The Supercollider

The Germ

2010-03-13T08:38:00.000-08:00

If you're ever in Philadelphia, check out The Germ bookstore. It must be one of the last Science Fiction bookstores left in the country. I think this has something to do with the city itself. It's an eccentric, angry city. It has a strong conservative contingent and a deep catalog of history that undermines that conservatism. It's that irreconcilability, I suspect, which is a fertile ground for Science Fiction. Though "fiction" doesn't quite cover it: Philly SF is outrageously, pleasantly aspirational, too, when viewed through the lens of The Germ. The Science Fiction section is largest section of the bookstore, with great Sheckley, Moorcock and Zelazny finds, but it blends seamlessly with a handful of other sections, including UFO Abduction, Paranormal Research, Zero-Point and Anti-Gravitational Energy Studies, and Training in ESP. In the front there is a petition to the Serbian Orthodox Church requesting sainthood for Nicola Tesla, and in the back there is a gallery devoted to Tesla-related artwork. On purchasing a hardcover edition of Dangerous Visions and a selection of Leigh Brackett stories I received ("50 cents or free with every purchase") the gift of a Nicola Tesla pin. The Nicola Tesla Inventors Club meets there. Tesla acolytes are tough, perpetually unfashionable, prickly and fairly democratic sort of utopian. After the last general interest bookshop (whoever came up with that fanciful notion?) has shuttered its doors, The Germ, or something like The Germ, will continue to sell what it sells and bear host to what it hosts. Salut.

Another Castle

2010-03-10T09:40:00.000-08:00

"To me, Super Mario Brothers is less like The Waste Land and more like a tennis ball."

Very interesting conversation with Adam Parrish on Another Castle about gaming and language. Bruce Andrews and Zork are also mentioned.

Not Flarf

2010-03-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

More like this at inter-meme-I-hope-lasts Godzilla Haiku.

Congratulations!

2010-03-08T09:47:00.000-08:00

Hey, that was great. A dose of gender parity was dished out. It was--honestly--really satisfying to see Jim Cameron's smug, techojock grin wiped from his face, and to see Katherine Bigelow fumble happily through her two acceptance speeches. The better movie won.

So, just maybe Rex Reed, Anthony Lane, Grandma, Uncle Sam and Che Guevera can finally relax and actually talk about these movies as if they were fictional things? Now that the movie whose budget could have gone to feed an African refugee camp won out over the movie that could have gone to feed a small African country? Because the movie which was explicitly a set of anti-militaristic cliches--and which was not, in fact, so anti-war after all--had as its chief advantage the fact that no one could ever, ever mistake it for reality. Which makes Avatar--and a lot of other science fiction-- less a fashion accessory for the epistemologically challenged and more like something you can actually talk about at the end of the day.

Not that I'm saying The Hurt Locker didn't have good special effects. I'm just saying, it'll be a great day when a woman can win an Oscar for a real, grown-up movie like this:

The Final Final Cut

2010-03-07T07:21:00.000-08:00

The Windup Girl

2010-02-25T14:20:00.000-08:00

Over at i09 they've begun their book club on Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.

The book meets a categorical need in science fiction for novelty, which I appreciate particularly after the last decade of relatively trouble-free and bodiless singularities, (not to mention the still-popular warhorse starship captains living out their midlife crises among weird galactic fauna). The Windup Girl, by contrast, is willfully Earthbound, set as it is in a grimy, superflorid Thailand, which is itself an uncommon enough setting in science fiction to fulfill the fickle standards of novelty. Most interestingly, Bacigalupi's novel deals with the special mash-up of political and scientific anxiety represented by current concerns over global warming, peak-oil and AgriGen profligacy, and which is not really represented anywhere else in science fiction. There is no question of a singularity occurring in Bacigalupi's future. There is hardly any electricity. Instead, joules are counted to the last, and are most powerfully produced by genetically modified megodonts and by high powered mechanical "kink-springs."

I'm on the fence regarding his style, and from the look of i09's message boards, I've got company. On one hand, he's a great handler of SF wonkiness. Lines like "mounds of durians fill the alley in reeking piles and water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-finned plaa" practically squiggle with undergrowth. On the other hand, the prose becomes laden with this stuff. One solution to world building in SF is to glide past the particulars elegantly and to leave some things mysteriously unexplained. The other tack is Bacigalupi's: leave no info undumped. One character will say one thing, there will be some exposition about the manufacture of kingsprings, and then a few pages later he will get an answer. This is not Proustian recall, either: the dude's meticulously cataloging the world. Nonetheless he owns this world, and is not only proud to display it, but wants its constituent parts underfoot and overhead. His style betrays a desire to wed life with the information we use to explain it.

Still, what a world to own. To say The Windup Girl is resolutely Earthbound is not to say it doesn't have a beautifully realized unreality. The cheshires and megodonts and genetically modified humans in this world should delight any SF fan in need of something strange to snack on. Aliens abound here, and betray the fact that Bacigalupi's achievement is defiantly unliterary, in a context in which the literary is synonymous with the dull and apparently unfashioned. Which is to say that the political responsibilities charged to any reader of The Windup Girl still remain political and not confused with the author's inventions, even when the book garishly reminds you of them. Apocalypse should be so much fun in every fiction.

Books recieved

2010-02-23T16:42:00.000-08:00

Consider the mail and how often you don't want what comes through it. Now consider that I received a bunch of great new books this week, many of them unexpected. Imagine my delight.

Simone Muench's Orange Crush is already on shelves: it features her fantastic suite of poems dealing with the iconography of the Orange Girl.

Dottie Lasky has a new book, Black Life, coming out from Wave Books. She can be added to my list of pals who have been published in The New Yorker ever since Paul Muldoon took over. Find the poem here.

Also from Wave we've got Geoffrey Nutter, who's Water's Leaves and Other Poems was one of my favorite books of the last decade. I say "decade" instead of, say, "last year or the year before" because it's been awhile. A happy thing that his new book, Christopher Sunset, is coming out in April, too. Here's something to tide you over until you run out a pick it up.

I want my 63 minutes back

2010-02-20T10:31:00.000-08:00

At 75 minutes long, Shutter Island is a great little homage by Martin Scorsese to one of his heroes, Val Lewton.

Huh? What's that? You say it's actually 138 minutes long? And that it's fleshed out by a bunch of corny dream sequences and hallucinations which are then redundantly recounted by the characters after they've been shown? That it features gratuitously explicit flashbacks to the protagonist's liberation of Dachau in the middle of what is essentially a corny, preposterous movie about soap-opera schizophrenia?

I've been waiting for Scorsese to make a picture like this for a long time--it's too bad he had the clout to make it exactly the way he wanted it. It could have used a little more RKO front-office interference.

Deitch Projekte

2010-02-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

The Elcor

2010-02-08T16:16:00.000-08:00

Mass Effect 2 is now one of the best reviewed video games of the current generation, and even if the provenance of some of those reviews can't withstand close scrutiny, the game deserves it.

I've never been fond of the vast accretion of item management tools that have dogged RPGs since they moved from the tabletop onto the screen, even in the case of Bioware RPGs. Finding stuff, jettisoning stuff, acquiring stuff, most of it undifferentiated, except by increments of power and efficacy the gameworld's conflict engine scales to match; this is the sort of zero-sum game electronic entertainment too often mistakes for depth. RPGs are like crack to the meritorious, and the "experience point" is among the most ideologically suspect conventions in video games. XP suggests that money does not quantify our experience enough on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis--the RPG player wants it dribbling around her head, instantly quantified, for every conflict resolved either by word or by hammer. In Mass Effect 2, however, advancements in weapon load-outs and powers make sense and jibe rhythmically with the justifiably praised conversation system Bioware has produced. It's the same wish-fulfilling reward system of absurd responsiveness, of course, but it doesn't keep you constantly counting, selling, counting, as happens in a game like Fallout 3. Mass Effect 2, in short, is an incredibly fun and addictive experience.

Yet video games are quibble machines, and I have one: where are the Elcor?

I met my first Elcor early in Mass Effect 1. He was arbitrating a dispute in The Citadel, which is Mass Effect's galactic United Nations. The Elcor are the type of creature that never get a line in most science fiction movies. They look as if they weigh the better part of a ton and have the rhinocerine skin to match their heft. This one was standing behind a computer console, which was strange, as they appear to be quadrupeds; their front legs, though massive, are long and nearly elegant, but probably not fine enough for a computer keyboard. No matter. He had a voice like Eeyore, lugubrious and sad. He was doing something arbitrative between another member of his species and a small, temperamental Volus.

The best thing about the Elcor, however, is that instead of mouths they have something like a cross between a cabbage and the flume of a violin. In order to express emotion to non-Elcor sentients they very thoughtfully append their emotional state verbally to their conversations-- as in, "Annoyed: I cannot help you right now, human," or, "Pleasantly amazed: Thank you for the gift, human," or "Venomous sarcasm: 'What a piece of work is a man...'"

The particularly economic problem of filmmaking made it so that all film aliens are either bipeds or sacks of cloth and rubber. The Elcor represent something that could only exist in video games--an elegant solution to an overworked animator having one more mouth to sync to a vocal track.

Where did they go in Mass Effect 2? The only Elcor I've been able to talk to so far has been a short exchange on a criminal waystation called Omega. They are entirely in the peripheral in this new iteration of the franchise. I miss their gentle ways.

Urs Fischer

2010-02-06T08:36:00.000-08:00

Finally made it to the Urs Fischer show, due to close this Sunday at the New Museum. I got many interesting impressions from it. Most of them had to do with being in a large, sunlit space full of large, conceptual objects; not a bad impression, but not significantly different from similar impressions. I suppose it's worth paying for. I had a guest pass.

Fischer has an interesting anxiety about organic form. One room features massive, Serra-sized sculptures, yet these sculptures are made from flighty aluminum rather than Serra's earthy leads and steels, and mostly hung from the ceiling rather than mounted on the floor. These are expanded from shapes formed from the modest dimensions of the artist's hands; they are as shapeless and absurd as the negative space of a hand when in pursuit of leisure or the flailing grip of small-hours indigestion. They are comforting in the way that King Kong's hand is a comfort to Fay Wray.

On another floor, you step off the elevator and are greeted by a 3-and-a-half foot long lighter with a picture of an underdressed lady on it. Further down, a similarly-scaled box of matches, half-opened, lay on its back. Closer inspection reveals that the mount for these blown up reproductions is a mirrored box; the mirror only pokes through behind the lighter's sparkwheel, where the thumb would ordinarily connect, or at the collapsed, rounded edges of the matchbox.

The gallery space is full of a few dozen of these Brobdingnagian objects. Many of them fit the 90 degree angles of the box; a VCR tape of Love Streams, a CD head cleaner, even a stomach-churning Froot-Loop-and-marshmallow dessert cube exploded to the size of a bus. More interesting are those things that do not fit the box; a pear, the artist's shoe, a motorcycle helmet, the seams of which objects become entire mirrored surfaces reaching forward into faceted, three-sided corners. The negative space of the artist's giant hand is once again represented, this time in the reflective surface surrounding a fizzy fluted mimosa. This is fun, but the message as I see it is self-evident: products tend toward a squareness the human form cannot mimic.

Funny, then, that he decides to open one of the exhibition's two reproduced books, an Italian collection of 19th Century nudes, so as to allow that negative space to shimmer through what it would not otherwise. After all, the book is the first reproducible and marketable media produced in the square format. Why the enforced organicism? And why not include a gun in this collection of objects?

Poetry in its places

2010-02-03T08:43:00.000-08:00

Building a context in which to write is dull work, yet it's the only work available to poets now. We've been watching--we poets are the last ones watching-- epistemology and ideology bat one another in a bloodless Punch and Judy show that reveals and inspires nothing equally. Poetry moves fast because it has no one to account to; if we as poets decide to erase history and replace it with radical epistemology we do it, boom, and the generations of poetry flash by with all the undifferentiated movement of a strobelight. If we continue on, no one will notice. If we pull back, no one will notice. Neither capital nor human solidarity nor the beasts of the field. So perhaps what is interesting about poets to the outsider, if it is interesting (and I am becoming more like an outsider to poetry every day) is in the way we flail around. After all, jobs are starting to look a lot more like poetic post-experimentalism every day, the product of libertarian dreaminess and anxiety.

What I'm saying is; poets lack context. It's hard to review.

Now, if geography as a theme could replace the specific context poetry has lost everyone would be doing it. It's been done often enough, though; it's a great context to borrow. Geography has a staid meaning; and, bonus, its boundaries become supple and weird upon inquiry (read Names On the Land from George Stewart to find out how). This is what a lot people think poetry is, or want it to be. Alas, maps do geography better than poetry. What geography lends us instead is a distorted mirror that's fun to look at but unhealthy to depend on.

With this caveat that I introduce, briefly, two new books of poetry. They are both from Ugly Duckling Press; they are Kevin Vallone's g-point almanac: passyunk lost and Rick Snyder's Escape from Combray. Their combination of poetry and geography are both worthwhile: better, I think they are both playfully done.

I nearly passed on Escape From Combray for the same reason that I passed on Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Yet it had a cover that looked a lot like the early, slim edition of The Maximus Poems from The Figures press. Except in this case the map was not of Glouchester (nor, thankfully, of Combray) but Chicago, a place I spent nearly a decade of my life. If this were a novel, I'd say he captures well both the gray, cozy eternity of its winters and the sterilizing creep of its commerce ("Gold Sounds" begins, "Having become/ the type of person/ who will walk/ to the Shell station/ on a Friday night/ to buy a KitKat"). This is a book of poetry -- a very comfortable, very nice book of poetry, refreshing mainly because the stuff around it is so sharp and niggardly-- that does much of the work that a novel or a short story does. This is not a bad thing, especially since few novelists I know this side of Aleksandar Hemon have have captured as Snyder has what it feels like to actually live in Chicago rather than go on bogus adventures there. This is a book of poetry in which the author goes out and does stuff. The reason "I do this, I do that" was so interesting when Frank O'Hara did it was that he lived at a time when middle-class, intelligent Americans could live interesting lives and write interesting poems without getting blown up by airplanes or mortar fire. Rick Snyder seems to know this but tries it out anyway, with all the requisite KitKats--and passive observation-- that approach implies. This is mostly a guy watching his city change, not someone changing his city. Still, a pastoral that begins "Somewhere between the wine and the nightmare/ my ex-girlfriend's cat/ comes to work with me" has a lot of charm, and charm is good for something.

Keven Varrone's book is the third of a tetrology; I haven't read the first two parts, though I've seen his work around. It's of interest to me because I've been spending time in Philly lately (Passyunk is a town outlying Philadelphia) and talking to some Philly poets in preparation for our upcoming event. I do not know Philly well. Having said that, I do not recognize Philly in these poems--streets are just streets and go unnamed, coal is burned here and there, gulls are displaced, "inland." It could be Gary, Indiana or someplace in West Virginia. Varrone definitely drinks from the postexperimental fountain, and so vague things float by on puffs of the author's intelligence and words go unmoored on the page (and, really, no caps? A la e.e. cummings? Why?). Still, there is too much here to like to pass it up. This is less a meditation on place then on time; in the long, continuing sequence, poems are numbered by season and date and have the literalness of a day captured half at work and half at rest, as most days are. "among the laterals, amazing upward structures" begins one of the poems for some unannuated January 11th. It is not only literally describing a spreadsheet, but has a similar cadence. A week later, "the birds made a dappled panic on the bocce court." Which strikes me a much livelier and in debt to Hopkins, which one never sees.

Buy these books and see for yourself.

It's official

2010-01-27T13:35:00.000-08:00

"Dungeons & Dragons could 'foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,' prison officials said in court."

Dungeons & Dragons Prison Ban Upheld NYTimes.com

Hey, neat!

2010-01-24T16:34:00.001-08:00

Soldiering through

2010-01-23T09:38:00.000-08:00

I've given myself a deadline of Tuesday to finish a story.

This deadline business never goes well for me. The story keeps unraveling and I find myself rapidly stuffing the cotton back into the seams and stapling the seams shut. Why can't I just sit down and write a neat, clean ten-pager? It seems like a lack of good judgment, ultimately.

Punch Kick Pause Punch

2010-01-17T16:50:00.000-08:00

To play this game in front of any human being over the age of 12-- indeed, just to play it in front of yourself-- is to develop a sense that something has gone horribly wrong with your recreation. This choice of leisure bespeaks some profound defect in your makeup. That niggling thought that shadows much of our play...is amplified to the point of palpable shame by Bayonetta's relentless barrage of steaming tawdry nonsense.

So begins Iroquois Pliskin's recent post about Bayonetta, which ends:

You cannot pass up this game for its visual and thematic inanity. The libretto for your average operatic masterpiece is some genuinely nonsense, and this does nothing to obscure the beauty of the music that is its rationale. As Frank Lantz astutely noted, games are more music than cinema. Let the music take your mind.

Unbridled admiration combined with mouth-watering disgust of just this sort seems to pretty much sum up what people have been writing about this game. As for me, I am truly enjoying the smooth, unapologetic, and nearly-mechanical videogaminess of this title. Its self-awarness is of itself as a Video Game, and not as a Video Game attempting to be something else.

Canada Dry

2010-01-13T15:56:00.000-08:00

1
It's the layering of gimmicks--rhyme schemes and repetition and metric jingles--that lend poetry its natural opacity. In fact, the whole history of free verse has been an attempt to replicate that opacity without the appearance of gimmicks at all. The Oulipo had a word for a text wherein the constraint is to produce a text which reads as if written under a restriction, without any restriction being imposed at all--"Canada Dry" (derived from a series of advertisements in the 60's that promoted ginger ale as a "kicky" alternative to real alcohol). In other words, the supposed difficulty of poetry is not a poem-to-poem problem, but a universal one. Assuming that, it's also not worth arguing. It's fortunate for the crossword puzzle industry that what they produced was never mistaken for soulcraft--they are neither expected to fill in the puzzles nor make them unsolvable.

There are poets who, in an effort to bypass the difficulty of poetry, write little synopses of the novels they would have written if they weren't so lazy. They aren't difficult, it's true, but they're also boring, too boring even to understand things like games and puzzles, boring even in translation, and are not worth talking about. It's the people engaged in the 30-year cult of difficulty (70 years, if you count The New Criticism) you have to try to talk down from this stuff. They're the ones getting too old to continue the pretense, who created our very difficult world in a situation of unparalleled ease, who are still squatting on a big chunk of poetic real estate, and we younger writers should know better than to allow them to fuck with our dignity, and especially with our fun. No other generation has folded so readily before their elders as we have before ours. They will die soon, and what will we have? Nothing of our own. Not an art, nor a legitimate politics: nothing. Just this meaningless word called difficulty.

2
After hosting a reading of self-identified "literary" science fiction writers this Thursday--a very talented group, and one of the more exciting and fun readings we've had--I was chatting with one of the founders of The Interstitial Arts Foundation. She was singing the praises of an annual science fiction convention outside of Boston called Readercon. She hit upon all the things that make it exciting to me: "it's science fiction writing, but it's the rare convention without the distractions. It's by and for writers." At first, I was excited by the focus of it. But something deeper hit me about it. I'm tired of the "focus" of poets. Because it's all focus, all the time. What luxury, I was thinking, to be in actual danger of being distracted by one's peers. I dream of being so distracted by another poet, instead of watching him or her pretend, in drudgery and recitation, to have honed their specific ideology of language to a killing point.

As we discussed the merits of Readercon, I was thinking the analog to poetry would be if we were in a situation in which there were regularly these fantastic Rhythm and Rhyme conferences featuring birdwatchers, video game developers, graphic designers, musicians and hopscotch athletes --conventions available from month to month in states all over the country, held together by the specifically unserious love of its participants-- and that at least one of them had the rare benefit of featuring only poets. This does not exist of course, because poetry shares with factories and offices and government bureaus everywhere an obsession with perfecting singular processes and the neat-freak abhorrence of the non-ideological.

Where else can you find such clarifying unprofessionalism as in science fiction?

Moon!

2010-01-10T16:30:00.000-08:00

I don't know if it'd make much sense to make an annual list of top science fiction movies. Frankly, not enough of them get made to compete, but this year was different.

If you missed Moon you owe it to yourself to rent it when it comes out on DVD next week. It's not that the story's so great--the twist at the end is the story, and while it's fun it's also sort of cheap. The really great thing about it is twofold. First, you've got Sam Rockwell pretty much holding down the fort solo, and to his credit, he's fascinating to watch throughout. That's he's really the only actor in the movie illustrates the point that what's merely intellectual in a high-concept Louis Malle movie becomes actual, philosophical dreamwork in a spacesuit (that is to say, when the director has already asked you to suspend your disbelief at the door). Secondly, it's obvious that Duncan Jones likes the moon. I'll bet money that he liked the moon since he was a kid. I bet he's spent time daydreaming of the peculiar motion of men in fluffy spacesuits moving and bouncing around against the moon's desert, and that clear, clean shine the horizonline makes when unobstructed by atmospheric blur. I'm thinking he did not so much intend to make a movie but to do something with the moon. A movie was just the way to do it, the way Willis O'Brien made a beautiful animated monkey climbing the Empire State Building and asked himself: what can I do with this?

Runners up: District 9, of course, and I hate to say it but I sort of liked Avatar. Of course, I loved last year's Star Trek, but it does not bear repeated home viewings, as I discovered recently. How does Kirk not get arrested for bald Machiavellian intrigue, anyway?

Speaking of Adam Roberts...

2010-01-03T09:02:00.000-08:00

Speaking of Adam Roberts, he has an interesting recent post on Science Fiction and Poetics:

Hazard Adams, The Offense of Poetry [Punkadiddle]

THE "BEAST" SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR

2009-12-28T02:23:00.000-08:00

THE "BEAST" SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR

Okay, a few caveats. There's no way I'm going to be reading everything released in 2009. That should be pretty much obvious in the poetry category, too, except that with poetry you don't have to wait around a year for the paperback to come out. Hardcover science fiction in anathema to me, so I haven't read the big hitters like Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which I've heard is great. That said, here's my myopic look at the year just past.

YELLOW BLUE TIBIA
Adam Roberts
Orbit Books

Probably the best novel released last year, Adam Robert's book is less about a vast conspiracy unthawing in perstroika-era Soviet Russia involving aliens, Cherynobl, Stalin, Scientology and the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion, and more a manifesto of why one writes science fiction in the first place, as well as a well-hidden excoriation of those that do so thoughtlessly. "A realist writer may break his protagonist's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying...How can this not produce callouses on those tenderer portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?" (He also took the Hugo Awards down a peg this year with a great essay on his blog, Punkadiddle.)

THE SECRET HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION
ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kressel
Tachyon

I was wary at first, looking at the contributors. Don DeLillo and T.C. Boyle and Margaret Atwood and so on. The introductory essay, which echoes and references Jonathan Lethem's 10-year-old essay from the Village Voice, asking what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon had won the Nebula for Gravity's Rainbow back in 1974, is equally obnoxious. A word to the wise, SF writers, comic book artists, graffiti artists, video game developers, et al.--"hi quality" is a racket real artists have been trying to wriggle out from under for 40 years. There is no "hi quality." From our America-has-won, 21st Century position, it may never have existed. Philip Roth is a "great artist" only in the sense that Micheal Jackson was a "great artist." That is, it wouldn't matter either way. However, in spite of the editor's worst intentions, this collection is redeemed by its actual, present, right-there vitality. The work inside is not good literature. It's good science fiction, which at least has the potential to be worthwhile.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF J.G. BALLARD
FSG

Of course.

ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE
Electic Velocipede finally hot a Hugo nod this year. They deserve it. If you're interested in seeing which kids are publishing Karen Joy Fowler these days (just kidding! They publish a lot of stuff, honestly) this is the magazine to go to. Well-rooted and risk-taking at the same time.

GARBAGE TREND OF THE YEAR
If you want a weird-science/Jane Austen pastiche, read Susanah Clarke's terrific Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell from a few years back, or else read the Oulipo Compendiuum for fun, genre-trashing experiments in language. Whatever you do, skip this whole gutless "I'm going to read something trashy but really I'm not" white-girl phenomenon of splicing Jane Austen novels with Zombie-related nouns. It's strictly Shirley Temple.

BEST POETRY OF THE YEAR

2009-12-09T08:57:00.000-08:00

BEST POETRY OF THE YEAR
In no particular order

Ish Klein, Union!
Canarium Books
Ish Klein's first book of poems caught me totally unprepared when I first heard them last February at AWP. If listening to most poetry is like listening to a radio tuned between the classical and NPR stations, Ish Klein represents a station all the way down the dial, playing Amon Düül and The Beach Boys. I don't think that accurately represents her freewheeling, rhapsodic and honest approach, but that's how I felt. She's a refreshing presence in poetry. Likewise, Canarium is a great publisher--they have really terrific work on the slate for next year, too.

Noelle Kocot, Sunny Wednesday
Wave Books
Noelle Kocot's "Poem for the End of Time," touched on the political disaster of the 00's and the personal disaster of losing a loved one: not only is it great, it's probably the poem--the collection of poems--most likely to last beyond this sorry decade. Sunny Wednesday finds her on the other side of that maelstrom, willing to put her heroic, playfulness to post-traumatic use. It's often funny. "Persephone would lie awake nights," she writes,"Beating off, thinking about Olive."

Matvei Yankelovich, Boris By The Sea
Octopus Books
There has been a lot of great translation within the last year: Cavafy, Char, Rilke, Vallejo, among others. I try not to review or comment on translation--I possess a little French and nothing else. Also, I don't trust it. Translation--or rather, the small industry of translation-- sponsors the notion that poetry is something else: an intellectual job, something inherently decent, to be spread like television PSA's, something one works at rather than experiences, something one can safely say has been predigested in advance. It runs counter to my way or reading poetry. Okay, I'm probably wrong. We might agree on one thing, however: this has been a great year for Matvei Yankelevich, a great editor of works in translation and a great translator himself, notably of Daniel Kharms. Boris By The Sea fuses his interest in his translated subjects in a way that puts him in the shoes of the more personal and intrusive, and therefore more interesting, translators like Pound. His witty, absurd prose is unlike anything else this side of Kharms himself.

Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson, eds., Poems for the Millennium, Volume Three, The U of C Book of Romantic and Postromantic Poetry
University of California Press
Finally, a book that actually delivers on the categorical irresponsibility only hinted at by the revealing yet squishy inclusiveness of the first two volumes. I suspect there are very few scholars of 19th Century literature who wouldn't find this anthology grasping and bizarre: what fun! What a disappointment that it was largely ignored on its release earlier this year. Volume Three plays Twister in its attempt to isolate only those works which support its thesis-- namely that the avant-garde as codified in the mid-1970's actually started sometime in the mid-1770's! The odd thing is, it all starts to make sense--for instance, finally someone has managed to get Goethe, Christopher Smart and Walt Whitman all together in a single, focused anthology. One of the more fascinating reads this year.

WORST POETRY DEVELOPMENT OF THE YEAR
It's got to be this whole deal about the Dickman brothers. An article appears in the New Yorker praising these kids for their magical telepathic twin powers and suddenly they're our generation's great white hope. Is there no one else who finds these poems linked only by a flabby, self-satisfied malaise?

Tonight! Amiri Baraka!

2009-12-03T12:16:00.000-08:00

Wow! Tonight the store is hosting Amiri Baraka!
Hipsters, take notice!

Bang Bang Discuss

2009-11-29T16:26:00.000-08:00

At some point in the last two years or so, perhaps since the annus mirabilus of 2007's third quarter, video games, as a general phenomenon, surpassed poetry in capturing my interest--this puts them just behind music and neck-and-neck with science fiction in the hierarchy of my personal and savagely irresponsible cosmos of forms. My conflicts with them are numerous: they're bad for the environment, they raise the heart-rate without offering any real exercise, they conflate violence and form, the critical culture surrounding games attributes an illusory agency to the user, using the rhetoric of "interactivity," that's just not there. But at least they create conflict, and games criticism is the last place you can actually find people talking about how a particular art form works, rather than what it's supposed to do, or where the author eats lunch or gets indigestion or teaches or how she feels about things contra other artists. The greatest thing about video games is that so few people confuse them with art. Most of it lacks the barbaric seriousness of the last century. Video games, unlike most things written or vocalised today, actually have a chance at becoming poetry. I've gone from using games as a reward system for writing to becoming very engaged by the culture surrounding them.

An interesting and relatively new site is doing a good job of rounding up the state of VG commentary. It's called Critical Distance. Take a look.

Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

2009-11-10T10:14:00.000-08:00

Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

Ronald Johnson

2009-11-04T09:47:00.000-08:00

I've been AWOL, I know: but then, is blog-neglect really such a crime?
I've been working on a short review of Lev Grossman's The Magicians. To come.
Yet I was gratefully distracted by rereading Ronald Johnson's posthumous The Shrubberies:

burnish bones
by maggot

no Lenore,
nor Minotaur

only light, to
say the least

immure by theft
beast loft

& suckle star
are & are & are

--

Other distractions include Niall Ferguson's informative if growth-happy The Ascent of Money. Also, if I'm being honest, I'm distracted by this. For which I make no apology.