Dada Koan #24: sex dancer on Mars

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Here’s another Weekly World News-influenced dada koan. First-timers to this post should know– these are surreal poems created with random words. Well, the capital S joined to the Ex might strike some as a bit of a cheat. Tristan Tzara would be shaking his head and sighing. But sex in caps is a good poem-enhancer.

Here’s the above blood on pink poem in B&W:

an actress

flawed and sumptuous

is SEX dancer

at a

graveyard on Mars

pulling weeds

cutting down weeds

Weather really cold

I had a friend who was a sex dancer. She did it for a month to prepare for a role in the play In the Boom Boom RoomShe told me that when people asked her to do things she agreed because “who am I to say no?” She additionally worked for a brief time at a sex phone place. She said the other women were quite old and bored and eating big ham sandwiches while they talked.

Well, thank you very much for stopping by. May 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.


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Unrelated Addendum #1: Read for two days straight. Didn’t go out of the apartment– sustained by animal crackers, pretzels, diet soda, vitamins.

1) The Sisters by Mary S. Lovell. Bio of the Mitford sisters– a rich and powerful clan. There’s six of them just like Henry the VIII’s wives. Debo (duchess), Diane (big-time fascist married to Oswald Mosley), Nancy (novelist), Jessica (muckraker and Commie), Pam (magnificent blue eyes matched her blue stove), and Unity Valkyries (super-duper rabid Nazi and Hitler groupie and pal). When they were children Jessica and Unity used their diamonds to scrape competing hammers/sickles and swastikas into the family home’s window panes. Jessica grew up to write The American Way of Death which blew the casket lid off the funeral industry’s unsavory methods.  Unity worshiped Hitler and trembled and shook in his presence. She dropped stuff so he’d notice her. It worked.

 2) The Secret History by Donna Tartt. The author interview in back lets us know that originally this novel was over 1000 pages but due to a clever typesetter– it’s only over 500 now. Set at the fictitious Hampden College in Vermont. (Tartt went to Bennington). The writing is lovely, “coffee-colored snow,” for example. Also, there’s a likable chatty Cathy character with Weekly World News headlines pasted over her door. Six degrees of WWN! This book shows how easy it is– especially for a group– to kill someone.

3) Started H.P. Lovecraft, a biography by Sprague de Camp. When Howard P. L. was five years old his mom sent him to Sunday school. The teacher talked about the Christian martyrs and little Howard stuck up for the lions.

 

 

Dada Koan #22: Sensing Atlantis

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Last week, I mentioned rescuing seven Weekly World News papers from a dumpster. A “Bat Boy Escapes” WWN paper from the ’80s could fetch $25 now. The ones I cut up for Tristan-Tzara-inspired things were from 1997 and not valuable. You can also go on the WWN website and order a Plush Bat Boy. That sounds pretty good but the ears are too exaggerated to be realistic. They also sell Bat Boy statuettes but they are quite unappealing and sell for $99.95. Good Lord! A better deal is the Vote For Bat Boy T-shirt at $24.95. If you can believe anything they say, they’ve Sold Out of their Vote For Bat Boy buttons. Bat Boy stickers are the cheapest.

Weekly World News stopped publishing their print version in 2007.

Well, words from those seven cut up WWN papers must have floated to the top of the chocolate box for #22. Lurid papers are well-suited for making random poems. You don’t get many references to Atlantis in regular newspapers.

The seven WWN papers contained two separate articles on finding Atlantis 1) undersea (We’ve Been Looking in the Wrong Ocean!, header) and 2) at the North Pole. It’s rare for a Weekly World headline not to culminate in at least one exclamation point.

Chili Con Carnage!, for example, featured a murderous rampage at a wedding reception involving a too strongly seasoned bowl of chili.

Here’s the above blue on blue surrealist poem in B&W:

SENSING

Atlantis

a dream

within the dream

undersea

slippery

a vast playful puppy

professing to have ESP

learn

how to

wear nothing but a smile!

Well, thank you very much for stopping by.

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Unrelated Addendum #1: Shirley Jackson wrote, “Grace Paley once described the male-female writer phenomenon to me by saying ‘Women have always done men the favor of reading their work, but the men have not returned the favor.”

Unrelated Addendum #2: Danielle Dutton (Attempts at a Life) started her own press, The Dorothy Publishing Project. Exquisite, coaster-sized paperbacks. Smooth, rub-them-on-your-face covers. They’re all strange and wonderful books– sometimes better than wonderful. Especially recommended: The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington, Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Leger, In the Time of the Blue Ball  by Manuela Draeger (a.k.a. Antoine Volodine among a slew of other pseudonyms). “Guidance/The Party” is a terrific short story by Jen George. Currently reading Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead by the great Barbara Comyns. Publisher Danielle Dutton is credited with starting that read women twitter thing.

Dada Koan #21: immense traditionalism and warm spoons

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Rip van Winkle yawns and stretches, saying, “Okay 2017– but who is president? Who? Oh, c’mon! Knock it off guys– I’m serious. Who? Who? Really, who?”
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I’ve been reading the Weekly World News. Someone was about to throw out seven old copies. Bat Boy at NASCAR, the face of God photographed from a Hubble telescope (blurry), a severed finger turns up in a can of peas. Two stories about men who died from their own flatulence– one suffocated, one passed by an open flame. Two stories about female surgeons who– confronted by their rapists who needed appendixes out or something– castrated them.

The Weekly World News definitely had its big furry Bigfoot toe on our 2017 zeitgeist.

Well, here’s Dada Koan #21. The above dada koan was made by following– sort of– Tristan Tzara’s rules for a cut-up technique surrealist poem. Ten words and phrases, blindly chosen, are taken from a Whitman’s Sampler chocolate box and glued to colorful paper. The words are rearranged– sometimes extensively– for sense.

Thanks very much for stopping by. Well here we all are, huh?

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Unrelated Addendum: Shirley Jackson was amazing.