thee istsfor manity reader

Flarfish 16: mumpsimus earwig

I’m about to die of pleurisy…

Take a moment to note the reading and book…

For two days I have had these lines stuck in my head…

Don’t worry about me around these here parts, but I do want…

The lack of substantive posts continues at a furious pace…

The Mumpsimus ….

No Country for The Affirmation…

this weekend after I learned of the massacre by Old Men…

Earwig So Fey Reading This Weekend Mandarins …

 Both words are derived from insects…

A canopy is, literally…

a bed with mosquito netting about my experiences with carpenter ants… 

earwigs, wasps, skunks, raccoons, and a host of other pests…

Win Bigly? A superlative …

A mumpsimus is a person who holds tight to error in the face of fact…

A mumpsimus is…

Earwig is used to getting her own way…

An orphan left on the doorstep of St. Earwig Home for Children. 

“Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite — getting something down.”
— Julia Cameron

Like Drinking Molasses

He woke up that night aposiopetic. He spoke in fits. He spoke in starts that ended abruptly.

Just as a thought was gathering steam he’d hit a wall and become suddenly silent. He didn’t even taper off, it was sharp and severe.

“Good morning, hun, would you— wep— I though we might—wep— I’d like to— wep— I don’t know what is—wep—“

He felt a globule of fear expand in his throat, becoming a vise and sitting like acid in his neck…

The night became an ellipsis…

He caught it… He was sick now… His life would be different from here on out…”

And all he could manage was:

“I voted Republican… wep… I’m a Methodist now… wep… I converted online… wep…”

“If you write every day, you’re going to write a lot of things that aren’t terribly good, but you’re going to have given things a chance to have their moments of sprouting.”

— Nicholson Baker

flarfish 33: palindromic grimalkin serpentear

The old snake-charmer, The iron queen,

the river winds across

a wide plain squiggles along your ear, staying

in place by

Having a barn cat will make your life

on the farm much easier

This earring flips up and the long conjugation

has never been easier

one of the main characters in fiction the great

Mowmowsky roared

and plunged in anguish folded his arms

and scratched himself

Each day say to yourself that you are the best,

the strongest,

and the most awesome character in the book

series: taco cat

“You may as well be who you are.”

— Grace Paley

flarfish 30: Orphic quiriquiqui

gallo quiquiriqui, as the Spanish nursery-
language calls him,

has a lone collection of everybody’s essays
in Europe expressed in

that passage of monotheism, it became a secret
of the priests;

nevertheless, in the Orphic Hymn
it is very explicitly stated:

quipsome quipsomeness quipster quipsters
quip

The cock, gallo quiquiriqui, while more or less
ranged high on

his wife Sonia and others, cofounded the art
movement.

“…Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city…”

— W.H. Auden / “The Fall of Rome”

The Pivot Point

I’m not really hungry just now… she wrote longhand, the first time in weeks, in her journal.

And she thought that odd because she’d been ravenous all throughout her illness, and hadn’t written a thing, but now she felt a shift. She didn’t necessarily like what she intuited lay ahead, but on her life unspooled. A shrunken head, lifeless and truncated, appeared before her again. It floated and shimmered — a self-contained Fata Morgana, hovering above the ottoman in a slow pulsating light. The heavy odor of ammonia filled the room.

“I am the shrunken head,” she said, “and the shrunken head is me.” 

She tried to suppress a cough but it scratched its way up her throat, and in a paroxysm she expelled a smaller shrunken head — golf ball sized — which rolled end over end down the marble hallway and eddied below a gilded full length mirror. 

The sound of a theremin swelled from beyond the living room and a small red spot of light framed the smaller shrunken head.

This would be her pivot point in life. The one moment by which she would measure the rest of her life. There would be her life after this shrunken head moment, and all the other inconsequential living she’d done up until this singular moment.

A ululation came from the smaller shrunken head —  at first like a sweet distant trill, as if she were looking for scarlet tanagers in a clearing at the edge of dark woods — but the sound became shrill as it grew louder. And the bird broke out of a thicket and headed for her, with every flap it transfigured itself: first flap, from scarlet tanager to a pileated woodpecker, with its second flap it became a crow, and with its third flap (making up the distance to her with great speed) it became a red shouldered hawk, and as the shrill ululation began to sound like a fire alarm the bird transmogrified into a turkey vulture lancing at her eyes with its talons. 

In this manner she awoke to the original, larger, shrunken head hovering above her bathed in a golden light. She swatted at it, but it was just beyond her range. She let out a meek, “fuck you,” and placed the pillow over her face. 

“Today you’ll find and bring me the most beautiful starfish in the world,” the shrunken head said.  “I demand it of you. Go!” 

After her long illness, it’s what she felt compelled to do…

“What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

It’s a tie: Never surrender (Ken Kesey), and when dragged under, kick. Kick the fuck out of it. They’re not expecting us (Kathy Acker). They seem related to me.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch

Pscittacisms

Ambigram, anagram,
Bring me sate
Destitute, prostitute,
Slap my bald pate.
Epigraph, paragraph
Please do as I bid
Ostracism, psittacism
Here I whither…

Wanna’ cracker?

“Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy”
— Jack Kerouac

138 Pieces

I wrote this yesterday under the influence of twin tornadoes

While hiding under the bed with my grandmother and dog

I planned a funeral as mattresses, pans and medicines strafed the air

I saw my brother’s arm impaled on a jagged rafter

The grey-green sky draped like humid laundry above

I heard telephone poles snap in succession like cannon fire

Fred, from next door, called for Annie as he flew by among the shingles and sharp detritus

A dishwasher smashed into my one remaining bedroom wall

Splintered it in 138 pieces, and disappeared into that toothy vortex…

“… history proved that epidemics have a way of recrudescing when least expected.”
— Albert Camus, The Plague

Inveigles

Wind whistling insanities through the crack in the door.
High pitched inveigles to step off the balcony 16 floors
above his parents, lounging by the pool,

and crushing them to tarnation.

It looked easy a few moments ago, and the pull of it became
so tangible
that he forced himself back inside.

Writing is not like dancing or modeling; it’s not something where — if you missed it by age 19 — you’re finished. It’s never too late. Your writing will only get better as you get older and wiser. If you write something beautiful and important, and the right person somehow discovers it, they will clear room for you on the bookshelves of the world — at any age. At least try.
— Elizabeth Gilbert

Stop Thinking Right to Left

Dear Jesse—

You of the cryophilic heart… You fill me with inertia.

Jesse, stop writing backwards! Stop thinking from right to left. You prepared the statues and raised the cupolas, and now the patina congeals on your soul, and your  effervescence is now effluvium. Mucho mistrust. It’s all over.

Paregoric?! It’s tincture of opium, you idiot. What have you done? Jesse, what have you done to me?

How do I manage to stay underground? Are you going to help me? I can’t arrange it. How do I get to Papua, New Guinea from here? I can’t do this alone.

This is my life. Is this your cozen to me?!

Oren.

“Art hurts. Art urges voyages—and it is easier to stay at home.”
— Gwendolyn Brooks

Aeonian or Aeolian?

She mistook her aeonian harp for her aeolian harp. She mistook her bemusement for amusement. Her confoundment for profoundment and her conclusion for inclusion. Nothing seemed to be what it needed to be and her mind kept elapsing and prolapsing into a crater like protrusion into the black hole nimbus that what her brain. From now on nothing would be what it should or sound like its meaning; rather things would be tinged in a greenish patina and sound like retinal shrieks of retinues and concubine purrs. Nothing like what she was accustomed to. She would have to reeducate herself in the ways of wares and the forms of norms. Much would be ochre now, because there was no sense in being saffron about it. At least that’s what the older boys meant, or what she thought they meant, when they claimed she was immature. Now was the time for ripening. The moment was upon her. Now is the only thing that’s real. And Cramps be damned!

“The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense, whereas reality never makes sense.”

— Aldous Huxley