Can you guess what the Texas legislature’s little secret is? If you have ever been around an organization that is 80% male, you almost certainly can.

“It’s Not Breaking Bad’s Job to Punish Walter White” [Related]

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Art

As an expression of our inability to live up to the standards of experience, which aren’t even that high, art is transcendent, beating reality at its own game, making reality real, the imagination wearing mortal flesh, slumming, readying itself to go back to God after sprinkling its messages like apple seeds across a nation, which will grow into fruit-bearing trees.
Because of this, artists have more, or less, sex, or the same amount. Think of Picasso and Kafka.
Art is made instead: if life were enough, we wouldn’t. But we need art’s off ramp to a parallel road, less congested, more beautiful, where it means something just to pass by.

Craig Morgan Teicher is the author, most recently, of To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012) and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums (Omnidawn, Fall 2013).

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“BBC apologises after it broadcasts music video picture of Prince William with a penis, comedy glasses and a moustache drawn on his head”

“Almost invisibly in her own day, Natalie de Blois, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, helped guide the design of three of the most important corporate landmarks of the 1950s and ’60s — the headquarters of Lever Brothers, Pepsi-Cola and Union Carbide — whose suave steel-and-glass facades still exude the cool confidence of postwar Park Avenue…. Debates can always be had about the provenance of almost any significant architectural project, particularly one coming out of an office as large and collaborative as Skidmore (where my father was a partner until his death in 1973). No one person can ever wholly claim credit. But there is little doubt that Ms. de Blois, who died last week, was long denied her due.”
 — This is a hybrid of obituary and appreciation, and is well worth your time.

by Patricia Lockwood

When you publish a poem like “Rape Joke,” you take it for granted that two things will happen. One: that people will share their own stories with you, which is wonderful; and two: that people will barf all over their keyboards at you, which is interesting. Here is a selection of the most notable barfs I encountered in the wake of the poem’s appearance.

• Another FAIL for the moral butthurt brigade.

• Please stop calling this a “poem.”

• Should we also ban all ‘man walks into bar’ jokes because of sensitivity about alcoholism?

• When I backpack through northern Washington or Montana, I don’t do so without carrying protection. I also don’t smear my clothes with blueberry juice and salmon oil.

• The same readers who take offense to rape jokes probably had fifty status updates last week screeching about they want to cut off George Zimmerman’s penis and light him on fire.

• The rape joke is being told you “look like a rapist.” When you’re a gay male with no interest in raping women.

• So…you don’t like rape jokes then? I don’t like onions — but I don’t think that McDonalds should stop putting them on your hamburger.

• Someone should write a poem about the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld because, for every laugh that episode has had, a real person was killed in World War II.

• Patricia Lockwood totally raped rape jokes.

• Great job Patricia, you capitalized on some sort of twitter uproar over rape jokes by writing a bad poem called “The Rape Joke”, which details your (1) experience with rape by your white trash BOYFRIEND and posting it on some crap website. I now FINALLY understand why rape jokes aren’t funny!

• The rape joke is Pet Sounds because of the ANIMALISTIC sounds you made as you were made love to, not raped.

• Knock, knock
Who’s there?
A lengthy poem about rape
A lengthy poem about rape who?
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

• This reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where Jerry became convinced that one of his rivals got raped just for the jokes.

• “Destroyed cherry” would have been funnier. Good writing though.

• oh, get over yourself, you attention whore. he was your boyfriend. you were drunk. he was drunk. that aint rape. you’re not a survivor, you’re not important and no one feels bad for you. you’re the rape joke.

• I’m not particularly pleased with the Pet Sounds association with rapists. If it’s a fact, that’s one thing. If it’s supposed to have some meaning in the context of poetic license, I’m not sure if I like the connection that might arise in the minds of some young women who read this poem and later may receive it as a gift from a man solely for its musical merit.

• Rape joke, rape joke rape joke. Rape joke? Joke rape. Jokes about rape. Grow up Amerikkka,who is wearing the rape mask? The cis man, in his rape van.

• It was as if I was right there being raped with you. Except I wasn’t.

Patricia Lockwood is the author of Balloon Pop Outlaw Black

(Octopus Books, 2012). Her next book, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, is forthcoming from Penguin. Follow her on Twitter at @TriciaLockwood.

“’It was a seedier part of the neighborhood,’ said the barkeep. ‘Now you have strollers everywhere and chalkboard paint and arugula — it’s a different scene.’”

This list of things to do today is extremely sensual!

Today’s podcast is sponsored by Audible. From this link right here you may obtain a 30-day free trial of Audible and a free audiobook. I love free things.

“A hangover can leave you with more than a sore head in the morning — it impairs the way your brain holds and processes information, according to new research.”

He was once the future of the blues, and now Young Bob is 60. I guess that’s what happens. Anyway, here’s one of his first big ones. It came out the year before Gary Clark, Jr. was born. It’s a funny old world.