This is at least 45 percent embarrassing.
http://c4.libsyn.com/media/19075/RumpusRadio2.mp3?nvb=20100609201814&nva=20100610202814&sid=48c304b6631c80a2c83dc133639d04cb&t=0406e78cab969cd56ec2bPlutarch Was Not a Poet
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Category Archives: the believer
Daybook
Last night I read the “front-matter” — probably not the right word for the preface, introduction, chronology, etc — of the recently released Damion Searls-edited NYRB Classics edition of Thoreau’s Journal.
Kind of great: check out the accidental "Adobe Photoshop CS3" text on the cover! How sublime would it be if that made it onto the real cover! Not sublime at all. But still, this is the kinda junk that makes me happy. My daughters are all grown and moved away.
In Searls’s funny and helpful introduction, he calls the volume an “abridgement”–similar, in one respect, maybe, to an abridgment Searls made of another 19th-century American classic, Moby-Dick: called ; or, the Whale, Searls wrote a great essay in the Believer about the project here. I’ve recently been hit with an overwhelming amt of semirequired reading, and Searls’s introduction, which talks about the distinction between abridgement, which seeks to retain the flow and balance of the original, and editing, which simply reduces its length (I am bungling this, hard, and giving up on this sentence).… Of further interest is the fact that it’s basically Thoreau’s life that’s being abridged. I somehow thought it was going to be easy to make a point here about the amount of books one feels one needs to read and the amount of days one has to live and have these things be gloriously connected in a reading of Thoreau’s journal. But it’s not and I’m at work and need to get back to it. These excuses smell like excrescences on an old cheese.
Late last year I ate a pot cookie and went to the California Academy of Sciences with some loved ones. That evening I accidentally spilled two full beers on a reality TV show demi-celebrity and her date (I have severe night blindness, didn’t see their table). Then I ate more of the pot cookie and went to Rosemarie Waldrop’s George Oppen Memorial Lecture, where she spoke a bit about Oppen’s Daybook. My grasp of the lecture was suitably tenuous but I did love the idea of a daybook, even just as a prettier word than journal. I guess, my dear Wolfman (I write this blog for one person only, and that is the Wolfman, sweet web-surfing Wolfman, I hope you like my blog, I hope your Internet connection is clear and fast and uninterrupted, I hope that no one bridles at my calling you a “person”, for even if you’re sometimes more wolf than man, you, adorable Wolfman of mine, are always a person. Because you can read! What the fuck) this discussion is inevitably leading toward a discussion of blog as daybook. Blog as journal. Something about the fact that the Wolfman has immediate access to it, and that it has hyperlinks, distinguishes it from the intensely private, contemplative analog journals of “yore” (and yore is, of course, still in full contemporary effect, in tens of thousands of active Moleskines and spiral-bounds worldwide). But seriously, I smack your face with my unworn leather gloves: blogs are allowed to be daybooks. Let them be. Why do I feel the need to defend the internet from hypothetical reactionaries? Why do I insist on calling my rambling, soggy rants “discussions” or “arguments” when they’re really just excrescences on my poor old personal cheese, and I should be getting back to work at work?
The self-abusing rhetorical question smells like the privates of an old man. I’ll see you tonight, Wolfman. Hugs.
- Further listening: Yummy Fur [live at the Cafe du Nord 1/18/10]
Permanent Teardrop.
Hey Cancer
How’s “the darkness
Fine
Not as dark as you make it sound
Black beans and codfish
Shapeshifter rsvp’d.
Self-Zine?
Got fired Friday, can’t make it
Dog wearing lipstick?
Dunno, she’s in heat, maybe spayed, upset
really?
aye
listen
Fear-monger
canceled too. it’s just gonna be me you and self-zine
shapeshifter
And li’l caesar
The pizza guy
used to work for Men’s Wearhouse.
Hey whoww ofenn does your zine come out?
—Every other fortnight
does it pay
No but the internet makes the printing free, minus electricity and rent
***
paper mewl is here
PAPER MEWL: I’m so fed up with the ass in this city
TEAM: where’s your girlfriend?
PAPER MEWL: Out with her friend gary
TEAM: you didn’t invite her?
PM: She doesn’t need to come to everything, i don’t think her and gary are anything more than friends
TEAM: Whe—
PM: To a reggae/dub/skiffle/punk/lord show. at the Beenurry
T: In Troeptown?
PM: Near there. Clobo Village.
T: That’s a gay neighborhood
PM: …so?
T: Nothing, i’m just bean helpful with regard to you know travel… guide
PM: So are we gonna DO THESE DRUGS, OR WHAT?
T: cool your jets, hang on, here [hands drugs]
PM: I wanna do drugs carefully, not just in a big blast
T: Well, that’s your call not mine, be as careful as 7ou want
PM: I can’t be careful unless you are too. your sloppiness infects MY UNIVERSE
t: look we’ve been friends for almost twenty years, you know how careful iamb, which is not that careful, but you know my style, my styles not changing, i’m learned but i’m not a PEDANT, so take the drugs and be the peace or go eat a pizza be well but let’s not talk about it
PM: I’m the Prime Mule. Announcement time.
TEAM: Our favorite game
pM: I’m the prime Mewler. Minister Muenster. Papa Gyyno [“Geeno”].
TEAM: Cannibullingus! Classic. “Framingham Farms”
PM: Sodabeer Sobadeer! HarmHock Tavern! I’m lickin the back of a pretty heart
TEAM: Lick that back of pretty hearts. great stuff.
PM: There are some drugs left. …. May I?
tTEAM: you’re still my guests—be our guest. my guessts is as good as ours
PM: Pull yourself together——the last thing I meantioned about “careful”
TEAM GOGOLBERRYS: Careful did as carefully was— you know that expression
PM: That’s not the expression—————it’s “a careful home gets bigger as my gorgeous daughters get older”—-pita read sadder for older
PM: Listen listen your zine is good but you need to delete more of it
TM: You mean “edit”?
PM: Nah, edit or delete,? Same thing. just pick huge arbitrary/celebrity swaths that aren’t singing and click #delete
TM: What do you mean “Sign” i mean “sing
PM: Same root as “swing”. swing flue. sign flu. the nonjazzy parts.
TM: Punk-jazz?
PM: Jazz isn’t the same as it was in the 1970s: be troppa deuce and so on. swinging jazz has to come from a lamer emotion in today’s age to really get the big dicks swinging. punk rock is fine-ground avenue. is working construction—
TM: I need to work construction to make parts sing?
PM: Deleting unsinging parts is more important but doing big jobs in construction is fine.
I started out as Party Mule, but went backwards in time with the aid of drugs and now have a confusing relationship with Trawldad, with Party Mule, with Picaba and D. the Skiier and the wreast of my Team; Team was the other guy. Multiple dudes with a single voice that choruses sweetly & softly ( then, horny, gets meaner with more “skronk”——[jazz term]). After a meal the quietest parts go deaf and drown in the gay roar of a metabolism overwhelmed by an excess (or, contra-pace Gander, a “sudden access”) of satiety. All that remains is the basic four-four pattern native to pop: “It’s A Gas,” “Onlycake Fountain,” e.g.
Math-rock, “Intelligent Dance Music,” Polynesian polyrhythms—all of them sad, wishful thinkings of a freeboned drug-depression found in culture. A cake is a metaphor you can eat; a shower’s only as hot as its horniest teardropped teabag; pastiche is not flavor; and so on.
RAE ARMANTROUT, TROY JOLLIMORE, & JOSHUA CLOVER perform language TONIGHT at the LATIN-AMERICAN CLUB of San Francisco, 3286 22nd St, 8:30 p.m. Arrive early, call venue for parking. More information is available here.
“An Education” advance screening in San Francisco, 10/7, feat. Nick Hornby IN PERSON!
click to "enlarge"
LI’L TIFFANY: Thirty dollars? Fuck that.
PROVOST GARY: Li’l Tiffany, you spend that much on Vitamin Water and Zen Party Mix every week. And it’s a fundraiser for the Believer magazine, which you’re always reading at Patronio’s house. But you never buy it! And you love Nick Hornby’s “sensibility.” And look at this effing still from the film, it’s awesome:
LI’L TIFFANY: That does look funny. That looks like a photograph of your birthday party.
PROVOST GARY: Oh, Tiffany!!!
LI’L TIFFANY: OK, I’ll take 12 tickets, please.
PROVOST GARY: Oh, Tiffany!! I’m not selling the tickets! You’ll have to buy them from Brown Paper Tickets Dot Com!
LI’L TIFFANY: Sure thing, Provost Gary!!!!
[They both perish from Melancholia]
[Later that day, LI’L TIFFANY’s brother, JARED, is washing the dishes—one of his regular chores. He takes a sponge, wets it, and reaches for a plastic bottle of what he assumes is diswashing soap. He pours it all over the sponge, squeezing it, re-wetting it, etc. His mother, BETHANY, enters.]
BETHANY: Jared what the holy frock are you doing???
JARED: Whaddaya mean, mah? I’m doin’ my chores!
BETHANY: But Jared, you’ve coated your sponge——with honey!!!
[JARED regards his sponge with new interest. It is shining and sticky with Grade-A California Honey, a plastic bottle of which stands near the sink. He smiles and shakes his head with amazement.]
JARED: Geez, that’s amazin. Mah, didya know——I’m flying on three tabs of acid right now?!??
BETHANY: Jaaaa-redd!!!
[They perish from dehydration]
my visceral dinner
DENNIS: Too busy to blog
JENNY: Too busy even for me? Your “private” blog?
DENNIS: [his laughter setting his corpulence a-vibratin’] Well….. a ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho
[ten minutes later]
DENNIS: [screaming] Fuuckk!!!!!
JENNY: [deadpan] What’s wrong
DENNIS: Nothing
JENNY: Oh. I thought you were screaming
DENNIS: Naw, just “surfin the web”
JENNY: Ha. Cool.
DENNIS: Where are you going?
JENNY: Out. With a boy.
DENNIS: Oh… I see. Um… are we still dating?
JENNY: Yeah. You’re concerned about the boy? [her heart beats fourteen times, sending blood to all the different parts of her body, all of which are sexy]
DENNIS: No! I mean… should I be?
JENNY: Yes. [her blood is poison. She’s the worst.] Just kidding!
DENNIS: I feel like my viscera are serving dinner to other parts of my viscera, in an artificial “formal dinner” context, sort of like when famous cellists serve lowly students of the bassoon at the magical music camp Alex Ross wrote about
JENNY: That article was odd. It was written with a barely supressed prancey exuberance that bugged me
DENNIS: I still haven’t read the imaginary composers piece. But doesn’t it seem a little overlappy with the Arthur Phillips Believer piece?
JENNY: I don’t know; I don’t read the Believer. Just the smell of that magazine makes me feel so hopelessly and sexually aroused that I go all but blind; reading becomes the furthest thing from my mind
DENNIS: Oh, darling——
JENNY: ‘Kay, not now, sweetie—— gotta run! Back tomorrow
DENNIS: [writhes]
- For the to-be-read (2-bread) file: Jesse Nathan’s giant essay on “an Italian poet named Leonardo Sinisgalli“. Should be good!
- Also: Everything sucks
- And: Everything is terrible
- And while I’m at it: Steamboats are ruining everything
Ezra Buchla of Gowns believes that his band’s brittle harmonies have a similar effect to gospel music. (“If people have souls, that’s the way to activate them,” he says.)
- I would conceivably go to this tonight with some paper and pens and make a fake zine in one shot for the hell of it if you wanted to.
- Blah blah blah no age streaming new album blah blorge
- new new yinzer’s got justin taylor, m. rebekah otto, poems by someone named “Becca Swimmers Ear”
- this is what happens when I spend my lunch break on twitter, just finding quasi-interesting things I don’t actually look at, and so on
The Genre Artists
- John Haskell (2003)
- Jack Vance (2009) [plus preddendum] [&+tripleddendum: this webpage, wherein the names of carlo rotella and ben marcus are both mentioned, has a weird suggestion:
Children, Cover Your Eyes, a novel [by Ben Marcus??!]
(&, late-breaking, via @r_nash:
jamba juice is a bunch of sucker motherfuckers, long live david rees!
Whoever made this ad is probably a 22 year-old “creative” at some ad agency in Tech Valley, CA. Way to think outside the box, sonny. Have fun snorting cocaine at the nightclub you go to with your friends who work at Twitter or wherever. And no, Adult Swim will NOT buy your stupid cartoon you’re developing with your housemates about four guys who work at an ad agency but are secretly lobsters.
Domo Corpusti
OCEAN: The black flag wavers for a fucking second, not safe for work, a grand glugging gets going and the waters of the world drain away.
BUSTY CACTUS: They drain? Don’t you think they’d evaporate first?
OCEAN: Naw. No. They drain. Through mine anus. Through mine geo-bio-tunnel. Which, I should add, can be quite sensitive. There is a monolithic crustacean scurrying back and forth there right now, and it’s driving me fairly batty with Enchrodinicius [flutters his eyelids]
B.C.: Aight
O: Yepp
B.C.: Wanna tangle
O: Nope
B.C.: Cooking school vacation?
O: Naw
BC: Comic book store
O: Naw. When I feel like this, all I can listen to is stuff from Apraxia records.
BC: These guys?
O: No. Where did yo find that.
BC: Tee hee the internet
O: You’re a terrible person [stabs the busty cactus in the face with a pen knife]
BC: [horrible screeming (sic), cactus blood everywhere. this is a nightmare. weeping, moaning, awful]
O: [horrible screaming]
BC: [horrible screaming]
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private post
I have a degenerative retinal condition that causes severe night blindness
normally it only affects me at night/low-light situations
this week I’ve been having trouble seeing during the day, too
it’s supposedly supposed to slowly encroach to my “normal” vision but this feels sudden
maybe I just need new glasses — my prescription is a different joint than the condition — it’s like deck chairs on the titanic vs. poison flesh-eating barnacles on the titanic
sorry if you are here to read a recipe for Pussy Pie, or whatever, this isn’t a food blog anymore, so “fuck off”, I stopped food blogging like a year ago, get with the fucking program, food blogging is dead
that’s right, I’m angry and inappropriate and gay and uncompromising from now on on this blog
If you can’t take the heat, get out of the Google Reader (or other RSS reader of your choice)
I read almost all of Bill Buford’s Heat yesterday, instead of cleaning/working or hanging out with wonderful “locals”
It’s way fluffier than I thought, I don’t know why I thought it would be such a masterpiece, I recall being “gently surprised/kurious” that the blurbs weren’t more like “this book will pan-sear your fucking brain like a pheasant with a clove shoved up its ass, oh my god this book turned my nutz into a fricasse, I’m freaking out”——Joyce Karol Oats, the New York Review of Sexuality
“This book made my nuts feel like real nuts, like marachino almonds or some shit, oh my god, this book is about food but also about life”—Steve “Marschino” Almondz, the New York Prostitute
“I’m reading this book right now and I feel like Habermas or Leonard Bernstein is blowing me, I’m weeping, it’s that good” —Cynthia “French Toast Points” Ozark, The Ozick Monthly
“When I read this book I feel like I’m eating — oh wait, I was eating while I was reading it, and the book and the thing I’m eating [salmon sandwich with beer] is also equally good”——Paul Rabinow, famous Foucault scholar
“When my daughter told me she wanted to read this book for christmas, I fucking punched her. Then My wife called the cops and I was jailed for child abuse. I wasn’t raped in prison——not everyone is——but I wasn’t exactly having fun there, either. I ended up ordering Heat through interlibrary prison library loan, and I read it. Reading it was like fucking a jello bagel in the back of a mercedes. unfuckingbelievable!!!!”——Richard Lewis, comedian
“Dip dip trippa slip, rumblefish, tee-pee grip. Just kiddiing. Twelve stars.” ——Calvin Johnson, the man who discovered K records
“This book is the perfect nut-sheath”——Gwen “Ifill, Triffid” Stefani
“Like Stanley Crouch and Curtis White before him, Bill Buford has eaten two consecutive lunches, and created a masterpiece of filth and beauty — very dirty, very pretty. I like. I like a lot. Gimme.”——David Sedaris, author of “The Gloaming as Wet as my Ritz” and “BeaverChattt”
just kidding, these are fake blurbs that I made up to make up for hurting your feelings earlier on in this blog post.
my “boss just walked” in, so I have to close up the fuck-up shop in a sec. oh well. I was having a lot of fun just “jazzing around”, as the late John Gardner (gardiner) would have it. fuck you–
anyway
Shellfishness
This blog has lately become yet another “Chris Ying is ineffably awesome forever” blog, which is fine by me. (He’s written a few guest posts, after all!)
At any rate, old Plebescite‘s got a brilliant piece in the new issue of Meatpaper, on “why we watch men eating meat”:
If the complaint about porn is that women are treated like meat, then the problem with UM/UM [unattractive men/unattractive meat] television is that meat is treated like meat.
The essay is funny and smart, Wallacean in a good way. I also love this pre-blogged chart, which the Plebiscite probably designed himself:
Anyway, worth a look.
(I wonder too what old CTY makes of this oldish Harper’s piece on “The Food Network at the frontiers of pornography”?)
##########################################
I was camping in the Sierras this weekend with a Crude Futurist who told a story (can’t remember the provenance) of a Brooklyn-raised African American man talking about his experience of Election Night 2008 in Fort Greene: [I’m paraphrasing] All the white people who moved to this neighborhood showed for the first time that they actually cared about something other than food.
(no violence meant here to Meatpaper or Plebiscite. I’m just laterally riffing. I care about food, too, and think it’s important. But the quote from the Ft. Greener still struck me as a tidy damnation of my entire existence. Literature is just as pointless as food, art, the rest. Sex, death, drugs, commerce, Internet, everything else. It’s important to care about something other than food, but it’s also possible to study and write about food without wasting your time. Same goes for noun declensions of dead languages, and the craft of sock puppetry. It’s interesting, actually, maybe, how “POLITICS” can make any/every-thing else seem pointless by comparison. And there’s of course a difference between the mindless chichi consumption (of consumption) going on in Ft. Greene vs. the relatively political analysis of food, “food politics,” etc, going on in, say, Meatpaper. I’m not trying to imply that dude was damning hilarious smart articles about Food TV — I don’t think he was — he was damning people who move to your neighborhood and are food-obsessed yuppies. These are separate issues that got connected through my free-associative bloggy style. I love you guys. Chris hey help me for I have written myself into a lazy corner and I can’t get out and I am going to post this before I delete it.
“Notes!!!“
- apolitical art
- political art
- is there any sort of sense that one is “better” or “worse” than the other
- “food politics”
- Pollan v. Wallace
- Reichl v. Ying
- the imperative for people to be engaged in the communities they live in
- the importance of cynicism
- the destructiveness of getting stuck in a cynical mode
- yuppies/gentrification/blinkered existences amid “suffering”
- accidental yet inexusable condescension
- desire (sex, food)
- etc (drugs, babies)
- discipline (martial arts, Yaddo)
- knowledge (the library of congress, obama’s e-mail newsletters)
- selflessness, generosity (dude)
- community service with and without condescension
- gluttony, selfishness
- shellfishness, spumoniïsm
Good Jobbbbbbbbb 