February 2012
12 posts
2 tags
The Dishonest Mailmen
Robert Creeley
They are taking all my letters, and they put them into a fire.
I see the flames, etc.
But do not care, etc.
They burn everything I have, or what little I have. I don’t care, etc.
The poem supreme, addressed to emptiness—this is the courage
necessary. This is something quite different.
1 tag
2 tags
And
Robert Creeley
A pretty party for people to become engaged in, she was
twentythree, he was a hundred and twentyseven times
all the times, over and over and under and under she went
down stairs, through doorways, glass, alabaster, an iron shovel
stood waiting and she lifted it to dig
back and back to mother,
father and brother, grandfather and grandmother-
They are all dead now.
I dreamt of Mexico last night, a landscape whose personal reality has avoided my thoughts for at least a year with every necessary force experience existed, I am near the ocean. I am leaving because I always leave at sunset. The muscles of my torso ache for anger, reasons and if I could sleep, Somebody cried Ships! because there are boats on the water. Thus a shudder of distance or time put me on...
"It's Finished." by John Lanchester →
From the London Review of Books, May 2009, John Lanchester writes the clearest and most salient explanation of the ongoing global financial crisis.
It’s long, slightly dated, and slightly anglocentric, but there were at least a dozen quotes that I felt the need to excerpt here. Most importantly, I now feel as if I can at least adequately understand an impossibly huge issue that is also...
"Darkness" by Boulet →
One of the best comics I’ve read in a long while. This short piece is amazing. And—it’s stunning to think it was all done in 24 hours.
January 2012
37 posts
“Starting at Gilgamesh and reading forward, I find no evidence that consciousness...”
– Marilynne Robinson
“A similar sort of effect can be seen in the work of Wallace’s great idol, Don...”
– Scott Espositio
“Had anyone chosen to ponder further, he or she might have wondered at the...”
– Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman
Refrigerator - “The Worthless...
2 tags
“Basement Song”
Peter Gizzi
Out of the deep I dreamt the mother.
How deep the mother deep the basement
the body, odor of laundry the soul of a bug.
The grass inside the song stains me.
The mother stains me. That was the year
they cut my throat and toads bloomed
on my voice box. I have kept my head up.
Have kept myself out of trouble
but deep is trouble deep is mother.
Deep...
“I think the beautiful life is a lie.”
– Ange Mlinko
List of Anticipated Records of 2012
Craig Finn - Clear Heart Full Eyes (01/24)
John K. Samson - Provincial (01/24)
Leonard Cohen - Old Ideas (01/31)
Fucked Up - Year of the Tiger (02/07)
Sharon Van Etten - Tramp (02/07)
Shearwater - Animal Joy (02/14)
Trust - TRST (02/28)
The Wrens - ?? (??) [I really do think it will happen this year, though I also said this last year…]
The...
2 tags
The Bicameral Eyeball
John Ashbery
No one noticed that it was midnight out. The tools to make the tools were forthcoming. It wasn’t so much that we were afraid of farting as that other thieves had gotten wind of his maladdress. She was startling in her new headdress. Oodles of trolls performed the funeral litany— hey, it wasn’t their turn at the foc’sle, so why be perturbed ahead of time, and...
Chris T.’s 2011 Top 10 Top 10: 10. 4 9. 5 8. 2 7. 6 6. 9 5. 10 4. 8 3. 1 2. 7 1. 3
(via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog)
“Recurring Awakening”
Franz Wright
I stop a tall girl all in blue on the hall and receive first a harried and desultory apology then, point blank, news that you passed late last night. You passed at three-thirty in the morning. What is it, some sort of exam? She smiles at herself, epicenter of this revelation, I find myself walking along a high ridge in the wake of an ice...
WatchGarry Marshall made a movie, and it’s called New Year’s Eve. Perhaps you’ve seen it—though it’s more likely you’ve seen the posters for it. Everybody who ever sneezed at famous is in this movie. And it may surprise you to learn that this is not a very good movie. That’s a real shame because a concept so timeless as New Year’s Eve should not be ruined...
“It is not known what exactly Obama did on Mars. (Socializing Martian health...”
– Wired article about everyone’s new favorite conspiracy theory
Anonymous asked: What would happen if you made a mix out of your top 10 albums and posted it here? I'll tell you what would happen: I would download it. And listen to it. And play it on the radio.
December 2011
62 posts
“The charge of obscurity has been raised at regular or irregular intervals since...”
– Ezra Pound, in the Preface to George Oppen’s “Discrete Series.”