Sod Poems, Jared Leising and The Widows and Orphans of Winesburg, Ohio

Pudding House Press, a small press in Columbus, Ohio, has recently released the first chapbook by Jared Leising who says he is a Midwest Poet, a regional poet, which might strike some people as an odd and even humble declaration from a poet when every poet is a mouse click away from every other poet on the entire planet. Any poet with access to a word processor can launch a Web browser capable of exchanging poetry with poets in Perth or Timbuktu.

What exactly is Jared Leising? Is he actually a regional poet? He grew up in the Midwest, and this is a chapbook of poetry rooted in the dirt of the Midwest, and really very few things could be as locally specific as dirt. In " Loess" Leising writes " But, this dirt made me, I can't help it." The poems are Midwestern poems.

Voyage of the Peapod by Steve Himmer on A Boy, a Cat, a LifeBoat

Ever since reading that novel the whole city read at the same time, the boy had imagined what he might do, how he himself might behave if trapped in a lifeboat with a tiger. "I'd tame the tiger," the boy told his friend. "I'd fashion a whip from fishing nets and detach the whistle from my life preserver and for my tiger tamer's chair I'd use a..." [Read Voyage of the Peapod by Steve Himmer]

SALVATE PIPPA BACCA

If Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo had managed to safely hitchhike from Milan to Lebanon dressed as a bride as part of her conceptual art thing (the Brides on Tour project) thereby demonstrating that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people, this success which would have been novel, would have broken with any kind of expected narrative. If I were to describe to you her project -- two woman in their early thirties dressing up as a brides and hitchhiking across the Baltic states, through Greece, Turkey, and into the Middle East -- you would most likely say, "What are they thinking, they'll be raped and killed and their naked corpse thrown into the wilderness." You'd think she was either naive or had a death wish. Her success in braving this cliche and breaking the expected narrative would not be marked by an event. It would be marked by a lack of an event -- the lack of death -- and it wouldn't have generated any kind of international press coverage. In short, as a conceptual stunt success would have been failure.

Instead someone identified as MK picked up Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo at a gas station outside of Gebze and performed the obligatory roll dictated in the situation. He raped and killed Marineo, removed her wedding dress, and tossed her naked body into the woods. He also took her cell phone and used it to make calls, even if he did switch the SIM. He needed to be caught, I suppose to satisfy the story. Art against barbarism.

And so this it is the cliche and the expected narrative that is newsworthy. The story confirms the trope of the barbaric Middle East against the civilized West. In some ways it is worse than this though because Marineo working as a conceptual artist makes even her impulse to bridge this gap and work to dissolve this trope seem not only naive but dangerously delusional, and this gap I think undermines the entire impulse behind her project. She demonstrated that she not only could she not trust the locals but that she should be very, very afraid of them.

The project was doomed to failure from the beginning.

A Scanner Captures an Individual and my friends Miis

What does a scanner scan in order to to capture an individual? Does it understand the general features of a person and only capture the differences that identify an individual? If this is the case, then does the scanner store the master copy, the boilerplate person? Can a scanner store these differences and then if you would like you could restore a person when they die or they are lost? Can you synchronize the differences so that as a person becomes different even from their different selves you could restore them to say how they were in 1976?

I imagine that the first implementation of a scanner would focus on certain administratively expedient features -- finger prints, eye color, skin color, hair color -- and that of course these would be poorly implemented. Nuance would be lost. Finger pints would be reduced to a laser-eye-readable bar code. Eye color to a 16 crayon Crayola box. Human skin to eight shades. Hair color the same eight shades.

The Wii features an Avatar builder called the Mii. My daughter entices houseguests to make versions of themselves from the limited palatte of bobble-head accessories. Given these limitions people are able to make very close approximations of themselves. Long after they leave their Mii Avatar's wander around our Mii plaza. On occasion a person will create a Mii that is free form the constraints of their physical world self. It makes me wonder why more people don't make bodies and shapes and faces that are free of any reference to their physical world self?

Here is an online Mii creator in Flash.

Story in SmokeLong Quarterly

A new story of mine, "Trestle," appears in SmokeLong No. 20, guest edited by Claudia Smith, along with stories by Aaron Burch, David Barringer, Sue Powers, Gail Siegel, and others. There is also an interview where I say some things.