Speaking of Anne Carson,
which we were doing at some point in the last 10 or so posts, there’s a prose poem of hers from Plainwater that makes me want to die.
On Waterproofing
Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sister, Ottla, Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not Jewish. When the Nuremburg Laws were introduced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He at first refused. She spoke about sleep shapes and property and their two daughters and a rational approach. She did not mention, because she did not yet know the word, Auschwitz, where she would die in October 1943. After putting the apartment in order she packed a rucksack and was given a good shoeshine by Josef David. He applied a coat of grease. Now they are waterproof, he said.
Hill of Beans, Can of Words
These are some books I bought or otherwise acquired recently. A hill of words.
& that is a can of beans.
Ben Mirov
Ghost Machine
(not pictured)
Caketrain
Pittsburgh, PA — 2010
I read most of this book at the park that is in the book on a pretty much perfect day and it was a hell of a pairing I have to say. It has the kind of restraint my own work lacks a lot. Makes me jells but not bad way. Read the rest at my ex’s apartment who is no longer my ex while she made me dinner, which I could not believe was happening and yet there it was happening. I often felt breathless and thought maybe that’s not such a dumb name for a movie after all. READ MORE >
“On the Youth at Night”
The youth at night would have himself driven around the scream. It lay in the middle of the city gazing back at him with its heat and rosepools of flesh. Terrific lava shone on his soul. He would ride and stare.
-Anne Carson, “On the Youth at Night,” in her book Plainwater
A Predominately Bespectacled Army
http://billmurray.tumblr.com/
A bunch of poets and poetry enthusiasts, including Anne Carson and Bill Murray walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and the Wall Street Journal wrote about it:
The predominately bespectacled army of attendees wore sensible shoes. Mr. Murray’s were a hybrid sneaker/hiking boot, quite popular among the crowd, and Ms. Carson wore brand-new, shiny, bright-red Adidasesshe picked up “in the outlet malls in Toronto where I was this weekend.
Who knew that anyone at the Wall Street Journal has a sense of humor?
At first, the earnest verse appreciators ambled awkwardly. They annoyed runners and bicyclists, and people who like to walk fast. They were joined, unintentionally, by The Brooklyn Bridge Boot Camp, a gang of eight heaving women who followed their leader’s barking orders through a variety of laps, leg lifts, and squats.
The Spectacle of Spectacles: A Response to Perec’s “On Spectacles”
I.
In fifth grade, a little girl whose name I don’t remember called me tacky—and I was, good god back then I was the oddest confluence of patterns and colors, bowed skirts with striped t’s, without a hint of the irony hipsters today sport—and so my older brother took me shopping. I didn’t need glasses back then, but he needed a new pair so we stopped at a little spectacle boutique, and I tried on the cutest pair of specs, equipped with rounded tortoise-shell frames, practically wire thin, that hooked around the ears. Back in 1992, I wished my vision would go awry, just so I could look intelligent and stylish. Keep in mind my distorted sense of fashion, which I have yet to shake.
Three years later, I needed glasses, my vision had completely deteriorated, though I hadn’t noticed, except that I began falling down arbitrarily, a habit that’s stretched my ankles beyond repair, and to this day, I fulfill a prophecy of falling down annually. It’s embarrassing and painful and debilitating. But when it came time to get those glasses I’d wanted so badly before, it was sister who took me, and although she’s quite fashionable, I ended up with the most hideous glasses—to large, disc-shaped, odd colors—or at least I thought they were and never wore them, such is a story of first glasses.
In high school, late high school, I got my first pair of square plastic frames, tortoise-shell, and despite my very flat bridge, I found the right pair and style. Now, when I was seventeen, I don’t remember square frames as being “hip.” None of my friends had them, preferring instead oval wire frames, usually colored, but this past January, I gave a reading in Amherst, and I stopped in a coffee shop to do “work” (and meet the very cool Jedidiah Berry), and I looked around. Hot damn, there were twelve people there, including me, ten of which had on square plastic glasses (the other two didn’t wear them), eight people had silver Mac Book Pros (two had black Mac Books), I counted three people reading Foucault and five people with Moleskines displayed in some way. And I think back to &Now or AWP, somehow glasses becoming the sign of intelligensia and creativity, commodified, like Apple products, easy, and I’ve fallen for the trick.
Unsaid Magazine online
The monolithic Unsaid Magazine has just relaunched their website, with online content from each author in every issue, including the latest #4, with work by: ANNE CARSON, BRIAN EVENSON, BLAKE BUTLER, DAVID OHLE, EVELYN HAMPTON, PETER MARKUS, ALEXIS ALMEIDA, ROBERT LOPEZ, BEAR KIRKPATRICK, MICHAEL KIMBALL, MEGAN LAYTON, DAWN RAFFEL, EUGENE MARTEN, DAVID HOLLANDER, OTTESSA MOSHFEGH, SHELTON WALSMITH, JASON SCHWARTZ, RUDY WILSON, SARAH MANGUSO, PAUL MALISZEWSKI, RICHARD ST. GERMAIN, SAM MICHEL, EMILIA A. PHILLIPS, BRIAN KUBARYCZ, SVEN BIRKERTS, RICK POINSETT, ALYSON JANE, BIANCA GALVEZ, JOE WENDEROTH, M SARKI, JOANNA HOWARD, WILL ENO, JESSICA NEWMAN, PATRICIA O’CONNELL, MATTHEW THOMPSON, CAROLYN ALTMAN, PETER CHRISTOPHER, ANDY DEVINE, DANIELLE BLAU, RACHEL B. GLASER, PATRICK EHLEN, M.T. FALLON, JONATHAN CALLAHAN, LAUREN MCCOLLUM, KRISTINA BORN, JULIA HOLLEMAN, TRIA ANDREWS, VIRGINIA KONCHAN, BJORN VERENSON, MICHAEL STEWART, TRENT ENGLAND, DYLAN T. NICE, BRIAN SCHORN, RYAN MURPHY, SAM PINK, BENJAMIN LANDRY, EMILY MAHAN, SHANE JONES, THOMAS LAVERTY, A. MINETTA GOULD, COOPER ESTEBAN, LINDSAY ANDERSON, JOSHUA KORNREICH, SCOTT GARSON. If you don’t have this yet, it’s 500+ pages, and brain-eating on every one of them. A true mechanism of new tongues.
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October 6th, 2009 / 11:46 am
October 6th, 2009 / 11:46 am
15 Significant Contemporary Women Writers
Blake’s recent post on Towering Literary Figures inspired me to consider a list of significant contemporary (living) women writers. By significant I mean significant to me: women writers who I admire and who I feel have significantly contributed to the advancement of literature.
Perhaps someone else on the Giant staff will take up this theme and focus on writers of color, or GLBT writers, or writers from Australia, or writers with children, or writers still living with their mothers, or etc.
For the record, I understand that what I am doing here is, to a degree, essentialist: by labeling a writer based on their gender I am furthering a world in which these distinctions exist. Furthermore, I completely sympathize with the position that argues that we should not see color or sex or race or whatever, that we should instead see only writers.
But, alas, differences exist.
So, with my disclaimer now fully realized, I give you my list of contemporary women writers that I think kick a lot of ass –(in black&white and in no particular order):
The classical education I never had: Hippolytos
Hippolytos, the insufferable son of Theseus, was a celebutard of antiquity. In Euripides’ play, the dandy loves only two things: himself and the goddess Artemis. He’s even got an entourage to follow him around and tell him how great and pure he is. Yes, pure. He is untouched by woman, devoting himself exclusively to his chosen deity. The problem is, his chastity and vomit-inducing self-regard has pissed off Aphrodite, who takes his piss-poor attitude as an affront. Theseus is out of town, and Aphro believes the time of her revenge is at hand. Did I mention that Hippolytos’ stepmother is in forbidden love with her stepson? READ MORE >
The classical education I never had: Hekabe
Thus was Hector smote. Smoten?
After reading Herakles, a play in which a man-god returns from hell only to savagely, accidentally kill his beloved wife and children, I figured I had seen the worst that Euripides’ Grief Lessons had to offer. I was wrong.
I have had for some years on my computer a file called “unpleasantness of Euripides,” in which I place at random thoughts on this subject, in hopes that the file will someday add up to an answer to the question, Why is Euripides so unpleasant? Certainly he is. Certainly I am not the only person who thinks so. Not the only person whose heart sinks at the prospect of reading, teaching or attending one of his plays.
Nice introduction. Anne Carson will translate Euripides, but she doesn’t have to like him. I respect that. In the second of four Grief Lessons, Carson introduces us to Hekabe, who bore many brave sons to Priam, the slain king of Troy (she also apparently “knew” some other fella and consequently popped out some “baggage” named Polydoros). After the sack of Troy, the ghost of Achilles shows up and demands a blood sacrifice. Hekabe’s daughter Polyxena pulls the short straw, and compounded as it is with news of her son Polydoros’s death by betrayal and drowning at the hands of the thrice cursed goat of a Thracian, Polymestor, you know Hekabe is gonna get pre-medieval on some poor fool. But who? READ MORE >
The classical education I never had: Herakles
One half of Power & Glory
I don’t know balls about the Greeks or antiquity, friezes or columns. I sort of remember reading Antigone in school, but don’t remember being all that interested in the degenerate offspring of Oedipus. Still, knowing the difference between the major Greek playwrights, or even just a workable understanding of the mythology, seems one of the marks of an educated person, and I find myself in the possession of two collections translated by the wonderful Anne Carson. The one, a collection of four plays by Euripides, is called Grief Lessons. Here, my internship begins with Herakles—Euripides’ take on the half-human son of Zeus, once ably portrayed by television star Kevin Sorbo. I wonder, was anything lost between the fifth century BC and mid-nineties USA programming? READ MORE >
