Here’s a bunch of people in Ohio at Noah Cicero’s house watching the ALT LIT GOSSIP awards talking shit, doing drugs, and other things people here can bitch about being a ‘waste of [your internet time].’ Enjoi.
My Favorite New Movies of 2011
Happy New Year, HTMLnets. I watched fewer new films in 2011 than usual, but that won’t stop me from opining on what I saw. Although I should clarify that the following list isn’t limited to 2011, but covers “the thirty newish films I saw this past year.” And here are my lists from 2009 and 2010, for comparison’s sake.
We’ll start with the best…
God is a collective action problem
I read maybe a weird amount about finance and economics. I’m not entirely sure why: it’s not as if I have the means, educational or otherwise, to evaluate the truth of what I’m reading. Felix Salmon is one of my favorite writers in this area. He and others have been talking up this post by Steve Waldman as uniquely informative and thought-provoking. I read it and I felt that this was fair, and then I started thinking (as I will so-painfully-predictably do) about its applications to writing. You should read the whole thing, but I’ve put together a short version (with most of the assertions and very little of the evidence-by-example, the gold standard of persuasion!).
I’ll summarize in advance: finance in general, and banks in particular, are hopelessly complex and opaque, but this is basically a good thing. It allows us to trick ourselves into investing despite our naturally risk-averse nature by hiding the risk inherent to investment. Economic development requires us to solve a classic collective action problem: nobody wants to be the first to invest, but we need broad investment and many failed enterprises in order to generate returns–and benefits in terms of human welfare. Banks help us to move past this problem by lying to us (though they themselves believe the fiction). They can’t eliminate risk, but they can and do hide it. This opacity allows them to commit fraud and other shady activities, but it’s probably necessary to develop something like modern civilization. My edited-down version of Waldman’s argument, and some attempts to link this to writing and reading, are after the fold: READ MORE >
Ariana Reines & Mercury: An Interview
Mercury
by Ariana Reines
Fence Books, 2011
128 pages / $16.95 Buy From Fence
Three falls ago, I was in one of my first legit poetry workshops (that particular workshop during which I realized that poetry was going to be one of those things that would be part of my life for forever, like Lyme Disease or an eating disorder) and I was freaking out about being a girl and wanting to write a particular kind of poem and feeling that I wasn’t allowed to do so. My professor, who was/is this very wise man, a carpenter as well as a poet and probably a prophet of some kind, told me I might be interested in reading Ariana Reines. Since I was at the time a very eager and diligent student I went to my room and read every one of her poems I could find online, and as it was right before Christmas I sent my mom the following e-mail that night:
re: christmas list
Carina Finn
11/30/09
to Debra, debiallied
Also every book ever written by Ariana Reines instead of just the one. There aren’t that many and they aren’t the expensive because she’s only 26. In fact there are only two, Coeur de Lion and The Cow, three if you count her translation of My Heart Laid Bare by Baudelaire which I would also enjoy. Feel free to pass this along to anyone you know who’s in the market for a Christmas present for me. Those books are now the most important things on my list because they are the most important books that have been written in a very long time.
Carina Finn
11/30/09
to Debra, debiallied
Also every book ever written by Ariana Reines instead of just the one. There aren’t that many and they aren’t the expensive because she’s only 26. In fact there are only two, Coeur de Lion and The Cow, three if you count her translation of My Heart Laid Bare by Baudelaire which I would also enjoy. Feel free to pass this along to anyone you know who’s in the market for a Christmas present for me. Those books are now the most important things on my list because they are the most important books that have been written in a very long time.
Because my mother has always bought me any book I have asked for without question, I did get these books for Christmas and I spent all of winter break that year reading them and re-reading them. Since then, because of a lot of happy cosmic circumstances, I’ve had the chance to read her work in graduate classes, write about it, see Ariana read it, and talk to her about it. What follows is a rendition of Facebook messages and e-mails between Ariana and me about her new book, Mercury, which was just released by Fence Books and can be purchased here.
11 Comments
January 2nd, 2012 / 1:00 am
January 2nd, 2012 / 1:00 am
Blake Butler—
For the New Yorker podcast, A.M. Homes reads & discusses Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
3
I Hate Reality
Here is the outline for my novel: there is a complication! but it’s okay because there is a nonsensical invention to solve it! but it breaks! but it’s okay because there was no complication in the first place! I’m a writer!
I hated Mission Impossible: 4 but Chris Toll told me I was wrong but I’m not wrong and here is why.
Take a look at the scene where the mask-making doohickey malfunctions when they are at the hotel to make the deal with the French assassin and the henchman. Here we have some technology that is ridiculously advanced, capable of laser etching into some polymer substance, and also portable and also capable of paint mixing and spraying the paint (albeit not flawlessly, as the machine breaks down). OK, no problem; I don’t care about the probability of that. I’m happy to accept that they have such a device. READ MORE >
woman reading A Season In Hell 2 days before the world ends-but-won’t has 22 thoughts
1. Rimbaud was a hot twink.
2. Rimbaud loved the shit out of god.
3. If Rimbaud read that article in Time about how Mother Teresa didn’t feel the presence of god for 50 years but did her work anyway, he probably wouldn’t beat himself up so much about not experiencing “celestial calm.”
4. Celestial calm is spa spirituality.
5. Who wants to be numb?
6. I want to be numb.
Watch the ALT LIT GOSSIP 2011 Awards Broadcast
ALT LIT GOSSIP ran a live awards broadcast hosted by Steve Roggenbuck. Below you can watch the archive footage.
The Top 20 Albums of 2011 According to David Fishkind
20. Go Tell Fire to the Mountain – WU LYF
I noticed a band with a ridiculous name appearing on music blogs and googled the name. Something like World Unite Lucifer Youth Federation came up and I navigated to their website. The page was cryptic and dark. I watched videos of what seemed like old stock footage under the impossible-to-decipher vocals and heavy drum beats. I downloaded the album, and the next day listened to it while picking strawberries in the rain. It was a Friday and I was cold and my fingers began to prune. Later I would drive to my girlfriend’s house 100 miles away.
19. An Empty Bliss Beyond This World – The Caretaker
After a fight with my girlfriend weeks earlier—I think, or later, or maybe just moments earlier (it’s hard to remember a summer anyway)—I found myself on Facebook deleting the majority of my friends. I needed something to listen to, as the process would end up taking two hours. I put on The Caretaker’s new album and thought I’d made a mistake. It was just sounds, old-seeming sounds, like the musical accompaniment to a 1930s black-and-white Looney Tunes, or Louis Armstrong’s “St. James Infirmary Blues.” Weeks later I listened to it again lying on the ground, and then with my girlfriend in bed, where we agreed we would purchase the record on vinyl the following summer once we got a lease and I moved my record player from my parents’ house to New York.
18. Leave Home – The Men
At some point in the summer I wanted to only listen to loud music. But this record came out before then. Recommended by a friend, it took me three tries to get through the first song, usually stopping the track on my iPod at work before even 90 seconds had passed. When I finally did break through that first song, I listened to the album a lot more, mostly driving, once in my girlfriend’s hometown, after we’d purchased Blizzards from Dairy Queen; I remember she asked who the band was and upon my reply, said, “I thought this was from the 80s.” We would lie in her basement and eat the ice cream until one of us, almost definitely me, started to fall asleep.