May 22, 2011

Sonnet Club

In 2004, Jan and I started Sonnet Club. No one else wanted to join.

Sonnet Club was like Fight Club, except with more dactyls and less posturing. I am Jack’s half-assed attempt at a rhyming couplet.

Each week, we both wrote a sonnet, then met at Jan’s house to discuss and critique each other’s poems. The point of the exercise (apart from being pretty much the most fun two people can possibly have without being on really expensive drugs) was to get a feel for the art of writing within a rigid and strictly defined formal mode, with the idea that it would probably be extremely good for our writing in general. It was. It was also immensely difficult. Writing sonnets is a terrible pain in the ass.

But anyway, I was going through some stuff the other day and found all of my sonnets from Sonnet Club. Here are four of them – they’re all Shakespearean (Italian sonnets are hard as fuck to write), and they’re all focused, to some extent, on the difficulties of trying to write a sonnet and to almost no extent on, like, feelings and stuff.
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May 8, 2011

Playlist for Sunday

Happy Sunday! I’ve tried really hard to keep my sad-bastard tendencies in check a bit on this one. The tone I went for is “Wistful but Optimistic”, which seems about right for a lovely Spring Sunday afternoon.

May 1, 2011

The Top 200 Pop Songs of the ’90s: 140-121

<< Previous: 160-141

As far as I was concerned, the soundtrack to everyone’s lives in the Washington/Baltimore area between, say, 1992 and 1997, was a collection of tunes lovingly assembled by the venerable Disc Jockeys at 99.1 WHFS, Baltimore’s only alternative rock radio station.

On the way to school, we were tended by the careful ministrations of Zoltar, the Brother From Another Planet; on the way home we were gently serenaded by the beautiful (I assumed) Catherine. And if you happened to be near a radio on a Sunday evening, you would have the spectacular treat of listening to Dave Marsh’s “Now Hear This” in its entirety, where you could discover actual new bands making music you probably actually hadn’t heard before. A rarity in rock radio.

Towards the end of high school I began to think that HFS wasn’t really all that cool anymore, and though that eventually came to be true (to be specific, on a cold day in September, 1997, when the station’s new ownership deliberately and irrevocably played, for the first time, a short musical number by the band Puddle of Mudd), it was probably an ungrateful way for me to treat an institution that for years had given me new music by Sonic Youth and Pavement and Sebadoh in equal doses with the latest from, like, Harvey Danger and Eve 6.

Here are 20 more songs from the countdown:

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April 24, 2011

Thoughts of a Positronic Brain in a Dry Season

[to be read in a robot voice]

and so, the last grains of life. filter. through the funnel. of existence.

through the funnel…

through the…

fun…

fun… fun… fun… fun… fun… fun… fun…

Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday. Everybody’s looking forward to. The. Weekend. Partyin’ Partyin’ Yeah. Partyin’ Partyin’ Yeah.

fun… fun… fun… fun… fun… fun… fun…

etc.

April 22, 2011

Thoughts Before the End

Tomorrow the Great Soul Eater devours my very essence. I have a few regrets!

1. I regret that I did not prepare a way for the Dark One with bloody sacrifice and dark rites and general nastiness.

2. I regret that I did not work harder to become one of His dread lieutenants, that I might stand at His right hand and preside over the Scouring of the Souls with a very smug look on my face.

3. I regret that there were many days during which I neglected my duty to worship Cthulhu, the Great Old One, and offer up to Him dark prayers and libations, and that despite the extra time this freed up I still couldn’t get it together to go to the gym.

4. I regret that I did not finish reading Guns, Germs, and Steel.

5. I regret that I did not make more time to socialize with my fellow Cultists in their homes, to discuss with them the many forms that Our Dark Lord takes, each more horrible than the last, and to reciprocate by having them over for tea once in a while.

6. I regret that I did not spend more time preparing my own soul to be ravaged and devoured in an eternity of agony by Cthulhu the Destroyer, Bane of Worlds, Scourge of the Very Universe, and instead frittered away my days playing Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.

7. I regret that I did not post more often to my blog.