Hanging Out vs. Being Hanged: An Interview with Jarett Kobek
Jarett Kobek is the author of ATTA, from Semiotext(e), and the forthcoming If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write? on Penny-Ante Editions.
If You Won’t Read…, often referred to by Kobek as “The Sex Tapes Book,” is a collection of the coincidental dialog from celebrity sex tapes (and some other hyper-media-based ‘tapes’) transcribed and presented as a text. Included alongside these transcriptions is the criminal records of the celebrity whose dialog is on display. Riding a fine line between conceptual writing, humor, gossip, and ‘alt-lit,’ the book ends up being hilariously funny while resonating with an intense cultural relevance.
I sat down with Jarett one afternoon at a café in San Francisco’s Mission District to talk about his new book. The hour-long conversation, covering everything from Normal Mailer to Jennifer Lopez to Miley Cyrus’s shamanic trip, is available to listen to below:
Interview with Jarett Kobek, Part 1
Interview with Jarett Kobek, Part 2
Pre-order If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write? at Penny-Ante Editions.
Mess Section, anti-fragile edition
Nassim Taleb has posted a table illustrating his concepts of fragility, robustness & anti-fragility. Context: “This seems quite a universal traits of languages (I tried Mediterranean, classical, and Semitic languages),where the notion of antifragility is totally absent.” :: Noah Cicero gives a short history of philosophy. :: Jonathon Keats tries to make porn for God. :: Sententia #3 wants novel pitches/excerpts. :: gifs get subtle. :: “I often heard [D.W. Griffith] say that he would rather have written one page of Leaves of Grass than to have made all the movies for which he received world acclaim.”
The rise of pants
Circa 1800 Goya painted “La Maja Desnuda”; three years later, in 1803, perhaps feeling a little guilty, he does another, this time with clothes on her. This was before feminism, so let’s just say ol’ Goya was a little pensive about the Inquisition. (The paintings were owned by Spanish prime minister Manuel de Godoy, who preferred to go by “Manual” while gazing at the former painting.) Maja’s fate is ours as well — to start off naked, then end up clothed as some apology. Don’t blame eve, but Ross dress for less.
I Like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz A Lot: Part 3
I like Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz so much that every day this week, I’ll be posting excerpts from a really long interview between Cristin and I about writing, New York and her forthcoming book Everything is Everything which will be released in January 2010 by Write Bloody Press. In today’s excerpt, Cristin talks about poetic boundaries, nostalgia and penis-shaped poetry.
If Blake’s post on Zak Smith wasn’t enough for you…
The good people over at Jezebel are asking “Why Don’t Women Watch More Porn?” The Jez post is actually a response to / analysis of this piece by Violet Blue, “Are more women OK with watching porn?” which was published in O the Oprah Magazine and for some reason is online at…CNN? Okay, sure. But I thought the fun really started in the Jezebel comments thread, especially after Lux Alptraum from Jez’s quasi-disowned sister-site Fleshbot showed up and offered to help the group out with recommendations of more palatable porn. Also, reading this post taught me a new word–kyriarchy. It’s one of those great crit-theory words that perfectly describe a really-existing situation, and yet you just know that if anyone ever used it earnestly in your presence, you’d bolt. Oh well. Still a cool word.
Oh also, since I forgot to give it its own post when it came out the other day, there’s also a new installment of Susie Bright and her daughter Aretha doing tag-team sex Q&A, which both is and is not what it sounds like.