All Things Pankish

It’s My Two Cents: Cambridge, Huff, Daum, Dando, Coke, Beck, Aldo, Howle

Greetings from a bakery/cafe in Cambridge, MA called Carberry’s, where I paid 4.95USD for an hour’s worth of internet access. Don’t say I never did anything for you, readers…The mp3 CD I dug out of my glove compartment kept me sane as I drove off of I-90. Artists included Jason Moran, INXS, Clarence Frogman Henry, Lush, Missing Persons, Kitty Wells, and my beloved Let’s Active…Underwhelmed by The Informant!, Inglorious Basterds…I hate pleated pants…To answer one email sent to me last week: just stop scratching it, and the tingle sensation will go away. Then send your poems over to Lumberyard…Speaking of poetry, did anyone really read Richard Howard’s books? Not the translations I mean…Did the phrase Smell ya later! begin with the Simpsons?…

I miss the Showtime series Huff…As far as essayists go, it’s Meghan Daum’s world, and we are just writing rough drafts and living in it…Speaking of the Lemonheads, was there ever a more beautiful man than Evan Dando in the mid-90s?  Oh right, most of you were in grade school back then. Sorry. I’ll try to talk more about the Ting Tings…I never thought of Danny Kortchmar much, but now I think he is a fucking cool dude…I visited the Emma Willard school today, and read Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You,” Gerald Stern’s “96 Vandam Street,” and Sharon Olds’ “The Blue Dress.” The students loved them all. Do you think they would have liked Language poetry as well?

Speaking of movies, some monologues I know or wish I knew by heart include Christopher Walken in Annie Hall, Richard E. Grant/William Shakespeare in Withnail & I, the Bill Murray/Gunga Lagunga riff in Caddyshack, any number of Helen Mirren lines in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover…Someone should take Jeff Beck aside and say, lose the jazz fusion keyboard thing. You sound like Sonny Sharrock. And not in a good way…

If you’re in San Francisco at the end of this month, be sure to check out my old friend Aldo Naboa’s solo acoustic set on March 31 at the Madrone Art Bar. Here’s the Facebook event page…Holy crap: in the time it took to write this, Emma Willard posted a photo of me holding forth…It’s OK to cry to Danielle Howle. In fact, it’s encouraged…Lida Husik could have been Beth Orton if we didn’t worship English people so much…I think Cocteau Twins are better than My Bloody Valentine. There I said it…

Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.

It’s My Two Cents: Mayer, Naropa, Huth, Pritts, Oral, Three Things That Piss Me Off About The Rumpus

If Jane Mayer could look more smug when she is not talking in her recent television appearances, she would explode in a flameball of contemptuousness.  Super reporter, though…I don’t know what Google Buzz is, but evidently it’s a hit…

I own a copy of Tom Clark’s The Great Naropa Poetry Wars, and it is, indeed juicy poetry gossip, what with W.S. Merwin, Ginsberg and other figuring into it.  Why isn’t it back in print?…Ethan Hawke is still hot…So is Kim Addonizio, as are her poems…

So far Geof Huth and Nate Pritts have visited my Oral Interpretation of Lit class at The College of Saint Rose, and both times they have read/performed beautifully; check out my students’ readings of them and others here…

Ah, to know the twists and turns of tautology and aphoristic egoblogspeak…Ah, to join up with others who know same to build platforms and presences…O, how simple it was in the late 90s to start an online journal and email people…Alack! what one could have done if one had not contracted founder’s syndrome…

Three things have pissed me off over at The Rumpus, which I usually love, lately… The first was Steve Almond and his former student making fun of the students in their old workshop. You just don’t do that, it’s icky, and it goes against all implied ethics of of the writing workshop and even academe. It’s called college for a reason; one is collegial; get it?…

The second was Vanessa Garcia’s snarky, reductionist review of my friend Kathleen Rooney’s essay collection For You, For You, I am Trilling These Songs. Part of the hazard in writing about this type of nonfiction is that dumbass reviewers will realize that what they have on their hands is a real live, “unsurrogated narrator” (Vivian Gornick’s term), and wowsa! They get to play ad hominem don’t-pile-on-the-rabbit games on all review long. It’s a made bed many nonfictionists lie in, and leads to being called a “schoolgirl.” Unconscionable…

The third is whoever “Gladys” is over in the comment boxes calling me “ten years behind” in essay studies for the horrible suggestion that perhaps an essayist should get his or her facts straight on a subject before waxing all lyrical about it. Bull to the shit. You want to write about something? Look it up, yo. So anyway, like some Silliman’s Blog douchebag, I engaged in comment box trench warfare. See it ongoing here….

Did I say I love WordPress? I love WordPress…I promise not to make fun of fat people if my latest gym-going spurt results in me getting down to my wedding day weight. You read it here first…

Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.

It’s My Two Cents: Reznor, Lennon, Ving, Mordor, Burt, Wakoski, DiNovis, Banks

Was it a former coach of the New Jersey Nets who said, “Don’t be the lion who stares at the legs of the chair? I think it was…I’m not sure if this guy is for real, but he sure knows how to wear a sweater…I tried to read Brian Lennon’s thick review of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era.  I really tried.  I took two Advil PM and washed it down with Tsingtao…

I like everything about Trent Reznor–the attitude, the smarts, the Freddie Mercury obsession–except the music…I’ve never thought Amy Poehler was funny…I once owned the 12-inch single of Stanley Clarke’s cover of “Born in the U.S.A”…I stood in line for coffee with a 20-year-old student whose ears perked up when my friend mentioned he saw Oingo Boingo in concert in 1985…Irish butter is disgusting…The smell of melting cheddar cheese makes me dry-heave…Former Fear frontman Lee Ving is still working as an actor. And that is a good thing…Sure, everything Chuck Klosterman says about Led Zeppelin is smart and perfect and mot-just-y. It all falls apart, for me at least, at that mention of mordor in “Ramble On”…

One of the first “new” books of poetry I bought as a high schooler was a very cool book of Diane Wakoski’s; its full title This Book is Dedicated to All Those Men Who Betrayed Me at One Time or Another, in the Hopes That They Fall off Their Motorcycles and Break Their Necks: The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems…Someone please scan a bigger copy of the cover than this teenie one, and I’ll post it here…

I don’t know about you, but when I need to want to feel fierce, I watch guitar shred videos…Burt Reynolds turned down the James Bond role?…Here’s a quote from Jeffrey H. Gray: “Most poets today are magnificently oppressed, lashing out fearlessly against the “mainstream,” which consists of everyone except the poet in question”…Here’s another quote from “Distinctive Virginia Pronunciation“: “If we say the word putt and, after sounding pu, try to change the word to pout as pronounced in Eastern Virginia, we find little difficulty”…

I could have sworn I saw a trailer for a BBC TV movie with actors Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant, billed as the reunion of the Withnail & I team. Maybe it was a dream…I now have officially moved from Blogger to WordPress, and I have to say, my life is easier. What’s next, a Mac?…

Actress Elizabeth Banks’ first role, I’m pretty sure, was in my old friend Kevin DiNovis‘ dark comedy Surrender Dorothy, winner of the Slamdance Film Festival back in 1998 and described as “Singapore Sling for the gay festival set.”  Back then, she was known then as Elizabeth Casey…Play the Pull My Finger game online…Neither my undergraduate college or my graduate college has invited me back as an alumni. I don’t blame them, in a way…

Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.

It’s My Two Cents: Yule, Iris, Long, Blogger, Cooper, Hitler, Vocoder

If you get the name of the person singing wrong in a song–Doug Yule, say, instead of Lou Reed–you do not get to write a poem about that song…An ex-friend just wrote a hate email to me, after I used a song we recorded at his house for the first version of my book trailer.  In this email, he accuses me of stealing office supplies to point out how awful I am…If you want to see what the early 90s punk-hip hip-metalhead band scene looked like in Philadelphia, go to Dan Long’s Flickr page and watch the flannel fly…If you want to see a chick who can play guitar, look no further than Orianthi taking on Steve Vai in their “Highly Strung” duet…If the book title Introducing Empiricism strikes you as funny, then we have something in common…If you are upset that Blogger is discontinuing its FTP services, then we have another thing in common…

If you wonder why Alice Cooper isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Patty Smith is, then you should follow Bob Lefsetz…Why isn’t Nicky Katt working more, has leading man roles?  One of the best actors of our times, underused…I once prayed to God that “Radio Ga Ga” would crack the American top 20…There are three Hitler Downfall iPad mashups at the time of this writing… For the record, my favorite Hitler Downfall mashup lately is the one about the Phish Halloween cover album…No one will respond if you tweet at  McNally Jackson. So just do what I do and direct message them intimate secrets…

Unstable literary males who are online all the time are a particular breed. Of what, I have yet to determine…I want to go to Pittsburgh to see Donnie Iris live…He’s the guy who did “Ah Leah,” by the way…Here’s an orchestral version of that song, in case you needed to hear what that sounds like…And as an amuse bouche, let’s listen to King’s X…Does anyone really know what Harry Allen is fucking saying?…Friendster must have underwent a redesign…On my to-buy list: Dave Tompkins’ How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from Stalin to Frampton to Bambaataa. The title sounds out the phrase “how to recognize speech,” in case you were a bit slow, as your faithful columnist is…The Faster Times continues to impress me…

There’s Christine Hill, and then there are the other conceptual artists.  Simple as that…A few months ago, I came to the minor revelation that Troy is a much hipper town than fellow New York State towns Albany and even Hudson; what with The Sanctuary for Independent Media and the Troy Waterfront Market, I just might up and move there…

Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.

It’s My Two Cents: And We’re Back

And we’re back.  Sorry folks, sometimes a columnist needs to have a nervous breakdown or three before three-dotting his way back to sanity. Onward. Some predictions sprinkled in…Am I the only person who love that the same image of the same smiling guy appears on the cover of The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio (complete with a giggling woman) and The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Men?…Prediction for 2010: the original line-up rock supergroup Journey will finally reunite. This will happen in Canada. Former replacement bassist Randy Jackson will have nothing to do with it..A message to litbloggers in their twenties and thirties: enough with the “you’re old” jokes. Your time will come…

I like writing that uses the semicolon; I just don’t know if I can use it and not sound stupid…Osama bin Laden will mention reality show results in a video dispatch…More than 150 people will figure out what Google Wave does exactly…I wish my metabolism was faster…If I ever utter the phrase “negotiating the curriculum” out loud again, someone needs to smack me…

Bands from the late 80’s and early 90’s I’d like to see again: Fetchin’ Bones, The Reivers, The Veldt, 24-7 Spyz, Deee-Lite, The Housemartins, Style Council…Ross McElwee needs to be celebrated, honored, deified.  He may have invented reality TV, sure; but he also changed the way we look at ourselves…Bolo ties are making a comeback?…I miss the first iteration of Muxtape, where you could make your own mixtape online. Waaah…

Am I the only one who didn’t know Paul Westerberg is a big cigar smoker? … People I miss in my daily life: Ross Martin, Jill Ivey,  Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Thomas V is for Victor Hartman…Come to think of it, wait: Do I miss Philadelphia?  No. That can’t be…Dave Barringer’s There’s Nothing Funny About Design is twice as good as most experimental creative nonfiction lyric whatchamacallits.  Why?  Well, it’s about something, for starters…

There is a whole cohort of suburban males who will never get over Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridegmont High…Speaking of teen movies, I saw 1995’s The Low Life back when I worked at NYU, and thought it would be a big hit. It wasn’t, but I saw Rory Cochrane, the lead, mounting his motorcycle outside Joe’s Pizza in the Village, and said I loved it. “Thanks,” he said, “that means a lot”…I think Todd Zuniga and his Literary Death Match is genius, and I think it’s logical and brilliant that he’s teamed up with Bob Holman and the Bowery Poetry Club…Is there an American equivalent of Withnail & I?…The greatest invention for parents with stuffy noses is the nosefrida.

More predictions…Teenage hackers will break into streaming music sites and replace songs with their own homemade tracks…A new form of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome will emerge as a result of the iPad’s button-less keyboards…Henry Kissinger will die…Poets will continue to draw artificial, stark distinctions between rear- and front-guard aesthetic movements…The old Palm shorthand will be used as a secret code…Someone will do a Heavy Metal Parking Lot-style documentary on AWP. Just make sure you do it when I’m not there.

Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.

It’s My Two Cents: Dunham, Jillette, Litbloggers, King, Sabotage, Shortz

It’s Christmas, which means people might be reading this or might not. Or perhaps you’re Jewish, Asian, African, or my favorite, Depressed..I love this quote by Carroll Dunham: “In the contemporary context, there appears to be a divergence between “sincere” abstraction and “ironic” or even “bitchy” abstraction, although frequently, and paradoxically, the latter feels emotionally deep and on target, and the former seems full of shit”…

Penn Jillette’s genius-as-autodidact act gets on my nerves something fierce…Malena Morling should be a much more famous poet than she is now…Listen to “Do Ya” by the Move on Theraflu, and you may actually end up forgiving Jeff Lynne for the Traveling Wilburys…Sorta feel turned off by literary bloggers who have to keep the arch act on all the time, especially when some obviously think it leads directly book deals. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always admired Jessa Crispin, aka the Bookslut, for not taking the book bait…Activia shakes are kind of addictive…Thank god for Calmol 4…The more I visit Chicago, the more addicted to it I become…Larry King sure didn’t like Spy Magazine back in the day…It’s going to be 2010 soon, and I just logged into my MySpace page…

There’s no shame in a man who gets his hair colored, as long as he lets the gray grow back in and not “do his roots,” as the girls say…I do wish the Eagles would win the Super Bowl. Someday…I’ve had an aversion to the smell of melting cheddar cheese since I was a little boy…Will someone please tell me which Stephen King novel to read, if I am to read just one?…I forgot that Kim Basinger “sings” on Prince’s soundtrack for the first Batman movie…

The overall feeling I get reading Second City Unscripted is a fascination over the logistics of putting on a show, not so much what was in the show…Peter Monaco, a former colleague at The College of Saint Rose, once told his class that “rap is in its big hair phase”…God bless the people who invented electronic delivery of letters of recommendation…I hear that Ithaca, NY, has the most restaurants per square mile of any other city…David Lehman’s The Daily Mirror still makes me smile…

I guess I am not the only one who wondered if J.J. Abrams’ inclusion of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” is an homage to William Shatner’s infamous mispronunciations of that word…The Chronicle of Higher Education’s newish website design looks like it’s straight from a WordPress template…The sound of NPR puzzle master Will Shortz’s voice makes me want to punch a wall. I guess that means I hate puzzles…I miss indie movies of the mid-90s…See you on New Year’s Day…

Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction, which is out now. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.

It’s My Two Cents: Telfer, Hickey, The Laughers, Colins, Claire, Nash, Afros

Greetings from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, while I wait for my flight to Albany International Airport.  The latter is international, we think, because of a flight to Toronto once a month.  But Chicago? The wind is cold, the people are warm.  Great town…Listened to a good chunk of the American Song-Poem Christmas comp in Laurie’s Planet of Sound record store yesterday, and can say I am finally in the holiday spirit…

I wonder if Tiger Woods’ groupie wranglers will get more coverage…Am I the last person to have heard about the “Let The Laughers Stand Up!” story-slash-controversy? Fascinating stuff. I fall on the side of the laughers and I guess against the cause of poetry. Either way, I don’t think laughing at a poem with the word cock in it necessarily means one is a lackie for consumerism…Claire Zulkey, an original gangsta in the clever-internet-writing world, is as funny and as clever in person as she is on the computer screen…

Last night I met up again with Robbie Q. Telfer, poet and force of nature.  His new book, Spiking the Sucker Punch, is just out from Write Bloody. It’s so great I wrote a blurb for it! Telfer is also the force behind The Encyclopedia Show. I didn’t know what it was until he explained it…

Maggie Gyllenhaal doesn’t do it for me, by which I meam I don’t think she’s sexy…The end credit blooper reel of Peter Sellers from Being There still makes me convulse in laughter…If Dave Hickey would care to claim his throne as greatest art writer alive, he should claim it now…American bands that matter right now: Spoon, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Grizzly Bear, My Morning Jacket and…Colin Farrell doesn’t do it for me. I’m more of a Colin Firth kind of mancrusher…

In a recent interview in Stop Smiling, Junot Diaz shouts out “Your Mom’s in My Business” by K-Solo. I like him even more now…Speaking of old school, in Words In Your Face, Saul Williams mentions T-La Rock’s single “It’s Yours” as an inspiration…

Why do graphic novelists, as a rule, act more intelligent than they really are?  Perhaps it’s the closed-circuit of their own scene?…Felipe Rose, the Native American-attired member of the Village People, has a website. Who knew?…Speaking of actresses I never thought Kate Hudson was hot. Beautiful, but not hot…When did people start using the word “epic” sarcastically?…

My advice to new authors: come to New York City and have lunch with Richard Nash. It will be the best $250 you’ve ever spent…Wow: “When Lucas was fourteen, he found out he couldn’t bang his hot cousin, and what a terrific phenomenon resulted from that reproductive urge!”…When will Amy Krouse Rosenthal write a sequel to Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life? Please?…I guess I’m biased, but Brian May and Elena Vidal’s stereo photography study, A Village Lost and Found, is a fascinating gem…

The storm over the Afro Picks! Publisher’s Weekly cover will have passed by the time this goes to press, but I need to talk more as a former trade magazine journalist. Itt was odd and perverse to this columnist to see high-brow art coupled with low-end, racially charged headline…As I Tweeted, this is the equivalent of having Poets & Writers run a Mapplethorpe on cover (NSFW) headline “Gay Fiction Explostion!”…That’s my two cents, anyway…

Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction, which is out now. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.

It’s My Two Cents: Mathews, Cupcakes, Shukert, Nuno, Vito, Chet

I’m back after a week-long bender of book tour and absentee blogging…Thank you for your patience, oh readers and Panksters…Onward to two-centsing…

Coat racks are bullshit…Did you know that the Thoreau family–the Henry-David-Thoreau Thoreaus, the go out into the woods and get away big bad civilization Walden-Thoreaus–made their money in pencils, the laptops of their day? They did, so points out Dennis Baron…Found this clip of Isiah Sheffer on Selected Shorts reading Harry Mathews’ “Country Cooking from Central France.” It’s a freaking tour de force.  Find it anthologized in The Next American Essay…

I would like to eat pigeon some day…The apples given out in a basket in the lobby at the Nittany Lion Inn are the most delicious in Central Pennsylvania…What is the difference between brass and silver pots and pans?…Living Colour’s version of Pere Ubu’s “Final Solution” is superior to the original…I plan on visiting Bettie’s Cakes in Saratoga, where they sell cupcakes in B-, C-, and D-cup size…Speaking of cupcakes, if you haven’t heard Terri “Cup Cake” O’Mason singing her cupcakes song, you should so now.  It’s sort of NSFW, if you W in the 1950s…

I wish I had caught Charles Aznavour on his farewell tours…Listen to my new best friend Rachel Shukert’s piece on Hannukah on National Public Radio…Peter Criss’s version of John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” is better than Elliott Smith’s. Suck on that, hipsters…Yep, that was Extreme guitar god and fellow Brian May fan Nuno Bettencourt performing with Rihanna on Saturday Night Live a couple weeks ago…Speaking of guitar gods, I didn’t know that White Lion guitarist Vito Bratta doesn’t play anymore…I wish I had a good solid file cabinet…Who in fucking tarnation took down the video of Matthew Sweet performing “Girlfriend,” complete with the late great Robert Quine ripping it up, on the David Letterman show?

If you use Gmail, install the offline email feature. It’s better than using Outlook, that’s for sure…I use undereye cream, but not in a fruity way…When enter “douchebag” in Google, and click “I’m Feeling Lucky,” you get the Wikipedia article for douche the feminine treatment…Suzi Quatro is releasing an Elvis Tribute album next month…If and when the people from MenWhoLookLikeKennyRogers.com do a coffee table book, I will buy it for every one of my white-bearded friends…I put Ben-Gay on my temples when I get a really bad headache…Onkyo is the best mid-line audio products on the market…Early winter: time to listen to Chet Baker…

Shameless self-promotion time: Did you read my essay on Coldfront about The Outfield’s “Your Love”?  You should…I’m  going to be reading twice in Chicago next week: first, on Wednesday, December 16, in what will be the final Bookslut reading with fellow Counterpoint Press author Kathleen Rooney; second, December 17, at The Book Cellar, with the inimitable Claire Zulkey. If you live or are near the City of Big Shoulders, then bring your  bookish self over to either or both venues and say hi. See you next week.

Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction, which is out now. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.

It’s My Two Cents: Turner Overdrive, The Regulars, Nader, Runaways, Arnold, Flatulists

Here’s modern poetry in a nutshell: paintings, animals, mythology…Every word can end either with the suffix “-esque” or the suffix “Turner Overdrive”….But nothing shall ever be “Turner Overdrive-esque”…

Written while tipsy…Heck, we all have pets; heck, if we went to a decent college we’ll know the story of Hecuba… Double-heck, we would know about chalk drawings of Rembrandt…The question I ask you: Do you “bend” or do you ‘utter sweetly’?…I’m not sure who would go and say iambic pentameter = Peter North…

Did you know George Plimpton wrote an essay on Caddyshack? He did…Oh Camarado, there’s nothing in between mediating, Jack… If people get too precious with the self, then it’s another self… The self is its own story…And just what did I mean in an old essay by a “jazzercise dialectic”?…Got me..Mime me—the aftermath…Everything that I say might be glamorous—it’s the blood that we should look at…

I used to be a Republican in the third grade and supported James Baker’s 1980 bid for the presidency, but now I am a moderate Democrat who still reels from Ralph Nader’s 2000 spoiler run…I feel out of breath today, but still happy…I thought about my thighs tonight…Make haste to your shoe repair shop…Take your long senator-ish socks off, shave your senator-ish legs…Snakes are always straight-friendly…

Two mentions of buffet this evening…To the road. To the sewer. With ceremony. I’ve gone away again. Nothing. There will be no talk of the road. The Jersey winds still blow. East…

The Regulars, Sarah Stolfus’s excellent collection of photo-portraits of regulars at Philadelphia’s McGlinchey’s bar, brings back fond-but-conflicted memories for me. I lived there when I was 23, 24, 25 years old and it wasn’t where I wanted to be. Perhaps the quote from Jonathan Franzen’s introduction puts it best: “Philadelphia makes short work of a certain kind of ego; it refuses to flatter our sense of self-importance”…

I urge you to listen to this 2008 Queen + Paul Rodgers cover of Del Shannon’s hit “Runaway” with an open mind. At least until Brian “Is God” May plays the organ line on his guitar…

Here’s a joke by Bob Brookmeyer: “Saxophonists get all the girls, trumpeters make all the money, and trombonists develop an interior life”…

Here’s another joke, this time from Y, an ex-girlfriend of my ex-best friend; she’s speaking of X, my ex-girlfriend, who became friends with my ex-best friend and all my old college friends we broke up. As Y put it, “Dan got the dog and X got the friends”…

Quote from talk show: “I can remember thinking I would be the next Mary Lou Retton”…Another one “Some part of this countryplay”…Misheard quote from documentary on all-female rock band The Runaways: “I’m going to steal all the drugs I can and leave your house with a good cassette”…How do you sound like you know what you’re talking about when you don’t? Desiderata…Yadda yadda yadda…Randall Jarrell deserves to be quoted again more. I have been looking for the one where when he said that the job of the critic, if nothing else, is to repeat what has been forgotten every 50 years…

“Farts carry anxiety and humor and disgust. People see themselves in the reactions of others and are thus intensely aware of themselves in those moments when farts manifest themselves”–Evan R. Goldstein, “The Language of Farting,” no workable link available folks, but it’s from The Chronicle of Higher Education…Did you know there were professional farters?  They were called flatulists…

Here’s a rejected sentence from some poetry essay of mine: “Avant gardism these days is an extension of what the poet dictates is the subject, which is capable of vacillation mid-composition, it has cheapened itself to the private thing, much the same as lyricism has prided itself on distance and, in most cases, silence”…I used to shake hands with my finger, but now I wave my hand close to my face…Quote from a student paper about Matthew Arnold and The Backstreet Boys: “This statement is correct because we all want to be characters of perfection”…

If you made it this far, here’s your reward. Self-promotion time: I’ll be touring over the weekend: Penn State this Thursday, Philly on Friday, and my ancestral homeland of South Jersey on Saturday afternoon. Try to make it out to all of them if you can. And bring 300 of your closest friends.

Daniel Nester’s latest book is How to Be Inappropriate, a collection of mostly humorous nonfiction, which is out now. He teaches at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Photo by Joe Putrock.

It’s My Two Cents: Friendster, Frisell, Jordan, Arcangel, et Cetera

Humping a statue can be a dignified form of political protest…I logged onto my Friendster page for the first time in, like, two years…Sometimes I miss living in Camden, NJ, but not going to school there…I can’t wait to see what a Powell’s bookstore looks like, and I will on January 7…Some nonprofit organizations aren’t run well at all…Even non-elaborate movie plots are confusing when taking Theraflu…We’ve used a cleaning person before, and I am not ashamed of saying it. It’s an almost religious experience, and everyone should try it once…Look up “guitar maestro” in the dictionary and you will see a picture of Bill Frisell…Those Jerky Boys Fans eager for another high-concept crank call duo should look no further than Matador Records artist Earles and Jensen…I didn’t know that my wife didn’t care for the music Hall and Oates. If it wasn’t for our daughters, I would have divorced her…Please, just once, let me see the streets of Prague…Prediction: I will not see the street of London for at least 15 years…Let’s all go to Cracker Country. Or not…

Idea for band name: Peter et Cetera…Bob Holman has done more for American poetry in third quarter of the 20th Century than all of the poets laureate from that period combined. To paraphrase Steve Earle, I will stand on Billy Collins’ coffee table in Clarks and say that…You could listen to Bill Joel’s 1980 Glass Houses album and sing along to every song this Friday afternoon. Or you could remain a miserable person…My students love it when I impersonate my mother’s voice, fake cigarette in hand…When the Poetry Foundation website ran a letter from John Freeman complaining about my first article for them, they didn’t contact me.  They just ran it.  I still think they were dicks for that…The best poetry critic in the United States right now is still Jordan Davis, followed by Michael Scharf and Joyelle McSweeney…

Do over-funded literary journals ever feel embarrassed and help out other journals? Until they do that, I won’t donate to any of them…I didn’t know Cornelius Eady was a playwright…Doesn’t all yogurt help you go the bathroom?… A website that ran a snarky-but-smart review of my new book invited me to read for their series. I consider myself a publicity whore, dear reader, but that’s where I draw the line…People should stop referring to themselves as “white trash”—it’s fucking offensive and condescending…

I once ended a poem with a JJ Walker “dyn-o-mite” imitation reading for third grade poetry contest, for which I won second place. The kid who won first, we learned that evening, clearly didn’t write the poem. He ended up getting kicked out of the armed services for selling coke, I was told…If you keep committing the “comprised of” error, I won’t read your record reviews.  It’s as simple as that…Space heaters have probably done more to promote literature in this country than any state arts agency…I wish more colleges would invite me to read there… My two-year-old daughter picked up my wife’s curse words first. Karma is sometimes tardy…I can still read the Crutchfield catalog from cover to cover…If you read The Chronicle of Higher Education enough, you will think you have been fired even before you get your first professor job…I didn’t know that Walter J. Ong of Orality and Literacy fame, was a Jesuit priest. But somehow it makes sense…Speaking of Judas Priest, I had a dream about a guy who worshipped Priest in college. It was present day: We hung out in his apartment, which he shared with his mother, furnished entirely from Design Within Reach… AAAARG.ORG is like the theory PDF handout Napster…Here’s what a colleague said other people say about my first two books: the first had the passion, the second had the craft. I’ll take that…Cindy Crawford is still hot…

Check out my friends Knit-Head site, where you can get a mohawk-style knit cap…Cory Arcangel is my favorite artist right now…If you have Sirius radio, you will know that the term “tunage” lives on in DJ Earle Bailey’s banter at Deep Tracks channel 17…Here’s what I can say I use Torrent for: to download a copyright-free copy of the Marx Brothers’ A Night At The Opera…I didn’t know about Tributosaurus, the “future of rock and roll,” but now I do.