Why I Will Love David Lynch Forever
"Coop, I may be wearing a dress, but I still pull my panties on one leg at a time if you know what I mean."
I have been re-watching Twin Peaks for, literally, the first time in a decade. I first saw the series when the Season 1 DVD was released, unfortunately long before Season 2 ever saw a DVD release, on December 18th, 2001. I got the box-set for Christmas. I had never seen the series before, but in the midst of my Lynch obsession at age 15, I was pumped.
Since I’ve been re-watching it, I’ve been thinking a lot more about David Lynch than I have for years– at least since Inland Empire was released. While I know that Twin Peaks is specifically not exclusively the work of Lynch, in any sort of auteur sense, it certainly maintains a lot of elements that are specific to his aesthetics, and the episodes he himself directed are certainly the best of the series. The point is, I’ve been thinking about how awesome David Lynch is, and how really he is sort of the only ‘dark cult figure’ that I can still deal with after decades of obsession & attempting to navigate ‘fanboy’ culture (which, for the record, any sort of genre-based fanboy culture–actually just make that any sort of fanboy culture in general–is pretty much the most annoying thing in the world; I can no longer deal with the cult of Werner Herzog due to his incessant pandering & the caricature of himself that he’s fallen into (and the fact that Klaus Kinski is 100x more awesome than Herzog while Herzog gets all the credit majorly pisses me off)). Anyway, the point is I’ve made a list of why I will love David Lynch forever.
1. David Lynch understands the idea that films are more than just a representational narrative, rather, they are experiences in their own right.
2. David Lynch is not afraid of unwavering intensity. In fact, he loves it, and uses it to a very strong degree. Within the first season of Twin Peaks, made for prime-time network television, after establish a jovial tone filled with the lower-middle class & hat-tips to coffee and pie (“americana”), there are strobe lights, sexual perversions, and intense screaming & crying. This is not Lynch pandering towards “revealing the dark underbelly of suburbia”– maybe that is what Blue Velvet did, but I’d argue it’s more likely that Lynch is just prone to exploring this intensity in various environments (which if you ask me, the rest of his filmography seems to prove).
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A letter to Michael Kimball
Dear Michael Kimball,
In perhaps a not entirely sober state, I started your book Us on Saturday night. It was midnight, plus or minus some time. I had many other books to read, but I started your book, and after I read the first paragraph, I wanted to read the whole thing, that night, but I fell asleep on page fifty, plus or minus some pages, and all night while I slept, I was angry at myself for falling asleep.
Michael Kimball, I started your book from the very beginning yesterday because I was perhaps not fully sober when I started the night before. I woke up unnecessarily early yesterday morning, despite having had a raucous night previously, not to mention the disturbed slumber, at 6:30. I propelled myself out of bed and picked up your book immediately. I read your book while I prepared my coffee.
Rather than check my email, I read your book.
I read your book while I walked to the café.
Once, I got romantic in a Shaws grocery store and bought a bottle of pamplemousse rose flavored perrier water and then climbed a mountain of snow until I found some craters on the top. I played in these snow holes until packets of taco bell hot sauce fell out of my pocket. Before the mountain of snow melted I drank the rest of the bottle of pamplemousse.
A week later, I tried to buy more pamplemousse. There was no pamplemousse. I went to whole foods. There was no pamplemousse. I drove to three other grocery stores. I could not find any pamplemousses. I looked online. I could only find some gland cream. Months passed. I forgot about everything I ever knew about my mouth enjoyment.
Last week, I went to Stop and Shop to buy eggs. I looked in the water aisle out of habit. I found twenty bottles of pamplemousse. I bought them all. I drove to another Stop and Shop. I found ten more bottles. I have over thirty bottles of pamplemousse. I’ve returned to the Stop and Shop since, but there has been no more pamplemousses.
It’s nice that I have all the pamplemousse left in the entire world. If you would like some pamplemousse I can send you an empty bottle and you can let it drip on you and then maybe you can suck on these last drips.
What’s wrong with liking what other people like?
Recently, I’ve been listening to the radio.
Pop music.
God, it is soooo good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaPW5le3cug&feature=player_embedded#!
I mean, Rihanna’s Only Girl has a beat you (read: I) can’t help bopping my head to. I’ll admit it: I love pop music. And not in an ironic-I-like-this-but-only-to-show-how-much-better-I-am-than-it (or, hipster) kind of way. No, I really like it. But I’m embarrassed that I like it. As in: when I’m walking down the street listening to Lady Gaga on my iPod and I pass a cool looking person, I have this intense urge to turn it down so he/she doesn’t hear it (and thereby judge me), or, I want to take out my earbuds and convince them how I mostly listen to indie music and this is just my running mix or some stupid excuse like that. But why? Why should anyone be embarrassed about liking what other people (read: a lot of Americans) like?
For the shit genre!
Opening my notebook the morning after a night of woozy ambien scribbling is like opening a present: you never know what’s inside. Today there was a note that said, “Beckett—101-2. Shit genre.”
Here is the passage I noted. It’s from Samuel Beckett’s first play Eleuthéria, which was disowned by the Beckett Estate.
Dr. Piouk: What does he do?
Mme. Meck: (With pride) He is a man of letters.
Dr. Piouk: You don’t say! (Enter M. Krap. He reaches his armchair and cautiously sits down)
M. Krap: You were saying nice things about me, I feel it.
Mme. Meck: There isn’t anything the matter with her?
M. Krap: She is unharmed.
Mme. Meck: She is coming?
M. Krap: She’s getting ready for that.
Mme. Piouk: There was a time when you were unaffected.
M. Krap: At the cost of what artifice!
Dr. Piouk: You are a writer, Monsieur?
M. Krap: What gives you leave to–
Dr. Piouk: It can be felt in the way you express yourself.
Mme. Piouk: Where has she been?
Mme. Meck: She is going to tell us.
M. Krap: I will be frank with you. I was a writer.
Mme. Meck: He is a member of the Institute!
M. Krap: What did I tell you.
Dr. Piouk: What genre?
M. Krap: I don’t follow you.
Dr. Piouk: I speak of your writings. Your preferences were for what genre?
M. Krap: For the shit genre.
Mme. Piouk: Really.
Dr. Piouk: Poetry or prose?
M. Krap: One day the former, another day the latter.
Dr. Piouk: And you now deem your body of work to be complete?
M. Krap: The lord has flushed me out.
Dr. Piouk: A small book of memoirs does not tempt you?
M. Krap: That would spoil the death throes.
Mme. Meck: Admit that this is a bizarre way to treat guests.
Mlle. Skunk: Extremely odd.
The shit genre. I love that. I’m stealing that. Whenever someone asks me what genre I prefer I will tell them, “The shit genre, of course.” You’ve never heard of it? You must not know much about literature. (Like Beckett’s characters, I sometimes fantasize about getting sassy with “legitimate” types….)
Behind the Scenes & Craft Notes & I Like __ A Lot & Massive People & Random / 8 Comments
March 31st, 2011 / 3:02 pm
March 31st, 2011 / 3:02 pm
Hey Small Press!
I’m excited about Hey Small Press! an organization focused on getting small press books into libraries. They are the next thing in the new literary movement, which is focused not on publishing a journal or a book, but on providing a useful and specific service to the literature that is already being produced.
Hey Small Press! was founded by Don Antenen, a library employee in Kentucky, and Kate Hensley, a literature student at Harvard (and, er, editor of her own beautiful-looking Monolith Magazine). Together, they will select ten new books every month and send their curated list to libraries across the country, with info and ordering instructions. Here’s some copy from their press release:
Year after year, independent presses publish the most exciting books but lack the marketing budgets to get noticed by public libraries. The lack of marketing leads to under-representation on library shelves and lack of access for readers. HSP! exists to pick up the publicity slack and push hard to get these books noticed. Every month. Free of charge. Because amazing books should be available to everyone.
Giorgio Morandi & Daren Wilson
If you google image search “morandi” you’ll be searching for Giorgio Morandi, a relatively unsung Italian painter who spent his adult unmarried life living with his sisters in Bologna painting the same twenty or so objects for decades upon decades, obsessively rearranging them, emptying himself of bias towards the “subject” until the objects held no more importance than the unattributed space they resided in. When, it is said, they asked him why he never dusted the objects, he said that such furriness was visual time. I’m paraphrasing of course. Morandi is my favorite artist because of his faithful reticence, his solemn humor and patience. Daren Wilson is an artist who copies Morandi with an earnestness that seems to precede any postmodern tendency, hanging his paintings “salon” style in what seems to be his studio. I like Daren Wilson a lot. And so, it is both auspicious and odd how I, we, are here — looking at things that are real and not real. The representation of objects in oil; the representation of oil in pixel; the representation of space as contour; the representation of physical objects which we’ve accepted we’ll never touch. Touch your screen, I dare you.
Al Burian US reading tour
I recently caught up with Al Burian in Berlin to record a podcast and I realized that I should let all of you know that you should not pass up the chance to see Al Burian read if he is rolling through your city on his upcoming reading tour. Seriously. I’ve seen him read several times and he’s always delivered. Tell him Jackie sent you.
NEW PUBLICATIONS BY AL BURIAN
BURN COLLECTOR #15 will be out in March, published by Microcosm.
http://microcosmpublishing.com
March will also see the release of OK, OK, You Smote Me, a short story in zine format, available exclusively from Quimby’s bookstore of Chicago.
READINGS
March 12 Bookthugnation, Brooklyn NY
March 13 Molly’s Book Store, Philadelphia PA
March 15 Towson University, (near Baltimore) MD
March 17 Sugar City, Buffalo NY
March 22 Quimbys, Chicago IL
March 25 Chicago Zine Fest
Beefin’
I wrote an article about editing and some of my past favorite submissions (favorite as in “was this handwritten paper submission composed with human blood? ha ha. wait…no seriously look…this submission REALLY IS written in dried human blood, wash your hands!” or “poem about a snowflake written in the shape of a snowflake just in time for Christmas,” or “story from guy in prison who in his cover letter asks us to mail the money he’ll get if his story is published to the address of a given drug dealer below, explaining that the funds will be an installment payment towards the crack cocaine tab he’d accrued at the time of his incarceration” or even “travel back in time to kill Hitler only to end up falling in love/sexing him, so much sex that he becomes docile and happy, except you then get pregnant with his hitlerspawn who grows up to do exactly what his father would’ve done even though his name is Wilhelm, sometimes the best intentions don’t get the best results” favorite). But also about the pure, kitsch-less favorites as in “this story makes me see Pushcarts rain from the sky.”
Also, I will be reading this Saturday at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle at 7pm
Also, I keep trying to quit Taco Bell beef but it’s like that Taylor Dane song “Love Will Lead You Back.” Ain’t that the meximelt truth.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6A0xivfIMo
Geography Thursday: A Place of Dreams
A non-magic magic story: In April 1879, a French postman tripped on a stone while he was delivering mail. Inspired by its shape, form, texture, whatever, he picked it up. From that day forward, this postman, named Ferdinand Cheval, collected rocks in a wheel barrel after work, and from these rocks he built a palace. I wanted to use the word “castle” to emphasize the magic component, but “palace” is just as sufficient. He called it Palais Ideal, his Ideal Palace. It took him thirty-six years. Below, you’ll find images, lots of them. They are glorious.
2010: the books I didn’t read
Yeah, I read some books in 2010. I wish I had read more. These are my favorite 2010 releases I didn’t read.
EXPLOSIVE FUCKT EXTREME BEST-OF
I read a lot of books in 2010 and here I am briefly going to say things about my favorites. I don’t think any of these came out in 2010, sorry? I will include the titles, my notes upon initially reading the book, and some brief notes made fresh.
SpoilAr alert: I say things are “fucking amazing” a lot. There are a lot of books briefly mentioned in here. It is overwhelming. It is also Christmas today.
I like the WNBA a lot because it is a place I go when I want to be alone
I woke up today and looked at my boyfriend. He looked at me. People make a big deal out of today. My boyfriend and I didn’t do anything except look at each other. Then he made an omelet and I drank a glass of water. Today was not a big deal in the chronology of my life. After I drank some water I went on my computer.
I got an email from the illegitimate-seventeen-year-old child of someone famous. She sometimes emails me when she is upset. She is upset almost every day.
3 OOP BOOKS I READ RECENTLY AND LOVED
[Another not-mean post for mean-week. Sorry. I had part of this done before I realized it was mean week (duh) & wanna write about these books while they're fresh in my head. Also, I might do this regularly because I am a major proponent of out of print books, who knows.]
I end up reading a lot of books that are out of print. Part of me feels like I do this to compensate for the fact that I no longer dedicate an excessive amount of energy to digging up & talking about lost films. Another part of me just always insists that the best shit is found by digging as deep as possible. I like looking for things, reading about lost things, and finding things that there’s not an abundance of discussion about. It makes me feel like I’m solving a mystery, and I get a major rush out of it.
I spend a lot of time combing through World Cat listings & requesting books & articles from inter-library loan networks. I also obsess over used-book meta-search engines. I also feel like, perhaps, that a lot of marginalized Other’s books end up out of print, so I sometimes tell myself that I can feel slightly empowered. This may or may not be ridiculous. Regardless, I’d like to talk about three out of print books that I recently read and enjoyed.
3 things I like a lot
I.
"Echo #6," 8.5"×11", oil & dirt on paper, by JK Keller
Artist JK Keller does a “chronic drawing” of sorts, by replacing a mouse pad with a standard piece of office paper, the result of which is an apparition of presence and self. The dirty ghost of grime is our one untrained vocation, hands down.
Writing: the balancing act between self and other, solitude and engagement, me and world
Hello my little Giants.
I fell out of blog world for a second. A combination of personal turmoil, relocating to Pittsburgh for a month, and buckling down on my novel has left less room for reaching out to my fellow writers via the internet.
In Pittsburgh, I am doing a writer residency at a punk house. Isn’t that interesting? I think more people that own houses and have a little extra space should do DIY writer residencies. Here, they give you a room to live in for free for a month, and you produce something by the end of your stay. The room has a bed, a desk, clean sheets/blanket, and there is a grocery store just a few steps away. They also have a letterpress studio and the equipment to do perfect binding at the house, so they are always making beautiful DIY books and zines. I’ve only been here for a few days, but already I’ve been immensely productive, averaging about 3,000-3,500 words a day on my novel alone. My head feels clear. And one of my best friends from college lives here, which means I have enough socializing opportunities to feel engaged, satisfied and happy, but not enough to be terribly distracted. Virginia Woolf’s thing about having a room of one’s own is starting to seem true. But I still wonder, are such conditions ideal on a more permanent basis?
Here in Pittsburgh, I am thinking about the conditions under which people are able to write. When are you most productive? I am considering the following factors: free time, personal space, emotional stability, routine, environmental, etc. In Baltimore and Florida, I shared a room with my partner. Right now we are both dedicated artists that don’t have “real” jobs and just work on our projects all day. This is completely different from my life several months ago, when I worked 2 jobs while I was going to school full-time and working on my thesis. While my partner and I are living together, every day we continually have to negotiate how to spend our time, where to work, when and what to eat (who should cook), space (she works best listening to loud music, I can’t focus when loud music is playing), our emotional needs (I feel upset right now, will you put aside your work to talk to me?), sleeping schedules (I will often sneakily get up in the middle of the night to pound out several pages [if I have already taken my ambien, you get this]), etc etc. Rather than seeing this as “bad” for my work because I am quantitatively less productive, I see it as something that indirectly enriches my work because it forces me outside myself, makes me more expansive, forces me to learn how to balance self and other. Plus, we always have the opportunity to bounce ideas off of each other, and since we are hyper-engaged and thoughtful about things, we challenge and move each other in unforeseeable directions.
This balancing act brings me to the next issue I am trying to sort out in my mind. The question of living vs. writing.
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A BOOK I LOVED: THE DEVILS OF LOUDUN
a cardinal's instruments
One thing I’ve meant to do more frequently as an HTMLGIANT contributor is simply to post about books I love, especially ones that didn’t just come out, especially ones that don’t get flogged constantly here already. I’ve got a mental list, but when there’s no publication date to which a post is tied… well, shit gets away.
But I read something in the past two weeks that absolutely got me by the throat, and I want to write about it: The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley. It came out in 1953 and I’d never heard of it until a few weeks ago. I’ve rarely read a book that gnaws so thoroughly — and simultaneously — at the intellect and the viscera.
Dolor
I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.
I Like J. Bradley A Lot
J. Bradley is a poet and fiction writer who wears many different hats. He is the author of two excellent books—Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books 2009) and The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot (Safety Third Enterprises 2010), a slam master for the Orlando Poetry Slam, and the Interviews Editor for PANK. If I were to use one word to describe J. Bradley’s writing, it would be sharp, like a knife. The word “edgy” is often overused when discussing writing but that term is appropriate when talking about J. Bradley’s work. He is often profane and downright inappropriate and yet, his stories and poems are compelling, sometimes funny, and sometimes they’ll tear your heart out of your chest. He’s not writings thing like, “”I’m gonna fuck you so hard, you’re gonna have Down’s Syndrome,” just to be outrageous. There’s always a purpose to the profanity, a method to the madness. When I read Bradley’s writing, I cannot help but think, “Who is this man who dares to go there?”
The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot is a curious little collection of words. Each story is unique but possessing Bradley’s distinct voice. He makes frequent use of analogy, forever comparing one thing to another in ways that are surprising or shocking or charming but always engaging. Whether writing about a boy with chainsaws for arms or a man’s wife’s girlfriend or a wedding ring forged into a bullet, each of the very small stories in this chapbook are strange but controlled and cool breaths of fresh air. Bradley’s wonderful stories offer the reader vivid snapshots you would not be able to see from the mind of any writer but J. Bradley. I loved his chapbook so much I thought I’d ask him a few questions about his writing, warped mind, and other literary endeavors.
2 Podcasts I like a lot did episodes I liked a lot.
A couple of my favorite podcasts have had some pretty amazing episodes lately. Go download them if you are so inclined.
So, I loved William Burroughs in high school and the first couple of years of college. I tired of him in my later college years and after for quite a while. And now, I find myself turning back to him again, rediscovering an appreciation for his work. Does Burroughs come in and go out like a tide for the rest of you as well?
(I had a friend who bartended at a place in Lawrence that was, people said, owned by Burroughs’s lawyer, and he used to give me free drinks all the time. This, in some sideways way also makes me think of Burroughs fondly, though he was in no way responsible for me getting free drinks.)
2. Marc Maron—who I, and other people named Matt(y), like quite a bit and have written about in the past—had a really fascinating discussion with a comedian named Moshe Kasher on a recent episode.
The whole question of subculture and identity became the core of the discussion. Kasher is the son of Hasidic Jews who were also both deaf. Both he and Marc are sober, as well. Jewish culture, and a Jewish kid who idolizes Oakland’s gangsta rap (Spice One, Too Short) culture. Deaf culture. The culture of sobriety and therapy. Stand up culture. Really interesting stuff.
Moshe talking about people who use the phrase “there’s really no translation for it in English,” an absurd claim that was always been a pet peeve of mine, as well:
Thank you, Moshe. Thank you, Marc. Thank you, Don.
