Jeez, Jackal, You Sure are a Jackal!
I feel loathe to spread attention about a dude who goes by the goober moniker “The Jackal,” but the story is moderately interesting enough to bring up: supposedly notorious literary agent Andrew Wylie makes a supposed splash by selling e-book rights for books that had not supposedly had previous e-rights contracted, including Updike, Nabokov, and etc., in an exclusive contract to Amazon via his newly established Odyssey Editions, formed entirely for ebook handling. Now there’s a big legal kerfuffle over who gets to do what with what and why to who and for how much and why not me and what are you doing motherfucker that’s my vacation house #2 fund we’re talkin’ bout. Moby Lives has the full scoop.
Agents. I mean look at this guy!
Props to MHP for the 'shitforbrains' image filename
Now look at him again, in 1972!
All the LeatherJacketed Young-Once Not-Really-Literary Men
If you’d like to buy a copy of that picture to hang over your bed, the pricing & information has been included in the image like a good salesboy.
I wish George Bush era brains had popularized Styrofoam-books instead. That seems more fun.
10 Sentences: John Jodzio
Bored of the same old interviews, I’ve decided to start something new. It’s pretty self-explanatory.
1. A sentence using three or more words you consider ‘personal favorites.’ She was a college girl, waylaid by a bad fan belt — he had tried using the word “morass” in his pickup line, but she’d slapped him just like the townie girls always did.
2. One sentence about your grandmother: Nana rubbed my gums with ice cold gin, unless she’d already drunk it all.
3. A sentence using a really bad metaphor and too much punctuation: I realized, suddenly, that Misty and me, we were like that tetherball there on that school playground — spinning violently around that cold steel pole and that the cold steel pole was like OUR DEAD FATHER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4. A sentence spoken by the thirteen-year-old you once were: “Hey fuckstick — watch this!”
Mustache mediation
Some say Leo D’s “Mona Lisa” was him in drag, that he was gay. Some say gay is the last chapter of evolution, that we reach a point where ppl. get to make love without the threat of babies, which leads to child support, etc. An effeminate man is often deemed sophisticated, at least in our liberal-progressive artsy business. What used to get you beat up in the playground is now considered “interesting,” a word used in place of a compliment. Testosterone is boring. Toblerone is fattening, so much for semantics. So Duchamp turns Mona back into Leonardo, or at least signifies his convoluted wants quicker, while turning himself into Rrose Sélavy. Look at the poetry of Rrose, how it looks like Prose.
Don Mee Choi’s THE MORNING NEWS IS EXCITING
I’ve been feeling disappointed in books lately. Whereas I’ve encountered many well-written books, they’ve lacked something—a politic, perhaps, or maybe something as simple as a point. I’ve found myself reading half a book, losing interest, the well-crafted sentence not enough to compel me to completion. But then, yesterday, as I was rushing out the door to go to a dentist appointment, I remembered this book that Johannes Goransson had sent me, a new Action Book, and I thought maybe this would be different. And it was.
Don Mee Choi’s The Morning News is Exciting is perhaps one of the most exciting books I’ve read recently. A collection of poetry or prose or prose poetry or poetic prose, whatever, genre is so passé these days, Choi’s book challenges not only genre but also the politics of colonialism, post-colonialism, empire, and identity. As cutting as it is tender, as angry as it is intelligent, this is not a book for the faint-hearted reader.
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July 23rd, 2010 / 11:31 am
July 23rd, 2010 / 11:31 am
It is Friday: Go Right Ahead
Civilization ends at the waterline
Floating horror of a 35 mph red-light
Your pelvis aches in your hands, too?
You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when it’s waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye
Get drunk. Get naked. Fall
Despite your refusal
Who can control themselves around so much “rough trade”?
There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of an ether binge
It was embarrassing
When black-dog down, get your tires changed. It will make you glow 2 hours
Gobble
Sloppy drunk and starting to sink into the winged chair
Electric monkey
Fly
Live Giants #7: Mairéad Byrne
The seventh installment of Live Giants will feature Mairéad Byrne, a va-va-voom poet and professor and all-around great person. She will be the first in the series with an accent.
Her latest book, The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven, was just released by Publishing Genius.
Her earlier book, Talk Poetry, had me in stitches, but when I saw her read from it in Chicago I was like, what, wait, these prose poems is kinda sad.
Tune in next Thursday, July 29, at 9pm to find out if it will be funny or sad or what-all. No cover.
Richard Yates | Story Prize | Fence
1. Tao Lin is hosting a huge Richard Yates contest at his blog, with cash and books and other things to win. I am reading Richard Yates right now. It’s kind of crushing and insane. Emotional-minimalist brutalism? It’s good.
2. The Story Prize has a blog, where they are hosting authors talking about their nominated books. Our man J.T. is all up in it, as are several others. Do a look!
3. New issue of Fence is out, and as always looks amazing. Checking my mailbox daily as I do during this time. My local homeboy Chris DeWeese has some poems in it from his Alternative Music series, wherein he tries to remember the lyrics to rad songs from the 90s without really relistening to the songs. I am ready to see that project become a book that I can hold.
Ars Poetica
Because I’m doing a presentation today on Horace’s “Ars Poetica” I’ve been reading various other versions of the poem about poetry. Horace, of course, being that dastardly villain who has filled countless heads with the tedious idea that literature should not just delight but also educate, who reached back to Aristotle and pulled those cumbersome ideas about unity, clarity, decorum, and morality up through the ages for people like Sidney, Pope, and Sartre to latch onto and pass along. Horace, who opens his version of the “Ars Poetica” (circa 30-10 BCE) with a preemptive attack on Surrealism:
Suppose a painter to a human head
Should join a horse’s neck, and wildly spread
The various plumage of the feathered kind
O’er limbs of different beasts, absurdly joined;
Or if he gave to view a beauteous maid
Above the waist with every charm arrayed,
Should a foul fish her lower parts infold,
Would you not laugh such pictures to behold?
Such is the book, that like a sick man’s dreams,
Varies all shapes, and mixes all extremes.
Horace, who liked his shapes and extremes clearly separated.
Anyway, I thought I’d share a few of the other Ars Poeticas I’ve come across. It’s an interesting form that allows for a wide range of approaches.