Wag’s Revue 7
The 7th issue of the Wag’s Revue is now online, & includes a new interview with Gary Lutz by Dylan Nice: “I have too a hard time picturing anyone ever turning the pages of one of my books to worry about what that person might make of having ended up in the privacy of my paragraphs, though my heart no doubt goes out all the same.” It also contains new work by Jen Percy and an interview with Paul Harding, as well as a compelling “frenetic examination of self-loathing in the online era” by Mitch Salm.
The Word Made Flesh is officially out TODAY
Hey, guess what? Fourteen months after first announcing our project on this site, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is as real as a needle driving ink into your skin. Today is Publication Day for us, and my co-editor Eva Talmadge and I want to take a moment to offer our gratitude to all of the HTMLGiant readership. Without your early support, encouragement and re-blogging, this project might well have come to nothing. But instead, we’ve got this full-color anthology of hundreds of tattoos in a panoply of languages from book and body-art enthusiasts all over the U.S. and the world. Eva and I have done a lot of press already, and there’s more coming. I won’t be gumming up the works here at Giant with a running tally, but one of the highlights for us thus far has been our appearance this morning on NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook. You can stream our segment here. Also, many listeners are uploading pictures of their own literary tattoos to a fan gallery that NPR is hosting on their site. We’ve also been getting a lot of new tattoos to our submissions address, tattoolit@gmail.com , and we’ve been posting those on the book’s official site. If you’ve got one (or ten), we want to see it, so please do keep ’em coming in. And thanks–seriously–for everything. Cheers!
Live Giants #9: Grace Krilanovich
You missed Grace’s live broadcast but you can still check out and buy her novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, at Two Dollar Radio, and you should do that cuz it’s ooooo.
Banksy Directs Simpsons Opening
[Video removed by Fox.]
From the streets to Fox, with meta commentary yeah? Seems less subversive than just mostly, mmkay dude. It’s definitely blowing up twitter, though, which is kind of like the graffiti shithole of the internet, if easily addictive. How many more sites like this can we have that become a new daily tab in the refresh bin. My Firefox at all times does Gmail, iGoogle, Facebook, Twitter, and at least 1-2 other tabs of whatever I am trying to remember to look at again or buy something from, or just something I’m reading. Does it end? What else are you going to do? I like to sometimes login to Myspace and walk around like I’m in a bombzone. Deleted profiles, weird spam thugs talking to no one, desperate new features by the machine trying to catch up & keep alive. I like the people who are still there spinning out things as if to no one and the people who used to be there. The smartest thing Banksy ever did aesthetically I guess is keep his head out of the light.
Plath & Hughes
Ted Hughes draft of "Last Letter"
Newly released by the British Library archive, and published in the New Statesman, Ted Hughes’ poem “Last Letter” recounts the three days leading up to his wife Sylvia Plath’s suicide, ending with the moment he is informed of it. Fervent Plath fans, of the kind who vandalized her tombstone to remove his name from its inscription, may or may not receive his anguish well, for he is commonly blamed for her suicide, given that their break-up (initiated by him) immediately preceded it.
It is dangerous when fans, readers, and critics meddle in the private lives of writers, for their biographies, poetry, and nonfiction are all a kind of fiction; we can never know them, let alone judge them, the way we can never know ourselves. For anyone who thinks words, of any sort, lead to truth, I say: look outside. It is odd how Ted Hughes can finally be vindicated, as if such a pardon was ever needed. He had a severely depressed wife who killed herself, much like Leonard Woolf, except the former was also famous, so more meaning was attributed, relished, to their drama. Biographies are highbrow soap operas.
Tao Lin @ Booksmith in SF 10/5/10
[Takes a second to start. Short reading, medium length q/a. I laughed a lot. Fuck you for whining, if you’re whining.]
Literary Doppelgangers
Joe Brainard may have handed James Franco a free pass to the “New York School,” where during the 50s and 60s, poets, painters, dancers, and musicians (unemployment check in one pocket, manifesto in the other) all “hung out” and made stuff out of cardboard or something. Of our most “generational” literary places: Paris gave you nihilism, Bloomsbury gave you spell-check, New York gave you solipsism, and San Francisco — thanks Haight St. — gave you lice. It’s a good life to be a good looker, and charm doesn’t hurt. Brainard died of AIDS, Franco died of Spiderman, and we all die after the break.
“Everything you could ever want, even if you don’t know you want it”
A cool new video series from Coldfront and Eye For An Iris Press, Tourist Trap, NYC follows and films poets visiting NYC. These people walk around and talk interestingly about things, and then they read some poems. Sort of like a Take Away Show for people who write/read poems. The first episode features Julie Doxsee, who has graced HTMLGIANT a little in the past. Forthcoming episodes will feature Matt Hart, Nate Pritts, Josh Harmon, Kate Greenstreet, and more. By posting this, of course, I am hoping soon I will be invited to appear on an episode where I’m filmed alone in my apartment, killing silverfish with a tambourine and ruefully/wistfully clicking “Not Attending” on every Facebook invitation I get for another event in “the city.” Jays and cakes! Tourist Trap, NYC is a sweet looking project, so take a look.
Live Giants 8: A Crew of Ruefle (NYC/Chicago)
Thank you to everyone who read, and thank you for watching tonight. We should have the videos archived at our ustream channel now.*
Remember, from now until 9am tomorrow, you can purchase Mary Ruefle’s Selected Poems for only $15 from Wave Books here.
*To watch the archived version just go here.
Also, from the comments below, Mary Ruefle says:
dear readers, thank you so much, I am in a concrete room, very small, not very experienced, and although I do not believe for one moment of my life that I wrote those poems, I can go so far as to say I wish I did.
