godthedog

22 - athens, ga. soon to be east village, nyc. close to the olsen twins.

i'd give the "art's poster boy for gen x" nod to m. c. escher. his stuff DOMINATES the college dorm rooms, and his art is probably more recognized than dali's (although dali has the bigger name).

robert johnson - 'king of the delta blues singers, vol. 2'. found on vinyl downtown for $6.99. i rule the world.

'finnegans wake' is a thousand times moreso (home of the lovely word "hierarchitechtiptitoploftical" that i wouldn't stop saying once i learned how TO say it), so you may want to check it out just for that. but it's also a thousand times more dense, which more or less followed the trend throughout his life: i read 'dubliners' in 3 days, 'portrait' in a week, 'ulysses' in 3 weeks, and it took me five months to get through the wake. and unlike 'ulysses', there's no strong content to build upon & the tone of the book never changes. aside from the glorious final chapter, if you read the first hundred pages, you've essentially read the next five hundred.

looks like i missed a lot. and i'm masturbating to that post as we speak. talent is part of the equation, but i believe it tends to get overrated. i don't believe anybody starts from scratch as a good writer. it's a craft, with tools, and most people can learn it. some people will naturally have the capacity to get better than others, but even those people have to work at it to get better. to take an example similar to (but outside) poetry: i write a lot of drama, and my dialogue tends to be at least interesting. i may have a talent for writing dialogue, i may not; but when i started out, my dialogue was horrifically bad on all sorts of levels. i had to pound away for a good five years before i was able to hone anything remotely readable or speakable, and it's only in the last year or so that i've gotten "good." it's probably very clear how seriously writing is taken by each respective person in this thread. it's not a matter of how seriously someone says they take their writing, it comes out in what they write and the ways they talk about writing. they're two sides of the same coin, essentially. even if you do it intuitively, you're clearly practicing a lot and getting a better feel of how you can make things work. even if you can't neatly fit it into a set of propositional statements (as marney has), the discipline is there. think john coltrane: he stated over and over again how much he works just by feeling, but he was supremely disciplined in using his instrument for expression and knew what he was doing. i'd tell you to keep going on that. jumping in way over your head and trying by trial, error & sheer force of willpower to make it work when you don't know exactly how or why it might work is how i've learned most of what i know now. again, it wasn't poetry, but i've applied it to drama, prose & movies, so i don't see why it shouldn't work for you. by trying your hardest just to make that thing work, you'll learn a lot. and you'll learn it the hard way, which makes it that much better for you. i guess i've already become the official carrier of joyce's jock here, so i'll have a crack... it's clearly written in english, with sprinkles of latin, french, etc., and its sentence structure is based very firmly in english, but it could easily be approached as another language. a better analogy might be to say it's like suddenly being dropped in a foreign land where you don't speak the language; you're immersed in it, you have to accept the fact that you won't get it right away & have to learn your way around it as you go. if you come across something you don't understand, you can't just stop and go "well shit, i don't get it" and close the book. if you come across MANY things in succession you don't understand, you just keep pressing on. the first time i read it, i didn't really get a handle on things until around page 250. but once i started being able to feel my way through it and noticed what was going on, i couldn't put it down. i've since gone back to it 3 times in the last 4 years, i get something new out of it every time, and it never fails to amaze me. it took me a year to convince a friend to read it because it's so daunting, & she went into it kicking and screaming, but once she finished it the first thing she told me was, "i want to go back and read it again."

meh. faulty analogy. my point was that at that point, one could've contributed to the thread in 2 ways: 1) offer criticisms of already-posted work 2) offer examples of one's own work which is why, in addition to saying "i was wondering that myself," i offered up something of my own, inane & meager as it was. having done neither, what you posted was an example of posting masturbation, whose only point was to serve the one posting. and as p. j. gibson told me, masturbation is a private thing. when done so that others will notice, it tends to be off-putting. THIS i want to see the reasoning for. i've come across people that don't like 'ulysses', but even they grudgingly admitted its good points. i'd like to know how exactly nothing in it is redeemable. i'd argue the same for 'ulysses'.

sadly, no. i'll keep an eye out for that one.

see, that's better. acidic as it is, it gives someone a small indication of why you think it sucks, rather than just saying "this sucks." i observed that your opinion was pointless and did nothing. sue me. not at all. i've come across a healthy amount of good writing that could've been more effective and polished if the author had chosen his words a little more carefully--doing active instead of passive verbs, condensing a seven-word clause into just a couple words, etc. joyce labored over finding exactly the right word, & look where it got him. again, not at all. as i understand it, both those criticisms applied to t. s. eliot's original draft of "he do the police in different voices [the waste land]." but with pound's help and extensive revising, he got something worthwhile. writing doesn't always come out perfect, or even good, on the first, third or fifth draft.

i think i had a 3.66, ranked maybe 80 out of 330 or something. fuck if i remember.

check it out. easily the most abrasive thing i've ever heard in my life, it's probably right up your alley. i tried the ornette coleman thing, but his "free jazz" bores the shit out of me. the problem is, it feels truly random and never goes anywhere. 'ascension' and 'meditations' are irregular and atonal and all that, but you can at least sense them going for something, and the tension in the music comes from that. i don't hear any tension in coleman's music. to me, it's the equivalent of taking a handful of actors, putting them on a stage, and saying "here, don't try to build a scene or respond to each other, just say any word that comes into your head." with especially 'ascension', you can feel that the music really wants to come together and never quite gets there. coleman doesn't want to go anywhere, he stands still.

they weren't really "criticisms." a criticism is more helpful and qualified than, "these are awful." the purpose of this thread is, obviously, to share work and be productive about it. marney did neither. it's the equivalent of walking in on a creative writing class in the middle of discussion, saying "you all suck!" and leaving. it doesn't really help the process, all it does is hurt some of the more fragile students & leave the rest going, "....quoi?" if she wanted to offer some of her own stuff, fine. if she wanted to give a hint of "you've done too much of _____, try going in another direction with _____, find another word for ____," great.

the cat power edition: 1. "names" 2. "nude as the news" 3. "satisfaction" 4. "werewolf" 5. "good woman"

the usual, miles & coltrane. i've also heard a little bit of peter brotzmann & love it. found out he's playing here in athens tonight or tomorrow night, i just might go see him.

Care to share some of your poetry? i was wondering the same thing. speaking of the "holier than thou" attitude, i guess i'll contribute something... Why I Am Not a Poet Line breaks Don't interest Me.

I'd have to disagree with Pound here. I've been writing for years operating with only bits and pieces of poetic techniques, smatterings of some authors and decade-spanning collections of others, etc. and I feel like I've grown a great deal by simply forcing myself to evolve my writing based on what little knowledge I do have. That said, though, I'd appreciate any Pound reccomendations. He's one of those authors that is on my long list of "Poets to Read" that I keep forgetting about when it comes time to go to the bookstore. K. for me, it's more of a "i don't take the time to read so much of OTHER people's stuff, yet i'll expect others to read and appreciate my work" thing. pound thought such an education was essential for good serious writing, but i think of it more as lack of reciprocation. if YOU don't read the work of your peers, you have no right to expect any reaction from them over what you've written. being a serious writer is also about being a member of a certain community, and actively participating in it. if you're writing without reading, you're not just being willfully ignorant; you're being selfish, asking the community to help you without you having to help the community. i'm more familiar with pound's patronage of other modernist writers & his credos than his actual works (as i said, i don't read much poetry). he was an ENORMOUS editorial help on "the waste land", & i believe the most famous work he did on his own was the "cantos."

the fact that you somehow expected it to NOT be a piece of shit really disturbs me. 'kid a' i bought the first week it came out, it gathered dust for a couple years & then i got rid of it. it's got some nice moments and at least one track of pure, unfiltered genius, but as a whole it just feels too sedated to engage me.

I just got this cd a couple of weeks ago, and it's already probably among my all-time favorites. "Molly" might have my favorite vocals ever. There's no possible way they can ever be duplicated. that track is fucking scary. the whole vibe of it is just creepy, and when you think it ends you breathe a sigh of relief and then it comes on again and you're all "aaaaugh" and then the music stops again and you're all "sigh of relief, it's over" and then it starts up AGAIN and you're all "mommy, hold me." my quintessential memory of that album is when i was in atlanta driving a friend home at 4 in the morning (we were downtown & she lived in stone mountain, so it's about an 80-minute drive round trip) with it on the speakers. i was pretty hyped up on caffeine, not a soul on the road, and it was really starting to fuck with my sense of reality. it was like listening to "heroin" on an endless loop, & i just kept drifting. i could barely hold a conversation with the girl, and by the time i got to "she fucks me" i wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

actually, having seen him speak at my college, i can attest to the fact that harvey pekar is indeed a great man. very intelligent, humble, warm, funny, and stayed as long as anyone wanted him to for questions & autographs afterwards. i still have the signed ticket stub in my wallet.

how about in place of "the murder mystery"? the teary-eyed song edition: 1. sarah mclachlan - "hold on" 2. john lennon - "god" 3. the beatles - "golden slumbers" 4. bob dylan - "it's all over now baby blue" (live 1966 version) 5. more beatles - "eleanor rigby"

sarah mclachlan - "hold on" never thought much about the lyrics until i was told the guy that the narrator's singing about has AIDS.

'bringing out the dead'. it WAS good, but it should've been GREAT.

1. the white album, the beatles (more or less the 'ulysses' of popular music: a statement and summation of everything that has come before it, climaxing with an attempt to take it into the future; similarly, it works precisely BECAUSE its individual parts are so different and don't seem to belong together) 2. electric ladyland, jimi hendrix (not as all-encompassing, but way more unified) 3. the pod, ween* (which manages to be all-encompassing AND unified, in a really weird way) that was way too easy. all these are also in my top 5 all-time favorites. *not QUITE sure if this one should count. although it has the same epic length (70+ minutes) as so many great double albums of the past ('electric ladyland', 'blonde on blonde', etc.), but it can also be fit on to a single cd. and unlike the past double albums, which were originally released on two LPs, 'the pod' was released on a single cd to start with. so i don't know if the list should only include albums that can only fit on 2 cd's (disqualifying 'london calling', 'electric ladyland', etc), or if it should include anything that can't fit on a single lp (which opens up the floodgates for any album that lasts over an hour). but 'the pod' definitely has the FEEL of a double album, reaching for everything they can think of.

cat power - "nude as the news"

i've read chunks of '120 days of sodom'. more than anything, it seemed hilariously bad to me. didn't get anything in the way of substance out of it at all, just a bunch of "can you top this" stories of depravity that all seemed to end with, "and then we all ate our own shit." i won't swear by that judgment, since i didn't read the whole thing. but what i read didn't give me the impression that reading any more of it would change my judgment of it. EDIT: almost forgot--also fun for its repeated use of the phrase "let his fuck fly."

it took FOUR AND A HALF YEARS TO SETTLE THIS SHIT? jesus.