Codex Followup: Dr. Harpold’s Syllabus
It’s a love-fest! A couple of days ago I posted about an old essay of mine on an art book called the Codex Seraphinianus, and about all the responses I’ve gotten to that essay over the years. To my enormous pleasure, that post generated a whole new round of reader response, which came in via the comments section here, via email, and via Facebook. A few people who wrote in mentioned Dr. Terry Harpold, the professor at UF who first introduced me to the Codex in a course called Eccentric Spaces and Spacialities. Dr. Harpold, it seems, has the makings of a cult web-following, and that’s a fire I feel is well worth stoking. As it happens, I was down in Gainesville over July 4th weekend, visiting my little sister. I hadn’t been there since 2005, and I was only in town for a few days, so I didn’t even attempt to touch base with Dr. Harpold (or any of my other former profs) but when I visited Goerings Bookstore–which gets the book orders for the sweeping majority of UF’s English department course offerings–I saw the reading list for the most recent iteration of Harpold’s LIT 4930, and snapped the photo you see just above. It seems that the latest version of the course is called “The Literary Representation of Space,” and is being offered Summer B, 2009, ie right now. I’m straight-up jealous of anyone who gets to study Mrs. Dalloway with Dr. Harpold, a book that wasn’t on the syllabus when I took the course. Housekeeping, however, is a Space/s mainstay. It’s one of my all-time favorite pieces of literature. I don’t even know how many times I’ve read it, but I do know that I read it for the first time because Dr. Harpold assigned it to me. One more thing I’ll always be grateful for.
LIT 4930 Summer B – The Literary Representation of Space
Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path (Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2008) by Terry Harpold
Donald Duck, who wore no pants.
My favorite chapter from the otherwise pretty fun, but ultimately forgettable book The Science of Superheroes is this one where the author reminds readers that the man who wrote the Donald Duck comic book from 1942 – 1966 (Carl Barks) tried hard to always get the science right. Starts on page 161 of the preview on Google Books:
World Takes: Stories by Timmy Waldron
Word Riot Press recently published World Takes, a collection of stories by Timmy Waldron. Many of these stories appeared online in journals, including “Worry for the Well Rested” on pindeldyboz and “Things You Would Know About Paul if You Were His Friend” on eyeshot. And yet, buy the book for the ones that you can’t find online, and to have this wonderfully shaped collection in its entirety. My philosophy about story collections is that they are like albums more than novels. What story is chosen to go first, second, last and so forth, greatly shape the book. Often, there are a few “hits”. Sometimes, there is filler. Many a poor collection revolve around only one or two good stories. This is not the case with Waldron’s World Takes. Here is a collection perfectly shaped, with a strong punch of a first story, “Amanda”, that sets the dark, funny tone for the book. READ MORE >
Gagaku Meat and Influence
(Photo of Steve Richmond by Mike Daily, 1993)
A couple of weeks ago, Portland writer Mike Daily sent me a copy of a bound essay entitled Gagaku Meat: The Steve Richmond Story. It’s a hell of a thing, actually.
Daily discovered Richmond through the work of Charles Bukowski. They were (Richmond and Bukowski) on-again, off-again friends and fellow practioners of what some call the Meat School of poetry—masculine, direct, sometimes down on its luck. And where Richmond seems to have been influenced by Bukowski, Daily seems influenced by Richmond. Legacy. READ MORE >
Anne Boyer on a Provisional Avant Garde
THE PROVISIONAL AVANT GARDE
by Anne Boyer (originally at Odali$qued). I liked this essay so much when I originally read it that I asked Anne’s permission to re-post it here, and she graciously agreed.
1. It won’t be called the avant-garde. It will be referred to by various names, all of them precise, like “the society for touching lightly the forearms of another” or “a tendency toward making chains of half-rhymes in a circle with one’s friends.”
2. It will share with the historic avant-garde that art will often be made in groups, but it will seek or find the artistic and literary expressions that mimic something other than war or machines or violent manly death, something like “human touch” and “animal touch” and “comforting noises made when another is ill” and “maternal protection” and “friendly ritual” and “a little daub of secretion” or “just like playing cards with my aunts and uncles” or “the soft feeling of an arm” or “game for which the rules are never directly stated but which everyone knows how to play.”
Frederick Seidel Redux: In Which We Attend to Some Cart-Before-Horse Issues We Were Having
So the other day I linked to Ange Mlinko’s Seidel piece at The Nation website, where she comes down pretty hard on Frederick Seidel, as well as a number of critics who have praised him. It was just a snippet link, because I don’t know the first thing about Seidel or his work, but I thought her piece was interesting in its own right, and so I passed it along. Since then, I’ve been reminded that the best solution for un-acquaintance with a subject is acquaintance, and so here then are several Seidel-related links for your weekend-
Seidel’s author page at Macmillan is loaded with audio.
“Hell on Wheels” by Christian Lorenzten; this was one of the reviews with which Mlinko took issue.
Frederick Seidel poems at Harper’s (you have to be a subscriber to view these)
David Orr reviews Seidel’s Poems, 1959-2009
“Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin” by Frederick Seidel
Meet Bianca Stone
Bianca Stone makes poetry comics. I’m really in love with them. The first time I met her she gave me a chapbook of a collaboration she made with Matthew Rohrer, and then last night, after we read together at Happy Ending, I was lucky enough to obtain two more sweet, sweet poetry comics: “The Secret Intimacies of Insects,” and “Book of Beasts,” a collection of her abandoned fragments, revisions, and drawings. I’m really excited to read these little books, and to get to keep them. I think you could do a lot worse with your Friday afternoon than make friends with Bianca’s work. Here’s her blog. And here’s a sweet little poem, comic-less but that’s OK, “Watching Superman” in the current issue of elimae (which, btw, also features Mike Topp, our own comment-thread regular Darby Larson, fiction by Elizabeth Ellen, Michael Kimball interviewing David McLendon, and more. Maybe somebody else will post soon about the new elimae.)
Still More Harold Bloom… Hooded Negro’s YouTube Posts
I just discovered this, and it’s awesome. Part 1 is a general discussion of Bloom and his work; Part 2 focuses specifically on The Anxiety of Influence.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_WtTx2x5sg
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj7p_brtNA8
(some of) Mark Sanford’s (old) emails to “Maria”
Not pictured: Argentine sex kitten.
[Hat tip to my friend Pete for the link.] Well kids, another day, and another Republican turns out to be a lyin’ cheatin’ AWOL SOB. But I give the presumably-soon-to-be-ex-Governor credit for one thing–he’s a pretty decent prose stylist. He’s erotic, but not too trashy, and he’s upfront about his emotions and his mixed feelings, but you never get the impression he’s at loose ends. Check out this passage, from July 8 of last year.
[…] I went out and ran the excavator with lights until the sun came up. To me, and I suspect no one else on earth, there is something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the back ground, the tranquillity that comes with being in a virtual wilderness of trees and marsh, the day breaking and vibrant pink coming alive in the morning clouds – and getting to build something with each scoop of dirt.
Fuckin’ poetry, man. As I was just saying to Jeremy Schmall in gchat, if I was sleeping with this guy, and he was writing me letters like this, I’d totes be sticking around to see how things panned out. Read all they’ve got up so far (they promise more to come) here.
RELATED (in a sense): Greta Christina’s classic essay, “Are We Having Sex Now Or What?” (via Susie & Aretha Bright at Jezebel)
Slavoj Žižek gives capitalism a shot
Lamenting the 21st Century? There's an ap for that.