Riot: The Cost of Education
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPW9YU9z5gg
What do you think about the effectiveness of this kind of dissent?
Go Ahead: It is Friday
my father warned me about men and booze but he never said anything about women and cocaine.
for seasickness? a glass of champagne.
the sooner you know your lines the sooner we can go out for a drink.
look at that bitch, carl, look at that!
la-dee-da, lost at sea again…
i am hag-ridden with ambition.
this isn’t drink. It’s only wine!
dance? I’ll waltz your ass right up against that wall.
a blend of champagne, gin, a spot of sugar, a squirt of lemon juice, the whole topped off with a brandy float.
i don’t want to be taught!
i’m quick on the bottle.
codeine…bourbon… (last words [?])
if I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Friday Fuck Books, Let’s Get Atonal Avant Garde 2x animals 2x human
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89Kz8Nxb-Bg
5 noggles of rye
1.) Every editor for every Best American series 2010 is a white guy.
2.) I stumbled across this Julia Harris blog. Pretty ordinary, but I was amused by the sidebar Percival Everett–“cocky writer of many books– hate. Julia needs to drop by for Mean Week.
3.) I have been blinking into some of the Xbox games everyone here suggested. I notice they keep asking me to make ethical decisions. Is that the new trend in games, or what makes them “literary”? The Call of Duty crazy in that scope clarity makes human look human and then you bring the rain/pain from high above like god or government. Little green people scurrying. I feel excited and dirty while playing. Maybe the point?
4.) A powerful article on violence, women and violence, literature and women and men and violence. Smart.
5.) Snow loses its beauty.
KILL KILL KILL
hi it's me
I had an interesting morning. Early this morning I sat down at my computer to write and realized that my computer had eaten, or I had deleted, ten pages that I wrote yesterday.
Stage Fright
Here’s a serious question. I’m 32. I’ve been reading here and there for a few years now. When I was young I had bad, migraine-inducing stage fright. But recently I’ve been fine. I’ve read in front of hundreds of folks without an iota of sweaty palmage or trilling voice. Then, today, I read in front of 10, maybe 15, people, and I was quaking in my boots. You could freaking see me shaking. AND, I wasn’t even reading my own poetry, rather some of my favorite poems by Yusef Komunyakaa.
So, what gives?
I wasn’t intellectually nervous, but my body at that moment said, fuck you. Why? Do any of you have stage fright moments or tips to share?
Threefer
The Rumpus has a long interview with Paula Fox.
Okay, this one’s actually two, but I stole them both from Bookslut, and “fourfer” sounds stupid. Therefore, (2a) everybody’s homeboy (that is, Bookslut’s and ours) Michael Schaub is interviewed at Willamette Week. (2b) Anarchist news dot org has an interview with Eric Hazan of La Fabrique, the French publisher of The Coming Insurrection, which I have read a lot about and plan to own by the end of the day today.
Question: What is the reason for the resurrection of the communist idea?
Eric Hazan: People feel that there is no longer a choice between the Right and the Left, but between ways of getting out of capitalism. That’s the key question. If it remains in the domain of ideas, one can only go round in circles. For me, thinking about communism isn’t heading towards a political organization, but towards practical reflections.
And finally, the other day I was trilling about having finally received my copy of The Axioms of Religion in the mail. What I did not understand was that the 1977 edition, attributed to Hobbes and Mullins, is not in fact Mullins’s original work as edited by Hobbes, but is rather a wholesale revision by Hobbes of the original work. As such, he rightly credits himself as the primary author, and it’s not clear where and to what extent he is quoting or paraphrasing Mullins, whose writing is the actual locus of my interest. Also, after reading the intro and the first chapter, it’s clear to me that Hobbes is an incredibly annoying–though basically well-meaning, and only unintentionally racist– propagandist for his own weird notion of the Baptist cause. His edition, published during the (brief) heyday of the Carter administration, is basically designed as a primer to introduce the Baptist faith to a general American audience that, at the time, apparently needed a documentary special to explain what it was to be “born again” after Carter declared himself so. What a difference a generation makes! Yikes. Anyway, I want to read the real, original Axioms of Religion by E.Y. Mullins, which has apparently been out of print since 1908. HELLO INTERNET ARCHIVE. THANK YOU PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. I recommend the B&W pdf version, which is easier to load than the full-color one, and all you really lose is the yellowness of the scanned pages. Very, very excited to start reading this. Soul competency, here I come!
PS- As long as we’re all careening toward some weird conversionary episode, Mathias Svalina and I were talking the other day about Xian-era Bob Dylan. I was talking about listening somewhat obsessively to Shot of Love but he said the real action is on Saved. They’re both pretty amazing records. Have you ever seen the original cover art for Saved? It’s so hardcore that they actually switched it out after the first edition of the album, for this kind of crappy picture of BD playing live. But I still think Shot of Love would make a better poster.
Barry Hicks, Bill Hannah
P.S. If this actually ever happens, I’m getting out a gun, Hannah-style.
P.P.S. Here’s Barry editing himself.
Let’s Love Some Stuff
crash art by Scott Teplin
I was lucky enough to hear Fred Moten read at the Segue Poetry series at the Bowery Poetry Club a month or so ago. This post at Beatrice.com has one of Moten’s poems, as well as a link to Pennsound where you can hear him read some of his work.
Schools used student laptop webcams to spy on them in school and at home. (h/t to Rumpus for the link.)
There was a Times profile of DeLillo and we somehow missed it when it was new. But now it’s NYTea Time. William T(ea) Vollmann has the cover story, a review of Ted Conover’s The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today. Dwight Garner discusses Elif Batuman’s The Possessed–remember this book? We all flipped out over the excerpt that was published at the Chronicle of Higher Education a few weeks ago. You probably don’t remember that this book was first discussed on this site before the Chronicle “controversy,” when Keith Gessen mentioned it in his anti-top 3 top 3 of 2009 guest-post. Jenifer Egan, whose reviews I always appreciate, discusses Eight White Nights by Andre Acimann. On the Paper Cuts blog, I am answering Stray Questions , and David Goodwillie has a playlist for his new novel, American Subversive.