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Band Names 4eva
As part of its mission to “promote cultural innovation,” Purewater University’s Department of Applied Excellence in Language Excellence presents lists of potential band names, free of charge, as compiled by a survey of Department faculty. –PB Wombat Image credit: scottythejock Continue reading
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The Lost Conference
You cannot say we didn’t try. Budget cuts are real, of course, and Purewater University’s rebrand under new president Ridge “Rotgut” Jahline to make PU “The Job-Creation Station” made a conference featuring literary and cultural theory a difficult line item to justify. “You can do it as long as it doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t take… Continue reading
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Against Originality: Rediscovering Art in the Time of AI
by PB Wombat With all the folderol regarding fears that artificial intelligence (AI) will destroy creativity and the livelihoods of artists and writers, we lose sight of one important and longstanding problem: the tyranny of originality. Long gone were the days when anonymous priests and monks copied down scripture and lore unencumbered by the “need”… Continue reading
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Bean/Yurt
This fragment, first discovered among Bean Newton’s notebooks dated 1994-1995, represent the poet’s early attempts to (re)visit European pagan mythology in a somewhat straightforward way while peering through the lens of late 20th Century popular culture. While he later abandoned this project, the kinetic movement between subjects characteristic of his later poems (1996-1998) are already… Continue reading
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PostModernVillage Conference 2023
–EW Wilder This year’s Purewater University PostModernVillage Conference represented, like so many things in 2023, a “return to normal,” reminding all of us of how terrible “normal” actually is. The conference, held as was usual in the Purewater University Student Capital Accumulation (formerly the Student Union, until a wealthy industrialist donor objected), was plagued by… Continue reading
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13 Ways a Blue Jay Is Lookin’ at Me
(With a few apologies to Wallace Stevens) 1. The blue jay feels free to stare–there are no blackbirds here. 2. Belly-deep in the birdbath, his gaze betrays no gratefulness. 3. A light strip of stippled mask embeds eyes poised to fight. 4. There is no peace in the blue jay’s forward gait, his attendance to… Continue reading
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On Being an Idiot
by Lael Ewy I am an idiot. This is not an insult. No denigration of self-esteem is implied in this case; like others, of course, I do have many good reasons to despise myself, but those reasons have little to do with my own idiocy. Because I am an idiot, though, it took me decades… Continue reading
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ZB
by S. Oterica Coli Zamboni Buttfinger was named after an ice-surfacing machine, which wasn’t so bad by itself, and so he let it slide, but because he came from a long, proud line of Buttfingers, he found he could not do anything whatsoever about his last name. A combination of paradox, bullying, and lassitude led… Continue reading
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Of Men and Monarchs
by E.G. Wonsktein 1. The funeral-goer. On his lapel, an orchid. His suit, agreeably black, the margins of his trim form, from toe to top, cut with awful symmetry. Temples grey, his shave close, the funeral-goer smiles warm and wan, not broadly; shakes hands, just enough firmness to reassure, just long enough to kiss the… Continue reading

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