“Citing both the ageless gloom of morning and a weary sun, its astral luminescence wrapped in arid gauze, the nation’s poets told reporters this week that doubt lingers in the frail minutes of a young dawn, adding that said doubt was a heathen doubt — a father’s doubt — untouched by faith”: from a poets’ press conference.
[It’s sad that this sort of stuff is, for many, synonymous with the words “contemporary poetry.” Here’s a nice gateway to alternatives.]
Monday, June 11, 2012
Poets’ press conference
Nancy meets Stanley Kubrick
[Nancy, January 5, 1944. From Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943–1945 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012).]
I didn’t know that Nancy Ritz did a screen test for The Shining.
Related posts
Nancy is here
No (“the greatest Nancy panel ever drawn”)
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Recently updated
David Foster Wallace, nonplussed My friend Sara McWhorter found nonplussed, correctly used, in Infinite Jest. Thanks, Sara.
Tiny Furniture
Tiny Furniture (dir. Lena Dunham, 2010) might be the only Criterion Collection film I’ve seen that was an utter disappointment. The film’s characters are blanker than blank: alienated, inarticulate, self-obsessed, devoid of such human resources as empathy, self-awareness, and skepticism. The protagonist Aura (played by Dunham) is a new college-grad with nothing to show for her education. She makes choices that are beyond bewildering, and her mother Siri (played by Dunham’s mother Laurie Simmons) seems beyond caring. There’s very little that’s engaging here: the film’s ninety-nine minutes pass at a very slow speed. When I imagine how my college-grad children and their peers might respond to Tiny Furniture, I suspect that they too would be unimpressed and exasperated. Dunham’s work does not look to my eyes like a portrait of a generation.
I found Tiny Furniture via the New Titles list at my university library and did not know until last night that Lena Dunham is now Big, the creator of the HBO series Girls. This week’s New York Times Magazine has a short interview with Dunham, just one of many Times appearances in the last few months.
[Roger Ebert is a national treasure, but his taste in movies often baffles me. He likes Tiny Furniture, calling it “well-crafted.” Well-crafted: yipes.]
Neologism contest continues unabated, expected to last several more days, but experts predict an end “soon”
The challenge: to devise a word that means a “foolish shortcut, the kind that, often in a foreseeable way, fails to save time and may result in irritation or the feeling that one is absurd and a dimwit.”
The neologism contest that began on Monday continues to continue. There are now seventeen entries. The contest ends on Monday, June 11, at 11:59 p.m. Central.
Friday, June 8, 2012
Ralph Nader turns into Andy Rooney
From an interview with Ralph Nader:
Do you have a computer?Enjoy yourself figuring up the mistaken assumptions and faulty bits of reasoning in the above response.
No. No computer. No iPhone. I do admit to an Underwood typewriter. When the lights go off and the electricity is ruptured, I am still working. My colleagues are not.
[How did I ever vote for this guy?]
Separated at birth?
Former United States Senator Blanche Lincoln and television star Elaine Hansen.
Related posts
Ted Berrigan and C. Everett Koop
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks
Beans Spasms returns
Bean Spasms has returned, still crazy after all these years. From the Granary Books website:
Originally published in 1967 by Kulchur Press in an edition of 1,000, and out-of-print for more than 40 years, Bean Spasms is a book many have heard about but relatively few have seen, and which — until now — has been shrouded in legend. The text is comprised of collaborations between poets Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, with further writings, illustrations and cover by artist and writer Joe Brainard. The three began collaborating in 1960, and kept a folder of their works titled “Lyrical Bullets” (a humorous homage to the well-known collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth, “Lyrical Ballads”). As Ron Padgett describes, in his introduction to this new facsimile edition, their collaborations included “plays, a fictitious correspondence, a picaresque novel, goofy interviews and poems of various types and lengths, as well as mistranslations and parodies of each other’s work and the work of others.” Poet friends dropping by during writing sessions would also add lines, and although Berrigan and Padgett also contributed visuals, and Brainard contributed texts, all works in the book were intentionally left unattributed. Full of wild wit and joy in experimentation, competition and collaboration, Bean Spasms is a classic document of the New York School.I have large portions of Bean Spasms on xerox: for me, the cost of a used copy has always been prohibitive. There are four originals now at AbeBooks, starting at $500. The Granary Books paperback reprint: $39.95.
A few related posts
Canon-formation
“A FINAL SONNET”
Good advice on looking at art
“Pikakirjoitusvihko”
A poem for New Year’s Eve
Separated at birth?
Neologism contest continues to keep going, expected to continue “for days”
Needed: a word that means a “foolish shortcut, the kind that, often in a foreseeable way, fails to save time and may result in irritation or the feeling that one is absurd and a dimwit.” The neologism contest that began on Monday continues to keep going. There are now sixteen entries. What’s missing: maybe yours?
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