Amy Lawless and I like to read chapbooks and review them on the internet. We used to write these together, while drinking wine and watching TV. We live in different cities now, so we do them over gchat. Here are our recent reviews:
Hey guys, I’m a big fan of Jimmy Chen in general and his Formspring in particular, and it’s recently been turned into an ebook. It compiles the best of his circuitous, you could say Nabokovian responses to questions like “Should I go to grad school?” and “Who should I lose my virginity to?” It’s available here.
Two synchronous 2012 releases, Joel Craig’s The White House and Nick Twemlow’s Palm Trees, invoke the communal support Chicago’s Green Lantern Press evokes in its intimate independent practice: small groups collaborate in the sort of devotion that can only survive beyond the constraints of money, friends sutured together in the simple creation of works of beauty.
Craig and Twemlow are longtime Chicago friends. Craig co-founded and curates the Danny’s Reading Series, and is the poetry editor for MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Twemlow now lives in Iowa City, where he writes and makes films. He also co-edits Canarium Books.
Because of Craig and Twemlow’s friendship, Green Lantern’s founder, Caroline Picard (who launched the Press and Gallery years ago, with pal Nick Sarno) released their respective books of poetry simultaneously, so the friends could tour together.
No Green Lantern release is regular; every book steeps in curiosity, newness, the unexpected. Every release is bound with delicacy, according to the “slow media” approach, making each book a curatorial site. It feels limiting to call them books. They contain ephemeral inserts, silk screen covers; artist plates.
The books might be siblings. They do bear some physical resemblance:
Vanessa Place looks on, as Blake Butler reads from his forthcoming book 300,000,000.
Probably I shouldn’t post this. Probably I should just keep my mouth shut.
But a few people have written and asked me to explain what happened, having heard about the fight from one source or another.
Basically, things got ugly between Blake Butler and Vanessa Place, nine days ago, down here in Florida, when the three of us convened for the first time as a group since the publication of our collaboration ONE.
By the end of the night, which began with me introducing them, and then each of them reading, and then the three of us conversing with the audience, Vanessa had vowed to never speak to Blake again.
To tell you the truth, I don’t know how it happened. (Which is partly why I haven’t written about it until now.) It just sort of happened.
One of them said something about the other one being too orderly or too chaotic or too derivative or something — at least that’s how I think it started — which I thought was a joke, but apparently it wasn’t taken as a joke.
The next thing you know they’re shouting at each other.
The audience, not knowing how to react, weren’t sure if they should laugh or be worried. I was pretty much in the same boat.
I tried to stay out of it, partly because I was confused and partly because I didn’t want them to turn on me.
Over a hundred people were in the audience that night, so there are plenty of versions of what happened. But from my perspective, to put it generously, it seemed like a moment when two different approaches to literature were coming face to face and not for the purpose of a warm embrace.
During the first five years of my career I lived in total squalor. I had been arrested twice and faced multiple charges in different states. The quarrelsome women I had surrounded myself with had all vanished to the margins of society, a caste I had inhabited for as long as I could remember. Somewhat of a petty criminal and drifter I decided that pure beauty must become my new mantra. The old bohemian ways and derelict charm gave way to sartorial pursuits and exquisite eastern landscapes.
Jon Leon, The Malady of the Century (2012)
At the beginning of the last decade there was a kind of moral fad in parts of the United States that spread almost immediately to the capital cities of Europe. The age old Anglo-European taboo of handling money was shoved offstage by the sheer force of events in the financial world, clearing the way for a new money culture.
Michael Lewis, The Money Culture (1991)
Downsize
Nobody at my job lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Most people live in Manhattan or New Jersey. I can’t really imagine what they spend on rent, let alone at bars and in restaurants. Nobody pays what I pay for a two bedroom apartment. I pay almost nothing. Everyone at my job lives paycheck to paycheck. I wonder why. They certainly make more money than I do, as I am one of the most junior people at the company. I make almost nothing. Maybe my lifestyle is shitty. Whatever. READ MORE >
Of a kind of modesty far disproportionate to the attention it’s getting — for it would take a hacker to get into our former president’s sister’s email — amateur yet keenly perceptive paintings by George W. Bush have surfaced. They are remarkable: not so much their rendering or skill, but in their quiet internal repose, evocative of the peculiarities of the Nabis post-impressionist school. An immediate, and easy association — if one considers their respective and mindless havoc onto their perceived enemies — is Adolf Hitler, who also produced unexpected touching watercolors of churches. The imperial hubris with which Bush demonized Afghanistan at large, and later Iraq, is a sad example of turning the enemy into an abstraction. The same can be said for liberal media in their inclines against Bush; and so now, it seems, we are perplexed, and very taken aback at being allowed to see this man in a different light. It is simply hard to imagine such a heartless war monger painting such gentle paintings. Yet, the disparity lies not with Bush’s character, but the assumption that artists are somehow — by the very auspices of their art, as if introverted pastime were a moral act — essentially good people. Enter Pierre Bonnard, whose codependent relationship with his wife Marthe has kind of hilariously been documented by the many paintings of the her in the bathtub. She is said to have suffered from OCD and compulsively bathed half-a-dozen times a day, as if trying to wash away the dabs of paint for which she might have been mistaken by her husband. The pairing here is at best merely coincidental, until we look at their perspectives: George W. Bush gives us his own POV, as autoerotic muse, his phallac member just off the bottom of the canvas, perhaps the rod-like stream of water a surrogate hard on. This is the same view Marthe was having back around 1935, and toggling between the two collapses us into a kind of he-said-she-said scenario, of different versions of the same history.
Stephanie Barber’s new book, NIGHT MOVES (Publishing Genius), is an exquisite corpse-style collection of YouTube comments on the Bob Seger classic. It is one long epistolary poem comprised of many short poems.
The text at once contains lost youth, a melancholic longing for past loves, as well as the potential for chaos, connection, vitriol and fun within the realm of internet anonymity. NIGHT MOVES also depicts the range of responses that one piece of art can elicit, from fierce loyalty to disdain, deeply personal symbolism to some shit that somebody found by way of 30 Rock. The question of what defines poetry — found, conceptual, or otherwise — and of who can be called a “poet” is never far from the surface. Here are a few excerpts:
To Julie… where ever you are. I STILL remember the first time I saw you in psychology class, 10th grade, spring of “76”. You made the nights move for me 77-78. I will carry those memories in my heart forever, and only stop, with the last beat of my heart….
points all her own sittin way up high… << what does that mean?
I can really relate to this song as I have a daughter that is a product of the “Night Moves” and you can bet that she knows it. She is still working on the “Night Moves” what a Gal!!
NYE – OH NO WERE NOT FAR FROM IT AND AUTUM CAN’T CLOSE IN BEFORE I HAVE U TO LOVE FOREVER!! NO BACK ALLEY TRUSTED WOODS FOR MY BABYGIRL ANY MORE, BECAUSE WE DO HAVE TOO MUCH TO LOSE!! I LOVE YOU !!DADDY!! I’m coming for you soon!! OUR LOVE WILL NEVER END! REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE LIKE THIS SONG ? IM SO GLAD WE WEVE FOUND EACH OTHER ONCE MORE. IM IN LOVE WITH YOU MORE N MORE EACH DAY! (PURE) DADDY
88 people didn’t get any in high school…
Gina will never know the truth
The 60,s from Nam to Woodstock you had to experience it.God Bless America
u gotta loveee bob segar u fag, it seems like you have devoted ur fag life into talkin about bob segar
hell, i’m 81 and i love this song. anyone who was ever young has to choke a little when you hear it. it’s the best anthem of youth ever written
got me knocked up in 84
wtf is a pie in the sky summit?
this song makes me so nostalgic it actually hurts
Me too man, me too
NIGHT MOVES is a strange combination of dusty Polaroid-old and lol-contemporary. It also presents an intersection between universality and pop, and the ways that pop culture can summon universal emotions or be, in itself, a shared experience. I don’t think this book would have worked so well had it centered around Rhiannon, Dream On, Show Me the Way, Slow Ride, Dream Weaver, Carry On Wayward Son, or any other classic from the same year. There is an inherent nostalgia in the song Night Moves, an awareness of itself aging, of “autumn closing in,” which makes it a catalyst for worshipful confessions from the lovers and hilarious takedowns from the haters. I asked Barber, a Baltimore filmmaker whose work has been screened at MOMA and The Tate Modern, some questions:
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