Toppling the Vinyl Castle (Rule of Threes #3)

Or, what I did over Christmas Weekend.

1. Liked a photo called “Sawhorse Buddha” from an upcoming series by Josh Grigsby:

2. Read A poem from Lana Turner Journal called “Market Forces Are Brighter Than The Sun” by Cathy Park Hong, which is crunchy and smudgy and full of errant exclamation points.

3. Read Less Than Zero and felt wonderfully wretched afterward. This excerpt encapsulates the book for me:

While reading the paper at twilight by the pool, I see a story about how a local man tried to bury himself alive in his backyard because it was “so hot, too hot.” I read the article a second time and then put the paper down and watch my sisters. They’re still wearing their bikinis and sunglasses and they lie beneath the darkening sky and play a game in which they pretend to be dead. They ask me to judge which one of them can look dead the longest; the one who wins get to push the other one into the pool. I watch them and listen to the tape that’s playing on the Walkman I’m wearing. The Go-Go’s are singing “I wanna be worlds away/I know things will be okay when I get worlds away.” Whoever made the tape then let the record skip and I close my eyes and hear them start to sing “Vacation” and when I open my eyes, my sisters are floating face down in the pool, wondering who can look drowned the longest.

Plus One:

Watched The Lakers get spanked by the Cavs. This made my Christmas, especially when they got whiny and pouty about it. Phil Jackson, I love you, but you can be a spoiled brat.

I Like __ A Lot & Random & Web Hype / 18 Comments
December 28th, 2009 / 3:14 pm

Weird stuff inside holy places

2618_Erwin-Wurm.jpg sant_h.jpg

If you live in a city, chances are you can walk into a gallery or museum and see something extremely weird on the floor. Pedestals are like easels, cloaked in antiquity — it’s not brilliant unless it’s on the floor. I used visit art galleries on Saturdays, a sorta tryst with culture as a full-time bureaucrat, shamefully bowing my head at the severe, stunningly attractive “receptionists” (dunno what to call them, those hot chicks sitting at the front) as I licked through the resume of whoever got his or her MFA. If there’s a tinge of resentment in my voice, I’m sorry, I’ve just put down too many Artforum essays completely confused about not what I just read, but why. If you need a “post-” to label it and a PhD to describe it, it don’t got that swing.

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Random / 35 Comments
December 28th, 2009 / 2:01 pm
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A new issue of Glitterpony is live with hot poems by Rachel Glaser, Hoa Nguyen, Michelle Taransky and others.

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Interview with Jeremy M. Davies

I met Jeremy M. Davies in a hotel room. It was late—or early, depending. He came in with a whirl, holding a huge manuscript, wearing a lot of black, or charcoal, depending. As soon as Davies walked in, someone handed him some whiskey, then the whole group left.

The next time I saw Davies, he walked into a Mexican restaurant, late—not late in the evening, per se, but simply late. About an hour late. Whereas he did not walk in with a huge manuscript, he was wearing a lot of black, or charcoal, depending.

But enough about that. Jeremy Davies’s Rose Alley is dense with wit, charm, and dirty, dirty smut, disguised in lush, meandering metaphor. Although the story—if one can honestly call it a story—is set during the 1968 Paris student riots, the chapters jump to follow different characters all involved in a film. As I was reading this book, I emailed Jeremy & told him I forgot he was the author. To me, that’s one of the ultimate compliments. I mean: I read his book, knowing him, and I was so blown away I forgot he wrote it. But don’t take my word for it: Josh Cohen said this book was his favorite of 2009 from someone he knows; powerhouse demi-god Harry Mathews says, “You have no excuse for not reading this book;” the ever brilliant Steve Katz says, “He is an impeccable stylist who creates a richness full of Nabokovean Pynchonistics, totally original, dressed in wacky erudition.”

And so, without further ado, the interview:

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Author Spotlight / 16 Comments
December 28th, 2009 / 9:48 am

“Bring a Book or Prepare to Die of Boredom”

Are the new [stupid fucking] post-flight-253 regulations the best thing to happen to publishing since the week before James Frey turned out to be a liar? From the Gizmodo Unofficial Guide to Flying After the Underwear Bomb.

Bring a book. Not a Kindle, not a Nook, not any other sort of ebook reader, but a plain ol’ low-tech book. Because apparently books are pretty much the only thing you can have in your hands during the final hour of your flight (“the government says ok”) and how the hell else will you keep from falling into a cold and uncomfortable slumber?

Technology / 22 Comments
December 28th, 2009 / 1:11 am

Sunday Service

Joe Hall Poem

4.13.5

In the mother fucking sound and the mother fucking light, in

The iterations of thunder, the bass so high

It hurls you into the grass, all these bitches lying

On their beds, touching themselves, waiting for me

An algorithm of trees exploding in your face, shaved from soap

In a prison cell, in a pair of yellow finches

Alighting from the high power line, all these dudes

Lying on their beds, stroking their cocks, waiting for me

Leached from the circuits in a baroque array of evolving graphical

Representations of a black economy, a cancer, a subverting process, O Christ!

Only imminent, you cannot be found, waiting to subsume, fuck up

Them cities, bring murder into the bridal chamber

And armies copulating in the killing field mud

Delete all images of yourself, crash

This party, sink this continent

To petrify latitudes of soy and corn—

To perform plastic surgery on everyone—

Make us wear our guts like streamers

A clarity scouring the berserk horizon

Murdering the letter ‘B’ from the alphabet

No name for you ever had it

I will not break down my tent

You are a lamb

Joe Hall is the founder and co-organizer (with Wade Fletcher) of the Washington, DC area reading series Cheryl’s Gone. His first book, Pigafetta Is My Wife, will be published April 2010 by Black Ocean Press. He is also an avid collector of bloody noses.

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http://suicidemachine.org/

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You do send your Very Best work Every time when submitting to a literary magazine, right?

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“Do you think a work that is faulty but which has fine and powerful things in it can be considered to have less authenticity than a work that is perfect but without inner resonance?” – Artaud, who will kill himself less than one year after asking (via this gorgeous object)

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other countries **Updated**

what the hell is this?

I like it.

**Update**
Oops, I drunk posted. Watching the video again this morning, I just realized that if it was in English it would be the sort of “Adult Swim” crap that I really hate. Since I don’t understand it, though, I am more inclined to like it.

Which is a thought that I think can be extended to writing this way: sometimes I get the feeling that bad poets are taking a marginal idea and, unable to make it better with vivid language (or a better idea), they make do with making it unintelligible.

Unlike that video, though, I don’t like poetry to be unintelligible. Why not? I guess the difference is that it’s a lot of work to read a poem, and I don’t trust poets. (That said, sometimes I want a poem to be oblique and abstruse, ridiculous, meaningless, unintelligible, even.) (Ha.) **End Update**

Behind the Scenes & Film / 14 Comments
December 27th, 2009 / 4:05 am