April 2012
32 posts
“What needs to be reinforced is the idea that good writing — solid, honest, entertaining, beautiful good writing — is simultaneously the reward, the challenge, and the goal.”
—Tom Bissell on the secrets of creators and creation. (via explore-blog)
“The internet… leaves me feeling the same overwhelmed insignificance. The truth is that when I think about myself as part of something larger, no matter what kind of thing that is, the point of it all evades me. Some people feel better, stronger and more significant when they’re part of a community. I feel less so. But the internet does let me be alone too. I get to have my autonomous blog and do my thing and I can choose not to run with the pack. The degree to which I seek out and participate in the community is very much within my control.”
—Ill Seen, Ill Said: Going turtle (via somethingchanged)
“
It should be clarified that Lil B is essentially an internet product. Facebook purchased Instagram on Monday and with it came an onrush of thinkpieces on how we are all trapped in an economy of personal taste, of experience, of identifiable sums of selfhood. Users realize themselves for free while profit funnels into an unknowable corporate face. Lil B especially contributes himself. The Basedprint II, his most recent mixtape, was issued nine days after his previous tape, #1 Bitch. There is no filter. He is a feed.
I suppose the strange, unusable mixtape hosts make some money off of him. But he seems curiously distinct from it, a self-replenishing system of giving. This is, admittedly, mostly in how he presents himself. “You know how I serve humanity,” he says near the end of his talk, returning to grander themes. “Spreading true love. Putting myself out there to be vulnerable, to be criticized, to be one of the most critiqued artists ever.”
There’s also a culture of expectations, that our small expressions merit attention and will be gripping to a dense block of human numbers, but B seems sweetly unaware of it. “I been giving you guys free stuff,” he says. “You don’t have to listen to me. You don’t have to watch me.”
” —Brad Nelson went to Lil B’s lecture at NYU last night. (via sotc-nyc)
“We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans. We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving… We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins… We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers… We are the daughters of the feminists who said, “You can be anything,” and we heard, “You have to be everything.”
—Courtney Martin (via smoking-sections)
“To our minds, fake obscure was even worse than popular. Obscure knowledge was once a kind of currency. To get it, you had to be in the loop. You had to know the right people to learn about the right bands. You had to know the right record stores to hear those bands…
Thanks to the Internet, cultural knowledge was now a collective resource. Which meant that being cool was no longer about what you knew and what other people didn’t. It was about what you had to say about the things that everyone already knew about.” —Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter - NYTimes.com
Thanks to the Internet, cultural knowledge was now a collective resource. Which meant that being cool was no longer about what you knew and what other people didn’t. It was about what you had to say about the things that everyone already knew about.” —Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter - NYTimes.com
Litany In Which Certain Things are Crossed Out by Richard Siken
(if you don’t want to read this you can also listen to it here)
Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die.
So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog
of non-definitive acts,
something other than the desperation.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.
Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party
and seduced you
and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.
You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.
Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.
What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.
Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly
flames everywhere.
I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,
that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.
I’m not the princess either.
Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
shut up
I’m getting to it.For a while I thought I was the dragon.
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was
the princess,
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,
young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with
confidence
but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,
while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,
and getting stabbed to death.
Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.
You still get to be the hero.
You get the magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re
really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?Let me do it right for once,
for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,
you know the story, simply heaven.
Inside your head you hear a phone ringing
and when you open your eyes
only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.
Inside your head the sound of glass,
a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.
Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.
Especially that, but I should have known.You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together
to make a creature that will do what I say
or love me back.
I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not
feeding yourself to a bad man
against a black sky prickled with small lights.
I take it back.
The wooden halls likes caskets. These terms from the lower depths.
I take them back.
Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.
Crossed out.
Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something
underneath the floorboards.
Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle
reconstructed.
Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all
forgiven,
even though we didn’t deserve it.Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up
in a stranger’s bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
And the the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view
of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
smiling in a way
that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
I looked out the window and said
This doesn’t look that much different from home,
because it didn’t,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.We walked through the house to the elevated train.
All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful
mechanical wind.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn’t say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—
here’s the pencil, make it work …
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it
Jerusalem.
We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not
what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,
a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over
and over,
another bowl of soup.
The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.
Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.
Forget the dragon,
leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.
Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,
in gold light, as the camera pans to where
the action is,
lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see
the blue rings of my eyes as I say
something ugly.
I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,
and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.
But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.
There were some nice parts, sure,
all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas
and the grains of sugar
on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry
it’s such a lousy story.Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently
we have had our difficulties and there are many things
I want to ask you.
I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,
years later, in the chlorinated pool.
I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have
these luxuries.
I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.
We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor …
When I say this, it should mean laughter,
not poison.
I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.
Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.
Quit milling around the yard and come inside.
“To decide to do “this” as a living is to invite barbs that generally pile up around gender and power. The poet is a fag, the poet is a drag, the poet is righteous. But really I think people resent our freedom. Our choice to keep doing something they may have done badly when they were younger and were full of feeling and to keep doing something that supposedly anyone can do – making something out of something as practical and mundane as language is to brand oneself as a lifelong fool rather than merely a fool in her youth. People feel sad about what they disavowed to become who they are now. Poets are human of course and have disavowed plenty, but to stand behind this nonetheless significant or foolish act – it’s a kind of self identifying, self categorizing act (like language itself) that enrages people exactly in the place where they’ve made choices and need to assume you haven’t.”
—Eileen Myles on being a poet (source)
Wendy MacNaughton gets me.
“I admit that I’m a thief, but so eager was this court to add another to its already long list of slaughtered victims that you remind me more of a lot of buzzards hovering over a carcass than men supposed to dispense justice. You half-starved hyena, you’ve sat through this trial with devilish glee written all over your hellish face. You talk about Spring with its sweet smelling blossoms and Fall with its yellow moon, you damned offspring of a diseased whore. You say that I’m to be hanged as I gaze into your bloated, whiskey-soaked face, I’m not surprised at the pretended gravity and the evil sarcasm with which you send me to my death. You haven’t even the grace to call down the mercy of God upon my soul, you dirty-nosed, pot-bellied, dung-eating descendant of an outhouse maggot. I defy you to the end. You can hang me by the neck until I’m dead, dead, dead, and you can also kiss my ass until it’s red, red, red, and God damn your foul old soul.”
—
Anonymous Mexican sheep thief, in response to the racist Judge Roy Bean (1825-1903) sentencing that the thief be “took to the nearest tree and hanged by the neck until you’re dead, dead, dead, you olive-colored, chili-eatin’, sheep-stealin’ son of a bitch.”
(via slightly)
