David Fishkind—
What do you do on Saturdays between waking up hungover/alone and going out/drinking?
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Song for Bob Dylan
In 1988, I spent my month’s allowance on Guns n’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction,” and was unwittingly yet gleefully met by a stunning illustration on the inside cassette flap of a disoriented woman having just been sexually assaulted or raped. At 12 years of age, I think I understood the sociopolitical significance of the image — that it was “bad”; that rape and physical violence towards women was “bad”; that a hard rock band had a vested economic interest in conveying the image of themselves as “bad,” yet there was still a part of me, perhaps the majority, that simply, essentially, found the cotton stretched panties and exposed plump breast extremely erotic. I may have even unsuccessfully masturbated to the picture; I kept saying “this is a cartoon” to myself as I eventually grew flaccid. More than two decades later, today, knee-deep in Occupy Wall Street media k-hole, I came across a picture of a young protester, perhaps in need of some originality, reading a book that could be anywhere from Twilight to Chomsky’s greatest hits. And guess what I thought? What image immediately came into my mind. I know this is “bad,” that my adult male brain has been hijacked and permanently fucked by the images, album covers, videos, proposed by “bad” rock n’ roll boys who ostensibly were writing songs about how I felt, my unsettled and unsettling emotions, somehow, somewhat, probably not. David Bowie’s “Song for Bob Dylan” (1971) offers the lyric you gave your heart to every bedsit room / at least a picture on my wall / and you sat behind a million pair of eyes which honors Dylan’s voice as being that of his generation. Decades only happen once, but they take ten years to happen, and that is a enough time to get bored. I was born already tired of the 60s. Children dream of perfect worlds, and adults resent and lament the missed opportunities. It is touching, really. This slow dance between frowning parties that never ends. Cobain is dead, and Bieber’s voice is still of a eunuch’s, so maybe our reposed protester can only settle for a sign printed in caps, a sign she doesn’t hold, but places between her legs.
Pleasant and Painful Experiences
1.
A few weeks ago, Glen Duncan reviewed Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and he certainly got a vocal reaction, not necessarily because it was a less than glowing review but because of how he wrote the review, the strange and insulting analogies he made and so on. In his review he, among other things, attempts to predict what those ultimate arbiters of literary taste–Amazon.com reviewers–might have to say. As he discusses the literary nature of the novel, Duncan writes, ” We get, in short, an attempt to take the psychology of the premise seriously, to see if it makes a relevant shape.” He also revisits this idea of porn starts, throughout. Ooh! He said porn star in a literary review! Edgy! Today, he wrote a defense (???) of his review. He responded to the criticism of his criticism with more criticism! Meta! The follow up can be summarized thusly: You are all haters who didn’t understand what I wrote.
On Place Memory, The Other Side, and Yelp as a Forum for Political Debate
+ Wednesday night I found myself standing in a ballroom on Wall Street in line for coat check beside a librarian who was wearing a button that said “Tax The Rich.” Ignoring her button, you’d think we were the rich (and, in a way, just being invited to pretend to be rich for a night is a kind of wealth) but this was after-party for the National Book Awards and the opulent and gigantic room was filled with writers, publishing folk, and journalists. Many people in the room were a part of the Occupy Writers movement, had participated in the protests or had at least covered them.
+ Two months ago, on the first day of Occupy Wall Street, this video caught a smug gathering of the “1%” (whether just figuratively or actual) sipping champagne in a balcony just above the street, waving and laughing at the protestors as they marched and chanted. That balcony was attached to this place, Cipriani, a restaurant and luxury venue for galas and awards ceremonies and fundraisers.
+ As I walked up to the massive, castle-fortress at 55 Wall Street, I could not unlatch it from the image of the smug, clueless champagne sippers. I know that that those people did not have fangs and yellow eyes but in my memory they have fangs and yellow eyes. Now I was standing here, dressed up in a way I am not often dressed and standing among rented tuxes. I felt out of place, but all the friends I saw at the after-party felt similarly out-of-place, so our cumulative out-of-placeness, in a way, placed us.
Been there, bought the T-Shirt: Interview with Dan Boehl
Naomi and the Horse-Flavored T-Shirt
by Dan Boehl
Self-published, 2011
200 pages / $12.99 Buy PB from Lulu, Buy Kindle from Amazon
Forgetting books on airplanes should be a genre of poetry community service. I was in Terminal A of the Baltimore airport when I realized my copy of Dan Boehl’s Kings of the F**king Sea was still on the plane in Terminal B. No, I was only halfway through! So I hurried back to rescue it from the pocket with the barf-bag and instruction manual on how to save yourself with a seat cushion once you land in the ocean. Before the plane pushed, the gate agent let me search for the book, disturbing a few passengers, finally spotting the Kings cover atop a recent issue of SkyMall. I asked the passenger who had taken my place if he could hand it to me. He grabbed Kings, processed the cover, and said frankly, “Oh. Yes. Here. I wouldn’t be reading that.”
8 Comments
November 18th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
November 18th, 2011 / 12:00 pm
Gulogulo
Due to the recent turn of events in the Occupy movement — by which I mean it is turning into a movement, not only because of the fact it is literally moving but because the real test of a movement occurs when the opposition tries to purge it — I feel obliged to do my small part in suggesting a word for what the occupiers are against. Perhaps you think there are existing words to describe what is opposed; and this is true, of course, there are lots of words; among them: corporate greed, economic disparity, banking malfeasance, shady lending, bullshit, derivatives, the 1%, fat cats, motherfuckers, etc. But consider for a moment that prior to 1944 there was no word for genocide. The explanation for this is simple, genocide was not a word — no one had thought to make it up. There were some other words to describe what was going on, such as: holocaust, perfidy, atrocity, burning people alive, etc. But, as there was no word for genocide, this made it difficult to discuss or wrap one’s head around what it meant when one race wanted to destroy another; that’s why Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide, from the latin genus (a race) and –cide (to kill).
So I would like to offer up the term gulogulo. It’s a clunky word, I know, but so is the greasy sect it describes. It can easily be modified to wield as an adjective, e.g., “I just saw some gulogulous assclown punch a flower child in the face.” Gulogulo evokes the tyranny of the Gulag, the brutality of a masculinized Caligula, the monstrosity of the half-man, half-snake G.I. Joe villain Globulus (who gets his name from globule, a particle, often of fat, or, in astronomy, “a small dark cloud of gas and dust seen against a brighter background”); but most importantly it is a compound version of gulo gulo, a fun way to say wolverine. Gulo is latin for glutton, and in many parts of Europe wolverines are commonly known as gluttons — like fierce-ass war pigs.
What-a-dick
words and a napkin
1. This audio interview (The Lit Show) with Martone is sort of great. It sprawls about and then, at the half hour, writers and teachers Rachel Yoder, Dylan Nice, and Zachary Tyler Vickers join the conversation. A lot of glow here on regional writing, teaching writing, experimental writing, etc. Worth a listen.
2. Christopher Grimes goes:
Like life itself, writing and reading can be really boring. Reading boring writing, writing boring stuff.
14. This is not a bible verse. This is that amazing hangover essay from a while back in the The New Yorker:
3. Philip Hunt on creativity.
4. You can get a wine-speckled bar napkin signed by Peyton Manning for 10 dollars.
All of My Desire to be Involved: An Interview with Robert Kloss
Robert Kloss is the author of How the Days of Love & Diphtheria (Mud Luscious Press/Nephew) and The Alligators of Abraham (Mud Luscious Press, 2012). He is found online at rkbirdsofprey.blogspot.com.
Jackson Nieuwland likes unicorns.
Jackson Nieuwland: This is my first time being a ‘real’ interviewer. I’ve interviewed people before but they were pretty close friends of mine and I just posted the conversations on my blog. I don’t know you that well and hopefully this interview will be published somewhere cool. I enjoy interviewing, the finished product often feels like a significant achievement. I’m going to try and continue with my personal ‘style’ of interviewing here by asking you questions in bunches to be answered together and putting myself into the interview a bit (you are encouraged to ask me questions if the urge takes you). Have you been interviewed before? Have you interviewed people before? Do you have any interest in the artform of the interview? Do you read many interviews? What sorts of interviews do you prefer? Text? Audio? Video? What are your thoughts on each medium? Have you watched any of Nardwuar’s interviews? Do you have any favourite interviewers? Do you have any favourite interviewees? Are there any types of questions you particularly like or dislike?
Robert Kloss: I’ve interviewed a few people but I never really felt too comfortable with the process. It was fun and the writers I interviewed were very good to give their time and thoughts, but I don’t know that I had a knack for the form. I think a good interviewer is curious and is open to a certain process of discovery and I’m afraid I’m just not a very curious person. And, when it comes to people, I’m at the opposite of curious–the thoughts and particular cares or wants of a certain person just aren’t interesting to me anymore. So I don’t read or watch too many interviews. I don’t even read the letters or journals of famous writers anymore. Even if the conversation is profound (and they rarely are) I’m not sure I get much out of it. It wasn’t always like this. I used to watch Charlie Rose, for instance, because I was interested in World Figures. And I used to read interviews with filmmakers and composers and writers I admired. But I’m just not terribly curious anymore. That said, there are some people, some writers, who take the interview and turn it into a real art, a sort of extension of their work, and I do find that interesting/readable. Partly because I’m new to the idea of presenting myself to the wider world, and shaping that image in a certain way. But partly because while the mundane thoughts and opinions of some stranger aren’t terribly interesting, that stranger’s art probably is. I feel like any writing worth much is a reflection of the truest part of the writer anyhow so why shouldn’t the writer present themselves as what they are, a reflection of their art? READ MORE >
Blake Butler—
This is the only Christmas record allowed in my house: Agoraphobic Nosebleed “Make a Joyful Noise”. Eat.
4 Short Reviews
- “This Love is Office Lighting” by Ani Smith is a skein of seamed prose poems. (You can yawp/yak them micro-fictions if you want—I’d rather lick a cocked fist than enter that argument rightly now.) This chapbook is yellow of hue, the yellow of grappling car sparkle or admitted regret or light, fingernail brail on inner thigh. It is obsessive. It is a crawl, a bite, a love arachnoid of outrageous size, each leg a bristly possibility, from “stab my mother in the eye with a silver rattle” love to pluck love to alien planets love to “violently maim” love to “my pussy hair is a field of dewy flowers” (hey now) love to eyelash love to “dribble starlight” to “plot to blot” love. (That’s 8 legs, pay attention now.) Interview here of author:
- Sports radio. Sports radio as a human being. Who knows? You are basically eating Cracker Barrel, with a chaser of bottled tap water, or Time. The words are plastic, white orbs. Shake your head at mistakes whiles you make mistakes. Crest strip the jock itch. What I would have done in that situation!…possibly the stupidest thought in a person’s gray mass/dimpling ass/twitter gas. You know the smell. Ha! Ha! I agree! (Cue sports-reporter laugh and story about wife-at-home/kids/time you met an aging shortstop at a steak house.) But, hey, you’re not causing immediate harm either. For a short auto drive, let the mind go snapped towel or jowl, falling earfuls of nothing.
I like this guy’s jacket, notch and lapel.- The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by David Brinkley. Who the fuck reviews a 736 pp. book in this format? That’s stupid. That’s inconsiderate and reductive. Well, me. Most “authorities” fucked up every way possible (or just ran away). Most “outlaws” did very well. In this way: Do something. Or this rarest of qualities: When the shit goes down, be a Decent Human Being. Many stark images, many sad facts. An accumulation. Prose exhaustive, sometimes clinical. That’s fine. Actually the way to write about Katrina. We don’t need bells and whistles. We need the gurney, abandoned, one wheel spinning, the body missing, as in gone.