Saturday
Dec202008
Saturday
Dec202008
This is the Motherfucking Remix
Saturday 20 December, 2008 I did a collaboration with the poet Brian Howe around five years ago. Some of it was published in Tony Tost's Faascicle magazine. Well now Scantily Clad Press has published the final version. Just published yesterday. it is a very strange little thing. A remix alright. Lots of found language and sounds. Swerves out of the personal. Away from the father. Away from the thick syrup of the body. Sound dictates.Read it over at the lovely issuu. Also, read this post and this post by Marcus.
Friday
Dec192008
Camille Martin
Friday 19 December, 2008 If you're going to make a website for your poetry, do it like Camille Martin and make sure you have lots of stuff to show.
Friday
Dec192008
Friday
Dec192008
Wordsalad
Friday 19 December, 2008 The internet provides poetry with a means to disseminate audio work cheaply or freely to whoever wants to listen to it.
Paul Baker is taking full advantage of these new outlets. Wordsalad is well worth your time.Wordsalad is a concept. For the time being it manifests itself as a weekly radio program on WSUM-FM, Madison.
Each one-hour installment includes recordings of contemporary authors performing their own work, whether intended for page or stage.
The content is (kind of) arranged in advance, according to a set of rules and random operations. As the host, I don’t know how it will really sound until it’s in process. If you’d like to submit audio of your work, contact me at pabaker55 (at) sbcglobal (dot) net
Thursday
Dec182008
"We'll Meet Again, Don't Know Where, Don't Know When..."
Thursday 18 December, 2008 Patrick Cockburn in the LRB about America's timeline for exiting Iraq:
Astonishingly, this momentous agreement was greeted with little surprise or interest outside Iraq. On the day that it was finally passed by the Iraqi parliament international attention was focused on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. For some months polls in the US have shown that the economic crisis has replaced the Iraqi war in the minds of American voters. In any case, Bush has declared so many spurious milestones to have been passed in Iraq over the years that when a real turning point is reached people are naturally sceptical about its significance. The White House is anyway so keen to keep quiet about what it has agreed in Iraq that it hasn’t even published a copy of the SOFA in English. Some senior officials in the Pentagon privately criticise Bush for conceding so much, but the American media are fixated on the incoming Obama administration and no longer pay much attention to the doings of Bush and Co."You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning."
Thursday
Dec182008
Emily Dickinscribble
Thursday 18 December, 2008 Visual work by Zachary Sifuentes:
What does sound look like in [Emily] Dickinson’s poetry? With their associative logic, tangential reasoning, and circuitry, Dickinson’s lines hint at a shuffling of the mind. In other words, the linear behavior of her poems is anything but linear.
Instead, her lines are large flocks of starlings, or cormorants, or even sparrows, fugitive from apprehension.
via Al Filreis
Thursday
Dec182008
The Blah Story
Thursday 18 December, 2008 I was looking at an article regarding the longest (published) literary sentence, a record now held by Mathias Enard for his 517-page French novel Zone. At the bottom of the article I saw this:
NOTE: The above list does not include "The Blah Story," by Nigel Tomm, which has a sentence of reportedly 2.4 million words that rambles through Volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19. It was left off because (a) the book is self-published, (b) about a million of those words are "blah" and (c) its literary value is highly questionable. An excerpt: "As no one was blah any blah to blah, and no one blah needed blah, blah quietly blah blah ..."This struck me as madly unfair, so I trundled down to the local The Blah Story weblog where the truth soon unfolded like a picnic blanket covered in envy:
For now, 23 volumes of The Blah Story are published, they contain 11,338,105 words; 61,745,771 characters (with spaces); 17,868 pages. Some trivia about The Blah Story: Volume 19 contains the world’s longest word, Volume 10 contains the second world’s longest word, Volumes 16, 17, 18 and 19 contains the world’s longest sentence, Volume 4 contains the second world’s longest sentence, Volume 8 contains the world’s longest poem, Volume 13 contains the world’s longest drama.For some reason I find this literary elephantitis incredibly compelling. Maybe it's just because I'm a bloke. Still, it seems patently wrong to ignore The Blah Story on the basis that many of its words are 'blah'.