Some Jews are OK?
Thanks to Tony O’Neill for the tip off: christwire.org calls Jonathan Safran Foer “A Jewish Star Christians Really Can Follow!”.
Some direct quotes from the article:
John Updike crowned Foer the genius voice of his generation, but sadly, the rest of that generation was off growing goatees and clicking around MySpace.
His soaring words put cruel and negative Jewish writers like Gary Shteyngart, Sam Lipsyte and Michael Chabon to shame. All they write about is chasing homely girls and how they lack the jocky virility to open a mayonnaise jar. Pathetic!
Snap! Take that Lipsyte, ya hack!
Sandra Doller, EXPLAIN YOURSELF!
If you want to see a poem that excels based on its sound meaning, here’s one below the fold, from the just released IE Reader: READ MORE >
Colson Whitehead for Secretary of Post-racial Affairs
Published a couple weeks ago in the NYT, but I didn’t know about it till I saw it linked on Amber Noelle Sparks’s blog, which itself is today’s fun new discovery.
INTERVIEW WITH MOLLY GAUDRY
Molly Gaudry is the author of We Take Me Apart (ml press, 2009). Here is an excerpt of the book. Molly is an editor for Keyhole, Willows Wept Review, Twelve Stories, and a contributor for Big Other. She has a face, and hair and fingers, and a place to live and probably a personal computer. Here is an interview I conducted with her:
Critics on Criticism: Roland Barthes
From “Blind and Dumb Criticism” in Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers:
Why do critics thus periodically claim their helplessness or their lack of understanding? It is certainly not out of modesty; no one is more at ease than one critic confessing that he understands nothing about existentialism; no one more ironic and therefore more self-assured than another admitting shamefacedly that he does not have the luck to have been initiated into the philosophy of the Extraordinary; and no one more soldier-like than a third pleading for poetic ineffability….
The reality behind this seasonally professed lack of culture is the old obscurantist myth according to which ideas are obnoxious if they are not controlled by ‘common sense’ and ‘feeling’: Knowledge is Evil, they both grew on the same tree….
In fact, any reservation about culture means a terrorist position.
Bonus Reines: from The Holloway Series in Poetry
[Ariana begins around minute 16, if you want to skip the intro.]
I ESTABLISH THE CLARITY THEREFORE ALL THIS GOES WITH ME: Ariana Reines Week, Part 5
Today we close out Ariana Reines week with a shift from the present to the imminent future, with sneak previews of two forthcoming works by Ariana Reines. The first, Miss St.’s Hieroglyphic Suffering, is based on act two of Reines’s highly regarded play, Telephone, and will be performed at a Works+Process show at the Guggenheim this weekend. (I’m going on Sunday. Maybe see you there?) The second is from a book of poems (or is it one long poem?) called Save the World, that seems to be forthcoming from FENCE Books. Pretty not bad, yeah? Fun starts below.
Ariana Reines Week, Part 4: The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real
We began Ariana Reines week with AR’s original translation of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, published through her own press, Mal-o-Mar Editions. Now, after two days cavorting with Dan Hoy and Jon Leon, whose split book (The Hot Tub / Glory Hole) is also new from MoM, we return to Reines-as-translator, and consider a new book from Semiotext(e), The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore. Here (from the site) is the briefest of introductions to Real:
Hailed as a virtuoso writer and a “revolutionary whore,” Grisélidis Réal (1929–2005) chanced into prostitution at thirty-one after an upper-class upbringing in Switzerland. Serving clients from all walks of life, Réal applied the anarcho-Marxist dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” to her profession, charging sliding-scale fees determined by her client’s incomes and complexity of their sexual tastes. Réal went on to become a militant champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes’ rights. She has described prostitution as “an art, and a humanist science,” noting that “the only authentic prostitution is that mastered by great technical artists … who practice this form of native craft with intelligence, respect, imagination, heart…”
The main action of the Semiotext(e) volume is a series of lengthy interviews between Real and Jean-Luc Hennig (a professor at the University of Cairo) but the final section, a hearty selection of entries from the titular Little Black Book are not to be missed. They are the concise, practical, hilarious, and delightfully NSFW. Click through to read some of my favorites.