Poetry Magazine #2

So we were driving back to the hotel last night from the rehearsal dinner (at Barley’s Brewhaus, but more about that later, maybe), and I told my dad to turn a few blocks ahead of when we should have turned; and as a result, we wound up driving past a Barnes & Noble I would otherwise have missed. (I may well have marked it this morning when we went out for coffee, but who can say for sure?) It was certainly close enough to walk to from the hotel, though my dad thought it was not a good idea at that time of night, because he didn’t know the streets. I wasn’t about to get into how little sense that made, but I got online and mapped it when we got back to the hotel; and sure enough, it was only half a mile away. Google maps even estimated that it would take about ten minutes to walk there from the hotel.

Unfortunately, they closed at ten, and it was after ten when we got back from dinner. This morning, however, we took a walk and went past the bookstore for coffee at Scooter’s (another one of those chains that copied almost everything about Starbucks except the mermaid and the lingo) and then doubled back to the bookstore. We had to go upstairs to get to the newsstand, and I took that to be a good sign. They had a nice, big, wraparound newsstand section that took up three walls and was easily twice the size of the newsstand section at the Barnes & Noble at Clearwater Crossing. I saw n+1 in amongst some political and cultural (but not precisely literary) magazines, and was afraid that that might be it—but then I let my gaze travel along the bottom row (because those kinds of magazines are almost always on the bottom row—you gotta make sure to leave the prominent rows clear for pretentious shit like Esquire) and sure enough, there were the literary magazines, a couple of sections down.

And they had Poetry magazine. But when I got over there and picked it up…it was the May issue. The issue with the Dorothy Parker article that I had my eye on was the April issue. (I may not have mentioned that the last time I wrote about this.) I just can’t win for losing! Though the Poetry issue was disappointing, there were plenty of other interesting titles on the racks—including The Normal School, Boulevard, n+1; and some journals I had never seen before, like The Objective Standard and SubTerrain.

(Yes, I found The Objective Standard to be of interest. I admired Ayn Rand’s fiction and philosophy long before the Tea Party retards co-opted it—incorrectly, of course, but do you honestly expect that conservatives would do anything with philosophy other than misinterpret it and fuck it up?—for their own nefarious purposes. Ayn Rand was not a libertarian, and the only reason the Tea Party retards have latched onto her is because they’ll reach for even the flimsiest branch if they think it will make their goofy ideas look even remotely plausible. Plus, anyone who thinks that Objectivism equals the kind of "Don't tread on me" nonsense the Tea Party retards babble about either hasn't read Ayn Rand's fiction or simply doesn't understand even the basic tenets of the philosophy—but again...that the Tea Party retards don't understand something is not a concept that should come as a surprise to anyone.)

The selection obliterated the selection at any bookstore in Indianapolis that I know of (although it occurred to me as we were going up the escalator at Barnes & Noble that I should go back to the Books-A-Million location at Trader’s Point, because I seem to remember that they had a pretty solid selection of magazines in general, though I don’t recall what they had for lit journals in particular), and almost made me want to move to Kansas City—except that Kansas City is just as midwest as Indianapolis is, and to hear my brother tell it, even hilljackier than Indianapolis. I find that hard to believe, but that might only be because Kansas and Missouri don’t have In God We Trust plates, which sort of give you an idea of the number of hilljacks and bad drivers we have in Indianapolis.