Ways to Use Twitter
I’m relatively new to Twitter. I’ve only posted ~200 tweets. This compared to three people I follow: @blakebutler who has posted over 3,000 tweets or @matthewjsimmons who has +6,000 or @sophierosenblum who has ~9,000.
While I got my twitter account a long time ago, I never used it because I couldn’t figure out my approach. I mean, I couldn’t figure out how to use it in a way that seemed interesting to me. Also, I couldn’t understand the protocols, all that R/T and # and @ this and that. Nor did I understand the etiquette. How many times a day is it okay to tweet? Are you supposed to follow everyone who follows you? And so on. I felt like an old man confronting his inability to adapt to technology.
So, because I’m a nerd, I studied Twitter for a while. I began to pick up on the etiquette and protocol, and what I noticed was that the individuals I found most interesting had some kind of a angle. For instance:
Shampoo Horns by Aaron Teel (part one)
Rose Metal Press makes a wonderful chapbook. Shampoo Horns, for example. It feels like hair, if the hair was made of Pop-Tarts or red sun and waterfalls of beer. It was printed on a Vandercook letterpress, with care. It smells like dandelion broth. The entire book-making process is fascinating and you can see it here:
This book has 19 short stories, linked. This would be a good book to examine while considering the nuances/decisions/contemplations of a linked collection. You could ask the author, “What kind of things did you think about when ordering the collection?” You could get Winesburg, Ohio and stack it upright on the dirty kitchen floor and then take three paces and place Shampoo Horns on the disgusting floor (pasta sauce and dream stains, etc.) and then you could fill in the space between the two with other linked books, like stack them into bones or whatnot, and you would have yourself a self-education session. (If you aren’t going to autodidact, you are doomed.)
This book contains red plastic cups, you know the cups, so simple yet they connote so much (even their name–solo). I bet you’ve held a red, plastic cup. Cradled it. Sucked from. There are also “pink flamingos with missing heads” and “stray huskies” and a “overgrown toddler without a shirt” and a “trash bag flapping” and “bologna sandwiches” and “MTV” and “wood panel walls” and a mobile home full of angels and “Texas drawl” and “shit-filled Underoos” and a dildo in a swimming pool and “RV’s” and “a busted La-Z-Boy” and a “greasy ball cap” and a “plastic vodka bottle” and a lot of other THINGS. Agglomeration. Interesting method of delivering the world from a child/boy’s POV. Most don’t do it well. But Teel does, by creating a tornado-like effect of THINGS spinning by, the narrator watching the world blur. Puzzlement and understanding are the milieu of a boy, an aging boy. Your parents are no longer some minor gods. Pain enters life (this world can hurt). And, of course, sex—this strange, persistent force—is in the air. Possibly this is a trailer park Bildungsroman.
Michael Godard: Art that is Freedom from Success
The UK low-res pop band Cleaners From Venus have a song called “Corridor of Dreams,” which I think is basically the most chillwave, or even dadwave, thing possible. I don’t mean this as a joke or even as disrespectful. Ariel Pink was and is a huge fan of this band. I found out about this song when I was dating (or trying to sleep with?) a girl in a band in Oakland CA, before I left for NYC, in 2010. We were driving to get milk shakes from McDonalds in West Oakland. It was a hot spring day. She had amazing tits and didn’t give a fuck what I thought of here. I let her borrow my Fender and she almost didn’t give it back. The woman in question dropped it off with Frankie Rose when she came to New York on tour. I didn’t go to her show. She said my guitar was a piece of shit.
She put the song on, in her tour van, and I didn’t want to leave California, ever.
I’m listening to it now. It has the most amazing lyrics. They are all fantastic. Here are a couple lines.
riting not riting
Some days it feels like pushing words around in a flat wheelbarrow. You write for hours with no real result, or with result far from satisfactory, or with result very far from satisfactory, as if you’ve lost the thing (always a fear), the thing that worked before but is now clearly not working (see David Duval, see Harper Lee [?], etc.). Were these hours wasted? In a busy life, could you have spent these hours on something clearly and concretely productive (mowing lawn, purchasing drugs, thinning mints, etc.)? Some bray, “Well, it all counts,” it is all grist for the mill, tourists for the ants, but possibly they are patronizing a person who just spent many fruitless hours staring at the whiteout conditions, the frowned forehead of the page. For me, a lifelong runner, I think of training. Some days I’m in a glow groove with running—the planned fartlek, tempo, hill surges, go exactly as I’d imagined.
Other days–and I learned this after decades of competitive running–the biorhythms are just funky-junked, right from the first warm-up step. There is immediately no flow. The legs are squid. So I usually shut that workout down. I switch the workout over to something less arduous, or I might just go play disc golf, or I might pop open a beer. That day wasn’t the day. Period. So maybe, in writing, we should do the same? Just accept the reality of the neurotransmitters and let it go. The other option—and, admittedly I’ve seen this work in running, though not so often—is to grind yourself into that space. Some read a book or lit mag, or listen to music (or write a blog post?), whatever, hoping to prime the engine, to transition into writing. Is that the better way? Or another? It’s something I’m pondering.
a band called Buzz Aldrin’s Relentless Tears
I like what Claire Evans said about Neil Armstrong’s passing.
In the Roman Triumph it was customary for the general, man of the hour, to have in his chariot a slave bearing a large gold wreath, whose job it was to whisper in the general’s ear that he would some day not be alive, like a buzzing mosquito, a little memo, so that his ego would not lift the chariot to the moon. Wikipedia says that popular belief says this is where we get our memento mori, which literally means “remember (that you have) to die.” Seems a lot like our comedy roasts, a quintessentially American tradition begun at the New York Friars’ club, informed by the attitudes of Jewish comedy, which is obviously where American comedy gets its attitude. Eight of the first ten roasted were Jewish, beginning in 1950, just a few years after the second World War wrapped the human condition in a cloud of dust.
On Sacrilege
Provincial painter Elías García Martínez painted, sometime in the 19th century, Jesus Christ as mirrored in our minds; or rather, in the accepted manner by which our minds have been irrevocably influenced — the tilt in the head, sullen look, blanketed yet speculative eyes perhaps wondering if He, just before his “Ecco homo” crucifixion, should have simply conceded to the Romans that he (left column of H now broken off) was just a man. Christianity’s solipsist ethos is based off an antagonistic bluff: that this Man was much more than that. A hundred or so years later, one 80-year-old woman Cecilia Giménez, in the Santuario de la Misericordia, a Roman Catholic church in Borja, Spain, voluntarily “restored” the brittle fresco to such a comical simian degree, that the irony of the church’s denial of man’s evolution from ape is felt upon me.
Teju Cole Tweets America
Because his wife came home late once or twice, Tim, of Indiana, suspected her of what any husband would: working too hard.
In Florida, a quiet man, Edward Reece, purchased a new pair of cargo shorts, and said very little.
Popper in bed
Interview: Reader Who Recently Finished The Savage Detectives
1. So how long did it take you to read the book?
I didn’t actually finish the book. So when people talk about the ending (this happened the other day in the lime aisle) I have to front like I know what they are saying. Like yesterday, in the lime aisle, this elderly woman saw me with the book and said, “That’s a funny book. I like the monologue by the guy who draws the dwarves with giant penises. That’s the best monologue I’ve read from a mentally defective character since Faulkner.” And I just had to shake my head and smile and fake it. So.
2. Did you ever read the book in public places or leave the book out purposefully when visitors were over?
Ha Ha. Well, yes, as I mentioned the grocery store. I mean I know there’s like this Bolano surge right now and so then a backlash (Newtonian law there) and a lot of my friends (so-called) sort of rolled their eyes over me reading Bolano but fuck them. I walk alone, you know? I’m not going to have others deciding what I want to read. I mean that would be almost anti-literature. I couldn’t read something just to say I’ve read it. That would be like picking your college major because your parents want you to be like a landscape architect or something. I mean only about 20% or something of people even have a college degree. The entire point is to select your occupation, to attempt to create your destiny, and you’re just going to toss it away? You’re just going to abdicate free will? Fuck that. I’m not reading a damn thing for others. That would be death.
3. How did you deal with the footnotes, I mean logistically? I know some people like to use two bookmarks.
What in the fuck are you talking about?
4. Have you read other Bolano? How did this book compare?
I read The Third Reich. It was serialized in The Paris Review. I felt like Charles Dickens and shit reading a serialized novel. It was a strong book, very, very technical (something Bolano prided himself on, when he wanted to write a technical book) and with this ominous undertone, the constant state of threat, a character who really NEEDS TO HELP HIMSELF and knows it, but just can’t. You ever felt that way? I have. I could relate. You ever stuck a cattle prod down your throat but LIKED THE TASTE? (That’s a metaphor, BTW) I also read that short story collection where every story (IMO) is really about writing. Craft, how to write, etc. It might look like the stories are about something else, but you’re wrong. It’s called something last evenings? I don’t remember. But Bolano, in his essence, is always writing about writing. That’s what he gives a shit about, period
5. Did you ever read the book while on drugs or alcohol?