What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Dodie Bellamy}
Dodie Bellamy’s most recent book is the buddhist (Publication Studio), an essayistic memoir based on her blog, Belladodie. Her most recent chapbook is Whistle While You Dixie (Summer BF Press). Time Out New York named her chapbook Barf Manifesto (Ugly Duckling) “Best Book Under 30 Pages” for 2009. She usually teaches 4 classes a semester in the grad writing programs at Antioch Los Angeles, California College of the Arts, and San Francisco State.
Interview of an Intoxicated Runner
Last week I had a slight buzz and attempted to randomly email 10 random athletes who intoxicated themselves on various substances WHILE COMPETING in their chosen athletic event. Dock Ellis has no email; he is dead. (“The ball was small sometimes, the ball was large sometimes, sometimes I saw the catcher, sometimes I didn’t.”) Ron Artest, of Hennessey fame, would not answer his Laker’s fan site email address. (“I kept it in my locker. I’d just walk to the liquor store and get it.”) Jeremy Mayfield (“What are you calling illegal?”) drove a race car while on meth, but who here gives a fuck about NASCAR? So. But human being and conceptual artist (in my opinion, as I feel artistic perception presupposes its own dimensionality, beyond involvement or signification or even the substitution of stimulus for sensation, etc.) Joe Kukura answered the mail. Thank you, Joe.
Last July, Joe ran the San Francisco Half Marathon (13.1) miles while drinking 13.1 beers, or one beer every mile along the way. I decided to interview the man.
It seems you have removed the form and movements of running and drinking from their normal contexts, selected their material and spiritual natures and combined them, thus creating art. And any art that becomes physical I consider to be the sublime. Do you consider yourself a conceptual artist?
No, but I’m flattered by the analogy! I consider myself a humor blogger. That medium, though, holds outsize importance in contemporary culture. Any old nobody with a DSL connection, if they’re funny enough, can have a driving role in how vast numbers of people are amused — if for an hour, a day, a week, or more. (Ever forward an LOLcat jpeg? It was produced by an un-famous random person, yet it may have ultimately amused thousands.) It’s a great blessing to be writing during this era.
I suppose there is a train-wreck “self-abuse as art” strain in this project, a la Lux Interior from the Cramps or on that old “Jackass” TV program. And I will admit to bringing a philosophical or intellectual tone to discussions drinking booze while exercising — but that is meant only as a humor device. My main creative motivation is that I just want to be someone who has a good blog.
How many times have you vomited during a run?
The Beginner’s Guide to Deleuze
Over lunch, Christopher Higgs and I talked about Gilles Deleuze. I was saying how a lot of my friends–Chris, Blake Butler, and Derek White, to name a few–are really into his writing, especially the ginormous book A Thousand Pleateaus, co-written with Felix Guattari. I’ve tried to read it and get into it a few times, and kept putting the book up, scared off by not being able to immediately comprehend the text, not being able to decipher the numerous codes, terms, coinages. Recently, I changed. I picked up A Thousand Pleateaus again and flipped to a random chapter and read. I enjoyed it, and am enjoying it. Like my experience with Finnegans Wake, there are lucid swathes that I feel I understand, and then there are times when it’s packed dense or just orgiastically conceptual and I tune out a bit. But that process of coming in and out of lucidity is nice. Sort of trancelike.
I mentioned asking Chris some questions about Deleuze, his thinking, the books. I’m sort of acquainted with his ideas through the book A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (amazing book!), and what Deleuze I’ve now read. But, let me ask you/Chris some maybe dumb questions.
Firstly: Why should we read Deleuze?
Deleuze is the future. He is almost the now, but not yet. Just out of reach, just over the horizon, he is akin to the force that makes the sky pink after the sun sets and pink again right before the sun rises. He is both pre and post everything, like the feeling before a meal of being famished followed by the feeling after the meal of being stuffed. He does what no other thinker before him could do: he upends Plato, he quiets Hegel, he puts all the little thinkers to bed. READ MORE >
Well that’s interesting: Poets Athletic Club
I will send Chris Toll's book to the first commenter to name this player.
What’s in a name? From the outside, the Poet’s Athletic Club on North Avenue in Baltimore looks like it might be a bar. I’ve never been inside it. One time me and Steph called to see what the deal was. Apparently it’s a philanthropy club for people who went to Poets High School. There isn’t poetry happening, but I’m thinking there might be shuffleboard. There is a positive but racist review of it at Yelp.
After a lot of social searching, the softball team I’m playing on this year decided to co-opt the name for our team. We feature writer bodies, so Poets Athletic Club works well. We also considered “Ballers,” “Aristotle’s Poetics,” “Phat Pitches,” and “Nuts and Berries.”
Other teams in the league are, “We’d Hit That,” “Butt Sweat and Tears,” “Multiple Scoregasms” and “Smack that Pitch Up.” Names that are funny but aren’t vile include “Jean-Claude Grand Slam” and — no, that’s the only one. There are two teams named “Saved by the Balls” and two named “Don’t Come on Our Bases” and three named “Master Batters.” There is only one “Top of the 6th Bottom of the 9th.” There are over 200 teams in the league. I’ll let you know how we do.
Go! Team. Bring on the Major Leagues. Boring Triple Play (for Sasha Fletcher). Best baseball catches of the world. Braves go 13-0 in 82. The Brothers K. She’s 9. Ambidextrous pitcher has 6-fingered glove. Mike Schmidt retires crying. Cap’n Jazz. This stupid thing. This amazing thing. Spaceman Bill Lee. Tinker to Evers to Chance. Merkle’s Boner. OK, the bird one. Prince and Cecil. All the Stars Came Out That Night. The poop one. Steve Bartman (fuckn Cubs fans). Mays. Jones. Softball.
Twilight of the American Idols
I’ve been having problems sleeping lately. When I have problems sleeping, I become restless. It’s hard for me to get much reading done, especially anything heavy, because when I’m at my apartment I prefer to read in my bed, and if I’m tired and distracted what generally happens is that I fall asleep mid-sentence (and bend my glasses). It’s hot out. It’s really hot out. I have no A/C in my apartment. This is perhaps the reason I’ve been restless, and hopefully that’s true, because the heat is something I can adjust to.
Because I live across the street from my favorite bar, when I get restless I head to the bar and have a few drinks, generally with the intention of facilitating sleep. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I end up at the bar and there’s nobody I know there except the bartenders and it’s awkward. Usually I can count on familiar enough faces to at least guarantee conversation.
Last night I couldn’t sleep, found myself restless, had already watched two movies and an episode of Twin Peaks (which I’m revisiting for the first time in the decade since I originally saw it), so I said fuck it and headed to the bar. I ordered a vodka gimlet first. Then I ordered a whiskey & soda. I was out of cash by this point, because I don’t carry that much cash on me regularly, and I knew that after mixing vodka and whiskey it would be unwise to drink that much more anyway, so I went home. I had a bit of a buzz going on. I got on my computer.
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What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Brian Evenson}
Illustration by Dave Crosland
Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the limited edition novella Baby Leg, published by New York Tyrant Press in 2009. In 2009 he also published the novel Last Days (which won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009) and the story collection Fugue State, both of which were on Time Out New York‘s top books of the year. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an IHG Award. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Slovenian. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program. Other books include The Wavering Knife, Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship.
Best friends forever
These two shirts were worn by Beavis and Butthead between 1993 and 1997, though one may presume that our friends still wore their shirts in our collective consciousness following the show’s end — through spin-offs King of the Hill and Daria, via ones Tom Anderson and Daria Morgendorffer, respectively — to this very day, we among the kids who unwittingly grew into near adults, the thick riffs of the invoked bands still sawing away at our heads, some distant drum roll ready to lift our arms in the tethered rapture of a limb. Watching MTV into the night, I always wished I had someone to share my feelings about the death of masculinity, or rather just feelings in general. The odd effeminate misogyny and the perverse coital nuances of their guitar holding were misguided directions to manhood, so I had no choice but to look towards my father, who picked up dog feces on the lawn with his bare hands. I told him to wear gloves and he called me a girl.
What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions: Series Returns Monday!!!}
Here is the publication schedule for the next volume of my ongoing series “What is Experimental Literature? {Five Questions}” which promises to be dynamite, thanks to the amazing contributions from the writers who have graciously joined the conversation. New writers, new questions!
Week of June 6th
Brian Evenson
Dodie Bellamy
Week of June 13th
Eileen Myles
Evan Lavender-Smith
Week of June 20th
Johannes Göransson
Sesshu Foster
Week of June 27th
Dennis Cooper
Selah Saterstrom
Week of July 4th
Vi Khi Nao
Michael Martone
