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.