[:en]When Tom Bradley was a little boy he was given a gazetteer for Christmas. As little boys will, he looked up all the places in the world that start with the F-word. There were two, Fukien in China and Fukuoka in Japan. Little did he suspect that he would one day be exiled to both.
Tom is a former lounge harpist. During his pre-exilic period, he played his own transcriptions of Bach and Debussy in a Salt Lake City synagogue that had been transformed into a pricey watering hole by a nephew of the Shah of Iran.
He taught British and American literature to Chinese graduate students in the years leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was politely invited to leave China after burning a batch of student essays about the democracy movement rather than surrendering them to “the leaders.”
He wound up teaching conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese “imperial university” where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers raw at festive banquets. But his writing somehow sustains him.
DA
What are some of your most important aesthetic influences?
TB
What Louis Armstrong did, starting in 1929, after the Hot Five and Seven, until 1935, when some malignant spirit mysteriously turned off his talent spigot. During those six years he did things with his larynx, and with his Selmer, that I still can’t believe. The way he bends the lyrics and stretches the language tears my sensorium into skin-confetti. John Milton does similar things with blank verse. Madame Blavatsky goes even further with cosmology and anthropology.
DA
What’s your view on fracking, if done by elbow?
TB
It beats fucking, if done to Rimbaud.
DA
Would you like this interviewtf more if it had another title, like “No, Sir-iously,” or “‘Have you explained your pupils to the cloud?’ I asked my ex-mom. But she was without vigor, she just stayed very calm and revised myhermy strangeness over and over again”?
TB
You leave one’s ex-mom out of this! I can vouch that she was with vim, if not vigor, and never calm when emasculating one emotionally. As for pupils, I was removed from the classroom long ago. I used to snore at the podium and tell the baccalaureate candidates to get murdered if they tried to awaken me for the sake of being taught something.
DA
What is the most (experimental) piece of art you’ve ever enjoyed?
TB
“Castle Bravo,” the 1954 experimental H-bomb test at No Bikini at All.
DA
If 100 divided by 2 were 42, what would 3 times 1°1 be?
TB
How do you make that little circle go way up high there between the numbers? I want to make it, too. It’s eiskalt.
DA
One TED talk a day keeps the _____________ away?
TB
skateboard injury videos
DA
Which role will (or should) male genitalia play in the far future – dick-hacking, ass-splicing, bio-junk, interstellar engineering?
TB
That is not for me to say. You must consult our sisters, who are building a brighter tomorrow for all our sakes. I defer to their superior sense of where Homo sapiens, as a species, is headed in this New Age.
DA
„?“
TB
How do you make that little sunken quotation mark? It’s also eiskalt, and nifty, as we say in the Lingo of Liz Two. It looks really European, and we Americans are taught that European things are more, like, you know, cultural.
DA
At which point does Bizarro become an unacceptable transgreßion?
TB
”TransgreBion”? What’s that? The process of reassigning the gender of a grebe?
DA
Is it possible that music is totally overrated? Could one say the same about athlete’s dick?
TB
After intercoursing in the locker room, if you dry off thoroughly, especially under your goyishistically retained prepuce, the vegetation won’t get a foot-hold, and athlete’s dick can be avoided well into early middle age.
DA
What would you rather have invented – the Ö or the 1?
TB
Umlauts cause us Americans to feel sheepishly ignorant, and deprived of eiskalt mouth sounds. Plus, we don’t know how to make them. Especially the one that sits on top of the O like two tiny horn-sprouts. That’s why we have to say “Cologne.”
DA
Why doesn’t the Canadian tech-metal band Martyr get the attention they deserve so much?
TB
Because everyone’s busy following the Canadian Special Needs Bowling League.
DA
How many spiders are needed to creep out one level-4 arachnophobe?
TB
Depends on how many spider-sized holes are in the level-4 arachno-what you said.
DA
What is your favorite ____________?
TB
The more or less vertical ____________ that slithers up from Angela Merkel’s Bustenhalter.
DA
Who/what is the biggest dick in the universe? Whose asshole would it fit perfectly?
TB
For self-preservation’s sake, I can’t tell you the name of the universe’s biggest dick. But I will say it’s the editor of a truly major poetry publishing house in NYC. Even among Americans, this dick’s obesity is without precedent. It is so grotesque that, before revulsion can overwhelm your consciousness, simple curiosity takes over: can there be a skeleton under that reeking, amorphous mess?
I have never been to a “Star Wars” movie, but I’m told that, having been in this editor-dick’s presence, I know what it’s like to be granted an audience with Jabba the Hutt, right down to the inch-thick coating of mucus glazing the quintuple chins.
This dick tells you to rewrite your book “for stupid people.” Meanwhile you are privy to the workings of its digestive tract from clear across the room, where you cower against the opposite wall to avoid the catastrophic editor-flatulence. This dick perfectly personifies the poetry publishing scene in America today. One of this dick’s demographically correct poets just won the Pud Blitzer Prize. This is the same cetacean slag whose press holds “contests” in lieu of a slush pile, which attract five figures’ worth of hopeful entrants, each paying a thirty-buck entry fee. You do the math. The po-biz in America is much like our Democrat party: larded in blatant financial corruption, encrusted with identity politics, and imbued with contempt for the public. Is it any wonder nobody buys “poetry” books? No more surprising than Trump being our prezzy.
In answer to your second query, I doubt such a dick could fit in anyone’s asshole, not even a parmacetti whale’s. I pity the Moby Dick who tries.
DA
You don’t have to be gay to find penises fascinating. The comedy „Superbad,“ for instance, features some funky dickophilia moments. What do you think about enhancing (or encocking) classic films the way you enhance (or encock) newsies? Oskar Schindler smoking a dickarette, for fuck’s sake?
TB
“Whoever gnaws a prepuce, it is considered as if he squoze the scrotum. And whoever gums a goy-nad, it is considered as if he gulped the spritz.”
–Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, ru-486
DA
Bonus question: What’s your take on the following 8 Nonsemes?
And even if It undermines itself
by chewing Elvis off,
so be it. Take It by the neck,
but never without saw.
The shadow of the poet Kruste,
dumm-eyed, chippy-ghuuled …
This author’s shadow grew and smelled
strictly-speakingly.
D/ch: I can only mute silence.
D/ch: I can only Ken Zucchini.
D/ch: I can only Vonderville.
D/ch: I can only Ken Spooknik.
The Prince grew a sort of ear
beneath his foot (behind his chin).
He turned faces into water
and back into assholes again.
“Lyxe minuxen,
triple the man,”
sang in unison
the editors.
TB
I like them. Metrically, they scan well. It’s surprising how many people can’t actually put language in rhythm. I wish it was 1928-1934, and we could get Louis Armstrong to scat on these Nonsemes of yours, Daniel.
Image source: (c) TB[:de]When Tom Bradley was a little boy he was given a gazetteer for Christmas. As little boys will, he looked up all the places in the world that start with the F-word. There were two, Fukien in China and Fukuoka in Japan. Little did he suspect that he would one day be exiled to both.
Tom is a former lounge harpist. During his pre-exilic period, he played his own transcriptions of Bach and Debussy in a Salt Lake City synagogue that had been transformed into a pricey watering hole by a nephew of the Shah of Iran.
He taught British and American literature to Chinese graduate students in the years leading up to the Tiananmen Square massacre. He was politely invited to leave China after burning a batch of student essays about the democracy movement rather than surrendering them to “the leaders.”
He wound up teaching conversational skills to freshman dentistry majors in the Japanese “imperial university” where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers raw at festive banquets. But his writing somehow sustains him.
DA
What are some of your most important aesthetic influences?
TB
What Louis Armstrong did, starting in 1929, after the Hot Five and Seven, until 1935, when some malignant spirit mysteriously turned off his talent spigot. During those six years he did things with his larynx, and with his Selmer, that I still can’t believe. The way he bends the lyrics and stretches the language tears my sensorium into skin-confetti. John Milton does similar things with blank verse. Madame Blavatsky goes even further with cosmology and anthropology.
DA
What’s your view on fracking, if done by elbow?
TB
It beats fucking, if done to Rimbaud.
DA
Would you like this interviewtf more if it had another title, like “No, Sir-iously,” or “‘Have you explained your pupils to the cloud?’ I asked my ex-mom. But she was without vigor, she just stayed very calm and revised myhermy strangeness over and over again”?
TB
You leave one’s ex-mom out of this! I can vouch that she was with vim, if not vigor, and never calm when emasculating one emotionally. As for pupils, I was removed from the classroom long ago. I used to snore at the podium and tell the baccalaureate candidates to get murdered if they tried to awaken me for the sake of being taught something.
DA
What is the most (experimental) piece of art you’ve ever enjoyed?
TB
“Castle Bravo,” the 1954 experimental H-bomb test at No Bikini at All.
DA
If 100 divided by 2 were 42, what would 3 times 1°1 be?
TB
How do you make that little circle go way up high there between the numbers? I want to make it, too. It’s eiskalt.
DA
One TED talk a day keeps the _____________ away?
TB
skateboard injury videos
DA
Which role will (or should) male genitalia play in the far future – dick-hacking, ass-splicing, bio-junk, interstellar engineering?
TB
That is not for me to say. You must consult our sisters, who are building a brighter tomorrow for all our sakes. I defer to their superior sense of where Homo sapiens, as a species, is headed in this New Age.
DA
„?“
TB
How do you make that little sunken quotation mark? It’s also eiskalt, and nifty, as we say in the Lingo of Liz Two. It looks really European, and we Americans are taught that European things are more, like, you know, cultural.
DA
At which point does Bizarro become an unacceptable transgreßion?
TB
”TransgreBion”? What’s that? The process of reassigning the gender of a grebe?
DA
Is it possible that music is totally overrated? Could one say the same about athlete’s dick?
TB
After intercoursing in the locker room, if you dry off thoroughly, especially under your goyishistically retained prepuce, the vegetation won’t get a foot-hold, and athlete’s dick can be avoided well into early middle age.
DA
What would you rather have invented – the Ö or the 1?
TB
Umlauts cause us Americans to feel sheepishly ignorant, and deprived of eiskalt mouth sounds. Plus, we don’t know how to make them. Especially the one that sits on top of the O like two tiny horn-sprouts. That’s why we have to say “Cologne.”
DA
Why doesn’t the Canadian tech-metal band Martyr get the attention they deserve so much?
TB
Because everyone’s busy following the Canadian Special Needs Bowling League.
DA
How many spiders are needed to creep out one level-4 arachnophobe?
TB
Depends on how many spider-sized holes are in the level-4 arachno-what you said.
DA
What is your favorite ____________?
TB
The more or less vertical ____________ that slithers up from Angela Merkel’s Bustenhalter.
DA
Who/what is the biggest dick in the universe? Whose asshole would it fit perfectly?
TB
For self-preservation’s sake, I can’t tell you the name of the universe’s biggest dick. But I will say it’s the editor of a truly major poetry publishing house in NYC. Even among Americans, this dick’s obesity is without precedent. It is so grotesque that, before revulsion can overwhelm your consciousness, simple curiosity takes over: can there be a skeleton under that reeking, amorphous mess?
I have never been to a “Star Wars” movie, but I’m told that, having been in this editor-dick’s presence, I know what it’s like to be granted an audience with Jabba the Hutt, right down to the inch-thick coating of mucus glazing the quintuple chins.
This dick tells you to rewrite your book “for stupid people.” Meanwhile you are privy to the workings of its digestive tract from clear across the room, where you cower against the opposite wall to avoid the catastrophic editor-flatulence. This dick perfectly personifies the poetry publishing scene in America today. One of this dick’s demographically correct poets just won the Pud Blitzer Prize. This is the same cetacean slag whose press holds “contests” in lieu of a slush pile, which attract five figures’ worth of hopeful entrants, each paying a thirty-buck entry fee. You do the math. The po-biz in America is much like our Democrat party: larded in blatant financial corruption, encrusted with identity politics, and imbued with contempt for the public. Is it any wonder nobody buys “poetry” books? No more surprising than Trump being our prezzy.
In answer to your second query, I doubt such a dick could fit in anyone’s asshole, not even a parmacetti whale’s. I pity the Moby Dick who tries.
DA
You don’t have to be gay to find penises fascinating. The comedy „Superbad,“ for instance, features some funky dickophilia moments. What do you think about enhancing (or encocking) classic films the way you enhance (or encock) newsies? Oskar Schindler smoking a dickarette, for fuck’s sake?
TB
“Whoever gnaws a prepuce, it is considered as if he squoze the scrotum. And whoever gums a goy-nad, it is considered as if he gulped the spritz.”
–Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, ru-486
DA
Bonus question: What’s your take on the following 8 Nonsemes?
And even if It undermines itself
by chewing Elvis off,
so be it. Take It by the neck,
but never without saw.
The shadow of the poet Kruste,
dumm-eyed, chippy-ghuuled …
This author’s shadow grew and smelled
strictly-speakingly.
D/ch: I can only mute silence.
D/ch: I can only Ken Zucchini.
D/ch: I can only Vonderville.
D/ch: I can only Ken Spooknik.
The Prince grew a sort of ear
beneath his foot (behind his chin).
He turned faces into water
and back into assholes again.
“Lyxe minuxen,
triple the man,”
sang in unison
the editors.
TB
I like them. Metrically, they scan well. It’s surprising how many people can’t actually put language in rhythm. I wish it was 1928-1934, and we could get Louis Armstrong to scat on these Nonsemes of yours, Daniel.
Image source: (c) TB
[:]