And look at that drawing! How could I not. I know she's known as a sculptor, but I'm interested in her drawings.~
Bessie Smith's version of St. Louis Blues is also really good.
~
Mondays and Wednesdays have become my speedwork/interval days.
G-d knows why. I don't need to be doing speedwork. I'm not trying to improve my mile time.
On my runs along the beach, I always see at least one couple making out and usually more, and I always smell pot. I find it all rather comforting.
~
The famous Alp now has a blog!
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Nina Simone's "Feeling Good" is a good song. Listen to it with the volume up while sitting down.
~
I wanted to watch the debut episode of Cheerleader Nation but it is on too late. I'll have to be satisfied with Design Her Galls.
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Adorno loved furry animals. What about slimy ones and ones with feathers and ones with neither feathers nor slime?
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Things I've unpacked (mostly books):
From the Country of Eight Islands (anthology of Japanese Poetry) Translated/Edited by Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson
An anthology of Club 8, a group of Romanian poets, including Radu Andriescu, who read at Unpleasant Event Schedule a while back. It's difficult for me to read these poems rationally. I think I like them, but the evening we spent at his house in Iasi was so out of control that I find myself thinking about that instead. Andriescu's poems certainly take issue with boundaries, and they're often interested in a kind of reckless, hyper masculinity. Here's a sample from "Bloody Bad Shit":
(Subject: here comes the nastiest part
Date: Fri, 06 Oct 200 16:53:26 +0000
From: Radu Andriescu
To: Dan Ursachi
Badge, last night really ate shit. I danced the manele with the
gypsies in my neighborhood at an Internet cafe, a huge
wolf almost bit off my balls, and
I sprained my other ankle. Today I've got to attend a memorial service.
Really bad shit, couldn't be worse, you can just about taste it.)
I also unpacked Naked, Poems by sundry Tanaka (Trans. by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura). Here's "Train":
I hate crowded trains.
When this old man breathes on my neck
I fell like shoving him away
or else getting to be friends with him.
Since we stand so close together
we might at least be able to manage eye contact
and at least say good morning.
The old man is facing away
and I have no idea what he's thinking.
Though he looks like no one else
he has a mouth and nose like we all do
and he's breathing through them.
I breathe in the breath strangers breathe out.
All the passengers' breaths blend--
coffee breath, soup breath.
A hundred years from now
all these people'll be gone.
I hate crowded trains.
That's why I like them.
4 comments:
didn't you have a picture of a cool marble globe with a tiny baby leg coming out of it? i thought that was cool.
not that i'm going to pass up spook-owl-witches.
Lorraine!
hi!
I'm downloading Nina Simone.
I tried to argue in my cross-cultural poetics class today that the way one sees the environment is culturally relative, and in terms of his ecopoetics (....) Derek Walcott is more like Juliana Spahr than he is like Louise Bennett (b/c Ramazani's obsessed w/racial/geographical borders and won't let things like environment and gender be classified as "cultural"), but, no one bought it. that said, at least if adorno likes furry little animals, his example was a wombat. and not like, a kitty-cat.
i had a dream last night that i had a pet aye-aye. it wasn't an aye-aye exactly but i'm not sure what it was.
this week i have a crush on hedgehogs.
I lost the cool marble globe but I will put it back. Hedgehogs are very cute indeed. What's an aye-aye.
Of course the way one sees environment can be culturally relative--you're totally correct.Ramazani must have a narrow deffiniton of culture. I haven't read Walcott in a long time. I like his earlier stuff best and not his later Wallace Stevens-ish work.
Oh well, my "problem" as a critic is my ability to rearrange connection rather than classify, so I'm not a good professional person to bounce critical arguments off of.
i like to rearrange connections and make new classifications.
most literary taxonomies are based on a WASP-Male perspective so i don't think this is a "problem". it's rather one's obligation as a critic to bring one's unique perspective to the table... isn't it?
this walcott was from the late 70s i think.
i like wallace stevens! sometimes he's a little confused. i think that's one of the problems with criticism in general. They alway assume that an author knew from the beginning what s/he was doing with his/her entire ouvre. which is never the case, and this is blatantly obvious in stevens ... i mean if you try to fit "Sunday Morning" into the same critical schema as the later works it's problematic.
"I like to rearrange connections and make new classifications." Yes, better said.
I'm not anti-Wallace Stevens, per say, but there's still too many contexts where a class on modernism is Modernism=Stevens, Elliot, Frost. It's an old complaint.
" i think that's one of the problems with criticism in general. They alway assume that an author knew from the beginning what s/he was doing with his/her entire ouvre."
Yes, and I think even now there's pressure on all writers, especially if you're vaguely innovative, to have a clear poetics or manifesto to describe what you do.
Visual artists have this problem though--there's a lot of pressure to find a specific, deffinable style and stick with it.
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