I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET by Sophia Le Fraga
I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET
by Sophia Le Fraga
Keep This Bag Away From Children, August 2012
45 pages / $5 Buy from publisher
If you accidentally drop Sophia Le Fraga’s I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET, the book is fucked. This text is unbound, typewritten, looseleaf and there are no page numbers, so one misshap and the whole thing is irrevocably scrambled.
Or maybe it is not fucked. The sequencing of these poems is malleable and they do not have to be read chronologically. This “randomness” lends itself to all kinds of questions about the way that we perceive the order of a book of poems. Bound books appear official, permanent, as though there is an art god or a poetry god who said “do it like this” and it was so, and it is so forever. But sequencing is really subjective. If given the chance to rip out the binding and re-shuffle, many poets would likely re-sequence their books shortly after publication.
And what about the god of the internet, the @Lord? Is there one? “do me a favor, / professional / consoler: / get outta my sky. / save yourself on a computer / and zoom in on a stranger,” writes Le Fraga. This text is tense, at once resisting and embracing the fleetingness of pop culture and the meme. The speaker is “sick with / sincerity” yet “mass texts” are rendered “a / worse feeling / than hearing / about suicide.” Likewise, “time is a waste of #Poetry” but “RunningOutOfXanax” and “#y’all” and “#Instagram” are immortalized on the printed page. If an electronic god exists, it exists everywhere—irl too. Any attempts to separate the lexicon of the internet from poetry, are futile. The internet is omniscient, a time traveler and in you.
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September 12th, 2012 / 1:30 pm
September 12th, 2012 / 1:30 pm
List of Artworks Destroyed in the 9/11 World Trade Center Attack
(via @PierreMenard (via biblioklept (via Wikipedia)))
DIED: Dorothy McGuire of the McGuire Sisters
A McGuire sister passed away last Friday. As the New York Times obit points out, the McGuire Sisters sang simple, traditional pop songs in contrast to the low, burbling, grinding roil of early rock and roll music. When the McGuire Sisters made a hit out of the song “Sugartime,” history’s greatest rock and roll performer, Jerry Lee Lewis, was marrying his cousin and putting out “High School Confidential.” But they have their charms.
I’m going to just go ahead and admit that I find something particularly distressing about the death of the member of a ’50s close-harmony singing group made up of sisters. Those acts took such pains to eradicate all but the subtlest differences between them in their presentation, worked so hard to let the collective subsume the individuals. (All with nearly the same hairstyle, in nearly the same dress, bantering with Perry Como with nearly the same wit and tone, singing a song with nearly the same notes.) And, sure, they don’t perform anymore. They are in their 80s. But one imagines they sing at home sometimes. And one imagines they hear the other two when they sing at home sometimes. And one imagines they might hear a change in one of their phantom sister voices.
Superhero Wikipedia Pages: Hulk Guys Edition
HTMLGiant’s Superhero week has, like a day-glo-green mutagenic ooze, spilled over into an additional week, and may continue for all of the weeks to come, forever. In this post, I construct some (let’s call it) free-verse poetry from more Superhero Wikipedia pages, this time focusing on some of the Hulk characters. My feeling isn’t that the language of these things is beautiful, though it is sometimes what I would call incredible. What I find continually hypnotic is their dedication to story above all. CLICK BEYOND THE FOLD TO LEARN THEIR EPIC STORIES!
Reading Frank Miller’s influences on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy
One more post on the Batman, if you’ll please. It’s no secret that Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy drew a lot of inspiration from Frank Miller—specifically, from his 1986 mini-series Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and its 1987 follow-up, Year One (which featured art by David Mazzucchelli). And so I felt like taking some time to note all the connections (or at least the ones I can see—feel free to chime in as to what I’ve missed!).
I’ve already commented elsewhere on how Batman Begins took:
- the Tumbler design (The Dark Knight Returns);
- Batman’s escape from the police by means of a bat homing device (Year One);
- and the ending in which Commissioner Gordon muses about the arrival of the Joker, having received one of his calling cards (Year One).
And there are still more connections. Commissioner Gordon’s character arc in that film is similar to the one he follows in Year One—he even has a corrupt partner named Flass. Furthermore, Bruce Wayne distances himself from the Batman by cultivating the image of a drunken playboy:
That’s everything that I can see in the first film.
The Dark Knight is I think the least indebted to Miller of the three films. Nonetheless, its ending, wherein Two-Face kidnaps Gordon’s family, echoes the mob’s kidnapping of Gordon’s family at the conclusion of Year One—Batman even saves Gordon’s son from falling:
Moving on to the The Dark Knight Rises …
Boners of Bushwick
Episode one, in Erik Stinson’s series “Boners of the Free World”
1. Nu Stallion: A feeling of elation near the subway exit of the Morgan L station. This is the night beginning to hasten. The wind in the Oak at a nearby park pushes a feeling. The party is over here. The party is over there. Women pass me heading to the train in the opposite direction.
Check Out
Poet Rob Stephens reading alongside V. Penelope Pelizzon at The Center for Book Arts in NYC this coming Wednesday.
This piece called “Touching Feeling” by Divya Victor @ Two Serious Ladies.
Patricia MacCormack’s essay on “Necrosexuality” at Rhizomes.
&
This new music video for Antony and the Johnsons’s ‘Cut the World,” directed by NABIL and starring Willem Dafoe, Carice van Houten, and Marina Abramović: