Nick Antosca—
The Republican Party in Arizona is recruiting homeless people to run as Green Party candidates in order to siphon off Democratic votes. Short story writer Richard Grayson won the Sixth Congressional District Green nomination with six votes, and says he is now being sued by the Green Party for being a sham candidate.
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I Learned Important Things in School
I have been in school for nearly 32 years with a few years off during my twenties to solve existential crises and the like. I don’t know much but I do know school and I have gone as far as one can possibly go. In a couple weeks, I will defend my dissertation and I have already started working as an assistant professor at a university in the middle of a cornfield so it’s safe to say that I will probably always be in school in one way or another.
Education is not something that has to happen in the classroom. I often tell my students they will learn just as much, if not more, beyond the classroom, by living life and losing at life and learning what to do with the critical thinking we try to instill in them. Anyone with a library card can get a valuable education. Self-taught scholars abound. Education is also a privilege. To be adequately prepared to succeed in college and to be able to afford college, either through financial aid or having your family pay for your education is a real gift and one not available to nearly enough of the people who want a college education. I believe the education system harbors an inherent bias to people who are white and/or middle class or wealthy but I also believe a good formal education has helped more people than it has harmed. Whenever a student complains about something like the amount of reading or writing I assign (to be fair, quite a bit), I like to remind them that they choose to be in college and if they don’t like it, they can move on to a different opportunity. They can also drop my class. I don’t mind. There are all kinds of things wrong with the education system but I don’t think there’s enough talk about what that the education system does right or at least I would like to talk about what a good education has done for me.
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September 7th, 2010 / 5:17 pm
September 7th, 2010 / 5:17 pm
Nick Antosca—
My friends over at RapGenius put up a pretty excellent post on the triple entendre in hip-hop. I tried to think of some triple entendres off the top of my head, and now the top of my head hurts.
Fire Beats Art
This morning, I heard a story on NPR about the wildfires in Russia.
Among the stories of the tragic loss of life and home was one about a woman in a small village who attempted to save her house from the flames by standing out front holding up a Russian Orthodox religious icon. One could react to this in a number of ways. This could be an opportunity to deride religious faith or a point in the “God is dead or never was” column. This could be seen as a cautionary tale about the right and wrong kind of fire extinguisher a person should have on hand in their home. Or this could be, for artists, a time to offer an apology.
To the extent that I might or might not be an “artist,” and bearing in mind the fact that, even if I could be considered an “artist,” the community of artists is likely never going to vote me in as their spokesman, I would still like to apologize to this Russian woman for the failure of the religious icon to stop the fire from consuming her house.
I realize that when holding up the icon against the fire, the woman was thinking of it as a lens through which to focus her religious faith, and hoped that through her faith her home would be spared. It was a religious icon being held up to beat back the fire, not, say, a de Kooning print or a copy of Joshua Cohen’s new novel Witz*. But religious proxy or not, it was still a piece of art, and it still failed to save her house.
Frankly, artists should be thanking this woman. She has a—probably misplaced—faith in art**. A faith most artists certainly don’t have***. She tried to hold back the destruction of her home with art and art failed her.
And when art fails, it is because the artist failed.
Go ahead and complain that the woman did not use art as directed. Try to find some clever loophole to absolve yourself of the guilt. Deep down, though, we know what we did. Or what we failed to do, anyway. Shame on us.
Russian lady: we’re sorry****.
* Have you readers heard anything about this book? Anywhere?
** And—possibly misplaced—faith in God. But who am I to judge?
*** Cynical, cynical bunch.
**** And those of us who aren’t should be.
John Grisham wrote an interesting editorial in the New York Times about the kinds of work he has done including selling underwear at Sears.
Amber Sparks has written a must-read post about professionalism and literary magazines.
Lionel Shriver has some things to say about women and publishing in The Guardian.
Have you all read Bad Marie by Marcy Demansky yet? It’s amazing and you should go get this book immediately so you can let it kick you in the face. It will be worth it.
Speaking of hipsters, here’s something on cultural vampirism.
If you loved Beverly Hills 90210 (the original, of course; let us not speak of the current abomination) you might enjoy this interview with a producer from that show.
I have always been fascinated by the giddiness of women in commercials about cleaning products so when I read this poem, I felt like something important was happening.
Finally, four little magazines that always have interesting things to read: vis a tergo, Metazen, Dark Sky, and Staccato Fiction.
the paintings of e.e. cummings
As a poet, E. E. Cummings has enjoyed tremendous popularity throughout the 20th century, and great critical acclaim from many different literary circles. His poetry has been widely hailed for its experimental form, typography, grammar, and word coinages, as well as for the subtlety and sensitivity of its perceptions and feeling…Less well-known, however, are Cummings’ achievements as a visual artist and the extent to which they express in an entirely different medium the same aesthetic principles and rigorous artistic intelligence that inform his poetry. Cummings viewed himself as much a painter as a poet…
Let’s all Wish Joshua Cohen an 800-page 30th Birthday
Today’s the day for Joshua Cohen, frequent target of this blog’s affection and voice of his generation for all those whom Tao Lin is not already providing a voice. So, how are you going to celebrate thirty years of the Tribe of One? As always, this blog recommends that you mark the existence of writers whose existence you are glad for by buying their books.
Witz is 20% off if you buy direct from Dalkey Archive. (Read Drew Toal’s Time Out New York review, and a snippet from Blake Butler’s in The Believer). A Heaven of Others is available new, used and Kindled at Amazon. You can get Witz there too, obviously, so if you want both you can probably score free shipping. And once the shipping’s free, why not pump those savings into Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto? The trifecta is very much in the spirit of thirtytude. Here’s me and Kyle Minor in conversation re A Heaven of Others at The Rumpus. Here’s Cohen himself answering Stray Questions at the Paper Cuts blog. Oh, and don’t miss Christian Lorentzen’s profile in the New York Observer.
From Yuri, Stoya, and all of us at HTMLGiant–Happy Birthday!
Paragraphs of Paragraphs (8): Pierre Guyotat
Death to the officers! O my latrine, hug me stronger. I give you my wife. Throw my babies into the fire, to the dunghill, trample them under the foot of the marriage bed heavy with your intermingled bodies. She caresses, she kisses your worried muscles. Tear with your teeth rotten by the black meat and the bromided wine, tear with your tanned cock the linen hanging in the toilets, the linen fragrant with the talc and the vomit of the new-born. Ransack my furniture. The room exhales, you erect naked and wearing wool up to the knees, a fragrance of snow and grease. Strangle, knock senseless in their bed my father and my mother. Slaughter on his exercise books my brother dozing at the table. The bites of the native whores reopen on the lower part of your belly under the hair. Dig with your dagger, ear cutter, the polished flooring and free the spring singing for my child in the foundations. Lie down in its water and the cuttings and the earth and the cement powder covering your jaw, fuck my wife to death and, standing up again, squash her head in the stream blocked by sperm. And feeling light, rifle hanging from the shoulder and the mosquito net tied around your loins, push the door and, once you reached the border, throw yourself into our arms laden with dying game. O ear cutter, hoist yourself up with us in the hollow between the branches warmed up by our turds. The smell of the married men’s blood is shrouding the city. To it we prefer the fragrance of the bugs gorged with our blood.