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.
Friday Fuck Books, Let’s Get to Trippin’
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbRkM2gD1Ak
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMUKqnelfQM
So much more… READ MORE >
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
Why not dine in the library?
I’ll have to have a drink in my bath.
My brain is unalterable as a ball.
And now the children subscribe to judgment.
I am growing meaner by the hour.
Don’t bother with the fixings!
Honey, drink your beer and get me another one.
Like seeing an orange crow.
We did nothing all day long but drink bathtub gin and play solitaire and smile to ourselves and talk to our animals.
..apocryphal glitter, essential doom.
Hey. Don’t take my rum away.
Scroll down to read this
Jack Kerouac was either stoned or zenned out when he wrote the entire manuscript of On the Road without paragraph breaks on a scroll (how he fed this through his typewriter still confuses me). Stream of consciousness is a nice conceit, one deserving to be hosted on a scroll, as long as toilet paper — the most imperative scroll of modern time — isn’t evoked. I remember reading a 1/4 way into On the Road and thinking “where is he going?” Dharma Bums was much better, especially for people in their late twenties who are living with their parents, a plight shared by the narrator.
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Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953) is a 100-ft. print of, um, a tire. He created it with John Cage, who no doubt was mumbling 4’3″ to himself while driving the car. In museums it’s displayed horizontally, mostly in part due to ceiling clearances probably, though this strikes me as a “western” way of seeing things: we read and write from left to right, and stuck on this earth without notions of above, we walk and drive horizontally. Rauschenberg is a more playful and earnest Warhol; his tire print traces the volition of our time — driving nowhere, from left to right.
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I don’t know much about the Torah, except that it’s rules of Judaism. I don’t understand why Jews are the only white people who aren’t white; what the hell happened? I once looked up a list of common Jewish surnames and was like “holy shit I know a lot of Jews!” even including girls I had crushes on. I recently learned that Jews only date Jews; where was wikipedia when I was 17?
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Okay, let’s talk about Asians. I feel like I can freely talk about Asians because I am. Asians read up and down in columns, as it’s easier to pivot your neck up and down as supposed to left and right. I may seem biased, but Asian ways are usually more logical than western ways. If you take a Chinese character written in calligraphy and zoom in, it looks like a Franz Kline. (I had a Greek friend who would argue with me about who invented what first, the Greeks or the Chinese. Stupid ass dunno that Gorillas invented everything.) Do you know what the Chinese character for “patience” is? A knife forever suspended above a heart. The heart looks like a heart; the knife a knife. And the character for “good”? A mother next to her child. I will admit the alphabet is more useful, but Chinese breaks my heart.
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HTMLGIANT contributors have been instructed to insert “READ MORE >” breaks within a 1/3 of screen space out of consideration for the other posts; thus, a sort of “politics of page breaks,” where the longer it takes for a contributor to place a break, the more selfish he or she is deemed. It’s funny how so much time later, devoid of past sacred ties, we use the word “scroll” to describe the act of descending deep and deeper into a website page. Most mouse’s have a “scroll wheel” to help with our profane endeavors. My finger often gets so tired, running across the wheel blindly like a hairless guinea pig. If you’ve made it this far, I think you know what I mean. I worry about this post, for hogging so much “front page,” but I hope you understand the vertiginous verticality of this post is simply in aid to the point offered by its title.
NY Event I Wish I Could Go To
Sometimes traveling sucks. By sometimes I mean it will suck on March 9th when this amazing event happens.
Tao Lin, Lore Segal and Melville House Editor, Kelly Burdick will be doing a panel discussion about the novella at The Center for Fiction in Manhattan, which is where I usually live when I am not having a what’s-going-on-with-my-life-thing somewhere else.
Kelly Burdick, if you’ve never had the pleasure of chatting with him at a Melville House event, is a really smart, cool editor; Lore Segal is a fantastic, old-school-New-York writer who says really interesting stuff and Tao Lin, as we all know, says crazy shit. On top of that, The Center for Fiction is an awesome venue. Sounds like a good panel to me.
So don’t make any plans on March 9th and tell everyone I said hello.
Jimmy Chen—
Faith No More used to be “Faith No Man,” which was way more awesome; The Cure used to be “Easy Cure,” which was lame; Motörhead considered the name “Bastard,” which would have sucked; Oasis used to be “The Rain,” which was totally stupid; Pink Floyd used to be “Tea Set,” then “The Pink Floyd Sound,” then “The Pink Floyd,” until finally just Pink Floyd, which is understandable; Pixies used to be “Pixies In Panoply,” which sounds retarded; Queen used to be called “Smile,” which seems about the same level of okayness; Radiohead used to be “On a Friday,” which was really stupid; Van Halen used to be “Mammoth,” until David Lee Roth suggested the former, which is surprising because of their ego war.
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Eschaton Lite
When my sister and I were little, we sometimes played around our house a very loose adaptation of Calvin Ball. Our version involved one of those big Koosh balls that were popular in the late 80s, as well as other objects and toys and so on. We also ran up and down the hallway a lot. I don’t remember who won or how we scored it or whatever. I just remember that we had fun.
I say all of this above in order to set up a very enthusiastic hurrah for these people, who have organized a game of Eschaton in Minneapolis. Anyone else seen this? They seem to be very serious about it. They have an extensive rule book. They are planning ahead a month in advance. They will not bring dogs to the event.
Keith Pille, the author of the rule book to Eschaton Lite, writes on the event wall:
One thing we could do with a month of lead-time: figure out what sort of game-scale works. My half-assed experimentation in the back yard tells me that i can’t throw a tennis ball with much accuracy for more than 30 feet (it also tells me that we shouldn’t have a dog on hand, because she’ll try to catch and run off with our warheads). I’ll do some more experimenting to see what sort of scale/target size would really work for us. I think ideally, you want targets to be hittable but not automatic…
I hope they take pictures or post a debriefing or make a video.
(via @TheLiftedBrow)
Other lame posts
Postmortem examination; postpartum syndrome; postmodern art; post traumatic stress disorder; post apocalyptic movies; post nasal drip; post baccalaureate unemployment; postcard from ex-girlfriend; New York Post; Post, TX; Post cereal; post office.
From syntax to ego to erasing Rauschenberg
Whoa, wikipedia’s bracket illustration totally brought to mind de Kooning’s Woman series, in which the female figure is broken into a kind of provocatively aggressive male syntax. This post is not an invitation to the feminist angle, however called for, as the gestural implications are obvious; this just got me thinking about “Erased de Kooning Drawing,” (1953) by Robert Rauschenberg, who, then a young artist, asked the patriarch if he could erase one of the latter’s drawings, who, in the spirit that marks a great man, said yes. The result is beautiful on all counts, and proves that ego is never destroyed, only transferred from one artist to another. I see my surname in his, so in the spirit of self-abnegation, Mr. Rauschenberg, I ask if I may erase you?
2 for googoo
Brian Butler’s Night of Pan, starring Vincent Gallo and Kenneth Anger for onedreamrush
Ryan Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (in 5 parts)