Psychic Master Style Manual
1. I am appalled by this A&E show called Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal. The show’s shtick is that the grown ups–a psychic and a therapist it looks like–help psychic children “use their powers for good,” i.e. shoving scared little girls into dark rooms and expecting them to keep their wits about them. God, scary kids make for good tv. You know that’s what the show’s creators said sitting around that well-lit Hollywood brainstorming table.
2. I’m interested in this book: The Master Switch by Tim Wu. Here’s what Very Short List has to say about it:
In his new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu argues that our increasing dependence on a single network (the internet) makes us more and more vulnerable to private interests bent on controlling the flow of information.
Much of the book is taken up with deep-focus histories of radio, telephone, film and television: Wu coins a Gladwellian phrase—”the Cycle”—to describe the trend toward media consolidation in each industry, and wonders how far away we really are from an internet that’s totally under corporate control. “Every other invention of its kind has had its period of openness, only to become the basis of yet another information empire,” he writes. “Is the internet really different?”
Random Live Reading of Recent Books I Liked #4 (take 2)
You missed the live random reading, but you can still check out the books I read from (the recorder malfunctioned so there is no video archive):
The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse by Lonely Christopher [Little House on the Bowery]
Nick Demske by Nick Demske [Fence]
Orange Juice by Timothy Willis Sanders [Awesome Machine]
Asunder by Robert Lopez [Dzanc]
Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey [UDP]
The Size of the Universe by Joseph Cardinale [FC2]
Glass is Really a Liquid by Bruce Covey [No Tell]
7 Controlled Vocabularies by Tan Lin [Wesleyan]
Avatar by Evan Lavender-Smith [Six Gallery]
Faulkner on Christmas
“Nobody knows how I dread Christmas. Nobody knows. I am not one of those women who can stand things.”
– The Sound and the Fury
They’ve put up all kinds of lights and wreathes in my neighborhood and the girl who made me a coffee this morning sulked under a Santa hat. ‘They made me wear it,’ she said. She is not one of those women who can stand things either.
It is Friday: Go dye a sled
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Try a smirk that is not a smirk.
Nothing shall turn me.
What will happen to our odd photos now? We delete them. We delete them. We delete ourselves.
Drunk like house keys handed over to a youngest son.
Of word-play it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.
The nose of a mob is its imagination.
Golden bells! Brass rings!
There is an eloquence in true enthusiasm.
Sleep is a slice of death. I hate it.
Drunk as a famous photo.
Look. Convince yourself not to convince.
Very Little Holds This List Together
Thanksgiving is fast upon us. At Dish Online, Robb Todd runs down a list of crazy Thanksgiving movies which is fitting given that this right here is a list too.
At the Chronicle of Higher Education, a paid for hire essay writer reveals the work he does to help students cheat. It’s a pretty interesting read.
Speaking of cheating, this guy is pretty angry about catching some cheaters.
Jason Sanford has written a writer’s guide to social media.
Oh Sugar, Sugar, Sugar, Sugar.
I love The Awl and they have a great feature where five writers discuss how they got their agents.
In today’s celebrity publishing news, Chelsea Handler will now have her own imprint at Grand Central (a division of Hachette).
Emily Gould writes an open letter to Tavi Gevenson and Jane Pratt. Tavi, you see, will be helping to relaunch Sassy Magazine. She’s like 13.
On the Dark Sky Magazine blog, Kevin Murphy asks if e-books serve the interests of independent literature.
Are you following the blog Hyperbole and a Half? You should be.
Nathan Ihara has some interesting thoughts on literary theft.
Stories I have read and enjoyed this week even if you’ve already seen one of them mentioned here this week: Exhibit A; Exhibit B; Exhibit C; Exhibit D; Exhibit E
Johannes Göransson Does A Lot of Interesting Things, And Here Are Three Recent and Interesting Things from Johannes Göransson
1. Johannes Göransson interviews Robert Archambeau about the Cambridge School, among other things, at the UK’s Argotist Online:
JG: But what about Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of Kafka as “minor literature.” His very deformation of the German language becomes a profound type of political activity. Could there be a minor politics involved in the Cambridge School?
RA: This, I think, is an interesting path to pursue, and one that leads in a similar direction to the observations of Sadri and Kiberd. For Deleuze and Guattari, major literature is the literature that articulates the values of a dominant population. I think Goethe’s Faust was the example they used in the book on Kafka: Faust became a kind of model for the bourgeois subject of the nineteenth century, trying to police his own desires in a world of new powers and possibilities, and in the absence of the old hierarchical constraints on actions. But minor literature, in this scheme, is the really interesting thing: it’s the means by which dominant values, and even the language through which they are articulated, and inverted, parodied, questioned, and mocked. Deleuze and Guattari didn’t see this as necessarily the literature of a marginal or oppressed population, but to write in this mode was to position oneself outside the dominant values of one’s place and time. Is this political? It depends on the definition of the term. If we take politics in a very strict sense—as a change in the polity—it’s probably fair to say that such a literature is political, but weakly so. If we think of long-term shifts in consciousness, its role could be taken to be larger, perhaps considerably so, but of course it is easy to exaggerate this, and hard to demonstrate it. I remember a conversation back in 1996 at the “Assembling Alternatives” conference in New Hampshire, a huge event that gathered experimental poets from all over the English-speaking world. A woman from the audience stood up, and declared that the funding for her experimental poetry magazine, and for all other magazines, was precarious, because “the power structure knows we’re the ones challenging their language.” This, I thought, was an understanding so crude as to be almost a parody. I’ve encountered that kind of thinking more than once, though. (http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Archambeau%20interview.htm)
7 bleed him poppers and coke and tell slim fey shouldn’t possibly lop at brother nervous vacation
- I didn’t even glow/know there was such a dang as “Geography Thursday.” WTS? (What the Suck?) OK, I’m game.
- Is it true you have to be removed from a location to write about it? Because that smells like dung beetle dung or someone reading A Moveable Feast while sitting in a coffee shop looking at eyes or maybe a conference answer to a hang-tongue/clam-eye question.
- Ever wrote in front of a mirror or a large window? Do tell.
- What is Southern lit? I don’t know. You get knocked down. Black holes burnt into a map. There is moss and gonorrhea. You scramble back up but don’t know your mind. What you were was it worth reaching fer? You can’t tell your Bad Faith actions from your authentic mind. It’s all a low fog, over soybean fields and the jawbone of a deer. You get knocked down. Why scramble up for something you might hate? Why return to your own spent virus/kudzu vine? Oak limbs. Several doors, later plated in gold and writing. A speech. Your home is a hole. There are other definitions aloose I spose. I couldn’t answer. Add cathead biscuits.
- Do you like to read first at a group reading or last or not at all or more like: who cucking fares, dude?
- Ain’t many links in this post, but fuck it.
- A friend of mine in MFA/grad school said she enrolled for one reason: “To get laid.” (Her words) Is grad school a great location for getting laid? I mean more than working at Chili’s or enrolling yourself in law or culinary school? Why/why not?
- 7
What is Experimental Literature? {pt. 1}
I’d always intended to write this series of posts, but kept putting it off.
Until now.
First, let me begin by saying that this topic is the focus of my doctoral research work. I’ve been actively engaged in the historical and critical study of issues surrounding this topic for about seven years now. Therefore, I have a shit ton of stuff to say about it. That said, I don’t want any of these posts to be overwhelming. My goal will be to introduce a brief, digestible amount of information for your consideration. I like what Kyle and Lily have been doing with their Geography Thursdays series: brief but compelling punches of thought. Sadly, I can’t promise to maintain their consistent frequency of publication, but because I like their model I’ll try to emulate the brevity.
I want to be clear: what I have to say is meant to start conversation not conclude conversation. I hope y’all will see that my intention is to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. In other words, I will strive to identify tendencies, not truisms. I don’t believe in truth, I believe in interpretation. (God bless Nietzsche.) Thus, I do not pretend to be right; I only pretend to have ideas worth talking/thinking about.
Now then, the focus of my first post arises from a consideration of Lyn Hejinian’s concept of open and closed texts…
Geography Thursdays #13: ZIPScribble
What would happen if you were to connect all the ZIP codes in the US in ascending order? Is there a system behind the assignment of ZIP codes? Are they organized in a grid?
More here: http://eagereyes.org/Applications/ZIPScribbleMap.html