Bridges Hopes

Have I told you how excited I am to go to Fishtrap Outpost this summer?

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The Dude has nabbed the rights to the influential novel The Giver by Lois Lowry. Bridges hopes to play the title role — the one person chosen to feel for the whole of a future community.

Okay, Jeff Bridges. I see you.

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106 of the most beloved Street Art Photos – Year 2010

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While there are many reasons to study the thinking ability of animals—devising better conservation strategies, opening new pathways in artificial intelligence—the great evolutionary question driving many researchers is this: Under what evolutionary pressures do different types of cognitive abilities tend to develop? If several entirely unrelated species turn out to have a given intellectual ability—mirror recognition in humans, dolphins, and elephants, for instance—are there common denominators in the conditions they confront (membership in complex social groups, for example) that might explain the development? Can the study of such examples of convergent evolution help us understand how and why higher intelligence arises in nature? Researchers have taken only the first steps toward finding definitive answers to both of those questions.

-via The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Gary Soto is known for poetry that depicts the visceral side of working-class Mexican-American life. Jobs in factories and fields have shaped his work, as has an apprenticeship under fellow poet Philip Levine. A winner of the Nation/Discovery Award and the Levinson Award from Poetry magazine, he has also been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Of his job as a writer, he has said, "My duty is not to make people perfect, particularly Mexican Americans. I'm not a cheerleader. I'm one who provides portraits of people in the rush of life." In addition to his poetry, Soto has written novels, short stories, memoirs, and over two dozen children's books. Here he shares the drafts of two poems, one from his 1985 collection, Black Hair, and one from a forthcoming volume, Sudden Loss of Dignity.

via The Atlantic

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When I’m going strong I can’t wait to wake up and start. Without having something promising to work on, life would be pretty boring. With nothing to do, with nothing I like doing, why wake up in the morning? What I like about writing is its incision, the fact that language is operating at its fullest. Words and poems exist on multiple levels. Poetry is a way of feeling deeply without being threatened. The other thing about poetry, why I like writing it, is I like making things up. I like writing a sentence or a few words and wondering where they’re going to go. How can I create meaning, or the illusion of meaning, out of these words, words that have never been used in this particular order ever before and may not be used so again.

-a nice interview with Mark Strand, via Eduardo Corral

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Kingdom of the Starr

Glad to get my hands on the newest issue of Phoebe, in which I've got two poems. There's a ton of terrific work in there--big congrats to the editors, and big thanks for including some of my work. If you're so inclined.

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So here we are, citizens, back in the kingdom of the Starr Report, that sad realm where the Fourth Estate, in its desperation to enthrall and thereby profit, abdicates what the antique moralists among us might call a conscience.

For the past two weeks, actual grown-up Americans have risen from their beds and put on their grown-up clothes and driven their grown-up cars to their grown-up offices and pretended, collectively, that the most important event occurring on earth was not the possibility that the United States will default on its debt, or the mounting evidence that our planetary climate has gone kaplooey, or even any of the three and a half wars in which we are, as a nation, mired.

No, the big news was that a horny guy did some dumb shit.

-Steve Almond over at the Rumpus

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Compare this with the experience of the callow, inexperienced, unworldly writer who milks the system for all it’s worth; some good-looking guy or gal in their mid- to late twenties goes straight from Yale to the Writers’ Workshop to the Fine Arts Work Center to the Stegner fellowship, with stints at Yaddo and MacDowell in between, and very thin to non-existent (often just cranky online) publications to back it all up—all because the network functions purely on connections, a very corrupt, almost medieval exclusion. The writing world today is the antithesis of meritocracy. I imagined more than fifteen years ago that meritocracy would be more prevalent in the literary world compared to academia, but the situation is a thousand times worse than in scholarship. Oh, and by the way, I was a fucking rebel at Harvard too—you should ask some of the people who knew me then. The best minds of my generation fucked themselves up on Wall Street—or deconstructing literature for the always already privileged.

-An Interview with Anis Shivani over at HTMLGIANT

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Since he's widely considered the greatest writer in the history of the English language, we tend to think of William Shakespeare as well-educated and dignified, a true master of his craft. However, what you might not have realized is that he liked to toss F-bombs around like Tony Montana breaking his foot on a trampoline.

-8 Filthy Jokes Hidden in Ancient Works of Art

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Out June 28, Black Up is a sonic world made up of discordant beats, swirling synths, bouncing 808s and Butler's nimble, impressionistic poetry. Straight narratives are nowhere to be found, and rhythms emerge and then vanish just as quickly. The effect can be bewildering, and yet the album is far from unfocused. Butler's rhymes are lyrical and tight in the opening track, "Free Press and Curl," where he offers an ostensible mission statement: "I run on feelings, f—- your facts / Deception is the truest act."

-Shabazz Palaces album streaming at NPR--more righteous Seattle music...

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Obsessed with their new album.

Psychologically Neutral

For the first time in about seven months, I'm writing new poems. Hallelujah Hallelujah.

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To eat in and around Seattle, which I did recently and recommend heartily, isn’t merely to eat well. It is to experience something that even many larger, more gastronomically celebrated cities and regions can’t offer, not to this degree: a profound and exhilarating sense of place.

-via NYT

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Why the government is involved in art is beyond me. I also think it's pointless for a human to paint scenes of nature when they could just go outside and stand in it.

Ron Swanson 2012

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Killer first line of the moment:

"It's not that Monet cared that much about stacks of hay."

-from Dean Young's "Opal"

(Fall Higher, Copper Canyon Press, 2011)

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My relationship with Twitter has never been as fraught, probably because being "followed" as opposed to "friended" is more psychologically neutral. I'm used to being followed by my enemies. The minimalism of Twitter also appeals to me—I fear the day its developers improve it so you can use it for CAD/CAM and to build PowerPoint decks. It gets to the point in 140 characters, out-Hemingwaying Hemingway. Unfollowing somebody who has become an annoyance is a one-click job. Another plus: Folks can't put their vacation photos directly on Twitter. Yet.

via Slate

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From the comments:

""The difference between a fiddle and a violin is that you can spill beer on a fiddle".--Tim O'Brien

Reading

This was amazing. Grand Hallway is making incredible music. Go buy their new album.

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I could go on, but I'd rather pluck my own pubic hairs than read this fawning idiocy written by fools who have only read the press release of a novel they probably couldn't get through either.

Who is Ruth Fowler and why is she so angry?

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It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. It's not easy, but if you accept your misfortune and handle it right, your perceived failure can become a catalyst for profound re-invention.

-Conan O'Brien's commencement speech at Dartmouth

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Anthony Weiner went from a junior congressman to a politician of national significance, thanks in large part to his use of new media. By following back some of his most ardent fans, the way a teen idol might oblige his fans with signed photos, and otherwise working the apparatus of Twitter to drive up his followers and get a hearing for his issues, he managed to create an online persona using the same tricks — digital versions of gerrymandering, triangulating and earmark — that politicians use. Twitter handsomely rewards those with a capacity for risk and an aptitude for the social sciences, especially economics, game theory, psychology and sociology.

-via NYT

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Ledge of the Sandbox

Body Politic

Out for stars he
took some
down
and we all
wondered if he might be
damned to such sinister
& successful enterprise:
we took him and
unfolded him: he
turned out
pliant and warm
& messy in
some minor way: then, not
having come to
much, we
lit into his stars which
declaring nothing dark
held white and high
and brought us down.

-A.R. Ammons (Collected Poems 1951-1971)

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When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. So that, in the beginning, writing, like reading, was less a solitary pursuit than an attempt to connect with others. I did not write alone but with another student in my class at school. We would sit together, this friend and I, dreaming up characters and plots, taking turns writing sections of the story, passing the pages back and forth. Our handwriting was the only thing that separated us, the only way to determine which section was whose. I always preferred rainy days to bright ones, so that we could stay indoors at recess, sit in the hallway, and concentrate. But even on nice days I found somewhere to sit, under a tree or on the ledge of the sandbox, with this friend, and sometimes one or two others, to continue the work on our tale. The stories were transparent riffs on what I was reading at the time: families living on prairies, orphaned girls sent off to boarding schools or educated by stern governesses, children with supernatural powers, or the ability to slip through closets into alternate worlds. My reading was my mirror, and my material; I saw no other part of myself

-Jhumpa Lahiri over at The New Yorker

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In pressure moments, he comes and goes … and when it goes, it's gone. He starts throwing hot-potato passes, stops driving to the basket, shies away from open 3s, stands in the corner, hides as much as someone that gifted can hide on a basketball court. It started happening in Game 3, then fully manifested itself in Game 4's stunning collapse, when he wouldn't even consider beating DeShawn Stevenson off the dribble. Afterward, one of my closest basketball friends — someone who has been defending LeBron's ceiling for years — finally threw up his hands and gave up. "It's over," he said. "Jordan never would have done THAT."

For real.

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Oh, internet: Kim Jong-il Looking At Things

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Holy moly.

No Small Amount of Heart

Reading Ammons. Trying to write a long poem--hoping to get deep down in it when I spend a week here this Summer as a Fishtrap Fellow. Until then, notebook tinkering.

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Folklore used to be passed by word of mouth, from one generation to the next; that’s what makes it folklore, as opposed to, say, history, which is written down and stored in an archive. Stories can be true and documents can lie, of course, but there’s still a difference between them. Anyway, lately they both seem quaint, because now there’s hyperlore, which passes from one computer to the next, along a path best called hyperbolic.

Take Paul Revere’s heroic ride.

-via The New Yorker

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The recession that has ravaged Spain, along with much of southern Europe, has had an especially hard impact on the young, with unemployment rates soaring to more than 40 percent for 20- to 24-year-olds, about twice the national average and the highest in the European Union. Many of them see limited hope of improvement unless they reshuffle the political deck and demand a new approach to creating jobs.

“Suddenly people are talking about politics everywhere,” said María Luz Morán, a sociologist at the Complutense University of Madrid. “You go to have coffee or you are standing in the subway and you hear conversations about politics. It’s been years since I heard anyone talking about politics.”

-via NYT

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Hey poets, erase your way to 500 dollars and a trophy: Geist Erasure Poetry Contest. There need to be more trophies in poetry. For real.

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“This is a great day for illiterate authors,” Shteyngart said. “From Snooki, to Nicole Richie, to me. I prepared a speech, but I can’t read. USA!”

-via WSJ Speakeasy (quickly becoming one of my favorite internet places)

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But this is not an easy thing to do, this peering into darkness, this ruin-reading. It requires nuance, practice, and no small amount of heart. I cannot, however, endorse it enough. Given the state of our world—in which the very forces that place us in harm’s way often take advantage of the confusion brought by apocalyptic events to extend their power and in the process increase our vulnerability—becoming a ruin-reader might not be so bad a thing. It could in fact save your life.

-Junot Diaz at the Boston Review

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Sunday Evening Shenanigans

The dog escaped the yard this afterrnoon. It was terrifying. He's back at the foot of the bed now, quite pleased with himself.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"When I set fire to the reed patch"

from "When I Set Fire to the Reed Patch" by A.R. Ammons

(Collected Poems: 1951-1971, W.W. Norton, 1972)

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Bikini-clad female visitors frolic under the Caribbean sun in an outdoor pool. Marijuana smoke flavors the air. Reggaetón booms from a club filled with grinding couples. Paintings of the Playboy logo adorn the pool hall. Inmates and their guests jostle to place bets at the prison’s raucous cockfighting arena.

-via NYT

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Hey Seattle Writers! Tomorrow is the deadline to apply for the most excellent Hugo House Writer in Residence gig...

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I got the question in that form only once, but I heard it a number of times in the unmonetized form of “Why did we have to read this book?” I could see that this was not only a perfectly legitimate question; it was a very interesting question. The students were asking me to justify the return on investment in a college education. I just had never been called upon to think about this before. It wasn’t part of my training. We took the value of the business we were in for granted.

I could have said, “You are reading these books because you’re in college, and these are the kinds of books that people in college read.” If you hold a certain theory of education, that answer is not as circular as it sounds. The theory goes like this: In any group of people, it’s easy to determine who is the fastest or the strongest or even the best-looking. But picking out the most intelligent person is difficult, because intelligence involves many attributes that can’t be captured in a one-time assessment, like an I.Q. test. There is no intellectual equivalent of the hundred-yard dash. An intelligent person is open-minded, an outside-the-box thinker, an effective communicator, is prudent, self-critical, consistent, and so on. These are not qualities readily subject to measurement.

-via The New Yorker

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I love this song, and this video, if only because the drummer totally flubs the first 30 seconds. The look on the guitarist's face says it all.