Exterminating Angel Press

Creative Solutions for Practical Idealists.

Exangel

Artistic parties.

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by DS Maolalai.

christ get me out of these artist-type bars
and people rambling over cigarettes about the
projects
they’re working on, books and movies
and the screenplay ideas and
bands they’re all in bands
rock bands back to basics
or experimental bands
all talking to other artists painters poets
people who make little
prints or little gold fish keyrings
artistic parties full of half people who want to be in novels
shouting loud witty things
like dogs who see the bowl go by
and half people who are writing them
sitting in the background
vague as praying mantises
parties like this are like ships in a bottle
full of detail and looking great
but going very much nowhere.
let me go to a pub somewhere
with a couple of builders
or a door to door salesman. a man
who paints houses has much better stories
than just a man
who just
paints
not talking to anyone
not getting any stories
just mixing colours quietly
in silence like marmalade
warm deep orange
learning
very much the way a child learns
about shade and shape and colour
until he finishes up
goes out
gets drunk
gets loud
and talks about art.

 

 

Ramen Hacks.

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Do you know the magazine “Cook’s Country”? I love that magazine. Big format, sensible writing. I learn something new in every issue, and how many cooking mags can you say that about? I get almost all the cooking magazines on offer, just to see what’s going on, and I’m telling you, a couple of them […]

Dog in The Storm.

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by John Grey. Thunder rattles the house. It sounds like danger though I know it’s not. That knowledge doesn’t translate into canine however. My dog is yelping in circles. A knock on the door spurs him into protective mode. One growl says it all. He will ward off my enemy. He will save me for […]

What Happens Next.

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This remains one of my favorite of our EAP themes, this one this summer, so do have a look at what inspired it, the intense Stripped and Despoiled, by Charles S. Kraszewski. Also there’s Into the Underworld and Beyond, where Bruce Thompson takes issue with Joseph Campbell (and why not?), as well as the (as […]

The Language of Spirituality.

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by Thomas Larson. Growing up, neither my child nor my adolescent selves nursed the Christian nipple; my ex-Catholic father was an atheist, and Sundays were spent, by my choice, singing (not worshipping) in a church choir. After I read, age twenty or so, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I […]

Stripped and Despoiled.

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by C.S. Kraszewski.   I and suddenly it hits you there is to be no more becoming you are no longer and yet there you are paralyzed, you are a soul sealed tight between pith and ray in the sapwood of a palm tree on the Strip never to reach the air and light at […]

What Then?

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by Marissa Bell Toffoli.   Resist the evening, the settling of scores. Watch our cocktails sweat next to the binoculars on the patio table. Our shade grows long. My boy palms his silhouette–everything still new. Suspended between generations. Your wise hands to his youth. Instead of anchored, unmoored. I hunger for stories, but you’re not […]

On Not Yet Having Read “Waterland”.

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by Chris Farago. I spent the day inside, With a sunburned neck, reading. I think it was in tribute to a friend, A commentary on the life I ought to be living, Alternating the raucous pleasure of urban hikes And multiple drinks with a period Of quite-literal sober reflection, Examining the damage done to my […]

Into the Underworld and Beyond.

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by Bruce E.R. Thompson   I have a bone to pick with Joseph Campbell, but I’ll get to that in a minute. What I really want to talk about is visits to the underworld. The best known story of a journey to the underworld is Dante’s Inferno. It is a 14th Century depiction of a […]

The Three Spheres of Ignotum Prophetam.

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by Ronnie Pontiac. For hundreds of years scholars have attributed a mysterious manuscript to Ignotum Prophetam.  Best known to European historians as one of the mad monks of history, the contemporary consensus attempts to prove from scant and contradictory evidence that Ignotum was never more than a myth, most likely invented on the island of […]