So much soy lining. A parrot strains, laughing

at the

gas masks or wolves. I

laughed (just a

little). A feather across

an intersection.

Mimicking a parent,

socializing

demented love

songs. She spoke

through a gap in her

fingers.

Amish Trivedi

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Moe Tkacik’s “Journals of the Crisis Year” is now live at The Baffler’s website. Tkacik considers a baker’s dozen books about (and/or by players in) the Recent Financial Crisis.

“From time immemorial,” Tett explains, “the worlds of business and finance have been beset with the problem of default risk, the danger that a borrower will not repay a loan or bond.” This is frustrating to read if you think of this lingering “problem” as a bank’s fundamental reason for being.

This is a long piece that demands and deserves your full attention. It will make you aware of things that you ought to be aware of. Also, while we’re at it–Holy Shit! The Baffler! I always thought of them as that small, weird journal whose publication schedule never made sense to me, but thanks to Moe’s piece I’m now looking at their front page and am thoroughly thrilled. Matt Taibbi, Christine Smallwood, Walter Benn Michaels. And I guess if/when the actual issue comes out (is out?) there’s also Naomi Klein and Lydia Millet in the paper version.

I believe there is little to gain by exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods. Very much alone in my work, I am almost jealous of it. Geography has no bearing on it, nor have the interests of the community in which I work.

-Yves Tanguy, 1954 (via this John Ashbery article)

smug asshole

We don’t run a lot of blind items, but it’s an available tag for posts, so… here’s a blind item.  READ MORE >

Dorothea Lasky has a poem in this week’s New Yorker, which you can read online.

Congrats Dottie!

Not that I’m against the Super Bowl, but hey, maybe you are. Or maybe you’re just killing time Until. Anyway, here are some ways to do whatever it is you’re doing.

There’s a new installment of Weiden+Kennedy’s Story Time. They’ve got Patrick deWitt reading from his first novel, Ablutions, with music by his brother Nick deWitt, whom you may also know as the dude from Pretty Girls Make Graves and/or Murder City Devils. NdW also offers an entry into WKE’s mixtapes series.

You could (read=should) also check out the video for Rock Plaza Central’s “(Don’t You Believe the Words of) Handsome Men.”

Oh and last but not least, after watching the “I Am Not a Lawyer” Mr. Show clip that Blake posted in a comment thread about something else, I started playing the YouTube association clickaround game, and stumbled upon this open letter from David Cross to Larry the Cable Guy.

from Zapatagraphy

Chad Hardy is a contributor on the Gnoetry Daily website (gnoetrydaily.wordpress.com) and blogs infrequently on his own Male Cousin (malecousin.wordpress.com). In 1999, he voted for Jerry “The King” Lawler in Memphis’s mayoral race. He is currently completing an MFA at Purdue University.

One of my favorite places to read is while running on a treadmill. Seeing as reading is powerful in its ability to render time null, and exercising is a space where time seems to stretch the longest, the most against the frame (though sometimes that is part of what makes the experience nice, in a wholly other way, other times you just want to get it done), reading, then, can create an amazing mental blank over the focus of physical exertion, separating, in its best moments, the body from the mind, while putting both to maximum work in enhancement of a kind. The ecstasy of reading, I mean, can cancel out, or at least sure as hell distract you from the bitchmaster that is fleshy exercise.

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There is something in classical music called the deceptive cadence, in which the chord progression seems to build toward one thing–to resolve itself in a way that is naturally pleasing/tension-releasing to us–but instead does something different and a little bit wrong. (Technically, it is a five chord that doesn’t go down to a one chord like it ought.)

In a wonderful TED talk called “Feeling Chopin,” Benjamin Zander talks about the deceptive cadence in Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor (Op. 28 No. 4). I’m performing the prelude tomorrow, so it is all I can think about today, which is why I’m writing about it now. Zander suggests raising one’s eyebrows at the audience when playing the deceptive cadence, so they get it, but I’m not really close to the level of being able to do two things for my audience at one time.

It’s really worth a watch, even if you aren’t performing the piece tomorrow. Zander compares what Chopin is doing to what Shakespeare does in Hamlet–Hamlet finding out in Act I that his uncle killed his father but dithering around until Act V to do something about it, because otherwise it would end too soon. And thus a series of deceptive cadences. In the prelude, we know what we want from the beginning, right from the first B–we want the E. But we don’t get it till the very last, after a series of heart-wrenching (truly–it is the saddest) fake-outs.

Can you think of any poems or stories with a deceptive cadence, where you feel entirely set up for something and then don’t get it until much later? How is it done? I mean, I would think there are lots of them, but I’m curious about just how purely formal they could be in writing, rather than plot-based. Or, what other formal devices do you find useful from other art forms?

Sorry, this is funny. Good spirit. But funny.

Song of the day? Converge? Trying to figure out the perspective here. On a Wallace review video for the recent Pale King excerpt he talks about how you can mention “DFW” at a hipster party when people are talking about “hipster lit” like Bolano and Lispector. F’real?

Thoughts?

Do you know Tolstoy’s “Three Hermits”? You should.

A Joshua Cohen double-shot– Reviewing Gilbert Sorrentino’s The Abyss of Human Illusion for Bookforum; and at Tablet:

Two subjects that even most conscientious readers know not enough about: concrete poetry and the German-language, postwar literary avant-garde. These subjects reach their dark syzygy in the work of Heimrad Bäcker, an Austrian poet, editor, and publisher of a certain generation whose transcript—the lowercase is not just correct but imperative—has recently been translated into English.

And now it’s Rumpus Double-up Interview Sex Time- for Recession Sex Workers #8, Stephen Elliott interviews Antonia Crane; and Steve Almond interviews his former student Jason Mulgrew.

This Santa Fe Institute economist claims that 1 in 4 Americans is employed guarding the wealth of the rich.

Joanna Scott on J.M. Coetzee at The Nation, because hey why not?

And now, in what I’m more or less convinced will be officially known as NYTea Time: Will Blythe likes Bolano’s Monsieur Pain; Joel Brouwer goes high-low on the new Tony Hoagland; Geoff Dyer is unimpressed by the new DeLillo (this seems to be the general trend of opinion, but I still want to see for myself; also, in the opening lines of the review, Dyer sketches his view of the best and worst DeLillo; to the extent that my two favorite DeLillo books (Mao II and Cosmopolis) are the ones he thinks are the worst, may be safe to say our tastes may diverge); Deborah Solomon talks to Douglas Coupland about Vancouver; and Francine du Plessix Gray on the new Amy Bloom collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out. She likes it quite a bit–no surprise there. I’ve never heard a cross word said about Amy Bloom, who seems to be one of the highest-regarded contemporary writers I’ve never quite gotten around to reading. There’s a copy of her book Come to Me that I can see on my shelf from where I’m sitting. Tell me friends, is it high time?

M Sarki with an interesting defense (I guess) of Gordon Lish at EWN. I found the intrigue here in Sarki, not in Lish (not so riveting to revisit the Carver thing). Not sure I’ve seen such reliance on another in judging an individual work. Sarki sends his poems to Lish via mail then gets a YES, NO, or SO SO written on the poem. Sarki writes:

But after so many years of working with him I pretty much have a feel for what he’ll like and what he won’t. I get mostly a Yes these days.

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“He’d say, ‘If it is familiar, it has not eaten you yet.’ ” -on cognitive fluency and disfluency.

GW: My only interest in photographing is photography. That’s really the answer. -an interview with photographer Garry Winogrand.

Yes yes yes! Bookforum editor and The Awl contributor Chris Lehmann has signed a book deal with Or Books–he’s expanding Rich People Things, a series originally for The Awl. Details here. Congratulations, Chris!

Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process. -Garry Kasparov on chess and computers.

&

Writing the Great American Video Game.