It was a pretty awesome evening.
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Just got my contributor copies of American Literary Review, and it looks great and, I say this too often, has a great line-up of folks. They didn't update their website yet, but not only are future first book interviewees Jericho Brown and the omnipresent Seth Abramson in the issue, there's also Dana Curtis, Rachel Dilworth, Patrick Carrington, B.H. Fairchild, Richard Lyons, Jennifer Percy, David Wagoner, and Charles Wyatt, among others.
When I first got to VCU and was learning how to submit and buying subscriptions to magazines and journals, American Literary Review was one that blew me away. I thought it would take me many many submissions to get in, and somehow miraculously, it didn't. It's also one of my favorite poems of mine, so that makes it even better when the contributor copies arrive with such poems.*
A few days ago there was a chicken-scratched makeshift letter attached to the door of our apartment building. Jess and I have been making fun of it since then. When I went down to get the mail, I found someone had thrown it away, and it's too good not to share here:
Hi—
I live in Kensington Court (the big building across Shepherd) and a friend of mine is mailing me a very important package. However, she got my address wrong and put 3000 — — instead of 2900. She needs me to feed her birds so they don't starve to death while she is gone, so it's very important that I receive this package. My number is — — —. Please text me or call me and let me know when you get it. I will be at work for the rest of the day, but I will get back to you if you contact me. I get off work at 11:15 pm. This very urgent. Please help! Thank you!
Happy Thanksgiving!
— —
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Seriously? What the hell are those birds eating? Saffron and gold only from gold panning?
Anyway, I would've been nice enough to go ahead and text the guy or call him, but unless someone else did it in the building — and I think almost everyone's gone for the holidays — the package never arrived.
A day after it was still duct-taped to the door, someone put WTF? on the bottom in black magic marker.
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After years of wanting to watch the Stanley Kubrick documentary A Life in the Pictures that's always included in the now-always-revised-and-more-expensive-version of the box set, I finally got around to it, and at the very least it makes me want to write.
Kubrick was the opposite of the perpetually seemingly cocaine-snorting and if-not-filming-always-editing Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Though they're both legitimately heralded directors, I think it was interesting that Kubrick always wanted to be faster than he was. I think the cinema's better for how painstaking and beautiful his movies are, but I can see where he's coming from. And he seemed like a pretty warm and caring guy amidst the bearded exterior, always trying to get the most of his actors while always saying some pretty brilliant things. The kind of guy that seemed to make everyone smarter around him because of his work ethic and always striving to learn more and create better and more lasting images and films.
It's around two and a half hours, but it didn't feel like it at all, and I'd suggest seeing it, even if you're not a Kubrick fan, though I don't understand people who would say they are not.
