Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Expect to see a lit slut within this shop sometime in July.

Can I please live there? Please?

Someone, or something like it

I am a young lady, but I do not like to write like one.
I like to write like truckers, like benzedrine-laden Beat boys, I like to have words that spew across the page with random punctuation and random exclamations that make you feel like you've been slapped.
You will not get chains of daisies from me.


I pretend not to see that
He always has a .44 caliber tucked in his jeans; and he pretends
That he doesn’t notice me fading;
Our eyes swollen open from
Lack of sleep; hopeless in an
Empty field of moonlight; we are fucking diseased;
Lost in a wasteland
Of helpless breeze; the voices of a thousand losses blowing
Through our fingertips;
“You’re too fucking young to hurt like this.”
He cuts through the air, voice gnarled from
Too many cigarettes;
Eyes stinging and remembering,
How strong this is- this love is an insomniac dream;
Drinking hot gasoline on a summer night and
Handing you the matches; set me ablaze;
A child diving in the lake for the
First time, naïve and helpless;
I will light a fire within me and
burn out all the pretty;
I am a fucking inferno.
Stop me?
“Sometimes I forget that it’s scary here.
I forget how to breathe through all this smoke.”
Somewhere close the
Petals catch fire.
We searched everywhere for flowers, but we
Never found them.

How To

The Lit Slut's Guide To Studying For Finals:

1. Consume massive amounts of caffeine
2. Make flashcards, and spend far too much time with Mr Sketch scented markers color coding them
3. Listen to Bon Iver (he is so talented he makes me sick. seriously. garrrgh.)
4. Dance around your room madly, preferably when you're alone
5. Read everything but actual academic material (Neruda, I'm looking at you.)
6. Sit on your balcony and stare at the cars driving by
7. Curse the fact that other people are not insomniacs, and therefore go to bed at a decent hour and cannot be bothered to text you in your extremely bored state of being at 1 am
8. Eat mini marshmallows- very important that they're mini. Large ones are simply gluttonous, obviously. Eat the whole bag, it's fine. It's finals.
9. Drink massive amounts of water to counteract the caffeine, and find you were foolish to build any other rooms beside bathrooms
10. Scour the internet for randomosity.
11. ...study. Eventually. It's sort of the important part, I guess.


Lit Slut out.

Any Suggestions?

"So...I haven't read any good books lately, I know you're a lit slut, can you suggest something for me?"

...does this question not simultaneously fill readers with dread and excitement?

I hate it, because it's so vague. If someone asks "Can you suggest a good novel set in Egypt" or "Can you suggest a novel which has a delicious aura of rebellion" or "Something that has a really interesting main character"

These are more specific, therefore can be answered. One can file through their mental bookshelves and select an option or two that fulfill the request.

But to just pose any novel, from any time period, of any genre...give us a chance! There are millions of novels! Narrow it down a little!

At the same time, though, I also become an overly enthusiastic puppy, tale thumping and knocking over vases.

"Oh! I know one you'd like-oh, this one is good too! If you're looking for- oh, wait! Wait! I know the perfect one!...here, hold this..."

Soon, the poor unsuspecting individual is buried under a pile of books while I frolic around, chirping 'Just one more! You won't regret it!"

Moral of the story...if you ask a lit lover for a book suggestion, either narrow the category down so they can get a better idea of what you're looking for, or let them have their wicked way with you, and be prepared to be buried in a mountain of books.

Somnus! The Tales of the Uncounted Sheep

Okay boys and girls, today we’ll be talking about insomnia in literary culture!
It’s an observation I’ve made over the years, sitting up and pondering life when I should’ve been sleeping.
Insomnia- a friend or a foe to writers everywhere?
A lot of writers had insomnia. Twain, Dumas, Kafka, Dickens, Proust, and Fitzgerald were all said to have been insomniacs to a certain degree.
Insomniacs come from all walks of life and occupations, but somehow the writers stand out in particular. Why?
I think a large part of it is due to the creative mind. An accountant can simply put away their papers for the day, and know that in the morning they will be right there. Those numbers will not be erased; the calculators will still be functioning. Something about the artistic mind sometimes seems to think (in my experience, at least) that the ideas won’t be there in the morning. So, many writers are often plagued by literary ‘night sweats’, ideas constantly popping into their head that they must leap up and write down. “If I don’t write it down, I’ll forget it! This could be the idea that sparks my next great novel/poem/etc”
Or maybe writers are just, in general, messed up people? Who knows.


And to conclude, another little excerpt, just for the hell of it.

Everything is broken here.
I look at her, her little doll arms spread across my once-white sheets.
Her hair seems duller, her eyes seem more sad, and I worry that she will not leave this place in time.
She coughs up the blood of a torn esophagus and her hands shake.
Her fingertips are blue, blue-tipped, as if they've been soaking in the ocean for too long, permanently frostbitten. Frostbite is fine, until it starts to thaw.
I chew valerian root, trying to lull myself into slumber.
Her knuckles are permantly scarred, her hands telling her story to anyone who knows to look, but no one ever does.
The rats click in the walls.
We hold onto each other as if we're trying to save ourselves from drowning, but really, it's only so we'll sink faster.

We are entire solar systems, attempting to operate alone.
No man is a galaxy.
I used to map out entire constellations amongst her freckles.
I pretend that I know where Orion’s belt is because I am interested in astronomy.
I send her books sometimes with my cramped margin scrawling. It is my way of proving that we existed, once.
That we were real, long ago.

She weaves these spider webs of hope and does not realize they are gossamer thin.
We are in the Garden of Eden.
I tear at a fig leaf with my dirty fingers.
It is not she who has eaten the apple in this story.
Our soil is barren.
Our branches bear no fruit.

(c) A.S.

For something different...

I write.
I write all the time, I write a lot, but like most writers, I hate my own writing, so I hesitate to show anyone.
I cannot wait to take creative writing in university.

But until then...mostly because I'm too swamped with school to think up any good posts...
A glimpse of the lit slut's future bestseller?
Ha.
In my dreams.



I wish I could tell her that I’m on to great things, but the days blur together in mediocrity. I am nothing special.
If she was nothing special, maybe we would have worked together.
I wake, long fingers usually tapered around a pen, the ink staining my sheets. I fall asleep scribbling musings in a notebook, a private game to see whether I can fall asleep before my mind does. Because the moment your thoughts stop buzzing, and that quietness envelopes you, that is unbearable.
Forever in the pursuit of nothing. She was the only thing that seemed to give me meaning, a flicker of hope, but I threw her away.
The old man living in the apartment next door, I pass him when I go to get the morning papers. His sunken, weary eyes always follow us, and Lukas and I, we are more similar to him than he will ever know. He does not know what to make of us, our appearances so downtrodden, but our behavior so respectable in his presence. Lukas always tips his hat, and I incline my head as I pass him to get the papers. Lukas has a subscription to some German newspaper that his mother signed him up for, hoping to maintain his national pride. Lukas skims it while he chain smokes, and I do the same to the New York Times. I unlock the mailbox in the graffiti-strewn hallway, staring out the small window in the front doors, a nameless brochure fluttering across the sidewalk in a silent plea. So many of these circulate in the city, thinking they have the power to change the world, but they always end up in the garbage bin within hours. Our landfills must be moral temples.


This girl and I, we knew that we fit before we even knew each other’s names.
I try to carve away my edges, to make myself lose shape so that she will think we are no longer the same.
This girl and I, we hold hands, and I feel like I am seconds from drowning.
We wandered through forests and meadows, trying to find someplace where we could both exist.
We are the rainbow that you see in a toxic oil spill.
We are drowning the seagulls.

I send her my tattered copy of Howl, express mail, and picture her face when she receives it.
I leave no return address.
She will know who it’s from.
I am with you in Rockland, I think. I am with you forever, if I could just stop running.
This is my way of saying that this is still happening.
This is still breathing, we can resuscitate it.
We can make this happen, this time around.
I see it stretch like a new kitten with a belly full of cream.
It’s sleepy, this love, but it’s still there.

We do not belong.
Not to each other.
Not to ourselves.
We are the gutter babies.
We are breaking the speed of light, just to have a pocket of time that is hidden.

(c) A.S.

Howl.

Could I possibly love this more? Unlikely.
If you have not read it, you need to.
Now.





I'll wait.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and
migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively
vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary
indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes,
cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational
therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul,
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare,
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture,
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet,
and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent
and shaking with shame,
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night