October 2008
1 post
Temporary Suspension
Dear readers,
If you have been watching this blog recently, then you have been watching nothing. I am temporarily therefore declaring this tumblr suspended. I will be blogging about food at http://xianonfood.tumblr.com/ and later I will be starting another tumblr about global events.
—Brown
September 2008
3 posts
SMS/SOS
callmeicebox:
First of all, if you had chronic pain, I really do not think you would want a hug.
Annals of bookchat: Elegy for TitlePage revoked;...
The comments have been exploding here with news from the inside that Titlepage is not dead, merely in hibernation. Well, thank the ether for that! In the meantime I have been dosing on bookchat archivally, tying a rope around my arm and gleefully sticking every half hour a needle called Linebreak—an all-audio program from the 1990s about poetry, mostly avant and post-avant—into the back of my...
Look in the puddle, Narcissus!
To kick off a series of posts on the subject of Narcissism, we will begin by pointing to an essay by the poet Gabriel Gudding, “From Petit to Langpo: A History of Solipsism and Experience in Mainstream American Poetics Since the Rise of Creative Writing.” Here are two relevant quotations:
To this day the personal experience of the writer has been so foregrounded that the writer...
August 2008
20 posts
Official Verse Culture IV
1. Shelter won’t come from the sky.
So there, Paul Bowles.
Official Verse Culture III
1. An erratic fountain that makes
I bet that fountain is actually a metaphor. What could it be a metaphor for? Perhaps poetry itself? Correct!
2. Your hands are indispensible. Without
This poem is actually pretty good. It proceeds to list off a few things that we do with our hands—including hand jobs! And then it contrasts them favorably with the legs and ends with a call for all legs to be...
Elegy for titlepage.tv: What Went Wrong? And Who's...
Amid growing, entirely justified hysteria about toxic climate change in the literary ecosystem, as book review sections across the United States are shuttered, when the nation’s rivers of lyricism taste of the piss of critics addled by their own bile, while scheming illiterate frauds of criminal descent turn their pseudo-literary exercises in vacancy into high-stakes con games, what may have been...
The truth is out there
Was briefly transfixed yesterday (and sadly, I can’t now remember how I stumbled across it) by a preposterously amateurish September 11-conspiracy theory video purporting to explain that THE JEWS did it.
The Vimeo server seems to be slow as hell, so I didn’t get very far into this sub-Loose Change nonsense, though I did see some top-notch material — references in the titles to...
Official Verse Culture II
Despite pleasant weather and a nice free lunch, a mostly foul mood prevailed today after a largely sleepless night. I will emit some aggression by listing a series of first lines from immediately mediocre and sentimental poems I’ve read over the past few hours: 1. There is safety around the smell of coffee and laughter. Right away you can tell that this poet is going to elaborate for about twenty...
The Fake Saakashvili Profile
I was reminded by Delmore, who learned of it here, that back in 2006 I became fascinated with the phony psychological character study of Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili put out by Russia, which sold it as the work of Scandinavian, German, and Dutch doctor’s. Below is an edited version of the full paper.
ANEMNESIS AND FAMILY HISTORY Raised in a single-parent family environment, the...
Official Verse Culture
Who is it that can tell me why my bed seems so hard and why the bedclothes will not stay upon it?
Good question, Ovid.
But what if Corinna came by? In that case, Cetera quid nescit?
Better to live in Rome or in exile in Tomis than in the Third Reich.
I have made an elegy for myself it is true.
But what’s up with Fergus Allen? Apparently, he’s started a blog, posting with...
The Nobel Prize
Let me commence this response by averring that I will never “go all” or even a little Slate. So if you are going there, you will be going there alone. Your questions: 1. What is Nobel’s greatest sin, if he may be said to have one? (And we can speak of sin in the absolute sense, or merely sin in the eyes of his now-many online haters.) Is it the leaving of the wife and kids? Or the lengthy...
Brown and Smith go all Slate
Here is how time gets wasted. I am reading Spencer Ackerman’s blog. It is a fine blog, to be sure. But reading blogs at work is already a waste of time, particularly when you compulsively return, throughout the afternoon, to the list of blogs (which I call “USA”) on your bookmarks toolbar, in the vein hope that Josh Marshall or Andrew Sullivan or The Plank has updated, so that...
Watch—Brown
Homicide on Cubs Path
There was once a coffee shop by the name of Brown & Smith. It was on Main Street, in a town. In terms of area, the town was large, bigger perhaps than the commonwealth’s capital. There were few other places to go for food. They were called Carbone’s and the Golden Spoon. For ice cream, there was Brigham’s. For drinking, you had the Central Tap Room, Cornell’s Roadhouse, and T.J.’s...
lasso
what a mindfuck that is. and sort of utterly transfixing. i watched to the end just to figure out what the hell it was. is that morricone? from once upon a time in america? and does the lasso man live in some kind of mies van der rohe glass house?
—Smith
