Personal anecdote followed by utterly shallow pop-culture reference. Sweeping claim of quality. Comparison to artist from another discipline. Description of content, return to pop-culture reference, return to personal anecdote. End of introduction.
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Three men were not well and one died but not the one I thought would doesn’t matter now another cascade suddenness literally ashes not only is it possible it’s a fact if one dies then my entire family will which is obvious the next time I get a Google alert with my full name it better not be another obituary if so I will need someone to slowly feed me a handful of candy I will be childlike and difficult.
Extreme situational juxtaposition or incongruity followed by specific details then a short anecdote that brings in another voice or character. Rhetorical question or general statement. Return to specificity from beginning, but with modulation. Surprising use of simile or metaphor, disregard secondary characters in favor of meaningful interiority: idea, image, epiphanic zinger.
Labored explication of first line; labored explication of seventh line; eschewal of remainder of quoted poem. Repetition of first line for effect. Transparent attempt to cover up failed attempt at restatement of sweeping claim (cf. introduction): less grand claim, made with more conviction. Continue Reading »
Generally, equinox refers to the poise of a dependent figure (Earth), inclined neither away from nor toward the sun. So–equinox is the short-term experience of a figure that is in usual relation to the sun (being held in correlation by the sun) becoming its own temporary primary—becoming abandoned, becoming the painful solitudes of a thing forced into the position/ poise wherein it has to be its own light.
Jill Stengel writes deeply of the losses and lonelinesses of the solitudes of such equinox realities in the Dusie chap dear equinox. This book is an unintentional prothalamion (“I am out here raw as the/ night sky waiting for you”)–a pouring song to a not yet found future beloved. This sweet little book is an agonizing, loving pitch that emerges by way of calling out to the night (“dear night [...] filled with longing and seek”).
Calling out to the night as a figure to relate to, pulls the sun toward us (“the sun always comes”), which is the power of a “passive chalice [being] ruptured.” I think of the sore nights in the cave where the tears were countless and no matter what I did the night seemed to thicken. It may seem dramatic, but moving from the hermetics of the cave into nomadisms with bare feet (until the feet bleed) in the darkest hours is worth—is something more romantic and vigilant than time merely passing in an awaiting bucolic zone (“there are tears there is ache there is such desire”). It is a way to promise presence to the not yet seen or not yet seeable (“and if the match is wet with tears I will find my own light”).
Embedding oneself in The Ambassadors by Henry James is like reading little else. I feel as if every time I start up again an unending endoscopy of my perceptions proceeds until I shut the book. Take this section of beauty from. Strether, the main character, is talking to Madame de Vionnet—a woman who has some hold on Chad. This young man is the son of Mrs. Newsome—it is she who has dispatched Strether to Paris to see what is keeping her son there for she wants him to return to Massachusetts and take over the family business. Mrs. Newsome is also Strether’s love interest and it is probable he will marry her if he succeeds in getting her son back to the old USA):
Friends–I wanted to post here regarding an Anthology of Queer Nudes that I am curating. The book is slated to be published in color by Knives Spoons and Forks Press in 2013. The premises of the book are honesty, nudity and ink (interpretations encouraged). There are already a few very exciting submissions in the queue. We have quite a bit of space to work with in the book so likelihood of being published is high (depending on quality of submission). The submission will need to include photographic images as well as a body poetics statement. Please feel free to forward my email (or post on other lists) to anyone whom you think might be interested:
Sara Levine, author of the fantastic Treasure Island!!!, was interviewed in the Globe and Mail Monday. The article seems to treat “slow writing” (a “cute” coinage a la “slow food” — fuck) as quaint, eccentric. Disaster!!! I want to say (though I am in complete agreement with what Ms. Levine has to say):
As a teacher, the 41-year-old author says over the telephone from Chicago, she struggles to slow overeager students down, demanding they set aside their billowing reams to concentrate on the architecture of the sentence – “things like grammatical suspension, the difference between nouns and verbs, rhythm and sound.”
Since I first encountered the above quote from David Shapiro (courtesy of the Village Voice‘s Pass & Jop ‘Personals,’ via fourth time around), his words have come to mind anytime I’ve listened to Psychic TV‘s “Godstar”–and lately I’ve been listening to “Godstar” an awful lot.
I’m sympathetic to Shapiro’s complaint, despite basically believing that the aesthetic does trump all other variables in the evaluation of a song. But more than that, occasionally a preoccupation with (and maybe illusions about) the “creative genesis” of a pop song will overwhelm every other consideration for me, which I’m not convinced is a good thing, and which is a problem that rarely extends to Shapiro’s targets anyway. Continue Reading »
The appeal of Instagram is, for lack of a better word, simple; the world is moving too damn fast and we don’t want the cognitive load of figuring out what we’re looking at — we just want to see simple pretty things. This simplicity is what makes services like Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest a joy versus other entertainment offerings.
The truth is that on any given day, I’d rather check in on Instagram than watch a movie.
I felt despondent. I love movies. When I say I love movies, you have no idea how much. Almost as much as books. Almost enough to make me wish I could have been young in 1939. Almost enough to make me wish for silent movie stardom. I mark the major events of my life with film. Time passes with each new movie. Eras become genre: the year of the spaghetti western, the year of the Godzilla movies (all of them), the years of Universal Horror classics. The fall I fell in love with Bergman. The spring I watched Vertigo ten times in a row. This is not, of course, novel. I’m guessing most writers feel the same way.
Do people no longer truly have the attention span for stories? Continue Reading »
Please join us for our next special reading and conversation with Susan Daitch, Brian Evenson, and Bradford Morrow. RSVP
Susan Daitch is the author of four works of fiction. Her short fiction has been included in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction, Tin House, Guernica, Bomb, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The Brooklyn Rail, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Ploughshares, The Village Voice, and elsewhere. Her work has been the recipient of two Vogelstein awards. Her novel L.C. won an NEA Heritage Award and was a Lannan Foundation Selection. She teaches at Hunter College.
…if the reader’s expression of his freedom through the text is tolerated among intellectuals (clercs) (only someone like Barthes can take this liberty), it is on the other hand denied students (who are scornfully driven or cleverly coaxed back to the meaning ‘accepted’ by their teachers) or the public (who are carefully told ‘what is to be thought’ and whose inventions are considered negligible and quickly silenced).
–Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching” from The Practice of Everyday Life
While I should–officially–frown upon the destruction of university property, I have to admit that upon entering the Writers House this week for the first time since the fall semester, I was amused to see that someone had presumably taken the creative impulse from the safety of the page to the signage of the building. With the removal of a few letters, the noun “WRITERS HOUSE” was transformed into the verb (perhaps an imperative?) “REHOUSE.” Certainly this act of poaching was in the spirit of the unit on textual appropriation, bricolage, and erasure that I taught last semester in my creative writing workshops. (One of my students had brilliantly whited out sections of Ellison’s Invisible Man–creating a striking alternate text as well as effectively playing with the theme of in/visibility.) This act of poaching also made me think of a syllabus that I recently drafted called “Poetry, Literary Recycling, and ‘Open Source’ Culture.” Looking at the sign again, I had thought that we could also remove “HO” to make “REUSE.” And out of the missing letters–wherever they may be–we could make “THIS ROW.”
Greetings once again! Since we’re doing this, we may as well be thorough. There are a bunch of Smiths songs (and versions of Smiths songs) that were never included on any of their official records (The Smiths; Hatful of Hollow; Meat Is Murder; The Queen Is Dead; Strangeways, Here We Come; Louder Than Bombs; Singles). Today I thought we could listen to them, see if any are worth our attention…
Republished late last year as a single-volume graphic novel, Daybreak was originally released in three parts between ’06 and ’08, and, in my mind, stands as one of the quintessential graphic (or “comic”) works of the past decade. Brian Ralph, the author and illustrator, is also notable for his graphic novels, Cave-In (1999) and Climbing Out (2002)—both highly recommended—but Daybreak ups the ante. So, having it picked up by Drawn & Quarterly and offered as a single book is an exciting event.
Daybreak is a zombie story.
It feels odd, saying that—like it’s a guilty admission or something. Continue Reading »
Late last year, we were looking at the lesser-listened-to Smiths albums—The Smiths, Meat Is Murder, and Strangeways, Here We Come—assembling a playlist of songs not collected on either Singles or Louder Than Bombs. Today we’ll conclude with
…which is admittedly getting somewhat obscure. Many of the songs on this compilation can in fact be found on Louder Than Bombs. But the versions I’ll point out here are not the studio recordings, but hail instead from from two John Peel sessions (31 May 1983 and 21 September 1983) and two David Jensen sessions (4 July 1983 and 5 September 1983), which makes this one also worth having…
In a womb-shaped wormhole, j/j hastain examines postmodernities of gender through the central iconography of the unicorn. If a wormhole is phallic, a womb-shaped phallus situates us at the beginning of a new gendering. Here we encounter the erotic as path, as activism; birth into the new virginity. The earth moves, “a tectonic-mid,” not letting the new arise so much as a concurrency with it (17). The omen, the portent “turns psychic roughage/ into emotional and physical/ alcoves” (19). We are slowly introduced to the unicorn, not the well-known unicorn of classical myths, but as a new unicorn born out of a new site of gender depolarizations. Here we have the classical view of feminine purity mixed with the phallic horn. Amongst the multiple representations of gender depolarizations, we see the “femme swagger,” (23) “female semen,” (54) and “the vascularity of surplus/ and need” (58). How the vein is both phallic and womb-reminiscent as it carries one thing to the other is receptacle-like.
Bresson's final film (1983) plays at the Film Forum from Jan. 17th-19th. It was based on Tolstoy's story "The Forged Coupon." One of the greatest works of art of the 20th Century, it contains all of Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier in it's 90-minute running time.
Hyperallergic, “a forum for serious, playful and radical thinking about art,” has launched a new online magazine, Hyperallergic Weekend, a venture spearheaded by the editorial collective of John Yau, Thomas Micchelli, Claudia La Rocco and Albert Mobilio.
It is, as Yau states in his introductory essay, “Unassimilated and Inadmissible,” interested in what “is simmering in the zone of the prohibited and unacceptable.”
Daniel Green’s review of Divorcer is wonderful. A taste:
The formal patterns that emerge are both a result of and a natural aesthetic complement to the singular sentences that constitute his work. If individual sentences in a sense leave us suspended in their word twists and serpentine syntax, the stories in which they appear do something similar, accumulating these sentences to create a kind of layering effect that gradually expands our sense of character and situation without making them secondary, mere vehicles for advancing a conventionally developed plot.
Last weekend I went to the Moby-Dick marathon, an annual event in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where much of the landlubbing early part of the book is set. It’s the second time I’ve attended the Marathon, but I’ve never read Moby-Dick. Ahem, yes. You read that correctly. I consider myself a Melville fan, having read a bunch of his short stories. I’ve been to his house, seen the mountain that is supposed to look like a whale, and I had a t-shirt that said “I Prefer Not To” that I wore to such shreds and tatters that it eventually looked like I preferred Toto. After being a spectator at last year’s 25 hour event, I vowed to call the signup number the instant they started taking volunteers, but like so many vows launched from the spurs of disappointment I got lazy and distracted and missed it by a few days and got a call that said I was on the wait list. High on the wait list. I never heard another word from anyone at Marathon headquarters. But anyway, that’s all besides the point, water under the bridge, under the bilge-pump. I showed up a couple of hours in on Saturday, and it was a great time. It was my third time in New Bedford, and every time I pull into town, particularly walking on the cobblestoned, hilly streets downtown, it’s like being greeted by a relative with a very distinct cologne and hug—let’s call it History. Continue Reading »
Last weekend I went to the Moby-Dick marathon, an annual event in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where much of the landlubbing early part of the book is set. It’s the second time I’ve attended the Marathon, but I’ve never read Moby-Dick. Ahem, yes. You read that correctly. I consider myself a Melville fan, having read a bunch of his short stories. I’ve been to his house, seen the mountain that is supposed to look like a whale, and I had a t-shirt that said “I Prefer Not To” that I wore to such shreds and tatters that it eventually looked like I preferred Toto. After being a spectator at last year’s 25 hour event, I vowed to call the signup number the instant they started taking volunteers, but like so many vows launched from the spurs of disappointment I got lazy and distracted and missed it by a few days and got a call that said I was on the wait list. High on the wait list. I never heard another word from anyone at Marathon headquarters. But anyway, that’s all besides the point, water under the bridge, under the bilge-pump. I showed up a couple of hours in on Saturday, and it was a great time. It was my third time in New Bedford, and every time I pull into town, particularly walking on the cobblestoned, hilly streets downtown, it’s like being greeted by a relative with a very distinct cologne and hug—let’s call it History. 
John Madera
John Dermot Woods
Ryan W. Bradley
Michael Leong
Greg Gerke
J. A. Tyler
Stacy Muszynski
A D Jameson
Tim Jones-Yelvington
Rachel Swirsky
Edward Mullany
Aya Karpinska
Paul Kincaid
davis schneiderman
Amber Sparks
Tim Horvath
John Domini
Elaine Castillo
Curtis White
Paula Bomer
Andrew Taggart
James Tadd Adcox
Nick Francis Potter
Brian Kubarycz
Gabriel Blackwell
Janey Smith
Matty Byloos
J/J Hastain
Greg Hunter
