Communicating through ink.

Tattoo ink, specifically. This blog, Contrariwise, features tattoos of literary quotes (and some lyrics and some symbols and some definitions...).

How much do you have to LOVE LOVE LOVE a quote or an author or a song to ink it on your body permanently? I like some of the ee cummings (i carry your heart in my heart), some Sylvia Plath (i am. i am. i am) and a few others. But my favorite is the Vonnegut-inspired ink at the top of this post. I mean, if you're going to get a tat, you might as well class it up a bit with some literary inspiration.

"It Ends With a Whimper"

Good story title, right? Today's reading comes from Dark Sky magazine, an online pub that features literature and art.

An excerpt from Patrick Parr's story, "It Ends With a Whimper," below:

You are on your fifty-first can of beans as the sky continues to crack and groan. You’re in your basement, or the basement below the basement. It’s a bunker you built nine years ago, right before the turn of the century. Though difficult to later admit, you were one of the dozens who took Y2K seriously. You dug an eight by twelve hole, reinforced the edges and slapped a thick metal door on top of it. The engineers who helped you said you could live inside it for seventy days. After that you’d run out of air. At the moment, you have no choice. It’s been forty-three days since you first (and last) heard the report of worldwide annihilation. Since that day you’ve remained in your bunker, listening to the sky sound like mountains breaking.

Makes you wonder, right from the start, fifty-first can of beans??

Today's reading:

Love this imagery and phrasing:

The night she walked to the house

she held a string; on the other end,

fifty-three feet in the air, a kite.

Wind provided the aerodynamics.

From "The Aerodynamics," by Rick Bursky, on AGNI

There's more, and it's a delight to read.

Image: "kites or hypercolor sky spermies" from NotRocket on flickr.

Old people pretending to be hip: Lk, i no how 2 txt!

Dear Newspaper Editors:

Please, for the love of all things that are good in this world, stop using text-language in headlines. It's not clever, it never was clever, and it shows how un-hip you are. It's like using the word "bling." But worse.

See: Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?

Thanks,
Your humble reader

PS -- Apparently, I didn't really read that article. Because it was online. And things that are online aren't "really" reading, right?!

The New Yorker's Book Bench

Another good resource for tidbits on the literary world: The Book Bench.

A nice round up of news and observations. The name, according to their about page, comes from a bench in the lobby where they toss new and old books for the staff to beg, borrow and steal. Book nerds fighting over literature?! How cute is that?

Image from the New Yorker.

Why sentence structure matters:

Whoaaaaa, wait, what? Let's look at this again:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A bulldozer driver went on a rampage in Jerusalem on Tuesday, hitting vehicles near a hotel where U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is due to stay later in the day before he was shot dead.

Hmm. Methinks this sentence should be rewritten.

Will they fix it before you visit this link? Gawker spotted this earlier today, and no change yet...

File under: interesting stories

Sick of the Revolution
By Deb Olin Unferth

Part One

My boyfriend and I went to join the revolution. Nicaragua had the best revolution, he and I agreed. There were several other revolutions in the area—in El Salvador and in Guatemala, in Honduras, in Panama (sort of). My boyfriend said we should get shots and malaria pills and that we would ride the bus there.

I knew my mother and father were not going to go for this so I didn't tell them. I wrote them a letter from Mexico. Actually I wrote the letter in Nogales on the American side of the border, then I crossed the border and mailed it from the Nogales post office on the Mexican side.

Another good resource

The Kenyon Review, a solid lit mag based in my ol' home state of Ohio (but don't hold that against them, please), has a solid online presence at their site, here. Lots of essays, poetry, reviews and, of course, a blog.

Here's a snippet of one essay:

"Just below us was a young couple, the woman eager and attractive and the man cocky and fulsome. He was oiling her up at such a rate that finally my brothers and I slowed our conversational ramble and bent to listen. We debated the right word for the young man: unctuous, said one brother, sharkacious, said another, oleaginous, said a third, horny as Howard Hughes' fingernails, said a fourth. Finally there was a moment when the young man leaned toward the young woman and gently covered her exquisite digits with his offensive paws and said, hopefully, you and I . . . at which point my brother Thomas stood up suddenly, launched himself over the balcony rail, landed with a stupendous crash on their table, and said to the young man, Never, and I mean never, begin a sentence with an adverb."

Who said grammar can't be funny? That essay came from Brian Doyle, right on the main page of KR Online.

On being a working, publishing poet

Seth Abramson, whose blog I quite like, has a lengthy post on being a working, publishing poet.
He's working under a contemplation of small literary presses, but he delves into the whole idea and mood of being a working creative writer now.

The post has a mantra near the top that is thoughtful and useful:
"1. Good work will find an audience.
2. Good work largely ignored is still good work; bad work widely read is still bad work.
3. Identifying problems in distributing good work is the beginning, and not the ending, of any publishing-related conversation worth having."

Interesting stuff to chew on, particularly for people who are in the midst of this writing-for-a-living thing. I also like this bit:
"If the maxims above offer up any wisdom whatsoever about being a poet, it is (reduced to simplest terms) the following:Write as well as you possibly can, as independently as you can, for as long as you can. Decide whether you want an Audience.If you do, show them the respect of considering them when you write, being as persistent as possible in trying to reach them, and reaching them (when and as you do) in as direct a fashion as possible. Foreclose no avenues of reaching your Audience, which means both acknowledging the problems of the Art Equation and being in no way whatsoever cowed by them.Have sufficient courage to meet the inevitable adversities."

New Kid on the Lit Block

I dunno, maybe it's not new, but it's new to me:
Chicago Literary Scene Examiner

So far: interviews, lit news, Chicago-related events. More to come, I'd guess.