We Heard You Like Doggerel

Posted Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

St. Mark’s Bookshop to get you some doggerel
from brooklyn
typeset on an antique typewriter
bound with a needle and thread

Marcy, Hewes, Lorimer, Flushing,
Murder Myrtle, Kosciuszko, Gates, Halsey
Just walk towards the Popeye’s
oh great, the bar is off the Murder Avenue stop
this will certainly end well

lime lemon gin in teacups
that we will never live up to
do you get the feeling that she’s a total Christian?

I don’t want to be like everyone else
but I don’t want to be different either
Calvin Klein: Bushwick
The smell of a Dumpster filled with farts

so let’s all go back to your place
where we’ll see the “I am enduring your words” face
why do you take cabs everywhere?
why do you have a backpack full of small bills?

Well then tell me what you do know about the Adonis cult
It’s not worth the time
to concoct an insult for someone
who flunked out of FIT and moved to Pennsylvania
“I just love ketamine!”

It’s time to go home
new standing policy:
I need to know someone for a few months
before I believe anything that comes out of their mouth

Se non è vero, è ben trovato:
“if it’s not true
it’s still a great story”

lines written upon giving up on nyu

Posted Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

it’s all right you know
when i’m not with all of you
pizza mercato urban outfitters
american apparel dimwits
culled from flyover states

drinking all of daddy’s money
puking the sidewalk outside of
The Bitter End
go, go take your places
Kelley, Ashlee, and Omar

we can’t forget the sizable cohort
of artless Pakistani autodidacts
spouting styrofoam Marxism
stolen from Dad’s rumpled copies
of the Paris Review

Oh, the dark of MacDougall Street
if ever there were
an outpost of New Jersey
and all the smelly streets
of nameless Midwestern towns
in the city, there it is.

Running with all the subtlety
of an open sewer
running along the Champs
Élysées—is that some band, bro,
playing tonight at Le Poisson Rouge?

Perhaps it’s nothing more than a pernicious accident
that NYU is in the Village.

renewal

Posted Thursday, December 1st, 2011

I just spent all night going through all of my old manuscripts and finding all of the papers and essays I wanted to put on here.

I also completely redesigned most of the site. I removed most of the web design work, because it was not really central to what the site is about. I also added some of my more controversial essays, like “29 2nd Ave.” I’m excited to start blogging on here now. I just saw Andrey Tarkovskiy’s Solaris last week for the first time on the big screen and had this whole thing in my brain that I wanted to write about how it fits in with Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television.

I mostly stayed up tonight to get my GRE score, which I was delighted to find out was three points from a perfect score. I am in the 99th percentile.

(The new scale is 140-170.)

However, it is now 6 AM and I must be going to sleep.

ars blogetica

Posted Thursday, December 1st, 2011

It’s not fashionable now, but I kept a blog since about 2003. As you can imagine, since my first entry was the day I graduated high school, it was a bit sophomoric.

However, as a writer, it’s great to look at your first story and go “wow, that is quite terrible.” It shows that you’ve grown as a writer and as a person. I’ve decided to move my writing from a semi-obscure URL to this one. I think that I’ve grown beyond the point where I need to hide behind a pseudonym. Also, my earlier goal of total honesty is not really appropriate. One of the central lessons of that experiment was certainly a postmodern one. Whose “truth” am I to write about? All writing is an exercise of power, and some people object vehemently to another voice transforming their lives.

However, to remain in practice as a writer one needs a sketchbook. A painter doesn’t execute everything on canvas. It’s only after sketching some studies that he or she gets ready to paint the full-scale version of their idea. I graduated just a couple months ago, and yet I feel that I am not using my degree is much as I thought I would. While I do get paid to write, I have mostly been writing computer code these days. And as much as I do enjoy monkeying around with PHP, it’s not a satisfying as writing a nice, self-contained story. While code has its own mysteries, it’s not as approachable as fiction.

So this is to be my new sketchbook.