“‘Charlie Rose’ by Samuel Beckett”
I feel like I just lived a week inside myself.
BONUS: Beckett on Beckett
Power Quote: Ezra Pound
“The man of understanding can no more sit quiet and resigned while his country lets its literature decay, and lets good writing meet with contempt, than a good doctor could sit quiet and contented while some ignorant child was infecting itself with tuberculosis under the impression that it was merely eating jam tarts.”
—ABC of Reading
[PS- hat tip to my man, Michael Signorelli, who emailed me the quote just now. Do you have any idea how rad it is to have an editor who sends letters that begin: “Have you been reading Pound today? I started up on ABC of Reading again…” ? Well, allow me to give you an idea: it is very, very rad.]
What’s up, Rumpus? Part Whatever in a Series of Infinity
Over at The Daily Rumpus they’re publishing new poems for National Poetry Month. So far they’ve got Daphne Gottlieb and Dawn Trook, but keep checking back to see what comes next. Also, YouTube clip of Tobias Wolff singing a song with John Darnielle.
from “the end of the county cheese princess’ reign” by Daphne Gottlieb
After I was crowned, I visited the next baby born
and brought a cheese basket with fruit.Fruit has no princess so I became
the fruit ambassador as well
on a moment’s notice.
Pardon this brief interruption…
News television is a socially and morally robust medium.
Hail to the hobo king
“It was all right,” said Norwood. “Some hobo got my boots on the train. He was one more slick customer. He took ’em right off my feet and I didn’t see him or hear him. Yeah, and I wisht I could get aholt of that sapsucker. He’d think boots. I wouldn’t care if it was the hobo king. It may of been the hobo king. He was plenty slick. Well, I’m not being serious there.”
“About what, the king?”
“They have a got a king. That’s right, this is no lie, I read this. They have got them a king just like England and France and he rules over every tramp in America just like…a king.”
Has anyone else here heard about this boxcar monarch? Is he in Bulfinch? I’m ready to swear allegiance to him right this second, I swear to gawd. Now taking applications for inclusion on a road trip to the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
On Influence: ‘DOOM, DOOM, DOOM!’
I was at a reading end of last year or sometime, this guy, reading words on paper, talked between the things he’d written previously, to explain the things he’d written previously, though in a way so that the lead-ins were way better than the things themselves, making me huddle in the head some for the idea of making words, at least in there.
Word schools. “My father was a steel man: me, I’m in syllables, ones that don’t quite say.”
Me too, me too, I’m sure.
Regardless, during one of these monologues between glossies the dude said something about how when he teaches fresh writing students, the first thing he tells ’em is how they have to get out of the mode of imitating what they love. How they needed to stop trying to mimic other writers in the mind of ‘using their own voice.’
I seriously had to grab my pitching arm from grabbing a book off the shelf of the store the reading was in and lobbing it at dude’s head.
I bit my mouth and forgot about it for a while, so I could get out without hemorrhage.
All this acting as a lead-in for the real post I wanted to post, my current favorite viral video of the month:
Mos Def in admiration for his man the MF Doom
Magic begets magic, like how I get up any day at all, maybe.
Those ones that make you glow.
Mean Monday: Fuck Everybody, I Hated This Book
Hi. I am in a really bad mood although I was in a worse one a few hours ago but I just paid a woman to make me lift weights for an hour and feel maybe a bit better? Hm. Nah. I came home from working out and spent 30 minutes or so cleaning up cat urine. My house still stinks to high hell. I hate my old cats. I am going to have them put to sleep. I hate them. They pee everywhere. Also, when I was working out? I smelled cat pee. I took my clothes out of a laundry basket full of clean clothes and so what that means is one of them got in the laundry basket and peed on my clean fucking clothes. Hi, lady who worked me out! I smell like cat piss! Be my friend! I was hungover when I got to the gym- hi, scotch and a pack of cigarettes, I hate myself more than I hate everybody else- but now I am not so hungover. One of my cats slept on my head though last night, so I am asthmatic today because of that. Fuck everything. It’s raining like crazy. READ MORE >
HTMLGiant Readin’
Come out. See people read. See this person live. See this person live, too. See the person who wrote this live. See Kevin Sampsell host. (See me.) See all this in Portland.
The next night, see a variation of this in Seattle. Add this person with the glasses to the line up. Subtract the pidgeon guy.
PAY NOTHING FOR BOTH events! Except maybe if you buy books.
Also, BUY BOOKS. This top book, maybe.
Mean monday (statistical interlude)
In an effort to reimplement the somewhat abandoned concept ‘mean Monday,’ I’ve decided to take the mean testicle count of our contributors. For you lit-freaks that blow at math, the ‘mean’ or ‘arithmetic mean’ of any given set is “the sum of all of the list divided by the number of items in the list.” ‘Average’ is too broad and generic a term, as it may mean (no pun intended) ‘median’ or ‘mode.’
Okay, here we go: there are 11 male contributors, all of whom (presumably) have two testicles, giving us a total of 22 testicles. There are 3 female contributors, giving us a total of 14 total contributors. Take 22 and divide by 14, and you have 1.57 — the number of testicles each contributor has. (Juxtapose this with 0.43 ovaries per contributor.)
These Are Not Divergences They Are Where You Mean to Go
The trailer for Kathryn Regina‘s chapbook forthcoming from Greying Ghost is enough to make you cry.
Ingrid Burrington is an artist and writer in Baltimore, MD. Her work is pithy and remarkable. Check out this frames gag.
Nathan Leslie nails tone in “Pickle Man,” his story in the new JMWW.
If you care about chapbooks, what if you were in NYC on April 23-25 and went to this conference, called “A Celebration of the Chapbook“?
Via Chris Higgs, here is Ad-Art by Steve Lambert, a Firefox plug-in that replaces online ads with art. Will this development ruin online publishing?
I received HTML Giant-owned Chelsea Martin’s book Everything Was Fine Until Whatever from Future Tense this weekend. It’s amazing. Here’s a rad video (*I updated this link to the Noo Journal one I just watched, which is newer*).
Baseball season is now upon us, and accordingly Hobart released their annual baseball issue yesterday. In Simon Smith’s “Man’s Man,” an overzealous pinch-runner shoulda held at third. It’s literally mind-blowing.
Do link round-ups work in this Web 2.0 era, or are they more pre-embeddable video?