Ch. 25: First Circle, Limbo, as narrated by Kashmir

At the edge of the suburban-green field, inside the White Castle, Socrates and Plato hold either end of the broom. Ovid bends nearly in half but it isn’t flexible enough to squeak under without bumping his manboobs.

“Too many Slyders!!!” the philosophers cry out in unison, and double over in hysterical laughter.

“I, Kashmir, am not impressed. I shall slip under easy-breezy as a miracle.”

And I do! Of course I do! I am about to inherit the Oprah Show! I am Kashmir, free and gorgeous as a nineteen-year old named Kashmir! I float under as if levitating inches above the ground!

Really I don’t feel gorgeous at all. TYRA will have nothing to do with me now that she’s on this mission, which has made me fall hard in love with her. Also, she keeps asking the Charming Man for philosophical advice, which really irks me, because he keeps saying things like “We’ve all had our buttons pushed to the point where we feel like we need to stab people in the face, but in the end the buttons belong to us: we are the ones who must deal with and take ownership of them. The more we take responsibility for our own buttons, the more we sew them tightly onto our stylish pea coats instead of letting them be pushed, the less tender they will be.”

“Exactly,” Kathy says. “That’s it exactly. That’s like, totally the philosophy behind my Animalfits™.”

“What the fuck? What the fuck does that mean? Kathy, explain to me in your own words what that means.”

“Oh Kashmir, it’s beyond words. Duh. You have to be…connected with the Universe to get it.”

Tyra nods in a faux-intelligent way, but it’s clearly just a front for lust.
She wanders off and shoves her face in in a to-go box of Slyders like it’s a trough, fighting off the plus-sized models with flailing backhands. Why can’t she see that she’s just like me, insecure and desperate; why can’t she see that we are twins? All she’s got on her mind is gorging. It’s part of our “Oprah destruction training.” We’ve stopped at every Burger King along the way. Her ass is getting beyond plus-sized.

puddin’ asks if she can please have an iceburg salad please, no dressing.

TYRA says: “Nu-uhh, Girlfriend. You’ll eat another cheeseburger and orgasm all over it. And you won’t vomit it up this time. We’re marching toward my dream, Girlfriend. Do you understand?”

puddin’ slinks off into the corner, bitching into her voice recorder; Caravaggio and a wave of tiny animals following in her wake.

“Sorry pud, It’s Slyders or nothing,” says Plato. “This is the awesome thing that happens to geniuses who are totally too smart to believe in God. We get to hang out at White Castle, talk existentialism, and eat Slyders all our lives! And Slyders are like crack! And existentialism is like crack!”

“God is not like crack—I don’t get how people get so addicted. He’s more like that Pinch-Punch thing you just gave me: mean and vile. We are totally not grieving our separation from Him like we’re supposed to,” says Socrates. “How can one grieve when there are Slyders everywhere you turn, just waiting to be thrown in the microwave?”

“Limbo, however, is the least joyous pastime on earth,” says Ovid. “Plus it just makes me feel old and fat. That’s the only part of the deal that sucks.”

“People, people, shut the fuck up; it’s mandatory viewing time.”

I put on the MANAGER nametag and the MANAGER hat and tell everybody to sit their bitch asses down while I set up the projector. Two hundred hours and six boxes of Slyders later, Ovid says:

“I like the part where Caravaggio tears out all of his hair while he’s flying the kite. But the rest is crap. Plus the sex scenes are nasty. What’s going on with his balls?”

“It’s all crap because it’s art,” says Plato. “Art is not life. Art is so fucking lowly. I’m going back to my cave now to gorge myself on Slyders until I fall into a restless, pornographic sleep. I’m dreaming of Bette Midler rubbing Slyders all over her frontside tonight. Slyders are all I dream about.”

TYRA says: “I totally know how you feel; me, too,” and her eyes bulge with empathy like plus-sized marbles.

TYRA has never said that to me. But she will, oh, she will.

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chris killen has done another funny thing

chris killen is my favorite internet comedian. i found a new funny thing that he did today: BEST WEBSITE EVER.COM

Tyra's writing about the Pinch Punch

Probably. It's called Modelland. On her website it says: "pronounced Model Land."

We should review this. Tyra update!

Pinch Punch Ch. 24: Everybody, Observe and Mimic the Charming Man in his Steadfast Confidence!

Nobody knows where he got the striped walking stick to pump up and down as he do-si-dos in place by the impenetrable steel door. It can’t have been his item of questionable existence. It is a stick. It can’t have fit in his rollerboard. Maybe it’s collapsible.

The Charming Man simply waits for us to join him in his vigil. So confident, so certain that TYRA will emerge with the skeleton key at the witching hour and spring us. It’s infectious, this hope. The howling girl has placed her head at his feet, gently massaging the bicep on his pumping arm.

Time elapses; hope is eclipsed.

We gauge expression and calculate at what point it will be rude for us to return to our rooms. I ready my feet to slink off to go sew neckties for the tiny monkeys, but I catch sight of a doe-eyed young woman with a prominent forehead standing barefoot among us. She looks like a catalog model, face de-lacquered and free of lines.

It is she, brimming with as much faith as any of us, traces of evil shooting around her head like electrons. Our attention is drawn to her naturally, and any misgivings any of us possessed wisp away. She is TYRA, inheritor of all things tangible and intangible, our savior, our guide, our one and only. We would follow her into hell. And we do.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the lovely and disturbing Ray Cline

New Blog

You should check out this new blog, McCarty's blog. I don't know why I'm posting a picture of the puppet bike, because it has nothing to do with her new blog, which I'm pretty sure is not about puppets.

Pinch Punch Ch. 23: A Subliminal Revolt

The rumblings started at the animal level. Tiny monkeys whispered revolution to the martens who whispered it to the piglets and the chain began. They told me I was the first human to hear them speak, and I chose to believe them. The second floor, Sunday morning—revolt? TYRA will know. Kashmir is her little bitch, and the piglets trust everyone.

Kashmir is the only one TYRA would ever listen to, but only subconsciously, only in mid-dream. Caravaggio is the only one Kashmir would ever listen to, also only subconsciously, also only in mid-dream.

Caravaggio wants out more than anybody. I bribe him with a fourth color of fingerpaint and four switchblades. I hand him the subliminal message-lies the tiny monkeys have written to imbed in Kashmir’s miniseries:

You are better than TYRA. You are better than TYRA. You are waaaay fuckin’ better than TYRA, and definitely more voluptous. Plus you want Kathy to become waaay famous for her Animalfits. Way more famous than you. Plus you want Caravaggio to earn his redemption from the Pope. (He will even give you the saucy red shoes you’ve been lusting after!) And we have to get out of here to do any of that. You hate the effin’ Pinch Punch and its vats of despair. You must lure TYRA out into the forest and over to Oprah’s studio where we will all stab the tits off Oprah and also stab TYRA to death; then you can take over not only TYRA’s show, but also Oprah’s, and make a miniseries about their lives of sin. But first you must record a subliminal message, in your sexy, rascally voice, and play it to her in her sleep, for she will listen only to you.

Two hundred hours later, after reel one of the miniseries, Kashmir disappears under the floorboards, emerges in TYRA’s room with a brilliant idea, and whispers in her ears all night long.

TYRA, TYRA love. TYRA baby. You are better than that. You are God—do you know you are God? You are absolutely GOD. Oprah is not God, as you may have been deluded into believing, just as the rest of us have. God is you. You are God. You are this. This is you. G-O-D is spelled T-Y-R-A. Plus you want Kathy to become waaay famous for her Animalfits. Way more famous than you. Plus you want Caravaggio to earn his redemption, and for I, Kashmir, to take over alongside you until I stab your tits and Oprah’s tits, at which point I will take over the world—wait, I didn’t just tell you that. Erase that part. Anyway, Sunday morning you will unlock the front gate of the Pinch Punch, and we shall all escape together, in one clump, and cartwheel across the lawn on our way to murder Oprah and all of her cronies. Sunday morning 3 am you will unlock the gate and we shall flee the Pinch Punch and its self-esteem-destroying liquers.

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Barbaric yAWP and Venom Literati Present Deborah Brandon

The wonderful Deborah Brandon reads "bloom-ing."

bloom-ing (for venom literati) from on Vimeo.

deborah brandon lives in tucson. by day, she helps her toddler form, from a previously unintelligible mash of sound, words such as 'potty' and 'elbow.' deborah reverts into her own intricate gibberish, sometimes writing it down, after everyone else is fast asleep.

more yAWP! "Cars" by Meghan Austin

Click here to listen to Meghan Austin reading her short story "Cars". You really need to listen to it. There's a soundtrack involved, with beats from crunchywhite.com. It is amazing.

Meghan Austin is a writer trying to escape Chicago.

yAWP continues - Miki Howald and John Heckman Wright

Miki Howald, reading two poems recently published in Ariel journal:



Miki Howald writes nonfiction essays and prose poems. Her work has been published in Gulf Coast, Like Water Burning, swap/concessions #4, Ariel, and in several online journals and zines. She has performed her work at the 2009 AWP Conference, Reconstruction Room, the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the First Friday Reading Series in Anchorage, AK, and the Quiet Storm café in Pittsburgh, PA. Miki was a semi-finalist in the 2009 and 2006 Guild Complex of Chicago's non-fiction prose contests. She is a former co-organizer, webmaster, and blog writer of the Reconstruction Room reading series in Chicago. Miki earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska Anchorage and a BA from the University of Pittsburgh.


John Heckman Wright, reading from his novel in progress:


John Heckman Wright is a writer, bedroom DJ, and outdoor enthusiast who lives in Portland, Oregon. His website is at http://www.johnheckmanwright.com/.

And now we read: yAWP!

The ladies of Venom Literati pawned our diamond ring collections and invested in webcams. Listen to us read. Watch our lips as they form words:

What did people do before the internet?

I should be able to remember this. It was not around for my whole life. I learned to type on a typewriter. A nun taught me.

James Sturm is quitting. I feel like quitting, too. The internet, that is.

Entry Day II: Kathy’s POV

A new resident has brought in a unicycle as his item of questionable existence, and the plus-sized models are a-flurry with excitement. TYRA convinced them they can learn fluid movement by cycling down the staircases, but so far it has resulted only in carbuncles and exposed bits of skull. Caravaggio takes advantage of their unconsciousness to paint them, re-arranging their arms and legs to relive stabbings in his past.

I whisper down the hallway, “A little to the left,” but puddin’ fixes me with a hairy eyeball. I raise my blue glass bead to thwart her ill intentions. I used to want a muse so bad. Now I want to muse so bad.

I feel feverish, and the roof of my mouth tastes of zinc. I don’t know why I wanted a muse in the first place anyway: I do not want anyone to tell me what to do ever again.

There is a Charming Man guesting at The Pinch Punch. He isn’t much of a stabber, but his anecdotes are amusing as all get out. The howling girl’s cries have turned to giggles, and she enlists the martens to comb out her hair each morning. Is this the start of harmony? Is charm the great equalizer?

I refuse to believe that anyone is better than me. But even the small pets snub me at evening prayer.

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lightening things up

Poetry Market Crash

I have a lot of sadness regarding the internets lately. And because of it I am going to write a cranky post that is actually about writing and not about celebrities, which I will probably later regret.

Today I would like to blame the internets for everything mentioned in the article, "The New Math of Poetry," which everyone has probably already read except for me because I have been trying to avoid the internets as much as possible, out of sadness.

This article basically says how everyone on the planet, including my cats, can now a) have their work published in journals and b) have a book out because there are so many journals and presses. It also says that way more people are writing and publishing books than are actually reading them. It's sort of like the credit market crash: every writer gets offered a book just like every financially defunct human (including myself) could get a credit card in 2005. The result being that there's a glut of sucky books out there, and an excess of writers who think they're famous even though no one is actually reading their books - there are just all of these books floating around out there unread! And allegedly good books aren't being read either, because there's so much clutter that nobody even knows what's good anymore - because they can't find it.

I have wondered about this for a long time - especially lately with the excess of online "journals." Do we really need more journals? And why does every writer feel entitled to start one? Well, now someone else has said it, in this unnecessarily long and overwhelming article that has confirmed my suspicions that the internet is just a gross place where people create press for themselves, regardless of the quality of their work. Then we "network" by telling other people about our press (which we actually created ourselves) and they publish our books, even though really our press (and maybe our work) is bullshit.

Of course I'm all for there being more good books in the world, and that's why I like little presses, which is not what this article talks about at all - all the little presses that create books that are beautiful and strange and that I love. So of course there's this cuter and fluffier and more positive flipside.

Really this is just another example of me being cranky about living now instead of in the woods near Walden Pond...

Puddin’, Audiodiary #3

I had a muse once, although I did not know it at the time. Her name was Lucy. She was a fairy tiny and light as a mosquito, but badass, with bangin' hair, and kung fu moves that she demonstrated on the teacup piglets--whacking them into the side of the barn so their brains fell out. She threatened to remove my mother from my periphery; after all, she was a muse; this is what muses do. She glistened and glittered, as muses should. She was my alter-ego, as muses should be.

She adored me; she adorned my shoulder at all hours of the day, so that I noticed her only in the rarest moments, usually at daybreak, when she was whacking the teacup piglets into the barn. Or making me perfect coffees, and cakes that tasted like the world I’d never seen: Argentina, South Pacific, Pakistan. I liked the taste of the arctic cakes best: pure as wind, they blew through my whole body, they exhilarated my insides. Her mixing bowl must have been so tiny. Her cakes were the size of a thimble.

I did not tell her how I loved those cakes best of all, but she knew. She was my muse.
She gave me maps of the icecaps, handdrew them on the inside of my mind like wallpaper. What she whispered to me at all hours was: flee.

I did not understand that we shared a language. I could barely hear her at all, except in rare moments, at daybreak. I could not picture the icecaps--what existed there? After arriving, who would I become? None of this mattered; I knew.

I didn’t know she was my muse. I did not choose her. I did not feel it when she left. I only noticed years later, brown and lumpen, that she wasn't there, that I hadn't tasted her cakes in decades.

This is how one falls through the skylight into new life: by chasing what doesn’t exist.


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Whose muse? The Plus-sized Models Flaunt It

Caravaggio begs us to pose, granting us access to his extensive selection of wigs and swimwear. We swagger the hallways in his trunks, our breasts swaying, tiny monkeys clinging to our nipples to preserve our dignity.

We cannot sit still long enough for him to paint. We are meant to be captured in the present, to prolong a single moment by means of flashing light and electric sensors. Photography is so much more efficient.

He pops around corners, menacing us with knives. We submit, and he embraces another medium, sculpting us, removing ears and eyebrows, but no inner light emerges.

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let's go to japan and hang out in kitty cafes

i found THIS on chris killen's blog. it is awesome.

arrogant russian nostalgia

you guys, i feel nostalgic for men's figure skating, even though i only watched it one night and i was on the computer the whole time. i keep turning the olympics on to see evgeni, but he's not there anymore. now it's always those weird skiers that look like flying squirrels. so boring.

Need I say more?

Celebrity Crush: Yevgeny Plushenko

Oh, Yevgeny, you returned to thwart your enemies. My heart is not your enemy. I'm so pleased you did not bother to shave. It seems like maybe someone punched you in the nose since the last time I saw you, and it makes you look dangerous. I'm strangely pissed off at Dick Button for not understanding your frenetic footwork. (Not all art has to be fluid, Dick.)

my cats only love me because i feed them

Have you guys read Fugue State yet? I just returned it to the library. I guarantee that I will only remember the bleeding eyes when it comes time to meet again. And playing ponies. Except maybe that I'm not sure if that was the same book. But that's okay, right? I'll just be like the surly undergrad in the insane clown posse tee. You will appreciate me for my commitment to character. Maybe I'll check it out again.

I wish there were some way to see who else/how many other people had checked out books before you now that the little stampy pages are gone. I wish that the internet actually let us spy on people more. Maybe we should all mount webcams around our houses. We can be the girls of Venom Literati. Gross.

Weather Enticement

I would like to announce, for Literati who may be considering moving eastward, that tomorrow it will be 48 degrees here and sunny. Weather is important to mental health. This is a public service announcement, brought to you by Venom Literati - Cincinnati Branch.

let's state our allegiance.

Okay, you got me. I like plot.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about how I read, which means I am a 'uge nerd. More particularly, I have been thinking about how I read vs. how I watch TV or movies. When I watch TV, I am willing to subject myself to the lowest, most banal, most repugnant things, and what's more, I enjoy it. I am not ashamed to admit I like the Bad Girls Club, for example, and all they do is shout nonsense at each other in a repetitive way. I can pretend to think intellectual things about it, but really it just fascinate me because of what it is. And then afterwards I feel sort of gross and overexposed. So why am I such a snob about reading, or more accurately, closeted about occasionally reading things that are not also, like, art?

Confession part two: I really like plot.

I read both "Fugue State" by Brian Evenson and "The Dolphin People" by Torsten Krol over the weekend. I liked both of them immensely. "Fugue State" seems like literary horror, which is one of my favorite things, and reading "The Dolphin People" was very much like watching an adventure movie in my brain. I hope I am not discouraging you from reading "Fugue State," Kathy. The words in it are really very good, too. It's not a plot-only book.

The moral of this post is that I'm going to watch less TV and read more like I watch TV. More widely and less ashamedly. I am going to reject things that don't interest me partway through, like flipping the channel, and sometimes I'll read things that verge on chick lit. As long as they're funny. And well-written enough. I'll still read poetry. I'll still read lots of stuff from small presses. It's unlikely that I'll start reading celebrity autobiographies to substitute for the E! network, but I'm probably going to read some other terrible things. And tell you all about them. So there.

So...what's our next book?

I watched a Dr. Phil episode sometime during the last week, and it turns out that teens are having sex. America is outraged. Dr. Phil cannot believe it either.

I am reading something called "Fugue State" and something else called "The Dolphin People." I am not sure either of those is appropriate for us.

Kathy wants us to read Robert Lopez. I have not discussed this with her. I can just sense it.

Wait, I just started looking things up and discovered everyone loves "Fugue State." I've barely begun it. I've only read "Fugue." Maybe that should be our book. What do you think? Here it is:http://brianevenson.com/fugue.html. It's hallucinatory and darkly comic. That sounds like us.

Re-start

Let's do it for reals.

Pinch Punch Ch. 19: Every surgery is a success if you have a positive attitude

They danced like instinct around the bottle. Anaesthetized, necks flopping as though cooked, their jazz hands popped and limpened. All olive-skinned and tawny and freckled, my own sweet tribe of wavy-haired combos. Joining, then separation, then joining, then separation. It has traditionally been male to female merging in the past, mostly due to biology, but The Pinch Punch is like a large scale Petri dish.

Damn, they’re beautiful. Powdered blood puffs out from every pore, giving them the high color of drunken Northern Europeans.

The Plus-sized Models howl as the chemicals wear off and projectile vomit on my army of hedgehog nurses. They don’t mind. Their soft needles slough off everything.

Just because I am hot doesn’t mean I’m stupid. Have I created four monsters? Will they attempt to usurp me? Will they work out that knotted bedclothes make as good a rope as rope does? The tiny monkeys have agreed to distract them with double dutch stylings and aerobatics. They also will be underfoot. No one is ever more careful than when there are many adorable tiny monkeys cantering about your ankles. Cuteness unseats evil.

Did you know that it is possible for someone of my stature to despair? It hurts me more than it hurts you. Now drink up.

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I can't stop thinking about this

There is this grave that can hold up to four people. This is real, by the way. And in this grave are the matriarch and the patriarch on one side, dead and under the ground for many years, and the other side is reserved for the son and his wife. Except that the son isn't dead yet, so just the son's dead wife is in the grave.

This is real: Carved on the son and wife's side of the grave it reads: "[This son] married [this other person, probably his foxy secretary or a golddigger or maybe it was true love late in life] in 2000." This is carved on the dead wife's grave. News of the alive widower's second marriage. On the first wife's grave. Carved.

I hope she's haunting the everloving ish out of him.

Postcard From the Norton Anthologies

Dearest Literati,

I have emerged from the Norton Anthologies; finally I can read things I like again, such as this blog.

I had an affair with Lord Byron via the Norton Anthology. I traveled the world with various Byronic heroes whom I had thrown myself at in order to be invited. That was pretty awesome, but I'm itchy now. Do you know that Byron was considered ridiculously attractive during his time, but was genetically prone to obesity and existed mostly on crackers and soda water? I was very hungry traveling with Byron; if we went to restaurants he only ordered water or clear liquors. I had to eat greasy things alone.

I also attended Wordsworth on his walking tour of the Alps. Mostly he grumbled about Byron's fame and picked me a lot of flowers that made me sneeze. I grew bored of his rhymings.

I never knew what Blake was talking about, and enjoyed his company most of all.

Mostly I forgot to study other things that didn't interest me, and left the test center with 50 questions blank. Alas.