interval interventions

Fran Lebowitz & American Manners

Even the moon in my nightmares are forced to laugh, as always. Blame the voice, not so much the content. I often wonder if she'd still be funny had she not lived in New York in the 1970's. I think 'LOL' should be changed to 'FRAN.'

University of Iowa Writers' Workshop Turns 75

Wanted Cataloger-Historian for Dracula's Archive

That Dracula wants to recruit the best qualified cataloger-historian for his vast archive indicates how much he respects the printed word and the world of publishing itself. For the qualified recruit, he or she must first be inducted into Dracula's world. The first phase of that induction guarantees longevity for the new employee: he or she will be able to live hundreds of years, like Dracula himself. In Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, Dracula is an indomitable recruiter. He lures his candidates to him, into the history and mysteries of his life, its probable origins.

I admire the amount of research Kostova had spent for her first novel, which is set in the US, UK, Turkey, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, France, or, let's just say, Europe itself. She also offers glimpses of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, encroaching into the borders of Eastern Europe, where a god-fearing Count -Dracula- tries to defend his territory from being occupied by foreign invaders. This is something new -for me, that is- about Dracula and his connections with Christianity; it almost takes out the evil aspect of vampire identity, an identity I've mainly known through movies and tv-shows, represented in the faces of Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Antonio Banderas, and Stephenie Meyer's vampire-gang in her Twilight series.

But the other new element that Kostova injects in the mythology of Dracula is that she tries to blur that myth. Here, Dracula is a product of circumstances, that of anger against the expanding Ottoman Empire, of revenge. This revenge reaches a height. That height is myth that quietly morphs into idea, the idea of a highly-intelligent being that can live forever, provided it stays away from sunlight, crosses, garlic, silver-bullets, or wooden-stakes. It's a being that (perhaps) updates the idea of evil in human-form that isn't quite human: vampire: Dracula. Bram Stoker's Dracula is an expression of that update.

Kostova's vision of Dracula in this novel is perhaps the opposite of Bram Stoker's vision of Dracula in his novel. Stoker's Dracula mythologizes a historical figure, Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (1431–1476), more commonly known as Vlad the Impaler (Romanian: Vlad Țepeș pronounced [ˈvlad ˈt͡sepeʃ]). Kostova de-mythologizes Dracula and treats it as an element of history, a historical-figure whose descendants might still live among us.

Now Live: Galatea Resurrects 16

Galatea Resurrects 16 is edited by Eileen Tabios.

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Issue No. 16 TABLE OF CONTENTS

[N.B. You can click on highlighted names or titles to go directly to the referenced article.]

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Eileen Tabios

NEW REVIEWS
John Herbert Cunningham reviews THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO WALLACE STEVENS edited, and with an introduction by, John N. Serio; WALLACE STEVENS: SELECTED POEMS edited, and with an introduction by, John N. Serio; and WALLACE STEVENS AND THE AESTHETICS OF ABSTRACTION by Edward Ragg

Andrew Durbin reviews THE DIHEDRONS GAZELLE-DIHEDRALS ZOOM by Leslie Scalapino

Allen Bramhall reviews DOGGY DOO by Bob Brueckl & Jukka-Pekka Kervinen

Marthe Reed reviews SONJA SEKULA: GRACE IN A COW’S eye : A MEMOIR : by Kathrin Schaeppi

Eileen Tabios engages SONJA SEKULA: GRACE IN A COW’S eye : A MEMOIR : by Kathrin Schaeppi

Allen Edwin Butt reviews PETALS, EMBLEMS by Lynn Behrendt

Eileen Tabios engages FOR THE ORDINARY ARTIST: SHORT REVIEWS, OCCASIONAL PIECES & MORE by Bill Berkson

T.C. Marshall reviews THE ARAKAKI PERMUTATIONS and WORLDBOOK: 1925—A POEM, both by James Maughn

Nicholas T. Spatafora reviews DAYS POEM, Volume I and Volume II by Allen Bramhall

Peg Duthie engages THE GODDESS OF GOODBYE by James R. Whitley and IGNOBLE TRUTHS by Gail White

Catherine Daly reviews HOW MANY MORE OF THEM ARE YOU? and VICINITIES, both by Lisa Lubasch

Eileen Tabios engages THE NEW POETICS by Mathew Timmons

Caleb Puckett reviews HOW TO BE PERFECT and HOW LONG, both by Ron Padgett

Kimberly Wine reviews CUNTIONARY / REPENT AT YOUR LEISURE (OR THE FOLKLORE OF HELL) by Benjamin Perez

Nicholas T. Spatafora reviews THE CHAINED HAY(NA)KU PROJECT curated by Ivy Alvarez, John Bloomberg-Rissman, Ernesto Priego and Eileen Tabios

Andrew Durbin reviews THIS TIME WE ARE BOTH by Clark Coolidge

T.C. Marshall reviews OPENING DAY and THE WHALEN POEM, both by William Corbett

Harry Thorne reviews THE ECO LANGUAGE READER edited by Brenda Iijima and IF NOT METAMORPHIC by Brenda Iijima

Tom Beckett reviews IF NOT METAMORPHIC by Brenda Iijima

Eileen Tabios engages 100 SCENES by Tim Gaze

Simon Perchik reviews CREATURELY DRIFT, NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Allen Planz; EROS DESCENDING, POEMS by Edward Butscher; THE DISCOURSE LETTERS by Anselm Parlatore; THAT NOD TOWARD LOVE, NEW POEMS by Graham Everett; SILVER FISH, POEMS by Ray Freed; SHARPSBURG by Joel Chace; and BLUE EDGE by Susan Tepper

Allen Edwin Butt reviews TERMINAL HUMMING by K. Lorraine Graham

Micah Cavaleri reviews ENGLISH FRAGMENTS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SOUL by Martin Corless-Smith

Jessica Bozek reviews SUM OF EVERY LOST SHIP by Allison Titus

John Bloomberg-Rissman reviews NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman

Eileen Tabios engages THE SOURCE by Noah Eli Gordon; THUS & by Derek Henderson; and DOG EAR by Erica Baum

Tammi McCune reviews ITERATION NETS by Karla Kelsey

Jim McCrary reviews PITCH – DRAFTS 77-95 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and DAY OUT OF DAYS (STORIES) by Sam Shepard

Jonathan Lohr reviews DUTIES OF AN ENGLISH FOREIGN SECRETARY by Macgregor Card

Steven Johannes Fowler reviews IN THE ASSARTS by Jeff Hilson

Peg Duthie engages THE BOOK OF WHISPERING IN THE PROJECTION BOOK by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Guillermo Parra reviews YOU AND THREE OTHERS ARE APPROACHING A LAKE by Anna Moschovakis

Eileen Tabios engages X (ANGEL CITY) by Joseph Lease

Steven Johannes Fowler reviews CLERICAL WORK by Wayne Clements

Genevieve Kaplan reviews VENTRAKL by Christian Hawkey

Crag Hill reviews AD FINITUM by P. Inman

Eileen Tabios engages BONE BOUQUET: A JOURNAL OF POETRY BY WOMEN, Vol. 1, Issue 1, Winter 2011

Jerry Brunoe reviews A THIRST THAT'S PARTLY MINE by Liz Ahl

John Herbert Cunningham reviews THE SELECTED POEMS OF TED BERRIGAN edited by Alice Notley, Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan

Jim Tolan reviews AS IF FREE by Burt Kimmelman

Fiona Sze-Lorrain reviews AIRS & VOICES by Paula Bonnel

Eileen Tabios engages THE HISTORY OF VIOLETS by Marosa Di Giorgio, Trans. By Jeannine Marie Pitas

T.C. Marshall reviews ARRANGING THE BLAZE and PARABLE OF HIDE AND SEEK, both by Chad Sweeney

Bill Scalia reviews THE PACKAGE INSERT OF SORROWS by Angela Genusa

Micah Cavaleri reviews SCENIC FENCES | HOUSES INNUMERABLE by Aby Kaupang

Michael Boughn engages the article "THE HERO AND THE GUNSLINGER: DID ROBERT CREELEY AND ED DORN LOSE THEIR WAY IN MIDDLE AGE?" by Aram Saroyan

Marianne Villanueva reviews SONNETS by Camille Martin

Eileen Tabios engages NOVALESS (ELEMENTS TOWARDS A METAPHYSICS) by Nicholas Manning

Jerry Brunoe reviews ISHMAEL AMONG THE BUSHES by William Allegrezza

Jeff Harrison engages COMPLICATIONS by Garrett Caples

G. Justin Hulog reviews DIWATA by Barbara Jane Reyes

Aileen Ibardaloza engages BABAYLAN: AN ANTHOLOGY OF FILIPINA AND FILIPINA AMERICAN WRITERS, co-edited by Nick Carbo and Eileen Tabios and THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF LITERATURE BY WOMEN: THE TRADITIONS IN ENGLISH, Third Edition, volume 2, co-edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar

Eileen Tabios engages CHAPTER & VERSE: POEMS OF JEWISH IDENTITY edited by Sim Warkov, Rose Black, Margaret Kaufman, Melanie Maier & Susan Terris, and BLOOD HONEY by Chana Bloch

FEATURE ARTICLES
The Quincouplet: a Matter of Words
by Benjamin C. Krause

Kingdom by the Harbor by Nicholas T. Spatafora

THE CRITICS WRITE POEMS
Marthe Reed

Simon Perchik

FROM OFFLINE TO ONLINE: REPRINTED REVIEWS
Moira Richards reviews CARRYING THE FIRE and BURNT OFFERING, both by Joan Metelerkamp

Richard Kostelanetz reviews the article "Re: Print: Poems from Ten Exciting New Books,"

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Hay(na)ku for Haiti--a Haiti Relief Fundraiser

Poets On Adoption:
Poetry: it inevitably relates to -- among others -- identity, history, culture, class, race, community, economics, politics, power, loss, health, desire, regret, language, form and genre disruption, love ... as well as the absences thereofs. The same may be said about Adoption."

BACK COVER
Let Sleeping Dogs Lie...

Decelerating Infinity

Where hesitations accelerate. We decelerate to accommodate the scent of exhausted words. The glamour of speed has lost all caffeine. Where we slow down, to inhale the movement we cannot stop.

Decaffeinated Fame: Lady Gaga

Mouse-clicks going gaga. Poetry of hair. Fashionista as conundrum. Technology exploitation. Charming as someone from a rural area. High on heels. Glassed between the Sun and Venus. Aphrodite as Transformer. Wonder-Woman as Elizabeth Taylor. A kind of nun, really, fit for a monastery somewhere in the mountains of Eastern Europe. Language high on steroids of surrealism. A verb tired of being a verb, because verbs are not infinity. Decaffeinated fame with twenty sugar-cubes. God without God. Portrait of A Lady.

Yawn

Pleasure to Ruin

Before opening the gate, there's a pause. You hear the silence of mountains folded in the sound of car-engine. The moon traps itself in your windshield, deforms its geometry in a tangle of shadows. You're trying to remember the tail-end of whispers, clinging on the curve of lips. Soon, you deface the idea of loss, its hyperbolic sentimental affectations. And you think you understand this, the pleasure to ruin. It's a kind of freedom, flight forceful as wings. The absence of adjustments is air, reduction of the need for something logical. Later, the smell of coffee blankets your patio, tempts the night to rest in the hush of leaves falling in their movement.

On The Road

At some point, you vanish in the corrugated destinations of tires. You forget your fragility, and just move on. Freeway signs become indications of hope. Clouds of any form shape the weather in your prayers. If you allow it, memories huddle in those broken lines in the middle of the road, as though they want to straighten your vision of what might. You feel you don't care. But you do. You see mountains rising in their contours. You see these in your peripheral vision, that place where things don't want to vanish, but remain as blurs, the kind that softens the saturations in your reality.

Dinaw Mengestu

I'm finishing How To Read The Air by Dinaw Mengestu. Fantastic. I like the momentum of the story that becomes meta-fictional, now and then, especially when the narrator, Jonas, creates fictional encounters between him and his father. These encounters draw Jonas into the intimate aspects of his family's past, a story of movement, from one mental geography to another, into conundrums of exile.

More Fables

More FablesMichael Caylo-Baradi
after Kate Braverman

You set the conditions, validations, necessary entanglements. Grace wears masks in sentiments, your hyperbolic, highly toxic perfections. We prefer the numbness, the intimacies we penetrate during aftershocks, as we contemplate beauty of disasters, the chaos that so resembles us. Our dry seasons aren't over yet. More droughts to come, nourish, pour prayers into. I see myself on and in glasses all the time, the clones of my shadows, disintegrating into religions of you, myths dispossessed, like debris of silhouettes you leave in my eyes.

Clothing

When you hang them close to each other, they form a group of common things you use, wear. You remember places and people, and maybe the time of day, too, or whether it was sunny or not. It's possible that what is remembered has already been filtered, carefully selected. The selection is not felt, because of automatic mechanisms that erase what need not be remembered.

Was a drink spilled on the sleeve? Did a hand touch the back of the collar? Questions bother, because there are details that need recognition. Digital instruments can be helpful for these questions. Their pixels are tools for remembrance, especially when zoomed. But as you zoom, are you magnifying something in memory, irrecoverable absence, or something that wasn't even there in the first place?

Stars

They're familiar shapes, like the curve of eyeballs, enlarged, so we can see what's out there. But Hollywood probably offers brighter stars than those up there. We like stars seen by the naked eye, so we can immediately use them for the projectors in our imagination.

Awesome Physics Talks

Video-Clip Source: Studio 360

I saw this video-clip at Studio 360, one of the links on this blog. The layers in this discussion doesn't end; they all converge in many surprising ways. A gift for this new year. HipHop-Physics-Theory-Relativity-Cosmology-Etc. Comedian-Musician Reggie Watts, Columbia University Professor Janna Levin, Professor Maiullo, and Host Kurt Andersen are great.

Egypt

Description For A Car

Almost colorful. Round tires, hard as your smile. Firm body, stylish. The wipers can wipe dried leaves out of sight. Great lights, big. Its name has the same number of letters as my worst description of you. The license plate can be a dinner plate, if need be. I see dead words in it talking like humans driving themselves crazy at 120mph. It smells leather in some parts. Other parts smell like engine smell. The rear-view mirror can't view the rear. A bear once bumped against it. It has been through natural disasters, like stormy arguments. It runs on historical element, fossil fuel. It has windows, square as souls.

Products

Phones. Phonemes. Names. Aims. Alms. Balms. Bumps. Bump. Pump. Rump. Rumpus. Umph. Lump. Mephisto. Christo. Gesto. Gestapo. Abelardo. Leonardo. Borado. Prado. Rado. Aldo. Algo. Algonquin. Akin. Taken. Aching. Achtung. Entschuldigung. Bildung. Building. Vading. Gelding. Grading. Degrading. Mending. Manning. Canning. Cannes. Ban. Bane. Rain. Pain. Raising Cain. Vaining Cain.Vain. Weathervane. Lane. Sane. Brain. Braun. Bran. Brink. Link. Crink. Ink. Beatnik. Neatnik. Freak. Leak. Seek. Meek.Reek. Leek. Wikileak. Beak. Eek. Mach. Bach. Iraq. Barack. Barbwire. Ire. Ireland. Sand. Stand. Bland. Rand. Bend. Send. Lend. Sand. Band. Canned. Tanned. Wand. Blend. Hand. Frond. Id. Did. And. The End.

Mike Tyson

[This was posted two years ago: 19 Jan 2009.] David Carr's recent interview with Mike Tyson at Utah's Sundance Festival was quite revealing about the boxer, even though it was very short. Sometimes, I like Carr, because of his voice. This hoarseness makes me think of the gritty aspects of New York City's urban world; and I'd like to think this is one reason why The New York Times chose him to be the web-video correspondent for the paper's The Carpetbagger episodes, or webisodes. I know that's a weak justification; but still, there's no harm speculating. Now I don't know if his voice always sounds like that. I haven't checked the rest of his webisodes. But the feeling of urban grittiness in his voice does make him sound endearingly cool. And too, the image of approximate roughness on his face somehow reminds me of Mickey Rourke, a one-time boxer aspirant. And so when Carr was interviewing Tyson, I had this playful image of boxer interviewing boxer. Mike's answers were, I thought, articulate and gave me ideas of how he thinks. Of course, the act of manipulating answers to interview questions to give a pleasant or certain effect to viewers could certainly be factored there. Mike has had extensive experience with the media for years; he had been in the spotlight since he was 20-years-old as world champion, then the rape charges, the drugs, and other dramas or tragedies along the way. He did mention the word 'tragedy' towards the end of the interview, as though highlighting something in written-text narrative. Somehow I can sense the link between how he answered Carr's questions and his rise to prominence in the boxing world: sharpness, focus, and his determined right to carry things through the end. This short interview made me want to see the documentary "Tyson", directed by James Toback. The director was actually there, sitting beside Mike, and mentioned there were other celebrities there at Utah, but that people paid more attention to Mike than these other Hollywood big-names: what a natural way to promote his film's subject, I thought. Then there's that tattoo around his left eye, a sort of Maori tattoo. He can look menacing with it, no doubt, although not during that interview.

(For interested parties: video section of paper's website.)

Ian McEwan & Richard Dawkins - On Moral Instincts, Religion, Atheism, Love, Darwin, Inward Cinemas.

There's a lot to absorb here, at least, for me. One is a scientist, concerned with investigations to solve the mysteries of the material world, and the other a literary-writer, concerned with investigations NOT necessarily to solve the mysteries of the material world, but more so, to expand and deepen the meaning of those mysteries and, to certain extents, illuminate hidden mysteries. That's why, while this exchange feels fresh, it's also not easy to listen to it, because of the layers of perceptions embedded in their spoken words. The tone of their exchange proposes that they have the same wavelengths, and understand each other well. But I think that is an aspect of the highly deceiving glamor and color of appearances.

What is ironic about the way or tone Dawkins promotes his ideas regarding atheism and evolution is that he often sounds eerily dogmatic you think he's about to start his own religion, a fourth and official addition to the eternal triumvirate: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Righting Frames Left

I am on the left-turn pocket, about to make a left. The wait hair-splits seconds to infinity, a very physical experience of eternity on a street-intersection, the kind in which your life feels trapped, and there is only one direction, there, into the abyss of the left, into its freedoms, chaos. I see faces in the cars, on the other direction, faces of pursuit, aggression, those who'd confess their day in frantic phone calls later, unnecessary calls they have to make just to have someone to talk to, to feel linked, networked. They are wearing sunglasses, as though to leave the sun out of their directions, ignore its illuminations, consider them distractions, nuisance. I am in the intersection of 5:00pm and 5:01pm, the intersection of life as abstract and life as material, bad decisions and worst decisions, fiction and non-fiction, poetry and reality. In a moment, I could crash, collide into another dream in the making, a city official, a president of a porn-company, a thief trying to be the best thief in the world, or a horny man having phone sex on his cell-phone. My life is on the line, and there are no lines to read in-between those lines. Am I in someone's surveillance camera? Am I in a movie-production set? I make the sign of the cross. Soon, I let that sign fade to insignificance, to the shadows of other crosses I've made before. The light is green, is yellow, is red, the color of anything, an empty sign, emptied of sunsets, death, crime, failure, genesis of ironies, the erotics of daily life, birth, or as myth before flights to nowhere.