Wanted: Artist

Tolkien Boy is concerned that Fob's lack of artists will prevent us from becoming the Bloomsbury of the 21st century. Apparently, the dinosaurs TB draws on our manuscripts saying "He's gay?!?!" don't count. Nor does Lady Steed, who is a graphic artist (with a BFA, I might add) and no less a Fob than the fobbiest of us. Nor Dec, who is, as his name implies, a decorator of weddings and other fine events. Nor I, whose job title for two years was Artist.

I think Fob represents a good selection of the humanities as is: besides all the writers and poets (I distinguish between the two), we have editors, librarians, teachers, journalists, linguists, and (most importantly) a gym manager! Heck, the fact that Queen Zippergut lives in England has to count for something.

However, I can humor Tolkien Boy. So if you are a capital-A Artist and would like to join Fob, please submit your resume, portfolio, and a 3000-word essay on why you belong in Fob to fobfiles(at)gmail.com. Please also submit the results of a Kinsey scale test taken in the last five years, as homosexuality is not required but preferable, as heaven knows we already have too many straight Fobs to truly compete with Bloomsbury.

Position open until filled.

Post-foibal Report, 07/27/06

Master Fob: We have just fobbed. It was fun.

Melyngoch: Tolkien Boy is neglecting to adjust for inflation while being financially melodramatic. The Marchioness is feeling neglected by a twenty-seven-year-old who lives with his parents and thinks he's Gimli. Editorgirl is neglecting to include overt references to backs in her poetry, although those of us with mad critical reading skills can find them there anyway.Those of us with mad critical reading skills can also "read" Master Fob's dessert as a "text" to make up for the fact that he, like me, neglected to bring an actual text, in the sense of words written on paper. And I have no excuse. There is no excuse for me. I have neglected to come afobbing laden with either writing or excuse.

Tolkien Boy: I posit that being mildly concerned about borrowing as much money as your parents paid for the house you lived in for twenty-two years in exchange for one year of school does not constitute being melodramatic.

While the rest of the FOBs (sans Edgy) are busy discussing the many, many ways that a male caller can be inexcusably geeky, and because I know no other FOB will do it with any sort of coherent narration (trust me, I read these people's writing), I will now recount the things that went on in this FOB experience, July 27th.

In the absence of his family, Master Fob and I repasted ourselves with lasagna until the arrival of the Marchioness, who came bearing tales of occupational hazards. In this case, the worst hazard seemed to be an overabundance of compliments given, so in complete confusion I wandered to Master Fob's bedroom and worked on his computer (insert your mom joke here) until such time as editorgirl (sic) showed up, bearing not only a beatiful poem but also a beautiful bag of Reese's peanut butter bites, which I eagerly and rapidly consumed.

The irrepressible Melyngoch, meanwhile, called the united FOB to ask if any knew of a transportation device that could transport her from her house to Master Fob's demesne, to which the united FOB expressed great regret that she did not call a FOBmember from the very beginning. editorgirl (sic) and I sped hastily to the Goch home, suddenly seeing what sort of girl we wanted to be after traveling past a big black horse and a cherry tree.

When at last the FOB settled, we read a short selection from my story in which an angel and a devil get drunk after a long day of work and get into each others...file cabinets. editorgirl (sic) then wrote an explosive poem (not that sort of explosion, Ms. Melyngoch), and reminded us all that a poem shouldn't mean, but be (or perhaps that was Archibald MacLeish). Finally, the Marchioness read us some of her emails home, in which she most emphatically did not talk about either diarrhea or vomiting.

Marchioness: I have learned from Master Fob, Editor Girl, and Melyngoch that before I date anyone that I must first ask if they play Dungeon and Dragons. If the answer is affirmative, I must run in a speedy fashion in another direction. If the answer is negative, I must ask other searching questions about possibly geeky, lack of social skills problems.

Back to the fobbiness. I really liked Editor Girl's poems and I enjoy that all of her poems fly, or have wings at least. Unfortunately Melyngoch didn't bring anything besides her wit and her need to know the redefinition of good and evil. Master Fob was also unprepared but brought strawberry shortcake. Tolkien Boy continued with his hellish heaven story that is devilish good fun. Whether you official decide that Satan or Bezaylbub (spell check) is the correct name.

editorgirl: Without Edgy here, I find that it's my responsibility to correct my wayward associates. I did not bring the Reese's peanut butter bites, although TB did devour them. And Melyn didn't call the Fobcave. I called her to see if she was coming and discovered that she was in need of transportation. And finally, we didn't tell the Marchioness to ask any person about Dungeons and Dragons. Asking may result in the inference that the asker herself participates in the game, which is just a bad situation all around. Speaking of bad situations, I'm going to return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Master Fob: Hi. I have decided that I should have the last word, and it is this:

Narf.

An Ode to FOB

Master Fob, in complete disregard for the facts,
writes passionate prose about men's lower backs.

Thmazing's art prose is a little mature,
but still . . . erudite? Oh, let's face it--obscure.

The Queen (when she writes) gives us words for the ages
from the minds of young girls or her own journal pages.

Melyngoch writes about girls' hearts on a shelf
who are morally troubled, a lot like herself.

Jeph's intimate knowledge of Melyngoch's neck
was enough to keep praise of his writing in check.

Tolkien Boy, to demonstrate who wears the pants,
writes fairy tale spoofs and comedic romance.

editorgirl quips from the papers she grades
and writes stirring poetry on shoulder blades.

The Marchioness's heroines are witty and chic,
and she brings us the first part of a novel each week.

The Straight Friend of Petra of prose quite chaotic
once said, "I'm attempting to be homoerotic."

EKB, an editor, still shines the most
when he writes on the Fobsters (hint, hint) or Ms. Post.

But Petra, perhaps, shines the best through the pall,
and firmly avoids bringing writing at all.

Revisioning

. . . revising is dishonest.
Soldiers on the battlefield
do not have the ability to rewrite
their errant mortar fire.
Firemen are allowed no second drafts.
How often have I wished
I could return to a scene
from my own life
and pencil in a witty rejoinder,
an encouraging word, or a condom?

-----Kevin Guilfoile
(attorney's husband)

.

Thmazing's List of Awesome Revisioning Tips

♦ Time is money. Revising takes time. Do the math.

♠ Can you really shovel it on any deeper than you did the first time around?

♣ What smells better, perfumed tobacco smoke or burnt-out Bics? Neither, am I right?

♥ As with all things, use The Love Equation (just plug in "revising"):

Will revising bring me more or less love?

Given that revising is a sad and lonely activity, I'm going with no.





Thmazing's List of Awesome Revisioning Tips is to be used by trained, fobbing professionals only. By no means does Thmazing's List of Awesome Revisioning Tips claim to be all inclusive, all disclusive, or even all clusive. In fact, some experts claim Thmazing's List of Awesome Revisioning Tips is the opposite of clusive. That these people are idiots is fully beyond the point.

Thmazing is an imaginary construct and does not exist, speaking clusively only and without respect.

The Real Fobcast

The evening is dim and growing dimmer. In a semi-lit room ringed about with cast-off shoes and emptied Pringles cans, we surround the pool of tiled graphemes wrestling (metaphorically) with the language and each other (not metaphorically).

The players: Tolkien Boy (who is male and dismisses the concept that ladies come first), Melyngoch (who is beating up TB for being male), editorgirl (who is too focused on the project at hand to beat TB up), and Ginsberg (who is watching the best minds of his generation running naked hysterical and Melyn wants to know where the naked people are).

As the play progresses, a definite power structure is developed, with Tolkien Boy being at the top of the metaphoric pyramid. Being somewhat bored with his brahmin status, he charitably offers the word ail to Melyngoch, only to reclaim it later for the more desperate-sounding flail. To supplement the steady stream of sharpened sarcasm he recieved from his co-players, he hummed showtunes under his breath, which seemed good-natured but actually was a ploy to demoralize his competitors.

And demoralize he did. This being the case, after two rounds of the much-hyped word game, our foursome degenerated into a general state of resolved depression worthy of a Hemingway narrator--a good one too, I'd pick Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises, personally--and turned to baking, actually.

"Foursome", also, should be taken literally.

At least as literally as you can take anything that happens at Fob. But the baking produced a "divine" cake (quoth Ginsberg), which was devoured in the company of editorgirl's sister, who for the evening was an X-box widow. Moving on, the night developed into Freud's couch. . . existentialism, damnation, and Diet Coke with Lime. Which I don't understand, but TB does, so we'll hand the fobcast over to him (and in the process apparently switch to present tense).

The party really got started when editorgirl (sic) broke out the trial-size antidepressants. Melyngoch argued that Ambien is the only true and living antidepressant, and the evening deterioriated, inevitably, into an antidepressant fight, with each participant attempting to prove that they were, in fact, the most against depression. Tolkien Boy threatened a filibuster on "happy songs," but were voted down when editorgirl (sic) decided that, a la Ginsberg, we all needed to write poems about being virgins. Melyngoch pondered on how one could poeticize about a cat that wasn't there. Much practicing of backward miaous ensued, the reasoning being that possessed cats must be as close to uncattedness as a poem was likely to achieve.

At this point, "Ginsberg"--whose namesake, incidently, was decidedly NOT a virgin of any sort--felt as if whatever was it is that has just been written here makes no sense whatsoever. "Backward miaous?" . . . cats? Honestly. . .

And some of us are, in fact, aware of the pharmeceutical uses of Ambien.

Live Fobcasting Week Two

It's Thursday night and here we are at Fob, about to give you a live transcription of our meeting.

Master Fob: Master Fob here. But then you know that because I just wrote my name before saying anything.

Tolkien Boy: Hi. I have white teeth.

editorgirl: I write poetry about shoulder blades. La la la.

Melyngoch: Narf!

Marchioness: Blog? What's a blog?

Edgy: Writing? What's writing?

Th.: Hey. What am I doing here? Shouldn't I be in California saying something obscure and profound?

Queen Zippergut: And I'm supposed to be in England having sex. What's going on?

Jeph: Didn't Master Fob and Th. kill me off in a story last summer?

The Other Fob: I wish I had a blog name.

Master Fob: Oh, wait. None of those people actually said the things I've attributed to them. As a matter of fact, I'm in Vegas with the J family and hence there is no Fob tonight.

Cheers.

Required Reading

I know most of you are prose-ists, but try this.

Cherry Blossoms Blowing in Wet, Blowing Snow

Tolkien Boy, Published Cartoonist

FOB July 13

In order to more accurately record the events at this weekly FOB meeting, and in order to gather data from a wider variety of FOBsters, we here at the Beareau of Better Blog Posts (also known as the BBBP) here present the weekly meeting of the FOB, a la carte:

Tolkien Boy: At 7:50 pm, twenty minutes after the meeting had officially started, I discovered to my shock and pain that the noodle dish that I had thought I had devoured on Monday was, in fact, completely undevoured, and was sitting under a dishcover on a long-unused burner coil, and to boot was flowering with a nice toupee of green-gray mold. Panicked that my guests should witness this shameful example of bachelor oblige, but mollifed somewhat that not a single fobsoul showed up until at least 8:00 pm, I hastily deposited the offending pasta disaster in the nearest trash receptacle and sprayed copious amounts of carcinogenic air freshener. There's no limit to the extent of neatness that I will go to for the FOB.

editorgirl: Rushed in, feeling guilty, at 8:00, only to find I'm the first one here. After establishing that nothing happened today (for me) and everything happened today (for TB), we stood around awkwardly for a few nanoseconds until we decided on a quick game o' anagrams. TB was getting his trash kicked when Edgy showed up and violated my personal space. . . granted, my personal space is larger than TB's apartment, but still. It was my space.

Master Fob: I am here. It is 8:24. I am the third to arrive, not counting Tolkien Boy who lives here. We are still waiting for Melyngoch, even though her Greek counterpart is already here. Edgy just went to get food at Lon's Cookin' Shack, but did not get enough for the rest of us. I forgive him because I am stuffed with salmon, macaroni casserole, potatoes, and chocolate cheesecake. Mmm... cheesecake...

Mely: Some of us need no excuse to say "ass" repeatedly. Ass ass ass ass ass. Ass ass. Ass. Ass.

Edgy: Apparently there's something about Mary.

Mely: Apparently, my wearing a bandana and propositioning editorgirl leads Master Chauvinist Homophobe to believe that I'm a lesbian. People are more than manifestations of stereotypes, people.

Tolkien Boy: That's Master Chauvinist Homofob. Get it right.

Edgy: You still haven't told us whether or not you arrived tonight in a big rig. Or was it on a Harley? Stereotypes exist for a reason, people.

Tolkien Boy: We just finished reading my somewhat adverb-laden story and everyone was very nice and didn't even point out that I suck. And there are a lot of reasons for that, too. Me sucking, that is, not them not pointing it out. Anyway, Melyngoch is now is singing Celine Dion songs in preparation for her upcoming wedding. It could be, perhaps, that someone else is getting married, but from the way that she's currently eyeing editorgirl (sic) we can only assume that a sudden remove to Massachusetts is in the works.

Melyngoch, after determining why it was, really, no man would ever loathe her, read a the half of a story in which a man and a woman argue about cats. In this particular case, there was no double meaning in the use of the word cats, though Edgy did threaten a dramatic filibuster, including the songs "Memory" and "Jellicle Ball" sung in a nasal, romance-languaged voice (particularly impressive since "Jellicle Ball" is an instrumental piece). editorgirl countered Edgy's performance with "Mr. Mistoffelees" and "Macavity: The Mystery Cat," complete with choreography. Waiting for the return, Edgy. . .

Edgy: Do I have to return if I'm doing it upside down?

editorgirl: Yes. But luckily Master Fob distracted us all with a brilliant four pages of his latest novel featuring men named Leon, Tim, Crow, and a little sister, too. And this time a man in drag. So much for his contract with Deseret Book. But we have more important things at hand as we wait for Master Fob to decide which fob will get a chance to go to the Heaviside Layer (cat heaven. . . and yes, we mean that kind of cat).

Edgy: Last I checked, Master Fob did not name one of the men "a little sister, too," but I'll review the pages. . . . Yeah. Nobody here goes by the name "a little sister, too."

Mely: I answer to "a little sister, too," but then, my rig is parked behind Lon's Barbecue Shack.

Tolkien Boy: And here I thought that the little sister was a dog. I'm getting my pet animals mixed up. Unfortunately, there are no pet animals in the house to keep me company, and I have to rely on my mold growths. We're all now sitting around talking about how hot it is. And how hot editorgirl is.

Edgy: Your mom is hot. I just learned that Tolkers doesn't know my last name. Silly boy. It's Bunny. Sheesh.

Master Fob: And now I am going. Edgy is going to take me and Melyngoch home, and he is tired. As am I. But then I am usually tired, even when I have no reason to be. And there is always room for dessert, as Tolkien Boy's parents remind us.

Mely: Mmmmm . . . dessert . . . editorgirl . . .

The Seven Deadly Sins of Petra's Writing

1. What writing?


(I've always been a martyr to sins of omission.)

editorgirl and Melyngoch make a joint appearance, which confuses them both

The Seven Sins of Melyngoch and editorgirl, who are not the same person (for those who came in late), but manifestations of the same Fob goddess

5. Lack of concrete images.

2. Excess of classical allusions.

4. "There's a lot of backs." Ginsberg

1. Chronology.

7. Inability to determine which swear words take participial endings. (e.g., shitting)

6. Inconsistent hair color.

3. Excessive celibacy.

Fob it up

.

1. Someone arrived here looking for "fobs novel". This is appropriate.

2. There are some writers called "F.O.B.s" (Friends of Bendis). This is not appropriate.

3. These toad-head keyfobs are awesome.

The Seven Deadly Writing Sins of the Zipster.

1. Not writing.
2. Writing in binges.
3. Not finishing what I write.
4. Using one word sentences. Really. Frequently.
5. Just really using "really" and "just" lots and lots and lots. Really.
6. Not making notes about ideas of what to write so I can eventually write about things that are currently of great interest to me, or were, at one time of great interest to me so that my writing might be considered the type of writing that would be classified as "interesting" to a certain "audience" should they ever be asked after reading something I wrote whether they thought my writing was 1) boring, 2) somewhat interesting, 3) interesting.
7. Writing really long sentences.

Overheard in New York honors the Fobs

I'm addicted to Overheard in New York. Huge fan.

Anyway, one of today's posts honors the Fobs. Well, kinda anyway.

Guy #1: Wait a sec, what train is this? What am I on?
Guy #2: I'm on your mom. That's what I'm on.

--D train

My Thursday Evening

Me? Thursday evening? Besides the obvious pining for FOB, I was sitting in an English emergency room waiting to have my shoulder xrayed. We managed to finish with that nonsense about 8:30 pm at which time I proceeded to put the children to bed, eat a little late dinner and then do some laundry all while trying not to move my shoulder too much. And later that night...well...let's just say there wasn't much talkin', if you get my drift.

At 7:30

I was at the Gallivan Center in Salt Lake with Foxy, Boogie, and LD, listening to Hot Buttered Rum. Actually, I was waiting for Michael Franti and Spearhead to come on. Which they did, about 8:30, and I'll post about that at the Fobcave when I get a chance. I'll say now, though, for Tolkien Boy's sake, that there were a total of two rap songs in the entire show. But I liked it anyway.

Theric's Dangerous Life

.

At about 7:30 I was walking five feet up upon a precarious, thirty-foot-long cinderblock fence. The toppping was missing here and there and sometimes I was walking upon open cinder block holes.

Having finished that, I went inside my house and have been packing pritty much ever since.

I've been packing books the last three days and we still have two large Billy cases full. Sheesh.

But tonight we were mostly vacuum packing coats and bedding using specially designed bags.

It was awesome!

I am Theric.

No FOB?

For those of you who are keeping up at all (and here's a big tip o' the hippo to all our loyal fans in Ottoro! Thank you, FOB freaks!), due to conflicting schedules the FOB front has decided to forego FOBbing on this day of July 6th, 2006. Although we are not together in physicality, we are certain to be together in spirit.

Yet, because some of us flag in spirit when we don't have physical presences nearby (coughTolkienBoycough), the latest FOB challenge is to give some sort of accounting, literary or otherwise, for your actions today during the hours of 7:30 pm to midnight. Be you provincial in Provo or ennervated in England, you still, technically, exist, and are part of the FOB fraternity (or sorority, or gynernity, depending on your Latin affiliation). Therefore, it is incumbent upon you to fill us in on what you did instead of FOBbing on this Thursday night.

So, what did you do? Did you have, as Melyngoch frequently suggests, wild crazy monkey sex? Did you bake a cake for George W. Bush's birthday? Did you dance the funky chicken on your seventy-fifth wedding anniversary? Did you have a multitude of unlikely dates and determine that they are why, truly, no man will ever love you? Did you leave your troubles on the doorstep and head west on the sunny side of the street? Enquiring minds want to know.

So, when you're done with the monkeys or the men, let us know. When the cake is eaten and the country is occupied, write a quick blog post. Don't delay - this offer is limited to this week, after which Tolkien Boy will find something else to encourage people to participate.