The Crow Arts Manor Needs the Classics.
The Crow Arts Manor—a new-ish writing endeavor in Portland that hosts readings and sets up workshops with Massive folks like Kevin Sampsell, Emily Kendal Frey, Zachary Schomburg, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Monica Drake as instructors—is gathering a library. Here’s a note I got from the director, Sid Miller:
Crow Arts Manor, located in a Northeast Portland, is a 501c3 non-profits writing center, that provides low costclasses and workshop. Over the last 9 months we’ve been hard at work assembling a literary library. Through donations we’ve been able to obtain a large amount of current literary journals, magazines, books of poetry, short fiction and criticism. But it’s been difficult to obtain the classics, from writers going back to Whitman reaching to the end of last century. So now we’re asking the public for help. We’re looking for folks willing to donate a title or more from their own personal library. Our library will be open to the public and will be a tool for local writers, as well as local schools and non-profit organizations. It will be a place to read, write, and engage with other writers. We will never charge a fee for use of the library. If you are willing to donate, we are happy to send you a present, a past copy of Burnside Review (our partner). Please e-mail me if you are interested in helping.
sid@crowmanor.org
Help ’em out?
Midtown Skin Essay Series Part 3 of 5: Lunch Hour
3. Lunch Hour
Can we stop all this? Can we just stop for an hour?
The Indian buffet on 39th Street simmers as fat men in blue suits break their day into two unequal pieces. Neither piece seems palatable, at this juncture. The morning was dull and the afternoon will be a replete – so the whole day is a tangled mess, layers of nothing upon layers of too much. Clients have weighed in, money is on the line, and all of the executives are out of office (OOO) selecting window dressings for their new condos in MiMa.
***
Adam Robinson—
Booksellers, concerned about the prevalence of eBooks, are making their print books look better, says this article in the NYTimes. The paperback of Jay-Z’s book has shiny embossing and costs $25.
5
Privacy, Personal Papers, Pricks, Rumps
Do we have the right to read, discuss and analyze the personal papers of famous writers, often who have died? I think about this a lot because I am as curious (nosy) as I am uncomfortable with the idea of intellectually traipsing through a writer’s personal papers. In Slate last week, Katie Roiphe wrote about David Foster Wallace’s syllabus. Her article wasn’t particularly noteworthy but I was reminded of how often writers write about DFW and, increasingly, draw from his personal papers. Who knows how many hundreds, if not thousands of articles have been written about the man, the writer, and the scholar, each one trying to offer some kind of new insight into the man and his work. Certainly, there’s a lot to be learned from most things related to DFW including his syllabi. He had a unique, at times incisive approach to communicating to his students the material that would be covered in his courses as well as his general expectations of students in his classes. At the same time, as a teacher, I shudder to imagine anyone reading too much into my syllabi because I know how the sausage gets made.
Midtown Skin Essay Series Part 2 of 5: Hedge Fund
Hedge Fund
It’s ten AM, do you know where your money is? Who touches your credit? Who makes it feel safe? Touching candy, scraping paper skin over the fires of the market, these are the goals of the new new Downtown set. These are the men and women who give your money value, who quantify your life growth. They deal your commodity. They are the men and women who take your life and make it fabulous.
She whispers to money before she dreams, in her loft Downtown. Money takes her to bed. She kisses her own power like an empty vase
On the other side of the world, in New Jersey, money begins to seek power. It begins to roll in the direction of Wall St. It divests itself from your retirement plan. Money wants to be in Manhattan. Money wants to be strong with sexy friends, cigars, power boats. A vacation for money would be a week on the beach at Battery Park, in the 1980s, during the bond market boom. Your money wants to merge, to kill. Your kids go off to college, your money goes off to war.
And now your moeny has gone digital – just like your love life. Your money is dating your iPhone. Your money is fucking your second wife in the back of a Towncar. Every morning at 9:30 AM Eastern, your money sits at a Bloomberg terminal and watches itself breathe.
You can’t have your money now. It belongs to math and it belongs to disappearing mental real estate – the headline market, the gold hedge, the metals sector. Your money is bored by you. Your money is long gone – blowing lines of coke in some Russian death bar with the twin daughters of a brand new oil baron. Say goodbye to your money.
Previously: Happy Hour
how to snort an owl
For many years my doctor has prescribed owls to me in pill form to help me cope with the mental disorder of my personality. He said, “Swallowing owl pills will help you not suffer as much attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Owls are composed of a number of amphetamine salts that are thought to increase the amount of dopamine in the brain. Like many stimulants owls affect the area of the brain that controls the amount of rewards or pleasures you are capable of feeling. Sometimes after I ingest an owl I experience a psychological positive value that is beyond any positive value I have ever experienced from the natural pleasure systems of eating, drinking, fighting, or doing sexual movements. Recently, I have been under a lot of stress. My throat has been really dry and it has been very difficult for me to swallow the full grown owls my doctor has prescribed. As a result, I’ve had to develop a new system of ingestion that involves snorting the owl. READ MORE >
Blog Is Still a Four-Letter Word
Monday morning. Cold cat-nose, green tea, sleepy checking of email. Among the messages, one from my workshop leader, asking if I could stop by her office to talk before class.
Back up, explain: I’m a brand-new, first-semester PhD student in a creative writing program. I’m a poet; I’m a woman; I’m forty-two. And I moved to this city exactly three months ago to start the program. It was an astonishing stroke of good fortune to get accepted, and I was deeply excited to move here and to do good work. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that these three months have felt pretty much like trying to drink from a firehose.
That’s okay—that’s how it is when you’re somewhere new. New city, new acquaintances, new university bureaucracies and departmental eccentricities. A new roomful of bright undergraduate faces staring up at me three mornings a week. It’s a struggle to adjust, but as more or less a career academic (in the sense that I career among institutions, jostling back and forth around and between them), I’m used to transitions and I’ll be here for the next five years. I’m a little daunted, but not too badly. I may weeble but I don’t fall down.
Nonetheless when my workshop leader asked me to come chat with her, I was grateful. I knew she’d met one-on-one already with the other members of the class to discuss their writing; they said she’d been extremely helpful and frankly I kind of felt like I needed some extreme help, to get through the whole drinking-from-a-firehose part of the experience. I felt optimistic about maybe getting a dab of reassurance from her—that thin trickle of validation that lets you know there’s some point in continuing the effort.
Imagine, then, if you will, my surprise. READ MORE >
Midtown Skin Essay Series Part 1: Happy Hour
Midtown Skin Essay Series with Parts 1-5
WINTER 2011-2012
1. Happy Hour
The sound from exhaling smoke is everywhere. People breathe with their hearts as rain clouds come from New Jersey. But they do not fall. The sky is gray and empty of a future. Women cruise through revolving doors into catalogs of private romance. Men linger with their fantasies for a moment, on the curb, outside of the brokerage firm. The bosses wait together for their car service, placing bets on who will fuck at the VP afterlounge. Lincolns in line stretch down the blocks past marble stairs and hedges. These cars are thick and black and they do not forgive. At this hour, corporate art can sneak into our souls. The markets change over to Asia. All through Manhattan, the people are killing their day lives. Captains of Industry are embracing their moment of blindness, at the intersection of work and sex. Everyone follows a different path to the gratification called home.
***
Mud Luscious Acquires Blue Square Press
This week, J. A. Tyler’s Mud Luscious Press announced that they were taking over/buying out/merging with Blue Square Press, run by David Peak and Ben Spivey, as an addition to their imprint series. As Tyler says in the brief interview below, the deal gets BSP in on MLP’s distro (and more), while MLP gets to participate in the publication of more great books.
To celebrate the union, they are offering Jack Boettcher’s Theatre State and Ben Spivey’s own Flowing in the Gossamer Fold at a reduced price, here.
I asked the parties involved some questions, starting with J. A. Tyler:
When did you first start paying attention to Blue Square Press? READ MORE >