Incendiary Lit

I refuse to afforest the bodyguard. Shave, hew the bodyguard.

(thank you engrishfunny for your great many found poem fragments–I do hope this phrase makes it into a poem of mine someday. Its on my list.)

I was trying to think of a grabbing title, what do you think? Of course he means it, and he doesn’t mean it. Like we all do. Emotional truth right? Capsules of time and spheres of existence and…. Yeah. Anyway, I was flipping through the new New Ohio Review and saw one of Bob Hicok’s lovely long titles in the table of contents: “Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry” and thought Hmm. I too feel like picking on an oil company, the Deepwater Horizon’s spill still fresh (sadly, even while writing this right here, still gushing).

Also, is it just me, or does the name Deepwater Horizon sound, at least in retrospect, like Event Horizon? About the ship attempting a form of travel (drilling) never tried before, to a place never gone before in space (the ocean) and after a mishap a dark presence is making its way toward our homes. How did we not see it coming?

Anyway, Hicok’s poem begins “Never before have I so resembled British Petroleum.” Of course, British Petroleum is the essential parent company of Transocean, operators of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Now comes the part where I say the ironic tone of the poem perhaps rings even truer in the light of the current gulf spill. The poem is anchored very well in a time not far divorced from the spill (present) with other lines referring to current events such as:

…Isn’t a corporation technically a person
and responsible? Aren’t I technically a person
and responsible?

which seems, at least to this reader, to be very much a comment on the supreme court ruling allowing corporations the rights of citizens, and therefore the right to donate to political campaigns (which gets chosen politicians, law/policy makers in a place of actually deciding law/policy, with a debt of sorts to that corporation).

Hicok critically questions his own actions, his own ineffectualness, at the same time as asking the reader to consider their own global ineffectualness without getting preachy. How? Well, because he’s a magician, mostly, but also by building a strong case of self deprecation before laying into the ubiquitous you with: “How far would you walk for bread? For the flour // to make bread?” And, as promised, the poem goes awry at the end in a very organic way. From destruction to apathy to well, what’s next? I was going to quote his line about how gently BP planned to drill for their oil, but I’ll let you discover that as it was intended, within the poem, which New Ohio Review’s graciously produced not only in their pages, but also on their website as a pdf.

Read Bob Hicok’s “Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry”

You be the one to decide. Can you distinguish from CGI-heavy Mordor from the Lord of the Rings movies and the volcano eruption in Iceland?

Well, if you’re a word nerd at least. Or have a sense of humor. Here are 3 reasons.

and

and though this isn’t a Weird Al-made video, the song’s great. Some funny visuals though.

Of course there’s a story behind this amazing piece of fictive nonfiction, a video essay if you will, and when bored it’s tough not to click on something titled “Absurd Reactions to Star Wars Episode One” even if just to laugh at crazy fanboys nerd-raging. This review had to have taken weeks to put together, is hilarious, and draws (through tiny fragments) a careful picture of such a likable serial murderer. He’s definitely more curmudgeon than Dexter Morgan, but it’s highly entertaining, and it is a close look at things like character development, story, and behind the scenes footage presumably form a special feature version of the movie. There is a lot of swearing so be forewarned.

(more…)

Found this gem researching a project about Choose Your Own Adventure Novels. And Jessica found the following on Cracked.

 A quote from David Mamet’s essay “Hearing the Notes That Aren’t Played” about a certain trend/type of writing.

 Yes, it is true that life would be better if we were all a little kinder, and it is true that paint splattered in the air will fall to the ground. Both are true,but who would have suspected that they were notable?

which reminds me of a little selection from “James Dickey’s Dream” by David Kirby:

…………………….that makes me think of the remark
Jane Smiley made about how much better it would be

if American literature had sprung from Uncle Tom’s Cabin
instead of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and Roy Blount, Jr.’s reply that that’s like saying
it would be better for people to come from heaven
than from sex.

Why? The two quotes are related, but I flipped through House on Boulevard Street like a madman til I found the quote which is follow (and preceded) by the idea of mimicry and homage. Coincidence? Heck yeah. But probably influenced by little memory ticks from studying the (Kirby) poem.

And now for something completely different. (borderline nsfw, but in a good way)

This was a sequence of Facebook wall posts that someone posted on CollegeHumor, that I wasn’t sure why I was reading, exactly, until the end. There are a few different reasons why this could seem so funny to me, and I’m not sure which is the real reason. Read to the end, is all I’m saying. It’s not long.

Oh no my geek is showing!

There’re a ton of ‘best of’ Jimmy Kimmel’s segments of unnecessarily censorship on youtube, and I’m retarded so I just stumble on them after re-fixating on the censored count. So here’s a nice long (that’s what she said) ‘Best of’ Compilation

And here’s their wn compilation of Sesame Street clips, the Come and Play edition.

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).

Oh lovely lovely formula.

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

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.

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.

Andy Samburg’s been hitting more than missing lately, which is nice. EXPLICIT LYRIC VERSION, or uncensored or whatever.