Delonte West on Writing
I’m into all kinds of art. I enjoy beautiful things and I like to create.
I guess he had some emotions he wanted to get off his chest. He was just skipping down the Yellow Brick Road in the Wizard of Oz.
If we are going to play with a sock, I’ll play with a sock.
I got out of house arrest this morning.
Bugs Bunny is the smoothest dude I ever met. You know he be chillin’ like it just be a normal day and he- it be cold just like how it is in Boston and he just want to dive in the ground, pop up, he be like oh man this ain’t Albuquerque. That’s got to be the tightest life you just hop underneath the ground and go! No traffic, no Mass pike, no tolls, no taking Yankee hats off- just underneath the ground…BAM…carrots…
I did a study in college, and my study show, in the African American community, the Yankee hat, the navy blue and white, it just, I don’t know, do something for your swagger.
I like to paint murals of the ocean that I see beyond the horizon, because I feel if — in order for us to grow, we gotta know.
You kinda almost have to be the voice of reason out there.
My timing’s a little off. I felt a little foolish.
Soon, maybe this summer, I may get an art gallery going.
Twenty years from now, you’re going to see me riding in a drop top hummer buck naked with some ankle socks on and a headband on.
Well, there is two halves to everything.
One fish, two fish. Red fish, blue fish. Knick knack, paddy whack, give a dog a bone. Ding.
You can’t kill a G. Bugs Bunny is a G.
They took my uniform out of my locker today.
I think it’s kind of freaky.
Dispatch from North Country: The U.P. Book Tour
I started going to the library when I was a kid. My mom took me often, let me check out as many books as I wanted. During the summer, I participated in reading programs. Back then, it was popular to have contests to see how many books you could read in a summer. There were prizes and I enjoy prizes so I would read even more voraciously than I was ordinarily wont to do. It was always such a marvel to me that you could go and borrow books and when you returned them you could get even more books, all for free. I don’t go to libraries as much as I did when I was a kid but there are few institutions that impress me more than the modern library.
On Thursday I participated in the kickoff event of the U.P. Book Tour, which will feature more than 20 events and 65 writers all over Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for the next month. The tour was organized by U.P. writer and resident Ron Riekki who has been coordinating this project for months. Before moving last summer, I lived in the U.P. for five years so it was great to come back to the area and do a bunch of literary things and participate in the first leg of the tour. The tour event I participated in was a panel discussing Michigan books at the Peter White Public Library in Marquette, MI. At a time when libraries are under attack and facing severe budget cuts across the country, it was fantastic to participate in this event at a really amazing, community-supported library. The staff was gracious and professional and the whole set up was really welcoming. If you’re ever in the U.P., the Peter White Public Library is well worth a visit. The facility is really extensive and it’s not just a library, it’s also a community center. There’s a café, a community room with its own stage, public computers and wireless Internet, a really serious children’s library with a play area that comes in really handy during the impossibly long U.P. winters, and most importantly there is, as with every library I’ve ever known, a truly passionate and dedicated staff of librarians who love nothing more than books and putting books into the hands of readers. The library is also open late. It seems so rare these days to see a library open after 5 p.m. that I had to look at the door twice. During the week, they close at 9 p.m.
Metamorphoses
One morning Michael Richards woke up to discover he had been transformed into a giant racist. Saying “nigger” is the opposite of suicide, horrible for one’s career. He freaked out and kept repeating the n-word in a comedy club, caught on tape, the way the thousands of rapes and lynchings never were. Technology’s greatest capacity is its inadvertence to do some good. One morning I woke up to discover that I didn’t want to read any more of Kafka’s diaries, just too depressing I guess. To Milena Jesenská he once wrote, of his love for her, “love is to me that you are the knife which I turn within myself,” which — if I were a girl — would’ve done wonders at the bar, instead of that vodka martini and BMW car keys (or Roland Barthes, depending on the girl you’re after) rested ever gently on the counter. Love is to you the butter knife that spreads it on you, which is less of a compliment than a call to have your cholesterol checked. It’s a beautiful moment when, deep into a book you don’t enjoy, you finally stop. The most honest blurb is not finishing. As the make-up artists applied “baked” on Kramer’s face, I wonder if it reminded them of Blackface ☻. When white people want darker skin for socioeconomically convoluted reasons, I feel so happy ☺.
Have You Seen This Bear?
This young fella (about 1 year old, according to some expert) has been creating quite a stir in the local Boston area. This picture, courtesy of The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, cycled across the local news channels last night, poking its cute little nose into the homes of thousands. One woman reported that she saw this guy rolling around in her backyard yesterday morning. Ah, imagine! A quiet New England summer, the sun just rising over the trees, lying down in the cool, wet grass and rubbing your naked back and ass all over it. Can’t say I don’t envy Mr. (or Ms.) Bear over there. Another visual witness filmed the great creature lumbering about its day, explaining that normally he is a simple wedding photographer, but this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity roused him to take up the camera in new and unprecedented ways. Truly an inspiration to us all. And this seemingly innocent candid bears (pun intended!) a great deal of weight. It shows the fear and isolation of the creature in the eyes of modern suburban culture. What he thought to be an open grassy knoll happened to be the cornerstone of middle class life. A life more foreign to the bear than its onlookers are to the wild. There is such beauty and grace in its stature. It grasps to the branch like a child to his mother’s leg, eyes wide, mouth puckered tight. The greenery just slightly blocking our view of its face. And is there not a better moment to talk about precision and power in metaphor? Man and nature have been torn so far apart, blah blah, no connection, alienation, etc. We all know that. But hey, this is aesthetics in action. This is not just a photo of a bear. This is a photo of a human pondering his surrounding world. So controlled, so conformed, so well known and understood and industrialized, and yet… Here we are, bear and man, so close together in the circle of mammalian life, but further separated than any two creatures that have ever shared a backyard. I went camping a few weeks ago with my girlfriend and there were signs everywhere warning us of bears, and we put all our food and beer in the car when away from the site, but man, can’t we all just get along? Ehh, I guess not. Anyway, that’s old news because Whitey Bulger is dead!
Thoughts on The Visibility of Darkness
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal has gotten quite a bit of attention. In the article, Meghan Cox Gurdon laments that Young Adult fiction has, essentially, gotten too real, too dark with stories that explore complex, difficult themes that Gurdon argues are too much for young adults. She writes:
If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.
Many people, both Young Adult writers and writers from other genres have been swift and passionate in taking Gurdon to task for her rather narrow argument and the shallow way she criticizes Young Adult literature. Individuals also took to Twitter, as we are wont to do these days using the hashtag #yasaves, as a means of discussing how Young Adult literature was more than just literature but also some kind of salvation. Most of the counterarguments to Gurdon’s perspective speak to the difficulty of adolescence and how it is good for young people to see a multitude of realities reflected by the literature they read. As one of many, many people who relied heavily on books as a coping mechanism when I was younger, I was glad to see such a resounding response to Gurdon’s polemic. What really inspired this level of response though, might well be the condescending tone throughout Gurdon’s article. Any valid points she makes are difficult to appreciate because she’s so busy casting aspersions on an entire genre by discussing a small selection of books that reflect the “depravity,” that so troubles her.
What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Johannes Göransson}
Johannes Göransson is the author of four books – Dear Ra, A New Quarantine Will Take My Place, Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”), and Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate – and the translator of several more – most recently Johan Jönson’s Collobert Orbital and Aase Berg’s With Deer. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame and edits Action Books and the online journal Action, Yes, and he blogs at montevidayo.com.
Drinking at the Movies
I glow Hobart and came across an interview with Julia Wertz. Interesting. I then went to her comic blog (once named Fart Party, but she’s tired of that phrase). I then $$ her book. I also glow drinking at the movies. Once, during an absolutely packed house of the showing of Fahrenheit 911 (this was Massachusetts, go figure), I snuck a Fosters oil can into my pants and then when I opened it (always an awkward moment) the beer loudly exploded all over my jeans. That was embarrassing. Julia Wertz is a graphic memoirist. Often she is stumbling, spilling things, misunderstanding the situation, young and dumb (I mean the type of dumb that comes with this developmental age; the character is always self aware and obviously intelligent) and wander/wondering about Brooklyn—often, well, embarrassed. (Example: At one point, she has a giant, painful, of-unknown-origin rash on her ass.) If you are about to go all Oh God another story about a twenty-something in Brooklyn, blah, blah, bar scene, go right ahead. In the introduction, Julia Wertz says, “As an autobiographical writer, I had no choice but to portray the natural progression of my life, and I apologize to anyone who’s sick of these stories as I am.”
It’s an insightful, funny thing to say, and most likely speaks to one of the more endearing aspects of this character, her voice.
The Screen on My Phone Broke
Above is the last picture it took before taking on water at work today, from which it would never recover. Luckily I uploaded the captured smorgasbord before it was too late. I replaced the phone at my local Verizon retailer. Now I’ve got a classic Samsung flip-style phone. Feeling pretty retro. Like, déjà vu. This shit happened two years ago. Seriously trippy.
Anyway, yesterday I received a package from out of the country containing three copies of a chapbook titled “Porn” and by “Richard Longfellow.” After some Facebook+Gmail research and hard-thinking, I determined the package to be from Jackson Nieuwland. I haven’t read it yet, but my mother did. She said it was like karaoke. Seems interesting. The chapbooks are pink and have a lot of things. I read a few words from the middle of a poem in the middle of the pamphlet yesterday, but was it like karaoke?
My dog is getting groomed right now. Right outside the house. In a van. The van pulls right up, washes the dog, cuts the dog’s hair, delivers the dog anew. It’s a deal.
I just want to take this moment to shout out to M Kitchell, I been loving David Lynch too. Rewatched Twin Peaks this month too.
And to all you out there thinking about voting for Mitt Romney, I’m just here to say, that’s cool I guess. I mean, I’m not gonna do that, but I’m not here to judge. Just out of curiosity though, are any HTMLGIANT readers Mormon? Does religion influence your vote (I mean anyone, not just Mormons)? Does anyone here even vote?
But really, don’t those hotdogs look good?
Random Ass Live Reading Of Some Recent Books I Like #6
The reading is over.
I read from:
Fog Gorgeous Stag by Sean Lovelace
Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City by Michael Bible
The Village on Horseback by Jesse Ball
The Iguana Complex by Darby Larson
Sparrow and Other Eulogies by Megan Martin
The Book of Interfering Bodies by Daniel Borzutzky
Tongue Party by Sarah Rose Etter
Helsinki by Peter Richards
&
The Cow by Ariana Reines
What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Sesshu Foster}
photo by Gary Kuwahara
Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East Los Angeles for 25 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and the on-line magazine Joyland. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the ELA Guide. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex (winner of the 2006 Believer Magazine Book Award) and the hybrid text World Ball Notebook (winner of a 2010 American Book Award).