Andrew Weatherhead
http://www.andrewweatherhead.org/
I was born in Chicago. I have friends everywhere.
Andrew Weatherhead—
Comments Off on velvet skies and blacksmith dreams
a few things I like more than commenting on the internet
Exercising
I love it. I love stepping into a gigantic room with a bunch of machines in it and manipulating them until I get tired. There are heavy objects you can pick up and put down. There are lighter objects you can pick up in weird ways to make them feel heavier than they actually are! Sometimes I just get on the treadmill and vibe out to a podcast or a television. You don’t have to be a nut to do it; even swimming is exercising.
Stephen Tully Dierks punches Megan Boyle with Love and Understanding
This is Stephen’s review of Megan’s book:
your actions become more forgivable if you don’t know the rules: an interview with Harriet Alida Lye
I wanted to talk to Harriet on here because I like what Harriet is doing and I think people ought to know. What Harriet is doing is living in Paris as a Canadian expatriate, publishing a journal that keeps getting better, writing her own fiction, and essentially just doing it. In the last three years, I’ve watched her journal, Her Royal Majesty, grow from printer paper and staples to cardboard and printer paper and staples to letterpressed covers and hand-sewn binding to its most recent incarnation as a slick and perfect bound gem. Something I love about the journal is how fully-considered each issue is — unlike most “journals of the arts,” the art isn’t an afterthought in Her Royal Majesty. The layout and design — the way the thing functions and moves as a whole — seems prized above all, which makes each issue less a collection of contributors’ work and more like a large-scale collaborative project. The journal has recently expanded its online presence with a fancy new website and very nice looking blog called HRM Daily, which I advise people to look at. I’m thrilled that Harriet has kept the faith and never looked back. After the jump we talk about the journal, being a foreigner, James Franco, and European MFA programs (they don’t really exist).
I’m going to liveblog whatever baseball game is happening now between the tigers and the rangers until my computer runs out of batteries, right now it is at 33%
A job I’d like to have and think I’d be good at is writing the script for the announcers for baseball video games. One thing I’d innovate the shit out of is to write bits/segments/whatever that have nothing to do with the game that’s going on. In this way it’d be like watching a real baseball game. I’d have the announcers talk about things that happened to them on the way to the stadium and like their kids and shit. I haven’t played a video game in years and I don’t know if I’ve ever played a baseball video game.
Baseball is incredible to me. It’s all mediated. There’s a bat and a glove. The only person who really touches the ball is the pitcher and then he’s a pitcher throwing a tiny ball into a tiny space. The whole thing seems impossible to me. Other sports seem more feasible except for golf.
Wow there are 3 mascot versions of real people racing around the stadium. They are Davy Crockett, Lincoln, and someone else. Their heads are fucking huge and they are scowling it doesn’t look like fun at all.
Imagine if David Foster Wallace wrote that book about baseball instead of tennis. Just imagine, don’t comment. I hope no one comments on this. I think more and more that is an ideal I work towards in social media/blogging. It’s easy to get everyone pissed or write something that everyone will pat my back and congratulate, but it’s kind of fun to write something that goes completely unnoticed. Or like something that is good and I can acknowledge it as good but it doesn’t demand my concrete interaction in any way. That is perfection to me. That’s like how books are.
Oh here comes the manager. Someone might have just scored while I wasn’t paying attention. It would be funny if there was a man on first and the runner and the first base coach switched places so the coach was running and the player was just standing there doing whatever.
The announcer just said “now they’re playing the Munster’s theme song” and the other guys was like “bro that’s Addams family…” — that’s the kind of shit that needs to be in video games. Sometimes I feel like I could make everything better if I were just in charge of everything.
Have you ever seen those photos of broken bats flying into the stands? I’m going to see if I can find one, they’re really funny sometimes.
I mean you hope no one gets hurt but it’s also like “damn is that Michael J. Fox?” and “what the fuck is in that guy’s mouth, could that be his tongue?”
The score is 3 to 2. Detroit is winning. Good for them. Did GW Bush really own the Rangers? How’d he do that? Does he even like baseball?
I got Sam Pink’s novel in the mail today, just like 30 mins. ago. It’s called “The No Hellos Diet”. I think it would be funny if he called his next novel “Just a Few Hellos Diet” or like “The Three Hellos Diet” although I have a feeling I won’t think that’s funny in two hours.
Damn the tigers just got out of some sort of situation. The pitcher was totally psyched and they showed him being totally psyched in slow motion as they went to commercial. The Fox Sports theme song makes me think of oreos! I wonder how much longer TVs are going to be as we know them.
Today is Columbus day? are we really still celebrating that? You’d think they’d just drop it already. I found my copy of “A People’s History of the United States” from sophomore year of high school and it was full of retarded annotations like “good” and “yes”. I think that’s why I don’t write in books anymore, I just embarrass myself later on.
much more interesting than this is whether or not UFOs are real: an interview with Matthew Rohrer
I feel like there’s not much I can say about Matthew Rohrer that hasn’t been said already. He is a poet. He is the author of several books. He teaches at NYU. His poems are funny and sad and familiar and strange. There’s a liveliness in their voice and a deep reverence in their construction. They take place outside and inside, in the city and nature, alone and with others, somewhere where the imagination and concrete reality intersect. Despite all of Matt’s experience and worldliness, his poems also have this remarkable ability of never seeming “above the reader,” while at the same time never resorting to familiar tropes. His poems always level with you and remind you what’s good about poetry.
His new book, Destroyer and Preserver, was released this year by Wave. You can read poems from it here, here, and here. We emailed over the past few days to talk about the new book, other people’s books, punctuation, and hurricane Irene gets a shout out too.
Hi I want to talk about influence a little bit
I read this post the other day over at Montevidayo. It’s about influence. It’s not terribly long, so you can read it if you want, but I’m going to focus on Joyelle’s opening sentences, the post’s premise:
I want to begin by suggesting my discomfort with the conventions of discussing literary influence. I want to suggest that influence need not come from literary forebears, elders, teachers, or even people. For me this notion of influence, regardless of the gender of the participants, is too close to patrilineage, which bothers me for three reasons: its method of conserving property and wealth, ownership of originality; its copying over of heterosexist, male dominated bloodlines and the reproductive futurism that goes with it; and its commitment to linear notions of temporality—that what comes before causes what comes after, and that the most important thing is to move forward in time. I find all these structures suffocating and confining. I think we’re all conceptually limited by the unexamined assumptions about temporality, property, gender, sexuality, wealth and inheritance implicit in most discussions of literary influence, regardless of the gender of the writers under discussion.
Andrew Weatherhead—
Jordan Castro and his band, The Ohioans, have released their debut studio album, also called The Ohioans. Bros are really good, I’m impressed.