Variations on Hating Part 2! The Young Philip Roth Rebels
I had- and still have, but that’s another post- a huge crush on Philip Roth. Look how hot he was. In an earlier brief post (click here), I touched on a certain artist’s need to embarrass herself. I often feel the same. I think Roth did, too. Perhaps it’s a youthful impulse. Regardless, I believe Roth has three masterpieces (One which is actually four books): Zuckerman Bound (which consists of The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson and The Prague Orgy ), Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral. (Oh, And possibly The Counterlife goes in there too.) READ MORE >
Variations on Hating: A Miniseries: Dido Merwin on Sylvia Plath
Dido Merwin lived in one of these beautiful houses at some point in her life. In the biography Bitter Fame: A Life Of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson (which is not as good as Janet Malcolm’s book, The Silent Woman, although it is more extensive), there is an appendix that contains a nasty thing written by Dido Merwin called “Vessel of Wrath: A Memoir of Sylvia Plath”:
TV Tropes
Once a week or so, I check my traffic on my other blogs. One of them gets a few hundred hits on a good week, the other gets almot none for the most part. (I have sort of abandoned it…maybe I’ll pick it up again someday…) Today, I checked the traffic on the latter, abandoned blog and noticed that TV Tropes sent me 24 visitors! And what is TV Tropes? It’s here. Check it out for yourself. It’s very thorough!
An Exclusive Interview with J.G. Ballard
J.G. Ballard Interview by John Hughes
The following interview with J.G. Ballard took place in the spring of 1996. It was recorded on to micro-cassette off speakerphone on a 6 a.m. call from the 4AD Records office in Los Angeles, CA to J.G. Ballard at his home in Shepperton, England. The tapes were transcribed in New York in 2005.
I contacted J.G. Ballard through a friend at Zone books. Zone had recently published a Ballard essay; an experimental dictionary of words for the future. I got his home number and called him to set up the interview below. The original plan was to discuss Rushing to Paradise. The interview opens, however, with the revelation that David Cronenberg was planning to release Crash at the Cannes Film Festival, summer’96.
In that respect, the interview has two parts. The first addresses the Crash movie release and the second, Rushing to Paradise.
Terrible Tuesday: I’m Stressed and Reading Depressing Things
Sometimes, when I am miserable, I read things that are even more awful than my life and this is soothing. Twelve years ago, my marriage was a pile of dogshit and I was really miserable and I read all sorts of stuff on Cambodia, including a biography of Pol Pot called Brother Number One, watched The Killing Fields, read Eichmann in Jerusalem, and more or less immersed myself in thinking about genocide. READ MORE >
The Clockwise Cat and Caffeine Society
I googled Olga Zilberbourg because of her comment on Ryan’s post about We and found this web literary journal, Clockwise Cat, with which I was unfamiliar (click here). J.A. Tyler is in it- OF COURSE! I also found this publisher/web journal thing called Caffeine Society ( click here). I also discovered she is a contributing editor to Narrative Magazine. That’s all, folks. I haven’t spent enough time looking at the aforementioned sites to say anything about them, but I like to share! Share share share!
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April 27th, 2009 / 10:44 pm
April 27th, 2009 / 10:44 pm
Literary Lessons from Metal Magazines: Rumpelstiltskin Grinder
This is a band called Rumpelstiltskin Grinder
Rumpelstitskin is one of my favorite fairy tales. (Click here to have some guy read it to you.) It made me sad as a child- I felt so sorry for Rumpelstiltskin. I would be haunted by his misfortune after reading the story. I had no feelings for the girl. Hm. Theories exist claiming it is an anti-semitic tale. Regardless, as we can still read Pound and Hemingway even though they were crazy anti-semites, I still can read Rumpelstitskin with the great pleasure of compassion it stirs in me. Click here for some very funny “new’ uses of the word Rumpelstiltskin. Click here to read the story itself- it takes a few minutes. And click here to learn about the metal band, Rumpelstitskin Grinder.
From Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
I'm going to think really hard about this, thinks Walter.
Of the customary modes of aquisition, the one most appropriate to a collector would be the borrowing of a book with its attendant non-returning. The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders of the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books. If my experience may serve as evidence, a man is more likely to return a borrowed book upon occasion than to read it. And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say this is the oldest thing in the world.
Sylvia Plath’s Boogers
I love you, Sylvia. I really do.
Hi. I mentioned this once in the comment section, but I’ll say it again: I dyed my hair red when I was fifteen and recited all of “Lady Lazarus” (click here to read it) in English class, which ends with, “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/ and I eat men like air.” I was really popular- dudes were lining up to get some action from me after I did that!(Click here to hear Syliva read it) ! I loved high school. Oh wait, that is a lie. Anyway, Sylvia Plath can also be funny, which I feel like highlighting due to the recent tragedy of her son’s suicide. Here she is, picking her nose: