Anything else interesting happen at AWP?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rNJ4acmEUY
Poem Addressing Doubts that are Illuminated Before I Again Shift the Attention to You, Before Shifting it Back to Me Again
I want to explain more about what I’m thinking, but I’m afraid it will make me seem stupid. I do worry about how I appear in this poem. It is not cool for a poet to appear to be anxious for praise and attention in a poem. It is not cool for anyone to appear to be anxious for praise and attention. I’m just saying something that is true. I hope you will not hold that against me, or this poem. I would suggest that if you do not feel that you, or those you admire, are anxious for praise and attention, then you are not looking at yourself and the world realistically. Of course, I’m not interested in saying insightful, realistic things, which I wouldn’t say except for the fact that I’m interested in saying insightful, realistic things.
Drought Resistant Strain: A Conversation With Mather Schneider
Mather Schneider’s Drought Resistant Strain is now available from Interior Noise Press. We had a great e-mail conversation about his writing, his attitude and much more.
I have to ask. Intentionally or not, you were a pretty polarizing figure on HTMLGIANT, and have been accused of being overly negative. Do you agree with the characterization? Do you think of yourself as a contrarian? How do you feel about being the only person who has ever been banned? Would you like to return to the HTMLGIANT community and if so, why?
If I see something that bothers me, like unthinking pc happy face rhetoric, frat boy backslapping, hyperbolic praise, etc. I negate it. Pretentiousness bothers me a lot, like when someone expects to be admired for getting out of bed and eating a bowl of frosties. And hypocrisy bothers me too. I have seen Blake Butler use basically the same tactics in commenting that they kicked me off for. Essentially a rude jokster tactic that refuses to take the conversation seriously. I have a negative side yes, but I have a positive side too. Most of the people who accuse me of being a contrarian only know a small part of me. As you can see from my poetry I am not all negative.
I am not sure I am the only one who has been banned from HTML GIANT. It would not surprise me if others had been banned but not many people knew about it. Either way, yes it bothers me to be banned when I have seen so many others making what I consider much worse comments than I ever made. I have been threatened by people on the net a few times, and that’s something I would never do. I also do not call people “cunts” or shit like that, which I have been called many times. In fact one guy on HTML GIANT said he was going to burn my house down, but I’m sure he’s still allowed to comment, ha ha! You stood up for me on HTML GIANT and I appreciate that. And if you’re willing to post this on there, you must know you’re going to get some backlash for it, and I respect that.
Manuel Delanda on Deleuze & Genetic Algorithms in Art
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50-d_J0hKz0
This video held me rapt for the 1 1/2 hour stretch. Delanda is a great speaker, and what he says about environmental & intensive partnerships in art is really fascinating to me.
Promise some for The Promise Keepers
Riley Michael Parker, the genius behind some hyper-sex and gruesome chapbooks from MLP and Future Tense, is making a film with Carolyn Main, and it needs our help/$. Described as ‘an exploitation style film like the 1970’s John Waters movies’, this is sure to be guh & wonderful. More info, featuring a teasing introductory video that sees both of the above bodies dancing around in drag, can be found here. Go give some! I did!
5 clunks of beer gloss
2. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q90_ZjuKgo
3. Who is the best writer to not have a book?
4. Book I could do without.
5. Think how lame it is to send/receive the new sarcasm emoticon being bandied about. “Hey I am adding this emoticon because I think you are concrete. You just can’t go abstract and also you bore me and you talk really loud to boot.”
boston’s best dad
As many writers alter ego as editors, all too often their own work is overshadowed by their press efforts. I know the feeling and its a little bittersweet. But today is a different day because Janaka Stucky has been voted Best Poet by the city of Boston.
On “Phone by Darby Larson,” with digression
“Phone by Darby Larson,” by Darby Larson, in the current issue of The Collagist, is one of the most refreshingly original pieces I’ve read in a while. The fading sequence of gray fonts mirrored at both beginning and end make the words, or ‘tips’ of the story, receed along an arc into visual space, as if the story itself were a giant sphere — a circular notion aptly mirrored in the jumpy, overlapping, entropic, and ultimately symmetrical narrative. Here, Larson (also per Abjective’s editorial fancies) is not just interested in telling stories, but writing them. In my mind, the two are different: the former merely a transcript of what one might say aloud to a spectator, the latter being actively aware, pensive even, of its ‘wordness’s’ function, capacity, limitation, and artifice. Oral history is fine, but I prefer writing that is seen, upon which, in this case, the structure looks like an almost palindrome, with wonderful tiny placed errors.
Happy Belated Birthday, Beckett
if all that all that yes if all that is not how shall I say no answer if all that is not false yes
all these calculations yes explanations yes the whole story from beginning to end yes completely false yes
-from How It Is
Yesterday was Beckett’s birthday (he’d have been 104).
To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.
-from Watt
Last semester, while I was studying theories of modernism with S. E. Gontarski, I got the opportunity to copy edit Jean-Michel Rabaté’s contribution to the just-released collection of original essays by leading Beckett scholars and biographers, A Companion to Samuel Beckett.
Rabaté’s essay is called “Philosophizing with Beckett: Adorno and Badiou.” It’s pretty interesting. Here’s a taste: