February 2008
37 posts
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Sentences
I am fairly certain that the best sentence I have ever written and that, in all likelihood, I will ever write is: She was short and almost as wide. A close second-place has to go to — She was thin but not quite as tall.
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Garden Path Sentences →
The man who hunts ducks out on weekends. The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississippi. Fat people eat accumulates. The complex houses married and single students and their families. The prime number few. The old man the boat. The tycoon sold the offshore oil tracts for a lot of money wanted to kill JR. I convinced her children are noisy. The player kicked the ball kicked the ball.
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Suicide →
If you’re going to kill yourself, you might as well do it with style I guess….
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Snow
The first thing I ever got published—in a manner of speaking—was a poem about snow. I’m pretty sure it was awful. I was 7 or 8, and we were living in Vermont, I interred in the last one-room schoolhouse in America, the sole occupant of the third grade. The assignment was to write a poem or a story, and completely without any inspiration, I wrote about the one thing that was in...
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Lucas Samaras
Lucas Samaras’ new show NYC: Chairs isn’t so much bad as just completely out-of-touch. It reads, more than anything, like a case example of why you shouldn’t let your grandparents use Photoshop. Samaras has been doing digital manipulation for long enough now that this shouldn’t be the case, and yet there they sit on the wall, oblivious to their own comedy. While I imagine...
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Unnecessary Details →
Thanks to D T Max and The New Yorker, I can now sleep comfortably knowing that Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano, had “an unusually small penis.” Thanks for that. Finally, that last bit of information that allows a thorough understanding and appreciation of Lowry’s work.
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The Paris Review and the CIA →
Peter Matthiessen, one of the founders of the Paris Review, was indeed in the CIA:The news of Matthiessen’s C.I.A. involvement was originally reported in a 1977 New York Times series on the cultural dynamics of the cold war but caused something of a stir in literary circles when it re-emerged in an article about Immy Humes’s documentary in The Times last year. The question of secret C.I.A....
Stupidity
Why is being able to solve a Rubik’s Cube always Hollywood’s shorthand for intelligence?
The History of Visual Communication →
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Patterns
There’s a fascinating NYTimes Blog Piece by Oliver Sacks about the sorts of patterns people who experience visual migraines see. Forgive me for quoting so much of it:Seeing multitudes of tiny, identical structures, sometimes “unrolling” steadily, sometimes flickering, forming and reforming, all over the visual field, is common in migraine auras, though it is only occasionally that these are...
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Alphabets
Anacalypsis by Godfrey Higgins is a sort of Ur-New Age text that attempts to prove there’s a hidden connection between all the world’s religious traditions. While only ever published in small numbers, it’s supposedly been highly plagiarized, influencing a lot of later Occult and New Age thinkers, among them Madame Blavatsky. It’s an interesting if exhausting book. Most of...
“This regime of the surrounding error, these enthusiasms like drownings, this...”
– Jacques Rigaut
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Music
I originally intended to avoid talking about music in this space, so as to keep it as separated from the “day job” as much as possible. I still suspect that’s the best policy, and truthfully talking about music is not something I have much interest in these days. At all. I am, however, fascinated by the cultures that surround music and by the identities people build around music...
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Self-Promotion →
Two of my short stories are now in the online version of Perfect Eight Magazine available here and here. Print version (with one more piece?) to follow. Thanks to Diana Schmertz and Rachel Meuler for that.
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Stolen Art →
“Masked robbers brandishing handguns stole four paintings by 19th Century masters worth $164 million from a Zurich museum in Switzerland’s biggest art theft, police said on Monday. Oil paintings by Cezanne, Degas, van Gogh and Monet were stolen in broad daylight on Sunday from the private Buehrle Collection in the second dramatic art theft in the area within days.”
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Polaroid Stops Making Instant Film →
“Meanwhile, Polaroid is seeking a partner to acquire licensing rights for its instant film, in hopes that another firm will continue making the film to supply Polaroid enthusiasts.”
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Art
We didn’t see much art that we liked, wandering around openings last night. I did like Kuno Gonschior’s paintings at Stux Gallery. They’re large, bright, and colorful, with the paint pebbled onto the canvas in large dabs. A little obvious but enjoyable. Better was the art of Kenny Williams Tjampitjinpa at Robert Steele Gallery. They’re Aboriginal tribal paintings, but once...
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Music and Possession
Here is a video interview with Michael Gira (of Angels of Light and The Swans) talking about the spirit, Joseph, that is apparently really responsible for the music. Notice how he retreats a bit from that claim as anything out of the ordinary after the interviewer takes an interest in the idea…. And from another one:Thank you. I spent a year working on the album and it contains my DNA, or...
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Odd Things in Odd Places
O’Reilly’s Programming PHP by Rasmus Lerdorf, Kevin Tatroe, and Peter MacIntyre uses Einstürzende Neubauten as an example for formatting special characters.
Later, in another example, Jello Biafra.
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Guy Debord's A Game of War
Not but a week ago or so, I received Guy Debord’s A Game of War from the always excellent Atlas Press. One of the last pieces of Debord’s work to be translated into English (if we exclude the incomplete attempt made by Len Bracken), it is a war-game meant to serve as a sort of practical application and exploration of military theory and which “proposes to resemble the conduct of...
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“Can one — at least, could one ever — begin to write without taking...”
– Barthes, by way of Walter Abish’s 99: The New Meaning
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Bob Dylan, Plagiarist. →