First is Not the Worst

New poems in the first edition of Flora Fiction.  Don't let the name fool you, there's plenty of poems in the journal. The second one is an older piece of work. I wrote it for a creative writing class at NYU. I don't remember what the specifics of the assignment were, but I used them to produced a work about the sights and sounds of Washington Square Park.

Finds and Observations 6/24 to 6/26

I hope by making it small enough, it isn't obscene.

Room in Rome is a terrible fucking movie. Literally. I looked it up on Wikipedia and surprise, surprise, a movie about Lesbians that fails to stimulate, educate, or even titillate was made by a man. Not only that, the same man, wrote, produced, directed, and EDITED the film. So there was no one reining him in. He was probably the caterer too. It wasn't even filmed in Rome!

I found a few interesting things in the city yesterday. The first was a twenty year old syllabus for a film studies class at NYU. I came across it at a Goodwill. It was tucked inside of a tome on film criticism. It is interesting to read because it shows how just a few years ago everything was different for students. There was no internet, no DVDs, and no expectation of using a computer and printer. In one assignment, the professor, Joy Gould Boyum, tells the students to keep the carbons because they won't get their essay back until the end of the semester. Carbons! I could also tell the syllabus was originally typewritten then xeroxed. The smudges on the letters give it away. Since the class was in 1996, I imagine she got twenty papers on Pulp Fiction for the final.

Oh, so much progress we've made since then! On the other hand we still have a Clinton running for president.

I also found a ticket for Eastern Airlines tucked inside of a book the library was selling for a dollar. The book looked like a Dave Barry knockoff, a lament by one of the early baby-boomers about how Elvis was great and the Beatles ruined everything in a frothy over the top style that hides a serious bitter core. Anyway, the ticket was at least 25 years old since the airline went out of business in 1991. What I found fascinating was the lack of personal information on the ticket. There was no name, nothing. Anybody could've used it to board a plane.

Ah, the innocence that was pre-9/11 America. I'm starting to sound like the author...

And finally, the final find. A kid's book by Eugene Ionesco.

I'm Big in West Africa

I'm almost as big as fufu.

This is the second time I've been published in West Africa (remember when I wrote that poem Erica Shumener?). The Ehanom Review, a literary publication based in Ghana has put a poem of mine up online. Read it while drinking a nice palm wine.

A Message from Bank of America

I guess it lends a whole new meaning to the phrase: "Too big to fail." Also, judging from the picture it looks like Brian Moynihan really let himself go. Or Charles Holliday.

Talk about the Look of Robot Pity in the Year of the Tiger

Three poems of mine are present in the Barefoot Review. One of them goes all the way back to my senior year poetry class at NYU. We had to take one another's lines and assemble them into a new work. You can probably tell which one of the poems was constructed that way. Look at me Professor Fitterman! I'm making good!

The Online Empire of My Presence Is Expanding

Getting published in other people's websites is pretty much all I'm good for anyways.

Poem up at Dead Beats.

Poem in the last edition of Guerrilla Pamphlets.

Proceed to Party

New poems of mine can be found at Ken*Again as well as The Vehicle. This poem "American News" which is in Literbug, has been in the works since early 2008. I believe the lines originally came from stories I found on the AOL Homepage. It braved the poetry workshops of Robert Fitterman and is now published! I also have a short story in this collection from Circus of the Damned. It was originally published here.

Meanwhile, back in real life, the struggle continues...

A Poem Straight From The Vine

I have a poem up in the first issue of Vine Leaves. The poem's one of my older ones, written around 2006 or so. It is based on the pictures up at NYU's home page for students. If you keep refreshing the page and ignore the pictures of the study abroad sites, you might see bits and pieces that I incorporated.

The Best American Writing

For May/June 2011 at least. I've been travelling up and down the middle of Italy and have a backlog of new links to post for stories and poems.

Here is a short story from Pink Eye Lemonade about global warming and protests.

I was part of a project at Super Arrow that involved creating a persona and corresponding with it. I was a crazy dying/delirious poet and I spoke with another writer who pretended to be a train conductor from Chicagoland. Neither of us knew the other.

At Poetry Super Highway, I was poet of the week with a poem about America.

UCity Review generously published two of my poems.  

The Stone Hobo has a poem of mine as well as AUDIO that will let you listen to me reading it. I'm a multimedia artist now!



Possible Book Titles

Okay, I have one more post let to make for the month, so I'm going to make it count. A few years ago (2005) I wrote a novel and have been editing it here and there for half a decade. It is a coming of age story for two young college freshmen, set in New York City, with an updating of sorts of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. One of these days it will end up on somebody's bookshelf, but before then it needs a better title. The default one is "Brief Smiles," but it doesn't stand out enough. Here are some I have been considering, some more than others, what do you all think?

Brief Smiles

Everything With Wings Is Restless

Combination of the Two

Born to Go

The Millennials

Intercession Hours

The Late Great Planet Werner

War, What is it Good For?

The Bearditudes

The Towers and the Streets

Between the Windows of the Sea

Far From Perfect

Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment

In the Devil’s Territory

Stained to Perfection

Trimalchio in West Egg

The City and its Discontents

I don't know what it is, but italics sure do make everything look bibliographical!

"I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these DIFFERENT things have happened"

That's me, the Rabbi. Lucky enough to appear in the comedy show that's taking NYU BY STORM!!!!

West Tenth Launch Party!

Well, what is this handsome Rothko? Just kidding. It's the cover of the first issue of what I hope will be many, of NYU's premier undergraduate literary magazine, West 10th Street. This Friday we will be having our official launch party at 7:00 PM at the Creative Writer's House, 58 West 10th Street, NY,NY. The theme is black, red, and white, so if you want to come wear one of those colors. If you don;t own anything white or black, I guess you could go topless (depending on your race) or somehow bloody yourself. Anyways it should be a good event. We're having poets and fiction writers reading their pieces. All are welcome. If you can't make it, look out for copies of our magazine on shelves, bathroom stalls, used as bookmarks, ask me for a copy if you would like to see one, I think I can photocopy a few.

And no, I don't have any poetry in it. But I helped to select them. There some really promising work by one young poet. Check it out.

A Find

I was digging around my poetry stash and found this poem I wrote as an exercise for my poetry class last year. We were supposed to write lines in iambic pentameter, but I decided not to count syllables and just write in the rhyme pattern I was familar with. I remember reading something that said English speech generally follows that kind of scheme so I went with what I had and wrote something CRAZY

Another Friday in Lent

He went down to the stream
And saw life floating past
He wondered if it was a dream
And how long it would last.
A fish swam up, green and free
It startled him a bit,
Under the reflection of a tree
Seeing he was lost in quite a fit.
The fish cried out, do not be afraid
For this is the world that you have made.

I AM DOING A POETRY READING

P OET R Y R E A DI N G P O E T RY RE A D I N G PO E T R Y R E A


JOIN US FOR A POETRY READING:

ROB FITTERMAN’S NYU ADVANCED POETRY WORKSHOP

169 BAR, MONDAY 3/31 - 6-8 PM

169 EAST BROADWAY (@ Rutgers Street)
[take the F train to the East Broadway stop—walk 1 block east]

READERS INCLUDE:

SARAH ADLER
WALTER ANCARROW
JANIE BUCKLEY
GABRIEL COREN
DAN DONNELLY
LEAH EVANS
JAMIE LESS
BENJAMIN NARDOLILLI
TAINI SANON
+ special guests

E-Mails I've Received

This is probably the least motivational E-mail ad for a product I have ever received.

To start off with, it was sent by a guy named Gard Irwin. That sounds like a name from a Homestarrunner cartoon, one of the sketchy people with a pimply face and big glasses that are created to be random authors and such. That should have been enough, but the subject line gave away the whole reason I was being graced with Gard's communication.

"Get rid of your lilliputian penis."

Thank God I had read Gulliver's Travels this summer. Otherwise, I would never had known just how small my penis is. The prefix "lilli-" might have given it away (although it is the suffix for my last name). Coincidentally, Swift's work was not above ribald antics. He has a character in the story named Master Bates.

Of course I have gotten emails like this, as people with and without penises all over the world have too. We know that a subject line that mentions the organ at all tries to sell a medication or an herb. Rarely do they sell a castration service. Opening the e-mail up confirmed my suspicions.

With a big penis you can beat up all the other men
CHECK NOW
Now your penis will be too big to big covered by your hat.

The first line made me laugh. I never knew that this was the point of a large penis, to beat other men up with it. Not to impress the women (or the men), not to pleasure, but to abuse. I could be the king of the hill. Others might come to me with guns and Ninja stars, but I would just have to drop my pants and spin in a circle. Victory would then be mine.


What really scared me out was that the last line talks about having a hat. I am one of the few people who wears one regularly. How did they know? How did they know that my hat his a humble one, not a cap (which I think would be too small as things stand right now ;) ) but not a top hat, which could hide a very large member.

Of course I did not click on the link. Not even in the library where they couldn't trace me back to my laptop. Overall, it is an honest ad, but totally fails to do anything but amuse me.

Meanwhile, Lionel Blake (upstanding and British, perhaps a poet laureate?) sent me a message,"breaking news."

We start:

No smokescreens here
What you see is what you'll get.

Good. finally. I was excited, yet worried that I was getting another e-mail begging to get its electronic hands on my genitals.

SHOTPAK Inc (SHTP) has a unique product that's causing ripples across the globe.

Notice that SHTP looks a lot like SHIT, though of course I have bad vision, even at five inches away from the screen.

The company's shares are going through the roof, up 42 % today alone.

Hmmm, perhaps cheap Viagra? That would make things rise quickly.

see the recent headlines
- ShotPak Signs Major Import Agreement For South Korea
- ShotPak Signs Letter of Intent with India Importer
- ShotPak Signs Letter of Intent with India Importer to Be Available in 120 Hotel Mini Bars Throughout Country
- ShotPak Ships Throughout Texas

It is an interesting choice of markets, South Korea, India, and Texas. But it will be in mini bars, which is a growing market, because I know how popular they are. You just go into your room and knock a few whiskeys and bags of nuts back.

And so on and so on.
This is a real company with real products NO SMOKESCREEN
Look into it and get in on the action.

But they won;t tell me what they are. I am supposed to get in on the action. Do they want to mess with my penis?

History of Poland

Today I had my midterm for the history of Poland. It was alright. I finished with time to spare. Basically I wrote in a Blue Book, identifying several terms and trying to explain how they were significant. I had studied all of them and found it was most difficult how to repeat information without sounding like I was just spitting out the same answer, since the terms all related to the big dates of Polish history at that point: 1386, 1414, 1569, 1648 etc.

It is an interesting class, closer to the kind of history I took in High School than what I have learned in College. One might decry the fact that it was all names and dates, no grand post-modern theories deconstructing the whole notion of "Polish-ness." But I am learning about the history of a country and its peoples, and I find it interesting. it is a good lesson of how not to build your government. I feel bad that it was the Poles who seemed to have a state and constitution that was a laughingstock of Europe. Its most ridiculous provision was that it let nobles legally revolt and fight the king with their own armies. How the country survived for so long without being conquered is the real miracle of the country's history.

Since I knew only the basics of the country's history, this is the approach that works best. I am learning things I can share with other people. One of the kids in my class is in the same fiction workshop as me and we tried to out-do each other in telling our instructor, Darin Strauss,of all the poor decisions Poland made from 966 to 1795.

Imagine trying to teach the history of the US to kids on the model I have experienced in college. They would learn nothing. Even if it was all myth, they would still know something and then could deconstruct it to see what was underneath. Before Racism can be taken apart or the notion of freedom, the concrete history of slavery and the adoption of the constitution has to occur. Grand theorizing is fine (I do it all the time) but without any grounding in time and space, its just wasted energy.

The Only Thing I Can Do Right is Write

Oh well, I hope at least someone other than me thinks so

Today I was supposed to have a meeting with someone for Teach for America. We would sit around a table, drink coffee, and talk for an hour. Actually I was hoping that it would be less, because I had to take part in an economics experiment later on today. I was looking forward to making a few bucks for a minimal amount of work. However I was running behind as soon as I woke up. I haven't been able to sleep well, or do anything well for that matter, and I called the guy I was supposed to meet and said I would be fifteen minutes late. he said that was fine and hung up.

It was time to get dressed. I threw on the shorts and shirt I have been wearing for the past four days and left my room and took the elevator down. I had forgotten one crucial detail. Earlier in the week, I had received an e-mail telling me about the meeting and what to look for when trying to pick out one young guy sitting by himself from a whole room filled with them. It turns out the distinctive marker was a blue mug that appropriately said "Teach for America" on it.

Well, I didn't know that at the time I was out of the building and making my way to cross Houston Street. So I went into the coffee shop and looked around, expecting someone with a giant sign above them announcing who they were and what organization they were representing. I had no id what he would look like. I suppose I thought young and urbane, not in a suit and tie, maybe glasses, but probably not. If he had been a teacher himself, he probably would have exchanged rims for contacts, to appear younger and less overly erudite.

I saw plenty of people who could have been the man I was looking for, the man who was looking for me. There were some sitting with lap tops and I wondered if these were likely candidates. I had expected to share an empty table and exchange forms, brochures, numbers, and my resume. So what would he need a computer for? Maybe if I bored him he would starting surfing the Internet, checking out personals on Craigslist.

Pacing around, looking at my watch, and rocking back and forth on my toes didn't seem to catch Antone's attention. A few people looked at me, but not int he inquisitive way I hoped, trying to figure out if I was the one they were waiting for, the promised child, the future teacher for America. I'm sure the staff working behind the counter were pleased, seeing this young man with a beard looking around, clutching a bag close to himself, not ordering anything.

Finally, I gave up. I left, wanting to catch my experiment in time and to be able to catch a bite to eat before then. I had a pumpernickel bagel and in change I got back dimes and nickels, the man was out of quarters. it was a bad omen. Or a bad closing. Well, one thing that I didn't expect and know how to deal with.

I went inside the building for the experiments and waited until they were ready to let me into the lab. Now these were economic experiments, I would play a lame computer game and I would be paid base don my decision making skills. The people running the experiments would collect the data and weave grand theories out of it. I would get a few bucks and science and society would be advanced by the cause. I suffered no setback in getting into the experiment, my name was on the list and there was a computer available for me. I was relieved. Something good was going to happen.

However the experiment was more structured than I thought it would be. There was little left up to me. I had to choose the right combination of balls, marked with either an X, a Y, or a Z. Then I was eligible for a lottery were I could win $105 dollars. If I chose wisely, or more accurately, I was lucky. I could choose to change the balls I had, in any combination, or to keep them the same and then risk not getting the payout. If I did not choose the right balls in the electronic urn (harking back to Ancient Athens' juries) then all I would get was a show up fee, minus the cost of switching balls.

I decided on a compromise, changing one ball and keeping the other two the same. I thought that this was like a Monty Hall problem or something like it, but I didn't know what was the best solution in this case. I wanted to keep as much of the show-up fee as possible, so I lost a dollar by changing one ball. Anyways, the computer turned its gears and decided that despite my efforts, I was not worthy of the grand prize. I knew I was not alone, most of the people in the room with me probably didn't get it either, but that solidarity would not pay for a nice meal and a bottle of Scotch.

So today was a day of failure in regards to events within my control and for events regarding luck. At least I was able to buy my groceries without any problems. If only the one guy who did win the huge prize wasn't in line next to me at the Bursar's office, waiting for the petty cash officer to count off his plethora of twenty dollar bills.

The NYU Home Homepage

Well they updated the NYU Home Homepage (I have to figure out a better way of saying it) which I don't understand. They are always messing with the colors and where things are on the screen. It is frustrating having to learn it all over again and I don;t understand why we should pay money for people to design things constantly and to worry about how to change the color. It should just be a variation on the school colors and that should be it. You seen enough purple and white here, so they should not be offensive. However what I dislike the most is on the sign-in page. Now I appreciate eccentricity, that's why I go here. I was a big supporter of the dinosaur on the page, which was a mistake that become popular, and rightly so.

Yet the new homepage features pictures of the study abroad sites. I know we are big on study abroad (rumored to be because it opens up space in housing) but I don;t think these images should be on there. i think that the point of NYU home having pictures is to create a sense of community. The library, Silver Center, and Washington Square Park are all used by the students. Only a portion go to any one study abroad site, some go to more, but very few have been to all of them. They are good pictures and make me wish I had studied outside the US, but I think they work against what the design of what the NYU Homepage should be.

Go to home.nyu.edu and refresh the screen to see them and compare to the shots of the campus around Washington Square Park

A Coat of Arms

Being in the Broome Street Residential College next year, I decided to contribute to the nascent organization by designing a coat of arms to represent us. It's a little bit complicated and so I don't know how reproducible it is, but then I guess no coat of arms or state seal really is, they were designed after all, to identify knights and the more complex the design, the least likely it would be copied.

I decided that our coat of arms should reflect what we hope to achieve this year in the college. Since we are a part of New York University, I have put it a picture of our logo, with the torch on its purple background, reflecting our school colors. The blue, white, and orange flag in the upper right hand corner is based on the flag of New York City and including it with the NYU logo reminds us of where we are and our mission of building a private university in the public service.

The Design in the bottom right is taken from Ghana and is a symbol of learning,“nea onnim”, which is representative of learning as a life long process. The green behind it is taken from Middle Eastern cultures, which use the color to signify learning. The dolphin might surprise some of you, it is taken from traditional heraldry, when the dolphin was seen as a symbol of charity. I wanted to represent this idea on the coat of arms because service is one of the goals of the residential college.

Anyone familiar with the university will recognize the bobcat towering over the shield. It is the mascot of NYU and though fierce, is caring and protective towards its young, nurturing them in full. The motto I have chosen for Broome Street: "Aut nunquam tentes, aut perfice." Translates roughly to: do not attempt, complete. I think that this is relevant to us because the Broome Residential College will have requirements for its residents and it expects these to be met as a condition of living here.

On the sides I have placed drawings of the Empire State Building, once again to remind ourselves that we are of the city and not the fields and the woods. Like the skyscraper, we aspire to great heights and lofty ideals.

Paul Giamatti and I

On Saturday I went on a cruise organized by my favorite people in the world, the Inter-Residence Hall Council. My ticket was free because I have a position within it. I went alone since Natalie didn’t have, in her opinion, anything nice to wear to the event. While I was on board the ship, we went up and down the East River and while Sinatra’s New York, New York was playing, we saw Lady Liberty.

When we got back we were detained for half and hour or so because some had stolen a bunch of gift certificates that we were handing out. They were to starbucks, worth five dollars each, and we were all going to get one. The thieves took about three-hundred dollars worth of them. So, we weren’t allowed to leave the boat for half an hour or so. Luckily they found the thieves, two girls who were drunk and who handed the police fake IDs.

While I was quarantined or whatever, I was with a group of students and we talked about many things. One topic of conversation that came up was that it was claimed I looked like Paul Giamatti, the actor. His best known role is probably in the movie “Sideways.” Let’s see the comparison:



and this, in case you were wondering, is me:



No not the Spainard in the painting, the handsome man in the three-piece suit. Hmmm I suppose there is some likeness in the beardal region, but I'm not seeing it. Maybe the beard is too long. I think our eyes could be similair, dark. Other than that, not much else. Maybe it was the sea air that warped people's vision.

I've also been compared to matthew Broderick and Toby Maguire. But that is when I don;t have a beard, which is rare. I recently found out that besides sharing a birthday, F. Scott Fitzgerald and I also are the same height. We also both like to drink, although he liked it a lot more than I do and probably ever will.