I've never read a Brautigan poem I didn't like

"IT'S RAINING IN LOVE

by Richard Brautigan"
at Flotsam/Jetsam

"Great"

Sol Hashemi and attended a Future Tense poetry reading at Neptune Coffee. There were some poets we liked and some we really disliked, but I'm not gonna say because I have no authority to be judgmental and therefore it would be kind of rude. Nevertheless, we were flabbergasted by the beautiful chapbook Brandon Scott Gorrell and Chelsea Martin made. It's called "Great." Sol and I discussed how awesome the design of the chapbook is the entire ride home.

Issue 17 of 6x6 rocks

And it proves to me just how much more I love Ugly Duckling Presse, Zachary Schomburg, Mathias Svalina.

Number in My Head

I have this number in my head

Do you want to know what it is?

20 Million

The Nuts You Bought Have Grown Dry

The nuts just wrote a poem
in your Mitsubishi.

It's called "Still Life with Buddy."

A Birthday for Mom

A birthday cake
two weeks later.

Dry like your
push-button phone.

I am not afraid
of the sadness.

I have never been
to Memphis.

Fred Muram makes great art and writes great poems

Great poem of the day:

coffee cancelled due to lack of gold.
meeting cancelled due to lack of gold.
shower cancelled due to lack of gold.
computer crashed due to lack of gold.
personality cancelled due to lack of gold.
blog entry cancelled due to lack of gold.
girlfriend cancelled due to lack of gold.
bus route cancelled due to lack of gold.
face tattoo cancelled due to lack of gold.
Disney World Resort vacation cancelled due to lack of gold.
American newspapers cancelled due to lack of gold.
gold cancelled due to lack of gold.
gold-card cancelled due to lack of gold.
Bob Sagat cancelled due to lack of gold.

Fred Muram is a very talented Seattle artist and his blog is ten kinds of wonderful. Check out his calibration videos and the box sculptures.

I accidentally spent $116 at Open Books

But that's ok, because Open Books is the best.

For my own reading pleasure, I bought:
Issue 17 of 6x6
Issue 1 of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry & Opinion
Bad Bad by Chelsea Minnis
DJ Spinoza's Dozen by Eugene Ostashevsky (I already have all of these poems, but it was cheap and small and pretty and published by Octopus Books)

For class, I bought:
Rhapsody in Plain Yellow by Marilyn Chin
The Tether by Carl Phillips
The Ether Dome by Allen Grossman
The Sighted Singer by Mark Halliday and Allen Grossman

I'm not linking to those last four because they're not sold through the publisher and I don't want y'all supporting Amazon. Go buy them at Open Books or something.

Dave Eggers/McSweeney's

Every time someone asks me what my career/life goals are, I generally direct them to Dave Eggers. He's accomplished basically everything I would ever want to accomplish. He was a writer for Salon.com (an amazing magazine), wrote the phenomenal best-seller Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius, founded and edits the playful and profound McSweeney's, founded the now nationwide nonprofit writing and tutoring centers of 826 National, and co-wrote a script (Where the Wild Things Are) for director Spike Jonze. Writer, editor, generous goofy human being.

I was reminded of this because of two things:
1. Going home after a long time (8 months, more or less), you end up being asked the aforementioned question quite a lot.
2. Two of the recent McSweeney's Internet Tendency articles had me in stitches.

"If you're like most workers today, you've probably been running yourself ragged working overtime, trying to show your boss that you're a team player. But, let's be honest, is it getting you anywhere? No. So quit doing it, girlfriend. Instead, apply the following rules, taken from dating tome The Rules, to your job-related conduct. And remember: you are an employee unlike any other."

"Daguerreotypes Will One Day Be in Color; Will Feature Cats in Humorous Poses With Misspelled Captions" (January 1870)