The Believer interviews Doseone
Doseone is a true original among the rap shits. Pretty much any record he touches (from cLOUDDEAD to his solo discography to 6-piece band Subtle), dude is going to be doing new things not only with the music he is rapping (or singing) over, but with the words he puts on top of it. Where a lot of rap is made of repetitions and nonsense, Doseone invents science and languageisms that are often just as new as the words coming out on Diagram or Fence or wherever you wanna talk about.
I tried to do this interview for the Believer but couldn’t get a hold of my man. Anyway, you can read the interview now fully online, and it is a fun weird one, as would be expected of a man who wears suits made out of plastic spoons and writes huge poetry manuals to accompany his most recent project’s trilogy of albums (all of which are really good and worth checking out, if you like experimental but still catchy music):
antonio negri reviewed at 3 a.m.
3 a.m. magazine reviewed antonio negri’s book GOODBYE MR SOCIALISM. i haven’t read this particular work but i have read EMPIRE and MULTITUDE, both co-authored by negri. i think those two books are really good political books that don’t make you think a pube-bearded che guevera shirt wearing motherfucker wrote them. check it out.
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December 26th, 2008 / 2:55 pm
December 26th, 2008 / 2:55 pm
Harold Pinter, RIP
Harold Pinter, who used his Nobel Prize win lecture to really give it to U.S. foreign policy, has died.
A few minutes from The Birthday Party:
Letter From Austria: Peter Handke’s Sorrow and My Own
I am deep in the Austrian Alps of Carinthia, near the borders of Italy and Slovenia, in a province largely full of people who never leave it, a six hour train ride from Vienna, staring out my hotel window to enormous mountains and yards and yards of snow, pine trees, and quaint houses that have not changed in structure for hundreds of years. Handke is from Carinthia, from a town not far from here. My parents and I see each other once a year because they live in Vienna and we live in New York. Once, I looked out at all the beauty and thought; “All this beauty. Too bad it is full of Austrians.” Other times I look out and try to be happy and grateful. (There are things I like about Austria. I like the food, the Frittatensuppe, the Topfen, the Semmeln, the delicious Austrian pastries, as good as any Italian pastry. I have a weird fetish for the traditional clothes, the Dirndls, the Lederhosen, the felted wool in general. (I grew up wearing that stuff.))
Peter Handke’s mother killed herself by taking an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of fifty-one. He writes:
My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide.
Secret Santa Results and Thank You
Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s Secret Santa Gift Exchange for Indie Lit. One hundred and forty people took part in the exchange, and if everyone followed our suggested $15-$25 gift range, I feel like saying that we exchanged around somewhere between $2,100 and $3,500 worth of gifts – so that is exciting, I think, for everyone. Also, several participants kindly donated their own work to others, as did editors of various presses, which is another fine way to spread word about new writing.
Below I’ve posted the Santa pairs and the gifts that I know were sent, and as far as I can tell, everyone played fair – for those who haven’t emailed me what you purchased, please let us know what you sent/received in the comments. Please email me if you have had any trouble with the exchange, but keep in mind that some gifts may arrive after today, some are subscriptions that will also take time to kick in, etc. Pretty soon we’ll have an HTMLGIANT sort of marketplace to trade gifts around if you’d like.
Also, if you still haven’t received your gift and don’t want to know because you’re waiting for the surprise, be aware that spoilers come after the break.
Thanks again to everyone who participated; I think this was good fun.
Merry Xmas from HTMLGiant & John Donne!
Nativity
Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-belov’d imprisonment,
There He hath made Himself to His intent
Weak enough, now into the world to come;
But O, for thee, for Him, hath the inn no room?
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars and wise men will travel to prevent
The effect of Herod’s jealous general doom.
Seest thou, my soul, with thy faith’s eyes, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.
+
More English Renaissance Christmas poetry at the Shakespeare Authorship page.
Word Spaces(3): Jason Ockert
Jason Ockert is the author of Rabbit Punches, a collection of stories from Low Fidelity Press. Jason Ockert also edits the fiction at Waccamaw. I met him this past summer at Sewanee and he was awesome enough to share with us his word space.
And here’s what he had to say about it:
Just a map of the world. Outside, trees. That phone never rings. I got that chair at a garage sale in Syracuse and am under the impression it is worth something because after I bought it for twenty bucks the lady reconsidered and then tried to buy it back from me.
(A word about the new desk: The old desk, which had no nails and you put together like Lincoln Logs, collapsed. My knees often got caught up in the bastard. So, Staples.)
The computer is all stripped down. No internet. Not even solitare. If I can be I will be, distracted. I stare at the wall. Trees. I can find countries, man.
Thanks Jason, for the pic and paragraphs.
Tables of Contents for The Quarterly, issue 1 – 25
THE QUARTERLY
_________________________
16 / Winter 1990A Nace Page 2
Cecile Goding / The Big Dog 3
Gary Krist / Bone by Bone 8
Dom Leone / I Have a Stapler 21
Leon Rooke / Drivers 22
Jaquelyn Reingold / Freeze Tag 24
Sam Michel / The Naming 49
Patricia Lear / Solace 59
Richard Blanchard / Dear Miss Wright 105
Barbara Blewer / I Am Safe and Live at Home 106
Thomas Wooten / The Other Side, Radiant 118
Rolf Nelson / The Men on the Ground 123
Dawn Raffel / Table Talk 135
Hugh Kelleher / John, Barney, Van 138
J. R. Rodriguez / Eating the Father’s Penis 140
Lisa Wohl / Magnificat 143
Diane Williams / Four Fictions 152
Christine Schutt / Two Fictions 156
Sandra Stone / Soup of the Evening 160
Rick Bass / Susan 162
Tom Whalen / Murder Story 188
Peter Christopher / The Year of the Purchase 191Another Nace Page 194
Cooper Esteban 195
David Kirby 205
John Allman 206
Marjorie Milligan 209
E. Ormsby 210
Bruce Beasley 213
Al Ortolani 217
Elizabeth Lerner 219
Lynne H. Decourcy 220
Jim Paul 221
Ansie Baird 222
Shahid Hoda 223
M. D. Stein 224
Maurice Eidelsberg 226
Blake Nelson 227
Gregory H. Johnson 228
Ray Halliday 229One More Nace Page 230
Harold Bloom to Q 231
John S. P. Walker to Q 235
Jason Shinder to Q 236
Sharon Korshak to Q 238
Dom Leone to Q 239
William Myers to Q 242The Last Nace Page 246
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December 24th, 2008 / 1:20 am
December 24th, 2008 / 1:20 am
today i saw the word POSTMODERNISM like 5 times so i thought about something
i like the books POSTMODERNISM: THE LOGIC OF LATE CAPITALISM and also THE POSTMODERN CONDITION: A REPORT ON KNOWLEDGE. i think that after reading those two books i actually knew what postmodernism meant, not just like: “oh there’s a giraffe eating fritos and watching himself on television” type of postmodernism. frederick jameson wrote the first book and jean francois lyotard wrote the other. they both explain the idea in terms that apply to production and technology and to me that makes them applicable. i think before, when someone said “postmodernism,” i thought, “oh there must be a giraffe eating fritos and watching himself on television in that story.” READ MORE >
Tao Lin’s “All Purpose Promotional Video”: Reviewing the wrong one
Tao Lin offered me $2 to review an ‘all purpose promotional’ video which would be uploaded in 1-3 days, then said ‘just kidding.’ I was moved by the initial spirit behind the request and have done so (though I am reviewing the ‘wrong’ one. I will try to review the correct one too.) Please read this before viewing the movie. It will make you more excited for the movie, I hope. [I just spent five minutes trying to embed the source-code but it didn’t work, so what follows this review is a mere link.]
REVIEW: This review will not have a point, because I don’t think the ‘all purpose promotional’ video had a point, other than being an ‘all purpose promotional’ video. I will simply describe what I saw in the order of when I saw it, with light commentary. Also, I only watched the video once, taking quick notes, so I may be wrong at points. The ‘narrative’ might not make sense due to choppy avante garde editing. READ MORE >