Antichrist Superstar: Rule of Threes Resurrected
1. Holy hell. Antichrist, the film, might have ruined my life. And on top of that, it was one of the most beautifully shot films I’ve ever seen. Talk about content versus craft. Fuck.
2. I dreamed last night that I had a reading in front of 1,000 or so people, and I hadn’t prepared. Got up on stage and couldn’t decide which poems to read. Blake Butler offered to read one of my poems for me, but I wouldn’t let him and proceeded to babble and choke my way through something until some audience member began playing the piano…
3. A girl I like:
Artist Kendra Binney
source
Matthew Simmons—
Inquiry: besides Sigur Ros and Magma, can you name a band whose lyrics are in a language made up by a member of the band? (Did a little edit on the sentence. Sounded made-up.)
103
THIS HEALTH INSURANCE SHIT
can't go to emergency room, too expensive
After I lost/left my old job last summer, I went on COBRA for health insurance, which costs me a burdensome $200 a month. When my COBRA stuff expires later this year, it’ll go to a blistering $600 a month, at which point I’ll have to drop it and get something else. Or maybe circumstances have changed now that THIS HAPPENED. (Did you think it would? I didn’t.) Here’s a rundown of changes that go into effect immediately.
As a writer who had a day job for a long time and will have one again and hates the idea of it, I’ve been waiting for “universal health care” for a long time, and fervently, and I fucking hate insurance companies. This is how I would like to see the folks who run insurance companies end up:
5 swank stalls of roaring!
1.This dork will grant you a Lorrie Moore book.
2. We don’t want your damn glowing buoy things in our river, arty-farty.
3. Oh no we copy edited The Broken Plate 7 full times and should have done 8. Sweet mag but we konked up some of the table of contents. Like the page #s might not match the author’s work. Uh, sorry.
4. Publisher Or Books has had enough of Amazon’s bullshit.
5. I almost forgot to mention Tao Lin. Whew. Hold up. Here’s a classical album on Ebay. Art work, something.
Pimpin’
I stumbled upon the St. John’s College Reading List and I find it fascinating. Readings cover the Greeks, the Bible, and much much more. A few universities do this sort of thing–a comprehensive reading program to serve as the foundation of a student’s education. I think it’s a wonderful approach but I agonize over how you decide which books to include. What would be on your reading list?
Mud Luscious Press is having a bookmark contest. Details here.
Another year, another Orange Prize fracas.
Frequent, lively commenter Amber Sparks has assumed the position of Fiction Editor for Emprise Review. Send her some great writing, won’t you?
Come April, Letter Machine Editions is reading manuscripts.
Offered without commentary: Robert Swartwood vs. Narrative, Part II.
I read a couple of great books this weekend and you may want to check them out—Congratulations! There’s No Last Place If Everyone is Dead by Matthew DeBenedictis (sold out, sadly) and Non/Fiction by Dan Gutstein. The former came with an odd packet of instant coffee and Yo! MTV Raps trading cards. I now know that there are trading cards for everything.
Submishmash is a great alternative to the CLMP submission manager (which is a fine product albeit a bit pricey) and its run by fine people who are very responsive to their customers. If you’re looking for a submission management option, you should check them out.
Sean Lovelace—
Anyone with HTML G sensibilities (have no idea what that means, so or not) has a reading during AWP please comment here with time, place/sarcophagus of shouts. This is a selfish post (but not, people wanna know). My emails bury me, like all. I am at AWP Denver interviewing professors for a job (at BSU/work), but would love to strike (hunger, bass lure, match box, beauty, etc.) mad readings every single night, 7pm to oblivion. List them here. For those in town Tuesday to Sunday of AWP, where should we go, when? And how exactly are the nachos?
Start Saturday Right (ie at around 1 in the afternoon)
Josh Cohen double shot! If this doesn’t get you out of bed, it’ll put you back in. JC considers The Sabbath, among other Jewish contributions to the science of keeping Time.
Shmita
The Torah ordains every seventh year a Sabbatical Year, as it says in Leviticus 25: “Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.” This septennial respite is known as shmita, Hebrew for “release” or “freeing.” After seven of these seven-year cycles, Leviticus declares a Jubilee, a special fallowing during which all debts are forgiven and all slaves must be manumitted—two tenets not currently observed in the State of Israel, though the agricultural component of the shmita year still is.
And “Thirty Six Shades of Prussian Blue,” which I think was previously mentioned in the Triple Canopy post the other day.
At the Bombsite, Susie DeFord interviews (new to me) poet Damian Rogers.
At Moistworks, noted fictionist and writer-on-music Ben Greenman remembers Alex Chilton of Big Star. This is a short, affecting piece that is worth reading. Also, there are some mp3s to download there.
I remembered beginning to date the woman I’d later marry, playing lots of Chilton’s music for her, and trying to figure out his secret: the way his try-anything-once aesthetic was both forthright and evasive, how he could combine an anarchic sense of humor and an unironic ability to convey pain, his addiction to the brilliant throwaway, his graceless grace. He drew lines back to Slim Harpo and Ronny and the Daytonas and Danny Pearson, so many it seemed he’d get trapped in the tangle. He escaped, again and again–but escaped to what?
And finally, I had always heard that SxSW was some sort of music festival, but apparently it is some sort of international conference for the dork industry. perennial home-girl Rachel Fershleiser and her partner-in-brevity Larry Smith present a flickr album of the nerdiest tee shirts at SxSW, which for some reason is also being referred to in some place as SxSWi. No idea what that’s about but please, don’t anyone tell me, as I’m finding the ignorance very soothing. The picture up top is drawn from their album, as is this one here, which happens to be my favorite of the lot, and on which note I leave you.
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
I am paranoid and belligerent. You?
How I stumbled once drunk into Mary.
A writer’s life is a sentence.
After the picnic, more beer.
Clocks. They annoy.
When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Ireland.
Is it OK to pray for an orgasm?
I like to waltz in.
Take it for Christ’s sake and get drunk!
Large beer. Please. Shut up, Mom.
Ha, ha, drink up, death deliverers.
A milky, cold smell…
A. Pope, Tao Lin, and HTML Giant walk into a bar…
This past week, there have been several blogs (plus the mention in the New Yorker) about Tao Lin and the reviews lodged for and against him. To be fair, I haven’t read much of Tao’s work, but I am entrenched in the pure spectacle of “Tao Lin.” Mostly out of boredom but partly because I can’t get away from it, even if I wanted to.
But consider this, in his Author’s Preface, Alexander Pope argues, “Poetry and criticism [are] by no means the universal concern of the world, but only the affair of idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there.” So I’m back to the question of boredom. Why do we care who says what about Tao? And here, just look back at the comment streams about Tao. People seem to do more than simply “care.” They’re invested! I barely have time to care about the reviews written about my friends, much less any other contemporary. I have no desire to be an idle man writing in my closet, nor an idle man reading there.
It doesn’t matter much to me whether or not Tao (or any other writer, for that matter) cultivates this particular brand of hype. My concern has to do with the unabashed responses that indicate how very right Pope is. Even this post reinforces Pope’s argument that I’m simply an idle man—or woman in this case—reading in a closet.
Massive Hangover, Massive Roundup
Okay, I’m being a little dramatic, but seriously, Michael–a Long Island iced tea to end the night with? You’re an animal. My kind of animal. ANYway.
The Rumpus has an interview with the artist Jake Gillespie (worksample above), whom we in Poetryland know as “the guy who did that cool cover (and interior) art for Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth.”
The Second Pass celebrated their 1-year anniversary recently (hey, cheers!) and they mark the occasion by taking a break from the newer-newer-now pace of publishing/culture to take a look at some very untimely (and in some cases, unavailable) books. “Tales of the Unread.” I was especially intrigued by Jacob Silverman’s discussion of Past Continuous, a 1977 novel by the Israeli author Yaakov Shabtai, and Matt Weiland’s discussion of Killings by Calvin Trillin, a 1984 true-crime book from more or less the last person on earth you’d ever expect to produce a true-crime book.
Speaking of things you’ve never heard of. Over at The Daily Beast, Elif Batuman introduces the Tolstoy-weary Russo-phile to four “alternative Russian classics” by Shklovsky, Platanov, Mandelstam, and Kharms.