THE ZERO-DEGREE NOISELESSNESS OF DEATH: LECTIO I-IV

Speech may be a function of Logos, where rational compositions serve as cultural appropriation, or speech may serve a revolutionary, contestatory role by internally rupturing the structures of Logos at the very points of its own contradictions; screams and laughter may be reactive phenomena, resulting from the neurotic exigencies of life, or they may serve serve as rebellious eruptions of corporeal energy, heterogeneous outbursts of expropriation, where Logos is disrupted by the libido; silence may be the zero-degree noiselessness of death, where life itself is betrayed, or silence may be that moment where sovereignty is elliptically expressed as incommunicable inner experience.

-“Impossible Sovereignty,” Allen S. Weiss

In Medieval philosophy and theology, a lectio (literally, a “reading”) is a meditation on a particular text that can serve as a jumping-off point for further ideas. Traditionally the texts were scriptural, and the lectio would be delivered orally akin to a modern-day lecture; the lectio could also vary in form from shorter more informal meditations (lectio brevior) to more elaborate textual exegeses (lectio difficilior).

–In the Dust of This Plane: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1, Eugene Thacker

LECTIO I: Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl

LECTIO II: Horror vs. The Patriarchy

LECTIO III: Joe Wenderoth pushes the surface

LECTIO IV: The Dionysian Excess of Living

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Word Spaces / 13 Comments
August 25th, 2011 / 4:53 pm

Reviews

The Bee-Loud Glade

The Bee-Loud Glade
by Steve Himmer
Atticus Books, 2011
224 pages / $14.95 Buy from Atticus Books
Rating: 5.0

 

 

 

 

 

 

I wish I had read The Bee-Loud Glade with fewer expectations, though that may have been impossible after examining its exterior. The title is from Yeats (“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”) and the front cover features a slightly altered version of Magritte’s “The False Mirror.” One blurb employs the phrase “postmodern complexity.” Another describes the novel as “Thoreau meets Ballard meets Huysmans and many more.” Thoreau was a hermit for some time, and The Bee-Loud Glade does feature a hermit.

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20 Comments
August 25th, 2011 / 12:06 pm

2 New from Calamari: Gary Lutz’s Divorcer & Vincent Standley’s A Mortal Affect

Calamari Press jumps back to action with two exciting new titles, both now available for order: Gary Lutz’s Divorcer & Vincent Standley’s A Mortal Affect.

“DIVORCER is a collection of seven harrowing and hyperprecise short stories about ruinous relationships and their aftershocks.” $13

“A Mortal Affect is a satire of meaning systems targeting the role bureaucracy and cultural assumptions play in creating, distorting, and replicating the things we believe to be true. Informed by an absurdism in the Modernist vein, the novel is a celebration of error and folly that questions the wisdom of conviction and the faith in metaphysics. These themes play out in a fictional world inhabited by mortals and immortals, the oppressed and the oppressors. The former understand their condition of being oppressed but have no concept of freedom, while the latter emulate mortals but lack the ability to eat, reproduce, or die, even by suicide. Never allegorical or polemical, the novel operates comfortably within the bounds of comedy, avoiding the earnestness and self-conscious urgency common to the novel of ideas.” $18

Presses / 6 Comments
August 25th, 2011 / 11:36 am

The Last Days of Slash Lovering

Slash Lovering (1970-2008) was a Seattle poet whose work focused on the Internet. His work has been labeled “grunge” however his actual association with the music scene is not well established. He was however, confirmed as a freelance writer for Microsoft, writing marketing materials. He traveled in many software-related circles. In 2008 Slashed died in a bike accident while going home to his new house in Redmond. The bits of conversation that follow are based on notes. 

“One of you fags buy me a beer,” said Slash. We were at a Belltown bar in 2007, a year before his death. I was underage with a fake ID. Slash was loud and he seemed extroverted, for once. We were celebrating his retirement from Microsoft.

“I’ll get you a beer,” I said. I met Slash at a dinner party with my parents in 2004. It was a street-of-dreams style house on the Sammamish plateau, outside of Seattle. It was the house of some Microsoft VPs, who my parents also knew from mingling with the parents of my classmates at the Overlake School in Redmond. Redmond is the home of Microsoft. I grew up about a mile from the main campus.

I would not have discovered Slash’s poetry at all except for a burned CD he gave me shortly after our first meeting. He was hanging around a punk show at a place called Dog City in the University District. I had driven out there on some desolate high school Friday. I was depressed and I didn’t know anyone at the show, so I left early and put the CD in my parent’s computer. The poetry was dense and short and almost always included elements of graphic design. I had always assumed that he posted his work to obscure forums, but to this date, the CD is the only evidence I have of his poetry.

“I gave this company my life. And they gave me a way to live, but not a good way. I had to make my own way,” said Slash. READ MORE >

Author Spotlight / 9 Comments
August 25th, 2011 / 10:42 am

Girl, Girl, Girl

Linda

In 1982, one fictional Brad Hamilton, the mascot of every boy’s autobiography, watched from the bathroom — only he wasn’t eye, but mind watching, lids and palm closed over his eyes and penis, respectively — a fictional Linda remove her red bikini and approach him with that timeless face of two nipples, nose of a navel, and nether smile, to open mouth him with chlorine-flavored lips. I must have watched that scene ∞ times in my life, each time saddened by what I had missed, my hetero-normative tastes so vanilla ice-cream you’ll need a brownie to help it go down. We’ll accept the disembodied rain or sprinkler behind Linda, placed, mind you, by woman director Amy Heckerling, as some natural timely event, for the best muse has a production team working behind her; or rather, in front of her, behind the cameras. The trick of painting a nude in a landscape is not the nude, but the landscape — the wiggle and waddle of foliage so natural, it goes unnoticed. Heckerling’s faint dabs of purple play with Monet’s Giverny, at times breached by the Seine, which the latter painted numerous times, the schizophrenic morning light never loyal to the day before. So Monet kept painting the same scene, the same Seine, retroactively polishing memory into a final sheen. Phoebe Cates goes on to Private School…for Girls (1983), a sex comedy in which you know what happens without watching. Voyeurism was always mental anyways.

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Random / 11 Comments
August 24th, 2011 / 7:27 pm

Reviews

Gender City

Gender City
by Lisa Samuels
Shearsman Books Ltd, 2011
114 pages / $16.00 Buy from Shearsman Books
Rating: 0.0

 

 

 

 

 

 

The epigraph(s?) of Gender City condenses what would be the otherwise unacknowledged or scattered cathectic charges of pavilions in a blank and anti-readerly moment as esoterically alarming as the discovery of age-weighted shelving practices, while utilizing the stylistic succor of regulative coolant (the wonderful Lisa Robertson) and aspirant fantasticality (New Zealand at Shanghai World Expo 2010). Spectrally efficient, these two quotes effect mutation and prove temporarily problematic: by brushing the bounds of a credible tele-cocoon with you, the writing soon coaxes out resentment for the rhetorical transposition in section one, that is, demoing a contrasting reader task, and projecting this actual loneliness backwards. This is not a question of inelegance, but a question, for me, of palling around with dissatisfaction beyond an intimacy that was never anything but that, a serif font that does the one like an I [“Homosocial fugue”], the first of nine content markers marking content that does not.

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64 Comments
August 24th, 2011 / 12:57 pm

ZOETROPE, PLEASE.

I got an email from Zoetrope with the subject line: “Fall Preview!  The Horror Issue” and my first thought was, Awesome, I’ll probably have to resubscribe to Zoetrope: All Story.

Then I opened it and read the email’s content:

Zoetrope’s Fall 2011 release is a specially themed horror edition that includes scary stories from Jim Shepard, Karen Russell, Alexandra Kleeman, and Ryu Murakami.

Are you fucking kidding me?  Those are the authors you pick for your horror issue, Zoetrope?  READ MORE >

Random / 61 Comments
August 24th, 2011 / 12:00 pm

“as a human being living amidst a civilization’s collapse”: Mathias Svalina talks about his new book & gives away money


I’m pleased to present the following interview I conducted with Mathias Svalina, author of one book of poems, Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), & one book of prose, the newly released I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur (Mud Luscious Press).

To celebrate the release of I.A.A.V.P.E., Mathias has decided to give away money.

One dollar to be exact, but a very special dollar…

To win, post a word from the dictionary in the comment box below. Mathias will randomly select one of the words as the winning word. To the writer of the winning word, Mathias will write a unique business plan on a dollar bill, which the winner can then showcase (or spend) to commemorate their first dollar earned.

Contest ends Friday at noon.

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Author Spotlight / 48 Comments
August 24th, 2011 / 10:43 am

The Writerly Life: Part Uno

Started teaching at a new place today. Was hired on Friday. That’s one weekend to prep. It’s a freshman writing class. Nice kids. First day of college, etc. etc. They all get laptops. I do too. I don’t like teaching when I’m not doing it. I like it okay when I am. We talked about some fiction-y things. They wrote a little about an impossible thing that didn’t happen to them but did, ala truth vs. Truth in fiction, etc. I don’t know. I had no time to prep this class that I’ve never taught. It will not be taut. But they will write some things and revise a few. Maybe they’ll develop a writing vocabulary. They are art students so they will also draw some things. They will put these words and pictures together and make new things. I said something about Sid Vicious. I said fuck. I wore a nice teal dress and some heels. You know, like a real-live-person. This morning, before everything, I wrote a poem about X-ray Astronomy but really about pain or something. This is part of a new hour-a-morning scheme. And then I worked at another job where I wrote emails and shuffled papers, which was fine. I dealt with some drama here and there. Then I went to the other job, teaching writing. Then I went to an art collective meeting. Then I went home and crawled into my pajamas and a hoodie. I wrestled the tennis ball away from the pit-chow mix. I can stick my hand into his mouth, and he won’t bite me. Sometimes he growls if I tug on his paws. Sometimes I try to stick my head in his mouth. I did not walk too much today. Or do my special physical therapy exercises. But nothing hurts too bad. There was coffee. I smell like cigarettes.

Behind the Scenes & Random / 4 Comments
August 23rd, 2011 / 11:27 pm

Thoughts on Masha Tupitsyn’s LACONIA, cultural criticism, the excesses of a text, minimalist critique, and living vicariously through film

When I first read Masha Tupitsyn’s hybrid-genre book Beauty Talk and Monsters (Semiotexte), I was completely floored by it. So I was excited to read her new book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (Zero Books)—a book of aphoristic film and media commentary written in the spirit of cultural observers like Chris Marker. There is something beautiful about Masha’s way of “reading” culture, how she honors the connections and resonances of the media she encounters, the way it is processed, assimilated and re-invented when it is filtered through her perception; intermingling with specific memories and preoccupations. Masha integrates the subjective and the critical in a way that demonstrates the specificity of our encounters with media.  Both Beauty Talk and LACONIA could be described as a literary approach to film criticism, but it’s also fitting to describe the works as a cinematic approach to literary writing. In Beauty Talk, narrative and a criticism are tightly interwoven. As stories, the essays are stunning; as critical analysis, sharp. Masha’s recent book LACONIA reminds me of the ways in which the viewer is also a meaning-maker, a participant critic.

 

#481. IN AMERICA, WHEN YOU ATTACK THE CULTURE INDUSTRY, YOU ARE CALLED CYNICAL. BUT IT SHOULD BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND. *

“Postmodern irony means never having to say you are sorry. Or that you are serious.”
–Suzanne Moore, Looking for Trouble

Cultural studies is on the rise. The canon is dying, or at least is seriously ill. Critics are now turning their attention to the media that surrounds them—sitcoms, Hollywood films, magazines, pop music, kitsch, reality TV, fashion trends, internet memes. Repulsed by the academic elitism of cultural criticism as well as the notion that there are certain texts that are unworthy of the critic’s attention, the proponents of cultural studies have launched a vitriolic attack on the hierarchical distinction between high culture and low culture. The exclusion of “low” and popular culture and the privileging of refined culture and art that caters to a specialized/trained audience has its problems: it reinforces the idea that art is an “autonomous” institution while implicitly promoting classism, eliminating the perspective of lower class folk and ignoring subaltern cultural production and engagement (Adorno famously denounced jazz music).

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Craft Notes & Film & I Like __ A Lot & Technology / 30 Comments
August 23rd, 2011 / 8:33 pm