Sean Lovelace—
I go to the beach. I ask what you are reading, your ‘beach book.’ 99.4 % of the time it is a novel. Why?
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WORD RIOT HAVIN’ A CONTEST
contest!
Yo! Word Riot, publisher of me (oh and some other folks, like Mike Young and Paula Bomer and Kevin Sampsell), is having a contest. THREE contests. Poetry, flash fiction and short story. The winner of each will receive half the contest money (from their respective individual contest, I assume) and be published in the WR 10th anniversary anthology. They’ve also opened up submissions for the WR 10th anniversary anthology from authors previously published on the site. More info here: http://www.wordriot.org/archives/2019. I just got a galley of Paula Bomer’s book Baby this week and I’m gonna read it ASAP, like as soon as I finished this amazing Aldous Huxley book The Devils of Loudun that I got from the library. (Read this shit, it’s so good!)
listen: This Noisy Egg
Because when I go outdoors, light splits
up my head and super siren dogs
try to eat my balls.
1. Your book seems to me to be full of movement. Feather-minded bullets and clutch-curls and tilting sways and breezes and tickling groins. Discuss.
Poems should move. Sometimes, when I think of poems, they seem so blocky and static on the page. I think that’s one reason people resist them. In these poems, I tried to get some flight into them—partially from that high-minded notion that poems should move but also probably from some less honorable fear that the poems will get stuck somewhere and I won’t be able to move it out from there. Like swinging on the monkey bars, if you lose momentum, you fall down. I resist resolution in the poems for the same reason—that tied-up-in-a-knot feeling that makes poems feel so smart but also so done. If I fully resolved something in a poem, I don’t know how I’d write the next one.
Phone is ringing, oh my gawd, it’s a giveaway
Telephone is a new journal. Here’s their introduction:
The first issue features poems by Uljana Wolf which are translated by Mary Jo Bang, Christian Hawkey, Susan Bernofsky and more (a damn impressive list; that “more” doesn’t mean “friends of the publisher”). They all translate the same poems, so you can contrast and compare (samples here).
Paul Legault and the editorial crew of Telephone are offering 5 copies of this first issue to htmlgiant readers with a contest. Here’s the game, according to Paul:
I think it would be a good idea to get people to mis/un/dis-translate Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone message:
“Watson, come here! I want to see you!”
And give 5 books to the best five, as judged by the editors.
I take that to mean: translate Bell’s first message any way you want. Do it in Spanish or Klingon or English or whatever. Translation is hip, as Lord Buckley showed Groucho Marx. **UPDATE: Entries must be posted by 12pm Eastern on Friday the 17th.**
And set your cell to vibrate this Friday at their release party:
Time: September 17 · 7:30pm
Place: 177 Livingston, Brooklyn, NY
Freaking NYC man. This looks like a great reading.
Mud Luscious Press ‘Blind Faith’ subscription deal
Mud Luscious Press is offering a ‘Blind Faith’ subscription deal: If you are willing to trust us on the titles & authors of our 2011 catalogue without any cover takes or blurbs, then we’ll reward you by knocking the price down. So until mid-October, we’ll give you all the 2011 titles for $35, including:
GRIM TALES by Norman Lock, THE HIEROGLYPHICS by Michael Stewart, I AM A VERY PRODUCTIVE ENTREPRENEUR by Mathias Svalina, [ C. ] an mlp stamp stories anthology, plus handmade chapbook volumes from Jessica Newman, Stephen Gropp-Hess, Neila Mezynski, Kristina Marie Darling, John H. Henry, Andrew Borgstrom, Ani Smith, & others
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September 12th, 2010 / 11:26 pm
September 12th, 2010 / 11:26 pm
Off-camera, Alfred Hitchcock says, “We’re gonna have chicken for dinner tonight.”
The posthuman is merely the subhuman that results whenever people aspire to the superhuman.
– Garret Keizer (On ‘postmen’ in this month’s Harper’s)
Dick Cavett: What psychology do you use on a seagull?
Hitchcock: Birdseed.
On the extent of my errors
Forever, I thought solipsism was one’s belief that she is the center of the universe. This seemed to be a logical definition to me, “sol” after all means “sun.” Also, someone who is solipsistic is egotistical, duh. I mean: my definition made sense. To me, at least.
I started this post with something profound to say.
I was going to say: Logic would tell us that solipsism derives from ego, the inflation of self to the point that one believes she is the center of the universe, planets rotating around her; however, solipsism comes from a deep sense of insecurity and nothing else.
But I was wrong. Solipsism is not the belief that one is the center of this galaxy. Solipsism does not equate self with the sun, a star. No, solipsism is “the view or theory that self is the only object of real knowledge or the only thing really existent” (OED). It’s etymology does not come from “sol” meaning “sun” but from “solus” meaning “alone,” easy mistake, sure.
Shakedown YouTube Money
1. Tomorrow in New York, The Rumpus Summer Shakedown.
3. I just read the James Gendron’s Money Poems chapbook from Poor Claudia, really loved it. Occulty money mesmerism with good brainlaughs. Wonderful. Poor Claudia makes beautiful books.
What the hell is the world coming to?
I went to a gala of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s tonight, where they performed an exceptional program. I never saw a room of Beethoven-lovers so enchanted by fucked up avant-garde prepared shit. The whole program was amazing. A soprano, mic-less, hummed an aria, wtf. Some world-renown violinist played what I took to be a broken violin. And the first piece struck me as a cooler Philip Glass thing. It was the “Danza Final” by Alberto Ginastera. Never heard of him. I looked it up on Youtube and found it, but this one is done by those things, the squeeze box. Get a load: