There have been plenty of years of my life when twenty bucks for a book was at the far edge of the possible. Not now, happily.
― Aimless, Friday, 7 March 2014 02:23 (ten years ago) link
I paid 11 for Ashbery's Flow Chart last month, that was a splurge
― merciless to accomplish the truth in his intelligence (bernard snowy), Friday, 7 March 2014 04:50 (ten years ago) link
how do you feel about edward dorn, f.
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 00:21 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
really like it - the protean central voice and the presentation of time are done very well I think. it's a precise, clever performance, which it needs to be given the looseness of its environment and form. "Western frontier as appropriate place and set of characters with which to study the soul and it's journeys" is absolutely a premise I buy. it's witty, conversational and fun, and laced with song. i like Burroughs, but you allow a lot for the pleasure of listening to his discursive tone of voice - Gunslinger reminded me of Burroughs, but here the internal philosophy, structure and tale, such as it is, is in its own terms coherent, which gives it that overarching tension that long poems need. there's some brilliant set pieces, like this abstract gunfight between the Horse and a loose-tongued stranger:
The Stoned Horse said Slowlynot looking upfrom his rolling and planningStranger you got a [i]pliable lipyou might get yourself describedif you stay on.
Come on!Who's the horse, I mean who'shorse is that, we can't haveNo Horse! in here.It ain't properand I think I'm gonnaput a halter on you!
Uh uh, the Gunslinger breathed.Anybody know the muthafuckathe Stoned Horse inquiredof the general air.Hey, hear that the strange gaspedthat's even a negra horse!
Maybe so, maybe notthe Gunslinger inhaledbut stranger you got an Attitudea mile longas his chair dropped forwardall four legs on the floorand as the disputational .44occurred in his hand and spun therein that warp of relativity one seesin the backward turning spokesof a buckboard,
then came suddenlyto rest, the barrel utterly justifiedwith a line pointingto the neighborhood of infinity.The room froze harder.
Shit,Slinger, Lil noticed, You've pointedyour .44 straightout of town.I keep tellin younot to be so goddamn fancynow that amacher's got the drop on you!
Not so, Lil!the Slinger observed.Your vulgarity is flawlessbut you are the slave of appearances –-this Stockholder will findthat his gun cannot speakhe'll findthat he has been Described STRUMthe greenhorn pulledthe trigger and his store-bought ironcoughed out some cheap powder,and then changed its mind,muttering about having been up too late last night.Its embarrassed handlerlooked, one eye wandering,into the barreland then reholstered it and stood there.
strum
The total .44recurred in the Slinger's handand spun therethen came home like a sharp knockand the intruder was described -a plain, unassorted white citizen.
the successful unpunctuated distinction of speech and description is always i think a sign of writer invisibly in charge of their rhythms and tone (like Evelyn Waugh or PG Wodehouse's long pages of brief exchanges where the identity of the speaker remains fixed in the mind. It reminds me of what George Saintsbury in his book on English prose rhythm said about Malory's Morte d'Arthur:
[There are plenty of sentences in Malory beginning with "and"; but it is not the constant go-between and usher-of-all-work that it is in Mandeville.] The abundance of conversation gets him out of this difficulty at once; and he seems to have an instinctive knowledge - hardly shown before him, never reached after him till the time of the great novelists - of weaving conversation and narrative together. [...] His narrative order and his dialogue are so artistically adjusted that they dovetail into one another.
After all, this method and presentation is a 20th/21st C one, but Dorn does it very well. The closest analogue in some ways feels like the Pynchon of Mason & Dixon and Against the Day.
cost me £10, which didn't seem unreasonable - tho like Aimless I'm now in the happy position where I can spend that amount on a book without feeling a bit sick.
― Fizzles, Friday, 7 March 2014 06:55 (ten years ago) link
"a precise, clever performance, which it needs to be given the looseness of its environment and form" -- yeah, i think at the time i looked at it i wasn't really in the mood to read it charitably: like, my response was Yes I Get It And I Am Bored Of This Riff Now And I Am Only About Two Fifths Convinced Your Line Breaks Are Not Arbitrary. i think it's a lot like other pynchon performances too, like the occasional drops into pulp in GR.
when i read the north atlantic vortex pomes i found myself thinking mb i should have given slinger more of a shot; have forgotten what i liked about those, though. was enthused about the collected but i. the cover is carcanet's worst ever ii. fear of amassing further collective works i will not open, like geo. hill's collected e.g., which has been glaring at me resentfully from various piles and bookshelves, still totally unopened, since december
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 11:00 (ten years ago) link
yeah the North Atlantic Turbine poems definitely show that he knows what he's doing with his linebreaks/form - iirc i liked them because there is a spine of traditional lyric there, he's closer to a posed or precise English voice than I expected - & I think that gave me some of the trust needed to follow Gunslinger (which I liked a lot). I'd like to read more but, yeah, it's stuck in the black hole of being a huge ugly book that I can't or won't carry round with me. I will never learn about big collecteds.
― woof, Friday, 7 March 2014 11:15 (ten years ago) link
actually maybe I will. I've been buying single volumes of Geo Hill 2nd-hand lately - cheaper since the collected.
― woof, Friday, 7 March 2014 11:19 (ten years ago) link
interesting. if you should decide any of them are run-don't-walk let me know and i will set up some kind of lever and axle system with which to heave the collected onto some sort of lectern for necessary physical support and prise it open to the relevant section
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 11:41 (ten years ago) link
i just this week ordered a single louise gluck instead of all of the louise gluck under one cover. i feel very glad of that.
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 11:42 (ten years ago) link
we should start a Hill thread. Maybe he'll show up too.
― woof, Friday, 7 March 2014 11:49 (ten years ago) link
actually, I haven't seen that collected Hill about – does it go full on with the apparatus?
(I don't know why the thought of lots of notes at the back depresses me. Maybe it's because Hill feels a bit too much like a poet born to be annotated)
― woof, Friday, 7 March 2014 13:04 (ten years ago) link
i literally haven't opened the thing. it feels a little intimidating.
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 14:00 (ten years ago) link
I always used to like that he was a poet with a tiny collected. You could take it anywhere.
― woof, Friday, 7 March 2014 14:24 (ten years ago) link
I'm reviewing the collected Hill for Poetry. Thing is HUGE. No notes, just nearly 1000 pages of poems—including no fewer than FOUR new books. I love Hill, but I'll stick w/ my nice portable Penguin UK ed. of the Selected.
My being here should in no way preclude anyone's saying anything about my work, to answer something said above. Me. My work. See? Two separate things. Not really, but I wouldn't argue w/ anyone's taste—no one's poetry's for everyone.
― murk, Friday, 7 March 2014 21:29 (ten years ago) link
Also: I reviewed Glück's collected for the LARB, but rereading it recently I felt I was overgenerous. Meadowlands is the shit.
― murk, Friday, 7 March 2014 21:30 (ten years ago) link
Been digitally carrying around Jack Gilbert's medium-hefty Collected Poems for the past month.
― That's So (Eazy), Friday, 7 March 2014 23:01 (ten years ago) link
I am actually kind of tempted to order the smaller Hill, or at least to hope to find it, as a way of delaying opening 'Broken Hierarchies' again. Odd that both of the books I'm most putting off reading right now look like they're written by Santa Clauses gone to seed.
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Saturday, 8 March 2014 09:44 (ten years ago) link
The American ed. is the same, just not as compact & attractive, in my view, but still portable:
http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Geoffrey-Hill/dp/0300164300/ref=sr_1_2_title_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1394382467&sr=8-2&keywords=geoffrey+hill
― murk, Sunday, 9 March 2014 16:28 (ten years ago) link
I just read Colin Burrow's review of Broken Hierarchies in the lrb, and it is not a terrible piece of work but I do find it dismal or circular or something when historically minded eng lit dons claim Hill as a great poet.
Four new volumes. I'm not going near it. going to reread Mercian Hymns instead.
― woof, Thursday, 13 March 2014 14:21 (ten years ago) link
('I liked that,' said Offa, 'sing it again.')
― woof, Thursday, 13 March 2014 14:23 (ten years ago) link
so
https://twitter.com/alienvsrobbins/status/473826291507277824
has 'otm' penetrated wider public consciousness and i hadn't noticed or
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:08 (nine years ago) link
hey murk how far from the end of broken hierarchies are you now
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:13 (nine years ago) link
have you started it?
― woof, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:26 (nine years ago) link
no judgement I'm not exactly tearing through that Dorn.
― woof, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:50 (nine years ago) link
i read mercian hymns and three other pages selected at random
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:45 (nine years ago) link
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, June 3, 2014 10:08 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=otm
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:52 (nine years ago) link
had no idea! thought it was ilx specific.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 17:11 (nine years ago) link
did click through tho on the money is like 5th down w 4 votes
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 17:39 (nine years ago) link
1 otmOther Than Mexicans A term used by US Border Patrol agents when catching illegal aliens.What a night last night! We caught 250 people 23 of them were OTMsby abula February 29, 2004 58 34
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 17:40 (nine years ago) link
how ironic
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 17:57 (nine years ago) link
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/07/atheists_the_origin_of_the_species_by_nick_spencer_reviewed.single.html
3,200 comments
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Wednesday, 9 July 2014 06:16 (nine years ago) link
enjoyed that but i am not going near those comments
― woof, Wednesday, 9 July 2014 09:20 (nine years ago) link
gotta admit i've really come around on this guy and this book
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 9 July 2014 14:11 (nine years ago) link
There once was a rapping tomato,That's right, a rapping tomato,And he rapped all day,From April til May,and also, guess what? it was me.
― thomp, Saturday, June 9, 2012 6:50 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
also this is hilarious
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 9 July 2014 14:14 (nine years ago) link
Michael Robbins@alienvsrobbinsAnyone interested in buying my 2011 32" LG LCD flat-screen HDTV? Great shape. Will let it go cheap if you transport from Crown Heights.
― lag∞n, Sunday, 10 August 2014 23:52 (nine years ago) link
B-)
http://i.imgur.com/7UlScn2.png
― lag∞n, Sunday, 10 August 2014 23:59 (nine years ago) link
yo did you guys see 'country music' in the nyer last month, i thought it was p fuckin lovely
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/lifeguard-2
God keep Carl Perkins warmand Jesus Christ erasemy name from all the files inthe county’s database.The dog that bit my legthe night I left the state,Lord won’t you let hisvaccines be up to date.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 11 August 2014 02:02 (nine years ago) link
Thanks, but there's a glitch on the NYer's website. That poem is in quatrains. All stanza breaks have disappeared from poems on their site, which is really annoying. Here's Shannon McArdle's version, icyi:
http://michaelrobbinspoet.tumblr.com/post/94073831275/shannon-mcardle-formerly-of-the-mendoza-line-one
― murk, Tuesday, 12 August 2014 15:56 (nine years ago) link
sick! (wont play for me tho)
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 12 August 2014 16:13 (nine years ago) link
hm, it don't work. well, here it is on shannon's blog:
http://www.shannonmcardlemusic.com/blog/2014/8/12/god-bless-michael-robbins.html
did anyone else love the mendoza line as much as i did?
― murk, Wednesday, 13 August 2014 04:10 (nine years ago) link
i am a fan
― lag∞n, Wednesday, 13 August 2014 04:22 (nine years ago) link
lmao i both can can't believe there's an ilx thread about this dude
one of the worst writers and people
― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Wednesday, 6 March 2019 17:43 (five years ago) link
i agree since he unfollowed me on twitter
― lag∞n, Wednesday, 6 March 2019 17:45 (five years ago) link
he was an incredible asshole on a message board i was on circa 2010-2011? right around the time "alien v predator" hit the new yorker. that poem is ok, but dude's essays truly reveal the total nothing going on behind his eyes
― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Wednesday, 6 March 2019 17:51 (five years ago) link
I think he posted here a few times. He’s a metal fan. I saw his essay collection in the bookstore the other day. Blurbed by Elif Batuman.
― o. nate, Wednesday, 6 March 2019 17:58 (five years ago) link
He posts upthread a few times.
― woof, Wednesday, 6 March 2019 18:01 (five years ago) link
i'm pretty sure he's aware of how much i hate his work
― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Wednesday, 6 March 2019 18:04 (five years ago) link
lol
― lag∞n, Wednesday, 6 March 2019 18:05 (five years ago) link
yeah this dude is like nails on a chalkboard for me
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, 7 March 2019 07:49 (five years ago) link