St. Valentine’s Day Massacre Issue | ‘09 #1-2

James Luther Dickinson

does it to Dave Hickey's

BILLY & OSCAR

I sing of the swift and mysterious style of Billy the Kidd and Oscar the Wilde...

Bart Plantenga’s

CONFESSIONS OF A BEER MYSTIC #4

Anyway, the driver scumbag leaps outta his cockpit – no fan of percussion – yanks out a fuckin’ mammoth pistol, a shiny, sexy fuckin’ thing, aims it at my face, pulls the trigger and says; ‘I wish this fuckin’ thing was loaded so I could blow you away, punk scum.’ [...]more

WHOSE CONSPIRACY
IS THIS ANYWAY?

TALES FROM THE OLD STASH:
Jack Wesley Hardin’s

QUEST FOR THE HOLY OIL

A quest of the soaring '70s you won’t find in any books or learn in any school was a working formula for the production of hash oil from raw marijuana. [...]more

SPARROW

on Writing

GREAT MOMENTS IN SPORTZ

A BUM LOVE STORY

by Viola & B. Prune (reverently continuing the tradition of Damon Runyon)

Now not many men who were looking for a Buddhist bum alcoholic poet who claimed to be on the grassy knoll the day J.F.K. was murdered met Sal’s impeccable specifications, and so in the 35 years she had been on the planet, she had yet to have what some jerk coined a “meaningful relationship”, [...] more

GREAT MOMENTS IN SPORTZ #2

EDITOR's NOTE:
Apocalypse When?

No doubt about it, this Feb 14th may finally have been the long awaited dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but in its present form this is the closing "act of Quality Lit" as T. Southern use to call it. We need to come up with another handle for quality writing or some crank Emperor’s-New-Asshole like Malcolm Gladwell is going to do it for us[...]more

Darius James’

Razbliuto, baby

I was frustrated by the triumph of commodity over the growth of radical aesthetics, radical spirituality, and the vacuous mediocrities commodity supported. The dictatorship of Dubord’s simulacrum. This, in turn, had marginalized the exceptional and brilliant. I dreamt of carnivals—an exuberant life turned upside down [...]more

THE LOVED ONE

An excerpt from
Gail Gerber's
TRIPPIN' WITH TERRY SOUTHERN

I guess I was destined to fall in with a bad crowd. Henry Miller and Terry Southern were chasing me - I never had a chance[...]more

Mikhail Horowitz's

LAST OF THE BEATS

Well Ginsberg's gone, and Gregory too, and Burroughs furrows the void, you know Jack Kerouac is in his railroad shack, man, he's happy he's unemployed...

John Giorno-Renfreu Neff Interview

(Giorno) More than 15 years later, it hit me, the Dave Dinkins of that August afternoon in 1973, and the (current) 1992 Mayor David Dinkins of New York, are the same man. I never called him, but he was a great lover[...]more

TULI TUNES presents:

MODERN (you call this) LIVING

Joey Amdahl’s

TAKE HER AWAY

And within five minutes of Leslie being gone, the boy comes up with a plan. “Jasmine, sooo, what do you say we post an ad on Craigslist in the Women Seeking Men section and see if anyone will come take the annoying one away for the night?”[...]more

Photo by Robert Frank

Nominate, Call Out and Vote for:
ASSHOLE OF THE YEAR 2009!

WISH YOU WERE HERE

No point here.
No illusions.
But plenty of laughs.
Not funny ha ha — schmuck slipped
on a banana peel — laughs –
NOOOOOOOO
more like the iridescence of truth:
We’re all gonna do our time,
all gonna die,
maybe come back
like good Bodhissatvas
to fuck up again. [...]more

Jim Harrison's

DEAD FOOD SCROLLS #4

I’ve agreed to do a project with the French actress Jeanne Moreau: the project is of course top secret as is everything I do. [...]more

Bukowski's (all new in ’82)

NOTES OF A DIRTY OLD MAN #4

Well, so Mailer and his cohorts got him (Jack Abbott) out; he was a writer, there was a book, I haven’t read it all – all I know is what I read in the papers while I’m crapping. [...]more

DICK LIT

excerpts from
Michael Carnevale’s novel in-progress
GOLDBERG

"You must grieve for your severed foreskin, you know. Circumcision is mutilation. A mutilated penis is probably at the root of your anger." [...]more

Joe Maynard's

THOUGHT I WAS COUNTRY

I was out drinkin' longnecks with cowboys and rednecks...

Dr. William F. Pepper

WHOSE CONSPIRACY
IS THIS, ANYWAY?

ASK DR FAUSTROLL, PATAPHYSICIAN

I just heard some co-workers talking about St. Valentine’s Day in the lunchroom. Apparently Val has something to do with driving Irish snakes straight into the snatches of English virgins, but I wouldn’t swear to it, considering how poorly my American-made hearing aid is working these days.[...]more