This Wednesday Afternoon in May Triple-shot is brought to you by MIDNIGHT IN NOVEMBER
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It is seeyerbreath cold in New York. Also raining. My friend in Denver says they got 3 inches of snow the other day. Dear Mother Nature, WTF!?!?! etc.
Speaking of Mother Nature and WTF, I can’t figure out why Crooks & Liars seems to be the only people to have reported this angle of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill–that the Gulf of Mexico is a major dumping ground for unexploded ordnance (UXOs)–ie bombs and stuff. BP WAS LITERALLY DRILLING IN THE MIDDLE OF A FUCKING MINE FIELD!
Anyway, enough of that. Over at something called Review Fix, Mickey Ehrlich extols the virtues of and provides some contexts for understanding Joshua Cohen’s Witz.
Last November, Sarah Palin spoke to Barbara Walters about the expansion of settlements in Jerusalem: “That population of Israel is going to grow…I don’t think the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.” Israel makes such strange bedfellows. We Jews in America find ourselves building alliances with politicians whose wish is to corral us into the Holy Land, so the Messiah can return, and we sinners may repent or die.
In other news, have you checked out Pop Serial, edited by our own star commenter Stephen Dierks? The magazine can be downloaded for free right here. It features Tao Lin, Joshua “the aforementioned” Cohen, Zachary German, Kendra Grant Malone, I. Fontana, Miles Ross, Donald Futers, Paul Edward Cunningham, and a whole lot more besides. So go get it, yeah?
Speaking of MIDNIGHT, here’s a little culture for nothing extra- What secret ministry do YOU perform?
Early Bernhard at Little Star
Little Star has posted “Two Tutors,” an early story by Thomas Bernhard. The story is part of a forthcoming book of prose originally published in German in 1967, but now translated into English for the first time.
Conversation as the expression of the most absurd human miseries is not possible for us. As far as conversation is concerned we are both such characters who must avoid it in order to save ourselves in a totalitarian madness from being frightened to death. Today, too, no conversation came about. We walk well outside the town and above it and in the middle of it through a grotesque alpine limestone flora, constantly at the mercy of critical observation and constantly making critical observations. The soothing effect of a conversation—we do not permit ourselves such a thing. In fact what the new tutor during our walk today had initially taken the liberty of judging a “confession,” he already described, after only a couple of sentences, as if he wanted from the outset to prevent any intervention on my part in this “confession,” to make it impossible, as merely a remark.
Ken Baumann—
Mini mess: an interview with ‘MoMA’s Mystery Man’ & Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Collected Works as a free .pdf (via UbuWeb).
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“The story? The characters devour the story.”
Just read Rick Moody’s suspiciously effusive review of Charlie Smith’s Three Delays. I get the feeling that Moody wants every living writer to go out and read Three Delays, and I am not sure if I will, but I like this idea of the characters devouring a story. It reminded me of a book I recently read– Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell.
A friend told me to read Mrs. Bridge a few years back and I asked what the book was about. She said something like, “Oh, it’s just about Mrs. Bridge, who lives in Kansas and is married and has three children and a maid and a big house and she is faintly unhappy all the time.”
(I should mention that this recommendation was given while we were at a Halloween Party and my friend was dressed as Mrs. Bridge and she had gone through some trouble to get the 1940’s style costume; she loved the book that much.)
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May 12th, 2010 / 1:24 pm
May 12th, 2010 / 1:24 pm
Some Books I Loved Recently and Hope to Write About Soon
I got laid off! It’s awesome (seriously, it’s kind of good news). I have to work till the end of the year and then: the future!
Since I’m feeling so positive, I want to list some books I read recently and loved. My mom would call this “a lick and a promise,” which, now that I think about it, is kind of gross. Can someone tell me what is a lick and a promise? Mom would say it when she only wanted me to do a fast job of cleaning up the living room with the intention of doing a better job later, as I intend to do with these book thoughts about Killing Kanoko, When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother, Ten Walks/Two Talks, Poetry! Poetry! Poetry!, The Irrationalist, and O Fallen Angel, below the fold. READ MORE >
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May 12th, 2010 / 12:45 pm
May 12th, 2010 / 12:45 pm
Blake Butler—
While I was just now reading a random small section of Cronopios and Famas from a copy I found left sitting in a small stack in a small room, a tiny hundred-leg bug suddenly scurried out from between two earlier pages and onto the white around the sentence I was reading. Close up, in my face, a little word. I screamed, threw the book down, killed the bug, looked at its smashed parts. Pretty shortly I came back to reading, suddenly creeped by the pages and nervous to go further on each word. Now suddenly it seems pointless to be writing anymore until I can figure out how to make that happen again, from the other end.
Win Robert Lopez’s Part of the World
In one of my favorite books last year, Robert Lopez’s Kamby Bolongo Mean River, a man is locked in a room with a telephone and a bed. He spends a lot of time answering phone calls from strangers, and a lot of time drawing stick men and masturbating, and rummaging through his brain contents of growing up in a place called Injury, Alaska.
The book’s title comes out of the narrator’s remembrance of his brother repeating the phrase from the TV miniseries Roots. The phrase, along with other odd small ideas, indented moments, phrases looped, present themselves so seared on the narrator’s head it is as if he’s not in this single tiny room at all. If you’ve ever wanted a perfect book to teach or observe voice as character, setting, etc., Rob is the one, both here in Kamby, and in his first book Part of the World. Few maintain such control line by line of what, where, and when while managing to keep you hypnotized in tone.
Rob has offered to give away a few copies of a rare purple-covered edition of Part of the World, never before available. To enter, just comment here with a memory of your own childhood related to some looming repetition of phrase or sound or image from TV or film.
Three winners will be selected late Thursday night.
The Whole Thing About Poetry
At the Juniper Festival a few weeks ago there was a panel about The Future of Poetry. The panelists were Evie Shockley, Cathy Park Hong, Heather Christle and Rebecca Wolfe. It was good, cutting edge, perhaps too polite but definitely the sort of thing that is supposed to happen at panels.
Rebecca Wolff said poetry doesn’t matter and it sucks that poets, who are smart and engaged people, are wasting their lives on something cloistered and anonymous (my words) when they should become civil servants, business people, people who can make a difference. Essentially, the world is missing the poet’s perspective in areas where they are needed.
I could be paraphrasing this in an unacceptable way, just so you know. But that was the gist. READ MORE >