Submitting Book Manuscript Question

Is this pitching--to Black Ocean--of a manuscript titled Smoked Marrow Scream Cream engaging or off-putting/makes barf and bile fountain up one's windpipe:

Hello, it's Adam Strauss. I am submitting a manuscript titled Smoked Marrow Scream Cream. It consists of two sections: Feminist Pig, and Blue Ossuary. This collection is not long, but aims to pack opera upon opera of wallop. The poems contained within it are aggressive, jocular, plain and plainly ornate. They aim to devastate and be devastatingly funny--friendly-Grinch smack to femur. Put another way: they're Homosexual Prophecy, but with prophet cindered. I would be thrilled--and then more thrilled than that--if this manuscript is deemed apt match for Black Ocean. So far, few of the constituent poems have been published, but the following pieces do appear in Cricket Online Review: Work We Do For Hegemony; Glass Of Milk With Apparitions; BloodHot Mineral Planet; Lungs Are Grammatical.

I Like This

from Feng Sun Chen's Ugly Fish:

I don’t care about poetry. 
I slap it around. 
Poetry is my bitch. 
I put a collar on it. The collar has a bell. The bell is pink. 
Fuck bitches.

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You cannot tell when I am lying and when I am not. 
That is because I am sincere about my lies.

Sincerely Mockery

HETEROSEXUALITY

THE COW has been called a heterosexual book.  THE COW is not a heterosexual book.  So far, however, the world is composed of people who exist because a man and a woman copulated and a woman got pregnant and gave birth.  Sexuality, the sex act, desire, and what it takes to make a human: I should make a Venn diagram, because they aren’t all the same. 

THE COW is concerned with maternity, not heterosexuality per se.

 

Sexuality, the sex act, desire, and what it takes to make a human: I should make a Venn diagram, because they aren’t all the same: OK, sure, fair enough--but also wonky, as not all the same does not necessarily mean wholly distinct either.  I kind of like the distinction between maternity and heterosexuality, but also find it disingenuous: the world--every country in it--is quite happy to equate the two (though maybe the Netherlands and a few in vicinity are starting to erode this equation?  It has sure as hello not reached sufficient "mass" in the USA); many countries can barely fathom the phenomena as not one and the same.  Basically, I think this statement of Reines severely underestimates Heterosexuality (not capitalizing it is one clue; it should be capitalized--it's truly major, and majorly connected to Capitalism).  I get that she wants to divorce her Cow--cunt, as a wife has?  Cute if we're dealing with a Stein allusion--from Heterosexuality, because Heterosexuality, although totally sexy and mm scrumptious and sexy and sexy and sexy and seductive, is gross, HEGEMONIC, cruel, crueler than that, then even crueler--oh but yummy, yummy, so good, mm!  Biceps, pectorals, perfectly bodied manly men--so delicious; and tall itsy bitsy blond--died, duh--girls with tits (pert, pretty jumbo, it's all good) and perfect make-up and silky hair, yay for Anna Selezneva, though her beauty seems quite natural, the superior rigged kind: natural men and women are more often than not going to be aesthetically inferior, and unless I'm talking to you, who cares how you think compared to the way you look!--but if you are a screaming Heterosexual (and though I have not read The Cow, I have read other Reines poems, and they are very Heterosexual--which is to say, at the least which is more than most, very human), I vote for wearing your hegemony on your sleeve.   I think that'd be rather cool--much more so than THE COW is not a heterosexual book...snooze: CEO logic. 

 

Sketchy

I just drank a beer.....and this isn't a new feeling--but...I am suspicious of Queer epistemology.
It strikes me as, for many--not all, never all--a great way to avoid coming out, to ever fully confront
difference and its insane glorious pain and isolation.  I think it's through Queerness that Heterosexuality will succeed in, again, subsuming all sexuality such that it's status as baseline, normative, unmarked, never fritzes.  As far as I can tell, queer wants to erode boundaries twixt Homo and Hetero.  I certainly see how abrading a major binary has appeal--but I think this is the wrong tactic in service of an appealing ideal.  My, arguably, number one beef with Heterosexuality is that it's un-marked--there's no need to declare it unless one's in a scenario where there's any risk of being identified as otherwise.  This un-marked status wreaks hell for Homos, puts the potential stress of coming out on them and them only (though them only never makes complete sense), thus any episteme which wants to contribute to further un-marking Heterosexuality (by positing that Hetero and Homo limn rather than separate, that they should not be distinguished, be seen as operating with radically different power valences) seems dubious to me.  In somewhat redundant conclusion--via Queerness I have a hunch Hetero-Hegemony's perpetuity will be guaranteed, as there's no greater power than maximally un-marked dynamics: there is no questionable power rigging, only element as necessary as thoroughly oxygenated air.   However, if one is willing to abandon, in all "real world" instances,  genitals defining biological sex, then I am so cool with Queer: no more demographic tallies asking M/F; no more being born a sex rather than a human--as currently one more often than not has to have a sex to qualify as human.  So my revamped conclusion is--Queer epistemes are awesome if they're willing to be as radical as their implications already are...but blah to those strains that seem mostly to locate salvation through evasion. 

Warrant for the above: Judith Butler's claim, in Gender Trouble, that Heterosexuality predicates sex distinctions.

Note: I don't think it's practical to wholly disavow Queer as world-view, and I don't believe it will always engine what I suggest are its likely results.  Hopefully I'm really wrong--Homosexuals won't go extinct as recognizable demographic and Queer epistemes will brilliantly retard its ebbing wholly outside legibility. 

Another Viewpoint on MG, Blah To This

Naizgroth 1 day ago

"This is the reason why men tend not to respect women... decades of dumb slutty shit like this, that has indoctrinated good women into materialistic whores.. She's basically calling herself a prostitute.. Buy her shit, than she'll fuck you... Stupid.. I feel bad for those who live by this creed, always seeking out men with money to fulfill that never ending void via materialism which never works... WHy couldn't she have died young (preferably before this song) like all the other dumb artists.."

 

I am too lazy to respond to all the points raised here except for the final musing: "WHy couldn't she have died young (preferably before this song) like all the other dumb artists.."  My response to this is--because she's so smart she's lived and lived and lived on.

 

 

MGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!

This is a comment I posted on Youtube for a Material Girl video--this view it totally old-hat for many friends who have heard a version of this in person; and it may be repeating a prior non re-paste post from way back whenever:

           5 months ago             

"This song is brilliant; it may be the best political pop song of the past twenty five years.  This may seem counterintuitive; here's a reason or two: if it's truly pop, the politics should not stand out, just totally be there; if you hear a message it's protest not pop.  This song gets this: the girl, the shallow blond, becomes emblematic of the world at large, or at-least the USA, and its materialism; one can't dismiss the girl as vapid etc because in fact she's ground zero for where some of the world is totally at--to dismiss her is to dismiss real politics.  Put colloquially: Bitch (finger points at dude), you think I mean nothing but I'm really at the very pulse of what your world means."

 

On a different, but related, note: I love the word-play happening in the title "Like a Virgin"--which, too, is a great song; isn't a Madonna a virgin mother?  So like a virgin like a virgin mother--lol.

 

OK, back to MG: I like the video--apparently it's the official one: M on a staggered/stair-like stage, in a long pink dress, with lots of cute guys in suits--but think this would extend the politics wonderfully:

 

M is overseeing an assembly-line chute chockfull of packages containing man dolls, and tossing the packages with damage...and scrutinizing how they should be displayed at toy stores....and doing other things clearly linking male bodies to Capitalist profit.  As it stands in the video, M is still a consumer--but she doesn't control the means of production.  With my fantasy version, girl does have this control.  Hmm, and then to play with cultural cliché of girl on stage being "bid for," we could have male execs fight to bid to buy her man-doll company!  My acedimazation of this song feels like such a no-brainer to me, so hopefully someone, or manyone, has made a version of this hypothetical video.

 

Oops, Blogger did not maintain GN's lines.  It's testament to the poem's quality that Blogger's prose-poem looking version is much inferior.  Here's, hopefully, restoration:

Lachrymatory

Geoffrey Nutter

Remote controlled substation no. 10,
a utilitarian structure down by the tracks

that run past the ruined marina,

was built in 1931, and is now being

renovated. Scaffolding has been erecte

dall along its sides. A big coil

of damp rope is lying in a pile

of broken concrete, brick, and plaster.

The topmost row of the chain-link fence

that runs along the river

is twisted into barbs, and shredded

plastic sacks are snagged in the barbs

as far as the eye can see: dirty gray

and shredded, flapping in the wind.

A candy box, once green, has been

bleached out to light blue by the sun.

Silent gray boulders are lapped at

by waves. What’s that

in the mud where the tide is going out?

Buttons; bottle caps; small bits

of styrofoam that look like shells or coral;

a few dead crabs; a cracked porcelain

vessel from the Victorian era

for containing the tears shed by those

who have survived the death of loved ones.

Signs are posted to warn against

the consumption of eels by children.