Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Deep down, I'm pretty superficial.
— Ava Gardner

Comments
He's gotta be able to open jars. That's non-negotiable. It's a plus if he can reach the top shelves.

Posted by: Texan99 at May 25, 2010 10:27 AM

All I know is, my boys can be up and out of the house to school in 30 minutes. That includes a shower.

Meanwhile, the parents of little girls are waking them up as much as 2 hours ahead of time, to be sure they have time to wash and dry their hair.

For little girls, getting out of the house is a big production involving careful scrutiny of their clothing choice and coiffure every morning before they go to school, much less church or someplace special. They spend more time learning to control their looks than on any other subject.

We don't need evolution to explain the difference in attitude about looks between contemporary heterosexual men and women.

Looks, Men, Women: Blah, Blah, Blah

David Markson - Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage. I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel

David Markson, whose wry, elliptical novels probing the scattered mind of the artist and the unruly craft of making art were frequently called postmodern and experimental and almost always surprisingly engaging and underappreciated, died Friday in his Greenwich Village apartment. He was 82.

Mr. Markson’s books expressed, both mischievously and earnestly, the hem-and-haw self-consciousness of the perpetual thought-reviser. He wrote mostly monologues, or at least the narration seemed to emanate from a single voice, though the books were not necessarily narrated in the first person. (The writer at the focus of “This Is Not a Novel,” for instance, is called Writer.)

Mr. Markson did not much bother with character development or plot; nor, as his work evolved, did he care much for devices of organization like chapters, or even paragraphs. Rather, he built his books in nuggets and epigraphs, oddball observation by peculiar found fact, to portray the mind of the narrator, who was generally an artist in some state of mental distress.

Mr. Markson excavated the history of literature and art for eerily resonant and often amusing, petty or scandalous tidbits of biography and juxtaposed them with declarations about the narrator’s state of mind.

“Author has finally started to put his notes into manuscript form,” begins the novel “Vanishing Point” (2004), about a procrastinatory author known only as Author. Then there is a line break, followed by:

“A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York — and left that way for a month and a half.”

That was followed by another line break, another factoid (about the car crash that killed Albert Camus), then another line break, and so on.

Such was the form of many of Mr. Markson’s books. And though readers who crave narrative may have been put off by them, reviewers almost always found themselves succumbing to what many referred to as a cumulative, hypnotic effect. His admirers included Amy Hempel, Ann Beattie and David Foster Wallace, who referred to “Wittgenstein’s Mistress” — a monologue by a female painter, evidently mad, wandering the globe as the last surviving person on earth — as “pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/arts/ ... n.html?hpw

The Last Novel

non lined paper is best too
the video of camranh airfarcebase
from an interesting point of view
it was a huge base on a peninsula
that sticks out away from the coast
and away from danger also
and for these guys, they never left the base
they were away from the flightline
they came home drunks and acidheads
our quarters were near the flightline
we came back home drunks and fuckups