H/T: http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/medieval-monks-couldnt-cure-the-plague/
Flashy Poem Monster
Monstrous Mental Gym Poem: de-monstrate, not tell
I have been reading lists of clichés;
listening to talks about random violence-or-not at chuckycheezes
spoiler: it’s usually a domestic affair
Also:
weapons of mass destruction
points-of-no-return
small-step braveries
shooting of mentally ill patients in hospital beds
snatches of gravity’s rainbow
and long re-reads of tortuous tales
It made the time on the treadmill go by somewhat faster
even without stem-cell time crystals
Touché cliché has a bonjour tristesse ring to it, no?
wickéd
like sweat through a lulu leotard
demon straight
demon’s traits
– I am trying to think of a monster-
in 1500 words
Cheesy.
The monstro-of-consciousness
morphs and changes.
Now cooing sweet nothings,
then tearing self-esteem apart-
It throttles the black dog;
tickles the tummy full of cherry pie-
whispers, cajoles, shouts;
pulls at bruised toe-nails.
It pinches off yeasty-dough pizza thought bubbles
and spins and flattens and tosses them.
Some plop down like toe-biter offspring;
take root, potato-eyed spud roots
with leaves and shoots and spider hair.
Others crawl away, skinless, raw, unlit:
shoestring allumette fries.
The stem cell time crystals voice their opinion:
They protest too much, methinks.
Vulture paté, it’s a thing:
They came for its liver, every day
and it grew back by night.
Now, they sit, own talons nailed to a plank; force-fed themselves.
It’s a delicacy, you see.
The post-prandial pancreatic pleasure
of Deliverance
de mon traitor
Ma man,
the good father
That is, the water bug dad:
not a monster, you say.
When you tear the legs off a sea star,
you can grow five new ones.
Twenty-five torn off could soon add up.
High five, oleaginous prince,
you get a five star review!
We’re going on a monster hunt
Mon stêr
Mon star
My stare
I see you now:
You are a true monster,
my monster.
The woke monster
The delicious monster, caught by its tail
of twenty-now’s.
Descend the stairway to hell on tippy-toes.
Apoptosis
(Not halitosis)
tie; grrr
Sorry, Pops, what did you say?
Pop star?
Pop tart?
No: just toast
How can toast be just?
A toast to justness then!
It’s just a lemma after all.
A choice between the high road and the low one:
bract or chaff.
The grass roots of a double-take.
But don’t panicle;
there’s no stigma attached to this ovary,
the anthers in fact a filament of your imagination.
Don’t unsheathe the blade
of ridicule so readily.
True post-modern poetry
is hard to conceive
And readily aborted
No mint will sweeten that breath:
vulture vomit is an involuntary evolutionary un-evil defence mechanism.
You know that.
A sticky wicket, when your software won’t update
Even with the license key
It leaves one vulnerable
to all kinds of unholy trolls
Raging at the fall of the good knight.
Do not go gently.
Monstrosity
Fight that good fight.
Into the night rode the five hundred
their duty done
Screw the one thousand;
we do this for fun
So: nine more words:
it should have been none.
Now: the other thousand words will have to be a picture, because I’m out of time and talent. Hey, it’s pi day today.
A Feathered Thing
I am working on a commission. Some to and thro-ing has occurred and conceptually we’re talking about feathers. I am doing some Chinese ink and brush sketches to get into the mood. Because the painting will be going all the way to Australia, I briefly considered doing it on ‘rice paper’ (it isn’t really; it is made from the bark of the mulberry tree). That way I could just roll it up and send it off in its little tube, le voila. But I’m prone to larger, more dramatic pieces that you can sort of climb into physically, well, metaphorically, euphorically, wholly. I have recently done quite a few using oil and cold wax- this I like. The texture, the flat colour. Acrylics are great because they dry so quickly, but they are very shiny, as they should be. That is their true character. For this I wanted something with a little gravitas. The painting will be a wedding anniversary present. It is going to be fairly large- a triptych of about five foot by five foot. I will have to do it on the floor, so to put some kinetic energy into it. We’ll see.
Fall
Fall
Writer Resolution, 2017: Write Despite « terribleminds: chuck wendig
The Existentialist Penguin
Gravel gizzards literally rock!
It’s World Penguin Day! Watch your back though… these penguins aren’t as nice as they seem. But they need us to be nice to them!
Whether you watch a classic GIF like the one above, or a kid-friendly TV/film documentary, you might get the impression that penguins lead carefree, or at least silly or slapstick, lives– happy feet and all that. It works for Hollywood: a Charlie Chaplin comedy relief role to play. And that’s the vision of penguins I grew up with: they were living cartoons to me.
But what’s the reality? Plenty of documentaries, most notably to my mind the recent Attenborough’s “Frozen Earth” episodes or “March of the Penguins” film, have dealt with the darker side to these two-toned, tuxedo-toting antipodeans. And anyone who has experienced penguins in the wild has probably seen those not-so-light facets of penguinity firsthand. On realiizing just how compulsively horny young “hooligan cock” male…
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Death’s Doll: The World’s Most Beautiful Mummy
Death’s Doll
They call her ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ the world’s most beautiful mummy. Rosalia Lombardo died from pneumonia in 1920 at the tender age of 2. Her body was embalmed by Alfredo Salafia (below), put into a glass coffin, and placed inside the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy. If it were not for the oxidizing amulet of the Virgin Mary resting atop her blanket, you would swear she had died a few days ago.
Very little is known about Rosalia’s life, and, until recently, even less was known about Salafia’s preservation methods.
Embalming as a means of memorializing the dead has ancient roots, dating all the way back to the Egyptians beginning in 3200 BC. During this period, embalmers removed the internal organs before rinsing the empty cavity with palm wine and filling it with natron salts. Over the next 40 days, the body would begin to dry out and mummify. The internal…
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The Best Literary Facts from the Twitterverse
I am inspired to get a pet lobster and name him “Nuances of Growth”! (or maybe Nuisance?)
Last Wednesday, we issued our 50,000 followers on Twitter with a challenge: to tweet us with the best literary fact they know. The reason for this was simple: since last December, the modestly sized research team here at Interesting Literature has been tweeting (as @InterestingLit) little facts, quotations, and links based on all aspects of literature, but one of the joys of literature is that as well as being a solitary experience (reading, writing) it can also be a social and communal interest (blogging, tweeting, discussing). And everyone who is interested in literature knows far more interesting things about it than they probably even realise themselves, so we saw this challenge as a chance for our followers to show us what they’ve got. They didn’t disappoint.
So, here are what our followers tweeted us. The author of each fact is included in brackets after the relevant tweet, placed in…
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Fright Night Villanesque
Fright Night Villanesque
Strip it down bare-boned, meet the beasts head-on
The serotinal thief is cowardly
Fright night’s raging will pale when day is done
The swirly eyes feverish when light is gone
The brake lights, air bags all but memory
Strip it down bare-boned, meet the beast head-on
Sharp fangs glisten, triangles having fun
In sad abandon they blink forever uselessly
Fright night’s raging will pale when day is done
The pulse of light, a gonner, such was man
The scritching sounds of horror legs scurry
Strip them down bare, boned; meet the beast; head on
Dismembered in the day’s light, now there’s none
Just the skid marks on an easel, somewhat sunny
Fright night’s raging will pale when day is done
But lie down and dream deeply, hon
Those leglike lashes come crawling for more fun
Stripped to bare bone, meat- the beast’s head
Fright night’s whimper will pale when life is done
Coup de chapeau au Passé: J’ay perdu ma Tourterelle, translated here…(Lichtenstein too-two-II, of course…tipping the hat is so much better than tipping the cow, no?)
Related articles
- From Michael Gambon to Stephen Fry which A-listers battled with the dreaded stage fright (express.co.uk)
- Three Pieces of Me (michelledevilliersart.wordpress.com)
- Living with Defeat (vincentmars.com)
FilMishMishMash
Well, today you can read The Fruit Detective, by John Seabrook (New Yorker, 2002) on Byliner…The Bright Eyes song is nice too.
Cadmium Diamond Dreams 