Incendiary Lit

Here is the link to Esquire’s Summer Fiction Contest.

The titles are:

1. “Twenty-Ten”

2. “An Insurrection”

3. “Never, Ever Bring This Up Again”

SO WRITE!!!

It’s simple enough for anyone who’s familiar with the Firestarter Exercises. Titles is a good exercise because of its ambiguity. A while ago NPR issued a challenge to fiction writers to write a story that included the image of a wedding cake in the middle of the road. Richard Bausch’s Tandolfo the Great introduced me to the collection NPR put together. It’s a fun assignment to try to work to your own whims.

HOORAY!!!

The program sounds really nice, its an Income Based Repayment (hence IBR) for student loans, which also forgives loans after 25 years, so you won’t be paying for your college textbooks with your social security (if that’s still around). So yeah, very exciting news for so many people, that their income calculator was overwhelmed and crashed temporarily. But it will be back soon.

That pretty much sums it up. It’s a stereotype, of course, but a funny one. Here’s the link to the article on College Humor and here is the first picture… can you tell? Science Fiction Writer or Crazy Person?

Craig Ferguson kind of reminds me of an older version of a young Conan, only funnier. As I slowly make my way toward finally writing a movie I’ve been making a little mental list of people I would really, really like to work with, even just in cameos. Craig Ferguson is one of them.

Read it here.

Although from the review’s tagline “a remembrance of how movies used to suck” tips the hat of the tone of his review, nothing sums up what he thinks of the movie better than an early simile “[Year One]’s like walking in the rain under an umbrella made of dog shit.” He does not like what he perceives as movie cliches, and isn’t shy about expressing that feeling of disgust. Check out his site, lots of hilarious and terribly honest reviews of movies fro the last decade(ish).

Did that title make sense? If not, let me break it down. Prepare your Amazon cart to spend $25, which means you could add the following to your order of

Reviewers have said it’s a “masterpiece” with touches deeper than a typical genre novel and “explores characters in a way that is true, whole, and touches deep down into the reality of a person.”

What’s it about?

(from publisher) Awake in the darkness, long after midnight, Long Beach Homicide Detective Danny Beckett is trying to keep his past at bay. Haunted by all the things he’s lost–his wife, his family, his hope–he begins to investigate the brutal murder of Elizabeth Williams, a popular High School English teacher. Soon Danny begins to understand that apprehending the murderer is not just a case to solved, but an act of personal redemption.

 What’s the Buying Event?

It is a effort to spike Amazon numbers with purchases so that it manages to match “you might like” or “other popular purchases” type lists that are programmed into Amazon to help suggestively sell more books.So, if you like detective or mystery novels, or just like reading period, on July 1st go buy Tyler Dilts’ A King of Infinite Space. Word.

Thank you Glimmer Train, for providing the world with so much information and literature for writers and readers around the world. Someday I’ll be able to afford a GT subscription, and won’t have to slip inconsicuously into SDSU’s Library and hide in their massive dominoes of magazine racks. Anyway, they provide a service called “Writers Ask” which featured this short essay by Lee Martin about trying to emerge in the publishing business as a writer, but ultimately about balancing character and plot in the arena of memorability. It’s a good read. Check it out.

La Mesa, California, in Grossmont Center’s Barnes and Noble at 7:30 for the “Third Wednesdays” poetry reading on 6/17/09 featuring Steve Kowit (Author of the wonderful writing ‘textbook’ “In the Palm of Your Hand” as well as great books of poetry and prose) and Terry Hertzler (publisher of Caernarvon Press and a great poet, and though I haven’t read any of his prose yet I’m sure its also very good). They’re both really great poets, and there’s an open mic afterward too for more local flavor. I just may have to clear my throat a few times and try reading again. Anyway, go to this reading if you’re anywhere in the area at all. If you’re in a poetry reading or writing class you can probably even talk your teacher into giving you some extra credit for going and writing a little essay about it.

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Oh lovely lovely formula.

I have an EnV2. The secret is out. And, oh noes! Anyway, a lot of phones these days include a full keyboard for easier texting, which also means easier note-taking or brainstorming when on-the-go. Whether this means you woke up late for class, or you’re waiting for the East County Youth Symphony (they’re amazing, and the program– including weekly lessons– is completely free for the kids.) to begin, you again have the capability to write.

Maybe this is a problem that has only plagued me. I am constantly trying to write. First drafts of poems have occurred on TV Dinner boxes, but most often, on receipts. Or at least receipt paper. But now you don’t have to master the art of miniscule-printing, you have essentially a novelty, or micro-machines version of an old school Brother word processor, the evolutionary interstep between typewriters and computers for most consumers at the time. But I’m a hopeless narrative addict.

Enough dilly-dallying. On the EnV2 there’re easy shortcuts to get you directly to the Notepad function. (I love that Wordpress gave e a red underline for “there’re” but not dillydallying, even when I had it as one word. DON’T RELY on SPELLCHECK. It’s already bitten me in the ass more than once on this thing.) Menu (OK)-9-2-8. [If you’re curious, that’s for (9) Settings and Tools (2) Tools (8) Wordpad.] Four keytouches and you’re ready to either work from a saved file or start a new file.The keys are very small and I kind of feel like Will Ferrell in that Jeffrey’s skit where Jimmy Fallon kept laughing, using a thin stick to punch the keys, but I manage well enough, and will soon be testing the Wordpad function’s memory capabilities, because I have a feeling I’ll be using it a lot during downtime to work on projects.

Original Link : SNL Jeffreys Skit w/ Sean Hayes Uploaded by: bryantchoung

Even though it has little to do with his fondness for poetry, (Robbie Burns isn’t a favorite AND I’m majoring in poetry) Craig Ferguson has long been my favorite late night talk show host, and yes that’s including Conan. Don’t get me wrong, I love Conan, but the format of Craig’s show just gets e a bit more these days. I’m sorry. I am glad to be shed of Leno (though until Jimmy Fallon gets his stride, its a step back. But Leno’s a leap back from Carson, and he’s still occasionally hilarious, so let it be). These asides are confusing even me. So let’s get to it. A little while back Jessica and I were with some friends and convinced them to change the channel after a number of consecutive Fallon awkward moments to Ferguson, whom they’d never seen (aside from the Drew Carrey Show, which I still feel is kind of like Carrottop. Easy to make fun of and laugh at secretly. Come on, they’re puns, and we, as word nerds, should love them). And randomly he not only spent the entire monolog talking about poetry (and making fun of poetry as a subject of higher education– and rightly so, I guess. But one comment that really helped set me in my ways was from a History professor, who interrupted tangents about the history of beer and of flipping the bird (of which he was writing a book about), to share a short anecdote about a good friend of his, with a PhD in history who happily manages a Pizza Hut. The anecdote was lost on me, but the concept was not. And I hated the idea, but still couldn’t shake my want to learn more about writing. So I gave in. What is this? This is an introduction to two Craig Ferguson Monologues about poetry. Kind of. Why Two? Because when I searched for Craig Ferguson poetry Burns, I get a link from 2009 and I almost posted it unwatched. It was from the very beginning of the year, a separate monologue, which focused highly on poetry. So I have to post them both. They make me laugh a lot.

via videosift.com

and
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The show we’d seen originally.
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see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Many props to the guys who put someone charismatic behind a vocoder, instead of the standard brood of Fox, Pain, West and Abdul… First up we have Winston Churchill: “Great Declaration” remix

and then we have Martin Luther King Jr. “Let Freedom Ring” remix

So you can again get your fix of a year’s worth of poetry/prose exercises whenever you need to. Right here at the Firestarter Exercise page. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Firestarters are writing exercises to get the literary fires lit beneath your computer chair. Today’s is to write a short poem. Check it out and enjoy.

I had originally intended on reviewing the winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series in 2009, Susan Parr’s Pacific Shooter, having entered and included a SAE for the winner (DO IT!) but after reading the majority of the book I was divided. Lying in bed watching the shadow of the ceiling fan behind infomercials the best I could come up with was that the poems seemed like if Campbell McGrath’s lexicon had read the complete works of Charles Simic just before becoming obsessed with Ted Kooser and writing a book of quirky descriptions. But that seemed so inadequate. There was much more to the book than I was understanding, so I waited, emailed some friendly poets, and then got impatient, so I open this to the internet forum, please learn me my ig’nant ways. I absolutely loved Susan Parr’s “Poem in the Shape of a Poem” (among others, like Earthirst, an ode to scancion-adicts if you will) however, poems like “Internmoon” and “Brandoid Roundteen” completely eluded me. So I felt I couldn’t write a review. Especially after reading Susan Mitchell’s accusation that the “Bourgeois reader will hate it” because I didn’t hate it, I just wanted to believe in every single page, and apparently haven’t read widely enough to fully understand this collection. Which, in its own way, can help those reading this. So here are the two poems. If anyone has insight into “Brandoid Roundteen” I would be so, so happy to hear it, because there has to be something behind the poem. Random quatrains generally don’t find their way into award winning collections.

Poem in the Shape of a Poem

Forgive my shorn appearance,
my torn ends, tufts of cut hair;
the trackmarks of my comb.
Forgive my staggered racks, flat art,
my standing in this floating room.
Forgive my monochrome.
Forgive my tailored look, my pleated parts,
my tendency to stop and skip.
And please forgive my hats.
They rarely fit.
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(Not sure what in my past made me so guilty, but I like the absurdist apology poems. Like Hal Sirowitz’s confessional poems, or Billy Collins’ “Sonnet”, or perhaps because just wrote a Villainelle apologizing for its own repetition. I’m not sure, but this poem got me, and I would often flip through the book late at night in the fading light of Shamwow ads and stop at this poem and read it, yet again, and smile. How silly poems, really, are.
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Brandoid Roundteen

Brandoid Roundteen is a very fine drink;
a very fine drink indeed.
One of them makes six of a man,
two of them makes thirteen.
–

Now, this poem even more than the even shorter and more obscure “Internmoon” - “Internmoon, / internmoon // It’s a ha’moon” which the only thing I could pull from was the lament of a ‘half-funded’ internship?, and being under the ten words poem rule, I’ve apparently subconsciously awarded it a zen-like pass. But “Brandoid Roundteen” got me. Is it a comment on alcoholic effect on machismo? Is it a parody or homage to some poem I have yet to discover? Is it a way to push the collection to the minimum pages required? Although I’m inclined to believe one of the former, the last possible dwells in my mind, as a poor writer with an in-the-works collection. I don’t feel like I’m a bourgeois reader. I don’t want to be a bourgie-mofo. Please, internets. Help me. You are my only hope.

First, doesn’t this guy look like a “more business” version of Jimmy Kimmel?

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There was a fair amount of outrage against the entendre-fest here amongst those it was aimed at, not shockingly. But this just made me laugh so, so much.

Yes, the TV channel JWTNY is to blame for this bit of entertaining eye candy while Billy Collins reads his poems slightly drone-like.

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Is the site really back up now?

HTML hates me. Or whatever language is translated into html or however it works. Whatever. Welcome back to Incendiary Lit.

Wait for it… wait for it… think about it being a kid’s show and the likelihood that they’ll get that four word retort. WOW. Thank you yet again Stephen Spielberg, for great entertainment.

Not sure why, but the media player finally decided to take to the new playlist I’d uploaded. If you haven’t checked it out, the first song is rap, I’m sorry, but “Yesterday” off Atmosphere’s new CD When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold is I think one of the better examples of competent hip hop. But maybe I’m biased cuz I can remember riding the city bus home from Cheapo blasting my new copy of Overcast so loud on my off-brand discman that the driver could hear it from the back. Or because my dad recently passed, and once again Sean Daley touches on a nerve with his lyrics (also see Body Pillow, swingin’ back an forth…) But for the most part it’s a mellow mix of acoustic and instrumentals that will either aid in your reading of the site with their soothing melodies, or intrigue the poetic side of your brain with their interesting narrative. Both lyric and musical. Another thing I should point out is a line from Ben Folds’ “Fred Jones Part 2″: “There’s an awkward young shadow that waits in the hall” which is the perfect description. You can totally see the young employee in charge of leading the old one off the premises. That’s a really, really sad song right there. Then “Bright Eyes I always associate with the Black Rabbit and Richard Adams. I can attribute his fatalistic rabbits in Watership Down for my entry into the world of poetry, so it’s a soft spot for me. And damn. I’m for some reason, at this moment, also hooked on asian pianists. Joe Hisaishi and Nobuo Uematsu especially, though Joe didn’t made it in just yet. Also, poor poor Buzz. I hope you enjoy the songs, and would love to hear feedback of what you’d like to hear in the future.