gimcrack addict get

Posted on April 4, 2021 by istsfor manity

Strangely Attracted to a Lack of Sense

I’m feeling strangely attracted to the can of viscous motor oil in the corner. I could have said “vicious” but I’ve just come from the cornershop thrumming in a pink and light blue aura of sexiness, one that is ineffable in these turbulent times. Anarchic times for desolate people—times for rows and perturbations. Give me some kind of sign. It doesn’t have to be a walk hovering upon the water kinda sign or a multiplication of leaves and frog’s legs sign, but let it have that old-timey censer mysteriousness about it, as if you’re driving me crazy to ask you why you’re swinging censers that way, and what is that smell? Is it frankincense? That sounds like it would smell of toe jam cheese … lift me not into temptation and deliver me from anvils. Semen. Okay take a blithe light around the blockyard, you. Just leave me alone. You gimcrack addict. Get your orgasms elsewhere, maybe at the Orgasmart—they’re open 24 hours. Be off with you … and your pedestrian fish pix.

“Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.”

— Adam Zagajewski / “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Experimental writing, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Microfiction, Writing | Leave a comment

this may be

Posted on April 3, 2021 by istsfor manity

The Second Day

The month started off well enough, but on the second day life seemed to go upside-down and backward. Huh, he said, this may be a challenge.

“Stray bullets and consequences were landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.”

— Tommy Orange / There There

Posted in Writing | Tagged A Challenge, Autofiction, Creative Writing, Erasure Poetry, Experimental writing, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Upside-Down, Writing | Leave a comment

shot she shot

Posted on April 1, 2021 by istsfor manity

SLR

It was an aversion that grew out of a childhood compulsion to read every interpretive sign she came across on family vacations and school field trips.

She began back in the analog age on a single lens reflex camera, in high school she switched to a digital camera. She rarely dipped her hands into photochemicals again—goodbye, D-76 and HC-110—hello memory cards. Within a decade everything she shot she shot on her phone. All through the years the same obsession persisted she must shoot every interpretive sign with its ancillary scene, if possible, she encountered. And she often went far out of her way to encounter them.

She still hadn’t figured out how to create a vacation or trip where she was assured of encountering these illustrated signs, but a historical or memorial plaque in situ would do in a pinch. Clearly, her ideal was to shoot the scene illustrated on the sign before the self-same scene in nature from the same angle illustrated on the sign.

It was not always possible, but she always strived for perfection—often waiting hours until the flow of tourists at scenic or historic spots dwindled away, or more often arriving at spots before tourists arrived. Although the lighting often added its own set of challenges. She was in the process of transcending—a true existential argonaut.

“The human organism is an atrocity exhibition at which he is an unwilling spectator…”

— J.G. Ballard / Atrocity Exhibition

Posted in Writing | Tagged Creative Writing, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Photography, Poetry, Random Sights with Signs | Leave a comment

welt on your

Posted on March 31, 2021 by istsfor manity

Beyond Grammar

Clothes hoist. They can’t stop every time it gets windy or they’ll never finish the job. Don’t disturb Papa. He’ll rage out of the room and throw darts at us. I wish we had never given him that dartboard as a present—it doesn’t matter how professional grade a set it is. We’re the ones who have been the targets of those darts. Look at that welt on your temple—it still looks angry as hell…

A kind of ode to money for which the widower shines. I’ve been drinking and my alexandrines are sleek by the dozen, she said. Here, look, a whole armada of alexandrines. For food I had guayaba and queso blanco—the breakfast of conquistadors with too much time on their hands, and hairs on their hides. We’ve run out of auto-da-fe candidates, he says. Go bugger yourself, she says. Do you just live beyond quotation marks now?

i live beyond grammar and orthography she said
rules are for rabbits dont u know
and philology is the is valium for the gods
i will go on as i wish making myself seen and heard by the dusty corner of our southwest wall
i become unmoored
an a syntacticle mispeleing fer pleashur n shur to pleace no von
im a lower case werd person with nuthin 2 loos

¿Que tu dices?

“Paternal authority is, of all authorities, the one most inimical to poetry.”

— Noémi Lefebvre / Poetics of Work

Posted in Writing | Tagged Experimental writing, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Random Sights with Signs, Welts, Writing | Leave a comment

which is unfixable

Posted on March 30, 2021 by istsfor manity

A need to repair the past …

which is unfixable …

“Whoa there, scooter … looks like you might be starting to veer toward nihilism … Sometimes all you can really do is keep moving and hope you end up somewhere that makes sense.”

— Allie Brosh / Solutions and Other Problems

Posted in Writing | Tagged Creative Writing, Erasure Poetry, Hybrid writing, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

you must know

Posted on March 29, 2021 by istsfor manity

The Contractive Subtractive

There were erasures to make. He made the erasures. There were no complaints. The work was done. He moved on. When more erasures were required, he made those; and in this manner his work was accomplished, and he continued erasing. This is how it was to be alive then. This is what it meant to finish. Whatever you take from this—you must know this—this was only one of many ways of moving through life. There were alternative ways of working, and of moving through life. That much is assumed. That much is certain. When he needed more erasures, he did this:

“I was jealous, of course, partly that by avoiding the academic race beat, Genie had sidestepped the daily trauma of the historical record, the sometimes brutality and sometimes banality of anti-Blackness, the loop of history that was always a noose if you looked at it long enough.”

— Danielle Evans / “The Office of Historical Corrections”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Creative Writing, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

of obtuse observations

Posted on March 28, 2021 by istsfor manity

Critical Focal Acuity

Fade In

-Series of found film cuts as the camera goes out of focus or shoots unfocused
-Series of stills from said shots
-Series of cuts of shots becoming resolved into focus
-Asynchronous sound of obtuse observations
-mundane observations
-Cut-ups
-Fade ins / Fade outs to black leave 2-3 sec black between shots

Fade Out

“A new Americanism would mean a devotion to equality and liberty, tolerance and inquiry, justice and fairness, along with a commitment to national prosperity inseparable from an unwavering dedication to a sustainable environment the world over.”

— Jill Lepore / This America: The Case for the Nation

Posted in Writing | Tagged Experimental film, Experimental video, Experimental writing, Hybrid writing, Writing | Leave a comment

horny canary executioner

Posted on March 27, 2021 by istsfor manity

Desultory and Inert

It’s the anvil in the stomach that gets me. You never get me. The feeling of being tethered to the earth by your viscera. That insouciant look when you ignore me. So I’ve taken to overconsumption of foodstuffs—I call it foodstuffs, because what else can one call a slimy cheese sauce that coats the inside of one’s mouth and tongue with a sebaceousness that says: all American eats! Cheese is good food, but I can hardly call this cheese. This is really some kind of sign that I need to get moving or I will waste away here on the outskirts of civilization. You are nonplussed. Jacob Pablum is my name, and I am a horny canary executioner — out of work for a decade or so, and constitutionally unable to take a morning constitutional. You are eyelid flickering ennui. So, I pledge allegiance to my own, to the United Crates of Distemper and to the republic for which I grandstand. One evasion under fraud with extrusions and sniffles for all. That’s what I’m about. You are nameless and filled with inertia. The desert stretches out before us.

“I offer myself awfully
abyss frost
I offer myself
you frighten me
I offer myself
I don’t give a fuck”

— Alejandra Pizarnik / “Memory Near Oblivion”

Posted in Writing | Tagged Desert, Experimental writing, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Hybrid writing, Microfiction, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Writing | Leave a comment

three-chord chaos

Posted on March 26, 2021 by istsfor manity

Circumnavigations

Testy? Who does what to whom? This is now. Now is the only thing that’s real. What are you talking about? Why are you quavering in the light of darkening testimony? What is this? Does this make any sense? Does this seem appropriate in light of unseen circumstances? In light of circumnavigations, circumcisions, and charitable giving in the year of the buffalo? Testing again, on another day, something not so new—but new fangled and angled—Los Angeles without the pouting and disease. Miami without the vapidity and self-absorption (calm down, it’s my hometown! I know of what I squeak) Some time far from self-simulation there were simulacra crying out for liberation from the fantastic twelve—imagine 900 foot Jesus … 899 feet just won’t do! Something remotely Daliesque and grandiloquent. Stop stop the triangulation of the suicides, it all stops here, herr doctor … Here, it’s time to write by hand. Time to use the other dendrites and axons—bathe the neural synapses in luxuriant Oil of Olay and Jean Nate not to be confused with John Natty, Natty Bumppo! God-damned Natty Bumppo! A blast from a past we need not unearth. Hell freezes over. See, this is a tale, told by a post-punk, full of pus and pleurisy signifying nothing, but three-chord chaos. Does this make any sense?

“The only moral, meaningful course for a civilization facing its own end: To learn how to ask for forgiveness and to atone in some tiny measure for the devastating harm we had done to our human family and to our fellow creatures and to the beautiful earth. To live and forgive one another as best we could. And to learn how to say goodbye.”

— Sigrid Nunez / What Are You Going Through

Posted in Writing | Tagged 900 foot Jesus, Creative Writing, Experimental writing, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Hybrid writing, Poetry, Prose Poetry, Three-Chord Chaos, Writing | Leave a comment

a conflation of

Posted on March 25, 2021 by istsfor manity

Blackout Poem 020314 (redux)

An irritating squirrel says
To an umbrella made of stone:

“You are a conflation of an Absurdist dialectic.
You are an impossible form.”

The umbrella sprouts a stratocumulus cloud on its ferrule and floats away.

The squirrel, inspired, writes a sonnet, follows that with an ode, then a sestina.

“Perhaps another thing the dystopian future might bring: People suing their parents for having given them birth. Pointing as evidence to the abundance of scientific studies and warnings their parents had been given. What did you assholes think two minutes to midnight meant?”