Authenticity Is No Longer an Option

Main Street

1. I have a new website. Well, semi-new. I coded it by hand. Probably I will keep fiddling with it in the future. It is about as simple as a website can be. But mostly, I like it: http://authenticityisnolongeranoption.com/
    
2. Artifice Magazine is currently open for submissions, here. We’ve been getting some really good work this time around, too. One piece involves Eliza, that AI program from like the nineties that was supposed to simulate talking to a therapist. I remember a friend of mine had that on his computer when I was in middle school, and we spent a lot of time typing in dirty things to the program, to see how Eliza would respond. A lot of time she would respond something like, “Why do you want to talk about Hey do you want to fuck?” or “What does Penis Dick Cock Cunt Pussy mean to you?”
    
3. I am branching out my internet activities into reddit. I have never used reddit before, but my friend Adam suggested it. He said that it was a good way of introducing small press literature to audiences that aren’t part of the small press “scene.” Adam is often worried about this, about introducing small press stuff to people outside of the “scene.” I think he’s basically right about this. So I signed up for a reddit account, so that I could post stories and poems that I like to reddit.
   
   So far, reddit is maybe the most frustrating website I have ever used.
   
   After you post something to reddit, you have to wait before you can post something else. This kind of makes sense. They want thoughtful posts. They don’t want some nobody creating a reddit account and spamming up the place. I get it. But they don’t tell you how long you have to wait between posts. Sometimes it’s like eight minutes. Sometimes it’s over a day. And there’s nothing to indicate when you are and aren’t allowed to post. You just have to try, and sometimes reddit rejects you, and sometimes it doesn’t.
   
   Possibly reddit is trying to teach us something, something about life and patience and desire. But reddit can go fuck itself. I didn’t sign up to reddit to learn about life and patience and desire.

Ozzie Guillen be mine

I got a three-pack from Tiny Hardcore Press. They just arrived at my door. I am excited:

Please Don’t Be Upset by Brandi Wells, which includes that one story that got published in PANK, plus the line “My obligation holds out a pickle.”

The Fullness of Everything, a collection of chapbooks by Christopher Newgent, Brian Oliu, and Tyler Gobble. It has a really incredible cover. I was reading it last night at Letizia’s, a bakery in Ukrainian Village, and got really excited about the first paragraph in Newgent’s story “The Last Time”:

I came home drunk and we lit ourselves on fire. We were such flammable creatures then.

Also another collection of chapbooks, Shut Up / Look Pretty, featuring Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty Logan, Michelle Reale, and Amber Sparks. I don’t know Michelle Reale’s work, but I like all of the rest of these writers.

This morning I finished reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré. Then this afternoon I finally finished an interview that I’d been meaning to finish for weeks, for the Collagist. I am steadily returning to being able to do things. For a while there, I was not able to do anything.

The next thing I knew I was here

I am always being slightly disinginuous but I promise only slightly

A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.

New post on the Artifice blog, here.

New work forthcoming in the February issue of The Collagist.

From my office I can see the Sears Tower through a tiny, slit-like window between two masses of concrete.

Our twin language consisted of all English words, each of which had a meaning in our language completely different from its English meaning

My first book of fiction, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge, is now up for pre-order, here.

“It has been my aim to express myself clumsily”

I am in a department store in London, my aunt and uncle and grandmother are around me, I am on my back and screaming, I scream three times

before this, in the dream, I witnessed my friend Carlos get into a fight, someone approached him in the street while we were talking and began threatening him, Carlos in self-defense or out of fear stabbed the man in the neck, blood suddenly everywhere, on my clothes even though I wasn’t directly involved in the fight

the police arrive, but I don’t remember what happened then.

I have work forthcoming in Redivider and > kill author. I also have a short, journalistic-style essay in the most recent issue of American Book Review.

In the coffeeshop I am in right now there are pictures signed “Thomas Kinkade” but I do not think that they are by Thomas Kinkade.

The world is all that which is the case

At dinner Robert and Viola’s uncle discuss the secret law. “I’m in favor of it,” Viola’s uncle says. “These are drastic times.”

“Is it about to come back up for a vote?” Robert asks.

“It’s unclear whether the secret law requires a vote or not, constitutionally. At least that’s what they’ve been saying. Though I figured you’d know more about that than me…”

“I don’t work in the secret law,” Robert says. “I do corporate litigation. Regular kind.”

“We bought all these baby toys,” Viola’s uncle tells Robert, later on that night. “We were pretty sure this time, you know? Like we had this feeling. She seemed to be doing so well. And then when we heard from Vivi that this one wasn’t going to make it either, we had to take all those toys and things back. They have this one toy you can get now—” Viola’s uncle gestures, trying to explain the toy. “I would’ve killed for something like that, when I was a kid,” he says.

Here is a list of people who have drowned in the river

“This arbitrary compilation asks questions regarding the wet space around—and taken up by—a line between two points of being.”

I am working on a “Best of Everything” year end list for my friend Keith at Frontier Psychiatrist. Current contenders: Lentil soup, blue lights, a variety of books that were not published in 2011 but that I am just getting around to reading now (Journey to the End of the Night, JR, Mason & Dixon), the dying FYE store downtown that only weird old men seem to go to, ginger.

I have just received my copy of Mid-American Review in the mail. I’m excited to be in an issue with Brandi Wells and Lindsey Drager, both of whose work I really like.

The title of this post is a line stolen from one of the essays from Brian Oliu’s book So You Know It’s Me.

An airplane is a box like other boxes

The Si Fan, or Murder Group, has been described by some social theorists as a program to teach sociopathy. Its methods are based originally on Neuro-Linguistic Programming (the effectiveness of which is itself quite controversial), though much of the modern terminology of the Si Fan seems to have been influenced by “business speak”: “compliance tests,” “influence paradigm,” “alpha/beta responses.” “Detoxing” is a recognized and common (some say necessary) phenomenon among them, particularly among the newer members. Human beings, at least those outside the so-called sociopathy continuum, can only look at other human beings as meat for so long before it affects them. Typical responses for members circa three to four months include paranoia, trouble sleeping, racing thoughts, difficulty breathing, a feeling that one might faint or “snap.” An unbearable tension. Tolerance for the Murder-Group worldview increases in time, the new member is able to go longer and longer periods without the need to “detox.”

What is the world to our hearts without love

you girls have been there: you finish a nice first date with a hot dude, you want to keep hanging with him but don’t want to go to another bar. you don’t want to go back to your place, because you aren’t sure whether or not this motherfucker is CRAY and can be trusted with your address. he offers drinks at his place, and since you have your taser you give it some thought.

<3 irby + ian