Swarm

THE SWARM exists here and only here and spreads forthwith. New material and things of note, for instance, and other tiny swarming mammals after darkness, they cluster together for warmth.

This column of text is a monument to the possibilities of the digital page, or what we consider a page, even having named these html constructions after our very own printed page. Is the web page a page in any sense of the world? It contains, it constrains, it contends that it can continue to expand. Not a leaf, it is a part, a stage, an elevator shaft descending into nothingness.

The items on the right are recent things I have been excited about but that have not yet fit into anything larger or more permanent (could anything be more permanent and archival quality than this?). Books and publications lag far behind my interest in writing them and reading them and putting out them to be spidered by you and the ginger fingers of whatever is passing over this space every second, capturing data and pushing it into packets for redistribution and indexing on search engines. Isn't that a beautiful thing, to think that we are all being recorded and as such elegized continually?

You find a box. It is partly open. The contents are as follows. What do you do? (Newest material at the top...)

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Mix 2022

150 Random Things About Me Too

Essay Daily Advent Calendar 2020: On Living in the Delay

Essay Daily Advent Calendar 2018: On Selah Saterstrom

Essay Daily Advent Calendar 2017: On Paying Attention

"Pecha Kucha for Poems in a Language I Do Not Know, Interrupted by Whitesnake" [video]

"The Gnome" [story]

"Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator vs Predator" [essay]

"It Is Hard Not to Love the Starvationist's Assistant" [story]

"The Sadnesses of March" [essay]

"The Exhibit Will Be So Marked" [essay]

"The Internet is a Cat Video Library" [essay]

"For ELF" [poem-video w/ Nayda Collazo-Llorens]

"For Orts" [poem-video]

"Predator v. Predator Masters" [poem-video]

"Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies" [poem-video]

"Composed on a Cellphone While Driving" [poem]

"Short Lessons in Hybridity: on Lia Purpura, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Boully, and Thalia Field" (essay, over at Essay Daily)

"American Renaissance: on the American Renaissance Faire" (essay, at the LA Review of Books)

"In Hennepin" (essay, on the Bending Genre blog)

"Dear Tom Chiarella" (essay, in Wag's Revue)

"On Shortness" (essay, in Essay Daily)

"The Fold" (essay, in Menagerie)

"A Fat Man Story: on HL Mencken's 'A Forgotten Anniversary'" (essay, in Essay Daily)

"Hide and Seek" (video essay, a reworking of an essay forthcoming in Columbia; the video essay itself is forthcoming in Ninth Letter)

"Dear Unsighted" (essay, in West Branch Wired)

"July Letter" (essay, in West Branch Wired)

"If Winter is Ours (on Adam Gopnik)" (essay, in Essay Daily)

"See You Next Week" (essay, in Triquarterly)

"How to Read a Book" (essay, in Triquarterly)

"On Cybele Knowles and Yngwie Malmsteen" (essay, in Essay Daily)

"Letter to a Future Lover [Handwritten]" (essay, in Brevity)

Advent Calendar 2011 (disappeared, sadly, since the chocolates were eaten)

Take Me to the River/Don't Worry, Be Happy (video)

Epic Index: Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse

"New Approaches to Infinities" (talk given at AWP 2011)

"The Woodchipper" (talk given at AWP 2011)

"Let Us Speak of the Essay" (talk given at NonfictioNow 2010)

Essay revisioning of the video variety, "I Have Been Thinking About Snow" (Close to the Edit)

Story, "Believing in the Future with the Torturer's Apprentice" (from the Huffington Post)

Essay, "Long Live the Jart, Heavy and Pointed and Gleaming" (from Defunct)

Videos for poems from The Available World:

Point of Vanishing: Intermediary (updated 07/21/09; shit, dog, that's a long time ago, yo)

Essay, "Ode to a Bad Ass Disc Golf Course" (from the Oxford American)

Essay, "If I Had a Heart I'd Die in It: Writing the Writing the Midwest"

On this circuitry.

A fragment.

The Designed Essay (Design as Essay), a pdf version of a talk I gave at the NonfictioNow conference at the University of Iowa in 2007.

Short Burst on Ames, Iowa

On Patricia Clark

"Breakfast at Tiffany's" a cappella which is entirely worth watching and writing about. I am writing about it.

Essay as Hack

 

 

 It is no accident that this space recalls the insect life, the ways insects organize their thinking, such as it is, and approach a problem. It takes many different directions, a lot of dead ends to end up somewhere that isn't dead, all humus and humument, where something new can grow.