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.

Pinch Punch Ch. 18: Prep

Psychic severance is the most difficult to accomplish. Gazing at their roaming eyes, their nervous tics, fills me with dread. It is so easy to kill my confidence. I don’t know if an eggbeater, a table saw, and sandpaper will do the job. But I have always made due. When they said I couldn’t, I said nothing. To their faces. To their backs TYRA always spoke truth, singing hymns with alternate, rude lyrics, subtly stripping the screw.

I am fairly certain that surgery was accomplished mostly by magic in the past. I bring my own brand of fairy dust, but I am no sorceress, despite (self-started) rumblings to the contrary among the residents. All it takes to get ahead is a little bit of common sense, a touch of street smarts, a strong constitution, and a chameleonic philosophy.

The gruel has protein powder in it, okay? The compulsory Pinch-Punches contain some milk. I blend broccoli, got it? I am gentle.

I just don’t know how they managed it, the merging. I don’t think they even did it on purpose. I hate it when people succeed at something they’re not even trying that hard to do. I guess that’s called talent.

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The flu, the prisoner

Everyone I know either has the flu, just got over the flu, or is terrified of getting the flu. The skin on my hands is starting to bubble from using so much sanitizer. I guess I'm in the third camp. It's starting to seem inevitable.

The problem with this is that I recently decided that I hate cable. I don't even like Real and Chance anymore. Heidi Klum looks overtanned. There are way too many shows where dudes stand next to a green screen and talk. I can't even special order movies because I don't have a landline. How, if I have the flu and am debilitated, am I going to enjoy myself? I'm not.

In other news, they're (being AMC) remaking The Prisoner, starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen. But at least 90% of the reason that The Prisoner is so awesome is the dude who played Number Six, Patrick McGoohan. His facial expressions are so...cross between charming and smarmy: smarming.

Pinch Punch Ch. 17: Self-Absorbed Non-Conversation Between Howling Girl and PUDDIN’, As Transcribed by the Tiny Monkeys

HG: It’s what they tell me, what everyone tells me: Get over yourself! I do not disagree, however howling is addictive. It’s like ho-hos or weightlifting.

P: Why does everyone hate me just because I’m not ashamed of stains?

HG: I mean, whether you are being vocal or not, you are howling, you know? Howling takes on different forms: you, for example, howl by hiding in the telephone booth with as many teacup piglets as you can cram in. Kashmir by refusing to speak except with the vampire teeth in, and only to say: Um. Caravaggio by stabbing. Charming Man’s brilliant smile, upon closer observation, is a howl, too.

P: I can’t help it that my hair smells like lilacs, lilies of the valley, ocean, freshly cut grass, oranges, topsoil, and coffee beans all at once. Why don’t they get that? I can’t fucking help it!

HG: Sure, I see where they’re coming from that a howl is not words, and therefore not the best way to explain oneself, but that is generally the motivation: to release your sorrow into the atmosphere for everyone to feel so that they come running after you and bury you in a big pile of soft animals. Yet nobody does that. Why doesn’t anybody ever do that, anyway? We need more of that in this world.

P: I heard the Plus-Sized Models saying the other day that my legs look like raw chicken breast, and also that they don’t think I poop. You don’t think that, do you? Because I do poop. It just happens to smell good, and it’s really tiny so there are never streaks left behind like the ones Caravaggio leaves. I can’t help that, either.

HG: You know how once you howl once, you just get this feeling like you’ll be at it your whole life? How the more you howl the more the howl fills you up and the more you have to release it? I think that howling is basically undiagnosed bulimia. Drink a single Pinch-Punch and you’ll howl the rest of your life away.

P: Also, yes, I know the tiny animals follow me around like I’m their queen, but it’s not like I asked them to. And plus I do know everything. I scored perfect on my SAT. People who score perfect on their SAT know everything.

HG: I mean, I don’t completely disagree, but they don’t get it, how if you howl long and deep enough, everything around you fills you with howl: the empty sky, the sky full of stars or rain, commercials, supermarket muzak, everything.

P: I just happen to care about my teeth. I am a self-respecting human. I brush. I floss. I have never done that laser-whitening like they all say.

HG: Of course we would all prefer not to howl; not to be so human. I do not trust people who do not howl, like that bitch-ass gleeful seamstress making her Animalfits™ up on the hilltops. Her howl is released through her split seams and masked by her pink paisley patterns at once. She just doesn’t happen to know it.

P: And you know what? Just for fun I actually lied to them all the other night about how TYRA lets me go beyond the red curtain. I had too many Pinch-Punches that night and couldn’t help myself. I’ve never been there. Tee-hee.

HG: Nobody gets over themselves; what would be left anybody if they did?

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Benny and Joon: Some sort of cosmic significance?

We all know Megan is totally and completely obsessed with Benny and Joon as of like a month ago, and then last weekend I was at a party where two people who don't know Megan brought it up independently, and then it was a question on Jeopardy, and then last night it was on television, and I watched it.

You are right, Megan: They are not--ahem--mentally challenged as my former young self thought, and that icky feeling I had associated with it the first time around has disappeared. So where is all this Benny and Joon coming from? What does it mean? Am I about to become schizophrenic? Or meet Aidan Quinn? Either seems possible.

chris killen is my new favorite comedian

he has videos that everyone else on the internet was laughing at a year ago while i wasn't paying attention. and also this awesome choose your own adventure game. and also a novel called the bird room. do you want to read it for the next venom literati book? or also, i think i have a chapbook that he wrote with shane jones. i could make photocopies. let's vote. i am happy we are meeting at headquarters this weekend. someone please shine a batman light in the sky so jen and i can find our way.