At Rhino.
Teaser quote: Just a few words on each of these. But before I get into it, let me say that, in my opinion, the translator who calls himself Red Pine is a national treasure. At first you think: Oh come on. How’s he gonna be any good? Some American hippy named Bill Porter goes to Taiwan and starts calling himself “Red Pine”? He’s gonna be one of these New Age goofballs… Friends, that’s what I thought….
Teaser quote: A guy—Borges—explains that the Zahir is a twenty-centavo coin. —If you’re like me, you think OK, that’s what Argentinians call that coin. Wrong. He goes on to explain that at other times in history the Zahir has been a vein in a piece of marble, a tiger, a brass astrolabe, and many other things. —Now if you’re like me, you don’t know what he’s talking about.
Teaser quote: I think her name puts people off sometimes. It’s like her name is “Kimmy Peanut.” How can these books be any good if they were written by somebody named Kimmy Peanut.
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: Here—and almost nowhere else in American poetry—we have an anarchic sharp-fanged satirist of the very first rank. She makes fun of Ben Lerner. She makes fun of Marie Howe. She trashes Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones.” She rewrites Raymond Carver. And when she’s got nobody left to attack, she strangles herself. And not once does she lose her cool.
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: Think of movies. The soundtracks are the giveaway; they let you know, in the sex scenes, that the Secret of Life, the Solution to Everything, is at stake. Faunlagui is never like that. The othergay-sex poetry I read this week was TOTALLY like that; Faunlagui—never.
On Poems.
Teaser quote:
You have most likely forgotten
By the time you're reading this rhyme,
That you, as a baby, were possibly maybe
The greatest kid of all time.
Teaser quote: When I was recommending it to people after I read it in June (right after Decameron), there were certain people I felt should not be informed of the book’s existence. I felt it would kill them dead.
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: If, gun to my head, I had to compare the Popol Vuh to something in European literature, I might compare it to the most deliciously twisted Russian folktales. The ones where the morals are deeply weird, and the structures arbitrary. (Or forget Europe. The Popol Vuh is a lot like Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard.)
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: By page 200, this reader was thoroughly fed up. This, despite the fact that Kunin really does have substantial knowledge of Herbert and his 17th-century milieu. Moreover, when Kunin goes all-out memoirist and recounts scenes related to his own enjoyment of being bottomed and humiliated, he does not fail to be interesting.
On YouTube.
Teaser quote: “Ursula started violently. She turned to see the warm, unfolded face of her mistress looking at her, to her. She was acknowledged. Laughing her own beautiful, startled laugh, she began to swim. The mistress was just ahead, swimming with easy strokes. Ursula could see the head put back, the water flickering upon the white shoulders, the strong legs kicking shadowily.”
At The Curator.
Teaser quote:
If a rat gets a hold of a fufu,
he will eat it; he does not steal the pestle.
The souls of all tormentors are soft
like the lead of an artist’s pencil.
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: Pound, as everyone knows, was a piece of work. Sometimes he was high-minded, nurturing; he was frequently as witty and quotable as anybody on earth. Other times, he sounded like some foaming Nazi podcast.
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: The poems are crazy and very satisfyingly barbaric. They read like the effusions of men in helmets who drink honey straight from the hive, and scratch their nuts with weapons.
From Prelude Books.
Teaser quote:
There was an old person from Douglas,
Was in need of a hug but was hug-less.
When he got up and fled, we pursued him and said
“Let us hug you, Old Person from Douglas!”
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: All it is is twenty-five very colorful photographs of the same Black “Barbie”-style doll (turns out the doll’s name was Julia), in different clothing in each shot, with a meme remark blasted across the top and/or bottom. The sodium content of the remarks is extremely high, and the effect, deliciously, is to make the fixed stare of the doll seem transfused with various levels of indignation or perplexity.
At Rhino.
Teaser quote: Whitman seems, in the last five years of his life, to have had only three or four ideas, of which he never tired. Outdoors is better than indoors; the common man is better than the highfalutin; don’t take any advice; all men are brothers; history is full of inaccuracies; America is very, very, very special.
Teaser quote:
If one were to construct a TOC just for Book 7, it would be even more of a mess than the TOC for the anthology as a whole. There would be sections on:
animals
insects
sailors swallowed by the sea
fools and unincorporated persons
children—’specially unmarried girls
long-dead celebrities
whole armies
persons who deserved what they got
—and so on. Only a very, very few of these came out of (or could dreamily produce) emotions. For the most part, whatever merit the individual specimens have is confined to the “recto” pages in the Loeb.
Teaser quote: Reader, I swear to you (even as that Goddess, who has thus far lent me grace for writing this, may grant an immortality to my writings, such as they may be) that I found myself at that moment so desirous of dying, that I would have been content with any manner of death whatever: and fallen into hatred of myself, I cursed the hour that ever I left Arcadia.
Teaser quote: The Tale of Genji, too, puts the adult reader right back where he or she was, in childhood, facing the Greek myths—but with a difference. Not for a microsecond does one think that Ovid (for example) has any resistance to the Cult of Beauty. You can see he’s a pervert through and through. The suffering involved in all that love stuff is part of why, according to him, the shit is good. Ovid—and the Romans in general—saw absolutely nothing wrong with gladiatorial combat, even if the weapons involved were people’s genitals. Whereas, one can never comfortably class Murasaki in that same category. With her, you’re closer to Milton Mind or Dostoyevsky Mind. She is able to disagree with something she idolizes; she doesn’t make herself agree with it ’cuz she idolizes it.
