Here's a solution to your recession worries: Japanese poems! "Working on a haiku is the perfect anecdote when life's financial challenges mount. Compose one in your head when you're stuck in traffic or as you're waiting in line at the supermarket to pay with your ever thinner wallet."
What we talk about when we talk about books that sound horrible.
A haiku in English is like coq au vin minus the duck, the wine, and the heat to bring it all together. (What the fuck are you eating, and why are you calling coq au vin?)
The features of the Japanese language that make haiku work, that make haiku what it is, do not exist in English.
COQ au vin is made with chicken. But chicken is funny.
Shit. I was writing coq au vin thinking of duck à l’orange but basically going for something foreign that everyone has heard of but nobody ever makes.
Or maybe I just have coq on the brain?
*call me
Thank you, Goldman Sachs
You broke the economy
Here, have a bonus
Congratulations
Moral hazard? You don’t care
You’re too big to fail.
Dow Jones going down
Like a whore during Fleet Week
Please avert your eyes
Oh, subprime mortgage
That cruel, fickle mistress
Now I am homeless.
So very hungry
Not poor enough for food stamps
Where is my bailout?
Credit-default swaps.
The fuck does that even mean?
Oh well, time to drink.
I don't have the cash
To waste my precious time
Being artistic.
Forget the haiku
Pharmaceuticals will make
Your hard times better.
I saw a woman doing this on the subway the other day. Think it was part of a continuing-ed or ESL assignment … either way, she was using the Bible as source material and all of them were basically little lectures to her heathen instructors about pursuing the path of righteousness.
I have an awesome book of Japanese Death Poems (written by monks shortly before their deaths or on deathbeds).
My favorite is one that sounds like bad-high-school-poetry:
I long for people;
then again, I loathe them.
End of Autumn.
Like a rolling stone
People try to put us down
Carbona, not glue.
Miami Herald
See you in Chapter 11!
Jesus. Florida.