Friday, February 29, 2008

Braindead-of-Winter Activity Number Five

Spend your extra day during the year working at your office job. Chuckle mindlessly when the Starbucks lady says calories don't count today because today doesn't really exist. Wonder if you might actually be friends with this Starbucks lady if a counter didn't separate you. Decide you wouldn't.

Order decaf.

braindead-of-winter activity #4: create a mindless journal like this dude.


This Robert Shields is super effin' awesome.

He has written the world's longest diary about...nothing. It really is about nothing.

When you hear him read some of the excerpts you'll believe me. Also Robert Shields is insane.

I heart Robert Shields. He is my new role model.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

braindead-of-winter in the animal kingdom


At the risk of morally offending Kathy by turning this into a cat blog, I just have to say: this kitten has the right idea.

Braindead Activity Number Three


Do the dishes, make a large dinner, and then do the dishes again. Then drink half a glass of water, but don't do that dish.


After that, it will be ten o'clock and time for bed.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Braindead of Winter Month - Activity 2


A friend of a friend shows Pomeranians because he says it is the one thing in his life that's completely pointless. Activity two is to do something creatively pointless, something you are not good at, something half-assed. I made half a painting. I might finish it someday, but for now, I am basking in its empty whiteness and half-finished microphone.

Braindead-of-Winter Month Activity #1

Remember those orange-juice popsicles your mom used to make in an ice tray with toothpicks as the sticks? Or if you were super lucky you had one of those popsicle-maker-tupperware containers?

This month, fill ice trays or popsicle-maker-tupperware-containers with tap water. Freeze and enjoy the taste of nothingness. If you need a warm pick-me-up, try boiling water and drinking it like a flavorless tea.


Monday, February 25, 2008

It's still Braindead-of-Winter Week


My fingernails are growing at an alarming rate. I am looking forward to finishing laundry this evening. Mood categorization: resigned.


All signs point to Braindead-of-Winter Week's continuation.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

quilted poems

sometimes i feel shocked when non-literary organizations talk about poems in a way that is not stupid. like apartment therapy learned me about cento poems just now, and if apartment therapy were a human i would marry it or at least stalk it until it issued a restraining order. please love me back, apartment therapy. you are wonderful.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Vote for Brady!


I'm about a year late on the the "news" that Jan and Marcia Brady used to make out. A few days ago, I saw on a very reliable news program (that one that isn't Entertainment Tonight) that Marcia Brady is starring in a country-themed reality show with Bobby Brown where she smokes, chews tobacco and has a "girl crush" on a somewhat attractive female country singer I've never heard of. Marcia Brady for President! Click here to hear her say something scandalous YouTube won't let me uh, embed.

Remember when Marcia and Greg ran against each other for class president? Me neither. But I bet it could provide some useful campaign tips for Barack and Hillary.

hillz is just the best

i love that hillary. i don't have cable so all i saw of the debates last night on the news was hillary jabbing obama for "xeroxing his speeches." but she's so wonderful. lookit.



Thursday, February 21, 2008

alls i wanna do is look at other people's apartments

i have given up all of my previous dreams and now my one goal in life is to have an apartment featured on apartment therapy. wouldn't it be awesome to have a card catalog in your apartment? or to have a headboard constructed out of tiny ikea mirrors? or to have white lacquer floors?

all i have thought about for the last couple of weeks is fabric and color palettes.

i am lost to the world.

Alls I wanna do is look at cupcakes that I will not bake


That seems like a Braindead-of-Winter week activity. You should look at cupcakes and not eat them, too. Like here and here.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Braindead-of-Winter Week



I hereby nominate this week Braindead-of-Winter week. February has succeeded in turning me into a total zombie who does nothing but stay home, eat cereal, and grade papers.

That's right. My brain's so dead that Braindead-of-Winter Week starts on a Wednesday. During this week, you don't have to write anything on our blog that has meaning or makes sense, you don't have to think about anything or have conversations or brush your teeth. You can just curl up in a ball in the corner of your bed, or the corner of your room, or the corner of your office, or the corner of yourself and exist as a shapeless, colorless, brainless blob.

If you read something, it should only be a blank stack of paper; if you watch anything, it should be a fuzzy non-channel on your tv that looks like a snowstorm; if you eat anything, it should be pureed flavorless in your blender and then microwaved for way too long until it achieves the consistency of overcooked oatmeal. If you exercise, do so only on an exercise bike with zero resistance--no hills, no increase in heart rate, no sense of satisfaction afterwards. Breathe only dead air that smells of nothing.

Know what sucks?


Smoking/butts week, that's what. And also maybe Venom Literati as a whole for not being able to get our shiz together.


Let's make next week the Week.


This week is Scattered by Too Much Caffeine Week for me.


Hey, has everybody seen Kanye's (and Spike Jonze's) video for Flashing Lights? It's so awesome.


My horoscope says today is a good day for research and making new moves toward success. I love believing in my horoscope. I love making vague things mean what I want them to mean. I love hope. I love caffeine.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

You guys, I can walk!


I am currently sitting upright! Isn't that awesome? Also, I am in elimae right now. Here I am!


That's a lot of exclamation points, I know. And writers hate those, I know. I used to, too, but I am on the internet for the first time in four days, and I'm feeling a little giddy.


When I am sick, all I want to eat is fried chicken and chocolate chip cookies. And I do not eat fried chicken.


So, this week is smoking-and-butts week, no? Send in your smoking/butts literature to venomliterati@gmail.com. Terrible puns permitted (within reason), but not required. Also, I think it's fair that submissions may address the issue of either smoking or butts.

Friday, February 15, 2008

let me read it, then burn it


The debate about whether Nabokov's weirdo opera-singing, race-car driving son should burn Nabokov's unfinished final novel "The Original of Laura" continues here. I'm of the fascistic opinion that anyone who can correctly pronounce Nabokov's name should get to read it (so no Sting fans), then we should throw it in the Volga.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Why MFA in Writing Programs Suck


I feel like ranting today. I hope lots of people argue with me about this. (click here or read below)

Why MFA Programs Suck: A Partial List

Every year around this time, middle class college graduates who hate their terrible jobs start thinking of ways to escape them. Joining the circus requires coordination and years of training. Becoming a massage therapist means touching unattractive people. And a new incoming class packs up their boxes of crap and takes two years off work to drink, take or not take psychiatric medication, in short, live the lifestyle of decadence, sloth and (occasional) productiveness that the upper classes have enjoyed for centuries. So why does everyone hate MFA programs?

The MFA in writing sucks for the same reasons that it sucks that your great granddad squandered the family fortune on gambling debts and Wild Turkey or that your grandmother packed up her ten kids and moved to Spokane during the Depression: you aren’t rich. Because you aren’t rich, you have certain expectations about what education will do and you have certain financial realities that may or may not have anything to do with those expectations.

That the programs are administered by and for the middle class; that their (unspoken) claim is to remove graduates from the tediousness of said class, to provide Freedom; and that everyone involved knows this is impossible are a few of the many reasons the MFA machine sucks.

Yes, there are hobby-professors and a handful of students who can more than afford tuition. These are the same students who won’t mind that their future career, adjuncting at six different colleges, pays almost nothing. In fact, they can afford to adjunct at only the better crappy schools, to hold out for the best among crappy jobs. But most of the people in these programs are middle-class people writing various genres of middle-class literature to be published by (who knows) and read by (again who knows). If MFA programs, indeed any academic or artistic pursuit, really removed people from the social and economic classes into which they were born, then what are your professors still doing there?

It is easy to become embittered, just as it is easy to take out four credit cards and charge up $12,000 in six months. Virginia Woolf said one only needs a room. I must’ve missed the part about sitting in that room next to a space heater through a soul-crushing Chicago winter, pretending to be one’s own secretary when receiving calls from one’s collection agencies.

Part of the backlash against these programs is due to their accessibility. Anyone who can fill out a FAFSA form and write a few short stories or poems has a respectable chance of getting into some program, somewhere. And the success stories from the major programs: a handful of writers of predictable fiction (and it is always fiction) produce the types of predictable books that publishers think people want to read.

Workshop-y fiction is likened to Socialist Realism. If only! Writers in Stalinist Russia who didn’t end up in the gulag enjoyed a rather affluent lifestyle, while their neighbors fought for potatoes. Even Stalin had his literary pet-projects. Bulgakov did not care for his self-appointed guardian and wrote a letter attempting to free himself, but at least the threat of death was exciting; he never suffered the indignity of someone with absolutely no power sighing over his manuscript and saying, “this bit about Pontius Pilate has a bit of the baggy elephant to it.”

MFA programs suck. There’s no question. But only because the best of them offer a temporary social transformation, the worst, tedium. Thank God or the empty meaningless universe that we have the privilege of being born in a country where one can borrow $80,000 from the government for education, where one doesn’t have to work three factory jobs to provide herself with barely enough tortillas not to starve, to face political persecution or war or famine. Sure, get an MFA. Borrow tens of thousands of dollars. Write the most amazing fiction or poetry or whatever that you want. Be as marketable or unmarketable, as experimental or careerist as you feel like. Go crazy, literally or otherwise. But don’t expect never-ending freedom. If it’s not one factory, it’s another. And you are not Virginia Woolf.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Let's make another week


You guys, I still miss Pee Week. I think the only way to get over it is by making another week of something. Let's decide of what, and then have this week next week. My vote is that it be something juvenile, like butts or boogers or something. Thoughts?


Also, I think we should call our weeks of immature literature "juvenile offenders." And plus also too, I am kidding about that.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

What, I go to South Beach for a long weekend and everybody stops posting?


Abby and I are back from the land of eating disorders, hooray! While there, I read part of a book by a French dude; I cannot remember the title or the author. It was about a self-obsessed guy with a complicated and boring revenge fantasy about a bottle of wine and one of Sophie Calle's birthday parties. Okay, from I just learned the title and author from the Wikipedia entry, but I don't want to start this entry over. That's his picture though. I like pictures of people smoking. I left the book accidentally on-purpose in my friend's apartment. I bought it because it had a shiny gold cover.


It was warm there. I like the ocean a lot. I am still pale.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

kathryn regina for president of space


Kathy was right. Robert Lopez's novel "Part of the World" is what we should've been reading all along. Anyone who has stumbled onto this blog looking for shirtless pictures of Barack Obama should read this book too.

Excerpt here

Smokers For Obama!



So I am super disappointed. First of all because this post looks like shit because I tried to fit two pictures in. Second because I've spent a good portion of this morning looking for pics of Barack lighting up a cig, and all I've been able to find is this probably fake, probably airbrused one. I think this is a huge mistake on the part of Barack's campaign advisors. Because he is sucking it up with Latino voters, clearly he should be trying to make up for this deficit by fighting for the Smokers' Vote.

Everybody who has gone to college knows that the only cool people you ever meet during class are found outside the English Philosophy building between classes. Smoking. Look at JFK there, thoughtfully smoking while his brain runs amok with revolutionary thoughts...look how much more brilliant he looks with a cig in his mouth...I will admit that Barack looks more angry than thoughtful in his smoker pic, like he just lost a bunch of money at the racetrack, but whatevs. You get the point. He should be put on national TV in a big leather chair in front of a fireplace, wearing only a red, crushed velvet smoking jacket and drinking a brandy and chain smoking while he talks about Nietzsche and about how he, Barack, is the Ubermensch. And that we are all the Ubermensch. And that we shall inherit the earth.

Sorry girls, I like Hillary and all, but she will never look cool smoking a cig. I think she would grip it so tightly that it would completely deflate between her lips.

I anxiously await your hate mail about this post and the negative image I am propagating of Barack by publishing this picture. Also, I personally nominate myself to run the "Get the Smoke Out" portion of Barack's campaign.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

barack and hillary are totally going to subscribe to our rss feed

we got a bunch of hilarious hater comments yesterday on our post "Barack Obama is Totally Black Now" and we were wondering how these people suddenly found our blog. then we realized that if you google image search barack obama, we come up second! which means that when barack obama google images himself at night, our blog comes up. and when hillary google images barack at night, our blog comes up. i am posting this picture in hopes that we'll get bill to join the literati.

I am running out of room under my bed and on that one shelf in the study


A couple of years ago, right after we had 1000 CDs printed, the band that was Abby and me decided to go on hiatus. Semi-permanent hiatus.


Right now, we are considering doing covers of songs that we like or think are funny like Flo Rida's Low, or Bed by J. Holiday. "I'm gonna love you till your eyes roll back!" But that is the future.


In the meantime, we have approximately 800 unsold, un-given-away copies of our album of original music: I'll Be Your Food.


Do you even know what 800 CDs looks like? It's a lot. It's like the entire underside of a king-sized bed, plus a 12-inch shelf. We live in an apartment with two closets. We have no storage because of our CD-printing folly.


Do you want one? You can totally buy a copy at CD Baby. Or else, you can just email me at venomliterati@gmail.com, and I'll give you a deep discount. Like really deep.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

i wonder what hillary clinton is doing right now

i wish there was a live satellite feed on hillary clinton today. i want to watch her. i bet she is sitting in a chair in her den doing interviews whilst chelsea fixes her hair and fluffs her pillows.

sarah just had a that's-so-raven vision that chelsea is going to be president in 30 years.

i found pictures of all of the candidate's houses. huckabee's is the smallest. i am the most jealous of mitt romney's. guiliani has a cigar room. wasteful. mccain lives in a luxury condo in phoenix. lame.

if there was a live satellite feed on me today you would see me sitting at a desk that is too high for me so that my feet don't touch the ground. i am checking my gmail every 60 seconds. i am changing my status message every 15 minutes to reflect my most current emotions. i am drinking hot chocolate. right now it is papa bear. i am waiting for it to be baby bear. i am writing something about financial staffing. i am coughing. i am thinking about hillary clinton.

Monday, February 4, 2008

I have a bad attitude today


It is messing with my spelling. For example, I spelled it attitute in the title, and it took me several beats to recognize what was wrong. Also, it took me three tries on architecture in an article I was writing earlier today. I kept throwing another h in there: Architechture. And then I started thinking about how that could be the name of an architecture firm with some sort of proprietary technological tool.


But that was a particularly businesswomanly thought, so it made me sad to think it.


Plaxico. Plaxico plaxico plaxico. That is a football player's name. I think it is crazy awesome. I may change my name to Plaxica. Because I am a girl, so clearly I could not be named Plaxico. That is just too wild.


Also, I'm cranky. But then Kathy gave me hot chocolate so I feel slightly better. It is, however, lacking whipped cream. See? Bad attitude. Not even hot chocolate can make me truly happy.