I don’t give a fuck: I like Magic. I haven’t played in at least ten years, but even just off my memories of the game up to, oh, 18, and later in the online versions, I will attest that MtG is the greatest and most intricately strategic and customizable game ever created. Fuck chess and backgammon. Magic is a universe where not only are there so many possible utilities under the array of spells and creatures you can involve in any given match, but also a ridiculous level of inner-tuning, logic, semantic, prediction, counteractivity, and innovation of nuts and bolts. It is the ultimate rendering of a game where to be successful you must decide your approach, construct your apparatus, and operate that apparatus under the manner of luck and the countless structures employed by each opponent. There are so many fucking spells.
Today I’m bored again and found my old archives of cards I have left after I sold most of them off when I quit in high school. I decided to pull 3 cards out at random and write about their utility. It seems to me to have a lot to do with manipulation of other entities, like words and systems of words.
Oh, and also, kiss my ass, Magic rules.
READ MORE >
180 Comments
August 12th, 2010 / 2:11 pm
Julie Doxsee is doing a “blog tour” for her terrific new book, Objects For a Fog Death, so I asked Julie to write about her 5 favorite object combinations and her 5 favorite objects to leave by themselves. She did us better than my essaystic suggestion and wrote these “fabley little poem paragraphs.” I have used sophisticated Google Image Search techniques to jimmy up some complements. Enjoy!
Giraffe tooth/Helmet
You pull into a nook in the alley and my helmet clunks yours and this is a kind of talk we’re having but in the talk there is a kill wish and a rocket launch and a bright laser-beam lengthening our hearts across the sidewalk end to end. There is blood and light. You pull a giraffe tooth from your pocket, center it in your palm and say have you ever seen one of these? From under my tongue I pull a giraffe tooth. I center it on my palm and say yes. We sit this way until the shadows disappear. READ MORE >
Author Spotlight / 17 Comments
August 12th, 2010 / 1:24 pm
Photo Booth Mask by Mark Pernice
“Photo Booth Mask” is an actual mask rendered from a distorted image using Apple’s photo booth application; that he documents himself wearing the mask adds to the disembodied simulacra. The project may point to the absurd narcissism of the affected expressions usually made with the distortion effects, a kind of reverse aesthetic of trying to look grotesque. One is reminded of Francis Bacon, who fucked with faces way back; true, the camera changed painting, and now it changes sculpture, and with the latter, there’s an eerie leap from what ought to be two-dimensional to an actualized object, a transgression of mimesis.
Random / 12 Comments
August 12th, 2010 / 11:57 am
I’m reading Dean Young’s new nonfiction book, The Art of Recklessness, part of The Art Of Series from Graywolf Press. Only 30 pages in, and I feel like I’ve swan dived into the swirling, dangerous waters of Young’s unbelievably complex collector’s brain. I love it. Here’s a review.
On page 12, Young quotes Wallace Stevens:
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
This is the exact idea I want to relay to my students when school starts next week. Not being shackled to rules, allowing poems to fall out of you un-self-consciously, is what makes great art. Learning craft so that you don’t have to think about it should probably happen simultaneously, but without imagination, recklessness, fire you’re fucked.
This is a different kind of book, one that might be the most important kind. I’ll follow up when I’ve actually finished reading it.
29 Comments
August 12th, 2010 / 8:26 am
I mentioned Dave Mustaine yesterday on twitter jokingly and then realized today that dude just published a memoir. Shit yes. I am going to put on my fat kid clothes and read this while eating cereal.
Author Spotlight / 40 Comments
August 11th, 2010 / 3:50 pm
Seems like someone said something somewhere about 3D books happening in about 3 years…well, it looks like these “Between Page & Screen” folks have got it going on right now!!
Have you ever checked out textsound: an online publication of sound? Their mission: “Our mission is to bring together a range of experimental soundworks from the U.S. and abroad.”
According to some dubious organization called Online PhD Programs, here are The Top Literary Studies Blogs of 2010
You gotta check out the Philoctetes Center: The Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination, which has nearly 200 videos spanning all kinds of interesting things…
Here’s one example:
“I’ll Go On: An Afternoon of Samuel Beckett”
Roundtable discussion with
Edward Albee, Tom Bishop, Alvin Epstein, Lois Oppenheim, and John Turturro
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5UF2-2kqaw&feature=channel
Roundup / 4 Comments
August 11th, 2010 / 12:01 pm
