http://www.christopherhiggs.org/
Christopher Higgs recommends Tierra Whack's WHACK WORLD, Otomo Yoshihide's ANODE, Marlon James's BLACK LEOPARD, RED WOLF, and a lunch of cucumber, tomato, red onion, feta, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.
The other day, Lily wrote about how she “found Inception potentially very interesting but in the end quite disappointing.” I didn’t get a chance to see it until yesterday, but I had a different reaction: I found it uber freaking fascinating.
My thoughts after the jump…with Spoilers Aplenty, so beware if you haven’t seen it yet!
Because I’m doing a presentation today on Horace’s “Ars Poetica” I’ve been reading various other versions of the poem about poetry. Horace, of course, being that dastardly villain who has filled countless heads with the tedious idea that literature should not just delight but also educate, who reached back to Aristotle and pulled those cumbersome ideas about unity, clarity, decorum, and morality up through the ages for people like Sidney, Pope, and Sartre to latch onto and pass along. Horace, who opens his version of the “Ars Poetica” (circa 30-10 BCE) with a preemptive attack on Surrealism:
Suppose a painter to a human head
Should join a horse’s neck, and wildly spread
The various plumage of the feathered kind
O’er limbs of different beasts, absurdly joined;
Or if he gave to view a beauteous maid
Above the waist with every charm arrayed,
Should a foul fish her lower parts infold,
Would you not laugh such pictures to behold?
Such is the book, that like a sick man’s dreams,
Varies all shapes, and mixes all extremes.
Horace, who liked his shapes and extremes clearly separated.
Anyway, I thought I’d share a few of the other Ars Poeticas I’ve come across. It’s an interesting form that allows for a wide range of approaches.
Seems like a strange genre. Is it a genre? How can the term “Long Poem” apply to both Eliot’s Wasteland and Zukofsky’s A, when the former is 434 lines and the latter is over 800 pages? How come everybody’s always yapping about Pound’s Cantos, when they should be yapping about Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You? Does Chelsey Minnis’s Poemland count as a Long Poem? What about Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw?
Edgar Allen Poe says: “I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, “a long poem,” is simply a flat contradiction in terms.”
Peter Middleton asks: “What significance does the adjective ‘long’ carry when we talk about the long poem? Is it literal or metaphorical, or a more or less implicit proper name?”
Rachel Blau DuPlessis says: “[W]e could say that the lyric/short poem haunts the long poem even as the long poem surrounds it, trumps it, smashes it, and envelops it. Even when it is made to disappear, or to become untenable, perhaps the ghost of lyric/shortness does variously haunt the long poem.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3IZS2QddAY&feature=player_embedded
ps – This weekend I’m reading John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, making Emeril’s Watermelon Margaritas, and watching Mark Forster’s Quantum of Solace. You?
Which are the most inspirational five books about film ever written? This was the question the British Film Institute asked 51 leading critics and writers, and their answers are printed here in full.
Those lists provided me with some new titles to check out. (I’ve just begun reading Stanley Cavell’s A World Viewed, which made it onto a good many of the lists.) At any rate, I’d love to learn about your favorite books on film. Here are my top five:
Gilles Deleuze — Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [&] Cinema 2: The Time-Image
Jean-Luc Godard — Godard on Godard
P. Adams Sitney — Visionary Film
Stan Brakhage — Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Film-Making
David Bordwell — Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema
The Opening Page
Amazon Description:
The Giant’s Fence (by Michael Jacobson) is a unique book. Instead of being filled with words, it gives you 80 pages of trans-symbolic script. Each page has several lines of linked, dancing symbols. They live, move, mutate, and die. The whole book could be interpreted both as the song of how we humans invented symbolic communication, and the telling of its slow disintegration. There are at least 2 ways to “read” The Giant’s Fence. You can begin at page 1, scan the first line, scan the second line, and so on, as you would read a regular book. You can also flip to a random page, and jump to a line which catches your eye. Some pages distort the rows of horizontal lines of symbols into curves, so you can’t exercise your usual reading habits. The Giant’s Fence stimulates new ways of reading and new ways of thinking. As the introduction says, “any meaning” the reader constructs “is a correct translation.” The book’s title is a translation of Finnish “Jatulintarha”, a name given to many of the stone labyrinths found in Finland. The only precursors to The Giant’s Fence are the hypergraphic novels of the Lettristes (such as Alain Satie’s Ecrit en Prose) and some of the more complex works of asemic poetry. If you want to step outside of language, and bathe in unmuddied waters, this book is for you.
Catalpa: This Is Not True
by Amanda Goldblatt
50 pages. Tape-bound.
Book design: William Todd Seabrook
Cover photographs: Amanda GoldblattWe can not know what presence is until we know how to punctuate it. We cannot know how to punctuate it until we admit the truth. We cannot admit the truth until we know what words we need to hide. Catalpa is an essay on scrims and landscapes. It’s a poem, a redaction, a confession, at least once a recipe. Here one wants to know: what if animals die and it might not mean anything? Here one is given: an essay that builds sandcastles on the floor. It’s the best kind of nonfiction: the kind that isn’t true.
page 67: He took off the shirt. It stuck to the skin and a yellow pus ran. His arm was swollen to the size of his thigh and it was garishly discolored and small worms worked in the open wound.
Remember how Zak Smith did that cool illustration of Gravity’s Rainbow? Well now he’s doing Blood Meridian as a collaborative project with Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, Shawn Cheng, and Matt Wiegle.
Also, Matt Kish is doing one for Moby Dick:
Page 048 : Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.
To celebrate the release of Ben Brooks’s superlative new novel(la) AN ISLAND OF FIFTY, he and I corresponded across the great expanse of the Atlantic Ocean via electronic mail.
MLP publisher J.A. Tyler has graciously offered to give away a free copy of Ben’s book to the commenter who gives the most interesting answer to this question (apropos Ben’s book): What would you miss most if civilization were to be dismantled?
Interview after the jump…
To celebrate the official release of Sasha’s exciting new book, WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS & WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS (Mud Luscious Press), he and I chewed the old question/answer…but first: publisher J.A. Tyler has graciously offered to give away a free copy of the book to whomever leaves the most interesting comment in the comment box below…
HIGGS: I wonder if you’d begin by describing your process. To me, this book seems meticulously constructed: the way certain images and themes repeat and resonate, build upon each other and then collapse or disappear or mutate, the way the final passage almost seems to encapsulate all of those images and themes. Did this book come to you as an idea first or were you just thinking on paper as you went along? Did it take years or days? Did you compose it from opening to closing or did you compose it in sections and then arrange them?
FLETCHER: The book came out of several things.