Not a real post.

Just something that's allowing me to do something else. Believe me, it's not worth explaining.

The creepy creepy dolls of Michel Nedjar.

Essay Daily: Not Really So Daily: Things I'm fond of that can be found in a review o...

Although I've already shown this off to a number of people, in emails, on Facebook, etcetera, I figure I might as well put it everywhere I can and at this point the only location lacking a link is now (well, not really, not anymore) this blog.

I was contacted by Craig Reinbold, a staff writer from Essay Daily, who was writing a review of South Loop Review Volume 12, and was particularly enamored by, and also somewhat puzzled by, my piece with the spurious title, "Untitled". Craig was intrigued, but felt the piece needed more, and was curious about how I saw the little "art exercise". Did I view it as an actual construction project? What was the piece doing, exactly?

I explained how "Untitled" came about, that the exercise in South Loop was actually just the first page of a four-page essay, and that I personally have a hard time seeing it stand on its own. Neither the first nor the second part entirely works without the other (the first even less so without the second). In retrospect I was probably too eager to see the piece in print, and probably shouldn't have released it in pieces this way. But the article in Essay Daily is a marvelous vindication of my feelings that the exercise cannot stand alone, and that it was kind of a weird editorial decision to excerpt it this way.

Essay Daily: South Loop Review Volume 12 review

Here's the portion of the piece that SLR12 took:

One of the undergraduate editors of South Loop wrote some short reviews for everyone who read or spoke at their publication party. She was very kind and generous with nice comments, and I thank her.

South Loop Volume 12. Reviews of the readers from Enjolique Bender.

Just what I need - more vintage knitting patterns.

South Loop Review Publication Celebration

If you're in Chicago on Thursday, October 21, swing by Columbia College to hear me read at the publication party for South Loop: Creative Nonfiction+Art Issue 12. My good friend, Holly Vanderhaar, will be reading as well, and it'll be Chicago in October, and that's just dandy. Even better, the event is part of the Creative Nonfiction Week at Columbia - there should be plenty to do and lots of great people to talk to.

South Loop Review

3:30 PM

Columbia College

618 Michigan Avenue

2nd Floor at Stage Two

Chicago, Illinois

The next project? Maybe?

Bella Pants from Burda

Awesome phish - a fortune, an evil uncle, and a soulmate:

I've always got the urge to write back to these people. String them along. But never enough gumption to actually do it. These are the moments when I'd like a closer writing relationship with someone like David Legault (remember that name - everyone will know who he is, one day), who not only has the gumption but is also one of the weirdest people I've ever known (in absoutely the best possible way). Dude puts himself out there in the world, actually does the sort of things that most of us only bother to daydream about. Gets messy, behaves like an idiot, throws up, and all with an essayist's sensibilities. He's a little bit of DFW, performance artist, anthropologist and dungeonmaster rolled into pillowy, dorky white bread that does essentially nothing to belie what what's actually going on between his ears. This was supposed to be about the phish, and how I should write back to one of these people and get a good essay out of it, instead of becoming a Tribute to Dave. It's just too corny and hackneyed to ask WWDD, but what would Legault have to say in response to this?

The cozy-covered boulder.

My boulder made it into an article in the Star Tribune today. Just last night I wrote myself a reminder (in lipstick on the bathroom mirror) to bike over to campus with a pair of scissors and finally set the boulder free. I'm glad I've forgotten up until now.

(Photo by Tom Sweeney of the Star Tribune)

Graffiti Gets All Warm and Fuzzy.

The eerie (and simulated)(and oddly musical) sounds of the Higgs boson on the BBC News: "God particle signal is simulated as sound." June 23, 2010. The link to the article and some sound files:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science_and_environment/10385675.stm

I don't know the first thing about composing music. Haven't tried to compose anything since I was sixteen or so (that was just after the dinosaurs roamed the earth, but before tapes and records went extinct) and all I can remember of that is how clunky it all was. It's just not something my brain is made to do. So please, please won't someone who knows their way around a blank score sheet please write some fabulous ambient tracks with these fabulous, ambient sounds?

Current publication info:

"The Myth of the Prose Poem" will appear in Sentence 8. Summer 2010. Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics is edited by Brian Clements and published by Firewheel Editions.

http://www.firewheel-editions.org/sentence/current.htm

"Good Idea #3: peanut butter" and "Measurement of a Man" will appear in South Loop Review: Creative Nonfiction and Art #12, fall 2010. South Loop is the literary journal of Creative Nonfiction Program at Columbia University and is edited by RéLynn Hansen.

http://cms.colum.edu/southloopreview/

"Good Idea #3: peanut butter" also received an honorable mention in the Fourth Genre 2010 Michael Steinberg Essay Contest. The contest is held by Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, the nonfiction literary journal of Michigan State University. The journal is currently edited by Marcia Aldrich; the contest submissions were judged by the journal's founding editor, Michael Steinberg.

http://msupress.msu.edu/journals/fg/

Frat boy.

Will someone hand me the scissors?

Influences. Pressures. Constraints.

Bagpipe monster.

Lunch and tea at the Birchwood.

Befallen

A cubic stone. Lapis exillis. Stones, from a small dark cloud. Angular black pebbles. Warm polished pieces of flint. A cylindrical marble object of unknown origin. Warm oval rocks and stones, up to sixteen pounds in weight. A ball of limestone containing fossil shells and a creature like a trilobite. One half-pint of red rocks. Layered metamorphic rock.

Jack perch and sun perch. Water lizards. Living snakes. Thick sheets of white spider web. Periwinkles. Cut worms. Dead birds including ducks, catbirds, woodpeckers, many birds of strange plumage, and canaries. Catfish, trout, and perch. Unidentified living creatures. Fish. Largemouth bass, sunfish, shad, and minnows; some frozen, some merely cold, all fit for consumption. Live frogs and toads. Fish. A monkey, destroying a clothesline post. Hundreds of fatally injured ducks. A small shower of thirty-four fish, each about two inches long. A single fish.

Hundreds of golf balls. Eighteen inches of heavy chain. Two large metal balls, sixty-five pounds and one-hundred-ten pounds. A six-pound piece of charred metal, pierced by two drilled holes. A large brick of metal turned up at the ends and pierced through by two large holes.

Burning sulfur. Lumps of transparent fiery jelly that disintegrates into fine white particles. Cinders, from a small dark cloud, that set fire to the ground. Flammable sulfur rain. A fireball. Fireballs and burning cinders.

Blood and meat. Liver, brains, and blood. Strips of bloody flesh, covered in fine white hairs. Meat. Flakes of fresh beef.

Rock candy. Green peaches from a dark cloud.

A domed mass of quivering purple jelly. A very large, pale yellow object, descending slowly.