Previously:
AMR Music Month (Introduction)
AMR Music Month – Track 1

This one’s a laffer for all you pre-Valentine’s day <3 birds, lyrics after the jump:

Click to hear “My love,” by Mark Fullmer

Quick Housekeeping: All you folks participating in AMR music month, send me your mp3s! I just remedied my own recording situation so will start posting Courage tracks over the weekend, but so far Mark’s leading the convoy. Or, you know, whatever.

Context:

“I hadn’t at all expected to get to my second song on the list this soon, but after I got home from this Thai cafe I found myself playing around with ye ol’ guitar of yore and, well, this is what came out. I originally wrote the lyrics as a poem, back in those highfalutin grad school days. I sent it out to the literati, the intelligentsia, the hoi AND the poloi. One friend, a girl, a grad school buddy who shall remain nameless, wrote back something like “Please don’t send me stuff like this again. Ever.” So now I find myself putting it to music. Anyway. The chorus came first (from a tidbit I was humming on the way home today) and the verses followed pretty intuitively. -M”
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Click here to listen to “Vespers” (cover), by Mark Fullmer

The first installment of AMR Music Month, an updated version of the cover song you may remember resonating so profoundly with me in a previous post. Without repeating myself, this version – this version is darker and more hopeful, which seems like an impossibility, but never underestimate escape. It’s also more of a palimpsest. There’s some Plath, I think some Hemingway (?), an unmistakable Ginsberg. Definitely, in any case, a textured yearning, an almost – appropriately – ecclesiastical meditation reverberating with best-of-Tarantino atmosphere. For completists, the spoken word bit at the end is from a poem in Mr. Feather’s Flies Again, “PhDville burnt down”.

Liner notes, care of Mark: “This was put down over three states — the guitar and main vocals in CA, the poetry additions and harmonies in AZ, the final mastering in NM (one time zone closer to Brooklyn).”

Addenda: Mark is currently making his way eastward from California en route, ultimately, to China for two years. The catalyst in the crucible of this particular cover, I think. Relatedly: Last night, before Mark sent this on, I was watching a BBC documentary on China and thinking vaguely about Mark’s future life there. Today an editor friend sent me a picture of one of our authors with Quincy Jones’ daughter – whats-her-name – and my immediate Rorschach reaction to their admittedly impressive foreheads was “the limestone mountains of Hunan” and, of course, Mark among them.

Which feels reflected here, everything all together – the tension between self-mythology and mounting history, the impossible abnegation of a primetime oversoul that recognizes itself in world wonders and facebook doppelganger shots. Sort of the opposite, really, of the solipsistic original (in the player at right as “younger”).

Also see: Mark’s take on MarkFullmer.com

Related:

Friend of a Friend Interview: Mark Fullmer

“The Right Shadow Spoke”: A Facebook App Novel Shout-out

Tweet, Tweet: A mysticotelegraphic fistbump panegyric to the American open road odyssey

So the novel is called 1337: A Videogame Novel About Videogames and it’s an honest to goodness facebook app by Friend of a Friend Mark Fullmer, drawing on your friend-base for characters and fully interactive in a post-modern but also old school text adventure sort of way. Points for Ennui and Whimsey! A refreshable Lustiness index!

I work in publishing where we’re always talking about harnessing “New Media” and a nowhere lit. e-zine just became a major player because they tweeted a short story – badly. This is pretty much the most fun thing I’ve seen in a while, and the least specious re: actually utilizing new media (not counting “Mr. Plimpton’s Revenge: A Google Maps Essay”).

But unlike “Plimp’s Revenge” this is a whole novel: serialized and super-fun – launched on David Lynch’s birthday, 1337 (pronounced: “leet”, for I guess my octogenarian demo) has a sort of William Gibson down the rabbit hole meets Cory Doctorow in Little Brother feel to it. I hope you give it a chance, because I <3 this stuff. And while you're at it, check out the context, both wiki – linked – and “developer website“, which is extensive and more Hackers than Hackers. This, folks, is Mark Fullmer Overdrive.

Bat is moving back to Brooklyn and wrote a song about it (click to listen). Know anyone looking for a roommate in Williamsburg/Greenpoint starting late February/March?

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.
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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)

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

this green or that green.mp3 (No Sexy Regrets version). Actually, don’t choose – I like them both. But, I was going through my mp3s yesterday for the player and realized I’d never recorded a clean version of “green,” my song on SORRY ABOUT THE SOUNDS (the colors album). You gotta have a clean version.

click here for green.mp3 redux

While clicking through the archives, I also found this – the cavalierly misinterpreted guiding principle of No Sexy Regrets: “It is an art which does not seem to be an art. One must avoid affectation and practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, disdain or carelessness, so as to conceal art, and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it … obvious effort is the antithesis of grace.” – Baldassare Castiglioni (Book of the Courtier, 1528)

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.

Click for AMR Podcast #22
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Click for AMR Podcast #21!

In this podcast: the one about the sharks, getting dumb comme d’habitude, a mild case of being inarticulate (i.e. ummm, like), edmund white’s City Boy, too-soon nostalgia, dirty water, neustonic plastics, destabilized oceanic ecosystems, and the encroaching food apocalypse & what you can do about it.

Click here to read the original poem/for more resources.

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

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1.

“the ceremony of innocence is drowned”

so many sad people on prozac in NYC
that the municipal water supply tests
positive for the drug, meanwhile we’re

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