Handbill Handout

Belief and Technique for Modern Prose by Jack Kerouac ( March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) 1.Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy 2.Submissive to everything, open, listening 3.Try never get drunk outside your own house 4.Be in love with your life 5.Something that you feel will find its own form 6.Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 7.Blow as deep as you want to blow 8.Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 9.The unspeakable visions of the individual 10.No time for poetry but exactly what is 11.Visionary tics shivering in the chest 12.In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 13.Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 14.Like Proust be an old teahead of time 15.Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 16.The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 17.Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 18.Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in languag...

A friend e-mailed me about blogging and where this friend could find mine. I gave the friend the URL and some advice. Here it is, with some additions. Said friend may read this. Said friend may not. Either future is fine. "Blogging is so 2006. Nobody does it anymore. And mine is crap, but it's here (with the URL) You can also subscribe to my twitter feed at that site should you want to be a little contemporary. Oh yeah, and accept my goddamn Facebook friend request already. Nobody is your friend in real life if they're not your friend on Facebook . Didn't you get the memo? Oh yeah, you should know that there are five good entries on my blog. Unfortunately, there are 410 total entries. Good luck finding the five good ones. What you don't think I'm gonna tell you, do you?" Notice the terrible, terrible lies I told this friend. There are now four hundred and eleven entries on this blog, or will be as soon as I hit "publish post" on this...

“We need to do more than go after the low-hanging fruit and if we go hunting for bear and come home with rabbits we’re going to starve.” I really wish the previous sentence was a figment of my imagination. Unfortunately, it was not. Words like these, my friends, are the kinds of things one hears at media sales conferences. You know why Dilbert is such a money making machine? Because for many of us, Dilbert is a documentary, not a work of fiction. However one doesn’t have to attend a business function to hear silliness. I was on the airplane coming home and seated on an aisle with an Asian woman in her late 20s or 30s occupying the window seat with (thankfully) nobody in the middle. Without any prompting from me she said “Something isn’t right. You know that feeling when something isn’t right? You get an itch in your third eye and you know something isn’t right.” Now I only had time for one beer before boarding the plane so I was relatively certain I didn’t hallucinate that sentence. I ...

I was born on Staten Island but I grew up in Bay Terrace. There are restaurants in Manhattan, some of them are in Greenwich Village and some are on the Upper West Side. “In” versus “on” vis a vis location. What’s the rule? I Googled and Binged the subject and didn’t come up with much. I guess most people are like me and they just play it by ear. It still seems very arbitrary to me and just so I make it clear that it’s not exclusively a New York thing, I’ll note that when I visit the Chicago one speaks of being “In Chicago” but if you go to Wrigley Field you’re “on the North Side” as opposed to being in an area downtown where you’re “in the Loop.” Back in New York, you can be both “in Brooklyn” and “on Coney Island”. In France you can be “in Paris” and “on the Champs-Eysee”, though I think the distinction there is that one is almost always “on” a particular street or avenue while “in” a city. Still, none of this addresses one of the great regional linguistic conflicts: Friends and reade...

The other day the Mrs. went to A Large Chain Bookstore That Shall Not Be Named For Fear Of Attracting The Corporate Blog Searchers. We’ll just call them LCB for short. Oh, and the Corporate Blog Searchers I refer to are those folks whose job it is to monitor word of mouth on the World Wide Web and try to counter any negative WOM about their company. I had one of those folks come right here a couple of months ago, remember? Then again, maybe it is nice to have strangers drop by. So let’s just call LCB “Barnes and Noble” instead. The Mrs. asked me if she should pick up any of the books from my Amazon list (another corporate name, another potential visitor, whee!) and I gave her a list of three titles, all fiction. Normally I like to be reading two books at once, one fiction and the other non-fiction and I pick what to read at a given moment based on my mood, the surroundings and how much time I have. I just started a non-fiction book so fiction was the way to go. One of my trai...

Oh I ate the poor dog’s homework Yes sir I surely did I ate that poor dog’s homework And then he ran and hid I ate the kitty’s cat’s tuna Yes sir that definitely is quite right I ate that poor cat’s tuna It was a grisly sight I ate the bison’s grass feed Of that there is no doubt I ate that bison’s grass feed It was green and chewy and stout I ate the dolphin’s fishes They cooked up tasty and nice I ate the dolphin’s fishes Over the top of rice Oh I ate the poor dog’s homework It was a dumb thing to do I ate the poor dog’s homework And now I have to poo!

A new (to my knowledge ) word has been coined to describe the sort of relationship Leah Cohen and Hosea Rosenberg had on Top Chef NY: showmance . Welcome to the 21st century.

Two headlines appeared near each other on my Twitter news feed. Talk about unintended connections.... "Inaugural Balls Held - See Photos " and "Human Rights Worker Caught with Child Porn " I wonder if clicking on one led to the other.

Twitter can be fun. Here are some recent posts of mine: __________________ Soup? This is a car wash! 1 minute ago from web in reply to sallymack So how are we all doing? Want to see a dessert menu? about 2 hours ago from web So that's one cheeseburger deluxe, a patty melt, two green salads and four cokes, one with no ice. Do I have that right? about 3 hours ago from web So, where did you want this? about 6 hours ago from web Who put THAT over there? about 22 hours ago from web Look out! 2:46 PM Jan 7th from web Bailing as fast as I can. Or trying to. 8:40 AM Jan 7th from web Savoring the moment. 9:43 PM Jan 6th from web Surprisingly sharp! 2:49 PM Jan 6th from web Fighting the inertia 9:26 AM Jan 5th from web

The late, great Kaos used to say that men under 40 should not wear suspenders or bow ties as part of their business apparel. Don’t know why. He was an accountant at a commodities firm during the 1990s so it’s possible that the people who dressed that way treated him poorly which caused him to create a rule for himself. Since he died before he made 40 there’s way of knowing if he would’ve expanded his sartorial repertoire upon reaching that age. I, on the other hand think there are certain words that you shouldn’t use before you hit middle age. I have reached that wonderful phase of life, and I am proudly using those words whenever I can. One of the words in question is “keister”, as in rear-end, buttocks or ass. Now I know what you’re thinking: why use a word that makes you sound like Colonel Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H? It’s an attention getter, that’s why. Nobody uses that word, least of all young people. Throw it in a sentence and watch those heads turn! It’s even money tha...