Poetry and crisis

New Believer is out! THE MUSIC ISSUE!

More soon, but for now—best Blvr author bio?:

Joshua Clover has contributed poetry and an analysis of the economic crisis to the Believer, but this is his first music feature anywhere since he retired as a music critic in 2001. He would come back only for M.I.A., because she combines the best of poetry and crisis. He currently teaches at the University of California, Davis, when he is not in jail.

(A taste of the interview.)

Turtle diary (I think I've used this headline before)

Come on, people—get that turtle metaphor right.

To see how it should be done, grab the January Blvr. while you can and read Joshua Clover's piece, "Notes on the Meltdown."

Impossibly good new BELIEVER is out...

The January Believer has been unleashed! Dzyd Theo has an instant classic, twining personal memoir with the quest for the mysterious author of Let's Kill Uncle; you need to read this piece! Plus there's an unusual interview with Gordon Lish; a potentially life-saving megadose of Gary Lutz—

A word that I remember coming out of my parents’ mouths a lot was imagine—as in “I imagine we’re going to have rain.” I soon succumbed to the notion that to imagine was to claim to know in advance an entirely forgettable outcome. A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.

...reviews of Jack Spicer and others; interviews with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and translator Robert Alter; "much more." Greil Marcus inadvertently tells me the name of a song that popped up on my Shuffle the other day—it was great and strange and I didn't know what it was (Fiery Furnaces, "Oh Sweet Woods": ).....Don't miss this amazing Joshua Clover piece (another instant classic!) on the financial crisis—here's how it starts:

We could begin in fifteenth-century Genoa with the invention of fixed currency and modern banking, or with the first foreclosure of this current crisis just a couple years back. I’m going to begin near the middle: in the nineteenth-century United States, with banks and railroads.

Railroads being too pricey even for the well-heeled capitalist, banks that could provide grand lines of credit became major players. This concert of powers dominated the nation’s finances, extending the financial network even as they exerted increasingly centralized control. They were only too willing to loan the money forward, both for stakes in the enterprises and in the happy knowledge that the intercontinental railroad would open up new markets. Credit doesn’t just allow for such expansions; it requires them, to conjure its necessary returns.

The relationship was so intimate that sometimes it collapsed into singularity. Chartered in 1833, the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company built a then-lengthy line from Atlanta to Augusta; the firm survives as a real-estate concern. Its rail system now belongs to massive CSX Transportation; the banking division was a part of Wachovia, which was nearly obliterated this September and has under Federal duress recently merged with Wells Fargo, which started in 1852 as a transport and banking company. Two great tastes that go great together.

The salient point is this: that the expansion of the rail systems throughout physical space, sewing together the continental United States with threads of iron, was identical to the credit-fired expansion of financial networks. Not parallel developments, but one and the same. Geopolitical space and finance space are simply different dimensions of the same structure, the same unified market—what we might call geofinancial space.

New year's resolution: I will subscribe to The Believer for a mere $45 and if I already subscribe I will get subscriptions for my friends.

"The Good Fight"

The new Believer is out—it is just WOW—you need to have it. Adam Thirlwell (whom I've dubbed "too good to blog about")...Jason Boog on GI Joe and war...Greil Marcus on Joy Division and more...short reviews...Bishop/Lowell letters.........interviews with Will Eno, Bruce Jay Friedman (by Amy Sohn), Nico Muhly, Diane Williams....a Joshua Clover poem!?—and this piece by Dzyd James, about a failed run for a state house seat........:

I was a Democrat who disdained most other Democrats—suicide in a Democratic primary—and finally hired my old assistant, a fearless twenty-six-year-old who shared my “I love it because I hate it” philosophy of politics. Aryah’s job for the first few days was to stand behind me while I talked to voters at their doors, then ridicule my performance. I was nervous, talked too fast, apologized when I asked for someone’s email address, and generally squirmed like a kid whose ball had gone through each voter’s window. Aryah’s attitude was that we were trying to help people by interrupting their dinner and telling them about the great James Browning. He told old people that I was going to make universal health care a reality, people with toys in their yards that I was going to get more money for the public schools, people with Chesapeake Bay license plates that I would do something about Maryland’s terrible air quality. Listening to Aryah talk, I started to like the sound of this Browning guy and lost some of my shame.

Crowing

From Jane Dark's Sugarhigh!:

Born four years apart: two faces of one feeling...both in their own languages named after the crow...

Who is he talking about? (Click through to find out.)

A few recent Astral Weeks topics have featured this bewitching bird—Ekaterina Sedia's The Secret History of Moscow and Endless Things, the culmination of John Crowley's Aegypt sequence. (Crowley's Livejournal page is found at crowleycrow.livejournal.com.)

Now feast your gaze on the ominous crow symbol on the keyboard of the Personal Days cover (and done white-on-black on the spine)...What does the crow signify in my novel? You will have to read it to find out! Get your copy online today—or stroll over to the store and purchase it!

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Check out the crow at Crawford Doyle on Madison Avenue:



UPDATE: Rocketlass sends in a PD sighting from 57th Street Books in Chicago!

Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for February 10-13

I. The Electronic Poetry Review has put out its eighth and final issue—where you can read Dizzyhead Joshua Clover's "Century," which he has dedicated to us, and which we have just deemed the best poem of 2008 on the basis of this powerful penultimate line:

"I loved the palindrome and the ourobouros and the subway system turning back on itself."

II. Any Amharic speakers out there? Yet another Awesome Tape from Africa...

III. PTSNBN alumni notes: The Dust Dive (featuring ex-PTSNBNers Ken and Bryan) get interviewed; meanwhile, at the place itself, you can get monitored remotely!

IV. Great story in the NYT's Automobiles section: "New York to Paris the Hard Way, 100 Years Ago," by Jerry Garrett:

On July 30, the battered Thomas Flyer bearing Schuster; another mechanic, George Miller; and MacAdam, the Times reporter, reached Paris — and a gendarme would not let them proceed without a working headlight. A passer-by volunteered his bicycle’s light for the duty; the bike was lifted into the car, which arrived at the finish at 6 p.m.

V. I also liked the final installment of D. Clowes's "Mr. Wonderful" and Virginia Heffernan's piece on drunk-people videos:

The crowning achievement of YouTube, which showed nine billion videos in a single month last year, may be that it has flouted what was once considered the immutable law of the Internet: All images online eventually turn to pornography. In a minor miracle, YouTube rendered this law obsolete. Thanks to ingenious programming and community-building, the video-sharing site now shows every imaginable kind of video except pornography.

VI. Cf. end of Rebecca Mead's piece on Nico Muhly:

Lassen...and Muhly huddled in a corner laying plans for their new piece, which was to consist of music composed to accompany a series of YouTube videos that had been chosen expressly for their mundanity.

“There’s a way to search for interesting things on YouTube, and then there’s a way to search for uninteresting things,” Muhly said. “You put in search terms like ‘My daughter’s yard,’ ‘My friend’s restaurant.’ ” The music was to be modelled on cantatas by Bach and anthems by Purcell, he explained. It was going to be great.

VII. Outsider music? Interesting article on Gordon Thomas in New York magazine...which led me to his website...

Some GT fans have recently contacted us asking about the chronology of the recordings available on this site. Unfortunately, the answer to this question is not as easy as one might think. Some of the albums were recorded over a period of several years; Gordon has been somewhat haphazard about dating his releases; several different records are titled “Gordon” or “Gordon Thomas,” and although he has a near-photographic memory for anecdotes, philosophical tidbits and the like, he has a wide margin of error when trying to remember when things happened. (When we mentioned to him recently that fans wanted to know the original release dates of his albums, he helpfully suggested: “Well, I could always make something up!”)

VIII. Ed Keeps Reading the Paper

Saki Knafo: "Mr. Fischer had ordered a tongue sandwich and milk..."

A piece on rival Pakistani papers in Queens:

“My only skill is journalism,” he said a few days after Ms. Bhutto’s death, taking a break from drafting an editorial. “I can’t do anything else, can’t fix a car. My children always say, ‘Turn off the phone.’ But you know, it’s an addiction. To educate people on what is going on, this is my love, this is my passion, this is my romance, this is what I believe my body desires. It’s my peanut and butter.”

Gossip Girl roundup

New Yorker:

“Gossip Girl,” by its very title, promises both to tell you the secrets of the city and to remind you that you weren’t invited to the party.

New York Observer:

The facts are this [...]: Dan's father's loft—it looks to be at least 3,000 square feet—probably sells for about $600 a square foot now. That's going by the general rule of thumb that Brooklyn condos (and we'll assume it's a condo as no co-op board, even in Brooklyn, would likely let in a rock musician-turned-artist who keeps odd hours) sell for half of what they would in most of Manhattan; and in most of Manhattan, condos sell for over $1,200 a square foot on average, according to research firm Radar Logic.

(Via Chrita)

Jane Dark's Sugarhigh!:

[Gossip Girl is not a character]...It's a blog with Kristin Bell's voice, which posts news, salacious stories, gotcha pix and so forth about the popular students. It is, in short, a gossip site. The show's imagination is that celebrity journalism has made its way to high school.

The five-paragraph essay

Best new form?

This magic moment

Zoilus reports on EMP [LINK FIXED]:

Joshua Clover gave one of the conference's best presentations, "1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About," part of a book in progress. I can't convey all its multimedia umph, but its main point was to weigh the actual year 1989 (the year that included Tiananmen Square and the "fall" of the Berlin Wall) against the signified cultural 1989, or 1989 versus "1989". Using the example of La Marseillese, he said that "it's no easy matter to date a song" (adding, "as every Pazz & Jop voter knows"), which is like "the difficulty of dating history itself." When the French Revolution happened in 1789, La Marseillese didn't exist; it was composed in 1792. "It cannot belong to 1789 but it belongs entirely to '1789.' " The result of these slippages is that "our sense of process disappears," and we lose our awareness of historical contingency, when memory is consolidated in images and symbols and songs....

(For further reading about 1989, see Dizzyhead Hua's terrific "Three Songs From the End of History, " in the Believer's 2005 music issue.)

Letter by letter

Today's poem: Joshua Clover's "Antwerp Rainy All Churches Still Haunted," from The Totality for Kids (U. California).

Lots of good lines here—each line ends with a period. It's like a good-line contest!

Three to mull over:

"Being constructed letter by letter like a labyrinth."

"Like she had seen into each pocket of you and found no money there."

"Words on the yellow streetcars riding their one empirical sentence."

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I dreamed about this book last night, or rather this morning.

I had opened it and J.C. had written a poem about another poet.

The poem only used the letters present in her name.

The Oulipians call this a "beautiful in-law"

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Over at the FSG National Poetry Month blog, maintained by Ami Greko, we learn the provenance of the cover photo for Frederick Seidel's Ooga-Booga: It's one of four clicked at the photo booth at Lakeside Lounge.

The Year of the Cat

Via Paper Thin Walls, a great Frog Eyes tune to download, Dizzyhead Douglas's brief appreciation of the Huxtables, and a nudge to check out The Onion's latest "Random Rules," in which Chuck Klosterman hits shuffle and comments on whatever comes up. (Interested parties could also check out Joshua Clover's iPod shuffle essay in one of the old issues of the PTSNBN.)

Lisa Loeb, "Stay"
CK: This is, of course, on the Reality Bites soundtrack. I was always a fan of Lisa Loeb, particularly because you kind of get the impression she sang every song either about or to her cats. They seem to be the driving force in most of her creative process.