Weird stuff inside holy places
If you live in a city, chances are you can walk into a gallery or museum and see something extremely weird on the floor. Pedestals are like easels, cloaked in antiquity — it’s not brilliant unless it’s on the floor. I used visit art galleries on Saturdays, a sorta tryst with culture as a full-time bureaucrat, shamefully bowing my head at the severe, stunningly attractive “receptionists” (dunno what to call them, those hot chicks sitting at the front) as I licked through the resume of whoever got his or her MFA. If there’s a tinge of resentment in my voice, I’m sorry, I’ve just put down too many Artforum essays completely confused about not what I just read, but why. If you need a “post-” to label it and a PhD to describe it, it don’t got that swing.
Brian Foley—
A new issue of Glitterpony is live with hot poems by Rachel Glaser, Hoa Nguyen, Michelle Taransky and others.
15
Interview with Jeremy M. Davies
I met Jeremy M. Davies in a hotel room. It was late—or early, depending. He came in with a whirl, holding a huge manuscript, wearing a lot of black, or charcoal, depending. As soon as Davies walked in, someone handed him some whiskey, then the whole group left.
The next time I saw Davies, he walked into a Mexican restaurant, late—not late in the evening, per se, but simply late. About an hour late. Whereas he did not walk in with a huge manuscript, he was wearing a lot of black, or charcoal, depending.
But enough about that. Jeremy Davies’s Rose Alley is dense with wit, charm, and dirty, dirty smut, disguised in lush, meandering metaphor. Although the story—if one can honestly call it a story—is set during the 1968 Paris student riots, the chapters jump to follow different characters all involved in a film. As I was reading this book, I emailed Jeremy & told him I forgot he was the author. To me, that’s one of the ultimate compliments. I mean: I read his book, knowing him, and I was so blown away I forgot he wrote it. But don’t take my word for it: Josh Cohen said this book was his favorite of 2009 from someone he knows; powerhouse demi-god Harry Mathews says, “You have no excuse for not reading this book;” the ever brilliant Steve Katz says, “He is an impeccable stylist who creates a richness full of Nabokovean Pynchonistics, totally original, dressed in wacky erudition.”
And so, without further ado, the interview:
“Bring a Book or Prepare to Die of Boredom”
Are the new [stupid fucking] post-flight-253 regulations the best thing to happen to publishing since the week before James Frey turned out to be a liar? From the Gizmodo Unofficial Guide to Flying After the Underwear Bomb.
Joe Hall Poem
4.13.5
In the mother fucking sound and the mother fucking light, in
The iterations of thunder, the bass so high
It hurls you into the grass, all these bitches lying
On their beds, touching themselves, waiting for me
An algorithm of trees exploding in your face, shaved from soap
In a prison cell, in a pair of yellow finches
Alighting from the high power line, all these dudes
Lying on their beds, stroking their cocks, waiting for me
Leached from the circuits in a baroque array of evolving graphical
Representations of a black economy, a cancer, a subverting process, O Christ!
Only imminent, you cannot be found, waiting to subsume, fuck up
Them cities, bring murder into the bridal chamber
And armies copulating in the killing field mud
Delete all images of yourself, crash
This party, sink this continent
To petrify latitudes of soy and corn—
To perform plastic surgery on everyone—
Make us wear our guts like streamers
A clarity scouring the berserk horizon
Murdering the letter ‘B’ from the alphabet
No name for you ever had it
I will not break down my tent
You are a lamb
Joe Hall is the founder and co-organizer (with Wade Fletcher) of the Washington, DC area reading series Cheryl’s Gone. His first book, Pigafetta Is My Wife, will be published April 2010 by Black Ocean Press. He is also an avid collector of bloody noses.
Sean Lovelace—
You do send your Very Best work Every time when submitting to a literary magazine, right?
Blake Butler—
“Do you think a work that is faulty but which has fine and powerful things in it can be considered to have less authenticity than a work that is perfect but without inner resonance?” – Artaud, who will kill himself less than one year after asking (via this gorgeous object)
other countries **Updated**
what the hell is this?
I like it.
**Update**
Oops, I drunk posted. Watching the video again this morning, I just realized that if it was in English it would be the sort of “Adult Swim” crap that I really hate. Since I don’t understand it, though, I am more inclined to like it.
Which is a thought that I think can be extended to writing this way: sometimes I get the feeling that bad poets are taking a marginal idea and, unable to make it better with vivid language (or a better idea), they make do with making it unintelligible.
Unlike that video, though, I don’t like poetry to be unintelligible. Why not? I guess the difference is that it’s a lot of work to read a poem, and I don’t trust poets. (That said, sometimes I want a poem to be oblique and abstruse, ridiculous, meaningless, unintelligible, even.) (Ha.) **End Update**
Choice Gleanings from the NYT Weekend Book Review
Rick Moody reviews Mick Wall’s biography of Led Zeppelin, and finds it overly focused on prurient groupie-stories, at the expense of any real discussion of the band’s music. This is the same Mick Wall, then of Kerrang! called out by name (along with Bob Guccione Jr., then of Spin, Andy Secher, then of Hit Parader, and the entire entity that is/was Circus Magazine) in the song “Get in the Ring” on Use Your Illusion II. (“You be rippin’ off the fuckin’ kids/ While they be payin’ their hard earned money to read about the bands They want to know about / Printin’ lies startin’ controversy / You wanta antagonize me / Antagonize me motherfucker / Get in the ring motherfucker…”) Guess things haven’t changed much for ole Mick over the years.
Sheila Kohler (alumna of The Quarterly and a Lish-era Knopf) has a new novel, a work of historical imagination entitled Becoming Jane Eyre, which Christopher Benfey seems to have enjoyed.
Christopher Byrd, a rad younger critic, whose unexpected popping-up here seems like a general omen of good tidings, reviews Running Away by Jean-Phillipe Toussaint.
And Patrick Cockburn–intrepid journalist, and brother of Alexander–greatly admires Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, a new work of graphic historical-journalism depicting two long-forgotten massacres of Palestinians.
[E]arly in 1956, the Israeli chief of staff Moshe Dayan made a famous speech at the funeral of an Israeli commander killed on the border with Gaza. What, Dayan wondered, explained the Palestinians’ “terrible hatred of us”? Then he answered his own question: “For eight years now they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.”
Oh right, that.
Uncategorized / 6 Comments
December 26th, 2009 / 11:24 pm
December 26th, 2009 / 11:24 pm