There are No Entities, Only Processes: Re: Frank Hinton’s I Don’t Respect Female Expression
Frank Hinton has a book out, I Don’t Respect Female Expression, published by Safety Third Enterprises.
Reading Frank Hinton is bracing, like stepping outside on a brisk, windy day freshly showered, contacts newly put in. I feel unsettled and unsure. An implacable menace hangs over these pieces like death every moment. The book is thematic at the language level. There is talk of physical and emotional bonds. There is meditation and joyless sex and animals in traps and death and death. Almost every piece directly or indirectly involves death. Hinton has spoken in an interview with Dark Sky about doing Osho’s death meditation.
Like waking from death meditation, sensory details are heightened: clementine juice filling one’s mouth; thick curls of hair crowning the base of a father’s penis; etiolated skin; a round, plump ass; the taste of one’s t-shirt collar.
24 Comments
May 24th, 2011 / 1:39 pm
May 24th, 2011 / 1:39 pm
The Nazis & Our Critical Consciousness
I just got done reading Piotr Uklanski’s monograph, The Nazis. Reading here, of course, simply refers to the act of looking, as there are no words in the book (until an index at the end). Uklanski is an artist, a Polish photographer. Although, similar to my own approach to photography, Uklanski doesn’t take photos per se. Rather, he’s sort of a curator, a collector, highlighting, as the New York Times says, “Conceptual attitudes” (the superfluous capital letter on conceptual is NYT, btw).
The Nazis is a book that bears 247 pages of appropriated images of Hollywood, and prevalent European, actors decked out in Nazi regalia. What I’m interested in probing here are the following things: 1) why are there enough stills for this collection to be possible? and 2) why was I interested enough in this book to go through the process of requesting it from WorldCat?
Fluxus For Free
Very excited to learn about this new free digital edition of the out-of-print Fluxus Reader, via Jacket 2.
What is Fluxus you ask? A few introductory examples after the jump…
Blake Butler—
LOL re Dale Peck: “Literature cannot be saved, because literature saves us. When it no longer saves us, it is no longer literature.”
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Dogs vs. Birds
I like dogs. I’m what you might call a “dog person.” My dog, who my parents purchased somewhere in central Indiana in November 1999, is not only a great friend, but an important influence on my writing and art. Today, she sits approximately fifteen feet behind me staring out the window at the cold, gray earth. Did I mention she likes HTMLGIANT.
When I was growing up, a strong percentage of my favorite books were centered around dogs. There was Go, Dog. Go!—the second book I ever read. Then there were Marjorie Flack’s Angus books about a mischievous Scottish Terrier, not unlike the more popular The Poky Little Puppy, which as of 2001, was the single all-time best-selling hardcover children’s book in the country, selling nearly 15 million copies since its publication in 1942, according to Publishers Weekly. As I grew older still, I read Shiloh and, my favorite childhood novel, Where the Red Fern Grows. There was even a book narrated by a Pointer, read aloud in some public school setting, which has left an undying impression on me, years later. Needless to say, the dog books were a big part of my childhood.
Somewhere along the line, though, a shift occurred.
No Rapture But Plenty of Freaks
From Jamie Iredell:
Thanks to everyone who submitted something for a free copy of Freaks!
The winners, selected by Roxane Gay and Mike Young, are:
“Ain’t Saying She’s a Grave Digger” by “joe bloe”
“The West Coast” by “Frank Tas, the Raptor”
“VAG” by “barry”
“Pets” by “Tyler Gobble”
Get me your contact info (email me at jamieiredell [at] gmail [dot] com) and I’ll mail you a(some) book(s) and other bullshit.
All of the entries were awesome, awesomely funny and disturbed. They made my week. Below one can read the winners’ entries. These entries do not reflect the opinions of HTMLGIANT or of Jamie Iredell and remain the sole property of the authors. These are caveats. Caveats remain.
Read the winning entries after the jump:
Hoe Fiction Works
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The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors. As for the door to the laundry room, only my wife knows that one. But enough about white male jokes. I quickly got lost in my Barthian funhouse and called my editor, who told me to say Flaubert every other page. The hoes of friction, besides a pun, implicates literature’s true calling, to quench the muse of hoes, those handjob sirens motioning like a rap video, if such videos where directed by Renoir.
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
In order to talk about a book I am certain will make many of the “best” lists this year, and one I loved, I’m also going to need to talk about three things I really hate in novels–epigraphs, prefaces or prologues, and epilogues.
When I read an epigraph or a series of epigraphs in the front matter of a novel, or even worse, at the beginning of a short story or poem, I then spend an unfortunate amount of my reading time trying to make sense of the importance of that epigraph. Is the epigraph a commentary on the writing or the story to be told? Is the epigraph a commentary on the writer or the reader? For better or worse, the use of an epigraph shapes and informs how we read the story that follows. There is an implication by the epigraph’s very existence, that the story cannot exist without the imprimatur of the wise or witty words of someone else. I never find the relevance of an epigraph no matter how hard I try. Epigraphs seem to be an indulgence on the part of the writer. Sometimes I read epigraphs and think, “Well, now you’re just showing off how well read you are,” particularly when the epigraph comes from some obscure text perhaps three people have read. I am even more vexed by biblical epigraphs. It makes me wonder if there is some spiritual agenda to the book I’m about to read and if I don’t quite understand the biblical verse I begin to wonder about the disposition of my immortal soul. It is all very stressful.
58 Comments
May 20th, 2011 / 2:23 pm
May 20th, 2011 / 2:23 pm
Are you ready, or what?
All signs point to the apocalypse tomorrow. Have you heard?
Fuck: what if they’re right? (They’re not, but who would get the last laugh?)
What are you doing in preparation and/or celebration?
