Cultural Masturbation
If you want to go to a very lonely place, find the Cultural Criticism section of your local bookstore. No one is ever there, it seems, except for the occasional confused student staring at the placard– Cultural Criticism?— wondering what it could mean and forgetting that he is actually looking for Joan Didion’s The White Album. But if you find yourself in this dusty corner, you could do worse than pick up Will Self‘s Junk Mail. It’s a collection of nonfiction and journalism he published over the 90’s and 00’s. There’s an essay about London crack houses, another about Woody Allen and Jewish comedy, and many others including one about artist Damien Hirst in which you will find this question:
“Is it better to masturbate over the image of the Emperor if he has no clothes on, or is it preferable to stimulate yourself discreetly knowing that he is tightly sheathed?”
Adam Robinson—
Jonathan Burks, my friend and former Milwaukee roommate, just put out an album of boozey rock songs that you can download free at http://jonathanburks.bandcamp.com. It might be the sort of thing where liking the person affects the way I come to the music, but I don’t feel like I’m overstating it by saying that this is some of the most honest-sounding, unmediated rock/folk/country music I’ve ever heard. And his last record, Brown Paper Bag, may be even better.
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Toppling the Vinyl Castle (Rule of Threes #3)
Or, what I did over Christmas Weekend.
1. Liked a photo called “Sawhorse Buddha” from an upcoming series by Josh Grigsby:
2. Read A poem from Lana Turner Journal called “Market Forces Are Brighter Than The Sun” by Cathy Park Hong, which is crunchy and smudgy and full of errant exclamation points.
3. Read Less Than Zero and felt wonderfully wretched afterward. This excerpt encapsulates the book for me:
While reading the paper at twilight by the pool, I see a story about how a local man tried to bury himself alive in his backyard because it was “so hot, too hot.” I read the article a second time and then put the paper down and watch my sisters. They’re still wearing their bikinis and sunglasses and they lie beneath the darkening sky and play a game in which they pretend to be dead. They ask me to judge which one of them can look dead the longest; the one who wins get to push the other one into the pool. I watch them and listen to the tape that’s playing on the Walkman I’m wearing. The Go-Go’s are singing “I wanna be worlds away/I know things will be okay when I get worlds away.” Whoever made the tape then let the record skip and I close my eyes and hear them start to sing “Vacation” and when I open my eyes, my sisters are floating face down in the pool, wondering who can look drowned the longest.
Plus One:
Watched The Lakers get spanked by the Cavs. This made my Christmas, especially when they got whiny and pouty about it. Phil Jackson, I love you, but you can be a spoiled brat.
I Like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz A Lot: Part 5
I like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz so much that every day this week, I’ll be posting excerpts from a really long interview between Cristin and I about writing, New York and her forthcoming book Everything is Everything which will be released in January 2010 by Write Bloody Press. In today’s final excerpt, Cristin talks about what keeps slam poets from the printed page, really huge Word files and guardians of slam poetry history.
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December 4th, 2009 / 3:00 pm
December 4th, 2009 / 3:00 pm
I Like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz A Lot: Part 4
I like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz so much that every day this week, I’ll be posting excerpts from a really long interview between Cristin and I about writing, New York and her forthcoming book Everything is Everything which will be released in January 2010 by Write Bloody Press. In today’s excerpt, Cristin talks about the train to Queens, the circular nature of writing about writing, and performance as process.
I Like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz A Lot: Part 3
I like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz so much that every day this week, I’ll be posting excerpts from a really long interview between Cristin and I about writing, New York and her forthcoming book Everything is Everything which will be released in January 2010 by Write Bloody Press. In today’s excerpt, Cristin talks about poetic boundaries, nostalgia and penis-shaped poetry.
I Like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz a Lot: Part 2
I like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz so much that every day this week, I’ll be posting excerpts from a really long interview between Cristin and I about writing, New York and her forthcoming book Everything is Everything which will be released in January 2010 by Write Bloody Press. In today’s excerpt, Cristin talks about raping giraffes, slam poetry and bridging writing communities.
I Like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz A Lot: Part 1
I like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz so much that every day this week, I’ll be posting excerpts from a really long interview between Cristin and I about writing, New York and her forthcoming book Everything is Everything which will be released in January 2010 by Write Bloody Press.
Food for Thought With Sasha Grey
Sasha Grey at the First Thanksgiving
DD: Do you think it can be a really positive thing to do so much so young because you learn so much.
SG: Yeah, over the past few years my learning curve has been huge and sometimes people say, ‘Don’t you just want to be a normal 21-year-old and go party and have fun?’ No, I mean why do you think great artists of our time have always said youth is wasted on the young? I don’t want to be an old a person in regret and think I should have done this but I was off being lazy. There are enough mistakes we make as human beings anyway, so let the mistakes be real mistakes not chosen mistakes.
You know what? I think this is great advice. The rest of the interview isn’t bad either. (via Jezebel.)
I Like Nicholson Baker A Lot
Last week I read Nicholson Baker’s new novel, The Anthologist, all in an evening sitting propped uncomfortably across the smaller of two sofas in my apartment. One thing about reading Nicholson Baker is in his exorbitantly minute and often startling descriptions (his first novel, The Mezzanine, is simply the thoughts of a guy during a ride up an escalator, which sounds boring but is incredible), you might think that it would then be easy to get caught up in the vibe, overthinking ideas and elements as you sit in the presence of a master doing the same. And yet, Baker is so good at catching all the spillage of thought you might have in listening to him speak, there is actually very little loosening of one’s own awareness while in the grip of even such an often everyday-aimed and frank voice as he wields. I hardly even recognized how uncomfortable I get usually while reading. It all went down, as have all of his books, leaving me hungry and excited, even in, again, a seemingly arbitrary subject matter: The Anthologist is about a guy, Paul Chowder, preparing to write the introduction to a poetry anthology. There is simply probably no one else alive who could pull this off, and Baker does, quite so.