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.
First published in 1818
I have often wondered to what degree my childhood experiences with literature shaped my current relationship with reading and writing. Unlike many adults who enjoy reading, I did not engage in reading as a pleasure activity in my youth. In fact, I only came to literature as an extension of my rebellious teen years, through my unquenchable thirst for hallucinogenic drugs and my obsession with Jim Morrison (the lead singer of The Doors), who – despite what you may think about him – was a voracious reader and closet intellectual. I read Dante’s Inferno because Jim Morrison read it. Likewise with Aldous Huxley, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Kerouac, etc. Were it not for drugs and Jim Morrison, I would never have gotten interested in literature. When I was a boy, I only read books I had to read for school — and even then, I did a pretty good job of not reading and pretending that I had. So while other kids were reading books like Frankenstein (for either an assignment or for fun), I was busy playing Atari or running around outside make-believing I was Indiana Jones, or, later, dropping tabs or snarfing shrooms till the trees began to speak.
I share this bit of bio for the purpose of illustrating how I come to literature in general – not as someone with a lifelong love of it – and specifically how it informs my reading of a text that I assume many people read in their youth. Only two short months away from turning 32, I have just now read Frankenstein for the first time.
John Domini has an interesting (and, I think, provocative) essay in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation called “Against the “Impossible to Explain”: The Postmodern Novel and Society,” in which he discusses Aureole by Carole Maso, Zeroville by Steve Erickson, and Michael Martone by Michael Martone by Michael Martone. It begins:
Here’s the problem. You decide to try some reading outside the ordinary, a novel that doesn’t have the usual earmarks, and it proves interesting, satisfying, but you don’t entirely understand why, and when you look for help, an illuminating review or something, you can’t find any.
What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions…First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals.
–from N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1999)
“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction…The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century…Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”
–from Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991)
Peter Ross took some photos of possessions found in Burroughs’s windowless New York City apartment, preserved since his death in 1997. Here is an interview where he explains the project.
Got an email from Dave Madden — who has an awesome book called The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press, and who also co-edits The Cupboard — requesting some suggestions that I thought y’all might be able to help out with:
I’m thinking of teaching [collaboratively written short stories] in my workshop one week, and am looking for some things to read. Any ideas of any, and feel free to define “short story” loosely. Fiction, though. Prose.
My brain has frozen. Can you think of any examples?
At the 1982 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders set up a camera in room 666 at Hotel Martinez and asked a few directors to answer the question: “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” Their answers became a documentary called Room 666. I wonder how you might answer this question if it were reworded to focus on literature…?
Godard
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hdAcxvQrUs
Antonioni
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_RrzoyzolM
I read an awesome book and I want to tell you about it. Originally written in French by Claude Simon, and titled Les Corps conducteurs, the translation I read (by Helen R. Lane) is titled Conducting Bodies. It was originally published in 1971, but my version was published by Grove Press in 1974. Sadly, it appears to now be out of print — but used copies are out there.
I stumbled across it a few weeks ago at a used bookstore here in Tallahassee. It wasn’t like I saw it on the shelf and went “Oh yes! Oh my god, I can’t believe I found this.” It was more like, “Claude Simon sounds vaguely familiar…wasn’t he associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet and the Nouveau Roman movement?” I picked it up and did as I always do: I read the first sentence and prepared to put it back on the shelf if that sentence was not exceptional:
In the display window a dozen identical female legs are lined up in a row, feet up, the thighs lopped off at the hip joint resting on the floor, the knees slightly bent, as though the legs had been removed from some chorus of dancers at the precise moment that they are all kicking in unison, and put there in the window, just as they were, or perhaps snipped out, in monotonous multiplicity, from some advertisement showing a pretty girl in her slip pulling on a stocking, sitting on a pouf or on the edge of an unmade bed, her torso leaning backward, with the leg that she is pulling the stocking over raised up high, and a kitten, or a curly-haired puppy gleefully standing on its hind legs, barking, with its pink tongue sticking out.
Out now from Harvard University Press, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction by Brian Boyd.
Michael Bérubé reviews it for American Scientist:
On the Origin of Stories attempts an evolutionary explanation of the appearance of art—and, more specifically, of the utility of fiction. From its title (with its obvious echo of Darwin) to its readings of The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who!, Boyd’s book argues that the evolution of the brain (itself a development of some significance to the world) has slowly and fitfully managed to produce a species of primate whose members habitually try to entertain and edify one another by making stuff up.
Speaking of musics…looks like Amazon is giving away for free The Orange Mountain Music Philip Glass Sampler Vol.I.
If this wets your appetite, I’ll be posting a link to a free download of Glass’s Dracula played by the Kronos Quartet — along with links to other free musics, and art, as I do every Wednesday — tomorrow over at my spot.
Easter Rabbit (Publishing Genius 2009)
100pp
perfect bound
cover art by Christine Sajecki
$12
I seem to recall that somewhere online Adam Robinson (the publisher) double dog dared people to read this book all in one sitting. His contention was that it was too overwhelming, that after reading a few pages one would need a breather. Here’s how I read it, and some thoughts I had about it…