Shortly after embarking on my blogging stint at The Awl this week, I noted to Alex that my experience with the backend seemed extra-gloppy compared with my last stint on the site, and he agreed — the exact terminology involved the phrases “SUCKED BIG TIME” (all caps in original) and “terrible for me lately.” What happened? The common threads between mine and Alex’s experience seemed to involve WordPress and our browser of choice: Firefox. Could the once-nimble browser be hindering me? I inquired with a tech-savvy friend of mine to find out.

frustrated maura: Can i ask your EXPERT OPINION on something? Why has Firefox been so sucky for the past three weeks?!?!
firefoxylady: I don’t know for sure, but my feeling is that this is again the curse of the open source.
frustrated maura: In what way?
firefoxylady: There are so many little pieces that have to fit together and so many continual upgrades. That’s why I myself am now using Chrome at work because I got sick of Firefox asking to update every single time.
firefoxylady: I bet your Firefox experience includes, like, Greasemonkey and five million little scripts, right? And WP plugins?
frustrated maura: Hmm. I have seven add-ons; greasemonkey but no scripts.
firefoxylady: Is this your problem?
firefoxylady:
frustrated maura: Mainly the slowness, and i keep getting logged out.
firefoxylady: Hm. For that I would try clearing your cache if you are willing to re-enter all your passwords…

Which, ugh. (Not to seem like a lazy or ungrateful user or anything.) All that to see if maybe it’s not the browser’s fault that I feel like I’m swimming through spaghetti-laden water when trying to crank out a little piece of news riffage?

Anyway, this got me Googling through complaints about Firefox being slow (most of which were illiterate enough for me to sigh) and thinking about the Internet’s recent-ish past, which seems a lot less recent than it actually is. Has it only been six years since the launch of Firefox, which positioned itself as the nimble browsing alternative and promised an experience that would cast off the “feature creep” of Netscape and lead browsers into a leaner, sleeker Internet? Did it all go wrong when Firefox started offering up those silly backgrounds that could turn your Web browsing into the surface of the moon? (And what happened to Firefox’s in-browser calculator? Can we blame Google Instant? I’m 100% fine with blaming Google Instant.)

Firefox 4, which is currently in beta, is set for proper release next month; it’s promising many things, most of which involve speed or the illusion thereof. (A simpler interface that users can take in more quickly, message bubbles specific to individual tabs so they don’t have to throttle entire browser windows, faster JavaScript, etc.) Perhaps it will solve the problems that I and my hastily surveyed panel of pals are struggling through; perhaps it will introduce a whole new array of issues.

Or maybe something more depressing will happen. Maybe this new version of Firefox won’t come close to satisfying the need for speed that so many of us have developed since the browser was first released to the post-Netscape world. 2004 was a different Internet, after all. We were so much more patient then! More than half of Americans were still using dialup at home. “Microblogging” had yet to come into existence; Evan Williams was just quitting Google, and his 140-characters-per-thought baby Twitter wouldn’t be birthed for another two years. The iTunes Store was just getting off the ground, which meant that most people were forced to leave the house if they wanted to acquire Usher’s Confessions. (That was the last album to attain the RIAA’s Diamond Award, or as I like to call it “the accolade that made it plainly obvious the major labels were going to fail.”)

I wonder if the lost feeling of speedy browsing and blogging is something not dissimilar to the feeling that came over me when I upgraded from a 2400-baud modem to a 14.4, then got sick of that and moved up to 56k, then got restless and bumped up to home broadband. Have we reached the end of the Internet? Is that all there is?

Or should I just stop being such a wuss, copy and paste my passwords, and do the whole cache-clearing thing? Seriously, there are so many, ugh.

Hot on the the heels of their instant classic Man gets spare rib stuck in anus (“The La Règle du jeu of animated Taiwanese news bulletins about things getting stuck in anuses”-Peter Travers, Rolling Stone), the folks at Next Media Animation turn their attention to Christine O’Donnell’s recent Delaware primary victory. This is one of the cases where the clip is actually more enjoyable without subtitles, but if you really need to know the whole story, the English-language version is here. Enjoy.

Sorry.

“The planet should be highly visible to the naked eye; with Jupiter’s apparent magnitude of -2.94, only the moon will be brighter after Venus sets relatively early in the evening. Apparent magnitude is a measure of an object’s luminosity as viewed from Earth; faint objects have large positive magnitudes, whereas bright objects have large negative magnitudes. When Jupiter and Earth draw near, the nearly full moon will shine with an apparent magnitude of -11.87. Jupiter will be visible in the direction of the constellation Pisces, appearing to the east and low in the sky at sunset, before moving toward the south as the night progresses. With a decent set of binoculars, stargazers may be able to identify Jupiter’s four largest satellites, the Galilean moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.”
–The big huge giant planet Jupiter will be passing closer to Earth than it has in 47 years Monday. We can see it with our naked eyes this weekend. I can’t make any promises about how clear the skies will be, but here’s a reminder to look up.

A crisis pregnancy center in St. Cloud, Minn., has figured out a way to entice local students who might not otherwise appreciate their mix of sex education and religious lecturing (not to mention whoosh-filled videos): According to a coupon inside the most recent edition of the St. Cloud University annual agenda, the Pregnancy Resource Center of St. Cloud, Minn is packaging its STD, HIV, and Pap tests with a free cheese pizza at the local Little Caesars. (One pizza per person only, alas. Although given the religious bent of this place… if you’re pregnant, does that mean you’re eligible to eat for two?) [Via]

No matter how competitive or jealous or petty you are in your own line of work you will, at some point, find yourself in a moment where a colleague of yours pulls off a maneuver so astounding in its brilliance that you have no other choice but to stand there breathless and applaud. This, for me, is one of those moments.

by T. J. Clarke

“Done!” Dree leaps off the elevator and rushes toward me. She holds a copy of Freedom in her hand. She wears a long, beige dress. It is linen and opaque. Her breasts, soft and doughy half spheres capped by erect nipples — their contours evident — compete for attention against her sun-bitten glossed lips.

“This is not fair,” I say. The store’s abundant AC freezes my sweat glands instantly. My face too feels frozen at an expression between displeasure and mild happiness. “Coming in early and reading the book by yourself, is cheating.”

“Well, I’m done reading it,” she says. Her peach-pink tongue also makes a special appearance.

“Fine,” I let out a deliberately heavy sigh. It cheers me to see Dree smile. “But I’ll only pay for half of it.”

“Whatever, you lost.” She is on her way to the cash registers. “I am done,” she sings out, looping her arm around mine and drags me along.

I take the ten-dollar bill she hands me. It’s not quite half of twenty-six dollars, but a bet is a bet. And winning cheaters are still winners.

Being unemployed, reading books is a not-terrible way to pass the time. I prefer the Barnes and Noble at Union Square for reading books I never plan to buy. Lately, however, even free AC and hardcover books can’t bury the sad fact that my job prospects are dwindling. My savings are disappearing at an alarming rate. I calculated that if I can stay within a $400 food plus miscellany budget, I can pay rent and last through November. That leaves me just three months to try to find something viable, to remain dignified.

“How was your interview?” Dree asks me.

We are sitting on the floor in the “self-help” section, a litter of magazines at our feet. Freedom sits on my lap, open to page 306: Walter Berglund is ready to eat dinner. I close the book. Life is depressing enough without the insult of so-called literature.

“It wasn’t really an interview.” I say.

“When will they let you know the results?”

“Next week, I think.”

“Well, how do you feel about it?” Dree offers me some of her iced coffee, as encouragement for me to keep talking. My ego falls deeper into the quicksand of self-pity.

“Well,” I take a sip of the coffee. It is very sweet. “It’s a part-time job at Whole Foods. Nothing to write home about.”

“What’s the problem with it?”

“I will barely be able to pay my rent and eat food. It’s not an ideal situation for a someone with thousands of dollars of student loans, don’t you think?” I sound angry, and I am.

There is no respite, no good news, nothing but fake optimism as law schools and committees of established lawyers shut the door in the face of the discardable already graduated. The priority is the new class of fresh innocents ready to pay for the privilege of over-education. It is easy to blame myself if I were alone, the only loser who failed. It is more discouraging to know, to be informed by newspapers and friends, that there are thousands of people who are similarly unemployed, unemployable yet desperately searching for jobs. I am very willing to work. But willingness isn’t enough. Dree, in her beige linen dress that shows her perky-enough breasts and nipples, doesn’t understand my anger because she believes there is hope.

It is all unnecessarily grim, of course, this sinking feeling that I am finally, quietly growing into a failure.

I collect my thoughts. “No, there is no problem,” I say. “It’ll be a job, if I get it.”

Dree puts a hand on my shoulder and sighs. I close my eyes. I try to match her rhythm of breathing. “Do you want to have dinner with my dad and me tonight?” she says.

T. J. Clarke is the pen name of a struggling writer. She lives in Brooklyn.

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

This week, three new poems from Wayne Koestenbaum.

The Bitter Tears of Alexander Scriabin

A novel begins here
but I’m too tired to write it.

I caught a computer virus
while googling “James Caan nude.”

His hairy chest-Lady in a Cage-interrupts
Olivia de Haviland’s neurasthenic woundedness.

Scriabin, pugilistic and naïve,
tastes briny. A bird

shat on my head as I crossed 9th Avenue.
Don’t be so inhibited! My bedspread

in Baltimore was a tablecloth
in a long-ago story no one liked, though I polished

its language. At a funeral
I met my great-uncle Melville,

an arbitrageur, a forbidden planet
no astronomer can find. Petrarchan

means the impossible predicament
of a male lover addressing the precipice

while veiling his voice’s
aperture. Hair patterns

of porn stars are too stylized. No
topiary, please! Transpose me, klepto shaman.

Archaic Awe

My name is Bossyboots.
Liza Minnelli chose me for audience

participation guinea
pig. On a pad

I doodled
Fallopian detours. Later

Liza escaped on a daisy-
festooned tangerine

bike, handlebars
shrink-wrapped, while eating a water biscuit.

Dossier of Irretrievables

Last night at Bar 6
I asked an Icelandic superstar

how to say “I have always depended on the kindness
of strangers” in Icelandic and she told me how.

*

My father forewarned me
about Simone Weil’s club foot.

In a green Chevy-
the only possible tabernacle

for communicating facts
of disease and deprivation-

he insisted: be nice to Simone,
play with Simone.

An envy molecule,
she will save you from time’s encroachment.

*

Unfortunately, in a failed
screen test for Rebecca,

Vivien Leigh wore no makeup and revealed
melancholy ordinariness-

uncast Mrs. De Winter,
vulnerable on Waterloo Bridge.

*

Dr. Schreber’s butt slid away
or offered hairy contiguity.

Dr. Schreber’s butt entered
my house as death ambassador

offering AIDS brotherliness
as surveillance lollipop

to snobs (c’est moi)
with rhinestone glasses and Kabuki macquillage.

*

I am a flat, white, tongued,
funereal flower

associated with a fried chicken restaurant.
I am a jade tree-

150 years old-traditional
and eligible

for dessert. I am
the palsied boy who annexes the entire yard,

his identity uncertain-troublemaker,
gardener, narcoleptic, dentist?

*

Hush… Hush, Sweet Colonoscopy
Hush… Hush, Sweet Spam

Hush… Hush, Sweet Careerist
Hush… Hush, Sweet Untimely Death

*

I dreamt about my typewriter
from Beethoven’s point of view-

a fat man or a man
becoming heavy, wading in bloomers,

his unquestionable testicles a cloud
of implication near seaweed.

Fingering my hole, he became
a suicidal crêche

at high noon, no mother in sight-
merely schmutz on a mono Missa Solemnis.

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of poetry: Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Model Homes, The Milk of Inquiry, Rhapsodies of a Repeat Offender and Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He has also published a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Andy Warhol, Cleavage, Jackie Under My Skin, The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist) and Double Talk. His newest book, Hotel Theory, is a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at poems@theawl.com.

Would you like to read more? Visit our vast archive of poetry!

“The last time a government endeavored to keep people from smoking, it was actually Hitler. You should look into it.”
-It is super-Hitlery out there! This part of our Nazi trifecta comes from a disgruntled smoker who was asked by a New York Times reporter to extinguish her cigarette as part of an “experiment” to see how New Yorkers would respond to requests not to smoke-an assignment potentially as lethal as actually consuming a pack of cigarettes.

“I’m not seeing a lack of (effort), I’m seeing a pathetic effort. These Cards fans deserve much better. That’s just awful. They won’t admit it, that they’re quitters. If you can’t put a better effort out there on the field, take ’em all out, back up the truck, ship ’em all out and get somebody in here that wants to play baseball. … We’ve got one team here [San Diego] going for the title and we’ve got our team going for the toilet. They’ve got poopy in their pants.”
–Former St. Louis Cardinal Jack Clark defends the honor of baseball’s self-proclaimed “best fans” by going after the current crop of players at his MLB alma mater. (The Cards are currently seven games behind the first-place Cincinnati Reds in the NL Central, and seven games out of the Wild Card lead.) I’d say that the ex-slugger’s words were intended to light a fire under the collective asses of the Cards’ 2010 roster, but the outcome of that scenario could get kinda messy! [Via]