I am getting pretty regular electronic mail from people & orgs who do not like, as I do not like, any notion of "giving any money to rich assholes." Yes, certainly. But many of these same people work at or attend universities or community colleges or technical schools, where the majority of students (or their parents) need loans to make tuition, and the loans began crunching last year (see Time Magazine) and now will only get worse, if you believe the Parade O' Experts. If there are fewer (or less affordable) loans, there will be fewer students. And so the untenured instructors are fucked again. Of course they are.

I am not usually such a pessimist, but my mother was a government loan officer in a former life and if not for a full-time hourly job all through college in addition to Staffords and Pells, I would be working at one of those burger joints that as of this week cannot get credit to buy the new cappucino machinery.

Our retirement pennies (such that we have not already withdrawn early to pay for a poetry habit) have decades to bounce back I guess. (And we'll probably be broiled crispy by then anyway, those of us who are not raptured before then.)

I sure hope people don't stop purchasing designer consumer goods from a certain ginormous department store chain via the internets. Hopefully the landlords will let us stay on for free. Or the banks, when the seize the landlords' homes because we cannot pay their mortgages for them. Or the government, when they seize the banks. Or us, when we seize the government.

Voila!

Um, yeah

No wonder they're trying to weasel out of the VP debate. Unbelievable.

Tonight @ KGB!

Monday, September 22 in Manhattan

Danielle Pafunda & Caroline Knox
Hosted by Laura Cronk & Michael Quattrone

KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street
7:00 PM

FREE

Subway: 6 to Astor Place or F/V to 2nd Ave

Vote for me.

I know where Spain is. Also, I can see Pennsylvania from my house.

Reminder: This Saturday! & Monday!

Saturday, September 20 in Brooklyn

Nada Gordon ("flamboyantly brillant!")
Sharon Mesmer ("mesmerizingly genius!")
Danielle Pafunda ("V.C. Andrews-creepy!")
Laura Sims ("utterly astounding!")

Hosted by Shanna Compton ("winningly self-effacing!")

Unnameable Books ("easily the best bookstore ever!")
456 Bergen Street
Brooklyn, NY
3:30 PM

FREE, including refreshments. A party in the middle of the day...why not?

(Subway: Any train that goes to Atlantic Hub)

+++++

Also, don't miss...

Monday, September 22 in Manhattan

Danielle Pafunda & Caroline Knox
Hosted by Laura Cronk & Michael Quattrone

KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street
7:00 PM

FREE

Subway: 6 to Astor Place or F/V to 2nd Ave

David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008

Terribly sad. One of my favorite novelists and essayists.

I saw him read a couple of times. It seemed excruciating for him, but the standing-room-only crowds were delighted and engaged by his work. He was brilliant, funny, insightful. Infinite Jest is a major book, not to be missed.

For making your way through the muck

If you haven't seen it yet, take a look at PolitiFact.org.

This morning I sent this link to several people whose politics don't jibe with mine, and I got a much better response than I expected. (I usually make it a rule just not to engage on such topics with family, etc.--the arguments are useless and everybody ends up angry or feeling bad.)

I was careful to note the site is nonpartisan and unaffiliated with either party, and that *both campaigns' statements* could be fact-checked there. I noted that I've been feeling frustrated with both campaigns and most of the media, and am worried about the resulting difficulty voters may be having becoming truly informed. (Record turnouts are expected this year, including lots of first-time voters!)

Seemed to get through to folks OK, and nobody responded defensively.

Average reply was "Thanks, great site. We have been feeling frustrated too. I'm going to forward it to my friends."

So there's that.

Also, this may be the first time ever The View is worth watching.

It's been far too long since I stated publicly that David Rees is the funniest evah.

You're invited

Danielle is coming to town soon. So we're staging a to-do, a hullabaloo, a coup!

Saturday, September 20 in Brooklyn

Nada Gordon ("flamboyantly brillant!")
Sharon Mesmer ("mesmerizingly genius!")
Danielle Pafunda ("V.C. Andrews-creepy!")
Laura Sims ("utterly astounding!")

Hosted by Shanna Compton ("winningly self-effacing!")

Unnameable Books ("easily the best bookstore ever!")
456 Bergen Street
Brooklyn, NY
3:30 PM

FREE, including refreshments. A party in the middle of the day...why not?

(Subway: Any train that goes to Atlantic Hub)

+++++

Also, don't miss...

Monday, September 22 in Manhattan

Danielle Pafunda & Caroline Knox
Hosted by Laura Cronk & Michael Quattrone

KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street
7:00 PM

FREE

Subway: 6 to Astor Place or F/V to 2nd Ave

Sleazy, racist bullshit.

In other words, same shit different day.

I really hate election years.

Roll'd

Unlike Heart, Van Halen & Jackson Browne re: their songs being used by the RNC, I think Ric Astley might be cool with this:

On Warsaw Bikini...

Update: Sandra has chosen a cover design. Drawing (detail) by Andy Mister.



"In Sandra Simonds's poetry, a terrific, nihilistic dislike of herself and others (her heroine "dires" men) vies with an extreme will to prevail in full color. The tension is sustained by an imagination of remarkable fertility and a rich and crowded verbal palette. Simonds writes to sting. She's like a Plath whose capacity for erotic altruism has thoroughly imploded, producing a crisis that only a brilliant talent could turn into a field of triumphantly exhibited power. Simonds has such a talent." --Cal Bedient

"For 100 years, maybe 3000, poetry has wanted to know what it is. Sandra Simonds shows it. Every outset projects a lack the sequence must undo, overturning postponement our wanting’s askance with preposterous now. Why these baubles on the brain? Food, fishes, Poland. I am small, she says, her happenstance clothing the essential. That wilderness holds together, discloses organum, who knew?" --R. M. Berry

"Sandra Simonds' poems are hyperactive conduits into the chaos of our lost-at-sea moment in time. She's in love with words and all the damage they can do. La belle dame sans papiers--she's witty, smart, a real troublemaker, playing the lyre of her twenty-first century blues." --Barbara Hamby

FLARF BEAT!

Good company

Kate Greenstreet answers her own questions (at last!)

She will "withdraw her name from consideration" to "focus on her family."

They're going to dump her. They're using the hurricane to stall for time.