I Stole a Book-- I Did.

I have this thing for Balzac. I do. I don't fully understand it since he's this early 19th century French writer and I'm an Americanist whose French is spotty. But the fascination started when I was in college.

I told my French 101 teacher, when she asked us about our 'goals' in the class, that I intended to be able to read Balzac's entire Human Comedy in the original French (la Comédie Humaine ensemble dans l'original français).

She laughed.

At a huge book swap one year, I found the entire collection of the Human Comedy -- something like 17 volumes -- in a box for 30 bucks. I couldn't afford it. I walked away from that box with a big pang in my heart. The next year, I went back to the book swap and found the same box, with all volumes, that had not sold the previous year. I borrowed the money to buy them. I still have them. I'm staring at them on my bookshelf right now.

But near that collection of the Human Comedy (complete with original image plates like the one in the pic above) on my shelf is another collection of Honoré de Balzac's writing ... Droll Stories. Well, there are actually two copies. One was stolen.

Yes, I know. I confessed this to a friend once (a friend who gave me Balzac's biography for a birthday present) who called me 'the scum of the earth' for stealing a book. He took no Abbie Hoffman like stance. There is nothing, was nothing, noble about stealing a book ... from the library no less ... from a library I worked at no less ...

But this is what happened: Freshman year I'm working in the stacks of my local anonymous-maybe-campus-maybe-not-library. I may have already developed my strange Balzac fetish, from what origin I simply don't remember, or I may not have, but, in any event, I come across this beautiful but dusty cloth bound version of Droll Stories, complete with image plates (like the Human Comedy I would buy years later). I take the book off the shelf and turn the onion leaf pages and I was, I kid you not, filled with literal (no pun) glee. And then, I turn to the last page where the card pocket was and the check-out card with a record of readers and dates the book had been borrowed.

Never. Never-ever-ever!

The book had been sitting on the shelf of the library for about 35 years, in my estimate from the anonymous-maybe-campus-maybe-not-library 'Rec'd' stamp on the inside cover, and had not once been checked-out by anyone.

Now, Balzac, he was a peculiar fellow. He wrote incessantly. I think he might have even had what is now called 'hypergraphia' -- yes, hyper-writing disease. Some people believe Tennyson had this affliction as well, but, I digress. Balzac wrote many titles under the names of rich men who wanted to include the title of 'author' among their accolades. He wrote for money so that he could afford lamp oil to stay up all night and write his own work (per the myth presented of him in the gifted biography). He wasn't of any nobility. He included the 'de' in his name with purpose, making him Honoré de Balzac, in the same way the baby brother of the famous singer who has no job of his own drives around in an Escalade to perhaps appear a bit more 'regal' himself. Balzac was a little obese, and a little bit oily, as in poor hygiene, and not so attractive, but none of this stopped him from believing in his own greatness. Flights of fancy aren't rare, but it is rare that a trickster who deludes himself that he's Great actually ends up being Great.

How could I let this cloth bound version of Droll Stories linger another day on this dusty shelf? And so, I took it, with the justification that Balzac, with all of his midnight delusions and body odor and abusive parents and fake title of nobility, deserved to be loved by someone, and that someone was going to be me.

Now, the truth is, I have two volumes of this book. I stole that book to save it and to save Balzac, but as a book lover, I never recovered from the guilt. It literally haunted me. I couldn't even display the book on my shelf. And then along came the era of eBay and to my surprise, I was able to find an exact copy, cloth bound and all, of Droll Stories.

My plan was to anonymously mail the new book back to that old anonymous-maybe-campus-maybe-not-library. I imagined the surprise of the librarian (the woman I'd worked under would surely be retired, or dead, by now, right?) as he or she opened the package and read my confessional note. I imagined that someone might even write it up in the local paper: 'Anonymous Thief Returns Lost Collection of Balzac's Droll Stories' ... I wondered, even, if they might figure out who the thief was, track me down, and either sue me or interview me for the story.

What is that little ditty ... the road to Hell is paved with good intentions (?).

My good intentions are still sitting on my bookshelf, partly because I fear that the book will continue to rot on the shelf in the back of a seldom used anonymous-maybe-campus-maybe-not-library in the Pennsylvania countryside and all of Balzac's sleepless manic nights will have been, once again, in vain. Each new year comes and goes and I promise myself I will mail one of those copies back to that library (to sit and rot and never be read again, again, again) and I can't bring myself to do it.

Until now ... because I have finally remembered from where my obsession with Balzac came. It came from the moment that I found that dusty cloth bound book sitting on a shelf where it had been for 35 years, apparently, untouched. When I tucked the Droll Stories under my arm to take home that day, I apparently took the ghost of Balzac with me.

And so I've promised-- I've promised myself, I've promised Balzac, I've promised Mrs. Tiffany the librarian (whose name I've changed to protect her, retired or expired, though she may be), I've promised the friend ( who was actually an ex-boyfriend, which qualifies, to some extent, the 'scum of the earth' comment) to make it to the post office this year and mail that book back to that dusty old anonymous-maybe-campus-maybe-not-library.

I have even set a date: February 14th. Valentines Day -- just to show a little symbolic love to Balzac, the great impostor (imposteur) turned authentic genius that he was.

I imagine writing the narrative of my crime and calling it The Thief and the Trickster, which sounds so much like a Balzac title, no? And yes, it is true, that if you've looked, Valentine's Day actually falls on a Sunday this year. I'm hoping to happen upon the road to redemption with my intent, but, if the road to Hell is (in fact) paved with good intentions ... I'm in big trouble.

Guston in Grasmere: The Poem-Pictures

... misunderstood and castigated by the art world, he sought the company of writers and poets, amongst them his Woodstock neighbour, Philip Roth and the poets Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge, William Corbett, Stanley Kunitz, and Guston's wife, Musa McKim. From these friendships came an astounding series of collaborations: the result was not illustrated poetry, but a hybrid art-form of intermingled words and mysterious images, which were called 'poem-pictures ...

from
Dove Cottage: Wordsworth Museum and Art Gallery

How Deliciously Innocently Evil

Edith Wharton, "Roman Fever," -- the first fr'enemies?

The moment Mrs. Slade blows her cool, my heart, still, skips a little. I've taught this story so many times I can recite some passages if I'm in a thoughtful-enough mood. A digression; but isn't the whole of the narrative orchestrated digression?

When you read this story, if you have'nt (because I have faith in you), you'll find, immediately, that Wharton is toying with you. She's as present in the text as the two lead female characters. She is the conscious thought which Mrs. Slade cannot contain within herself: yes, the moment she blows.

The bait and switch, a very popular trope in 70s situational comedies, is at hand. Three's Company. Bewitched. I Dream of Jeannie ... something is not as it seems here; hmmm, something is amiss.

Neither character, Ansley nor Slate, emerge unmarred. The brutality of women, in a quiet psychological way -- in a story absent of men, by the way, except by mention (which makes me think of the film "The Women" with Annette Bening, Meg Ryan, and Jada Pinkett-Smith, Debra Messing and a host of surprising high profile actors with a visible exclusion-- completely-- of men) -- recalls those Discovery channel scenes of two female hawks who have built their nests in too-close a proximity to one another.

Well, the point, most simply, is that there may exist a particularly female aggressiveness, that it is, perhaps, more lethal, more stealth, more exact than the offenses of men who vie each other as inherent practice.

I feel sorry for both women. In the backdrop of the Palatine, the Forum, the Coliseum, they end with no less than ruin.

That's me at the Forum, or il Fori, in the background. What a harrowing place to wander around during a cold winter night! Shame on you Mrs. Slade.

Douglas Kearney, Black Automation

I need to warn you that I'm really about to gush. Now, I don't mean gush in a girly way, but gush in a deep-book-language-poetry-artsy way.

Doug Kearney is one of the most creative people I've ever met. That says a lot since my life, my career, and my recreation center around creative poetics and prose, and arts and culture. He refers to himself on his web page as Poet/Performer/Librettist/Educator, which in some ways doesn't cover the range of his talent, but more importantly, his skill. He has the visual sense of a graphic artist and the aesthetic consciousness of a painter. He has the ear of a musician. He has the mind of an architect who is also a linguist. He has the spirit of a poet, and the tongue of a storyteller. He has created poetry of the kind I have never, ever seen before, and yet, the work is immediately a delight, sometimes a privilege to be immersed in it.



I'm still gushing, I know, but the bottom line is that there is no limit of respect and awe I hold for this writer. I can say, personally, that I've read this book three times, which is a great testament given that I tell my own students, each term, their goal as writers should be to produce something that their readers are compelled to pick up and read again, to go back to, to remember while they are shopping in the super market, on the train. I imagine, off in California where everything seems a bit magical in some way, his instruction is a gift and his students are some of the luckiest young writers in the country.

His new book Black Automation is a treat for the eye as well as the ear. I cannot imagine being a reader of Contemporary Poetry and not having this text in your collection. Hats off to Fence Books for seeing real talent, and investing in it. I applaud his work, and I'm certainly not the only one, as you'll see if you read on.

I've taken the liberty of excerpting some information from Fence Books and thank them ahead of time for not blacklisting me for doing so (insert smiley here).

THE BLACK AUTOMATON
Douglas Kearney
Winner of the National Poetry Series

From ambivalent animals thriving after Katrina to party chants echoing in a burning city, The Black Automaton troubles rubble, cobbling a kind of life. In this collection bodies at risk seek renewal through violence and fertility, history and myth, flesh and radios.

"First, you have to see Douglas Kearney's visual poems, which cheekily diagram cultural memes as if they were parts of speech (as they are). The Black Automaton has its share of sharp, tender lyrics, too...these exploit the political possibilities of puns and the way meanings hinge on inexact resemblance. Kearney's poems tweak and skewer pop culture and literary sources from Paul Laurence Dunbar to T. S. Eliot to traditional ballads and blues...Kearney's work turns poetic and cultural conventions disquietingly inside out."

—Catherine Wagner

Douglas Kearney's work as a poet, performer and librettist has been featured in many venues in print, in-the-flesh and in digital code. His first book, Fear, Some, was published in 2006 (Red Hen Press). In 2008, he was honored with a Whiting Writers Award. He lives in the Valley with his wife and teaches at California Institute of the Arts. For more info, go to his personal web site: www.douglaskearney.com

"Douglas Kearney's innovative new collection makes me tremble like a "mouth and mind full of fish hooks." It makes me think of the despair at the heart of ecstasy; of restlessness as a kind of anodyne. These poems literally vibrate with Kearney's precocious intellect and passion. They hum, they bang, they bite. This is a jaw-dropping, electrifying book. What else can I say? I have never encountered poetry like this before."

—Terrance Hayes, author of Lighthead and Wind in a Box

"We inhabit a world of automata, complicities, complacencies, sound waves, soundless suggestive sales pitches and blaring lingo-infested jingles, machines, robots, rotgut and gut-wrenching city-burnt silences, slave ships, space ships, straitjackets, samples, metonyms and nimble meta-limbs angling gangly nomenclatures, singularities, consecrations and condemnations, assassinations and ass-backward nations, disgraced antonymic masses of matter jostling in unchosen seas, types in stereo singing syncopated tunes out of time with the lock-step of what we might have been supposed to think. What good is poetry in such a world? No good. Not good, useful: "righteous art is a rod./rods are very useful." The Black Automaton is a whip-smart lightning rod: use it."

—Jen Hofer, author of one and translator of sexoPUROsexoVELOZ+Septiembre (Dolores Dorantes)

"Kearney's poetry flows from a consideration of urban speech, negro spontaneity and book learning not easily parsed if you haven't fully digested every major hiphop lyric composed between 1979 and 1983 and spent a considerable amount of time backtracking the library stacks stuffed with Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed's neofolkloric trails. The Black Automaton is the graphic afterbirth of a Jeep with a booming system driven at 90 mph into a stack of Bibles, small press journals and the Tibetan Book of the Dead by a man who mistook his mouth for a sledgehammer."

—Greg Tate is a writer/musician currently working on a book about James Brown and is still HNIC of Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber

Radio

the first black you met was on the radio.

this is true even if you lived with blacks.

the first black to speak the word radio

knew it meant the same as blood.

the first black to know blood meant radio,

claimed radio meant love, to better lure you.

the first black you dreamed about was on the radio

and waited for you there each night to fuck you,

you still believe this and sleep with the radio

on or off; it all depends.

the first blacks to realize they were blacks became radios

at once, singing something that could never be english.

the first black to confess it was a radio

did so to account for the snow filling its voice.

the first black you heard was a radio

and did not speak english even if it did: radios cannot speak.

the first blacks to change radio's

meaning from love back to blood are still here

and want to fuck you. they are doing so on the radio

right now. you don't like it but go to sleep.

Tallahatchie Lullabye, Baby

cattail cast tattles Till tale,

lowing low along the hollow.

crickets chirrup and ribbits lick-up.

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

skin scow skiffs upon pond scum skin

going slow along the hollow.

now may mayfly alight brown brow.

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

maybe bye baby bye baby by and by—

lowing low along the hollow—

we will slip the knot not slip will we?

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

who's a bruise to blue hue 'hatchie,

going slow along the hollow?

who's a bruise to whose hue, 'hatchie?

what's chucked the 'hatchie swallow.

Kodak flash tattles Till tale

going slow among the hollow.

who's a bruise to bruise hue?

swallow what the 'hatchie chucks.

—Emmett Till (1941–1955)

... Tempted to Not Include Langston Hughes on my 20th Century Lit. Syllabus. Seriously.

I found out in December (ahem) that a class I'd prepped for was being dropped and I would be assigned a new course, in this case, American Literature from 1900. It's a senior level course and not the quickest prep, with 4 weeks and 3 holidays between me and the first day of school -- that is -- without an anthology.

I love this century. I love it a lot. I love the century before, the 19th century, as much. I adore the first few decades. I love the evolution of each genre within the rapid evolution of socio-political history that runs concurrent to the work at hand. The first day of the semester in such a class for me is always dedicated to a timeline of people and events in order for students to have specific historical context for the work we read.

So, timeline in hand and anthology table of contents at hand, I set out to construct a syllabus that I might have taught, oh, maybe a dozen, or two, times. The worst part about this process is the omissions. Do you teach the late 19th century so that students understand how Whitman effected the emergence of poetry after him? Do you teach Dunbar and McKay, Sexton and Plath and Bishop and Rich? Do you throw Ashbery in the mix or leave the canonical to fend for itself with Eliot and Pound in one corner and Williams and Stevens in another?

The early 20th century is a hotbed of literary activity. The Modernists were doing a jig at the same time that Harlem Renaissance writers were having a clam bake. Everyone was writing a Manifesto of some sort. The Europeans were establishing 'schools' and 'movements' and 'revolutions' of culture. And the word on the street was that everything was new again and the past was just that ... past.

As I page through the anthology, I see Langston Hughes and the same poems that I see in every anthology I've ever taught from, perhaps, every anthology I've ever been taught from. I see "The Weary Blues" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Mulatto" and so on, and I think, for the first time (ever) maybe I won't teach Hughes this term.

Gasps, right? Yes, I had to wonder where the thought came from.

I thought, perhaps, the work could not be taught without it falling into cliche (not true) and then I thought I wasn't sure if I could make it matter to my students (curious) and then I thought ... they just won't care.... I thought, I can't make this 'matter' anymore ... Where did that come from?

I know where it came from. It came from absence. It came from my memories of walking into a literature class at the University of Missouri or at Southern Illinois and having a myriad of subject positions staring back at me. It comes from the recollection of students coming to me after class and telling me about their grandfathers reading Hughes to them at night and pointing out that he was a Black poet and that any Black child could grow up to do what he did. It comes from the nods and acknowledgment that resound in a class of Black students when I read Hughes, when we dissect Hughes, when we talk about the relevance of Hughes to contemporary racial issues. It comes, quite frankly, from knowing, not wondering, that the work mattered in a personal way to each of them.

Yeah, okay. This is a bit sentimental, a bit redundant, even, dare I say, a bit touchy-feely. But sometimes the sentimental, redundant, touchy-feeliness of a thing is the true nature of the thing. Am I ripping off Elaine Scarry here? If so, I assure you, she said it far more eloquently.

These often anthologized poems, the ones teenagers are asked to write reports on in their AP English courses in high school, these poems for 'Poems on the Bus', these poems they recite at the end of 'cultural' news shows, sometimes, even, car commercials ... these were somehow not poems that I felt could break through the brittle shell of 'we've heard this before' that I feared in my forthcoming group of majors. I wasn't sure, for the first time in 18 years of teaching, if my most-likely homogeneous group of majority representative students would really care no matter how hard I tried.

This streak of doubt got me pacing and pacing and worrying and worrying and imagining Langston sitting with Countee and both of them shaking their heads at me ... each sipping on a bourbon, neat, and shaking their heads ... muttering '... and a sister, no less'

I'm still worrying about this, despite the fact that Hughes is safely on my syllabus. I worry about whether or not race (outside of a class specified to be dedicated to authors of color), for 'non' racial students, has become a subject that is somehow tread upon so heavily that they often don't want to revisit the path.

Or, in my worrying, I imagine the opposite ... that what we read is so foreign (in meaning) and so familiar (in form) that they will dismiss it as something that doesn't 'include' them. I worry that the work has become an effigy to all things good and right and all injustices (that exist in the *past*) and all wrongs that we dare not repeat again: a little 'noble savage' and a little 'dandy-savant'. Hughes, I realize, has become somewhat irreproachable, and so what is it that they can say, anyway?

For the record, I've taught Hughes to plenty of students from plenty of backgrounds and never had these reservations before ... so, what's going on, now?

And herein comes my revelation -- something I'd known and forgotten.

The work includes us, includes them, because the work is more than a 'song of the self' and is more than a long cast shadow of Whitman. The work is the performance of conflict and intent and philosophy and commentary on how a Black man should write and for who and of what. The intersection he presents to us reveals how the work strains against the great prosperity Black writers were beginning to experience but which seemed also as though, any minute, it could fall apart if a certain sentimentalist notion of 'Black Folks' was not entertained by the literary-minded. The educated Black writer became, in Hughes' time, a living ethnographic text of the community conflicts inherent to the time, writing of 'Black' themes, often for white readers.

The writer in me says, when it comes down to it, within all literature lurks the writerly self of the author, prone to self-analysis and process and form-- the writerly self who doesn't really give a rat's ass (ew! sorry) about the literary self but about how the work connects the 'me' to the 'we'.

So, Hughes is on my syllabus. I'll supplement the poems with his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" in order to problematize his work in a way that might get this particular class to understand the inherent conflicts within community, as well as without. We will talk about how, in many ways, they represent the audience he knew would have most access to his work -- educated, and generally privileged, White readers, and hopefully they might ('might' is not a gambling man's kind of word) find new ways to see his work in that context.

And we'll talk about his writerly demon and how he might have navigated that brawling Self past the literary expectations he experienced in the wake of his success.

I think, today, I forgot what I knew until I remembered what I'd forgotten. Langston and Countee have joined Baldwin who's tipping the piano man. They're paying no mind to me at all, caught up in something that makes Countee slap his knee when he laughs. Langston motions for James to come back from the piano ... and so, all things are, again, as they should be ..

The Death of the Book or a Hurried Euthanization?

what do you think about this coming 'death of the book' (?) ... as i've read and heard it coined lately. this isn't exactly a PopEater kind of rumor.

in "The Death of the Book, Again" Tania Kingserley says It is an immutable law that the Death of the Book must be debated at least once a year. she wrote this in April of 2007. Kindersley looks to Margaret Atwood's lead on the matter, with commentary from Atwood's appearance at the London Book Fair that year:

Latest up is Margaret Atwood, talking at the London Book Fair in a seminar apocalyptically titled: Digitise or Die. She went on to start the week yesterday morning, to expand on the theme. Despite the best efforts of Andrew Marr, it was a curiously bloodless discussion.

Well, said Atwood, of the putative e-book, you can't read it in the bath. But it was hard to see which side she was coming down on. She conceded that having Jane Austen texts searchable online was "useful if you are doing a term paper". She mentioned the bewildering overload of information on the internet.

The most arresting intellectual point she made was that a study has found that the brain processes words on a screen differently from words on a page. But the most profound emotional strike came from another of Marr's guests, Philip Zimbardo, who said, very simply, of the book: "It's something you hold, near to your heart."

i cannot resist saying here, close to our hearts, indeed although it might be cliche and expected ...

this supposed long death of the book takes me back to the second year of graduate school, and the arduous yet touching Clarissa, with which Samuel Richardson will forever taunt the sleepless student of literature. Richardson's book is the longest book written in English in a single volume, at 969,000 words. poor Clarissa remains in the throes of death for 2/3 of those pages.

on my copy of Clarissa, as i remember it, the cover was a painting of a barely there girl, her corseted torso thrown on her dressing table, he arms folded over her face. exasperation. but the painting held a stillness as well. i often closed the book and stared at the cover in reflection of what I'd read.

as Kindersley notes the "Great technological forces [seem] to be ranged against traditional printed books ... " ... and I'd have to agree with her, conspiracy theories aside, if only for the prolonged death knell being rung by someone, or something, that doesn't tire of it, even now, years after the patient's predicted demise.

where is Dr. Death when you need him? where's the plug? how can we just put this pesky notion of print away?

the death knell rings and rings and rings, regularly, from the steeple on the corner with a loyal old man tending it: Michael Hyatt, The Death of Traditional Book Publishing, Andreas von Bubnoff, for Nature.com, Science in the web age: The real death of print, Vincent McCaffrey for Powells.com The Death of the Book Is Not Exaggerated, Antonia Senior for TimesOnline Publishers are braced for the slow death of the book, and so on ...

and some resist the death knell, of course. "The Death of the Book" By S. David Mash, for the Mars Hill Review, a publication that characterizes itself as one which "reveals Christ within the stories of our everyday lives" ... and in kind, Mash "examines the e-books phenomenon, seeking a synergy between electronic and traditional publishing." who knew the survival of the book would also bring into play the secular vs. the spiritual, which of course, is a digression.

without the book, where is there a place for hypergraphia and hyperlectio in our tactile world, ever again? i mean to say that despite statistics on the waning activity of reading as a priority among we westerners, those of us dedicated to the past-time, which is also sometimes a job, we are yet over-writers and over-readers who love the feel of the book in our hands. we all admit that much, can't we? have you ever walked along your bookcase, your fingertips running along the shelf's edge, scanning titles as you look for something you can't find, and in the midst of that looking, find so much else. i have.

but has our hunger for the book been the actual source of its predicted demise. we read, we buy, our markets expand, our bookcases fill, we want more and more, smaller and smaller, always at our fingertips ...

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins wrote for Mashable: The Social Media Guide, The Death of Tangible Media is a Little Murky which characterizes the obsessively doomsaying as 'bloviators' who are"re-using the same media type" ... i love this term. brilliant. it's not Arnold Schwarzenegger trying to kill the future, but then again, perhaps it is.

although, Hopkins himself seems to believe that the death of the book, specifically (he also talks about tv, movies, etc) is inevitable and only a matter of getting 'the device' right.

clarisa is dying. clarissa is dying. clarissa is dying ... i get it. i really do.

but i'm dubious. has anyone considered 'usage' and the reasons we buy books? i really don't want to use a kindle or a tablet when i'm sitting in bed reading to my child. i don't want an electronic tablet in the bath tub. i don't want it for poetry. i don't want it for technical information (but if i *did* then i could certainly more easily understand it's displacement of a traditional text) .. i could, however, want it for a host of different things and other kinds of reading -- true.

do you get it? i'm asking everyone lately when they think the book will die? if they think the book will die? will it hold on for a few months... will it make it through another season or two, enough to see 2, maybe 3 generations of early spring crocus? will we pull the plug when Dr. Death arrives only to find that the book goes on breathing, its heart, beating without us?

perhaps the book has taken on its own life, found its own god, lived its own way, fully understanding the changing world around it, and understood, also, that like a little kudzu, it will never, really, go away.

with all this death knell reverberation, i wonder if you are ready? do you care about the book? does caring about the book matter, ultimately, in how long it is, or isn't, with us?

Updating Links, Come One, Come All ...

i haven't updated the links to this blog since, well, maybe 2007 or so ... 2008 would be a generous estimate. and much has happened. and many blogs and homepages and loci have changed. and i'd like to keep up with them. i'd like to include links to journals and presses as well ... so, if you'd like a link included on this page to your homepage, or blog, or journal, or press, or organization, please message me through one of the various options available. most comments to this blog actually show up on Facebook, after the blog content is imported into my Facebook Notes (haven't figured out how to synthesize that yet with Blogger comments) so it's fine if you 'Comment' the information in Facbook Notes or message me on Facebook. spread the word. if it was 2003, i'd say 'go viral with it' ... but i'm already quite passe.

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