Sunday, December 30, 2007

Today's Post Sponsored by...

For the frustrated poet in you. May cause irritable vowel syndrome, why mouth, and, yes, venal leakage.

Thank you M and M and L and all you hipsters in Brooklyn for the whiskey, meatloaf and music. 'Twas a very merry xmas, indeed! New records include (but are not limited to):

Animal Collective, Strawberry Jam
Black Keys, Rubber Factory
Blonde Redhead, 23
Blur, Think Tank
The BJM, Massacre and Strung Out in Heaven
Califone, Roomsound and Roots and Crowns
Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity
Grizzly Bear, Yellow House
LCD Sound System, Sound of Silver
Mount Eerie, No Flashlight
A Place to Bury Strangers, A Place to Bury Strangers
Thurston Moore, Trees Outside the Academy

Thank you, Mr. H. And to all you blogger poets--keep an eye out in '08 for the band Colossal Cheek and their new record, Cheek to Chic, as well as Mr. H's forthcoming Let It Be Nearby.

Great to see Sommer and Jean-Paul. Sorry to miss you, Matt & Katy H. Beers soon.

Thursday, December 27, 2007

Untitled


Leaving the Jersey burbs later today and taking with me a bag of goodies for the Brooklyn gang (Mark, Miriam and Lucas). I've been promised meatloaf and whiskey, though hopefully not as part of the same meal.

Some of my favorite lines of poetry this year:

"When people lied, the stars came back enjoyably." --Matt Henricksen
"The day was a blue beyond." --Michael Schiavo
"Outside your body is a set of bleachers." --Dorothea Lasky
" Don't / just say there--signify something." --Graham Foust
"The wind carves long scarves." --Mark Horosky
"Desire that hollows us out and hollows us out, / That kills us and kills us and raises us up and / Raises us up." --Robert Hass
"Where men can't live gods fare no better." --Cormac McCarthy
"Once upon a once there was a once / and that once evaporated into air." --Peter Gizzi


NEW YORK (Billboard) - English rock band Radiohead will perform its new album, "In Rainbows," in its entirety during a pre-taped, hour-long set that will premiere New Year's Eve on TV and the Internet. The event will air on Current TV and Current.com starting 12 a.m. EST on December 31, and will repeat three times throughout the next day.


What do you get when you cross Whittier with Emerson? Apparently an intersection in a neighborhood in Toms River, NJ where all the crissing and crossing streets are named after 19th century American writers. I've lived here nearly 30 years and just noticed this.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

The day was a blue beyond

Michael Schiavo's Mad Song is over at No Tell Motel this week.

Tight is back.

And short assessment of the fun in Otherhow.

Merry Christmas

CAIRO (AFP) - In a potential blow to themed resorts from Vegas to Tokyo, Egypt is to pass a law requiring payment of royalties whenever its ancient monuments, from the pyramids to the sphinx, are reproduced.

Zahi Hawass, the charismatic and controversial head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, told AFP on Tuesday that the move was necessary to pay for the upkeep of the country's thousands of pharaonic sites.

"The new law will completely prohibit the duplication of historic Egyptian monuments which the Supreme Council of Antiquities considers 100-percent copies," he said.

"If the law is passed then it will be applied in all countries of the world so that we can protect our interests," Hawass said.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

So silence is pictorial / when silence is real


Another reason to see Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood--Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead has written the movie's score.

Speaking of music, I had no idea Michael Schiavo double as indie singer-songwriter M. Ward.

Books I haven't touched since arriving home but which I'm sure will touch me in all the right places in the new year:

Elizabeth Willis, Meteoric Flowers
Charles Bernstein, A Poetics
Frank O'Hara, Lunch Poems
Christian Wiman, Poetry and Survival

And this from the NYTimes:

Ryan Watkins-Hughes, 28, a photographer from Brooklyn, teamed up with four other artists to shopdrop canned goods with altered labels at Whole Foods stores in New York City this week. “In the holidays, people get into this head-down, plow-through-the-shopping autopilot mode,” Mr. Watkins-Hughes said.

“Warhol took the can into the gallery. We bring the art to the can,” he said, adding that the labels consisted of photographs of places he had traveled combined with the can’s original bar code so that people could still buy them.

“What we do is try to inject a brief moment of wonder that helps wake them up from that rushed stupor,” he said, pausing to add, “That’s the true holiday spirit, isn’t it?”

Friday, December 21, 2007

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Congrats Kristi

Congratulations to Kristi Maxwell who's first book, Realm Sixty-Four, is now available for pre-order from Ahsahta.

Be dust myself pretty soon; not now.


Two interesting interviews, the first with Christian Bok, the second with Kennith Goldsmith.

Heather McHugh: "Misprision, judiciously administered, can be indispensable to the protocols of art. At its best, it cannily administers the motions of the senses, makes a map of takings in, and of mistakings; a fever of identifications--first, false, and final. In the literary arts, the placements and displacements of our readerly regards can become a narrative of its own."

Cormac McCarthy from Blood Meridian: "The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being a fact among others."

from the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday denied California and 16 other states the right to set their own standards for carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles.

The E.P.A. administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, said the proposed California rules were pre-empted by federal authority and made moot by the energy bill signed into law by President Bush on Wednesday. Mr. Johnson said California had failed to make a compelling case that it needed authority to write its own standards for greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks to help curb global warming.

The decision immediately provoked a heated debate over its scientific basis and whether political pressure was applied by the automobile industry to help it escape the proposed California regulations. Officials from the states and numerous environmental groups vowed to sue to overturn the edict.

In an evening conference call with reporters, Mr. Johnson defended his agency’s decision.

“The Bush administration is moving forward with a clear national solution, not a confusing patchwork of state rules,” he said. “I believe this is a better approach than if individual states were to act alone.”

The 17 states — including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — had waited two years for the Bush administration to issue a ruling on an application to set stricter air quality standards than those adopted by the federal government. The decision, technically known as a Clean Air Act waiver, was the first time California was refused permission to impose its own pollution rules; the federal government had previously granted the state more than 50 waivers.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Overcaptivated



Download Langdon Hammer's lectures on modern poetry. Though a fairly standard, establishment take on the period (he teaches at Yale, afterall), his lectures on Crane and Stevens are wonderful and will fit snuggly between Johnny Cash and Lou Reed on your ipod.


If that makes you sleepy, take a moment and read Katy Henricksen's interview with Zach Condon of Beirut. End of the year thanks to Mr. H for introducing me to the music. The Flying Club Cup may be my favorite album of the year.

Finally, if you're going to buy yourself one more book this year, make it a copy of Heather McHugh's Broken English. I know it's 14 years old, but these essays are smart and soulful. This is language poetry. A must read:

"The place of poetry is nothing less than the place of love, for language; the place of shifting ground, for human song; the place of the made, for the moving. Like other loves it cannot be free of the terrible; it is barely dictable at times, certainly not predictable. It verges on (and toward, at last) the unsayable, even the unspeakable."