Esther Press

"Moping around" should not be confused with Major Depression (see DSM-IV) or Dysthymia (see DSM-IV). It's rather like calling a person with cancer "a bit under the weather".

NY READINGS

APRIL 29 (SATURDAY), 2 PM, Elena Rivera, Selah Saterstrom, Jonathan Skinner, Jane Sprague, and James Wagner at The Four-faced Liar, 165 West 4th St. [Between 6th & 7th Ave.] Tarpaulin Sky Reading Series.

APRIL 29 (SATURDAY), 7 PM, James Wagner at Pete's Candy Store, 709 Lorimer Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

APRIL 30 (SUNDAY), 7 PM, Jen Tynes and James Wagner at Zinc Bar, 90 West Houston Street (corner of La Guardia Place), Greenwich Village. Lungfull Reading Series.

A friend of mine, Jacqueline Lalley, has an essay in the collection, Secrets & Confidences: The Complicated Truth About Women's Friendships. She's had work in various places, including Bitch Magazine, The Harvard Review, and The Onion. She's a very engaged, perceptive, intelligent, and humorous writer.

Cal Ling is a local Chico artist, but her work is all over the country, in private collections and institutions. Here's her website, Cal Ling Paperworks.

So often what one gets is a writer who likes his/her imagined idea, his/her theoretical impulse, in a fit of vanity or class-expected understanding or ... so that rather than a movement toward an outward, what one gets is his/her reflected optimism and/or arrogance, because the writer sees his/her own idea as unique, culturally situated, feminist/masculinist, alive/dead, et cetera. We see this psychology pushed out at us, the readers, much more obviously than the idea/s within it/them. It is generally assured, in a fit of palsied magic, that these items equal truth, equal "progressive", equal cosmos, equal whatever vain psychological persona that the writer, him/her-self, likes to fit him/her-self within. It's that old standard dance of ego unaware of the eclipsing shadows of otherhoods. These otherhoods interest me slightly more than the authorially-intended/authorially-focused face.


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Recently received:


6X6, Issue 11, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006

Perspective Would Have Us, Erica Carpenter, Burning Deck, 2006

Denver Quarterly, Volume 40, Number 3, University of Denver, 2006

WI



I bet you like cheese do you wear a cheese head is that where you go with the farmers into the cheese hill and can you believe all the cheese. I went into Wisconsin once and we came to a kind of cheese hut and we just laughed because where else would one ever and so we got some of the string cheese which is quite good but we laughed at those goodhearted midwesterners though they are fat and so common and we even tried the brick which becomes or is limburger cheese. Cheese curds too someone got at some point and we bit into them and they squeaked which is so like midwesterners to do so often because it snows there and did I ask if you like cheese then because you’re from Wisconsin. Do you like hard or soft cheese or doesn’t it matter to you? I mean what’s there to do there? You must hunt and eat cheese and think about cheese being made as you shovel the snow. Are you a Packers fan then, because you said you’re from Wisconsin, you know because the snow and hunters and the Packers oh and you probably like cheese don’t you being from Wisconsin? Do you like cheese from Wisconsin? Or do you like New York cheeses too, or Vermont’s, or Oregon’s, or California’s? I was once in Wisconsin and we couldn’t believe how fat everyone was—do you just eat cheese all the time! There are even things we saw that are only made of cheese, like we saw a reindeer made of cheese once and we thought oh how wonderfully midwestern it was because of the Catholics and the snowmobilers and the just friendly people there though who are fat. Do you like beer you must like beer because Milwaukee and the snow it’s so cold there with the cheese vats and the hats with the holes in them like swiss that one sees on the television.

As of March 2006, number of U.S. troops in Iraq: 132,000
Number of U.S. military killed: 2,321
Number of U.S. military wounded: 17,269

Reported Iraqi civilian deaths: 33,814 to 37,936

[from Global Security dot Org] As of July 1, 2005, there were 26 non-U.S. military forces participating in the coalition and contributing to the ongoing stability operations throughout Iraq. These countries were: Albania, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mongolia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, United Kingdom, and Ukraine.

As of December 2005, Bulgaria and Ukraine have removed their troops, bringing the "Coalition of the willing" to 24 members. Italy has announced plans of removing itself fully in 2006

Percentage of U.S. and British military as total "coalition" military presence in Iraq: 98%