BOMBlog: Russian Avant-Garde
Those who are following my year-long Russian lit journey might be interested to glance over at the BOMBlog, where Kevin Kinsella has an essay about the Russian Avant-Garde, particularly the photos of Aleksandr Rodchenko, whose portraits of Lilya Brik, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Osip Brik have shifted through various meanings/uses: photographic evidence of the threesome’s close friendship, symbols of the Russian Avant-Garde movement, and state propaganda posters.
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?Molly Ringwald NYT Op-Ed: Remembering John Hughes
My friend, Jacob, at a bar tonight in Hong Kong (I’m back stateside this Sunday, if anyone’s keeping track) told me I had to go look this up. I’m drunk now, and my belly is full of spicy lamb kebab, but I did it anyway, and I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty beautiful, heartfelt, honest remembrance. If you’re only going to read one John Hughes memorial, make it this one.
Spader is the new Rumsfeld
I didn’t think it was possible to pack so many cliches into such a small space, but the voiceover on this trailer for the 1985 James Spader vehicle Tuff Turf may have set some kind of record. It’s almost poetic…
Meet Morgan Hiller
He’s got an attitude
They’ve got a problem
He lives in two worlds
Always behind enemy lines
Tuff Turf
He’s a loner on a roll
An outsider on the edge
Caught between a dangerous loser
And the girl they both love
They can’t shut him down
And they can’t cool him off
Tuff Turf
He stands alone
And one way or another
He’s going to make this town his own
He’s always been a rebel
Now he’s about to become a hero
Tuff Turf
‘Then My ADD Kicked In’
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V-4jbto2C8
New Business Model: Celeb Lit
Actual photo evidence of B. Spears reading
What if instead of celebrities paying to have shitty biographies ghostwritten for them, they published good progressive/fucked ghostwritten novels? ‘White Larvae of the Ill Nacht’ by Tom Hanks. ‘Borsmissisott’ by Lil Wayne. I’d read a Lindsay Lohan novel if it was written by Brian Evenson, and so would several hundred thousand little girls. That seems like a ‘new literary business model’ I could get behind, one that would actually make some serious $$$. Now offering my recently competed 70000 word ‘post-structuralist language novel’ to the first rock star/model/actor willing to take it on. I’m serious.
Sonnets for Saturday
I googled "sonnet" in images and a million pictures of this lady came up.
I briefly studied poetry with William “Bill” Matthews eons ago. I liked him very much. I was a bad poet. He made us write sonnets. I wrote one that narrates a mother teaching her daughter how to masturbate in the shower. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like much of my work, and yet, we liked each other. After the jump is my sonnet. Feel free to share your bad sonnets in the comment section.
God if I have to get old at least let me be awesome
“Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.”
“I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”
“Anything that can be done chemically can be done by other means.”
“”Nothing is true, everything is permitted””
Deranged Writers
A few weeks ago I read The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato, a novella of the “this is why I am so crazy” genre of first-person fiction. After reading it I decided that when it’s done well these kinds of narratives can be really compelling and I started to wonder what other kinds of stories like this are out there.
Then a real-life one surfaced. You might have heard about this story. A psychopathic man walks into his gym, shuts off the lights and starts shooting. Three women died, many others were critically injured including a pregnant 26-year-old aerobics instructor and her husband. Then he killed himself. Turns out the guy kept a journal and a blog and even posted confessional videos on youtube.
I’ve been going back and forth about whether or not I should even post this here. I decided that I would because as creepy and sad and strange as this edited version of his journal (pdf) is, it’s still perversely interesting. Literature it is not, but somehow it makes the case that “this is why I’m crazy” fiction is only that. Only fiction. The minds of the truly deranged, I think, do not make for good reading.
Emails from ‘The Littlest Literary Hoax’
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently posted an article about a few years old DFW/Delillo-related prank authored by a Jay Murray Siskind and published in Volume 11, Issue 4 of Modernism/Modernity, a scholarly literary critical quarterly review. According to the Chronicle, Mark Sample, an assistant professor of English at George Mason University, discovered the article, a review of Oblivion, in 2005 when one of his graduate students cited it in an essay. He forgot about it, time passed, then he got curious and dug some more to discover a good bit of humor behind the whole thing. I won’t go on to summarize all of the details, as plenty of information is out there already and many other blogs have covered it – see the following links:
Mark Sample’s original post regarding the ‘hoax.’
The Chronicle of Higher Education article, written by Peter Monaghan.
However, I do have this to add. I’ve got the email exchange between the graduate student, who asked to remain anonymous, and Sample, who kindly gave me permission to share it with you here. It’s a great little exchange, pretty funny. Enjoy after the break.