December 2011
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The Year in Reading: Poetry →
Dan Chiasson remembers some of his favorite individual poems & poetry books of 2011. In other news, why haven’t I read Srikanth Reddy’s “Voyager” yet?
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You Can't Always Get What You Want: On Stephen... →
I love this article because I love Stephen King. I think Taylor is spot-on in his assessment of the way most people usually think about King—
The serious consideration King has sporadically received over the years peaked in 2003, when the National Book Foundation honored him with a medal for lifetime achievement …
But respectability can leave a writer as underappreciated as dismissal...
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“How many people came and stayed a certain time,
Uttered light or dark speech...”
– John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
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The Year in Review: 2011 Movie Character Fantasy... →
Chris and I drafted fantasy football teams with our favorite 2011 movie characters. Click through to see who’s projected to win.
brightwalldarkroom:
2011 MOVIE CHARACTER FANTASY FOOTBALL DRAFT
by Chris & Elizabeth Cantwell
(with Special Guest Judge Brendan Joyce, Fantasy Football Expert)
We’ve watched a lot of movies this year. And as the NFL playoffs approach, what better way to...
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“What philosophy worthy of the name has truly been able to avoid the link between...”
– Michel Serres (from Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time)
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White Christmas (1954)
I wrote this essay a few years ago and still really like it.
brightwalldarkroom:
WHITE CHRISTMAS, DECONSTRUCTED
by Elizabeth Cantwell
As most of my friends know, I tend to conceptualize movies in terms of brief, disconnected scenes that for whatever reason stuck in my mind. (So: “The Godfather is the movie where there’s a cat on Brando’s lap, and people are making some kind of red sauce,...
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Bloodletting Over an Anthology →
In case you needed to be caught up on the Rita Dove/Helen Vendler/”What does 20th Century American Poetry mean?” dispute.
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Best Of 2011: Subject Lines of Emails I Wrote
are you online? i’m bored
hey I know I send you poems all the time now
don’t read that document I sent you yesterday
Fastest & Easiest Way To Fail My Class
This is your kid
Shroom
HI CHRIS, HI
more cake, etc.
READ IT AND WEEP
Tumblr is weird.
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"Rushing through the Night," by Dean Young
What you wait for rushes through the night. Darkness rushes through the summer night so fast, now it is nearly light. He holds her hand, presses as much as he can see over her sleeping body. The owl rushes back to its nest to regurgitate mice. So many cars rushing through the night into the city with its buildings stuck in the ground. He looks at his hands, they seem like someone else’s,...
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“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects;...”
– John Keats, from a letter to his brothers (George & Thomas) on Dec. 22, 1817.
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“I will say that learning how to write has to do in part with learning how to...”
– Frederick Seidel, in his Paris Review interview.
I am awful about writing what I think I ought to write. It’s really hard to give in, as Seidel puts it, to your own themes, your own obsessions (and not feel somehow guilty for having those obsessions, for putting the reader through the wringer...
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“But then around Section 5, his legs began to loosen, his lungs to unclench....”
– The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
(Dear everyone who told me I should read this book: you were right.)
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Dissertation Update
You know shit is getting serious when you spend your morning paging obscure books from the Grand Depository.
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Recipe #17: Amursanu-pigeon stew
Split the pigeon in half, add other meat.
Prepare the water, add fat and salt to taste, breadcrumbs, onion, samidu, leeks, and garlic (first soak the herbs in milk).
When it is cooked, it is ready to serve.
From a Babylonian tablet containing 25 recipes for stews and soups. Who wants to whip up a batch for the holidays?
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"Universes" and "Black Stovepipe Hat," by...
UNIVERSES Think of the suckers on the tentacles Without the tentacles. A honeycomb Of space writhing in the dark. Time deforming it, time itself deformed. Fifteen billion light-years later a president Of the United States gives the Gettysburg Address. Two minutes. The solar system Star beams down on him. Other special stars express themselves, Not shy at all, particles Of powder floating on the...
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Also
the intro to that interview is amazing:
The interview was conducted at John Ashbery’s apartment in the section of Manhattan known as Chelsea. When I arrived, Ashbery was away, and the doorman asked me to wait outside. Soon the poet arrived and we went up by elevator to a spacious, well-lighted apartment in which a secretary was hard at work. We sat in easy chairs in the living room,...
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From the Paris Review interview with John Ashbery
INTERVIEWER: You said a minute ago that reading modern poetry enabled you to see the vitality present in older poetry. In your mind, is there a close connection between life and poetry?
ASHBERY: In my case I would say there is a very close but oblique connection. I have always been averse to talking about myself, and so I don't write about my life the way the confessional poets do. I don't want to bore people with experiences of mine that are simply versions of what everybody goes through. For me, poetry starts after that point. I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them. I know that I have exactly the opposite reputation, that I am totally self-involved, but that's not the way I see it.
INTERVIEWER: You have often been characterized as a solipsist, and I wonder if this isn't related to your reputation for obscurity. The way the details of a poem will be so clear, but the context, the surrounding situation, unclear. Perhaps this is more a matter of perspective than any desire to befuddle.
ASHBERY: This is the way that life appears to me, the way that experience happens. I can concentrate on the things in this room and our talking together, but what the context is is mysterious to me. And it's not that I want to make it more mysterious in my poems—really, I just want to make it more photographic. I often wonder if I am suffering from some mental dysfunction because of how weird and baffling my poetry seems to so many people and sometimes to me too. Let me read you a comment which appeared in a review of my most recent book, from some newspaper in Virginia. It says: “John Ashbery is emerging as a very important poet, if not by unanimous critical consent then certainly by the admiration and awe he inspires in younger poets. Oddly, no one understands Ashbery.” That is a simplification, but in a sense it is true, and I wonder how things happened that way. I'm not the person who knows. When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn't read poetry much anyway. But I also felt that my work was not beyond understanding. It seemed to me rather derivative of or at least in touch with contemporary poetry of the time, and I was quite surprised that nobody seemed to see this. So I live with this paradox: on the one hand, I am an important poet, read by younger writers, and on the other hand, nobody understands me. I am often asked to account for this state of affairs, but I can't.
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My Feature Script Made the 2011 Black List →
chriscantwell:
Number 16: THE KNOLL.
I could not be more proud, or less surprised.
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From "Tape for the Turn of the Year," by A. R....
I devour the sunlight off leaves, the sound out of jet engines, I devour the whistle out of the bird, bust his guts open and devour their churning: where is the source? I eat the wind, frilly as a nap, off the mossbeds: I get down & close-up...
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adiaz87 asked: What inspires you to write?
'The Artist': This is your brain on silent films →
I love the brain.
“If we were able to record your brain while you watch a silent movie, we would see your auditory cortex activate, even though there’s not a single sound that impacts your eardrum,” said Kaspar Meyer, research assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute. “There’s a creative process involved....
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“I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of...”
– Wallace Stevens, in a 1904 note. (via washingtonpoststyle)
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"Her my body," by Bob Hicok
The dog licks my hand as I worry about the left nipple of the woman in the bathroom. She is drying her hair, the woman whose left nipple is sore. We looked this evening for diagonal cuts or discoloration or bite marks from small insects that may be in our bed. It is a good bed, a faithful bed. A bed that won’t be hurt by the consideration we gave to the possibility of small though...
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Bookslut | Fire Wind by Yván Yauri →
Hey, I wrote a poetry review for Bookslut! Go check it out if you like poetry in general, or poetry in translation, or Ugly Duckling Presse, or me.
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True Stories from Saturday Night
Tonight I ate a frozen pizza followed by a pop tart balanced on an old Elle magazine (that I only have because it was delivered to the wrong address, because PLEASE, I do not subscribe to that), wrapped myself in a fuzzy blue blanket, and watched a movie while calling my dog things like “lamb butt” and “stink mouth.”
Lesson learned: GETTING MARRIED DOES NOT TAKE AWAY THE...
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chriscantwell:
markbringelson reblogged your photo: In case you were wondering, here’s as much of the…
[Re: It’s a Wonderful Life] Ok, I suspect I understand why perfectly intelligent people like this film, but honestly I cannot stand it. Basically, I loathe it. Stewart is annoying as hell all the way through; one of his worst performances. The film itself was shot like a frickin’ television...
