The Cnidarian Way

YT, a jellyfish by trade, has been bobbing along in the ocean currents for three decades now, from Florida to the UK, Japan to New York. Today she enjoys the warm, wash of the Gulf Stream off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina.

Here YT reflects on living life the Cnidarian Way (adrift), compiles recipes for found object ceviche, muses on metamorphoses and notes all the bits and bobs that comprise a genuinely SLOW LIFE.

November 19th 2011

2 notes |#

WRTSHP 4 : BRICKWALL c/o NaNoWriMo 

Mon Nov 21 @ Hope & Union Coffee in Downtown Charleston

It’s holiday time. You need a break. You need to eat yourself into a starch and protein coma. You need to drink too much and tell your uncle what you really think of him and his views about the OWS movement.

What you don’t need is a lag in your wordcount.

So come join us. We dedicate this write-in to word-sprints, hot chocolate, and bouncing ideas off each other. It’s like handball. And it’s time to play it with your novel. Get through the trouble spots. Get some advice. Get ahead in your wordcount so you can sleep off all that tryptophan.

Be well, WriMos & Non! And remember, all are welcome. Even your weird uncle.

YT





Posted at 9:39am and tagged with: WRTSHP, NaNoWriMo, Charleston, Hope & Union, writing, literature,.

WRTSHP 4 : BRICKWALL c/o NaNoWriMo  Mon Nov 21 @ Hope & Union Coffee in Downtown Charleston It’s holiday time. You need a break. You need to eat yourself into a starch and protein coma. You need to drink too much and tell your uncle what you really think of him and his views about the OWS movement.What you don’t need is a lag in your wordcount.So come join us. We dedicate this write-in to word-sprints, hot chocolate, and bouncing ideas off each other. It’s like handball. And it’s time to play it with your novel. Get through the trouble spots. Get some advice. Get ahead in your wordcount so you can sleep off all that tryptophan.Be well, WriMos & Non! And remember, all are welcome. Even your weird uncle. YT

November 14th 2011

WRTSHP 3 : Stream of Consciousness c/o NaNoWriMo

|#

Mon & Fri 4-7pm at Hope & Union we’ll be once again working out our words and scrambling our transmissions! Come. Write. Bring a friend. 

And afterwards (tonight only) we’ll march to Monday Night Blues to take over the open mic with what we have produced. 

This is a dare. You should take it. Or forever hold your peace.

Posted at 11:42am and tagged with: WRTSHP, nanowrimo, literature, writing, charleston,.

November 4th 2011

|#

Monday! WRTSHP 2 : TIMELINES is happening whether you are there or not. It would be nicer if you were, though. 

Once again the locale is Hope & Union Coffee in downtown Charleston from 4-7pm and the host will be YT. Come learn how to do that writing thing. 

Any and all are welcome! Don’t be scared off by Nanites. Be impressed instead. Those kids are COMMITTED.

FB invite here.

Posted at 4:44pm and tagged with: chalres burns, WRTSHP, literature, writing, workshop, Charleston, nanowrimo,.

Monday! WRTSHP 2 : TIMELINES is happening whether you are there or not. It would be nicer if you were, though.  Once again the locale is Hope & Union Coffee in downtown Charleston from 4-7pm and the host will be YT. Come learn how to do that writing thing.  Any and all are welcome! Don’t be scared off by Nanites. Be impressed instead. Those kids are COMMITTED. FB invite here.

September 24th 2011

|#

YT floats in a fishbowl off the Lauderdale coast, wishing she were perhaps in this other, grander, fishbowl in the woods.

Posted at 2:12pm and tagged with: writing spaces, libraries, literature, architecture,.

September 4th 2011

6 notes |#

-Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

No one can write a paragraph in a sentence (and a novel in a paragraph) the way Pynchon can. Seriously.

Posted at 9:25pm and tagged with: Pynchon, Literature, Psychedelia, The Sixties, Inherent Vice, Surf Hippies,.

“
Out there, all around them to the last fringes of occupancy, were Toobfreex at play in the video universe, the tropic isle, the Long Branch Saloon, the Starship Enterprise, Hawaiian crime fantasies, cute kids in make-believe highlights, Vietnam footage, helicopter gunships and firefights, and midnight jokes, and talking celebrities, and a slave girl in a bottle, and Arnold the pig, and here was Doc, on the natch, caught in a low-level bummer he couldn’t find a way out of, about how the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness… how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.
”

July 16th 2011

|#

When gravity exerts just too much pull on YT’s soft and spinelessness she pulls out Pynchon’s latest, Inherent Vice, and lets the ocean waves and cannabis smoke waft over her.

Chapters can be read in any order. Not because the novel is nonlinear. As a noir, even a drug addled, psychedelic noir, our hero (stoner detective “Doc”) moves through time in only one determined direction. And that is forward. Whether or not the plot actually progresses or merely meanders is a whole other story.

YT is convinced that Crystal Antlers somehow got their hands on an advanced reading copy of Inherent Vice, passed it and a bong, around the studio, counterclockwise, until both were read aloud/cashed.

God bless.

Posted at 6:49pm and tagged with: crystal antlers, music, music videos, psychedelic noir, thomas pynchon, inherent vice, lit, books, literature, stoners, surf culture, soundtracks for books,.

July 14th 2011

A Secret Bookstore in New York City | Open Culture

3 notes |#

YT spent part of her polyp-hood in a fishbowl atop her family’s place of business. Something in her finds the idea of living (and loving) where you work agreeable. Ideal, in fact. If this were the case perhaps we would have fewer franchise stores. Who would want to live in a Barnes & Noble? Or a TGI Friday’s for that matter?

Click link for the very agreeable tale of a not so secret anymore bookstore in the city.

Posted at 6:39pm and tagged with: books, literature, Nyc,.

May 27th 2011

Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism

Reblogged from motherjones|414 notes |#

motherjones:

theatlantic:

Have a good holiday weekend, everyone!

In the dictionary under “brilliant things that improve our lives,” see this.

Posted at 10:24pm and tagged with: literature,.

May 27th 2011

14 notes |#

When John Waters’s latest memoir Role Models came out last year YT rushed to the store and stared at it with longing, but did not buy.

Oh that simplicity of line! The dirty little pencil mustache, now rendered in ink on the white hardbound cover. One perfect line slashed above the fleshy, pink promise of the upper lip that transforms the most upstanding individual (male or female) into a flagrant pervert. And with such graphic economy and panache!

The urge to purchase was all but uncontrollable. But since she’d moved to the South, to the land of dogeared, mystery novels in large print and Stephen King paperbacks on the nightstands of beach front B&Bs, YT’d become a loyal member of the Charleston County Public Library System. Seems that no one here checks out the new acquisitions unless they’re Harlequin Press or Clive Cussler.

So from the well lit chain bookstore to the dim, salt-smelling brown carpet of her island library she went. It took perhaps five minutes to locate Role Models and then to check it out with a barcoded keychain fob.

This never happened to YT in New York. Her given name languished on waiting lists for the newest books from the Brooklyn Public Library for months at a time. When an email finally arrived notifying that it was at last her turn she had already purchased and read through the title weeks before.

To hell with the city.

(For an excerpt from the first chapter on Johnny Mathis and an interview w/ John Waters via @nprfreshair click here. Then go to your local library and check something out.)

Posted at 4:04pm and tagged with: memoirs, John Waters, perverts, pencil mustaches, Public Libraries, New York, Charleston, NPR, island life, literature,.

When John Waters’s latest memoir Role Models came out last year YT rushed to the store and stared at it with longing, but did not buy. Oh that simplicity of line! The dirty little pencil mustache, now rendered in ink on the white hardbound cover. One perfect line slashed above the fleshy, pink promise of the upper lip that transforms the most upstanding individual (male or female) into a flagrant pervert. And with such graphic economy and panache! The urge to purchase was all but uncontrollable. But since she’d moved to the South, to the land of dogeared, mystery novels in large print and Stephen King paperbacks on the nightstands of beach front B&Bs, YT’d become a loyal member of the Charleston County Public Library System. Seems that no one here checks out the new acquisitions unless they’re Harlequin Press or Clive Cussler. So from the well lit chain bookstore to the dim, salt-smelling brown carpet of her island library she went. It took perhaps five minutes to locate Role Models and then to check it out with a barcoded keychain fob. This never happened to YT in New York. Her given name languished on waiting lists for the newest books from the Brooklyn Public Library for months at a time. When an email finally arrived notifying that it was at last her turn she had already purchased and read through the title weeks before. To hell with the city. (For an excerpt from the first chapter on Johnny Mathis and an interview w/ John Waters via @nprfreshair click here. Then go to your local library and check something out.)

May 27th 2011

Reblogged from motherjones|301 notes |#

motherjones:

tarnoff:

Mark Twain’s almost-history as a drug lord. 

In 1856, a twenty-one-year-old Mark Twain was stranded in Keokuk, Iowa, working for his brother’s printing office, bored to death by the small town’s soporific pace. Restless, he needed a change. He started reading about the Amazon River, and soon cooked up a scheme to sail to Brazil. In August, he wrote to his younger brother Henry about his plans. Fifty-four years later, he reminisced about the episode in an essay published just two months before his death in April 1910:

Among the books that interested me in those days was one about the Amazon… [H]e told an astonishing tale about coca, a vegetable product of miraculous powers, asserting that it was so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill and down all day on a pinch of powdered coca and require no other sustenance. I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon. Also with a longing to open up a trade in coca with all the world. During months I dreamed that dream, and tried to contrive ways to get to Para and spring that splendid enterprise upon an unsuspecting planet.

In short: Mark Twain, at twenty-one, almost became a drug dealer. He wanted to go to Brazil and start importing cocaine into the United States. He got as far as New Orleans before he decided to become a steamboat pilot instead.

There were no flaws in that plan that we can think of, except that his original budget to complete the exploration of the Amazon was $30.

Stringer Bell & Mark Twain-> YT would most certainly have enjoyed Huck Finn more if he’d faked his own death and run away w/ a slave while COKED TO HIS EYEBALLS and frothing at the bit.

Posted at 1:24pm and tagged with: literature, film, graphic art, transportation, travel,.

motherjones: tarnoff: Mark Twain’s almost-history as a drug lord.  In 1856, a twenty-one-year-old Mark Twain was stranded in Keokuk, Iowa, working for his brother’s printing office, bored to death by the small town’s soporific pace. Restless, he needed a change. He started reading about the Amazon River, and soon cooked up a scheme to sail to Brazil. In August, he wrote to his younger brother Henry about his plans. Fifty-four years later, he reminisced about the episode in an essay published just two months before his death in April 1910: Among the books that interested me in those days was one about the Amazon… [H]e told an astonishing tale about coca, a vegetable product of miraculous powers, asserting that it was so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill and down all day on a pinch of powdered coca and require no other sustenance. I was fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon. Also with a longing to open up a trade in coca with all the world. During months I dreamed that dream, and tried to contrive ways to get to Para and spring that splendid enterprise upon an unsuspecting planet. In short: Mark Twain, at twenty-one, almost became a drug dealer. He wanted to go to Brazil and start importing cocaine into the United States. He got as far as New Orleans before he decided to become a steamboat pilot instead. There were no flaws in that plan that we can think of, except that his original budget to complete the exploration of the Amazon was $30. Stringer Bell & Mark Twain-> YT would most certainly have enjoyed Huck Finn more if he’d faked his own death and run away w/ a slave while COKED TO HIS EYEBALLS and frothing at the bit.

April 19th 2011

YT Reviews eFiction Magazine #12

1 note |#

If you’re unfamiliar with Sabotage Blog and what it is that they do, it’s this: Filling The Gap.

They take the time to read and review “pamphlets, small presses, poetry and fiction magazines, manifestos, online journals, stapled pieces of paper, installation poetry, … In other words, those ephemeral works that are often created on a small budget and distributed to a limited amount of people.”

There’s a place for this. And the internet is it. If you’re putting something out that fits the criteria above, send it to Sabotage. Ask someone to give your production a serious going over. That someone could end up being YT.

eFiction Issue #12

For some unfathomable reason they trusted Yours Truly to review the March edition of eFiction Mag. Go there, read it if you like (click title above or here) but really, only if you wanna. It probably makes more sense to read eFiction itself, though.


Posted at 4:51pm and tagged with: literature, lit mags, writing, reviews, eFiction, Sabotage, Aaron Wilson, Flash Fiction, J. Eric Miller, Jeff Baker, Jordan Hart, Lovecraft, Short Stories, Z. J. Woods,.