MIRRORHOUSE

From The New York Times: “The Neighbors,” an exhibition now at...

Fri, 24 May 2013 09:46:08 -0400

From The New York Times: “The Neighbors,” an exhibition now at the Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea, is, as you may have read, angering many residents of a certain TriBeCa building. Arne Svenson’s photographs, which he shot using a telephoto lens from inside his own apartment across the street, capture people at home through their windows. The neighbors, who were unaware they were being photographed, are somewhat obscured — bending over, back to the window, head turned, behind a curtain — and therefore mostly unidentifiable. But the subjects are recognizable to themselves, and maybe others.

theparisreview: Have you ever heard Virginia Woolf speak?

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:57:21 -0400

theparisreview:

Have you ever heard Virginia Woolf speak?

from i09: book spine poetry

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:20:25 -0400

from i09: book spine poetry

bbirkensnake: Write a series of museum labels for everyday...

Fri, 03 May 2013 09:17:08 -0400

bbirkensnake:

Write a series of museum labels for everyday objects. Use art jargon to describe public places. Water fountains, bicycles, fire hydrants, etc. Take photographs of your new museum. Submit the writing and photographs here.

cosmarxpolitan: Cosmarxpolitan, Issue 3 Arise, ye workers from...

Fri, 03 May 2013 09:15:36 -0400

cosmarxpolitan:

Cosmarxpolitan, Issue 3

Arise, ye workers from your slumbers! Revolutionary morning sex

via the Daily Beast Wainscott, New York 11975 19 July...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:34:39 -0400

via the Daily Beast

Wainscott, New York 11975

19 July 1988

Dear Don DeLillo.

Why in the world have I waited till the day your Libra gets its nihil obstat from Christopher Lemondrop* to send you a note. It showed up in galleys in New York 2 or 3 months ago when things were ghastly (health) about the time I saw you, I looked into it then & should certainly have written without waiting to read it through because my response was immediate, it is a terrific job. I don’t know all your work & also hesitate to say to any writer whatever comparing one of his works to another but in this case must tell you I find it far beyond White Noise. Obviously if we take our work seriously we do not try to clone one novel to its predecessor so comparisons are indeed odious, & equally obviously the constantly shattered & reknit & fragmented again style of this new book appeals to me rather more than the linear narrative, when it’s always 9 o’clock in the morning at 9 am & 3pm at 3 in the afternoon if you see what I mean; but the hard cover arrived here a couple of weeks ago & I’ve just read it & confirmed all my earlier impression, its marriage of style & content—that essential I used to bray about to ‘students’ in those grim days—is marvelously illustrated here I think & especially as it comes together at the end as we know it must, speaking of the ‘nonfiction’ novel if we must but why must we, except that concept does embrace the American writer’s historic obsession getting the facts down clear (from “tells me more about whales than I really want to know”** to Dreiser tapemeasuring*** Clyde’s cell at Sing Sing, or Jack London’s “Give me the fact, man, the irrefragable fact!”****) & again one marvels at what you’ve marshaled in this impressive piece of work. We’ll be out of the country for August but may hope to see you in town in the fall, meanwhile high marks.

best regards,

from THE MEZZANINE by Nicholson Baker: It isn’t right to...

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 09:16:03 -0400

from THE MEZZANINE by Nicholson Baker:

It isn’t right to say, “When I was little, I used to love x,” if you still love x now. I admit that part of my pleasure in riding the escalator came from the links with childhood memory that the experience sustained. Other people remember liking boats, cars, trains, or planes when they were children—and I liked them too—but I was more interested in systems of local transport: airport luggage-handling systems (those overlapping new moons of hard rubber that allowed the moving track to turn a corner, neatly drawing its freight of compressed clothing with it; and the fringe of rubber strips that marked the transition between the bright inside world of baggage claim and the outside world of low-clearance vehicles and men in blue outfits); supermarket checkout conveyor belts, turn on and off like sewing machines by a foot pedal, with a seam like a zipper that kept reappearing; and supermarket roller coasters made of rows of vertical rollers arranged in a U curve over which the gray plastic numbered containers that held your bagged and paid-for groceries would slide out a flapped gateway to the outside; milk-bottling machines we saw on field trips that hurried the queueing bottles on curved tracks with rubber-edged side-rollers toward the machine that socked milk into them and clamped them with a paper cap; marble chutes; Olympic luge and bobsled tracks; the hanger-management systems at the dry cleaner’s—sinuous circuits of rustling plastics (NOT A TOY! NOT A TOY! NOT A TOY!) and dimly visible clothing that looped from the customer counter way back to the pressing machines in the rear of the store, fanning sideways as they slalomed around old men at antique sewing machines who were making sense of the heap of random pair of pants pinned with little notes; laundry lines that cranked clothes out over empty space and cranked them back in when the laundry was dry; the barbecue-chicken display at Woolworth’s that rotated whole orange-golden chickens on pivoting skewers; and the rotating Timex watch displays, each watch box open like a clam; the cylindrical roller cookers on which hot dogs slowly turned in opposite direction to the rollers, blistering; gears that (as my father explained it in their greased intersection modified forces and sent them on their way. The escalator shared qualities with all of these systems, with one difference: it was the only one I could get on and ride.

from “Five Pop Quizzes” by Matt Bell, at FRiGG Pop...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 08:16:56 -0400

from “Five Pop Quizzes” by Matt Bell, at FRiGG

Pop Quiz: Question #37
A man and a woman have been dating for two months. They first have sex on the second date, and three times a week thereafter. After the first month, the man finally notices that the woman never urinates at his apartment or at hers when he’s around. At least, not while they’re awake.

During the night, long after lovemaking and cuddling, she gets up and sleepwalks to the adjoining bathroom. The sound of her bladder emptying echoes through the apartment, then she comes back to bed and falls asleep.

Q: Why doesn’t the woman trust the man? Show your work.

The Rough South of Larry Brown.

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:25:57 -0400

The Rough South of Larry Brown.

“Variant Table” by Elizabeth Wade at Brevity.

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:52:57 -0400

“Variant Table” by Elizabeth Wade at Brevity.

excerpt from” Prelude to Disease” by Katrina Prow,...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:39:05 -0400

excerpt from” Prelude to Disease” by Katrina Prow, at Passages North

On a scale of one to ten, if one is a kitten scratch and ten is losing a finger in a bowling ball, how bad will this hurt? Will it be a four, a tire running over my foot? Or more like a seven, a touch on a blistered sunburn? Does it feel like a sting or more of a slow burn? How long will the procedure last? Is the speculum going to be chilly? Will there be numbing? Can you give me a Valium? If it hurts, will you stop for a minute? Do I get a paper nightgown? Will anyone hear me crying? Can the nurse take my hand for squeezing?

(from Paris Review blog)

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:47:28 -0400

(from Paris Review blog)

an excerpt from “Dress Codes” by Brenda Miller, from the new Passages North1st...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:43:04 -0400

an excerpt from “Dress Codes” by Brenda Miller, from the new Passages North

1st Grade

You must wear something clean. You must wear clothing that matches even a little bit—some hint that the colors are trying to coordinate. Yes, we know you can dress yourself, but you must wear shoes. You must wear sock with those shoes, preferably two that match. You must not show your underpants but if you do, accidentally—as you are prone to do when lost in the spiral of the carousel or the wide momentum of the swing (which you always insist on swinging high, too high, to the very edge of the acceptable arc)—these underpants should not be dirty. Dirty underpants bring shame upon you. And upon your poor mother, and you mother’s mother, a shame going back generations to the field in Tasmania, where—although these women were poor and had little they could call their own—they still knew how to keep their underpants clean. Why can’t you keep your underpants clean? What is wrong with you?

3rd Grade

You must wear a green corduroy jumper that’s too heavy for the weather, and you must wear green striped knee socks that do not slump to your ankles. If you do have knee socks that slump to your ankles, at least have clean kneecaps, pink and unscabbed. If you can’t manage even that, you are a shame upon yourself and your mother and your mother’s mother. Do not cut your hair above the ears. If, by mistake, you do cut your hair above the ears. If, by mistake, you do cut your hair above the ears, be prepared for the taunts: you look like a boy! You look like a boy! Be prepared for the one that hurts the most, the one hissed by your best friend as she stands a few inches behind you in line, her face half turned to the other girls to get their approval. Her hiss will be like a dart entering just under the breastbone.

“i’m dead” by rachel b. glaser, in...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:17:00 -0400

“i’m dead” by rachel b. glaser, in notnostrums

I’m dead she said I’m just

still hanging around

her body was hollow

but the right shape

everyone gets where they’re going

the cue ball sends solids to sleep-away camp

a hug puts people in a temporary place

this was the overtime

her wig looked fine

not at all flat

she said not to eyeliner on

too many eyebrows

and I always listen at advice

a boyfriend shouldn’t smash your records down the stairs

a cheerless living situation turns a year towards itself

I’m not without convictions

Hollywood should cut more film to the floor

religion is a club and

you don’t have to root for the home team

someone fainted

taking attention away from her

we all hung around resembling each other

redid her nails since the people had taken it off

didn’t know if she’d die again or something worse

the body inevitably misbehaves

but that’s how we bought it

time spills

an eight-ball gives plot

I’m dead she said

and made a face

we stayed up late and families usually don’t

“A Position at the University,” by Lydia Davis, via...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:22:39 -0400

“A Position at the University,” by Lydia Davis, via Poetry Foundation

I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university. Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely, and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.

debauchedcanary: Someone should translate contemporary texts...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:12:53 -0400

debauchedcanary:

Someone should translate contemporary texts into early modern illuminated manuscripts.

l-cy-v-s: ECSTATIC PROSE, part 2 (see also previous) Renata...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:59:40 -0400

l-cy-v-s:

ECSTATIC PROSE, part 2 (see also previous)

Renata Adler’s Speedboat advertises itself as a novel, but that’s absurd. This is a prose of modern life (published in bicentennial 1976) so deadpan, clicking, and at times toneless as to be nearly grotesque; but because it’s reportorial prose one can’t quite say it’s grotesque. Accurate is in fact the word. One might also say, hard, harsh. Lyric, and yet: lacking in sentimentality.

Speedboat has some of the hang-ups of New Journalism: some of the same striving after simplicity, a mode of actuality, the immediacy of direct speech. It also has a kind of misanthropic drive that reminds me of Charles Baudelaire of all writers of occasional prose, a kind of unreformed disappointment with the human species that here takes refuge in the well-turned anecdote rather than a negative aesthetics. I mention this partially because I found myself surprised to be reading something so skillfully written that was yet so totally irrelevant to me in many of its preoccupations (Art, boats of the very rich, bureaucracy, ennui, journalists, precocious college students, tennis lessons), and also so very good. It’s a gorgeous book.

It’s actually funny to think of the 19^th century in this context. One of the first questions you have to ask yourself about Speedboat, after you have given up on finding the plot, is where the fiction is. Many, many vignettes about the life of a woman closely resembling Renata Adler, a writer and journalist, have been packed together. A first-person narrator shyly appears from time to time. Urbane, oddball topics like “the slowest-talking man I know” are combined with dispatches from the Civil Rights Movement and Greek and Caribbean vacations among stylish acquaintances. It’s as if daily life is emerging as a topic worthy to be written about, again, for the first time. Here daily life is not a matter of style or even a mode of consumption; daily life is a rhetorical strategy, and, according to the narrator of Speedboat, you really live only if you are at all times astutely managing your own relationship to discourse:

“What is the point. That is what must be borne in mind. Sometimes the point is really who wants what. Sometimes the point is what is right or kind. Sometimes the point is a momentum, a fact, a quality, a voice, an intimation, a thing said or unsaid. Sometimes it’s who’s at fault, or what will happen if you do not move at once. The point changes and goes out. You cannot be forever watching for the point, or you lose the simplest thing: being a major character in your own life. But if you are, for any length of time, custodian of the point—in art, in court, in politics, in lives, in rooms—it turns out there are rear-guard actions everywhere. To see a thing clearly, and when your vision of it dims, or when it goes to someone else, if you have a gentle nature, keep your silence, that is lovely. Otherwise, now and then, a small foray is worthwhile. Just so that being always, complacently, thoroughly wrong does not become the safest position of them all. The point has never quite been entrusted to me.”

In a way, it’s sobering news. And this is such an odd sentence: “To see a thing clearly, and when your vision of it dims, or when it goes to someone else, if you have a gentle nature, keep your silence, that is lovely.” Grammatically it’s odd, but also the sentiment. The sentiment is odd for the author of such adamantine prose (I use Dickinson’s adjective not unintentionally.)

I think this book lately appeared on a certain well-read list and so it gets read. People have told me they’ve read it. At the same time this seems like a pretty rarified sandbox. I like it.

Photo

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:57:45 -0400

nequiquam: david foster wallace on humor, ‘irony,’ sadness,...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:56:03 -0400

nequiquam:

david foster wallace on humor, ‘irony,’ sadness, suicide, literature, among other things; 2003.

"These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor,..."

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 14:54:08 -0400

“These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. I once later tried to define this kind of sentence as “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.” The writers of such sentences became the writers I read and reread. I favored books that you could open to any page and find in every paragraph sentences that had been worked and reworked until their forms and contours and their organizations of sound had about them an air of having been foreordained—as if this combination of words could not be improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity.”

- The Sentence is a Lonely Place - Gary Lutz (via kelsfjord)