Back from AWP.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3zjG9xRg5E
Roxane Gay—
The 2010 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced and independent publishers did quite well for themselves in the Fiction category where Paul Harding won for Tinkers by Bellevue Literary Press. The poetry Pulitzer went to Rae Armantrout for Versed published by Wesleyan University Press. I have not read either book.
16
die my pretty
The neighborhood is not glow. For some reason, dandelions have swarmed the lawns of our imaginations (and also our lawns). A vexation unseen. Everyone asks, “How do you kill the dandelions?”
Here’s one: What exactly is wrong with dandelions?
Someone relate this to writing.
Blake Butler—
Vanessa Place has appropriated the Warhol Factory model, available thus far as 3 text objects: Factory Work : Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by : Poems for OodPress
Comments Off on
Sommer Browning Stand-up
Hey I just discovered this. Sommer Browning–poet, comic book artist, editor of Flying Guillotine, and host of the Pete’s Candy Store series–has officially added stand-up comedy to the list of things that she does or has done. It is very funny and you should watch it.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFS1KPxJcbg
Also, since I’m still in Denver even though AWP is over, I thought I’d share this. It’s a pretty bad recording of a pretty okay song, attached a dead celebrity tribute video that doesn’t relate at all. If you get bored, just shut it off and watch Sommer’s thing again. Enjoy!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLcfz8jMKzM&hl
Listening In
iphone Denver by poet Rick Bursky
-There’s a piece called “How to Unfeel the Dead” by Lance Olsen in Artifice that knocked my socks off.
-A review of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters, something I’ve been thinking a lot about. Richard Howard summarizes Grossman’s thesis:
In the end, Grossman warmly (after all) and gratefully rehearses the twofold answer to the question of her title: translation matters because it is an expression and an extension of our humanity, the secret metaphor of all literary communication; and because the creation of any literary translation is (or at least must be) an original writing, not a pathetic shadow or tracing of the inaccessible “original” but the creation, indeed, of a second — and as we have seen, a third and a ninth — but always a new work, in another language.
-I was tired this year at the AWP Conference. I couldn’t sleep past 5am, and my head swam in treacherous waters all day. New CollAge magazine had a table—we sold about 2.5 copies—at which I sat for 15-20 minute intervals before getting the jitters and flying the coop. Lots of wandering around the Denver Convention Center, admiring the big blue looming bear, sneaking peaks at the car show, listening in:
IN THE HALLS
I can’t just get drunk and flirt with all the students—
Jesus wouldn’t come down and have sex with me like that.
I feel like my arms look like big white baby harp seals.
I’m glad nobody got raped.
I got my MFA in deleting words. I don’t know anything
about throwing babies.
Sean Lovelace—
But why do the individual stories in a collection have to be connected in any way (tone, character, subject matter, etc)?
Third Mess Section
1. Artists of genius, such as Goya, or those of merely remarkable talent, do their best work outside the bounds of capital, patronage, and today’s Great Strip Bar of Artistic Veneration that is New York City, and to a lesser and lesser degree, Paris. Autonomy of creation relies on autonomy of thought and production. –John Sevigny on Francisco Goya, at Guernica
2. “Wasn’t there a sentence in there somewhere that we don’t have now,” Simon asked Mills outside, “where he says — and this is a terrible sentence, but — ‘I went over to the house, and I was hoping there would be a message there or something’? I feel there’s an emotional bump between him talking about his father, which is real substantive stuff, to a moment of what sounds like, by comparison, almost petty practicality about, What I’m going to do with Dad’s house? It goes from one to the other and there’s no…” –David Simon on the set of Treme, a NYT profile
3. Ji Lee on his Bubble Project, creativity & advertising.
4. The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon. –the Abilene Paradox
5. “They are all there, the great talkers,” he answered, “them and the things they forgot. In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man sees, thinks, and what seeing, thinking, saying does, to what Freudians call the subconcious,–but as far for psychoanalysis,” he broke off, “it’s neither more or less than blackmail.” –James Joyce, A Portrait of the Man Who Is, at Present, One of the More Signifigant Figures in Literature, from Vanity Fair (1922)
6. In a series of mock gunfights with colleagues Bohr always drew second and always won. –The gunfighter’s dilemma, or, Always draw second
7. Seizing the moment I told him that I had been hustling him and had deliberately lost the first four games. His response was that I was a patzer. All during the filming of 2001we played chess whenever I was in London and every fifth game I did something unusual. –Playing Chess With Kubrick
It is Friday (not–I was at awp, so flight-wobbly): Go Right Ahead.
Friendlier, prettier, smarter. This illusion.
My beard grew wild, as did my waistline.
The way I write these aren’t like the way I told you I write these…
Imagined dignities.
AWP with 6$ plastic bottles of gnu pee.
Pour down a tall wine or two for ballast.
Drink. Love you, don’t like you.
Frogs. I like the attitude of frogs.
It was a night jump and I was drunk.
Prick-points of sensation. Get it?
Clinically, you know…
I will fucking stop for cornbread!
Like those balloons.
Power Quote Quartet
You know who wears sunglasses inside? Blind people and assholes. — Larry David
It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision. — Helen Keller
I’m into the girls fancying me and stuff, mad for it. — Liam Gallagher
A man’s errors are his portals of discovery. — James Joyce