Publishing Genius Press (who will be publishing my chapbook, Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, in March 2009) has just released a beautiful new chapbook called Pocket Finger by Ryan Call and Christy Call:

It's a sinister sort of family drama. A sad tale. Haunting. Macabre.

For those of you who like Hollywood pitchline comparisons, think Peter Markus meets Brian Evenson meets post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy.

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Since the Spring 2009 Prêt-à-Porter collections have all shown, the Couture lines are soon to follow. (Something I look forward to every year!)

Here are a few of my favorites from last year's Spring Couture shows:

Jean Paul Gaultier

Christian Lacroix

Christian Dior

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What with the recent Wells Tower story and now this, The New Yorker seems to be on a roll: publishing things that aren't their typical sucky yawnfests:

"Lostronaut"
by Jonathan Lethem

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"The overall concept of this video revolves around images of imaginary astronomical phenomena. I selected a method which I anticipated would be appropriate to the construction of "scaleless" objects, such that one could imagine them occupying planetary sized volumes of space."

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Streetsy does "40+ Street artists You Should Know Besides Banksy"

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From: Larval Subjects -- "Ethical Principles for the Intellectually Honest Critical Thinker"

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A 15th century Ottoman scroll of the Koran on display at the Asian Civilizations Museum in Singapore.

Photo taken by Rachel Leow, a self-described fledgling historian who curates Bookporn.

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"I didn't want to do it in the first place, I wanted to read books, but I knew I was good at it. But don't consume crap, make a choice."

--Vivienne Westwood

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Paul McCartney says it's time to release Carnival of Light - a Beatles album from 1967 that George Harrison said was too avant-garde.

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The Getty digitizes twenty-one Russian avant-garde books.

Michael Berryhill is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University:

Shortest Mustache Between Two Points

Francisco

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William Faulkner

Speech Accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature

originally delivered December 10, 1950 in Stockholm Sweden

...Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands....

[full text & audio recording of Faulkner reading it]

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"Homegrown in Baltimore, Whartscape is a touring music festival featuring nearly one hundred bands, thousands of attendees and a lot of sweat...."

[via cool hunting]

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Žižek on Obama’s Victory and the Financial Meltdown

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Adam has a post on Zadie Smith's New York Review of Books article about the future of the novel.

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Click here to watch the uber titillating trailer for the forthcoming Star Trek, directed by J.J. Abrams.

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Texas artist Joseph Santandrea:

Let's
(2004)

Zeitgeist
(2004)

British artist Ian Francis:

A young couple search for their beach resort

A young woman laughs at her husband for wanting to spend time with ghosts

Don't worry about anything Miss Lavigne, it's time to go see the Wizard

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Two websites you should follow: Jahsonic and A Journey Round My Skull. Those two are consistently presenting the most interesting content on the interwebs, if you ask me.

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Italian-born, Paris-based artist Miriam Mosetti:

Live Together, Die Alone
(2007)

Noyée II
(2008)

Untitled
(2007)

Raymond Uhlir is currently an MFA candidate in Studio Art at the University of California – Santa Barbara:

I'll never finish, so I cut my legs off to be sent home
(2008)

Little Bishop Wears the Dream Shirt
(2008)

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Texas artist Ryan Thies:

By the Power of Grayscale!
(2008)

The Fractalization of Woody Woodpecker
(2008)

Darby Larson has created a new online literary journal called Abjective, which came to life today with a short piece by Todd Zuniga called "The Recurrence."

(Keep your peepers peeled, I've got something new appearing there in the near future.)

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Sir!, another new literary journal recently came to life, packed with exciting writing by many folks I dig: Blake Butler, Mike Young, Julia Cohen, etc., etc.

Check out especially Sean Kilpatrick's "Ten Percent" -- that piece cracks the moon.

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Speaking of reading....

After posting recently about finishing the Murakami book, someone wrote and asked me what I was reading now. The answer is contingent on space:


In the reading room:

Pieces O' Six by Jackson Mac Low

Dear Mr. Capote by Gordon Lish


In the kitchen:

Mythology by Edith Hamilton


In bed:

Theory-death of the Avant-garde by Paul Mann

As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem

The Perfect Crime by Jean Baudrillard


On the bus/on campus:

Feeling as a Foreign Language by Alice Fulton

Sensual Math by Alice Fulton


In the bathroom:

On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism by Jonathan Culler

George Washington’s Farewell Address

(1796)

[Washington refused to be a candidate for a third term of the Presidency; and in May, 1796, he sent to Hamilton a rough draft of his farewell address, asking for his criticism. After much revision by both the document was published on Sept. 19, and was read to theHouse of Representatives. The advice contained in it has ever since exercised a profound influence on the policy of the nation.]


Friends and Fellow-Citizens:
THE PERIOD for a new election of a Citizen, to administer the Executive Government of the United States, being not far distant, and the time actually arrived, when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person, who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprize you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those, out of whom a choice is to be made.

I beg you, at the same time, to do me the justice to be assured, that this resolution has not been taken, without a strict regard to all the considerations appertaining to the relation, which binds a dutiful citizen to his country—and that, in withdrawing the tender of service which silence in my situation might imply, I am influenced by no diminution of zeal for your future interest, no deficiency of grateful respect for your past kindness; but am supported by a full conviction that the step is compatible with both.

The acceptance of, and continuance hitherto in, the office to which your suffrages have twice called me, have been a uniform sacrifice if inclination to the opinion of duty, and to a deference for what appeared to be your desire.—I constantly hoped that it would have been much earlier in my power, consistently with motives, which I was not at liberty to disregard, to return to that retirement, from which I had been reluctantly drawn.—The strength of my inclination to do this, previous to the last election, had even led to the preparation of an address to declare it to you; but mature reflection on the then perplexed and critical posture of our affairs with foreign Nations, and the unanimous advice of persons entitled to my confidence, impelled me to abandon the idea.—

I rejoice, that the state of your concerns, external as well as internal, no longer renders the pursuit of inclination incompatible with the sentiment of duty, or propriety; and am persuaded, whatever partiality may be retained for my services, that, in the present circumstances of our country, you will not disapprove my determination to retire.

[continue reading]

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Leila Josefowicz - Bruch 1st Violin Concerto

(part one)



[parts two-five]

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United States Presidents and The Illuminati / Masonic Power Structure

By Robert Howard

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Fitzwilliam String Quartet - Shostakovich 14th Quartet

(1 - Allegretto)



[Allegretto 2 & 3]

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The Los Angeles Lakers are the only undefeated team in the NBA as of today.

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Sarah Chang - Dvorak Violin Concerto

(part 1)



[parts two-six]

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It has been announced that President Obama will deliver weekly fireside chats via youtube.

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Schoenberg String Sextet

(part 1)



[parts two-four]

Neil Gaiman & Henry Selick go 3-D

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Barack Obama still has time for a little poetry.

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rhizomes.manifesto

"Rhizomes oppose the idea that knowledge must grow in a tree structure from previously accepted ideas. New thinking need not follow established patterns.

Rhizomes promotes experimental work located outside current disciplines, work that has no proper location. As our name suggests, works written in the spirit of Deleuzian approaches are welcomed but not required.

We are not interested in publishing texts that establish their authority merely by affirming what is already believed. Instead, we encourage migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions."

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Gary Snyder - “Four Changes” (1970)

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Paul Theroux reads Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Gospel According to Mark” and discusses Borges with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

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Argentinian stencil artist Cucusita:

Gnarls Barkley - "Who's Gonna Save My Soul?"
Directed by Chris Milk

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Herbert Marcuse
An Essay on Liberation

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Philosophers on Obama:

"Uncritical Exuberance?" by Judith Butler

"Métis and Hermaphrodite" by Jacques-Alain Miller

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Publisher's Weekly releases their list of The Best Books of the Year, which includes my OSU comrade Donald Ray Pollock.

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R.Alan reads Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays
3.58 pm EST

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Tucker Sampson on Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.

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British artist Julian Opie:

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"Leopard"

by Wells Tower

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Jeff VanderMeer selects The Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Titles of 2008:

"Coming in at #6, new novelist J.M. McDermott summoned the spirit of William Burroughs in creating perhaps the first heroic fantasy collage/cut-up with Last Dragon--perhaps the most original book of the year."

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"A provocative feature documentary that explores the politics and culture of the latest generation of hackers."

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A Former Slave Declines His Master's Invitation to Return

(via) On the Digital History site, hosted by the University of Houston, there are a number of primary sources under their "African American Voices" topic, including the following letter, which carries this annotation: "Jourdon Anderson, an ex- Tennessee slave, declines his former master's invitation to return as a laborer on his plantation."

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning well; the teacher says grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday- School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, "The colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free- papers in 1864 from the Provost- Marshal- General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly- - and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty- two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any pay day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good- looking girls. You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve and die if it comes to that than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood, the great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits. <>P.S. -- Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson

Source: Cincinnati Commercial, reprinted in New York Tribune, August 22, 1865.

Amsterdam-based artist Marijn van Kreij:

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Peripatetic

–adjective

1. walking or traveling about; itinerant.

2. (initial capital letter ) of or pertaining to Aristotle, who taught philosophy while walking in the Lyceum of ancient Athens.

3. (initial capital letter ) of or pertaining to the Aristotelian school of philosophy.

–noun

4. a person who walks or travels about.
5. (initial capital letter ) a member of the Aristotelian school.


"Walking" by Henry David Thoreau - 1862 - with annotated text

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Here are a few images you would find if you did a google image search for: Ben Marcus Has Retired (with the safe filter turned off):




















[for the record, I don't think Ben Marcus has actually retired; he's just been on a nearly seven year hiatus]

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Nick Mamatas has an interesting article in The Smart Set called "The Term Paper Artist," which is about his personal experiences.

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THEODOR ADORNO
"Culture Industry Reconsidered"
(from The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, 1991)

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Raymond Federman reviews Cormac McCarthy's The Road

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Amsterdam-based artist André Avelãs:

Just finished Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; translated by Alfred Birnbaum.

Genius.

Please read if you like: Surreal things, Sci-fi things, Postmodern things, things that are excellent, and/or Cognitive Theory


Quote:

"I can tell Bob Dylan in an instant," she said.

"Because his harmonica's worse than Stevie Wonder?"

She laughed again. Nice to know I could still make someone laugh.

"No, I really like his voice," she said. "It's like a kid standing at the window watching the rain."

Key Words: INKling, Semiotec, Accordion, Whiskey, Dreamreading, Librarians, Unicorns, Skulls, Shadows, Information Warfare


Answer:

"Ever read The Brother's Karamazov?" I asked.

"Once, a long time ago."

"Well toward the end, Aloysha is speaking to a young student named Kolya Krasotkin. And he says, Kolya, you're going to have a miserable future. But overall, you'll have a happy life."

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Oregonian artist Joe Ryckebosch:

Stellar Jay
(2008)

Alaskan Folklore Part 1
(2008)

Panthervision
(2007)

There is a really interesting conversation about books going on here:

I can’t rightly say that my life has ever been changed by the reading of a novel. . .and more than that, I can’t think of any novel that has changed my thinking about life, the way I conceive the world, this matter of existing. - Which is to say, I guess, that I’ve never looked into novels for philosophy, for meaning; - and which may in turn be why I’m so antipathetic to novels which are largely concerned with “philosophising” or constructing philosophies, or at least the modes of interpretation which favour this approach to them (I certainly can’t think of a novelist who ever contributed anything important to human understanding; and for those about whom it is claimed, often none of it is their own thought at all, but they were themselves strongly influenced by philosophers. . . .

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Katherine Bernhardt:

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THE MIXTAPE VOLUME THREE

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badiou on the financial crisis
(via infinite thought)

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CRISIS IN THE HUMANITIES
by MARJORIE PERLOFF

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The Difference is Spreading: on Gertrude Stein
by Marjorie Perloff

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Miguel Chevalier:

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"Andrew Feenberg discusses his new collection of essays by Herbert Marcuse. The most influential radical philosopher of the 1960s, Marcuse's writings are noteworthy for their uncompromising opposition to both capitalism and communism."

The Essential Marcuse

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Theodor Adorno

Minima Moralia

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David Hawkes asks the question: Is fiction inherently capitalist?

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Georg Baselitz:

Natalie Westbrook is currently an MFA Candidate at Yale University:

Lion Hunt (After Rubens)
(2007)

Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (After Rubens)
(2007)

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"On the Function of the Line" (1979)

by Denise Levertov

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Bruno Schulz, The Cinnamon Shops

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"America Gets a Professor in Chief"

By Richard Monastersky

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The Home Video Review of Books

Editors: Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina

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Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias

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For aural pleasure, check out these musical groups that are engaged in avant-garde practice:

Blue Phantom

Museo Rosenbach

Zs

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum

Progressive Rock For Your Election Day

Italian band Cervello - "Canto del Capro"

French band Ange - "Sur la trace des fées" (live 1977)

Brazilian band Os Mutantes - "Preciso Urgentemente Encontrar Um Amigo" (live 1969)

British band Gentle Giant - "Free Hand"

German band Can - "Oh Yeah"

American band Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention - "Mother People"

Went to a book sale at the public library today. Came away with first editions of Michael Moorcock's "Dancers at the End of Time" trilogy: An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, The End of All Songs (1974-76).

[The title of the series is taken from a poem by a fictitious 19th Century poet, Ernest Wheldrake (a pseudonym used by Algernon Swinburne).]

I also scored three unbelievably rad compact discs:



Alina, by the astounding Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Performed by Vladimir Spivakov, Sergej Bezrodny, Dietmar Schwalke, Alexander Malter, and Sergei Bezrodny. (1995)

OMG. If you have not yet heard this album, you must. I guarantee you will have a human experience.

In the cd booklet, Hermann Conen opens his notes with a quote from Pärt:

"I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener."

Béla Bartók, The Two Sonatas for Violin and Piano

[Except I actually got the Hungaroton imprint (1986), with Gidon Kremer & Yuri Smirnov performing, for which no comparably cool-looking cover art exists]







The Big Gundown:
John Zorn Plays the Music Of Ennio Morricone
(2000, the re-issue with six extra songs not included in the original 1985 edition)

[performed by over forty musicians and vocalists]