June 2011
59 posts
“Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops
At body heat and lush with omen...”
– Seamus Heaney from VIII of “Glanmore Sonnets” in Opened Ground.
May 2011
47 posts
Brian Dettmer →
There is something here that I really admire, in the patience of these sculptures, in their archaeological methodology and the way that they engage the book. The materiality of language, and of the book itself, is exploded and reconfigured, autopsied and resurrected in new bodies with new names. Dettmer’s work excavates artefacts implicit in the book, but authorially unintended. This is...
“few were the words we said,
nor knew each other,
nor asked, are you Spirit?
...”
– H.D. from Book 1, [3] of “Pallinode” in Helen in Egypt.
First Chapters: Stefanie Posavec →
Interesting visual representations of writing style correlating mapping line lengths in the first chapters of classic works of fiction. It’s sort of fascinating to see the style of someone like Steinbeck - short, regular, squarely shaped - compared with Faulkner’s long loping sentences that manifest themselves as austere corridors in this representation.
The images also give an...
Watch::: Grimes - Crystal Ball :::
Natural that Grimes’ lastest split EP with d’Eon, Darkbloom, should have “bloom” in its title. Her music has been, itself, rapidly blooming into a robust and unique aesthetic since she released her first album Geidi Primes online last summer, more fully articulating the aspect of her music where weird intersects pop.
The video, maybe just a...
Parents keep child's gender secret →
Certainly a very interesting article, though I am still trying to suss out my own feelings about the issue. While attempting to raise a child free of any societally instilled gender norms is laudable, something about the valuation of “gender” - as a amorphous and abstract concept - above and beyond, while somehow subsuming, the physical factuality of “sex” seems a little...
Zoned In: Holy Other: With U →
The lovely folks over at Altered Zones have posted Holy Other’s new EP With U for streaming on their website ahead of its release on 7th June.
Their write up is more eloquent than anything I could say about the band and their sound, so I’ll just say that this sort of music that combines elements of R&B and darker electronic musics really hits a sweet spot for me in terms of my...
“What garment is adequate? Did we dream that the red pigment from the cloth...”
– Lisa Robertson from “The Value Village Lyric” in Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture.
Electric Kool-Aid Catharsis: Sufjan Stevens Live →
The Quietus give a good review of one of Sufjan’s recent live shows with a lot of thought about how his music and stage persona have evolved in time: from his ostensibly folksy roots to his current Tron-esque electronic psychedelia, from earnestly low-fi to neon day-glow.
“– I am like a slip of comet,
Scarce worth discovery, in some corner seen...”
– Gerard Manley Hopkins, “I am like a slip of comet” (from Selected Poetry)
The Death of the Text: Kenneth Goldsmith at the... →
A piece by Vanessa Place on the Harriet blog on whether or not the recent White House poetry reading was a significant aesthetic event and what one can take away from Kenneth Goldsmith’s reading at the event: the institutionalization of conceptualism, the death of the text, its reincarnation (or revelation) as machine of radical mimesis, and more. A little too harsh on the Lyric to my mind,...
“Poetry is consciousness dreaming of domicile at the core of the foreign world,...”
– Tim Lilburn from “How to Be Here?” in Living In the World As If It Were Home.
Odd Futurism →
Even bloggers at the Poetry Foundation website chip in two cents with an article about the OFWGKTA kids. The article approaches the group and their music from an interesting, if potentially problematic, literary slant, drawing parallels to literature by people such as Dennis Cooper and his Guide in a way that calls to my mind the work of Bret Easton Ellis also.
The article may be too quick to...
“Half out of his wits with insomnia, Vowl is willing to try almost anything that...”
– from A Void by Georges Perec, translated from the French La Disparition by Gilbert Adair.
The World's Most Inspiring Bookstores. →
Making its rounds about my bibliophilic pals on the social networks, Salon takes a little worldwide tour to some mouth-wateringly lovely book stores and makes most everyone jealous and sad in the process.
I can’t help but wonder if fetishizing book stores such as these is just another step in the protracted mortification of the book as physical artefact; it’s certainly implicit in...
“Rue: My colour is guttural.
I was born in lachrymose air.
My face makes a...”
– “Identity 1“ (from Execution Poems) - George Elliott Clarke
Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010): Futurism... →
I think, almost certainly too much, and edit too little, about Marvel’s Iron Man and Iron Man 2 films in relation to America on my film blog.
Occasional Friday # 27 - in Perec Français: What a... →
France Culture provides an interview with George Perec given in English to the Australian Broadcasting corporation a few months prior to his death. Perec covers topics about writing, language, Oulipo and more.
Tree of Life: Lyrical, spiritual, kitsch - Barbara... →
No matter how divisive the rhetoric for the film gets, I find myself only more and more looking forward to seeing Tree of Life.
