Life Sentences: Jibber-Jabber of the Sportscaster
Is a ballgame a series of events, disparate parts, or some kind of whole, something to catch or keep? Or is it an ever-changing probability, waiting to resolve into belonging to someone or other?
The South of FranceFrom the Print
The stuff was thick. It was denser today, and so when Trimble dropped his key card outside his office door, it was not swallowed up like so many before it. Instead it rested on the surface, with its magnetic strip down…
On Surveillance: A Conversation
“Remember that great line from 1984? ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face—forever.’ The way I look at these recent revelations about our surveillance capacities—I think that what’s been revealed to us, essentially, is the boot of the future. This massive surveillance/intelligence system, documented by Snowden and others—this is the boot of the future. And the question is going to be, eventually, who wears the boot?”
Micro-review: On Kate Durbin’s “E! Entertainment”
Enter into the arena Kate Durbin, whose latest book, E! Entertainment has just been published by Wonder Books, demonstrating seven years of atomically precise attention paid to the linguistic ecosystem of reality television. Deliciously designed in the prettiest of pink pages by Joseph Kaplan, E! Entertainment arranges, annotates, reports, and represents our favorite national pastime…
Life Sentences: The Pleasure of teh Typo
This seems more likely, but wouldn’t this acknowledgement of superiority bring a kind of joy? If you are using your education to enforce class boundaries though grammar, then appreciate the chance to do so! That Ivy League school tuaght you to catch errors like these!
What We’re Watching: Eileen Myles on Spoilage and Ruination of Other Kinds
As part of PEN’s World Voices Festival, poet Eileen Myles participated in the Obsession series at the Standard, East Village. Myles’ topic was “Spoilage”…
Ask Katharine: First-Date Nerves, Unemployment
Wear a wedding dress. That says, I care so little about this date that I’m willing to destroy any possibility of a future for us. Deranged behavior is the new effortlessness—are you following me?
WashingtonFrom the Print
… Erasing, blurring
and blowing. We’re marking
forever. Get this.
I am recording you.
I will keep you in my gut.
the cars are stalled.
Zounds the trucks. Litter and
it will hurt.
A Conversation with Andrés Neuman
“I think that poetry has a very specific kind of freedom, which has to do with almost always not knowing what you’re saying until you’re saying it, or to be more precise, being able to improvise one hundred percent of the syntax. That is a very specific type of freedom, both powerful and dangerous. It’s so easy to write a silly thing with that freedom and yet it’s so moving when you arrive at a meaning at the end of the syntax…”
Journeymen
Billups was the archetype’s quintessence: experienced but expendable, affable but reserved, resilient and lonely. Yes, Chauncey, great work, bye. Welcome, Chauncey, powerful and baldheaded sharpshooter, we need you, we don’t, begone, be good. I can’t imagine Billups took all this with anything other than measured acceptance, a tip of the jockstrap, a grinning-bare of his huge many teeth, before zooming off in his Mercedes to some new part of America…