httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87-d0Mg7Xzc
Philosophy Lessons from Metal Magazines: Summoning
Hi! This is a picture from Summoning’s website. They are metal. Some really nice person (here on the Giant!) told me I should write about their Tolkien fetish, in regard to literature, so I tried to get my husband to do it (I have never read Tolkien and he recites that shit in his sleep), but he told me to fuck off. Also, he hit tennis balls at me as hard as he could today after I beat him 7/6 in the third in a almost 3 hour match we played. I was embarrassed for him being a bad sport- he’s normally a good sport. But I fucking WON MOTHERFUCKA! Anyway, there is a FANTASTIC inteview with them at the wonderful anus.com. In it, is this great quote from Kant: READ MORE >
Anne Boyer on a Provisional Avant Garde
THE PROVISIONAL AVANT GARDE
by Anne Boyer (originally at Odali$qued). I liked this essay so much when I originally read it that I asked Anne’s permission to re-post it here, and she graciously agreed.
1. It won’t be called the avant-garde. It will be referred to by various names, all of them precise, like “the society for touching lightly the forearms of another” or “a tendency toward making chains of half-rhymes in a circle with one’s friends.”
2. It will share with the historic avant-garde that art will often be made in groups, but it will seek or find the artistic and literary expressions that mimic something other than war or machines or violent manly death, something like “human touch” and “animal touch” and “comforting noises made when another is ill” and “maternal protection” and “friendly ritual” and “a little daub of secretion” or “just like playing cards with my aunts and uncles” or “the soft feeling of an arm” or “game for which the rules are never directly stated but which everyone knows how to play.”
Frederick Seidel Redux: In Which We Attend to Some Cart-Before-Horse Issues We Were Having
So the other day I linked to Ange Mlinko’s Seidel piece at The Nation website, where she comes down pretty hard on Frederick Seidel, as well as a number of critics who have praised him. It was just a snippet link, because I don’t know the first thing about Seidel or his work, but I thought her piece was interesting in its own right, and so I passed it along. Since then, I’ve been reminded that the best solution for un-acquaintance with a subject is acquaintance, and so here then are several Seidel-related links for your weekend-
Seidel’s author page at Macmillan is loaded with audio.
“Hell on Wheels” by Christian Lorenzten; this was one of the reviews with which Mlinko took issue.
Frederick Seidel poems at Harper’s (you have to be a subscriber to view these)
David Orr reviews Seidel’s Poems, 1959-2009
“Poem by the Bridge at Ten-Shin” by Frederick Seidel
Fence 21
Reading and enjoying muchly the new issue of Fence, #21, which is full of fresh and good and fun, one of their best issues of late. It has some wonderful work from Giant friends Sean Kilpatrick, Colin Bassett, Janaka Stucky, as well as new by Rachel Sherman, Dean Young, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ben Black, and a roundtable on nonrealist fiction with Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Joyelle McSweeney, Kate Bernheimer, and Eric Lorberer, and a lot more. I haven’t read a piece yet that I haven’t enjoyed and felt cooled by.
While you are at it, the friends at Fence are still offering a really great deal in that if you subscribe for 2 years (only $30, which is a steal), you get a free book of your choice (another $15 value, at least) from their excellent of array of past titles, including, among my favorites, Joyelle’s Flet, Daniel Brenner’s The Stupefying Flashblubs, Aaron Kunin’s The Mandarin, and their many new titles. If I weren’t already a subscriber, and have most all of their books, I would have done it again now twice.
Not sold yet? Fine. If that won’t do it, try on this sentence cut from Kilpatrick’s poem (1 of 3 from him), ‘Gay Trade.’:
Same old fears kind of save the day, / or make you look vacuously sane / in this light, eyelid small, giving / handshakes of solid milk, warmed / by crack-lighters drying your reflection / on a buried clothesline.
If you aren’t ready now, you never will be.
Uncategorized / 30 Comments
July 3rd, 2009 / 1:24 am
July 3rd, 2009 / 1:24 am
Catherine Lacey—
Butler gets some New York free-alternative-weekly love. Interview in L magazine hitting plastic orange newstands and subway cars all over New York right about now.
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Clerihew Thursday
Follow this link for a series of clerihews by my friend Brad.
A clerihew is a four-line biographical poem. They are characterized by a whimsical tone, and I thought maybe today we could use some whimsy. Included is this one about Dennis Cooper:
Party-pooper,
Dennis Cooper:
First violent erections…
Then, alas, vivisections.
(For the record, Brad is a big fan of Cooper’s work. Whimsy.)
More (including Foucault) after the jump READ MORE >
Uncategorized / 31 Comments
July 2nd, 2009 / 3:05 pm
July 2nd, 2009 / 3:05 pm
Writing Spaces at Fictionaut Blog
Fictionaut has announced a new blog feature, Writing Spaces, “dedicated to the desks, cafes, libraries and retreats where Fictionaut writers work, providing a window to the physical places where some of the stories on the site originated.” The first featured writer is Stephen Stark, whose writing space appears to be a tiny barn.
Those of you interested in writing spaces might want to check back every now and then to see what goes up. Should be a cool time over there.
(via Monkeybicycle)