Little Things

Get a $109 Amazon Kindle for $79!

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 16:30:00 -0400

Since I’m in the mood to sell things and since I could use the money, too, I’m going to let all my friends and readers of “Little Things” in on this deal as well: An ongoing 20% off at the Amazon Kindle store:

Get a $109 Amazon Kindle for $79!

And this, when you think about it is pretty darn cool, too. An Amazon Kindle owner myself, I can vouch for how much money this thing saves me in books. The only downside is you have to buy specially made Amazon Kindle accessories, such as the Kindle-compatible wall jack if you have an iPhone instead of a Droid. Plus, you need some sort of cover to keep your little eReader buddy safe, and you might want to upgrade to Wi-Fi if if you’re going on a long road trip or can’t find a Starbuck’s—and, and, and….

So, yeah. You can get that stuff cheaper by clicking the link above. And, if you don’t have an Amazon Kindle yet and really want to make “Little Things” happy, you could purchase said Amazon Kindle after clicking the link above, then buy all the necessary Kindle accessories as well. Heck, order enough stuff, and I’ll write a poem just for you. See how awesome this deal and I are?:-)

P.S.: If you like books, check out this deal I got through an educator’s discount as a WyzAnt Tutor (I’m not really supposed to share it, but I doubt they’ll mind if they’re selling books.): Shop Amazon Books - Summer Reading for Kids

25% Off Yahoo Web Hosting

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:50:06 -0500

25-35% Off Yahoo Web Hosting!

Do you like reading things on “Little Things”?

Do you have a Web site idea, but need hosting?

Would you like to combine giving back to “Little Things” AND getting 25-35% off your Web hosting at the same time?

If you answered, “Yes,” to all these questions (and don’t mind my cliche ad-speak), click the appropriate banner ad below or the following link to get Yahoo! Web Hosting - 25% off for the first 3 months, 25% off Yahoo Business Hosting or 35% off Yahoo Online Store Hosting, and send $40 to Phill Provance’s pocket for your trouble:

Top 10 Worst Retirement Planning Strategies

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 04:12:00 -0500

10. “Do something fascinating, then live off the proceeds from sperm donation.”
9. “Win Jeopardy.”
8. “Work at Wal-Mart.”
7. “Perform some feat of unnatural ridiculousness for which you will become famous in the ‘Guinness Book of World Records.’”
6. “Endear yourself to a wealthy patron.”
5. “Cross the street slowly so that someone eventually hits you with his car and you can sue for an immense sum in damages.”
‎4. “Work around asbestos, then sue your formal employer when diagnosed with lung cancer.”
3. “Participate in several drug trials until you begin suffering from bleeding bowels, seizures and all manner of awful things, then, yes darlings, sue.”
2. “Make millions as a day trader.”

And No. 1….

1. “Rely on social security.”

New Poetic Developments for Phill Provance

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 01:57:45 -0500

Dear Readers,

Well, so my reading at the studio of friend and painter Shelton Walsmith last month seems to have gone well, and Mark and I are trucking right along with sales. I’ll be sure to post a picture of the chap’s cover when Mark gets back from Spain and gets the details for The Day the Sun Rolled Out of the Sky up on the Cy Gist Press blog.

While we wait for that, (but only if you are part of my so far 424 person-strong “inner circle” on Facebook) you can view some pictures of me, Ben Fama and Natalie Lyalin reading at Yardmeter Editions Thirteen—plus some of Doug Campbell’s exhibited paintings—in my Facebook photo gallery.

If, on the other hand, you are not part of my Facebook friend list, you have two options: Add me (I will of course accept), or don’t and miss the pics. Also, you can check out some other new developments with the name “Phill Provance” stamped on them by visiting Arsenic Lobster, where my poem “Hard to Say” went up today in their 24th issue.

What’s more, you can read my bio (this time with the word “new” in it) on Danse Macabre magazine’s About Us page. Our 42nd issue, “Nussknacker,” has yet to appear, I’m afraid, likely due to the holidays, but when it does you will have a very long and, I hope, perceptive review of Mark Lamoureux’s Spectre. And, then, you can stop over at the Lantern Review and read some (possibly) nice things one of their editors said about “St. Petersburg Has Many Churches.”

Finally, if you are really feeling froggy and live in the New Jersey/NYC/Philadelphia area, you are invited to attend my next reading as a presenter for the River Read reading series. This upcoming event will take place on Jan. 9, 2011, at NovelTeas, which is located at 78 Bridge Avenue, Red Bank, N.J. 07701. You can find all this on the blog of host and poet John Petrolino.

As for me, I’ll be up at some undisclosed location in the Poconos skiing with my family till New Years. In between times I’ll also be taking intermittent breaks to watch more episodes of one of my all-time favorite Britcoms, Blackadder, whose unabridged, definitive DVD set my brother Mike got me for Christmas.

God, I love that show! I’m even watching the audio commentaries that come on the disks. And I almost never do that. What can I say, Rowan Atkinson (whom you probably know as Mr. Bean) is just the funniest man alive and decidedly on my “List of the 10 People I’d Like to Befriend If I Ever Do Anything Substantially Worthwhile.” If you have never seen Blackadder you’ve got to get this DVD set and catch up. Otherwise you’re a minger.

Well, so, I suppose that’s all from me at the moment. But I did want to add one final note here because it seems people are getting my name wrong in several publications. So let me introduce myself: I am Phillip DeNune Provance, decedent of Mareen Duvall and a very distant relative of President Obama and President Truman, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, actor Robert Duvall and Iraq War whistle blower Samuel Provance.

Professionally I am a writer, editor and poet and as such I choose to go by the name “Phill Provance”—which appellation I feel has a familiar and folksy ring to it. This is the nom de plume I gave myself while in college, but often the (presumable) oversight of presiding editors has caused spelling errors.

Therefore, if you find writing under the names “Phil Provance,” “Phill Provance,” “Phill Provence,” “Phil Provence,” “Phillip D. Provance,” “Phillip DeNune Provance” or any other unofficial, but likely variation it is definitely me. (Only one other “Phil Provance” has existed in the cyber age: A middle-age, distant relative who was a building contractor in Missouri and who sadly passed away recently.)

I hope that clears up any and all confusion you might have.;-)

-Phill Provance

P.S.: Sorry, Adam, I have no clue how to input a German esszet in Tumblr, but I did consider trying at least.:-)

Learn a Cool Thing Today from Julie Doxsee

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 14:26:00 -0500

To plaster over my bemoaning I thought I would post a positive note here on something very cool you can do with a line of poetry. Today, Zachary Schomburg posted this line from a Julie Doxsee poem:

I pretend your hands are the cleaved sunup this morning’s window hums toward the width of my animal syllable.

I can’t remember if this line came from “Undersleep” or one of Julie’s newer books, but it is fantastic, isn’t it? Check out the lack of punctuation. It’s as if you can read the line multiple ways; she is using a kind of internal enjambment to achieve ambiguity. For instance, you can read it as:

“I pretend your hands are the cleaved sunup. This morning’s window hums toward the width of my animal syllable.”

OR

“I pretend you hands are the cleaved. Sunup, this morning’s window hums toward the width of my animal syllable.”

OR

“I pretend your hands are the cleaved sunup this morning’s window hums toward… the width of my animal syllable.”

It’s very nice, imho, to have these as options, or take them as all part of the same line. The words aren’t just working overtime. They’re working non-stop. They don’t stop, but are kinetic because they are simultaneously offering different readings and different ways of reading (take them together, or choose one or any two) that make one line jump into three, then fold into two, then back to one—then over to another two.

It’s very cool, shifting meaning like that—as if Julie has taken her experience and walked it past some amorphous fun-house mirror. What’s more, this weirdness and de-centering of meaning removes the burden of conveyance from Julie’s words. Like Zach said in one of his poems, “Look through a complex eye and see 1,000 of everything.”

Julie is giving us that complex eye, and we are not just seeing 1,000 things but 1,000 ways of seeing things. And in this way, I feel, she’s elevating her volta (the weird moment in the poem that changes everything; See: Zach’s sudden jaguars in “Scary, No Scary,” or even that mental shift you experience between lines 12 and 13 in one of Shakespeare’s sonnets) from simple tactile phenomenon to noumenon (something you perceive with your mind, not your senses).

She is doing this (at least to me), and not only wiping the map clean of simple signposts; she is also making us wonder if the hidden treasure of meaning is found by putting the meanings together, combining the best two, or choosing the best one as if we are playing at the Monty Hall problem. Then, too, she is making us wonder if we’ve found all the doors and if there really is a prize meaning behind one of those doors at all.

If not, the prize is whatever we put there ourselves. And probably that is the healthiest thing. After all, contrary to what your high school English teacher might have told you, a poem is not a riddle. Otherwise, we would not have two separate words for these verbal arrangements. And paradoxically, by making her line more of a riddle, Julie is in fact making her poem less of a riddle because we can’t say if there is really anything to “figure out” or “understand.”

Julie’s line looks more like entertainment and experience—like film—once we see this, than it looks like a puzzle we have to figure out. And maybe that’s what poetry needs to do. It needs to not be a puzzle. It needs to be a living art form people access for pleasure. Poets need to be less involved with trying to “trick” people and more involved with making people think, “Hmm, I’d like to relax and read a poem.”

A great film does not bother its viewers with the trivialities of its inventiveness or its cliches. It simply conveys experience and emotion. Whether there is meaning behind that, or even if part of that experience is experiencing its inventiveness is neither here nor there.

“Casablanca,” for instance, has one of the most wobbly prologues you’ll ever see, and it pulls many things from the hardboiled genre that saturated the literary pulp market of the 1930s. But we barely notice this, and that can hardly be called an effect of time because the folks in our grandparents’ generation barely noticed it either. It’s just a captivating film. It makes us experience and feel something. And this is what the best poetry should do too. By that standard, Julie’s line is a “Casablanca”—but a helluva’lot more inventive.

Very, very, very cool….

And to think Julie does all this just by cutting a few select dashes and dots very precisely. In the words of Liz Lemon, “I want to go there.”

P.S.: You should probably buy these books by Julie:

Here: http://www.blackocean.org/objects-for-a-fog-death/

AND

Here: http://www.octopusbooks.net/main.html

A Very Awesome Issue of Jacket

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 13:11:00 -0500

If you like poems as much as I do you should read this: http://jacketmagazine.com/37/piccinnini-ashbery.shtml

and this: http://jacketmagazine.com/37/iv-baus-ivb-king.shtml

They make so much sense together in that weird tenuous way that makes you want to sit for a whole day and fill in the planks. Of the bridge. See, I am doing it. Kudos to Jacket’s editors for putting together an issue with such great synergy. I mean, it is from last year, but if you are just now discovering it, isn’t it new?:-)

Something You Should Attend

Sat, 06 Nov 2010 18:29:16 -0400

Something You Should Attend:

The first reading for “The Day the Sun Rolled Out of the Sky” will be in Brooklyn Nov. 13, 2010. You should go. I know I will.:-P

This is exciting! I just got some of the first preliminary art...

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 16:47:00 -0400

This is exciting! I just got some of the first preliminary art for a top-secret comics project called “Children of the Gods,” or “CotG,” which I’ll be working on after I finish up the chapbook. Check it out and let me know what you think. My artist, Edgar Arce, is a genius, no?

My First Pushcart Nomination

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:53:24 -0400

My First Pushcart Nomination:

“Well I’m on my way/I don’t know where I’m going/I’m on my way/I’m takin’ my time but I don’t know where.”

Wow! I’m just ecstatic. My very first Pushcart Prize nomination came in from everyone’s favorite spot to find up-and-coming Asian poets. Also a nomination from them for the Best of the Web award. The nominated poem, “St. Petersburg Has Many Churches,” is definitely my best, and I’m so glad that’s the one that got the nomination. Hell! I’m just fucking excited by this, excited by getting some assurance that I’m moving in the right direction. This, plus the chapbook…. There’s still a long way to go; I need a book and to win a prize. But who knows. And at least I’m making some headway. Damn! How cool.:-)

Cha: An Asian Literary Magazine, issue 12

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 05:43:49 -0400

Cha: An Asian Literary Magazine, issue 12:

Hi, guys. Here’s issue 12 of Cha put together by the lovely Tammy and her intended, Jeff (who is cool enough, by the by, to have the initials “J.Z.”). I am in it. But please don’t just read me. Cha, you see is Hong Kong’s first English-language online magazine, and as a result, it attracts the attention of many awesome poets and fiction writers (as well as press from all over). Yessir, I’m quite proud of this one. In fact, despite Tammy’s gushing, I’m quite sure I’m not the best in the lot. So read ‘em all and tell me how terribly awful mine were comparatively. Or don’t. Well, just say something, you know. Otherwise I won’t know if you read them at all.:-)

Reminiscent of Poems by Billy Collins and Pablo Neruda

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 17:11:00 -0400

Reminiscent of Poems by Billy Collins and Pablo Neruda:

Check out this post from Cha editor Tammy Ho Lai-Ming about what she thinks of my poetry. I’m just floored by the comparison she makes and am extremely grateful. I also want you guys to get to know Tammy as I’ve been following her stuff since I found her “Sending You Away” in decomP. She is exactly what a poet should be, in my opinion: Succinct, clear, thoughtful, expressive and powerful.

I’d also suggest checking out “Love and Lust” to get a feel for the new and exciting things happening across the Pacific (and in Tammy’s case, across the Atlantic). Perhaps English is the current Lingua Franca, but let’s not forget the influence of Asian poetry on folks like Pound that touched off what became Modernism.

What we have today, then, owes itself almost entirely to the Japanese tradition, and I think it’s very worthwhile delving deeper into Eastern poetry for more influences, even if it’s only for new ways of looking at things. Many of the mental back flips we see, for instance, in Zach’s, Heather’s and Matvei’s work come from similar neural performances from the Russians. And such perspectives are healthy for the troubled Western brain. As the poem Tammy is about to publish says:

When you look at a tree in a garden
it is easier if you look at all the things that are not a tree.
When you sleep under a blanket
it is important to remember it’s not the blanket that is warm,
but the space between it and your skin.

What it is, in my opinion, is the ability to transform otherness into familiarity, which could be very important for all humans to learn as we grow closer together. I am not advocating a loss of classic Western individualism, which I see as invaluable. But what I see at the heart of Western decay, a disregard for everything but the self, could be turned in on itself through simply identifying the self as distinct but inclusive.

Think about it: Self is essentially a composite of experience and experience is usually the result of interaction. We are each unique and special and entirely ourselves, but we are this way because of everyone we’ve interacted with. It is kind of like a social lineage to match our genetic one. And just imagine if the stock broker who went to college because he spoke with some derelict poet who morned his not making better career decisions had thought about himself this way; had thought of his individual self as everyone else.

Perhaps in such cases the world would be a better place. Perhaps combining Eastern and Western culture into World Culture could take us there. I think a good place to start on this project is to read Eastern poetry, and a great gateway into this is to read the works of Eastern writers working in English like Tammy.

More Upcoming Publications

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:24:46 -0400

Well, so yeah, apparently I’m getting a little popular in the poetry line. Danse Macabre and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal are both taking “St. Petersburg Has Many Churches,” and Cha is also taking “What I Said to Her Was Not a Lie.” So kudos to me once again and much thanks to both Tammy and Adam. Seems there will only be four poems in my first chap that won’t have appeared elsewhere first, so yes, buy it to see what else there is you can’t find elsewhere, but know that everything that will be in it is pretty much quality and has passed muster with nearly twenty literary editors already (in one case, twice).;-)

Also, I am working as a go-between to get my hero and the man many people describe as contemporary poetry’s Jesus figure, Zachary Schomburg, to the northern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Nothing’s set in stone yet, but if it happens I expect all of you who can make it to show. (P.S.: Zach, I know Mathias is Peter already, but can I be Paul, pls, pls.:-P)

Disgusting News

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 01:32:59 -0400

Disgusting News:

Man! This is awful. Who the heck are these people saying they’d vote against the Dems and the Prez. This is very disturbing to me. I am very pleased with the fact that my elected officials have consistently acted in ways since 2008 that I feel are in my best interest. I lived through the previous eight years of warmongering and greed and I feel the country has turned a corner.

I know we haven’t gotten everything we wanted. No state-run healthcare. No breakup of big banking cartels. But, folks, the President has kept his word. I hope my fellow liberals will not let us fail now out of boredom. Remember how it felt two years ago? The battle’s not over. We have to man the guns again. If we can take them over the top once more, we will have succeeded in truly pushing the country far enough in the right direction that the Right won’t be able to undo everything. That’s what’s at stake.

I write like David Foster Wallace

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:44:40 -0400

I write like David Foster Wallace:

Really?

"This Above All"

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:19:00 -0400

Two weeks ago I got drunk with my mom, brother Mike and cousin Ashley. It was Ashley’s birthday, so Mom was took us all to a local diner after the bar closed, and I was looking forward to having some eggs and chicken-fried steak on Mum’s dime. It wasn’t 15 minutes after getting to the diner, though, that Mike and I got into the biggest fight I’ve been in since last January.

It all started with Mike singing some song about living like a “rock star” and, ever my curmudgeonly self, me telling him “For now, sure, but live too hard and you’ll tire out.” I guess it’s never good to be a killjoy like that, but I was just trying to give Mike some advice. I lived pretty hard during college myself, and I’m not particularly proud of it. Mike, however, thought I was just trying to bring him down, and brought up the one thing in my life I regret: A fight I had with my roommate my senior year that landed me in jail for a week and prevented me from finishing my final class (thus leaving a permanent blemish on my transcript).

I’ve always been self-conscious about this, have even avoided applying to grad school because of it. And Mike knew this. He started yapping about having a better GPA than me (which I’m proud of him for), but I’d told him before that this was a sore spot for me. I have done pretty damn well for a writer without an MFA so far, but I always feel insecure around my fellow poets. And my mind is the only thing I’ve got really that’s anything to write home about. Mike knows this and knows the one way to really hurt me is to bring up how I’d lived hard enough to make the rest of my life a fight I sometimes worry I don’t have the energy for.

Well, so this turned into a fight. First there was a shouting match between me and Mike, then after Mike went outside to get away from me, I drunkenly followed him out to shout at him and tell him he wasn’t staying at my house. Mike started pushing me, and I told him I wanted him to hit me so I could call the cops. All the while, poor Ashley, whose birthday it was, kept trying to break us up. Mike ripped my shirt and threw my glasses on the ground, and I continued to chase him into the parking lot while everyone in the restaurant came out to rubberneck.

Eventually, the head waitress threatened to call the cops, breaking it up. But I still wasn’t over it. I was extremely hurt because of what Mike said, and after crying over my eggs and arguing with my mom, I walked the two-mile stretch back home.

I’ll admit, I was being extremely immature. But I also stand by my being right, even now. Mike has no right to bring up a situation in my past that has had a horrible effect on my life to make himself look better. And he also has no right to destroy my things with impunity.

I was still so huffy when I returned home that at first I wouldn’t let either of them into the house. Then, I only let my mother in to get their things, and I said some pretty nasty things to her. She slapped me several times, then she and Mike went to her truck to sleep. I just felt so abandoned. I couldn’t understand why Mike was able to destroy my things and insult me, and Mom was siding with him. I felt like a tiny boy who was being kicked and abused. I did swallow my pride and apologize because I couldn’t stand seeing them sleep in a truck. But I still felt like I shouldn’t have had to apologize.

The reason I’m explaining all this is because I have never really felt whole or complete. I’ve always felt the need to prove myself, and after my life turned for the worse, I’ve felt so insignificant and useless. Yes, there are the comics and the chapbook and the poems and the magazine work. But I feel like I should have a best seller already. I feel behind, like a complete loser.

The next day, three things happened that brought on an epiphany. The first was a conversation with my ex, Hilary, in which she said one of the reasons she’d broken it off was I was “too negative”; the second was a conversation with Mike after we’d buried the hatchet in which he told me a very similar thing. I didn’t think I was particularly negative, and even if I was, I figured it’s at least honest to be that way when things aren’t going your way.

But then the third thing happened: In a conversation with a new friend that night, I listened to her call herself a litany of terrible names. I tried to reassure her, but she wouldn’t have it. She just made me feel so awful for her. I kept imagining the little girl inside her and felt like she was beating that little girl. It was almost disgusting, and after she signed off AIM, I finally had an idea of what a negative person is like FROM THE OUTSIDE.

That night, I laid in bed remembering how my mom would bandage my knees and rub my back when I was sick or sad. I realized that she was never going to do that again but that that was natural. I’m an adult now, I realized. I couldn’t expect anyone to console me. Life is a lonely thing. You can never really be outside your own head, and you will always be alone in the final moment. The only entity that will be there always, in my belief, is God. But God has many larger problems to deal with than my hurt feelings. Will He do it? Yes. But God also knows better than I do what’s good for me, and what’s good is my growing up, learning to stand alone with courage and dignity.

Then I thought about my new friend and how she was harming herself. I realized that I was doing the same thing to the little boy inside me, and there was no reason for that. I am an adult, after all. I provide for myself, and I fight for myself. I am at the age when many men are already fathers, and I don’t think I would be a very terrible father myself. So it occurred to me that, with no other little people to provide for, I can father myself.

I decided that every night before I went to bed I would rub my own back (metaphorically) and tell my inner little boy that he was indeed a smart boy and a good boy. These things aren’t lies. I know myself better than anyone else, and I can firmly state that that little boy, who is the center of all my dreams and the origin of all my best ideas and creativity, is very smart and very kind. He can come up with some of the most amazing ideas, and in conjunction with my no-nonsense adult self, he can make those ideas a reality. Also, he always helps people. There is never even a question about it. If it’s within his power to help someone he will. He shares whatever he has to share, he is inquisitive and, above all, he is worthwhile.

It also occurred to me that reminding him of this was a good way to keep myself positive. Yes, there are going to be failures, but as long as I can honestly admit that those failures are not my own fault, then I know I’m fine. And if a failure is my fault, like that fight that steered me off course, the best thing I can do is recognize where I made my mistake, change whatever about me caused that and try to fix the situation as best I can.

Since starting this regimen of pre-sleep self-therapy, I’ve felt myself become a happier, more positive person. This does not mean I am a phony. I will still tell it like it is. But saying a negative thing once is enough. It’s far better, I think now, to concentrate on the positives. And, in doing so, more positive things happen. I’m sharing this because I feel it’s a worthwhile epiphany to have, and I’d like to see my friends try it too. Yes, there will be disappointments, but that doesn’t mean each of us isn’t worthwhile or that one failure is the end.

As every older adult I’ve ever met has told me, we are all still so young. Perhaps if nothing good has happened by the time we are 80, then we can complain. But considering complaining doesn’t get us anywhere and positivity does, I’ d like to see all of us become our own mothers and fathers and move forward. We have all been raised in such a morass of self-pity and self-loathing - the ’80s/’90s culture of self-victimization and psychobabble - I just think maybe this offers a good start for something different that will make our time on this planet more worthwhile.

Hey, wow! Check me out: I’m only trailing Phil Collins by...

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:00:00 -0400

Hey, wow! Check me out: I’m only trailing Phil Collins by four spots on Google’s suggestion list, and I’m the only Phill with two l’s too! Go me, go me, go me, go me! Bonafide hustler making my fame and all that.

:-)

Also, Cy Gist Press publisher Mark Lamoureux and I were discussing his publishing my first chapbook. It’s not set in stone yet, but Mark sounded really positive about it when we talked, so I’m really getting excited. It would put me with the likes of Angela Wong, whom I saw read last year and who is not only a stellar poet, but also a major babe. (shawing!)

The only thing I’m not sure about is how he’ll take to some of the earlier stuff. He really likes the poems of mine he’s read, but I’m not sure he’s going to love some of the earlier ones. I’m guessing he’s going to cut about five of them, three schmaltzy, romanticistic ones from college (“Los Dos Joaquines,” “Clodhopper” and “White Dress” ) and probably two from my Bukowski period (I’m guessing probably “Between You and Me” and “High School Nostalgia” - maybe “Seconds” too).

The reason he’d cut the first three is they’re all a little overdone, all a little blah and sound like what they are: College work. I included them in the manuscript because I personally like them.

I figure I’m allowed one or two fillers, and if I get one or two, I’d like at least one of them to be something I believed deeply in as a kid. Yes, it will be a little “off.” But then, I’m not expecting to win a Pulitzer with this, just get some new readers and maybe make a few high school girls wet. Overall, then, if Mark gives me the benefit of the doubt for one of them, I’ll take “Los Dos” because it fits better in the overall arrangement of the manuscript. Plus, “White Dress” is a little too Poe in a big way.

As for the Buk-period ones, I’m thinking Mark will definitely not let me keep “High School Nostalgia” because it’s simply too vulgar. The other two are a little flat, but I can basically argue for them because they all appeared in print somewhere else, and are therefore already editor-approved.

Also, they do fit well with the whole day-in-the-life structure I’m going for—fit well, in fact, in the part of the chap that’s about morning, day and work. After all, not everything is interesting. Not everything is grand and inspiring. Most things are absurdly pointless, and since I have a little bit of an absurdist streak (with a little a to save me because I’m not schooled enough to really call myself an anything), I figure absurd boredom is also in order.

Anyhow, that’s my take. Don’t anyone get too excited yet. Mark might take one look at everything else I included besides “St. Petersburg Has Many Churches,” “What I Said to Her Was Not a Lie” and “Hard to Say” and tell me to screw off till I have some better poems to go with them. But, hey, most of the collections and chaps I’ve read in the past year had filler, and since I write to be read (not agonized over) I think even the worst of them will connect with someone.

As a final note, Mark Brunetti is putting out a best-of collection for The Idiom. I still have to get back to him with galley corrections, but some of the pieces that will be in “The Day the Sun Rolled Out of the Sky” (tentative title) will be in there with others Mark L. doesn’t have the stomach to put his name on—Mark B. and Mark L. being totally different people taste-wise. I’m thinking I’ll wait till I have passed the poems through some other editors and Mark L. before replying to Mark B. That way I can kill two birds as the saying goes.

*Note to self: Stick with Marks and Mikes. For some reason people with M names will publish me. (Mike Searle, Michal Kadera, Mark Brunetti, Mark Lamoureux). Incidentally, I’ve dated three women named Melissa, have a brother named Mike a coworker named Mike and a mother named Mary. Weirdnessssss!

Acceptance from Arsenic Lobster

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 21:40:07 -0400

Acceptance from Arsenic Lobster:

Yes, folks, another acceptance, and this time it’s sticking. Arsenic Lobster likes “Hard to Say”; in fact, I’m glad I submitted since it seems according to Duotrope Digest that the acceptance rate is only 1.82% currently. Ha! Imagine that.

Also, I am officially labeling my work “Bizarro” or “New Absurdist” - though I don’t think I know enough about Absurdism to really use the latter. Anyhow, thanks Mark, thanks Zach, thanks Marvin, thanks Larry, thanks Walt, thanks Jillery. :-) You’re all awesome, and I’m super grateful to you all for helping me in one way or the other.

More Webcomic review attention from Apollo

Wed, 26 May 2010 21:45:03 -0400

More Webcomic review attention from Apollo:

No kidding! The guy really likes Ace Hoyle. And we really like him.:-) No doubt, someday when I am dead, dear Apollo will be critical analyst No. 1 of my work—the edgy old dude with the cigarette dangling from his tracheotomy: “When I first met Phill it was wild times, man…. Crazy sonovabitch was doin’ this Ace Hoyle thing and e-mailed me out of the blue—haha!”

But, seriously, Apollo’s got a pretty happenin’ blog with lots of game and Webcomic reviews and, also, plenty of treatment on FreeMMOs, so why not do me a favor and check it out sometime?

Here is a picture of my beautiful Jillery. I’ll see her...

Wed, 26 May 2010 03:06:43 -0400

Here is a picture of my beautiful Jillery. I’ll see her tomorrow finally. It reminds me of Westron Wind from my Brit. Lit. I survey years ago. In fact, it reminds me of it so much, I’m reprinting the poem for all of you here:

Western Wind

Westron wind, when will thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.

And yet another positive webcomic review from Luprand

Tue, 25 May 2010 13:44:07 -0400

And yet another positive webcomic review from Luprand:

Geeze, man. We told them we didn’t have to be nice to Ace Hoyle at all. We even paid a guy who trashed us. And look at this: Yet another positive review! And one that sort of appreciates what I’m doing artistically?!! Geeze, man! This guys good!

The only thing he missed was how the melodrama is used to satirize comics as a genre. (I’m trying to go over-the-top, after all, because comics generally are melodramatic—you guys will have to let me know if you think I’m pulling off the satire-by-exaggeration;-))