“I used to stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning in me at that time.” — From St. Patrick’s Confessio

Okay, you’ve done your penance. Now go drain a Guinness.

by Brian Allen Carr

We have a broken rib. This is the most unfortunate of wounds. Doctors can do nothing for you. Luckily there’s alcohol. Thankfully there is YouTube. We are at our most powerful while watching strangers get wounded.

Check out this sucker.

That poor sonofabitch. Our pain lessens every time he winces. Our wound was sustained in far less dramatic fashion. We rolled out of our bed and landed on a table. At first it wasn’t bad. We coughed. Something shifted that shouldn’t have. Now we cannot move. This would be okay, we suppose, but unfortunately we are on vacation. It’s no fun to ache through your free time. We’d prefer the condition kept us from things we’d rather not do. We don’t like to work. We don’t like to shovel snow.

The agony is mesmerizing. We tried reading, but it hurts to hold the book. We will try a smaller book. We may re-read A Jello Horse. It’s the most beautiful small book we’ve read in a long time. Matthew Simmons’ prose is supple. His words lay like buttons made from bruises on the page.

Watch this wipeout.

We don’t wish hurt upon anybody, however, we are happy that others are suffering along with us.

Here are five randomly selected sentences culled from various books:

But the laughter, the whiff of the hospital smell, and the boy’s nearness combined to put him into a trance that held his mind and his senses hopelessly captive. After the cows have warmed under the sun, they roam the pasture eating its grasses and drinking from the trough. The dogs do not get up,  and their tails don’t wag. Ordinarily, however, a subject requires division into topics, each of which should be dealt with in a paragraph. We drove to the lava field.

Can you spot the Matthew Simmons’ sentence. If you can, and you are the first to post it in the comment box, we will send you a copy of A Jello Horse.

Here’s a video of a monkey sniffing his finger.

A Poet's Time Machine

If you’re bummed you can’t make SXSW this week, so are we. Want to get even more bummed? Read on. This week we put on our street-worn Chuck Taylors and headed over to the festival — you know, virtually. The most important thing to us was seeing where poetry might fit in to this Music, Film & Interactive festival (by the way, according to the SXSW overlords, interactive means “compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology,” by which we’re assuming they mean Twitter). But where is poetry found on Twitter? Why, in a multitude of Twitter movements, of course. You see, these days, Twitter has its own subcultures and isms — just like Slow Food! –  that require directions and much explaining from a panel of witty Twitter users who sit around and talk about Slow Twitter — yum.

What else did we miss? Just a film-poem on Sunday “in the whispery language of Polish.” We’re excited about this because we didn’t quite know film-poems existed, or that people are walking around saying, “Hey, seen any good film-poems lately?” We’re going to start tuning in to that kind chitchat, but not before we lose our film-poem virginity.

Are your legs tired yet? Let’s keep trudging along, looking for more poetry highlights. Not much to do with poetry, but interesting nonetheless, is a screening on Wednesday that covers the works of filmmaker Alan Govenar. The current film examines Governar’s short film The Poetry of Exactitude, which is based on the career of Lucien Mouchet, a Parisian who makes small-scale reproductions of carousels that are 1/20th scale of the original.

Poetry made an appearance in yet another film, aptly named “The Happy Poet.” (Are there any other types?) The story starts out by telling us about Bill, an out-of-work poet — whoa, hang on. What’s the opposite of an out-of-work poet? A gainfully employed Poetry CEO? Is this film trying to say that poets work at hot dog stands? Furthermore, does this film imply the even more disturbing stereotype that poets work at vegetarian hot dog stands?  It’s showing this Wednesday. You decide.

After our remote time-machine trip to Austin, we headed home — tired but inspired — and promptly began staring at the author names in our bookcase: Jonathan Lethem, Robert Haas, Jeanette Winterson. Hey, what’s Jeanette up to these days? Maybe she’s writing some vicious book reviews? In fact, she’s reviewing a book about a woman who traveled for forty years with a suitcase filled with  hundreds — hundreds! — of snails. Who are we talking about? Why none other than the smutty, wife-stealing author Patricia Highsmith. (This article appeared in the New York Times in December 2009 — we’re not claiming this is breaking news. But hey, we’re traveling in our time machine, remember?)

She'll Steal Your Wife

Miss Highsmith is quite the bad-ass. She’s obsessed with taxes, hates food (DSM does not condone eating disorders and no female appetites were harmed in the making of this post) and can easily steal up to three three wives at one time all while living off a robust diet of booze and cigarettes. Jeanette, thanks for reviewing Joan Schenkar’s book about Patricia Highsmith. Finally, someone who thinks it’s perfectly normal to store snails in your suitcase — not that we’d ever do that. — Lori Huskey

Video: The Poetry of Exactitude

Every week during the month of March we’re featuring fiction and poetry Noir.

We’ve asked writers to contribute their darkest and most sinister works.

The result is a batch of stories and poems that aren’t shy about using vulgar language and violent imagery, as well as putting forth an unmistakably bleak societal prognosis.

Today’s installment: two shorts by Marc Lowe.

Enjoy.

The Inspector, by Marc Lowe

– We were silent for some moments.  She stopped stroking my back abruptly and said, I have something to show you.  Come.  I followed her into the living room, where I had seen the safe and the stack of paperwork.  Can you keep a secret? she asked.  Yes, I said, though I had no idea of what she was getting at.  She smiled at me then, a conspiratorial look in her eye.  OK, turn away for a moment.  I heard the sound of the large flower painting being moved. — Read the entire story here

The Investigator, by Marc Lowe

– Here you are, she says, placing a brown, rectangular package tied up with brown string onto a corner of his desk, directly beside a volume with a green cover entitled The Investigator. I nearly got killed trying to retrieve it. Did you—? he says, but before he is able to finish his sentence her dark-red lips are upon his own, and he is sinking, sinking, allowing himself for one single moment of self-deception to believe that she might be completely innocent. — Read the entire story here

Shotgun, by Joseph D. Haske

(3/12)
– It’s the first time a man ever tried to put his hand in my pocket. I would have killed him if he didn’t have the.22 four-shot stuck in my gut. It’s a cheap plastic thing, as far as I can tell, and they outnumber us fifteen to two, but just the one gun. It should be fifteen to four, but Tommy’s pussy cousin Darnell ran as fast as he could, first sight of the pistol. Maya didn’t want to leave, but they made her. I know she’s watching from behind the stained orange curtains of our motel room. I know she wants to call the cops, but she can’t with the box in there. — Read the entire story here

Outfits, by Caron Tate

(3/9)
– We was out riding one time. I was driving her car. She had a red Lexus IS 350 C convertible that her father got her special before they even came out. She actually talked about getting the interior done over in some wack-ass pattern (to match her favorite dress!) but the bitch wasn’t that crazy. I guess. I know she kept saying, “I’m going to pimp my ride. I think I’ll just pimp my ride,” over and over again in her chirpy voice. That was my fault. I never should have let her watch a show where they fix up cars. Too much like them stupid ass design shows. — Read the entire story here

Kitchen Knife, by Ed Higgins

(3/2)
– KITCHEN HEALTH & SAFETY; CUT WOUNDS; KNIFE WOUND SUTURE MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES; METAPHORICAL CUTS; KNIFE SHARPENING TRICKS; HOW TO ARGUE WITH YOUR SPOUSE OR PARTNER CONSTRUCTIVELY; REMAINS OF “BOG MAN” FOUND WITH SHARPENING STONES WORN AS PENDANT — Read the entire story here

Time To Get Free, People

Mind, body and spirit: One day in Berkeley Mario Savio tried to free them all. Revisit Savio’s reckless story of student revolt in The Nation. Martin Scorcese seeks out the lost mind in Shutter Island. But some audiences see only a shadow of what was once the filmmaker’s central power. Five women freed their bodies in The Naked Reading Forum, make the plunge and liberate your reading habits with them. Sexy readings are a springboard to further explore the body, specifically Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s in Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which gets its treatment from The Morning News’s satire. Finally, concluding our roundup of all things mind, body and spirit, we’re transcending space and visiting Guernica’s interview with Judith Butler. Yes, can you hear that? It’s your personal trinity saying it’s time to get free.  – Andrew Geer

Video: Salvo’s Mind, Body and Spirit

Check out the magazine and newspaper kiosk of the future. Hubba hubba…

Savvy Bookishness

More times than not we consider ourselves savvy individuals, especially when it comes to literature. After all, it’s what we do, and think about, and dream about. But, after reading David Shields’s Reality Hunger, our proclaimed savviness is under construction. Are Shields’s concepts the stuff of a manifesto, or do they merely parlay the insight of thinkers from the past? Luc Sante weighs in on the NY Times. Speaking of manifestos, where do war veterans turn when they want to relive their experiences through books? Tim O’Brien comes to mind. But where else? Lewis Carroll was a tricky fellow; perhaps he should have been a mathematician, which leads us to The Big Short, a book about numbers and the housing crash of 2008. Elsewhere, John E. Bolt is interviewed in Bookslut, a critic pursues her fascination with taxidermy, and the Guardian figures the value of publishing the advice of aging poets is worth its stock in gold. Talk about savvy. — Kevin Murphy

– Consider the state of literature at the moment. Consider the rise of the memoir, the incidences of contrived and fabricated memoirs, the rash of imputations of plagiarism in novels, the overall ill health of the mainstream novel. Consider, too, culture outside of literature: reality TV, the many shades and variations of documentary film, the rise of the curator, the rise of the D.J., sampling, appropriation, the carry-over of collage from modernism into postmodernism. — Reality Hunger in the NY Times

A Veteran's Collector's Item

– He turns it over in his hand. He is seated in the auditorium of the Royal C. Johnson Veterans Memorial Hospital (commonly known as the Sioux Falls VA Medical Center). Twenty or so hospital professionals sit around him in respectful silence. They have finished reading Tim O’Brien’s classic war novel “The Things They Carried” and have gathered here to discuss its implications as part of the state pilot program Literature and Medicine, designed to encourage those who work with veterans to read and discuss war literature. — War Literature in ArgusLeader.com

– Readers familiar with the works of Lewis Carroll will see much in these few sentences to remind them of the strangely logical and always symbolic world of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, where concepts become weirdly animated. Think of the caprice of the Red Queen, at whose sovereign will and pleasure knaves and servants bow and scrape. And the avowal that a writer should attach any meaning to a word or phrase sounds straight out of the mouths of any of the mad and maddening poets of these books. — Lewis Carroll in Slate

– In the run-up to the housing collapse of 2007–2008, houses weren’t merely expensive, they were insanely expensive. Yet just when it seemed that prices couldn’t go higher, some fool would come along and pay an enormous sum for a glorified hovel. You didn’t have to be a genius to realize that American real estate was overvalued. It did, however, take something special to figure out how to make money off the madness. A group of between ten and twenty people did just that, making the bet of a lifetime that author Michael Lewis calls “The Big Short.” — The Big Short in Book Forum

Gorgeous, No?

– If you are the kind of reader who thinks Susan Orlean’s smart, offbeat pieces in The New Yorker about chickens, pigeons, or, well, taxidermy, are the best thing going in nonfiction, then Still Life is the book for you. Melissa Milgrom doesn’t offer a personal introduction or an explanation of the genesis of her idea—she simply jaunts off in search of working taxidermists and hopes we’ll follow her down this neglected path. — The Living Dead in The Second Pass

– When Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900 to 1920: Art, Life and Culture in Russia’s Silver Age arrived at my door, I flipped through it and was instantly captivated. I sat on the floor in my hallway, pulled the book into my lap, and sat there for hours. It’s physically beautiful, reproducing prints by Mikhail Larionov, Mikhail Brubel, Natan Altman, Zinaida Serebriakova, Natalia Goncharova, and — a personal favorite of mine — Leon Bakst. There are photographs of Russian society and intellectuals. An aged Tolstoy is here, as well as Diaghilev of the Ballet Russe with his dyed grey lock of hair, and countless others artists, architects, designers, dancers, poets, journalists are here, too. — John E. Bolt in Bookslut

– This remarkable gathering of new work by senior British poets has been some months in the planning, but it seems appropriate to publish the poems over the weekend when we celebrate Mother’s Day (though Father’s Day would have been equally apt). “When I am old, I shall wear purple,” wrote Jenny Joseph in “Warning”, once identified as the nation’s favourite postwar poem, and her beautiful but less well-known “Lullaby” is reproduced here. — Aging Poets in the Guardian

Video: A Good Old British Poet

How many literary journals are there? How many stories in those journals?

Thousands.

If you’ve got time to read them all, we want to know your secret.

For the rest of us, here’s a sneak peek into the world of online literature, where stories — really truly great stories — abound.

Enjoy.

– I had been in that cave. Wrapped my hands around the well-worn rope tied to both sides and followed it through the fifteen foot tunnel to the cavern with head space on the other side. Before I sank in the water I was intimidated as I stared into the moon’s reflection on the otherwise dark water. I took off my shirt with hesitance and touched the water with my feet. My skin tightened and I felt a charge through my body as my veins started to change colors. I had clutched the rope the whole way, vaulted my body through the water all around me. When I emerged in the cavern I was nervous and afraid that I might somehow lose my energy, and I stayed there long enough only to look around, breathe deep, then swim back. I usually felt the fire of fear in my bones and never stayed long in the cavern, relying on that fire to shoot straight back through to the other side. — Michael Palmer in CutBank

– For fun, my wife and I sit around and watch documentaries about the lives of extraordinarily fat people so we can feel better about ourselves because we work hourly jobs and live in a crappy apartment because our GEDs didn’t take us as far as we hoped. We got our GEDs because we wanted to get married. We wanted to get married so we could have sex because back then we believed what our parents told us about going to hell if we fornicated. — Roxanne Gay in Twelve Stories

– I met a flimflam man in March and by May I was took, husbandless. I could be so naïve sometimes. I’d sought only the barebones of conversation. The days of early spring were muted, lonely; my husband off somewhere I could not reach him, herding buffalo or bison, I could never remember which. I’d been hustled similarly in my youth, conned of sixty dollars in the penny arcade where I worked. I’d had to explain the loss to my superior. I was a hard worker, otherwise reliable. I was easily forgiven. Could have happened to anyone, my boss said, his hand transgressing the small of my back. — Elizabeth Ellen in elimae

– It was spit and teeth. It was clumsy tongues and my chapped lips and this was the first time we met face-to-face and the lonely men sitting at the bar stared at us as if we were just another freak show passing through their world, a circus tent that would later be rolled up and hauled away. — David LaBounty in Smokelong Weekly

– Tommy, Janna, I’m going to stop you right there. Now when I say the feelings you’re describing are exceptional, I mean nuke the moon. Your account of the time spent between Tuesday’s kickball game and this evening when I happened upon you in each other—all I can say is wow and God bless and cherish it because for some of us, this has never happened. Have I been in love? I would hesitate and then say yes. But there is love and there is the ineffable mountain you’re scaling. To review: you two share the same favorite show, favorite movie, favorite band, favorite song, you both run track, and you both find camp a little immature. — Gabe Durham in NANO Fiction

“And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on the innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void–”

– Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969)

Como Se Dice Angelic?

Getting Awkward In the Bilingual Boudoir

by Charlie Geer

They say that if you didn’t learn a given language in the cradle, the next best way to learn it is in the sack. If you really want to learn Polish, for example, date a Pole. Be this as it may, the conjugal bed should not be considered a language lab. It is first and foremost a conjugal bed, and there are much more interesting things to do in a conjugal bed than conjugate verbs.

In the bilingual boudoir it’s a good idea to maintain clear boundaries between things linguistic and things romantic. Without clear boundaries, life can get awkward. As an example, let’s say you’re engaged in a little pillow talk with your Spanish sweetheart, and you decide you’d like to compliment her in her own language, in Spanish. You’re thinking something along the lines of, In the light of the moon, my love, your face is angelic. If this sounds a bit cheesy, that’s because it is — in English. The nice thing about using a foreign language to flatter is that you can be a bit cheesy without feeling cheesy: the cheese is being filtered through another language; you don’t really process the cheese as cheese. The words just sound like, well, sounds*. The risk is that maybe you aren’t yet fluent enough to be making blandishments, cheesy or otherwise, in your sweetheart’s language. Mid-blandishment you may realize that you do not know the Spanish word for, say, angelic, and what might have been a melodious prelude to a night of delight instead becomes a linguistic trainwreck: En la luz de la luna, mi amor, tu cara es, umm—wait—I mean—espera—how—I mean—¿cómo se dice—umm—“angelic” en, umm, español?

Here one of two things will occur, neither of them exceptionally romantic:

a) Just as you don’t know the word for angelic in Spanish, your beloved does not recognize the word angelic in English, in which case she will then ask you, in Spanish, what you are trying to say about her face. You don’t know how to say what-you-are-trying-to-say-about-her-face in Spanish, that’s the whole problem, so someone will need to fetch the conjugal language dictionary from the den, which fetching will entail the finding and donning of clothes, the turning on of lights, and other practical endeavors. The result is roughly akin to a bedside iPod shuffling from Sade’s “By Your Side” to Rush’s “YYZ.”

or

b) Your sweetheart does recognize the English word angelic, and she informs you that in Spanish it’s angélica, pronounced “ahn-HAY-lee-ka.” You might now patch up your compliment, paste the mot juste in, try to salvage some semblance of a mood, but hey, why use a word when you can analyze the living hell out of it:

“Ah…angélica. Of course. Angelic, angélica. It’s a cognate.”

“Yes. Sí.”

“I suppose the masculine would be angélico, with an o.”

“Claro.”

“And the g is a soft g, not a strong, hockin’-a-loogie-here g — because it comes in the middle, not at the beginning. Right?”

At this point you’d just as well put on a pot of coffee and break out the whiteboard. Any ambience that may have been established by the light of the moon on an angelic face is surely shot beyond repair. In the future maybe you’ll remember to make sweet-talk with the language you learned back when you were still in the cradle, soiling yourself. Who knows? What sounds cheesy to you may sound exotic to her. In any case it will, presumably, cohere.

*There is a flipside to this phenomenon, a danger: it’s possible to cuss like a roofer in another language without processing the true weight of your cussing until a native knocks you upside the head for impudence.

____________________________________

Charlie Geer is the author of the novel “Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston.” His work has appeared in Tin House, The Sun, Bloomsbury Magazine, and The Southern Review.