Excel at art
"Vimeo Waiting," Microsoft Excel, 2010
In 1963 Josef Albers published a book on color theory, and since then color — “pure” color, the mathematical hue — has been the rage in abstract painting and design. In the old (c. ’70 – ’80s) days, painters spent months covering a canvas monochrome, blending, blending away the brush marks. The human hand was a horrible thing, corrupted with subjectively. An MFA in Painting student today is still prone to sit hours in front of their canvas, lamenting over which color to juxtapose another color with, and while I respect that solemn responsibility, I prefer the quick MS excel fix, take Vimeo’s default ‘no signal’ screen.
Go Right Ahead: It is Friday
I drink because it’s the only time I can stand it.
I am as tall as a shotgun and just as nosy.
[JW: Can we have a drink?
TC: Oh, we will!]
I can walk soberly while drunk.
The way a cottonmouth rears up…
This huge female bouncer threw me into the street!
Why not remove restrictions and let the people drink good whiskey?
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We want two more double margaritas, and I want some ice in my drink, and I want a straight jigger of just pure tequila.
Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.
But I seem to be off the track again.
another day another roundup (also, BANJO FEEVER continues)
Strandbeest by Theo Jansen, courtesy of Gallerie Dennis Cooper
The Rumpus has a conversation with Banksy.
Here’s a Times article on testing Google’s new translation software (via Sara Faye Lieber’s facebook).
Jezebel has a sympathetic Q&A with a guy with a female-constipation fetish (believe it or not, this is actually SFW).
Julia Cohen posts poems by her 4th and 5th grade students.
Ron Rosenbaum, who you probably know better as Slate‘s resident Nabokov-obsessive, reviews Seth Rogov’s Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet for the Jewish Review of Books. Depending on your personal feelings about Dylan, this piece is either about as much or slightly less fun than it sounds like.(via Arts & Letters Daily.)
And in today’s installment of BANJO FEEVER, we’ve got Frank Warner and Pete Seeger on Pete’s old RAINBOW QUEST TV show, doing Frank Proffitt’s “Tom Dooley.” This was the first bluegrass song I ever got obsessed with. The version that caught my attention was Doc Watson’s, from a live album that I picked up because I wanted to hear a “more authentic” version of “Shady Grove,” than the Jerry Garcia / David Grisman version on their album of the same name, which I was already in love with.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OATZrTibcFY
How about a rousing game of literary-cultural high-low?
[NOTE: Guess which are which.]
“The Bubble and The Globe” – Joshua Clover on John Ashbery’s Planisphere as a chronicle of the financial collapse at The Nation.
Ashbery is heroically free of the world-was-better-when-my-body-was-younger piffle that mars some of his well-known contemporaries. Instead we have the sense of the poet (and us with him) being always inside time, suspended within it as within some queer medium (an entirely proprietary substance, one part limestone and two parts prosecco). There is no lyrical leap to ecstasy, to someplace beyond the capacious Ashberian land. Time itself is the worldly country, and there is no other.
Part two of Melissa Broder’s two-part series on twitter as a strange attractor in the writer’s life is now live. In Part 1 she spoke to poets, including Ron Silliman, Amy King, Tao Lin, and Reb Livingston. In Part 1.5 she spoke at some length with Brandon Scott Gorell. Now, in Part 2, she speaks to prose-writers, Kevin Sampsell, Dara Horn, Fiona Maazel, our own Blake Butler and Matthew Simmons, and yours truly.
Fiona Maazel: Twitter? What the hell is that? I, Neanderthal.
“Carded” – William Deresiewicz amply disgusted with the packaging of Nabokov’s Original of Laura at The New Republic.
The cards are perforated and, as Dmitri says in a note, “can be removed and rearranged, as the author likely did when he was writing the novel.” I’ll get back to the second half of that statement, a claim both strategic and semi-dubious (not to mention ungrammatical). The first breaks new ground in editorial chutzpah, inviting us to play a kind of Nabokov: Rock Band–the novel as theme park. One can only imagine what dear old dad–the ultimate artistic control freak, not to mention one of the all-time snobs–would have thought of the idea of letting his readers re-arrange his scraps and chapters at will.
And Boing Boing introduces us to Jake Adelstein, the American Jew who relocated to Japan and became the toughest reporter on the yakuza beat. Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice, will be collaborating with Boing Boing over the next two months, to bring out a series of exclusive stories about the yakuza. Which we’ll have our eye on, no doubt, but in the meantime they kick things off with an interview.
Do you worry about your family?
I have a guarantee from someone up high in the Yamaguchi-gumi that they won’t touch my family. Their word is pretty solid. It’s a gentleman’s agreement that they’ll only kill me, which makes me feel better.
The Presentation
“The stage is still raised, but it no longer rises from an unfathomable depth; it has become a dais. The didactic play and the epic theater are attempts to sit down on a dais.” — Walter Benjamin, “What Is Epic Theater?”
Here is a Bunch of Things!
That’s right–many things; one bunch of them.
Faster Times books editor and commenter-in-good-standing-here Lincoln Michel takes on David Shields’s Reality Hunger over at The Rumpus. I have to say that Lincoln’s review is thorough, even-handed and thought-provoking; but after reading it, I can’t imagine anything I’m less interested in reading than this book. I say read Lincoln’s piece and call it a day.
Julia Cohen went to a small press festival in Boulder, CO. Then she ate some crappy pizza from a place called Sexy Pizza. She also talks about the new issues of Horse Less Review and Ugly Duckling’s 6×6. Plus, you know, other stuff–flowers, her brother, March.
Valleywag blows the pickles off the Cheezburger empire–sort of.
Also, Borders is firing lotsa people.
And what the hell has John Gallaher been talking about lately? Well, he likes the new Double Room, he’s interested in the new Sawako Nakayasu book from Letter Machine, he says the Laurel Review is looking for reviewers, and he digs the paintings of Glennray Tutor (see above), whom you know as the guy whose works adorns several of Barry Hannah’s Grove-Atlantic covers. Here’s Tutor’s site.
Some neat book sculptures from Paul Octavious.
A team of publishing nerds Tumblrs what New Yorkers are reading on the subway (etc.) at CoverSpy.
The OED costs $200ish a year to access, but you can enjoy for free their word-of-the-day feature (thanks, jh).
Coudal Partners field tests some books with the help of Jonathan Messinger, Ron Hogan, Eric Sptiznagel, and Jessa Crispin.
One Story is offering editorial mentorships for writers who’d like some thoughts on their work ($25 for 15minutes).
That’s all I’ve got for now.
HOLLYWOOD LIT
showing how it's done
Being in L.A. at the moment, I read with interest this list at the Daily Beast titled The Five Best Novels on Hollywood. (Also, happy Oscar weekend! Turns out this is a big deal out here…) I like Day of the Locust and The Last Tycoon but I’m mezzo-mezzo on Play It As It Lays and The Player (admittedly it’s been a long time since I read either). The only one I haven’t read is Children of Light by Robert Stone. Anyway, I’d argue that two masterpieces are very, very missing from the list.
Ways to Spend (a small part of) Your Weekend
image by Lori Nix, via Blood Milk Jewelry
Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow gets around to reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, a study of consumer behavior that challenges the “rational consumer” hypothesis. CD also links us to this NPR story on obsolete professions, such as switchboard operator, ice-deliverer, and “lector,” who is the guy hired by all the cigar workers in the factory to sit in the center of the factory floor and loudly read the workers left-wing newspapers and pro-union propaganda, so that everyone can better themselves and become less alienated from their labor. If this job ever makes a comeback, I want to do it! The NPR piece has photos of each profession and audio clips of very, very old people talking about when these things existed and they themselves–young then–did them.
Dennis Cooper is testing your sight recognition skills at a French wax museum. I already failed utterly.
The Rumpus asks: Would you like to write about poetry (for the Rumpus)?
Tell us about the last poem or book of poetry you loved, no length requirements. The best will be published right here in the blog. Send your entries to poetry-at-therumpus-dot-net.
They’re also looking for people interested in reviewing full-length poetry collections. But FYI: Stephen Elliott and I had a long conversation the other night about the problems with book reviews for sites like his (and ours); we are both highly suspicious of the kinds of “reviews” that read like press releases or protracted blurbs, because they don’t tell us anything we can’t glean from a blurb, which is two lines long instead of seven paragraphs. The site-meters prove that these pieces don’t get read or linked the same way that more incisive, interesting books-pieces do, so neither the book nor the review-author nor the site is benefiting. If you’re going to try and review some poetry for The Rumpus–which you absolutely should–be sure and give them some red damn meat to sink their teeth into–something we’ll want to link to after they publish it, something that tells me something about the book I couldn’t glean on my own from its Amazon page. Good luck!
NYTea Time: Lydia Millet loves on the new Lipsyte, and Laura Miller likes the new John Banville, but Allison Glock seems to like Tammy Wynette less after reading Jimmy McDonough’s new biography of the country star.
The life story of the fame/drug-addled brat is nothing new, but McDonough wants more than for us to appreciate Wynette, he wants us to like Wynette. Because he likes Wynette — a little too much at times. He writes a handful of chatty letters to his subject. Page 1 begins: “Dear Tammy . . . Don’t worry, I won’t spill all the beans — I can’t. There’s just too much about you that will never be resolved.” Putting aside the dubious choice to shoot your biography in the foot on the first page, writing mash notes to a dead woman is oddly creepy — and only grows more so as the letters progress, one recounting a dream he had about her in which she wore “a yellow pantsuit and matching headband.” At another point he admits to having had “the hots” for her.
Yeesh. Also: A book about making moonshine, Sam Lipsyte answers Stray Questions, and Daniyal Mueenuddin won the Story Prize.