WORMSLUT's Top Five
Secret Phones, Mark Leidner, Flashcards, Geoffrey Young, Kissing Booth Social Club
Wormslut, a collaboration between Ash Yang-Thompson and Nia Musiba, returns (again) with our “Top Five” feature, in which we identify notable publications, events, or ideas of the past two hours.
TOP FIVE
Secret Phones
Since I never delete my contacts and was formerly incapable of saying “no” if someone asked for my number, my iphone has 574 contacts. That’s 564 contacts too many. So I got a second, extremely dumb phone with no texting or contacts. My secret phone affords me the privilege of tuning out everybody except my nonagenarian grandmother who might die any day now. Whose phone number do you know from memory? That might be my new definition of love.
Mark Leidner
“Mark chews the fuck out of a premise,” said my friend Mikko Harvey over the phone, “and he discovers the sublime in that chewing.” In his poem Turning Forty (from Elegy for Pangaea, preorder it here), Mark Leidner pushes Scream masks to their ecstatic, holy extreme. What I love about Mark Leidner’s poems is that I don’t have to try to like them, nor do I have to read his poems ten times in order to comprehend them. I laugh and feel things right away, and then end up reading the poems ten times over because I want to make my friends laugh and feel things too.
Flashcards
Nabokov said something like, “one must form a habit of searching with unflinching patience for the right word, the only right word which will convey with the utmost precision the exact shade and intensity of thought.” If I look up a word, I will forget its definition before the end of the hour. Flashcards are my commitment to maintaining a variegated vocabulary and a nimble mind ripe with adjectival resourcefulness.
Geoffrey Young
When I lived in Great Barrington, MA, Geoffrey Young invited me to read my poems at his 75th (?) birthday party. (I made the unfortunate sartorial decision to dress like a raving extraterrestrial.) Geoff is a brilliant poet, artist, and curator; every month or so, he handed out a new chapbook to his friends (using a different pseudonym for his press each time—”WORLD WIDE SUICIDE,” “JOB LOSS,” etc). I never actually read his freely disseminated booklets until now, and I feel like a COMPLETE FOOL. These are some of the best poems I’ve ever read; yesterday, I sent Geoff a letter requesting the complete catalog. Hopefully he’s still alive.
Kissing Booth Social Club
“Did you know that you can pay $20 to kiss someone and have them rate your kissing abilities?” said Nia to me over strawberry shortcake. Sarah Ruby Armstrong, a Portland-based social practice artist, provides charts that assess “Teeth Presence,” “Lip Tensility,” “Tongue Tensility,” et cetera in between make-out sessions. Wormslut will be hosting a free, non-graded, sober hugging event across the street for closeted conservatives.
