Wednesday, July 15, 2009

the new deal



Starting today, this website will become a weekly publication, instead of the near-daily publication it has been for the past three or so years. My hope is that this decision will help you to look forward to Wednesdays a little more. As you will see from today's offering, I intend to make the weekly posts gigantic feasts of content, which will give you the option of gorging or savoring.

Now, without further ado...



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Ben Aqua is based in Austin, Texas:











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A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)
by Ryan Trecartin



[parts 2-5]




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"Space, with its extension; time, with the idea of before, now, after; quantity, mass, substantiality; number, equality and inequality; identity and difference; cause and effect; the ether, atoms, electrons, energy, life, death—all things that form the foundation of our so-called knowledge: these are the unknown things."

Tertium Organum
by
P.D. Ouspensky




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Danish artist Asger Carlsen:











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Gary Dexter has a new spot called Alternative Reading, which he describes as "A blog about the odd literary productions of people famous for doing something else."





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Tommi Toija lives and works in Helsinki:











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Interpellation: When Louis Althusser seeks to describe how ideology actually works, he argues that we, as subjects, actually subject ourselves to the power of ideology. This is because we identify with subject positions or categories of identity which are predetermined within ideological frameworks.

Critical Concepts
by
Aidan Arrowsmith




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Westminster Abbey Bell Ringers





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Sarah A. King a freelance illustrator currently living and working in London:











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New entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for Existentialist Aesthetics




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Val Britton lives and works in Berkeley, CA:











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The Free Music Archive has loads of interesting Experimental Music




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Leah Tinari lives and works in New York:








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To do or not to do: Gods, how to opt?
For who knows good from wrong, or wrong from good;
who'd follow forlorn lords, bow down to clods,
stoop to Sodom, boom songs of so long loss,
or dog coxcombs, hobnob to hollow loons;

"The Restrictive Muse (Writings for the Oulipo):
An Homage to George Perec"

by
Ian Monk




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New York artist Uri Aran:











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"For me the most compelling question in English studies today is the tension between the figure of reading and the figure of writing, especially as it plays out in what David Downing calls managed disciplinarity, the disciplinary division of labor between writing and literature."

"The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies"
by
Marc Bousquet




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"Krąg" (1978)
a short film by Jerzy Kucia





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"Selected by the Guardian's Review team and a panel of expert judges, this list includes only novels – no memoirs, no short stories, no long poems – from any decade and in any language. Originally published in thematic supplements – love, crime, comedy, family and self, state of the nation, science fiction and fantasy, war and travel – they appear here for the first time in a single list."





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New York artist John-Finneran:








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"Can this be the present task of theory, to grasp the creative moment of difference, of ontological diversity itself? A leap of empathy, you might say, a recklessness with all we know and are. A way of grasping the moment out of time, the kairos of aesthetic globalization. That may be too much to ask."

"Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization"
by
Ihab Hassan




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Biz Markie Performing "Bennie and the Jets" on The Chris Rock Show





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"McCarthy has given new shades to the English language, and that should be enough. Were he a painter or a composer, or perhaps even a poet, it probably would be, but Cormac McCarthy is a fiction writer, and fiction is generally construed to carry burdens above and beyond anything so frivolous as mere style. Stories must mean something. They must appear to argue for or against moral systems—or at least interrogate them. They must be a little less inconstant than dreams."

"Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession"
by
Scott Esposito




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Turkish artist Pinar Yolacan:











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Anne Sexton: “Language has nothing to do with rational thought. I think that’s why I get so horribly furious and disturbed with rational thought. Language is the opposite of the way a machine works. Language is poetry, maybe? But not all language is poetry. Nor is all poetry language….Who, me? Sailing around like crazy in LANGUAGE whatever it is and then brought up short by reality (what is it, really?)…”





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New book from The Cupboard!!!

Acts of Kindness and Excellence in Times Tables
by Caia Hagel
44 pages. Tape-bound.
$5.00

[order it here]




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Kate Mitchell: I am not a Joke (2008)



Saturday, July 11, 2009

whip me such honest knaves



I have a new prose piece in the new issue of Ocho:





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"...the basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time. That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. Being is time and time is finite, it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls "being-towards-death"."


Simon Critchley on "Why Heidegger matters"
part I - part II - part III




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Gordon Lish on Bookworm

Part I (SUN DEC 12, 1993)
Zim Zum Part I: "Captain Fiction" talks abut the fiction he writes, the fiction he edits (at Alfred Knopf) and his career as a magazine...

Part II (MON DEC 20, 1993 12:00A)
The madman of contemporary fiction examines his influences: Beckett, Harold Bloom, Thomas Bernhart, J.D. Salinger, et al.



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Lipogram in E: Writing as a form of a workout is paradigmatic to Oulipian praxis.

Lipogram in I: Textual workouts are a fundamental concept of the French, rules-based art group that spawned the Ou-x-po’s.

Lipogram in O: The idea that writing can be an exercise is a central tenet held by the French art enterprise that practices rule-based writing.

"The Exercise and the Oulipo: 99 Variations on a Thesis"
by
Louis Bury




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Thanks to Shane for turning me on to the work of Ria Brodell who earned an MFA at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, MA in 2006:

Self-portrait as Miami Vice Dude



A Picnic with Audrey Hepburn



He-Man is Introduced to G.I. Joe




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"Immerse yourself in the energetic, innovative and potentially illegal world of mash-up media with RiP: A remix manifesto":



[thanks Tim]




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New issue of The Chapbook Review




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Original "District 9" Short Film
directed by Neill Blomkamp



Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Sunday, July 05, 2009

contributions to ontology




Benjamin Cottam
-- from his Dead Artists series:

Man Ray



Kurt Schwitters



Diane Arbus



John Cage


Thursday, July 02, 2009

hydrangeas grow paperclips




Frank Gonzales
is an American contemporary artist who "explains that his work is “process oriented” which means that the creative process remains open to possibilities from the beginning of a composition until the final brush stroke is applied.":