HILARITAS

Define it.

So Long, Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009)

Her husband Christo is the more well-known of the pair, but if you watch these Maysles brothers films, and you really should, you'll see how much they were a life and artistic team, and you'll learn the story of how Jeanne-Claude ran away from her aristocratic French family to create life and art with a poor painter hanging around her family's mansion.



"We always say that each one of our projects is a child of ours, and a father and mother who have many children will never tell you which one is their favorite. If people insist that we have to have a favorite one, then we say, 'Okay, you are right, we do have a favorite one and it’s always the next one.'" --Jeanne Claude

Thank You Eve Sedgwick for Glimmering Out Some Hope for This Whole PhD School Thing

Also the ecology of genres was changing around The Warm Decembers. Part of my motive as a poet was that the most writerly writing I could do, and the most thinkerly thinking, be shown not to be generically alien to each other. But literary critics, I among them, were meanwhile beginning at the other end too, experimenting with increasingly elastic understandings of what kinds of writing the genre of criticism might accommodate. And the sense of there being a coherent, engaged, demanding and changing, highly queer, and highly interlocutory audience of peers for ambitious critical writing--especially with the emergence of gay studies--marked an almost indescribable difference from the exiguous relations surrounding a young poet at the same moment.

Looking back, though, I feel it anew--in how many ways even the thinkiest narrative poem is a stranger to even the most writerly criticism. Ontological thresholds not to be denied or dissolved, but sought out with longing; where possible crossed and recrossed, even at the risks of estrangement, loss, deformation, abandonment. How should I even pretend to promise never to try it again?

--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009), "Note on 'The Warm Decembers'"

Robby Hecht in Brooklyn Tonight!

a.k.a. "the new buzz songwriter guy in Nashville" and my sister's boyfriend.

Zebulon, Williamsburg, 8:30 p.m.



You should probably also watch this Dylan Santa video.

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.

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