What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing
After several months of not friend-requesting Ishmael Reed on facebook, I have now friend-requested Ishmael Reed on facebook. I can see from his public page that several of the people I am friends with in real life in addition to on facebook are facebook friends with Ishmael Reed, including Andy Farkas and Jacob Knabb, along with 30 other people that I am facebook friends with and in some cases real-life friends with.
It is still strange to me that writers that I love in book form are actual people that one can interact with, etc.
This is a strange thing to not-yet-be-over, maybe.
The June PANK is out, including work by Christopher Newgent and Mike Meginnis and Jessica Hollander and several poems by Caroline Crew (who I am not facebook friends with), one of which includes the lines “THE VERB WANTS ME LISTEN / AND STOP CHEWING ON YOUR HIP.” It also includes a story from me about bones and names and machines and I guess fucking. It contains among other things this short monologue:
“Charlie calls me names when we have sex. He started out by calling me bitch, whore, cunt, cocksucker, slave. Then he branched out. For a while it was racial epithets, homophobic slurs, religious blasphemy. There was a period in which he was making up names, whole new words, things that didn’t necessarily have a precise meaning but sounded horrible. Now he’s moved on to other languages. He spends hours in the library looking up new languages to call me names in. Some of the things he’s found are unimaginably bad, concepts of degradation that we don’t have in English.”
UPDATE I have friend-requested Caroline Crew on facebook.
