Charles Lavoie offers an alternate, if not more compelling, line for The New Yorker‘s caption contest illustrations, which may point to a redundancy of logic in the latter’s humor — that of minor transgressions in inopportune moments.
This Thursday April 29, at 9 PM Eastern, Michael Kimball, author of Dear Everybody and more, will read live here at HTMLGIANT from his home in Baltimore. Special guest appearance by Andy Devine, author of the newly released Words. Mark your book and bring your good hat.
NY’ers don’t forget that the Ag Reader event is tonight.
Here’s a sweet new review of Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth, which you might remember I liked a whole lot. I’m not the only one, it seems. Good.
There’s less than a day left to bid on my Metal Flowers at Significant Objects. (What am I talking about?) The price is up to $58, and the prize package (for whoever wins if the bidding goes over $76) is still on offer.
The Rumpus has got Jack Pendarvis on Wuthering Heights.
Coldfront’s Graeme Bezanson pointed out on my facebook page that I spelled the name AND url of his organization wrong on my AWP photo album post. He did not point out that I spelled his over-voweled, maple-syrup-drenched name properly. Anyway, I’ll go fix the other post in a minute, but for now, those of you who are interested in poetry criticism would do better to look for it at Coldfrontmag.com, ie here.
Upcoming for NY’ers: Sunday 5/2 is Nirvana Night at Cakeshop, in which “12 poets read original poems—each inspired by one of the 12 songs on this epic album.”
The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen you imagine them of course but you more or less describe the things that happen but nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting, one knows it by radios cinemas newspapers biographies autobiographies until what is happening does not really thrill any one, it excites them a little but it does not really thrill them.
…
It is awfully difficult, action is direct and effective but after all action is necessary and anything that is necessary has to do with human nature and not with the human mind. Therefore a master-piece has essentially not to be necessary, it has to be that is it has to exist but it does not have to be necessary it is not in response to necessity as action is because the minute it is necessary it has in it no possibility of going on.
…
And so always it is true that the master-piece has nothing to do with human nature or with identity, it has to do with the human mind and the entity that is with a thing in itself and not in relation. The moment it is in relation it is common knowledge and anybody can feel and know it and it is not a master-piece.
from “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them”
by Gertrude Stein
Dead Ahead, by Ben Doller
The Sore Throat, by Aaron Kunin
Living Must Bury, by Josie Sigler, 2010 Motherwell Prize
Right now, subscribe for two years and get a free copy of A Best of Fence, volume of choice. Magic win!
I really want to call someone “the Santana of the literary world,” but I don’t know whom.
Why am I oddly stoked to read, or make attempts to read, this?
“Shattering the conventions of political autobiography”?
Looks like somebody’s been noodling with the Reality Hunger…
Archibald's Bar-B-Q
1. And so we mark the success of Slash Pine Poetry Festival No. 2: The Year of the Laundromats. Lots of poems about laundry and laundromats.
I don’t really know how many hours it was. 40 readers at 10 minutes per over the course of the weekend. Then there were the overages (you can’t keep all 40 poets in line, can you?), the undergrad reading, the dinners and bars and making new friends, etc. etc.
Joseph P. Wood puts together a real shindig. There were art galleries, blues singers, bars, bands, poets of all shapes and sizes—and even some fictioners and essayists, though I think they crashed the party. Seats were packed for every venue despite the tornado warnings and thunder so loud I thought I could hear it inside my head.
On a maybe more important note, Joseph took Myron Michael and I to Archibald’s Bar-B-Q (see above) in Tuscaloosa, and I ate a plate of the tastiest ribs I have ever had. The sauce on these things was magical.
2. New issue of Sixth Finch:
Sorry. I was mara-stumbling (stumbling through a marathon)
Sorry. So drunk to not realize my drunkenness
Sorry. But you must order your life for it to fall apart
Want an hour to vanish politely? Well…gin
Anyone can panhandle at night. Even the afternoon. I’d like to see you properly panhandle in the morning
Strange. All whiskey is “fairly good.”
Is that you, trembling in the bed?
I can’t seem to click my tongue with my teeth. Maybe that’s only for novels, or sober people
Disgrace will dive at you!
Drunk as a fucking postage stamp
Me? I prefer an array of siphons and a punch bowl big as a synagogue
Ceiling up your honey! My Sara!
That’s cold