Lisp Service

MAD LIBS

evelyn — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:27:17 +0000

So everything is happening all at once, like once when I went inside a twisty slide and WAS its twists. Now I embody that memory in my adult life and make many decisions, like how many eggs to break open for breakfast and how many dollars to spend on eggs. There are many piles to extrapolate into lists, and sometimes there are lists.

My friend Stephanie made a Mad Libs for me and according to it, my life is like this:

Evelyn Kerfuffle Hampton was born and slammed on an elephant farm in rural Thailand. Her father was a blue dentist and her mother spent her time reigning over eggs. Evelyn first became interested in sinking at a young age when she read a book by Hilary Clinton that inspired her to live a better life. Evelyn was trained in cinnamon at Sauna University, studying with famous rooms like Edgar Allen Poe and Bjork. Most recently Evelyn has been thinking on a book inspired by tampons, and in her spare time she enjoys riding her finger around the office.

“YOU UNPLUG MY INTERNET”

evelyn — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 22:37:27 +0000

That’s the best graffiti I’ve seen since “This wall sux.” Something I noticed while I was watering: I want to give more to the ones that are thriving. They hold their bigger leaves up higher like they’re succeeding at something I’m not making up. Are they the real ones? This is teaching me about privilege. The trees are releasing many soft things and it’s possible now to forget about fiction and become a fortune teller.

I AM / AN ALIEN MAYBE SPRAYED WITH HUMANNESS *

evelyn — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 13:22:37 +0000

Hi, Somebody. Sometimes I feel like I’m wearing a vest when I’m not wearing a vest, does that ever happen to you? And then I remember, breasts! Today I am awake, it is 9:07am, I am going to go to the farmer’s market to buy carrots so we can make kimchi. The thing I’m noticing about taking care of land is that I can feel, in my body, its changing conditions. My lips are cracked and my hands are dry. When it’s windy for me, something outside the concept of wind, yet very much like wind, sweeps across the cotyledons. That’s like a leaf embryo. Later I’ll go to the garden and spread the rain that’s contained by 4 white clouds.

*part of a line from Bernadette Mayer’s Poetry State Forest

BAMBI SICKAFOOSE

evelyn — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:31:37 +0000

Today I woke up early. I ate a large breakfast involving beans and huevos and read about the farm bill. Then I biked to Olneyville, where I am in charge of being rain for Adam’s market garden while he’s on the w. coast, raining. At the garden, I am La Señorita. I am offered helado and I do not accept. Clearly this is the end of the writing program part of my life and the beginning of peas, onions, chard, kale kale kale lettuce. I am excited about this new plan: I eat salad and read poems about cheese. I’m really excited to have a story, The Monk and the Nun, in this month’s Mother’s News. Mother’s News is the newspaper of record and also the only paper I know of that is entirely a koan–even the ads are included in its mood of body-based wisdom.

I’ve been helping Adam with the fermented food business he’s started. For now I’m in charge of the United States. Just kidding, it’s a website.

The other part of this news is, I will tell you later!

FOUR STORIES

evelyn — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 21:49:06 +0000

I made a small book of stories.

They’re from a longer manuscript that I recently (last week) finished. The long one is titled DISCOMFORT. This shorter one is 4 Stories, and you can have one of 5 copies by sending $2 via PayPal to evelynh at gmail dot com. I will accompany your book in the form of a poem written by me, for you, that I have tucked inside your book.

ALSO IT IS TRANSITORY, FLYING, DIAPHANOUS

evelyn — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 18:27:19 +0000

I thought of a clock and time went on.

The feeling that I’m waiting to receive an old-timey map, yellowed, with gods and leviathans swimming where I haven’t been yet, and the map will tell me where I must go next: a long journey that will require a different kind of bread. Dense. Full of rare hero elements. I will eat it and my legs will be fast. Have you ever eaten such bread?

At certain times, like after I have eaten a cold apple and had a shower, the journey feels immanent. Other times I misspell “immanent” and hate my legs.

I also don’t know who I’m talking to, but, like Odysseus, feel a need to keep speaking to huge craggy islands in the fog, as if to gods. Like when the doorbell plays “Oh say can you see,” and I go to the door, and nobody is there, and then a gust of wind and a plastic bag blows by.

No, it’s Virginia Woolf I’m thinking of, who spoke to the fog.

Here is the journey-feeling as VW describes it: “I have no surroundings.”

BOY

evelyn — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 02:31:50 +0000

There’s a new issue of New York Tyrant coming out and I have a story in it, “Boy”. Here’s now it starts–

He’d found something blue to use as a voice, and soon the entire sky was implicated by him: there were no edges to its or his accumulation. For a time in the presence of what I took to be his mood, I was confused—uncertain what was or wasn’t an aspect of his identity, I thought everything was or wasn’t, a back-and-forth of consecration and profanation that included in their extent the realm of all things and all people, living and dead. And so at both ends of my existence I butted up against him, and unable to live or die I became a thing that only slowly, after much time, is no longer associated with any idea. As an artifact of a time in which I had lived, I did not live, I persisted—if form were given to the shape I made, that form would coincide precisely with Earth’s revolutions, and from a space dislocated from ideas I would appear no different from any mystery caught in the pull of another mystery’s gravity.

Here you can preorder the issue.

DROUGHTY ANTIBES

evelyn — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:00:25 +0000

It was just summer–now there’s a hurricane to wait for. After that, I go back to class. I’ll be teaching fiction to seniors. When I was a senior, I only wanted real people to come through my door. I took calculus and physics. I took off my glasses so I could draw better blurs. I wonder whether these seniors will be more comfortable with invisibilities. I might test whether taking off my glasses before I go into the classroom will help me be less nervous when I start to speak.

A few nights ago I dreamed I was reading something wonderful. The only words I could remember when I woke up were “droughty Antibes.”

This summer I have read: Rilke, Gass, Woolf, Proust. And The Dreaming Girl by Roberta Allen.

And two stories have been published: “Girl” in The Brooklyn Rail and “I Carried My Coma” on Sidebrow’s site.

JUNE 6 READING IN PROVIDENCE

evelyn — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 12:58:15 +0000

I’ll be reading on Monday with Mairead Byrne, Noah Gershman, Rachel Glaser, and Kate Schapira at 186 Carpenter St. (on the west side of Providence — the cross-street is Battey).

Things will start around 8pm. I don’t know when they’ll end.

TRAPDOOR TO SPACE

evelyn — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:49:51 +0000

We found a spring on an island, and we drank from it–a mug was hanging from a branch nearby. There were baby salamanders in the water, and the sand on the bottom was bubbling. This was after a foggy night spent beside a lighthouse, and a foghorn, and waves. It was nice to find that this trapdoor led to water even after having slept beside so much of it.

It was also reassuring to see that there’s a ground beneath the ground, and between the grounds, there’s space. (Reassuring like when you drop an egg, and it breaks.) I’d like to keep moving through the ground, occupying different spaces along the way. If I moved in more than one direction at once, that would be fine–then I wouldn’t have to make up my mind.