3 teensy reviews
Tight Times is a children’s book about a kid who wants a dog. His mom says don’t talk to her because she is busy. She wears a bra around the house. The family makes the kid eat a cereal called MR. BULK. Dad gets laid off and comes home and smokes a cigarette and makes a stiff drink. Mom tells the kid to stay outside. Kid finds a cat in a garbage can. Some nosy aging hipster woman stranger says he should just keep the cat. Parents say, fine, OK, keep the damn cat. Kid does so and names it Dog. Kid feeds Dog lima beans.
Vivisection is the controversial act of operating on a living animal. People have performed vivisection on humans, primarily as some demented form of medical “experimentation” or as torture. Anesthesia usually not applied during these surgeries. The term is also the title of a poetry chapbook by Eric Weinstein, winner of the 2010 New Michigan Press chapbook contest.
Damien Hirst on Writing
“Every day your relationship with death changes.”
“You’ve got to be oblivious to other people-the push and pull of other people’s opinions, the way other people measure success. It’s then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things. And that’s very difficult because everyone wants to be better than they are. You’ve really got to get down on the floor with yourself and get low in order to make great art. I think you’ve just got to accept who you are and do the most unbelievable things.”
“I sometimes feel that I have nothing to say and I want to communicate this.”
“Artists are like everybody else.”
“And I think, you know, I like it, so I can’t understand it, I think if you’re gonna have this stuff going in your ears, you might as well have some stuff going in your eyes.”
“I wanted a shark that’s big enough to eat you, and in a large enough amount of liquid so that you could imagine you were in there with it.”
“There’s always something you missed or something you didn’t notice or somehow you got wrong… I don’t really have a beginning.”
“Architects don’t build their own houses.”
“I always feel like the art’s there and I just see it, so it’s not really a lot of work.”
“I’m more interested in why people are frightened by Jaws and why Jaws was such a hit than saying Spielberg’s my main influence.”
“Sometimes when you’re drunk you can see better.”
“I always liked the fact that you get these totally unacceptable images, but they’re taken by a really expensive photographer, with great light, and in terms of the quality of the photograph it’s a great photograph, but in terms of imagery it’s unacceptable, and I like that contradiction.”
“People say to me that my work’s sensational. And I go, “What’s wrong with sensation? It’s like touching skin.” Sensation is an element of what I do, and why not? It’s not sensational for the sake of being sensational, but it’s sensational art.”
“I don’t think I invented anything. It’s like I just saw it, just because I did it first. The road was there. It was going to happen.”
“It’s good to have a title that’s not just one word. If you’re gonna title it, you might as well try and say something.”
“There’s no possible way you can get what you want.”
“The great thing about painting now is that I’ve gotten to the point where I can forget everything just by doing it. And I never used to be able to do that.”
“I just wanted to find out where the boundaries were. I’ve found out there aren’t any. I wanted to be stopped but no one will stop me.”
“I don’t mind if it falls over… if you break the glass you replace the glass, if the sheep falls out you can always get a new sheep.”
“Warhol said a brilliant thing. He said if anybody slags anything off, make more.”
We’re Looking for a Reviews Editor
This is an open call for a position as Reviews Editor of HTMLGiant. Responsibilities would include organizing regular posts and reading/selecting/soliciting incoming reviews. Modest monetary compensation. Interested parties please email blake [at] htmlgiant [dot] com with anything you think I should know. If you don’t hear back, we filled the spot. Thanks! Thanks to all who responded so fast. We got more than we expected. More soon.
Strawberries Are Delicious
For Short Story Month, Matt Bell has been posting reviews of short stories, guest posts, and quotations from renowned writers on the craft of short story writing. Yesterday, Bell wrote an amazing post about Eduoard Levé’s When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue which appeared in Paris Review 196. You should read both the excerpt (genre indeterminate, sort of, you’ll see) and Matt’s commentary.
I am drinking gin & wrote about 7 songs as they came up on random in my itunes while they played until they ended
“Slow Down” Snoop Dogg, Da Game is to Be Sold Not to be Told
I remember when this album came out like while I was in high school or right after I got out, a bunch of my friends liked Snoop and felt curious to find out what Snoop sounded like on No Limit having moved from Death Row after all that weird shit was going on. We went into a Media Play that since has closed and not been replaced as a business near where I hung out when I was in high school and shit, we took it out and immediately listened to it in my Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot without driving anywhere, we just sat there and like listened to the beginning of the tracks and I remember feeling more and more pissed off by each, how he had changed, there was all this UNHHHHH from Master P on it, and like on this song there was this weird production singing, it felt synthetic, I think we took it out after only really previewing each track and I never listened to it again, I might have returned the CD to Media Play like was so easy to do back then, even with severely used shit, I had a good scam system going where I could buy used and return for full store credit, I’m kind of digging this track right now though does that mean I got older or that I was stupid then or that I appreciate cheesiness in a different way or
“Trapped Under Ice” Metallica, Ride the Lightning
Damn I used to listen to this album on repeat after I finally was able to get a copy of it from one of my friends, I think I tried to buy it at Turtles once with a Turtles coin I got for my birthday but my mom saw the weird death penalty cover and looked at the song titles and probably asked the guy at the counter what was up with the CD and ended up deciding I wasn’t old enough to buy it yet, though she never really censored anything else I did she was careful about music at least until i was in high school or some shit though she didn’t stop me from getting it elsewhere, I think I bought C&C Music Factory instead that day which in retrospect seems more vulgar. Ride the Lightning is still a solid metal record, you can’t really fault a dude wearing a Ride the Lightning T or putting these songs on, I think I remember this album less than Master of Puppets or And Justice For All, I even liked the Black Album but pretty much after that I didn’t listen as much, this song is making me feel further away from the computer screen or maybe it’s because I’ve been sitting still for 7 minutes so far typing without taking a break. Seems like James Hetfield would be chill to hang out with but probably the other guys would be less chill and kind of interested in doing their own things
“Horse” Brian Eno, Small Craft on a Milk Sea
I downloaded this album the other day off of google blog search and I think previewed two of the tracks and it seemed okay but I didn’t really explore it much after that, I kind of prefer Eno’s pop albums though Music for Airports kind of got me through the first half of 2008. This sounds too much like it was influenced by Venetian Snares or something. It makes me want to go eat tacos but that might be unrelated to the music because I always want to do that. I don’t like the way the main background melody is reminding me of Egypt while the bassline reminds me of standing in a small room looking at vegetables. I wonder what Brian Eno does during the day, if he likes to go outside or if he’s mainly an inside kind of guy. I wonder if he ever still calls David Bowie or if they’re not cool. I like the name of this album better than this song. I need to check my email cuz my gmail tab says two new emails since I started writing this.
“A Mercedes Benz is class because it represents money. However, chili dogs have absolutely no class but a great deal of style.” – David Lee Roth
from The Magnetic Fields (1920)
Philippe Soupault & Andre Breton
The corridors of the big hotels are empty and the cigar smoke is hiding. A man comes down the stairway and notices that it’s raining; the windows are white. We sense the presence of a dog lying near him. All possible obstacles are present. There is a pink cup; an order is given and without haste the servants respond. The great curtains of the sky draw open. A buzzing protests this hasty departure. Who can run so softly? The names lose their faces. The street becomes a deserted track.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLH2k_qlxE8
Today & Tomorrow Today
Here. Now. Today. Ofelia Hunt‘s Today & Tomorrow. I read it and liked it very much. (No surprise. No offense meant to any of the other wonderful books from Bear Parade, but My Eventual Bloodless Coup is the site’s monster.)
Today is her birthday. Her sisters are Merna and Anastasia, who once told her it was good luck to touch all doorknobs. Her boyfriends are Aaron, whom she just met, and Erik, whose name is actually Todd. Her grandfather worked in a tin can factory. Now he bakes blueberry pies and laughs and says it’s all true. In the Carlsbad Caverns, Bill Murray wields a giant robot, swallowing families. Today is in Wal-Mart, in Denny’s, at the ice rink. Tomorrow there will be blood on the zamboni. Tomorrow there will be a voice that locks the door behind her. Set among haunted parking lots and AM-PMs and home invasions, Today & Tomorrow melts identity, memory, and consciousness into a hypnotic and hilarious adventure of body and mind, the haunting absurdity of what it means to be a person that can make up everything but itself.
“This book would like to give you an ice cream, but you will have to get in the van.” — Amelia Gray, author of Museum of the Weird
A dream that leads to something real that I made up
I had a dream last night that today was National Prose Poetry Day. I just looked it up. Today is not National Prose Poetry Day. In fact, surprise surprise, there is no such thing as National Prose Poetry Day. That does not deter me. I, nobody Lily Hoang, declare today National Prose Poetry Day. In celebration, here is a prose poem by Mary Miller, published in Rose Metal Press’s awesome collection of flash fiction chapbooks, They Could No Longer Contain Themselves. READ MORE >
Win Limited Edition Prints from There is No Year
Pardon the shameless self post, but it’ll be quick: Harper Perennial has agreed to give away framed, original limited edition prints of three images created by Justin Dodd that appear in There is No Year (examples of which are above). There are two ways one can win:
(1) The book includes information of the odd deaths of certain young celebrities. An example: “Rainer Werner Fassbinder died with a cigarette in his mouth and blood pouring from one nostril.” Comment here with some kind of information of this sort about a person that doesn’t appear in the book, also in one sentence.
(2) Take a picture of yourself close to a mirror holding the book and put it somewhere online, then post a link here.
Three winners will be selected (1 or 2 by choice from the death facts, 1 or 2 at random from the pictures) to received a framed edition of one print of any image in the book, your choice, or I will choose for you. Others chosen at random from the celeb facts may receive a copy of the book.
Winners be selected this Sunday.
Thanks for the indulgence.