Hey look–it’s STUFF!
It’s HTMLGiant meatspace weekend (for me and four other people)! I’m heading down to Atlanta this afternoon to see Amy and Blake–then Amy and I will continue onward to Sarasota, FL where we’ll be reading and talking at New College with Alec Niedenthal and Alexis Orgera. But while I’m doing that, you can do this:
The Heart is Green from so Much Waiting by Sam Starkweather is now on sale from Immaculate Disciples Press.
There’s a new installment of WKE Story Time (episode 5) and it features Willy Vlautin, author of Lean on Pete, which I have heard nothing but the best and most enthusiastic things about.
The Spring issue of Sixth Finch, featuring Leigh Stein, Jackie Clark, Farrah Field, Dan Hoy, art by Glenray Tutor, and more.
The “metal flowers” ebay auction has ended. I am very proud to announce that the winning bid was a whopping $81, all of which will go to Girls Write Now. As this amount is greater than $76 (the so-called Doty-Lethem threshold), the winning bidder will get an additional prize package. (What am I talking about?)
Oh and last but not least, here’s a little more followup (via Crooks and Liars) on the “racist racists” post about Arizona from the other day. Here’s some information about AZ-State Senator Russell Pearce, author of the law, and his close friend, neo-Nazi J.T. Ready. Now here’s an avowed white nationalist bragging on his website about how he “helped” Pearce write the law. So, yeah.
Monday Roundup: let’s talk about me for a minute.
NY’ers don’t forget that the Ag Reader event is tonight.
Here’s a sweet new review of Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth, which you might remember I liked a whole lot. I’m not the only one, it seems. Good.
There’s less than a day left to bid on my Metal Flowers at Significant Objects. (What am I talking about?) The price is up to $58, and the prize package (for whoever wins if the bidding goes over $76) is still on offer.
The Rumpus has got Jack Pendarvis on Wuthering Heights.
Coldfront’s Graeme Bezanson pointed out on my facebook page that I spelled the name AND url of his organization wrong on my AWP photo album post. He did not point out that I spelled his over-voweled, maple-syrup-drenched name properly. Anyway, I’ll go fix the other post in a minute, but for now, those of you who are interested in poetry criticism would do better to look for it at Coldfrontmag.com, ie here.
Upcoming for NY’ers: Sunday 5/2 is Nirvana Night at Cakeshop, in which “12 poets read original poems—each inspired by one of the 12 songs on this epic album.”
Roundup / Comments Off on Monday Roundup: let’s talk about me for a minute.
April 26th, 2010 / 2:26 pm
April 26th, 2010 / 2:26 pm
Roundup in which the pollen count leaves me with no choice but to shapeshift into my reptile self
hotmanhokage i seen one before it was riding a bike disguised as a man and i saw his eyes.i think my cousin is a reptilian because her eyes look like it all that all the time
lescwilson I think u should consider that one of the qualities of these reptilians is known to be their cold hearted nature and that they’d kill u at the drop of a hat… for food…so don’t be so eager for their control lest u be farmed like veal or pork!
LadyWennor Draconians happen to be my favorite cataloged species. Don’t care about their plans of taking over earth if that is the case. I find Draconians hot but if you ask me I always fall for the extream.
“Wake Up!”: The Reptilian Shapeshifter Vidclip Festival is currently running at Coop’s place. Where else?
With a great hearty hat tip to Kate Ankofski- this interactive guide to finding your favorite Bob Dylan album.
At the Rumpus, Jami Attenberg interviews Teddy Wayne and David Goodwillie at the same time (!!!) about their new novels, terrorism, and the media.
And this one from the Almost Rhymes File: Christopher Hitchens on the Dark Side of Dickens.
Roundup: In which we get religion, then get stoned, and are chock-full of hatred and family values
Super Best Friends
Jewcy has an interview with Michael Muhammad Knight, author of Journey to the End of Islam. This one is a must-read.
Also in Islam-related news, the South Park guys finally got the death threat they’ve been gunning for, but it was kind of lame, and posted to a blog, and issued as a kind of speculation that Trey Parker and Matt Stone would “probably wind up like Theo van Gogh.” Also, it’s already been taken down from the site where it was posted. To learn less about this story than I’ve already told you, go to Gawker, where I got it from.
Slate’s got the latest installment of their title-like-a-Slate-parody-but-actually-pretty-fascinating series “Why I give my nine-year-old pot” (spoiler alert: he’s autistic and it helps him). In this latest episode, when Marie’s dealer goes out of town, she learns the hard way that not all strains of pot work the same. Her son J doesn’t respond to anything quite like he does to the White Russian that nobody in town seems to have in-stock!!!!
Speaking of great strains of pot, last night I got this email from Ronnie Scott of The Lifted Brow. Subj: “Too much bongs.” Text: “Whoops! I put about a fifth of our August issue online.” And it’s true, by God! Diane Williams, our own Jimmy Chen, Kim Chinquee and more!
Have you heard about Scott Baio’s twitter-based war with Jezebel.com? They’ve posted a handy complete timeline of their conflict with him. It gets really good when his wife Renee steps in, via facebook and calls the entire Jezebel staff “FAR LEFT lesbian shitasses!!!! No wonder you’re all lesbos because what man in his right mind could put up with your cuntness? Scott Baio has more class in his piss than all of you all!!!” Yes, because that’s how you prove classiness, with homophobic slurs and a piss joke. Big win for family values!
Speaking of family values, if you fell into a coma in 1995, and just woke up this morning, you may not want to read the rest of this sentence because it might make your heart and brain simultaneously crumple into powder under the crushing realization of just how much has changed. Okay, are you braced? Are you ready? Green Day’s Broadway musical is a smash hit, says Charles Isherwood in the New York Times. Also, this thing called 9/11 happened, but I’ll tell you about that later.
Blake Butler—
Great article on collaboration, with Joseph Young and Christine Sajecki, by William Walsh at Kenyon Review blog.
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Back to the Grind: Your Monday Afternoon Roundup
If I don’t tell you about Molly Young writing about Charles Bukowski at the Poetry Foundation, the terrorists win.
You are also not going to believe that such a thing as not knowing about this great writer is something that happened to you in your life. – Giancarlo DiTrapano introduces a story by Harriette Simpson Arnow on the VICE blog. We probably linked this already, but I really like this sentence.
The Examiner has a list of fifty author-on-author put-downs. Here’s Byron on Keats in 1820- “Here are Johnny Keats’s p@# a-bed poetry…There is such a trash of Keats and the like upon my tables, that I am ashamed to look at them.” And Katherine Mansfield on E.M. Forster’s Howards End in 1915- “And I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.” Thanks for this one go to Elliott David.
VIA FACEBOOK: Sara Faye Lieber refers us to this helpful guide to the trustworthiness of beards. Alice Townes is interested in this Observer article about Simon Singh, chiropractors, and the net-based popular uprising against Britain’s insane libel laws. Is this because she is a 1L or because she is part-British? The world may never know. Yennie Cheung, proprietor of the Hipster Book Club, has charts and graphs detailing The Music Industry & Online Piracy by the Numbers. Speaking of the Hipster Book Club, did I ever link to their “Reliving Your First Time” feature? Well whether for the first or the second time, here’s that link now.
One of the best parts of experiencing a book for the first time is being thrilled, stunned, even moved to tears by its content. It’s easy to read the book again and try to recapture some of that magic, but nothing quite compares to the first time. With that thought in mind, the HBC asked a few writers what books they would like to read again for the first time.
There are ten contributors including Junot Diaz, Dan Chaon, Steve Almond, Julie Klausner–and yours truly. It was a very cool thing to be part of; hope you’ll give it a look.
via Gawker, who got it from the Rumpus!
Will Manley is a retired librarian. In 1992, while working for the Wilson Library Bulletin, he sent a survey to subscribers about sex. 5,000 librarians responded, but the prudish Library Bulletin wouldn’t publish the results. They’ve finally been released! […] 22% believed that libraries should have condom dispensers in their bathrooms. 20% had “done it” in the library. 91% had read “The Joy of Sex.”
Read the full results here.
And just to end up where we began–with terrorists–at Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin catches up with Trey Parker and Matt Stone to talk about the 200th episode of South Park and their ongoing battle with Comedy Central over whether they can depict the Prophet Mohammed on TV. Funny thing, the boys point out that SP actually did depict Mohammad in an episode called “Super Best Friends,” a pre-9/11 episode which has never been censored or pulled from re-runs.
NYTea Time
Hey, it’s really nice outside so I want to go walk over the Williamsburg bridge, but I actually got an email inquiring about what happened to these little roundups, and directing my attention specifically to this review of the new Ander Monson by marketing guru David Shields. Shields is ecstatic about Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir, and he left me intrigued, which is more than I can say that any of the seven hundred “think-piece”-reviews of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto did for my interest level in it–so, point for Monson, I guess. I have very good memories of Other Electricities, less good memories of Vacationland, and didn’t quite get around to reading Neck Deep, though I heard him read from / speak about that book once, and remember enjoying it–though not what I enjoyed exactly–so anyway it’s good to see something new from Monson, and maybe I’ll get around to this one. Okay, what else? Well, Walter Kirn’s got the cover story, with a take-down of the new Ian McEwan. Here’s the whole first paragraph.
According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad — so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed — that they’re actually rather good. “Solar,” the new novel by Ian McEwan, is just the opposite: a book so good — so ingeniously designed, irreproachably high-minded and skillfully brought off — that it’s actually quite bad. Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it’s impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral. There’s so little wrong with it that there’s nothing particularly right about it, either. It’s impressive to behold but something of a virtuous pain to read.
It goes on from there for two pages. Joe Queenan has an essay about why he won’t read books that feature sports teams he hates. Elif Batuman reviews Those Who Wait, the new novel by Olga Grushin. Anne Lamott has written another book with the word “bird” in the title. And Joseph Salvatore looks at the new Adam Thirlwell, a novel about–among other things–a geriatric libertine. Good times at the Times! And now, if you’ll excuse me–THE BRIDGE.
Third Mess Section
1. Artists of genius, such as Goya, or those of merely remarkable talent, do their best work outside the bounds of capital, patronage, and today’s Great Strip Bar of Artistic Veneration that is New York City, and to a lesser and lesser degree, Paris. Autonomy of creation relies on autonomy of thought and production. –John Sevigny on Francisco Goya, at Guernica
2. “Wasn’t there a sentence in there somewhere that we don’t have now,” Simon asked Mills outside, “where he says — and this is a terrible sentence, but — ‘I went over to the house, and I was hoping there would be a message there or something’? I feel there’s an emotional bump between him talking about his father, which is real substantive stuff, to a moment of what sounds like, by comparison, almost petty practicality about, What I’m going to do with Dad’s house? It goes from one to the other and there’s no…” –David Simon on the set of Treme, a NYT profile
3. Ji Lee on his Bubble Project, creativity & advertising.
4. The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon. –the Abilene Paradox
5. “They are all there, the great talkers,” he answered, “them and the things they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man sees, thinks, and what seeing, thinking, saying does, to what Freudians call the subconcious,–but as far for psychoanalysis,” he broke off, “it’s neither more or less than blackmail.” –James Joyce, A Portrait of the Man Who Is, at Present, One of the More Signifigant Figures in Literature, from Vanity Fair (1922)
6. In a series of mock gunfights with colleagues Bohr always drew second and always won. –The gunfighter’s dilemma, or, Always draw second
7. Seizing the moment I told him that I had been hustling him and had deliberately lost the first four games. His response was that I was a patzer. All during the filming of 2001we played chess whenever I was in London and every fifth game I did something unusual. –Playing Chess With Kubrick
Must-See TV
Here’s Bill Donohue facing off with Sinead O’Connor and some less interesting people on Larry King Live. BD, if you don’t know, is the rabid bull terrier of the Catholic League, a far-far right outfit whose exact relationship to Catholicism-proper I don’t know much about. In this priceless clip, he literally makes the “if there’s grass on the field, play ball” argument re child-molester priests. The best part is when Sinead asks him to please explain to her what exactly he means by “post-pubescent.”And hey, since we’re up on Sinead today, here’s her recent op-ed in The Washington Post, the scariest part of which is when she mentions that her famous pope-tearing-SNL-episode was eighteen years ago. Wow.
at The Rumpus, Drew Johnson has got a big fat interview with Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of their Lives, and the man about whom Barry Hannah said “Only the Irish geniuses wrote like this.” Speaking of which, don’t forget about the Rumpus’s 4/6 NYC Reading and their Read With Sam Lipsyte Contest.
Defaced, the tumblr blog we’ve all been waiting for. I can’t wait to start contributing to it seven times a day (see above artwork). via Rachel Fershleiser’s facebook. Also on facebook, Elliott David reviews the new Lost: “Totally pointless jerk off waste of time Lost episode. I was really rooting for Keamy to kill them both. The fucking Kwons are lame.” I don’t know what any of that means, and kind of hope I never find out. Hey, and how awesome is this? “Carly Fiorina: Breadless holiday of Passover is a time to ‘break bread.” (via Mark Doten’s.)
And oh boy! Sex stuff! via A&L Daily–
via same, At the American Scholar, Brian Boyd wonders about all the unpublished Nabokov that’s out there.
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1. Alison Malone, sister of Giantfriend Kendra Grant Malone, makes awesome portraits of gamers.
2. Michael Kimball interviews Dawn Raffel.
3. Talkshows used to be rad [via David Peak]