my new favorite

book

happy late birthday

yesterday was richard brautigan's birthday. i stayed in bed. and later, i woke up and went to the store to buy ingredients for a cake, but instead bought bread pudding and it tasted like eggs and perfume.

today we went to bishop castle:

this picture reminds me of mirrormirror

 

this is pont at some nice mountain place

 

we went to a snow river

 

my best friend came over for a visit

 

this is pont's view of the castle

i deleted my myspace account.

the reason i couldn't do it before was because there was a message there i could never read. it was sitting there, unread, for two years.

a lot of times, i would open the account and look at the message being there, but i would always log out without opening it. 


it was from melissa, about her sister michelle. michelle was my best friend for a long time. melissa was too.

yesterday, i read it.

what i thought it would say, how michelle died, it didn't.

i don't know why i read it. i always thought something dramatic would have to happen in order for me to open it, but nothing happened at all--i just woke up and read it. i didn't even have to talk myself into it.

now i wish it was still there.

who doctor who

i want this

who doctor who was one of my grandpa's favorite horses. pontiac and i were talking about aksarben (this is a whole site about it). it was the horse track i grew up in. when i was there, we would eat at joe tess and i would eat pickles and rye bread. that's what i got at the store tonight so i could eat it and remember all these things.

there have been 27 revolutions

and rebellions in the most recent ten years. and probably more. i feel like memorizing something. a list if things. like all of the revolutions. or all of the parts of my bicycle. i also feel like reading about old things. i feel like reading civil war literature. or going to a civil war reenactment. there is a place called missouri town that i went to once. you get to live in the 19th century if you go there.

i've been reading a lot of baudelaire this week. he says this: "modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable."

i have to use a picture of me for an author photo. here is one that has the sky in it so it is my favorite. i hope i get to use it.

and here is an even better one, but i'm an animal in it, so i probably can't use it

submissions

this awesome place is accepting your things!

Super Arrow, the online journal for experiments in writing and art, has re-opened submissions through 3.31.10 for Issue 2.

Visit the blog at superarrow.blogspot.com for guidelines and the new assignment: CROWDMAP.

Dig into Issue 1 at superarrow.org, and e-mail superarrowfliestrue@gmail.com with questions.

meme

i found out something new.

that apparently is something old.

arrival

today, there was a knock at the door.

so the soap went to answer it

he almost fell over when he saw who it was!

his son, albert!

they spent some time catching up. after supper, there was another knock at the door.

who could it be, everyone thought--

sweet baby pears! it was rhonda, his daughter! the whole family was back together again.

they spent the evening catching up and watching tv.

we talked about the man suit on tuesday in the class i'm teaching.

what the students wanted to talk on: the index

what i wanted to talk on: states of being and the reification of metaphor (which kw was just talking about as a trademark of the fabulists)

what we talked about, mostly: the index

we picked a gorilla part from the index and only read the poems that pertained to it. i think every time i read this book from now on, i will choose a category from the index and just read those poems--that way, my experience of the book always changes (in a more selective way).

the other thing we did was each pick a poem we were excited about. everyone read their poems at the same time. it was a whole room full of man suit noise!

next tuesday, we get to watch wings of desire!

reading time

this is my favorite picture. my grandfather and i. i'm little. and i love him.

i've been out of control ordering books. books for classes and comps.

the class i'm taking is about how modernity is a paradox. and not likely to make sense when constricted to time. we're reading things like candide, flaubert's tales, fleurs du mal, freud, rilke, cortazar, sebald, and lots of philosophy: rousseau, kant, hegel, nietzsche, husserl, sartre, etc.

i'm also taking a tutorial with e. on land use and such. we are reading the granite pail, paterson, a handmade museum (which i'm teaching as well), and susan howe. 

and i've been making lists for comps. my fabulist list looks like this (but may change some):

Madeleine Is Sleeping, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
Under the Glacier, Halldor Laxness
The Streets of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
Trampoline, Kelly Link
The Thin Place, Katherine Davis
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, Grace Paley
Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme
The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka
Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
If On a Winter’s Night A Traveler, Italo Calvino
Tin House, Issue 33: Fantastic Women

ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction: Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories

The Cuckoo, Peter Streckfus

Secondary Sources:
Fabulation and Metafiction, Robert Scholes
The Fabulators, Robert Scholes
Post Modernist Fiction, Brian McHale

The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre 

here is another picture i like. my dad and i and some magic white person bending over.

cabinets of curiosities

something from nick bantock

i've been getting to read so many good things for the class i'm teaching this quarter.

one thing is a book called cabinets of curiosities by patrick mauries.

in it, he says this:

“for the aim of any collection is to halt the passage of time, to freeze the ineluctable progress of life or history, and to replace it with the fragmented, controllable, circular time frame established by a finite series of objects that can be collected in full. . . . while all collection are concerned with the dialectic between disappearance and survival, cabinets of curiosities elevated this obsession to a higher and more rigorous level. Not only did they bring together objects that had eluded or survived the test of time-in itself a cause of wonder- but they also brought together hybrid, luminal objects (suspended between art and nature, death and life), so investing them with new value, new power and new meaning. Like the hero of the Edgar Allen Poe story, the objects in the cabinet of curiosities seem to oscillate perpetually between life and death, returning to life in death, and occupying an eternal no man’s land between the two” (119).