The Window of Perception Are The Doors To The Soul Or Something
I sort of want to start a band called Girls Looking At Puppies,
it would sound like Arthur Russell playing in a garbage can.
Reading Notes
1. In grad school I took a wonderful course on the poetry (and lives) of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell taught by the poet Gail Mazur. I was fascinated, in particular, with Robert Lowell’s mental illness and how it affected his artistic life. Lowell’s poem “Eye and Tooth” is ostensibly about a cut cornea (“My whole eye was sunset red,” it begins), but in the end it’s about manic depression and how, duh, it tinges the way he sees the world:
1. Gigantic is new for June and on the search for submissions!
2. Les Figues announces Not Content!
3. I just ate too much chocolate cake and it hurts!
4. So much Artaud!
Music is great and people like to listen to it.
1. Here at Stereogum, a bunch of musicians phone in their tributes to the record Meat is Murder, and then Drew Daniel from Matmos schools the rest of them with a really fascinating, considered, kind of beautiful tribute to the record Meat is Murder.
2. Blake’s favorite band, Wavves, have a new record, and it’s not as fucked up and distorted as the last one. So someone fucked up and distorted the first single:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKJkE1l5pH0&feature=player_embedded
Mini editing prompt: take something you just wrote, compare it to one of your first published pieces, and then try to rewrite the new thing as if you were still the writer you were when you first started writing in earnest.
3. Last night, Aaron Burch drunkenly decided to have a summer West Coast tour. I propose we all send him mixed tapes. Or mixed CDs. Or whatever the hell kids do these days.
1. At The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott questions the authtor copy policies of publishers, rightly insisting that the author is his own best promotion machine and should therefore have books to back it up.
2. At Abe Books, 25 iconic book covers. Any they missed? [via Moby Lives]
3. At DC’s, 80 chandeliers.
4. At n+1, Paul Maliszewski remembers David Markson.
5 Shits 4 PinkPartyGirl
1. New issue of Harp & Altar, with work by Matt Kirkpatrick, Luca Dipierro, Susan Daitch, A.D. Jameson, Ana Božičević, and several others. Also available, a print edition of their archives.
2. The Tyrant is blogging for The Paris Review.
3. The titular story from Ben Greenman’s What He’s Poised To Do appears now at Fictionaut.
4. Some people are real pissed about the NYker list apparently. It’s like being upset when the sun rises. Or sets.
5. Backlist staff picks at Dalkey Archive.
3 3 3
1. At Huffington Post, an excellent interview with Cal Morgan on Harper Perennial’s place in the current state of fiction.
2. Fence has brought back their In Rainbows style pay-what-you-want subscription drive. From $1 up to whatever, you can get Fence in your home for a year. Just in time, too, for their new issue, featuring work by Anselm Berrigan, Evan Lavender-Smith, James Wagner, Allyssa Wolf, Anna Moschovakis, Elizabeth Fodaski, Thomas Doran, Debbie Yee, Rodrigo Toscano, Christina Yu, Michael Robbins, Lee Ann Brown, Heather Christle, Carl Phillips, Sandra Doller, Tomaz Salamun, Steven Alvarez, Timothy Donnelly, Jack Boetcher, Ben Greenman, Rebekah Rutkoff, Angela Ashman, Rebecca Schiff, Aurelie Sheehan, Wayne Koestenbaum, Greta Byrum, with beautiful art by Dawn Clements.
3. New issue of Rabbit Light Movies, including 29 new video readings of 31 new poets. Here’s a sample, of the radical Eula Biss:
4 4 the 4ace
1. @ Autotypist, Jeremy James Thompson presents 103 Image Search Results for Poetry Characterized Differently by an Assortment of Commonly Associated Adjectives
2. @ Almost Dorothy, an interview with Heather Christle
3. New issue 10.2 of Diagram
Let’s All Go Through the Wide Open Gate of Mount Holyoke College to Our Wednesday Roundup
Joshua Cohen on Paper Cuts! This is very exciting. Weirdly, his book wasn’t reviewed on Sunday–I’m holding out for this coming weekend, though.
This is really interesting. Thanks to Rachel Fershleiser for passing it along.
from Jeremy Schmall- the Crimethinc. guide to what to do when you are stopped by a cop.
Zizek Zizeks on the Iceland volcano.
Nathaniel Rich on Ray Bradbury at Slate.
Tao Lin interviewed on Chuck Palahniuk’s The Cult, a website I did not know existed and now am kind of wigged out by. They’ve got their own whole universe over there, apparently, with a writing workshop and tee shirts. Live and let live, I guess. Oh also, if you’re in the city, homeboy’s in an art show on Friday.
Last thing: this month’s Harper’s is fantastic. Readings opens with a commencement speech Barry Hannah gave at Bennington in 2002. Also includes an excerpt from Padgett Powell’s “Manifesto,” the long wild piece that was published in Little Star #1, and a collection of slang terms for methamphetamine. Why not? I don’t know if people realize this, but a subscription to Harper’s costs $16.97. Seriously. That’s it. Newsstand price per issue is $6.95. So basically, if there are decent odds that you might buy an issue of Harper’s three times over the course of a calendar year, you might as well just sign up and have it all the time.