You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2008.
A selection of her work at Nicole Klagsbrun and a couple of prints available at sensationally low prices at 20×200.
The birth control company Yaz currently has a commercial (found here) in which the song “Goodbye to You” by The Veronicas appears.
The New York Times had an excellent article on Daniel Day-Lewis last November:
Despite the fact that he is the most eloquent of men, able to speak extemporaneously in flowing paragraphs without the use of colloquialisms, he is unwilling to expose the mechanics of his acting process. “It’s not that I want to pull the shutters down,” Day-Lewis said, as he finished his sandwich. “It’s just that people have such a misconception about what it is I do. They think the character comes from staying in the wheelchair or being locked in the jail or whatever extravagant thing they choose to focus their fantasies on. Somehow, it always seems to have a self-flagellatory aspect to it. But that’s just the superficial stuff. Most of the movies that I do are leading me toward a life that is utterly mysterious to me. My chief goal is to find a way to make that life meaningful to other people.”
At least a dozen people have insisted that the lines of “Footprints in the Sand” came to them alone, usually by divine spark, differing only by a few words here and there.
The Washington Post has the full story.
In the letter column of this month’s Poetry (June 08 ) Marilyn Chin, in response to a question of translation, savages the questioner for the use of the expression “noodling around”:
“Perhaps Joseph Bednarik is not conscious that “noodling around in the margins” is an appalling and problematic expression, fraught with demeaning sexist, racist, imperialist overtones, and born out of the very hateful stuff that Ho Xuan Huong so pointedly and whole-heartedly fought against in her poetry and in her life.”
I’m fairly certain that the writer did not intend a sexist et cetera expression, much less a “demeaning” one. Personally, when I use sexist/racist expressions with imperialistic overtones I always avoid the demeaning ones, but my point here is that if this is the sort of thing that we can make big to-dos over then racism and sexism is done. It used to be that racism was stringing someone up from a tree, sexism used to be treating a woman like a possession, but now we’re digging up archaic denotations of common expressions -one that I’m not even sure I buy, but we’ll grant for argument. Some scholar once said that as the races grow closer together, as their differences shrink, then those differences will become all the more important, and though the flash go up, the bang goes down. So either the end of racism is in sight or Marilyn Chin demeans the problem with such a silly and grasping display of victimhood.
Joel Brouwer : An Aubade
Megan O’Rouke : My Life as a Subject & On Marriage
D. A. Powell : republic
Peter Cole : And So the Skin…
W. S. Piero : A Lowrider Loudly Brings Us
Learned new word from Roddy Lumsden : scut
Liked a couple of lines from Donald Revell’s Odysseus Hears of the Death of Kalypso:
I have hidden a cruel, secret oceanIn sinews and in sleep and cowardice.
Rae Amantrout : Djinn
Tom Sleigh : For the Executive Director of the Fallen
My bones
feel the quilts;
a frosty night.
-Buson
