If you’re not quite ready for Death Takes Me, why not throw a little Parade?

… to unsex the human form… return to youth, Eden and primal meaning-making. This could be Michelangelo’s whole deal (according to another recent read, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants). Or like Headshot, exposing a hidden continuity of bloodshed, exposing everything that is denied and suppressed in femininity, everything that remains darkly continuous behind its volcanic cycles of change and yet is unknown. Even as a gloss on Normal People, authority and erasure, selfhood and the other under commerce, perpetual exchange and obstruction. Creativity and gestation and violence. Death inherited at birth. How to be proud of this. Do you like what you’ve made of yourself? What I’ve made of yourself?

Sad and hard. So many failings.

Ducks, Newburyport (Abridged) [Explicit]

“A novel.” Everything is a novel!! I know the experimental fiction I read can’t fully anticipate what other experimental fiction I read, but boy am I getting tired of these half-effort instructions. Way prefer Gogol’s Dead Souls telling me every other chapter to read it as an epic poem, as opposed to the surfeit of modern poetry and anthology insisting on its novelhood. It’s a great conceit once, but at least for me, the novelty has been fully lost.

Petty rant aside, this is a delightful work. Do not fear the tumblrized portrait of the author: this is merely ironic and sincere and ironic and sincere again. As the book is, ironic and sincere and ironic and sincere again. As culture has been, ironic and sincere and ironic and sincere again. There is an emptiness and there is a mourning that stirs the surface humor of our digital age, and who better to sieve the cultural sediment than twitter user @333333333433333? Someone any less funny could not manage this. Someone any less earnest could not manage this. A beautiful and crass grieving for a lost mother and failing father that wants to be doesn’t want to be left alone.

if my kids’ father dies i'm going to tell them i killed him and got away with it. i'm going to tell my grandchildren that their grandfather is the only man i touched without vomiting. i'm going to tell my grandma i love her and don't have tattoos

imm sad again n im punk as hell at the croissanteria

i want to be cyberbullied by someone who loves me

Boys being boys — little bit of networking in the field, trading resumes and business belts and spearing each other in the left nipple. Hardcore.

Excited to finally get around to these. Legally, they will not let me identify as an English major in public until I’ve finished The Odyssey and The Aeneid, but already I am feeling leagues above the common man. Particularly with the Lattimore translation — beautiful work. I debated going with Pope, and still may for the sheer art of it, but to my minimal understanding the best balance of poetry and fidelity belongs to Lattimore, and I can see this holding true. Moving, heroic phrase. Makes me want to revisit Paradise Lost. Always want to revisit Paradise Lost. On to Odysseus!