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.

Oh! Oh!

Lecture
Wayne Koestenbaum: The Anatomy of Harpo Marx
#604: Sat, Nov. 14 12:00 - 1:00 PM

Poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum will share his contagious enthusiasm for the silent hilarity of the mostly mute Harpo Marx brother.

Admission: Adults: $5.00, Educators & Students: FREE Where: Chicago Cultural Center - Claudia Cassidy Theater, 77 East Randolph Street, Chicago, IL 60202

A gimmick will make me famous

I saw Julie and Julia over the weekend, and anything in it that didn't involve Meryl Streep sucked (by which I mean all of the Julia stuff was good, and I could have done without Julie entirely). Really: That husband with his meaty smacking lips and eating grunts was so repulsive that I really wanted Julie to divorce him on grounds of disgustingness and selfishness so when the inevitable Marital Problem Scene surfaced I just got mad.

Also, I am pretty sure that the parents of writers everywhere are suddenly calling up their kids and asking them if they have ever heard of this thing called blogging. Which will make them famous. All they have to do is find a hook.

Crap. I just looked that dude up on imdb, and he's going to be in An Invisible Sign of My Own, too.

Pinch Punch Ch. 16: The Tiny Monkeys Overhear an Odd Conversation Among the Residents, Re: Who the Fuck is Tyra

“I think she is a robot.”

“I think she is made of fiberglass and plastic.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t make a very intelligent painting: I have already made 36. To look at them is to lower your IQ by fifty points.”

“I think she is the fire that shall inherit Oprah’s forest.”

“It’s true that the chameleonic philosophy of the common man churns in her hair, but there is the bald spot, the flaw, the hunk of pink exposed brain, human as any other: warding off unforeseen desires, releasing the bitter chemicals of loss into her blood.”

“Still, she walks the robot’s walk. Do you choose your robot, or does she choose you?”

“Maybe the chemicals just pile up. Maybe the chemicals char and blacken and harden over the years until you walk like that.”

“Dreams and mothers are just piles of chemicals, too, but what do hers sound like?”

“A child kneeling in a Saharan mirage, scrubbing her face with sand, scooping sand into her mouth to ward off thirst.”

“Just think how pure her blood used to be back then.”

"You know her secret ingredient is moon, right?"

"I hear she rises mornings and claws it down with her fingernails. In her giant’s hands it is bright and tiny like a baby, then she mortars and pestles it to death, scatters it fizzing into the vats: a cremation undone."

"The moon does not resist; the moon does not strive, it only reflects."

"What would happen if she tossed it out over the ocean, into all the city’s orifices like a cure? What would happen if she bathed in it? If we all did?"

"Nobody ever looks into a shot glass before they put it inside of themselves. Nobody sees how the silvered liquid reflects us doing cartwheels across the lawn in unison."

"Only the werewolves know, and only for a minute before the moon recollects itself."

“Um, guys, I think we’ve been in here way too long. Everything is starting to get way too poetic.”

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And plus, this

More faces.

Dag. Like weeks have passed.

So here's a post to get me/us out of our stagnation. Look at this. I am interested in family resemblance because I think it is creepy.

Sex Toy Hostesses Are Surrealists

Clearly I can't escape these things: you know how much I hated that effin' jewelry party? Well, one of Garrison's friends from the climbing gym invited me to a sex toy party. What a way to get to know people. But the party was actually not at all uncomfortable. The hostess lady just handed around a bunch of sparkly liquidy things to try on that were basically all the same lotion that tasted like cotton candy or Smarties. She also handed around this amazing pheromone spray that made your pheromones show off their own unique scent. Mine smelled like burning wood and tabasco, which was hilarious.

The best part was that we played Surrealist games. One went like this: think of the chore you hate most around the house. Think of exactly how you'd describe it. ("I hate ______ because _____.") Now substitute the word sex for the first blank. This is totally the surrealist game where they'd pull the labels off of household products and replace the brand names with "Love" or "God" and then read the descriptions on the packaging as if the products were Love or God!

The other game we played was the exquisite corpse except better. You answer questions and fold over the paper for each one and pass them around. If you could go one place in the world where would it be? Which boy would you take with you? What's the first thing you'd do to him once you arrived? What would he say afterwards? What would you say?

Venice. Anthony Bourdain. Eat seafood off him. I'm hungry. A-ha. I liked mine how it would have been originally if I'd kept my own paper. But those answers got distributed and the girl who read mine didn't know who Anthony Bourdain was, which was disappointing.

What is the connection between sex toy hostesses and surrealism? I feel like I should become a sex toy hostess now.

Mission Literati

Okay, I just found out that one of my personal heroes was born and grew up in the town in which I currently reside. It is now my mission to make him come back here and perform.

The dots, the dots

First there was this spider caught between the storm window and the interior window in our kitchen, and it didn't move ever. I thought it was dead. But after an indeterminate amount of time there was a small brown ball sort of next to the spider that didn't move. This small brown ball was clearly an eggsac, but I am not a handyman, so it seemed like the only recourse for removal was breaking the window, which I did not want to do. I told myself both the spider and the eggsac were dead. And then after another time period there suddenly were many dots. Many, many dots. These teensy baby spider dots also did not move, and were in a sort of exploding star formation around the sac. But they weren't moving, so I thought they were probably all dying, if they were not already dead.

But now the dots are gone. Where are the dots?

Drive-in movies, WK

Do you think that Wayne Koestenbaum goes to the drive-in? I'm pretty sure he does.



I have seen four movies at the drive-in this year; each of them could be considered bad, but there is a hierarchy of badness. To wit, I have ranked them from one Wayne Kostenbaum (worst) to four Wayne Koestenbaums (best). Please do not forget that none of these movies would receive any Wayne Koestenbaums under any other normal rating circumstance.



1. Night at the Museum II. This movie is for stupid people. Not even children, just stupid people.









2. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Abby and I spent the first 20 minutes of this movie asking each other questions like, "Are they in outer space or underwater?" "Is Sienna Miller the red-haired one or the brunette?" "Wait: Is she a hologram right now, or is she really there?" "Is that the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun? He's a slender villain." "Are we in the past?" Granted, most of these questions arose because it was the second movie shown, and both of us were slouched in our seats to the point where we couldn't see helpful words at the bottom of the screen, but still. Also, I kept thinking of Austin Powers for some reason.










3. Wolverine. I saw this movie after Night at the Museum II, it's like Wolverine was an average-looking person hanging out with someone very ugly: It looked comparatively beautiful. Also, the mouthless Ryan Reynolds at the end was actually cool.











4. G-Force. I giggled a couple of times. And the guinea pigs' hands were cute.

Pinch Punch Ch. 15: Oh my god what if I’m not the main character?

Nugget number one: It takes time. Well, duh. Some of the residents don’t think that should count as wisdom, but I always record it with such a triumphant air that they get confused. I spent four days meditating on the roof deck, thinking about it. It is like mu: Has a teacup piglet a Buddha-nature? One spoke to me in Italian on a moonless night, of having been the pope’s shoes in a former incarnation. Even the pope’s feet stink.

The tiny monkeys have taken over the second floor. I woke up and there was one curled around every finger and every toe. Their message was clear: Move out.

Caravaggio and Kashmir perform symbiotic stabbing rituals all night long and wouldn’t let me crash in their third bed. The Plus-sized Model(s) bared their rows of teeth at me and gave me the octuple finger. Now I’m sleeping in the corridor, like a common Edwardian hall boy. Everyone’s started to give me things to do: anaesthetizing kittens, blocking out the moon with my palm, following the marten parade around with a push broom.

It has occurred to me that I might not get a muse.

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Oversmoking

One way to quit smoking is to oversmoke, like chain smoke until your pallor turns minty green, and then you'll be disgusted with yourself and feel sick and not want to smoke at all for a couple of days, during which the nicotine can leave your system, and then, voila, step one is completed and you're practically free of that pesky addiction.

Last night I watched the two trashiest shows on VH1: Real Chance at Love 2 and Megan Wants a Millionaire.

The whole time I vacillated between shame and elation, and I got up and did things during the commercials to avoid spiraling into watching that one show where five women in lingerie rate themselves according to who has the hottest face, legs, butt, etc., and then three dudes rate them, too, and they win money if their rankings are the same as the dudes' rankings. You can actually see self-esteem deflating on that show.

And then I felt depressed because all of the "suitors" on Megan's show were verified millionaires, and apparently you can be both socially inept and kinda stupid and still make at least a million dollars. Because of luck? Or perhaps a high tolerance for risk often is associated with dumbness? Whatevs. It's slim pickings for poor Megan.

I am overwatching, so I can be free of the tyranny of trash television, which apparently I am powerless to resist, except I think this plan has already backfired because I'm kind of worried about Real and Chance and their bevy of strippers with real estate licenses. Will they find love? How will I ever know if I don't watch?

Tonight, nothing. I swear.