Silliman's Blog: Passings

Showing posts with label Passings. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Photo by Ben Friedlander

A reading
of
Rob Fitterman’s
Metropolis

kari edwards’ ashes
returned to the sea

Rae Armantrout,
talking with
Francis Raven

Some recent Drafts
by Rachel Blau DuPlessis:

Draft 83: Listings

Draft 85: Hard Copy

Draft 88: X-Posting

Draft 89: Interrogation

(Three Drafts
translated into French
by Chris Tysh
& J-P Auxemery
here)

Torques:
Drafts 58-76

A critical collaboration
in the mode of a wiki
on Robert Pinsky’s
praise of difficult poetry

In the American Tree,
the radio show,
(includes broadcasts with
Ted Berrigan,
Alan Bernheimer,
Stephen Rodefer,
more)

A story by
Roberto Bolaño

And
a poem

Charles Bernstein
shooting blanks

Waiting for Godot
in New Orleans

Talking with
Alice Notley

Jill Magi
destroys
her book

The secret poetry of
John Phillip Santos,
halfway betwixt
Laura (Riding) Jackson
&
Naomi Shihab Nye

Joyelle McSweeney
interviews
Carlos M. Luis
& Derek White

The plight of newspaper
book reviews
ignores the detail that
newspaper book reviews
mostly are crap

Conjunctions’
audio vault
is a great little resource
tho not in MP3s, alas

Almmiel Alcalay
on the limits
of translation

Mario Hibert
talking with
Kent Johnson

Plus Bill Friend
on Johnson”s
Epigramititis

A report on one of my readings,
or really the talk after a reading,
tho “invisible flan”
doesn’t say which one
(it’s Southern Oregon)

In Boston tonight,
a benefit
for Melissa Green,
featuring
Fanny Howe, William Corbett,
Jennifer Moxley,
Frank Bidart, Derek Walcott,
Robert Pinsky, Rosanna Warren
& more

Talking with
Kimiko Hahn

Joe Ceravolo,
two readings

The politics
of the
Nobel Prize,
an African perspective

Talking with
J.C. Todd

Attila Jozsef’s poems
will return to the web
January 1,
the day © expires

An unsigned review
of John Ashbery
that talks mostly about
Robert Lowell

C.D. Wright’s
use of
lists

Does
”creative nonfiction”
exist?

French ticklers

Getting divorced,
Angela Ball
is a
”happy poet”

Mary Ann Samyn
talking with
Kelly Moffett

Remembering
Jawdat Haidar,
a Lebanese poet
who wrote in English

19^th Century
sound poetry

The roots of Saussure
& modern linguistics

Is Kindle
the iPod
of books?

e-books
start to catch on

Damn the book!

A tale of
two bookshops

Powell’s
faces challenges

Rare book fest
in Hong Kong

Against
speed reading

What is reading
anyway?

Googlization
& its enemies

Spectacle & aporia
in Ted Kooser
& John Ashbery

Holly Green
is the Wirral’s
Young Poet Laureate

James Emanuel,
a formalist
for the simple people

Tom Paulin
on
Ted Hughes’
letters

Talking with
Stephen King

Kinds of Canadian
conservatives:
George Johnston
&
Peter Richardson

Taylor Mali,
rapping
in Providence

Talking with
James Longenbach

Everybody
knows
Gertrude Stein

Hauling the fathers
through the trees

Stein
not as a playwright
but as a subject
for theater

Talking with
Janet Malcolm

Unauthorized
Stegner novel
published

Can Beowulf
survive guilt?

Elizabeth Hardwick
has died

Abebe Payne
takes first
at
Writers Awards Dinner

Iranian-American
fiction

The Russian
Booker Prize

How to reach
4,000,000
possible readers
in one day

John Berger’s
”little book of hope”

100 years
of
Mills & Boon

Talking with
John Adams

Cecil Payne,
master of the baritone sax,
has died

The future of
post-classical
music

Is there a there there
in
I’m Not There?

Nobody’s getting
CDs for Christmas

Underground art

Time capsules
from
Andy Warhol

Mug shots
of the truly criminal

Banksy et al
find a use
for Israel’s
”security wall”

Plus
Banksy in New York

Is Paris crumbling?

Peter Schjeldahl
on what’s great
about Chicago

Where is
”great art”?

In Julian Bell’s
new art history,
the avant-garde
came to an end
15 March 1989

But Richard Serra
is back!

Mark Wallinger
wins
the Turner Prize
for
State Britain

Why Wallinger won

Damien Hirst:
the other white meat

“The heroism
of modern life”

Why vandalize art?

The Radiohead model
works
in Seattle

Rethinking
performance space

At stake in Hollywood:
the value of entertainment
&
the role of writing

The new Russian
culture wars

Culture, art
& the decline of
France

The inverse Orientalism
of Edward Said

The gospel
according to
Terry Eagleton

Amen!

Why dance criticism
sucks

Merce Cunningham now

The fate
of the essay

Movies better than the books
from which they were begot

Anthropologists return
to a world
of ethics

Or do they?

Schumpeter’s century

Special thanks
to
Reconfigurations,
a nifty journal
in the form
of a blog

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Poetry & depression:
Ken Rumble,
talking to CA Conrad

Nate Mackey
in
The Nation

John Ashbery
at the Folger Library

A great review
of Ashbery
by Ange Mlinko

Troy Jollimore’s
befuddled & quiet(ist) review

A similar review of
The Collected Poems
of
Philip Whalen

Thom Donovan
on
Hannah Weiner

Sixty-second lecture:
Charles Bernstein
on
”what makes a poem a poem?”

Talking with
Gary Snyder

The poetics of attention
in the work of
Gabe Gudding

Afaa Michael Weaver
wins
Ibbetson Street Press
Lifetime Achievement Award

20 Turkish poets
translated into English

Essays on
contemporary
Turkish poetry

A poem-by-poem
review of the first
105 pages
of the Best American Poetry
2004

Feds cancel request
to find out
what you’re reading

Talking with
Amazon’s lawyer

The life and work of
Lee Min-yung

Stupidest book review
of 2007
not about poetry

By comparison,
an intelligent report
of a student reading
in Piittsburg, Kansas

Chinh Huu
has died

Andy Gricevich’s
favorite tidbits
from
The Grand Piano, 4

John Latta
reads The Grand Piano:

on class
in the work of
Kit Robinson

on Tom Mandel
& the explosion of
Robert Duncan

Bangladeshi author
forced into hiding

Cyril Wong,
a gay poet
in Singapore

Jamie McKendrick’s
Crocodiles & Obelisks

Jack Foley reviews
Bernstein’s Zukofsky

On
Joseph Conrad

Is editing
evil?

The Washington Post
”gift guide”
to 2007 books
lists only
Zbignew Herbert
& Bob Hass
for poetry

Muting Pynchon

Remembering
Ingrid Jonker

Don Domanski
on winning
the Governor General’s
Award for Poetry

Search the MLA schedule
for interesting panels

Juan Gelman
wins Spain’s
Cervantes Prize

Lessing unable
to travel
to Stockholm

Court voids
free-lance digital rights settlement

Christmas with cowboys
& their poems

Poetry helps man survive
46 years in a cave

Landis Everson obit
in the
Los Angeles Times

The mind
of
Mirza Ghalib

Talking with
Le Hinton

Poems on demand

Writers
and/or
editors

Ten years of
Shreveport’s
Electronic Poetry Network

Sander Zulauf
loves New Jersey

Umberto Eco
on beauty
as a cultural
norm

Book tours
are passé

What to do
instead of book tours:
Tupperware parties!

Talking with
B.H.Fairchild

Mixed results
for booksellers
on Black Friday weekend

Britney Spears
at
Barnes & Noble

Robert Pinsky
on film
as a template for poetry
in the work of
A. Van Jordan

Translating Judas

Vendler’s Yeats

An anthology of Irish poems
all about Japan

Phil Levine
at 80

The limits of clear language

The poet as chef:
Prartho Sereno

Another British review
of Ted Hughes’
correspondence

The rhetoric beat

Is there any hope
for cultural reporting
in American
newspapers?

Talking with
David Henry Hwang

Vietnam War poetry
goes rococo

Completing the vision
of Jeremy Blake

Kenny G
meets
John Zorn

Steve Reich
in the heartland

For Einstein,
life’s still a Beach

The work
of
John Work,
ethnomusicologist

I’m Not There:
the soundtrack album

Plus
Bob Dylan, painter

Sylvia Plath,
in drawing, song &
conference panel
(in London, December 3)

Carey Young:
Body Techniques

Graffiti
of the
philanthropic class

What is the origin
of art?

Art con

The global intelligence paradigm:
a CIA
theory of knowledge

For that special
old book smell

Somebody
clicked a link
on this blog
every 33 seconds
in the month of
November –

Thank you!

Monday, November 12, 2007

The last time I saw Norman Mailer on the television – I never met him personally – he was on C-Span2 on one of that channel’s all-book days, talking at Austin where presumably his archives are going. Shrunken by age, he looked elfin. Except for the ears, which frankly were vast. How odd, I thought, that time alone can do that to us, rendering this larger-than-life character into something more closely resembling a hobbit. Or maybe time and bourbon. Hearing him speak, however, particularly on the subject of America under George W. Bush, you could tell that he had lost not one scintilla of the razor wit that made him such a unique writer.

One test of a great novelist, any great writer really, I’ve always thought lay in the size of their vocabulary and the ease with which they deployed it. I always come away from Shakespeare, for example, hyperconscious of how much more there is to the language than what I normally hear in daily life. Just this past week, after a phone presentation with one of the customers on my day job, a multibillion dollar global systems integrator, I got an email from the lead person on the customer’s team, thanking me for using the word “loquacious” & reminding him that a world existed where such terms could be used.

After the high modernists, especially Joyce & Faulkner, the two novelists who do the most to expand one’s vocabulary are Henry Miller & Norman Mailer. DeLillo & Pynchon aren’t bad in this regard, either. Miller of course is better known for the frankness of his writings on sex, but it’s the vocabulary’s scope that persuades me, not just the use of an occasional four-letter word.

With Mailer the two books that I find matter most are Armies of the Night, easily the best prose work about American political life in the 1960s, and the remarkably off-kilter Why Are We in Vietnam? I’ve always felt that latter book was an attempt to channel a later version of Jack Kerouac in a way that directly anticipates, of all people, Donna Haraway & Greg Tate. Here is just the first paragraph of “Intro Beep 1”:

Hip hole and hupmobile, Braunschweiger, you didn’t invite Geiger and his counter for nothing – hold tight young America – introductions come. Let go of my dong, Shakespeare, I have gone too long, it is too late to tell my tale, may Batman tell it, let him declare there’s blood on my dick and D.J. Dicktor Doc Dick and Jek has got the bloods, and has done animal murder, out out damn fart, and murder of the soldierest sort, cold was my hand and hot.

It doesn’t quite work, which actually proves to be an important part of its charm, critical to the linguistic vertigo that sucks the reader in. 224 pages of this can feel exhausting, but you aren’t actually going to open up to the work until you get to that moment, not some sort of suspension of disbelief, but rather through disbelief completely. It’s a move that takes Mailer out of the pallid circuit of Bellow, Roth, Doctorow & Updike & places him more fairly against Kerouac, Olson, Melville. While I like Doctorow, only Mailer can write with the intensity, word to word, of those poet-novelists even if it doesn’t come through in everything he did.

Here be some links that popped up in the days since he died:

BBC

Salon