httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIPfqON1-L4
If I get a sense of the uncanny valley when I watch Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, is this at least anecdotal evidence for evolution?
Fernando Pessoa
Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
–from The Book of Disquiet
A narcissist edits Faulkner
Wudda been pretty cool huh? Wudda went Benjy full retard for some o’ dat shit.
Ken Baumann—
The tools (as usual) are neutral. It’s up to us to insist that onscreen reading enhance, not replace, traditional book reading. It’s up to us to remember that the medium is not the message; that the meaning and music of the words is what matters, not the glitzy vehicle they arrive in.
from David Gerlenter, in this presentation: Does the Brain Like E-Books?
8
Any Wonder We Tried Gin
“Wystan Hugh Auden took the martini seriously,” wrote Rosie Schaap for the Poetry Foundation a few weeks ago. Yeah! That’s an Auden I can get behind! The kind who would write, “We must drink a lot of gin or die,” and then later change it to “We must drink a lot of gin and die,” before finally settling on, “This guy right here…this guy’s…YOU DON’T KNOW ME, YOU DON’T EVEN”
Anyway, Schaap’s search for the Auden martini set me to thinkin’: what other poets have had trademark martinis? I found the answer in What Other Poets Have Had Trademark Martinis?: A Book Which Answers The Question That We Asked in the Main Part of the Title, Before The Colon (FSG, 1987). This book totally exists, so fact-checking me on it would be a pitiable waste of your time. Below are just a small sample of the more intriguing entries, though if you have any others, you should post them. I mean, why wouldn’t you trust poets to give you alcohol-related recommendations? That would be like not trusting poets to give you divorce lawyer-related recommendations! Crazy!
Meta Context
I love John Rutter. His Requiem is my favorite of all Requiems. You should check it out.
But here is another piece of his, “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” which I also find exquisite. But what strikes me as most interesting now is that, just by posting this here, I’m making the video scary. The question is: what about this do I think is appropriate for this site? There isn’t an answer, but if you watch the video looking for one, I expect you’ll have some dark thoughts. Or funny thoughts.
Or maybe I’m completely wrong. I’d be interested to know.
Roxane Gay—
Conceptual artist Richard Whitehurst is creating a “rape tunnel” which will go live on October 30th. I struggle to take this kind of thing seriously. And yet, I have no doubt someone will enter this sad little tunnel just to “see what happens.” Under such circumstances, were they asking for it?
“Have you ever been bitten by a blue jay?”
Imagine yourself for a moment a laundry basket. A duffel bag of laundry, a black trash bag of laundry. Whatever. You’re one. Is there not, in the terrifying accumulation of our lives, a distinction between giving yourself away and asking to try someone on? Let’s say I ask if you’re okay. If you’re much pleasured by the current sky. Curried rice. Jim Carrey or ice cream. In so asking I’m digging in, hand in your basket, to take and pull a little cloth of yourself over a naked me-bit. Which is not always aggressive. Sometimes you do want me to ask you things; sometimes you’d rather I didn’t. I don’t want to talk about 2009, Facebook surveys, Michael Bloomberg’s polling strategies, focus groups for salsa commercials. It’s all relevant, but what I most want to say about Padgett Powell’s eye-twist of a novel (and I mean novel, like damn that’s novel) The Interrogative Mood is that its one-hundred-sixty-four pages of questions and question marks remind me that I am afraid of people, in love with people, hungry to know people, and made (bye laundry metaphor) mostly to be dispensed: what I mean is all that water.
Sommelier Says: Jereme Dean
There’s so much good whine out there that HTMLGIANT has instituted “Sommelier Says,” in which an indignant comment — either here or in our lit-blog vicinity — is studied for its complexities and rich character by this humble Sommelier. Today, we bring you Jereme Dean’s recent comment to P.H. Madore:
stop looking for kudos and emotional hand jobs and go your own way
Sommelier Says: Jereme Dean’s full-bodied redolence is rather pervasive. Just ask anyone who shares the bus with him on his “three hour commute.” A fan of Bukowski and Asian philosophy, his comments consist of grim verity, with hints of aging self-effaced misogyny and underlying currents of abnegation. His spicy black currant tongue, when not intra-labia, peppers this website with astounding truth. Never the diplomat, always the provocateur, his finish is very dry, with deep tannins which evoke the thickest of skins. This whine pairs perfectly with pudding.