Sunday Zen
It is Sunday.
The water in the river is cold.
Here are some images from and words about the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum:
Every surface has a face
if we explore a surface
as a human.
Here we can see a shape
like a hallway.
6
Twilight Reimagined
This site lists how Twilight might go if written by a list of other novelists…noteworthy remix styles include Murakami:
“Bella has sex with Edward, who is half a ghost. Jacob is a talking cat. Most of the prose is given over to descriptions of Bella making pasta.”
and Cormac McCarthy:
“In the opening scene, Edward dashes Bella’s head against a rock and rapes her corpse. Then he and Jacob take off on an unexplained rampage through the West.”
at a party guys…
Dumb fact guy
Brings 6 of beer has one left and takes it home with him guy
Has to phone girlfriend every four minutes guy
Guy who brings cheap jug of wine guy
Guy who gets pet drunk guy
Guy who turns everything into a bet guy
Doesn’t really want to go then dominates all conversations guy
Brings cheap 6 pack and you see him all night drinking Heinekens and Guinness guy
Let’s go out back and get high guy
Bum a smoke guy
Is this an open bar? guy
Way too old for this scene guy
Guy who just whips out his junk guy
Guy with hot, bored wife guy
Steal the silverware guy
Check the weather on phone and tell us the weather guy
Carries a gun to the party guy
Guy with guitar guy
Constantly gets laid guy
Profoundly depressed over break-up mopey guy
“When I was in Spain…” guy
CORPORATE ADVERTISING AND THE LANGUAGE OF CONSENT
there’s nothing i want more than a way to understand the world that does not rely on money and power
Matthew Simmons—
Stacey Levine on Ryan Boudinot: “This one whom some were following was calm and restrained. His work shows so much work. Thousands of bees in his brain. His work makes its own ceiling, then bursts the ceiling again and again. Those calm, compact manners and the close shave. But you sense at any moment the gentlemanly restraint could fall away. At the spelling bee he was the most polite of them all. He is not in love with the normal. But I think he dislikes the abnormal, because, after all, the normal and its trajectory is so much more complicated and interesting.”
Requited Journal #6
"Call and Response" by Adam Grossi
As the nonfiction & reviews editor of the online journal Requited, it’s my pleasure to announce that Issue 6 just went live. In the Essays section you’ll now find:
- an autobiographical comic by Keiler Roberts (Powdered Milk Volume 5);
- a video essay by Julianne Hill (“So, Mary?”);
- and interviews with Robert Ashley, Vanessa Place, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Curtis White regarding the materials and habits of their respective writing practices (see the introductory note here).
There’s also a new review: Jeff Bursey‘s take on J. Robert Lennon’s story collection Pieces for the Left Hand.
And much more!
Mouth: Eats Color
Mouth: Eats Color
Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-Translations, & Originals
by Sawako Nakayasu with Chika Sagawa
Factorial Press, 2011
90 pages / $14 Buy from Amazon
Sawako Nakayasu’s Mouth: Eats Color is enthusiastic. It’s enthusiastic about the plural nature of meaning, about disavowing loyalty to any single language, about the act of translation as a kind of breakage. Her own poetry which often has the quality of being exuberant but measured, folds into this new book of translations as if she is having a conversation with not only Chika Sagawa but the work itself as a separately conscious entity. Or perhaps more accurately the book is in the act of collapsing several conversations, continually re-engaging the same subject on various planes.
The collection tests the flexibility of language and Sawako Nakayasu isn’t particularly gentle about it. But being gentle is for writing tributes and Mouth: Eats Color is more of an elongation, a circular extension of the text. And while she’s very polite, there’s muscle behind the way she translates, assembles, dissembles, resembles. “Promenade,” a poem repeatedly translated in Mouth: Eats Color changes its first line from “Seasons change their gloves” to “Season bag” to “Seasonal gloves” to “Seasons change their gloves,” every variation slipping easily into the next until they stop reading like re-translations of the same poem so much as chorus. The flow between her poems and Chika Sagawa’s poems offers up questions of where translation ends and collaboration begins, or if the act of translation is even possible—posits that even if content were able to sync perfectly between two completely different languages it might not survive the desire to insert authorial perspective. The collection asks that the reader consider the point when a translation deviates from the original just enough to become an entirely new work and offers up no answers except to say that the authenticity of a poem never mattered in the first place.
5 Comments
January 6th, 2012 / 1:00 am
January 6th, 2012 / 1:00 am
Blake Butler—
Q: How much distance is there between David Foster Wallace–the narrator–and yourself?
DFW: I don’t understand the question?
American Apparent
In 1912, Egon Schiele was imprisoned for 3 days in a town outside of Vienna for producing hundreds of pornographic (according to the State) drawings discovered in his residence after he was arrested for soliciting an underaged girl to model nude for him. It is unclear if he had sex with his models, though it is commonly accepted as so. Painters and their models; writing professors and their students; rock musicians and their groupies. There is simply something gross about this. It is degrading for both sides. Of his models, one Valerie Neuzil (17 at the time), moved him to such a degree that he moved in with her, though ended up marrying Edith Harms, while maintaining his relationship with the former, who left him when she found out about the marriage, duh. Egon had his child in the latter, then died three days after she did, she six months pregnant, both (or all three) from the Spanish flu. His drawings are commended for their deft vigorous hand, but criticized by some for their empty stylization. A hardcover monograph of his work will run you $120.00 at a museum store, though a cunning curator may wish to simply decide on their favorite image and buy the postcard for $2.00. In 2008, American Apparel owner and creator Dov Charney allegedly opened the door in his boxers, removed his member from a “non-outsourced vertically integrated” flap, and forced Irene Morales, one of his models, exactly on her 18th birthday, to perform fellatio on him on her knees at the doorway, then forced her to repeat the act many times, “nearly suffocating her in the process,” according to the $250,000,000 lawsuit Morales filed in 2011. In his defense, Charney said “some people love sluts,” after leaking consensual text messages from Morales. Only evidence is evident, all else is merely apparent. Many other suits ended up as settlements, as many other suits ended up at used-clothing stores. Walk down the cool college-y street of your city towards the bauhaus-y designed store front, and you will see a group of headless manikins standing there. Their pose should be of repose, a calm loyalty that only those without a mind would not mind.