Useful Knowledge

Here is the actual ringtone, from pennsound.

Yo Yo Mr Such My Hand

I just started using Google voice, which transcribes all my voice messages and sends them to me in email form. Basically it's the latest version of the game “telephone.” Only better.

"A"

New Directions just released a new edition of Louis Zukofsky's "A." I'm reviewing it for MAKE, which has spurred me to finally read the entire book in its 800 page entirety. It's totally worth it.

Poem written while procrastinating

Ok, so I've decided once and for all that I'm going to put my own poems on this blog, because why the hell not. The only problem is, in the past when I've posted poems here I've gone back and deleted them later, since it usually takes me a week to decide that I don't like them after all. And unfortunately, I have no way of preventing my future self from doing that again with this one.

So I'm going to make a pact. I was listening to radiolab on the way to the annual Griffin family Christmas desert-not-dinner party, (a wonderful tradition) and there was a story of this woman who had tried her whole life to quit smoking. Tried, and failed. She was in her seventies I think, and had been a big civil rights activist in the sixties. So one day she told her friend that if she ever smoked another cigarette, she would donate $5,000 to the Ku Klux Klan. And it worked! Every time she wanted a cigarette she would think of the f***ing KKK, and get so grossed out that she wouldn't want one any more.

Now I don't have $5,000, but I swear right now to the internet that if I take this poem down (for reasons other than someone wants to publish it and so I have to) I will donate $50 to Rick Santorum. I'm for serious. If you don't believe that's enough of a deterrent, just look him up on the urban dictionary. Dude's a scumbag.

I've also decided to label them all "Mary Wilson Poems," in the hopes that I will one day overcome the google robots that will forever come up with Mary Wilson from The Supremes when someone googles my name.



(Nothing whatsoever against The Supremes, they're awesome.)

Another Saboteur


You’d written all over my book in the margins and at the very end you wrote
“The End.” The pocket guide to toolish possible behavior
went unheeded and ungrounded, went in your personal pocket with
the buried art of shedding light. And here I thought that I’d
been sent to you, as men are sent to other men for something
only senders comprehend. The book said simply
that the universe belongs to danger, truisms,
and arson. This advice had never until now been put to use.
I set a lighter to its binding. And you started hollering, as if I’d lit the
binding of your self-same pocket watch as if your very
soul was ticking, bounded or at least existing,
based on your behavior, which
is all that we can know about a person.

-

Rose Hobart

Well now I'm too sick-in-bed to write a word about Walter B., so instead I will just post the results of my latest internet time wasting binge. Which was comprised of the following e-steps:

responding to a email from my mom; realizing she'd uploaded a picture of an 8-ball for her gchat icon; finding that both adorable and surprisingly tech savvy; deciding to upload my own gchat icon; settling on a screenshot of the blue part of Joseph Cornell's "Toward the “Blue Peninsula” (For Emily Dickinson); remembering how much I love Joseph Cornell; re-watching his film "Rose Hobart" on youtube; deciding to post it on my blog; seeing that embedding was disabled; taking a screenshot of my favorite part; posting that to this blog; making the words "Rose Hobart" a link to the aforementioned movie, which Cornell made by cutting up an editing the 1931 B-Movie "East of Borneo." Why? Because he was obsessed with Rose Hobart.

Walter Benjamin Venn Diagram

From The Ground of Intentional Immediacy. This paper's gonna be a blast.

Prairies of My Masculine Epiphany

From Charles Bernstein, A Poetics:



All I want for christmas is for more writers to read this. Seeeeeriously.

And on that note,