Testify.
Let me take a MEAN WEEK—and HTML Giant’s usual apolitical bent—timeout to say how much I love Bishop John Shelby Spong:
I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.” Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy.
Much more here. Seriously, spread this link far and wide.
Drew Kalbach Power Mean Quote
"htmlgiant is the walmart of litblogs" -- Drew Kalbach, Oct. 25, 1:50 EST
Drew Kalbach
Poet Drew Kalbach is the Richard Simmons of creepy ebuillience, per his goodreads slash twitter pic. Two profiles and one pic; dos cojones y uno prick, hope you’re bilingual Drew. One figures what’s behind his profile pic’s ambiguous backdrop: a broken real doll, eight empty venti mochas, and an extra toupee. With Donald Trumpian hair like that Drew, you might have a future in real estate — not your literary estate, but the soft patch of grass under which we will all be buried. Start counting away them years, and for fuck sake, blink.
To me fiction is not about ideas. It is above ideas. I make a divide between the holy, the sacred, the mysterious, the unexplainable, the implicit, the aesthetic, the moral, and the ethical on one hand, and the empirical, the functional, the explainable, the logical, the true, and the proven on the other. In short, the Holy and the Empirical. Literature belongs to the holy. You can do fiction, nonfiction, a mixture, who cares. Literature is above the distinction. It is sacred.
This is either “Power Quote: Louis CK,” or “Louis CK on Writing”
“I just wanted to buy a trumpet to learn how to play trumpet. I went in to Sam Ash, or one of those places, and there were all these student trumpets for, like $100. The guy started showing me, you know, here’s like a nickel-plated, beautiful trumpet and it’s got a flawed bell because it was hurt, but they had repaired it. And it was $1400. I didn’t have any of that kind of money. But I went to an ATM and I took out everything I had in the bank, and I bought this fucking $1400 trumpet without having any ability. I’d never even blown into a trumpet before. And then I was walking through Times Square with this fucking thing in my hand, and just freaking out and feeling bad. And I went and ducked into one of those peep shows. Next thing I know I’m in a peep show booth, one of those upright coffins, looking at a chick—a tired Latvian girl, probably—through the window of this peep show and jacking off. And it’s a two-foot by two-foot room. So I jerk off and I came on the trumpet case, which was standing between my legs. And once I came, and I looked at the come on this beautiful, brass-buckled trumpet case, I realized that if I had come to this peep show first, I could’ve saved $1400.”
The very, very funny Louis CK explains the boundaries of ambition. From the October 4, 2010 episode of WTF with Marc Maron.
Begs the questionRaises the question: better that he bought it or better to have headed to the peep show first?
Me? Gotta go trumpet.
UPDATE: Schooled. Thanks for the links.
Power Quote: Luna Miguel
It’s impossible to support today the idea of the author as a divine entity… If we want people to approach poetry, it would be better to delete the myths.
I’m Scared; Happy Birthday to Google
And the fact that I’m wishing Google a happy birthday only frightens me more.
I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites. — Google CEO or whatever
The Sisterhood of Travel Books
I’m in the midst of writing research proposals for grants in a discipline I know next to nothing about, and so, naturally, I’m reading a lot. Naturally, I’m also procrastinating by writing this blog. (Brief back story: I’ve just started working on my PhD in Geography, which is only funny if you know me, because if you know me, you know I have no sense of direction. Up until five months ago, I thought Lake Champlain was a great lake. But of course, this has no real bearing on my Geography degree. I’m studying human geography. But either way, my training as a fiction writer has given me little insight, little preparation for grant writing.) The basic premise to my project is “imagined” geographies, that is, how second generation immigrants imagine a homeland they’ve never been to and how this imagining impacts development.
Naturally, considering the premise of my project, I’m reading folks like Benedict Anderson, Edward Said, Foucault (Jesus, people love Foucault), and Agamben.
I’m reading Said for probably the third or fourth time (each reading offers something new, of course), and this time, I found this gem:
Many travelers find themselves saying of an experience in a new country that it wasn’t what they expected, meaning that it wasn’t what a book said it would be. And of course many writers of travel books or guidebooks compose them in order to say that a country is like this, or better, that it is colorful, expensive, interesting, and so forth. The idea in either case is that people, places, and experiences can always be described by a book, so much so that the book (or text) acquires a greater authority, and use, even than the actuality it describes. (93)
avant-gagarde
Camille Paglia says:
If avant-garde is advanced guard, or vanguard, is Lady Gaga indeed avant-garde?
Andre Agassi on Writing
“In tennis you’re on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement, which inevitably leads to self-talk, and for me the self-talk starts here in the afternoon shower. This is when I begin to say things to myself, crazy things, over and over, until I believe them.”