Construction Zone

I've got a couple more ideas that I want to address in THE ROOF and more will come to me, but I think I need to shut it down for a while. I'm using a construction metaphor for what I want to do, because I plan to reread and edit the parts I've already written, eventually (hopefully!) making for a more firm foundation underneath THE ROOF. Ha, pardon the pun! My other concern is that I need to take time to better learn who the named characters are, learn their back stories and personalities. I know I'm mixing metaphors, but this is sewing in a way and I want to go back through the character threads and fix any missed stitches.

100 Things to Consume Instead of "Waiting for Gadot"

Here's a list of things to read, watch, listen, or otherwise consume, rather than my play, "Waiting for Gadot." This play is the first major piece of writing I have done in years, so I didn't want to boost my ego by simply pushing my play alone--in the interim I have still been a consumer of all different forms of media, and as a fan I would like to point people in the direction of a number of these different works of art as well.

A Long Sentence

In Ron Silliman's Ketjak, there is at least one reference that I understood to mean: can this work and be important as art while being tedious and very needless and unnecessary to read? The poem's construction largely growing from repetition perhaps causes the reader to have such a thought while reading it--and this was the brilliance of much of it, the way the poem might predict your mind thinking, while reading it--and so Silliman doubles down on this opportunity to admit a self-criticism in the work--by golly y'all are going to be bored somewhere in this deriving poem going on for a hundred pages--while also perhaps creating a very interesting connection between the reader and writer. All analysis aside, I have grown to return to Silliman's assertion--truthfully asked as a question if I remember correctly, so perhaps I should say my assertion, which is an answer of "yes" to that question--that we can view what is essentially too long to be interesting or what is mundane for aesthetic or other reasons to be considered important or noteworthy art. While reading a collection Harvey Pekar's American Splendor comic books I returned to this mindset as I have several times with Nicholson Baker's contemplation of the trivial. As one might consider from both the URL and title of this blog, I would consider much of my own thought in this category as well; for the purposes of this post, however, I considered it important to note all this. To establish a mood before sending you into one long sentence that, while perhaps too long to be interesting, derives its very importance from its length.

Autopsy Presents: CHASING VICTOR

Autopsy Presents is a new feature which brings new stories to light, rather than investigating the inner workings of old stories. The following is in honor of comics week.

"Books" of "Poetry"

"it depends on your definition of 'of'" (intentional misquote, everybody)

Welcome back to design and style. This is the new sorryforboringyou dot blogspot dot com. It's gone by noon in California on the first day of the month if you're reading this. I'm writing it a few days back in Florida (still don't know why the time's set to Pacific). Stephen King calls writing "telepathy," I call it "time travel." See you after the jump.

Scott van Pelt recalls the Tonight Show fiasco.

SportsCenter does these dj mixes of the month that play around with a lot of soundbites. They also did a recent "things they should trademark" segment. I was thinking about the NBC craziness with Leno and Conan and thought I would write a little remembrance up using quotes. Then I realized this was the perfect time to have an extended use of hyperlinks--it's a new type of reading really. So I hope this isn't too unbearable to get through. It's not very good, but it's the thought that counts, right? (Wrong.)

texts near and around the timing of the ghost town of Midnight

6/03-04/11
under the influence of the dark side of the moon

The Kind of Irony You Can't Write

One of the brilliant things about academia is how stupid it really is.

PLAINWATER

"Bohemian Rhapsody," "Happiness is a Warm Gun," "Band on the Run," and "Paranoid Android" are all songs that are known for their diversity--the way that they slip around on you--and are commonly thought of as more than one song somewhat cut and pasted together. But done so very well, of course. Which gets me to thinking--why do we like this idea? I mean, the concept of a mini-album contained in one song falls completely flat on its face so hard it doesn't even have a nose anymore. So why do we like the idea of a song containing the diversity of an album? I would postulated this is an interest in disparate connections: we enjoy being stunned by two ideas the fit together so well that we can't even see the seams where they logically attach. It's like CatDog: at what point is one the other? And yet they are completely different! And that's, as they say, poetry.

MEN IN THE OFF HOURS

Thoughtful if a little unnaturally negative review of the Anne Carson book I just finished. Good closing bit I've blockquoted, so read the review here if you've got a mind to or just skip to after the jump. I have a few words to add, but really Carson's work leaves me somewhat...thoughtless (a pun on speechless, I hope you understand), and Steve Harris seems to have gotten down points a lot better than I might.

Immateria

Reading Promethea, still immersed in Li-Young Lee, but I'm about finished with him now (few more interviews in Breaking the Alabaster Jar), listening to a mix of Say Hi and Nine Inch Nails, and just now I was electronically flipping through an ebook of James Tate's Selected. Guess that's as much a lead-in as any.

The Common Misconception

There are no rules. The only advice is that breaking any perceptions of rules, breaking these views successfully, shattering them like a mirror and gathering around the seven years' worth of bad luck to bask in the glory of, is always  beneficial. It's always a great thing to behold.

Sentences in Sociology

From TEXTBOOK

From CHASING VICTOR

Or rather not really. This is a very rough description of a few lines I would like to include in Chasing Victor, the current verse novella of my dreams. In other news, I'm reading Sharp Teeth, itself a verse novel, the first book by Toby Barlow about werewolves. (Imagine I could add a semicolon into the last sentence so that you would know this is Barlow's first novel and is about werewolves and not his first about werewolves.) Consuming art is becoming more and more a way of realizing all my ideas are taken. A Seamus Heaney poem or a random blog post from someone I'm never going to meet will strike me oddly and I'll realize that what some original (or what I thought was original) thought, poem, story was trying to say has been better stated here. Maybe that's one of the jobs of the writer. Realizing that everyone's better than you are. Maybe not. I mean, probably not, but I'm not going for pity so I tried to add an optimistic edge to that statement. And anyway that's enough here...

men among man

I have never had an original idea in my life, but neither have you, he said, finger pointing out towards the man in the mirror. And he's a crazy man, anyway, you thought, so that I could feel better about myself, but all this was still inside his head and mine. It wasn't out in the open. You are not the type of person to talk about these things. I am the sort who keeps them locked up. And that's a lie, I guess, he thought, as he typed it up for you, but then again, I had never been one to tell the truth. Never one to lie, but also not just one, and just not that interested in truth because truth was only fiction with tyranny and even my sort of communism is not something you think of as practical: he understood that there was always a dominating force, always someone walking into the picture and saying, "Hey! You, out there, you, man, yes! you: you're going to have to listen to me."



I'm calling that a prose poem. Inspired by this from December's Poetry: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=240834

Edit: This is the epigraph: "The me you know, he had some second thoughts." from The Becoming, Nine Inch Nails; adding it at the end because I came to it after writing the piece, and didn't want to make it seem as if this had sparked the paragraph.

Second Edit: The official title of this piece is "Psychology, a Paragraph," and it is part of a larger work called TEXTBOOK which may or may not show up in ebooks are spineless which may or may not ever exist. I have written and will edit and post a secondary work within TEXTBOOK soon, entitled "Sociology in Sentences."

Lows' Prose and Worse Verse

"Lows'" being the possessive of bad times. This one is crazy. Actually, the rest of them from this month are crazy, if they all weren't already. Not much else to get to. Let's let this part end here.

The American(?) Poet

Bit on politics, poetry, the politics of poetry, language and such. Not much more to say on it, *sigh*.

Land gauge.

A stupid pun of a title like a poem in my book called "Fascist Nation," which is playing off the word fascination. It might be apparent that this'll be a post on language, along with translations and a semi-focus on Jorge Luis Borges. Listened to the June Poetry issue's podcast today and Claire Cavanagh speaking on the publication of Anna Kamienska's notebooks recollects my view of recording thoughts here or on Facebook or in text messages, what have you. It's for yourself, but you think others might be interested--for Kamienska she showed people her notes and they reacted positively, for me it's more of a feeling along the lines that you can't keep your ideas to yourself, that writing in a dark room with no one in hearing distance might be a productive technique, but is also somehow snobby and not to be supported. Err...so without further ado...

Reading Poetry

This is like me writing about music, which I'll do one day, first in a short story called "Recollecting Patrick Bateman," and eventually in a collection called Secondary. It's me on poetry. Jack Gilbert. A book I came across by chance and I decided to buy, because it caught my fancy. But I discuss that in the post proper. Just wanted to get it out there first: I'm no good at this.

Writing Poetry

On a Youtube video for an early demo of  "Everything In Its Right Place," our presenter comments that they kinda lose it at the end but it's still awesome. I don't do so well here, but I'm just apologizing beforehand. "I can never lose it"? Maybe so, but maybe not. Welcome back to the blogging, rather than the slitting of a story up into bits. Continue on at your own peril.