Though the mailman brought this, it does not appear to be either a bill or an advertisement. There are words scrawled all over it, and there is a cryptic inscription at the bottom: JOB. It’s as if someone took an email and printed it, by hand, on a piece of paper, and then shipped that piece of paper to me.

“My Church, my boys, my girls, my porn.”

Augustine’s Member can rest in peace.

“The band’s gonna make it.”

“Play Me” – the first single from the musical collective Good Country People.

Vocals: Mary Ann Carr

Backup vocals: Betty Duffy

Music: Bill Wilson

Words: Matthew Lickona

Amazon
Spread the word. You know – if you like it.

So far, the group has published a book of poetry called House of Words by Jonathan Potter, a novel called Birds Nest in Your Hair by Brian Jobe, and Surfing with Mel. Also in the Korrektiv pipeline [is] the story of the Great Seattle Fire told in Pushkin sonnets and a collection of short stories based on ancillary characters in the works of Walker Percy.”

- “Mel Gibson Becomes a Character in ‘Korrektiv’ Catholic Fiction,” by Cyril Jones-Kellett, The Southern Cross [diocesan newspaper for San Diego], April, 2013.

And can we all please give a round of applause to sitemistress extraordinaire Dorian Speed of Up to Speed, who took time out of her ridiculously busy schedule to embiggen our Mitsui avatars? Thanks.

More soon! How are everybody’s projects? Gaga Confidential slouches toward publication. The sketches should be good.

…that is a VW microbus welded on top of a psychedelic school bus. Why do you ask?

The Wife: “Put that on The Korrektiv. It will make people smile.”

A sort of reverse baptism?

Wiseblood Books!

Excerpt over at The Millions.

Courtesy of Longreads.com, a story in People magazine (!) on Nabokov at the Montreaux Palace Hotel. The ’70s were different.

[Photo source]

Gotterdammerung: 1 shot tequila, 2 shots orange juice, 3/4 shot maraschino cherry juice.

A tequila sunrise has Grenadine. This is more of a tequila twilight. OF THE GODS.

As if in anticipation of the Korrektiv’s journey to New Orleans, The AV Club’s recently departed film editor Scott Tobias offers a kind assessment of The Moviegoer‘s icon of certification.

…you really do start to hate Potter for being such a skinny so and so.

Never mind, here’s a poem.

Robert Frost

Rhymed at any cost

To avoid the letdown

Of tennis with net down.

]]> http://korrektivpress.com/2013/04/its-true-what-they-say-about-approaching-forty-years-of-age/feed/ 1 http://korrektivpress.com/2013/04/sirach-at-70/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sirach-at-70 http://korrektivpress.com/2013/04/sirach-at-70/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:01:38 +0000 Matthew Lickona http://korrektivpress.com/?p=24194 Sirach finished his 70th year
And found he found it hard to hear
The toasts that all his loved ones gave -
But swore they all mentioned the grave.
The sons that he had helped to raise
The daughters he had heaped with praise
“Their voices blend and dully mumble
But I am sure I caught a grumble:
‘It’s true that he has blessed us greatly
But exactly what has he done for us lately?’
My wife, the apple of my eye
Seems to wish I’d up and die
The eyes that said that she adored me
Now make me feel a bull has gored me.”
Sirach looked around the room
And felt a growing sense of gloom.
“This family that I helped create
Seems to find it hard to wait
To put me six feet underground
Or somewhere else I won’t be found
What can I do? Have I a choice?”
Just then, he heard a still, small voice
A Holy Spirit that inspired him
To write before the family fired him.
“This trick? I call it Old Reliable
Put this in the family Biable:
‘Take care of your father when he is old
Don’t bump him off and grab his gold
If he spills his soup, do not revile him
If he seems cranky, do not rile him
With hateful words do not assail him
Even if his mind should fail him.’”
Like Sirach, my old man is wise
So it should come as no surprise
When my Dad opened up the Word
Sirach was the book we heard.

So moved was he by her angel face

He bought his condoms by the case

But though his love was never spent

He had to give a thought to rent

His ardor burned beyond all measure

His only joy – to give her pleasure

But lest his fund for love should fail

He got his Jimmy hats on sale

Where Pee Wee sits upon the wall to preach.

And yes, I am pleased as rum punch that we’ve broken 150 Facebook fans.

]]> http://korrektivpress.com/2013/04/oddfellows-local-151/feed/ 5 http://korrektivpress.com/2013/04/24156/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=24156 http://korrektivpress.com/2013/04/24156/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:45:15 +0000 Matthew Lickona http://korrektivpress.com/?p=24156 So The New Yorker has a story online about that Amina Tyler, the topless Tunisian teenage feminist Facebook activist. [Toplessness follows after the jump.]

Because Ms. Tyler’s feminist protest involved the posting of topless photos to Facebook, The New Yorker helpfully included the photo in question. But here’s the funny thing: they blurred out both the woman’s breasts and the word “fuck.”

Why is this funny? Because they don’t actually have a problem with the word “fuck,” and because they don’t have a problem with exposed nipples, at least not when Richard Avedon does the camera work:

Weird, right?

Tony: We lost the blogosphere. It was vibrant and rich and ever changing and filled with interesting design and BlogAds and PayPal and Amazon wishlists. That’s pretty much gone. Today it feels like jazz in the ’80s compared to jazz in the ’50s. Those who are doing it know that this isn’t the time to be doing it. But either they can’t stop or they’re doing it for the right reasons. That’s the good thing, if you’re blogging in 2013 you’re probably doing it out of love—certainly not for audience or money. So that’s good.

“Certainly not for audience or money.” Well, we’ve got that part down.

Source.

So hie thee hence on over to Kickstarter and make this happen, people.

I mean, given that tagline under his avatar, this has gotta be him, right?

Flannery O’Connor’s hen

Was trained in ways that I am not

She’d walk the line and back again

Whilst I just slip or hold my spot.

Now Deirdre Katherine, once called Scholl

Has chickens five, with backsides bare

And my frequent slips of mind and soul

Leave me as exposed back there

But Flannery and Deirdre, too

Found grace and truth in frightening things

O’Connor in the things freaks do

And Deirdre in our wedding rings

So they drop eggs and I raise wine

For our divine apothecary

She covers both their ass and mine

Southern California gothic – scary.

Somewhere between that Grape Nehi and that glass of Jack Daniels, Walker Percy managed to write five novels, several volumes of nonfiction, and a mess of other stuff. You all should be able to manage a paper proposal in the next week. Rally, Korrektiv, rally!

Pity he never met Walker Percy, ex-suicide.

“There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants. He is the type that gives rise to the jokes in the funny papers.

The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. He may bubble with wit, or expand with good fellowship. Or he may see intellectual spectres and phantoms that are cosmic and logical and that take the forms of syllogisms. It is when in this condition that he strips away the husks of life’s healthiest illusions and gravely considers the iron collar of necessity welded about the neck of his soul. This is the hour of John Barleycorn’s subtlest power. It is easy for any man to roll in the gutter. But it is a terrible ordeal for a man to stand upright on his two legs unswaying, and decide that in all the universe he finds for himself but one freedom—namely, the anticipating of the day of his death. With this man this is the hour of the white logic (of which more anon), when he knows that he may know only the laws of things—the meaning of things never. This is his danger hour. His feet are taking hold of the pathway that leads down into the grave.

All is clear to him. All these baffling head-reaches after immortality are but the panics of souls frightened by the fear of death, and cursed with the thrice-cursed gift of imagination. They have not the instinct for death; they lack the will to die when the time to die is at hand. They trick themselves into believing they will outwit the game and win to a future, leaving the other animals to the darkness of the grave or the annihilating heats of the crematory. But he, this man in the hour of his white logic, knows that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not even that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls—immortality. But he knows, HE knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He is compounded of meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world-dust, a frail mechanism made to run for a span, to be tinkered at by doctors of divinity and doctors of physic, and to be flung into the scrap-heap at the end.

Of course, all this is soul-sickness, life-sickness. It is the penalty the imaginative man must pay for his friendship with John Barleycorn. The penalty paid by the stupid man is simpler, easier. He drinks himself into sottish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, children, friends—in the clear, white light of his logic they are exposed as frauds and shams. He sees through them, and all that he sees is their frailty, their meagreness, their sordidness, their pitifulness. No longer do they fool him. They are miserable little egotisms, like all the other little humans, fluttering their May-fly life-dance of an hour. They are without freedom. They are puppets of chance. So is he. He realises that. But there is one difference. He sees; he knows. And he knows his one freedom: he may anticipate the day of his death. All of which is not good for a man who is made to live and love and be loved. Yet suicide, quick or slow, a sudden spill or a gradual oozing away through the years, is the price John Barleycorn exacts. No friend of his ever escapes making the just, due payment.”