Exhibit 1.3.18

Camera Obscura



I knew since their first issue that Camera Obscura would be one of my favorite literary journals. It's stylish without neurosis, smart without smugness, relevant without pandering. It's weird how easy a journal like this can make the format and how, well, obsolete it can make other journals.

It's not the photography that makes CO seem bigger--though it certainly doesn't hurt--but the boldness of the fiction which, much like the design, always seems to be doing several things at once without falling into any of the usual traps. Like the photographs, it's always worldly and adroit and, damnit, just hard to look away from. Take the opening to Vincent Czyz's "The Nameless Saint":

It was the hour when the lamplighter, toting a ladder over his shoulder, made his tedious rounds; when workers slogged through the streets as though souls on their way to purgatory; when bones turning to dust in graveyards unexpectedly shifted like a heap of logs burning on the grate. This was not the quarter of Samirska lit by theaters and cafes, cabarets and fine restaurants--a quarter smiling like a crescent moon in the dusk--here the restaurants had bare wooden floors and for a drima offered a bowl of cabbage soup or, for a few more, greasy stew and a slice of black village bread. here, mounted gendarmes patrolled the streets in pairs or not at all.

You want to read the rest of that story and the rest of that issue.

Of course, I have a story here which you probably don't want to read and is mostly notable for having taken its title from the repeated line in an Arthur & Yu song ("1000 Words") that Dave turned me onto a long time back. It seems appropriate to me that the story ended up in a journal with a photography emphasis, and I'm thrilled it's there.

Please help them out by subscribing here or by checking your local Barnes & Noble. Unless you're in Topeka in which case I think my parents already bought them all. See, that's how much I care. I told my parents, and they don't even know where I live.*

*That's probably not true.

Exhibit 1.3.17

Royals Thoughts

Eric Hosmer, Kyle Davies, Tim Collins, Chris Getz

What each Royal is presumably thinking during this picture. Royals hat-tip to Anders for sending me both links.


Hosmer: Hey, Stephen Malkmus knows who I am! Just like I know that "Jenny and the Ess-Dog" is the best song he's ever written. Well, there's "Tide to the Oceans" but that's a Silver Jews song and really it's only co-written.

Davies: I can't believe they haven't caught on to the fact that I haven't been on this team for two months. Just keep wearing blue and showing up every five days and nobody asks questions. It's unbelievable. Kinko's figured it out after a month, and I was even good at that job. Maybe if I throw left-handed next start...

Collins: Wait until I tell the Make-A-Wish Foundation how well this worked out. Sure, I might be Benjamin Button-ing back into a baby, but at least I look cool with my glasses hung like this...O, go to hell, Getz.

Getz: If I get released am I going to disappear from this picture like Marty McFly? I should ask Davies if that keeps him up at night, too. I wonder if he's Jewish. I'd like a Jewish friend. His real first name is Hiram and Hiram Davies sounds Jewish, but he's also from Georgia...wait, is Hosmer humming "Cut Your Hair"?

Exhibit 1.3.16

Things That Confuse Me about the Paperboy Universe



(This is about the Nintendo video game Paperboy not, like, the real paperboy universe which features fewer tornadoes yet considerably more angry dogs. You can play the game here if you're not familiar).

* The audience for the obstacle course. Note: not the obstacle course itself which, somehow, I can fit into my conception of the world. No, it's the people who rise at 5:30 a.m. to sit in bleachers and cheer the rare paperboy who completes his route that make me question the verisimilitude of this game. Too far, I say.

* The newspaper's coverage of its own paperboy hirings and firings. I mean, I can see something in the Community section, but front page? Day after day? When there's breakdancing in the streets and Death roams the city?

* The house painting. I mean, I get deciding to unsubscribe from the local paper is a big decision, but it's not the War of the Roses, here. A good paperboy can avoid throwing papers to yellow houses just as easily as red ones. It's, like, days two through three of the training.

* Housewives chasing paperboys with rollingpins. What is it about the paperboy that turns everyone into this city into Mrs. Capp? And these are subscribers, too. The unsubscribers don't really seem to give a damn, even as you're breaking their windows. Of course, they might get cut down like a bunch of dirty Lancasters, so they probably just don't leave their houses at all.

* The tombstones in the front yards. It just sends a bad message to the breakdancers.

Exhibit 1.3.15

What's Currently Killing Me

1. Being out of coffee.

2. It being too hot to get coffee.

3. Wurlitzers.

4. Replying to emails, phone calls, letters, owls, waves, punches.

5. The term "debt ceiling."

6. Tuesdays. Just as, like, a thing we can't do anything about.

7. Socks. Just as, like, a thing we can't do anything about.

8. The murderer.

9. Taco truck ennui.

10. Not these sweatpants.

Exhibit 1.3.14

Summer Drink

Okay, so this exists and I want one:

The Leland Palmer
Let me check my kitchen to see what I can throw together: (ingredients I have in bold)

1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup hot water
3 cups freshly brewed jasmine tea, cooled
3/4 cup gin
3/4 cup limoncello*
3/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup fresh grapefruit juice
1 cup chilled club soda
Ice cubes
6 lemon slices (for garnish)

So, water. I have the water-based ingredients. Previously I might have been impressed by my ability to provide these ingredients at a variety of temperatures, but now I need to step up my game. You know why? Here's why:

Exhibit 1.3.13

Things I Would Rather Be Doing Than Re-Reading My Novel

1. Finally deciding, for once and for all, whether my favorite type of soil is loamy sand or sandy loam.

2. Planning an Amanda Knox-themed murder mystery dinner party. Pizza! Tragedy! Pizza!

3. Arguing over what stats would be included if one were to--hypothetically--start a Fantasy Poetry league.

4. Writing this blog post, apparently.

5. Creating an even better version of the Four Pawns Attack--my favorite chess opening--called the Eight Pawns Attack which, presumably, I would like twice as much.

6. Emailing Bud Selig ideas for new All-Star game events like the Cake Walk, a game Jeff Francoeur can't participate in because he doesn't understand the basic concept of walking.

7. Plotting an elaborate scavenger hunt around Houston the only task of which is to eat at every Shipley's Do-nuts.

8. Playing two estranged siblings against each other until they realize it's me they don't like and come together to save Thanksgiving. Or, instead of actually doing that, just writing a family comedy about it while thousands of real siblings remain tragically estranged.

9. Inventing "Roller Basketball" because it suddenly seems like something that should exist.

10. Preparing my victory speech should I somehow win the Iowa Caucuses which, frankly, doesn't seem as unlikely as it probably should.

Exhibit 1.3.12

Things

* Look, I was in Vermont for a month and made the very mature decision not to blog while there in order to concentrate on my Game of Thrones watching. And watched it was though somehow I still managed to post an Air Supply video and a picture of me getting--what the kids call--served. Priorities.

* I'm back now with nothing else to do this summer except learn French so expect more posts about garcons mangeing on pommes or whatever. That was three-quarters French so I'm almost there.

* You should check out my friend Angie's new blog Childhood Relived. Angie's hilarious and a mom and a hilarious mom. So glad I now have a venue for her pop culture musings that doesn't involve me flying to Nebraska and scheduling a dinner party.

* I think I'm going to start writing about books again. Just because, you know, why not. French books? O yeah. I lit the livres. Right now, I'm reading Terrence Holt's In the Valley of the Kings.

* So I've had some more Sire onLines out there though what you should really be interested in is the far more awesome work in these journals:

* I love Super Arrow. This is exactly what an online journal should be: everything a print journal can't be. Especially a fan of the collaborations between Steven Karl and Angela Veronica Wong.

* The new jmww has some writers I love who I didn't know I loved and plenty I already knew I loved, including Cupboard-er Andrew Borgstrom. Be sure to check out Gabe Blackwell's equation-based story.

* kill author is amazing. That's all, really. Really proud to be in there (as I am with all the others), and I especially dig Katie Jean Shinkle's "When All You Want Doesn't Want You."

Exhibit 1.3.11

Thesis Defense

It suddenly occurs to me I stopped updating you on the exploits of Thesis Defense, our Creative Writing Program intramural basketball team. If only there was some way I could sum up our loss in the playoffs in one humiliating photo. O, there is? Great:



In my defense, we were in a zone so, really, it could have been any of the opposing players scoring on me. Not in my defense: my defense. Hands up, Peterson.

Photo thanks(?) to Karyna McGlynn whose book you should pick up here. Pick up and destroy probably.

Exhibit 1.3.10

Videos about Being on Tour Released in 1983: A Compendium

* Journey's "Faithfully"

* Air Supply's "Making Love Out of Nothing at All"
(also notable for having invented the video picture frame which is what you will be getting your parents for Christmas in 2014)




The end.

Exhibit 1.3.9

Need to Figure This Out

So I keep going back and forth on this point, and I can't decide: Did the dinosaur hunter guy from Jurassic Park use his final breath to make a Total Recall reference before being mauled by velociraptors?

Evidence for:

1) Said to a "girl"

2) This girl had been "clever"


Evidence against:

1) He's about to die making it an odd thing to choose as one's final words regardless of the quote's appropriateness in the situation (sort of like if you were stabbed and said, "If it bleeds, we can kill it." before, you know, dying).

2) No other evidence he's a Total Recall fan


Okay, that's pretty much it.

Exhibit 1.3.8

An Unnecessarily Obscene Letter to the Game of Thrones Universe

Look, dickholes, I've been loving your show. And I don't mean to call you dickholes, but I've been thinking it over and you're something like dickholes. It's not you. It's your civilization. Every so often a character on the show throws something out like, "We've been guarding this giant wall for 8,000 years," and, you know, I get that they're proud of their family's commitment to standing in the snow but I'm like wait, wait, wait--these dickholes have been here for 8,000 years and haven't invented Applebees?

I'm joking. Sort of. Just because we invented Applebees after less than 8,000 years doesn't mean everyone should have, but is a Hardees too much to ask for? I'm joking again. That's me joking. You guys might not even care for reasonably priced 3-course meals that serve families on a budget. I don't know that but I know this. Your civilization has been around for more than 8,000 years and you've accomplished these things:

1) Giant wall
2) Training crows to carry letters

That's it as far as I can tell. And it doesn't make sense because I see wheels and pulleys and you must be this close to the inclined plane so it's like, come on you shitbirds, learn how to build machines already. I'm not asking for Terminators or anything, just, you know, something more complicated than what my Tamagotchi comes up with if it lives more than a week before starving. For example: It takes your king a month to go on a ski vacation which means every trip anywhere is basically the Oregon Trail. How many jerkoffs have to die of cholera before you guys get trains?

You know how many Applebees I could visit in a month? Enough to enjoy a whole asston of their new sizzling Cajun shrimp.

So let's think this over. I mean, you've got the crows. That's pretty cool. Our crows just act like stuckup goth kids. Of course, if they get sick, we can save them with crow penicillin and make them see better using lasers. In fact, our crows might live to be 8,000 and they don't have to stand on a wall unless they want to. Come to think of it, maybe you should make one of our crows king and save yourselves a lot of action and sex-packed intrigue.

But look, that's really not the point here. The point is this: some of our people don't think our entire planet is much more than 8,000 years old. And that means you guys are falling behind in all areas except incest technology. But it's cool because it also means we're pretty stupid sometimes, too. I mean, we don't have an entire continent of people afraid to row across a tiny ocean, but we've got the Palins. They're sort of like your Lannisters only exactly like your Lannisters.

Still, if this were a game of Civilization, even Gandhi would have ridden you down with his war elephants by now. Not because he wanted to hurt you, but because those elephants could teach you how to navigate using stars and take tenure-track positions at the universities you seemingly don't have. You daft fucks.

But I get it. You're too busy stabbing each other to invent the shovel and dig up all the petroleum in your soil. Maybe if we had dragons, we would have turned into a civilization run by middle school boys, too. And maybe if our winters lasted a decade, we would have also taken a few millennia off.

O, no wait, we would have eaten queso blanco nacho platters at our centrally heated Applebees until it was time to jetski.

Tighten it up,

A.

Exhibit 1.3.7

Things

Mostly self-aggrandizing, sadly. But this way it's all in one place so you know where to look. Everywhere else.

* The new issue of Pank is up, and I've got a few pieces from my Sire [on]Line project in it. These are Michael Jackson, Bono, and Ghost Ronald Regan and they're mostly notable for involving one person who wrote "Billie Jean," one person who is a ghost, and one person who is not, in fact, an American.

* Quick thoughts on Thor: entertaining though I share Jon Favreau's concern that it completely destroys the rules by which his Iron Man movies were working and makes the upcoming Avengers movie seem impossibly broad. I mean, one guy is a Norse God and another guy is just really good at shooting arrows? Notably, this is the only concern I share with Mikey. I mean, we are talking about a series of films that are basically Robot Jox with better effects. He'll get over it.

* In the new The Reprint from Zine-Scene an old short-short of mine that was originally in The Southeast Review gets rewritten by the always amazing Kevin Wilson (whose upcoming novel I want to steal from heaven or wherever it's currently kept). Honored, impressed, excited, etc. Be sure to check it out.

* Sigh.

* So if you go to the new Collagist, you'll see a lot of great stuff, not least of which is Mathias's first short story, some poems by Houston-ite Russel Swensen, and a couple of great excerpts from forthcoming books. You'll also see that [SPOILER ALERT] by Laura Eve and myself won their chapbook competition. This was an accident done mostly to prevent the winner of the Collagist contest from also winning The Cupboard's contest. Unfortunately, we also won our own contest. I blame Dave and em for their lax rules.

* Joking. Cupboard contest results soon. Seriously though, I don't want to be the Jake W. Apple of the chapbook scene. I've been embarrassed into retirement.

* If you want a [SA] preview, check out the new Sixth Finch which has one and a lot of other great work up. Do it. It's not intentionally themed or anything--I don't think--but a lot of it is wonderfully apocalyptic.

* Speaking of the apocalypse, we must be about ready for another one because Jon Pack Approves or Disapproves is updating again. I love Jon Pack despite his disapproval of dipping sauce.

Exhibit 1.3.6

Foul Weather

The Weather Stations by Ryan Call from Caketrain

Despite all the tornadoes and hurricanes and tsunamis of the last few years, Call's book is a shocking reminder that even more terrible things might be coming. Wind that kills, lightning that maims, sky that crumbles--the stories here aren't post-apocalyptic, they're simply apocalyptic. Worse, they're powerfully personal. So often in lesser work a story's heart shrinks as the disaster increases, but here the tragedies are always human ones. The weather here produces not destruction but terror, and it's not on insubstantial difference. You don't feel like the author is a child kicking over an anthill--he's the ant.

I was able to read this entire book on the plane yesterday which I both recommend and warn you against. Recommend because it's a great read that keeps the clouds moving quickly. Warn because this book tells you those clouds are trying to kill you and it's impossible not to believe it. Those. Clouds. Are. Trying. To. Kill. You. I honestly didn't think we were ever going to land and when we did, just a minute after I finished the last story, I was shocked when we all didn't burst into applause out of wonder for our pilot. You know it's a great book when it can re-mystify the commonplace.

And that's what impressed me most as I turned the pages and the plane rocked slightly in the air. I didn't want to land because I didn't want to leave the book's world. At that moment, we could have just floated away.

Exhibit 1.3.5

Recycled Content

So I have no car and I'm pretty sure I'm dying, but that didn't stop Laura Eve and I from live tweeting Star Wars: A New Hope. Here it is, the laziest blog post yet from a guy who sometimes just posts pictures of his dog.



* Going to live-tweet Star Wars with @hoostown. I recommend you unfollow me now just like the Rebel Alliance unfollowed Emperor Palpatine.

* Laura Eve guest tweet: Live-tweeting Star Wars with @AdamWPeterson instead of working on my fan fiction piece, "What If Luke Had Picked Up Those Power Converters." *

* Instead of "A New Hope," Lucas should have changed the subtitle to "Star Wars: A PowerPoint with Robots."

* O really, Luke, "sand people are the worst?" Might be time to turn off the Fox News.

* When Alec Guinness says "evil" it has 8 syllables and takes 18 seconds. Usually he's not even done saying it when he has to say it again.

* "We don't serve their kind here." Tatooine is all racists and scrap yards. It's the Mississippi of the Star Wars universe.

* For a decade I've been trying to work "I find your lack of Faith Evans disturbing." into a casual conversation. Preferably on a date.

* I just created my own Star Wars special edition. For about 15 minutes while they're in hyperspace, the movie becomes Rush videos on YouTube.

* I will now live-tweet this Jell-O mousse cup I took a chance on at the supermarket: heavy pudding.

* I'm not saying Darth Vader is a micromanager, but I'm pretty sure he sewed the Death Star's curtains.

* Of course the garbage monster on the Death Star has a name. Also, a backstory. Also, the worst slash fiction ever. http://bit.ly/cB1dpE

* The Storm Trooper training manual includes only one rule: always say "Blast 'Em" before shooting. It's like the Empire's Miranda rights.

* Did Obi Wan really follow through on becoming more powerful after his death? Seems like he sort of just died. Same question, Jesus.

* Despite the planet-destroying starship one guy with a bo staff guards the Rebel base. Still, that system did keep my parents out of my room.

* Luke is a cocky pilot for someone who let C-3PO drive earlier. Vader lost to a guy who throws the keys to a talking little league trophy.

* Laura Eve guest tweet: Luke & Leia making eyes at each other but still not hooking up at the end of the movie makes a pretty good argument for waiting. *

And Star Wars is over. I look forward to going back and revising these tweets with new special effects in 2027. [screen wipe]

Exhibit 1.3.4

This Happened

My photo. I call it: A Trailblazer on Its Side After Striking My Parked Car Illuminated by 3:00am Police Lights

Not pictured:

1) The driver and his passenger who, uh, ran, apparently
2) My totalled car
3) Me, still sort of asleep, asking the police officer if I could just have the car they left behind
4) Helpful neighbors all introducing themselves and shaking hands as they watched, possibly plotting future barbeques
5) Me, slightly less asleep, saying, No, really, let's just flip it over and I'll take it