Excerpts

Op-ed: End the University as We Know It

In the NYT today, Mark C. Taylor (no relation), the chair of the religion department at Columbia, argues that “GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning.” He outlines a six-point plan for restructuring how graduate (and, later, undergraduate) educational institutions are structured and how they operate. He makes a number of good points–and a few I’m ambivalent about–but here’s one that especially resonated with me:

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. […] In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

He’s talking about the more traditional kind of academic, but I think the point is a salient one for MFAs and other creative degrees as well. The idea that all, or even most, of the people who specialize in a creative discipline will then be in a position to make any sort of living at the practice of that discipline is at best a willful delusion, and at worst a pernicious lie.

READ MORE >

Excerpts & Random / 20 Comments
April 27th, 2009 / 12:07 pm

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.

Excerpts / 12 Comments
April 25th, 2009 / 12:05 pm

EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#6)

 

[NOTE: The launch party for SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS is at 7 p.m. tonight at Cafe Orwell in Brooklyn. – JT]

 

 

 

 

 

My Dog is a Little Obese 

 

put the clif bar in your pocket from a florida gas station and walk away

 put the entire box of clif bars from a duane reade in penn station in your bag and walk away  

 put two clif bars from price chopper into your pocket and walk away

 this is CVS, there are no clif bars here

 buy 4 clif bars from albertson’s and feel bad

 there is 50mg of caffeine in your clif bar

 cut the clif bar in half with scissors and eat one half and put the other half in a bowl

 hide the scissors in the closet

 there isn’t any caffeine in the lemon poppyseed clif bar

 put organic green tea extract on your tongue and put your tongue in my mouth

 there is 50mg of caffeine in my brain  

 

 

Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.

Ellen Kennedy’s blog.

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 12 Comments
April 25th, 2009 / 10:47 am

Christopher Cheney is one of the only people who has threatened to run me over with a red car

cheney1
New from Blue Hour Press is an e-book of poems by Christopher Cheney (featuring photographs by Estelle Srivijittakar) called They Kissed Their Homes. They’re really something, these poems and photos, apart and together. The whole thing is like a violin you left on the stove and spilled coffee grounds over, which you feel bad about, since it’s not even your violin: you’re just keeping it safe for a guy who showed up at your door late one night smelling half-fried eggs and half-chicory, asking if you would be a brother and hide his fiddle. You don’t really want to, but he keeps shoving the case at you in nervous little here, here‘s, so finally you take it and leave it in your kitchen. He never comes back. But after a while you can’t seem to get the moon out of your refrigerator, and you start to feel like a dog’s around, hiding, watching you, doing that sleek coat shiver, trapped and can’t stop.

Cheney’s one of my favorite poets of disquiet. He’s like a sharpened eyelash. The real deal. Here’s the official blurb from Blue Hour Press about the book, plus some excerpts after the break.

Christopher Cheney’s They Kissed Their Homes is an album of everyday landscapes foregrounded with disquiet. Like warm Polaroids, the poems develop clause by clause; their subjects—the mundane, extraordinary, savage—colorize and sharpen; a nameless, faceless population pulls into focus. Together with the work of photographer Estelle Srivijittakar, Cheney’s declarative snapshots gain collaborative energy, grow even more lucid. The result is a catalogue of the countless small oddities of our American quotidian.

cheney2

READ MORE >

Excerpts & Web Hype / 20 Comments
April 24th, 2009 / 2:31 pm

Sylvia Plath’s Boogers

I love you, Sylvia. I really do.

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:

READ MORE >

Excerpts / 89 Comments
April 24th, 2009 / 1:33 pm

EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#5)

 

Green Toothbrush 

 

the train leaves in 50 minutes

two people having sex to a lonely and frustrated person singing “I’ll probably never see your face again”

two people taking turns standing under the water in a shower

the hair is black and smells like lemons

two people using one green toothbrush

the train leaves in 20 minutes

one person standing, ironing a red dress

the train is leaving in 15 minutes

the slip is too long and sticking out of the red dress

the boots are loud and slow

two people on a train taking turns laying down on one  person’s lap

the hair looks more brown than red when short

yelling “soccer” in secaucus station

waiting for the new york train

the new york train arrives in 3 minutes

two people buying two large organic coffees

caffeine making four eyes bigger and two brains faster

one person feeding a lemon to one pigeon

one pigeon walking away uninterested

two people sitting on a subway train with two coffees   floating above

two people lying very close on a one-person mattress

 

 

Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.

Ellen Kennedy’s blog.

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 10 Comments
April 24th, 2009 / 8:45 am

EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#4)

 

I Like Every Time We Have Sex 


“I want to have sex with you.” 

“Thank you. I want to have sex with you also.” 

“Really?” 

“Yes.” 

“When I say I want to have sex with you I mean really.” 

“So do I.” 

“I mean really, I don’t just say that as a feeling. Do you understand? Did you really mean that you wanted to have sex with me when we were waiting on line at the movie theater before or did you just mean that as a feeling?” 

“I don’t know. I’m sorry” 

READ MORE >

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 22 Comments
April 23rd, 2009 / 8:30 am

Giardiasis: Science Writing Can Be Fun

My husband got these little critters in Russia

Ryan is going to Russia. Which made me think of Giardiasis. Some Dutch dude wrote this about the parasite now known as Giardiasis (thanks Wikipedia). I think it is a beautiful description of the inside of certain kinds of shit and a wonderful example of how science writing, as Nabakov, Adrian (not to mention science fiction writers) and many others knew and know, can be great:

Antony van Leeuwenhoek of Delft, Netherlands, described such microorganisms he observed in the stool: “I have sometimes also seen tiny creatures moving very prettily; some of them a bit bigger, others a bit less, than a blood-globule but all of one and the same make. Their bodies were somewhat longer than broad, and their belly, which was flattish, furnished with sundry little paws, wherewith they made such a stir in the clear medium and among the globules, that you might even fancy you saw a woodlouse running up against a wall; and albeit they made a quick motion with their paws, yet for all that they made but slow progress.”

Excerpts / 5 Comments
April 22nd, 2009 / 2:22 pm

EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#3)


Orange

I wish my life consisted only of
riding my bike with you
down a giant hill that never stopped
while listening to music
with no one else around
in the middle of nothing,
except a few shiny and relaxing lights above in the sky
like stars but a little brighter
and more orange

Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.

Ellen Kennedy’s blog.

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 46 Comments
April 22nd, 2009 / 12:48 pm

EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#2)

Brighter and Clearer 

 

After I have an orgasm my body feels like a sombrero-shaped galaxy slowly expanding in the eyepiece of a 4th grader’s telescope 

After I watch a family of lions tear apart the body of a large deer on the Discovery Channel I feel a calming sense of inferiority 

After I watch a horror movie I can’t go to the bathroom without you holding my hand while I pee  

After I take my vegan dietary supplement my piss is brighter and clearer 

After I kiss your eyelids my lungs squeeze out through my ribs, then through my belly button and slowly fly to your face and push very lightly on your cheeks 

After I forget something I said I would remember my brain becomes a roll of vegetable futomaki that an obese chinchilla is trying to eat all in one bite 

After I make you cry one of my organs melts into a runny paste that trickles down the inside of my body and collects at the bottom of my feet 

After I make you feel indifferent towards me my heart turns into a small desert hamster running very quickly on an exercise wheel and then tripping and then spinning around in distress until the wheel stops and the hamster can get up and try running again, but in a more conscious and concerned way 

 

Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.

Ellen Kennedy’s blog.

Author Spotlight & Excerpts / 18 Comments
April 21st, 2009 / 1:03 pm