Readers, I cannot claim to have stared into hell, nor can I claim to have looked in the Devil’s eyes, but I do believe that the woman on Ladybug’s pilates DVD, the one repeatedly saying “and dowwwn, and dowwwn,” might be the voice of Hell itself.

Let me tell you this, too, while we’re talking hell: I hope the next time I have a bacterial infection, that bacteria’s got Paradise Lost written all over it.

I am low, friends, low. Someone send me a wicked poem, or link me to one. Otherwise, I will be listening to Mazzy Star. Furreals.

Yikes. I tend to sign my business correspondence with “Best,” because, well, I generally do wish the best for my clients and co-workers. But apparently, some of them are thinking that’s a brush-off!

Dear reader, know that if I e-mail you and sign the e-mail “Best,” I still love you. If I sign it “Sincerely,” I’m keeping my distance but you can trust the contents of the e-mail. If I don’t like you, you’ll see a signature like “I hope you die.” Or perhaps “Until the next time I hear from you.”

Oh, blog, I have done you such disservice to leave that lame video as the top entry since last week. And yet, I’ve not had the time to devote to you. This hardly seems fair, as you do little but wait for me. I know that some might argue that when I’m not here, you can at least serve up your content to others who might happen by. But let’s be honest– that’s like 10 people a day. You miss me.

So, what’s happened since I came to see you last?

• I have spent what downtime has been available to me with Ladybug, during which time we watched The Queen and Idlewild. I would have been better served writing in you, blog, during that time.
• I have done yardwork which was sorely overdue. Yardwork often leads directly to writing for me. That did not happen this weekend.
• The show I worked on so hard last month closed Saturday night, and strike was Sunday. Though it was an incredibly efficient strike, I think I managed to scare people by looking, at the end of it, as though I had just worked for 17 straight hours. No one else seemed to have that affect.
• I attended an “Art Party.” I understood the concept of the art party to be painting on the walls of my friend’s apartment, but when I arrived, it turned out that we were to paint things to hang on the wall. My impulse towards vandalism remains unsatisfied.

I’m not one to post YouTube videos, but I found this through Good Weather for Airstrikes, and couldn’t resist watching, since its title is one of the best lines from Chapelle’s Show. And once I had seen the video, I could not resist sharing. Robyn, you have totally made my night.

While Jilly is on vacation from Poetry Hut, I thought I’d spend a little time trolling Technorati for po-news. What keywords would one use to find po-news? Because when I just searched on “poetry,” holy crap, the majority of the results made me want to gouge out my eyes. I mean, I was as horrified by some of these links as I was by the idea that there’s now bingo on network TV. Thankfully, I’d somehow skimmed over the part of Jilly’s post that said Michael Wells would be posting some news links. Those were much better than anything I could find on my own.

Mentally, I made a real big deal about buying Civilization IV, but then played it for about 45 minutes and haven’t come back to it since. Heh. So much for that idea.

One of my students e-mailed to inquire about this, which reminded me, oh, yeah, that would be quite a nice thing to go to.

Thinking about pursuing a residency to work on my essay and a manuscript this fall.

Oh happy day! One Story was in the mailbox waiting for me.

Had beer and fries with MP today and discussed the future of the press. Now I have lots of energy and excitement. Having a potential collaborator is invigorating.

I finally got tagged for the “five songs” meme, which had been floating around the poetry blogosphere for days. I was pretty sure I did this when it was in the improv blogosphere, and sure enough, searching the old blog for “five songs” turned up an entry from July 2005. I think, at that time, the meme was more geared towards “stuff you’re enjoying right now.” Here were my answers then:

• The Comas, “Dirty South”
• The Decemberists, “The Bachelor and the Bride”
• Metric, “IOU”
• Son Volt, “Drown”
• Ben Lee, “Ache for You”

The current seems to flip back and forth between your five currently-digging songs and five songs that had significant impact or rocked you hard in some way. I’ll explore the latter this time around:

• XTC, “Dear God”
• Jane’s Addiction, “…Then She Did”
• Cold War Kids, “We Used to Vacation”
• Ben Folds Five, “Mess”
• Sarah Harmer, “Lodestar”

You’re tagged: Daryl, Jessie, Emma, Dan, Chris Fadden the great

I saw in someone else’s blog not too long ago a “poetry mixtape”– a list of several unrelated poems meant to be read in a specific order as a sort of written mix tape. I love the idea. I may have to nab it.

New tinysides are coming soon. That makes me happy.

Copyright law, with respect to K-12 education, is severely broken. I just got an e-mail from a teacher who would like to compose a course that’s made from freely available materials, but how does one put together a broad course using only materials available in the public domain? I think the next step will be writing lots of letters, asking for permission to use this poem and that story. This would not be an issue, except that we want to share the course with other teachers.

Danah Boyd on the death of the English language:

SMS is, of course, taking this to a whole new level. This is pretty
well known outside of the US where SMS-speak has destroyed native
tongues everywhere, but we’re only about a year into massive texting
adoption amongst teens in the States. Now, they’re trying to be
expressive using as few characters as possible. Remember when
secretaries used to learn shorthand? Imagine how fast a teen today
would be at that. Maybe we should train them to be secretaries and give
them phones? Scratch that. But once again, the solution to a
technological limitation is to mess with the English language. Hmm.

Poets! Your help and attention, please!

Why couldn’t I have thought of using the MetaFilter when KB asked a similar question on the Hot Chicks listserv?

New postage rates are in effect. I wonder what this will mean for all of the journals that have long backlogs of submissions? If the SASEs have the old postage on them, will the submitters just be SOL?

(In case yr wondering, Inch cleared its queue last week– the last set of responses went out on Saturday morning.)

One of the great joys of Mothers Day, for me, was sending dirty text Mothers Day messages to poet-friends who have kids. Perhaps “dirty” overstates things a bit. But in at least three messages, I claimed to be pantsless.

Jeremy turned me on to Rumble this morning. I just ate a sub at my desk, so I have about 20 minutes to spend poking through some microfiction. Rock.