Phallic Phractals
Why would the word “choad” be used to describe two distinct parts of the male anatomy which reside in extreme vicinity? Choad means both 1) a penis that is as wide as it is long, and 2) the area between the scrotum and anus (fml. perineum) — as conceptualized using fractals in opposite directions (emmision and butthole serve to orientate the viewer). It’s like using one word to describe both the rind and pulp of a lemon. Words are free, just make one up. Call a penis that is as wide as it is long a “brupmont” and the conflict ends.
I once heard a male porn performer refer to his imminent emission as “choad,” that (emphatically) “Oh, [he’s] gonna blow [his] choad on [her],” which is either semantic negligence on his part, or exclusive insider lingo. Brupmont will probably never catch on, as those who host such a diminished digit speak meekly into their laps.
Adam Robinson—
Check out the Teleportal Readings videos. They are stunning. The one of Dean Young reading, OMG, I was watching it, loving the amazing book art fly around, and I had that rare feeling of wanting something to last forever and simultaneously wanting it to end so I could find out who mad such a mad masterpiece.
2
Nick Antosca—
Read all the interviews ever published in The Paris Review. Of particular interest (to me): Bradbury, Salter, Amis, Amis, Ballard, Fowles, Ellroy. They have a new site design. We have a new site design. Coincidence? I think yes.
Well played, Tao.
Included in this issue is an article about Tao Lin by Tao Lin. I’ll update this post with a link when it is live. Or, if you’re the sort of person who might want to do something like this, you could just go ahead to The Stranger’s website and hit refresh for the next few hours.
UPDATE:
Live Giants #8: A Crew of Mary Ruefle
In celebration of the release of Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems from Wave, the eighth installment of the Live Giants online readings series will be next Tuesday, September 28th, at 8PM Eastern. This time we’ll be broadcasting live from two different cities, Chicago and New York, with small crews of local poets in each place reading from Mary’s work, all available for watching here on the site from your computer.
Keyhole Book Submissions
Kudos to Peter Cole for writing the best submission guidelines since those at Muumuu House. From KeyholePress.com:
Books. Fiction Collections, Novels, Novellas, etc.We are not accepting book submissions. Really, we can’t do much for you that you can’t already do for yourself. We encourage authors to release books independently.
Right on. I am for that too, once he convinced me of it. I called Peter a while ago and asked him to put the Keyhole logo on Say, Poem so that later I could put it on a CV saying I had a book from them. He basically said, why bother? He said, get a backbone. Make self-publishing worthwhile and legitimate. If you’re smart, he said, that’s the way to go.
All Context, No Content
Here is an image of a small boy walking along the precipice between a zone of water and a monolithic structure.
Hi. My name’s Mike. I will be posting here periodically (thanks Blake). I had planned for my first post to be about Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Film Photo Hallucination Landscape), which Adam Robinson mentioned last week, because I finished it yesterday and wanted to say something about it because it’s amazing, but I left my copy at home. I don’t like writing about books in detail if I don’t have them in front of me.
Instead of telling you about Tan Lin’s book, I will tell you about myself. Sometimes I really like talking about myself, and sometimes it makes me really uncomfortable. Most of my “author bios” are really brief and include a statement about how I am going to kill myself in the ocean. I also generally point out that this may or may not be true.
If you date a writer, they’re going to write about you: brutal honesty as performative writing
Not my knee, but might as well be
Jackie Wang here. New around these parts. I write the blog Serbian Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns. There you can find my writings on literature, film, art, theory, politics, music, and culture. My blog is named after a phrase written by Refbatch, a schizophrenic Russian woman who has posted around 12,000 YouTube videos online. She is perhaps my biggest inspiration. You can see a website I made for her here. I also do Eggs I Would like to Fuck. You can listen to my music here.
I am a Chinese-Italian (spaghetti-rice) hybrid and my writing is hybrid; I like to combine memoir, criticism and theory. I am against aestheticized indifference and for over-investment and brutal honesty. Jack Halberstam’s theories of negative feminism and antisocial queer theory describes two types of negativity: one characterized by “fatigue, ennui, boredom, indifference, ironic distancing, indirectness, arch dismissal, insincerity” and another characterized by “rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, sincerity, earnestness, over-investment, incivility….” I am of the the second camp. I would say that New Narrative writers like Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, and Chris Kraus (honorary member) are of this camp as well. (Speaking of brutal honesty, have you read the new Eileen Myles book? She talks a lot of shit on Kathy Acker. Even though I love Kathy, it’s kind of great.) I suppose this is a good segue into the issue I came here to discuss, namely the topic of brutal honesty as a specifically performative kind of writing and a way to undermine literary boundaries.
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