Raul Zurita at Notre Dame 2/2011
At Montevidayo, a fantastic series of videos of Raul Zurita reading from Song for His Disappeared Love at Notre Dame, with translation by Daniel Borzutzky. Part one of the series is below, part 2 & 3 at the link.
3rd Annual Chapbook Festival (NYC)
I went to the Chapbook Festival last year and it was really cool. Justin Taylor wrote about it in 2009. Lots of goodness. This year it looks to be great too. I know there are some “off-site” events going on. People ought to list them in the comments.
From their announcement:
Wed Mar 2–Sat Mar 5
Third Annual Chapbook Festival
The Festival celebrates the chapbook as a work of art and as a medium for alternative and emerging writers and publishers. Now in its third year, the festival features a two-day bookfair with chapbook publishers from around the country, panels, workshops, a reading of prize-winning Chapbook Fellows, and a roundtable and launch of Series II in Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Documents Initiative.
The Festival is free and open to the public, though some events require advance registration, as indicated below. READ MORE >
If love can be a brainworm then I would like to talk about my brainworms
I met someone who gave me brainworm recently. I used to think of brainworm as something that I would own and hold. I thought, “The person who gives me brainworm will be mine and I will be theirs.” The new brainworm I found does not feel like something I need to own or hold. It is a thought that continues to eat wherever it wants to eat. I enjoy the feeding of this thought. The feeding is endless. I could let this feeding continue the rest of my life and I would be happy even if I never saw the person who gave me the brainworm. I am so full of brainworm that I am sick. It seems stupid that I could be so happy about having something as dumb as a brainworm.
Tonight I ate some cheese. I was one of the last people in a room eating cheese. An elderly woman who reminded me of my grandmother began talking. She talked about the time she saw William S. Burroughs read. She went to the reading because she wanted to ask him a question. A lot of people at the reading just wanted to take William S. Burroughs out and get him drunk to see what would happen. She never asked the question she wanted to ask because she didn’t know how to formulate it. I continued to eat cheese and listen. The elderly woman said, “If I had a chance to ask William S. Burroughs a question now I would ask him: but what about love?”
My roommate just got home. He said, “Hellllwwwwwooooo” when he walked in the door. He likes to pretend he is a cat and an Asian when he says “Hello”. When he said, “Hellllwwwwwooooo” just now he was actually saying “Hello” to all the haters who will say they don’t believe in brainworm and think its so heterosexual to believe in something like brainworm.
But yes, I have a brainworm that I’m prepared to live with for the rest of my life and not doing anything about.
An Unnecessary Consideration of How 10+ Years of Daily Writing Has Changed My Wiring, Which I Wish I’d Considered Before I Started Even If I Wouldn’t Have Understood
I guess for like 10 years I’ve been coming to the computer to begin the day almost every day. I wake up to it, it is there. The machine has buttons that allow interaction with the system on a controlled level, meaning unlike humans it will not waver unless it finds errors or accrues age in hidden crap in such a way it can hardly work with the new sizes of the files of programs that run the programs that make the days go.
375,000 pounds of litter we left on the moon
11. Kevin Wilson short interview at The Short Review.
I cannot imagine a question I’d ask that would have an answer I’d be happy hearing.
10. Money. FC2 gets cash! Oh, and there is a 25% sale on For Whom the Bells Toll (now $58,500). Even Shakespeare couldn’t make money with all this internet bullshit, waaaaaaa.
9. Best title, best profile ever.
8. Dude prints out an 1818 edition of John Keats’ book Endymion on New York’s first espresso book machine. Wow.
375,000: Hi, I am vapid. Lady GaGa’s boyfriend (a nightclub manager/long-distance runner/deejay/certified personal trainer/semi-pro bowler) is a notorious drunk. He is also really fit. His blog here. Now he is writing a weight loss book called “The Drunk Diet.” OK.
Larson, Darby. The Iguana Complex (2011)
They are to each other after and on the flower near the crackling fire next to each other but when she looks she’s no longer looks at him. Looks at him. She’s not there looks at him. No longer on, she’s not there, the lone floor of Freeman’s living room and/or the opera stage where the deafening noise, rather, from our crowd’s spoke-woken her. She must have passed, missed, slipped out, slipped, must have hurled herself in the path of a hurled pointy hat. The crowd’s on their endingly feet singing neverendingly songs over and over, the song Cassandra beguttoned a day or so ago.
Oh Reuben, oh Reuben, offstage jumping: keep it going, yes yes, keep singing, keep it going. But she’s jumped and banged and heaven’s sake and sang enough for heaven’s sake, was just pointed-hat-hurled on stage for heaven’s sake, hurled in the pointed hurled hat with a head.
The crowd sobers when the loss of their leader is lost from the strange of the onstage. They file, the crowd, out of our theater seats whistling like a bird-caller army in their cars, near their dinners, at their desserts, within dreams, out from deserts, under oceans, sleepwalking-whistling to kitchens preparing two egg in the morning salad sandwiches.
Freeman prepares himself and his components, the components of the egg salad sandwich at two in the morning with his kitchen around him, tea kettle whistling. Whistling.
No longer whistling. Can you barely? You’ll need to look closer: Cassandra fashioning at Freeman’s kitchen table, the square one, eyes open, a mug of tea, ghost roses parading and the donkey playing a cello.