other countries **Updated**

what the hell is this?

I like it.

**Update**
Oops, I drunk posted. Watching the video again this morning, I just realized that if it was in English it would be the sort of “Adult Swim” crap that I really hate. Since I don’t understand it, though, I am more inclined to like it.

Which is a thought that I think can be extended to writing this way: sometimes I get the feeling that bad poets are taking a marginal idea and, unable to make it better with vivid language (or a better idea), they make do with making it unintelligible.

Unlike that video, though, I don’t like poetry to be unintelligible. Why not? I guess the difference is that it’s a lot of work to read a poem, and I don’t trust poets. (That said, sometimes I want a poem to be oblique and abstruse, ridiculous, meaningless, unintelligible, even.) (Ha.) **End Update**

Behind the Scenes & Film / 14 Comments
December 27th, 2009 / 4:05 am

Choice Gleanings from the NYT Weekend Book Review

Rick Moody reviews Mick Wall’s biography of Led Zeppelin, and finds it overly focused on prurient groupie-stories, at the expense of any real discussion of the band’s music. This is the same Mick Wall, then of Kerrang! called out by name (along with Bob Guccione Jr., then of Spin, Andy Secher, then of Hit Parader, and the entire entity that is/was Circus Magazine) in the song “Get in the Ring” on Use Your Illusion II. (“You be rippin’ off the fuckin’ kids/ While they be payin’ their hard earned money to read about the bands They want to know about / Printin’ lies startin’ controversy / You wanta antagonize me / Antagonize me motherfucker / Get in the ring motherfucker…”) Guess things haven’t changed much for ole Mick over the years.

Sheila Kohler (alumna of The Quarterly and a Lish-era Knopf) has a new novel, a work of historical imagination entitled Becoming Jane Eyre, which Christopher Benfey seems to have enjoyed.

Christopher Byrd, a rad younger critic, whose unexpected popping-up here seems like a general omen of good tidings, reviews Running Away by Jean-Phillipe Toussaint.

And Patrick Cockburn–intrepid journalist, and brother of Alexander–greatly admires Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza, a new work of graphic historical-journalism depicting two long-forgotten massacres of Palestinians.

[E]arly in 1956, the Israeli chief of staff Moshe Dayan made a famous speech at the funeral of an Israeli commander killed on the border with Gaza. What, Dayan wondered, explained the Palestinians’ “terrible hatred of us”? Then he answered his own question: “For eight years now they have sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and have watched how, before their very eyes, we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their forefathers previously dwelled, into our home.”

Oh right, that.

Uncategorized / 6 Comments
December 26th, 2009 / 11:24 pm

On Claude Simon’s novel Conducting Bodies (1971)

I read an awesome book and I want to tell you about it. Originally written in French by Claude Simon, and titled Les Corps conducteurs, the translation I read (by Helen R. Lane) is titled Conducting Bodies. It was originally published in 1971, but my version was published by Grove Press in 1974. Sadly, it appears to now be out of print — but used copies are out there.

I stumbled across it a few weeks ago at a used bookstore here in Tallahassee. It wasn’t like I saw it on the shelf and went “Oh yes! Oh my god, I can’t believe I found this.” It was more like, “Claude Simon sounds vaguely familiar…wasn’t he associated with Alain Robbe-Grillet and the Nouveau Roman movement?” I picked it up and did as I always do: I read the first sentence and prepared to put it back on the shelf if that sentence was not exceptional:

In the display window a dozen identical female legs are lined up in a row, feet up, the thighs lopped off at the hip joint resting on the floor, the knees slightly bent, as though the legs had been removed from some chorus of dancers at the precise moment that they are all kicking in unison, and put there in the window, just as they were, or perhaps snipped out, in monotonous multiplicity, from some advertisement showing a pretty girl in her slip pulling on a stocking, sitting on a pouf or on the edge of an unmade bed, her torso leaning backward, with the leg that she is pulling the stocking over raised up high, and a kitten, or a curly-haired puppy gleefully standing on its hind legs, barking, with its pink tongue sticking out.

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Uncategorized / 26 Comments
December 26th, 2009 / 10:30 pm

Funny peculiar?

I tried to write a couple of jokes for a friend of mine who is a stand-up. Here’s one: You know, with all the sneaking around in the dark, the shouting, and the forcible sodomy, a home invasion robbery is pretty much exactly like a surprise birthday party. Except without cake.

Hmmm. As I said, I tried.

Ever try to write a joke? Let’s hear it.

Craft Notes / 21 Comments
December 26th, 2009 / 10:26 pm
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Anybody get some new cool junk to read? Or eat? Or touch? I have two 700 pp. nonfiction books on my lap, like someone’s sitting on me.

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TIME DESTROYS ALL THINGS

I tried to write a Christmas message in the sand this afternoon, but within twenty seconds…

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Random / 22 Comments
December 25th, 2009 / 5:54 pm
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Major holiday lag & leisure has led to these recent fascinations: Robbie Cooper has been posting a slew of interesting glimpses, Ryland Walker Knight–increasingly my most cherished cinematic mind online–provides us another conjunction of quotations, 3:AM mag‘s got an Xmas mix going featuring a favorite from The Fall, VVORK supplies the sludge, Spencer Ackerman talks beautifully about Guantanamo Bay, Lauren Leto stereotypes people by their favorite authors (a favorite: Thomas Aquinas – Premature ejaculators), Lined & Unlined continues their six-part meditation on the production of text from the text’s point of view, the Concord Free Press continues to publish beautifully designed (and good?) books then give them away free yes free, and an unknown Italian maintains further a warped body blog. Merry Xmas!

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Merry Christmas, from John Darnielle from John Prine from Michael Schaub from All of Us to You

via Michael Schaub’s facebook. There are drunk people screaming at each other in the street. Everything in New York is closed except every single bodega everywhere. I’m going to Florida tomorrow. Be bugging you from there, probably–God rest ye merry gentlemen till then. Ladies, too.

Web Hype / 4 Comments
December 25th, 2009 / 1:37 am

Book-o-the-Day: Stoner by John Williams

Ah, the university novel. You know them, lined on the shelf in luxurious elbows: Lucky Jim, Straight Man, Death in a Tenured Position, Wonder Boys, I Am Charlotte Simmons, The Gaudy Night, etc. (I am sure you can name many others–go right ahead.)

We get the usual ideas of the Ivy Tower, layer after constructed layer, grazing grey skies of tile, the empty smiles (can I get a motion? I second that motion!), dusty classroom to cramped office to bewildering department meeting of the bewildered, a city made of suffering elephants, a Matryoshka doll (stop that metaphor!) of sad absurdity. (Here I am addressing English Departments, as do most of these novels. Makes sense, I suppose: Write what you know, and for many writers, the U is nursemaid, benefactor, sad (or happy?) reprieve.

Sad X 2 above, as device, for emphasis. Sad is the one cloistered within, wrapped in gauze and weak coffee, kept from the wobbles and needles and very real pains of the Real World, to fade, fade away…into self-laugh, self-hate, into nothingness.

But Stoner is not like these other novels (at least not the ones I have read).

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Uncategorized / 50 Comments
December 24th, 2009 / 10:00 pm
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Kind of crushing article at Wired about the recently disbanded, 12 year process of creation, repetition, competition, innovation involved on creating the failed video game sequel Duke Nukem Forever: “George Broussard, co-owner of 3D Realms and the man who headed the Duke Nukem Forever project for its entire 12-year run. Now 46 years old, he’d spent much of his adult life trying to make a single game, and failed over and over again.”

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