A Fear of Weather

Spring is coming. Spring is here. It’s raining and the grass is once again buoyant. Speaking of rain: weather scares me.

Growing up, my parents taught me that if I get rain on my head and I don’t immediately shower to clean it off, I’ll get sick.

This makes very little sense. Rain ought to be clean. It ought to be a pure – if not the purest – form of water. Certainly, it ought to be cleaner than the water I get from my green showerhead, which is still city-treated water, gone through further treatments via the showerhead.

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Random / 5 Comments
April 28th, 2011 / 9:37 am

Patience, an Asterisk, or the Kitchen

Not so Young today, eh Mike? Happy birthday to our gang’s torch-bearer. In truth if I could see it like any other I think it’d be like Mike Young. No one understands the elasticity of words like he does. No one births knowledge within me with the Other words like Mike. He tells me what I already know in such a way that I didn’t know I knew it. That’s how he usurps my brain. He makes me dumber and smarter while I thought I was looking for a spanking machine. He giggles a high titter. Until midnight tonight you can celebrate old boy’s birth with PGP by getting his poem book for just $6 which is $300 less than the perceived value of the poem “Let’s Build the Last Song and Sneak Away While Everyone Else Is Listening,” $100 of which you can watch below the fold.

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Behind the Scenes / 7 Comments
April 28th, 2011 / 8:51 am

Gopher gaze

This is what I know about sex, there is a hole, there is a stick, and it all works out in the end, and occasionally “in the end,” if you know what I mean. And duh, sometimes two sticks and/or two holes can get along just fine, I went to college. The idea of penetration can only exist because we feel outside of things, but what if we are put inside, a gopher hole maybe, or in a gallery peaking into a room made to make us feel inside a hole. What if aesthetics is humanity’s commercial, something to seem better than it is. Duchamp’s cunt is shaved because Courbet’s used up all the hair. We all know about the male gaze, but the gopher gaze didn’t get a thesis written about it, until now, well not exactly.

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Film / 10 Comments
April 27th, 2011 / 7:31 pm

loaded with tufts like a dogwood or 14 critics

12. Fucking A! Aimee Bender is interviewed about women and drinking.

It was a surprise for me after college to realize I didn’t hate beer, which I had assumed I hated, which cut off a lot of options.

9. Roger Ebert is a badass and just won New Yorker caption contest.

9. Bullet in the Brain is online here. It has typos but who gives a fuck. It has many technical flourishes. It has “moves.” You should read it and then pass it on or disrespect it or yawn or make some comment about critics. I am working a theme here, all crow, etc.

11.

“I made a mistake in writing an essay called ‘The Pleasures of the Difficult,'” Mr. Baumbach said.

13. At the store, do you prefer self-checkout, self-bagging, or is it ethically wrong? What exactly made the dandelion an enemy flower? Why do weathermen despair the rain? You can learn to talk wisely about a nice house or you can learn to build a house. Red Bull makes you an individual, except for the drinking Red Bull thing. Do you aim while peeing? Who chose what would one day be labeled white noise?

14. On the issue:

I’ve always felt those articles somehow reveal more about the writers than they do about me.

Marilyn Monroe.

Random / 30 Comments
April 27th, 2011 / 6:30 pm
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an ounce of cruelty is worth a pound of truth

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Happy birthday to our very own Adam Robinson, publisher of Publishing Genius, bearded loon and sunny gentleman, and also fifth among Iowa freshman in all-purpose yards (952).

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Reviews

Matthew Henriksen’s Ordinary Sun

“The great painter Degas often repeated to me a very true and simple remark by Mallarmé. . . . One day he said to Mallarmé: ‘Yours is a hellish craft. I can’t manage to say what I want, and yet I’m full of ideas. . . .’ And Mallarmé answered: ‘My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas, but with words’.”

Paul Valéry in “Poetry and Abstract Thought” from The Art of Poetry, which is an essay I was supposed to read in college but didn’t. It’s good though, and Valéry is using this anecdote on the way to illustrating a distinction between poetry and “purposive language” such that the latter is akin to walking to a destination while poetry, by contrast, is dancing.

I’m reading Valéry now as fodder for a conversation I’m having with my mom, in which I hope to justify Matthew Henriksen’s abstruse but beautiful book, Ordinary Sun, out now from Black Ocean. It was a valuable challenge to have Mom read these poems to me because her disinterestedness problematized the book. She’s not willing to see the poems as incommunicative but lovely because she is only interested in this “purposive language.”

I emailed her and argued that clearly Henriksen cares about what he’s writing, “so these poems are a good place to start exploring the ineffable. Language — words on their own, without communicative meaning — is one of the essential things about being human,” and she agreed, saying that “yes, words ARE one of the essential things of being human, but it is so they do make sense/meaning with each other, in contrast to nonsense.” So take that, Henriksen. I don’t think my mom likes your book.

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8 Comments
April 27th, 2011 / 10:49 am

In search of lost internet time

This is not an accomplishment: Yesterday, I woke up at 6:30am and went to sleep at 11:30pm, roughly. I spent under an hour on the internet.

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but this is the least amount of time I’ve spent on the internet while being in town (that is, not out of town, e.g. on campus visits, giving readings, or – dare I say it? – vacation) in years.

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Random / 42 Comments
April 27th, 2011 / 8:02 am

Loving All These Thieves

This week I noticed a correspondence between the opening sentence to Great Expectations and the opening of Lolita. I’m interested in the idea of Nabokov stealing from Dickens, a writer he admired and about whom he lectured at Cornell.

Here is the opening of Great Expectations:

“My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.”

Here is the opening to Lolita:

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

Note the correspondence between the two openings in terms of wordplay, the repetition of the consonant sound (p- and l-), READ MORE >

Random / 5 Comments
April 27th, 2011 / 4:43 am
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THIS THURSDAY, at 9 PM Eastern, we’ll be hosting the 12th edition of our Live Giants online reading series, featuring live offerings by the inimitable Matthew Rohrer, Noelle Kocot, & Anthony McCann, each in support of their new books from Wave, as always right here on the site. Don’t miss it! RSVP here.

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