• Asinine Press •
updated all during the month
The Bang of Francis
There's something interesting about banging a celebrity. Whether it's the queen of B movies or the guy that does the evening news.....
It seems that for a few thrust of passion, you're no longer Mr. or Ms. J. Q. nobody---Your fucking a dream; mixing your most private parts with the cream of society.
People used to read books to be part of something. Whether it was the Pilgrims Progress for phonics, or David Copperfield to enjoy a little poverty.
It may be cynical to say people have stopped reading. Perhaps it's better to say that smart people read to impress their peer groups with hard to find authors.
Japanese people read comics on commuter trains with the fluidity of Americans and their sitcoms. Web authors are told to make pages easy for scanning. Our direction appears to be "extracts", while a plethora of detail is passed over by our tramplings.
Have you read a good book lately? Did you remember to update your book list, taking special care to note the statement, new things learned, or at least the number of pages you finished? Would you rather write than read? Perhaps Salinger had it wrong,
writing will make you better, why bother to research.
Perhaps your a fundamentalist: reading three items before you write one poem or prose--Nice ratio.
The fact is poor countries like India have more than 20 million web developers. We can't all write more than we read. We can't create new genre with every write. Perhaps passing the buck makes us better world citizens; it is yet to be seen.
My three pills for the month:
Spider Fuck by Willie Smith.
I am thinking for Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Willie will have you taking to your dictionary. Just when you think that this urban hood is using a vocabulary he has not mastered, you realize that the author is very intimate with his subject.
Challenge: has Willie just hit the 'rock bottom' mark of grotesque? The cannibal theme is getting old if you’re trying to push the standards of convention. Are there more bizarre details to be written, then sodomizing a spider and turning it around for a dirty sanchez?
Pretty decent twist at the end. I don't know if this short will change your life/writing; it's sure to screw with you in some way.
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather.
I got suckered into helping a girl with her Fem. Lit. class.
(the trade: essays for pussy) It was a nice exchange.
See the movie (hallmark, 1991 with Jessica Lange, young Sarah Graham, Ann Hesche). Then read the book.
The book wins for description. This is an excellent resource for those of us that get too tricky with action in writes and forget to set her up with a little feeling.
Another reason to view: La Femme {perspective}. Unique offering of female model as the heroine with classic love interest and failings.
Enjoyable for women; a must for male writers.
Dead Souls:
(Nicolai V. Gogol, 1842)
This has been in my PDA for two months. I love the plot; find the writing slow as hell. (Brilliant forward where Dostoevsky and others call this the "originator" of Russian Literature)
Plot: collect as many souls from poor people as possible. Go to a bank and cash-in the value of the souls. The protagonist realizes that this is easiest to do by going to rich owners and bartering for their surf’s souls in bulk.
I guess I read for entrainment and insight. Clancy uses the Freedom of Information Act to research.Maybe Billy Crystal should have sent his students to a library in “Throw Mamma from the Train.” I dig the classics more than anything to have a conversation. Even though Scientific American may have this great article where mice “fight or fuck” based off smell (and the scientist cut off their olafactories just to be mean; no they didn't fight everything, when in doubt-- they decided to love.) I still see newspapers and periodicals making FACT of sources that trade gossip for some arm glue. (Think: march/New York Times, Ryan O’Neil on his deathbed). Some journalist may be great novelist. Please remember Bill Bryson when you read. In Mother Tongue, he said the German language gave us the least amount of English. Though the Leakeys may spend years at a digsite, Bryson will reference new facts straight off the wire.
Schadenfreude on the Wire:
[AP, Seattle, Washington] Boeing Executives finding large quantities of urine in their coffee (march 2002) have filed suit against Chuck Palahniuk. The suit alleges coercion and incitement by Palahniuk and his publishers for the "Project Mayhem" clubs found rampant on the internet. A 1992 case involving a publisher held responsible for How-to Plan Murder has been cited as precedence.
[AP, Alto DoCruzeiro, Brazil] "Feed the Children", an international humanitarian campaign, has been barred by the Ministry of Health, Brazil, this week. Local lore cited in Nancy Scheper-Hughes' "Death Without Weeping (UC Press, 1982) were confirmed. "For some time people have feared that children were being killed for their body organs that were sent to the United States. We found that Feed The Children was actually fattening our youth for this devious purpose." (Juan Jimenez, Director M.O.H.)
[AP, Bomb Jesus, Brazil] Celebrating their fortieth year of founding, the city of "Bomb Jesus" [sic] Brazil denies links to the Jim Jones Brigade that made the neighboring Guyana infamous in 1978.
"In 1962, Jones went on vacation and checked out British Guyana on the northeast coast of South America as a site for a possible pilgrimage. Jim and his wife then spent 2 years in Brazil helping to serve the local orphanages and also spending time looking for possible land to acquire for a colony."
James Warren Jones established a press in Brazil in 1962, a year after he was ordained. Jones left his wife, Marceline (Baldwin) Jones to care for the media sometime in 1976 when the San Francisco Branch was preparing for it's final pilgrimage.
• Asinine Press •
updated all during the month
