News of the Week

Item: Area man falls deeply and passionately in love with his old sofa. "I don't know what took me so long," gushed Romeo Boggs of Whipville, Tennessee, "She's been waiting quietly for me all this time." The love-struck Romeo spent the entire weekend in intimate collusion with his old sofa, eating, sleeping, snuffling, watching TV, putting off till next weekend what was eminently doable this weekend, and by and large acting like a soon-to-be-embalmed corpsicle, refusing to part from the genuine leatherette caress of his newfound paramour. Unable to summon the energy to entertain even the faintest whiff of self-loathing, Romeo Boggs grinned before he lost his remote "one more time" in the alluring dark spaces between the cushions of the love seat, and noted to himself, "Sometimes a man just doesn't feel like doing what he's gotta do."

From the Whirled HeadQuarters Random Inquiries Department:

1.] 

These words are both homonyms and antonyms:

Balm

&

Bomb

2.]

If some people are named Frances, 

how come some other people are not named 

Spains, Mongolias, Kenyas or Laoses?

3.]

The proper concession to the digital age 

is to quit doing things in real time.

This is a great place to parse Kierkegaard 

while enjoying a sauna.

Mom, Skidaway Island, Georgia

by Calvin Burgamy

In Pursuit of The Word

Pursued by the agents of formalized cliche, and in pursuit of the roots of true language, we ducked into a speakeasy - such places had sprouted like organic slang since the passing of the latest municipal syntax. After knocking twice and correctly identifying the true author of shakespeare's sonnets, the door opened and a boggy irishman ushered us in with a soggy nod of his head. "Say what you will, gennelmen", said he, "but parse not lest ye be parsed. Um's the word, y'know."
 
He beat a peaty retreat towards the bar and we entered, in Finnegan's wake.
 
The heat was off . This was cool. All about us came the hubbub of mother tongues, from sanskrit to gallic to y'all, all rising to a haze of thick glossolalia stirred into meaning by the lone ceiling fan. Verbal gumbo. We looked at each other and smiled wide as our prefrontal lobes ignited in phonetic sympathy. "Ah, the sweet elixir", said one of us, "Neural drool", said the other, laughing. "I think something stout is calling my name", said one more - and we eased into the din of antiquity, heading for the taps. 

 
Edging, shouldering, sidestepping past poets, griots and stern-looking umlauts, we arrived at the bar and asked for pints of the local dialect. The irishman fixed us with a brassy glare and boomed "In the beginning was the Word!" "One word!" came the sudden chorus from from the room. "BUT", roared the son of Erin, "One word cannot be said without a second to give it meaning." "Two words!" shouted back the crowd. "And so", said Finnegan softly, "this one Word, unspoken, breathes life into all you say and hear." All grew silent as the ceiling fan creaked to a stop and the irishman leaned forward expectantly, looking at us each in turn. We drew straws on a napkin and the shortest sketcher frowed his burrow, shrugged and cried, "Yo! What's the Word?!". The room exploded in laughter and high-pitched doggerel and the ceiling fan stirred anew. "Congrats lads", said the barkeep, "Yu'v just recapitulated the ontogeny of yer own vocabulary!" 

 
We didn't know if this was good or bad and a little greek guy with a sticker on his chest that read Hi, my name is Homer leapt onto a table and yelled, "And here's another history lesson: In a land where words were few and stark, no synonyms abounded. Each word described an equal portion of reality, and their relationship to other words was a succinct grammar in itself. This natural tongue, though noble, could not help but grow incestuous to preserve itself. Some words began to have more than one meaning; others survived only in reference to other words. As time went on, this fateful trend continued, from burble to babble to riot. And just when every word seemed to mean anything, everything, nothing, a very strange thing occured..." 

 
The doors to the speakeasy suddenly flew open, dark figures silhouetted in the streetlight pouring in. "Shadduuuuuup!!" screamed a hooded voice, and then menacing, "Stow yer tongues and nobody gets... hurt." The figures began to advance, reciting lines from cheesy gangster flicks in a low liturgical litany. "It's a raid!" yelled Homer, scrambling off the table, and all was bedlam. "Thought police" hissed Finnegan, pulling open a trap door behind the bar, "this way to clarity. Hurry." 

 
We hustled down the chute, recognizing the dark figures as our pursuers, centuries of articulation receding as we sped, chasing the word, and being chased by its constraints...

 

I was OK until you asked me if I was OK.

3-D Luxe

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

 – Emily Dickinson

Paint, Ink

Paint, Ink:

siblings

weirdly worth more

to civilization

than gold

Paint, Ink:

liquid siblings 

hand and brush

touch and breath

attention is physical

the liquid dries

proof remains

Poe

Words of the Week

Commerical: When a business turns into a joke.

Domicidal: Living in a place you hate.

Fleech: A neighbor who drops by whenever you have visitors.

Infantreed: When everyone on your family tree is a baby. 

Car Wash by Calvin Burgamy & Tina Kite

She believed in nothing; 
only her skepticism kept her from 
being an atheist.
Jean-Paul Sartre

by Calvin Burgamy

59th Street Bridge  NY, NY

by Matt Rosenberger

i have a great idea for a movie

opening scene everybody would die except
just two or three would survive, to live
gruesomely scabby yet riveting lives
the survivors would have cleft chins
and perfect breasts that heave on command
or off

and they, the stars, the beautiful stars
would repopulate the earth in 90 minutes
make it a better place for kids and golden retrievers

the movie crests into naked euphoria
in the first two seconds
when bill o’reilly explodes in a deluge of magma
that has surged up from the earth’s core
directly into fox studios

the remaining eighty-eight minutes
with the movie’s perfect pacing
of cliffhanger rescues followed by frenzied fucking
feature nancy grace, the former prosecutor
whose southern accent
with its bitter yet come hither edge
makes me and all other cinematic
dorky ass viewers of cable tv cringe
and lust mightily at the same time
her full lips feverish and shiny
her open thighs ready to receive
the burning priapus of the sub-plot

anyway i digress from my movie idea
of the people who recopulate the world
and for a brief time live happily, so happy
in utah, where the mormons used to practice posture
before my movie sent them all to kingdom come

in the denouement, just before the climax
a really horrible thing happens, finally
after reams of crazy deaths and ecstatic couplings
but strangely, it seems rightly horrible
you might even say – apropos of
all the things, the death, the life
the well-hung dialogue, the rippling tears
the crippling laughter laced in the sacral bone
the very emulsion of the film itself
all melting together – beguilingly
a strange comic relief, a last straw
in the unending beverage that is my movie 

by the boy poets, throwing an eephus pitch

Monticello Detail

By Jonathan Marcus

Thoughts for a Strong Week

May your bricks be

As strong as your mortar

May your jokes be short

And your pants even shorter.

One of Many Internal Conversations

 About the Medical Crisis of 2013

The extreme medical crisis brings me full circle on the brain question, the question about whether our brains are in charge of anything, and if so how much, because in a medical crisis you pretty much have to trust the medical professionals, because, let's face it, they use their brains and the accumulation of medical knowledge, to do things – such as save lives – that you, with your carpentry and plumbing tools and paint brushes and nice way of talking and cool life experience, simply can't do, plus they can prescribe morphine, which you also can't do, but speaking of brains, there's nothing like a medical crisis to engage you and your own brain to ask the bevy of doctors urgent questions and more questions and more questions until you start to notice that their answers don't always fit their other answers nor do they always fit the others guys' answers, so you ask more questions until you are layers deep into the accumulated medical knowledge of the eons, and now your questions are getting pretty good and engaging their brains because your brain has been paying very close to attention to the words they speak and parsing the words and breaking the facts down and stacking the facts up since this is a matter of life and death, and one day in the office of a major doctor dude, you realize that regarding the question you are asking he doesn't know the answer. He's never thought about this before. This is a scary moment. The doctor doesn't want to admit it. Neither do you. He's got his reasons. You've got yours. But none of the reasons are worth a flip compared to life and death, and within the space of one more question you don't care about anything but your hunger for knowledge, because his reasons and your reasons are small and shabby compared to life and death, and because your brain is engaged with your heart because your heart wants to go on beating and your brain wants to keep on breaking through the veil with new questions about the brain question and because of the crazy desperate throbbing exuberance of the immortal dizzy deep mystery of cells and space and the spinal column, and what doesn't belong there.

Some Favorite Obscure Wikipedia Pages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuriger

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Pierce

Photo of Photo of Joel by Calvin Burgamy

Car Wash by Calvin Burgamy/Tina Kite