jobless bitch magazine
10:54 AM
11/28/2006
About Me
- Name: Tao Lin
- Location: Brooklyn, United States
author of a poetry-collection, COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (melville house, 2008), a novel, EEEEE EEE EEEE (melville house, 2007), a story-collection, BED (melville house, 2007), and a poetry collection, YOU ARE A LITTLE BIT HAPPIER THAN I AM (action books, 2006)
people
- ellen kennedy
- noah cicero
- kristen iskandrian
- gene morgan
- ofelia hunt
- chris killen
- brandon scott gorrell
- mazie louise montgomery
- tracy brannstrom
- blake butler
- colin bassett
- jillian clark
- zachary german
tao lin books
- cognitive-behavioral therapy (2008, melville house)
- eeeee eee eeee (2007, melville house)
- bed (2007, melville house)
- you are a little bit happier than i am (2006, action books)
tao lin's 'e-books'
- hikikomori with ellen kennedy (2007, bear parade)
- today the sky is blue and white with bright blue spots and a small pale moon and i will destroy our relationship today (2006, bear parade)
- this emotion was a little e-book (2006, bear parade)
other things
tao lin literature
- essay about seattle
- we will drink our coffee
- gay stepdad
- a bored ant
- professional sasquatch
- american apparel
- emo poetry
- robot poetry
- existentially fucked
- tao lin
- essay on short stories
- sex story
- exactly what i want
- social anxiety story
- mall story
- grapes story
- child beating story
- job story
- bear poem
- february
- unemployed
- october
- friday
- whale poem
interviews
- chelsey minnis
- mazie louise montgomery
- michael earl craig
- richard grayson
- deb olin unferth
- matthew rohrer
- noah cicero
- rebecca curtis
- lisa gabriele
- todd hasak-lowy
Previous Posts
- while shitting out okra i ate last night
- what happened when i went to lara glenum's class
- i reviewed the condemned by noah cicero
- literary-agent killing poem
- review in the underground literary alliance review...
- review in time out chicago
- the very retarded giant moth
- repressed killing-rampage poem on juked
- bed & eeeee eee eeee
- tao lin doesn't exist therefore you should buy tao...
26 Comments:
i haven't posted here before but this seems like a good enough occasion.
probably the best consolation ever:
I wrote a poem about dead people, I wrote a poem about my friend getting struck by lightning, I wrote a poem about my brother dying, but tonight to mix things up I’ll write about something cute, something cuddly, and when you finish reading it you’ll say ‘Aww’ and have some hot chocolate and call your grandmother just to say hello
kittens
i don't know, that doesn't console me
it made me feel like i was getting papercut by a hallmark card
kitten hater
i just wanted to write a poem where the only word was kittens.
not to paper-cut you.
"this is part five of a poem about my cat sparksy whose human name is mark and who upon becoming human one day realizes he is fucked and then does some things"
mark is pretty sure his ankle is cancerous. it is tumor-like that much is true. mark is pleased with himself. television too is pleased with mark. god is indifferent. mark does cat things in his human body. his fingernails are dirty with cat litter clumps beneath their off white tips. it smells awful in mark's apartment. mark purrs. he is content because he just shit. mark has been studying campaign ads on television. he is 72% sure he will run for senate. mark is unaware of the requirements. 'fuck,' mark thinks 'will be my campaign slogan'. mark will have buttons made that say 'fuck' and he will get the youth vote. and he will get the minority vote. and he will get the working class vote. and he will probably get the rest of the votes too. 'fuck applies to us all' mark thinks. god mails him a PhD upon hearing this thought. it is honorary of course. mark still has whiskers. he decides to shave these to be more moderate looking for his campaign image. he clips the right side and immediately falls. 'fuck equilibrium' mark thinks. his honorary degree is teaching him more complex words. mark's cancer is metastasizing. this will win him the sympathy vote. mark purrs louder and with more conviction.
i would submit to jobless bitch, but i don't like any of my poems or other people's poems.
every poem i have ever read doesn't capture how i feel at target or what it's like to get my oil changed.
bear parade still stands at a 0% acceptance rate.
i reject everyone because rejecting is a labor of love.
my life is so overloaded and people should respect me more because i know rudimentary web design and got bored.
i just spent forty-five minutes walking around target, and didn't buy anything. the vacuum cleaner i wanted costs too much.
i deleted this from the post now:
let me type something about literary magazines
if you click on the submission policies for magazines, this one for example, it almost always seems like they don't like you, they never wanted to start a magazine, and it's a burden and also a great public service to have started a magazine
people always talk about the 'payoff,' how it's a 'labor of love,' things like that, always emphasizing that they are 'taking their own time' out of their already 'overloaded' lives to 'provide a forum for writers,' though of course they also 'love what they do'
some people, not all people
if you do something on your own volition either do it and don't complain or stop doing it; if you hear yourself complaining you should stop doing it, in order to match your actions to your words
literary magazines should enjoy taking submissions from writers who submit without using the correct font, the correct file type, or whatever
the phrase 'labor of love' should never be used
if you are in love with someone you don't say, 'yeah, this relationship is a labor of love'
the third rule of literary magazines by tao lin is that you should never start a literary magazine if you are doing it to gain power, prestige, influence, or to provide a forum for 'excluded voices' in order to 'show people what's good' or something
if you want to do those things you should start a corporation, not start a literary magazine
never mind, that doesn't even make sense
complaining is good; if something is causing pain and destruction in the world or just doesn't make sense complaining about it is good, i think that's all i do in life, not that that's the reason why it's good
never mind
thank you for going to the tao lin school of literary magazines
this doesn't have anything to do with jobless bitch, just something i think about a lot
The last time I was at Target, an elderly gentleman put his bags in the wrong car.
He and I realized the error at the same time. He tried to open the backseat door, to get his stuff out, but the handle was stuck again. My car is a piece of shit.
"You sure you don't want to trade with me?" I said. "She gets good gas mileage." He shook his head and pointed to his stuff, then mumbled something I didn't understand.
"Fine, then. Take your shit and go." The stubborn door refused to budge. "Jesus, can't you do anything right? Move."
He stepped aside and I opened the door and then I threaded my bird finger through the plastic loops. Together his bags didn't weigh much. I didn't have any bags because I'd shoplifted.
"O.K. Where are you parked?"
He looked around, unsure.
In his hand was an ignition key with a Ford emblem on it. "Is that it?" I asked, pointing to a Taurus. He looked like he would drive a Taurus. Actually it might not have been a Taurus; it might have been a different make. Or a different model. It could have been a Chevy, but Chevy doesn't make Tauruses. They manufacture the IMPALA.
Suddenly the old man remembered and I followed him to his car. His wife had fallen asleep behind the wheel. He pressed a little box and the car made a sharp beep that woke her up. I got the impression he'd done it before, startled her like that, because of the way he laughed when it happened. He opened the door and his wife said, "He can put them in the trunk," which annoyed me because she obviously thought I was a bagboy or something, even though in the end I put them in the trunk like she requested.
"Lots of beautiful naked men," said Jen with her pen.
...I think your main-page here is pretty impossible to read right now. Not only is it very wide, at least on my screen, but with the new realistic background, I can't see what words are links. Maybe you should put back the yellow rabbit wallpaper or the blue hamster one--can't remember which was which, they were up for such a short time.
Now I must get off this computer and have toast and make vegetable soup with farfalline.
FRAN
jobless bitch is the first magazine that doesn't make me think 'asshole' after reading the first two lines of every poem.
RICHARD YATES
TAO
TAOLESS TAO
TIPTOEING THROUGH THE TULIPS TAO
Why do you and your pals keep screaming my name IN ALL CAPS? Is this a secret code? Or a blogorgasm? I ignored it the last time, but it is a bit weird!
I ate toast today. With butter. Left the house with breadcrumbs in my beard and wished they were seeds as I continuously scratched my face and watched them fall. So that future thinkers could stare at the same piece of toast I stared at today, thinking about the non-existence of toast.
PHILIP ROTH
AMY TAN
There are dogs who don't roll in feces. There are humans who
don't eat meat. There are dogs who don't piss on the floor;
there are humans who don't transmit venereal disease. There
are dogs who don't bite me; there are humans who wash, daily;
there are dogs who lick fur carefully clean. I like those dogs.
A submission to Jobless Bitch:
Matthew, Chapter 4
by Matthew
5 Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple,
6 And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.
7 Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
What do you think about used baby items?
i'm not sure why i am doing this. i am all alone in a very large blue house with no dinner in my stomach and, speaking from past experience, this usually ends in total depression where i hide under the covers for at least 12 hours. if i lean a little over to the right and look through the doorway, i can see the woman on the front steps across the street. sometimes she sits there very still and sad looking, as though she has had a knife stabbed into her back and has not yet keeled over from blood loss. right now she is moving potted plants and throw rugs from inside her house to the front yard. she does not really have a front yard, but who am i to talk because i don't either. mine is more of a patch of dirt with sporadic sprouts of green and a white picket fence. the white picket fence has the word 'fuck' spraypainted on it. there is only one house on the whole block with a driveway. i think those people live in luxury.
right now i wish i was in the sixth grade on ICQ chat with all my internet boyfriends at once. in my away message i would put some sexy lyrics by christina aguilera or someone who was sexy at that time. a lot of my time in the sixth grade was spent trying out make-up and new types of underwear. sometimes i would go to the mall with my friends and buy jones soda at the bootlegger store and we would all look at the pictures on our bottles and try to imitate them. when that failed, we would read what it said under the cap and try to analyze it with our philosophical sixth grade points of view.
the woman across the street has now hired six large sweating men to move her belongings for her. i am thinking she will go the five blocks to the pawn shop and see what she can get for her many collected engagement rings and portable fans with the oscillate function broken. she seems to have several sports cars from the early-to-mid 90's that she doesn't want to sell. i bet each one of them tells a story and she holds too much value in sentimentality so she can't give them away. i want to put a sign on my front lawn/dirt patch that says "will work for car" and then maybe dress up as a large sweating man so that she will give me her car in exchange for my masculine strengths.
last night i decided i want to hold the same body for all time until i am at least 75 years old. the body agreed with me. i smiled. he smiled. i think our agreement went over quite well. i did not tell him about how sometimes i search google for free image generations of what our children will look like. the reason i didn't do this is because sometimes i am afraid by my own actions, and that is one of them. i think if my love life was ever documented in a film that avril lavigne would be playing in the background.
i take acid and go on monkey bars
It is a perfect night in June and I am laughing hehehe all the way to the playground at my old school. I have dropped some acid. It is a bad idea to do this alone. I am bad, bad, bad.
I climb up on the monkey bars. All the paint has worn off the bars so they are real smooth, and I swing, swing, swing. I hang upside down by my legs. I think that right now would be a good time for a box of Crunchberries.
This is my old school and I belong here. I have many memories of this school. One time I split my head open on these monkey bars. The blood scared me and I felt like a hero. Oh boy I am rushing. I had better get down now.
My body is transforming into rainbow light. I will float away and visit some planets. Just stay in school, kids. You will thank me later.
headsfromspace at gmail dot com
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I get up and head to the bathroom. I sit down on the toilet, grab the magazine at my feet, skip to the same page with the information on giving women a better orgasm and slowly let my body relax. I get impacient so I push and hurry up. Things arent working out, so it takes me about 7 minutes to completely wipe my ass. That gives me plenty of enough time to re read how to give my girlfriend a better orgasm.
I should probably get a new magazine. I think my girlfriend knows my moves now. There’s always a moment right before I do “the move” (I like to give my sexual moves names, it’s easier to remember them that way. The best one is called “The move”. There are others like “Airplane parachute dive” and “Bass fishing”) that I think, it will be perfect this time. Then I usually look up towards her and see her let out a perfect little sigh, a disappointed type of sigh, but one which never includes any sort of dialogue directed towards me so I pass it off as nothing and do “the move”. According to this magazine, you insert one finger into the vagina, and slowly push it in and out, while rubbing your thumb against her clit. Then, after the first moan, or the second, I forget, you add another finger. It seems simple at first. Then it gets tricky. They never make the pictures in the magazines life like. That pisses me off. I bet there are millions of other guys like me with the same problem, sitting in the middle of the bathroom floor on their knees, looking up towards the sky yelling “WHY??!?!” . Sometimes I Like to do that to amuse myself. I should be an actor. My mom always tells me I should. Anyways, you add the other finger, and then another after she lifts her left leg once. Then, once this happens, you move in and start to lick in circular motions around her clit. 3 oclock!, 6 oclock! 9 Oclock! 12 Oclock!!!! Yes, just keep going like that and you make her come. Usually. Sometimes I like to imagine I’m a coal miner, or a deep sea diver checking the pressure underwater, or working on some some new technology that will help the internet run faster. Something like that
The politics of friendship have a unique talent for symmetry but love improvises a theme tune when it walks through the door.
When Callous gets drunk its like the edges of his thought bunch up and peel away. They’re a duvet pulled gently from the bed to tease something naked. The sensations follow the caress of disappearance until there’s a space opened in expectance leaving a body of pleasure or body of affect (but for him it’s a dead body) that goes about making a case for its cause. So something cold emerges even as the mind watches pleasure advance beyond it towards life. The coldness isn’t present or remote, actually that’s wrong, it crackles like ice clutching to a tree, racing up life. Everything he can’t help but do takes aim at his sober miseries and he doesn’t miss himself once.
‘Stop searching for drugs’
‘I’m not I’m tidying up’
He’s in tears because they hung Saddam Hussein. Gender also cries when he thinks about Hitler and mostly the tears come when he imagines him in a bunker committing suicide. He says no one should have to do that or feel like that whatever they’ve done. He gets up and turns some euro disco on. To him it’s the epitome of perfection because it realises how pointless it is and embodies that lifelessness totally. He loves it and his love of it safeguards his taste from turning to art. He knows it means nothing but its own vacuous rim but there’s no hysteria to it. If anyone ever said that hysteria characterised western life then that person was right. So although there’s no point you can understand. So the music goes.
‘They ruined a planet. Had to leave. They were alone for thousands of years so they got frisky. What I’m saying is some bored aliens fucked a monkey, their genes are coming to the fore in us as we evolve. Now we’re repeating their same mistakes as we get more alien. This has been going on since time immemorial… FACT’
The corners a place where a slump gets upheld and lets a body slouch into its own death slash pose or death-slash-pose. Fiasco boozes there locked in an angle he’s narrowed to his frame. It holds his terror and his rage and puts a feedbag to his love in the form of a glass. In his brain a girls legs lead to heaven. He’s stopped here when he’d like to be lost up there. He deserves a god that he’ll love sincerely and love sincerely to defy because then there’ll still be something above his head putting him here. Right now he feels like life’s got nothing to rise through.
‘Tell me something nice about yourself’
‘I can only miss people when I feel good’
‘Is that nice?’
‘I’m hoping its something close’
That’s how this scene holds them, relating but distant in all the sadness that parallels communicate.
"High-Beams" by D.J.
"Don't look at me that way," she scowled, twirling that golden-brown hair of hers like she always does when she gets anxious.
"What way?" I said, trying to be coy.
She proceeded to let out a deep breath. I could see it escape her chapped lips in a cloud of fog that hung over the both of us.
I swung my leg mechanically from the bench, kicking pebbles into a cone-shaped pile, like Mt. Visuvius ready to explode.
"Stop fucking around. This is important, ya' know?"
"I know, I know. I'm sorry. I've just never been this.." trailing off as I pulled my hair straight up in the air.
"Yeah."
"Right."
My stomach started rumbling. For some reason it always did this at the most inconvenient of times. During math tests in junior high: check. While getting my teeth cleaned: check. Shit, on second thought, getting my gums scraped sounded pretty good by comparison.
"Listen, I think I'm getting kinda hungry," I said, in an attempt to change the subject. "What do you think of General Tso's?"
I got one of those classic double takes. One that she probably learned, like most things, by watching television.
"Are you fucking serious right now?"
"You know, I've always wondered how they could name a dish after such a ruthless man," I countered. "It's like having a Ted Bundy Salad."
She sighed, tilting her head gently to the left. I think she did it to hide a smile. I WON.
A car startled us as it sped down the road. It had one of those lame exhausts with the hole in it, popping a giant "HMMMMMM" over our night. It's high-beams exposed us, divided where we sat.
i am writing this poem to show how bored i am
read it
look at it
it is a perfect example of today’s America
i just said today’s America
nobody is poor
nobody is starving
i kill everyone i see
because i really believe
in overpopulation
in reducing pain and suffering
overpopulation contributes a great amount
when i kill people i am alleviating overpopulation and reducing long term pain and suffering
i don’t eat meat
i kill people
i punch everyone i see in the face
if that doesn’t kill them
i tell them that i will never be their friend
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