Featured: My Days with Millicent by Gilmore Tamny
Prose
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Hey Alexa by Melissa Amstutz
I get mad at Alexa but really she’s an extension of my brain. Brain, I’ll say. Start editing. Okay, starting Rupaul’s Drag Race, it replies.
Embrace Fear: On Steven Church’s “I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part” by Andrew Bomback
Let Me Tell You What Your Book Is About by Andrew Bomback, Prose
“Why are you so obsessed with him?” my wife asked.
“Because he seems so content,” I answered. “He has life figured out.”
“Based on his clothes?” she said. “You have no idea what happens to him after he gets on the train.”
Roland Barthes ♥ Annie Leibovitz? Y or N (Circle One) by Scott Navicky
Empty/Emptiness: that was a good way to describe Ghost’s feelings towards Annie Leibovitz. He did not dislike her work. How could he? Her photographs were beautiful images of beautiful people. But Leibovitz’s entire leviathan oeuvre was completely ignitionless. The question every image must answer is: Who gives a damn? Leibovitz’s answer to this question was obvious: her images are cultural documents. As such, they are the provenance of Cultural Studies, and as Ghost had learned from reading Walter Benjamin, Cultural Studies is an exercise in empty/emptiness.
Three Vague Fairy Tales by Shane Kowalski
A peasant boy, leading his family’s dairy cow back from grazing, came across a troll who offered him a trade. For your cow, dear boy, I will offer you an orgasm, said the troll.
Hammer and Nail: On Leslie Jamison’s “The Recovering” by Andrew Bomback
Let Me Tell You What Your Book Is About by Andrew Bomback, Prose
That night discussing Jamison’s failed antiarrhythmic therapy and her cardiologist’s inability to pick up on her alcohol abuse wasn’t the first time I’d heard a doctor say, “When you’re a hammer, all you see is a nail.” Doctors often throw this phrase around when we explain missed diagnoses or a surgeon’s refusal to consider non-operative therapies or even a patient’s insistence that her headache is due to a brain tumor. But we’ve also employed this cliché to describe how we don’t turn off our doctoring outside the hospital or clinic. We wonder aloud if our neighbor has a pituitary tumor. We tell our uncle he will die of a heart attack before he retires if he doesn’t lose fifty pounds. We comment on the salt or fat or carbohydrate content of meals. We speculate on why some of our kids’ friends are always covered in snot.
What to Wear When You Are Catcalled: Style Advice from Hobo Scumbag
Prose, The Bias Cut by Hobo Scumbag
I was walking down the street one day when I heard a whistle and a “____ _____,” and I immediately recognized it for what it was, a cry for stimulating conversation!
An Interview with Amy Shearn about Art of the Long Haul
I realized that I really had always been interested in crazy, ambitious, possibly-endless projects -- I love Diana Nyad, Ernest Shackleton, people who walk across continents, that kind of thing. What a way to live, you know? I am very low-energy and non-extreme myself, and would probably die on the first day of any expedition, so part of my attraction is sheer mystification.
Kicking and Shrugging: Why We Resist Self-Defense by Anastasia Higginbotham
For the majority of women and girls just trying to live our lives, it comes down to this: when we are raped, it’s usually by men or boys we know who are so confident in their ability to overpower us, they don’t even think they need a weapon. As insulting and depressing as that sounds, it’s not the worst news. This is an enemy we can beat.
King Cake by Donnie Boman
I figured I could make a king cake. I figured I should make a king cake. Being from Mobile, Ala., the home of the first Mardi Gras celebration in America (not New Orleans, Mobilians are sensitive about that), I thought it’d only be right that I tried once, at least. Maybe it’d be on par with a local Louisiana bakery? The bar was high according to my father. But at the very least it’d be homemade by me and there are points for that, and I could always blame a screw-up on the recipe. I’d bring it in to work, because what did I need with a bunch of king cake at home. I’d be an authority on king cakes.
From “Haircuts by Children and Other Evidence for a New Social Contract” by Darren O’Donnell
Certainly to be an adult is to be many, many things we think of as childlike: vulnerable, mistaken, confused, petulant, afraid, irrational, and despairing. We never stop making missteps, learning, and growing up. But that doesn’t mean we don’t sometimes have our shit mostly together. Just like many children do.
Something Was Eating My Brain, Too: On Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling by Andrew Bomback
Let Me Tell You What Your Book Is About by Andrew Bomback, Prose
I confessed to my older brother that my outbursts, all the yelling I was doing combined with the physicality required to control Mateo, felt like a form of emotional and physical abuse. “If a hidden camera was following me,” I said, “and you watched that footage, you’d say there was something seriously wrong with the father.” My brother, who has four children, empathized but warned against continuing this pattern. He’d done the same thing with his youngest child, and he now felt guilty seeing how often she, at age nine, erupted. Neither of us extended the conversation to its logical conclusion – had we failed our children? – but perhaps that point was already understood.
A Diagram about “Women” by Esther Neff
This diagram was drawn in rage and terror, working against subjection and abjection in attempts to objectify "the paradigm" so that it may be exposed and embarrassed as "a construction." How does such a diagramming process "work"? To flatten and position epistemes and influences is to perform a semblance of control, but isn't this very definition of "control" the same will-to-power that constructs binary gender and other coercive and oppressive orders for human qualities and properties in the first place?
OE Classics: Excerpted from “Trout Fishing in America” by Richard Brautigan
Then the two artists talked about committing themselves to an insane asylum for the winter. They talked about how warm it would be in the insane asylum, with television, clean sheets on soft beds, hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes, a dance once a week with the lady kooks, clean clothes, a locked razor and lovely young student nurses.
Ah, yes, there was a future in the insane asylum. No winter spent there could be a total loss.
Heavy Equipment: Five Poems by Donnie Boman
He was aware of the dump truck/ And he knew it would squat on him/ If he wanted it to
Happy Holidays!!
Happy holidays and may 2018 be kind and gentle to us all.
David Bowie, Art Collector by Duncan Wheeler
Hardly the most naturally gifted musician or performer of his generation, he is one of the very few one can imagine triumphing as anything other than as a rock star. Musical compositions were as much a means as an end, and it is impossible to gauge his legacy without taking into account the interdisciplinary multi-media nature of the finest creation of the lad born as David Jones in Brixton: global super-star David Bowie. In line with a raison d’être pursued throughout his life and career, his art collection accrued significant economic and symbolic capital, whilst allowing him to adopt an almost avuncular role.
Li’l Love Notes by Frances Waite
Just me and the void, /Ethereal attraction-- /Brutal pleasure /Pushed into my leg /Someone else's coffee /Dripping into my /Boot urgency/ Love! You!
When I Grow Up, I Want to be Unemployed by Stine An
My name's Stine and I dress like this because you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. And I'm pretty sure that when I grow up, I want to be unemployed.
Just Go! by Amy Shearn
Though I fetishize anachronisms like typewriters and newspapers, I’m only pretending not to be as technology-addicted as everyone else. In practice going through a day phoneless feels like I’m trying to do everything while wearing mittens. I have to stop and ask a stranger for directions, like no one has done in America since 2008. When I see the beautiful view of the city from the Morningside Park cliff, I can’t Instagram it. I feel momentarily bereft. But it is beautiful! What did I used to do with beautiful things before I had a smartphone? Oh yeah. I wrote them down.
Excerpts from “My Ida” by Simone Kearney and “Catcall” by Holly Melgard in advance of UDP’s Chapbook Release Reading/Party
Shit look at him now. Is he getting even littler or what? Just look at him. Look. He. Is. Being. A. Really, really, REALLY LITTLE GUY, and that is what he’s doing. --from "Catcall" by Holly Melgard
Out of Kitzbühel by Kevin O Cuinn
Orla’s Ethics professor starved himself to death; her brother cycled off a cliff. The cantor climbed the church’s steeple and stepped into the air. All in the wake of Orla’s death.
Two Poems by Ayşe Tekşen
There are cuts on paper,/ Scissors on cuts,/Paper on scissors,/Hands on scissors,/ Scissors on paper,/ Paper on hands,/ And our hands on paper./ Ours is a war on paper,/Rather than on scissors.
From “Fields, Rituals & Distance” by Spike Dougherty and John Schmidt
There is a river that runs through the center of Kyoto: I first heard it here. A few have suggested it might be the sho, a mouth organ that is used in gagaku court performances. Wikipedia tells me that gagaku literally translates to "elegant music." That is a genre, which is also a judgment, which is also a historical fact.
Short Fiction by Virginia Konchan
"Well, that’s cool. What is god, but a self-reflexive tautology?"
Jerry Saltz Responding To: “15 Questions About Kara Walker’s Latest Exhibition” by Seph Rodney
Who is educated by Mozart at the Emperor’s Opera house? Or by Velazquez’ Las Meninas – which only hung in the royal palace until very recently yet somehow affected all of subsequent art-history. We are “enlarged” and “educated” by art in a language beyond words and by osmosis and incrementally. Often we don’t even know how or that we’ve been “enlarged” and “educated” till years later.
On Not-For-Profit Gala Fundraising by Charity Auctioneer CK Swett
My calendar informs me that that November gala 13th will be my 87th of 2017, and probably in the neighborhood of the 400th of my seven-year career. In that time I’ve visited schools in rural Guatemala and a community center in Soweto, South Africa. I’ve shared lunch with women in domestic violence shelters and served lunch to the homeless in food kitchens. I’ve donned a blue jump suit and emptied trash cans on the Upper East Side with formerly incarcerated men of color working to put their lives back together.
The Legacy of Herman Wallace: Solitary Confinement and the Self by Serena Maszak
The body is the seat of the mind, where the mind happens, but it does not set the boundaries of the mind. If the body is a cage, Wallace’s creation is proof that the mind can make itself smaller than the gaps between bars. Wallace’s confinement was undoubtedly torturous, surreal, and painful, and he expresses this in his letters to Sumell. In the virtual tour of his house, he gives explanations for certain features, such as the master bedroom’s jacuzzi bathtub, six square feet larger than his cell. In the words of Sumell, “[The House That Wallace Built] illustrates not only what is wrong, but also what is possible.”
Let’s Check In With Fine Art Photographer Bill Burke
BB: My new stuff is outside the bubble. West Virginia, KY Coal country, Wyoming, gun shops.
The Plateau: On Marina Benjamin’s “The Middlepause”
Let Me Tell You What Your Book Is About by Andrew Bomback, Prose
I wonder if Marina Benjamin considered another title for her excellent book, The Middlepause. Specifically, I wonder if she thought about using “Mental Menopause,” a catchy moniker used by one of her friends as they discuss their mutual exploration of middle age and beyond. “It’s more a mental menopause I’ve been struggling with,” this friend shares, “with every significant choice I’ve ever made suddenly up for review – education, career choice, where to live, children; even your key relationship, which is so established, it requires work.”
Cinnamon Bun Oreos: A Snack Review/Soulful Ballad by Gilmore Tamny
Have you ever noticed that Oreos are the size of communion wafers? And was that accidental or subconscious or...psychological warfare?
Dear Writer: I’d Like to Interview You For a *Major* Magazine by Aizlyn B
I think it's rather vulgar to refer to oneself in the third person. I rarely say my name aloud. And I rarely say anyone's name when addressing them, usually just stating something or saying, "Hey, uh, statement xyz." Do you do that?
28 TV and Movie Characters Who Should Be My Boyfriend by Eli Rarey
Prose, YOU GET WHAT YOU ASK FOR: A Magazines/Media Expert Telling It Like It Is by Eli Rarey
MAX from MAD MAX: FURY ROAD: I know that it is hard to be in a relationship with someone who has such severe PTSD. I’m not even sure he’s capable of opening up emotionally to another person after what he’s been through. But if he’s willing to try, then I will bring all my reserves of patience. This is someone with a genuinely good heart.
Dusted Omnipotent Nina by Sharon Anderson
After that one time, I knew she couldn’t endure chemo. She was so small and her hair fell out, her mottled charcoal/pink skin turned solid black from the drugs, leaving just her tiny black Chinese Crested face, like a little spider monkey. When a little boy on the street looked terrified and tugged on his mom’s pants to point at Nina, that’s what I said: “She’s a monkey”, and smiled. And thought, you-- you-- little boy, will be old and look like shit one day and by then your mother will be dead, so fuck you.
Ohio Interviews: Artist Johanna Jackson
So many of us have been to art school and graduate school now and there's a lot of investment in a parochial way of looking at art. I think it's good to try to keep that out of the studio. Artmaking is not a good place to be dancing for judges. No one really knows anything about art! Rather than a conversation or a game, I like to think of art as a totally random collection of heavily cathectic matter-poems thrown up by regenerating but definitely dying spiritual-biological animals on a planet in space.
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
BRUSSELSGIUM: A Croissant a Day Keeps the Joy in Play by Gilmore Tamny
One very amusing Oasis documentary, and a short stop in Amsterdam later, voila, I landed in Brussels, finding it a puzzling Southern California-esque 85 and sunny. I napped for four hours as everyone advises you not to, then rose a la Lazarus to wander around in aimless circles. Getting lost was OK, then awesome, then scary, then fine, then fun, then alarming, then I stopped caring. Time didn’t stand still so much as flopped around in a haze of cafes, cathedrals, splendidness, garbage, beggars, tourists (U.S., China, India, U.K. most represented), squares, cobblestones, statues of that peeing kid, ornate windows, waffles, and chocolate shops. Euros are pretty. So nice to hear French. Dutch is hilarious. The youths are as tattooed and bearded as they are yonder U.S.
Fragments by Joshua Wolf Shenk
Art museums should have beds that lovers can climb into and nuzzle. Art museums should have choices of spectacles with colored lenses, red, purple, kaleidoscopic. Once an hour or so, or it could be once a day or week, art museums should play, loudly, a piece of music that people can dance to. Art museums with tall ceilings should offer bungee jumps to their patrons. This may be a perk of membership. Museums should have pits of foam so that we can look at a work of art and then fall backward safely and softly. Trampolines?
Munching Apples: On Paul Kalanithi’s “When Breath Becomes Air” by Andrew Bomback
Let Me Tell You What Your Book Is About by Andrew Bomback, Prose
These honest recollections, confessions of how the mind and the body will grasp at anything to survive the residency years, how Kalanithi found his “munching apples” moments in the trauma bay with some harmless jokes and a soggy ice cream sandwich, are why I consider When Breath Becomes Air essential reading for any doctor-in-training, why I push the book on so many medical students, residents, and fellows.
Celebrating a Year of @butter_toe !!
Exactly one year ago I opened an anonymous Instagram account and started posting pictures I took on the subway. Now one year later, and less anonymous, I've posted over 1,200 pictures.
The Charts and Scores of Annie-B Parson
Multimedia, Ohio Interviews, Prose
When I finish a chart, I feel a great sense of closure that dance never gives. Because in dance there are so many mitigating factors for anyone to see your work and for the work to be seen as it was intended to be performed: a dancer can be injured, a dancer can turn away from your work, a new production is usually out of reach, things can go wrong on any given night and make the piece not the piece, the house can be empty, the house can be full, the tickets are priced out of reach of your audience, etc.
Dear Daughter: A Cheat Sheet by Molly MacDermot
I told Chimamanda that I’d love for her to sign her book, "We Should All Be Feminists," for you. I offered her a Sharpie and she quickly and decisively wrote: “Summer keep writing. Keep doing,” and added a smiley face. I told her Summer was only six and I would wait before giving her the book. She looked me straight in the eyes, not unlike Gloria, and said: “She can get it now.”
Protest-wear Fashion Recap: Climate March to May Day! by Hobo Scumbag
Prose, The Bias Cut by Hobo Scumbag
One trend I advise you to veer away from is that of tear gas for civilians, razor wire, handcuffs, and water cannons for the unarmed. It is my humble fashion opinion that those accessories are incredibly passé, and should really be relics of the last century.
Rock On by Donnie Boman
One is often told that he/she should not think and act in binary terms - there is always room for gray. However, just as something can be on or off, one must be told to either "rock on" or "fuck off." (Certainly, I feel that people must often be told this! They can't read my mind. These switches will help facilitate this in a less combative manner.)