June 2009
2 posts
May 2009
3 posts
“Every class carries certain assumptions about what one is supposed to do and...”
– Eileen Myles’ Close Listening Conversation with Charles Bernstein [listen here]
April 2009
6 posts
"Kerouac Wore khakis" for charity, but Penguin's...
In my Beat Generation this past fall, we spent a little time discussing the use of the Beats as ad spokesmen during their cultural resurgence in the 1990s, from the (in)famous Gap ads proclaiming “Kerouac wore khakis” (shown at left) to William S. Burroughs selling Nike running shoes (follow the link above for video), however today I encountered a new and novel approach to...
Easter at the Creation(ism) Museum
What better (or stranger) place is there to go on Easter Sunday than Kentucky’s own Creation Museum? Nowhere, of course, especially since the place was pretty empty. Aside from discovering that the universe is only 6,000 years old, we also learned that before all that pesky business with Adam and Eve and the apple (or mango-esque thing with pomegranate-like seeds), animals were...
“To write by fragments: the fragments are then so many stones on the perimeter of...”
– Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
two upcoming readings
I’ve got two readings here in Cincinnati in the next week or so:
• On Friday, April 3rd, both Jennifer and I will be reading along with many of our colleagues at “World Without End,” a reading sponsored by The Cincinnati Review, which begins in the Catskeller in the Tangeman University Center here on the UC campus at 8:00 PM. More information can be found here.
• On...
March 2009
7 posts
Frank's Bruised Mandarin Orange
[clockwise from bottom left: CAConrad, Magdelena Zurawski, Aaron Kunin and Tom Orange]
Conrad, Maggie and Aaron were here in Cincinnati for the penultimate date of their Frank’s Bruised Mandarin tour (celebrating The Book of Frank, The Bruise andThe Mandarin, respectively); Tom saw them read in Cleveland the night before and came down for the reading at Dana Ward’s Cy Press HQ. The...
January 2009
1 post
“What I want to know - are you the stripper or the rapist??????
Happy...”
– My (single) mother’s reaction to Ann Coulter’s controversial appearance on The View (in which she blames single mothers for raising strippers, rapists and other assorted low-lifes, single-handedly destroying the fabric of American life in the process), combined with anniversary...
December 2008
1 post
(it's been a while, but now's not the time . . .)
Bas Jan Ader — “I’m too sad to tell you” (1971)
(here’s the reason)
October 2008
8 posts
one heartening turnabout
I’m always happy to be genuinely surprised by a more progressive or open-minded reaction than I might’ve otherwise respected. Last year, for example, when I used the gay marriage debate as the final essay topic in my freshman composition classes at St. Joseph’s University (my alma mater, I should add), I expected to hear mixed reactions from the students, but probably 3/4...
CAConrad's fantastic report from the Phillies... →
… paints Philadelphia as the sort of harmoniously energized metropolis Walt Whitman dreamt of, and makes me miss both him and the city.
yes, this makes me very happy . . .
Who could’ve ever imagined that this team could make it this far? Both Utley and Victorino have been astoundingly good with both their bats and our gloves in this series, and the pitching bookends of Hamels, Madson and Lidge have been more than solid. However, there are countless other names that deserve credit for our victories so far, and those still to come — twenty-five names, in...
something nice about Philip Whalen
After a long wait, I finally got my hands on a copy of The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen today, and have been skimming through it during lulls in my PennSound work this afternoon (namely, segmenting a wonderful reading by Kyle Schlesinger, Frances Richard and Jesse Seldess sent to us by Tim Peterson). While I’d first read Whalen at least half a lifetime ago in The Portable Beat Reader,...
TV on the Radio's latest
Jennifer and I are eagerly awaiting a pair of concerts later this month — David Byrne’s current “David Byrne plays the songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno” tour, which will take us to Indianapolis (since very few acts seem to want to come to Cincinnati), and TV on the Radio’s show here at Bogart’s. I’ve been listening to TVOTR’s latest, Dear Science,...
September 2008
6 posts
“The problem is not poetry but poems.”
– Charles Bernstein, from his fantastic, hot-off-the-presses “emergency manifesto,” “Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers,” in Harpers. True in so many ways …
continually proving Thomas Wolfe wrong...
Next week, I’ll be heading back to Philly for a few incredibly busy days, during which I’ll (hopefully) train PennSound’s new work-study, take in a Phillies-Brewers game with my mom, get my hair cut, and take part in two very exciting readings.
The first is Friday night’s URCHIN series reading honoring Ted Berrigan —I still can’t believe that I missed last...
“I cannot write without endless parentheses (a parenthesis indicates the...”
– William S. Burroughs, from “Ginsberg Notes”
August 2008
10 posts
a dream and nightmare combined
the movers come in a little over eight hours, and there is still a significant amount of packing left to be done, but a marvelous old Alice Notley reading, and the afterglow of Obama’s speech are sustaining (as is a half-gallon of iced tea).
nature (i.e. the record industry) abhorrs a vacuum →
A recent Idolator article about the Hit Masters, a cover band who released — and cashed in on — an MP3 version of Kid Rock’s latest single (since the blue collar “star” refuses to put out digital versions of his songs) inadvertantly turned up this article on one of my favorite little music stories of the late-90s. Back before the single was reborn as a one-track digital...
why didn't I think of this two moves ago?
Thanks for lending us the 3M Tape Gun, Elliot!
final essentials
With our move now ten days away, Jennifer and I are in full-on packing mode, simultaneously surprised to have gotten so much done so far, and overwhelmed by everything we have left to do. One major hurdle which is now out of the way is packing up all of our books As you can imagine, two English professors can manage to accumulate quite a few of them, and altogether, there are probably at least...
Obama and McCain pick their top ten songs . . . →
… and Girl Talk and Randy Newman discuss.
The Pennsylvanian knob-twiddler says: “If there’s a candidate with Fugees’ ‘Ready or Not’ on his list, I have to vote for him.” I couldn’t agree more —it’s only one of two songs on this list that I can say I truly love, the other being “Good Vibrations.”
Mostly trite and empty filler here (the songs,...
valiantly theorizing away at 2am
and the song, “Black Coffee in Bed” sounds almost as good as the real thing would be (if only …)
why I'll still be a Phillies fan (from 574 miles...
The Cincinnati Reds aren’t the worst team in all of baseball (San Francisco, San Diego, Washington and Seattle all have worse records), but they’re quickly destroying any enthusiasm I might have had for them. With my impending arrival just over three weeks away, they’ve traded outfielder Adam Dunn, who, along with Ken Griffey, Jr. (who at least I had a chance to see here in...
ps- why I'll still be a WERS fan (from 884 miles...
My alma mater’s station, one of the nation’s best, actually got me to listen to the radio again (for something other than NPR or the Phillies game). How’d pull off that minor miracle? An incredibly diverse playlist, which simultaneously manages to deliver many of my old favorites, and introduces me to new music (which, in this glorious age of information anarchy, can be easily...
June 2008
14 posts
Shawn Chacon suspended after throttling Astros GM... →
A few years after his firing, former Phillies General Manager Ed Wade seems to have benefited from a little revisionist history — c.f. this concilliatory entry on Beerleaguer, which deems Wade’s six year contract for Pat Burrell as a definite positive. Though he might not have been terribly successful at making key trades (consider his trading away many of the Astros’ prospects for...
PhillySound feature on FANZINE →
(which CAConrad is kind enough to begin with a lengthy quotation from my “Towards a True Avant-Garde Poetics” CFP)
slowly returning to life . . .
after a whirlwind tour of Cincinnati in search of a house to rent. It was an overwhelmingly dense trip, during which we saw at least a dozen places (most of which were ridiculously wrong for us) over the course of two days, along with a number of wonderful social outings which helped us feel very welcome in these new environs — a dinner party with a few of our future colleagues at UC, breakfast...
“I am not like The End I am like a doorway
that leads from one thing
to...”
– Ron Padgett, “Method” from How to Be Perfect (Coffee House Press, 2007)
