This is so fucking funny...

I love being Jewish...



Responsing to the Church of Latter Day Saint's (aka Mormon's) posthumous baptizing of deceased Jews--including victims of the Shoah--), the International Jewish Conspiracy unveiled a campaign this week to de-baptize the Mormons.

The Church of Latter-day Saints, a religious sect founded by a man who claimed to learn the word of God by putting his face in a hat, has been baptizing the dead, including up to several hundred thousand Jews. The International Jewish Conspiracy is fighting back with a sweeping program of de-baptism that will forceably "choose" Mormons and other Christian fundamentalists for inclusion in G-d's favorite tribe. ..

More HERE

I don't know who this guy is... found him through my new webring... still not sure what a webring is... but this is funny!

And since I've never really read the book of Mormon, I did a google search and found out all about it. I don't want to ruin the surprise, but it turns out...

Basically what happens throughout the entire book is that the Lamanites are bad, the Nephites are good, and then they switch. Whenever a group of people becomes 'righteous', they get blessed with riches, then they become prideful, and then they start sinning, and then God destoys them. This humbles them, so they become good again, then they're blessed, which makes them prideful, etc. etc.....

Oh yeah! Almost the whole book of 2 Nephi is copied from Isaiah, word for word. It is by far the most boring book ever written.

There's lots of wars that kill thousands of people, unless they're good. Jesus visits them during the 'three days' that he was dead. After that, they become perfect people for about a hundred years.

Anyway, at the end, the Nephites get killed off in a war. Mormon gives the record to Moroni, his son, as he's dying. Moroni ends up being the last living Nephite. He buries this 'precious record' in the mountain side. About 1500 years later, Joseph Smith finds it when the Angel of Moroni guides him there.

Oh yeah, it's written in Elizabethan English. Everyone knows that the Lord speaks Elizabethan English.
Or at least according to THIS GUY!

Speaking of New York...

Which I was...


When I was living in New York, during the days of lonelysongs.com...

Sarah T. and I used to maintain a site called the TOPIC PROJECT, where writers of all sorts posted daily on set topics...

As a sort of post-workshop vehicle to get our asses writing. Incidentally, this is the device that got me to write prose, which has been quite an adventure...

Visit our old site and see what we did... some of these (my) assignments (in later drafts) ended up in UTNE Reader, No Depression Magazine, and Bitch Magazine...

Viva la web!

Playing with the big kids...

In the big cities...



Having processed AWP (to some degree) and accepted once again that I live in Iowa City (still)...

I'll choose to focus on May and June, when I get to take several jaunts to Baltimore (home), Philadelphia, and The biggest apple of all. If you plan to be in Baltimore in the beginning of May, let me know! I'll invite you to my (mother's) pah-tee.

And if you're a New Yorker, you should mark your calendar right now... so that you don't forget to attend my BIG NEW YORK READING!

That's right... it's Laurel Snyder's debut reading in New York, alongside the likes of Ethan Paquin and Dan Nester. I'm very very very excited. I'll get to see Susan! I'll be a big kid for a day! I'll get to buy shiny plastic jewelry! I love New York, though I didn't last there long...

My BIG Bossman says, "Condi Rice isn't ugly...

So much as often caught in unflattering poses...."



I say:

The propensity to be caught in unflattering poses=UGLY!

Putting myself out there...

And jumping back into the pool...


(In which I post a poem on the blog, knowing you're reading...to prove I'm not scared of you!)



Honesty: the Unfinished Poem


This poem was rejected
by you, or I’m lying.

There’s a sky—a big one—and that’s
a truth. Do you understand?

Birds are flapping around my head
right now. Am I manipulative?

Once I lost a plastic shovel in a swift
river, and my father followed it down.

When he came back, his chest was
rock-cut to shreds, but he had the damn shovel.

I’m not manipulative, but maybe
I’m overeager. Maybe I want things.

And hey, there are birds now, flapping
in this poem, and a swift river too.

And my father is here, post-swim,
bleeding and young, hugging me.

He’s brave, strong, making a sacrifice
for a small cheap thing, long-since-lost.

And if you go back, trace your steps,
visit the beginning, you’ll see

what I did, that I invited you in—
gave you the power. To make me happy,

or honest. I might be a liar or not.
The river, the birds— we’re waiting.

A great man speaks...

And a poor typist fucks it up...




Went to see Salman Rushdie last night, and it was pretty friggin incredible! He is SO smart... and so articulate. He talked a lot about free speech, the war, France, and Israel, and I was intensely impressed with how well-informed, how sound his opinions were. A few choice quotes:


1. (On criticism) "The author is not dead. (applause) The author is very much alive. Most critics never were."

2. (On how/why writers write- a quote from Bellow, describing a chained dog barking incessently, translating what the barking dog is saying to the sky, to god) "Open the universe a little more?"

3. (On politics in America) "Up on Ashcroft Ridge there are people who work for the Ministry of False Alarms. They say, 'EEK! The Brooklyn Bridge!' And we all turn to look. While we're all looking they behave badly... but we don't notice."

4. (On India and Magic Realism) "People ignore the realism part. You have to understand that in India, there are literally 300 million Gods. That's one god for every 3.3 people. Private school numbers. Can you imagine that? Realism is different there." (I didn't get the exact quote for this one... but it was something like this.

The best thing about the evening was my personal conversation with Salman at the after-party. There were more than a thousand people at the lecture, but when he and I chatted at Paula's afterwards, there were only about 15 people present (and oddly, no faculty).

I'm not really a star-fucker, so I steered clear of the famous man, never having read a single one of his books (but I will, I will now!). So I was sitting on the couch, nibbling on celery sticks and Easter candy. Suddenly, he walked over TO ME and asked politely, "What's in that?" He pointed at the dip.

I said, "Spinach. It's not bad, actually."

He went for the salsa. It was inspiring. A moment. I'm sure he'll remember me forever.

And the other interesting bit of the evening was the closed captioning. They had a dumb blond (sorry, but you'll imagine it better if I say that) in a tight sweater typing into a laptop, the screen of which was displayed on a giant screen. The poor girl could type like a demon, but she had no idea how to spell many many many words. To her credit, she didn't flinch, just plowed on through the lecture.

Can you imagine how awful that would be, typing wrong in the middle of a giant people-sea, knowing you're misspelling every dang word, and with a pact of voracious poets (like me) ready to pounce on your every mistake?

The spellcheck corrected many of her blunders, but what it could not fix, it altered in amusing ways. A partial list:

Nabokov=Nobodier cough
references=remps
excrement=exkremt
revisionist=revan chist
satiric=Sa tir Rick

She didn't even try to spell Ceaucescu. Just quit typing until Rushdie had finished that part of the lecture, and started over.

When I got home, my huzband was in the basement, recording Pieta and Bo. Which makes for quite an eventful night here in Iowa.

I think about honesty...

I think about it a lot...


And after reading recent bullshit regarding the people who run this big weird country, I find myself thinking about what it means to testify, to swear/sweat on a bible...

Why should liars be afraid to commit perjury? I mean, if they've already proven themselves to be liars... what do they have to fear?

I decided that there needs to be a bigger penalty for lying. I think it would be nice if sentences were transferrable. Like, if you lie for someone, to cover up for your boss or a head honcho, or your mom... whatever...

And then you get caught...

Then you get the same penalty they were facing.

So like, if you were lying for a killer, then you could end up in the chair... even if all you did was fudge the truth.

Because I think that honesty is an absolute. I think that, for all the grey areas in the fiction/non-fiction debate... there is usually a truth to be told.

Weird...

Check this out...

My new comment-friend, Scott...

Found my old site, Lonelysongs.com, and emailed me the link. So if you want to see what I used to do, when I was doing it for the first time, you can visit the often-sad-drunk-New York-Laurel right HERE!

Quick quote...

From my Daddy...

I get a weekly email from Dad, always with the subject line, SHABBAT SHALOM. Always on Friday afternoon. This is religion at my house, I guess. This week the email only read:

"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
-Frank Zappa

Thanks Dad! You're the best...

Feels so good...

To feel so tired...

And to be able to sleep, read, lounge about in sweatpants, eat a tangelo... Really, it's a hell of a luxury-- exhaustion when you have the leisure time to indulge it, curl up inside it...

But I want to post. I have things I need to think about, and an ENFP like me has trouble thinking without an audience...

Will you be my interlocutor? Pretty please... and also thank you! Here are the things I need to think about:

1. I want to write more about poetry here, online... listening to Shanna and Daphne and Jordan and Tom and Mehgan (at their panel) talking about how "poetry bloggers" carry on a dialogue online... it makes me think about why I don't ever write about poetry online... at least not in any real way... I think it has to do with my own accidental habits, but also the IWW (no, not the Wobblies, the Iowa Writers' Workshop!).

I think that Iowa made me feel like the dialogue we (poets) carry on about poetry is, by nature, exclusive. It felt like a different language. At Iowa, poetry seemed to be an Ivory Tower we were defending. It didn't feel fun or accesible. It felt like something I had to keep a secret if I wanted to have real conversations with real (non-poet) people (i.e. the waiters at my diner, my family, non-poet bar friends). It made me feel like I should be sipping tea with my finger crooked just so, and more importantly, it made me feel like I wasn't crooking my finger just so. Complicated. It was very hard for me, and when I finished my MFA, I quit writing for a long while.

I was scared that if I got trapped in that weird dialogue again, I'd quit writing altogether.

But it sucks that I can't talk about poetry with poets I like. it sucks that I don't have a more fun/ spontaneous poetry community. So I'm looking to change that aspect of me, and of this site. I'm going to work on this... Right now I'm digging into all the good books I bought at AWP, starting with GIVEN, by Arielle Greenberg. I hope I can bring myself to write about it here, and I hope you'll bear with me, and let me know if I'm boring your pants off.

There are better ways to get your pants off!

2. I stayed with my friend Sharone while I was in Chicago, and I'd like to take a minute to say that she's incredible. Sharone is in the process of leaving a fancy-shmancy six-figure lawyerly job, to take a 75 percent paycut and turn into a do-gooder. She'll be representing refugee orphan kids for a non-profit, and I got to watch her nervousness/preparations this week. I want to say that I only hope I could do what she's doing, scaling back her own life to make other lives better... and also to keep herself honest. Pretty incredible, truly...

Think about your life... could you give up all the extras? Could you start suddenly brown bagging your lunch, stop buying coffee in the morning, clipping coupons, turning down the heat and putting on an extra sweater? Could you move into a tiny apartment with a roommate, after having a gorgous loft? Could you do all this while working way harder for a fraction of the pay you're used to? Could you do it if it weren't going to lead to a better career down the road? If the work wasn't going to be pleasant? Could you do it... just because it was the right thing to do? I hope I could, but I'm not sure. It's easy for me, since I've always made nothing/ lived cheap... but to "have it all" and walk away takes another kind of strength altogether.

3. I'm thinking a ton about full disclosure this week... With my old site, lonelysongs.com, I told everything... EVERYTHING... and got in a bit of trouble with the girlfriends of exes and parents and such. And so I've been more careful with this site, more encoded, more secretive. It isn't easy for me. I'm not a secret-keeper, and I don't care who knows which STD I caught from whom, or how young I was when a stoner popped my cherry, or whether I've shot heroin...

If you asked me I'd tell you anyway, so why not tell the web, right?

Except that now I'm married, and in some very weird way, my life isn't all mine. So I'm not sure where to draw the lines. I want to be honest about who I am, without opening a window into my huzband's life, a window he'd never open himself. I want to be an independent person, but I want to be respectful of my partner. How do you find a boundary? How do you conceal in the right ways, without losing your autonomy? I'm dying to know.

Becayse LIFE has been happening to me of late, and small amounts af death have been happening too...

4. I have a brain tumor. I have seizures too. I don't talk about them, and they aren't a major/ conscious factor in my life. But I thought you should know.

Oh yeah...

I forgot something...


Which is that I've never told you all about my son, Ezekiel Manifesto Behrle-Snyder. I forgot about him for awhile, because he's so tiny and all, and he sleeps in a drawer. He's a child from my last marriage...

From back when I was married to Jimmy, who broke my heart and left me high and dry... quite literally.

Oh, that Jimmy! He was an incredible monkey-lover, but he's a terrible baby's-daddy. He screws me on the child support because he doesn't like how tiny Zeke turned out. Jimmy is opposed to all things tiny. That rat-bastard! Just imagine how bad Zeke feels. It's hard enough to be tiny, without having an anti-tiny dad.

It's sad, really.

Where to ever...

Begin...

Okay, so I'm here at AWP, about to come home... and I've had so many moments in the last few days when I wanted to post.... but honestly, the real post will have to wait until I'm home.

But I have to say now that I'm thinking a lot about community, about what it means to have a circle of peers, folks who get it...

Poetry is, for me, such a strange thing. I love it. I love words in their many orders. I love when I'm at a reading, a really good one, and I feel like someone else has tapped into something, esternal or internal. I love books. AND I LOVE KNOWING THAT OTHER PEOPLE DO TOO!

That said, at a thing like AWP it's so easy to get caught up in the bullshit, that same sticky bullshit from grad school, the same bullshit that almost swallowed me a few years ago..

Here I am, wandering around, and people are trying to impress each other... and I just want to have fun, and maybe talk about writing, or being a writer, or a recent episode of Seventh Heaven, or what I ate for dinner. I'm just wanting a drink or a reading... and I get the sense that people are trying to figure out WHO I AM, what I can do for/with them...

Which makes community even more important. Because if you know you can trust someone in a place like this, you can relax and let your guard down.

But I think it's a little sad that I even have to feel/think these things... I think Iowa was, in many ways, really damaging for me... I think I had a particularly graspy class around me, and that it fucked me up.

But yesterday, I met someone wonderful, who melted all the icky thoughts for an afternoon... like, well... much like Jess Anthony and Tom Hopkins did for me last year at AWP...

I met a guy named Jordan Davis, whose panel I'd attended (same panel as Shanna and Tomhop), and we ended up wandering around the Bookfair together, buying books and talking... saving each other from creepy people and laughing. And it was so fun! And he was really genuine and nice and clearly excited, and not embarassed to be excited... which made me happy...

And we ended up having drinks last night (after ditching some dull-ish reading-parties) with another wonderful person, Meghan Cleary, who also seemed excited and pleased...

And so, just as last year, I ended up getting something really good from my conference, by avoiding the crowd and finding a few really friendly faces...

Who, just as last year, are bloggers, which is really something to think about...

community...

A girl has the right...

To waffle...


And so I'm going after all... to AWP. Better be fun or I'm blaming Shanna, Sarah, and Tom.

Better be free poems and drinks, as well as old friends from Breadloaf, Chattanooga, and Iowa.

Better be a chance to wear sandals (warm weather) cause I'm painting my toenails.

YeeeeeHAW!

Hotlanta...

Is a happening joint, no?

Anyone know anything about Atlanta? It's at the top of the list right now... as I've applied for a gig at Emory. Anyone know a nice/ cheap neighborhood? Don't tell me the traffic is awful, I know it already...

Are there poets in Atlanta? Are there poets?

The freelance...

Jungle...


Does anyone really understand how it works? I've been writing nonfiction for about three years now, a little at a time. In general, I make about fifty seven cents for each article I write.

Some things, like KtB and UTNE, I'm excited just to be a part of, but other mags... I wonder if it's worth my time...

The plan is, of course, that these dumb articles I write for 100 bucks a pop will ultimately catch the attention of an editor. The impressed editor will then offer me thousands to write for some tacky-ass glossy, and I'll quit my day-job... and have a kid and/or move to Paris or Damascus or Chattanooga.

But then I look at the hours and hours I spend reviewing dumb CDs or writing bad stories, and I think...

I could be doing the dishes, or writing poems, or seeing a movie....

Has anyone else solved this problem?

The sad part is that the 100 bucks a story seems like real money to me... living on my little shoestring.

In other news, I went and saw Dawn of the Dead.

SOOOOOOO Bad! Not in a good way either.

I'm a waffle....

Waffling away....


Not sure I'll make it to AWP after all.

Birthdays and CD release parties abound right here at home. Might hunker down. Sigh. And I coulda met Jeff Tweedy.

In other news, I'm getting ready for Pesach and writing an article (my first) for HUMANITIES, the magazine of the NEH. On Blake. Really a fun thing to write. He was a freak!

House for rent...

Next door...


There's a house for rent next door to me. I think the tenants got evicted. If you're a nice person you should move in and say hey! I'm afraid we'll get another cranky lady. The last one called the cops on my Huzband for practicing guitar. That bitch!

Also if you're a nice person you should read THIS, my new article on Will Oldhamm!

St. Paddy's Day...

Is for semi-shiksas like me...


Irish whiskey
makes me frisky.


And matza gets me hot-za!

Two things...

That fucking PISS ME OFF!!!!!


ONE!

It snowed here last night! A FOOT of snow is everywhere, and not two days after I put down grass seed and fertilizer. This sucks. I am absolutely moving south, to the warmlands. If anyone in TN or Georgia knows of a job I can have... or if anyone wants to give me a fat book deal... by all means.

I need to get out of these coldlands! We'll pack and move the minute we can pay the bills elsewhere. So you can either give me a book deal, or hire Chris to work in your studio, as an engineer.

Either way.

TWO!

There is an amazingly irritating woman in my interval training class. She's AMAZING! She was born without rhythm... she musta been. It makes no sense that she can't see how hard she makes it for the rest of us. She just flails her ams and jumps around at random, and if you happen to be behind her, as I was yesterday, it's HARD TO CONCENTRATE. She's in great shape for an old lady, I'll give her that, but YIKES!

Also she wears too much purple!

As usual...

Anther is right...


Creating my own BUSH/CHENEY poster was fun. Create yours today!

bush.pdf

Rock on!

Now it's for real...

I've got a little of everything...


A baby bib with the "placemat poem" on it...

A "half-nhalf" mug...

And even a "Ruthie the Riveter" lunchbox...

I feel very important...

What with all my celbrity contact...

Yeow! Filmmakers in my car and now presidential nominees in my inbox:


Dear Laurel,

I wanted to write and thank you again for your generous contribution
to my campaign. While I am certain you are asked to give to many
causes, your commitment to my campaign and to the larger political
process is humbling and much appreciated.

Your support remains crucial to my efforts and I trust that I can
count on your continued friendship and counsel.

Once again, thank you for your support.

Warm regards,


John F. Kerry

jewishyirishy duds...

and jewishyirishy doodads...


Here we go folks...

Not yuet remotely perfected, but a whole line of jewishyirishy-interfaithFULL, half-n-half CRAP!

More will follow tomorrow...

But for now:

www.cafeshops.com/jewishyirishy

Today is the day...

The big day...


I'm picking John Waters up at the airport in a few hours!

Can you believe that? In my beat-up Jetta filled with dog hair.

What does one wear?

Fuck the passion...

Daniel Boorstin is DEAD!


He was one of the writers who helped me realize that the world is connected. Everything. All of it. He was one of the people who woke me up. His books, The Creators and The Discoverers had a huge effect on me.

Mourn HIM!