The Supercollider

AN OUTLINE OF SOME OF MY RECENT CONVERSATIONS

2011-08-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

THIS SUMMER I STAYED INDOORS

2011-08-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

This summer, for the first time since I was a kid, I have had time to lean and loaf and reflect. I have banged together a pretty good poetry manuscript, and though most of the work is older, I have finished a monumental central text (and, I hope, a good central text) to act as a centerpiece. I've written about a hundred pages of new science fiction, none of it quite ready to be sent. I've traveled to Boston and New York a handful of times. Not great productivity, about average, considering I had four whole months to myself to do with as I please.

I have been playing board games this summer. I'll play them with other humans if I can, but if I can't, I'll lay out the board and the little bits and play them on my own. I go to the game store in the mall every Wednesday and play with a small coterie there, and I do not leave until after midnight, after the walkway lights have all gone out and all the Sbarros and Subways there have shut their anti-theft cages.

Over the last year I have collected thirty board games--some I've sold on a tiny little grey board game market to exchange for new board games. There are game stores everywhere in the Pioneer Valley--the place is truly paradisaical. There are now two game stores in the mall, one in a shopping center off of Route 9 near the Hadley Nissan, one in Northampton which also sells comic books, and a worker-run cooperative game store in downtown Amherst where the volunteers and patrons all dress in black and audibly hiss at you when you walk through the door.

When I'm not playing them, or mustering up the energy to write, I am scouring the internet for information on new board games. The language of these sites is not elevating. It's common to find self-identified ex-marines and/or chemical engineers on Board Game Geek who dot their posts with animated-gif emoticons. I was taken aback at how many people in the community identify boldly as Christian. I guess I can't blame them; the principle theme to these games is control; they are also refreshingly sex-free. Never mind that they are also the purest expression of hedonism the western world has yet produced, outside of Nero's caged wonders.

I was once--that is to say, only a year ago, before I moved into paradise--only vaguely aware that these games existed. Back in the eighties, my friend had an older uncle who lived at home and set up Avalon Hill wargames in his mother's basement. We thought he was cool. I understood, too, that the D and D and GURPS games I played when I was a teenager were a type of gaming, but nothing I would have ever associated with debased, aleatory garbage like Monopoly. As I made my first forays into the science fiction world, I'd run into gamers who shared a language about games I did not understand at all, and tried consciously to avoid.

Yet somehow, over the past decade, the hobby has become a laboratory, a weird little para-cultural phenomenon to which the application of the word experimental is not entirely empty. There are games which display perfect information systems; these are paper software programs whose hardware is the player's fingers. There are games that do not succumb to the luck of card draws and dice rolls, but which actively subsume that luck in an economic model. The language of graphic arts for these games does not obscure through yuppie simplicity, but is instead brightly and inorganically explicit in every way. These games rhyme, then escalate, then recombine to rhyme in new ways. They work at a level of poetry language should not attempt to achieve.

Now, it's almost over. In a couple of weeks I'll take on a full teaching load and I'll coordinate efforts for the University's Visiting Writers Series. I will have to ask significant poets whether or not they need this or that. I will have to deal with the fact that I have asked all of my colleagues over to my house to play these games, practuically begged them, and that they are now afraid of me. I'll have to talk like an ordinary person; discuss sports, the weather, Kent Johnson's latest outrage. I will soon have to take a merely ordinary interest in things.

Before that happens, I think I will spend the next week doing something I've never done before: painting miniatures. Specifically, the miniatures to my copy of Shadows Over Camelot. Let me know if you'd like to come over to help.

FINALLY

2011-08-18T21:01:00.001-07:00

MORE GEARS

2011-08-18T20:52:00.000-07:00

Gear Porn

2011-08-18T17:15:00.001-07:00

Don't Panic

2011-08-16T08:01:00.000-07:00

From Cryptome:

THE LATEST

2011-08-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

Ouch

2011-07-29T17:43:00.000-07:00

Flight of the Bumblebee played at 600bpm (discovered by Christian Bok).

Summer Movie Notes

2011-07-29T08:54:00.000-07:00

A couple of Summer Movie notes:

1) Second movie in a row in which the actor playing the villain probably had to work for hours on end with a bluescreened nose in order to appear "noseless" for the entirely of the film.

2) The Red Skull gives a very Benedict-Andersony speech during the very incoherent final act of Captain America: "Imagine, if you will, a world without flags!" "Not my world."

3) "If the Gorillas take the drug and get smarter than the humans, can't humans take the drug to become as smart as the gorillas?" Via Jim Behrle's Twitter post.

We Are Live

2011-02-12T09:46:00.000-08:00

The first episode of The No Slander Podcast is up! It's our inaugural podcast, Meet the Hosts/Public Speaking, in which your hosts introduce themselves. Topics include: Optics, Daniel DeFoe, Pirates, Public Speaking, Vladimir Mayakovsky and More! With a live recording of Ish Klein and Greg Purcell at The Green Street Cafe in Northampton. You can find it on iTunes! Probably also on our site, though we're working out many kinks as we learn the latest version of Dreamweaver.

Civil Society

2011-01-29T07:33:00.000-08:00

“Once you hollow out civil society and repress the unions and you concentrate so much power around your hands, you are vulnerable and it becomes the flip side of stability,” said Diane Singerman, a professor at American University in Washington who has followed events in Egypt for years. “I think he is hated for good reason: the constant humiliation, the over-the-top sort of need to control everything, the excessive force.”

GURPS love

2011-01-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

The great think about any given GURPS supplement is that each one is a catalog of genre highlights and pitfalls unparalleled in any other writing guide I know of. GURPS Mysteries includes a five-page timeline of criminal investigations beginning with the 1300's. GURPS Space will tell you how long it will take to get to Jupiter via Chemical, Fusion or Probability Drive. And Transhuman Space...well, don't get me started on the care and fidelity that went into Transhuman Space. Any fan of Charles Stross or Vernor Vinge owes it to herself to pick up these titles immediately. This has been my winter break reading.

I will be taking a break to come to New York and read for this. I seek nerds.

THE BIG (SORT OF) SUPERCOLLIDER BEST LIST 2010

2010-12-27T07:14:00.001-08:00

Earlier in the semester, Peter Gizzi asked me which contemporary poets I had been reading lately. I was embarrassed to tell him I was still catching the buzz from my friends and near aquaintences' recent books, and so cobbled together an answer composed of Graham Foust, Geoffrey Nutter, which I stand by.

In fact, this was the year it seemed I had a personal connection, however small, to nearly every book I was interested in. Gizzi's own long awaited collection of Jack Spicer's collected work came out this year, after all. Brandon Downing, my old neighbor from Astoria, hit with the art-collage poetic statement of Lake Antiquity, a book which owes more to Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann than to the arms-length half-measures of your typical Flarf effort. Macgregor Card's Duties of an English Foriegn Seceretary was finally released after a bit of back-and-forth about who would publish it, and it is great, a survey of nearly everything we forgot was great about post-Romantic English letters wrapped in a contemporary package. I really liked Dottie Lasky's Awe, but Black Life, released this year, was sort of like that moment in Star Wars when the Star Destroyer kept coming and coming, inch after inch-- white, silent, detailed, frightening and beautiful-- and you're just a kid tensely sinking into the fold of the seat and thinking what could possibly come after this? By contrast, Paul Killebrew released Flowers, the poems in which cycle through humor and pathos on the surface (reference: "John Fucking Ashbery") but turn toward the deeper clockwork of politics and shared value within--he's our best new poet in the vein of Pope and Dryden. Finally, John Beer's The Waste Land and Other Poems is insouciant, smart and fun, and I have told him so myself, because he's my buddy. To top it off, this was the year my old neighbor Sam Lipsyte wrote a book about Astoria and my old roommate Bryan Charles wrote a book about Kalamazoo (by way of New York). In short, this is the year everyone at or around my last birthday party released a killer book, leaving me thinking yes, it's over, my time has passed, the market can't bear another buddy by the name of Purcell. So I recuse myself. Consider these last titles all lumped together into a single category: Non-Objective Best Books of 2010.

Most of what else I've read this year was written before 1950. That leaves me with little to say in terms of keeping up a tradition of ranking best books on a blog, a consumerist model I'm fine with, and which seems to have been adopted universally this year. So here I'll present a different catalog for 2010, in no particular order. I am proud to present SUPERCOLLIDER'S BEST OF 2010: WHATEVER, SOME MOMENTS.

--A poet I do not know and had never met came into Northampton this fall and blew everyone away. His name was Aaron Kunin and his book was called The Sore Throat and Other Poems. The central text of this book uses a vocabulary of 200 words to "translate" Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberly into Kunin's disaffected but still emotionally rousing idiom. On paper, it's good, but read aloud, it was mesmerizing.

--I caught up on some of 2009's best science fiction in 2010, including standouts The Windup Girl and Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock. Both books answer the current fad for retconned Steampunk by illustrating the actual Steampunk world we can look forward to inheriting once the oil runs out. Stay tuned next year, when I'll finally get around to reading Mieville's Kraken, Banks's Surface Detail, Palmer's The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Valtat's Aurorarama and Cronin's The Passage.

--Northampton has a bookstore to beat them all. It's Flying Object, which just opened this year down the road from Grey Matter, which combined with Troubador Books, which is just down the road from Amherst Books, Food for Thought, and Raven Bookstore. All of which put Hampshire Township, population 150,000 or so, on a par with New York City when it comes to bookstores (and at a severe deficit when it comes to Duane Reades and bank branches).

--My experience with gaming might require a separate space. For now, Best moment: discovering the vast complications of the Arkham Horror board game using the distributed intelligence of a Halloween Party.

--MAJOR BUMMER of 2010: Too many funny poems. Or let me refine that. There are some poets who have made a study of humor and are therefore funny. There are other poets, usually very young poets, who will say any insouciant or sloppy thing in a poem to get a rise out of their friends, and I have sat through so many of their readings this year I don't think I'll ever laugh again. I used to think I hated self-seriousness in poets, but I hate insecure anti-seriousness much, much worse.

The Last Three Months

2010-12-07T06:11:00.000-08:00

No action on the weblog lately. My experience in the last three months of full-time teaching and writing simply might have allowed for it--hell, it allows for nearly anything--but I've been enjoying myself so much I haven't really thought to post. Is there a link between misery and weblog posting? Is there joyful blogging?

The graduate school experience runs parallel to an experience of culture without ever quite intersecting it. This is a good thing. The experience of culture as I've experienced it is lots of work and scrabbling with an occasional trip to the movies. Here, I read.

Had the weblog been caught up, here's what you would have read--my wrestling with modernists I hadn't thought about in a decade, specifically Pound, who I hate less now, via his Homage to Sextus Propertius, and Stevens, who I love less, just a little, via The Auroras of Autumn. The problem is this: while our bipedal, primate faculty for abstraction is the one extraordinary thing about us, and possibly the last consolation for the loss of the metaphysical, it is, after all, just a function, like opposable thumbs or relatively large braincases. We would not look kindly on a thumb fetishist, would we? So why the abstract qua abstraction? This is a problem poetry shares with politics and everything else. Certainly our bipedalism will not see us through global warming: why should our syllogisms? I'm not Derek Jenson's biggest fan, but maybe he's right. Maybe we should smash our way out of global warming, with sticks and projectiles... and so with literature, too. Pound in this context is less abstract, Stevens more. But then there's Harmonium.

In either case, there were mindblowing readings this semester by Aaron Kunin, Ben Lerner, China Mieville, not to mention a visit from my buddy John Beer, who read with Ish.

There would have been a hell of a lot on Minecraft, which may be 2010's watershed cultural moment. Even more on my rediscovery of the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, GURPS, which was 1986's watershed cultural moment, and which is no less than an algorithmic parallel universe simulator. I am totally engrossed with their supplement for Transhuman Space and GURPS Mysteries. This is not to mention the semi-regular games we've hosted of the super-complex board game Arkham Horror. This is the year gaming completely surpassed film as my medium of choice for getting out of the literary hothouse and enjoying the cool breezes of the outdoors.

There have also been a lot of bike rides, and the natural beauty of Western Mass, about which, more in time, especially as winter sets in...

More Like This, Please

2010-11-10T15:57:00.000-08:00

I sort of get a little giddy and jumpy when I read a story like this, on this scale:

Bubbles of Energy Are Found in Galaxy

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

2010-08-22T16:03:00.000-07:00

Near our new house is an arthouse theater* that plays morbid stuff like the overrated Winter's Bone and sugar-free French bubblegum along the lines of Coco and Igor. For some reason, this theater has a sister theater in Northhampton playing equally unadventurous fare. The Cinemark is the only non-arthouse cinema accessible to us in the Pioneer Valley. I'll say this for it; it was a common punishment when I was a child to be made to sit in a far corner, silently and out of the way, and The Cinemark sits in the same way, like an abashed giant, behind The Hampshire Mall. It's almost difficult to find.

I had natural reservations about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. The Brian O'Malley comic series never appealed to me at first glance--something about them seemed too big-eyed and pre-sexually dimorphic. Same goes for Michael Cera. But we really wanted to see a movie and were squeezed between the deadly Scyllia and Charbydis of The Expendables and The Kids Are All Right and right into Scott Pilgrim's seemingly weak arms.

We loved it! I can't think of any recent movie that better weds the play-sense of games and movies, or which evokes more honest interaction between the audience and the gimmick-packed toolbox accessible to modern filmmaking. Yet I'm not surprised by the bad box-office for this movie. The trailer is brain-meltingly generic. The movie itself is full of catchy, authentic-sounding garage rock and Nintendo Entertainment System references, both of which register strongly with my generation but which probably seem corny to an 18 year old. Edgar Wright, the director, seems genuinely to love these things-- the spatter of shiny coins against the ground, the swing of a flaming sword around a protagonist's head, the murky sound waves one wants to see pulse from a Marshall Stack. All of this equals Big Joy, which is anathema to the Neanderthal-browed Tarkovskian aesthetic dourness of your average teenager, and has been for decades. This movie is strictly for adults.

*In our first week in Amherst we went to see a revival print of To Catch A Thief. The audience was full of honor-roll kids and their parents. The projection was murky and off-center throughout. There was a recent ad in Craigslist for a professional projectionist at the theater. I hope they found one.

The Iron Dream

2010-08-16T08:58:00.000-07:00

I also found this beauty at Grey Matter Books last week. Norman Spinrad's take on the Science Fiction book Hitler would have written. From headier days.

Grey Matter Books, lest you get the wrong impression, has phenomenal sections in used poetry, science, literature and philosophy, a great line-up of events, and a pretty decent record selection in the back. It just happens to have the only substantial science fiction collection in The Pioneer Valley, as well. Top marks.

Too Much Fun

2010-08-16T08:39:00.000-07:00

The blog strips the teasing, private diary of its context and secures it as public. Believe me, I have no problem pumping out unsupportable opinions. In this respect I'm like a minor-league baseball mascot, blasting t-shirts with an air-gun over the beer-numb fingers of the crowd.

Yet I'm having too much fun in Amherst to notionally bronze its baby booties! Typical day--write some, read some, hop on the bike and do some errand, come home and play or learn some new game*, all the while taking time to make slightly more elaborate meals than normal.

Reading list: a Robert Sheckley omnibus, Michael Schmidt's clumsy but informative The Lives of the Poets (with The Penguin Book of English Verse at close hand), lots of Emily Dickinson.

*Cribbage and two-handed Euchre have re-entered my repertoire, and Ish and I have been circling around the great Amherst gamer's collective at Worlds Apart Games. Of special interest is the intimidatingly rule-heavy but open-ended Gurps role-playing system.

Going Mobile

2010-08-06T14:28:00.000-07:00

Lift, yoke, spend: the end result being, I live in Amherst, Massachusetts, now, with most of my stuff. It's a state I have yet to spell correctly on the first try (I always want to squeeze a fifth "s" in there), I am almost totally indifferent to the baseball playing on televisions in this city's many collegiate-style bars, and distances are to be judged by long, dull real estate patches of no public interest at all (I used to say we lived near Emily Dickinson's house until I walked there--now I say that Emily Dickinson's house is the nearest thing of interest to us). All that being said, I feel as if I were renting a patch of paradise. Just past the sliding doors of our kitchen are not just trees but a whole, dense woods from which exotic animals sometimes stumble, brace themselves, and retreat. The birds here have strange calls and sound to my dead, urban ears like amusement devices.

I just bought a bike to get around. It's a small bike, designed to fold in half and then in half again, and it fits well in the space between the bookshelf and the front door. Balancing myself on the thing is like balancing a watermelon on top of a moving pineapple, but when it gets going it's a pure joy. I bought a black helmet embossed with a bright green four-leaf clover. I think it suits me. I'm inclined to wear it on my head at all times, even at dinner. The bike will assist me in getting to the area's many record shops and bookstores, where I will attempt not to spend my dwindling resources. About which, more later.

Leaving New York

2010-07-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

My last month in New York has been so busy I've barely taken time to register the fact that I'm abandoning it. I moved here when I was thirty and now I'm moving out seven years later. New York is not the place to find you've transformed from reliably young to borderline middle-aged. At least, not earning what I earn. I suspect it's no more fun for those higher up the service industry. The flight away to quiet, green, smug Massachusetts may have a trace of panic in it. Still, I'm trying to take in this dying city one last time. I feel like I'm failing. I walked from a midtown party up to the Lexington Avenue stop on the N Train, and the buildings were all as anonymous as ever, awesome in their height but newly absurd.

READERCON IMPRESSIONS PART 2

2010-07-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

We started at 4 pm Friday with an almost disappointingly literate lecture on "The Unknowable Character" led by The Washington Post's Michael Dirda--the only mainstream reviewer I can think of who commonly reviews Science Fiction. The conversation--ostensibly geared toward the problems of writing alienness--veered from Beckett to James Purdy to Dostoyevsky without ever getting as bug-eyed and squishy as I would have liked. The "Authoratativeness in Fiction" panel had the same problem, so I snuck out and joined a standing-room-only lecture on microbes--titled "Microbes!"-- by a practiced lecturer on the subject. There we found out about the very cool notion of bacterially-produced electricity.

Still hot and tired from our bus ride, we escaped the panel for an hour to sit in the hotel's sauna and take a dip in the pool. As I floated face-up in the cool water a perfect sychronicity clicked into place: where I wanted to be and where I happened to be were the same, for maybe the fifteenth or twentieth time in my life.

After the swim there was a fun panel featuring college drop outs--Professor Chip Delany included-- which, once again, did not feature much in the way of Science Fiction, but which did feature a lot of accountable anger, amusingly recalled.

The highlight of that night's party was Barry Malzberg's disquisition on failure, given to commemorate that year's Corwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. Maltzberg is on in years, but above his somewhat crooked body his face popped with sour life as he recounted all the ways in which writers might go forgotten, necessitating the slim consolation of posthumous rediscovery.

Readercon Impressions Part 1

2010-07-12T08:28:00.000-07:00

After a lot of bus riding and walking around the Pioneer Valley cities of Northampton and Amherst--like the rest of the Northeast, they were experiencing record heat-- we finally found a place to live, in a townhouse not far from the UMass campus. We celebrated by canceling all of other showings and having drinks with the local poets. The next day, we took an early bus and went to the Marriott in Burlington, Massachusetts, site of the 21st Annual Readercon.

Burlington itself is a weird simulacra of a city about 7 miles to the north west of Boston, whose buildings encrust, in regular formations common both to bivalvic sea life and retail architecture, the intersection of Interstate 95 and State Road 3. It is a city built to encourage sales without the heady distractions of public life. The only thing distinguishing the Marriott from the nearby Burlington Mall was its bearding of flowering bushes and the swimming pool in back.

Inside was a different matter. By the time we walked into the front lobby at three in the afternoon on Friday, hot and tired from our apartment search, the convention had already been going for a good 24 hours. It was our first big science fiction convention. The front lobby was clogged with men and women, sporting physiques somewhat outlying those held by our Renaissance-era painter friends as falling within the ideal, wrapped to the last lumpen torso in black T-Shirts, either tight-fitting or loose-fitting but never in-between, proclaiming allegiance to "Clarion 2009" or sporting some cloud-borne cryptozoological monstrosity.* The Burlington Marriott is foremost a business hotel, and the hotel's ordinary clientèle, distinguishable by their minority presence as well as by their attractively-fitted clothing and ruddy skin tone, slipped among the Readercon bodies like declawed lions among a thousand confident gazelles.

Another first impression: outsider opinion holds that these conventions are attended exclusively by men, and while that may once have been true, the situation has changed. Unlike your typical corporate boardroom or university creative writing poetry department, the world of science fiction and fantasy has in the last twenty years seen an influx of feminine talent, both lucrative and inspiring. These are not necessarily the spiritual daughters of Russ and Atwood and LeGuin, who were first-rate writers because they had to be, but hard-headed dealers in the business of genre, ready to give a verbal power-point presentation on why her vampire-loves-mermaid steampunk novel is more thrilling than the other three on the market. These earners outnumbered this generation's first-raters like Nalo Hopkinson and Kelly Link, but they were in the right place, in the marketplace, having fun as both fans and untortured practitioners, among their peers. Readercon felt like a solidly co-ed affair.

More Drinking

2010-06-20T07:03:00.001-07:00

Preparatory to extracting the tenuous stakes of my life in New York to go and live in the Pioneer Valley as a student and instructor, I've done significantly less of what I like to do for this blog and more of the sort of things one does when one is about to exit a metropolitan living situation one might never truly have appreciated in the first place. Namely, I've been drinking, celebrating, counting money, saying goodbye.

Nonetheless, there are things I've read and experienced over the last month I do intend to address: Dottie Lasky's excellent manifesto, Poetry Is Not A Project, Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock, Splice, and Red Dead Redemption, to name a few.

But first, more drinking. I'm reading in Chicago at Myopic Books with Joel Craig this Thursday, June 24th. Please stop by if you're local and free.

A few notes on unusual poetry

2010-06-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

Last week I finally read Vanessa Place's Notes on Conceptualisms. I thought I liked Conceptualisms before, but now that it's been positioned like a powerpoint slide over the corpse of Flarf I'm not so sure. It's possible I'll be able to go back to Kenneth Goldsmith's 1010 WINS trilogy and renew my good opinion, but for now, my notes are these:

1) Did you know that Tom Wolfe, Max Eastman, Norman Mailer, Budd Schulman, Bruce Andrews, Dayle, Doyle, Bernbach, Laura Riding, Edward Murrow, John Hersey, Matt Latimer, Ford Maddox Ford, Joesph O'Neill, and virtually every single writer working in the English language since the first world war have thought or do think of themselves as writing in an "uncreative" mode? Did you know that I've never had a boss who'd disagree with you?

1b) We have been genuflecting before our publicly-sulking elders (who theorize the good of our anonymity but not their own) for a very long time. But does the position so suit us that we're now simply a creative anachronism society? We're just going to perform the year 1967 endlessly?

1c) Journalists do Realism and Analogy for money. Plus, their elders call them "experts," which is more than your elders will do for you.

2) Why can't poems just be unusual in certain hands? Why does everything have to be a careerist toilet? At least "unusual" begs the question. "Postmodern" and "Experimental" and "Conceptual" mean what they mean, which is to point at precisely nothing.

3) We have a word we didn't have before for what happens when the less-than-effectual bully one another anonymously using language. It's called trolling. This the singular legacy of the last thirty years of poetic/critical mash-up. We should get credit for that.

3b) If the point is to run for School Board President, or fuck up a bank, or explore hermeneutics, instead of writing poetry, then why write the poetry?

Money

2010-06-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

Agriculture Reader

2010-06-07T12:07:00.000-07:00

The new Agriculture Reader is out now:

I've got a couple of pieces in it. So do a lot of really good writers.

True story: I ran into New York editor Jeremy near the Rocky statue in Philadelphia the other day. Totally random occurrence.

Horses in Motion

2010-05-22T08:37:00.000-07:00

1) According to Ross King, Ernest Messonier, exemplar of the Beaux Art style during the decades in which it was being toppled by Impressionism, went to great lengths to add realism to the many horses appearing in Freidland, the painting he worked on for the better part of three decades:

"Unfortunately for Messonier, the technology required for these motion studies, a multi-exposure camera, was still just out of reach in the late 1860's...Messonier had a team of workmen lay a set of iron rails in grounds that had formerly featured only the bucolic delights of cherry trees and grazing livestock. He next installed on the track a small carriage, or what one witness called a "wagonette" and another "a rolling sofa." Parallel to this length of track he fashioned a bridle path along which the horse could gallop. With these two lengths of course complete, he climbed into the wagonette, whose motive power was not steam or even horses but a pair of men. These two unfortunates were ordered to push the painter as quickly as possible along the rails in his wagonette as a horseman galloped full-pelt down the bridle path beside them. This bizarre feat was performed time and again as Messonier, whisked along the track with pencil and paper in hand, "jotted down the action, the strain pf the muscles, every detail of the motion and the different transitions." Entire albums were filled with these scribbled observations."

2) Josh Bass, Rockstar Art Director, on motion capturing horses for digital recreation in their new Western-themed video game, Red Dead Redemption:

"The horse we used was a long-time Hollywood ‘stunt horse’ named Blanco. His owner was a proper old-time cowboy, and we were assured that Blanco had seen far more studio time than any of the staff on the shoot...Blanco didn’t have to ride a treadmill, but we did have to glue positioning markers all over him in order to capture the movements correctly, which was definitely an unusual sight.

"At first, we had to spend some time trying to determine where we needed to place the markers in order to capture the best data. Once we resolved that issue, we went straight into shooting, pausing after each take to replace the markers that had fallen off the horse during the take. After every take, we literally had to pick up a dozen markers off the floor and glue them back on, trying to figure out where they’d fallen from before we could continue.

"Once we’d mo-capped the horse, work began on modelling the barrel and hindquarters of the horses, as this was the anatomical area we knew would be viewed most by players, given the third-person camera. We then shifted our focus to the specific types of movement: the various types of motion, or gaits, that horses use. Research came from live, image, and film studies, as well as a state-of-the-art motion capture recording, breaking movement down to five common states that translate best into in-game motion: idle, walk, trot, canter/lope, and gallop.

"As the primary mode of transport in the game and one of the most significant animals in every aspect of Western iconography, the horses needed to move realistically in all contexts..."

The Problem

2010-05-11T11:39:00.001-07:00

The problem with many otherwise perfectly good science fiction movies is the way it splits the audience. It's that point where something happens on screen completely at odds with science or history or the mundane course of human perfidy ("Bond, I will tell you exactly how my scheme works before I kill you"), something totally insane. The majority of the audience will at that point shake their heads and proclaim that all science fiction was ever thus. Another small minority will actually start chewing on their own fists. That decisive moment happens in the new MIA video at the 6:50 mark, at which point one realizes that these antagonists want neither food nor money nor information nor revenge. They are a fantasy before which we are rendered utterly aesthetic, utterly helpless, like Obama T-shirt silkscreeners:

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Science Fiction, Your Kids, and You

2010-05-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

In an effort to catch up on all the science fiction reading I did not get to when I was thirteen--we're not counting the Marvel family of comics, here--I've recently picked up the Science Fiction Association of America's Hall of fame picks. That's the short stories in Volume A and the two books worth of novellas represented by Volume B, everything the mostly male members of the newly-formed SFWA voted in as foundational when the Nebula Awards were begun in 1964.

Reading through the first hundred or so pages of the first volume, it's much easier to see why science fiction got its reputation among the general public as a vast garbage barge of adolescent sexual and political philosophies, written in great hacking strokes by its practitioners.

Based just on this sample, the wizened twenty-something grandmasters of science fiction chose, as the work best representing them, some damnable stuff indeed. The scenarios sound like an International ANSWER leaflet produced under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. A trio of spacefaring adventurers steal a Martian blood diamond. A pair of bachelors accidentally create a robotic housewife whom they threaten to "shut down" lest she relinquish her feminine illogic. "Negroes" are praised for their "primitive musicianship." Most extraordinary is the Heinlein story, "The Roads Must Roll," in which a John Galt-like figure rolls around on a little wheelie-tron beneath a massive moving highway and busts up a striking union with fatal (but fun!) results. In Heinlein's world, as in Ayn Rand's and Rick Santelli's, "parasites"--the word is used in this story--are never those with the power to siphon massive public resources, but are instead those people who democratically organize in order to make them accountable.

But that's kid's stuff. There are stories I've yet to read in this collection by Sturgeon, Vance and Bester, and I expect more from them. Rather, it's important to realize that the reason science fiction is avoided these days has little to do with any of this. The difference between Science Fiction in 1964 and Science Fiction in, say, 1970 is vast, and those changes have remained with us permanently. The level of writing still is likely often to flub it (yet nowhere else can you find technical jargon elevated to the level of art), and now and again a book will begin with a loving quote from Milton Friedman, yet since the seventies the gatekeepers of written SF have broad responsibilities and sharper eyes than they did in the past. Ignoring all of it denotes a lack of curiosity bordering on self-imposed illiteracy.

Adults have to work long hours these days; the vast commercial cosmology of Star Wars has a lot more thought put into it than does the cosmology of your average libertarian. Only an adolescent has time to poke through the Lucas timeline, or the timeline of Dune, or invent the sort of ongoing scenarios your average Dungeons and Dragons game requires. The threat is not that our adolescents are swimming in a purile sea of sex and republicanism--it's that our adolescents are smarter than any clockpuncher can let herself become. Kids want their Batmans self-critical and their histories operatically vast. We want to punch out mentally after 40-plus hours of work.

Toy Soldiers

2010-04-24T10:50:00.000-07:00

The reviews of new XBox Live Arcade game Toy Soldiers seem less about the game itself and more like a referendum on the Tower Defense genre, of which every reviewer seems to be a little sick. Though it's a genre I happen to enjoy (in spite of the fact that tower defense is not well complemented by console controls), playing the World War One-themed Toy Soldiers did not once make me think "Tower Defense" except in reference to the game's critical reception. It made me think of other war games.

Video games do not capture the subtle quality of ennui well, and the violence they depict is explicitly not arbitrary. For this reason, games have jibed well with the journalistic historical record of World War Two described in the first-person accounts of Pyle and Murrow and even Liebling, but not with the accounts of First World War captured by writers like Robert Graves and Paul Fussell. I chalk this up to the change in journalism's cultural position between the wars.

Journalism during World War One could propagandize with the best of them -- just look at the Spanish Civil War -- but its propaganda was arbitrary. It appealed to anyone who could read, including working people swept up with the educational reforms of the late nineteenth century. The prose of the Hearst and Pulitzer presses came wrapped in exclamation points and was about as authoritative as the cartoons scrawled like graffiti against its ornate walls. This makes them entertaining to read but of little use when trying to tell the history of the war in retrospect, and so they have been forgotten. What we have instead are the accounts of war captured by writers like Robert Graves and Paul Fussell. These tell the story not from the modern reporter's point of view, with all the globetrotting and classlessness and upper-management access that implies, but from the point of view of the soldier. And what the soldier has done in every war for eternity is wait around -- often in terrible conditions, for days and weeks and sometimes even months -- to see whether of not he will die a quick and messy death. World War One was unusual in that it featured many soldiers from many classes. Not only were many of them writers, but many of them were modernists--which is another way of saying they were recovering romantics. They experienced the war first hand and they were expert in depicting the exquisite languors of the soul while bored or incapacitated. Imagine Coleridge composing "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison" while in recovery from being injured at the Somme, and you sort of have it.

Except in certain creative, game-breaking circumstances, no death in Chess, Risk, or your average video game is permanent. The same is true of the war video game, whether experienced in the mortal first person, as in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, or in the god-like third person, as in Command and Conquer. Nothing feels more removed from death to me than the gameplay loop of your typical competitive online first-person-shooter, which is like the line that forms in front of a slide at a water park: one splashes into the clorinated, flavorless bath of digital death and then queues up immediately for more. On a scale of optimism, I think this ranks fairly high.

Yet one could not mistake this gamesmanship for Romanticism. The romantic impulse is always aware of the boundaries of frame-- of real death, of the "reality" outside the poem. Tennyson, in his "The Charge of the Light Brigade" -- though it was written contemporaneously with the Crimean War battle from which its title derives -- is always aware of that battle's conclusion ("When can their glory fade?"), and his formal duty to memorialize the dead. Though Tennyson's circus-tent ejaculations--"Forward, the Light Brigade! /Charge for the Guns!"-- are unremarkable today except as cautionary examples against the Romantic impulse, they would not be possible in an atmosphere of endless police action, in which our writers are "embedded" during strong pushes, kept generally entertained, and so feel the need to not show that excitement. To be stimulated and not exclaim is the mark of a professional. If you'll remember, Bush was castigated for his own "Charge of the Light Brigade" on May 1, 2003. He learned afterward to speak in the language of slow accumulation.

I expected the popular music of World War One to be similarly out of touch with the modernism of its soldiers, setting Tennyson's Romantic sentiment to music. Reviewing the music recently, I found the opposite to be true (a great collection of sound files exists here). The music of World War One, about World One, is often witty and sardonic. It details the problems of being there, the trench life and dampness and terrible rations, rather than always the longing for victory or home. Detail is key to the success of any grift, especially the grift we must pass on our selves in order to keep going. This was was of course a discovery I'd made earlier in Paul Fussell's work but forgotten. More intriguingly, the songs were built to be sung and reiterated endlessly. Many of them have source melodies predating the war, and could be recycled wholesale for the purposes of wars to be fought, as George Cohan's "Over There" was exhumed 24 years after it's birth for World War Two era James Cagney vehicle Yankee Doodle Dandy. The songs themselves, considered separately, depend heavily on mnemonic repetition--the repeated choruses are often nearly as long as the verses, and the verses themselves revolve around repeated lyric themes. One imagines soldiers getting drunk on reserve behind the line, singing these songs endlessly, twisting certain words in the chorus to make them last through one long, free night of excess before having to return to the quiet horrors of the front. This may sound odd, but they seem to me to have been used, and received, much like video games are used and received by soldiers today. They are "dumb," ideologically rich, and a great source of catharsis.

World War Two marks a universally acknowledged change in the way journalism was performed and in the way it was perceived. Before World War Two, journalists were sensationalists and ambulance chasers. After World War Two, they were professionals and adventurers. What is not commonly acknowledged is that after World War Two, literature changed, too--at least, in part because of the change in Journalism's status. Modernism ended abruptly in America after the war. Every marquee writer in America after that had some association with the periodical press: Truman Capote with The New Yorker, Norman Mailer with The Village Voice, Hunter Thompson with Rolling Stone. None of them were adventurous writers in the modernist mode. They were literally adventurers. They took their habits from the reporters of World War Two, who sold papers not with modernist exclamation points and invention, but by literally leading the fanciful, exciting life of the classless, postmodern writer and sending back quiet accounts of the truth, expensing trips to Morocco, Tangiers and England back to their papers. (Surprising that no one has yet floated a video game about a World War Two photojournalist.) Put simply, Romanticism and Modernism transform the ordinary stuff of war into something extraordinary. Postmodernism insists that war is extraordinary all the time.

The reason World War One has not been recreated as a first person shooter is because most of the stories we have about that war are incompatible with the loop of that genre's gameplay. For readers, Goodbye To All That, All Quiet On The Western Front and Storm of Steel are still very much in print, and viable cornerstones of literary culture. Difficult to create "fun" from what those men describe. One does not want to wait in a trench for hours or days only to receive the call to go marching into the maw of a mounted machine gun and get torn apart in seconds flat. Every reporter given a chance has avoided it: it's not news.

What I'd call the "style" of the current military sinkhole we're now fighting in Iraq and Afgahanistan is similar, only in as much as it, too, is a war fought in a context shifting notions of nationalism, in which the ground experience seems to consist of long periods of absolute boredom punctuated by fatality-rich moments of batshit horror. The differences of scale between these wars--and this difference is vast-- does nothing to change the fact that young men so armed require not just entertainments but the verse-chorus-verse of endless entertainment. The current lie we tell our selves, that our soldiers tell themselves, comes not in the form of song but in video games. Both the songs of World War One and the video games of the American adventure have their charms. Playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 this week, I found myself in the truly ridiculous-- and ridiculously entertaining-- position of capturing a close-set series of checkpoints only to backtrack over and over again to recapture them in an frenetic game of tag. There is no objective to this capture, no final gain to be made, no liberating duty, and this is refreshing. We are told to do something and we know it will be an endless thing: the checkpoint will never be held. Yet everything looks brilliant, the guns have weight and realistic detail, the dust licks up around my soldier's feet. In this weird collision of lie and truth, we all get to report a fact about a war. I ran behind a wall and then this guy had a rocket launcher and the wall totally collapsed but he missed me and I took his flag.

Now, back to Toy Soldiers, the first compelling World War One game yet created. In this game, one is given a vast, open field, as opposed to the close quarters of a first person shooter. Up close, the field appears real-- it is pocked with trenches, and when mortar fire hits it, clods of dirt fly into the air. Yet, pulling back, one finds toyboxes instead of military barracks, and instead of a sun, there is a desklamp. The effect is jarring and quite unique. One participates in this game much as characters participate in their roles in The Twilight Zone, with a keen sense of the uncanny, of playing a role. To play, one sets up small units: machine guns, mortars, cannons, even units designed to distribute chemical warfare. This is all very much like a real time strategy game, except that one jumps into these units after setting them up, triggering a small orgy of personal violence against the enemy AI. The AI comes by way of the axiomatic World War One timetable, one wave after another. Keeping certain numbers from entering your "toybox" is the object of the game.

The adjectives this game inspires are downright Edwardian: ghastly, horrid. One actively sprays German soldiers and horses in this game with a chemical agent, watches them slow their march, turn green and die. One fires a mounted machine gun into row after row of approaching human torsos. One jumps into biplanes knowing full well that one's final strategy will be a kamikaze dive into a tank. That the enemy AI breaks into pieces and disappear upon being so mistreated only underscores the horror of their expendibility. None make a tactical retreat. All are ordered by an unquestioned game mechanic to press ahead. There are moments in which one, prepared in advance, simply waits for the Enemy AI to send the next wave.

There is a sense in which many reviewers are right about this game. It is a hybrid RTS/Shooter with none of the RTS's complicated strategy nor the shooter's visceral thrill. Yet one may say something similar about World War One itself, or the literature surrounding that war. It is neither here nor there, neither Romantic nor Modern. Its self-conception as a professionally-conducted war was proved a sham. No one ever called it The Good War--such sophistry required a professional class of journalist. Its effects were instead uncanny and went unreported except by artists. This game captures all of this in a way I find it difficult to describe. One never feels agency in the game. No matter the result, its mechanics seem fated rather than willed. In most "God" games, the God in question is the player, a perfect indifferent bureaucrat. In contrast, to this atheist, it seems that God (or at least the game designer) stands to the side of Toy Soldiers, subtly directing fatalities in the guise of the player's flimsy free will. And this is somehow the fun of it. There is a Romantic pleasure in taking up a biplane, knowing you'll never come down again, or to take the reins of a mortar unit you know you'll have to replace again before the battle's over.

In subtle ways, this is a modernist, rather than a postmodernist, take on video-game war. It may even be the first to make that distinction.

Rae Armantrout

2010-04-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize! I offer this as news in case you haven't been reading Ron Silliman's blog, which right now looks a little like a wine and liquor factory outlet, if wine and liquor were Rae Armantrout.

Isn't it strange how the Language Poets split into really good and really dumb factions, and all the good ones were women? Is this some concrete legacy of feminism? The demand that the abstractions of law answer to the body?

I won't say. The last time I was around a big group of poets and mentioned my recent successful efforts to fund my entry in an MFA program, one of them--someone who's always been friendly to me, who knows I'm a poet-- asked me in a fakey voice whether or not I was going into fiction. A fair question under normal circumstances, but I took it as a slight for my having recently written stabs in the direction of the elderly avant-garde. No mas, I'm done. I don't have the weight to throw around, I'm spent. I mean from here on out to shower love, pity and affection upon my peers, to cradle their weak, babylike heads in their time of need, to touch sugar water to their parched, anemic lips.

My question is, where are Lyn Heijinian's epaulets? The gauntlet comes down here. Her work from the seventies culminating in My Life is the best work done by anyone in that decade, and I'm including John Ashbery.

Anyway, congrats to Armantrout. Though big-time book prizes, like sausages, do not bear close scrutiny, in this case a good author is getting her due. Start with the book for which she earned the award, Versed, and then work your way back. Veil is currently the only survey of her work, though I suspect there is a Collected Poems on the way for this newly notable presence.

This is Rae Armantrout, from The Boston Review:

The Fit

In a fit of repugnance
each moment
rips itself in half,

producing a twin.

*

In a coming-of-age story
each dream
produces me:

an ignorance
on the point of revelation.

*

I'm at a side table

in a saloon
in Alaska,

my eye on the door
where a flood of strangers
pours in.

*

The door or the window?

It's morning.

Malcolm McLaren

2010-04-13T11:25:00.001-07:00

Malcolm McLaren, dead as of last week, is the test case as to why the principles of Situationism are entirely compatible with, and in fact reliant on, the principles of executive privilege as a creative force. No one believed he could credibly espouse both. Yet both systems believe that ideology is the first principle of creative life, rather than the toxic sludge it leaves behind, so where's the contradiction?

Hiring and "excommunicating" exploited creative workers in a floating cloud of superintellectualization about what people find credibly attractive: this is now the basis of our economy. As go The New York Dolls, so goes Raoul Vaneigem. McLaren deserves our respect, I guess, for illustrating this so clearly. Today, only the boss can change our relation to the economy. Only the boss can be a rockstar.

But, above all, good riddance! And long live John Lydon!

Found

2010-04-11T16:23:00.000-07:00

Pragmatism, Torchwood

2010-04-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

Great moment from the fourth episode in the five-part Torchwood: Children of Earth. Spoilers ahead.

During the credits, the immortal but all-too-human character Captain Jack Harkness used to repeat the very X-Files-y mission statement of the Torchwood organization: it goes something like, "we're joining together to fight the future." I'm apprehensive about the future, sure, but I consider myself on the side of those trying to pry it out with the Jaws of Life, not kick its face while it's stuck in the overturned car. Yet! It's refreshing to hear someone express their anti-modernism so plainly. As Cindy Adams says, only in science fiction, kids. At some point, someone thought that was a little too on-the-nose and cut it, but the sentiment remains crucial to the show.

Torchwood futures are to be fought, for sure--they are sticky and drooling and overpowered and weird-- but they're also terribly seductive. In the first few episodes of Torchwood's run it featured an elixir to control the minds of the opposite sex, a game controller that could talk to ghosts and a lovingly murderous robotic ex-girlfriend. In fact, sex comes up a lot. Alien technology is fun in Torchwood's world, even if it may blow up the world, or the galactic center, or what have you. Normally I dislike the just-for-laffs yardstick most reviewers use to judge SF (the best hilarity is performed with a straight face), but Torchwood seemed to do a great job of mixing seriousness and playfulness in a way that reminded me of Buffy.

Then the third season's Children of Earth came along, and things got grim, grim, grim. No more fun with toys.

Fortunately, things aren't Battlestar Galactica grim. No one is yoinking at their hair and doing actorly jazz hands while crying. The scene I'm thinking of in particular features a group of pressed-shirt government middle managers who've been given an ultimatum by a collection of literally multiheaded intergalactic businessmen whose principle export is children, which children are in turn hooked up to giant plungers and sold as a type of drug. The ultimatum is: give us ten per cent of your children or we'll gas the Earth and everyone on it.

The pressed shirts very calmly weigh their options. Do we fight? We're not sure how. So we give them the children. How do we choose them? By lottery, someone suggests. And so they begin the process of organizing the drawing of straws. Someone pipes up, softly at first, then more assertively: she says, not my children. Every mother and father around the table seconds the notion. Of course, there will be provisions made for our families, of that there can be no doubt, says the round-table leader. There's a clearing of throats, and everyone gets back to the drawing of straws. the woman who was quiet at first speaks up again. She says, let's just say it. Given that we're protecting our own children, how can we not protect those children who are most useful to society? Shouldn't we take from that portion of society that will grow up in unemployment and poverty, that'll tax the state disproportionately? There's more clearing of throats, a few weak protests, but the motion is passed.

Nothing I've read in the Critical Theory section of the bookstore has shaken my faith in pragmatism more than this quiet, tense little performance.

Thanks

2010-04-01T09:15:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Joanna Yas and my buddy Bryan Charles for having me read at the KGB Bar last night! It was great to meet Dennis, the owner of the place.

And wow! Ish came bearing all these great books from Canarium Books for me to peruse!

Looking over the Readercon schedule and getting psyched about that, too. Where's Burlington?

Will this be the best summer ever? Will my health hold out?

On Charles Bernstein

2010-03-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

When I left Chicago in 2003 I received, from someone who had only been in town a few months and didn't know me very well, the gift of Charles Bernstein's latest book. I'm not sure if he'd noticed my attitude as he handed over the gift, but he had a muted, defiant gleam in his eye as I first perused it, as if he expected me to take offense at something so patently inoffensive as a new book of avant-garde poetry. "You should really give this guy a shot," my benefactor said. "He's a very important poet." About Charles Bernstein. Whose poetry any fool in the business would have long ago read and formed an opinion about.

I have been attempting to dodge this level of pedantry my entire life. When it catches up with me, often a Charles Bernstein book is involved.

It's not uncommon for fans of Charles Bernstein to think of their hero as an obscure, misunderstood figure, though he is among the most widely published figures in contemporary poetry. His just-published collection, All The Whiskey In Heaven: Selected Poems, shares catalog space on FSG with John Ashbery and Seamus Heaney. Bernstein to this day poses problems other poets don't, and for that reason alone his ubiquity is justified. Yet even in the early nineties, Bernstein was not hard to dig up in the bookstores and libraries of Kalamazoo, MI, and he became something of a hero of mine at a time when the Ellen Bryan Voights and William Maxwells of this world were the only things properly considered poetry. Bernstein's publication L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E represented the still living legacy of mimeograph magazine movement that was so vibrant in the 60's and 70's, just before I was born, and while I understood the poetry Bernstein championed, the rhetoric left me cold (even if that rhetoric stuck it to the really dull poets, and was refreshingly conversant in my heroes Apollinaire, Jarry and Mayakovsy). To my adolescent, confrontational way of thinking, the enemy of my enemy was my friend, and so I jumped at my first chance to see Bernstein speak live with the great Marjorie Perloff (whose book The Futurist Moment introduced me to Blaise Cendrars, a fact for which I am grateful). This was in the mid-nineties, at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. The subject was Poetry and Contemporary Art, my two great interests at the time.

It was an entirely deflating experience. They did not touch on the issue of art and poetry at all. They stated the self-evident fact of Frank O'Hara's genius. They repeated that fact. Bernstein struggled to show an X-Ray of a human chest on an overhead projector and called it "a sonogram of the heart," which was cute. They both said "I entirely agree with you" to each other over a dozen times, which was not cute. (As in: "Of, course, poetry is really just a type of critical theory." "I entirely agree with you." And so on.) At one point I held up my hand and asked a question--I truly cannot remember what it was, something borne of a genuine if mixed-up curiosity about whether a thousand Jon Andersons writing at once could be thought of a "aleatory writing"-- which question, I was made to know by Bernstein, was irrelevant. "Totally irrelevant," seconded some fat, crumb-strewn creep in back of me. (Probably so, yes, but it seemed to me then, as now, that there was a very fine distinction between the stupidity of what I asked and what was being discussed on the stage).

Both Bernstein and Perloff looked grim throughout the event, as if they expected to be challenged. This in spite of the fact that the first six rows of the MCA auditorium were full of students slowly nodding their heads as if they were at a slow-jam rock concert. Afterward, I was overcome by a feeling that has not entirely left me for 15 years, a feeling that someone had entered my house and replaced everything I loved there with a simulacrum. Though I knew very much about them, though they had very nearly saved my life, though I loved them, poets like Mayakovsky, Jarry and Apollinaire were no longer mine: they were simply part of the airless rhetoric of Berstein, Perloff, and anyone else they let through the gate. I doubted I'd even be allowed to nod my head in the front row. To date, I have not been allowed that privilege.

I'll lay it out like this. It is my belief that inasmuch as political ideology touches ordinary life--sport, poetry, movies, family--it is an evil. After all that's been written about the subject of ideology, that sounds very simple, I admit. It risks sounding like everything I dislike about the acorny and poetic. But my sense is of the opposite: I don't deny that capitalist ideology does pervade every aspect of our lives, especially the acorns. Furthermore, it's my understanding that so-called avant-garde art is simply a return to the novelty of the art-making experience itself, and the sick concept of a "normalizing" art is the attempt by ideologues to turn what makes life worthwhile into a profession. In a sense, art and sport are the living utopia ideologues won't let us have under any circumstances, preferring instead that ordinary people like me work so they won't have to. This is not an intellectual matter. I exempt from the category of murder anything that happens to a person who attempts to keep me from my inalienable right to art and sport.

Bernstein is among the first poets of the current generation--the first of a great many--to say that ideology can only be fought with more ideology. It was said before by folks like Max Eastman, of course, but Bernstein is no social realist like that. His poetry fairly squirms with ideology, but only in the sense that all language does, to his mind. He adds fire to fire, subsuming the assumptions of language within--I hesitate to say it--a dialectic. I'm naturally led to believe that Bernstein thinks of his ideology as deriving from the writing of Marx, though I do not believe in any Marxism sheltered by that most delicious and insidious expression of consumer ideology, the contemporary American university. Bernstein belongs to a professionalized interpretation of modernist tradition proud to have expelled the ideologically suspect notion of imagination from poetry--in this, he owes so much more to T.S. Eliot than he acknowledges in his privileging of the "Pound/Williams tradition."* Instead, he favors something he calls play. Here is an excerpt from "Gertrude and Ludwig's Bogus Adventure," taken from the book that best explains what it Bernstein likes most to do, My Way:

As Billy goes higher all of the balloons
Get marooned on the other side of the
Lunar landscape. The module's broke--
It seems like for an eternity, but who's
Counting--and Sally's joined the Moonies
So we don't see much of her anyhow.

This is an example of the "play" Bernstein's talking about. But there are many places in this world where play moves with more suppleness than this. For instance, the word "Lunar" and the adjectival derivation of the Reverend Sun Young Moon's name have no real connection (unless you count the vaguely racist connection one Junior High student would think of to bully another on the basis of his name), and seems to derive in any case from what we'll call the mouthfeel of the word "marooned," as if this essentially prose object were in search of the merest alliteration to make it a poem. What the imagination does for us--place us on the moon, make us name and touch the things there--does not happen here. What happens here derives perhaps from something Derridian, and sets words in motion to relate to one another. In spite of rumors to the contrary, the poem in no way collaborates with its reader. It is not like a comedy routine or a chess match. It maintains the burden of all poetry: it is fixed either to the page or to memory. No matter how much it plays, it requires the lie of imagination to make the play in the diagesis live. What the Marx Brothers did was gambol. What Margaret Dumont did was stand there and purse her lips. Even in inanimate celluloid that collaboration is clear. I take the idea of play seriously enough to question Bernstein for not making the distinction between Groucho Marx, Margaret DuMont, and a corpse, which is what words are, considered as technological objects.

To drive it home further: only imagination redeems our words. Until ideology can back off from its triumphal, centuries-old war against the imagination, I will do everything in my power to ensure that the words it uses arrive DOA, regardless of what side it thinks it's playing on.

But I already know some associates who will disown me for all of this, and, in fact, some of them will be honoring Bernstein at the Zinc bar tomorrow, and I had here intended to break bread with Bernstein (if a person of my stature can be said to properly break bread with a poet of Bernstein's stature). Perhaps my early humiliation has flavored my ability to take Bernstein on his terms. I have been rereading his poetry in this new collection, and while I don't find myself exactly connecting to it, now all the ineffectual rage has dissipated. Bernstein is no longer in my house, replacing my stuff--I can enjoy Apollinaire on my terms again. Furthermore, I understand that he is selfless in the defense of very good poetry, and evidence of that can be found in myriad places. Even my girlfriend says that "all the generosity and warm feeling seems to surround him when he's in the room." Jeepers. More importantly, it's necessary to remember how bad poetry was, back in the eighties and early nineties, when there were nothing but Prairie Schooners and Gettysburg Reviews dotting the vast plain of American Poetry, and slow-moving ruminatives named Ellen Bryan Voight and William Maxwell munched contentedly on the brownish, high-fiber vegetation there.

Charles Bernstein, to me, is still essential reading. In order to understand what has happened to poetry in the last ten years, why the prosey dullards have receded and been replaced by a lot of scarcely more poetic "strategies"--the bulk of humorless and equally ideological word-mush that gently asserts itself these days as experimental poetry--one must read Charles Bernstein, for his sharpness, and because he opened the field for exception.

*I won't here elaborate the technocratic animosity some modernists feel for romantics. Here's the boilerplate.

Video time!

2010-03-21T08:01:00.000-07:00

1) I remember a day, back in the twilight months of the 1980's, when I was serving detention in the Portage Central High library. Out of boredom I was thumbing through two big picture books. One was a Rolling Stone survey of the run of the magazine, and the other was a history of Europe. I found two pictures that day. One was a grainy, 75-year-old image of a man in a stiff paper suit, his hands outfitted in lobster claws and held in front of his torso like salad tongs. The other was of a black man in a ballerina outfit and a cape, screaming into a microphone. These are the sort of things kids in detention discover early, and it sets them on the course their lives will take from then on.

Is Lady Gaga providing the same service for teenage girls? It depends on what you mean by detention. At the very least, she's introducing girls to the joys of subtle science fiction references.

2) My friend Jason Wade was featured doing what he does best on The Chicagoist last week. If you need really excellent furniture, look him up.

Food, Inc.

2010-03-20T10:44:00.001-07:00

Finally saw Food, Inc. last night. The tour on which it takes you is riveting, though I'm more affected by the rounded shoulders of the economically-smothered chicken farmers as they clear their factories of the bodies of diseased chickens than by the fate of the chickens themselves.* Especially rotten is the portion doled out to the immigrant workforce, who are lured to America by BPI and then forcibly arrested and shipped back when their surplus labor starts to look a little too much like rabble.

Just to reiterate, in case you saw it last summer and forgot about it: the calculations it presents, like most calculations these days, are just short of apocalyptic. One in two minorities will develop early onset diabetes from eating genetically modified corn-starch derivatives. Agricultural subsidies are not just unequally and poorly distributed, but in fact disastrous for our NAFTA "partners" and indistinguishable from a declaration of war against the Americas. The risk of mass death from serious foodborne illness is not just potential but practically inevitable. So, what, says Food, Inc., is the solution? Declare Tyson, BPI, Purdue, Monsanto and all the rest of them radical terrorist states operating on American Soil and then declare war on them, like real American Teddy Roosevelt would have done?

Nope. Food, Inc. tells us instead to write Congress and politely ask them to tell the USDA to do the job they've failed to do since (at least) the Clinton administration. Then it tells us to buy our groceries at the Farmer's Market. It was nice feeling the aesthetic effect of outrage while it lasted.

*Having been around a few chickens I can say that if chickens weren't pin-headed automatons they'd be purely evil. They're like land-fish.

New URL

2010-03-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

There may be some bumps in the road as I redisign the whole No Slander package, but I believe you will continue to find The Supercollider at this new address:
http://supercollider.noslander.com/

The Germ

2010-03-13T08:38:00.000-08:00

If you're ever in Philadelphia, check out The Germ bookstore. It must be one of the last Science Fiction bookstores left in the country. I think this has something to do with the city itself. It's an eccentric, angry city. It has a strong conservative contingent and a deep catalog of history that undermines that conservatism. It's that irreconcilability, I suspect, which is a fertile ground for Science Fiction. Though "fiction" doesn't quite cover it: Philly SF is outrageously, pleasantly aspirational, too, when viewed through the lens of The Germ. The Science Fiction section is largest section of the bookstore, with great Sheckley, Moorcock and Zelazny finds, but it blends seamlessly with a handful of other sections, including UFO Abduction, Paranormal Research, Zero-Point and Anti-Gravitational Energy Studies, and Training in ESP. In the front there is a petition to the Serbian Orthodox Church requesting sainthood for Nicola Tesla, and in the back there is a gallery devoted to Tesla-related artwork. On purchasing a hardcover edition of Dangerous Visions and a selection of Leigh Brackett stories I received ("50 cents or free with every purchase") the gift of a Nicola Tesla pin. The Nicola Tesla Inventors Club meets there. Tesla acolytes are tough, perpetually unfashionable, prickly and fairly democratic sort of utopian. After the last general interest bookshop (whoever came up with that fanciful notion?) has shuttered its doors, The Germ, or something like The Germ, will continue to sell what it sells and bear host to what it hosts. Salut.

Another Castle

2010-03-10T09:40:00.000-08:00

"To me, Super Mario Brothers is less like The Waste Land and more like a tennis ball."

Very interesting conversation with Adam Parrish on Another Castle about gaming and language. Bruce Andrews and Zork are also mentioned.

Not Flarf

2010-03-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

More like this at inter-meme-I-hope-lasts Godzilla Haiku.

Congratulations!

2010-03-08T09:47:00.000-08:00

Hey, that was great. A dose of gender parity was dished out. It was--honestly--really satisfying to see Jim Cameron's smug, techojock grin wiped from his face, and to see Katherine Bigelow fumble happily through her two acceptance speeches. The better movie won.

So, just maybe Rex Reed, Anthony Lane, Grandma, Uncle Sam and Che Guevera can finally relax and actually talk about these movies as if they were fictional things? Now that the movie whose budget could have gone to feed an African refugee camp won out over the movie that could have gone to feed a small African country? Because the movie which was explicitly a set of anti-militaristic cliches--and which was not, in fact, so anti-war after all--had as its chief advantage the fact that no one could ever, ever mistake it for reality. Which makes Avatar--and a lot of other science fiction-- less a fashion accessory for the epistemologically challenged and more like something you can actually talk about at the end of the day.

Not that I'm saying The Hurt Locker didn't have good special effects. I'm just saying, it'll be a great day when a woman can win an Oscar for a real, grown-up movie like this:

The Final Final Cut

2010-03-07T07:21:00.000-08:00

The Windup Girl

2010-02-25T14:20:00.000-08:00

Over at i09 they've begun their book club on Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.

The book meets a categorical need in science fiction for novelty, which I appreciate particularly after the last decade of relatively trouble-free and bodiless singularities, (not to mention the still-popular warhorse starship captains living out their midlife crises among weird galactic fauna). The Windup Girl, by contrast, is willfully Earthbound, set as it is in a grimy, superflorid Thailand, which is itself an uncommon enough setting in science fiction to fulfill the fickle standards of novelty. Most interestingly, Bacigalupi's novel deals with the special mash-up of political and scientific anxiety represented by current concerns over global warming, peak-oil and AgriGen profligacy, and which is not really represented anywhere else in science fiction. There is no question of a singularity occurring in Bacigalupi's future. There is hardly any electricity. Instead, joules are counted to the last, and are most powerfully produced by genetically modified megodonts and by high powered mechanical "kink-springs."

I'm on the fence regarding his style, and from the look of i09's message boards, I've got company. On one hand, he's a great handler of SF wonkiness. Lines like "mounds of durians fill the alley in reeking piles and water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-finned plaa" practically squiggle with undergrowth. On the other hand, the prose becomes laden with this stuff. One solution to world building in SF is to glide past the particulars elegantly and to leave some things mysteriously unexplained. The other tack is Bacigalupi's: leave no info undumped. One character will say one thing, there will be some exposition about the manufacture of kingsprings, and then a few pages later he will get an answer. This is not Proustian recall, either: the dude's meticulously cataloging the world. Nonetheless he owns this world, and is not only proud to display it, but wants its constituent parts underfoot and overhead. His style betrays a desire to wed life with the information we use to explain it.

Still, what a world to own. To say The Windup Girl is resolutely Earthbound is not to say it doesn't have a beautifully realized unreality. The cheshires and megodonts and genetically modified humans in this world should delight any SF fan in need of something strange to snack on. Aliens abound here, and betray the fact that Bacigalupi's achievement is defiantly unliterary, in a context in which the literary is synonymous with the dull and apparently unfashioned. Which is to say that the political responsibilities charged to any reader of The Windup Girl still remain political and not confused with the author's inventions, even when the book garishly reminds you of them. Apocalypse should be so much fun in every fiction.

Books recieved

2010-02-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

Consider the mail and how often you don't want what comes through it. Now consider that I received a bunch of great new books this week, many of them unexpected. Imagine my delight.

Simone Muench's Orange Crush is already on shelves: it features her fantastic suite of poems dealing with the iconography of the Orange Girl.

Dottie Lasky has a new book, Black Life, coming out from Wave Books. She can be added to my list of pals who have been published in The New Yorker ever since Paul Muldoon took over. Find the poem here.

Also from Wave we've got Geoffrey Nutter, who's Water's Leaves and Other Poems was one of my favorite books of the last decade. I say "decade" instead of, say, "last year or the year before" because it's been awhile. A happy thing that his new book, Christopher Sunset, is coming out in April, too. Here's something to tide you over until you run out a pick it up.

I want my 63 minutes back

2010-02-20T10:31:00.000-08:00

At 75 minutes long, Shutter Island is a great little homage by Martin Scorsese to one of his heroes, Val Lewton.

Huh? What's that? You say it's actually 138 minutes long? And that it's fleshed out by a bunch of corny dream sequences and hallucinations which are then redundantly recounted by the characters after they've been shown? That it features gratuitously explicit flashbacks to the protagonist's liberation of Dachau in the middle of what is essentially a corny, preposterous movie about soap-opera schizophrenia?

I've been waiting for Scorsese to make a picture like this for a long time--it's too bad he had the clout to make it exactly the way he wanted it. It could have used a little more RKO front-office interference.

Deitch Projekte

2010-02-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

The Elcor

2010-02-08T16:16:00.000-08:00

Mass Effect 2 is now one of the best reviewed video games of the current generation, and even if the provenance of some of those reviews can't withstand close scrutiny, the game deserves it.

I've never been fond of the vast accretion of item management tools that have dogged RPGs since they moved from the tabletop onto the screen, even in the case of Bioware RPGs. Finding stuff, jettisoning stuff, acquiring stuff, most of it undifferentiated, except by increments of power and efficacy the gameworld's conflict engine scales to match; this is the sort of zero-sum game electronic entertainment too often mistakes for depth. RPGs are like crack to the meritorious, and the "experience point" is among the most ideologically suspect conventions in video games. XP suggests that money does not quantify our experience enough on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis--the RPG player wants it dribbling around her head, instantly quantified, for every conflict resolved either by word or by hammer. In Mass Effect 2, however, advancements in weapon load-outs and powers make sense and jibe rhythmically with the justifiably praised conversation system Bioware has produced. It's the same wish-fulfilling reward system of absurd responsiveness, of course, but it doesn't keep you constantly counting, selling, counting, as happens in a game like Fallout 3. Mass Effect 2, in short, is an incredibly fun and addictive experience.

Yet video games are quibble machines, and I have one: where are the Elcor?

I met my first Elcor early in Mass Effect 1. He was arbitrating a dispute in The Citadel, which is Mass Effect's galactic United Nations. The Elcor are the type of creature that never get a line in most science fiction movies. They look as if they weigh the better part of a ton and have the rhinocerine skin to match their heft. This one was standing behind a computer console, which was strange, as they appear to be quadrupeds; their front legs, though massive, are long and nearly elegant, but probably not fine enough for a computer keyboard. No matter. He had a voice like Eeyore, lugubrious and sad. He was doing something arbitrative between another member of his species and a small, temperamental Volus.

The best thing about the Elcor, however, is that instead of mouths they have something like a cross between a cabbage and the flume of a violin. In order to express emotion to non-Elcor sentients they very thoughtfully append their emotional state verbally to their conversations-- as in, "Annoyed: I cannot help you right now, human," or, "Pleasantly amazed: Thank you for the gift, human," or "Venomous sarcasm: 'What a piece of work is a man...'"

The particularly economic problem of filmmaking made it so that all film aliens are either bipeds or sacks of cloth and rubber. The Elcor represent something that could only exist in video games--an elegant solution to an overworked animator having one more mouth to sync to a vocal track.

Where did they go in Mass Effect 2? The only Elcor I've been able to talk to so far has been a short exchange on a criminal waystation called Omega. They are entirely in the peripheral in this new iteration of the franchise. I miss their gentle ways.

Urs Fischer

2010-02-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

Finally made it to the Urs Fischer show, due to close this Sunday at the New Museum. I got many interesting impressions from it. Most of them had to do with being in a large, sunlit space full of large, conceptual objects; not a bad impression, but not significantly different from similar impressions. I suppose it's worth paying for. I had a guest pass.

Fischer has an interesting anxiety about organic form. One room features massive, Serra-sized sculptures, yet these sculptures are made from flighty aluminum rather than Serra's earthy leads and steels, and mostly hung from the ceiling rather than mounted on the floor. These are expanded from shapes formed from the modest dimensions of the artist's hands; they are as shapeless and absurd as the negative space of a hand when in pursuit of leisure or the flailing grip of small-hours indigestion. They are comforting in the way that King Kong's hand is a comfort to Fay Wray.

On another floor, you step off the elevator and are greeted by a 3-and-a-half foot long lighter with a picture of an underdressed lady on it. Further down, a similarly-scaled box of matches, half-opened, lay on its back. Closer inspection reveals that the mount for these blown up reproductions is a mirrored box; the mirror only pokes through behind the lighter's sparkwheel, where the thumb would ordinarily connect, or at the collapsed, rounded edges of the matchbox.

The gallery space is full of a few dozen of these Brobdingnagian objects. Many of them fit the 90 degree angles of the box; a VCR tape of Love Streams, a CD head cleaner, even a stomach-churning Froot-Loop-and-marshmallow dessert cube exploded to the size of a bus. More interesting are those things that do not fit the box; a pear, the artist's shoe, a motorcycle helmet, the seams of which objects become entire mirrored surfaces reaching forward into faceted, three-sided corners. The negative space of the artist's giant hand is once again represented, this time in the reflective surface surrounding a fizzy fluted mimosa. This is fun, but the message as I see it is self-evident: products tend toward a squareness the human form cannot mimic.

Funny, then, that he decides to open one of the exhibition's two reproduced books, an Italian collection of 19th Century nudes, so as to allow that negative space to shimmer through what it would not otherwise. After all, the book is the first reproducible and marketable media produced in the square format. Why the enforced organicism? And why not include a gun in this collection of objects?

Poetry in its places

2010-02-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

Building a context in which to write is dull work, yet it's the only work available to poets now. We've been watching--we poets are the last ones watching-- epistemology and ideology bat one another in a bloodless Punch and Judy show that reveals and inspires nothing equally. Poetry moves fast because it has no one to account to; if we as poets decide to erase history and replace it with radical epistemology we do it, boom, and the generations of poetry flash by with all the undifferentiated movement of a strobelight. If we continue on, no one will notice. If we pull back, no one will notice. Neither capital nor human solidarity nor the beasts of the field. So perhaps what is interesting about poets to the outsider, if it is interesting (and I am becoming more like an outsider to poetry every day) is in the way we flail around. After all, jobs are starting to look a lot more like poetic post-experimentalism every day, the product of libertarian dreaminess and anxiety.

What I'm saying is; poets lack context. It's hard to review.

Now, if geography as a theme could replace the specific context poetry has lost everyone would be doing it. It's been done often enough, though; it's a great context to borrow. Geography has a staid meaning; and, bonus, its boundaries become supple and weird upon inquiry (read Names On the Land from George Stewart to find out how). This is what a lot people think poetry is, or want it to be. Alas, maps do geography better than poetry. What geography lends us instead is a distorted mirror that's fun to look at but unhealthy to depend on.

With this caveat that I introduce, briefly, two new books of poetry. They are both from Ugly Duckling Press; they are Kevin Vallone's g-point almanac: passyunk lost and Rick Snyder's Escape from Combray. Their combination of poetry and geography are both worthwhile: better, I think they are both playfully done.

I nearly passed on Escape From Combray for the same reason that I passed on Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Yet it had a cover that looked a lot like the early, slim edition of The Maximus Poems from The Figures press. Except in this case the map was not of Glouchester (nor, thankfully, of Combray) but Chicago, a place I spent nearly a decade of my life. If this were a novel, I'd say he captures well both the gray, cozy eternity of its winters and the sterilizing creep of its commerce ("Gold Sounds" begins, "Having become/ the type of person/ who will walk/ to the Shell station/ on a Friday night/ to buy a KitKat"). This is a book of poetry -- a very comfortable, very nice book of poetry, refreshing mainly because the stuff around it is so sharp and niggardly-- that does much of the work that a novel or a short story does. This is not a bad thing, especially since few novelists I know this side of Aleksandar Hemon have have captured as Snyder has what it feels like to actually live in Chicago rather than go on bogus adventures there. This is a book of poetry in which the author goes out and does stuff. The reason "I do this, I do that" was so interesting when Frank O'Hara did it was that he lived at a time when middle-class, intelligent Americans could live interesting lives and write interesting poems without getting blown up by airplanes or mortar fire. Rick Snyder seems to know this but tries it out anyway, with all the requisite KitKats--and passive observation-- that approach implies. This is mostly a guy watching his city change, not someone changing his city. Still, a pastoral that begins "Somewhere between the wine and the nightmare/ my ex-girlfriend's cat/ comes to work with me" has a lot of charm, and charm is good for something.

Keven Varrone's book is the third of a tetrology; I haven't read the first two parts, though I've seen his work around. It's of interest to me because I've been spending time in Philly lately (Passyunk is a town outlying Philadelphia) and talking to some Philly poets in preparation for our upcoming event. I do not know Philly well. Having said that, I do not recognize Philly in these poems--streets are just streets and go unnamed, coal is burned here and there, gulls are displaced, "inland." It could be Gary, Indiana or someplace in West Virginia. Varrone definitely drinks from the postexperimental fountain, and so vague things float by on puffs of the author's intelligence and words go unmoored on the page (and, really, no caps? A la e.e. cummings? Why?). Still, there is too much here to like to pass it up. This is less a meditation on place then on time; in the long, continuing sequence, poems are numbered by season and date and have the literalness of a day captured half at work and half at rest, as most days are. "among the laterals, amazing upward structures" begins one of the poems for some unannuated January 11th. It is not only literally describing a spreadsheet, but has a similar cadence. A week later, "the birds made a dappled panic on the bocce court." Which strikes me a much livelier and in debt to Hopkins, which one never sees.

Buy these books and see for yourself.

It's official

2010-01-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

"Dungeons & Dragons could 'foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,' prison officials said in court."

Dungeons & Dragons Prison Ban Upheld NYTimes.com

Hey, neat!

2010-01-24T16:34:00.001-08:00

Soldiering through

2010-01-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

I've given myself a deadline of Tuesday to finish a story.

This deadline business never goes well for me. The story keeps unraveling and I find myself rapidly stuffing the cotton back into the seams and stapling the seams shut. Why can't I just sit down and write a neat, clean ten-pager? It seems like a lack of good judgment, ultimately.

Punch Kick Pause Punch

2010-01-17T16:50:00.000-08:00

To play this game in front of any human being over the age of 12-- indeed, just to play it in front of yourself-- is to develop a sense that something has gone horribly wrong with your recreation. This choice of leisure bespeaks some profound defect in your makeup. That niggling thought that shadows much of our play...is amplified to the point of palpable shame by Bayonetta's relentless barrage of steaming tawdry nonsense.

So begins Iroquois Pliskin's recent post about Bayonetta, which ends:

You cannot pass up this game for its visual and thematic inanity. The libretto for your average operatic masterpiece is some genuinely nonsense, and this does nothing to obscure the beauty of the music that is its rationale. As Frank Lantz astutely noted, games are more music than cinema. Let the music take your mind.

Unbridled admiration combined with mouth-watering disgust of just this sort seems to pretty much sum up what people have been writing about this game. As for me, I am truly enjoying the smooth, unapologetic, and nearly-mechanical videogaminess of this title. Its self-awarness is of itself as a Video Game, and not as a Video Game attempting to be something else.

Canada Dry

2010-01-13T15:56:00.000-08:00

1
It's the layering of gimmicks--rhyme schemes and repetition and metric jingles--that lend poetry its natural opacity. In fact, the whole history of free verse has been an attempt to replicate that opacity without the appearance of gimmicks at all. The Oulipo had a word for a text wherein the constraint is to produce a text which reads as if written under a restriction, without any restriction being imposed at all--"Canada Dry" (derived from a series of advertisements in the 60's that promoted ginger ale as a "kicky" alternative to real alcohol). In other words, the supposed difficulty of poetry is not a poem-to-poem problem, but a universal one. Assuming that, it's also not worth arguing. It's fortunate for the crossword puzzle industry that what they produced was never mistaken for soulcraft--they are neither expected to fill in the puzzles nor make them unsolvable.

There are poets who, in an effort to bypass the difficulty of poetry, write little synopses of the novels they would have written if they weren't so lazy. They aren't difficult, it's true, but they're also boring, too boring even to understand things like games and puzzles, boring even in translation, and are not worth talking about. It's the people engaged in the 30-year cult of difficulty (70 years, if you count The New Criticism) you have to try to talk down from this stuff. They're the ones getting too old to continue the pretense, who created our very difficult world in a situation of unparalleled ease, who are still squatting on a big chunk of poetic real estate, and we younger writers should know better than to allow them to fuck with our dignity, and especially with our fun. No other generation has folded so readily before their elders as we have before ours. They will die soon, and what will we have? Nothing of our own. Not an art, nor a legitimate politics: nothing. Just this meaningless word called difficulty.

2
After hosting a reading of self-identified "literary" science fiction writers this Thursday--a very talented group, and one of the more exciting and fun readings we've had--I was chatting with one of the founders of The Interstitial Arts Foundation. She was singing the praises of an annual science fiction convention outside of Boston called Readercon. She hit upon all the things that make it exciting to me: "it's science fiction writing, but it's the rare convention without the distractions. It's by and for writers." At first, I was excited by the focus of it. But something deeper hit me about it. I'm tired of the "focus" of poets. Because it's all focus, all the time. What luxury, I was thinking, to be in actual danger of being distracted by one's peers. I dream of being so distracted by another poet, instead of watching him or her pretend, in drudgery and recitation, to have honed their specific ideology of language to a killing point.

As we discussed the merits of Readercon, I was thinking the analog to poetry would be if we were in a situation in which there were regularly these fantastic Rhythm and Rhyme conferences featuring birdwatchers, video game developers, graphic designers, musicians and hopscotch athletes --conventions available from month to month in states all over the country, held together by the specifically unserious love of its participants-- and that at least one of them had the rare benefit of featuring only poets. This does not exist of course, because poetry shares with factories and offices and government bureaus everywhere an obsession with perfecting singular processes and the neat-freak abhorrence of the non-ideological.

Where else can you find such clarifying unprofessionalism as in science fiction?

Moon!

2010-01-10T16:30:00.000-08:00

I don't know if it'd make much sense to make an annual list of top science fiction movies. Frankly, not enough of them get made to compete, but this year was different.

If you missed Moon you owe it to yourself to rent it when it comes out on DVD next week. It's not that the story's so great--the twist at the end is the story, and while it's fun it's also sort of cheap. The really great thing about it is twofold. First, you've got Sam Rockwell pretty much holding down the fort solo, and to his credit, he's fascinating to watch throughout. That's he's really the only actor in the movie illustrates the point that what's merely intellectual in a high-concept Louis Malle movie becomes actual, philosophical dreamwork in a spacesuit (that is to say, when the director has already asked you to suspend your disbelief at the door). Secondly, it's obvious that Duncan Jones likes the moon. I'll bet money that he liked the moon since he was a kid. I bet he's spent time daydreaming of the peculiar motion of men in fluffy spacesuits moving and bouncing around against the moon's desert, and that clear, clean shine the horizonline makes when unobstructed by atmospheric blur. I'm thinking he did not so much intend to make a movie but to do something with the moon. A movie was just the way to do it, the way Willis O'Brien made a beautiful animated monkey climbing the Empire State Building and asked himself: what can I do with this?

Runners up: District 9, of course, and I hate to say it but I sort of liked Avatar. Of course, I loved last year's Star Trek, but it does not bear repeated home viewings, as I discovered recently. How does Kirk not get arrested for bald Machiavellian intrigue, anyway?

Speaking of Adam Roberts...

2010-01-03T09:02:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Adam Roberts, he has an interesting recent post on Science Fiction and Poetics:

Hazard Adams, The Offense of Poetry [Punkadiddle]

THE "BEAST" SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR

2009-12-28T02:23:00.000-08:00

THE "BEAST" SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR

Okay, a few caveats. There's no way I'm going to be reading everything released in 2009. That should be pretty much obvious in the poetry category, too, except that with poetry you don't have to wait around a year for the paperback to come out. Hardcover science fiction in anathema to me, so I haven't read the big hitters like Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which I've heard is great. That said, here's my myopic look at the year just past.

YELLOW BLUE TIBIA
Adam Roberts
Orbit Books

Probably the best novel released last year, Adam Robert's book is less about a vast conspiracy unthawing in perstroika-era Soviet Russia involving aliens, Cherynobl, Stalin, Scientology and the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion, and more a manifesto of why one writes science fiction in the first place, as well as a well-hidden excoriation of those that do so thoughtlessly. "A realist writer may break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying...How can this not produce callouses on those tenderer portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?" (He also took the Hugo Awards down a peg this year with a great essay on his blog, Punkadiddle.)

THE SECRET HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION
ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kressel
Tachyon

I was wary at first, looking at the contributors. Don DeLillo and T.C. Boyle and Margaret Atwood and so on. The introductory essay, which echoes and references Jonathan Lethem's 10-year-old essay from the Village Voice, asking what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon had won the Nebula for Gravity's Rainbow back in 1974, is equally obnoxious. A word to the wise, SF writers, comic book artists, graffiti artists, video game developers, et al.--"hi quality" is a racket real artists have been trying to wriggle out from under for 40 years. There is no "hi quality." From our America-has-won, 21st Century position, it may never have existed. Philip Roth is a "great artist" only in the sense that Micheal Jackson was a "great artist." That is, it wouldn't matter either way. However, in spite of the editor's worst intentions, this collection is redeemed by its actual, present, right-there vitality. The work inside is not good literature. It's good science fiction, which at least has the potential to be worthwhile.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF J.G. BALLARD
FSG

Of course.

ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE
Electic Velocipede finally hot a Hugo nod this year. They deserve it. If you're interested in seeing which kids are publishing Karen Joy Fowler these days (just kidding! They publish a lot of stuff, honestly) this is the magazine to go to. Well-rooted and risk-taking at the same time.

GARBAGE TREND OF THE YEAR
If you want a weird-science/Jane Austen pastiche, read Susanah Clarke's terrific Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell from a few years back, or else read the Oulipo Compendiuum for fun, genre-trashing experiments in language. Whatever you do, skip this whole gutless "I'm going to read something trashy but really I'm not" white-girl phenomenon of splicing Jane Austen novels with Zombie-related nouns. It's strictly Shirley Temple.

BEST POETRY OF THE YEAR

2009-12-09T08:57:00.000-08:00

BEST POETRY OF THE YEAR
In no particular order

Ish Klein, Union!
Canarium Books
Ish Klein's first book of poems caught me totally unprepared when I first heard them last February at AWP. If listening to most poetry is like listening to a radio tuned between the classical and NPR stations, Ish Klein represents a station all the way down the dial, playing Amon Düül and The Beach Boys. I don't think that accurately represents her freewheeling, rhapsodic and honest approach, but that's how I felt. She's a refreshing presence in poetry. Likewise, Canarium is a great publisher--they have really terrific work on the slate for next year, too.

Noelle Kocot, Sunny Wednesday
Wave Books
Noelle Kocot's "Poem for the End of Time," touched on the political disaster of the 00's and the personal disaster of losing a loved one: not only is it great, it's probably the poem--the collection of poems--most likely to last beyond this sorry decade. Sunny Wednesday finds her on the other side of that maelstrom, willing to put her heroic, playfulness to post-traumatic use. It's often funny. "Persephone would lie awake nights," she writes,"Beating off, thinking about Olive."

Matvei Yankelovich, Boris By The Sea
Octopus Books
There has been a lot of great translation within the last year: Cavafy, Char, Rilke, Vallejo, among others. I try not to review or comment on translation--I possess a little French and nothing else. Also, I don't trust it. Translation--or rather, the small industry of translation-- sponsors the notion that poetry is something else: an intellectual job, something inherently decent, to be spread like television PSA's, something one works at rather than experiences, something one can safely say has been predigested in advance. It runs counter to my way or reading poetry. Okay, I'm probably wrong. We might agree on one thing, however: this has been a great year for Matvei Yankelevich, a great editor of works in translation and a great translator himself, notably of Daniel Kharms. Boris By The Sea fuses his interest in his translated subjects in a way that puts him in the shoes of the more personal and intrusive, and therefore more interesting, translators like Pound. His witty, absurd prose is unlike anything else this side of Kharms himself.

Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, eds., Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three, The U of C Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry
University of California Press
Finally, a book that actually delivers on the categorical irresponsibility only hinted at by the revealing yet squishy inclusiveness of the first two volumes. I suspect there are very few scholars of 19th Century literature who wouldn't find this anthology grasping and bizarre: what fun! What a disappointment that it was largely ignored on its release earlier this year. Volume Three plays Twister in its attempt to isolate only those works which support its thesis-- namely that the avant-garde as codified in the mid-1970's actually started sometime in the mid-1770's! The odd thing is, it all starts to make sense--for instance, finally someone has managed to get Goethe, Christopher Smart and Walt Whitman all together in a single, focused anthology. One of the more fascinating reads this year.

WORST POETRY DEVELOPMENT OF THE YEAR
It's got to be this whole deal about the Dickman brothers. An article appears in the New Yorker praising these kids for their magical telepathic twin powers and suddenly they're our generation's great white hope. Is there no one else who finds these poems linked only by a flabby, self-satisfied malaise?

Tonight! Amiri Baraka!

2009-12-03T12:16:00.000-08:00

Wow! Tonight the store is hosting Amiri Baraka!
Hipsters, take notice!

Bang Bang Discuss

2009-11-29T16:26:00.000-08:00

At some point in the last two years or so, perhaps since the annus mirabilus of 2007's third quarter, video games, as a general phenomenon, surpassed poetry in capturing my interest--this puts them just behind music and neck-and-neck with science fiction in the hierarchy of my personal and savagely irresponsible cosmos of forms. My conflicts with them are numerous: they're bad for the environment, they raise the heart-rate without offering any real exercise, they conflate violence and form, the critical culture surrounding games attributes an illusory agency to the user, using the rhetoric of "interactivity," that's just not there. But at least they create conflict, and games criticism is the last place you can actually find people talking about how a particular art form works, rather than what it's supposed to do, or where the author eats lunch or gets indigestion or teaches or how she feels about things contra other artists. The greatest thing about video games is that so few people confuse them with art. Most of it lacks the barbaric seriousness of the last century. Video games, unlike most things written or vocalised today, actually have a chance at becoming poetry. I've gone from using games as a reward system for writing to becoming very engaged by the culture surrounding them.

An interesting and relatively new site is doing a good job of rounding up the state of VG commentary. It's called Critical Distance. Take a look.

Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

2009-11-10T10:14:00.000-08:00

Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

Ronald Johnson

2009-11-04T09:47:00.000-08:00

I've been AWOL, I know: but then, is blog-neglect really such a crime?
I've been working on a short review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians. To come.
Yet I was gratefully distracted by rereading Ronald Johnson's posthumous The Shrubberies:

burnish bones
by maggot

no Lenore,
nor Minotaur

only light, to
say the least

immure by theft
beast loft

& suckle star
are & are & are

--

Other distractions include Niall Ferguson's informative if growth-happy The Ascent of Money. Also, if I'm being honest, I'm distracted by this. For which I make no apology.

Sunnydale High circa 1997: Mac or PC?

2009-10-20T09:09:00.000-07:00

All of your questions answered here:
http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2008/02/buffy_internet_guide.php

Report from Albany

2009-10-11T21:16:00.000-07:00

They call this The Egg. It stands in the center of a pedestrian mall, half moon cityscape, half Tativille.

Colie Collen, gracious host, and Jessica Fjeld, featured at the Yes! Reading the night of my arrival.

The talented Jono Tosch.

With the great Paul Park at Albacon. A high point.

I would not say this man was harassing people with his dragon puppet at Albacon. I would say he was the only person in costume at an otherwise fairly grey event and was, by necessity, overcompensating for his fellow Albanians's lack of enthusiasm with an application of felt.

Natalie Knight and Anne Eyre, my hosts: they lived with a beautiful sightless dog named Vinnie I regret not capturing in a picture.

With Adam Golaski and Josh Potter, at the reading. We read in front of a highly original painting featuring a lurid warrior with a slashed nose. Before, him the One Ring was presented by Lady Gaga, represented as a pixie.

Albacon!

2009-10-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

I'm going to Albacon this weekend. I'm pretty excited. It's my first science fiction convention. I'll bring my camera.

The line for wedgies begins to the right.

And please pass the following along to any Albanians you know...

The Yes, Reading! Presents
A Sci-Fi Mini Marathon!

Date: Saturday, October 10, 2009
Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Location: UAG Gallery
Street: 247 Lark Street

Josh Potter writes music criticism for Metroland, Relix Magazine, and State of Mind Music, while amassing ideas in a notebook, which he tells himself will one day magically turn into short stories and novels. The few that have done so are available in Pindeldyboz, Thieves Jargon, Elimae, the Taj Mahal Review, and the American Drivel Review. He recently learned, however, that his most enduring literary legacy is for a poem he wrote on the wall of a composting toilet that mocks the poet Mary Oliver.

G. Carl Purcell is a science fiction writer from from Kalamazoo, MI. His writing has appeared in Open City, The 2nd Hand, and on his website, The Supercollider (http://www.noslander.com/supercollider.html). He is a founding member of SF writer’s collective The SIMPLGOS Six. As Greg Purcell, he publishes poetry and curates a reading series out of St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York.

Adam Golaski is the editor of New Genre, a journal dedicated to publishing literary and experimental horror and science fiction. He is the author of Worse Than Myself, a collection of strange stories, and of the upcoming–from Rose Metal Press–Color Plates. He’s co-editor at the poetry press Flim Forum. Adam’s poetry, fiction, and non-fiction will or has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Torpedo, The Lifted Brow, Moonlit, word/for word, McSweeney’s, Strange Tales II & III (from Tartarus Press), Zombies: Encounters with the Hungry Dead, Cinnabar’s Gnosis, and LVNG.

Re: Escapism

2009-10-06T08:16:00.000-07:00

Kind of a het-up article over at i09 hits on interesting points but fails to point out the obvious: people escape in communities. The opiate of the masses is actually that cult of the selfish, doomed individual creator--the one we may someday but probably won't become--who is able to escape the bounds of community and indulge himself in great thoughts and statutory rape.

Escapism Is The Highest Form Of Art

LeGuin, Hard SF, The 1960's, Literature

2009-10-05T10:52:00.000-07:00

Having recently finished LeGuin's The Dispossesed, alongside her story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," I'm left thinking about the legacy of the 1960's in science fiction. Like much that went on in the sixties, contemporary practice has only fitfully digested it.

The feeling creeps up on me that what I'm reading in LeGuin is literary parable, especially in the story. I don't put that in opposition to science fiction, except to say that it rarely comes up in SF anymore.

Political systems are not often debated these days: they are condemned. Even when debate is tolerated, the open conclusion of the parable is not.

The libertarian twist that runs through SF these days is an offshoot of the triumph of Hard SF attitudes. It is a certain way of confusing the politics of pragmatism with the utilitarian emphasis of the hacker/gearhead. It's interesting to note that in some reprints LeGuin's leading subtitle for the piece was "Variations on a Theme from William James."

With all due respect to LeGuin, I don't think I like parable, either. I'm not even sure on my best days I like literature, or fine intelligences, either. Perhaps I'll take one or the other but not both at the same time. Looking at a recent e-mail exchange with a member of our group, I find this:

Part of the beauty of SF is that it has sometimes been a refuge from the concerns of serious literature. The idea of colonizing SF with mainstream aesthetic concerns (and at this point, Borges, Calvino, Ballard all belong to the mainstream) is something that has been hashed out for a couple decades, now. One of the answers was Gibson: there's a reason why he didn't write like Borges or Calvino, though he was read in them. The previous generation had already done that. His answer was to go deeper into science fiction, to embrace new geekery and to go to darker corners of techspeak and SF neologism. This is an attitude I empathize with, though I'm not sure I'd want to follow him there...I sense a fumbling among the SF community for the
next thing, whether it be Steampunk or the New Weird or Mundane SF. They all seem to be in agreement, though: if SF all became sort of Virginia Wolffish, there's no longer be much interest in keeping the shop open. There would no longer be a refuge to pull from. Opening up SF to Fine Literature is like opening up the City Zoo to the City. All the strange animals would be dead within a week, and the residents of
the City would no longer be able to go see the zebras.

Ack, but I've got to go to work. More on this later.

Dear Gary Lacinski,

2009-09-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Gary Lacinski,
Advertising Account Executive
Village Voice Media
36 Cooper Square l New York, New York 10003

Thank you very much for your quick turn-around in responding to my
latest press release concerning The St. Mark's Bookshop Reading
Series. The breakdown of your advertising rates was very informative.
Thanks, too, for implying that I could get a drop on the Best of New
York Issue, coming October 21st. If the free reading series I host
around the corner from your offices ever turns a profit, I may very
well think about comparing your rates to a weekly events paper that
anyone in the neighborhood actually reads.

I suppose you're up-to-speed on the news that print media is dying
out, so I applaud your initiative. You're actually attempting to
capitalize on news subjects rather than lazily moping around, waiting
for advertisers to show up. Most of the other weekly papers covering
events in New York--Time Out, The New Yorker, both of which have
rolled over for us time and again--are quite backwards, compared to
you. They report what's happening in New York out of courtesy, in the
misguided notion that people want to read news instead of page after
page of advertisements disguised as news.

In fact, you've inspired me. Perhaps we should work out rates for
our front vestibule, where your paper sits untouched throughout the
week. That real estate is valuable, after all.

Nice MySpace page, by the way. It's gratifying to learn that your
interests run the gamut from "Money" to "Cash$" to "Beautiful
Expensive gorgeous Things!!!!!"

Get out of my neighborhood.

Sincerely,
Greg Purcell
St. Mark's Bookshop

Good News and Bad News

2009-09-25T16:15:00.000-07:00

This is so wonderful it makes me sad to report it's going to wind up in a commercial for Axe in about six months:

Guida and Johnston, 9-24-09

2009-09-25T15:40:00.000-07:00

Just put the first reading of a three-week marathon of readings to bed. Jim Guida and Devin Johnston were fantastic! Guida's a self-styled aphorist, a bright Australian, and, if the reaction of the female-heavy crowd is to be believed, something of a heartbreaker. There was some hooting. His wit encompasses the following:

"There's a ladder of social esteem which we begin as nonentities, and end by actually winning people's indifference."

"Too many novels boil down to either tourism or real estate."

"It's the gift of a certain type of person to detect tactlessness in anything."

"Awkwardness is collaborative."
--
Johnston is the editor of Flood Editions and a supporter of The Danny's Reading Series when it was in its infancy. So good to see him again, and to hear him read from Creaturely, his new book of essays on the alienness of the natural world:

"Metaphor lies in wait, the world's hidden scaffolding; yet the living bird adapts and evades fixed associations."
--
Next week! It's a reading for The Best of Fence. Got something of a dream team for this one: Alice Bradley, Macgregor Card, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jennifer L. Knox, and Paul Killebrew

First draft done

2009-09-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

Just finished my first complete science fiction story draft in over a year. I feel a bit hollowed out.

The difficulty of writing a first draft of poetry is holding a line through to a meaningful connection among words. It's a sustained pressure; I want to say it's like sprinting, but let's go farther afield. We'll say it's like, if you haven't done strength training in advance, you'll never be ready for the bizarre vocation of shutting overstuffed suitcases. But once the suitcase is stuffed and the clasp locks, and you determine there are no shirtsleeves poking out, then there's nothing more to be done. You either deliver the bag to its rightful owner (God, a friend, a magazine, a woman), store it away to be rifled through later, or chuck it. That's what writing poetry is like. What is becoming, in poetry, very quickly became; taking a rotten line or two out, you see how the whole project unstacks. I hate to say it's easy. More like, it's easier to disown. There's a fun to it.

My limited experience tells me that writing fiction, especially science fiction, one begins with an engineering trick. Which is a euphemism for a lie one has to work very hard on. It's as if one had to build a bridge starting in the middle of a river, and know whether or not it'll cross the river only after it's finished. With prose, there's just so much of it. It's in bulk. There's a fun to this, too, but it's lonelier and more possessive.

What a weird, niggardly, selfish practice.

Paff der Zauberdrachen

2009-09-17T23:28:00.000-07:00

For Mary Travers, of course:

Whodini was a steel drivin' man

2009-09-12T05:44:00.000-07:00

For Joe Wilson

2009-09-10T08:02:00.000-07:00

My swift, inclinatory solution to Rep. Joe Wilson's problems: let the Republican strongholds secede, given that they don't really want to be Americans, anyway (1,2, 3). Give asylum to anyone on that side who can still read and spell their names and who wants such benefits of civilization as flush toilets, paved roads and health care coverage. We get their disproportionately large federal spending back, to spend on communism. Then, we express remorse in a couple of years that their "countries" have devolved into Road Warrior cannibalism.

Weird

2009-09-05T14:38:00.001-07:00

Weird to see yourself on the national news. The segment on the bookstore starts at -7:18...

Employers Continue to Cut Jobs

One More Comparison

2009-09-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

A few more notes I'd like to make re: DS9.

1) When the Battlestar Galactica reboot was around, it was often praised for being an "adult" version of science fiction. Edward James Olmos's contract stipulated that there were to be no "weird" aliens on the show, in order to keep the drama at what he called a human level.

2) I imagine he must have been clicking through cable television and caught a glimpse of Deep Space Nine and shuddered in horror. I'll admit that some of the makeup design on DS9 makes even a hardened geek like myself snort in derision.

2a)(Though the truth is, the weirder it got, more pleasure I had in the snorting).

3) Olmos's point was this: "human" drama equals batshit religious ecstasy combined with militarized fear and paranoia. "Alien nerd" drama equals heterogeneity and democratic governance.

4) Rebuttal: at least the dudes with suitcase handles for noses on DS9 never went crying and drooling all over themselves in spastic paroxysms of "human" drama, show after show, like Adama did. That was the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen on television. Nor was "All Along the Watchtower" ever referenced.

5) A single episode of DS9 would have touched on all the themes of Battlestar Galactica and moved on, finding the characters hopelessly backward -- "human" in Olmos's formulation. BG was a stupider show than people give it credit for.

Why The Show You're Watching Makes for Pretty Good Science Fiction, Part 2

2009-08-27T22:59:00.001-07:00

(Con't)

Strike the weird outfits, the world-building sets, the outré cultural habits, references to "Gibsons" and scripted events far removed from our own time, and Mad Men, like DS9, becomes a pretty good drama about working in an office.

Right? I know I'm driving this thing home. I know you're probably thinking, sure, whatever, middle class people like to be "transported" by way eco-vacations to Brazil in the pages of Monocle magazine or into Flo Rida's bedroom through Cribs or among handsome 28-year-old novelists having meaningful spiritual crises in Manhattan through whatever book's on the cover of the NYTBR. So, why not to the 60's, why not to deepest space? Who's counting?

First, we have to distinguish between the promise of what's flatly impossible and what's merely improbable. The impossible requires a lot more information. From a creator's point of view, Science Fiction and Historical Drama share many of the same pitfalls, the dreaded infodump being foremost among them. Both of these shows show an artful dispatching of this background exposition. Roger Sterling's reference in last Sunday's episode to a “Yetta Wallenda-sized misstep," added nothing to the plot. And though it did evoke atmosphere, it was one potentially alienating to right-thinking people. Yet it was, thankfully, done without a lot of narrative hand-wringing, because "Yetta Wallenda" belongs to the sort of people who wear one-button suits and fedoras, and Matthew Weiner wants very badly for these people not to explain themselves but to simply be. They live within their own infodump. In this same way, the creators of Star Trek don't have to provide exposition when referring to potency of Klingon Blood Wine: if you don't know it's potent, you're simply not of that world.

To want things you can't have has become unbearable. I'm thinking this wasn't always so. I imagine that at one time, our attitude towards wanting things we couldn't have defined what it meant to be an adult. To have everything was the purview of a few mentally-ill half-children like Howard Hugues or Lee Iacocca, and the rest of us struck for a fair wage. Now, wanting to have a 64' flat screen television mounted above our bed is the basis of an unrelenting national ideology approaching the ubiquity and toxicity of Korean leader-worship (if you're able to afford both cable television and basic dentistry at once, you may be tempted to view the comparison as hyperbole -- come back to me when and if you ever fall behind that line). Even sexual pleasure has been reduced to the level of a Ponzi scheme. We have all failed to become Flo Rida, but if we put in a few extra Saturdays we may come a bit closer. What you think you need to survive, like science-fiction, is always just up the road, and the underpinning of this requires a communal exposition very like an infodump. Bernard Madoff, made sociopathic with information, required the same sociopathology of his victims. They had to be brought up to speed before getting fleeced -- they had to know that what Madoff was selling had every appearance of being a diversified investment. They had to be made smart first, and one gets, from their testimony, not only anger at financial loss, but the Flowers-From-Algernonian anger of one who has been made to look stupid after having just been made smart. Capitalism has been colonized by super-intelligent aliens such as these, aliens who now may be dying slowly of the common cold.

Given that very few can master the native ideology, it stands to reason that a good many of us would at least defect to another impossible-to-master ideology. Marxism won't do, of course, until whatever Marxists are left can identify as anything other than a bunch of weak totalitarian douchebags arguing amongst themselves about the disbursment of the world they've yet to win. I imagine that the post-scarcity, social-democratic, polyamorous world that DS9 and I am partial to is not to everyone's liking. For them, Mad Men must be a great relief. Mad Men takes place before the aliens have landed (try now to imagine Don Draper turning on the television to Star Trek's first season, just a few years down the road, in 1966, and huffily switching it back off). Ideological differences in Mad Men were real, and not just hypothetical.

The form capitalism took in Mad Men is utterly unlike the form it takes today: what could be more outrageous in contemporary terms than the scene in which Don Draper defeats Duck on the basis of a handshake deal he made with the partners many years back? What, not even a nondisclosure agreement? They may as well shoot phasers at one another. Peggy's heroic pre-feminism is far more interesting than Hillary's compromised post-feminism. Admit it -- Republican blackface aside -- the late fifties and early sixties were a high water mark for those who believe that capitalism is the tide that raises all boats. The only truly utopic moment of capitalism -- the southern and midwestern soul music industry -- rose (and quickly died) during this period. Their liberal-democratic, high-tax-base world, in which small firms could feel like they could make a big difference, in which not knowing the effects of alcohol did not in any way affect the pleasure of partaking of them, was worth working in. Competence -- either in liberal heroism or Republican stoicism -- was not a wasted effort in that world. There is nothing ignoble in the escape to this world. As any neoliberal can tell you, escape from unrelenting ideological systems has a distinguished history.

All that aside, look at the similarities. These characters are their jobs -- people like Betty Draper on Mad Men, or the Bejorans on DS9, languish for having too much time on their hands. It is in work that these characters find their identities. The open lobby of Sterling Cooper and the promenade in DS9 are constructed from some waystation in the art director's mind where present reality cannot enter. The spaces are perfect imaginings where every problem to be solved -- a march in Selma, Alabama, or the signing of a peace accord among old factions of Bejorans -- will be of the utmost importance. I've mentioned Benjamin Sisko's place in a long line of filmic middle-managers before him, and Don Draper stands at the head of that line.

Why The Show You're Watching Makes for Pretty Good Science Fiction, Part 1

2009-08-26T10:12:00.000-07:00

Strike the weird outfits, strike the expensive, "world-building" sets, strike the outré cultural habits, references to exotic paraphernalia like "Bejoran Synth-Ale" and scripted events far removed from our own time, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine becomes a pretty good drama about working in an office. This is mainly because other shows that take place in offices without such accouterments are always never more than just okay. The workplace is the liferaft which keeps us above a great ocean of dramatic circumstances we'd sooner avoid: mortgages, homelessness, methamphetamine. We don't require television programs to break that trust for an hour a week.

But there is an audience, and I suppose you'd have to call it a small but dedicated audience, that wants to see something that refers to daily experience without muddling it with phony mimesis, which transforms the poverty of reality into something rich and meaningful. We need this. One can only feel so good about, say, getting the spring brochure, with some 500 individual images, done, well under deadline, year after year. Nothing changes the fact that last year's competence is this year's redundancy. You may soon be taken off brochures. Competence these days means not being good at any particular job but being good at capitalism itself. Why pretend there's entertainment in it? There is almost something embarrassing about competence. In most cases it means you've taken on the extra burden of making your boss happy not because you were born to do it but because you've internalized it as a means of self-worth. You once wanted to dance in the street, run your toes through clean, soft grass, be famous, be counted along with your friends and lovers as being the freest and most interesting people one could have the privilege of observing. Now, you're competent. Just competent. You're probably competent at something no one needs you for.

Thus, the tradition of competence (a tradition in full swing when Howard Hawks was making movies and FDR was in the white house) has pretty much been erased by near-homeless blockheads jumping through fireballs and developmentally-disabled men -- grown men -- falling over backwards in elephant feces.

When those sets are up, however, and everyone's got their weird outfits on, something changes. Watch Chief O'Brien: he's competent. His major dramatic building block is that he's competent. He's a weird looking guy, but he's beautiful in his reliability. Commander Sisko is a great middle-manager: he knows when to cut the Gordian knot and when to let it go slack. Jadzia Dax is the person you want to talk to if there's "a sub-space plasma disruption" out near the wormhole or some such delectable nonsense. Everyone on DS9 received a job title and archetype when they walked on the station. Everyone there is not just useful, not just competent, but invaluable. Their job just happens to be the grass they brush with their bare feet.

This could be problematic. In this poor world we call real life, isn't the Prime Directive actually to screw the poor? To be competent but not necessarily to vote in one's own favor? To reward one's paltry competence with consumption? More or less, yes. Setting that aside, shouldn't our true Prime Directive be to build a better world, to dip our real feet into the real grass as soon as possible, after having possibly burned down the banks and the courthouses? If the answer is yes, we'll still require a few competent people to tend to the rutebega farm and fire shots above the heads of the Road Warriors, no? The lesson still stands. Competence is good. Competence also gets boring after a while. To be rewarded, competence requires an archetype: it requires a workplace drama of some displacement, something alien. And besides, isn't revolution always in the periphery in DS9? Doesn't Sisko always treat defiance of the utopic Federation order with some level of balanced inquiry? I'll stop there.

This balance is struck throughout Gene Roddenbery's universe. The same with the Whedonverse. Small collections of specialists getting the job done. They draw from very old models going back to L. Sprague deKamp and Cordwainer Smith. Simply put, they are worlds changed enough from our own that our best selves -- or at least, our other selves -- can have an audience.

Since DS9, the best of these has been Mad Men.

Part 2 coming up...

Ugh

2009-08-24T12:33:00.000-07:00

I get a real sadness somehow, watching these two go at it. I take a little satisfaction knowing that L.Ron Hubbard was a bad SF writer, too.

Will it suffice to just call this guy nuts?

Jim Krusoe at St. Marks: 8/20/09

2009-08-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

Jim Krusoe looks like a denizen of the Old, Weird America, a midwesterner in steel-toed workboots, a faded flannel shirt, and with wild eyebrows two shades darker than the rest of his hair and pointing skyward like devil horns. Very friendly but with an inwardness which fell, unlike most people's inwardness, to the outside.

His latest novel is called Erased. He traveled from Los Angeles to read from it (a born Clevelander, he moved west while still in his teens). I had just finished the book and was still walking around in his world when I met him. His world, incidentally, is Cleveland: a very strange Cleveland that bears some resemblance to the afterlife, if the afterlife had been designed by the Big Boy franchise of restaurants . "I set out to take my revenge on the place," said Jim to me before the reading. "But I found myself writing something different, something sort of affectionate."

The reading was among our best, and featured Zachary Schomburg, whose new work bears an extraordinary love for jaguars, and Gary Lutz, about whose work you could say the same, except that for Gary Lutz words are jaguars. Gordon Lish was there, wearing an interesting hat.

Krusoe read from a section of his novel in which the citizens of this other-Cleveland go to war with the city's rats. It is the most plainly fantastic piece in a novel which otherwise trades in odd coincidences and uncanny nighttime epiphanies. Yet as he went along I could see why he chose it: read by him, in his flat, uninflected manner, one pokes and prods at the vibe of the story, asking whether it's funny or violent or philosophical before realizing, some time later, the plain absurdity of the situation. "When have you humans ever changed your minds about anything?" ask the rats of their human persecutors, just before getting creamed.

I don't tend to follow the contemporary fabulists: Kelly Link's worlds seem open to vast and frightening realms akin to the world of science fiction, but most other writers in that vein are sort of warm milk, an excuse to reify the world we've been given rather than deal with the consequences of making a new one.

I've been following Krusoe since Blood Lake, however, and I'll read anything he does. There is no "magic" in his world. He seems to write about bodies, imperfect, uncomfortable, which stand so rigidly against a loose world that the biological fact of human life becomes a sort of fabulism. "In this book, the character stands in place, and setting unfurls behind him, like a scroll."

He's also funny.

An Oversight

2009-08-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

What? How had I not discovered May Swenson before?

QUESTION

Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

First Line Mash Up 1

2009-08-19T08:20:00.000-07:00

Another thing science fiction and poetry have in common are a peculiar dependent relationship to the effects caused by first lines:

Say you're a kid, and one dark night you're running along the cold sand with this helicopter in your hand, saying very fast witchy-witchy-witchy. Theodore Sturgeon, "The Man Who Lost the Sea."

Imponderable the dinosaur / sinks slow, / the mammoth saurian / ghoul, the eastern / Cape... Hart Crane, "The Bridge (IV, Cape Hattaras)"

"Look, Mother. The clock is running backwards." Phillip Jose Farmer, "Mother."

Is that dance slowing in the mind of man / That made him think the universe could hum? "Theodore Roethke, Four for Sir John Davies (I)"

Incomprehensible gaiety and dread / Attended what we did. Theodore Roethke, "Four for Sir John Davies (III)"

Athelsan Cuff was, to put it very mildly, astonished that his son should be crying. L. Sprague De Camp, "The Blue Giraffe"

The brown enormous odor he lived by / was too close, with its breathing and thick hair, / for him to judge. Elizabeth Bishop, "The Prodigal"

Listen Zombie. Believe me. James Tiptree, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"

A pebble swells to a boulder at high speed. May Swenson, "Electronic Sound"

Schadenfreude

2009-08-17T11:33:00.001-07:00

A convincing case made by an independent bookseller, predicting the death of new economy Amazon at the hands of the nasty old economy.

Incidentally, the Kindle, besides being a perverse form of tax dodge, is obviously a stopgap on the way to something better.

Alive in Joburg

2009-08-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't seen the Neill Blomkamp short that inspired District 9 (which is terrific! I saw it last night!) here it is. Live in Joburg:

It's getting to the point now where you can judge the merits of a science fiction movie by its budget alone. 150 million or more? Transformers. 30 million or so? District 9, Children of Men, etc.

Matter

2009-08-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to fit in as much science fiction reading as I can before ICWG gets underway: I'm halfway through Iain M. Bank's Matter right now. Reading his prose reminds me of a time I recommended Charles Stross's Accelerando to a poetry colleague. His response was that he enjoyed it, but, he wrote, "I can only handle so many consecutive sentences in the direct assertion form in which someone does something."

Banks is solidly in this mode, and while I don't have a problem with straight ahead prose (event after event, coherently stacked, but still hard to "angle"--that's part of why I love science fiction), Bank's early SF, especially Consider Phlebas, wore me out with its grinding plot machinations. This style may be a natural, or rather default, aspect of writing about anything as large as Bank's ongoing Culture, which, after all, is a vast utopic civilization spanning an entire galaxy and several millennia, in which lots of things happen. Much simpler to bend the limits of prose when writing about something more specific: one June day in Dublin, 1904, for instance. And that was only done interestingly once. So Banks has his work cut out for him: you could say the same of anyone with a utopic vision, however vast and strange.

Still, in his latest novels, Banks seems to have figured out how to explain the Culture without wearing the reader down. He's thankfully taken his cipher-like shapeshifters and really weird aliens out of the narrative driver's seat. A sympathy with heterogeneity should not be confused with the desire to see ourselves (or our avatars) totally obliterated by weirdness. Bank's sympathies flit around from chapter to chapter, as expected, but gravitate toward characters constrained by limited worldviews and Earthling desires. Which serves to make the tiered, billion-year-old Shellworld they reside in -- described in the book as "a concentric succession of spherical shells, supported by over a million massive, gently tapering towers never less than fourteen hundred meters in diameter, layered out to the final surface" -- all the more frightening:

...long after a given Shellworld had been apparently de-weaponized and made safe, hidden defense systems could wake up centuries, millenia, and decieons later resulting in gigadeaths, teradeaths, effective civicides and near extinctions as interior stars fell, levels were flooded from above or drained -- often with the result that oceans met interior stars, resulting in clouds of plasma and superheated steam.

The characters who reside in this Shellworld are aware of the danger they face -- a danger, like ours, as remote as "centuries, millenia, and decieons" -- and are aware, too, of the vast bureaucracy that forms the galactic Culture, yet live their lives according to their custom anyway.

But! I have to set it down in order to start Jim Krusoe's latest, Erased, in time for Thursday's reading.

2009-08-14T19:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, I suppose I'm finished with The Entertainment Industry for now. My new blog is called The Supercollider (http://www.noslander.com/supercollider.html). Check it out, won't you?

Stuffed Crocodiles

2009-08-14T16:24:00.000-07:00

SF and poetry share a certain garishness. That's one thing they have in common. At least, that's true of the stuff I like. Ordinary literature -- by this I mean anything that bears a close resemblance to the stuff written by Joseph O'Neill -- has as its goal a world we can depend on. It's a flawed world, displaying every knotty compromise the author has had to make with it. The chief encomium for these worlds is that they go unadorned. I'm not knocking it. But no art goes unadorned. Some of it just goes out in old khakis.

SF and poetry are defined by their adornments. So much so that a lot of modernism --which in the end, in its English-language form, is a defense of realism -- has erupted over the last century in an embarrassed attempt to disguise the fact. But the physical presence of adornment remains: both genres have in their past, and on public record, depictions of winged men. It suffers perfectionists: the type of unrealist who wears formal gowns, or cravats, or "furry" outfits, or cosplay.

And the fear in all this adornment is that something uncanny will be produced, that something that shouldn't talk will be made not only to talk but also to recite:

And, you know, if enough of these uncanny presences take voice, the world may disintegrate into a thousand factions. Or just plain look silly.

Here goes...

2009-08-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

In September, I'm joining a group with four friends, called The Invisible City Writer's Group, devoted to reading and writing poetry and science fiction. It'll go through December. There's no agreed-upon ideology girding this combination of seemingly disparate genres, though I have my own ideas. The first being, obviously, that these genres are not so disparate.

This will be a public journal of what I'm reading, watching and writing over the next few months.

Night and the City

2009-03-31T09:49:00.000-07:00

Richard Widmark as the ghost of capitalism:

1) Watches his prize wrestler die in the arms of another, demonstrably inferior wrestler. In fact, the whole movie hinges on the notion that Widmark doesn't make distinctions of quality, only of advantage.

2) Widmark is the locus of female desire in this flick, in spite of, or better, because of, his anemic face and pleading eyes. The commercial sculptor downstairs with the gingerbread house full of cash doesn't stand a chance. He makes things, he owns them, but the point is to want.

It Begins

2008-11-08T09:32:00.000-08:00

It begins, our new found status in Europe -- not the one in which we're boorish and obscene and violent, but the one in which America is unfathomably progressive. With how many European leaders will Obama have to sit and smile diplomatically, patiently, as they step all over themselves explaining away some gaffe or other, or perhaps why there's no Algerian President of France. I feel some satisfaction from this.

The Patient Wakes

2008-11-05T07:47:00.000-08:00

Got out of work at midnight and walked the few miles down Broadway from the E. Village to Times Square. New Yorkers were actively seeking Whitmanic, eye-to-eye contact with me as walked down the street, and whooping when they made it. In Union Square, thousands of people were hopping in unison around a pickle-barrel drummer in a vast human vortex. I saw an African-American man in a humiliating, canary-yellow Pax deli chain uniform openly weeping behind his counter. In Times Square, thousands were out, weirdly capturing the moment on their blinking mobile devices, like hands mimicking the movement of wildflower spores in a heavy wind.

I feel as if the patient has swung her legs over the side of the hospital gurney after an eight-year illness full of sputum, bile and senile midnight chattering, and is tentatively working her feet onto the cold linoleum floor.

Three Items

2008-10-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

1) The closest thing we have in America to real satanism is hard-core christianity. Now, being that satanism is simply a type of hard-core christianity, this may be so self-evident as to be not worth mentioning.

But of course, I'm thinking specifically of Sarah Palin. Anyone in her position, who was not an absolute hedon, and who was capable of the remotest self-assessment, would have flat turned down her recent "opportunity." Alistair Crowley and Jimmy Page wrapped together had nothing so obscene to show the world as Sarah Palin's ophidian mind.

2) My own hedonism extends to having recently gathered together all my stray electronics, sold them, and received in turn an brand new XBox 360 with a wireless controller and a 60 gigabyte hard drive. Look, I'm not running for Vice President, here. Plus, it barely cost me anything. Besides (suddenly I feel defensive) I consider the novel and all its attendant self-justifications a far sight more decadent than any video game. It's as if someone spent all the time they could have in gainful employment doodling around with the singular, lonesome pleasures of typeset printing. The novel is dead, people.

That said, I find the games confusing. They're so filled with visual data I can't tell what I'm supposed to be doing. Grand Theft Auto IV is practically just an undulating field of brown, with voice acting. My eyes start bulging with strain just thinking about it. The upshot is that my chief pleasure on this machine is a cheap little throwback called Geometry Wars Evolved the Second, or something, which is basically just shooting at or avoiding blobs and dots of varying degrees of malevolence, very clearly delimited.

3) I know those best suited to understanding the economic collapse are doing their best to move the consequences of it onto me, and that the result could, for me, lead to every discomfort up to and including death. I worry, too, for the relatively modest retirement funds and holdings of my parents. Yet watching it unfold in real time, possessing as I do nothing of value (aside from an Xbox) I feel joy in my heart, real cosmic joy, at the horror and panic of those most effected by what, after the last eight years, cannot remotely be called a tragedy. I like watching these un-American jerkoffs run, though they seem to be running straight for me.

Nothing to Inherit

2008-09-26T08:37:00.000-07:00

If I'm going to have my ass taxed off, I want it to be for big, inspiring infrastructure projects. Energy projects, school projects, projects that create jobs. Obama wasn't really inspiring on this front, choosing to focus on moderate tax relief for the middle class (that essential cesspool of wankery) instead of talking about doing anything really cool with the taxes he would collect. Well, there's no use pretending that 700 Billion of that is going toward anything remotely cool or useful. It's not that you can go with the crackpot Shelby/McCain opposition on this one (hey, it just warms the cockles of my naturally socialist heart to think that at least someone's worried about socialism), it's just that the course open to us stinks. The next decade is going to be a strictly punitive one, as we replace in a purely negative capacity what has been gutted through privatization while watching streets, bridges, schools, etc. crumble -- and I won't be working any less, or getting any closer to my own personal vision of complacent wankery, during my forced participation in this debacle. Obama will win, I really think he will. I just doubt there's going to be anything to inherit.

Spore

2008-09-08T09:17:00.000-07:00

I haven't played any video games in a while. Good for me, you say, right? Don't judge me, you sons of bitches. You're the one who'd be arguing that movies were "ruined" by sound, back in the late twenties. Meet the steamroller of history, douchebag. I just picked up my pre-order of Spore and started playing it. It's my first new game since the cozily casual antics of Audiosurf.

Spore, for those of you who don't know, is a sandbox-type game (so sandboxy, in fact, it hardly counts as a game -- people have taken to calling it a toy recently). In it, you take a single-celled organism and "evolve" the thing to the point at which it walks on legs, takes to vehicles, and eventually conquers the galaxy. Everything in the game is editable, no distiction is made between biological traits and parts for spaceships. My first impression is: the time commitment is so huge, I don't think I'll ever finish it. I've been mucking around on land as a bipedal sort of monkey-snake thing for a long time, getting my ass kicked by biologically-impossible looking but obviously better-adapted creatures. My second impression is: Will Wright, the designer of the game, can be counted on to make some sort of analogy between human happiness and wealth. The question is, will it turn out to be as brilliantly parodic as it becomes in the Sims. If I finish the game, I'll let you know.

In Ignorance is Strength

2008-09-04T20:19:00.000-07:00

If they held the Nixon-Kennedy debates now, Nixon would win. His sweating and hunching and discomfort would put him over. In a small way, that's a good sign. So few Americans are competent to pay their mortgages, achieve in the collegiate arena, organize wars, fix health care, theorize either Marxism or its opposite, or eat a healthy meal seven days a week it begs the question of how the competent got that way, or how they can be expected to proceed, so armed, among the rest of us. People want to vote for the candidate most like themselves, which is to say, someone entirely unprepared to deal with the 21st Century world.

Sarah Palin's speech at the RNC seemed, to my ears, as if it were being recited by a high school forensics student. Apparently, that is not what was heard by the media and by the attendees at the RNC. It seemed at first, from the way they were talking, as if they saw a stateswoman up there. But that's not right, is it? What they saw instead was not righteous indignation against Barak Obama's community service -- it was complete bafflement over what the hell community service is supposed to mean. She alone had the audacity to display her absolute ignorance of the subject.

I trust this impulse in spite of myself. I'm voting for Obama but I have to admit the guy creeps me out. There must be something wrong with the really competent, I feel it too. Some professed inability to sweat. The crisis in intellectual politics these days is not that it's being attacked -- it will always be attacked -- but in the way that it defends itself. Instead of saying that there's no evidence for God, we watch Dawkins bend over backwards to prove that it cannot exist. We're proud of our incompetence because it's more sophisticated. Can Democrats do something about this? Is it possible for us to be honestly ignorant about stuff? Or will we continue to flail around in bursts of measured self-defense?

The Eugen-olympics

2008-08-19T08:34:00.000-07:00

Once again, Slate Magazine is at the head of the pack in giving a knee-jerk, pseudo-scientific-sounding eugenicist answer to why it is that one race is going to be good at something and why another is not. On Jamaican sprinters of West African descent who, according to a Quebecois study, had "significantly higher amounts of 'fast-twitch' muscle fibers": "So far, there is no evidence that even extensive training can turn slow-twitch muscles into fast-twitch ones, though moving in the other direction is possible." Huh? Should I get my forceps out, Slate, to make sure you've calculated "fast-twitch" muscle density accurately? Or else, can you add a maybe a little more context to your bizarre-sounding claims so we don't think you're a bunch of nutjobs? Then again, according to William Saletan, perhaps we'd have to be Asian to appreciate the full dimensions of what would seem, to the naked (that is to say, Black or Caucasian) eye, to be totally slipshod reportage.

More reportage along the lines of "we're just reporting what appear to be the facts" can be found here and here. For Slate's bizarre, not entirely disinterested, eleven-part "study" of what happened to babies produced by the Repository for Germinal Choice, start here.

Today's Five-Parter

2008-08-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

A few thoughts occurring to me over the last week:

1) The Russian and Turkish bathhouse on 10th Street is my new favorite place in New York, third in line behind Roosevelt and Coney Islands. I just discovered it (and so, says Alex K., "where have you been, man?")

2) I'm a little burned out from literary activities, but it was nice to read at The Happy Ending Bar last night, and to have relatively new stuff to read from, and to declaim it in the old way.

3) I've been struggling over a little 400-word review of George Oppen's Collected Poems, soon to be released by New Directions. The problem with reading him today is that he tried to make the modernism of Ezra Pound democratic, and though that's still a legitimate problem, it's not one we even understand today. Oppen's tradition has been picked up and mauled exclusively by professional intellectuals, which is to say, people who are illegitimate both in democratic thought and in aesthetic practice. He has no tradition other than the passively theoretical, and for someone who put down his pen for twenty-five years to actively organize renter's strikes, that's a shame. That no one sees that "silence" as being parallel to and of a piece with the physical work of writing is a greater shame. Theory does not explain Oppen's life -- nor any other life that's been lived well & justly -- and I fear I'm not a big enough man enough to formulate it in another way. I need a better tradition to explain my favorite artists.

4) SCTV was a hell of a lot funnier than Saturday Night Live. I guess I knew that when I was watching them on rerun back in High School, but the new DVDs make the case very handily. I wish I could find some video of The Gerry Todd Program to post here.

5) To The Hold Steady: more Thin Lizzy, less Bruce Springsteen.

New York living

2008-08-04T12:54:00.000-07:00

I accepted the invitation to take care of Artie (Artie's a very friendly pit bull terrier kind of dog) with a minimum of delay, because Artie lives in the East Village, just a 5 minute walk from the bookshop. That cuts my Queens commute down by, oh, say, 50 minutes, give or take the five. The first couple of days were bliss. Artie took to me right away, and walking around the Village with a pit bull in the clothes that I had just rolled out of bed with made me feel like some kind of a tough guy and a real New Yorker. But a tickle has plagued my throat for days, and this morning I woke up with a hacking cough and runny eyes: I think I'm allergic to Artie, though he loves me none the less for it. The little manhattan-sized apartment now seems close, very close, and I feel significantly less sexy for living in it. The upside is, I haven't had a cigarette all day, and I may just quit...