I specifically asked you not to be slutty tonight.
texts from last night is a website that posts annonymous text messages from drunk party people who send each other funny texts and then submit them to this website.
It’s funny. I get the feeling most of the entries are written by brodudes and skank ass hoes. But like, sometimes they’re sort of smart or existential bro dudes and skank ass hoes. READ MORE >
Power Quote: Evelyn Waugh
“Women are an enigma,” said Grimes, “as far as Grimes is concerned.”
— Decline and Fall (1928)
I’m tempted to think ‘meta-fictional,’ though Waugh has excised himself from the enterprise. Referring to oneself in the third person, as Grimes has done, is not exclusively the domain of literature or the schizophrenic. Waugh is outside of the joke here, and it’s not between the reader or the words. The joke — the brilliant joke — lies between Grimes and the very syntax with which he is rendered. “Women are an enigma, as far as I’m concerned,” would be the natural and un-Waugh way to go. The objective assertion of “said Grimes” is completely undone when said Grimes (geez this is getting complicated), within that very assertion (Waugh’s), attempts to assert himself what he, Grimes, is saying. In short, a fictional character has tried to write himself in the same sentence. And no, I’m not high on caffeine; I’m low on vitamin D. I’ve been home all Saturday looking for quotes.
From Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
I'm going to think really hard about this, thinks Walter.
Of the customary modes of aquisition, the one most appropriate to a collector would be the borrowing of a book with its attendant non-returning. The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders of the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books. If my experience may serve as evidence, a man is more likely to return a borrowed book upon occasion than to read it. And the non-reading of books, you will object, should be characteristic of collectors? This is news to me, you may say. It is not news at all. Experts will bear me out when I say this is the oldest thing in the world.
EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#6)
[NOTE: The launch party for SOMETIMES MY HEART PUSHES MY RIBS is at 7 p.m. tonight at Cafe Orwell in Brooklyn. – JT]
My Dog is a Little Obese
put the clif bar in your pocket from a florida gas station and walk away
put the entire box of clif bars from a duane reade in penn station in your bag and walk away
put two clif bars from price chopper into your pocket and walk away
this is CVS, there are no clif bars here
buy 4 clif bars from albertson’s and feel bad
there is 50mg of caffeine in your clif bar
cut the clif bar in half with scissors and eat one half and put the other half in a bowl
hide the scissors in the closet
there isn’t any caffeine in the lemon poppyseed clif bar
put organic green tea extract on your tongue and put your tongue in my mouth
there is 50mg of caffeine in my brain
Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.
Ellen Kennedy’s blog.
When the Whip Comes Down: William Deresiewicz Reviews Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry
There's a heaven above you, baby.
I read “When the Whip Comes Down” in The Nation yesterday, and I think it’s well worth sharing, not so much because it matters whether Deresiewicz “likes” Mary Gaitskill (he does) or the new book in particular (he doesn’t), but because I think the piece itself is a shining example of a particular kind of critical writing, more or less in its optimum form. Though he’s fit his thoughts into a review-length essay, I think Deresiewicz has given us a valuable piece of criticism-proper. You come away from the review with a substantially enlarged and nuanced understanding of Gaitskill’s work, even if you’ve read it all before (and I have, except for the new one). I also think any aspiring critic looking to hone her skills (and I’ll go ahead and count myself among this number) stands to learn quite a lot from reading Deresiewicz and understanding how he works. After you’ve read “When the Whip Comes Down,” you should click-through on his name at The Nation website and check out his previous work for them. Critics are like any other kind of writer–if you’re lucky enough to find a good one, read up.
“How Wood Works: The Riches and Limits of James Wood” (11/19/08)
“Homing Patterns: Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction” (9/24/08)
“Fuku Americanus” – on Junot Diaz (11/08/07)
Lindsay Lohan’s nth circle of hell
Mark Baumer pointed me towards this interesting post on the FSG blog in which Kevin Guilfoile selects Lindsay Lohan’s scrambled ad-libbed rants, and with a quick line break, proposes unlikely poetry authored by her. He compares these ‘collaborative’ poems (see related Rumsfeld poetry post) with Lohan’s lyrics, easily establishing the former’s more literary sensibilities — which gets me thinking: the inadvertent tongue, coked out or not, is often closer to one’s truth. The much inferior ‘utilitarian’ song lyric of hers may implicate how sometimes intent (commercial, aesthetic, whatever) in writing has nothing to do with it.
Of course, stream of consciousness is an old bag and Burroughs an old man. I’m not saying ‘let’s go crazy’ yada yada (dada dada?) I’m just saying there’s a lesson here — stop making sense (the name of this reference is the talking heads). Or,
The Burn Books of Hollywood
By Lindsay Lohan
Oh my God,
I’m not working,
And I have a house
To pay for now. And yes,
The web sites,
The gossip pages,
And all of that stuff
Have hurt my career—
They’re like the
Burn books of Hollywood.
Poetry.com. You know you were a semi-finalist.
Did you know that poetry.com‘s database is SEARCHABLE? Well guess what, Internet? IT IS. Welcome to terrordome.
When I was 16 I sent a poem to them through bolt.com (anyone remember bolt.com? Social networking v.08 BETA…I was a bolt.com all-star, FYI…much less success on makeoutclub.com; did not like Coalesce…sad, so sad.) and it was from the point of view of a fortune cookie! But you didn’t KNOW it was a fortune cookie! Whaaaaaaat? I know, right? I was one mysterious poet!
Anyway, I totally was a SEMI-FINALIST and they were going to publish me in their MONTHLY ANTHOLOGY for like $45.00 and I was so psyched! Fortunately my parents did not believe in eCommerce at the time (shout-out to Patricia and Ed) and so I never got to see my poem in its Times New Roman 12-point double-spaced center-justified glory! This is why I write nonfiction today, no matter what Albert Goldbarth sez.
So, yeah, their database is searchable; plug your name in, hold your breath, and hope that you submitted too early for internet-foreverdom. Also, they have ‘POETRY REFERENCE’…’Need Help Rhyming?’ WHY YES I DO! Thanks for asking poetry.com! What rhymes with BLOODY?
New Journal from NewLights Press
Hey friends, I’m just home from two days at the CUNY chapbook fair, and I’ve got some great stuff to tell you about–but it’s 430PM on Friday and Brooklyn is sunny in the high 60s. Put another way: you couldn’t pay me enough to sit here and blog about books on a day like this, and anyway, you’re NOT paying me. So standby for the post-game analysis, but meanwhile here’s one tidbit to be glad about. NewLights Press is putting together a new experimental journal to be called Et Al.
Et Al. is an experimental journal focused on the possible intersections of the literary and visual arts. It starts from the idea of an “arts journal” as a (non)site of the collective production and reception of meaning; one object, in multiple, built from multiple inputs and transmitting to multiple outputs. While traditional journals operate by reproducing text and images as discreet entities centered around a common theme, aesthetic direction, or author-function, Et Al. will be built on the principle of active production and the legible intersection(s) of text, image, typography, material, printing processes, and the temporal structure of the book form. Each issue of Et Al.will be, in essence, an artists’ book of rhizomatic (non)authorship, textually, visually, and structurally. Brought to you by your friends at the NewLights Press.
NewLights had some of the most innovative and beautiful books I saw at the whole festival, plus Aaron Cohick was a pleasure to sit next to for two days, and was totally into trading some of my product for his. Check him out.
Later, kids-
Christopher Cheney is one of the only people who has threatened to run me over with a red car
New from Blue Hour Press is an e-book of poems by Christopher Cheney (featuring photographs by Estelle Srivijittakar) called They Kissed Their Homes. They’re really something, these poems and photos, apart and together. The whole thing is like a violin you left on the stove and spilled coffee grounds over, which you feel bad about, since it’s not even your violin: you’re just keeping it safe for a guy who showed up at your door late one night smelling half-fried eggs and half-chicory, asking if you would be a brother and hide his fiddle. You don’t really want to, but he keeps shoving the case at you in nervous little here, here‘s, so finally you take it and leave it in your kitchen. He never comes back. But after a while you can’t seem to get the moon out of your refrigerator, and you start to feel like a dog’s around, hiding, watching you, doing that sleek coat shiver, trapped and can’t stop.
Cheney’s one of my favorite poets of disquiet. He’s like a sharpened eyelash. The real deal. Here’s the official blurb from Blue Hour Press about the book, plus some excerpts after the break.
Christopher Cheney’s They Kissed Their Homes is an album of everyday landscapes foregrounded with disquiet. Like warm Polaroids, the poems develop clause by clause; their subjects—the mundane, extraordinary, savage—colorize and sharpen; a nameless, faceless population pulls into focus. Together with the work of photographer Estelle Srivijittakar, Cheney’s declarative snapshots gain collaborative energy, grow even more lucid. The result is a catalogue of the countless small oddities of our American quotidian.
Sylvia Plath’s Boogers
I love you, Sylvia. I really do.
Hi. I mentioned this once in the comment section, but I’ll say it again: I dyed my hair red when I was fifteen and recited all of “Lady Lazarus” (click here to read it) in English class, which ends with, “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/ and I eat men like air.” I was really popular- dudes were lining up to get some action from me after I did that!(Click here to hear Syliva read it) ! I loved high school. Oh wait, that is a lie. Anyway, Sylvia Plath can also be funny, which I feel like highlighting due to the recent tragedy of her son’s suicide. Here she is, picking her nose: