“Poetry is nothing but a certain astonishment before the world and the means for this astonishment.”
Andre du Bouchet, 1954
Dark Matter is a magazine I made up last night. It’s composed of poems from other publications on the internet and some songs. Some of the poems are newer and some are older. They come from publications that I enjoy reading. The songs are songs I like and can be listened to with the poems, or by themselves.
2. OK, you don’t want to read any fucking super “Can creative writing be taught?” posts on here so don’t, just skip this link and start pounding avocado into paste (for the guac dip later), but this one has some interesting points and some decent links. So.
Creative writing is about doing the work of writing, and the experimental innovator benefits from time, support, and guidance.
11. Super exchange between John D’Agata and a fact checker, Jim.
Really, Jim, respectfully, you’re worrying about very stupid shit.
7. Jim Ruland over at Hobart is REALLY cheering for the Giants tonight.
2. What’s your AWP book fair budget? I like to take a big bundle of cash and leave my card behind. I bring the card, and it’s butter my biscuits crazy.
3. How to handicap this Superbowl? Brady plays it cool but you can see in his eyes the wake up daily, the “WTF? I own $8,000 flower pots and can do things with my hair. This kicks ass!” Eli looks like he cuts Brady’s yard, and not well. He walks through life in a daze. Brady gets nightly cunninglingus advice from his Brazilian goddess wife (who could buy him out X 20). “Clockwise, fucker!” “Sorry,” he mumbles again as he rubs the back of his neck and walks out back and throws a football through his walnut fence (lands in neighbor’s spleen-shaped pool). Eli likes Applebees but thinks the Wonton Tacos Chicken are “Too dern spicy.” Brady sometimes eats sushi fried, OK? Eli once wrote a complaint letter to Wal-mart (about some frozen waffles that split in half upon toaster entry) but didn’t send the letter because, in his heart, he loves Wal-mart. Brady did attend the opera in Italy last summer, but he also took two Lorcet and a V&T before settling in his seat. Eli is scared of horses (their heads are way too big!). Brady likes to smell the tips of his own fingers. Who knows?
Versal 9 was the January selection for Literary Magazine Club (details of our next selection, Monday). Did you read the issue? What did you think? My favorite story was Carmen Petaccio’s “Tornado,” where the writer personified a tornado and created a really imaginative story. I also admired Stace Budzko’s “To Be Glad And Young,” particularly the ending. Versal editor Megan M. Garr and I had a great conversation via e-mail about Versal, the proliferation of magazines, being based in Europe, arrogance, editorial humility, and more.
Versal—where does the name come from?
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where he shortens the word “universal” to keep with the meter. It’s from a random comment by the nurse in act 2. Somewhere along the line the word “versal” also came to take on the meaning “single”. I liked that conflation, ten years ago when I was first figuring out how to live in a foreign country.
A “versal” is also that ornamental capital letter at the beginning of old texts – a fact that suits us, I think, with our attention to design.
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In Defense of Monsters
by BJ Hollars
Origami Zoo Press
52 pages / $8 Buy from Origami Zoo Press
Most people have little room for magic or legend in their lives. Folks spend most of their formative years cultivating a certain amount of cynicism towards legend and work incessantly towards creating a sense of control over themselves and the world at large. To be human is to conquer – whether physically or mentally.
We keep doing our work, spend inordinate amounts of time “surfing” the web (surfing itself invoking an image of an uncontrollable wave, that of information, tamed by man) and we watch television where we have 24-hour news coverage and programs that reflect our tastes. (Although it can be argued the practice of watching television is, in its own way, an acceptance of a mythology in itself. The very idea of personal choice in the current media system is false. A great infographic from designers Frugal Dad suggests, at the very least, we should reconsider what we’re watching as personal choice.)
Well, it’s finally started happening. Penn State’s MFA program decided to commit harakiri rather than go on forcing its students to go into debt over a degree to no where. I don’t think it will be the last we’ll see to go. I don’t even know if it’s the first (and it seems likely that it isn’t.)
Tell me the last time you quit a job. That’s a tough thing. You have to look at yourself and suck up and do it. Paint it for me. Then you must look at “that person” when you quit. Tell me how/why. I bet there are “hell yes I quit” and “why did I quit?” and the other thing, the space between the two.
Tell me how you felt. I mean this could be good. I’d like to hear your stories. I will NOT rip them off for my fiction, until I DO.
BONUS: Ever been fired? I was fired twice. Both lovely stories.
One year ago on February 16, 2011, as Odd Future made their television debut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, maniacally performing “Sandwiches” in their nerd/hipster-thug stage presence, a girl dressed as Sadako from Ring (1998) and/or its remake The Ring (2002) listlessly stood around in clear view on stage with them, as if recently excised from hikikomori, a “midbrow” pop-conscious nod which I’ve always found interesting, if not brilliant. Where Warhol and Koons seem to didactically curate their references, attached to their affected semiotic detachedness, it is rap’s erratic and somewhat manic collision/collation of culture which is our “true,” or at least more effective commentary. At one point, near the loud climax of the song, cymbals crashing, bros screaming, Sadako cowers with hands over her ears — as if suddenly transported into the NBC studio on 49th street. Though it may be her fault, one imagines, her voluntary entry into our real world as she climbs out of the television, scaring the shit out of everyone in front of their own televisions at home. The artifice’s protective medium of the screen was now broken, its very transgression part of the narrative. And when Tyler the Creator jumped on Fallon’s back as the latter bid his audience adieu, the former made odd (somewhat unfortunate, immune to irony) Blackface expressions with almost apelike movements. It’s hard to know how subtle, if any, his sarcasm was. Was it the self-critique of concession to corporate complicity (a la Cobain’s “Corporate Magazines Still Suck” t-shirt for their Rolling Stone cover), or Tyler simply now had a friend in Fallon, a fellow conspirator in the conspiracy of success. One year later, they are not news anymore, the future turns old; another group of young highly intelligent men in an alt-rock or rap band will be heralded as the real deal. Every generation wants to believe what they see before them on a screen somehow transcends the shallow vapidity from which it cometh, even a cute girl on your floor, actually smiling behind all that hair.
Not this time.
In the opening extreme slow-motion shots (the only appetizing thing in the Melancholia, though these brief scenes seem to be leftovers of his style in Antichrist), Lars Von Trier pays homage to no less than four masters: Ingmar Bergman (the close-up of Kirsten Dunst), Alan Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (the giant hedge garden, with tree shadows this time), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (the slow planetary movements to classical music), all of Andrei Tarkovsky, but specifically Solaris (the Breughel painting) and The Mirror (objects falling in slow-motion, a fire seen through a window)—the end of the world scenario while people bob and weave around an opulent country house is right out of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice. Von Trier’s whole opening sequence mirrors the opening to his Antichrist (using Handel’s music instead of Wagner) which scintillatingly displayed intercourse and the death of a child. One can only hope that Von Trier will go beyond homage and create something compelling, but it is not to be.