New Used Bookstore on Smith Street
I walked into this new used bookstore on Smith Street in Brooklyn after carbo-loading last night for a 10k race I was supposed to run right now in Central Park that I am skipping- last minute skipping- because it’s raining and freezing out and getting pneumonia is not worth it! As you can imagine, I am a bit disappointed and thinking things like, what if it stops raining??!! Anyway, I spent 25 dollars last night and bought a bunch of books. Here are the titles:
Good Friday, Femme Friday
Power Quote from Annie Proulx
Interviewer: You were in your forties when you wrote the first of the stories from Heart Songs. Do you think you had a late start when it comes to writing fiction?
Proulx: Well, I did yeah. But so what? Why should it bother anybody when somebody starts to write?
Interviewer: It’s fewer years writing the stories that you seem to enjoy writing.
Proulx: Oh, yeah, I suppose, but that’s OK too. The world is spared lots of crap.
What’s up, Rumpus? Part Whatever in a Series of Infinity
Over at The Daily Rumpus they’re publishing new poems for National Poetry Month. So far they’ve got Daphne Gottlieb and Dawn Trook, but keep checking back to see what comes next. Also, YouTube clip of Tobias Wolff singing a song with John Darnielle.
from “the end of the county cheese princess’ reign” by Daphne Gottlieb
After I was crowned, I visited the next baby born
and brought a cheese basket with fruit.Fruit has no princess so I became
the fruit ambassador as well
on a moment’s notice.
Hail to the hobo king
“It was all right,” said Norwood. “Some hobo got my boots on the train. He was one more slick customer. He took ’em right off my feet and I didn’t see him or hear him. Yeah, and I wisht I could get aholt of that sapsucker. He’d think boots. I wouldn’t care if it was the hobo king. It may of been the hobo king. He was plenty slick. Well, I’m not being serious there.”
“About what, the king?”
“They have a got a king. That’s right, this is no lie, I read this. They have got them a king just like England and France and he rules over every tramp in America just like…a king.”
Has anyone else here heard about this boxcar monarch? Is he in Bulfinch? I’m ready to swear allegiance to him right this second, I swear to gawd. Now taking applications for inclusion on a road trip to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Paragraphs I Would Probably Stab My Dick To Have Written (1): Barry Hannah
Geronimo Rex, pg. 142, first full graph:
Other nights Fleece explained to me how he had declared himself–he was going to be a doctor and study how “one suffers in the meat.” “I was always a meatball,” he said. “I’m going to be the best doctor Mississippi ever produced. They’ll bring in some whore whose boyfriend has shot her in the cunt pointblank with a shotgun and alongside her her boyfriend also, who thought he commited suicide putting the last shot into his navel, and I’ll put on my mask, wave my hands with some instruments, and bring them back Romeo and Juliet.”
My Life My Death By Kathy Acker: A Love Letter from pr
PR: Dear Kathy, you are dead. Here is a link to your supposed last writings that I found online. I like it. You are very unclever in it. People want to make you clever, and you are, but I prefer where your cleverness takes you, rather than the cleverness itself. Here is some art inspired by you. I don’t find you clever as much as desperately searching for comfort and truth and honesty.
Kathy: I just write the truth. I don’t write fiction. I write out of need. Culture is that which falsifies.
Mean Monday: Baudelaire’s Preface to The Flowers of Evil
Another Drunk French Dude
Baudelaire was sort of mean-spirited. I would have liked to have gotten drunk with him, maybe just once though, and then probably I would stay away from him. But damn, the preface to The Flowers of Evil is brilliant. The dude was a first class asshole. Baudelaire would have liked when Brian Johnson sang, “you get into evil, you’re a friend of mine:” READ MORE >
The CIA Bought Me This Nifty Headband: Ugly Ducking Presse Stands Accused
In some dizzying crinkle of web logic, I’d like to share not only a post on another blog but the comment stream of that post, which features an interesting discussion of small press successes, funding, avant-garde tendencies, dissonance/dissent, and the CIA.
The post in question is Shonni Enelow’s spotlight of Brooklyn-based Ugly Duckling Presse, which publishes strange and exciting poetry, including lots of work-in-translation, and all in editions of carefully made book objects that preserve bookmaking as an art unto itself. They’ve published great books by Eugene Ostashevsky, Tomas Salamun, and Laura Solomon. They published Dodie Bellamy’s Barf Manfesto, which is terrific, and Aram Saryon’s Complete Minimal Poems, which won the William Carlos William Award in 2008. That’s not the controversy. Controversy after the jump!