May 2008

¢ Interview with Venus Bogardus. And speaking of Ohle, mark your calendars New Yorkers, he'll be at Issue Projet Room on May 23 with Brian Evenson. Going to California tomorrow for a week or so sans computer, so no updates or freebies.

¢ Instead of My Life for Sale, I'm calling this My Life for Free. All you have to do is tell me your favorite line from the book or CD when you get it. Maybe at the end I'll compile the results or something. Today's freebies are double-CDs in the comedy vein: Mike Birbiglia's Two Drink Mike & Dimitri Martin's These are Jokes.

April 2008

¢ Freebies of the day: Sonic Youth SYR 1 and John Cage Roaratorio. Free to the first person that emails me.

¢ "All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces. Bright and early for their daily races, going nowhere, going nowhere. And their tears are filling up their glasses, no expression, no expression. Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow, no tomorrow, no tomorrow. And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad. The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had. I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take. When people run in circles, it's a very, very mad world."

¢ Sneak peak at the cover and who's in the next izzue of Sleepingfish, including the next installment of the wall project.

¢ Freebie of the day: I've got some extra copies of The Ecstasy of Capitulation by Daniel Borzutzky. First 2 people to email me get them.

¢ In preparation for our move, I'm starting to get rid of excess stuff. For starters I have 4 extra copies of John Olson's Backscatter that I will give away to the first 4 people that email me. Watch this space for future freebies as I find them.

¢ Pushed the redesign of a website I've been working on live today. Strange thing is the internet connection in our office crapped out, so I did it from Madison Square park with two freelancers, one in Quebec and the other in Austin. The first I saw of it live was outisde on the street. Funny how things are "built" these days and where they are located. Speaking of which, if you think my day job sounds cool, it could be yours. We're hiring for my replacement now.

¢ Foals tomorrow night (4/24) at Bowery!

¢ 100 days left in NYC.

¢ I haven't checked out Kevin Sampsell's new book, and probably won't have a chance to for a while, but Creamy Bullets is a hell of a title.

¢ Three randomly idle questions asked of me today by complete strangers: 1) A woman called my cellphone and asked if I was a graffiti artist. 2). On the corner of 34th and Lexington a man asked me if I was Jewish. 3). In line at the post office, a man asked me if I knew "what the Knicks needed most next year"?

¢ I got doored today riding my bike to work, which is not even noteworthy as it happens daily. I let loose a slew of obscenities as usual and turned around to see who opened their cab door on me and it was the CEO of the organization I work at. If that happens in a dream what would it mean?

¢ There's a review of James Lewelling's Tortoise as well as an interview with him in the new elimae.

¢ Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? Much as I hate cellphones, this is a great article on the importance of cellphones to the impoverished and displaced, interesting not only for the innovations taking place in "user anthropology" as it affects human-centered design, but also how in our increasingly nomadic and transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the fixed point of identity.

¢ I have some work in the new Journal of Experimental Fiction #34, "A Report from the Front Lines".

¢ Dick Palace took inventory of some Marsupial words I sent him and said them in another way in Lamination Colony. There's some other mangled and unmangled texts and songs and other goodness there too.

¢ The fine art of Elephant self-realization:

¢ The init-capping of "God": this comes up in every issue of Sleepingfish. Is it just me or is this a ridiculous and offensive convention? I deem that Goat should always be written as such. Init-capping god says that your Christian god is better than all other gods. It's as stupid as naming your dog Dog. I always feel like I need to tiptoe around people that write god this way and don't want to insult them by asking them to change it, but then thinking about it, writing it that way is insulting to anyone that doesn't believe in a Christian god.

¢ It seems to me the most useful application for the Kindle is for people living in say, Antartica or the Amazon, where it's hard to get books. But "it works everywhere" to Amazon means big urban areas in the U.S., excluding all of Montana and Alaska. When will book portability ever catch up to the portability and accessibility of music and movies?

¢ Colony Collapse Disorder Podcast featuring Miranda Mellis towards the end, right before Thurston Moore.

¢ Some very contemporary Kenyan Fiction: The Road to Eldoret by Tony Mochama.

¢ Some realest & illest Ugandan Hiphop: Sylvester & Abramz. The video for Lemerako on that page seems broke, try this one on YouTube.

¢ I think Andrew Richmond has left our town for another one. We had planned on going to his going away bowling party but, as usual, I flaked. Sorry Gus. I went to his virtual site to see if he had really gone and got all wrapped up in this post on Mr. Rogers and Koko, but found no evidence that Gus had truly left. Maybe he made that shit up so he could get free shots at The Gutter?

March 2008

¢ I tried to read Malone Dies this morning on the stairmaster, but I felt too much like a gerbil on a wheel. It's bad enough that Beckett writes likes a gerbil on a wheel, but to be living that sort of life while reading about it is too much. I need to get unstuck from this wheel before I can get Beckett. Right now I need escapism. That's two strikes against me for the trilogy... can I redeem myself with the Unnameable? It does help me to understand where the likes of Lopez and Lewelling are coming from though. But is it like understanding natural selection withouth reading Darwin? Beckett's memes are being propagated by imitators. His memes are not words or ideas even, but instrumental music to put your own words to.

¢ I've been at the State of the Planet conference for the past two days. I created a channel with some clips of Kofi Annan's keynote speech if you didn't get a chance to go. I'll be putting more up there as I get the chance.

¢Robert Lopez reading from Part of the World and Miranda Mellis reading from The Revisionist:

¢ Robert Lopez and Miranda Mellis will be at Mcnally Robinson tomorrow (Wednesday) night in NYC.

¢ I listened to Jeffrey Sachs for two hours today at work, and he's so engaging (regardless of what he's saying) I'm going to see him after work tomorrow night at the 92nd Street Y. He spends so much time reading and speaking that I wonder when he has time to think about about what he is going to say next. If you're in NYC, I suggest you check him out. He'll also be at the State of the Planet later this week.

¢ Seeds, Fertilizer & Credit.

¢ Condalmo posted an excerpt from Marsupial called the Adjoining Room at Calico Hotel. It's a dream sequence about a cat with a nerve disorder I knew once named Ziggy. I dedicate it to the memory of Ziggy.

¢ Speaking of Kwani?, this is a piece by the founding editor, Binyavanga Wainaina: How to write about Africa.

¢ I've been reading and enjoying an old issue of Kwani? (3). It's raw and rough around the edges, unfiltered, which makes it all the better. I'll have to move on to issue 4 now that it's available. Matter of fact, since I last checked the Kwnai? site a few months ago, they've completed updated it and added a blog and all sorts of other goodness including the launching of this Generation Kenya site. Good to see all is thriving on the literary/arts front in Kenya.

¢ Jess posted some pics from her recent trip to Hanoi. Yes those are dogs. Sad.

¢ Some people like to add "in bed" to their cookie fortunes to make them more interesting. I've taken to adding "with a goat". Like just now my fortune read: "You have an ambitious nature". Without a goat is boring. When I was young we had a goat. We also had a dog. We went on vacation. When we came home there was the dog in the backyard. And just two goat ears. I laugh about it now but obviously I never got over it. My future holds a goat, mark my words.

¢ What else Blake Butler did that night besides eat a heaping plate of Nachos.

¢ The Buffalo Small Press Book Fair is coming up on 3.22. I wish I could make it.

¢ I started to write a brief note to recommend Minor Robberies, and it turned into this peregrinating procrastination.

¢ Not sure if I've ever mentioned it on here, but there's this band out of the UK, Venus Bogardus, that's obsessed with David Ohle. The album is out now on iTunes, I for one am going to get it. Here's their musical rendition of Motorman.

¢ I think pretty much the whole night last night was spent dreaming that I was making salsa. Dicing and slicing all the necessary ingredients. It was an endless task and I become so absorbed in the process of making the salsa that by the time morning rolled around I don't think I was too interested in eating it. I think I dreamt that because I was reading some about the Slow Food movement yesterday. Speaking of Slow Food, this was poignant... "Only intellectuals love poverty. Poor people love luxury." If you took this samba (not salsa) proverb one step further and said only the rich, with their luxuries, can afford or have the time to be intellectual, it really leads to some spiraling logic.

¢ Obummer.

¢ Angela Stubbs interviewed me for Bookslut. Thanks Angela!

¢ Before I left Heavy, me and this guy Stephen Spyropoulos redesigned the homepage. It's live now.

¢ Okay, there's peace in Kenya. Now get ye on a safari! It's good for their economy. It's good for animal preservation. It's a good time (here's our pics and videos from a few months ago). I can't recommend it enough and you'd have the place to yourself.

¢ Sleepingfish goes public, is now a billion dollar industry.

¢ I meant to work on Marsupial this morning, but instead I wrote this.

February 2008

¢ My baby got shipped out to 'Nam.

¢ " ...I'm laying out my winter clothes and wishing I was gone, going home, where the New York City winters aren't bleeding me..." -Simon and Garfunkel.

¢ Irana Douer, whose art graced the cover of the last Sleepingfish, has some art for sale. Besides the cover of Sleepingfish, I also have another one hanging in my living room that I never tire of looking at. And they are quite affordable.

¢ I just read my 300th submission for Sleepingfish. We've accepted 15 so far. Yesterday somebody at work (dayjob) described his job as banging his head against a wall: it hurts most of the time, but 1 out of 10 times your head breaks through. My sentiments exactly.

¢ I think i have it figured out now, the name of the novel I'm working on. "Our Mother for the Time Being," is the more concise definition. But the word that is being defined is Marsupial. So the titile is Marsupial: Our Mother for the Time Being. To me and you, we can just call it Marsupial.

¢ I posted another Foals video from last week's show to YouTube. Now I have a whole Foals channel going.

¢ Tortoise is now here.

¢ I've been calling Our Mother the Fish that for so long that that is what it must remain.

¢ In anticipation of James Lewelling's Tortoise, here's an excerpt.

¢ Foals rocked the Bowery Ballroom last night. At one point the guitar player threw up all over the place without skipping a beat, such talent and dedication to the craft. Here's a video of the encore, Mathletics (that's Jess and I requesting it). The quality is not nearly as good as the ones I took before as I was using my shitty digital camera.

¢ Excited as all hell to see the Foals tonight at the Bowery. Here's some footage from last time they were in town.

¢ I finally saw There Will Be Blood yesterday. I thought it was flat in all respects. It didn't go anywhere. We also saw Paul Thomas Anderson's first movie Hard Eight a few nights ago, and thought that was much better. Of course nothing beats Magnolia.

¢ So it's been a few weeks since I started my new day job (hence why I haven't been saying much here, that and the continuing saga of our court battles with our ex-landlord which are now thankfully over). I've been blogging some on clusterflock about bamboo bikes and such, and I'd like to start highlighting some of the cool stuff Millennium Promise is doing on their site, start a blog even, but I'm still in the redesign phase. There's a lot of bullshit I'm finding out, like who was at the star-studded Gucci fundraiser on the UN lawn and most impportantly what they were wearing, and how the funds for Madonna's Raising Malawi are funneled through her Kaballah cult to instill Kaballah values in Malawi teachers. I just threw up a little and had to swallow it. Next thing we know Tom Cruise will open a Scientology docking station in Africa for the spaceships to land and "save" African souls. It's really not that much different.

¢ Matt Everett on the forthcoming Tortoise: "Lewelling is a patient, crafty writer, building up his story slowly, as if by accidental accretion, the minutia of human experience laid bare with a pleasing revelatory exactitude. Absurd, impossible conclusions are frequent, but only in denouement do events themselves become fully unreal, and by the time they do, reality seems no less strange."

¢ They might be more than Giants. That wasn't luck. That was divine intervention. Acknowledge it.

¢ Erpen are 'Dad and Lad' artists Anthony and Nathan Pendlebury.

¢ One of the first things I ever wrote (seriously) was just published in the new Willow Springs. Two people told me that the cover image looks like me. There's a helluva piece by Blake Butler in there too, that you can read online.

¢ The coolest find at AWP was The Singing Knives by Frank Stanford that Lost Roads reissued. I don't see it for sale anywhere yet though.

January 2008

¢ I'll be mongering books tomorrow at AWP in NYC. Stop by and say hi. If you can't make it and want to see what it's like, skype me at 'bayorwhite' for a live feed (assuming they have wireless there).

¢ "Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around." -Terrence McKenna

¢ Jess is airborne right now en route to Tanzania. Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania. I went to bed last night thinking about Kilimanjaro, in particular Hemingway's Snows of. I dreamt we were traveling somewhere and I was going back to our hotel room to get something. I had to traverse around these cliffs to get there. On closer inspection, the cliffs were made of stacked crates that were full of file folders. The file folders were jammed with papers and other bits of raw information. I was thinking it was absurd, that there was no way Jess could be expected to climb this. I was forced to climb straight up because it was easier. I ended up on top of this precarious spire of crates of file folders with nowhere to go (a reoccurring theme for me, a legacy fear from my climbing days). It swayed and I jumped off on to the top of this neighboring skyscraper. I dwelled on the fact that this action was irreversible, that I couldn't simply jump back on the spire how I jumped off. I was looking for the fire exit to go in so I could go back down. Jess called me and asked what I was doing up there. I said I was trying to get down. I think maybe I was that lost leopard.

¢ Lost in translations: two days ago I got word that Miranda Mellis' The Revisionist would be translated into Italian. Today I got word that Norman Lock's Land of the Snow Men would be translated into Japanese.

¢ In anticipation of AWP, I made 120 chapbooks this past weekend. Which included busting out the soldering iron for 10 of them.

¢ DIAGRAM 7.6 is tardy, but worth the wait.

¢ I was invited by a complete stranger to some writing conference that involved "speed dating with editors," which amounts to giving an on the spot 10-minute critique of a writing sample. This would be interesting if it was a bad dream, but I'm pretty certain this is for real. To tie in with my previous flash, this couple-to-be (in two hours) met in a speed dating session.

¢ Went to a fancy rehearsal dinner last night with all these rich white people. The groom's mother got up to get everyone's attention, and when she spoke it was to tell us all about an Obama rally we needed to go to. When I got home I had dozens of emails from virtual strangers promoting their own causes, books, readings, useless information supposed to fire my imagination. I can't get no, oh no no no. Hey hey hey, that's what I say.

¢ I started working at Millennium Promise today. The coolest thing is I get free lunch every day. Who said there wasn't such a thing?

¢ I read Mike Topp's Shorts are Wrong yesterday in the time it took getting from the Dakota to Canal Street and back on the C train. Though on the way back I took the A and switched at Columbus Circle. The koan about the boner was a classic. If you scroll down, you can find it here. And there's an associative interview I did with him here.

¢ Dreaming of rabbits, ostriches and "Charro Jul" on the Annandale Dream Gazette.

¢ A story of mine, Capturing the Shadow Puppets, was translated into polish on the Minimal Books site.

¢ I was walking up 9th avenue after drinking my last beer at Heavy (and there was much rejoicing) when I saw a guy wheeling boxes and thought, that's probably what I look like (minus the dolly, what a concept!) lugging books to the post office. The boxes said 'NY Tyrant' on them which didn't immediately register with the beer buzz and the excitement of leaving my job. When I got home my suspicions were verified by an email in my inbox: NY Tyrant III is here with the likes of Lutz, Lish, Kimball, Ames, etc. There is a release party for it, also on 9th ave at Bar Nine on January 19th. Unfortunately, I have a wedding to attend to that night, at some swanky social club on Gramercy (and there was much rejoicing).

¢ Dolphins join our culture club: evidently we are not the only ones that accessorize.

¢ Taking a break from fish mongering to monger bear pelt.

¢ I had jury duty today. Perfect opportunity to read The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, a fascinating study on how things become popular (in epidemic proportions). It tries to be scientific, though a lot of times with these things it's hard to distinguish between cause and effect. Do cigarettes or hush-puppies make people cool, or are already cool people attracted to cigarettes and hush-puppies? Human behavior is incredibly complex (as are the viruses which he often compares them to), and I kept thinking about chaos theory. Sometimes it seems truly random to me that something becomes hip and there is no justifiable reason for it. Strange that Gladwell doesn't go into chaos theory, or for that matter ever utters the word "meme" which is really what he's talking about here is how memes spread non-linearly.

¢ I've read a few books (of fiction) and manuscripts lately plagued with pop-culture name-dropping and brand names, ugly words like Wal-Mart and Starbucks and McDonalds and Chevrolet. It's distracting for me to read a page with words like that. It's like looking at a photo of an otherwise beautiful landscape or street scene and having ugly signs and telephone wires and cars in the picture. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't care what the story is about, I can't get past those words. Worse are the words Bush or Iraq, which I've been seeing a lot lately. I read to get away from such things.

¢ In anticipation of J'Lyn Chapman's forthcoming Bear Stories, here's some swag  to tie you over.

¢ I started hosting this blog on it's own server in Jan 2007. That month I averaged 57 unique visitors a day. In March 2007 I averaged 152 visitors a day. By June I was up to 262 a visitors a day. By September, 434 visitors a day and then in October, 531 visitors a day. December saw 485 visitors a day. Sometimes I wonder who these people are. 1155 of those visitors last month were searching for "dead dogs". 9 people were looking for "stinky pussy". Only 1 person was looking for "sad art".

¢ Call me short timer. My days at Heavy are numbered.

¢ Invisible: An interactive visual poem collaboration by Eduardo Recife & Adriana de Barros to the music of Digitaria!

¢ In lieu of a best of 2008 list, I give my Read on Location < 2008 list.

December 2007

¢ ...and for those that don't speak Hex-61, have an Abysmal New Year!

¢ Since brother Markus commented that my tattoo looks like a fish (being the fish head he is), I guess I should reveal the other half of the story. Here's the ink my better half got simultaneously on her arm. Together they could be a fish, though this wasn't the conscious intention. Or her's could be a fish and mine the hook. Mine could be the scale that weighs her fish. They could be a weight sandwich.

¢ Tattoo I got last night. It could be a fucked-up umbrella. Could is the operative word.

¢ I changed the name of the fragmented novel I'm working on from Our Mother the Fish to Our Mother for the Time Being. For the time being, until something else presents itself. I might throw some excerpts up here or send them around to places, so stay tuned. Off to get an image from it tattooed on my arm.

¢ Poste Restante was reviewed by Laird Hunt in the current American Book Review.

¢ Went to Gyu-Kaku for our 11th anniversary last night.

¢ Image from holiday card I got from BookMobile:

¢ Finally saw No Country for Old Men. It's one of the few McCarthy books I haven't read, so hard to compare it to the book. I'm curious to read the book now. I can handle the violence better in books than I can on film. I'm guessing there is a lot more to the book than we see. Not that the acting and cinematography wasn't good. And of course, the dialogue.

¢ 'Twas the longest night of the year last night. Here's to longer days.

¢ Got a new passport in the mail yesterday. I'm not sure what smells better, a new passport with blank pages, or a crusty old passport with all the pages used up. I guess you could same the same about books. Potential energy versus kinetic energy.

¢ "Did that love just get erased from the big board, as if it was never up there, as if it never happened?"  —Lish editing Carver

¢ I fell asleep last night in the Hall of North American Mammals at the Natural History Museum. When I woke up I was on the scaffolding outside of the bastion hull on the southeast corner that is under restoration, left wondering where all the genetic material is stored.

¢ LLamas+art = site with cool design objects that posted some of our photos. Llamas+spit =high art.

¢ Drinking and driving isn't funny, but drinking and riding is.

¢ Saw Tings Dey Happen last night. Dis Dan Hoyle guy him mouth done strong for pidgin o, where him done carry go one time as a Fullbright scholar to study oil politics.

¢ Robert Lopez read with Alexandra Chasin and Eva Talmadge this Wednesday at the Cup & Pen series at Think Coffee. Robert Lopez is of course co-editor of Sleepingfish and author of Part of the World. Alexandra and Eva have also both been in Sleepingfish, in fact, the piece Alexandra had in issue 0.875 is now up on the FC2 site as an excerpt for her newish book, Kissed By.

¢ The Language of Birds: a short film by Jason Martin using the text from Brian Evenson's Altmann's Tongue.

¢ I have a couple pieces in the long-awaited Snow*vigate.

¢ Some of my work was translated in Dutch for Deus Ex Machine 122. Peter Markus and Robert Lopez also had some work translated in the issue, and there is an interview with me that is posted online (for those that speak Dutch).

¢ Jess posted more pictures of faces of Africa on her site.

¢ We may have missed thanksgiving being in Africa, but that didn't stop the Associated Press from running an article about the now infamous "turkey dance" ritual my in-laws perform (though they misspelled Fanzo).

¢ Lillis Distro/Pittsburgh expanded on my "economy of words" posting.

¢ While I was gone, Harp & Altar 3 was releasted with work by both Miranda Mellis & Norman Lock.

November 2007 (On Safari in East Africa)

¢ Getting Out of Africa.

¢ Uploaded the next Mara installment from Amsterdam.

¢ The second afternoon of our safari we saw elephants and cheetahs.

¢ On our second morning we spotted a leopard.

¢ Landed in Masai Mara and our first game drive in Masai Mara we saw the rare black rhino.

¢ Spent the day reading Stars of the New Curfew by Ben Okri.

¢ On the second try, we made it to Dertu. Back in Nairobi now.

¢ Made it as far as Garissa.

¢ We crossed the equator to Kampala, Uganda. Now we're in Kenya.

¢ Crossed the border from Rwanda to Uganda and spent a day in Ruhiira.

¢ Hung out with our gorilla cousins yesterday.

¢ Finally was able to upload my last installment from Ethiopia. In Rwanda now.

¢ Third installment from Ethiopia: Cliff Churches of Tigray

¢ Second installment from Ethiopia: Addis Ababa to Hawzain (Reading Ayi Kwei Armah)

¢ First installment from Africa: NYC to Addis Ababa

¢ "Our nation is at a Fork in the Road. Some say we should go Left; some say go Right." Stephen Colbert, reporting for the NY Times, says, “Doesn’t this thing have a reverse gear? Let’s back this country up to a time before there were forks in the road — or even roads. Or forks, for that matter. I want to return to a simpler America where we ate our meat off the end of a sharpened stick."

October 2007

¢ As Day Same That the the Was Year: an interesting PDF chapbook by Michael Kimball, err, Andy Devine.

¢ For Halloween I have a frog in my throat. For that matter, I've always had a frog in my throat.

¢ Only 3 more days until we leave for East Africa!

¢ I got some words out of Mike Topp by giving him some pictures: Sled Hill Voices.

¢ Finally finished The Exquisite by Laird Hunt. He captures a noirey-East Village that is rapidly becoming endangered. I also watched The Warriors last night. The first time I saw that movie in jr. high school in Mexico, it made me terrified of New York. Now I file it under comedy.

¢ I wish James Lipton was my father.

¢ It's October 22 and I'm still wearing shorts!

¢ FOALS! Video and stills from their trip to NYC.

¢ In my dream last night I met some "funnel-web rabbits"... docile rabbits that lived in the bottom of cone-shaped pits. I also met these ostriches who travelled by coiling themselves into tight balls and rolling, and when they unraveled they weren't ostriches, but storks.

¢ Been doing some bookish networking. Fortunately it kind of ties into what I do for gainful employment so it's not too much of a waste of time. So now in addition to 3 myspace pages, a facebook page, youtube, Heavy, Burly and countless others, I have a Shelfari and a Goodreads pages. It seems Goodreads is the better of the two, although its a bit buggy and I'm not sure who I am. Someone needs to make a a super-amalgamater that combines all your social networking profiles so you don't have to keep doing it over, especially when it comes to the bookshelves.

¢ I have some work in the new LIT no. 13, along with other Sleepingfishers Rob Walsh, Jackson Taylor, Adam Golaski and Terese Svoboda.

¢ In anticipiation of our trip to East Africa (in less than 3 weeks!) got a new camcorder. I was messing around with it and iMovie and YouTube now so I wouldn't be scrambling to figure it out on the plane. If you're curious as to what the Calamari Press headquarters look like and want to glimpse into a day in the life, walking to work, meeting Jess after work, here's a rather random video, not even worth embedding.

¢ Reading The Meat and Spirit Plan by Selah Saterstom was like receiving an I.V. drip of bong water, pig placenta, T-bone steak, Anthrax (the band), bile, mayonnaise, mop water, ice, sex enzymes, unsalted crackers, pancreatic discharge, valium, Jack Daniels and Jell-O made from the flesh beneath toenails, but with the letters of the alphabet soup I.V. drip all beautifully scrambled and missing the letters E, N and S, and administered tenderly. Now kindly undo these straps!

¢ [After seeing Control] I was Ian Curtis living with hippies down in Mexico. This one hippie chick kept crying out, "police roll." We ignored her, but one time Ian/I looked up and the distant ridgeline was crawling with these tribal warriors with spears and elaborate headresses. They snaked down the mountain and next thing we knew they were upon us, scaling the walls into our compound. Ian become detached from me and realized that the tribal warriors were in his head and willed them away.

¢ Saw Control, which was an interesting movie about Ian Curtis from the point of view of his wife. Who's to say what Ian Curtis was really thinking towards the end. And in retrospect, it's twisted to think that she would even write a book about it.

¢ I got my download for In Rainbows. Everything in it's right place.

¢ Just cooked up some "Barbecued Babelfish," or monkfish done in the Babel style: First we marinated monkfish and green onions (an encore of this), only this time we marinated first in Japanese ponzu sauce, Moroccan preserved lemons and chili powder we brought back from Morocco. We served it with rice, fesh pico de gallo and a salad with nuts and gorgonzola.

¢ Ode to John Olson, on the occasion of doing the cover for his next book: Backscatter.

¢ I eat lunch at least twice a week at this dive of a Mexican restaraunt called La Poblanita on 38th street near 8th avenue. I would provide a link, but I can't find it on the web. Don't let the looks of it scare you away. They have the best and most authentic Mexican food in the city.

¢ I had coffee today with "Shanghai Sheba".

¢ I'm torn between my hatred of the Yankees and the stupidity of Cleveland's logo.

¢ Another interview, this one on "Men of the Web." Call me a whore. Next thing you know I'll be posing topless for calendars.

¢ We are going to Africa in exactly one month!

¢ Seems to be a slurry of Calamari-related interviews and reviews in the past day or two... review of Part of the World in Rain Taxi, review of Vaast Bin on Anglophile and also an interview with me, a radio interview/reading with Miranda Mellis on The Lit Show, a review of The Night I Dropped Shakeseare on the Cat in Sentence 5, and an interview with brother Markus on MinimalBooks.

¢ Do you ever feel like you're just treading to stay afloat in a turbulent sea of information?

September 2007

¢ I haven't even heard the new Radiohead, In Rainbows, but their custom of commerce alone made be buy it. For more than a penny.

¢ Ah, the joys of being a Mets fan. Fall is suddenly here. I cleaned out the little grill we have on the roof and put it away.

¢ Some interesting goings on this week in NYC: Tomorrow night (9/26) is the opening reception for the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers Exhibition. Thursday night (9/27) at Issue Project Room: Daniel Borzutzky, Shelley Jackson and Deb Olin Unferth. And Friday (9/28) is the opening of the NY Art Book Fair.

¢ Finally finished Ben Okri's The Famished Road. Okri reconfirms for me (someone who has not yet been to Sub-Saharan Africa) what Amos Tutuola had already established in my mind: There is another layer to the African collective unconscious that is more profound than non-Africans can fathom. Not only can we all be genetically linked back to Africa, but memetically the original well of all our dreams lies in Africa. Our growing detachment from this source is our own severance. If their wells run dry, the whole world starves.

¢ We hiked up Slide Mountain yesterday, evidently the highest "mountain" in the Catskills.

¢ Some kind words from The Written Nerd who I met at the Brookly Book Festival. Off upstate early in the morning.

¢ "You are inside the work for so long and it's entirely yours for that time and then it finally comes out and it has nothing to do with you anymore. The distance you feel from the work is striking." -brother Lopez, from an interview in Word Riot. Oh, and speaking of brother Lopez, here's a new Blindster story he has in NOÖ.

¢ Some images inspired by Michael Boyko's The Hour Sets.

¢ We (the "Heavy Ballers") came from behind to win our first game in the NY Urban Professional Basketball League. Woot!

¢ I'll be at the Brooklyn Book Festival tomorrow mongering fish.

¢ Michael Peters' Vaast Bin is now available.

¢ I have a piece in the new LIT, though I haven't seen the issue yet, and I was an idiot and missed the launch party when they were giving them out.

¢ Alexandra Chasin has a new book out from FC2, Kissed By. It includes a piece published in Sleepingfish.

¢ I have an en extra HP 15 ink cartridge from my printer that crapped out. First person to email me gets it free.

¢ Oh, and my handle on Burly Sports is PREE, after Prefontaine.

¢ Burly Sports: this is what I have been working on most of the summer (at my day job).

¢ In the beginning was the word and the word was mud.

¢ Even though Calamari squirt ink, not toner, I got a new color laserjet printer yesterday, and have since printed out over 50 chapbbooks, all with the set of cartridges that came with the printer. With an inkjet I probably would've gone through 3 or 4 cartridges and would not have been able to print that many in one day.

¢ " ...we are always imagining unpredictable deviations from the straight line, mindful of the freedom of atoms and animals." --Miranda Mellis, from her latest Blue Dog.

¢ No field report from New Mexico this time. I only took this one picture (near Santa Rosa).

¢ 3:49:03.95.

¢ Posting from Albuquerque. Eating posole every day and watching thunderstorms. Dug some holes with a post-hole auger. Ran a marathon. Heard coyotes, saw dead rattlesnakes and buffalos getting frisky while I was running.

August 2007

¢ Off to New Mexico to run a marathon and hang under a big sky.

¢ Scored some tickets to Revenge of the Book Eaters (thanks Jack!). Demetri Martin was funny and Feist and Jim James have great voices, but Grizzly Bear stole the show. Speaking of works of art as genes or genomes (see below), Grizzly Bear did this song Marla, that was written by the singer Ed Droste's grandmother, a "failed singer" in the 40s. It was a beautiful song, especially to think that it might have died, had he not revived it. Oh, and it was all to benefit 826NYC.

¢ Read Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History by Franco Moretti. I was intrigued by the idea of it: a quantitiave study of the literary output of the world as a whole. He analyzes the evolution and morphology of the novel through historical times, or at least he sets out to. While the book generated a lot of thought and had some interesting digressions, I think it bit off more than it could chew, or just went on too many random tagents. Still, interesting to think of novels as genomes, that expresses certain traits in some generations, that are somewhat dependent on past novels as a foundation, yet also necessitate mutation (new radically inventive ideas) to continue to survive.

¢ Buyer Beware: As someone who does a LOT of printing and is disgusted by the inflated price of ink, I was interested in the new Kodak Easyshare printers that supposedly saved you 50% on ink. I wasn't deterred by the fact that you couldn't find the printers or ink in any retail stores in NYC, and ordered one online. The result? I'm not sure as the printer never worked! I got a fatal error right out of the box. I dealt with incompetent customer service that sent me a replacement printer head, to no avail, they couldn't fix it. They offered to send me a "refurbished" replacement, and then hassled me about a refund when I asked for one. Bottom line from my experience, nice idea in theory, but they need reliable printer technology and customer service to back them up.

¢ The new Sentence 5 is out, with contents too awesome and vast to summarize in one sentence.

¢ "I was directed to the future, but it is hard for me to part with experience. Before I reached the subway entrance, I turned for a last look. He stood in front of the car, glancing up and down the street. There wasn't a soul in his sight. Not even me. Then he peed. He did not pee like a boy who expects to span a continent, but like a man--in a puddle." --Gracy Paley

¢ We saw Inland Empire the other night. I'm still not sure what to think. It was like watching a 0-0 soccer game that was beautifully played. There were some amazing shots, but the goals are so lofty that nothing went in the net. I'd say a third of the movie was closeups of Laura Dern looking bewildered.

¢ I started reading the The Famished Road by Ben Okri and am hooked.

¢ My knee's been kind of gimpy, so I've only managed to hobble like 16 miles this week before today. But today I had to do my last long run before the marathon. The first 6 miles my knee felt like a rusty hinge. The second 6 miles I was running really fast because it felt better, and I just wanted to get it overwith faster. The third lap I was running with some Irish guy so that helped. The last four miles i was hating life because I ran too fast out of the gate. My total time for the 22 mile run was just under 3 hours. My knee doesn't hurt anymore.

¢ Anglerfish have been on mind lately. There's one in the novel (Our Mother is a Fish) I'm working on. The anglerfish is not my mother, but my brother. To get in the spirit, we ate monkfish (a type of anglerfish). We grilled it with lemon, ponzu, sesame oil and spices, along with some shitakes, onions and aspargus. Here's how it came out.

¢ Ever wonder what makes The Edge's guitar so unique? The answer is e.

¢ Went to see the Richard Serra exhibit at the MOMA, but the line was around the block. Is it just me, or does everything seem like a ride at Disneyland these days? I saw an exhibit of his like 10 or 15 years ago, but it would have been nice to "see" some of his newer work as pictures don't do them justice. But not worth fighting the crowds.

¢ Picked up a copy of Soft Targets 2.1. It contains quite an eclectic and wide-ranging mix of text and art, and some excerpts and additional works online.

¢ Went for a 21 mile run. What a difference it makes when it's like 50 degrees out and not 80. There was a bunch of annoying roadrunners running in packs taking up the whole road, so half the time I was trying to find convoluted ways to avoid them. I don't understand why people feel a need to cluster together when running. Actually, that seems to be true in general of people. You can be in an empty subway car or restaurant and people will sit right next to you.

¢ Jess is back from Africa, here's a few images she brought back from Senegal and Nigeria.

¢ To all ye BK endorsers, Simpsonize this, my pitbull!

¢ For those that endured my bitching about my living situation last year (expressing itself in weird ways), I finally had my day in court with the slumlord. The first time I have ever been in any sort of courtroom, besides jury duty. During these strange ritualistic proceedings, with 50 other cases going on simultaenously, I amused myself by thinking how not that far along from chimpanzees we are, or perhaps even behind. The only thing on the far wall of the courtoom were huge words, "In God We Trust." What the fuck is that all about?

¢ The new Time Out New York has an article on small presses in NY, including Calamari Press.

¢ Ric Royer sent me this intriguing little book & CD of annotated artifcats that sees doubles in all their glory: There Was One & It Was Two.

¢ "Literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses to acknowledge "reality", but because it is not a priori certain that language functions according to principles which are those, or which are like those, of the phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language." -Paul De Man

¢ Ran around the park 3 times in 2:32. Ate 1/2 a cantaloupe filled with blueberries. Now I'm working on a novel. I'm at page 60 of rewrites, out of 180. I wrote the first draft 10 years ago. It's called Our Mother the Fish.

¢ My better half is still in Africa. Here's some pictures she posted from Ghana.

¢ I long for the days of Meat Puppets II before it became redefined as Meatpuppets 2.0. The funny thing is that the word was first newsworthy in the 2.0 sense in this article in the Washington Post about this Ruckus scam on Facebook, and Mike Bebel, who owns and heads Ruckus, used to be my boss at Napster.

¢ Miranda Mellis, er Flower, is writing a new serial novel she is putting online called Every Day She Makes a New Blue Dog. The world is ripe and ready for more blue dogs.

July 2007

¢ In addition to a few myspace pages, now I have a facebook page. I swear, it's only R&D for my job! I started a group if you're on facebook and care to join, Book Objects, the Dying Art form. The most recent question I posed was, is a book a book if a tree never falls?

¢ When the moon is full, I shave my head. 28-day stubble is all I can stand these days.

¢ Just got back from an 18 mile run, 3 laps around Central Park. It looked like it might rain on the 1st lap (49 mins). Up at the top of the park, a bunch of Senegalese were gathering, with their colorful robes and radiant black skin, appropriate since Jess arrived in Dakar this morning. Also saw a peregrine falcon. On the 2nd lap (51 mins) I wasn't thinking about much of anything. At the top of the park there were even more West Africans, singing and drumming, like they were staging for a parade or a protest (can't find anything in the news about it). By the 3rd lap (54 mins) I had to keep telling my body to shut up. I oscillated between a false euphoria and denial. At the top of cat hill, I saw this transexual named Tatiana that used to sit in on my quantum physics classes in Tucson (anyone at U of A in the early 90s would know who he/she was). When I got to the top of the park the Senegalese were gone, so they must have gone off to their parade or protest. As Gump would say, "I'm tired now."

¢ Finished most of the stories in The Apolcalypse Reader, quite a fine collection that Justin Taylor put together. Looks like there's a reading from it on July 29th in Portland with Brian Evenson, Lucy Corin and Justin Taylor if you are in the area.

¢ Andrew Richmond has put up a series of his fictions on his KnifePower site.

¢ I sent Michael Peters' Vaast B1n to the printers. Here's some excerpts, a trailer and a peak at the cover to tie you over.

¢ My better half flew off to Ghana last night. I'm in the doghouse for almost three weeks.

¢ Just ran 16 miles, starting at Strawberry Fields, across the park, past the MOMA east all the way to Carl Schurz park where we used to live and run when we first moved to NYC, down along the East River until you are forced to cut back in along First avenue past the UN, cutting back over to the East River and down, near where we lived and ran in the East Village, then further down near where we lived and ran in the LES, under all three bridges, past the now closed down Fulton Fish Market (where I took this picture that was on the first Sleepingfish) to Battery Park, blew a kiss to lady liberty then headed up the west side, past where I worked at pressplay, where I saw the towers fall from, to Riverside park at 74th street.

¢ This guy got what he deserved! Ha Ha. Anyone that drives an SUV, especially a Hummer, should get this treatment.

¢ I also recently received the new Cranky, which has an interesting postcard interview with Michael Martone.

¢ Received a copy of Carousel 21 from some nice folks in the great white north. Lots of interesting "hybrid media" to look-read.

¢ The best things in life are free, yet why is it that people feel a need to buy it at such an expense?

¢ Finished The Age of Sinatra, the sequel to David Ohle's Motorman, which I reviewed here. Mondenke returns from The Forgetting even more disenfranchised than ever, with bountiful neut gland eating, oozing flocculus (never has sex with alien life forms been so appealing) and other guilty pleasures umbrellaed under an absurdly random judicial system. And now I'm finding out there's yet another new one from Soft Skull, Pisstown Chaos. Holy Ohle!

¢ Holly Tavel makes excellent use of Foster's found photographs in this piece from Diagram 7.3.

¢ Ran from our apartment on 74th street along the Hudson down to the southern tip of Manhattan and back, around 14 miles in 1:47 (faster on the way back). Then we went to Brighton Beach. Read the first half of the The Age of Sinatra by David Ohle.

¢ Ran Fartleks this morning, only because I like the word and to break up the monotony of long runs and to push my natural pace. My version included 6 half-mile sprints between 2:55 and 3:10 each (on uneven terrain with hills), inspersed with walking and jogging. I'd like to get these down to 2:30 each.

¢ Pictures and video medleys from Femi Kuti's show last night in Central Park.

¢ "In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn." --Robert Bringhurst, from The Elements of Typographic Style

¢ Just saw Design for the Other 90% at the Cooper-Hewitt. I liked the idea of the exhibit better than the presentation, maybe because it was weird to see these objects in a museum setting with "don't touch," signs as opposed to in use in the field. You can probably gleen more from their website, in particular the Q-Drum is brilliant and useful, as is the Pot-in-Pot Cooler.

¢ In anticipation for publishing his next one, Tortoise, I read This Guy by James Lewlling. Ran 12 miles.

¢ Christian Tebordo has a new book, Better Ways of Being Dead, that looks interesting.

¢ Just watched Jan Svankmajer's collected short films. The DVD als contains some of his poems, collages and artwork. Here's something on YouTube. I sense he doesn't enjoy eating much.

¢ If you're in need of a global reality check, queue up Darwin's Nightmare by French filmaker Hubert Sauper. And be sure to watch the extra movie on the DVD about the Congo in 1997, Kisangani Diary. But not if you plan on getting a good night's sleep.

¢ Noon 2007 has some fine new work by the likes Kim Chinquee, Christine Schutt, Deb Olin Unferth and Gary Lutz, as well as two very interesting dissective essays on Lutz translated from French. Deb Olin Unferth and Gary Lutz are also reading this evening at Magnetic Field. I myself am too tired to go--having just run 12 miles I plan to sit on my ass the rest of the day. My goal in running this marathon is not a time, so much as a time concept, which is to do a negative split (where the second half is faster than the first). In preparation, I just ran the first lap (6 miles) of central park in 48 minutes, and the second lap in 46 minutes. If I could keep that up for twice as long I'd be happy.

June 2007

¢ Some images from Poste Restante are in The Tiny. I ran 6 muggy miles in 47 minutes.

¢ Blaise Aguera y Arcas gives new meaning to photosynthesis.

¢ Here's some pics and video footage of yesterday's Mermaid Parade in Coney Island.

¢ I shaved my head and ran 10 miles in 82 minutes. Yesterday a pigeon pooped on my right hand.

¢ Gary Lutz' new chapbook, Partial List of People to Bleach, is out. Here's the cover I did for it.

¢ mIEKAL aND and his son Zon in the NY Times!

¢ I've listened to Roscoe by Midlake about 50 times in the past 24 hours. It won't let go of me.

¢ Bloomberg declaring himself independent is the most promising political news I've heard in the past decade. Let's hope he makes a run for it. Speaking of running, I ran 6 miles in 46:13, my first time running with a watch in a while. I suspect I run faster without one, but one can never know. It's like a quantum physics conundrum. Or maybe it's more like fishing without a measuring tape or scale--the fish always seem bigger.

¢ I put some of my old songs up on MySpace.

¢ Rick Moody, Brian Evenson, Gary Lutz, Deb Olin Unferth and Justin Taylor will all be reading at The Strand on Thursday June 21 at 7 PM.

¢ I got to the end of The Road. An appropriate read for the fatherless like me on father's day.

¢ My personal philosophy about Starbucks is that I output more liquid there than I input, and so far by my count I think I'm liters ahead. But how does this philosophy apply to Sonic Youth putting out a record on the Starbucks label? Can you undo listening to music? Is there any hope? This, as I read 80 more pages of a book from Oprah's book club.

¢ I read the first 73 pages of The Road. I ran 8 miles.

¢ "The Revisionist seems not only to be an assemblage of ruin, but an assemblage of assemblages..." from a review by Blake Butler in Bookslut.

¢ Since I didn't get in the New York Marathon, I entered the New Mexico Marathon on Sept. 2. That gives me 12 weeks to train, so basically I need to do a long run once a week that gets 2 miles longer each week, starting with a base of 6 which is what I normally do. I mapped it out, and my total mileage over these 12 weeks will be 420 miles. This morning I ran 4 miles, though I don't know at what pace, I don't wear a watch. I also bike 4 miles a day to and from work. I've got some ground to cover this summer.

¢ We live in a world where information is no longer peer-reviewed or necessarily based on truth. Whether old dogs like Britannica like it or not, the most interesting and engaging memes will survive, regardless of validity. The double irony is that they are using a blog forum to bash blogs and "web 2.0" (I mean, isn't that term passé already?), and everyone, including me, that is responding to it are contributing to the value of that post by lashing back and linking to it. Bottom line: truth is boring.

¢ Somebody is selling a few of my old chapbooks for $80+ on Amazon. Pity the fool that buys them there when they can just buy them from me or Powell's for like $5 or $6. I noticed because I was checking out the "search inside" feature that is now available for most of the Calamari Press books.

¢ I didn't make the NYC Marathon lottery. Oh well, guess I can always just make up my own one man marathon. Far less hassle and far cheaper.

¢ Harp & Altar looks to be a promising newish literary online magazine, now on its second issue with a great cover, I think by Josh Dorman.

¢ Jess got back from Kenya yesterday. Here's some pics that she took while she was there.

¢ I did this wordless interview with Deron Bauman. Check it out.

¢ Tonight is Gary Lutz, Norman Lock and Eugene Marten at the Issue Project Room. An event not to be missed! It's the last event in the old oil silo before they move to a new space.

¢ It's here! Good, Brother: the long lost movie based on the short story by Peter Markus.

¢ I've been uploading book data and cover art to Amazon, and the covers for Poste Restante and Sleepingfish 0.9375 keep getting rejected. I guess the expectation is that a book cover should have the title explicitly on it? That's silly.

¢ I felt like inverting the site today.

¢ Sometimes I wonder how many people, in their web searches, come across this site intentionally, or by accident, and what gives me greater satisfaction. Last month, 53 people found this site looking for "ass," (in particular, 7 for "Brazilian ass"), 45 were searching for "white sand," 13 for "conch piercing," 9 were looking for the "Mayan underworld," 7 were looking for "Objects in mirror closer than they appear," 6 for "train toilet," 4 for "dinosaurs," (1 in particular for "purple dinosaur mascot rental"), 4 for "scary ostrich," (1 in particular for "zombie ostrich"), 4 were looking for the "tombstone of Marie Curie," 3 for "pantyhose cocoon," 2 for a "camel leather smell," another 2 for "turkey nipples" and 1 lost soul was searching for a " girl behind chicken wire coughing up ghosts."

May 2007

¢ Oh, and speaking of food preparation and delivery, Gary Lutz will be in The Kitchen tonight.

¢ Dabbawallas! What a concept. India's system of home-cooked food delivery is as awe-inspiring as a walk-thru of B&H in terms of the precise elegance of it's complex organizational infrastructure.

¢ We were an itchy finger click away from squandering all of our frequent flyer miles and then some on plane tickets to London to see FOALS in August, we think they are that good. Then our senses got the better of us, I guess. In the meantime, here's some more tracks and videos to check out while we wait for them to put out an album or come play here. Just when you thought there was no hope for humanity...

¢ My first real go at Mexipanese food.

¢ Review of the last issue of Sleepingfish in NewPages.

¢ duncan barlow put some pics up on his blog of the Sleepingfish launch party in Denver that he also organized. Thanks duncan!

¢ I've got some work in the new Versal, a fine journal out of the Netherlands.

¢ The other half of the Sleepingfish launch party is this Saturday May 26, if you happen to be in the neighborhood of Denver where there seems to be a disproportionate number of good writers. The likes of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Noah Eli Gordon, Duncan Barlow, J'Lyn Chapman, Sara Veglahn and Erik Anderson will be delivering their words. It's at some antique furniture boutique called Fancy Tiger. I only wish I could be there.

¢ Movie of the slideshow that never happened at