Rap Genius: A First Look
Someone grabbed me the other day. He wanted to talk about Rap Genius/Poetry Brain. He wanted me to talk about Rap Genius/Poetry Brain. I am good at talking—so I figure, why not? I mean this guy who asked me, he knew Barry Hannah, and I started right off the jump writing about Barry Hannah, and Hannah’s hospital visitation from Christ—which is just gorgeous and I would like to experience someday before my brain pops:
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201010/?read=interview_hannah_tower.
But then I had to cut the stuff about Hannah.
If this article were up at Rap Genius I could make the words “Hannah’s hospital visitation from Christ” into a link and when you clicked on it, then it would open directly to the part of the interview in The Believer where Hannah talks about Christ appearing in Hannah’s room at the old hospital.
Since it’s not, you have to go to the link and then scroll through the whole interview between Deep Water Hole Tower and Barry Hannah to find that moment of CHRIST appearing in Hannah’s hospital room, and the mountains behind him.
I don’t know much about Rap. I used to smoke Oregon marijuana and drive around as a skinny pale shit listening to my brother’s tape of “Too Short” in my brother’s old red Honda stick shift, driving through the hills of Portland, already making up crazy voices in my head to tell stories with, but not telling any of them, just listening to them making me crazy in my head. So stoned, and driving, and everything like a song. The whole world singing. Which was probably the best. The not telling them and just having them. I definitely didn’t believe Too Short and guessed he was just playing with voices in his head too. I didn’t think of any of it as factual, or having any larger implications, or that there was anything real to find out about. Which was my fault. I was dumb about rap. I was just another freaky weird kid driving around in a brother’s car, cologne in the console, getting drunk and stoned and looking at the sky. I don’t know why, but I want to put this link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uee_mcxvrw. If this were Rap Genius I could put this in as a link in the word freaky up above. You’d just click on freaky and the video would open in a little window and you would still be looking at this thing I’m writing and you’re reading. I was dumb about life. I thought it was always going to sing and that I wouldn’t have to find out about life in order to use my voices. READ MORE >
What is Michael Bible Doing?
Simple Machines
by Michael Bible
Awesome Machine Press, 2011
64 pages / $8 Buy from Awesome Machine
What is Michael Bible up to?
Michael Bible has fixed the toilet with a shotgun!
Michael Bible has hand-picked the sentence without kid gloves, without hubbub, without shilly-shallying!
Michael Bible has exploded the sentence by reforming the sentence into what it was once and dreams of being again.
Michael Bible is the new South, writing from Oxford, Mississippi.
6 Comments
November 4th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
November 4th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
A Kind of Weird Beauty: Michael Bible’s Simple Machines
Michael Bible is the author of Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City, as well as the chapbooks Gorilla Math and My Second Best Bear Rug. He was winner of the ESPN: the Magazine/Stymie fiction prize. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi where he edits Kitty Snacks.
Michael Kimball: I’m curious: How did you get the title? That feels like it must have been a key to writing the piece.
Michael Bible: As far as Simple Machines goes, the title actually came to me after I wrote it, but you’re right, it sort of crystallized it for me. I started the manuscript after I read The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed and I was playing around with random sentence generators and ESL textbooks. I love sentences that are used as examples for school. (Has someone written a book of word problems? Also, that would be a good title. Probably somebody’s written it.) There is an oddness to those example sentences that I love, “bad” writing as “good” writing. They have a kind of weird beauty and they seemly have no context but somehow make stories anyway. Simple Machines is also something I learned about in school so it made sense that that would be a good title. READ MORE >
Dispatches from Captain Maximus (guest posted by Michael Bible)
Michael Bible, a former student of Barry Hannah (and wearing one of the best names around), shares some of his Hannah light:
Zita, an odd and earnest woman in her 60’s, sat in on Barry Hannah’s workshop. She often reeked of gin. She hounded Barry so much about “rules” to writing (something he preached hard against) that he finally caved and wrote out a few things for her about her writing. She photocopied the handwritten “rules” and passed them out to everyone in the class the next week. So when reading this remember they are addressed to her.
1. [Your writing is] in the rut of adjectives and “Life Studies.” In the rut of people who aren’t there.