From "Smooch Tentet Resolve"

By Out to Lunch.

From the future

By Chris Goode.

Thompson, de-headed & gutted:

desire (8) spaces (6) attention (5) collaboration (5) consumerism (5) life (5) theatre (5) division of labour (4) future (4) want (4) audience (3) commitment (3) embarrassment (3) information (3) institution (3) internet (3) irony (3) masculinity (3) new media (3) participation (3) presence (3) publics (3) urgency (3) violence (3) worrying (3) 911 (2) Bush (2) Liron (2) Manchester (2) Shaw (2) Web 2.0 (2) actors (2) blurs (2) capital (2) centres (2) change (2) chaos (2) choice (2) civil privatism (2) cocks (2) control (2) dog (2) dreams (2) erections (2) exposure (2) freedom (2) funding (2) genitals (2) improvisation (2) infantilism (2) interactivity (2) marketing (2) models (2) moments (2) noise (2) passivity (2) poetry (2) power (2) queer (2) roles (2) sanctuary (2) self-indulgence (2) simulation (2) sitting (2) strangers (2) voyeurism (2) vulnerability (2) work (2) writing (2) Abrahami (1) Abramovic (1) Ahmed (1) Allen (1) BAC (1) Bartlet (1) Beckett (1) Billington (1) Blair (1) Cage (1) Corrie (1) Duncan (1) Eshun (1) Gaza (1) Joris (1) Phillips (1) Shakespeare (1) Sinclair (1) Sondheim (1) Sorkin (1) Stefans (1) Sundays (1) The Tempest (1) Titus Andronicus (1) West Bank (1) West End (1) Zizek (1) acting (1) action (1) activity (1) aftermath (1) architecture (1) art (1) assent (1) authenticity (1) authorship (1) blindfolds (1) blood (1) blurts (1) bodies (1) bomb (1) boot camps (1) both OK (1) buildings (1) bus stations (1) cadence (1) candles (1) cats (1) caught out (1) celebration (1) chorus lines (1) church (1) citation (1) closure (1) complicity (1) confusion (1) context (1) cool (1) corruption (1) craft (1) crisis (1) cybernetics (1) dance (1) decision (1) deliberation (1) democracy (1) depth (1) deserts (1) designation (1) despair (1) diabetes (1) difficulty (1) digital (1) dispersion (1) dissent (1) distance (1) distraction (1) dream (1) drinks (1) dynamite (1) ease (1) ecleticism (1) elegance (1) encounter (1) equity (1) establishment (1) events (1) everyone (1) exile (1) expertise (1) exploitation (1) exploration (1) feeling (1) fools (1) form and content (1) frame (1) free (1) fucking (1) gathering (1) generalities (1) generations (1) gratification (1) heckles (1) homes (1) hotels (1) humans (1) ice (1) idealism (1) impact (1) incompleteness (1) initiation (1) insularity (1) invention (1) joy (1) laughter (1) literacy (1) lunchbreaks (1) marriage (1) mercy (1) modernism (1) motorbikes (1) musicals (1) nature (1) need (1) nomadic (1) nudity (1) occasion (1) order (1) others (1) outrage (1) phallocentrism (1) plurality (1) politics (1) populism (1) post-punk (1) preference (1) presidents (1) prestige (1) protest (1) proxy (1) pudding (1) punishment (1) radical (1) recovery (1) refusal (1) rehearsal (1) responsibility (1) rigour (1) rituals (1) rolling theatre (1) sausages (1) scratch (1) seduction (1) shame (1) shit (1) silence (1) site specific (1) site-specific (1) skill (1) slowdances (1) smell (1) specialism (1) specificity (1) stagecraft (1) stakes (1) stewardship (1) stopping (1) straightness (1) suicide (1) technology (1) templates (1) therapy (1) thresholds (1) tickets (1) tolerance (1) turbulence (1) user-generated (1) viruses (1) vocation (1) voice (1) voting (1) weather (1) wish (1) wounds (1) yeast (1) zoning (1)

From "Granny Smith"

By Richard Barrett.

there are loads of places we could live if
we decide we do want to make a go of this
our two salaries could pay for quite a lot
i hear what you're saying about renting
being dead money without understanding
exactly what you mean do you mean money
isn't always already dead? - on the contrary
under some circumstances it might spend its
time dancing around and eating out at Nandos
on Sunday there is no counter-service here
deposits and withdrawals can still be made
don't please demand to see a personal advisor
i name each £5 note i have after someone
off the telly while each £10 note gets called
after a distant family member and the odd
£20 note is named for my mum and dad and
fifties by the names of ex-lovers / this is
usual isn't it? we'll be looking at starter homes
then of at least two bedrooms it's just
sitting there when it could be earning interest
this financial year the best ISA providers are
what's the opposite of excited?

Platelets and Bone Marrow Cheetah

By Goat Far DT & Papa Boup Ndiop.



My name is too big to fail
All up in whole nations became the agéd frail

From "Third Hymn to Lenin"

For Muriel Rukeyser.
By Hugh MacDiarmid.

[...] Proclaiming in ghoulish kirks our base immortal hope.
And what is this impossible problem then?
Only to give a few thousand people enough to eat,
Decent houses and a fair income every week.
What? For nothing? Yes! Scotland can well afford it.

It cannot be done. The poor are always with us,
The Bible says. Would other countries agree?
Clearly we couldn't unless they did it too.
All the old arguments against ending Slavery!

Ah, no! These bourgeois hopes are not our aim.

From "Room Manouevre"

By Jonny Liron.

"[...] pre taste / a mixture of your first finger at
a scratch unfurl

hurl the necessary appeasement brochure in face
get out of the fact line to weep the kiss bouncer slakes
you in the honorary kneecap twist measure enhance
deliberate knife, curl the fuck up in measure the systolic
embryonic plug attachment to the foreskin belt up is
squeak attractor infeasible hunt cake, mother desist
your unreasonable detonator of patrimony arch up
take two reasonable bullets and both holes, drip
your catchment area is your peacock circle blow hole
I dance you to our deranged convulsions of lobotomised
alphabet in milkshake embrace procedure the attachment
portion of your mistake in my mouth so sorry the fuck up
in a huntsman‘s gorge rush the splattering of possible children
on my palm is roughly millions of abortions
so half of my cum is fructose and you‘re a diabetic
holy cow it‘s a coma of swallowed woman‘s womb
the Indian lorry hurls through the window at 76 mph
as in miles per hour as in the neck of a woman‘s womb
chipping a gland of several chemicals which fertilise
the pew of the woman praying to your seminal vesicle [...]"

In QUID 20. This quid also contains prose by Joe Luna (on Andrea Brady's Wildfire), Danny Hayward (on poetry, sociology & attention, & on Timothy Thornton's PESTREGIMENT), and Lowri Jenkins (on Tim Atkins's Horace), Eirik Steinhoff's interview with William Fuller), & poems by Sarah Kelly, Neil Pattison, Amy De'Ath, Tom Jones, Gordon Finlayson (pace "a little prose in poetry"). Other quids in.

From "Your Editorial Comes In Three Chapters"

By Keston Sutherland.

"I want to come behind your bottom lip for you, I want my come to heat your teeth like cakes for you, I want my come to glue your cheeks together, but I won‘t do that. Shower, strong coffee, the internet, soup, clothes, drugs, then reality, then start, then read."

In Quid 20. Most other quids here.

So few Richards

"Despite this, I still had to fight the need to hack up phleghm all the way through and could feel the surgeons cutting my neck and failing to get the line in the right way at the first couple of attempts."

Richard Tyrone Jones's heart failure diary.

Tomaž Šalamun, with translation assistance from Bob Perelman, in Tom Raworth's INFOLIO:

HEY LADYPOVERTY YOU WHY SO SARCASTIC ABOUT MARKET??

So few Richards

Rich Owens' Punch Press has been getting petit-PSYOPS from the Kenneth Koch estate just because Kent Johnson wrote all Frank O'Haras poems or something. I know, right?

From "The Brothers Karamazov"

By Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

"[...] So, I accept God, and not only do I do so willingly, I also accept His supreme wisdow and His purpose, both of which are completely unknown to us, I believe in the order, the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony -- one in which we shall all as it were fuse together -- I believe in the Word towards which the universe strives and which once "was with God" and which is God, well, and so on into infinity. Too many words have been wasted apropos of all that. It looks as though I'm already on the right track, doesn't it? So let me tell you that in the last analysis, this world of God's -- I don't accept it, even though I know that it exists, and I don't admit its validity in any way. It isn't God I don't accupt, you see; it's the world created by Him, the world of God I don't accept and cannot agree to accept. Let me quality that: like a young babe, I am convinced that our sufferings will be healed and smoothed away, that the whole offensive comedy of human conflict will disappear like a pathetic mirage, like the infamous fabrication of the Euclidean human mind, as weak and undersized as an atom, and that ultimately, during the universal finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and become manifest something so precious that it will be sufficient for all hearts, for the soothing of all indignation, the redemption of all men's evil-doings, all the blood that has been shed by them, will be sufficient not only to make it possible to forgive but even to justify all the things that have happened to men -- and even if all that, all of it, makes itself manifest and becomes reality, I will not accept it and do not want to accept it! Even if the parallel lines converge and I actually witness it, I shall witness it and say they have converged, but all the same I shall not accept it. That is my essence, Alyosha, that is my thesis. Now I have expressed it to you seriously. I purposely began this conversation with you in as stupid a manner as possible, but I've led it up to my confession, because that is the only thing required. It wasn't necessary for you to hear about God, but simply to learn what your beloved brother lives by. And I have told it."

Ivan suddenly ended his long tirade with a display of singular and unexpected emotion.

"And why did you begin 'in as stupid a manner as possible'?" Alyosho asked, gazing at him reflectively.

"Well, in the first place, for the sake of russisme: Russian conversations on these subjects are invariably conducted in as stupid a manner as possible. And in the second place: the greater the stupidity, the closer to the matter in hand. The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit equivocates and hides. Wit is a scoundrel, while stupidity is honest and sincere. I led the conversation up to the subject of my destpair, and the more stupidly I portrayed it, the greater was the advantage to myself."

"Will you explain to me why you 'don't accept' the world?' Alyosha said.

Shame vs. ignominy

"The law of ‘find your voice’ and ‘write what you know’ originates in a phenomenon perhaps most clearly documented by the blog and book Stuff White People Like: the loss of cultural capital associated with whiteness, and the attempts of White People to compensate for this loss by displaying knowledge of non-white cultures. Hence Stuff White People Like #20, ‘Being an Expert on Your Culture’, and #116, ‘Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore’. Non-white, non-college-educated or non-middle or upper-class people may write what they know, but White People have to find the voice of a Vietnamese woman impregnated by a member of the American army that killed her only true love."

Great Elf Batman article on MFA writing.

PS: Don't like this bit: "As long as it views writing as shameful, the programme will not generate good books, except by accident [...] if everyone wrote like Eggers, what would happen to the novel?" If everyone wrote like Dave (in the sense of writing with serious and reflexive ethical curiosity, not in the sense of liking to say "adobe" and "frisbee") then whatever happened to the novel, it would be far less interesting than whatever would have already happened to the world. Not that "overcoming culture" isn't more stuff white people like.

"What about kissing in Clapton?"

Jamton Murpta's papal visit (via Chris Goode).