WhimsyLand

Pet Peeve #1432:  Deutsche Bank:  A Passion to Perform.  Microsoft:  Your Potential. Our Passion. Sony PlayStation:  Ten years of passion.  Mazda: Passion For The Road.  Crest Electronics:  A Passion For Perfection.  Fiat:  Driven By Passion.  Bridgestone Tires:  Passion For Excellence.  — Dear Corporate Advertising People:  Please get a life.  "Passion" is when you can hear your own heartbeat, get the nervous jitters, involuntarily run your tongue across your lips, giggle, groan, lust, and long for.  It's not the way you get tires made or loans renegotiated or software developed.

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The new Swink has taken the early lead for the 2007 Award for Whimsicality.  The issue is a big (6x10), fat, beautiful journal with a provocative orange cover and slick layout.  The interior is very professional, from the artwork to the font choice, and makes me feel like I've bought a book that somebody cared about.  Contributors include Seth Abramson, Michelle Bitting, Kristy Bowen, Rick Bursky, Sarah Fay, Lisa Glatt, Pete Jensen, Sarah Maclay, Elizabeth Scanlon, Zachary Schomburg, and Charles Harper Webb, among others.  Here's some of the chimerical verse that I particularly liked:

Rick Bursky, The Disappearance:   "He woke from a nap and discovered / the sky disappeared.  Clouds, / homeless, draped on trees."

Seth Abramson, Go Six Go Nine: "Today she said today after work can we / pretend you're only /     a carpenter?"

Elizabeth Rees, Dig:  "...// Soon the birds were replaced by bats, the trees collapsed / inside their skins to bear up for another sleepless night".

Chad Reynolds, Culture Abhors Nature, Nature Abhors Victor:  ".. // Meanwhile mousy couples are showing off / on thrift-store couches.  Victor lights / a cigarette and slouches in the smoke"

Kristy Bowen, The Migrations:  "Once again, I am somehow wearing the wrong dress / for this dream, carrying a jar with its feather and spool // of light-blue thread."

Carrie Fountain, Burn Lake 2:  "We found a duck, a mallard, dead / on the shore, head split, eyes loose, // yet when someone poked it with a stick / it shuddered suddenly"

Elizabeth Scanlon, Hippocampal:  ".., who the hell knows all, / it is terrible to know // you were their undoing, their remaking, / gunshot to their Camelot."

Zachary Schomberg, Full of Knives: "My back is full of knives.  There are notes growing brittle around the blades.  The world grows dark now around two.  The plants can be heard growing in the corners."

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Sweet Junie (my passion) has left me for the icy hell that is Wisconsin right now, mixed metaphors aside.  She'll be back, of course, and so will I.  See you tomorrow.