Beach Sloth

Pop Serial 3: Prepare Yourself

               Pop Serial 3 is an event. It is more than some ‘Oh cool, here’s some literary magazine we threw together’. No, Stephen Tully Dierks’ now-famous (alt lit famous anyway) Pop Serial is something to be savored, something to look forward to, like SXSW or the Cannes Film Festival. Yep, it is that gosh-darn important. Succulent Stephen Tully Dierks, with his infinite sex and single-ness, puts this together about once a year. It is always beloved. People go crazy for it, scream his name during alt lit sex, it is that big. And it’s been dripping down over the past few days and weeks onto the internet. Each drip of prose drives the ladies and gentlemen of the internet mad with desire. 

                Since this is the introductory post, let me explain why this will be a week-long celebration. Silly Stephen leaked these poems out little by little. I don’t know why he did it this way. As a result, I have no choice but to break up the coverage into several sections. Besides even if he hadn’t done such a thing this might have been an unreasonably sized post succumbing to the ‘too long, didn’t read’ syndrome. Mr. Dierks had already agreed to this method via the legally binding ‘Forumspring’ question. Enjoy!  

                Luna Miguel starts of the magazine in style. You may better know her as the cover to Megan Boyle’s best-selling book ‘Selected unpublished blog posts of a Mexican Panda Express employee’. Her first poem deals with disease invoked by poetry. Since the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 killed all those people, I’m scared of her poem. It’s beautiful but it may kill me. She informs us to watch porn. To Luna, porn is better than poetry. I’m tempted to say poetry is porn that all art is pornography, but I’m not sure how she’d feel about it. 

                Richard Chiem is amazing. He’s getting older, wiser, and better. I read him on a fairly regular basis as he has a good output of work. This is a strange piece. I like Chloe. I wish I didn’t already know a Chloe and have a history with a person named Chloe. That made the piece a little more difficult to read. Glad Richard focuses on a party. Parties can be such weirdly isolating experiences sometimes. Like, if you’re not a beautiful, attractive person, they can be downright scary. And in Richard party everyone is beautiful. I hope one day I am beautiful on the outside. Not sure when that day will come. Guess I’ll have to settle with that shitty ‘I’m beautiful on the inside’ malarkey. 

                Andrew James Weatherhead contributes ‘A Private View of Butt City’. There are many beautiful cities forever immortalized in songs. ‘Paradise City’, ‘Suffragette City’ and ‘Bear City’ are just a few of those unforgettable cities. Those cities live on in our memories. We tend to remember the positive and filter out the negative. ‘Butt City’ is when we look out the window and see nothing. When we see a parking lot, that’s Butt City we see. Butt City is everywhere. There is a distinct place known as Butt City, but it exists only on Myspace. 

                Liam Bjartrún Adams is my friend on the internet. I haven’t met him IRL so I can’t say I agree with his first poem. The mixture of the profane and profound is quite beautiful. Every sentence seems to turn on a dime, going from fuck loads of cocaine to suffocating on the love of the universe (these could both be the same things). ‘Every Miniature Flue’ takes a different approach, of dealing with Liam’s past, a past filled with milk drinking, before he became allergic to that bone-strengthening liquid. He also discusses his path down the road of love, but I’m more interested in the milk.    

                Ana Carrete thinks big thoughts. Some of these thoughts are dangerous. You ever seen a feta cheese suicide? Those things truly stink. Is suicide something to joke about? This is alt lit. The answer is yes. I like ‘where’ quite a bit. Ana says her secrets float around cyberspace. See, that’s why I’m anonymous. My secrets are IRL, not on the internet. By night I’m a blogger but by day I’m just an average Joe Sloth. ‘All I Do’ reminds me of Facebook picture viewing, of going through old friends pictures, to see a more idealized version of me. Wonder if anybody’s going to take up Ana’s suggestion to be her teapot and pour themselves all over her. Feel that may be ‘suggestive’ of Ana’s desire to become an anthropomorphic tea cup. Or it could be code for ‘sex’. And sunglasses keep falling on my head and that means my eyes won’t be turning red. Crying’s not for me. 

                Prepare yourself for tomorrow’s installment of excellence. This online party has just begun, or ‘Pangur Ban Party’ as some would put it.