GIANT EXCERPT: from The Dance of No Hard Feelings by Mark Bibbins (#1)
Arriving In Your New Country
Wrong decisions are harder to make than most
people realize, tears flying sideways in a gale.
We swerve in the road so as not to hit dead things,
but I used to know someone who did the opposite.
He liked to drive through them. Stars are most
serious when seen from the back of a pickup truck
while very very drunk, and if someone kisses you
there it doesn’t count. I would grab your sadness
as a movie monster would, bring it to the harshest
part of the mountain: I haven’t seen this place yet
but I am told weeping is not part of its economy
and everything there is delicious if eaten alone.
All this week, HTMLGiant will be posting poems from The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon) Mark Bibbins’s eagerly and long-awaited followup collection to 2003’s Sky Lounge. Check back daily for fresh doses.
Sam Pink—
i enjoyed reading this piece of writing by bradley sands. i also enjoyed the tips for a sexier stomach on the side of the page. reading the piece of writing by bradley sands and then learning how to get a sexier stomach, really, felt like two consecutive wins.
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Jimmy Chen—
The &Now Conference of Innovative Writing is happening October 14 – 17 in Buffalo, New York.
Power Quote: William Blake Runs the Voodoo Down
To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, & I feel Flatter’d when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil & Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible more Entertaining & Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason?
– letter to the Rev. Dr. Trusler, 23 August, 1799
Michael Schaub—
Mark Feeney starts off this piece on Thomas Pynchon and music with this sentence: “Music hasn’t really mattered much in American fiction.” Is that even remotely true? I suspect it’s not, but you guys are all smart well-read rock stars. Is Feeney right? Do I just wish music mattered more in American fiction? Will anyone come to the debut show of my band, The Very Special Episodes? Even though my band doesn’t technically exist?
Brittany Dennison—
If you Ask Jeeves (British actor Stephen Fry), what to read, he will tell you to read David Eagleman’s new book “Sum.” And he did. On Twitter. Sales went up six hundred percent, and sat on Amazon’s number two best seller list.
Fry, who has more than 750,000 followers, tweeted yesterday that “You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman’s ‘Sum’. If you read it and aren’t enchanted I will eat 40 hats.” … Fry later tweeted that when he promised to eat 40 hats if his followers weren’t enchanted by Sum, he was actually referring to the word “hat” as meaning “cashew nut” in a rare Papuan dialect.
Those who follow tradition are ignored
Brion Gysin famously said, “Writing is fifty years behind painting.” And it looks like Kenneth Goldsmith would agree:
What I learned in the art world is that anything goes. The further you can push something, the more it is rewarded: to shoot for anything less in the art world is career suicide. The art that is deemed the most valuable is rarely the most finely-crafted, the most expressive, or the most “honest” works, but rather those which either attempt to do something that’s never been done before or those that synthesize older ideas into something new. Risk is rewarded. Those who follow tradition in a known, dogged, and obligatory manner are ignored. Unlike the poetry world, the mainstream of the art world since the dawn of modernism has been the avant-garde, the innovative, the experimental. The most cutting-edge work — the work with the biggest audience and historical import — has been the most challenging.
–from “The Tortoise And The Hare: Dale Smith and Kenneth Goldsmith Parse Slow and Fast Poetries” in Jacket 38
FIREWHEEL CONTEST
complete information after break.
A Big Question
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr-gOLOlEic
or
Girls Against Boys (Thanks for the link, Michael.)
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcqkTOVbdPw