NPR's Decade in Music

Why was I so psyched to see that R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet made it onto the list? Oh right, because it's hilaaarious.



Even better, the Jimmy Kimmel spoofs:



Awww, Jimmy and Sarah used to be my favorite celebrity couple. Maybe Jimmy and Guillermo can be my favorite celebrity couple now.

"Mad Girls’ Love Songs: Two Women Poets—a Professor and Graduate Student—Discuss Sylvia Plath, Angst, and the Poetics of Female Adolescence"

If you have access to Project Muse, you can read the article on Sylvia Plath and teenage girls that I co-wrote with Arielle Greenberg.

If you don't have access and want to read it, email me! beccavista[at]yahoo[dot]com


Here's the abstract:

The legacy of Sylvia Plath’s poetry and the received notion of the teenage girl writer wallowing in self-pity are discussed in terms of their significance to adolescent female readers and their ramifications for girlhood culture at large. Plath’s legacy endures in part because of the recognition that a fluctuation in moods and personas is often the experience of young women, of writers, of those who struggle with depression or anxiety (and the overlap between these populations), and also because of Plath’s ability to craft the fever of her emotions into poems that rely on bold and rich figurative language. This essay uses memoir, a survey of Plath’s popular and critical reception, and a close reading of Plath poems that take on more adolescent concerns and themes, then concludes by looking at contemporary women poets whose aesthetics, attitudes and themes are relevant to contemporary teenage girl readers.

This Bookstore is Awesome and This Party Idea is Hilarious

TWO PUBLISHING PHENOMENA
two books phenomenally released
AT THE SAME TIME

november 16/17
MIDNIGHT

Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt Ave.
Brooklyn, NY

A never-before-seen, new publication from the posthumous Vladimir N.
AND
A we've-seen-it-all-before, new publication from the maverick Sarah P.

THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA by V. Nabokov
&
GOING ROGUE by S. Palin

Dress as your favorite character from either book.

We will attempt to perform a simultaneous (marathon?) reading of both.

Copies of THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA will be available for sale.
A single copy of GOING ROGUE will be available for perusal.

***
THIS IS THE BIGGEST PUBLISHING NEWS SINCE THE SIMULTANEOUS PUBLICATION OF _LOLITA_ AND L.RON HUBBARD'S _DIANETICS_
***

Warsaw Bikini

My review of Sandra Simonds' terrific Warsaw Bikini, one of my favorite manuscripts from a batch of Switchback finalists a couple years back, and published about a year ago by Bloof Books, is now up in the ninth issue of H_NGM_N. Here's an excerpt:

Finally, I’m interested in Simonds’ work as a new and especially vivid example of a trend in 21st-century poetics: at this moment, contemporary women poets in particular are in the habit of envisioning fantastical alternative realities and placing an “I” there to narrate what they see and do. This “I” takes its cues from the lyric (it wants to sing its subjectivity) and the dramatic monologue (it talks and acts in the space of the poem), but it most of all gives an imaginary performance, one that says: Artifice is everything. As I contemplate the reasons for this tendency, I think first about how women’s imaginations have not dreamt up much of the real world that surrounds us. It’s easy to forget that the brilliant, innovative American women poets writing right now would not have been able to vote just one century ago. This fact might seem irrelevant at first glance, but it’s the most hard-hitting evidence of the extent to which women have been prevented from shaping the political and cultural institutions we take for granted. Perhaps poetic visionaries like Simonds give a clue to a women-fashioned world when a real one still seems a long way off; accordingly, their poems eschew verisimilitude in favor of flights of fancy, escapades, dioramas, snowglobes, utopias. At the close of the first decade of the 21st century, there still aren’t many places where women can be the producers of culture without first having to enter into, and navigate, a cultural system produced by men. And while poetic language is not a patriarchal green zone, we could argue that it affords women a lot more autonomy than other modes of cultural production.

Spooky Mischief

A website tried to call this a Flaming Lips costume, but I'm not so sure.


Did I post this pic last year? Anyway, here's an amazing sign from the South Loop Chicago store where you can pay $39.99 to be a slutty anything you want.

I think I'm going to be a bunch of Judys for Halloween. Not sure exactly how this will work, but yesterday some PhD buds helped me come up with ideas: Judith Butler, Judy Blume, Hey Jude, Judith Light, Jude the Obscure, Judy Garland, Jude Law as Hamlet, Judy Jetson.

Help me think of more Judys!

This is sort of like a game Jenny and I would play as teenagers when we'd think of all the Jerrys we could, find their photos on the internet (photos were much harder to find on the internet circa 1998!), print them out and tape them to the neighbors' outdoor nativity scene. This was the logical outcome of one of our favorite exclamations: "Jesus Jerry and Joseph!" Doesn't this game make perfect sense to you?? Doesn't it seem like we could all use a little more mischief in our lives??? It will ensure youth and keep your skin firm and supple.

Here

are some poems (as in "some pig!") in the new Absent that you should probs read.

Ovid & Baudrillard: 'We Did This for a Show'

He gave a never to be repeated kiss to his son, and lifting upwards on his wings, flew ahead, anxious for his companion, like a bird, leading her fledglings out of a nest above, into the empty air. He urged the boy to follow, and showed him the dangerous art of flying, moving his own wings, and then looking back at his son. Some angler catching fish with a quivering rod, or a shepherd leaning on his crook, or a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough, saw them, perhaps, and stood there amazed, believing them to be gods able to travel the sky.

--Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk VIII:183-235 Daedalus and Icarus (8 A.D.)

We are witnessing the end of perspective and panoptic space [...] and hence the very abolition of the spectacular. Television, in the case of the Louds [insert Heenes] for example, is no longer a spectacular medium. We are no longer in the society of the spectacle which the situationists talked about, nor in the specific types of alienation and repression which this implied. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium and the message (McLuhan?) is the first great formula of this new age. There is no longer any medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real, and it can no longer even be said that the latter is distorted by it.

Such immixture, such a viral, endemic, chronic, alarming presence of the medium, without our being able to isolate its effects--spectralised, like those publicity holograms sculptured in empty space with laser beams, the event filtered by the medium--the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV--an indiscernible chemical solution: we are all Louds [insert Heenes], doomed not to invasion, to pressure, to violence and to blackmail by the media and the models, but to their induction, to their infiltration, to their illegible violence.

--Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Semiotext[e], 1983)

Always already happening, always already watching.
Slippery/greasepole wandering/runaway hoax.

--Bex Klaver

Flarf Screen Snag

Now Flarf is so easy, you don't even have to copy & paste!
Just hit PRINT SCREEN.


(actually I was thinking about the Gwendolyn Brooks poem "The Mother" that we were talking about yesterday in class, and trying to place the echo I heard in that line "I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children." It must be Eliot but for some reason I'm not 100% convinced.)

(also I totally remember one of those Google suggestions as a song we'd have to sing over and over in Catholic school and has popped into my head over and over since then ... Liturgical Music class as brainwashing?!?)

This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like

In May 2009, Danielle Pafunda curated the first installment of Delirious Hem's This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like. This forum featured women discussing the relationship between their feminism & their poetry, and these contributions elicited thoughtful responses from women & men bloggers alike. Mark Wallace was one of those bloggers. Together, we've curated This is What a (Pro)Feminist [Man Poet] Looks Like. We hope you'll visit, read, comment, & enjoy!

Monday October 5: Brian Teare, Christian Peet, & H.L. Hix

Tuesday October 6: Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Kareem Estefan, & Kevin Simmonds

Wednesday October 7: Mark Wallace, Mike Hauser, & Nate Pritts

Thursday October 8: Philip Jenks, Tim Atkins, & Tony Frazer

Friday October 9: Tony Trigilio, David Lau & Rodrigo Toscano

Upcoming Forums:
November: This is What a Feminist [Poet] Looks Like, 2
December: 2009 Advent Kalendar (check out 2008's!)

Amber Tamblyn Blogging @ PoFo

I haven't read the poems to know if they're any good (or Corgan- or Kilcher-esque), but as a blogger and poetry fan, she won me over by copping to typing the hilarious search string "Noelle + Amber + Three Nights Of Sin" wherein that "Noelle" is the fantastic Kocot.

Switchback Subscription Sale!

Check it out!



Three Books Plus Bonus for $35 total
Five Books Plus Bonus for $55 total

Do you think I should go to my high school reunion?

In high school I was the kind of person who was sure she'd go -- I think I even wrote a story about a high school reunion once; it was a kind of thrilling fantasy -- but as of right now I just can't imagine it!

Also I somehow got tix to the Drew Barrymore/Regina Spektor SNL! I figured that was just a fakeout, appease-the-masses online form. Huh!

That would be cool if I had to choose between going to my high school reunion or going to SNL. It's not true, though. Maybe I'll write a short story about that and have someone distribute it for me at my high school reunion. Why I Chose Drew Barrymore & Other Stories.