ToBS3: Working at Best Buy vs. Calling yourself the editor-in-chief of an online journal
[matchup #50 in Tournament of Bookshit]
I don’t have specific thoughts regarding either of these things. I imagine that working at Best Buy is similar to many retail jobs? You deal with a lot of odd customers, coworkers, and supervisors? Maybe that is an unfair assumption. See, the only retail job I worked was at a used book store in Virginia when I was in graduate school. I stocked the shelves and I also purchased inventory according to a massive buying manual that the owners had seemingly haphazardly created full of random rules regarding what sorts of books we should take in and what we should not. We bought a lot of mass market paper backs and children’s books. My following these rules at the buying table often meant that I turned down a lot of great books, fascinating and interesting books, that the owners had deemed a waste of shelving space. Probably, from a business standpoint, they were right: they knew their customers, and theirs were customers who were not interested in Fowles’ The Maggot, nor were their customers interested in Barnes’ Nightwood. Both of these books intrigued me when I held them in my hands at the buying table, and even as I turned them down, I wanted to know what was between their covers (I later read Nightwood in a class; still haven’t read The Maggot). Another terribly weird part of this job is that we threw out a lot of books. Like, shitloads of books. And the owners required us to rip the covers off these books because a few years before I worked there, a customer had pulled books out of the dumpster that they had trashed and resold those books to the store several times. So there I was, tearing covers off books like O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, simply because these books had ‘been on the shelf too long.’ After that, I began to take the discards and put them nicely in a box and hide the box in the store until my assigned closing night, and then I would take the box to my car. At one point I had five boxes of books in my car, books the owners had deemed a ‘waste of shelf space,’ and these I distributed to my friends in order to make room to save more books. Eventually, the store closed because the owners couldn’t pay the rent, and I spent my final weekend at that job boxing up books to save from the dumpster in between breaking down shelves and stacking the book carts in a moving van.
I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone
I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone
by Thomas Patrick Levy
YesYes Books, 2012
100 pages / $16 Buy from YesYes Books or SPD
I love a book about you and I. I’m not always convinced there’s anything else. One of my favorite pigeons of love, Raul Zurita, speaks in his book, Song for His Disappeared Love, of how impossibly big you and I can mean to each other, and yet, he emphasizes over and over how you and I always seem like they are on the heart twisting brink of falling apart in their own mouths. “Now the entire universe is you and I minus you and I / After the blows ended, we moved a bit and destroyed I was / only one you felt come closer” (6). What a cloth house we all are when we try to together/two gather. I’m never sure if we’re standing up or collapsing with love. I think it is going to have to be both ways if we’re actually going to climb much of anywhere. At any given point in Thomas Patrick Levy’s book, I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone, you and I are at different distances from each other, at different points of collapsing or standing with huge love. They reek of the empowered fragility that Zurita tries to illuminate for us. Levy puts you and I in cornfield after cornfield. He puts you and I next to corn-infused products and corn-infused foods and watches you and I squirm full of kernels (Why, oh why, aren’t there more glorious poems involving the most American of foods, corn?). His you and I struggle often in the house and in the bedroom of the house before they get dropped down the front of Scarlet Johansson’s dress. His you and I wake up on an island for the third time and they smell like the different kinds of cars they ride in. You and I make strange, domestic circles around each other, they sometimes touch. They sometimes speak despite all the leafy prose swaying between them.
1 Comment
May 18th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
May 18th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
ToBS3: Alcoholism vs the guy who goes 20 minutes over suggested reading time
[matchup #49 in Tournament of Bookshit]
The year was 2012 and we were all under the assumption that, in some way or another, the world would end soon. We knew that the Mayans had nothing to do with it because, as we all know, when one calendar ends we just buy a new one, we don’t assume the worst. Capitalism might collapse, geotraumatic insistence might just find us no longer rooted on the earth, it’s too bad NASA itself is gone. All that’s left to feel is our own collective solar body moving through time and space.
We find our bodies in bars, we find our bodies consuming alcohol, we find our bodies consuming more alcohol, we find ourselves going outside for a cigarette, we watch stars plummet and all make the same wish; that we can sustain, that the world won’t end, that our accelerated reality stops, calms down, pauses for a second. READ MORE >
What the Facebook IPO Means For Young Writers
Nothing Left To Buy:
A detailed analysis of the Facebook IPO:
i’m the only finance writer without any understanding of desire. i’m soft like the sound of a dead freeway or the jam band that plays in a warehouse above the impossibly cute shopping district. all the helpful selling colors. this is china in the future. the TVs are 40% thinner in 2050. american is 40% thinner. there are fewer white babies. people want things like food that is free from toxins and movies with uncompromising ethnic super heros. little kids want to grow up to be anything. anything at all would be better than youth. education today is like an expensive prison for brilliant young interns with no tasks to complete. there’s nothing but screens showing images of other screens. jean baudrillard’s nephew was right about that french restaurant – it’s really delicious if you can get a reservation by email. no i can’t give you the email sorry. i was asked not to.
Another way to generate text #2: “backmasking” (now with bonus Batman/Beatles content)
As I mentioned in my last post (“The Spell Check Technique”), I’ve played around with more than a few means for generating text. Another one that I used when writing Giant Slugs is a trick that I somewhat jokingly called “backmasking.” Here’s how it works:
- Write a sentence or the start of a sentence.
ToBS R2: Facebook-based political ‘activism’ vs. litblogging at age 35
[The tournament is back on! It will be decided before the 1 year anniversary of the tournament!– ed.]
[matchup #48 in Tournament of Bookshit]
i’m not on facebook, cause i guess i’m like THAT GUY or whatever, so what happened is that my gf gave me her login info so that i could browse it and be able to accurately judge this battle but all i did was look at her emails and private messages, and, like, pictures of dudes who comment on her pictures and also i looked at pictures of attractive women who seemed to show up a lot in general. but right now i can’t think of a single thing worse than facebook-based political ‘activism’ such as the bunch of posts i couldn’t help seeing that attempted to ‘deal with the problem’ of animal suffering and eating meat re thanksgiving and veganism. i maybe half respected the lady on the street who yelled “make the leap, go vegan!” at me as i passed but what i did on thanksgiving was sneak downstairs late after dinner and eat cold turkey by the light of the refrigerator, thinking of her. do i even have to mention ows here or can i just ignore it the same way everyone ignored the local elections last month? READ MORE >
The Sky Conducting
The Sky Conducting
by Michael J. Seidlinger
Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2012
308 pages / $14.95 buy from SPD
Rating: 8.2
The Sky Conducting is what post-apocalyptic America will look like. There won’t be as much bloodshed as some of the ‘gore-mongers’ would like. Don’t bother saving all those containers of spam. They aren’t going to prepare you for the overwhelming emotion. READ MORE >
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May 16th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
May 16th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
Analysis of War on a Lunchbreak
War on a Lunchbreak
by Ana Bozicevic
Belladonna Material Lives Chaplet Series, #137
Belladonna Collaborative, 2011
17 pages / $4.00 each; $6.00 signed Buy from Belladonna
Croatian-American poet Ana Bozicevic’s new Belladonna chaplet, War on a Lunchbreak, is a short, intense collection both carefully and carelessly written, working against the confines of time in an always clocked-in environment, where we can’t afford to lyricize.
“I’d like to have time to type this,
but all day long they’re looking over my shoulder.
I dofeel sorry for them. What’s it like
to care so much? Talking morning and night
to a proctor-god, tidy your toy box before bed:
to get degrees, have interests —
is that the anti-war?” (7)
but all day long they’re looking over my shoulder.
I dofeel sorry for them. What’s it like
to care so much? Talking morning and night
to a proctor-god, tidy your toy box before bed:
to get degrees, have interests —
is that the anti-war?” (7)
I love this: writing about not having the time to write, and so positioning the poem as a reclamation of stolen time, founded in its own impossibility, embodying its own disembodiment. That is to say she completes the poem stealthily under the panoptic gaze of the boss, the clock, and so performs what French social theorist Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press 1984) calls “la perruque”—“the worker’s own work being performed at the place of employment under the disguise of work for the boss. Nothing of value is stolen; what is taken advantage of is time” (Weidemann 2000). Bozicevic’s work speaks to this need to write in a society that has no need for poetry, and negatively appropriates the surveillance-productivist logic of our laboring culture into the content of the poem, informing us of the circumstance both preventing and, thru la perruque, producing the poem.
2 Comments
May 16th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
May 16th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
ii ii uh o
After reading the new issue of iO, I know some new things. Like some people will forgive you right to your face. Like every pier is out to get you. Like animals get into the distillery just fine. Like one thing you do is you want to hear someone say “that’s the one I want.” And the other thing you do is you know that, as you age, your desires start to feel less unusual. Then the way you know it’s real is when no one’s dreamed about you so much, or told you they dreamed about you so much, and in such detail. The way it is is a sad song about oranges. No one really cares about germs. The world moves even if you don’t take it out for a walk. My cereal tastes funny does your cereal taste funny? Some things I still don’t know, even with iO to help me. I still don’t know what roll tide roll means. Or how many corporations does it take, anyway, to make a dark that shreds the citydark like a bed of incriminating documents? How many years does running in the wrong direction become, if not right, at least something people stop niOticing?