8.17.07
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Curabitur odio nulla, elementum sed, placerat et, pellentesque sit amet, ligula. Sunset Rubdown's Random Spirit Lover. Suspendisse lobortis vulputate lacus. Integer condimentum. Integer eu augue. Sed risus. Nam pulvinar posuere dui. Donec mi. Ut semper, dui bibendum mattis lacinia, ante nibh laoreet orci, non nonummy erat leo vitae erat. Broken Social Scene Presents: Kevin Drew (Aliquam aliquam magna a velit here). Etiam non eros ac mi dapibus pulvinar. Sed arcu urna, mollis vitae, suscipit non, molestie vel, arcu. Nina Nastasia & Jim White's You Follow Me (Nulla commodo nulla nec cursus dignissim here).
Curabitur quis ligula et turpis varius imperdiet Robin Behn's Paper Bird. Proin odio neque, facilisis quis, fringilla id, ultricies a, libero. "God, somehow I've made them drink / the gold from their bodies. / They drive as fast as they can / through the hot kitchen air— / they plunge into dishwasher, cat's milk. / Those that have the strength / disappear into the hive, / come out staggering like gyroscopes, / one-winged."
Nulla fermentum, nibh vitae semper porttitor, ipsum dui faucibus orci, et vulputate velit risus ac neque. Suspendisse lectus urna, volutpat sed, rhoncus vel, mattis vitae, justo. Vestibulum consectetuer, Harper's Magazine neque vel molestie sodales LongPen™, lacus lectus mollis mi, sed ullamcorper tellus est non metus.
Duis in est nec lacus placerat scelerisque. Phasellus neque elit, nonummy at, faucibus ac, interdum et, est. Nulla nec lectus fringilla elit consectetuer adipiscing. In et dolor. Sed massa hindsight.
7.7.07
Reading: Zadie Smith's On Beauty
Listening: King Khan and the Shrines, Blitzen Trapper, Wheat, Bowerbirds, The White Stripes, Interpol, and Hallelujah the Hills
Watching: Salad fingers
Celebrating: Lisa's good news (second paragraph)
Drinking: pomegranate mojitos
6.4.07
Suckerpunch now has a cover. Here it is.
5.22.07
David busy write book and say me can write journal again so long me say nothing ina inna innapropreate. Boris no spell good. No laugh or else you feel wrath of club.
Me like listen Dungen. Me can listen to Dungen all day long. There (Their? Theyre? Boris never get that right) new record called Tio Bitar. They come from land of Sweden and play guitar good. Bang drum good too. Me send Dungen email and ask to play for Boris birthday next month. Me hope say yes.
Me pick up book David read other day. It say "Stories by Miranda July" on cover. Funny her name also month. If my name "Boris February" it could be confewsing. Person could say "February is coming" and person listening say "No its not it just passed" and first person say "No look over there in the hills. February is coming." But I digres. Miranda July book cover no good. Just black words on yellow. Look. Boris can design better. Look. That is woolly mammoth in case you are wundering.
posted by Boris @ 12:57 PM
4.11.07
We got a kitten last week—Sadie. Here is a photo of her thinking about the theory of relativity as it pertains to the Big Bang in terms of Derridean deconstruction.
Listening to Welcome's Sirs. Good stuff. You can listen to four tracks from the album on their MySpace page.
It's bad enough when I alone see my rejection slip.
4.5.07
My ears have been hooked to Panda Bear's Person Pitch for over a week now. On paper, this album hardly sounds appealing: a one man show of sampling, repetition, and indecipherable lyrics. But coming through the speakers, it's another story. It's Brian Wilson meets Neutral Milk Hotel. It's beautiful, hypnotic, and unforgettable. Click here to listen to the third track, "Bros."
I'm currently reading American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets, Edited by David Walker. I've only read up through the Bs (Ali, Alexander, Beasley, Behn, Bierds, Boruch). So far, so
goodgreat. And there's still Yusef Komunyakaa to look forward to, Larry Levis, Franz Wright, and Mary Ruefle. This is the first time I've really read Robin Behn's poems and now I feel like an idiot for dismissing her work. I'm struck by the uniqueness of her voice, her intelligence and suprising metaphors. Here's the beginning of "Drownproofing Lesson," which illustrates all three: "Hour upon hour I keep them hanging there like jellyfish // under the vast umbrella of air / until they re-open the primordial eye / that sees just light and dark // the way searchlights on their bodies, / all night afloat, would show alabaster clams / moored in black glass."My jaw keeps dropping at the thought of Oprah selecting Cormac McCarthy's The Road for her book club. I need a helmet with a good, sturdy chinstrap. Seriously though: Cormac McCarthy? Mr. Reclusive fielding questions from Ms. You-cannot-escape-seeing-my-face-at-least-once-a-week-on-TV-or-on-the-cover-of-my-own-magazine? I'm really looking forward to the interview, to see Cormac move and talk. I wouldn't be surprised if a few thousand readers spiral into a depressive episode after reading a novel this grim. Buy stock in Zoloft now.
We had some major plumbing problems over here. It was three days of worrying about the pipes beneath our house and front yard. I felt like one of my drawings. Our plumber tried to swindle $5,000 more out of us, but I sniffed a lie that a second plumber confirmed. If you happen to live in the Long Beach area and a plumber comes to your door with Tony embroidered on his name patch, slap his face with a lemon meringue pie and say, "That was from David."
3.16.07
I've been reading and rereading Melissa Ginsburg's chapbook Arbor, just out from New Michigan Press. The price on the back says $8.00, which is a steal for a collection of poems this imaginative and crisp. It should be more like $31.67. Here's "In the Yard" in it's entirety: "I heard a kitten behind the fence / crying so terribly it became a machine. / Once it was a machine I couldn't help it." Here's the beginning of "Pink Book": "A factory makes maps and calendars / next to a field containing hay bales. / Inside it seasons. It summers. / The future rolls out of a machine." And here are some lines from the title poem: "Machines were made to hide inside. / Despair a willow of icicles machine / ticking and shrieking from which we could see. / Our trees were. Our machines / arranged to wait for us forever." I suspect—what with all the machines that pop up like ATMs throughout Arbor—that Ginsburg is one herself. The MG 5000. A shiny, graceful robot that spits out one beautifully concise poem after another.
This guy stayed with us last week on his Southern California reading tour. Here are a few pics. I would've taken a photo of Bob making sunny-side up eggs, but I had to drop my camera and pick up the fire extinguisher.
We went and saw the Damien Hirst exhibit Superstition at the Gagosian. Usually the morbid aspect of his work is in your face (e.g., dead animals floating in tanks of formaldehyde), but here it was just below the surface. Definitely check it out if you're in the L.A. area.
3.5.07
AWP began with us eavesdropping on a giddy woman talking on her cell phone about her two-book deal before she hopped on a plane heading toward Atlanta. It ended four days later, late in the evening, with Lisa and I unable to fall asleep because a woman in the adjacent room was complaining to her roommate. Loudly. How some famous poet earlier that day (who was also her good friend) told her "Your time will come." How belittling that was to her. How small it made her feel. And then she began to cry. In-between those two moments—the ecstatic woman, the weeping woman—it was sensory overload, my brain pinballed here there here there, I said "delibitating" instead of "debilitating," I introduced myself to someone I met the previous day, two people stood before me like I knew them, nametags flipped to the blank side, we should all Sharpie our
names on our foreheads. Which brings me to Cracker Jack and that prize in every box. Yes, we opened the mini bar, that box of caramel-coated popcorn, and this was the surprise. Which isn't much fun unless you have Alex Lemon stand still while you take a photo of him with the Benjamin-Franklin-as-a-boy-illustration covering his head. Incidentally, the flipside (see illustration on the left) is pretty much how I felt walking around the book fair—one memory folding into another folding into another—as I tried to remember peoples' names, no matter if I met them a year ago or ten minutes earlier.
Almost done with Zadie Smith's White Teeth. A disjointed novel, but genius nonetheless.
Listening to the new Beirut, Arcade Fire, Modest Mouse, and Deerhunter, the latter of which is the best in the bunch. More transcendent. More something-or-other. Yeah. My head's still in Atlanta.
And I finished going through the copyedits of my first novel. Let's ban the semicolon. Who's with me?
1.23.07
As far as record releases goes, there probably won't be a better one this year than the four great albums hitting the stores and online today—Deerhoof's Friend Opportunity, The Shins' Wincing The Night Away, Menomena's Friend And Foe, and at the top of the heap: Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? which is either a reference to The Illiad or The Golden Girls, I can't recall which, but you can listen to the whole wonderful thing here. Next Tuesday it's Some Loud Thunder, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's anticipated follow-up to their self-titled release. The jury is still out whether or not SLT is the better album. Today I'm leaning towards "Yes." Maybe it's the shoes.
Recently read Daniel Alarcón's short story collection War by Candlelight. Absolutely loved it. He's the real deal.
I meant to post this earlier, but here is the painting I did for Lisa that I mentioned on my last journal entry.
Did I tell you already that Diego is the Johnny Knoxville of cats? It's true. He likes to play with the garbage disposal blade. And stick his paw inside the toaster. And this afternoon he snuffed out a candle flame. Have you ever smelled singed cat hair? It's not a pleasant odor. This weekend I'm going to shoot him out of a cannon and over 30 school buses. Aw, come on people, it's what he wants.
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