December 2010
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LRB · Eliot Weinberger · ‘Damn right,’ I said →
In the late 1960s, George Bush Jr was at Yale, branding the asses of pledges to the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity with a hot coathanger. Michel Foucault was at the Societé française de philosophie, considering the question, ‘What is an author?’
The two, needless to say, never met. Foucault may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his...
“He lit a cigar and said to Albertine, ‘If you don’t mind,’ as one excuses oneself for going on with an urgent piece of work in the presence of someone. For he always ‘had to be doing something,’ though in fact he never did anything. Just as a total lack of activity can eventually have the same effects as overwork, whether in the emotional domain or in the...
trastorn-deactivated20110108-de asked: A lot of the vegetarian options we had planned have got cheese and/or eggs. My aunt was like 'They can just eat beans, rice and mangoes' but that'd kind of suck for Christmas.
trastorn-deactivated20110108-de asked: A lot of the vegetarian options we had planned have got cheese and/or eggs. My aunt was like 'They can just eat beans, rice and mangoes' but that'd kind of suck for Christmas.
W/R/T some remarks about Dante
I posted a little while ago:
The main thrust of it being that a post-industrial ideology of good and evil is resistant to the aesthetics of a classical heaven and hell (you can trace this back to, at least, Melville’s “Paradise of Bachelors, Tartarus of Maids” I guess)
This is why, maybe, literature has become profligate with “hells” that more closely resemble the...
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The 12 Days of New(ish) 2010 Poems: Day 2: I'M...
The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing, edited by Kevin Young. Bloomsbury, 2010. $24.00 (310 pp.)
How far can an anthology go in serving as an authentic artistic artifact, a real, individual work of art? For as long as I’ve given a shit about poetry I’ve been on the side of the pack-rats, the compilers, the encyclopediasts. Tell me The Anatomy of Melancholy isn’t as original and...
5 tags
DISMISS THE EVENT AS A GLITCH IN TRANSMISSION
The Cloud Corporation, Timothy Donnelly. Wave Books, 2010. $16.00 (153 pp.)
In a lot of ways, Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation is exactly what you’d want a collection of new, forward-thinking poetry to look like in 2010. It has short, pithy poems that nod towards classical forms. It has long, reflexive sequences that brood on themselves from an ironic distance. It mixes high and low...
I wish I was more multilingual than I am. My French is a leaky ship plugged with very short poems and vague memories of Muzzy tapes.
3 tags
“Like Midas, cicadas can be read as an image of the fundamental erotic dilemma. They are creatures called into conflict with time by their own desire. They enact a nobler version of this dilemma than Midas did, for their passion is musical, and they offer a new solution to the lover’s paradox of ‘now’ and ‘then.’ The cicadas simply enter the ‘now’...
la-bas asked: I'm applying to PhD programs for Medieval literature in the upcoming weeks, which is a fucking nauseating process. I wish I had more of a craft I was trying to improve, rather than trying to fudge my competency in five languages and produce a writing sample that, three days before sending off, I've realized contributes zilch to current scholarship on the subject and on top of that has...
Anonymous asked: I'm pleased you like it, but please correct the lineation if you're going to reprint my poem here. It's four quatrains (see how it is printed on Poetry magazine's website). —MR
I Did This to My Vocabulary →
hungryghoast:
By Michael Robbins
The moon is my alibi. My tenders throw hissy fits.
My scalp’s at the foot of the precipice.
My lume is spento, there’s a creep in my cellar.
You can stand under my umbrella, Ella.
*
Who put pubic hair on my headphones?
Who put the ram in Ramallah?
I’m just sitting here spinning my spinning wheels-
where are the snow tires of tomorrow?
...
“He would lock himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, pacing back and...”
– George Sand (on Frédéric Chopin)
In one of our duller moments we walked into ‘Hold That Co-Ed’ by mistake. We let go of the co-ed after an unreasonable 1/2 hour.
-J.D. Salinger, Ursinus Weekly, 1938
At 12:00 I like to creep out of bed, tiptoe over to my roommate’s bed, and proceed to jump up and down upon the defenseless fellow’s stomach.
-J.D. Salinger, The Ursinus Weekly, 1938
I am disappointed in love. Life no longer holds any of its goodies for me. Nowadays I only talk to people to annoy them by staring at their moles or warts. I seldom go to the movies, and when I do, it is to chew hard candy, rattle my program, and jar feeble old ladies’ hats. I find myself visiting people solely to scatter their talcum powder and laugh at the pictures in their family...
During the process of going through several years worth of writing, trying to pick out anything that didn’t make me feel very sad and ill, I came across something good that I’d tucked away and forgotten about.
Now, if you’ve ever heard of Ursinus College at all, it’s probably in regards to J.D. Salinger’s brief and miserable stay there. It isn’t something he...
Nearly half of Americans can't come up with $2000... →
alexanderpf:
“Which means that they stand only one emergency or crisis away from really quite dire circumstances. This isn’t picked up in the national economic statistics.”
The Julian Assange situation is complex and raises a lot of questions both ethically and politically. Unfortunately most of the discourse I’m seeing on Tumblr isn’t really up to the task of dealing with it intelligently. Of the political blogs I follow, I’ve started to notice that it’s a very small slice of them that don’t immediately turn every new situation into a...
Anonymous Scottish Poem, c. 1300
Qwhen Alexander our kynge was dede,
That Scotlande lede in lauche and le,
Away was sons of alle and brede,
Off wyne and wax, of gamyn and gle.
Our golde was changit in to lede.
Chris, born in virgynyte,
Succoure Scotlande, and ramede,
That stade is in perplexite.
Code:Drift: Code:Drift →
codedrift:
Code:Drift is an ongoing site-specific locative media project which addresses the navigation of urban landscapes. Using quick response (QR) codes and smart mobile devices, Code:Drift augments a users experience while in transit.
Code:Drift adds layers of information to specific…