Steve Richmond died--I never really read his work, I only knew of him through Bukowski's letters.
Silliman's blog, where I found out about the death, posted a link to an interview over at 3 AM. The interview at times is hard to follow, it seems to be a transcript of a recording, but there's some cool stuff about the Cali scene.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Working Words or Workin' Words
Last Friday, I drank a bit at Chez Charlie's with Marcus Myers, a new MFA student in the program. Near the end of the night, I started to yell into his ear from all the noise of other people enjoying themselves. He's a cool guy. He's one of four cool guys reading at Working Words tomorrow, in the Plaza Library. Other cool guys include Glenn North (poetry), Eric Scott (fiction), and Scott Ditzler (fiction). Ditzler won AWP's student writing award in 2008.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
you shall die by your own evil creation
My friend Brandon showed me Fletcher Hanks' work in June 2007, shortly before both of us left Dayton, Ohio. I moved to Kansas City, he moved to White River Junction, VT to study at the Center for Cartoon Studies (comics college as he calls it). Brandon worked at a Donato's Pizza down the street to make money for his move--he banked most of it save petty cash for cigarettes, High Life, and the occasional book. He had bought I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! and I only leafed through it, thinking the art and language was crazy. It looked great--Hanks worked in solid lines (partly due to production costs) with saturated colors. I bought I Shall Destroy... months later, after I moved, and read it more. Hanks language and images are great--I ripped off a golden octopus and invisible chemical men with pink day-glo claws for a poem. When I brought Hanks back up to Brandon, he said "Oh yeah, that's stuff is pretty fun. There's not much you can learn from it though." He's right. Sam Pink, Russell Edson, and James Tate (at least Tate's prose work) seem to be the poet equivalent of Hanks--it's crazy, it's weird, it's intense, but you can't learn much from it. They're all their own forces.
A new Hanks collection, You Will Die By Your Own Evil Creation came out at the end of July. I got my copy last Friday. It's a good collection--just as odd as I Shall Destroy--but what's strong about this new collection isn't so much the work itself, but the supplements. You Will Die features an essay providing background info on Hanks--the first collection does not have one, instead featuring a "comic essay" by editor Paul Karasik at the back of the collection. The intro works better than Karasik's own comic essay from the first collection--we see examples of Hanks' correspondence school assignments, we get a better gauge of the man personally, (he's still painted as an abusive drunk and scoundrel, but we have more corroborating evidence) and professionally (we get an idea of Hanks artistic process in the early days of the comics industry).
We also get a bit of context of the work. Stories collected in I Shall Destroy are certainly vivid, wild, and colorful, but they're also displayed in a vacuum--it's hard to imagine Hanks' comics and characters come from 1939. The stories still have an element of the underground comics of the 60's and 70's (or at least my perception of them--my interest in comics stems more from Brandon's passion for them). What I find interesting with You Will Die is the intrusion of advertisements geared towards kids--these ads creep in at the end of some of the stories. These ads--"EARN YOUR OWN BICYCLE!/GET STRONG WITH THIS SUPPLEMENT/SPY WATCH AND DECODER RING"--put Hank's work in context. Ten year old boys, not hipsters or academics in theirs 20s and 30s, bought and read his work. There was nothing chic about it, no comics culture to counter, which makes it that much more significant and interesting. Whether Karasik intentionally leaves these ads in the stories isn't clear--I gather these were probably the best versions of the story available and the ads were kept in to keep the design of the book consistent.
You Will Die By Your Own Evil Creation's stories lack the weird punch of the ones in I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets. Stardust fails to fling gangsters into the clutches of golden octopi, Fantomah doesn't punish rich white hunters by making them giant green aliens and send them home on planes. The stories, while still drown in broad strokes and saturated colors, aren't as interestingly weird. Kind of like James Tate's Return to the City of White Donkeys. Tate is still there, but he's not as interesting. Same with Hanks.
A new Hanks collection, You Will Die By Your Own Evil Creation came out at the end of July. I got my copy last Friday. It's a good collection--just as odd as I Shall Destroy--but what's strong about this new collection isn't so much the work itself, but the supplements. You Will Die features an essay providing background info on Hanks--the first collection does not have one, instead featuring a "comic essay" by editor Paul Karasik at the back of the collection. The intro works better than Karasik's own comic essay from the first collection--we see examples of Hanks' correspondence school assignments, we get a better gauge of the man personally, (he's still painted as an abusive drunk and scoundrel, but we have more corroborating evidence) and professionally (we get an idea of Hanks artistic process in the early days of the comics industry).
We also get a bit of context of the work. Stories collected in I Shall Destroy are certainly vivid, wild, and colorful, but they're also displayed in a vacuum--it's hard to imagine Hanks' comics and characters come from 1939. The stories still have an element of the underground comics of the 60's and 70's (or at least my perception of them--my interest in comics stems more from Brandon's passion for them). What I find interesting with You Will Die is the intrusion of advertisements geared towards kids--these ads creep in at the end of some of the stories. These ads--"EARN YOUR OWN BICYCLE!/GET STRONG WITH THIS SUPPLEMENT/SPY WATCH AND DECODER RING"--put Hank's work in context. Ten year old boys, not hipsters or academics in theirs 20s and 30s, bought and read his work. There was nothing chic about it, no comics culture to counter, which makes it that much more significant and interesting. Whether Karasik intentionally leaves these ads in the stories isn't clear--I gather these were probably the best versions of the story available and the ads were kept in to keep the design of the book consistent.
You Will Die By Your Own Evil Creation's stories lack the weird punch of the ones in I Shall Destroy All Civilized Planets. Stardust fails to fling gangsters into the clutches of golden octopi, Fantomah doesn't punish rich white hunters by making them giant green aliens and send them home on planes. The stories, while still drown in broad strokes and saturated colors, aren't as interestingly weird. Kind of like James Tate's Return to the City of White Donkeys. Tate is still there, but he's not as interesting. Same with Hanks.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Process Article Excerise for Whitney Terrell's ENG 537
The bits in a processor works like dots and dashes in Morse code--think of the zeroes as dots and the ones as dashes. I have never accurately described the dots and dashes, even when my Grandfather threatened explained the process. Ones and zeroes string together in pulses to create messages similar to code--they both communicate by rhythm. The messages are relayed to the processor, who notifies the monitor. TURN ON THE MONITOR. STOP. DOWNLOAD KANYE WEST. STOP. SWITCH THE BROWSER FROM EXPLOITED BABYSITTERS.COM TO YAHOO FANTASY FOOTBALL. STOP. THE USER'S MOTHER COMES DOWN THE HALL, SHE CARRIES HIS LAUNDRY AND IF SHE CATCHES THE USER SHE WILL CLOSE THE DOOR QUICKLY, PRAY TO MARY LATER. STOP.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
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