ALLY OOP THE ALPACA: Forgive Me – Part II

NOW AVAILABLE You’re at your computer. Tickets are a tense, electrifying few seconds from going on sale. Eyeing the time, you’re hitting “Refresh,” and elsewhere, all your friends are doing the exact same thing. That’s Paul Siegell’s jambandbootleg. A widespread, high-spirited head rush. Desperation, fretfulness—all out life-leaping. “The party starts in the parking lot,” indeed. [...]

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Listen to This: Boundaries?

Kazim Ali’s recent American Poetry Review columns have been stunning. His most recent is a bad-assed belletristic constellation of texts (where he makes a common cadre in media studies—Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, and The Matrix—meet up with Melville & Dickinson), and it transcends the boundary of a “column” to become an essay. Ali [...]

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Listen to This: Convergence Culture

Gotta love the ironies of digital culture. A big fretful debate among publishers is whether the printed word is on the way out. But the first big internet retailer made its money selling books online. Amazon is a great example of what some folk call “convergence culture”— the term is a bit slippery: for some [...]

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ALLY OOP THE ALPACA: Man who always goes to sleep

ALSO, here’s an interesting look at what it takes to get a manuscript ready for publication, reacting to critics and editing. Pretty funny, too. Whenever I Am About to Publish a Book… by MARK TWAIN ~@~

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TBD: How To Hate The Kindle

Well, Bezos, if you’re listening—and I know you are—listen to this: No. Not no thanks. No. No Kindle. No glorified etch-a-sketch. No fake book that smells like what I can only assume is not a book. No safe harbor for trees doomed to become the novels I buy and read half of. I will chop down that tree, pulp it up, print words upon it, bring it to St. Marks Books, pay for it with my credit card and then read half of it all by myself if I have to!

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Slumdog

I taught a course in advertising history last summer and we spent a lot of time discussing the way “the culture industries” try to train us to see the world. In the 20s, for example, when PR and advertising were new professions, when mass production demanded mass consumption, advertisers tended to celebrate modernity: what’s new [...]

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Very Short Reviews Of Stuff I Have Encountered In The Last Week

Battlestar Galactica Series Finale: great the first time it ended, then fairly disappointing. The Walking Dead, Issues 13-59: so much better than what you’re reading right now. Dawn Of The Dead (The Old One): worth your two hours of staring, if only because you would want to get away with that kind of stuff in [...]

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Perspectives

I like tall buildings. I like tall buildings with rotating restaurants, observation decks, and those silvery view finders that make the user look like she’s manning a spotlight on a battlement instead of spotting some monument on the horizon. This jones of mine for impossible perspectives demands to be met when I travel. (Ask Kathy—she’s [...]

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Savage Detectives

Yes and yes again about this question of complexity, or difficulty, or opacity. Seems that Greg and Matt and Jason are staging a trace of a much longer debate about that modernist notion of the erudite ideal reader (a la T.S. Eliot), on one hand, and a Whitman-esque aesthetic accessibility on the other. Or maybe [...]

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David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.

I got absorbed last night in a New Yorker essay about David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass Infinite Jest.   It had been a while since I had thought about him.  When I heard about his suicide last year I was so saddened.  For a while, it was all could think about.  I read every [...]

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