Thursday, February 5, 2009

This Week in Campus News: KU Info Gets a Human Face! / Plus, Los Campesinos! Recap and a Werewolf Update!

For many years, local stoners have had to rely on the disembodied voices of KU Info's phoneline to provide them with information they could easily access themselves if they weren't so fucking high. But now that's changed. A small booth along Jayhawk Boulevard, vacant since 1974, is now occupied by an assortment of volunteers who will do their best to make sure you can find various buildings on campus and the best local pizza deals and such.

Richard: "Oh, I love this shit. It's like visiting a wizard! You can find me out there most afternoons asking random questions."

Chip: "I'm going to ask them who is the sluttiest sorostitute on campus!"

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The boys are often too hip to actually attend various important hipster shows, but KC's Wayward Blog is fast becoming the go-to guide for concert reviews. Here is an excerpt from their Los Campesinos! experience:

"It was an all-ages show, but instead of watching the usual mass of high schoolers form a half-assed mosh pit, I spent the night dodging grown men who were jumping around and dancing."

Chip: "This is classic Larryville hipsterism right here. The youngsters are home studying and the aging hipsters are down at the bar."

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The acclaim for yesterday's third sentence of Richard's werewolf opus was so strong on Facebook that the LC now plans to present a new installment each Wednesday, until people grow bored or the cultural spotlight shifts to a new monster (in which case Richard will keep the story's foundation and just change the references).

Chip: "I hope Frankenstein-monsters become cool again. I like those."

Richard: "What I envision for my werewolf story is sort of a mix of Hardy Boys-innocence coupled with exreme Apatow-style raunch, and full of Updike-like bad sex scenes. Who's the audience, you ask? Who isn't?"

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

First a Kooser reference, now an Updike plug?! Man, I don't know if the folks at the Center for Disembodied Poetics are going to take too kindly to such plainspoken, linear poetry getting this much pub. Where's the Rae Armentrout and the Ron Silliman?!

Screw them. Here's Updike's "Fellatio":

Fellatio
It is beautiful to think
that each of these clean secretaries
at night, to please her lover, takes
a fountain into her mouth
and lets her insides, drenched in seed,
flower into landscapes:
meadows sprinkled with baby’s breath,
hoarse twiggy woods, birds dipping, a multitude
of skies containing clouds, plowed earth stinking
of its upturned humus, and small farms each
with a silver silo.

Pardon the unintended line breaks. I don't think Updike was a very good poet, but can you tell that Armentrout or Silliman are from reading their work? Not too clearly.

Anonymous said...

The boys like the plain-spoken poetry of the Everyman!

(and Richard now needs to add this poem to his Updike section later this semester!).

Anonymous said...

A whole SECTION on Updike? Perhaps you need to peruse my Collected Poems!

"The landscape of love
can only be seen
through a slim windowpane
one’s own breath fogs."

Indeed!

And it's always interesting to note how much "Ex-Basketball Player" resembles Rabbit (or vice versa).

Anonymous said...

Oh yeah, and if "A&P" doesn't capture the strangeness and desire that exists between teenagers, then no story ever will. What IS in those girls' heads...a bee buzzing in a jar?

Mmmm...scoops of vanilla ice cream...

Anonymous said...

Well, I'm really just teaching two weeks of Rabbit is Rich in the 203 (but we'll try to make room for a dirty poem or two). And I teach "A & P" in the 101's and 102's (even though actual "readings" are uncool these days in writing courses).

Anonymous said...

"In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits." I'm hooked, Johnny!

"...what got me, the straps were down. They were off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms, and I guess as a result the suit had slipped a little on her, so all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim. If it hadn't been there you wouldn't have known there could have been anything whiter than those shoulders. With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.

She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face. Walking into the A & P with your straps down, I suppose it's the only kind of face you can have. She held her head so high her neck, coming up out o fthose white shoulders, looked kind of stretched, but I didn't mind. The longer her neck was, the more of her there was...

Now her hands are empty, not a ring or a bracelet, bare as God made them, and I wonder where the money's coming from. Still with that prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand...

...I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm "

Brilliant. And, of course, the end (abridged)...

"I look around for my girls, but they're gone, of course...and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter."

Hard indeed!

Anonymous said...

"Oh Daddy," Stokesie said beside me. "I feel so faint."