After looking at Billy Collins’s author photo, it has been decided that today’s game will be reading his poems in Jeff Van Gundy’s voice. And, for the pre-2012 version, occasionally interrupting the poems with MAMA THERE GOES THAT MAN!

My house is full of eighteen year olds. Yesterday was my sister’s prom; they celebrated after the prom with a sleepover that appears, horrifyingly, to have been Hawaiian themed; the place is lousy with fake coconuts full of daiquiri residue. I have never met almost any of these people; some are taunting my dog and even the ones I have met (inculding my sister) are studiously not talking to me while I eat breakfast and read tumblr. I avoided this last night by playing darts at the pub, but I have now had an entire breakfast’s worth of knowing what my wake is going to be like.

Last night at the saloon a blonde girl standing next to me ordered a vodka tonic, and when she went to pay for it, she also dug out of her purse a key. She looked to her right, where until seemingly just then here companion had been; but he had gone somewhere. So then she looked at me, and presented, for my inspection, her key.

“What do you think this is a key for,” she said. “An ATV?”

I had never seen the key to an ATV, and said so. But then I added that it looked like it could be the key to an ATV. Or a steamer trunk. Or a lock closet. It was a key.

The girl looked very disappointed at this wishiwashiness from my end. “Well,” she said, “it’s not the key to a boat. Do you think it could be the key to a boat?”

I did not know what the key to a boat looked like, I said, but I thought that the key should had very possibly could be the key to a boat. It was a key. I added that it might be the key to a gym locker.

The girl’s disappointment before had been formidable; now it was crushing. The muscles in my extremities all tensed up, like a cat’s, as if I were going to have soon flee. The girl continued to look at me, her face moving from disappointment into almost incomprehension. The song on in the saloon was: Spill the Wine by Eric Burdon and the Animals. Eventually, the girl stopped looking at me and went to find, I guess, her companion; my muscles remained tense. A different song came on next, and then after that I went home.

fuckyeahbookarts:

arpeggia:

Pouring Book Installation by Alicia Martin

That building is vomiting books! Glorious, glorious books!

fialta:

“You know what would make ‘Signs and Symbols’ even better? A man acting like a dick in a relationship.” — Lorrie Moore*

What is this, an in-class writing exercise?

… sorry, it’s hot and I’m cranky and I have a mile-long to-do list and sometimes good old L.M. just rubs me the wrong way.

*not actually a quote from the interview

I have eaten three of the M&Ms out of the jar on the desk of the teacher for whom I am substituting. The Spanish teacher. The jar, I have noticed postprandially, is quite full. Too full. I have combed the room for evidence of what I now suspect, videlicet: that the M&Ms were not eating M&Ms, but rather were there for some kind of guessing game (How many M&Ms in the jar? Guess closest without going over, win the M&Ms!) There are several ways in which I now see my having eaten three affecting the award of the prize. If the M&Ms are counted after the fact, I will have influenced events; but the injustice done to the child who picked the correct original number (or that number plus one, or two, or, heaven help me, three) will be known only to the powers of the cosmos. If, as seems likely, the Spanish teacher has already counted, perhaps nothing: most likely, the student closest without going over to the number of M&Ms currently in the jar, plus three in my digestive system, will win, with any luck win by a margin large enough to render my theft insignificant. It’s only three; it is a big jar. What though if the child guesses N, and a second child guesses n-4? n-5? Heaven help me, n-3? What if this child, whom I imagine coldly malevolent behind crooked eyeglasses, demands a recount? I can’t remember exactly now, but have a strong suspicion that I did not even enjoy the M&Ms. The recount can only end in disaster, in the supposition of favorites played, trusts broken. The beginning of the erosion of any belief, among the schoolchildren, of holders even of the smallest power to do right by any person.

The other day my father said some words, and I picked a particular one of them on which to focus: I think it was a collective noun, or abstract adjective, or some other less-than-reified bit of business. I remember wondering if there were a name for words of the type that my father’s word was a token, and wondering if I should ask him, my mother, my sister, if they knew what the type-name was. I did not think that any of them would know; if fact, if one of them hazarded an idea, I would have disbelieved it. I formed the sentence in my head: “Is there a word for words like X?” I cannot now remember, in the least little bit, what the word was, or what category it belonged to that might have been worthy of remark, possibly worthy even of its own name. Trying to remember it is giving me the feeling one gets when one tries, drunk, to spell polysyllabic words like infrarealism or Guadalajara. I am looking out the window and writing this down because the only other possibility seems to me to be to get up, to leave, and to  walk through the streets of the city, staring straight ahead, until I remember, or starve.

This is my poem about Harold Bloom’s A Map of Misreading:

I wrote a poem

About a bird, in a bush.

And Harold Bloom said, “See, you are obsessed with Shelley.”

And I said, no, this is about a bird

Or maybe my parents

Or maybe a girl I like

Or maybe just a bird.

And Harold Bloom said, “No, Shelley”

He said, “I have this map”

And yelled a bunch of Greek

And he seemed pretty confident, and now I don’t even know.

Harold Bloom called me after he read this poem, to murmur that it had a weak clinamen and that it was locked in an obvious death struggle with Marianne Moore.

The last time I went on a cruise, I brought (without knowing what the title essay was about) A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and had a lot of what I thought were interesting things to tell my parents about how their Fun Times were manufactured and illegitimate and queasy making. I lost count of how many times I brought up his description of the soap on a cruise ship, that smells like lemon-smell created by brilliant scientists who had never smelled lemons. This resulted in me being left off of the real-life equivalent of the Schratz family cruise invitation listserv, and several fun vacations for the rest of the family.

I am back in for a cruise next weekend, though. To cruise through the Caribbean, I am going to be reading Omeros by Derek Walcott, and I imagine I will end up never invited to anything again.