, which was unfortunately going out of business. One of these, I told the band, and eventually the Shreds, would be the “Angerlog,” in which anytime any of us had an issue with something, be it with each other, with the world, with the spots we were at, with anything, we would write it down. Then each night we would sit in a circle and read it and come to terms with ourselves. It was a semi-joke, because I thought it’d be cool. Everyone laughed at me, and I felt no one would do it, but surprisingly, it actually got used.
It is a vent machine, a tour diary, an eye on the road, an expression for the voiceless. This is the Angerlog, typed up to read (as unedited as possible).
You can download or at least view a PDF file of the original Angerlog HERE.
The Angerlog
2/4
I’m angry I don’t know what day it is.
I’m angry I can’t cut lyric sheets correctly.
I’m angry brian won’t pay half my rent and has a girl moving down to live with him.
2/6
I’m angry at servers who can’t keep shit cool, and don’t know what respect is, and act like little bitches.
I kind of don’t like blind people.
I don’t like exercising, and I want to see Johny Thunder’s grave in New Orleans.
2/6
I am angry no one took off their shirt too, last night, I hate that Pita pit was the only thing open last night and that I thought it was a good idea to buy 305’s. Yeah and life sucks too. I like this bridge surrounded buy dead trees though + brown rivers. I hope New Orleans has spicy vegan food.
2/7
I’m angry I didn’t touch that French girl who kissed me’s butt. Fuck!!!!!
I don’t like people who put themselves off as magician and then try try to get the guy letting us crash at his place to go outside to beat him up.
It’s not cool to start shit.
PEOPLE WHO CANNOT TAKE COMPLIMENTS.
PEOPLE WHO ARE EASILY COMPLIMENTED.
HARD BREASTS, MAGICIANS.
I hate castleing. Sux.
I HATE LAND
S
L
I
DE
FUCK
2/8
Fuck the colts.
Who datt?!
Spotcaller, spot caller, you’re a spotcaller, yeah.
NOT BEING THE BAD BOY I WANNA BE.
TOO MANY WHO DATS AND FUCK DATS DRIVE ME CRAZY.
SPOT CALLING. (HYPOCRITICAL)
2/9
I envelop heat wave in my self
and they exhume out through my fingertip
at your face, and then, you die.
2/11
We’re at a slow point in our tour right now. A slow time, maybe, kind of necessary. We had four nights of ridiculously insane shows. We arrived to Tallahassee close to eleven and played a small house party where there was vegan cake because it was the tenant’s birthday. There was a keg. Shreds played and then we played, and people got wild. There was a coat hanger on the mic, so I hung myself. Beer soaked the small room’s wooden floor. Then cops showed so the rest of the show was moved to another house, a punk house, Coolifornia, where Robert lived. He’d set up the show. Good night, we made fifty dollars. Enough for gas the next day. Greg was there and he ate breakfast with us at a kind of pretentious café, and he then went biking.
Second show was at Pensacola, a pretty cool punk house. [undecipherable words: maybe: We played first and it was wild], and before we went to a vegan restaurant. I had an okay tempeh tuna sandwich. Then, and this has been big, we played New Orleans on Superbowl Sunday, and the Saints were in the game. The saints we say and man the Saints intercept a touchdown! in the fourth period, way too ahead, too late in the game for the Colts to have a chance. We at a bar deep in the industrial ghetto portion of the city, walked for like an hour from the French Quarter, the Dragon’s Den, where we fucked shit up later on. Me, Rilly, and Sam, we got disappeared after the show, where we got $100, drunk for free, in search of drugs, but we were way fucked up to figure out how to get to the ghetto. We got picked up and went to Candice’s warehouse, and ate. We then went to Griffin’s grandmother’s house which lived about 12 minutes from the city, and I saw that Sam had pulled out a bed and quickly passed out on it.
Then we played Chattanooga, which was wild as well. I met Erica, singer of 40oz folklore and she loved us, comparing me to 80’s Spanish punk shit. Said she couldn’t find me in the crowd. She had grown up in the L.A. first wave of punk, and was 50 years old.
Then we played the Crucial Funhouse in Lexington, Kentucky, and that was a gear change on our tour. The house was very agreeable, and we got needed rest. I ran into Melody, who’d I met at the Harvest of Hope the year before, randomly, and had given her a copy of Kittens in the boiler. I was very surprised to run into her.
Since then we’ve been chilling to say the least. No shows till Friday, and today’s Thursday. We’ll be at Toledo, I think, Ohio. We’re at Ann Arbor and we just got done playing Space Ball at one of the twelve still active and useable spaceball “courts.” It was awesome fun staying at Byron’s, and shit seems really good.
[NOTE: This video was added post-Angerlog for the sake of the reader. THIS IS SPACEBALLLLLL! Byron’s the cat doing all the maneuvers in the video. The place is his grandfather’s joint.]
2/12
I still can’t stop hating the crucial fun house. I think they even spelled house haus. Man, I hate that shit. At least valentines day is soon! That’s not angry, sorry.
2/12
The crucial funhouse was a reststop for us, where we got crucially fucked up.
Toledo! is full of hate.
fuck forgiveness, biatches!
2/15
eF V-day
I hate veterans
I wanna play the crutch and am not allowed to dumbfound with my mad lyricism.
cold toes dressed in wet socks
full bladder and snow covered hills
on the side
thin, naked tree limbs
crossing like legs
biting like hungry “anarchists”
a car looks like it is halfburied in snow
a truck swerved off the road
No tude, please.
2/17
I’m disappointed that my statement of intent was not regarded when it came to me sitting in the front seat. I mean, damn, I am the one with the directions. Although I was beyond tipsy, I pointedly asked if directions were had or if assistance were needed, and I was told yes/no, when that was untrue. I hate to be disregarded because I’ve been drinking.
That’s not to say I was acting clear-headedly, but that was kind of the point. That said, I’m extremely frustrated with how I was dealt with by Sam at our arrival. Admittedly, I’m a loud talker and have difficulty gauging that, particularly while drinking. However, I highly doubt any breach of conduct that would merit “I’m sick of your shit” and a minor choking. In the spirit of keeping it cool for the folks, keeping it tropical, and generally kind of being a pussy, I went back to total silence. Dammit if I didn’t want to return in kind, and I’m still sitting on it now. Sure I had altered judgment, but I believe that was an unjust, insultingly inappropriate response where a “Dude, cool it” would have worked. I hate that shit. I’m legitimately offended and upset.
I plan to enjoy the day, though.
2/17
I hate getting sad about shit when I know what was up the whole time. I know she never wanted to be with me. She’s not the first girl who wanted to have an exheroin addict poet boytoy. She’s not the first girl to play me and drop me. But goddamn was I sad this morning. Goddamn did I feel like a fool all over again, even though there’s nothing going on between us. I fucking hate that either I feel that I’m in love, that I’m obsessed, or actually am in love with her. But I’m pretty sure I don’t believe love exists. Just synapses’ reaction to stimulus. I fucking hate that I think about her all the time, when I know she doesn’t give a shit about me. I also hate that I emailed to try to reconnect and was ignored. I wasn’t the one who betrayed anyone. I wasn’t the one who did the fucking-over. I wasn’t the one who left another hanging.
We’re in Laketown Massachusetts at Sam’s parents’ house, mormons. Very nice. Let us in at 4 in the morning after the R.I. show. Some girl, [Moe?] was really nice to me and the bartender from Peru gave me free beers and ten bucks for an eskorbuto shirt. I think Matty got offended. I felt bad but it had already been done. The Bartender was cute, and we spoke in Spanish and I defeated her with the word “derramar” while she said “dejar caer.” One word for two, I win. My language is more efficient. You have been defeated. The Ohio shows were cool. Carolyn ignored my emails. I’m sure I know why she wants nothing to do with me. I hope she’s just angry with me, but my gut feeling says she’s still running and that thought makes me very sad. I wish shit hadn’t gone down the way it did. Toledo was funny. There was a young girl who tried a lot to impress us with her punkness, but she was cool nonetheless. Kept on talking about the sex party they were going to have. I truly feel there’s more intellect and genuity, and love, in a van with two punk rock bands on tour than there will ever be in any university campus. I dread going back to school. I hate this society I’m stuck in. Cincinnati was really cool, there was poetry by a Bukowskish kid, and a Gingsbergish boy, and the Gingsbergish kid left right after he read. Fuck him. He missed the punk rock. We ripped it. The Columbus show was off the chain and Rat Attack from Chicago was awesome. There was a Minor Threat/Fugazi cover band which ripped and Vacation did a Ramones set—wicked. We, of course, ripped, but I think we always rip. Tomorrow we’re playing in Connecticut and then two NYC shows! I’m excited to se Dru, and Arvelisse, who I’ve been communicating with throughout the tour, I like her a lot. She takes this digital journalism class in which the professor picks up and makes phone calls during class, claiming they are important calls. She sent me his number and name and I called him during her class. He picked up and I said I was Augustus Semble from the Atlantic Monthly and wanted him to write for me. He believed it and said he’d call in an hour. I then called from Rilly’s phone saying I was Orki Molloy from the Cincinnati Esquire (Rilly’s # is a Cincinnati #) and then hung up on him. He never called me, so I guess I fucked up, but Arvelisse told me it made her day and she couldn’t stop laughing. He talked about it to the class, that he felt he was being sabotaged. That made me happy.
From today on I will touch more butts.
The first four shows, I touched butts. I’m slacking.
Butt touching, wooooooooooooooooo
WILLAMATIC SUCKS DIX. FOLK PUNK SUX DIX. THIS PLACE ONLY HAD BEER TIL 9??!!! STUPID COXSUXERS. FUCK THIS PLACE FOR BEING RUDE TO GUS.
P.S. ALSO NO WEEDMAN CONNECT
Willimantic was fun and I think there are differing opinions as to what’s acceptable as far as guest-host relations—i.e. what constitutes acceptable rudeness from either side.
Matty seems a bit dickly with a couple drinks in him. I know I can be obnoxious as shit, but Matty just seems to get mean. Whereas I can pull my shit together and get articulate when need be—because, um—fortunately for me, I’m not drunk—Matty seems to incorporate an unpleasant darkness. It should be noted that poor penmanship is not a result of inebriation so much as poor lighting.
2/23
We’re headed out of philly to Baltimore. There’s good word about Baltimore, so I’m excited. We played Connecticut, and probably won’t play there again. The next morning I had dry blood on the top of my head. We played a sixfoot basement. I got naked for a sec. We brought the party to where it wasn’t wanted. Some kid who was cool with me at first got pissed because he said I was hitting on his bestfriend’s girlfriend. I remember her talking to me, and he kept following me around telling me to stop talking to her, but I don’t remember saying shit to her. I do remember trying to convince two lesbians to sleep with me. We didn’t stay there, and Rilly drove maniacally to New York, where we stayed at his friend’s, Kelly Ginger’s, house in Brooklyn. She was cool, and so was her roommate Bronwyn. There was a fist fight in the van, but we were all just drunk. I got hit in the side of the head trying to prevent this violence, and it still hurts when I open my jaw too much. We got banned from Don pedro’s, which Dru told me was almost impossible, it being the grimiest rock spot in the city. I pissed off the bartender, Karen + Melissa, who are just a couple of trendyass hipsters. Melissa threw a beer at me as I walked out the door. Dru was in jail that night. He had gotten a d.u.i. the night we arrived to NY. He didn’t get out till Saturday. He saw us at Tommy’s Tavern, which was kinda lame. General NY lesson: Bar shows suck. Double booking, and band discrimination occurs. At Tommy’s there was some lameass metal show after us, so we were done by 11pm, and all the other show’s equipment took up half the hall. During our set I gave many thanks to the equipment for being so lively. The sound guy liked us. We made 60 buck at Don pedro’s and 25 at Tommy’s. The Philadelphia show was cool. We played with When I was Twelve, which was really good. Pop sung by a cute awkward girl. I traded a record for their CD. My Mind Works was cool too. Peter from Big Mama’s house, the art/music/band warehouse where we stayed two nights is super cool. I hope to make it out to Harvest of Hope to see him play in Algernon. I think that’s a general sum up so far. There are moments missing but either I don’t wanna reach or as Hemingway said, a story is life with the dull parts cut out. In philly, there’s shit on all the sidewalks, but people are nicer than in NY. Got to make it up for the shitloaded sidewalks.
2/24
I’ve eaten pizza in New York, Providence R.I. Philadelphia, Baltimore. Tried to get some at Chattanooga , Ann Arbor, and maybe some more spots?
I want a slice right now. We’re driving to Richmond, VA. There’s traffic everywhere. Last night we made $100. I got drunk on whiskey. We played with a bunch of streetpunk bands. Another band played a GG Allin cover. I got a weed hookup. 10 dollar handful.
I liked Baltimore. It was rundown. I’d like to live there. We stayed in a cool house, a warehouse, where lots of art students loved at. I met Renee and Lisa? and some of their friends. There were two guinea pigs, Muddy and Hairdo, and a ferret, Miss Smelliot. I want another ferret. I miss Popcorn. I don’t want to return to Gainesville. When I get there I gotta refocus. I won’t be taking the GRE again because I’m going to be broke. I could ask my mother for money, but I don’t want her to pay for my shit, and I can use being broke as an excuse not to retake it. I don’t want to stress myself out again studying for that fucking exam. It sucked. I’m going divine destiny on Grad school. If I’m to do grad school, I will. If not, fuck it. Education won’t run away from me. I want to work on my stories.
3/3
On our way to Miami, an added show done by Rick of Torche and Nuclear II. Since Baltimore I guess it’s been a blur. We played Greenville NC at a Christian Anarchist spot, which was wild. Had a cultish vibe, The Hangar. Young kids went wild. I felt wrong singing Km/Ky/Ly to them. I got a sad clown tattoo by Rich. Awesome. In Charleston, which we got really drunk and played sloppy as hell, but was wild, so in my opinion, good show, jaja. Gainesville was a mess as well. Lots of kids from Orlando came. Good vibes. Birdie played as Permanent Nap. That was cool. Heather told me she was leaving in two weeks. That bummed me out. The Orlando show was wild. A guy bought ten of our 7’’s for his store. We haven’t been getting paid well lately. I’m gonna get fucked up down south.
Review of Angles of Disorder by Zachary C. Bush
In this collection, our reality is distorted into Bush’s vision of the word we live in. In “Within the Within,” a person awakens and finds curtains at the foot of his or her bed. Behind that curtain is a stage, and on it: a painting of a “black-swirl sea,” in which a tiny boat floats, and in it the person of the piece is sitting, who is staring at the speaker. As Bush writes, “…you, so small, staring at me, staring at you.” The speaker is the person that woke in the night, and it is the person that awoke who is staring at themselves, but is also the speaker, and the “you.”
I’ve known Bush for a while. I’ve have some of his earliest chapbooks. I’ve been corresponding with him for at least three years now. I have seen his evolution as an “experimental” writer. That is a term I do not enjoy, “experimental.” But Bush definitely pushes language. He is well aware that one of the powers of the English language is the compound word. Bush creates images and feelings that never existed before with his use of the compound word. Bush is an experience to read. An experience that at times can be frightful, but many times beautifully exquisite as well. Examples of his use of the compound word: “blood-sticky linoleum,” a “crisp-cool wedge” of lettuce, “silver-sparkling blades,” “blood-red-tailed bumblebees,” and “redcurrant fire-flies,” to mention a few.
My previous experience with Bush’s writing has been through verse, language-pushing verse, but this collection is more prose. But it is a very poetic prose. I wonder at times why it is a good thing to have your prose be called poetic, but it seems insulting to have your verse be called prosy. Either way, Bush is constantly making anew, as one of his bigger influences, Ezra Pound, said, the purpose of writing was “to make it new.”
Of these selections, most are flash-stories, and a lot are interconnected, and touch on repetitive themes. There is a fight with nature, an attempt to reason with the illogical, and this reasoning is done through mathematical computations. The characters look for answers in time, in nature, in space, through numbers. At times, the characters despise these vessels in which previously, answers to questions were being asked. In “The Catch,” Bush writes of a girl who was resentful of “The Sun.” She then sets a “dwarf-moose trap,” which ends up catching “Thursday.” She is then skipped to Friday, and she spends that day observing Thursday bleed to death. This success makes her confident that she will soon be able to trap “The Sun.”
In “Angles of Disorder,” as “The Traveler” sits observing dogs in a fight, Bush describes the dogs with: “…thick clumps of blood wet-stained their raised hair.” This is more impacting than to have just written that “blood had stained the dogs’ fur.” And “The Traveler” observes a woman who is happy, and he questions why she is happy. The woman is happy because she has “a crumpled Carnival Finger.” She calls it her “Wishbone.” “The Traveler” then becomes pleased with the old lady, and understands her happiness. The dogs then come and snatch away the finger, and “The Traveler” leaves the old lady alone.
In “The Difference,” in which two characters, “He,” a vacuum repair man, and “She,” a female who entered his shop and is angered because no one in the town had noticed that the sidewalks were slanted “3.3. degrees,” meet. They have a strange conversation in which “He” is never sure whether “She” is telling the truth or lying. Throughout this piece, and in other pieces in the collection, common words are made into proper names, giving them a more significant identity and presence in the piece. For example, “The Others,” “The Clocks,” “The Calendars,” “Sixteen Hours,” “Everyone,” “Anyone,” and “No One.” In this specific piece, “He” and “She” are maintained in that manner even when in possessive form, so instead of writing “her cries,” Bush writes, “She’s cries.”
Sometimes one piece leads into the next, and there is a continuation of a theme. A drawing of a hanged man that appears early in the collection slowly disappears until all that is left is his hanged head in the corner of the page. In “The Small Town Musical,” an old woman cannot stop the sounds of polka music from sounding inside of her head. She buys a hammer, and a nail, and goes to her home. In the end of the piece, Bush writes, “The old woman stood still, outside her front steps, and thought ‘No, no more of This Hell; not anymore!’ She entered her trailer, alone, and slammed the aluminum door behind her. THERE WAS NO ECHO.” The following piece, “WHEN YOU ARE DEAD,” repeats the verses: “You hear no echoes/WHEN YOU ARE DEAD/You hear no echoes/WHEN YOU ARE DEAD…” This is the follow up to the old lady’s story. She killed herself to no longer hear the polka music. Once she was dead, she could no longer hear echoes of any sound. The pieces “To Say Just a Few More Things about the Desert [10],[19]” are of a speaker realizing that fingers are trying to escape from his plastic face. He can hear children chanting recess songs from within himself. The next piece in the collection, “What pain they must feel!” repeats the verse: “There are children trapped inside my face!”
My only complaint with the collection is that in some of its pieces, such as in “losingMACRO,” Bush’s pushing of language makes no sense to me, and I do not know what to do with it. In this piece, letters are scattered, in between numbers and punctuation symbols, some of them capitalized, some lowercased, and I look for something but find nothing. Pieces like that, I’d prefer not to even see. It distracts me from Bush’s prose. But this happens maybe once in between many interesting, and mind-bending pieces.
I’ve read around that Bush is working on a novel, along with all the other stuff he produces. Reading this collection has caused anticipation in me to read a novel by him. It should be a very unique piece of fiction, and I would probably recommend this collection, and anything by Bush, to anyone into innovative language and literature.
New Translations
***UPDATE***
After being accessed by David Leavitt on the legalities of publishing translations of deceased authors without permission, and out of fear of legal retributions, I have decided to temporarily (hopefully) delete all translations of José María Lima's work on the Instruction Manual until I have official permission to do so.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
- AR 4/26/10
Sin título I
Hoy de camino al correo resbalé sobre hielo y casi me di en el ojo contra una rama de un árbol. Recuperé mi balance y continúe adelante. El señor caminando detrás de mi se río. Tenía toda la razón en reírse por que daba risa y él no tenía conexión al dolor real que podría yo haber sentido. Pero si hubiese perdido mi ojo, hubiese ido hacia él y lo hubiese sujetado contra el hielo del piso—y dejaría que la sangre saliendo del boquete donde estaba mi ojo derrame en su boca en lo que él se reía. Mi correspondencia era un su mayoría mierda sobre tarjetas de crédito que nunca utilizaré.
- Translated by Andy Riverbed with proofs by Lola Pistola
Untitled I
On the way to the mailbox today, I slipped on some ice and almost hit my eye on a tree branch. I regained my balance and continued on. The guy walking behind me laughed. He had every right to laugh because it was funny and he had no tie to the physical pain I could've experienced. However, if I had lost my eye, I would've walked up to him and held him down in the snow—and let the blood from my empty eye socket spill into his laughing mouth. My mail was mostly crap about credit cards that I will never use.
- Sam Pink
El mañana está en llamas y soy muy joven. Mañana presionaré tu cara contra la ceniza del viejo puente. Mañana, emplegostaré la ceniza del viejo puente en tus ojos. Mañana odiare a todos quienes he conocido o he escuchado de. El día de mañana está en llamas y todavía soy muy joven. Mañana volveré y no soy una persona vindicativa, pero repetitivamente apuntaré a tu cara con mi dedo, y mi uña hará lunas diminutivos sobre tu cara. La presión creará moretoncitos, nubecitas, alrededor de las lunas. El día de mañana está en llamas y soy muy joven. No tienes que acordarte de nada de esto porque seguiré diciéndolo.
- Translated by Andy Riverbed with proofs by Lola Pistola
Tomorrow is on Fire and I am Very Young
Tomorrow is on fire and I am very young. Tomorrow I press your face into the ash of the old bridge. Tomorrow I push the ash of the old bridge into your eyes. Tomorrow I will hate everyone I’ve ever heard of or known. Tomorrow is on fire and I am still very young. Tomorrow I will return and I am not a vindictive person, but I will point my finger in your face repeatedly, and my fingernail will make little moons on your face. The pressure will create little bruises around the moons, little clouds. Tomorrow is on fire and I am very young. You don’t have to remember any of this because I will keep saying it.
- Sam Pink
A New Proofer for my to-Spanish Translations
Lola Pistola, who made the Instruction Manual look so nice, is now proofing and helping me out with my to-Spanish translations. She does a lot of stuff back home in Puerto Rico.
Check out her shit:
GlamScam
GlamScum
Cereal de Piratas
Mr. Potato Head has a column
at Girls with Insurance.
Don’t believe the hype. Mr. Potato Head exists. It only says that Andy Riverbed is the author of the Mr. Potato Head column because Mr. Potato Head felt that nobody would publish anything by a writer named “Mr. Potato Head.” So I’ve been sending out his stuff under my very prestigious and respected name.
I met Mr. Potato Head about five years ago on my road trip around the south, which landed me at Asheville, NC, for three weeks, after I graduated from rehab and was living at the half-way house in Riviera Beach, Florida. At that point, I had gotten very angry with the girl who would eventually become my ex-girlfriend, and I had taken all my money and bought a Greyhound ticket out of the state. I then bummed around until it was time to return home, a month later. While in Georgia, I met Mr. Potato Head at a restaurant. He was eating barbeque. He gave me some. I was broke. I was very appreciative of his kindness. We spoke. He told me he was a memoirist. That he had the strangest stories to tell. All autobiographical. I was interested, and since then, Mr. Potato Head and I have been corresponding. That day I met Mr. Potato Head, he could not finish his barbeque. From out of his butt, he pulled out his pen and notebook, and ripped out a sheet of paper. He gave me his contact information. The rest of his barbeque, he placed into his butt. Then he walked away without saying bye.
I am only an outlet. I do not know where Mr. Potato Head currently resides, for he is like the wind, with no outlined destiny. The stories that are to appear in the GWI column are true happenings that Mr. Potato Head experienced. Believe it.
Read “Mr. Potato Head Votes for the First Time” HERE.
Read “Mr. Potato Head Visits his Mother” HERE.
Keeping it Tropical during the Snowpacalypse, the St. Dad / Shreds February 2010 Tour
Updated St. Dad blog HERE.
Download “Keep it in your pants,” the debut St. Dad tape HERE.
Download “Do as I say not what I do,” the St. Dad seven-inch HERE.
Read a review of “Do as I say not what I do” at VinylRites HERE.
Download St. Dad side of the St. Dad / Shreds split tape HERE.
Watch a video of the final tour date (unfortunately without the Shreds) in Miami, at Sweat Records HERE.
Listen to multiple unreleased St. Dad songs at the St.dad Myspace HERE.
See pictures taken by Andrea Knight of Orlando (penultimate) show 3/2/10 (Facebook):
St. Dad
The Shreds
Lagues
Permanent Nap
Slippery Slopes
Listen to an audio recording of St. Dad at Pensacola HERE.
David Fishkind wrote of the St. Dad / Shreds experience in New York. Read that HERE.
Video of the Chattanooga Show
Photographic selections by Byron, drummer of the Shreds (Facebook), HERE.
Before we (St. Dad, the punk rock band I sing in, and the Shreds, from Orlando) went on tour this past February, I bought a bunch of cheap notebooks at a local bookstore, Goering’s, which was unfortunately going out of business. One of these, I told the band, and eventually the Shreds, would be the “Angerlog,” in which anytime any of us had an issue with something, be it with each other, with the world, with the spots we were at, with anything, we would write it down. Then each night we would sit in a circle and read it and come to terms with ourselves. It was a semi-joke, because I thought it’d be cool. Everyone laughed at me, and I felt no one would do it, but surprisingly, it actually got used.
It is a vent machine, a tour diary, an eye on the road, an expression for the voiceless. This is the Angerlog, typed up to read (as unedited as possible).
You can download or at least view a PDF file of the original Angerlog HERE.
The Angerlog
2/4
I’m angry I don’t know what day it is.
I’m angry I can’t cut lyric sheets correctly.
I’m angry brian won’t pay half my rent and has a girl moving down to live with him.
2/6
I’m angry at servers who can’t keep shit cool, and don’t know what respect is, and act like little bitches.
I kind of don’t like blind people.
I don’t like exercising, and I want to see Johny Thunder’s grave in New Orleans.
2/6
I am angry no one took off their shirt too, last night, I hate that Pita pit was the only thing open last night and that I thought it was a good idea to buy 305’s. Yeah and life sucks too. I like this bridge surrounded buy dead trees though + brown rivers. I hope New Orleans has spicy vegan food.
2/7
I’m angry I didn’t touch that French girl who kissed me’s butt. Fuck!!!!!
I don’t like people who put themselves off as magician and then try try to get the guy letting us crash at his place to go outside to beat him up.
It’s not cool to start shit.
PEOPLE WHO CANNOT TAKE COMPLIMENTS.
PEOPLE WHO ARE EASILY COMPLIMENTED.
HARD BREASTS, MAGICIANS.
I hate castleing. Sux.
I HATE LAND
S
L
I
DE
FUCK
2/8
Fuck the colts.
Who datt?!
Spotcaller, spot caller, you’re a spotcaller, yeah.
NOT BEING THE BAD BOY I WANNA BE.
TOO MANY WHO DATS AND FUCK DATS DRIVE ME CRAZY.
SPOT CALLING. (HYPOCRITICAL)
2/9
I envelop heat wave in my self
and they exhume out through my fingertip
at your face, and then, you die.
2/11
We’re at a slow point in our tour right now. A slow time, maybe, kind of necessary. We had four nights of ridiculously insane shows. We arrived to Tallahassee close to eleven and played a small house party where there was vegan cake because it was the tenant’s birthday. There was a keg. Shreds played and then we played, and people got wild. There was a coat hanger on the mic, so I hung myself. Beer soaked the small room’s wooden floor. Then cops showed so the rest of the show was moved to another house, a punk house, Coolifornia, where Robert lived. He’d set up the show. Good night, we made fifty dollars. Enough for gas the next day. Greg was there and he ate breakfast with us at a kind of pretentious café, and he then went biking.
Second show was at Pensacola, a pretty cool punk house. [undecipherable words: maybe: We played first and it was wild], and before we went to a vegan restaurant. I had an okay tempeh tuna sandwich. Then, and this has been big, we played New Orleans on Superbowl Sunday, and the Saints were in the game. The saints we say and man the Saints intercept a touchdown! in the fourth period, way too ahead, too late in the game for the Colts to have a chance. We at a bar deep in the industrial ghetto portion of the city, walked for like an hour from the French Quarter, the Dragon’s Den, where we fucked shit up later on. Me, Rilly, and Sam, we got disappeared after the show, where we got $100, drunk for free, in search of drugs, but we were way fucked up to figure out how to get to the ghetto. We got picked up and went to Candice’s warehouse, and ate. We then went to Griffin’s grandmother’s house which lived about 12 minutes from the city, and I saw that Sam had pulled out a bed and quickly passed out on it.
Then we played Chattanooga, which was wild as well. I met Erica, singer of 40oz folklore and she loved us, comparing me to 80’s Spanish punk shit. Said she couldn’t find me in the crowd. She had grown up in the L.A. first wave of punk, and was 50 years old.
Then we played the Crucial Funhouse in Lexington, Kentucky, and that was a gear change on our tour. The house was very agreeable, and we got needed rest. I ran into Melody, who’d I met at the Harvest of Hope the year before, randomly, and had given her a copy of Kittens in the boiler. I was very surprised to run into her.
Since then we’ve been chilling to say the least. No shows till Friday, and today’s Thursday. We’ll be at Toledo, I think, Ohio. We’re at Ann Arbor and we just got done playing Space Ball at one of the twelve still active and useable spaceball “courts.” It was awesome fun staying at Byron’s, and shit seems really good.
[NOTE: This video was added post-Angerlog for the sake of the reader. THIS IS SPACEBALLLLLL! Byron’s the cat doing all the maneuvers in the video. The place is his grandfather’s joint.]
2/12
I still can’t stop hating the crucial fun house. I think they even spelled house haus. Man, I hate that shit. At least valentines day is soon! That’s not angry, sorry.
2/12
The crucial funhouse was a reststop for us, where we got crucially fucked up.
Toledo! is full of hate.
fuck forgiveness, biatches!
2/15
eF V-day
I hate veterans
I wanna play the crutch and am not allowed to dumbfound with my mad lyricism.
cold toes dressed in wet socks
full bladder and snow covered hills
on the side
thin, naked tree limbs
crossing like legs
biting like hungry “anarchists”
a car looks like it is halfburied in snow
a truck swerved off the road
No tude, please.
2/17
I’m disappointed that my statement of intent was not regarded when it came to me sitting in the front seat. I mean, damn, I am the one with the directions. Although I was beyond tipsy, I pointedly asked if directions were had or if assistance were needed, and I was told yes/no, when that was untrue. I hate to be disregarded because I’ve been drinking.
That’s not to say I was acting clear-headedly, but that was kind of the point. That said, I’m extremely frustrated with how I was dealt with by Sam at our arrival. Admittedly, I’m a loud talker and have difficulty gauging that, particularly while drinking. However, I highly doubt any breach of conduct that would merit “I’m sick of your shit” and a minor choking. In the spirit of keeping it cool for the folks, keeping it tropical, and generally kind of being a pussy, I went back to total silence. Dammit if I didn’t want to return in kind, and I’m still sitting on it now. Sure I had altered judgment, but I believe that was an unjust, insultingly inappropriate response where a “Dude, cool it” would have worked. I hate that shit. I’m legitimately offended and upset.
I plan to enjoy the day, though.
2/17
I hate getting sad about shit when I know what was up the whole time. I know she never wanted to be with me. She’s not the first girl who wanted to have an exheroin addict poet boytoy. She’s not the first girl to play me and drop me. But goddamn was I sad this morning. Goddamn did I feel like a fool all over again, even though there’s nothing going on between us. I fucking hate that either I feel that I’m in love, that I’m obsessed, or actually am in love with her. But I’m pretty sure I don’t believe love exists. Just synapses’ reaction to stimulus. I fucking hate that I think about her all the time, when I know she doesn’t give a shit about me. I also hate that I emailed to try to reconnect and was ignored. I wasn’t the one who betrayed anyone. I wasn’t the one who did the fucking-over. I wasn’t the one who left another hanging.
We’re in Laketown Massachusetts at Sam’s parents’ house, mormons. Very nice. Let us in at 4 in the morning after the R.I. show. Some girl, [Moe?] was really nice to me and the bartender from Peru gave me free beers and ten bucks for an eskorbuto shirt. I think Matty got offended. I felt bad but it had already been done. The Bartender was cute, and we spoke in Spanish and I defeated her with the word “derramar” while she said “dejar caer.” One word for two, I win. My language is more efficient. You have been defeated. The Ohio shows were cool. Carolyn ignored my emails. I’m sure I know why she wants nothing to do with me. I hope she’s just angry with me, but my gut feeling says she’s still running and that thought makes me very sad. I wish shit hadn’t gone down the way it did. Toledo was funny. There was a young girl who tried a lot to impress us with her punkness, but she was cool nonetheless. Kept on talking about the sex party they were going to have. I truly feel there’s more intellect and genuity, and love, in a van with two punk rock bands on tour than there will ever be in any university campus. I dread going back to school. I hate this society I’m stuck in. Cincinnati was really cool, there was poetry by a Bukowskish kid, and a Gingsbergish boy, and the Gingsbergish kid left right after he read. Fuck him. He missed the punk rock. We ripped it. The Columbus show was off the chain and Rat Attack from Chicago was awesome. There was a Minor Threat/Fugazi cover band which ripped and Vacation did a Ramones set—wicked. We, of course, ripped, but I think we always rip. Tomorrow we’re playing in Connecticut and then two NYC shows! I’m excited to se Dru, and Arvelisse, who I’ve been communicating with throughout the tour, I like her a lot. She takes this digital journalism class in which the professor picks up and makes phone calls during class, claiming they are important calls. She sent me his number and name and I called him during her class. He picked up and I said I was Augustus Semble from the Atlantic Monthly and wanted him to write for me. He believed it and said he’d call in an hour. I then called from Rilly’s phone saying I was Orki Molloy from the Cincinnati Esquire (Rilly’s # is a Cincinnati #) and then hung up on him. He never called me, so I guess I fucked up, but Arvelisse told me it made her day and she couldn’t stop laughing. He talked about it to the class, that he felt he was being sabotaged. That made me happy.
From today on I will touch more butts.
The first four shows, I touched butts. I’m slacking.
Butt touching, wooooooooooooooooo
WILLAMATIC SUCKS DIX. FOLK PUNK SUX DIX. THIS PLACE ONLY HAD BEER TIL 9??!!! STUPID COXSUXERS. FUCK THIS PLACE FOR BEING RUDE TO GUS.
P.S. ALSO NO WEEDMAN CONNECT
Willimantic was fun and I think there are differing opinions as to what’s acceptable as far as guest-host relations—i.e. what constitutes acceptable rudeness from either side.
Matty seems a bit dickly with a couple drinks in him. I know I can be obnoxious as shit, but Matty just seems to get mean. Whereas I can pull my shit together and get articulate when need be—because, um—fortunately for me, I’m not drunk—Matty seems to incorporate an unpleasant darkness. It should be noted that poor penmanship is not a result of inebriation so much as poor lighting.
2/23
We’re headed out of philly to Baltimore. There’s good word about Baltimore, so I’m excited. We played Connecticut, and probably won’t play there again. The next morning I had dry blood on the top of my head. We played a sixfoot basement. I got naked for a sec. We brought the party to where it wasn’t wanted. Some kid who was cool with me at first got pissed because he said I was hitting on his bestfriend’s girlfriend. I remember her talking to me, and he kept following me around telling me to stop talking to her, but I don’t remember saying shit to her. I do remember trying to convince two lesbians to sleep with me. We didn’t stay there, and Rilly drove maniacally to New York, where we stayed at his friend’s, Kelly Ginger’s, house in Brooklyn. She was cool, and so was her roommate Bronwyn. There was a fist fight in the van, but we were all just drunk. I got hit in the side of the head trying to prevent this violence, and it still hurts when I open my jaw too much. We got banned from Don pedro’s, which Dru told me was almost impossible, it being the grimiest rock spot in the city. I pissed off the bartender, Karen + Melissa, who are just a couple of trendyass hipsters. Melissa threw a beer at me as I walked out the door. Dru was in jail that night. He had gotten a d.u.i. the night we arrived to NY. He didn’t get out till Saturday. He saw us at Tommy’s Tavern, which was kinda lame. General NY lesson: Bar shows suck. Double booking, and band discrimination occurs. At Tommy’s there was some lameass metal show after us, so we were done by 11pm, and all the other show’s equipment took up half the hall. During our set I gave many thanks to the equipment for being so lively. The sound guy liked us. We made 60 buck at Don pedro’s and 25 at Tommy’s. The Philadelphia show was cool. We played with When I was Twelve, which was really good. Pop sung by a cute awkward girl. I traded a record for their CD. My Mind Works was cool too. Peter from Big Mama’s house, the art/music/band warehouse where we stayed two nights is super cool. I hope to make it out to Harvest of Hope to see him play in Algernon. I think that’s a general sum up so far. There are moments missing but either I don’t wanna reach or as Hemingway said, a story is life with the dull parts cut out. In philly, there’s shit on all the sidewalks, but people are nicer than in NY. Got to make it up for the shitloaded sidewalks.
2/24
I’ve eaten pizza in New York, Providence R.I. Philadelphia, Baltimore. Tried to get some at Chattanooga , Ann Arbor, and maybe some more spots?
I want a slice right now. We’re driving to Richmond, VA. There’s traffic everywhere. Last night we made $100. I got drunk on whiskey. We played with a bunch of streetpunk bands. Another band played a GG Allin cover. I got a weed hookup. 10 dollar handful.
I liked Baltimore. It was rundown. I’d like to live there. We stayed in a cool house, a warehouse, where lots of art students loved at. I met Renee and Lisa? and some of their friends. There were two guinea pigs, Muddy and Hairdo, and a ferret, Miss Smelliot. I want another ferret. I miss Popcorn. I don’t want to return to Gainesville. When I get there I gotta refocus. I won’t be taking the GRE again because I’m going to be broke. I could ask my mother for money, but I don’t want her to pay for my shit, and I can use being broke as an excuse not to retake it. I don’t want to stress myself out again studying for that fucking exam. It sucked. I’m going divine destiny on Grad school. If I’m to do grad school, I will. If not, fuck it. Education won’t run away from me. I want to work on my stories.
3/3
On our way to Miami, an added show done by Rick of Torche and Nuclear II. Since Baltimore I guess it’s been a blur. We played Greenville NC at a Christian Anarchist spot, which was wild. Had a cultish vibe, The Hangar. Young kids went wild. I felt wrong singing Km/Ky/Ly to them. I got a sad clown tattoo by Rich. Awesome. In Charleston, which we got really drunk and played sloppy as hell, but was wild, so in my opinion, good show, jaja. Gainesville was a mess as well. Lots of kids from Orlando came. Good vibes. Birdie played as Permanent Nap. That was cool. Heather told me she was leaving in two weeks. That bummed me out. The Orlando show was wild. A guy bought ten of our 7’’s for his store. We haven’t been getting paid well lately. I’m gonna get fucked up down south.
Review of Angles of Disorder by Zachary C. Bush
In this collection, our reality is distorted into Bush’s vision of the word we live in. In “Within the Within,” a person awakens and finds curtains at the foot of his or her bed. Behind that curtain is a stage, and on it: a painting of a “black-swirl sea,” in which a tiny boat floats, and in it the person of the piece is sitting, who is staring at the speaker. As Bush writes, “…you, so small, staring at me, staring at you.” The speaker is the person that woke in the night, and it is the person that awoke who is staring at themselves, but is also the speaker, and the “you.”
I’ve known Bush for a while. I’ve have some of his earliest chapbooks. I’ve been corresponding with him for at least three years now. I have seen his evolution as an “experimental” writer. That is a term I do not enjoy, “experimental.” But Bush definitely pushes language. He is well aware that one of the powers of the English language is the compound word. Bush creates images and feelings that never existed before with his use of the compound word. Bush is an experience to read. An experience that at times can be frightful, but many times beautifully exquisite as well. Examples of his use of the compound word: “blood-sticky linoleum,” a “crisp-cool wedge” of lettuce, “silver-sparkling blades,” “blood-red-tailed bumblebees,” and “redcurrant fire-flies,” to mention a few.
My previous experience with Bush’s writing has been through verse, language-pushing verse, but this collection is more prose. But it is a very poetic prose. I wonder at times why it is a good thing to have your prose be called poetic, but it seems insulting to have your verse be called prosy. Either way, Bush is constantly making anew, as one of his bigger influences, Ezra Pound, said, the purpose of writing was “to make it new.”
Of these selections, most are flash-stories, and a lot are interconnected, and touch on repetitive themes. There is a fight with nature, an attempt to reason with the illogical, and this reasoning is done through mathematical computations. The characters look for answers in time, in nature, in space, through numbers. At times, the characters despise these vessels in which previously, answers to questions were being asked. In “The Catch,” Bush writes of a girl who was resentful of “The Sun.” She then sets a “dwarf-moose trap,” which ends up catching “Thursday.” She is then skipped to Friday, and she spends that day observing Thursday bleed to death. This success makes her confident that she will soon be able to trap “The Sun.”
In “Angles of Disorder,” as “The Traveler” sits observing dogs in a fight, Bush describes the dogs with: “…thick clumps of blood wet-stained their raised hair.” This is more impacting than to have just written that “blood had stained the dogs’ fur.” And “The Traveler” observes a woman who is happy, and he questions why she is happy. The woman is happy because she has “a crumpled Carnival Finger.” She calls it her “Wishbone.” “The Traveler” then becomes pleased with the old lady, and understands her happiness. The dogs then come and snatch away the finger, and “The Traveler” leaves the old lady alone.
In “The Difference,” in which two characters, “He,” a vacuum repair man, and “She,” a female who entered his shop and is angered because no one in the town had noticed that the sidewalks were slanted “3.3. degrees,” meet. They have a strange conversation in which “He” is never sure whether “She” is telling the truth or lying. Throughout this piece, and in other pieces in the collection, common words are made into proper names, giving them a more significant identity and presence in the piece. For example, “The Others,” “The Clocks,” “The Calendars,” “Sixteen Hours,” “Everyone,” “Anyone,” and “No One.” In this specific piece, “He” and “She” are maintained in that manner even when in possessive form, so instead of writing “her cries,” Bush writes, “She’s cries.”
Sometimes one piece leads into the next, and there is a continuation of a theme. A drawing of a hanged man that appears early in the collection slowly disappears until all that is left is his hanged head in the corner of the page. In “The Small Town Musical,” an old woman cannot stop the sounds of polka music from sounding inside of her head. She buys a hammer, and a nail, and goes to her home. In the end of the piece, Bush writes, “The old woman stood still, outside her front steps, and thought ‘No, no more of This Hell; not anymore!’ She entered her trailer, alone, and slammed the aluminum door behind her. THERE WAS NO ECHO.” The following piece, “WHEN YOU ARE DEAD,” repeats the verses: “You hear no echoes/WHEN YOU ARE DEAD/You hear no echoes/WHEN YOU ARE DEAD…” This is the follow up to the old lady’s story. She killed herself to no longer hear the polka music. Once she was dead, she could no longer hear echoes of any sound. The pieces “To Say Just a Few More Things about the Desert [10],[19]” are of a speaker realizing that fingers are trying to escape from his plastic face. He can hear children chanting recess songs from within himself. The next piece in the collection, “What pain they must feel!” repeats the verse: “There are children trapped inside my face!”
My only complaint with the collection is that in some of its pieces, such as in “losingMACRO,” Bush’s pushing of language makes no sense to me, and I do not know what to do with it. In this piece, letters are scattered, in between numbers and punctuation symbols, some of them capitalized, some lowercased, and I look for something but find nothing. Pieces like that, I’d prefer not to even see. It distracts me from Bush’s prose. But this happens maybe once in between many interesting, and mind-bending pieces.
I’ve read around that Bush is working on a novel, along with all the other stuff he produces. Reading this collection has caused anticipation in me to read a novel by him. It should be a very unique piece of fiction, and I would probably recommend this collection, and anything by Bush, to anyone into innovative language and literature.
New Translations
***UPDATE***
After being accessed by David Leavitt on the legalities of publishing translations of deceased authors without permission, and out of fear of legal retributions, I have decided to temporarily (hopefully) delete all translations of José María Lima's work on the Instruction Manual until I have official permission to do so.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
- AR 4/26/10
Sin título I
Hoy de camino al correo resbalé sobre hielo y casi me di en el ojo contra una rama de un árbol. Recuperé mi balance y continúe adelante. El señor caminando detrás de mi se río. Tenía toda la razón en reírse por que daba risa y él no tenía conexión al dolor real que podría yo haber sentido. Pero si hubiese perdido mi ojo, hubiese ido hacia él y lo hubiese sujetado contra el hielo del piso—y dejaría que la sangre saliendo del boquete donde estaba mi ojo derrame en su boca en lo que él se reía. Mi correspondencia era un su mayoría mierda sobre tarjetas de crédito que nunca utilizaré.
- Translated by Andy Riverbed with proofs by Lola Pistola
Untitled I
On the way to the mailbox today, I slipped on some ice and almost hit my eye on a tree branch. I regained my balance and continued on. The guy walking behind me laughed. He had every right to laugh because it was funny and he had no tie to the physical pain I could've experienced. However, if I had lost my eye, I would've walked up to him and held him down in the snow—and let the blood from my empty eye socket spill into his laughing mouth. My mail was mostly crap about credit cards that I will never use.
- Sam Pink
Friday, January 15, 2010
How to realize
There was once a man who owned a plastic piggy-bank. This piggy-bank’s plastic was of a thickness that made it impossible to see through into its interior. Even after holding this piggy-bank to the sky, hoping the glare of the sun, the warmness-giver, would give him an idea of its contents, he could see nothing. But the man did not worry about this. He found the piggy-bank to be so beautiful. The piggy-bank excited the man. He had never felt the way he felt during those spare moments in which he held the piggy-bank in his hands. But there was one issue. This piggy-bank was known by many other men. Those men as well seemed not to care that they could not see into the piggy-bank’s insides. This man, the man of our story, did not allow the idea of his piggy-bank being shared by other men to dissuade him. Everyday, he would set off on his way with his earnings of the previous day, and he would invest in this piggy-bank. Soon, he was not paying rent, his electricity was cut-off, he had no running water, and was not eating, but he believed that he was fulfilling the piggy-bank. One day, he spoke to the piggy-bank, but it did not answer. He held the piggy-bank, and felt warm, but then wondered to himself, If I have invested into this piggy-bank, why does it weigh so lightly? He shook the piggy-bank, but heard none of his money inside it. He neither heard the investments of the other men whom he knew were also investing in his piggy-bank. He turned the piggy-bank over and saw that under it, where its plump, smooth belly should be, was a hole. The man realized that his piggy-bank was nothing more than a drain, and that his investment would be forever lost.
How I came to realize that I was no longer writing for the Fine Print
Last semester, I was “writing” for the Fine Print, the University of Florida’s student-run, independent newspaper. It focuses on D.I.Y. subjects, and has a more liberal-minded swing to it. I had a review of the third issue of the Agricultural Review published there, a poem posted up on their blog, and was going to have a review of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel, and of Zachary C. Bush’s Angles of Disorder published in the upcoming months. Those reviews never happened, and never will, on the Fine Print for various reasons.
A bit after my first review was published by the Fine Print, a friend of mine (and other contributing Fine Print writer) held a party to raise money for farm workers. She said she was looking for bands to play, and I was told that if my band showed up, we could play. We maneuvered a lot to make it happened, but we were ready to play. My drummer was setting up the drum set, and a piece of it broke in his hand. That is what happened, but the owner of the set (I guess, because I really didn’t know who he was, but who also happened to be one of the tenants) started accusing us of breaking his set. At the moment I couldn’t consider his accusations, thinking, How could we have broken anything if we haven’t played yet? He said things like, “I’m not saying you broke it, but if you did, you should admit it.” And we responded, “But you are saying we broke it, and we haven’t even played yet. So how could we have broken it?” As I look back, now, all I can conclude is that whatever drum piece broke was already fucked up and meant to break soon, because Rilly is a very careful drummer, and never breaks things (that’s my job). We did not break that equipment, yet were blamed. Anyway, there were kegs at the party, and we had all been drinking a lot for free, so I was getting uppity. I just told the guy (because another friend of ours, who had lent us everything we were going to play with, who had gone to his home and carried that equipment to the house to have us play, who would then have to carry it all home alone because we were vanished), “Fine. We won’t use your drum set. We’re going to go to this kid’s house, get his drums, and then we’ll play.” The tenant wasn’t having that, and told me, “No, you’re not going to play in my house at all.” At this point I came to see this guy was just a power-tripping, little bitch, and I told him, “Fine, we won’t play, but you’re a little bitch.” To which he responded by telling me that I had to leave the house. And I told him I would, and then spat on his face. After that there was a shove and I let my fist talk the rest for me. I punched him. I am not proud of this, of resorting to violence, but that kid definitely deserved the bitchness punched out of him. Some other kid jumped in, and started hitting me, and soon I was combating multiple people, until Matty jumped in, yelling, and I ended up even hitting him (our glasses being knocked off). I snuck out of that and picked up Matty’s glasses, picked up mine, and walked to the other side, where I continued to hear yelling, and people trying to rationalize the situation. We were corralled outside, and as we tried to get on our bikes to leave, the tenant whom I punched, and his other roommate kept on “rationalizing” what had happened by saying things like, “This did not have to happen this way,” and bla bla bla. Basically, they were antagonizing us by bullshitting us, and we were just getting angrier and angrier. We wanted to leave, and the fucking little bitches kept on talking to us. I threatened to rape him, to stick my balls up into his asshole. One roommate said, “Man, I was just chilling in my room smoking from my bong, and all of the sudden there’s this fight.” I called him a fucking hippie, and clarified, on their request for what that mean, and said, “It means fuck you, and shit the fuck up!” Of course they didn’t shut up, and kept on with their “rationalizing” of the situation. Personally, once the fists have flown, rationalizing is pointless, and it should just end and people should go on their separate paths. They weren’t letting it end, and just pissing us off more and more.
Now, who was right, who was wrong? I sure wasn’t right in punching the kid, but I am not sorry. He wasn’t right in being a power-tripping bitch, but I doubt he’s sorry, either. Point being, student activists and St. Dad do not mix.
It also turns out that one of the tenants of the house happened to be one of the editors of the Fine Print, and when I went on campus in the following weeks, the editors, who always were pretty cool with me, were acting very awkwardly towards me, but never did they say anything about the occurrence. I spoke to my friend who told me we could play, explained the situation, and told her I was sorry, to her, not for what I did, but for possibly getting her in bad water for knowing us. Eventually I uploaded the Lin review onto the website where the editors edit the pieces for upcoming issues. I never got a response about it. I even messaged about feeling unhappiness towards me. No response. I never finished up the review for personal reasons, expecting to get a message about the deadline, just as I had received about the Agriculture Review review, but nothing. A few weeks later, when I had decided to finish the review because I felt it should be due soon, I went to the Fine Print’s site, and didn’t see my review up there, found that strange, but uploaded it again, this time writing something like, “I thought I had uploaded this earlier this month, but I guess I was wrong, so here it is again. Any suggestions are welcome.” Once again, no response. A few days later, I walk on campus and there they are, giving out copies of the new issue of the Fine Print. I was never told about the deadline. I don’t even think I was told the new issue was coming out. So, I see the editor giving out issues, and she doesn’t say much to me other than an awkward “Hi,” and my friend, who had helped us get equipment to the fateful house, was there and asked me to give out issues. And so I helped out, going up to people on that ugly, cloud-covered, rainy day, and telling them, “Take an issue, it’ll make your day better.” I hung out for about an hour and a half and helped them give out issues of the new Fine Print, the new issue whose deadline I was never made aware of, and came to realize that I was no longer writing for the Fine Print.
The review of Shoplifting from American Apparel that was supposed to be printed in some issue of the Fine Print
This novella’s action is focused around two shoplifting events, gmail chats, and a reading during Gainesville’s The Fest, but the “true” story lies within the interpersonal interactions between the protagonist, Sam, a writer living in New York, and those he encounters during his journey. Throughout the novella, Sam doesn’t “really” do anything, just kind of falls into events: jail, sex and kissing, Gainesville. There are interactions in which things are implied, but nothing’s ever really said directly. Lin says things the characters are thinking and feeling through minimal description of these humans’ interactions.
Early in the novella, we run into this passage on page 19:
“‘Oscar Wilde said that a genius is a spectator to their own life, to the point that the real genius is uninteresting,’ said Luis.”
This sets up the subject of the novella, the writer himself, Tao Lin. This novella, from my understanding, is Lin’s most autobiographical work.
But there’s another story underlying the occurrences of this novella, the story of Sam and his ex-girlfriend, Sheila. On page 13, Lin drops the first hint:
“Sam tried to guess the password to Sheila’s email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful…”
Nothing else is said about Sheila, or about Sam’s feelings or thoughts of Sheila until page 79, where Sam is talking with Robert, a friend of Sam’s through gmail chat:
“Robert said Sheila called twice earlier from the mental hospital, and that he gave her Sam’s phone number and told her to call Sam.”
Here we are clued into what might’ve happened. Is Sam no longer with Sheila because she went crazy? Why did she go crazy? When Sam was trying to get into her email account, was he worried about her and just wanted to feel reconnected to her, or was he trying to find out if she was hiding something from him?
Lin then writes:
“’I wonder if she’ll get better. I felt sad. Connie was here. I felt funny about the situation. Later when Connie said things like ‘why are you sad,’ I could say nothing and she would say things like, ‘are you worried about your friend.’’
‘Ha ha,’ said Sam. ‘’Concrete reason.’’
‘Yes’, said Robert. ‘’Easy to understand.’’
They talked about Sheila for a few minutes.”
Here, Lin is minimizing what could be considered “deep” feelings. In this manner, I’m even more intrigued about this dynamic, the Sam and Sheila dynamic. It’s the most interesting part to me. I felt as if it came out of nowhere, but it was there the entire time, hiding under Lin’s style. I think that to push this subject matter would be overwhelming, but Lin’s extreme minimalism does it well. It’s too subtle to overwhelm. But it’s there. “Deep” feelings are present while one thinks one’s just reading some petty gmail chat between some hipsters.
On page 83, an “out-of-control butterfly” hits Sam in the face. Is this Sheila? Sam’s thoughts of Sheila? A little before that, on page 80, Lin writes:
“Sam looked around. His cup of iced coffee was empty. ‘I felt emotional today thinking about the past, like a year and a half ago, at Sheila’s house,’ he said…’But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really,’ said Sam. ‘It just went away after a while.’”
Once again, the Sheila dynamic arises, and Lin shuts it down with his minimalism, with his philosophizing.
Later on, on page 99, Sam compares Audrey (a girl he meets in Gainesville) to Sheila:
“Sam thought that [Audrey’s] facial expression was as neutral as Sheila’s when Sheila was in similar situations. They had just kissed for a bit.”
No matter what he’s doing, it seems that his thoughts of Sheila do not cease.
Another enjoyable aspect of Lin’s novella is how he emphasizes that words and actions do not always correspond. For example this passage on page 50:
“On Hester’s sofa in her apartment in Chelsea Sam said he had sort of been seeing someone named Paula for a few weeks…Hester said she needed to pee and went to the bathroom and came back and sat on Sam’s lap and began to kiss him. Sam tasted mouthwash. Hester stood and walked around and said she shouldn’t be doing that. She sat on Sam’s lap and they kissed and she stood and walked around.”
Here Sam isn’t “really” seeing another person, but is “kind of,” so does that make that relationship ingenuine? Hester says she’s going to pee, but really just washed her mouth to make out with Sam, because, it could be understood, she became jealous that Sam told her he was seeing someone else. Did he do that on purpose as well?
Then, this happens:
“’I’m not going to have sex with you,’ said Hester…‘Should we go buy cigarettes and condoms? I’m out of cigarettes. I haven’t had sex in so long.’”
She then gets angry because she understands that Sam doesn’t want to have sex with her—which he denies, the not wanting to have sex with her. Lin never directly states whether they have sex or not, but it can be assumed. I would’ve done it.
Reaching the end of the novella at page 72, Sam realizes a “change,” when speaking to Robert about his feelings of Hester.
“’Do you like her,’ said Robert.
‘Yeah,’ said Sam slowly. ‘I think I changed or something…like, I like being around someone who isn’t like me a lot in some ways, or something. I’m pretty sure I feel happy around her. I think I always feel good after I see her.’”
Is this, like, the “change” that occurs in traditional literature? So, the big “change” the protagonist undergoes in this novella is that before he only liked being around people like him and now he can be happy around people not like him? Lin never defines this in the text. If this were true, then I feel it’s a petty change, but a change that defines American culture to a large extent, right now. People are petty, and their feelings are fleeting. People’s definitions of love, friendship, loyalties are meaningless.
But then Sam’s in Gainesville, Florida, and he’s hanging out with Audrey. They go see some bands at the Orange and Brew and end up making out. He ends up seeming to be in control of Audrey.
On page 92, Lin writes:
“‘Roll to go get it, Audrey,’ [Sam ] said. ‘You’re facing the right direction.’
Audrey started rolling. Sam saw that Jeffrey looked bored.
‘It’s funny you got her to do that,’ said Jeffrey.”
Later on the page:
“Sam pointed at something on the grass and said, ‘Jump over that,’ to Audrey…Audrey ran and jumped over the side of the plant.”
Sam has admitted his feelings for Hester, but here he is fooling around with Audrey, so therefore, it could be understood that his feelings for Hester don’t carry much weight.
On page 100, there’s a passage which sums up this novella for me (and probably my favorite passage)—the vagueness, the indirectness, the misunderstandings due to people not being straightforward:
“They parked near Chris’ house and Sam opened his car door. ‘You’re leaving?’ said Audrey. ‘That’s it? Well, okay, bye.’
Sam stared at Audrey with his hand on the door handle.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to hang out? Alright.’
‘Do you want to come in?’ said Sam.
‘Yes. I thought you were leaving.’
‘I thought you were coming with me,’ said Sam.
‘Me too,’ said Audrey. ‘Sorry, maybe I mumbled.’
So, in conclusion, I enjoyed this novella a lot. Read it a few times. Would read it again. I feel it’s an accurate portrait of young-adults in these contemporary times.
Self-publishing
Published a story, “A recording session” at the Amoricide blog, HERE.
Going to be in Puerto Rico from the 28th till the 31st of January, if anyone cares.
St. Dad and The Shreds on Tour
Every member of St. Dad has food stamps. Bring us substance and we will feed you. Matty can cook some mean-ass green. Arlo’s half-Cuban, and works at Leos by the Slice, has made us some great barbeque tempeh, so he can make some good pizza. Rilly has been slaving for restaurants since he was five-years-old and can cook you anything you want to eat. He can cook crawfish etuffles, and eggplant parmigianino, and tuna casserole. I can cook some mean-ass rice and beans, so satisfy yourself with that.
More reasons to hang-out with The Shreds and St. Dad? We can make you feel loved. Come to us. We will warm you through the cold winter months. I know it’s a gamble, but we all know who to use our limbs efficiently!
ST. Dad tapes in the Netherlands!: HERE.
ST. Dad will have their debut 7 inch “Do as I say not what I do,” and more, on tour.
Download the debut St. Dad release, “keep it in your pants,” HERE.
Tour Schedule:
***UPDATE NUMERO UNO***
FINALIZED TOUR DATES
February 5th
Tallahassee, FL with Sorry Mom at Farside 205 East Oakland Avenue
February 6th
Pensacola, FL with High Fructose at 309 6th Wright St.
February 7th
New Orleans, LA with Nervous Juvenille and Small Bones at Dragon's Den 435 Esplanade Avenue
February 8th
Chattanooga, TN with What If? at Anarchtica
February 9th
Lexington, KY at Crucial Funhouse 249 Kentucky Avenue
February 10th
Bloomington, IN
February 11th
Indianapolis, IN
February 12th
Toledo, OH with Yeti Machete at Black Cherry Info Shop 1420 Cherry Street
February 13th
Cincinnati, OH with You'll Get Yours at Art Damage Lodge 1420 Hamilton Avenue
February 14th
Columbus, OH with Vacation and Slugging Percentage at Monster House 115 West 10th Avenue
February 15th
Pittsburgh, PA
February 16th
Providence, RI with The Black Clouds and The Ram at AS220 115 Empire Street
February 17th
MA/CT
February 18th
Willimantic, CT at The Handsome Woman
February 19th
Brooklyn, NY at Don Pedro's 90 Manhattan Avenue
February 20th
Brooklyn, NY at Tommy's Tavern 1041 Manhattan Avenue
February 21st
Philadelphia, PA
February 22nd
Washington D.C.
February 23rd
Baltimore, MD with Shelter Shock, Sacrifidelis, Gnarly Rueage, Dry Clouds at Monarchs 6826 Hartford Road
February 24th
Richmond, VA with Nervous Ticks and Crass
February 25th
Charlotte, NC
February 26th
Greenville, SC at The Hangar
February 27th
Charleston, SC
February 28th
St. Augustine, FL at Nobby's Tavern 10 Anastasia Boulevard
March 1st
Gainesville, FL at Bo Diddly's Old House 911 SE 4th St.
March 2nd
Orlando, FL with Triscults and Slippery Slopes at Uncle Lou's 1016 North Mills Avenue
New Zachary C. Bush Poems
HERE
Next manual update will have a review of Bush’s Angles of Disorder, which as well, was supposed to be published in the Fine Print. It will probably be written on the road. And there were be something written about the tour, probably.
How I came to realize that I was no longer writing for the Fine Print
Last semester, I was “writing” for the Fine Print, the University of Florida’s student-run, independent newspaper. It focuses on D.I.Y. subjects, and has a more liberal-minded swing to it. I had a review of the third issue of the Agricultural Review published there, a poem posted up on their blog, and was going to have a review of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel, and of Zachary C. Bush’s Angles of Disorder published in the upcoming months. Those reviews never happened, and never will, on the Fine Print for various reasons.
A bit after my first review was published by the Fine Print, a friend of mine (and other contributing Fine Print writer) held a party to raise money for farm workers. She said she was looking for bands to play, and I was told that if my band showed up, we could play. We maneuvered a lot to make it happened, but we were ready to play. My drummer was setting up the drum set, and a piece of it broke in his hand. That is what happened, but the owner of the set (I guess, because I really didn’t know who he was, but who also happened to be one of the tenants) started accusing us of breaking his set. At the moment I couldn’t consider his accusations, thinking, How could we have broken anything if we haven’t played yet? He said things like, “I’m not saying you broke it, but if you did, you should admit it.” And we responded, “But you are saying we broke it, and we haven’t even played yet. So how could we have broken it?” As I look back, now, all I can conclude is that whatever drum piece broke was already fucked up and meant to break soon, because Rilly is a very careful drummer, and never breaks things (that’s my job). We did not break that equipment, yet were blamed. Anyway, there were kegs at the party, and we had all been drinking a lot for free, so I was getting uppity. I just told the guy (because another friend of ours, who had lent us everything we were going to play with, who had gone to his home and carried that equipment to the house to have us play, who would then have to carry it all home alone because we were vanished), “Fine. We won’t use your drum set. We’re going to go to this kid’s house, get his drums, and then we’ll play.” The tenant wasn’t having that, and told me, “No, you’re not going to play in my house at all.” At this point I came to see this guy was just a power-tripping, little bitch, and I told him, “Fine, we won’t play, but you’re a little bitch.” To which he responded by telling me that I had to leave the house. And I told him I would, and then spat on his face. After that there was a shove and I let my fist talk the rest for me. I punched him. I am not proud of this, of resorting to violence, but that kid definitely deserved the bitchness punched out of him. Some other kid jumped in, and started hitting me, and soon I was combating multiple people, until Matty jumped in, yelling, and I ended up even hitting him (our glasses being knocked off). I snuck out of that and picked up Matty’s glasses, picked up mine, and walked to the other side, where I continued to hear yelling, and people trying to rationalize the situation. We were corralled outside, and as we tried to get on our bikes to leave, the tenant whom I punched, and his other roommate kept on “rationalizing” what had happened by saying things like, “This did not have to happen this way,” and bla bla bla. Basically, they were antagonizing us by bullshitting us, and we were just getting angrier and angrier. We wanted to leave, and the fucking little bitches kept on talking to us. I threatened to rape him, to stick my balls up into his asshole. One roommate said, “Man, I was just chilling in my room smoking from my bong, and all of the sudden there’s this fight.” I called him a fucking hippie, and clarified, on their request for what that mean, and said, “It means fuck you, and shit the fuck up!” Of course they didn’t shut up, and kept on with their “rationalizing” of the situation. Personally, once the fists have flown, rationalizing is pointless, and it should just end and people should go on their separate paths. They weren’t letting it end, and just pissing us off more and more.
Now, who was right, who was wrong? I sure wasn’t right in punching the kid, but I am not sorry. He wasn’t right in being a power-tripping bitch, but I doubt he’s sorry, either. Point being, student activists and St. Dad do not mix.
It also turns out that one of the tenants of the house happened to be one of the editors of the Fine Print, and when I went on campus in the following weeks, the editors, who always were pretty cool with me, were acting very awkwardly towards me, but never did they say anything about the occurrence. I spoke to my friend who told me we could play, explained the situation, and told her I was sorry, to her, not for what I did, but for possibly getting her in bad water for knowing us. Eventually I uploaded the Lin review onto the website where the editors edit the pieces for upcoming issues. I never got a response about it. I even messaged about feeling unhappiness towards me. No response. I never finished up the review for personal reasons, expecting to get a message about the deadline, just as I had received about the Agriculture Review review, but nothing. A few weeks later, when I had decided to finish the review because I felt it should be due soon, I went to the Fine Print’s site, and didn’t see my review up there, found that strange, but uploaded it again, this time writing something like, “I thought I had uploaded this earlier this month, but I guess I was wrong, so here it is again. Any suggestions are welcome.” Once again, no response. A few days later, I walk on campus and there they are, giving out copies of the new issue of the Fine Print. I was never told about the deadline. I don’t even think I was told the new issue was coming out. So, I see the editor giving out issues, and she doesn’t say much to me other than an awkward “Hi,” and my friend, who had helped us get equipment to the fateful house, was there and asked me to give out issues. And so I helped out, going up to people on that ugly, cloud-covered, rainy day, and telling them, “Take an issue, it’ll make your day better.” I hung out for about an hour and a half and helped them give out issues of the new Fine Print, the new issue whose deadline I was never made aware of, and came to realize that I was no longer writing for the Fine Print.
The review of Shoplifting from American Apparel that was supposed to be printed in some issue of the Fine Print
This novella’s action is focused around two shoplifting events, gmail chats, and a reading during Gainesville’s The Fest, but the “true” story lies within the interpersonal interactions between the protagonist, Sam, a writer living in New York, and those he encounters during his journey. Throughout the novella, Sam doesn’t “really” do anything, just kind of falls into events: jail, sex and kissing, Gainesville. There are interactions in which things are implied, but nothing’s ever really said directly. Lin says things the characters are thinking and feeling through minimal description of these humans’ interactions.
Early in the novella, we run into this passage on page 19:
“‘Oscar Wilde said that a genius is a spectator to their own life, to the point that the real genius is uninteresting,’ said Luis.”
This sets up the subject of the novella, the writer himself, Tao Lin. This novella, from my understanding, is Lin’s most autobiographical work.
But there’s another story underlying the occurrences of this novella, the story of Sam and his ex-girlfriend, Sheila. On page 13, Lin drops the first hint:
“Sam tried to guess the password to Sheila’s email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful…”
Nothing else is said about Sheila, or about Sam’s feelings or thoughts of Sheila until page 79, where Sam is talking with Robert, a friend of Sam’s through gmail chat:
“Robert said Sheila called twice earlier from the mental hospital, and that he gave her Sam’s phone number and told her to call Sam.”
Here we are clued into what might’ve happened. Is Sam no longer with Sheila because she went crazy? Why did she go crazy? When Sam was trying to get into her email account, was he worried about her and just wanted to feel reconnected to her, or was he trying to find out if she was hiding something from him?
Lin then writes:
“’I wonder if she’ll get better. I felt sad. Connie was here. I felt funny about the situation. Later when Connie said things like ‘why are you sad,’ I could say nothing and she would say things like, ‘are you worried about your friend.’’
‘Ha ha,’ said Sam. ‘’Concrete reason.’’
‘Yes’, said Robert. ‘’Easy to understand.’’
They talked about Sheila for a few minutes.”
Here, Lin is minimizing what could be considered “deep” feelings. In this manner, I’m even more intrigued about this dynamic, the Sam and Sheila dynamic. It’s the most interesting part to me. I felt as if it came out of nowhere, but it was there the entire time, hiding under Lin’s style. I think that to push this subject matter would be overwhelming, but Lin’s extreme minimalism does it well. It’s too subtle to overwhelm. But it’s there. “Deep” feelings are present while one thinks one’s just reading some petty gmail chat between some hipsters.
On page 83, an “out-of-control butterfly” hits Sam in the face. Is this Sheila? Sam’s thoughts of Sheila? A little before that, on page 80, Lin writes:
“Sam looked around. His cup of iced coffee was empty. ‘I felt emotional today thinking about the past, like a year and a half ago, at Sheila’s house,’ he said…’But there was nothing I could do with the emotion really,’ said Sam. ‘It just went away after a while.’”
Once again, the Sheila dynamic arises, and Lin shuts it down with his minimalism, with his philosophizing.
Later on, on page 99, Sam compares Audrey (a girl he meets in Gainesville) to Sheila:
“Sam thought that [Audrey’s] facial expression was as neutral as Sheila’s when Sheila was in similar situations. They had just kissed for a bit.”
No matter what he’s doing, it seems that his thoughts of Sheila do not cease.
Another enjoyable aspect of Lin’s novella is how he emphasizes that words and actions do not always correspond. For example this passage on page 50:
“On Hester’s sofa in her apartment in Chelsea Sam said he had sort of been seeing someone named Paula for a few weeks…Hester said she needed to pee and went to the bathroom and came back and sat on Sam’s lap and began to kiss him. Sam tasted mouthwash. Hester stood and walked around and said she shouldn’t be doing that. She sat on Sam’s lap and they kissed and she stood and walked around.”
Here Sam isn’t “really” seeing another person, but is “kind of,” so does that make that relationship ingenuine? Hester says she’s going to pee, but really just washed her mouth to make out with Sam, because, it could be understood, she became jealous that Sam told her he was seeing someone else. Did he do that on purpose as well?
Then, this happens:
“’I’m not going to have sex with you,’ said Hester…‘Should we go buy cigarettes and condoms? I’m out of cigarettes. I haven’t had sex in so long.’”
She then gets angry because she understands that Sam doesn’t want to have sex with her—which he denies, the not wanting to have sex with her. Lin never directly states whether they have sex or not, but it can be assumed. I would’ve done it.
Reaching the end of the novella at page 72, Sam realizes a “change,” when speaking to Robert about his feelings of Hester.
“’Do you like her,’ said Robert.
‘Yeah,’ said Sam slowly. ‘I think I changed or something…like, I like being around someone who isn’t like me a lot in some ways, or something. I’m pretty sure I feel happy around her. I think I always feel good after I see her.’”
Is this, like, the “change” that occurs in traditional literature? So, the big “change” the protagonist undergoes in this novella is that before he only liked being around people like him and now he can be happy around people not like him? Lin never defines this in the text. If this were true, then I feel it’s a petty change, but a change that defines American culture to a large extent, right now. People are petty, and their feelings are fleeting. People’s definitions of love, friendship, loyalties are meaningless.
But then Sam’s in Gainesville, Florida, and he’s hanging out with Audrey. They go see some bands at the Orange and Brew and end up making out. He ends up seeming to be in control of Audrey.
On page 92, Lin writes:
“‘Roll to go get it, Audrey,’ [Sam ] said. ‘You’re facing the right direction.’
Audrey started rolling. Sam saw that Jeffrey looked bored.
‘It’s funny you got her to do that,’ said Jeffrey.”
Later on the page:
“Sam pointed at something on the grass and said, ‘Jump over that,’ to Audrey…Audrey ran and jumped over the side of the plant.”
Sam has admitted his feelings for Hester, but here he is fooling around with Audrey, so therefore, it could be understood that his feelings for Hester don’t carry much weight.
On page 100, there’s a passage which sums up this novella for me (and probably my favorite passage)—the vagueness, the indirectness, the misunderstandings due to people not being straightforward:
“They parked near Chris’ house and Sam opened his car door. ‘You’re leaving?’ said Audrey. ‘That’s it? Well, okay, bye.’
Sam stared at Audrey with his hand on the door handle.
‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to hang out? Alright.’
‘Do you want to come in?’ said Sam.
‘Yes. I thought you were leaving.’
‘I thought you were coming with me,’ said Sam.
‘Me too,’ said Audrey. ‘Sorry, maybe I mumbled.’
So, in conclusion, I enjoyed this novella a lot. Read it a few times. Would read it again. I feel it’s an accurate portrait of young-adults in these contemporary times.
Self-publishing
Published a story, “A recording session” at the Amoricide blog, HERE.
Going to be in Puerto Rico from the 28th till the 31st of January, if anyone cares.
St. Dad and The Shreds on Tour
Every member of St. Dad has food stamps. Bring us substance and we will feed you. Matty can cook some mean-ass green. Arlo’s half-Cuban, and works at Leos by the Slice, has made us some great barbeque tempeh, so he can make some good pizza. Rilly has been slaving for restaurants since he was five-years-old and can cook you anything you want to eat. He can cook crawfish etuffles, and eggplant parmigianino, and tuna casserole. I can cook some mean-ass rice and beans, so satisfy yourself with that.
More reasons to hang-out with The Shreds and St. Dad? We can make you feel loved. Come to us. We will warm you through the cold winter months. I know it’s a gamble, but we all know who to use our limbs efficiently!
ST. Dad tapes in the Netherlands!: HERE.
ST. Dad will have their debut 7 inch “Do as I say not what I do,” and more, on tour.
Download the debut St. Dad release, “keep it in your pants,” HERE.
Tour Schedule:
***UPDATE NUMERO UNO***
FINALIZED TOUR DATES
February 5th
Tallahassee, FL with Sorry Mom at Farside 205 East Oakland Avenue
February 6th
Pensacola, FL with High Fructose at 309 6th Wright St.
February 7th
New Orleans, LA with Nervous Juvenille and Small Bones at Dragon's Den 435 Esplanade Avenue
February 8th
Chattanooga, TN with What If? at Anarchtica
February 9th
Lexington, KY at Crucial Funhouse 249 Kentucky Avenue
February 10th
Bloomington, IN
February 11th
Indianapolis, IN
February 12th
Toledo, OH with Yeti Machete at Black Cherry Info Shop 1420 Cherry Street
February 13th
Cincinnati, OH with You'll Get Yours at Art Damage Lodge 1420 Hamilton Avenue
February 14th
Columbus, OH with Vacation and Slugging Percentage at Monster House 115 West 10th Avenue
February 15th
Pittsburgh, PA
February 16th
Providence, RI with The Black Clouds and The Ram at AS220 115 Empire Street
February 17th
MA/CT
February 18th
Willimantic, CT at The Handsome Woman
February 19th
Brooklyn, NY at Don Pedro's 90 Manhattan Avenue
February 20th
Brooklyn, NY at Tommy's Tavern 1041 Manhattan Avenue
February 21st
Philadelphia, PA
February 22nd
Washington D.C.
February 23rd
Baltimore, MD with Shelter Shock, Sacrifidelis, Gnarly Rueage, Dry Clouds at Monarchs 6826 Hartford Road
February 24th
Richmond, VA with Nervous Ticks and Crass
February 25th
Charlotte, NC
February 26th
Greenville, SC at The Hangar
February 27th
Charleston, SC
February 28th
St. Augustine, FL at Nobby's Tavern 10 Anastasia Boulevard
March 1st
Gainesville, FL at Bo Diddly's Old House 911 SE 4th St.
March 2nd
Orlando, FL with Triscults and Slippery Slopes at Uncle Lou's 1016 North Mills Avenue
New Zachary C. Bush Poems
HERE
Next manual update will have a review of Bush’s Angles of Disorder, which as well, was supposed to be published in the Fine Print. It will probably be written on the road. And there were be something written about the tour, probably.
