October | 2009 | HTMLGIANT | Page 4

October 2009

Matthew Simmons—

Reviews

DOUBLE YOUR POETRY FUN: Chris Tonelli’s No Theater, G.C. Waldrep’s Archicembalo

Christopher Salerno reviews Chris Tonelli at the Tarpaulin Sky blog. Click through to read the whole review.

Chris Tonelli’s chapbook, No Theater, the first from Brave Men Press, feels like a flagship collection. Tonelli’s poems are highly Apollonian. As a whole they are sculptural, relying largely on their form, moderation, measure, and order. These poems are leaden, unmovable yet spare: “You wear your mask to bed, / so you never have to be asleep. / I’ll wear mine / while I’m awake, / so I never have to / be awake.”

Darcie Dennigan reviews G.C. Waldrep at the Rumpus. Same click deal as before.

On the front flap of this book of prose poems structured after a 19th century musical primer, G.C. Waldrep prompts us, “What does it mean to listen to poems the way poems listen to paintings?” While I have sincere doubts that even Waldrep knows exactly what this means, the directive is liberating. No matter how intimidatingly intellectual these poems might look to the casual browser, the poet himself is basically saying, “Hey, no critical analysis required.” And so, over the last six months, I’ve made Archicembalo into background noise—I am reporting on it not as a reader but as a listener.

6 Comments
October 28th, 2009 / 5:19 pm

Blake Butler

Mean Week is Your Week too, I guess

mean

Things don’t feel mean enough for Mean Week. Things feel like they should be more mean.

Please use this thread as a place to say mean things you feel no one else is saying. If the only way you feel you can say exactly what you mean is to be anonymous, go for it. I promise not to look at or share IP addresses, and no one else can see them. Total privacy. I won’t blame you for not coming out of the gate. Just want to hear some real spit and shit from anybody. About anything, myself included. Only respect can be gained.

Go?

Mean / 1,361 Comments
October 28th, 2009 / 3:21 pm

Blake Butler—

RT @markleidner doing anything is automatically embarrassing

Blake Butler—

Years ago I used to think the advice ‘tell the truth but tell it slant’ meant that you were supposed to be smarter than your reader, and that telling it slant meant weird or funny. Then I stopped thinking that, and less years ago started thinking that it means you are supposed to be smarter than yourself, and that the show is out of your control, and when you stop trying to tell the truth so hard the truth will come out of your sound. Now I don’t know what I think, and don’t want to, and that seems better than the other two entirely.

Blake Butler

Sean Lovelace knows nothing about nachos

nachos11_03_06

Anybody who happens to have bumped into the words or online speaking of Sean Lovelace (author of the recently released How Some People Like Their Eggs, which is fantastic and very smart (that will be my last positive reference to Mr. Lovelace in this post)) knows the dude really wants you to know that he loves nachos. It’s hard to get through a week of his blogging without at least some kind of reference to it, and to how much he loves them, etc., etc. He’s even published essays on the subject, including one in the David Foster Wallace memorial issue of Sonora Review.

To me, though, Lovelace’s endless tirading about the food seems overbloated, and in some ways insecure. It seems the food-language equivalent of truck nuts:

nuts

Gore Vidal Endowed Chair

Is Gore Vidal just old or did something bad happen to him? (I’m not so glib to write this post usually, but it’s mean week.) He’s been sitting down, by my estimations, since c. 2002 and I wonder what his problem is. Maybe he always wanted an Endowed Chair.

Here he is in his reading chair with what appears to be either flat champagne or apple juice. He’s gonna have to get up to pee soon, and I’m worried about his efficiency. Below on the left is an image from the 14th Los Angeles Times Festival and the wheelchair clarifies that the sitting down might be an imperative. Notice the Prada shoes — good to know the royalties are in good shape. The picture on the right is him as close to camping as he’ll ever get. The cerebral man has no need for a suntan. He’s probably petitioning for the invention of color photography.

14th+Annual+Los+Angeles+Times+Festival+Books+4T0cvMQ6N-8l.jpg

—

Writers like shitty music (a sampling)

1. The Beatles

If these guys

backstreet_boys

suddenly stopped playing songs written for girls to get wet over and instead started writing ‘serious’ music, I wonder if generations years later would go around quoting and praising these fine young men as the greatest band of all time…

Naw. Ruiners of everything good.

Dan Nester Doubles Down on Mean: FUCK GERUNDS

gerund

Just fuck ’em.

Or better yet, let’s fucking fuck gerunds.

That way, it–the fucking–will keep going into the eternal present.

That is all.

—D.N.

Author Spotlight & Mean / 43 Comments
October 28th, 2009 / 11:48 am

Justin Taylor—

Click through anywhere to read the whole piece.

I’m a nurse, and I’ve seen the worst the system has to offer.

I remember Jim. He had worked all his life in a factory in Zeeland, Michigan. The latest round of layoffs had left him without insurance or savings.

Jim had an infection throughout his body that was serious, but treatable. After a few days, the billing department made their way to his room to discuss options with him.

The hospital was by no means telling him he had to go. Several doctors spoke with him about the severity of his infection. But after seeing an estimate of his bill, Jim left.

One week later, he died of an infection that could have been treated.

With 47 million Americans lacking health insurance, the stories add up.

Cicily Janus, former web editor for Opium, and author of two forthcoming books- Sick and Tired: An Oral History of America’s Health Care War and The New Face of Jazz, also fries a mean piece of chicken.