STARK WEEK INTERLUDE: SLampson at the Goth Club
This is what happens when a poet quotes his poetry to a lonely girl in Second Life, a 3D world where you can discover your artistic talents and share them instantly with friends.
[2013/06/24 20:49] Dibblez Doobie (busy response): If All You Are Going To Do Is Send Some Lame, Overused, DumbAss Line, Just Stop And I’m Someone Else. Be Creative Man .FFS Thanks Have A Nice Day
[2013/06/24 20:50] Slampson Slarkweather: I should just dance my face off for the next 20 seconds.
[2013/06/24 20:50] Dibblez Doobie: lol
[2013/06/24 20:50] Slampson Slarkweather: would that be weird?
[2013/06/24 20:51] Slampson Slarkweather: or good weird?
[2013/06/24 20:51] Dibblez Doobie: lol
[2013/06/24 20:51] Dibblez Doobie: im not even sure what ur talking about but u made me laugh
[2013/06/24 20:51] Dibblez Doobie: so good wierd i guess
[2013/06/24 20:52] Dibblez Doobie: r u 3 weeks old or an alt ?
[2013/06/24 20:53] Slampson Slarkweather: I’m 33.
[2013/06/24 20:54] Slampson Slarkweather: and I still don’t understand the bird and the bees.
[2013/06/24 20:55] Dibblez Doobie: lol
[2013/06/24 20:55] Slampson Slarkweather: and I’m a black belt in pussying out.
[2013/06/24 20:55] Slampson Slarkweather: :)
[2013/06/24 20:56] Dibblez Doobie: lol something to bwe proud of i suppose lol
[2013/06/24 20:57] Dibblez Doobie: r u sober ?
[2013/06/24 20:58] Slampson Slarkweather: I’m telling you, the squirrels are up to something.
[2013/06/24 20:58] Dibblez Doobie: duide
[2013/06/24 20:58] Dibblez Doobie: dude u know i have no idea what ui are talking bout right
[2013/06/24 20:59] Slampson Slarkweather: when you say “coffee” all people hear is “liquid turkey.”
[2013/06/24 21:01] Dibblez Doobie: im very used to men not making sence .. ;)
[2013/06/24 21:02] Slampson Slarkweather: I can hear the sound of your sadness, a small bird flailing in the grass, one wing making a useless music, and sometimes circumstance is the victim.
[2013/06/24 21:03] Dibblez Doobie: lol not the adjative i woulda used lol but ok
[2013/06/24 21:03] Slampson Slarkweather: what army hides inside you?
[2013/06/24 21:04] Dibblez Doobie: sorry im basing it on experince not
[2013/06/24 21:04] Dibblez Doobie: lol
[2013/06/24 21:05] Dibblez Doobie: lol no army silly
[2013/06/24 21:06] Slampson Slarkweather: Remember when Bill Murray was the right answer over Captain Kirk and you didn’t flinch?
[2013/06/24 21:07] Dibblez Doobie: lol wat the fuk are u talking abt
[2013/06/24 21:09] Slampson Slarkweather: I used to wonder what would happen if a plane flew through a rainbow.
[2013/06/24 21:10] Slampson Slarkweather: don’t you just love love?
[2013/06/24 21:10] Dibblez Doobie: i did once
[2013/06/24 21:10] Dibblez Doobie: n my friends adore me
[2013/06/24 21:11] Slampson Slarkweather: turns out this life is super fucking hard.
[2013/06/24 21:11] Slampson Slarkweather: you know?
[2013/06/24 21:12] Dibblez Doobie: that i know
[2013/06/24 21:13] Slampson Slarkweather: ever think the god that put us here forgot to punch holes in the jar?
[2013/06/24 21:13] Dibblez Doobie: every day
[2013/06/24 21:14] Dibblez Doobie: funny we are having this convo cause im watching titantic
[2013/06/24 21:15] Slampson Slarkweather: Depression is the fog that settles over the swamp you call your life.
[2013/06/24 21:15] Dibblez Doobie: ya tell me about it
[2013/06/24 21:16] Dibblez Doobie: i used to be happy
[2013/06/24 21:17] Slampson Slarkweather: I feel like my insides are about to explode.
[2013/06/24 21:19] Slampson Slarkweather: I want to help you, I want to open you up and fix all the black and bloody shit in there.
[2013/06/24 21:20] Dibblez Doobie: omg you sure are somethin
[2013/06/24 21:20] Dibblez Doobie: this party is lame, do you wana come hang out in my place
[2013/06/24 21:21] Slampson Slarkweather: I want to go where emails go, brave as the tiny birds stuck inside JFK airport chirping like a ringtone.
[2013/06/24 21:21] Slampson Slarkweather: Google Earth knows dick about my birthmarks.
[2013/06/24 21:21] Slampson Slarkweather: Dear Mom—you don’t know shit about poetry. If you were a think tank, we’d all be making cartoon balloons.
[2013/06/24 21:24] Dibblez Doobie: mom?
[2013/06/24 21:24] Dibblez Doobie: I ain’t your momma boy.
[2013/06/24 21:25] Slampson Slarkweather: It’s like Russia. Nobody realizes it size, the way you can die out there.
[2013/06/24 21:25] Slampson Slarkweather: We edit into existence.
[2013/06/24 21:25] Slampson Slarkweather: A girl’s leg disappearing.
[2013/06/24 21:26] Slampson Slarkweather: A hallway of possibility.
[2013/06/24 21:26] Dibblez Doobie: OMG.
[2013/06/24 21:26] Slampson Slarkweather: A new Eurydice.
[2013/06/24 21:26] Slampson Slarkweather: A green dress stitched with light.
[2013/06/24 21:26] Slampson Slarkweather: On her shoulders by thin electricity.
[2013/06/24 21:27] Slampson Slarkweather: Pulled the plug.
[2013/06/24 21:27] Slampson Slarkweather: The leg is flesh, which doesn’t make it real.
[21:27] User not online – message will be stored and delivered later.
Spectacle & Pageantry Always Trump Ethics
o, the humanity!
[ No, this post isn’t about the current state of Politics in the “greatest nation that’s ever existed”, or The Vatican. But it is me being, as usual, angry and amused, reductive, pessimistic, excited, juiced up, judgmental, and making sweeping generalizations about humanity, our plight, our collective cultural soul, blah, blah — note: I am a big fan of the Tour de France, absolutely care and absolute also do not care about the cheating. And I will be following as much of this year’s Tour as I can.
I think, really, that I care more about the Tour de France than I do about humanity ]
So, anyways,
In less than 48 hours the 100th edition of the Tour de France will begin with huge fanfare. Does it matter that Lance Armstrong finally came clean (in his way), admitting he’d cheated his way, coldly and methodically (Armstrong headed up, according to USADA, “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen”), to his record 7 consecutive tour titles? READ MORE >
New York’s 100 Most Important Rats Living In the Subway System
fluffy
darlene
beyonce
macduff
copyrat infringement
spike
fenton
skeletor
francois
meatball
And in itself and
“She comes to a rest in shadow. Above her is an overhang of chickenwire and tins. She freezes. Above her is a terrible shape, a jagged many-limbed thing, a tree tangled from the composites of aerials and tv innards, plastic extrusions like growths in its multipart trunk, thorns of glass and shattered plates. Its branches splay – finger after finger of tubing, and intricate wicked ribbing. Dangling from them like dirty dank foliage, like the skins of victims, are dish clothes, and umbrellas’ countless ripped canopies. Nylon in dinged colours.”
— from “The Flies That Bind” by “Jacques Francis,” The New Inquiry
“I used to compare everything in poems to metallic sheets of mica, the transparent fragments that flake off so easily. I never say I’m a poet; I just say “writer” and no one ever asks “a writer of what?” Once a man told me he was in the business of prosthetic limbs and I was speechless.”
— Stephanie Balzer, The Destroyer Vol 1.2
“We had a president living here once,
After he was president.
A famous animator lived here too.
We’d see him feeding the ducks.
This used to be a big duck town.
Ducks had a real voice.
Then one night they left for New Haven.”
— from “A Little Background” by James Haug, Connotation Press
Craft Notes & Haut or not & Technology & Web Hype / Comments Off on And in itself and
November 29th, 2012 / 2:32 pm
November 29th, 2012 / 2:32 pm
What we talk about when we talk about the New Sincerity, part 2
"Hi, How Are You?" cover art by Daniel Johnston (1983); "financially desperate tree doing a 'quadruple kickflip' off a cliff into a 5000+ foot gorge to retain its nike, fritos, and redbull sponsorships " by Tao Lin (2010)
It made me very happy to read the various responses to Part 1, posted last Monday. Today I want to continue this brief digression into asking what, if anything, the New Sincerity was, as well as what, if anything, it currently is. (Next Monday I’ll return to reading Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose and applying it to contemporary writing.)
Last time I talked about 2005–8, but what was the New Sincerity before Massey/Robinson/Mister? (And does that matter?) Others have pointed out that something much like the movement can be traced back to David Foster Wallace’s 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (here’s a PDF copy). I can recall conversations, 2000–3, with classmates at ISU (where DFW taught and a number of us worked for RCF/Dalkey) about “the death of irony” and “the death of Postmodernism” and a possible “return to sincerity.” Today, even the Wikipedia article on the NS also makes that connection:
What we talk about when we talk about the New Sincerity, part 1
Miranda July; Steve Roggenbuck (photo dates unknown)
I wasn’t surprised that my Monday post, which was ultimately about reading & applying some ideas from Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose, mostly generated conversation about Tao Lin and the New Sincerity. I knew that would happen even as I wrote it. So I thought I should take a post to clarify my thoughts on “the whole NS thing.” What follows will be a mix of fact and personal reflection.
point oh
I’m in the early stages of developing an online CW class. I’m thinking an intro class. Anyone taken one? Advantages? Entanglements? I wouldn’t mind hearing some anecdotes. Was it synchronous or asynchronous? Did it matter to you? Face-time versus online time—what IS the difference, to you? What can ‘physical’ time offer online could never? What can online offer over physical?
I’m asking big picture questions here, sure. As I said, I’m in the early stages. One key aspect of early stages: Do I want to do this? I feel it could be innovative and high quality, but I could be wrong. I haven’t taken or taught an online CW class. You?
“The Hottest Litmag” as determined by everyone who has ever read HTMLGIANT
—or at least those who responded a while back when I asked folks to name “the hottest litmag in the room.” As of that moment. And now, after the jump, I’ve compiled the responses.
By far the clear number one was …
Baby Bump
Yesterday I was walking around Brooklyn on my cell phone and I walked so far I ended up in Big Sur. Who knew Big Sur is so close to Brooklyn? I was like, This has to be the shittiest Big Sur it is so shitty.
I was on the phone with my Aunt Shira and she felt deprived of information as to why I don’t have a baby. I was like, Do you want to know why? There is an Ann Lauterbach poem that might help you understand. It helps me understand maybe a little. She was like, Is Ann Lauterbach Jewish?
The poem I’m talking about is called “Indictment Without Subject” and it doesn’t really help me understand why I don’t have a baby, but it’s a neat poem.
In it Ann Lauterbach uses repetition to convey reproduction in machinelike, rather than biological terms. She writes:
The bourgeoisie tribe makes babies.
The babies cry I want.
The babies cry more.
This is how it learns to count.
Lauterbach’s language suggests that the tribe’s baby-making is a capitalist action: a product of and for conspicuous consumption, rather than a biological urge. They “make” babies like a factory makes a widget. The babies’ first words in the poem are not Mommy or Daddy, but “want” and “more.” Rather than establishing a dynamic of a parent teaching a child, the tribe instead consumes its children by “learning to count” them.
When I think about Lauterbach as a female poet, I wonder how her consumerist portrayal of reproduction reflects upon women as childbearers and mothers? Nowhere in the stanza do we see any natural imagery, conveying childbirth as a biological action. The act of birthing and child-rearing are not described as women’s work, nor is there any joy in the process. Rather, it’s the collective “it” that churns out babies. Any reproductive ineluctability in this poem arrives out of an industrial, rather than a biological basis. The act of making babies—and the paradigm that encourages this as indispensable—is rendered a manufactured social signifier.
Can making art be as satisfying as making babies?
Is it selfish to deny your Aunt a niece?
Is there pressure on female artists to have it all?
Is there pressure on male artists to have it all?
Would you rather feel the pressure to have it all than the pressure to have only one thing?
Do you talk to your family?
Howz your biological clock doing?