...sunlight?

Now that I can be reasonably sure of avoiding snow for at least four months, if I don't go above 9000 feet, I feel ready to take on all you invisible interlocutors and interlocutrixes.

Go out right now and buy Phillip Roebuck's album Inertia. Aphoristically, it makes you homesick for places you've never been.

Little Britain:
The concert pianist with the short attention span. Why has that joke never been told before? How much of their humor rests in strategic breaks of character? The wheelchair-dweller who secretly walks, the fairy-dust Scots hotel keeper who breaks his insane pixie flute noodling to say "shit" when he realizes the tax police have used his own code against him. These are meta breaks, self-reflexive and distancing, but effective in that they alientate the audience from the scene, enabling them to laugh. I think I'm ripping off Aristotle here, but you can't laugh at someone with whom you identify totally. Empathy is stronger than humor. Breaks of character, whatever else they do in a scene, produce this distance.

-Yes-

Aright Aready

I miss you too, Dylan, but I'm working 12 hour days and have no desire to be in front of the computer in the evening as well as all day. But I love the shepherd in you. Bring me back to the flock.

I'm giving a paper at the &NOW Conference on Innovative Writing in April in Lake Forest, Il. Summer and Katie and Stephanie and I are planning a trip to Peru next spring to hike the Inca Trail. I've been watching Jeeves & Wooster and may be falling in love with Hugh Laurie. Or Bertie Wooster. I can't decide. No, probably Bertie. Never met the other lad.

I see Tom and Marlowe, now, on a regular basis (in Marlowe's case, twice in a week), as we all hole up here at Free Speech TV and try to change the world with narrative. I'm still besmitten by "continuing my education" as they say, even as I become more and more suspicious of -working- in academia. I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

I don't have worthwhile things to say on a regular basis. On a regular basis I have nothing worthwhile to say. I don't regularly say worthwhile things. And I'll spare you all my syntactic ambiguities.

Read Josh Corey's Fourier Series by Spineless Books. It's really good.

Peace out.

Narrative Binge

I'm on one. Intake-wise. Output is mostly caffeinated rants to myself until 1am.

When you don't drink coffee for a few weeks, and then drink about a gallon in twelve hours, the most amazing things come out of your mouth. I recommend it as practice. Rimbaud knew what he was talking about. I'm deranging the hell out of my senses.

And reading stories, and watching an average of three hours of television (in the form of movies and series-on-disc) a day. I'm ok with this. It's winter. Right? I can be ok with this?

And is Marlowe's page working because the link from Kyle's site is broken or something.

Sudoku my ass.

We call 'em lacunae in theory-land, pardner

My review of Hoa Nguyen's Red Juice should appear in The American Book Review sometime in the near future. Its publication marks the first time I have ever been paid for my writing. It's a damn fine book.

Being on the computer all day at work and then all night blogging ain't fun. That sweet month of unemployment indicated what I would do with my time if I could stop working, but since I can't stop working I have to see how I feel about maintaining this location.

Blogging occurs at computers, working occurs at computers, therefore blogging and being at work feel incredibly similar unless I have something I'm desperate to write and desperate to share.

I'd rather be the kind of associate who actually takes the time to closely read the artistic production of her friends and speak with them about it. And I freely admit that I enjoy reading your blogs more than I enjoy writing my own. Maybe it's winter. Maybe I'm passive. Maybe I'm thinking about and living with things I prefer not to blog about. The most interesting parts of my life are not the public parts right now, as much as a distinction can be made between public and private. Private is whatever I don't want to blog about, I guess. There are few events lately that are presentable in that way.

So that's it today.

Anecdotal Proof:

Blockbuster censors movies! And puts no notice on the movies that they've been censored! And denies it when asked directly!

It's close this time, not "some guy at work said his friend heard on the news" or even "a friend of a friend in Maine" but "Stephanie Heit and her girlfriend Brooke". And they were very scientific about it. They had a DVD version of Sex and Lucia that was purchased at a non-Blockbuster location and rented the VHS from Blockbuster. The watched the DVD first, then the VHS. Lo and behold, all the penises had been edited out. They even did an almost-simulcast to compare some scenes and transitions between scenes.

Which brings up another interesting question: why are breasts (and there are a metric ton of naked breasts in Sex and Lucia) ok but penii (yeah, I know, but I want to pretend I'm speaking Latin) are not? And what the hell is up with cutting a film that is already rated R? Presumably that was the argument behind the rating system in the first place, so that people have some idea what they're getting into breast and penis and "fuck" and gore -wise. Blockbuster wants to protect our virgin eyes so much that they don't even tell us what we're missing.

Be sure to worship at the Blockbuster of your choice.

Rene Char

Youth

Far from the ambush of roofs and the alms of country shrines you take your birth, hostages of the birds, O fountains. Man's decline in the nausea of his ashes, man's struggle with his vindicative providence, not even these can disillusion you.

Praise, praise, we have come to terms with ourselves.

"If I had been mute as the trusty stone step beneath the sun heedless of its wound sewn with ivy," she said, "if I had been childlike as the white tree receiving the fright of bees, if the hills had lived on into summer, if the lightening had opened its gates to me, if your night had forgiven me . . ."

Eyes, the orchard of stars, the gorse, the solitude are not part of you. A song finishes exile. The lamb-wind brings back new life.


from http://oldpoetry.com/authors/Rene%20Char
He explained his rupture with Surrealists in a letter to Benjamin Péret in 1935 in the following terms: "Surrealism needed to be dissolved gracefully in order to protect it from the humiliation of becoming centenarian. But aren't you fatalistic? Was the descent of Sade, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont entirely intellectual? Seeing this pathetic compromise coming, I refused to sanction it. I am leaving this circus. "

He fought in the Spanish Civil War, was a part of the French Resistance, a Maquisard.
from wikipedia:
The Maquis were the dominantly rural guerrilla bands of French Resistance. Originally the word meant a high ground in southeastern France and covered with scrub growth. It is the kind of terrain armed resistance groups hid in. Members of those bands were called maquisards.
Eventually the term became an honorary term that meant armed resistance fighter. Most maquisards operated in mountainous areas, Brittany and southern France. They relied on guerrilla tactics to harass Vichy France Milice and German occupation troops. The Maquis also aided the escape of downed Allied airmen, Jews and others pursed by the Vichy and German Authorities. Some maquisards did behave in unpleasant ways and raided villages for food but usually they could rely on some degree of sympathy and cooperation. In March 1944, the German Army began a terror campaign throughout France. This included reprisals against civilians living in areas where the French Resistance were active. Most of the Maquis cells - like the Vercors - took names after the area they were operating in. Their size varied from maybe ten men to thousands.
Politically, maquis were very diverse - from right-wing nationalists to communists. Some Maquis bands that operated in southwest France were composed entirely by left-wing Spanish veterans of the Spanish Civil War.
When Germans began a forced labor draft in France in the beginning of 1943, thousands of young men fled and joined the Maquis. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) helped with supplies and agents. The American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) also began to send its own agents to France in cooperation with the SOE.
During Allied invasion of Normandy, the Maquis and other groups played a major role in delaying the German mobilisation. As Allied troops advanced, the French Resistence rose against the Nazi occupation forces and their garrisons en masse. For example, Nancy Wake's group of 7000 maquisards was involved in a pitched battle with 22,000 Germans on June 20, 1944. Some Maquis groups took no prisoners and some German soldiers preferred to surrender to Allied soldiers instead of facing maquisards. Captured Maquis faced torture and then being shot or sent to concentration camps, where few surivived.
The Allied offensive was slowed and the Germans were able to counterattack in southeast France. On the Vercors plateau, a Maquis group fought 15,000 Waffen SS soldiers under general Karl Pflaum and was defeated with 600 casualties.
When De Gaulle dismissed resistance organizations after the liberation of Paris, many Maquis returned to their homes. Many also joined the new French army to continue the fight.
The use of the name originates from a short-lived democracy movement on Corsica (see Maquis (Corsica)) in the last half of the 18th century.

A democracy movement in Corsica was necessary because it has been swapped back and forth between Italy and France for about a thousand years, and before that was ruled by the Moors. The French apparently saw no irony in taking the name.

That's our poem and history lesson for the day.

Minimalist Ethics

Do what you say you will do. -John Cage

A reminder from me to me.

...throat clearing...

Sara Larsen and I have been offered a column at the American Book Review called "Staples" which will focus on small press chapbooks and journals. Ta-da.

Thanks to Kass Fleisher: teacher, mentor, friend, and newly pink lipstick wearing bestower of opportunity.

I am scared. But not yet scared straight. Scared slightly rigid but still crooked. Ossified. I am a big sculpture made of calcium and fear.