Have You Read Live Nude Girls?

LIVE NUDE GIRLS

Hope might be a trap. It might be what keeps us all going, but it might destroy you. Or it might just be what gets you on Oprah.

Kevin Postupack wrote this incredible novel ostensibly about a bisexual stripper with an overactive mind and who's maybe too much of an autodidact. She's a voracious reader with ADHD and an extreme imagination. But what the novel's really about is identity.

What's in a name?

Every character in the book has an alias, and you'd think this'd be a little confusing but it isn't. People are able to be two things at once, and rather than make this liminal space off-limits to the reader, Postupack invites you to inhabit it with Daphne and her assassin cat, Noodles. It's easy to do because the narrator is operating under the assumption that we all contain multitudes.

Like Schrödinger's cat, we're alive and dead at the same time, but rather than keep that proverbial box closed, Postupack spends his time ripping the tops off them like Cracker Jack boxes looking for prizes. Sometimes there's a prize, and sometimes you get a dead cat, but the courage to keep opening them is something worth celebrating, and I think Kevin Postupack's novel does that with aplomb.

Live Nude Girls is sexy without being crude, deep without being preachy, and hilarious without being corny. Those are all hard balancing acts.

There's even a Nazi-hunter, a self-declared goddess/restaurateur, and a Cuban strip-club-owner who claims to have prescient visions. The name of the strip club? Pandora's. You can't help but open that one.

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Prometheus could see the future, and Epimetheus could see the past. Epimetheus is often called the "foolish brother" but how could he be? Wouldn't an accurate and crystal clear remembrance of the past endow you with great wisdom? Wouldn't you almost be able to predict the future based on the events of the past? After all, that's how statistics work.

Anyway, the box: It was given to Pandora as a dowry after Hephaestus built her with beauty and cunning. But it was Zeus's plan to unleash plagues onto man via her box to take them down a notch. They'd recently been blessed with agriculture and fire. So out of her jar came disease and famine and hard work and all the other evil fates that befall men. . . but only one is mentioned by name. Elpis, hid under the lid, claiming instead to be the only palliative to assuage the plight of man. Elpis means Hope.

But I think Elpis was simply the most clever of the fates, endeavoring to stay close to us in order to inflict the most constant, enduring pain of all.

Have You Seen DUNKIRK? BTW, the Batman Movies Sucked

Dunkirk. a magnum opus, was an incredible use of Christopher Nolan’s bag of tricks. If you like those tricks, you’ll love Dunkirk. Fun with time relativity, action set pieces that pose as works of art, heavy themes that tug at the edges of the narrative, and a refusal to show a handsome man’s face. Dunkirk shines a light on something most Americans are woefully ignorant about, so it’ll probably be history teachers’ new lazy-day film pick. Verisimilitude in motion, it makes everything seem so real it reminds me of idiots telling me how realistic his Batman movies were.

It’s the director’s finest film with hardly any missteps. It reminds me how much I dislike his Batman movies.

His turn at Batman was obviously a genius held captive by a cadre of fools demanding he finish a trilogy for trilogy’s sake.

“Can I please shoot a film on 35mm about a space crew stuck in black hole time warps?”
“Not until you give us another Batman movie!”
“Can I please make sweeping epic about the evacuation of Dunkirk shot on 70mm?”
“We’re going to need another Batman movie!”
“Bloody hell!”

So what did we get? A military Batman who blows things up with military weaponry and unilaterally extradites foreign nationals. Anyone who says they’re set in a more realistic world is delusional. It’s a militaristic world, and after 2001, that’s what film execs thought we wanted and would accept as “real.” One can see his obvious talent, but we already knew he was special with his previous films.

To me, Batman is either the smartest man alive and the world’s greatest detective, or campy and cool. Campy and cool is hard to pull off, but it’s worked before. The greatest detective, smart-guy stuff is harder, but there're tons of comic material ripe for adaptation. Anyway, he was never a super soldier, and only a shitty studio exec would ask him to be.

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Anyway, fuck those Batman movies despite their fleeting moments of brilliance. Yes, there are plenty of moments evidencing Nolan's genius; that doesn't make the movies great. Even an iconoclastic, career-defining performance by Heath Ledger does not a great film make.

I love Dunkirk, by the way. I think it's one of the best things I've seen in a theme I'm actually so bored with I almost didn't go. Do we need another movie about the second world war? Maybe not. But Christopher Nolan's voice is certainly worth listening to, and I think it'll go down as one of the better examples of the genre. 

American Books One Might Want to Get to Before Others

I have a new friend from England, C. C admits to being woefully underread when it comes to "American Classics."

C wanted a list of American books I thought were worth reading, so I made one. I stuck to ten novels. Here's my list:

• To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee wrote one of those books you can never unread. It's simply the truest American story ever told.
• The crying of Lot 49: Thomas Pynchon's shortest novel isn't his best, but it's the best to get to know this writer and see if you want to try out heftier tomes like Gravity's Rainbow and V., which is my personal favorite.
• On the Road: Kerouac beats Thompson when it comes to writing about the American Dream. I think I've read everything by Kerouac, and I like Lonesome Traveler more than On the Road, but you have to start at the beginning.
• Lolita: Nabokov wrote possibly the best novel of the 20th century, called himself an American novelist, and the book takes place in the US, so don't try to tell me this doesn't count. If you can read, you have to read this.
• The Sun Also Rises: Fucking Hemingway had to write this one first. I think it's his best book, and I think the way the Lost Generation felt might be the way this one does in a lot of ways. Anyway, I think it's timeless.
• Sea Wolf: Jack London wrote the greatest sea adventure ever written, according to Carl Sandburg. How he's more famous for his dog books, I'll never understand. Anyway, this book is about a poet trapped on a ship with Nietzsche, and supposedly the captain is based on a real guy who used to go to one of my favorite bars on the planet: Heinhold's First and Last Chance Saloon.
• Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer: You have to read one or both. It's mandatory. Race, youth, class, yeah, Mark Twain had it all.
• The Catcher in the Rye: They make people read this one too young. Then they bury you with criticism about it. I think I've read this book four times. Each time, I get something different and hate my teachers more. 
• Moby Dick: Melville's better book might be White Jacket, some people say, but I never read White Jacket more than once. Moby Dick is possibly the greatest novel ever written and is experimental by even today's standards. If you say it's slow, watch a YouTube video instead. Yes, when I read this the first time as a young man, I struggled through some of it, but argh, thank god I did. 
• A Movable Feast: I feel a little guilty putting Papa on here twice. I'm not really a Hemingway freak, but this book has so much going for it. Wonder what it was like in Paris after the war? Read this. Gertrude Stein is in it. I love this book.

On a personal note:

• Legend of Greystoke: When it comes to prolific sci-fi writers, Edgar Rice Burroughs is, in my opinion, the best. I know, Lovecraft. Yeah, Lovecraft is wonderful, and everyone should read at least the Mountains of Madness, but I had to cut him because Edgar Rice Burroughs is just a better writer in the end.

Canadian Honorable Mentions:

• Yann Martel: Life of Pi and Virgil and Beatrice.
• Douglas Coupland: Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma, Life after God, Generation X
• Margaret Attwood: Handmaid's Tale

White guys I wanted to put on this list but didn't make it:

• Truman Capote
• Cormac McCarthy
• William Faulkner
• Thomas Wolfe
• Henry Miller
• Others already mentioned and even more I don't want to.

Women I should have put on this list:

• Zora Neal Hurston
• Toni Morrison
• Kate Chopin

Black guys I should have put on this list:

• Chester Himes
• Ralph Ellison
• Richard Wright
• Ishmael Reed
• Amiri Baraka

Anyway, that's my list. The last thing is, I think Howl should be mandatory American reading. It's a book of poetry, but I didn't want to leave this post without explicitly mentioning HOWL by Alan Ginsberg. I'll have to find C. a copy somewhere.

Rilke, W.H. Auden, and Pynchon

I've loved the three aforementioned writers for all of my adult life.

• Pynchon wrote V., which I think is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, and it was his FIRST!
• W.H. Auden and his wrecked face is the poster boy for poetry and poets. . . maybe he shares the poster with Jack Spicer?
• Rilke, who doesn't love Rilke? The angels and all of that in the Duino Elegies? C'mon. I read a good bit of it all in German years ago, and I just love Rilke.

But I never made the connection between them. I didn't know Auden and Pynchon were both totally into Rilke.

Today I was writing, working on my next book of poems, The Chris Hemsworth Sonnets, which I hope to have finished before they kill off Thor in the movies. And I was stuck on Rilke. I had Rilke on the brain. Jeder Engel ist Schrecklich! Was the newest poetical Ohrwurm. I decided to Google around and ended up at the bottom of a Wikipedia page and boom.

And things, loose strands of wire, broken synapses, copper sparking in the ether, all sprang to life in my tiny little head.

Also today, I was watching the latest episode of Dr. Who and an ad came on about a movie the BBC has done about Dylan Thomas. I'll be watching that. 

Rilke, Thomas, Roethke? Yeah, for some reason, this all reminded me of this short poem »

Call of Cthulu

Lately I've been really into table top gaming. When I came down with the flu, I watched a lot of episodes of Wil Wheaton's show, Tabletop on YouTube because a guy at work mentioned it, and it made me wonder why I ever stopped playing games. It's been a long time since I've played Magic or D&D or anything else like that.

So, I went out and bought Zombie Dice and Munchkin, and I got a few friends together and we have been making it a weekly ritual to play a game or two together over beers. The group grew a little and a friend named Mike had Cthulu Dice and Munchkin Cthulu, and I fell in love with H.P. Lovecraft all over again.

I downloaded the complete works of H.P. Lovecraft and I'm trying to get through all of it. I hadn't read him since I was a teenager, and it's so much better now because I'm able to laugh at his prose a lot more and able to just let go a bit more than I used to be able to. I was a very serious teenager in many ways.

So now that I'm on an H.P. Lovecraft kick, I'm glad to find that Cthulu is a much bigger deal in pop culture than ever. There are a ton of games and memes and all sorts of things paying homage to the unspeakable horror. There must be a bunch of people out there just like me who are rediscovering what they once loved as a kid. There are probably even more getting into the unnameable awesomeness for the first time, which is fantastic!

So I went to the local game shop (Dragon's Hoard) and picked up the Call of Cthulu Card Game. At first my wife, who's never read anything Lovecraftian, thought it would be too complicated and difficult for her to play. Why do people always say that? But once we learned the rules, she's all about playing again and again. It's as if she has traveled to a vast Antarctic wasteland and unearthed something she can never unsee.

Awesome game

In the meantime, I've also rediscovered Dr. Who. I liked the old ones when I was a kid, and in England, I got really into it again because people always asked me if I knew who the Dr. was. I was reluctant to start watching the new ones because I thought maybe it was going to be like how the new Star Wars movies ruined Star Wars for me. But I'm here to tell you that the new Dr. Who show is brilliant. I love it. There's even an episode with Cthulu slaves serving a dark ancient lord trapped on an asteroid floating above a black hole. What?!?!!

Lastly, I want to mention that Tabletop Day is March 30. It's a day to get together with family and friends and play a game you play on a table, i.e., not a video game. It's a perfect excuse to nerd out with friends and drinks. Most wine and beer geeks are geeks about other things too, I've found, so don't be afraid to ask your friend the beer geek. And whatever you do, don't look back at the mirage over the ancient and forgotten city of the grotesque.

How to Join a Motorcycle Gang

This was originally featured here. If you want, you can comment and join the fun. There's much to be had. MURDERCYCLE.

Poetry as Religion, Masturbation, and Science

The Oakland Fuel Dock is more important than any poem ever written, and it demands more respect. The container cranes stand with more majesty and pride over the gulls cracking mussels on the cement sides of slips because poetry, like all art, has no dignity.

It's easy to think of poetry as a religion. We experience poetry alone with a book or with a reverend-like reader in a group. and the more sinister boors of us will always try to make poetry a religion. Boors see a place where they can impose their own beliefs on others who love the art, and they will strive to turn those beliefs into dogma. Every religion has the arrogance to think that their set of rules are the right ones for anyone who loves God; of such stuff are proselytizers made. People who call poetry a religion are arrogant in the same way. When you refuse their dogma, they shake their heads and call you uninformed, like Martin Luther did when he said the Jews of Germany only refused Christ because Catholics had gotten all the rules wrong.

Rules assume that getting to heaven is a contest. They have holy men and saints, whose names act as place markers for ideas that reinforce those rules. These names have the mystical power of convincing people to believe what they know to be untrue.

The zealots of poetry as religion find saints in old critics. They chant their names in a mantra designed to feign an understanding of the ideas behind them. But reading criticism is analogous to watching the muscles of a very intelligent orangutan as he masturbates. Interesting? Yes. Fun? Maybe. But certainly not important or dignified. Poetry zealots watch to find new techniques so that they too can join the circle jerk of criticism, but they will never admit to having fun with it, and they expect you to stay quiet and reverent. Soon they will learn how to tell other would-be masturbators how it "should" done.

The only way to make criticism important is to change its purpose to that of science. Science's only goal is merely to know. Critics have spent so much time telling us things, eared seals barking orders at pelicans, that the pelicans have swallowed too much sea water and have started to believe that poetry and all other art is a religion. Only in religion do people subject themselves to being told so much. But poetry is not a burning bush and will not tell you anything. Moses was a liar, and so are most critics. They cannot ever tell you what poetry is really saying because it isn't saying anything. When art tries to say something, it fails because it has nothing to offer as a reward for your listening to Metatron. In religion, there's, you know, eternal salvation.

If you think that poetry and all other art is more than a form of entertainment, you suffer from arrogance. Art does not mean more than football. It seems like the more people know, the more they enjoy "fine arts," but who knows why that is? And that why is what's important. Why do we value the arts? Why do we enjoy ink on paper and paint on canvas or the sound wet breath makes through pounded brass? If you allow the educated and educators to stop you from laughing and having fun with the arts, you have been duped in the cathedral into thinking masturbation is evil and unhealthy.

But Art, Entertainment, Criticism, they all are very fun and healthy. The only question is how and why we enjoy the sticky mess they get us in.

Scientists are almost always more fun to be around than priests.

My Blog is Me. I am a robot.

A while ago, I learned about Mia Rose. I didn't know that she was tremendously famous now. I think I like her. A lot of haters are around now, of course, because they think she was prepackaged. This happens quite a bit online. Things on the internet seem so real. . . like it's DYI or something.

I mean to say that blogs and vlogs and Youtube and Facebook seem for and by the people using them. The corporations own them, and we all agree to be advertised toward in exchange for use of their products, but we are real. We are us online. Naturally, it's only a piece of us, it's only an avatar, but no matter how much we try to hide our true selves with assumed voices or fake photos, what's valued in online personalities is authenticity. Users can usually spot a fake. They know when they're being spammed or scammed online. So when a corporation sends out a decoy like one of those wooden ducks we all land next to, it pisses people off because they've invaded a realm reserved for non-corporate bitches. No one likes a phony.

Mia Rose seems like a girl who likes to sing to a video camera online, but some people are saying her fame was generated by handlers who bumped up her numbers with dummy youtube accounts. That the whole thing was actually an orchestrated marketing campaign rather than just a young woman with a webcam.

My favorite blog is stolenpony. If I found out that Jennifer Best was some kind of corporate robot created to sell me things on Amazon.com or something, I would be rather upset because it ruins precisely that which I love about her blog: it's a real person talking about real things that evoke an emotional response. I do wish she'd proofread sometimes, but her little typos or weird grammatical stuff makes me sure that a robot isn't writing it. But what if a robot were writing it? Would it change my enjoyment of the blog? Yes. I would feel stupid to fall for a computer/corporation who knew that little mistakes in grammar and spelling make me think something is real. It's a betrayal of an unwritten code. . . online etiquette.

You know how when you listen to guitar music, you can hear the sound of the fingers dragging across the strings between frets? When you hear that, you know there's a person doing that. What if a machine could mimic that sound exactly. You wouldn't be able to tell it wasn't human. Let's say you loved that guitar player; would you feel bad when you found out it was a robot?

We should all know by now that it isn't hard to make a good fake, and we buy artifice because we love it. But when we become aware of artifice, we are outraged; think about how Oprah's book army attacked when they found about James Frey. They described him as brutally honest, which I don't think a book of any kind can really be. Can a blog be?

No. But we want it to be as real and honest as possible. We're vulnerable online, so we want others to be, too. My blog is me. Jack Morgan here is a lot like the Jack Morgan you'd meet in RL, but it's not exactly me. Sometimes I think things are funny online that I wouldn't find funny elsewhere. Sometimes I think about things on my blog that I don't think of when I'm not writing it. Sometimes it's an overflow of RL obsessions, and sometimes the thoughts I have here don't come into my real life at all. Sometimes my blog is more private than public, weirdly. Sometimes it's the only place I have to be honest with everyone. I risk a lot having this blog. People hate me because of it, and people love me because of it, but is it me they're loving? Is it the blog they love? I know that when people say mean things about my blog, I feel like they are being mean to my person, but I enjoy the line between the blog and me, too, and I hide behind it as much as I hide behind poetry and art.

What if I were a robot?

St. Pat's and Clover in Retrospect

Poet, vegetarian, and tender of bar, Sara Mumolo, invited the whole trainwreck to party with her at Ben & Nick's in Rockridge last night for St. Patrick's day. Some random guy we've never met before wants to know about the Trainwreck Union. Heard we were it. FBI?

Pablo voted in the street.
Sisters Hamel, Sweet Caroline and Gillie-Sue, made grown men cry.
Jack was constantly in the way.
Ashley was in need of constant dotage.
Jason, Casey, Mo, and Sara Mumolo started a gang; they jumped us in, and we were all able to leave together safely. It doesn't seem possible, but no one fell, and no one fought. No one cried, and no one read an entire poem.

There are pictures somewhere with some of us drinking green Trumers.

Arron Pawlowicz had green teeth.
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Something about Joshua Clover:
Did anyone not like that reading? I love it when poets have arch enemies and friends in high places about whom they are never afraid to write. Setting friends up for public humiliation is always hard. Putting everything on the line just to see what happens is always thrilling for audiences.

I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Clover, Altieri, Bernes and other great minds after the reading. Putting people like that in a room together creates a palpable electricity. One might say it's shocking. I'm not very smart, but I know when I am around genius. Affect Affect Affect. Tons of affect. Post/late/postpost/pre modernity. Bull shit terms and categories annoy me, but hearing big shots using the undefinable makes me feel like less of an ass hole for doing the same thing.

Clover's goals for the evening were to exhaust all of Jorie Graham's budget (she's coming very soon) and wield words. He took one goal seriously. He told an amazing urban legend about John Ashbery, that is, I totally dig the idea of John Ashbery pulling a rock-star move by eating and drinking a year's worth of Holloway money in a single night. We discussed Weltsystemaffekt , string theory, and the latest horrible films. The guy's knowledge base is so wide, it's difficult to keep up at times, but it is always fascinating. . . much like his poetry.