found

my tweetcloud + line breaks + punctuation = found poem!

writing = awesome
trying/using print
delhi time, wondering...
wrong times?
ipod love
love publishing,
movie song,
pretty writer,
digital word.
hahaha: news, music
write cool
reading day's tweet
editing, thanks
live tweeting
life = read
home = books
india, "facebook idea? amazing!"
makes bombay; haha
kindle + apple = girl, happy
people, stop
public, what's itunes?
hope? woah.
online book
google story.

sunday poetry: shaadi season

because it's full-on shaadi season and the shopping never ends...

Loud brayed an ass. Quoth Kate, ‘My dear,
(To spouse, with scornful carriage,)
One of your relatives I hear.’
‘Yes, love,’ said he, ‘by marriage.’

– I.J. Reeve, The Wild Garland; or, Curiosities of Poetry, 1866

(via the awesome futilitycloset.com)

140

it struck me today most things i want to say don't need more than 140 characters. if blogger had a smaller window, my posts would be shorter. and that's why i guess i took to twitter.
so it has a silly name, but it isn't silly. it's this simple (not simplistic) way of telling your stories as they happen. of building the narrative of your life.
i've always been a fan of 'short' literature
haiku, flash fiction, six-word stories
never read lydia davis but interviews tell me i'll like her
and twitter is just this na. a whole mood/story communicated all concise, concentrated and combined with that other wonderful thing--immediacy.
@MelvinBurgess, @robinsloan, @AVARY, @rands do this so nicely.

tweetcloud is wordle for twitter. it said...

my top 3 words tweeted this year: book, love, story


so funny, those are also my three favorite words ever.

and this kind of aggregation makes sense on twitter because it's such few words. if you aggregate a blog or a book, the little words you get don't really add up to the whole, do they? longer pieces of writing need manymany words that on their own don't necessarily represent the whole piece. but short literature isn't the piece, it's only the representation. how awesome! so maybe a writer/artist/etc's twitter feed (or suchlike) tells you more about him/what goes through his head than his books. maybe it's a magical thing that lets us build our stories, narrate our legacies, track who we are at any given time. and if moments are like words, maybe who we are is best expressed as a sum total of the smaller fragments rather than a single, emphatic, defining point in time. maybe twitter is this fun mirror that exaggerates only the important parts (good and bad). and maybe, maybe we should learn to see each other like that as well.

so the point, within 140 characters, is this. stories matter. and anything that lets you tell yours is important. no matter how silly its name.

sunday poetry: "aggressively inarticulate"

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

old photographs

of palm leaves,
like stars,
reflected in
our eyes.

of palm leaves
reflected
in our eyes
like stars.

coincidence_boy

this is me and my lotus at pangong-tso, rocking back and forth, just like this song...



coincidence_boy visits me sometimes when i can't sleep at strange hours between night and morning when it looks like twilight. he worms his way inside my ear and speaks of big flat lakes and dust and towers of stones that will topple over tomorrow with no witnesses. i like him, this boy. he keeps me amused mostly, and sometimes gives hope. if there's a hole anywhere in the ground filled with blue stars, he'll find it you know, and take you there by the hand. let him talk to you sometimes, he's sweet. makes nice pictures and sticks them to his wall in pairs. and if you touch his pictures, a song starts to play whose name you can't remember. he's very earnest, that's one. reallytrulybelieves, you know? two, he never dances. don't ask him to ok. he won't say no and he won't say yes and then you'll just feel all bad because you'll think he's forgotten all the nice things you said about him, but he hasn't, don't worry. blink. he's trying to remember where your lost purple sock with the cows on it is, that's all. let coincidence_boy find your sock, your laserbeam... you sleep. he'll whisper it into your palm when your eyes are closed. close your fist now.

(pictures by j and v)

the day's singalong folks

i like singalong songs better than all other kinds of songs. singalong songs are the most special, fun kind of songs. i usually have one song everyday that i sing along to all day. this was today's.

budge

been buried in manuscript for weeks; just keeps going.
so demanding manuscript is. wants commitment commitment.
1% i don't put in screams me thin.
everyday all the time, yelling for attention.

i just want to say, "manuscript, shhh. calm down. listen to this. let's play solitaire."

manuscript has arms crossed, lips pursed.
manuscript won't budge.

sunday poetry: tao lin

tao lin is this strange little creature who is a self-promotion god and eats insanely healthy food and writes books and he bought a genre and spawned hundreds of copy cats and i have this theory that anyone who reads his blog for more than three minutes at a stretch will automatically start writing like tao lin and thinking all their thoughts in their heads in a steady monotone akin to his public readings with background slideshows of doodles of hamster-like creatures. this is just a random post of his from his blog heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com and it's not even one of those that like really "captures his essence" or whatever. he writes a lot so you'll eventually find something that does.

if i keep 'acting retarded' on the internet will i die

i know i will die at some point, that isn't the question i'm asking in this blog post, i think

i think i feel already not sure what this blog post is 'about'

i think i'm interested in whether or not i will 'wither' and then die, in my chair, in the library, if i type certain sentences

will my heart shrivel, inside my body, causing me to 'die,' as i type certain words in certain combinations onto this blog

seems like i can do anything on the internet, which seems weird

i've censored myself 'so much' in my life, even on this blog, i think, not sure actually

not sure what is happening right now, as i sit here, typing onto this blog

does each sentence i type onto this blog cause 95% of prizes/grants/reviewers to 'move away from me' (i have images of them, like, rolling away awkwardly, due to their shapes; for the reviewers i have images of them putting their forefinger/thumb on their forehead/cheek and then sort of 'swiveling' their head away from me), does that seem funny to me or not

i have images of people staring at their computer screens feeling confused

tens of thousands of people in a giant stadium staring at computer screens feeling confused

'hm'

if i have any friends, can you (if you want to) bid on my myspace account to increase the price to like $80000, so that it 'becomes news,' i think this requires at least 2 friends (just experienced a moment of uncertainty re '2 friends,' seemed good)

this was suggested in the comments section of the post below this post

i have a tumblr

brandon is having a short story contest

i'm probably going to enter under several fake names

i'm excited

i'm also afraid

will brandon choose me

or will he choose someone else

will i cry if i lose

or will i just eat carbohydrates

i think galleys of 'shoplifting from american apparel' will exist somewhere within 3-4 weeks

the distributor will have a number of copies of the galleys, i believe

i feel neutral

i feel like the thing in middle school that tests whether a solution in chemistry class has been neutralized or not; i feel like the moment when the thing is seen to be neutralized, using a tab or something, with numbers on it

i feel like the moment when an 8th grader looks at the tab, feeling no interest in whatever 'lab experiment' it is for, and sees that it has been neutralized, and thinks 'neutralized' or something

not sure what i'm trying to describe, might be less an emotion than a 'tableau' or something

sort of can't believe i blogged again, 'so soon' after the previous blog post, with no real new news

should perhaps have consolidated these three 'myspace-ebay posts' into one post, to maximize comments and other reasons, yet i keep typing

is this what mike tyson felt like when he bit evander holyfield the second time

i feel highly aware that what i am doing right now isn't the ideal blogging technique to achieve my goals, 'though, what are my goals, hehe'

i keep having images of doors closing

just had an image of a window closing, seemed 'slightly abberant'

sunday poetry: hoax!

Petit Testament - Ern Malley

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
Begin here:

In the year 1943
I resigned to the living all collateral images
Reserving to myself a man’s
Inalienable right to be sad
At his own funeral.
(Here the peacock blinks the eyes
of his multipennate tail.)
In the same year
I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins that flow between the hands and feet
(Here the Tree weep gum tears
Which are also real: I tell you
These things are real)
So I forced a parting
Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.

Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the comer.
I have heard them shout in the streets
The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich
And in the magazines I have read
The Popular Front-to-Back.
But where I have lived
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray
Guernica is the ticking of the clock
The nightmare has become real, not as belief
But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinite. Beyond is anything.

this is a fun sunday poetry.

the poem you've just read is one part of what is considered to be the twentieth century's greatest literary hoax. the poems were written by a couple of soldiers, writers themselves, who hated the modern poetry being published in australia at the time (the 1940s). so these two sat down one afternoon and made up a poet. they called him ern malley (because "mal" in french means "bad"), gave him a sufficiently tragic back story, found old photos and said they were his. then within a few hours they wrote 16 pages of incoherent poetry with vague hints at meaning and quotes from all over and sent them in to a publication they really hated. the editor loved the writing and published it all. and everyone else loved it too. and even today ern malley is supposed to be one of the faces of modern poetry. ha. ha. ha. art really has nothing to do with its creator, does it.

this is a good story to remember especially these days.

read the whole story here (it's very entertaining) and all of ern malley's mal poems here!

alma maaaaaater

jaya posted her school song on her blog and i loved reading it like that, out of context, without a conception of a tune, but just being able to imagine what it must have sounded like when a few hundred kids sang it together.

i was in st. anne's. and they made us call ourselves "annites". i learned the term "alma mater" from my school song. here it is :)

come annites gather now
with faith unshaken
let deep integrity
our heaaaaarts awaken
life's journey starts from you
we lift our hearts anew
all striving to be true
our alma maaaaaater

knowledge and love trust
daily engendered
and pace of mind from duty
noooobly rendered
the lives we lead will be
symbols of harmony
and truth we learn from thee
our alma maaaaaater

lead us o light from heaven
brighten our pathway
strength from within give us
to choooose the right way
where in the world we go
let hope and courage show
that we will always know
our alma maaaaaaater

lini_ment

you know you've been around pain killers too long when you start appreciating the art work on the labels, but i've got to say this bottle of sloan's liniment has a gorgeous old world charm. it's a bad picture so you can't tell but in person (in bottle) it looks awesome with its rough matt paper label and mr earl sloan's o-so-manly portrait (and the word "liniment"!). it's been around since the seventeenth century and it really looks like it. plus the simple, straightforward "kills pain" is great messaging. no?



ok i know this is sort of sick. i'm going to go now.

but ps: nash, it contains capsicum extract!

sunday poetry: rives - kite

rives is one of the best slam poets out there. this is a clip of his from an hbo show called def poetry jam that should really really air in india. this poem's called "kite".



another one of his i love is dirty talk.

he's even got four ted talks! the emoticons one is my favorite.

ps: i just discovered he also makes crazy complex pop-up books. wah!