Come on Gary

Every writer occasionally publishes work that later embarrasses them, but Gary Snyder recently published work in that esteemed of the esteemed journals "The American Poetry Review" that embarrasses me as a reader, and should have embarrassed him enough to keep it in a notebook. Snyder, riding his cache bareback, is featured on the cover with his de rigeur backdrop of craggy peaks. Just inside we meet his contribution, nine frags, of which I'll reprint three of the worst:

Don't Twist My Hair
"Don't twist my hair
old bear

Three inch teeth
good grief"

Out West
"There's all the time in the universe
and plenty of wide open space"

Country & Western
Loving, hurting

Cheating, flirting

Drinking, lying

Laughing, crying
songs


It's not just that he is still capable of much better work (I hope), but that a journal with the stature and respect of APR would give him the space over other, lesser known but far more worthy writers. And it also attends to the lack of judgment on his part. Has
Gary reached a place where lack of discernment is celebrated as yet another demonstration of his Dharma achievement?

Dick Dale at the NightLight

How many guitarists invented surf music? How many play a right handed guitar upside down and backwards? Dick Dale at the Nightlight Lounge 6/28. Twenty bucks.

Telephone Novels

This is somewhat related to my last post about novels written on Twitter, with mention of Japanese novels written on cell phones (the ones I've seen are pretty fragmentary), however this post concerns novels that are comprised entirely of a phone conversation, and are wholly dialog. Thus far it's a short list, though I'd love to hear of more. I've always been attracted to films that are largely dialog (My Dinner with Andre and Twelve Angry Men come to mind) as well as stories like Hemingway's The Killers or even A Clean Well-Lighted Place. There is something about sheer dialog holding its own without the props of background (or foreground) action that intrigues and satisfies me.
I'm currently reading Nicholson Baker's Vox which consists entirely of a conversation between two people who dialed up a phone-sex matchmaking service. I haven't finished the book, but the confessional nature (two people sitting/lying in the dark talking to a stranger) is compelling, and not nearly as sexual as one might expect. Although the man (anonymity is valued after all) is strangely aroused by Tinkerbell. Anyway, the only other novel that I've read or heard of, that takes place entirely as a phone conversation is Interviewing Matisse, or The Man Who Died Standing Up by Lily Tuck, and it was probably the most infuriating novel I've ever read outside of Creeley's The Island. This novel consists of two women talking past each other for around 140 pages. I couldn't wait to finish it, yet couldn't put it down for fear something might happen. It reminded me of watching Warhol's Sleep in Chicago many years ago, and how there were many comments about not leaving for fear of missing something important. Turns out the most important action was John Giorno rolling over. With regard to telephone novels, I'm sure that William Gaddis would have written one had he thought of it, although his would involve a switchboard.

Twitter My Novel

Cell phones in Japan supposed accounted for (as writing devices) five of the best sellers in 2007, but thus far Twitter hasn't made as much of a splash in longer fictive ventures. As Ed Sanders once penned "I'll write with my bloody stump if I have to," Twitterers have it easier and cleaner. A list of Twitter novels.

Bumper Sticker

One of the stranger bumper stickers I've seen lately:
"God was my copilot but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him"
Having grown up Catholic, and eating God in the form of little wafers, I can definitely relate.

The Books of Koolhaas

I was visiting the Seattle Public Library the other day and watched a brief video on how their automated system sorts the returned books. I couldn't help thinking how out of place, how displaced these books looked in the midst of vast steel and plastic technology, as if they were relics from another era, outdated, or sacred objects protected and shuttled about by some alien life form. What a strange technology paper and ink, and what strange contradictory impulses it causes within us, in this age of Kindle, and the online pulse.

Seven is the New Four