Back from AWP.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3zjG9xRg5E
die my pretty
The neighborhood is not glow. For some reason, dandelions have swarmed the lawns of our imaginations (and also our lawns). A vexation unseen. Everyone asks, “How do you kill the dandelions?”
Here’s one: What exactly is wrong with dandelions?
Someone relate this to writing.
Listening In
iphone Denver by poet Rick Bursky
-There’s a piece called “How to Unfeel the Dead” by Lance Olsen in Artifice that knocked my socks off.
-A review of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters, something I’ve been thinking a lot about. Richard Howard summarizes Grossman’s thesis:
In the end, Grossman warmly (after all) and gratefully rehearses the twofold answer to the question of her title: translation matters because it is an expression and an extension of our humanity, the secret metaphor of all literary communication; and because the creation of any literary translation is (or at least must be) an original writing, not a pathetic shadow or tracing of the inaccessible “original” but the creation, indeed, of a second — and as we have seen, a third and a ninth — but always a new work, in another language.
-I was tired this year at the AWP Conference. I couldn’t sleep past 5am, and my head swam in treacherous waters all day. New CollAge magazine had a table—we sold about 2.5 copies—at which I sat for 15-20 minute intervals before getting the jitters and flying the coop. Lots of wandering around the Denver Convention Center, admiring the big blue looming bear, sneaking peaks at the car show, listening in:
IN THE HALLS
I can’t just get drunk and flirt with all the students—
Jesus wouldn’t come down and have sex with me like that.
I feel like my arms look like big white baby harp seals.
I’m glad nobody got raped.
I got my MFA in deleting words. I don’t know anything
about throwing babies.
It is Friday (not–I was at awp, so flight-wobbly): Go Right Ahead.
Friendlier, prettier, smarter. This illusion.
My beard grew wild, as did my waistline.
The way I write these aren’t like the way I told you I write these…
Imagined dignities.
AWP with 6$ plastic bottles of gnu pee.
Pour down a tall wine or two for ballast.
Drink. Love you, don’t like you.
Frogs. I like the attitude of frogs.
It was a night jump and I was drunk.
Prick-points of sensation. Get it?
Clinically, you know…
I will fucking stop for cornbread!
Like those balloons.
Noah Cicero on Why Writers Write
[Noah Cicero sent this to me last week. And yes, it is another (slight) commentary on a review of Shoplifting from American Apparel. It’s more than that, too. If you’re unfamiliar with Noah Cicero’s writing, you can visit his blog, or check out his latest book The Insurgent. -Gene]
In one of the reviews of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel Huw Nesbitt makes the statement, “Real art seeks to examine the truth as it is; not through relativism, atomism, or universalism, but by seeking that which once was or irrevocably, true.” If you have read analytic philosophy your first thought after reading those lines will probably be, “Those sentences don’t make any sense.” The proposition, “the truth as it is,” is actually relativism and universal in its meaning. How can something be true but not universal is a contradiction. READ MORE >
March was small press month. Here’s my haul.
How was your Small Press Month? I got a bunch of books:
Adam Robison and Other Poems by Adam Robinson
In This Alone Impulse by Shya Scanlon
The Failure by James Greer
Iowa by Travis Nichols
Stories II by Scott McClanahan
The Awful Possibilities by Christian TeBordo
Imago Bird by Nicholas Mosley
The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney, a novel by Christopher Higgs
The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis by Mark Gluth
Misadventure by Millard Kaufman (galley)
Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder by Travis Nichols (galley)
Hiding Out by Jonathan Messinger
Sons of the Rapture by Todd Dills
Boring boring boring etc, by Zach Plague
OK, Goodnight by Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg
How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew by Aaron Burch
What I Want and What I Want by Chelsea Martin
How about you?
fuck
1. Fuck that story by that guy. Read something else. I wanted to introduce you to this new writer anyway and this story will make you pant-pee and laugh like a photogenic butcher.
2. Has anyone seen the fucking new Hayden’s Ferry? Number 46 is re-donk. I can’t link it’s so new. What’s up with these people? In a short time, they have made their magazine crisp, beautiful, full of bad-ass writing, crazy. I mean they stepped up their Slay and are not looking back. My mind on their magazine has gone from throw-me-a-bone to ranch-style nacho pie. Fuck yes. Get it.
3. fuck you. punk.
4. Yesterday walking the hallway and I see a lady at a table and advertising a free raffle. A FREE RAFFLE. What the fuck?
5. Heroin. Sex. Scientology. What do you want? NSFW pics, so sorry if you work on Saturday. I include this because I think the guy’s write-up was CW techniques all glow (He uses Tao Lin quotes and all types of solid pacing, transitions–“This is where things get weird.”) Also I’ve been drinking fake absinthe and it fit well in my “fuck” theme I have going here.
Last Thanksgiving I was staying at a friends house for a few days before a trip to South America.
Stories that begin this way always end up with heroin and Scientology, this we know. A lot could be learned from that opening sentence. If you say friends should be friend’s I’ll punch you in the spleen. It is Saturday. relax.
6. Kristen Shaw with a great fucking flash at decomP. It includes the term fuck.
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect.
Stupidity is a talent for…
Drunk after one glass. They say I am susceptible.
State everything twice: once when sober, once when drunk.
I was drunk so was carried ashore. So what?
The fellow with the plum-pudding face. He sold me a cask of gin!!
(Written to Poe.): Sir. If you should come to Richmond again, and again should be an assistant in my office, it must be especially understood by us that all engagements on my part would be dissolved, the moment you get drunk.
Words are like carriage wheels. They move.
I am upset by little things.
Folks. Folks. I feel. I feel I have drunk something. This lecture cannot be given.
Houston Indie Book Festival
For the good folks of Texas and Louisiana, if you’re looking for a good time that involves books, the Houston Indie Book Festival this weekend is very much that good time. Readings, books, writers walking around in hip clothes with sunglasses on.
It’s at the Menil Park, which means you’ll also be just steps away from the Maurizio Cattelan exhibition, which is just as free and awesome.
From 10am-5pm Blake and I will be near a table with the HTMLGIANT name all over it. We have copies of some small press books to sell (credit cards accepted, even Discover!), and I’ll likely have my son with me, who will sign all of your chests with cookies and boogers.
Stop by and hang out. I’d like to shake your hand.
UPDATE: Ryan Call is going to be there!
Second Mess Section
1. After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. –Marwencol, a photoblog
2. ‘And I personally only like high-class escorts. I don’t like sleeping with people I really love. I don’t want to sleep with them because sex cannot last, but affection can last forever. I think this is healthy. And for the way the rich live, this is possible. But the other world, I think they need porn. I also think it’s much more difficult to perform in porn than to fake some emotion on the face as an actor.’ –an interview with Karl Lagerfeld
3. Kubrick triple shot: Johannes Goransson & Joyelle McSweeney on The Shining, NotComing.com on The Shining (Kubrick: Freud in his essay on the uncanny wrote that the sense of the uncanny is the only emotion which is more powerfully expressed in art than in life, which I found very illuminating; it didn’t help writing the screenplay, but I think it’s an interesting insight into the genre.), and NotComing.com on my favorite enigma: Eyes Wide Shut.
4. ‘It turns out the doppleganger is Anya Liftig, a Brooklyn-based performance artist, and her intervention on Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” was a performance of her own, which she has titled “The Anxiety of Influence” after the Harold Bloom book of the same title.’ –an interview with said interloper