There’s this guy I know who was raised by professional clowns in New Mexico. When we met seven years ago in New Orleans I was terrified of him but now he can be counted on to bring things to my attention that I would have otherwise missed, like this passage from the introduction to The House of Blue Leaves by John Guare.
I’m right here in the heart of the action, in the bedroom community of the heart of the action, and I live in the El Dorado Apartments and the main street of Jackson Heights has Tudor-topped buildings with pizza slices for sale beneath them and discount radios and discount drugs and discount records and the Chippendale-paneled elevator in my apartment is all carved up with Love To Fuck that no amount of polishing can ever erase. And why do my dreams, which should be the best part of me, why do my dreams, my wants, constantly humiliate me? Why don’t I get the breaks? What happened? I’m hip. I’m hep. I’m a New Yorker. The heart of the action. Just a subway ride to the heart of the action. I want to be part of that skyline. I want to blend into those lights. Hey, dreams, I dreamed you. I’m not something you curb a dog for. New York is where it all is. So why aren’t I here?
The Equalizer 1.3: Joshua Corey, Stephanie Anderson, Buck Downs, Shanna Compton, Laura Carter, Peter Davis, Alana Dagen, Reb Livingston, Cody Walker, John Cotter, Craig Santos Perez, and Chris Martin.
The Equalizer 1.5: Cynthia Cruz, Reb Livingston, Allison Gauss, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Cody Walker, Buck Downs, Barbara Cully, Peter Davis, Lucas Farrell, Stephanie Anderson, Noah Falck, Carol Fink, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Matt Hart, Maureen Thorson, Amy King, and Chris Martin.
Strangely enough, Mr. Joyce has almost universally been denied the right to do on a larger scale what any Yankee foreman employing foreign laborers does habitually on a smaller scale, namely, to work out a more elastic and a richer vocabulary which will serve purposes unserved by schoolroom English… Those who cannot transcend Aristotle need make no attempt to read this fascinating epic. The ideas do not march single file, nor at a uniform speed.
from the manifesto of transition, a literary journal, published in 1929: “Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism, and desirous of crystallizing a viewpoint… Narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection of a metamorphosis of reality.”
from Reddit: “In 1903 the Wright brothers flew for 59 seconds. 38 years later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. 28 years after that, we landed on the moon. We went from gliding a few feet off the ground for less than a minute to launching rockets out of orbit, traveling for hundreds of thousands of miles, landing on the moon, and then returning, all within a single lifetime.”
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If you define technological growth/advancement as the continual manifestation of processes previously unexperienced, how would you define cultural growth/advancement? Is there such a thing? I sometimes think that evolution is a weird and harmful idea; so easy to term something as growth that may be more destructive in implicit or temporally stretched ways. Most of this relates to what I get in arguments about most of the time, anyway, which is: should there ever be an accepted utopia-pointed all-human goal? And if not, doesn’t the notion of advancement, even on a small (cultural; decade-to-decade) scale crumble? And, even smaller still: isn’t the (for now mostly inexplicable) emotional foundation for human action the purest and most reasonable foundation there is?
addendum: Also: if we say that technological improvement is understood as making new processes or making old processes with less energy, maybe we try to make our culture more efficient.
When I was a kid, I read the Sweet Valley High books. I read them all. I may still read them from time to time as an adult but will not confirm this publicly. I loved Elizabeth and Jessica, those adorable blonde twins, those charming California girls. They were twins! But different! I loved Todd, Elizabeth’s serious boyfriend. He played basketball. Jessica was a bit of a loose girl. She made out with more than one guy in high school. I empathized with homely Enid and misunderstood Lila. These people were my secret friends once I had exhausted the charms of Little House on the Prairie. I loved how chaste the books were and how satisfying each story felt. When the Super Editions were released, I was there, I was invested, thrilled to have twice the Sweet Valley goodness in one book.
Today, I squealed like a ten year old because there’s going to be a sequel, and now they are adults, Elizabeth and Jessica. I heartell of a rift. Elizabeth is in New York. Where is Jessica? Why is there a rift between them? I don’t know, but not nearly soon enough, we will have answers. Don’t you dare tell me dreams don’t come true.
A mime is a tragic figure, as they are contained inside a non-existent box, the projection of a world defined by its constraint. Their vocation and existential desperation is to communicate that which is not there. A happy mime is like a happy clown: a satire of itself, as anyone with a heart would be devastated to be locked inside themselves. One’s greatest critic are their organs, conspiring to spaz out any day. Comedy gets a smile and drama gets one salty tear drop because life is 70% sea water and that is some salty shit. Saline the sea of love. Ok I’ll stop.
1. If you missed last night’s live reading/q&a with Grace Krilanovich, it is now available for archived viewing here (in multiple parts, below the live feed screen).
2. Richard Nash announces Red Lemonade, the first imprint of his new Cursor publishing apparatus, including three compelling titles: Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman (Apr 2011), Zazen by Vanessa Veselka (May 2011), and Follow Me Down Kio Stark (June 2011).
3. Timothy Donnelly’s Cloud Corporation gets a 2 page review in the latest issue of the New Yorker (partial preview online): “…In Donnelly’s hands, we feel again that we live again in a universe with a god.”
4. Giancarlo DiTrapano writes about cluster headaches at Thought Catalog.
There is a small world nestled in a big sky. The small world has its own sky, land, people, animals, etc. etc., and although the world is small, if you take the world’s train, you begin to see that the world is vast, because the train travels a meandering route in a hypnotic motion.
We get on this world’s train when we read Ana Božičević’s book, Stars of the Night Commute. The passengers are intimates, yet they are covered with a film of remoteness, and the commute at times bores through this remoteness, and at other times travels the periphery. The abiding mystery of this commute is presented through lines in an early poem, “Always the beast has a remote heart.” And then at the end of the same poem, “At the end of poetry the poem can no longer be remote.” This tension between remoteness of the beast’s heart and intimacy of the poem’s heart causes the whole of the book to ache in the way of a taut muscle stretching to span these disparate realms.
How do we get from point A to B when we are involved in the physics of a dream? Is there a point A and point B in the physics of a dream? In the Stars of the Night Commute, there is a starting point, where the window is opened and air flows in. And, at the end of the book, is the closed and summerless room. But, the route between the two also climbs and descends, skips and glides, as we are woven through memory’s scaffolding. And, on this same variegated route, we are led round and round the circular path, an endless mulling that causes a thought to be worn down to a “white pebble.”
There’s this guy I know who was raised by professional clowns in New Mexico. When we met seven years ago in New Orleans I was terrified of him but now he can be counted on to bring things to my attention that I would have otherwise missed, like this passage from the introduction to The House of Blue Leaves by John Guare.
I.