Noah Cicero

“A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.” Albert Camus

Here is a video of Marshawn Lynch if you have never heard of him.

In case you do not know what happened during Super Bowl week, Marshawn Lynch began refusing to answer questions from reporters. He sat there and told them basically to “fuck off.”

Watch this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRbszGmvusU

It is hysterical to me, he sits there doing nothing, faced with American Media. They ask him one absurd question after another, “Are you excited to play in the Super Bowl?” “Who is the best player on the team?” “Are you worried about getting into the Hall of Fame?” All these questions are absurd, they have no relation to reality. Football like all sports can’t be predicted, there is no way to answer those questions besides just making stuff up.

How would someone answer, “Are you worried about getting into the Hall of Fame?” If Marshawn Lynch is going to be in the Hall of Fame it won’t be for decades. Why and how would Marshawn Lynch even go about worrying about that?

I believe this shows Sartrean freedom, at any moment we may lie down, we may kill ourselves, even the prisoner may daydream and think happy thoughts instead of feeling miserable and hating their cell, or we may accept a truth that terrifies us.

Marshawn Lynch said no to the media’s absurdity. He says family matters, his real concrete life matters, when he plays in the game, when he is with friends, that matters for him and you. He is giving the media advice, “Hey, your questions are stupid, stopping thinking so much about me and think about your family.”

Then he stares at them, as Sartre said he gave them The Look. Being stared at is terrifying, nobody really likes it unless they have an extreme amount of vanity, if they emotionally demand that level of justification for their existence. The average person, we won’t even mention reclusive authors, being looked at often reduces us to an objectification, it makes us ‘something’ we aren’t, it alienates us from ourselves. The media views Marshawn Lynch as this simple running back only there to carry balls from one location to another, but Marshawn Lynch knows he is an entire person, with many relations to other people and possibilities on and off the field.

Marshawn Lynch stares at the media saying, “You aren’t anything but objects who can’t play football, who aren’t a genius like me, the justification for your existence is asking me and people like me questions, without people like me, without great athletes you wouldn’t be able to feed your families or afford your cute little life styles. I Marshawn Lynch am the source of your happiness, but instead of giving me respect you treat me like a thug. And you can’t even think of a reasonable question to ask one of your fellow human beings.”

I don’t think Marshawn Lynch suffers from vanity, he doesn’t need the validation of the American Media to feel good about himself, he loves football, he loves the challenge of sports, he thinks it is fun to say “Beast Mode.”

Marshawn Lynch is 28-years-old, he is a Millennial just like us, Marshawn Lynch is us, Marshawn Lynch could easily be our friend. But there is a huge difference, most 28-year-olds in America do not have networths of 14 million and do not have constant media coverage of their lives. Every person I know in their late twenties and early thirties are dealing with student loans, trying to get promoted at work, most make less than $25,000 a year, most work mindless jobs that do not have unions, pensions or hope. Some are having their first kids, getting married, a lot spend their weekends at the bar drinking and singing karaoke, and we shouldn’t forget those dealing with PTSD from Bush’s Wars. The average life of a 28-year-old is not the life of Marshawn Lynch. But the existential crisis still remains, the anxiety of getting older, the anxiety of change, the anxiety that we have to become adults and grow up, the anxiety that life seems crazy, that life doesn’t make any sense, and if we go deep enough a knowledge that we are powerless to change the macrocosm of politics and business.

Marshawn Lynch has to deal with the fact that his networth is 14 million, which is an absurd amount of money and I believe Marshawn Lynch knows that. Because in America we seem to have four brackets of income, you either make lesss than $25,000, then around $40,000 to $60,000. Then it jumps to $300,000 for lawyers, small business owners and doctors. Then it super jumps to at least 10 million in networth. Whoever designed this system is mental as the British say. Frances Bean Kurt Cobain’s daughter who has never wrote a song in her life and has a networth of 75 million. The US government, a governnment that governs millions of sick and poor people and has epic problems all over the place spends 412 million on each F22 fighter jet, the US government bought 188 F22s, do the math. The USA is absurd, Marshawn Lynch has figured it out, and he is giving it back to them.

We must take it further though, when someone is as famous and rich as Marshawn Lynch they become a god. After a certain amount of money, you have an infinite amount of money. Marshawn Lynch can eat out and buy himself new clothes everyday if he feels like, he can put a giant television in every room of his house, he can buy and buy and buy. He is a god of capitalism. The problem is: everyone knows what he looks like, if he goes out to a restaurant he has to sit there the whole time being ‘seen’ as Marshawn Lynch. He can’t be ‘seen’ as a guy eating food with his friend, he is always Marshawn Lynch, and many sports trolls have stupid things to say to him. Even me, as a small indie press writer get at least one wacky email once a month, I wouldn’t even want to know what people say to him while he is trying to eat a cheeseburger at Five Guys.

Even though Marshawn Lynch has an infinite amount of money, he is still trapped inside of a prison because of it. He can’t go around being a normal person any longer, he can’t just go to the park or eat ice cream as a simple boring person like we are, if someone sees him and identifies him as Marshawn Lynch he is objectified, and alienated from himself. He is no longer allowed to peacefully enjoy his ice cream.

I feel in general what the American Media does with people in their twenties is odd and mental. People in their twenties are intensely insecure, they are still trying to figure out who they are and what they value about life. But our culture’s obsession with beauty and athleticism turns them into gods and then for some reason feels the need to emotionally abuse them in the media and online. We have to understand, that when a 14-year-old dreams of becoming a singer or athlete, of doing great things, they aren’t daydreaming about being emotionally abused by the media. I don’t understand how it has never occured to an internet troll that famous people have the Internet and can read their cruel bitter judgements of their fellow humans.

Marshawn Lynch has seen through the facade: American culture takes talented young people, gives them a bunch of money, a lot of old white people make millions off their talents, and then people give them no respect and emotionally abuse them until they break.

I can’t wait to see the next Marshawn Lynch interview.

If i Would Leave Myself Behind is a novella with short stories following it.

I couldn’t figure out what was going on the beginning of the book, but after page five I figured it out and realized what Becker was doing. But I have a hard time explaining it. The book is not a linear plot, with beginning middle and end. Random things happen creating an overall emotion.

In the novella a girl ends up playing board games with a boy, she didn’t want to play the game but she did anyway. Becker writes, “I was looking at your mouth, thinking that should not be what your mouth is doing.” I really like that line. The young girl seems so alienated, instead of enjoying the game, embracing the moment, she can’t, she is too awkward and just stares at the boy’s mouth.

Becker says, “He looks to a bottle and climbs into the bottle and becomes the bottle and comes out another boy.”

Becker says, “We were ugly. We were not ugly enough. We were not ugly.”

Becker says, “You smile at me now. You bring me champagne. You use words like compelling and captivating. They are precursors to difficult and irrational. The words are the same. If you look at me that way now, you will dislike me more. I am not complex. I am simple incapable.”

I believe I have this problem. I go on dates and women find me charming and cute, and everything is nice. They make me a hat or draw me a picture. I can be captivating, but I can also be irrational and scream like a maniac. But at the same time, everyone is irrational and difficult. The character seems to be under the impression that they are unique in terms of being irrational and nuts. I’ve known a lot of ‘basic girls’ and ‘basic boys’ in my life, they are all difficult and irrational too, in different ways, but still pretty much the same ways.

Becker says, “I bought cupcakes and cheese and bagels and butter. I bought things that would make me fat. I bought things that are not meals, food that does not meet daily nutritional needs. I eat soggy fries cooked in the microwave, which is not recommended, and look at a cookbook.”

Being overweight and eating bad food is discussed a lot in the book. I’ve known a lot of women who would eat bad food to emotionally feel better. It seems really sad.

Becker says, “He thinks things about me I do not want him to think.”

From the short story Tell Yourself Becker says, “You will watch reruns of Sex and the City or something like that where beautiful girls get things they want.”

I’ve watched a lot of episodes of Sex and the City, first my dad really liked it in the 90s and then an ex liked to watch it. I ended up watching most of the episodes. Sex and the City is devastating, it is wealth porn, the whole show is wealthy people living wealthy lives doing meaningless things for the sake of their own narcissism/vanity/emptiness. But still it is not as meaningless as comic book movies or pretty much any movie with Seth Rogen/Liam Neeson, Denzel Washington, Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale. So I am not going to judge Sex and the City too hard compared to movies about super wealthy people dressed up as bats fighting ‘crime.’ I guess the difference is: In Sex and the City it does kind of say, “You can be successful women, you can become lawyers and art dealers and have meaningless sex.” While comic book movies say to men, “VIOLENCE MURDER CORPORATISM!” I don’t think you need to be a semiotics expert to realize that Iron Man and Batman are pro some corporatism. (Why did I write this inside this review, because Lauren Becker made me think it, good books make you think weird things.)

I really like how the author shows that watching television is not an escape, mainstream movies and television are there to make you feel bad, to create jealousy and desire inside. But not a concrete jealousy like, “I want to be able to lift 120 pounds because my friend can,” or, “I want to write a book as awesome as Murakami.” Which is a very innocent kind of jealousy. But Sex and the City causes this type of jealousy, “You are poor, you are overweight, your lover is not as attractive as my lover, in fact your lover sucks, your house sucks, your job title sucks, even if your job doesn’t suck and you love your coworkers it still sucks because you do not live in NYC and have shit tons of money and you are not getting fucked by Mr. Big.”

Lauren Becker’s If i Would Leave Myself Behind doesn’t make you feel like shit, she is like a friend telling an elaborate story, she isn’t trying to sell you anything.

The story Parameters is about a woman named Beth who never leaves her town, she stays within 18 miles of her house. I like the story, I know people like that, who never leave their town.

The story Spin is about a guy who likes records.

Review of Women by Chloe Caldwell

I am a cisgendered white male with blue eyes writing a review about a woman in her late 20s who meets a woman around age 40 which leads to the younger woman having her first lesbian experience. I don’t know why I did this? Am I trying to prove something? Am I cool?

Why is this book called Women?

This book is about first lesbian experiences, I want to share mine: When I was 20 years old in the year 2001 I went to Eugene, Oregon to spend the summer with friends before I went back to college. I went to Eugene and found a room in the newspaper, it was with a 45-year-old lesbian named Laura, she owned her own house but was out of work and needed money. At that point in my life I had very few experiences with adult homosexuals, I had lesbian and gay friends in Ohio, but no adults. Laura was amazing to me, she was a total butch, she owned a green Chevy pick-up truck from the early 70s, did home construction, had a rock garden where she would tell you about each and every rock, what kind it was and where she got it. She walked around naked, never shaved any part of her body, would wipe her period blood on the plants in her garden, had copies of Nausea and Ram Dass on her book shelf, was very caring and forgiving and was totally different than the 45-year-old women living in Ohio. She was the first adult to ever take my thoughts and feelings seriously, she was one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met, and she has always stayed in my heart. That was my first lesbian experience.

The lead character in the novel moves to a city because she is a drug addict and wants a change, the lead character obviously suffers from addiction problems. She assumes that if she stops taking drugs the addiction will disappear, because it is a common belief that drugs are addictive but television and love and candy and shopping aren’t. But all these things are addictive, because we live in a culture where “cheering ourselves up” is a moral value, everyone has the duty to “cheer ourselves up.” We can’t just sit and breath and walk around looking at trees, we have to feel as if we are in a panic all the time, happiness is an emergency, that there is no time and we must resolve all the pressures surging in our bodies immediately.

The lead character gets a job at a library, she likes to read, she is intelligent and well spoken and bipolar. The lead character meets a lesbian named Finn, I have this theory that she named her Finn because the lead character is Jim, enslaved in her straight self, which Finn frees her from. (I could be wrong.)

Finn has a girlfriend, the girlfriend is never named or seen in the novel, this makes the novel so weird to me, you have one cheating person and a bird dog (If people don’t remember what a bird dog is, it is a person that romances other people’s girlfriends.) This makes the novel a lot better, because the premise of the two lead characters is that the lead character is a drug addict who romances other people’s lovers and Finn is a chronic cheater. The novel deals with the lives of extremely imperfect people. Seems odd how imperfect we all are, when I reflect upon my own life, I’ve never killed anyone but I have had some amazing imperfect moments. Everyone is so imperfect, thank god we have the ability for forgiveness.

I really liked on page 22 when the lead character says, “I want you so bad. Where did it come from? Since when I had wanted her so bad? Why had I not been conscious of it.” The lead character didn’t reason out here behavior toward Finn, it flowed from her, grew from her, the way a branch grows toward sunlight. I like that theory, it is more zen and human. I just remembered Cupid and Kamadeva though, Americans know Cupid from Valentines day, the little winged creature that shoots lovers with arrows, Indian mythology contains the same concept in Kamadeva, an invisible person that shoots lovers with arrows. I like this metaphor, a human walking around peacefully going abouttheir business, and a sniper shoots them from a distance unseen, the arrow hits them, they look down and say, “Oh shit, I’ve been shit, I didn’t expect this to happen today.”

After there is a short break up between Finn and the lead character, the lead character goes on dating sites and has a period of rampant dating to fill an emotional void. I’ve seen this several times in my life, I don’t have statistics only anecdotes but I’ve seen women after a break up have a three month period of promiscuity. I always kind of viewed at punishment toward the ex-partner, but I think now I was wrong, maybe it is freedom, filling a void, or maybe just distraction, or trying to replicate the old love. The song Habits by Tove Lo seems to be about this. I personally don’t know and accept there is no clarity to the answer. But I think as a male I will stop viewing it as punishment or spite, but just natural behavior.

The lead character has a bipolar meltdown which leads to a lot of amazing chapters about the nuances of being a bipolar in a relationship, I am actually bipolar or whatever that means. Bipolar people can get really annoying in a relationship, because they get obsessed with a single idea and want to follow it to the end without regard for the consequences.

Bipolarism is great if you are in college, writing a novel, or trying to get a promotion, you set your mind on a goal and get manic and accomplish your goal. But when the manic sets their goal on a fellow human, then it gets annoying and even creepy, because humans aren’t like promotions you don’t win them, humans aren’t like writing novels because you can’t write another person’s novel, everyone has to write their own novel.

At the end there is no clarity, things did not turn out the way the bipolar person wanted. Life didn’t turn out at all, everyone was a woman at the beginning of the novel and they are still women when the novel fades out, they are emotionally altered a little, but the woman remains.

Mike Young has been in the lit game for years, he started running Noo Journal in 2005, which greatly helped the growth of online literature. He has two other books Look! Look! Feathers and We are all Good Enough if they Try Hard Enough. And now he has a very original book of poems called Sprezzatura. The book is hard to describe, so I asked Mike Young some questions, his answers are really amazing.

Noah Cicero: What other books of poetry influenced Sprezzatura?

Mike Young: It’s funny because the first books of influence on Sprezzatura that float to mind aren’t poetry at all. While I was writing most of these poems, I was riding buses in Baltimore and Western Massachusetts and thinking about the ideas in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick and You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier. Highly recommend both those suckers, especially Gleick’s.  It has telegraphs and quantum physics and search engines and dictionaries and ambiguity in it.

The barnacled looseness of Jason Bredle’s monologic poems was big too. All his books, but maybe especially Standing in Line for the Beat and Smiles of the Unstoppable. Then there were the exuberant sentence claps of Frank Lima’s Inventory and the splattered anger of Linh Dinh’s Some Kind of Cheese Orgy. Anger isn’t something I’m good at, but Dinh is good at it.

And finally, I’d say Jeni Olin’s Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems and Geraldine Kim’s Povel were huge for this book. With Olin, I wrote this about her book: “I read her poems sometimes while drinking coffee but always felt like I was drinking coffee. Except the coffee was also Kool-Aid and Percocet and wine coolers and a recovery smoothie.” With Kim, I wrote this: “A splurge of diarytastic and spastic elbow dancing and early webcam kissy faces. Kills genre with a plastic sword. Pairs nicely with 8 bit GIF art. I really feel like more people should read this book.”

Noah Cicero: What was the first book of poetry you ever read that made you feel like, poetry is awesome and I want to spend time writing these things?

Mike Young: In high school, I discovered these online poetry message boards that were connected to the Alsop Review, and from there I discovered Frank Stanford, who was huge in my transition from caring about “poetic song lyrics” to caring about line-by-line, eyelash-by-shotgun page poetry. And then all the usual suspects: Eileen Myles, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, shapes of lips, Egyptian pyramid spaceships, etc.

Noah Cicero: In the first poem Sprezzatura you say life is not an argument? Can you name other things life is not? And two things life is?

Mike Young: It’s funny because the line “The world is not an argument” showed up first in a song I wrote for my friend James Haug after seeing a sign in the window of a hair salon that said “No Dogs Allowed,” and then for some reason I started thinking about how the world indifferently asserts itself; it doesn’t worry about proving itself; it continues with or without proof. And I thought about a bunch of other things the world is not in that song: a tennis match, a county fair, a pillow full of horse’s hair, a bowling league, a guy named Steve at the pool swimming laps. Now with your question I’m trying to think about the difference between “life” and “the world,” and I’m at a table with someone eating grilled cheese who said “Life is not a bag of chopsticks.”

Obviously, it’s impossible to say what life or the world is, as opposed to what it’s not, which is part of why we keep waking up. In the song, the chorus is all about wanting to say what the world is, and my favorite two are “I’d like to say the world / is a rowboat full of apples / drifting toward an island / that doesn’t have a shore” and “I’d like to say the world / is a joke about a ghost / delivered by your murderer / who’s funnier than most.”

Then the two chorus endings are: “But the world is the world / and I’m sleeping near the door” and “But the world is the world / and I want better dreams.”

Noah Cicero: In “Turn Right at the Bridge you Make by Lying there” you state “It’s a safe bet to blame ghosts on infrasound?” If I were going to blame a ghost how would I do that?

Haha, that line actually comes from a story about this scientist named Vic Tandy. Warning: I’m going to get this story a little wrong, but I’m going to tell my version of it and not look it up. Basically Tandy was this British scientist who worked in a spooky old castle lab, and all his assistants insisted that the lab was haunted. Being a good British scientist, Tandy was super annoyed by this superstitiousness, and he decided to figure out what causing all the fuss, and he realized there was a machine in the lab that was vibrating at the exact right frequency to rattle human eyeballs and cause them to see these streaks. And obviously they felt anxious about this, hence the scary part of seeing ghosts in addition to the seeing part. And this frequency was infrasound, below the frequency of noise we have the ability to hear. Seeing instead of hearing.

As for actually blaming ghosts, it probably functions at a level of ineffectiveness somewhere between blaming yourself and blaming the moon.

Noah Cicero: In “American Idyll” you say, “There are mothers who text. / And there are mothers who do not text.” My mother can’t text and she doesn’t even know how to turn on a computer. Does your mom text? What operating systems can your mom use? Mac, Windows, Linux?

Mike Young: My mother is very anti-texting, and she uses Windows. She could probably use a Mac if given the opportunity. When I was a kid, I made her two computer programs in QBasic to help her with her daily life. One was called Menlo Manager, and it was about helping her manage rental properties, and the other was called Plant Plotter, and it was about helping her plan her garden.

Noah Cicero: In “What Yo Personality got to do with That Lunch Meat” you wrote, “Should I explain mucus to him like a friendly website?” What is the most friendly website you have ever been to? To me WebMd is a really friendly website. It helps me live and feel better and it downloads quickly, all the links actually lead somewhere, I like it.  Answers.com to me is the most unfriendly website on the internet: it takes forever to download, it has a million popups, none of the answers are even worth having, Miley Cyrus sticking her tongue out like a dead deer hanging from a rope is the focal point of their website. Anything that reminds me of a dead deer hanging from a rope is not chill.

Mike Young: Totally agree with you on the dead deer rope unchillness. Friendly website is a great question. I put that question to the group at the table because I’m not sure how I would answer it, though when I wrote that line about mucus I was thinking about being a friendly website, like I was wishing I could be a friendly website instead of a person, which is something I often think about, and which led to me to later imagine an awkward website being best friends with an awkward tree.

What the group at the table said is that certain websites try to be friendly, like Netflix, but none succeed.

Noah Cicero: In the poem “What’s the Strongest Thing You’ve Ever Felt” you wrote, “When I say we drove through the woods, I would like you to feel like maybe you have died.” What does it mean to “have died?” Like they had a near death experience and returned or they died and had a beautiful peaceful sleep and then returned? Why did you write “maybe?” Seems funny, like the narrator is so unsure of their own poem. How do you feel when making a metaphor?

Mike Young: Oh this is a great question! For that line itself, I think it’s about that lack of sureness you point out. And you talk more about that lack of sureness in a great way in your next question, so stay tuned everybody who’s reading this because the next question is also really good.

So anyway, as for that line itself, it’s not the same as just feeling like you might be having a dream, though it’s a feeling that could potentially show up in a dream. Basically what it means is you have all the normal sensations and feelings, but you’re not sure if you’re dead or not. There are certain woods that give this lack of sureness, even when you’re not asleep, which is part of the reason I moved back to the West Coast.

As for what I feel when making metaphors, I thought a lot about that question, and I ended up typing a huge answer after drinking a lot of coffee. While it doesn’t directly answer your question, and in fact it ends up talking about a whole different line in a different poem (the end of the poem “You Must Motherfucking Change Your Life”), I swear I wrote it after reading this question, and I hope it’s interesting to read:

Sometimes it’s about phrasal energy. You say “Isn’t it great to get that out of the way?”, and it’s not about the context of that phrase, whatever “that” refers to. Instead, it’s about the mechanism of the phrasing itself, the energy it directs. Not about the carrots you dump into the dicer but watching and feeling the blades whip. Except less violent, let’s hope, because most of the phrasal energy I’m interested in is about weird sharing, clicks into personal crannies, sitting in between acknowledged unknowable alterity. And some phrasings seem particularly suited to that space for my ears and mind and eyes, they have a glowing whir. Like the phrase “Isn’t it great to get that out of the way?”, the idea of a “way,” paths being cleared, the metaphor that proposes for living by. (Some grand ol’ George Lakoff hubblety-wubblety).

What I hope, I think, is that someone reads that line in the chugalug of the poem, and it emerges in a surprising place, not the normal spoken conversation context that phrase usually appears in, and it turns from a phrase of utility into a phrase of pure energy. The dicer turns from a dicer into something unnameable, something that can only be nearly summed up by a close observation and appreciation and accounting of all its energy, a doomed awe of schematics, and that this—I’m not sure what to call it, “witnessing” seems lofty, but “taking in” seems wrong—this gawking comes up the next time the reader encounters the phrase “Isn’t it great to get that out of the way?” (or one of its composite parts) in real life, and they’re removed for a second from the context of that phrase, the work of it, and language suddenly isn’t working, it’s not “at work,” it’s not toiling away, it’s suddenly there for a second for a different kind of energy, way outside the paradigm of “work,” and being in this energy with the language for a second brings you into being in that energy with other people too.

And if there’s ever something to try to not reduce with final, tool-ish, let’s-move-onto-the-next-thing naming—but instead to witness and appreciate and attempt to account for in all its complexity, while acknowledging your inevitable falling short—it’s another person.

Noah Cicero: In “Is This a Poem for the Year 2219” it says, “Sometimes I try to make sure the best songs in my iTunes have the most plays, but I don’t know why?” I like how it says “Is This” in the title, I like how the narrator is always unsure of their poem? Do you feel unsure all the time? It is funny to “feel unsure” because it implies even though we as humans, even animals do this, have to choose all the time, because time keeps happening, which means we keep happening, we feel unsure all the time, personally I have lost faith in my decision making skills, but I keep doing things, only because time keeps happening. In a lot of Hindu literature people sit meditating for thousands of years sometimes eating only air or standing on one foot. Would you like to do that? Do you have faith in any of your choices? Alan Watts says it doesn’t even matter what we choose, because whatever is happening is happening, and we can’t ever know if we made the right choice anyway, because there is no way to check if we got the right answer, like an alternate reality machine where we can check how our alternate possibles came out. I find it really funny that everything just happens, and we all keep existing doing things, like right now I am writing an interview in a Starbucks while listening to synthpop music while in Las Vegas and I’m like, “Wow, this is crazy. I am human and this is wild.” Do you ever feel like this? What situations would cause this feeling?

Mike Young: See this is the really good “question” I was talking about. And it’s obviously more than just a single question, haha. I think I am totally in sync with everything you’re talking about here—this is the kind of thinking I’d feel awesome for Sprezz to stir up in people. This wondering about choice, the feeling of choice, the “whoa-I’m-here” feeling, and I think when a day is at its best, everything in the day elicits this feeling. And it’s funny because it’s a complex, privilege, complicated, fucked up feeling, but also a beautiful feeling, a pure transparent observer, a node through which life passes, being the air being eaten, the foot and the standing, etc. etc. And Sprezz is maybe more than anything about how that’s a feeling that gets interrupted in good and bad ways by love and fear and money, and you try and fail to gracefully contort to allow those things to pass through too, but they don’t, they get stuck, and you get sunk, and complexities pile up, and the world piles up indifferently too, indifferent because it’s nothing but difference, and there you go and go until you don’t.

This name kept coming up in links on my Facebook “Kate Durbin” “Kate Durbin” “Kate Durbin.” I began investigating Kate Durbin, I found amazing videos on Youtube like this one called iPrincess. I looked at her Hello Selfie photos, she went to LA and NYC and walked the streets with other women all wearing strange (I don’t know how to describe their outfits, I’m sorry) outfits covered in stickers taking selfies of themselves. I began a short email conversation with Kate Durbin and found her to be amazing, charming, intensely sensitive/philosophical/observant and even spiritually powerful, I got E! Entertainment in the mail and read it immediately, in it Kate Durbin wrote out scenes from reality television shows, the extent of the project amazed me, how much effort and detail she threw into it, I was blown away, so much indie literature is personal narrative or experimental, but she took it in a completely new direction.

Kate Durbin also has a Tumbrl called “Women as Objects” where she reblogs posts from teenage girls.

Here is an amazing interview with Kate Durbin and Lara Glenum.

Noah Cicero:  What would be three books or films or television shows that you really like and try to experience over and over again and why. And then three books or films or television shows that inspired E! Entertainment?

Kate Durbin: I watch The Shining at least once month. Kubrick’s creation of a foreboding atmosphere is terrific, as are his little hidden details that connect all his projects together, like Danny wearing the Apollo 11 sweater in the Overlook hotel hallway, which is a nod to Kubrick faking the moon landing. I put details like that in all of my work, hoping one day someone will parcel them out.

I read Anna Kavan’s Ice every few months. I like how she created her own environment in that text, this suffocating ice world, and also how nothing is explained. I like works of art that are bold enough to be unaccommodating, like an alien world.

Robert Altman’s Three Women is an important film for me. Visually it is beautiful, with these dreamy 70s pinks and purples. I like that it was inspired by a dream Altman had and therefore follows dream logic. I like that it’s about these women and their relationships to each other, which is what E is about, too.

Inspired E: The Hills, The Girls Next Door, Keeping Up With the Kardashians

The Midwest of America is founded on disrespect and environment damage. In the the late 1800s capitalists found out there was coal and other raw materials in the ground to make iron, tires, rubber, you name it. The capitalists built giant factories and steel mills along rivers and poured the toxics from the factories into the rivers. In less than a hundred years industrialization had destroyed what millions of slow evolution took to make.

The difference between the Midwest and say New York City or Boston or the American West is that people came to the Midwest often from struggling areas of the planet, the Italians came to escape Mussolini’s fascism, eastern europeans to escape the Soviet Union and abject poverty. And African-Americans left the horrors of the Jim Crow south to find work. This is very different from the dreamers who went to Boston or NYC or to the American West. The ancestors of the Midwest are commonly people trying to escape horror, and probably suffering from PTSD from the terrors they experienced.

In Walls Andrew Worthington starts off painting us a picture of industrialization and its decaying infrastructure, the reader will probably react with, “What,” but to tell a story about the Midwest, the reader has to know that a monster once tore through the land and left it in pieces, but humans still live there, living, working, eating, trying to have fun amongst the ruins.

The story concerns Tom, a young man in his mid-twenties. He has gone off to live in New York City and has a boring job working for the local transportation department. He needs to go to the dentist which leads to him returning to Ohio after two years. The crux of this whole novel involves a dentist appointment, but in the novel we never see him go to the dentist.