“Reading” is a word that can become a search term. At one website, it is possible to search for only animated images, given a specific word or phrase. These remind me that everyone looks different when they read. Reading is an activity with a necessary 3rd person visual component. I don’t really understand how someone can look like they are reading. It is like those people who try to look like they are paying attention during a meeting,
Dear HTMLGIANT, today sees me researching Professor X’s wheelchairs for a disability studies paper that I’m writing. In particular, I’m looking for information on the magical flying yellow one that he was given by the Shi’ar Empire (I think?) in the early 1990s—the one designed by Jim Lee. If anyone can direct me to any documents describing this fabulous device, I would be most grateful. (Yes, I am trying to figure out its capabilities, including whether it housed missiles, etc.)
So far, this site is the best I’ve been able to find. It says there:
This high-tech chair was a gift from the alien Shi’ar. Over the years, its appearance has varied a bit. Both gold and silver versions have appeared and some models have been slightly sleeker than others. [X-Men (1st series) #125]
In other words, not much. (Incidentally, that citation should be X-Men Vol. 2 #125, aka New X-Men #125. Part of what’s so maddening about researching the X-Men is how many different series there have been, and how many times those series have been retitled.)
Again, any help, much appreciated. Otherwise, feel free to chime in with your favorite memories/anecdotes/conspiracy theories regarding Marvel’s Merry Mutants.
board: voices from the nervous breakdown
by brad listi & justin benton
TNB Books / November 2012
246 pages / $15.95 Buy from Amazon or Powells
I recently purchased that massive Paris Review Book of Absolutely Everything Under the Sun (that’s not really what it’s called, guys) because of a handful of entries I’d rather read on a printed page than on The Paris Review’s website, and it was delivered to me at just about the same time I received a review copy of Brad Listi and Justin Benton’s board, a work of literary collage “derived entirely from comment boards at The Nervous Breakdown website,” and for a split second there I really relished the thought of reviewing the two in congruence: reading an entry from The Paris Review and then, say, five or ten pages from the TNB book. While the thought still strikes me as appealing, I can tell in the first thirty or so words of board that I’m not going to want to pick it up and put it down so repeatedly because the words carry every freshness of good personalized poetry, and the Paris Review Book of High Hopes n’ Dick Jokes Ad Infinitum strikes me as desperately boring in comparison.
Anyway, moving on. To my mind this is an unprecedented literary endeavor. A published collection devoted entirely to the commenters and loyal fans of a literary website in the form of their comments. The book begins with what one can assume is the result of a prompt like, “What was your earliest memory?” and as the results pile up and “nest” (the indentation as comments amass on sites like this, I learned in the Author’s Note) I realized I was witnessing a sort of new literature and art created in a way I’d never think possible. It’s as if Studs Terkel’s Working were condensed and piled up with—loosely—guided prompts and topics of discussion and yet for all this book’s digital initiation and contemporariness these entries are beautifully, often poetically written with an honesty you aren’t going to find on socialized pyramids schemes like Youtube or your overtly—and miserably—political best friend’s Facebook feed. Each moment, be it a combined dissertation on the collective childhood memories related to the Incredible Hulk or a seemingly random aside like “I murder every single bug that crosses my path,” is absolutely the stuff of literature.
I find it interesting/compelling that one of the quotes on the back of the book is given by Jeff Ragsdale, author of Jeff, One Lonely Guy who posted flyers with his number all over New York City and compiled a similarly-minded book that was the result. He lets people vent profusely in the phone calls and emails and messages that lead up to the finished book, and that same honesty—that same abandonment of concern and worry—is like a nervous system running between Jeff and board that causes both to permeate with energy and humanity in a mode I haven’t felt in good novels or poetry for quite some time.
Elsa, IT’S OKAY. CRYING on the bath-
room floor is a RIGHT of passage. You will
PRESS YOUR CHEEK against the bathroom tile and
find comfort in that irony. You will REPLAY THE
THINGS he said to you in those first 2 weeks
of dating. You will REMEMBER YOUR PLANS
to go to ———— together. IT WILL
FEEL like a condom on your heart. You
will DO THIS at least 17 times be-
fore you turn 35. EVERY TIME hurt-
ing will be different. You will EAT ONLY
WAFFLES and hope you lose twelve pounds. This is
a ritual YOU WILL CALL HEARTBREAK.
IT WILL DESTROY YOU LIKE NOTHING ELSE COULD.
Elsa when you are single this world
is so amazing. It’s like an enor-
mous penis. It PAYS ATTENTION. Your
nipples harden just thinking about it.
Everyone wants your vagina. Your nail
polish changes color according to
your emotions. Elsa when you are
single it never rains. You can get away
with the things girls do in public bathrooms.
Do you miss me, Elsa? My best ideas
with you come when I’m brushing my teeth. I
wouldn’t worry about it. Instead spend
your time building syllabi, buying
wedding clothes. Wiping bug guts from walls.
Angela Veronica Wong is the author of how to survive a hotel fire (Coconut Books 2012). She is on the internet at angelaveronicawong.com.
These Elsa poems were inspired by The Star card of the tarot deck
Last Call in the City of Bridges
by Salvatore Pane
Braddock Avenue Books, November 2012
224 pages / $16 Buy from Braddock Avenue Books or Amazon
Remember the slog of the 2004 presidential campaign – the long months of desperate hope that we’d send Bush back to Texas and finally turn the corner? At the same time, of course, that hope was tempered by the reality of John Kerry – his awkwardness, his lack of passion, his John Kerryness. But still, it felt great to believe, even just a little: to believe that the election was about something bigger, something more important than just changing the White House china. For those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s, it seemed like our generations (I hate the hair-splitting of Generation X, Generation Y, Millennials, Internet Generation, etc.) were dropped into a cultural void, searching for meaning in a century filled with greatness. Salvatore Pane’s debut novel, Last Call in the City of Bridges, is steeped in this feeling, in this desperate quest for generational identity. The book asks the same questions we’ve been asking ourselves for a decade or more: why is my generation here? What is here for us? How can we matter – and if we can’t, how can we at least get through this world alive?
The novel is bookended by the 2004 and 2008 elections. The false excitement and squashed hopes of Kerry. The thrill of watching our country leap forward, if only briefly, to elect Obama. More than any book I’ve read in years, this novel is grounded in a firm sense of its own place in history. In it, Pane writes of the importance of small events among uncertain times, of the longing for a larger myth – for something more to believe in:
In the summer of 1962, Howard Cosell found himself lying on his back at the side of the road, the joe-pye weed squaring off in the sun above him as he woke from his stupor. “That’s when I knew I had to make changes,” Cosell says, “those weeds bending over me like God’s many heads. It was my high, purple clarion call.”
Cosell rushed home then—a place he spent precious little time in—kissed his four children on the head as they sat on the floor watching TV, and went straight up to the bathroom. Taped to the underside of the sink was his stash, 6 brown cubes of the sweetest chat Eritrea had to offer. READ MORE >
fluffy
darlene
beyonce
macduff
copyrat infringement
spike
fenton
skeletor
francois
meatball
Pretty sure @joycecaroloates is the literary personage who most entertains me on twitter (closely followed by @breteastonellis).
“She comes to a rest in shadow. Above her is an overhang of chickenwire and tins. She freezes. Above her is a terrible shape, a jagged many-limbed thing, a tree tangled from the composites of aerials and tv innards, plastic extrusions like growths in its multipart trunk, thorns of glass and shattered plates. Its branches splay – finger after finger of tubing, and intricate wicked ribbing. Dangling from them like dirty dank foliage, like the skins of victims, are dish clothes, and umbrellas’ countless ripped canopies. Nylon in dinged colours.”
— from “The Flies That Bind” by “Jacques Francis,” The New Inquiry
“I used to compare everything in poems to metallic sheets of mica, the transparent fragments that flake off so easily. I never say I’m a poet; I just say “writer” and no one ever asks “a writer of what?” Once a man told me he was in the business of prosthetic limbs and I was speechless.”
— Stephanie Balzer, The Destroyer Vol 1.2
“We had a president living here once,
After he was president.
A famous animator lived here too.
We’d see him feeding the ducks.
This used to be a big duck town.
Ducks had a real voice.
Then one night they left for New Haven.”
— from “A Little Background” by James Haug, Connotation Press
