Ben & Amy Read Chapbooks: Gchat Edition
My friend Amy Lawless and I like to read chapbooks and review them on the internet. We used to write these together, while drinking wine and watching TV. We live in different cities now, so we did this one over gchat. Here are our recent reviews. We hope you buy these chapbooks:
Signs
Cornel West got hipstamaticed recently carrying a funny sign. He, among his compatriots, want to occupy wall street. I walked down wall street once, remember seeing a bronze bull with huge testicles. If males had two penises and one ball, everyone would want to suck the ball. This is called market economy theory. Hipstamatic makes photos look older than when they were taken, the inverse way old sci-fi movies tried to make everything look new. Though they were filmed in black and white. Somebody with borderline personality disorder is said to see the world in black and white, as in impulsive and erratic abstractions of “good” and “bad,” implying that well rounded people see things in grey, like an old dog. Movements with hashtags feel like phone numbers, like if I called #occupywallstreet I’d get put on hold with Rage Against the Machine playing. A cutie like Miranda July shouldn’t talk about holes and fingers without my thinking about her MFA. (I liked her “))<>((” thing more than Salinger’s parenthesis bouquet “(((((((((()))))))))).”) I like corporations because they take care of things. Sure it’s dishonest, but so is love. They’re like bad parents who don’t care enough but at least there’s food on the table and running water. If it wasn’t for Comcast, I’d be without internet and tv and I would have to binge on Indian food, and two hours later Pepto-Bismol would have themselves a “return customer.” I’d have no choice but to pick up War and Peace and use it for a pillow. In 1965, Bob Dylan was supposedly “[…] on the pavement, thinking about the government,” which is called loitering. Robert Zimmerman found himself a more gentile name on behalf of America; sorta sad, jew know what I’m sayin? Most revolution logos include a fist, a family of fingers inside a cave. I would rather they just flip me off.
A little street
A rare Vermeer painting “The Little Street” (c. 1658) shows the side of a street in Holland spotted with a cast of the painter’s usual subjects, who may be taking a break from their role at the windows above. His sole painting of this nature, nobody knows why, that day, he decided to leave his room and paint from outside. Some art historians suggest that the scene in entirely imagined. I imagine the daylight, however dimmed by the clouds, entering the black windows — the soft angular light, the new shapes presented, and the intricate narratives unfolding inside. Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Holland, 1945,” which begins the only girl I’ve ever loved/was born with roses in her eyes/but then they buried her alive/one evening 1945 may well be about Anne Frank, her legacy one of edifice: of her building, of the bookshelf that led to her secret annex, the published cover of her diary proposing how one might look at it. This one sees her in her room, the way Vermeer would have imagined, reading a letter from a boy, or writing one; and while history congratulates composing letters, decomposing bodies has the final say. Buildings haven’t changed much in Holland, at least I’m guessing. I’ve never been. Who needs Amsterdam when you have rush hour traffic jam in front of you. At a red light, I imagine things in a glass room moving in an anthropologically sound way. We list our wars I and II, as if we were counting on something.
Reading Comics: Christopher Lirette on the Dark Phoenix Saga
Welcome to the second installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’m excited to report that I’ve got a bunch of great contributors lined up, and am myself working on a few entries. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but would like to participate, email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Christopher Lirette…
“The Libertine Adventures of Scott and Jean, or Genocidal Orgasm and Mystical Unions in the Dark Phoenix Saga”
Over the last few weeks, my students and I read Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s 1980 Marvel comics classic “Dark Phoenix Saga,” the most popular story in Uncanny X-Men. I’m teaching a class focusing on superheroines and depictions of women kicking ass under the rubric of gender and sexuality. So far, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to teach that there’s more to studying gender in literature than pointing out moments of sexism—a harder task than I thought it would be, perhaps because our primary texts feature scantily clad women beating up villains and forming romance with dudes whose clothes get caught in their muscle striations. Although William Marston Moulton created Wonder Woman in 1942 to combat “the blood-curdling masculinity” he found plaguing titles such as Batman and Superman, it’s not until “Dark Phoenix Saga” that we get a comic book that truly addresses the problem of the deuxième sexe superheroique: a story that revels in the messiness of desire, one whose heroine’s problems, while mythic, symbolize the contradictory messages real people receive about gender.
Black harbor is featuring a lovely short film about Luca DiPierro’s work. There’s also a great interview with Luca on the Black Harbor website.
Woody Allen on Writing
I’d rather struggle with films than struggle with other things.
I love rain!
I hate special effects!
When you come in close, you can see the bacteria and what happens between man and his fellow man.
Art in general is full of people who just talk, talk, talk.
I am two with nature.
When a film is finished I look at it and I’m disappointed and I dislike it very much.
I don’t see my films again.
I work every day.
I don’t mind if she throws up on me.
Tradition is the illusion of permanence.
I try to make the characters always contradicting themselves.
To me the most tragic, the most sad quality is if a person has profound feelings about life, about existence and religion and love and the more deep aspects of life, and that person is not gifted enough to be able to express it.
Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.
I’ve never been an intellectual but I have this look.
I really haven’t lived up to the luck I’ve had.
I think being funny is not anyone’s first choice.
I feel that I have influenced nobody.
I never liked clowns.
Reading Comics: Greg Hunter on the new Daredevil
Welcome to the first installment of my new series: Reading Comics. I’m excited to report that I’ve got a bunch of great contributors lined up, and am myself working on a few entries. If you haven’t contacted me yet, but would like to participate, email me and let me know! Without further ado….here’s Greg Hunter…
Daredevil #4 (Story by Mark Waid, Art by Marcos Martin)
Shortly before the arrival of DC Comics’ New 52, DC’s competitor Marvel released the first issue of a new series starring its blind crimefighter Daredevil. In light of the timing, the new Daredevil serves as a parallel study in what makes a relaunch succeed or fail. And, if the first few issues are any indication, a master class.
