The following is a translation of Tomas Transtromer by Robert Bly, from Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall: Last Poems, Harvill, London, 1990, p. 49.The NameI got sleepy while driving and pulled in under a tree at the side of the road. Rolled up in the back seat and went to sleep. How [...]
Seems Michel Houellebecq has a new novel out. Platform isn’t even available in paperback yet, which means my protest at not reading the exorbitantly-priced $45 hardcover seems to have backfired somewhat. Lanzarote is much smaller, so maybe I’ll fork out the cash this time.Everything and MoreThe next David Foster Wallace is a biography of Georg Cantor, the [...]
10 Reasons Why Sport is Better Than Life
Pick your time and place.A slowly spiraling ball in a clear blue sky.Clearly marked lines.Lying together unthinking on the grass.Know your enemy.That time when Jimmy broke his leg and we all wrote on the plaster.Fixed goals.Let the water run icy down your neck.Known possibilities.Mum and dad always wanted [...]
“Subjects are left alone to watch pornographic videos on a small television in a darkened room where gauges measure their arousal. The subjects also report their own responses by operating an electronic lever.”
(Robin Wilson, “Dr Sex”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 49, Issue 41, p. A8, 20 June 2003).
The city is beautiful at twilight on a day when a rainbow hangs in the sky like a frame and old men walk with serrated movements along the crisp edge of the future. After braking to avoid an accident the bus-driver shrugs his shoulders in a performance for an empty audience flashing past in an [...]
David Markson writes beautiful novels interwoven with fragments of historical curiosities. When Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviewed one of his early novels he wrote that Markson was “a novelist, with nothing to say, trying to tell a story he doesn’t believe for a minute”. Markson responded with the following poem (from his Collected Poems):
Daily Reviewer-Haupt
What bile must rise [...]
I am not sure what is more disturbing: the remarkable similarity between the Moby track “Porcelain” from his multi-whatever album Play (also on the soundtrack for the movie The Beach) and the Boards of Canada track “Dawn Chorus” from their recent album Geogaddi; or the fact that the Moby track came first. Maybe Boards of [...]
In absence of ideas about
Who to be
We just
Are
So just give up, you fuckwit.
The Ridiculously Long Title (In Fact It Is (Far, and More Complex, Too, Though Poorly Structured) Longer Than The Poem (And Far More Interesting)) and The Fact This is a Poem about Poetry are Only Some of the (Many) Things Wrong With This Poem (But At Least I Can Laugh)
All you need do to write [...]