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.
Drew Gardner conducts Mel Nichols, Elisabeth Workman, and Nada Gordon in an improvised poetics orchestra at the Zinc Bar, November 22, 2009
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z72_xXC7Wvk’
Saturday, Adam did a post that included reference to Heidegger, which aroused a comment dismissing Heidegger because of his Nazi connection (which was later appended to be a joke, but still…). I always frown when people make that argument, the same way I frown when people discuss Woody Allen and then somebody goes “Yeah, but he married his daughter.” I always want to say, so what? What difference does it make to their work? If you want to talk about them as people that’s one thing, but their work is something else.
The flip side is the recent Polanski debacle in which I saw/read many folks making the argument that he shouldn’t be prosecuted because he made great movies. I find this equally frown-worthy. I love Rosemary’s Baby as much as the next cinephile, but dude forced a child to have anal sex – who cares if Chinatown is the greatest movie ever made, that shouldn’t impact his prison sentence.
Why can’t we separate the artist from the art? Does it matter to you if a writer is a “good person” or a “bad person”? Does it change what you choose to read, or how you read something? If so, why? In what ways? Would you be more or less likely to buy my book if you found out I ran a bi-monthly baby-eating party in my basement?*
*for the record, I don’t have a basement
from the editor, Darby Larson:
ABJECTIVE turned one year old over the weekend officially with Stump by David Peak. I as a human being want to personally thank everyone who submitted over the last year. As an editor it was humbling to be able to have so much to choose from. Maybe peruse the archives. They are already in love with you and ready to be loved. Love.
"Messalina Returning" by Aubrey Beardsley
from Juvenal’s Satire VI
(circa late 1st or early 2nd century A.D.)
Then consider the God’s rivals, hear what Claudius
had to put up with. The minute she heard him snoring
his wife – that whore-empress – who dared to prefer the mattress
of a stews to her couch in the Palace, called for her hooded
night-cloak and hastened forth, with a single attendant.
Then, her black hair hidden under an ash-blonde wig,
she’d make straight for her brothel, with its stale, warm coverlets,
and her empty reserved cell. Here, naked, with gilded
nipples, she plied her trade, under the name of ‘The Wolf-Girl’,
parading the belly that once housed a prince of the blood.
She would greet each client sweetly, demand cash payment,
and absorb all their battering – without ever getting up.
Too soon the brothel-keeper dismissed his girls:
she stayed right till the end, always last to go,
then trailed away sadly, still with burning, rigid vulva,
exhausted by men, yet a long way from satisfied,
cheeks grimed with lamp-smoke, filthy, carrying home
to her Imperial couch the stink of the whorehouse.— translated by Peter Green
William Gibson's Neuromancer
+
Sasha Grey
=
Case
“An ambitious new work by Brody Condon”
Sun, Nov 22, 2009
12:00 PM – 6:00 PM
New Museum
This evening I noticed that Kevin Sampsell posted a facebook update about how he was firming up tour dates for February…which got me thinking about book tours for indie writers…which got me wondering if there existed any kind of Reading Series Database — like an index where indie writers/publishers could go to find opportunities to read from their books. I couldn’t find anything like that, so I thought I’d ask y’all to maybe help contribute to an informal list in the comments here — is there a Reading Series in your town? For folks in NYC or San Francisco, I assume there are many — what are they/where are they? Outside those big city hubs, is there a venue for indie writers to read in your town?
Ira Silverberg thanked Harper Perennial for sponsoring the event and noted that the Bee was part of Harper’s effort to reach out to small presses and online journals like HTML Giant and its editors. People clapped. I clapped. I wondered who in this room filled with pillars of print publishing was wondering what HTML Giant was. I wondered if they all knew.
–“James Frey, Ben Greenman and Maira Kalman Spell Some Words” by Rozalia Jovanovic
If poetics does not ask the reader to re-negotiate how one reads, if it does not attempt to cast new light on all that came before it, then why bother? Outmoded “schools” of poetry must be transcended so that we might effectively evaluate what does and what does not alter reality and why and how.
For my first contribution to Mean Week, I want to address something that bugs the living hell out of me: when attributing singular possessive nouns ending in the letter -s-, nothing changes from the way in which you attribute singular possessive nouns ending in other letters. Just add an apostrophe -s-. That is all. Don’t change anything or do anything differently. This is very, very simple.
For example:
Philip Roth’s novels are boring as fuck.
Ben Marcus’s novels are fun.
You see how I did that?
I did not write: Ben Marcus’ novels are fun.
[Because that doesn’t make any sense – Ben Marcus is one dude, not plural dudes.]
I also did not write: Ben Marcu’s novels are fun.
[Because that makes no sense. His name is Marcus, not Marcu.]
Not sure why so many people are incapable of understanding this simple punctuation, but I notice these mistakes occurring all the time — and it drives me bonkers!
As I was saying to Darby recently, after he commented over at my spot about the frequency of my posting artworks of human-animal hybridity, in academia right now Animals are all the rage.
A recent edition of PMLA focused on Animal Studies, and a glance at the Penn CFP page reveals a growing number of conferences on the topic of Animals in literature, art, politics, etc.
Further proof of this growing trend can be seen in the rise of websites like The Inhumanities, as well as the swarm of books being published on the topic, including this new book of Derrida’s lectures being release on November 1st by University of Chicago Press:
The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract.