December 2010
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Christmas Week: The Nutcracker (1977)
This Christmas, let’s all celebrate Mikhail!
brightwalldarkroom:
The Nutcracker, Or: Baryshnikov’s Incredible Body and Kirkland’s Dream
by Elizabeth Wilcox
Christmas is the one time of year when a larger subsection of the population than usual—say, 5% instead of 2%—thinks about ballet. Yes, I know Black Swan just came out, but that’s not an annual occurrence—it may even have been...
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Current Fashion Trends, As Inferred By...
1) Scarves with sequins on them. 2) Cowboy hats two sizes too small for your head. 3) Sweatshirts with human anatomy drawn on them. 4) iPod earbuds worn sans iPod. 5) Capri pants with ballet flats and ankle socks. 6) Tears.
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Neutral Milk Hotel - Ghost
From "Gravity & Levity," by Bin Ramke
The heron resolves itself from the gray lake the water conversely the woman dissolves in sex, her own in liquefaction but the flesh reforms like wings unfolded flight like light drips glistens the setting sun the horizon first above now below the bird the evening only local the spinning earth flings its fluid surface dissolving itself into itself its ecstasy the need we feel each for each, the...
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Hot Metal Bridge, Fall 2010 →
katiecoyle:
You should probably start getting excited. This issue of Hot Metal Bridge is objectively the best thing ever to happen, featuring superb stories from Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Ethel Rohan, and Linda Tzoref, an interview of Vestal McIntyre by some girl, and (I just noticed) poetry from Elizabeth Wilcox! You’re welcome, internet.
Yes! I have not yet read all of these things, but I am super...
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Die Hard (1988) →
brightwalldarkroom:
DIE HARD IS ABOUT FUCKING
by Chris Cantwell
Die Hard is about fucking. Actually, there’s no sex in Die Hard—except for a brief awkward topless woman in the holiday party scene—but you can count the entire film as a metaphor for sex. Which I do.
Sometimes I don’t want to know what’s happening in Chris’s head. And sometimes I can’t get enough of...
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How Oprah's Book Club Gets Dickens—and... →
This article is EXACTLY how I feel about Oprah’s Book Club, but put into better wording than I could ever come up with. People I know who swear by it defend themselves by saying things like “At least Oprah is getting people to read!” … But Hillary Kelly explains why the way she gets people to read is far less than ideal.
Since its inception in 1996, the Book Club has...
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Crowd-Sourcing my PhD exams
So I’m coming up with reading lists for my field exams—a bloody, paper-writing battle that can only end in death—and one of the lists will be based around contemporary poetry. While I write poetry, and I read a lot of contemporary poetry, there’s also SO MUCH out there that I always feel like I’m missing something—some awesome young poet I haven’t heard of, or a grizzled...
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Searching the Brain for the Spark of Creative... →
Huh.
In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.
This article really interests me, partly because I’m fascinated by how our brains work, and partly because the video they showed the people in the experiment was a Robin Williams...
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"The Frozen Ball of Rattlesnakes," by Thomas Lux
How did they get in a ball? What do you mean by a ball, how many in it, and do you mean stone-frozen? Or do you mean dormant, sluggish, half-hibernating? Snakes can do that. A few creatures can, right? Rattlesnakes live in other countries, too. There are many species, right? I’ve seen copperheads and cottonmouths in some mountains and a few desultory streams I knew. I live in a large...
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Dean Young Needs a Heart Transplant →
poetbabble:
While it could easily be the title of one of his poems; in fact, his situation is grave. Tony Hoagland makes a thoughtful appeal for donations:
If you know Dean, you know that his non-anatomical heart, though hardly normal, is not malfunctioning, but great in scope, affectionate and loyal. And you know that his poetry is what the Elizabethans would have called “one of the...
NYT: 14 Actors Acting →
meetingofthemimes:
losemybuttons:
msavignon:
“This year’s great performers show — with a few gestures and props but without dialogue or story — what acting is.”
Includes Jesse Eisenberg, Tilda Swinton, James Franco …
Music by Owen Pallett.
Frames Janco leaves behind the metaphorical and literally makes out with himself.
Cassel’s is good but I think Bardem’s is the best. He’s so...
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“We are nothing more than a state of virtual fart.”
– Jean Baudrillard, Pataphysics
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While attempting to prove a thesis about Byron and fractal geometry at two in the morning last night (haha! Let’s not speak of this again!) I came across this section in a poem by Jonathan Swift (“On Poetry: A Rhapsody”) which mocks, in true Swiftean fashion, the ideas of infinite recursion and self-similarity which form the basis of fractal geometry:
So, naturalists observe, a...
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About to attempt my first run since completely...
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