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Archive for May, 2010

“He was the kind of boy I used to close my eyes, reach into my underwear and build from scratch.” –Dennis Cooper, from “Brian AKA ‘Bear’” in Ugly Man.”

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“It hung in the air exactly the way bricks don’t.”–Hitchhikker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams There are sentences I love for their beauty, but as an adolescent, I read this one over and over, and it would always send me into a fit of laughter.

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These are thoughts inspired, in part, by Shya’s recent post about ambition, but mostly by a question Maureen asked me last night: does nothing delight you any more? My immediate thought was: yes, of course, I really like … and I really like … But then I stopped myself, because there is a world of [...]

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RHETORIC   The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. –From Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String.

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“There was a wall.”

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[Update 30 April 11: If you like this passage, check out my interview with Yuriy Tarnawsky: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3] Part 4, “Death,” Chapter 27: “Why Is Water So Beautiful?” It may shine like cheeks down which tears flow. It may shine like tears. It may be dark like tears. It [...]

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“They had heard or had heard said or had heard said written.” –From James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

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“Suttree could hear the wheels shucking along the rails and he could feel the ground shudder and he could hear the tone of the trucks shift at the crossing and the huffing breath of the boiler and the rattle and clank and wheelclick and couplingclacking and then the last long shunting on the downgrade drawing [...]

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Leopard Arms

I’ve been reading the Harp & Altar Anthology and especially loved Leni Zumas’s Leopard Arms, which, since Harp & Altar is a web-based publication, you can — yay! — read in its entirety online. It’s maybe long for online reading, but well worth the investment. I like pieces like Leopard Arms that are speculative but [...]

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This post will serve double duty. First, it will point you toward John Madera’s excellent and informed monthly reading round-up over at The Nervous Breakdown. As he did last time, and as he will continue to do on every first week of the month, his column explores his adventures in reading both new and old [...]

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The bloody boy’s filled the bloody bath with bloody snakes, again!

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[Note: many of the ideas about the border as heterotopia come from an as-yet unpublished paper by Maureen Kincaid Speller, and have been stewing in my mind so long that I forgot to acknowledge her work. Apologies.] In the old days, when territory used to change hands with great regularity between Russia and Poland, an [...]

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I’m in the middle of reading Davenport’s Every Force Evolves a Form. And after being treated to his treatment of some of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theories and then his robust survey of Rousseau’s paintings, I was thoroughly floored by “Transcendental Satyr,” his examination of E. E. Cummings’s poetry. He convincingly demonstrates that Cummings’s poems may have been influenced [...]

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“If we do not find anything very pleasant, at least we shall find something new.” —Voltaire

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“My mother was always surprised by time.” –Joy Williams, “Escapes”

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[The following is a talk I gave at Buzzer Thirty in Queens for an exhibition called "...no right to assume otherwise," which was a response to The Tea Party and related movements of extreme conservatism.] 1. “The Tea Party is saying, ‘We’re tired of this, you guys caused this, and if we don’t wake up [...]

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“The woman, who is me–why pretend otherwise?–wants to love a man she cannot have.” –The opening salvo of Diane Williams’s story “All American.”

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“I had a hard-on so big I thought it would pick me up and throw me out the window.” –From Going Away, by Clancy Sigal.

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I’ve been meaning to write a series of posts about video poetry, but it’s proved tricky to find the right examples. Onward with googling and link hopping. I shall prevail. In the meantime, I came across a lovely project using augmeted reality (AR) to superimpose animations onto a book. Pretty: The book remains a book, [...]

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