GUYS dark energy.

Just look how much of it there is. It looks like a dark Pac-Man ready to eat "intergalactic gas" and "stars, etc" and probably dark matter too if dark matter doesn't have a really swell defense mechanism.

new information for the old-at-heart.

Recently, I took a trip to gorgeous Los Angeles for a reading put together by Gina at Birds of Lace, in celebration of the new book The Birdwisher by Anna Joy Springer. This book is beautiful -- you should see it (you can see it on the left)! It's an illustrated novella "about a girl, a pigeon-detective and a murderous mystery." Anna Joy's reading was amazing: two people read a dialogue as it was meant to be read, and then Anna Joy got up and sang a song for a portion of it. There were also two other readers, Christine V. Nguyen and Rhani Lee Remedes. The venue, Compactspace, had a majestic stalagtite sculpture, authentically dripping. Gina took video and it may surface somewhere sometime.

In LA, I also got to spend time with a dear friend; we cooked a lot and walked a lot and shared budget-gourmand food tips (discovered polenta! Now I'm going to try to make it with blue corn! Discovered also the amazing vegetable known as golden beets!). I returned with renewed energy to focus on projects and that feels like a good, good thing. For weeks I think I was starting to get a little bit raggedy around the edges, but now I feel like I have a semblance of control.

You should read these translations that I have in the current issue of Brooklyn Rail's InTranslation. They encompass a selection from the manuscript I've been working on, of the poetry of Tytti Heikkinen. Tytti is a search-engine-based writer and her poems are dark modern narratives, cohesive and devastating, bleak and funny, feminist and horrifying. I love that people are getting to see these.

Finally, I'd like to direct your attention to Girlpants.org, an old-new website recently redeemed from internet limbo. Girlpants is yet another place where I can be found spouting tangentially music-related terrorprose. The other contributors, Ben, Mike, Joel, and Jason are all awesome, funny, intelligent music writers, and from time to time we post thematic mixes. You should add it to your feed and read it often.

Tonight, Brooklyn is miserable: "destructive" winds and obnoxious cold rain all over the place. If it lets up, I'm going to try to make it to Poetrytime for Matvei Yankelevich and Heather Christle; it's looking pretty possible, though, that I'll just stay indoors.