Dude from WilliamsBoard
by Rachel Rabbit

I’ll meet you at Savalas
Complement your work
Get you alone
Stick a thumbtack in your balls

EcoWarrior
by Rachel Rabbit

If you think you’ll save the earth
By not using shampoo
Then perhaps you should
Stop using my $17 styling product

Doppelganger
by Rachel Rabbit

I’m trying so hard to be Parker Posey
You say I’m Mariah Carey

Tom Gabel
by Rachel Rabbit

If we had ever met
In Gainesville
Before Fat Wreck
You’d laugh at me
Buying showtunes at the record store

That Movie I
by Rachel Rabbit

The Village scared the shit out of me for years
Even with that ending
The rapist in Twin Peaks—I think about him when I am home alone
Don’t even get me started on I Am Legend
Because then I will start thinking about the dog and cry my fucking eyes out

The Fart Party
By Rachel Rabbit

Her comics are not really about fart parties
God you are so uninformed

American Apparel Dressing Room I
By Rachel Rabbit

I had a feeling your sizes ran small, based on
the gals in your ads

So I grabbed the hanger marked Large,
thinking strategically

Couldn’t get it over my hips, red-faced

Got all Kubler-Ross:
Shock
Denial
Anger
Bargaining…

Then saw the XXS tag at the waistband and
left without buying anything

From:

Ex Boyfriend I
by Rachel Rabbit

I found your Twitter
“Moving to Brooklyn tomorrow!”
(6 months ago)
Get the fuck out of my neighborhood

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”
more

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

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

Had been having some doubts about 2009 – felt like sort of an under-the-radar year for me. Enough doubts to make a list… and it turns out 2009 was pretty busy after all (and I know I’m only hitting a few of the highlights – what’d I miss?). Not to mention, AMR visitors have more than doubled since this time last year – so thanks to everyone for making this a thing [update: just checked, we actually sextupled, not doubled]. And I think we’re actually going into our 5th year!

1. moved twice (and with gf!)- now at literal foot of the Williamsburg bridge. logged over 70 miles walking to work before it got too cold, can’t wait to pick up again.

2. switched jobs, from editing english composition books to being a singularitarian for a literary house. am now working on some of my favorite authors’ books (which, has that ever happened in publishing? maybe twice?).*

3. recorded 23 AMR Podcasts with Rachel.

4. conducted 11 pretty exhaustive Friend of a Friend interviews.

5. wrote 5 articles (polemics) on plagiarism, copywrite, humanity, and the aspirational self: Rethinking Plagiarism: The Death of Text as Authorial Icon, pts. 1-3; Achieving Humanity: Theoretical Background; Civil Disobedience: J-B. Lamarck & the Aspirational Self

6. 6+ paintings, including: Skeleton, Magneto Tweets, Lucky the Cat (timelapse below), Fishman Jones, and my portrait of Rachel.

7. Mark Fullmer curated/birthed COURAGE: A Portrait of the Artist as a Man, which is too sweet to even talk about (and came with a Courage wiki!).

8. wrote a few songs I’m proud of (can listen to most of these at right, if not there: are in the AMR archives somewhere): Fierce Love (on Loud Guitars), So Okay So, Everything Fake is Real, Our Jurassic Holiday, Home Movie, Don’t Be Yourself. Also re-recorded Green.

9. wrote a few poems I liked enough to post: Finning Sharks on Garbage Island and Eco-Warrior at the Feminist Bookstore.

10. lost Bat to Miami at beginning of 2009 – getting Bat back in 2010. this time a real rock experience is inevitable.

11. celebrated Halloween in July, threw two housewarmings. these were strong parties – wish everyone reading could’ve been there.

12. my boner dollar was shanghaied and stickered all over Brooklyn and the LES. had fun tracking these – super weird to see something you did so cavalierly posted on every ATM in town.

13. was sketched alongside Moony (my favorite catahoula) by Michel Gondry.

14. co-published, but really just publicized, Tweet Tweet – the first ever Twitter-based poetry book.

15. was a comp-rhet cover boy for New Comm Ave.

16. contributed to AMUZE (L.E.S. zine) as much as possible – even got a chance to do the cover:

17. first real vacation since undergrad – Nantucket with Rachel’s family and Pounces the Cat. Caught some of the Nantucket film festival, read a book about dinosaurs. Touched a whale skeleton.

18. read both Infinite Jest and 2666 in the same month – year of the big books.

19. conquered year-long authorial dryspell (maybe linked to not having a computer in 2009) – psychically prepared for first full-length book

20. i had a garden in 2009. Did anyone know about that? Watering can and morning glories and window box and mini-trowels and everything.

Hope y’all all have strong 2010s!

xo

courage

*Hey, speaking of my new job – if you watch/share this I might have a better chance of keeping it.

While I was avoiding hungry vendor stares at the NYC Zine Fest last summer, Rachel – again – was being an admirable astronaut on spaceship earth and making awesome finds. Can’t remember the provenance of this poem either (outside of “from an egg”). If it’s from you, holla at your boy.

more

Rachel bought a cigarette shaped poem from a vending machine at NYC Zine Fest last summer. We can’t remember provenance outside of that since it’s been so long (if it’s you, let us know) – but it was worth the wait!

more