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OH, THIS IS DEPRESSING AND I CAN’T LOOK AWAY FROM IT

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvxwf1jxdaM

And in ever so slightly better times…

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V14PfDDwxlE

Film / 8 Comments
May 27th, 2010 / 1:25 pm

Nick Antosca—

New York Times Magazine on hipster darling M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasm: Maybe kind of a complete poseur? UPDATE: M.I.A. pissed off by story, tries to trick fans into prank calling the reporter, Lynn Hirschberg.

Blake Butler

Letters With Character

Check out Letters With Character, a site that publishes letters written from people to fictional characters, running in connection with Ben Greenman’s forthcoming and beautiful new collection, What He’s Poised to Do.

Here’s the beginning of one to Gertrude Stein’s Blue Coat:

Dear Blue Coat,

Why are you guided guided away, guided and guided away?

Uncategorized / 5 Comments
May 27th, 2010 / 12:14 pm

Brian Foley—

via thethe

I once heard a scholar use the term “project” as he introduced another poet at a reading. He went on and on: “Her project echoes Dickinson’s project [blah blah blah].” The comparison seemed fine, but I wasn’t really sure the poet in question really had a “project” per se. Nowadays, poetry critics and scholars often refer to an entire body of work by one poet as a “project,” but I don’t think poems work that way. I think poems come from the earth and work through the mind from the ground up. I think poems are living things that grow from the earth into the brain

(more…)

Nick Antosca

FEAR THAT MAKES THE HEART BEAT FAST

mother of tears

I had a vivid nightmare—it involved a member of my nuclear family turned into a little person with a suction cup mouth. The mouth had tiny teeth around the inner rim. The family member was coming to hurt me and grab me with its little hands. I thought Why did he ever buy the new mouth? because I knew that installing that on his face was what had changed everything. And I had to go up a narrow tower staircase and close a trap door behind me.

I woke up raining sweat. I was literally vibrating. The feeling of authentic fear was also a kind of exhilaration. Related to the feeling of having escaped.

(Is there a word, perhaps a German word, for the vertigo one feels when waking up from a dream and realizing it wasn’t real? That is, the terrible disappointment of waking from a dream of finding millions of gold doubloons buried just under the dirt of your back yard and realizing you’re still broke—or the glorious relief of waking from a nightmare of losing limbs or being humiliated, only to realize it never happened—or the guilty rush of waking from a dream of murder to think: Whoa… I got away with it. Because I’ve had all of those.)

I realized I hadn’t had that feeling in a long time—hadn’t had a nightmare that felt so real it scared me. I saw my heart beating fast through the skin of my chest. People pay money for that feeling. Then I realized I hadn’t been scared, genuinely scared like with a quickened heart rate, by a book or a film in recent memory.

Do you lose that susceptibility as you age (and read/watch more)? Because I know it happened to me more often as a young reader. Off the top of my head I tried to make a list of Shit that Actually Scared Me:

Maybe Something Including “Mother”

Everyday Genius has been a blast this month, with full weeks contributed by Christopher Newgent, Amelia Gray and Matt Bell, all figuring out ways to present lit on the net in a way that is more than words on a webpage.

This week, Rozalia Jovanovic curated a postcard series with 24 artists and writers, including htmlgiant faves like Deb Olin Unferth, Tao Lin, Justin Taylor, Leni Zumas, all based on five different assignments. Today’s instructions were to “Explain how to do something in 5-7 steps.” One contributor’s response is above, and all the contributors will be matched to their cards when the series is complete. Collect ’em all!

Uncategorized / 4 Comments
May 27th, 2010 / 8:57 am

Roxane Gay

FYI: Publishing is Dying Again Because Garrison Keillor Says So

Another day, another obituary for the publishing industry which, despite countless instances of garment rending for its death, somehow manages to continue… not dying. Garrison Keillor begins his lament by naming all the fancy writers he ran into at a fancy New York party, the implication being that he doesn’t quite belong in the fancy writing world and yet, there he is. Of course, because this is Garrison Keillor, he has to make an aw shucks reference to the Midwest and continues to offer his bona fides as a man of the people because he drives a car with 150,000 miles on it. That’s such a quaint practice when it’s a choice, driving a car into the ground. For people who cannot afford a new car, 150,000 miles probably holds considerably less charm. Keillor does this, of course, to remind us, yet again, that he is not one of the publishing glitterati. He is a stranger in a strange land, or at least, that’s what he wants us to think so he can continue hawking his down home Midwestern charm and wisdom, or what some might call, schlock.

Reading (&) the Body

Courtesy of Penelope Illustration

I’m re-reading a little Peter Brooks in column A and in column B thinking a lot about reading and the body, reading as consumption, reading while eating, reading while shitting, reading while smoking, the frenetic idleness of reading finding its counterpoint in various bodily acts/needs/processes.

From Brooks’s Reading for the Plot:

Speaking reductively, without nuance, one might say that on the one hand narrative tends toward a thematics of the desired, potentially possessable body, and on the other toward a readerly experience of consuming, a having that, in an era of triumphant capitalism, is bound to take on commercial forms, giving to the commerce in narrative understandings a specifically commercial tinge.

What do you do when you read? Or do you just read?

Excerpts & Random / 25 Comments
May 26th, 2010 / 10:28 pm

Ken Baumann