That thing with all the drowned authors – I’ve been feeling seriously bad in a way I don‘t expect anyone to really get or empathize with even though you all seem like the kind of people that should, you know – if you‘re being honest with yourselves given previous stances re: humanism and global circumstances and interconnectivities – but forgetting all that, I honestly promise every last one of you ten thousand times: there wasn’t anything sinister or “political” about it. It was basically – and I know, I know how this sounds, especially after all the memorials and stuff, but it was part of an environmental initiative. Reduced flow toilets, no-flow urinals. Enforced recyclable stations, and I know a few people who asked not to be named but who can attest to that enforced thing. We were super serious about sustainability – it was our main thing, which is a step forward given a look around yourselves, even with all the progress. And it’s hard when you’re a publisher to cut down on paper but we did that too: two-sided printing on that half-brown post-consumer product the soy ink doesn’t entirely stick to; e-books.

But the thing with e-books and brown paper, and I don’t mean to get too technical or whatever, but the main thing with e-books is electricity. And I am in no way claiming to be an expert consultant or electrician slash environmentalist but just from living in the world we all know that it takes however many joules or flashes of electricity or whatever to make an e-book run and that electricity mostly comes from the equivalent of blood diamonds, just clear cut coal farming in China or however, which is why we have windmills, which everyone also knows don’t work on any kind of a scale. So e-books never seemed to be the most eco-conscious sort of thing, we all thought, even though it might have seemed that way on the surface to the layman. I’m not meaning to give the impression that I was in any sort of inner circle or meetings, by the way. We were a family though, before the drownings, so of course I knew what was going on, felt able to empower myself to make a few suggestions when it came down to it. And what happened afterward, after the suggestions, well – I feel bad for that like I said before but basically this was just an office policy sort of thing and I’d like to remind everyone that we’re all people here and there’s no reason to make this hard world harder than it already is by default.
more

It’s raining and I’m at Verb Cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn looking out onto Bedford Avenue. I just bonded with two grizzled regulars next to me over watching a mom help her kid pee in the rain (tic-tac peen between her thumb and ring finger and pointing upward for maximum arc). And afterward, in response to three thumbs up in the window – a wink and curtsy, amazing. In that spirit of camaraderie and mutual respect – and in celebration of a long weekend – I’m happy to share some online AMR books to read and likewise share. I’ve been posting these individually as I’ve archived them, but this is the definitive forever-collection:

Click here to read Mr. Feathers Flies Again (2006).

Click here to read Triangulating Happiness (2007).

Click here to read some Nick Courage poetry on Exquisite Corpse.org.

To purchase physical copies of either of these and other books – and music! – visit our merch site or our in-stock order page.

My Life as an Aerophyte (2005) probably won’t be reprinted or online, but it’s been the most popular AMR book so far so I’m sure you can find a copy floating around

Read books I wrote as a kid:

Click here to read The Monsters (1988)

Click here to read Race Car Magic (1989-90)

Click here to read A Day in the Life (1991)

A new decade, a different direction; experiments with cursive and “British humor”.

Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:

The thrilling follow-up to The Monsters (1988)

Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:

front cover / back cover
front matter
epigraph

1. triangulating happiness (page 1, page 2)
2. hello hominid (page 1, page 2)
3. birthday psalm (page 1, page 2)
4. the salad days (page 1, page 2)
5. perfecting dissolution
6. elaborate penetration
7. thrift store banjo
8. victorian sensibilities
9. karma conscious
10. tingsha quarters (page 2)
11. like an impetuous sea (page 1, page 2)
12. Allahu Akbar
13. saddest stories make the sweetest songs
14. you gotta rise!
15. thieves like us
16. too much life to deny
17. terrible portraiture
18. vampire hunter
19. the resonant vibrations of sonicating bees
20. we belong in the sky
21. science v. romance
22. midnite in forevertown (page 1, page 2)
23. storyville revisited
24. hobo mittens
25. (se han) cubierto de gloria
26. two oranges, transformative
27. satori tuesdays
28. a thousand points of drunken light, part two
29. agency after all
30. against high windows (page 1, page 2)
31. crayon / crown
32. robert redford revisited
33. so terrifying
34. invisible violence (page 1, page 2)
35. summer of the giant squid
36. people in crisis
37. epistemology and reality
38. hail marys every play
39. origin myths
40. hold music for tin can phones
41. cambodian mixtapes (page 1, page 2)
42. last best hope

coda

front cover / back cover

1. and then i saw blue
2. lagniappe (to a landlord)
3. a valediction forbidding morning – part two: the early years
4. experiential living – for frank o’hara
5. one last love note
6. circling the square
7. theory with praxis
8. grasping for air
9. bomb this book fair
10. poetry of departures – post-apocalyptic part deux
11. two feminists
12. evolution and human nature
13. reception anxiety
14. dewey decimal daydreams
15. professional opinions 1
16. professional opinions 2
17. on developing a roll of two year old film
18. circular breathing
19. birthday card to myself
20. notes from a widening gyre
21. personal politics
22. bad skin
23. naked angels (page 1, page 2)
24. hiroshima eclair
25. entry level love affair
26. mr. feathers flies again
27. skim milk social
28. the wrong girl in new york
29. wake up winking, comrade laughter!
30. evening with onan
31. PhDville burnt down
32. one good minute
33. blues is the bedrock (of everything i do)
34. billy collins is wrong & i am not
35. prefontaine of the arts
36. grow a beard in brooklyn
37. loveless
38. the unsustainability of slash & burn agriculture
39. reading lois lowry with a head cold
40. “mans ruin”
41. l’esprit-du-temps
42. nectarines at a time like this

l a g n i a p p e .

42 + 1. narrative aperitifs
42 + 2. rapping serious – a postscript
appendix a: “i really was appalled”
appendix b: a colloquy of shout outs

By a young Nick Courage, working under the first of many surnames.

Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:

These past four months or so I’ve been preparing myself for the novel I promised myself I’d write before my 28th birthday [update: not my first, but the long overdue second attempt]. My problem has never been with words, more with plot and accessibility – that’s where the poetry business comes in – so basically I’ve been building a wire mother I think I’ll be able to love simply and directly and for the long haul. This morning I found out what she sounds like (below).

Not surprisingly, this track is from when I was 21 – from a tape I got through an ex-girlfriend from a prep chef who was friends with the singer. I actually had, I think, a live demo version – which got stuck in the car I ended up leaving with my non-wire mom in New Orleans, so she ended up listening to it for a few months with STOP ANIMAL VIVISECTIONS and KILL YOUR T.V. stickers on the bumper. Now the radio’s broken and instead of fixing it she has a transistor radio you have to hang out the window, which is more rock and roll than the song, really.

Anyway, this is the last you’ll hear from me about it. Just felt like a Christmas Miracle to finally get the sound down.

I knew, as it was happening, that a pre-dawn livery cab ride across state lines was bad news. Those drivers aren’t used to 3 AM straight-aways, they go too fast. Then, approaching Newark Int’l Airport, the whole freighted gestalt of a fluorescent Anheuser-Busch billboard behind an honest-to-god smokestack looking like an industrial fire. And finally, in New Orleans, that disconnect:

more

home waiting for a couch to be delivered (funnily, the same couch my mom apparently has in her living room!) and decided to get an AMR mp3 player up. This one is less exhaustive than the last one – only 25 compared to over 100 songs – but should load fast and will remain conveniently in the sidebar.

If you think of any songs you want me to upload into this player, let me know – and repost if you like what you hear, right?

1. Oremus

I’d met everyone earlier that night, picked up a few substantive facts because that’s what you do at that kind of party. He was drinking sour apple schnapps from Bavaria out of nostalgia, her landlord was a little too controlling. The inflatable pig – clean shaved – expressed continual disappointment with the vagaries of adulthood; a patchy beard. And then, at the end of the alley, a friend nods toward a make-out in progress. Some said fingerbang. Later: pants down and positioning in an adjacent alley (they’d moved), tweaked nipples. The whole thing.

2. Antiphon

I didn’t see, but it was her first night wearing a beret ($5 and, the girl with one vampire fang said, “worth it”). He was a fedora-d adjunct at a senior college in Queens who nicely introduced himself as a teacher. Western Civilization – “Bible to Freud.” Roughly the bits I’d cut out, but I was rooting for him regardless. A friend whose last name I still wrongly pronounce with an aspirated ‘K’ said it was only frottage, humping. Someone else – married to an architect – said there was more: rain-wet cock & crumbling mortar, dirty skies opening on the venially sinning. Luckily for them, they both wore hats.

An ancient one-track/one-take favorite (talked about in AMR Podcast #8 alongside “Fierce Love”, if you’re hungry for context, and played on that old, broken junior guitar Bat and me used to have). Lyrics also included @ that link. And as long as this is a thing, I’m cobbling together these YouTube videos from the extreme back catalog largely because a lot of heart – although, admittedly, not much time – got put into these songs when we only had a handful of people following us around the internet; not ready for them to die just yet. Also, I might as well cop to it: I’m a sucker for B-sides and always like the old stuff better.

Previously:
Rethinking Plagiarism: The Death of Text as Authorial Icon pt. 1
Rethinking Plagiarism: The Death of Text as Authorial Icon pt. 2
Rethinking Plagiarism: The Death of Text as Authorial Icon pt. 3
Achieving Humanity: Theoretical Background

‘The folk process is as old as music, and depends on the ability of musicians to adapt from existing sources. A.P. Carter heard an old spiritual, probably while on the road, and arranged it for the Carter Family as “Can’t Feel At Home.” Woody Guthrie took “Can’t Feel At Home” and modified it further into “I Ain’t Got No Home.” As intellectual property laws become more restrictive, the folk process suffers. When Woody sings, “Rich man took my home and drove me from my door,” it relates not only to the human right to shelter, but also to the human right to culture.’
From “The Absent Second, an Explanation,” by Steven Arntson
more

One thing i love is: mounting context. like this song i recorded – one take, ten minute deal after one of those long days everyone’s been having… (more after the jump)

more

previously: finning sharks on garbage island

there’s something about a man with
one-armed reading glasses reciting
the wrong chapter of a biography he
mostly didn’t write, the one about

more