The excellent David Peak and Mike Kitchell have new books from SOLAR LUXURIANCE, in an edition of 30 and 10. Grab one up before they’re gone. Here’s half a descriptor for Mike’s piece: One morning I woke up to find my browser open to an archive of an online Deleuze & Guattari mailing list. Scrolling through it I was struck by a narrative text by a user who went by the name of “rongrong.” Nobody at any other point in the archive made any reference to rongrong’s enigmatic post. I thought it was amazing, a hybrid theory/text that was interesting, distant, and intelligent. I decided, as an homage to the hidden mysteries of the web, that I would rewrite rongrong’s text, leaving occasional fragments verbatim.
Binary Countdown to You
00110001 00110000. A reflection, of the kind stylized under internet-based logos ever more increasingly, not only actualizes an object and propels it into space, but implicates a pristine white surface on which it stands.
00111001. An empty white room is a good place for a logo. A white room, if one considers the etymology of white (white blood cell, white wedding, white house), is a good thing, a room of one’s own without an angry Woolf, a good place to write.
00111000. A wall on which one writes one’s thoughts is not graffiti, for graffiti is written on walls by the marginalized other, a group who has been unfriended irl. In real life, people have less friends.
00110111. Your facebook wall is not the Berlin wall, or the Great Wall — a place to keep others out — but the Wailing Wall, a daily place of prayer, where hopes and dreams are stored.
00110110. If you are followed, your wall is on somebody else’s feed. You do not reflect on your wall, but type whatever. When someone says whatever, in that suburban ghetto way, they are dismissing you. A baby bird, a tiny twitter, chirps “feed me.”
00110101. In Caravaggio’s “Narcissus” (c.1599), the eponymous young man, in love with his reflection, is transfixed by its residence on the surface of a pool. Narcissus, in Greek, means “sleep, numbness.”
00110100. Narcissus cannot leave his reflection. Unable to differentiate between himself and his image, he wastes away and dies by the pool. He partied like it was 1599.
00110011. No one considers Pequod’s reflection on the sea, as it was not in a white room, but on a blue circle. The light, one presumes, is turned off in Beckett’s room, so his room is black. When Benjy Compson closes his eyes, he thinks the room turns black.
00110010. At the end of a difficult French film that was excruciatingly boring, you see a black box with the word FIN inside that box. You will write on your wall about seeing that French film, and how you only watched half of it, because half of the time you were reading the subtitles.
00110001. Every word is a subtitle in the film of your life, directed and shot in real time by you. Congratulations. You, in a white room, not reflecting on things, just reflecting.
Jimmy Chen—
Props to Sam Hey for making the connection between Gatsby’s allegorical “eyes of T.J. Eckleburg” and Geico’s recent googly eyes campaign. If God is money, then look the other way.
Productive Imitation, Appropriation, and Transformation of Which I Strongly Approve
Note the similarities (and, as importantly, the differences) between the openings to Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be An Other Woman” (from Self-Help, 1985) and Junot Diaz’s “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” (from Drown, 1996), a story that seems to this reader to be written in homage, ten years later, to Moore’s story. Both stories are from debut collections, both collections introduce voicey masters to the world, both masters continue to write deeply idiosyncratic work subsequently, but usually not in second person:
From Lorrie Moore’s “How to Be an Other Woman” READ MORE >
7 is holy like melt butter medium heat
1. Are you short? Well, bless your soul. Here’s a Short Review for you. All October like Alexandre Aja.
14. The Velvet Underground and Nico. Something. Sneeze. I never understand music.
9. 1926 Tao Lin silver dollar!
94. As I have said before, this flash contest will pay you in beer. Beer. Beer. This is why I keep saying it. Beer.
1117: I didn’t even know there was a wordstock festival. Should I have?
2. Duras:
Men like women who write. Even though they don’t say so. A writer is a foreign country.
17. Zines for sale on Etsy. Made by palm, finger, nail.
SINGSONGS: An Interview With Mat Sweet/Boduf Songs
New feature? Maybe. I have been thinking about doing some interviews with musicians about the way they approach what they do, informed by my approach to writing.
A few years ago, I managed to score a brief gig as a record reviewer for a now defunct print magazine. Which meant for me a few free records. Not much else. Some of them were okay. Many were dull. A record called Lion Devours the Sun by a English singer-songwriter named Mat Sweet remains a regular part of my music rotation. I very likely listen to it—or one of the two follow-up records, How Shadows Chase the Balance and the newest This Alone Above All Else in Spite of Everything—or some of it every week. Which is to say I listen to Boduf Songs every week.
Sweet’s music is quiet, dark, intimate. Alchemical. Occult. Not overly serious, but serious when it needs to be. Pretty. Pretty creepy. READ MORE >
I Like What The Hell Is Going On Over Here
New Hauschka album available for a stream. Preparedly playing prepared piano.
Richard Nash extravaganza at WWAATD. Was gonna do this myself, now I don’t have to.
Noah Cicero doesn’t want no one talking bout no theories. He very upset.
This lady, this movie, every time I think why not. READ MORE >
Vargas Llosa Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
The author of more than 30 novels, plays and works of nonfiction, he is known for his expansive language, his alertness to the profound and the profane, and his fierce and dark disdain for tyranny. His books are not without magical touches, but he is more grounded, more a “realist” than fellow Nobel laureate and South American Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Mario Vargas Llosa wins 2010’s Nobel Prize. Thoughts?