While I didn't write this, I feel this is the only appropriate place to write about the writing of others.

Taken from the 20 greatest singles of 2009 list from the editors of Spin magazine.

"Zero"
Yeah Yeah Yeahs

With her gift for sod-off squawking and tear-streaked realness, Karen O was born to lead the frisky rock revolt that the aughts never earned. So here, with a regal hip check, she strides off by her lonesome, resplendent synth riff all aquiver, cooing, "Get your leather on," as we gambol on the grave of 2009’s tragic, orgiastic flimflam.

I just gagged with absolute and utter hipster disgust. "frisky rock revolt"? "resplendent synth riff all aquiver"? Or what the fuck about the coup de fucking grace "as we gambol on the grave of 2009’s tragic, orgiastic flimflam"? Jesus Christ get me some drugs. I feel like someone took quotes from every poem from his self-indulgent undergraduate career and tried to incorporate it into a song review.

Who even uses the word "resplendent" in somewhat casual conversation? Fuck all of you.

I want your job.

The Fantastic Voyage or, Conversely, What the Bleep Do We Know?

One of the defining characteristics of Modernist writing is a sort of abstinence from expressing the personal. There is an attempt to walk the line between the interior landscape and the exterior; they try to find a balance between the interior and the exterior. There is a representation of the external universe. Visually, it is the narrowest point on the hourglass: the upper reservoir is the outside world, and the lower reservoir is the inside world. Three of the authors examined this semester walk that line in profoundly different places: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ezra Pound and Robert Frost all explore the ranges of this paradigm.

Intro from a take home final from the same lit class last summer. I like The hourglass visualization, and find it hard to think that I came up with that all by myself. But I think I actually did.

Backwards and in High Heels: In Defense of the Gender

“Don't forget Ginger Rogers did everything he did backwards . . . and in high heels!"
-- Bob Thaves

The experience of one given group of people cannot be accurately recorded unless one of their own does so. A person can be as close as they want to any group they want but until they are one of them, fully immersed in the scene, there is no way to truly know. Until a day is spent as an alcoholic, who can say what it is like? Until a day is spent as a Bohemian or “starving artist” who is to say that shoplifting paintbrushes is a crime? Until a day is spent as a woman, who is to say that they are irrational, absent-minded or “prone to fits of hysteria”? Literature by women about women is a relatively recent development, and it is one that has spent centuries attempting to dispel biases and prejudices. In the last two centuries women have gone from accessories to assistants to passive heroine to active heroine to anti heroine to everything else in between. Sometimes the phasing from one type of power to the other is called evolution. Sometimes the campaigning for this evolution is called feminism. Critics say that the most well-known (or at least widely taught) short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is a work of extremely feminist literature and speaks out against the sexual biases of the medical profession at the time. The women in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” represent a variety of socio-economic classes, and in turn a variety of views about their own roles.

Taken from the opening paragraph of a paper I wrote last summer on a porch. Arbor Mist could have been involved.

It's 80s night at the supermarket
there are breakdancers in the deodorant aisle
pop-lockers boogie down rows and rows and rows of carbonated beverages
and I forgot my legwarmers

it's 80s night at the supermarket
and I'm trying not to choose life in the deli
there are air guitars in the bread aisle
and we all jump when Diamond Dave tells us to.

its 80s night in the supermarket
behind various mirrors, big brother watches
considering more bleach for my acid wash jeans
and I'm thinking of checking out.

Chet drove faster and faster. He was pushing 100, and the rickety lime green 1990 Honda only went to 120. The spoiler had come off miles ago. She would find him soon enough. He looked at the passenger seat filled with an unruly heap of hundreds of hundred dollar bills in neat little bundles. Their order and uniformity made Chet nauseous. He knew they were mocking him, just like the rural Southwestern landscape he was speeding through. The oranges and reds and purples and all those other unaltered colors on postcards that dripped from the sky were there to only there to vaporize him. "Fuck this," Chet shouted over the open windows and the staticy classic rock radio. He picked up as many of the bundles as he could fit in one hand, and started chucking them out the window. It was gratifying, watching them get projected into dusty, dusky obscurity. "Yeah. Fuck yeah."

Diane alternated between shoving more tater tots in her mouth and shoving some in Bella’s as she sped up to catch Chet. Daddy's soul hung just a little bit above her head, whispering something indecipherable. Bella always knew when daddy was tailing Diane. She got this look in her eyes and slobbered even more than usual. Dogs were smart like that. She knew the end result: either Diane or Chet or both must go to meet him. Diane tossed the greasy tater tot bag out the window. She had a long way to go before she met up with Chet’s taillights.

Chet hit a rough patch. The road became pocked and rough, like the girl's face. He should have known she was only fifteen. That should have been his first warning. Miles and miles of redness, mountains, craters, and valleys all over the poor girl's face. The spots and textures made her look tough. If he had known she was just fifteen, he wouldn't have fucked her. Wouldn’t have fallen for her and those big goofy hazel eyes of hers. Nope. Just would have said "No more coffee for me, miss." But Chet had a real weakness for three things: cherry pie, whiskey, and ugly women. Especially redheads. When a plug-ugly redhead offered him cherry pie and whiskey in her $40 per night room at the Dew Drop Inn, Chet knew he would have to deal with the consequences later, whatever they might be. It was her damned fault anyway. Anybody that had ever seen Chet just knew that he was at least 50. Between the tattoos that started out black but had faded to green on the skin that was leathery and cracked, the thinning, graying copper hair and the fully gray beard, he had to have been somebody’s grandfather. He would be 36 in august.

Diane’s daddy was one of the best grave robbers in Oglethorpe County, Georgia. He covered his ass by running the only funeral parlor in the county. The family had the kind of privilege that only came from being loaded in a small town. Diane was the only child of Frank and Susan James, and some would say the prettiest child in the state. But then she hit puberty early and sprouted the kind of tits that even her daddy would marvel at. At fourteen, she got caught fooling around with the oldest Morgan boy. Susan cried and took to drinking bourbon all the time, Mr. and Mrs. Morgan took to sitting on their porch with shotguns, and The Morgan Boy’s wife chased him up and down Main Street with the pistol she got from her in-laws as a wedding present. Behind closed doors, he thought the whole thing was “funniern’ ‘ell,” but in order to maintain (because maintenance is everything in a small town), he drove her to the bus station on the county line, gave her three hundred dollars, and pinched her ass goodbye. It was his way of saying good luck.

Three days later Chet caught up with the Coast.

Four days later, Diane caught up with Chet.

Facing the kitchen in the greasy spoon, Chet wolfed down his gristly steak. He had hit the water, and now it was time to drive for the sky. The money was running out, which was just as well. Either he would run out of money and die from inadequate living conditions, or Diane would catch him and she would skin his ass for sure without thinking twice. Either way, he was a dead man. The waitress offered him more god-awful coffee. He took a look at her with her cotton candy colored hair and her wide ass in the unforgiving polyester dress. He politely declined.

Diane pulled into the parking lot and rear ended that fugly goddamn Honda twice.

opening/ending line:

"He looked at me like he wanted to get me pregnant."