Friday Fuck Books, Let’s Get the Band Back Together.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30AYABGnGkU
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuWB9Nhoypw
For you, B.
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
I’d feel better if you drank your drink.
I like to laugh smoke out.
You’re drunk, and I’m drunk, and I’m just exactly drunk enough to tell you anything you want to know.
Stupidly calm.
Now I am dangerous.
Drunk, yes, but so what?
I want to try cocaine, though because that’s suppose to sharpen the brain, isn’t it?
Stop waving your hat in my face.
Feed the lettuce to the bunny and eat the bunny.
Celestial Navigations
“Tens of millions of people have seen these films. No one knows who made them.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UdZSrEos-k
Hey, here are those links you asked me for
The new issue of Gigantic magazine now exists! UPDATED: Though I’m not seeing much evidence of #2 on the site right now. The launch party for #2, the “Gigantic America” issue will be at PPOW gallery in NYC on 2/27, and will feature readings by favorites-of-ours Deb Olin Unferth and Sasha Fletcher, among others. The issue itself has interviews with Sam Lipsyte and Lydia Millet, plus new fiction from Robert Coover and Leni Zumas, plus “collectible biographies of famous Americans” written by the likes of Michael Kimball and Clancy Martin. Holy awesome!
Also, check out their exclusive preview of Paul Willerton’s Little Big Cremaster 3.
Meehan Crist’s review of John D’Agata’s The Lost Origins of the Essay is now up at Powells.com. Crist, you may or may not know, is the reviews editor at The Believer. Her review originally ran in the February issue, to much acclaim, and was selected for publication on the Powell’s site by the NBCC. Cheers!
The Rumpus has an interview with the poet Gary Young. How often do you see a poet-interview at the very top of a general-interest culture website? Good God, I love these guys. While you’re over there, check out “Sexually, I’m More of a Denmark: A Highly Subjective Book Review” by Chelsea G. Summers, and then, if you like, get linked (via them) to Javier Marias’s KCRW Bookworm appearance, which went live yesterday.
It’s Derek Jarman Day at Coop’s Place. Re the photo above-
Jarman is also remembered for his famous shingle cottage-garden, created in the latter years of his life, in the shadow of the Dungeness power station. The house was built in tarred timber. Raised wooden text on the side of the cottage is the first stanza and the last five lines of the last stanza of John Donne’s poem, The Sun Rising. The cottage’s beach garden was made using local materials and has been the subject of several books
Speaking of which, do you know that Donne poem? It’s one of my favorites of his. Here are my favorite lines from it:
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
But you really should read the whole thing. Happy Friday!
Duck in a Basket
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBmjGV2Kb8k
Ever freak out about your writing?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch6Jtk6oJRo
Sometimes writing can knock a whole lot of angry into you. Ever really, really freak out? What happened?
I Am Not Sorry I Have A Vagina*
The fiction section of the new issue (ETA: the set of stories that indicate they’ve been guest edited by Claire Messud) of Guernica is guest-edited by Claire Messud and she offers a brief essay, Writers, Plain and Simple, to introduce her selections, all written by women. In her essay, Messud writes of how Elizabeth Bishop did not wish to be known as a woman writer and she states:
As an American writer of the early twenty-first century, I agree with her wholeheartedly. An artist’s work is in no way limited or defined by her gender. To allot space, then—such as this fiction section of Guernica—to women writers specifically is, surely, to limit and define them—us!—by an irrelevant fact of birth.
Monday Morning Webahol
Image chosen by word association game with one of the main subjects of this post. Any guesses?
There’s a new poetry blog in town. Contributors to The The Poetry include the Maggy Poetry editorial A-team, plus about eight more fine people, plus^2 some sort of daily-rotating tag-team editorial arrangement. And a key word cloud-sphere that rotates bewitchingly. What else do you want from life? GO THERE.
Several pieces of news from Sentence: (1) The winner of the Sentence Book Award is (for a book-length manuscript of prose poems or a book-length manuscript consisting substantially of prose poems) is Sinead O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds by Maureen Seaton and Neil de la Flor. (2) 25 Sightings of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker by Re’lynn Hansen has been selected as the winning manuscript of The Firewheel Chapbook Award. (3) Sentence #7 is now available. (4) Also available now, An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Congrats all you winners!
Some people know about my doppelganger, the Other (or, since he’s older, perhaps the Original) Justin Taylor, who is a Baptist preacher out of Wheaton, Illinois and the co-author of a book called Sex and the Supremacy of Christ. ANYway, JTO left a comment on his friend David Murray’s post at The Gospel Coalition Blog the other day, which naturally triggered my Google alert, and though I don’t always keep this close track of JTO’s doings, the title of the blogpost caught my eye: “101 Writing Tips.” Turns out that Mr. Murray actually meant “Writing Tips 101;” he’s actually offering his Top 5 writing/preaching tips, which themselves are actually only intended to summarize some video about “preaching blunders” that he linked to. Here’s one now-
3. Don’t overuse nouns
Use verbs much more. Not, “It is our suggestion…” but, “We suggest.”
Heartily recommended to all you young preachers out there. Also: JTO’s blog, Between Two Worlds, is here.
Your Very Non-V-Day V-Day Roundup
This will be as mushy as it gets.
At The Fanzine, Jeff Johnson considers Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path.
Dennis Cooper hosts the official online launch of Mark Gluth’s The Late Works of Margaret Kroftis. I have yet to hear anything but the best about this book.
Because we love Roger Ebert now, we are interested in his review of Valentine’s Day.
“Valentine’s Day” is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it’s more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.
Also, did you know that Ebert wrote a book called Your Movie Sucks ?
William Deresiewicz on Tolstoy at The Nation. (I’ve become such a committed Deresiewicz reader I can now type his last name without having to check the spelling first–I check after, and I’m usually right. This goes for you, too, Moe Tkacik.)
NYTea Time: Dominique Browning is quite taken with Cathleen Schine’s The Three Weissmanns of Westport. She locates the book in the updated-Austen trend, but hastens to identify a crucial distinguishing feature: “The strange thing about the Jane brigade is that most of its practitioners have raided only her plots, apparently not quite up to the task of honoring the essence of Austen. But Schine’s homage has it all: stinging social satire, mordant wit, delicate charm, lilting language and cosseting materialistic detail.” Hey, there’s a new Peter Handke book! And Adam Haslett wrote a novel! About the financial crisis! Michiko Kakutani did not like Union Atlantic–-but that was on a Monday; Liesl Schillinger likes it quite a lot today. What else? Jon Caramanica looks at a couple of rock & roll books; Catherine Rampell on the interesting-looking academic-ish-seeming, Capitalism and the Jews by Jerry Z. Muller; Dahlia Lithwick on death row lawyer David R. Dow’s memoir, Autobiography of an Execution; and Todd Pruzan makes my weekend.
Happy Sunday!
A lot of people wish it would rain. I know it might sound strange.
Some borrowing:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnFcoE_YtNA
(I really love the “here’s one of my old 45s on a record player” genre of Youtube videos.)
More and so much more. READ MORE >
Behind the Scenes & Random / Comments Off on A lot of people wish it would rain. I know it might sound strange.
February 12th, 2010 / 4:59 pm
February 12th, 2010 / 4:59 pm