i can't really sing, so

So this is a riff on a Marcus Greil column I loved when it was in The Believer, and it's apparently been other places too. It's sort of, in my version, a "cultural/art experiences" top ten? I had notes for one last year, but sadly never wound up posting it! So here it goes for 2019. Sorry, 12/31, for excluding you from the possibility of being included in this, in case I have an amazing cultural/art experience tomorrow. 10. PRESERVATION ALLIANCE OF LAFAYETTE ANNUAL MEMBERSHIP MEETING , MAY 2019 :: I am definitely a bit biased here, but Geoff did a lot of great work this year, and it was really amazing to hear him talk as a professional in front of a group of interested people about what he was doing on the Roy House on campus. I know that he knows a lot, but the nitty gritty details of it aren't often something we discuss, so hearing him talk about it in a setting like this made me so proud. 9. EAGLES VICTORY @ THE CHICAGO AIRPORT, JANUARY 2019 :: This is a w...

Because of my dissertation writing (and reading), I didn't read as many books cover to cover this summer, and those are always the only ones I write about/note as "read," so I'm combining all the summer months here! I definitely read a lot of excerpts from books, but this isn't the place for that. See: My dissertation! When it's done! Someday! Not too far in the future! American Hybrid Poetics by Amy Moorman Robbins I agree with so much of what Robbins says in this book, and it's provided a fruitful background for my research, though the way she uses the word hybrid makes me a little crazy because it seems to cover too much ground, and she never really defines how she is using it in a way that is clear to me. If it were only ever an adjective/modifier, I think I'd be fairly on board with most of the argument she is making, but she uses it occasionally as a noun in a way that gets me. I won't give away my entire dissertation, though, and instea...

Just a reminder that these aren't reviews, but... more like notes on the books that I feel worth sharing, some more substantial, some more review-y, some more helpful, some more personal, etc. I thought I read more this month--and I really did, but not in terms of "full books." I read a lot for a paper I wrote on Mercy Otis Warren and Susanna Rowson for this year's ALA in SF, and I read a lot for my dissertation, but I only finished a few books, it seems. Je Suis L'Autre: Essays and Interrogations by Kristina Marie Darling I was excited about this book because of the way it is marketed, as a sort of lyric-criticism. I liked some essays more than others, though I found some of the ways it described the works being commented on too vague, the sort of criticism that I fear slapping a broader hybrid label on texts might encourage. This being said, I find it difficult to read about a text I myself have never read but believe the right critic will make an essay comp...

Haven't done one of these in a while! But I managed to finish quite a few books in April. Here are some thoughts... Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media by Marjorie Perloff It took me a long time to read this book , but I was determined to get through the whole thing, since this is a subject I am interested in--and I'm especially interested in how it ages. What about the way we viewed media (TV, radio, advertising, the internet now, etc.) was true of the 1980s, 1990s, now, and how can we examine, if we can examine it at all, its affects on us or how we perceive it or how it was perceived and how can we look at the way poetry engages with language and the way media engages with language next to each other and why doing so is important--Perloff covers this for a time earlier than today. See What I Have Done  by Sarah Schmidt I even managed to fit a  novel  in during April! For funsies! What sort of graduate student am I... one who needed a true break ...

Hello! It looks as though 93 (!!) people visited my post on Lady Bird and Downsizing, while a smaller amount visited the one about The Disaster Artist and I, Tonya, which is a shame since that one is the one I liked better of the two I wrote so far. Alas. These are super informal, though, so anyone reading them is slightly thrilling for me in away. Here's two more: CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (contains spoilers) I knew little about this movie before watching it, except that a few people I know had seen it and enjoyed it, and that it made them cry, or that they had read or were reading the book it was based on. I knew it was about gay characters and set in the recent past. Ian Carlos Crawford pointed out to me prior to my seeing it that it's hard to imagine a happy ending when you have LGBT characters in an earlier time period. This adds a certain sort of tension to a film like this, which is otherwise understated in a beautiful way. Set in the Italian countryside, focused on a prof...

I didn't initially pair these two together because they were both based on true stories, but now I'm glad I did. I guess a lot of movies these days that aren't documentaries are based on true stories--there's something interesting about that for me in terms of genre, but that's for another day. THE DISASTER ARTIST  James Franco--I have some qualms with him for various reasons, though I did read an interview in The Believer with him once that made me be like, "okay you're alright," but then that time he hosted the Oscars with Anne Hathaway was a disaster and I'm still mad about that? Anyway, Geoff and I watched an interview with him on Jimmy Fallon  that made me want to see The Disaster Artist, despite having never seen The Room , the movie that made the main character of Franco's film, Tommy Wiseau, famous. You definitely don't have to have seen or be a fan of "the best worst movie ever made" to  enjoy this film. In a complet...

I've been on a mission to watch as many movies that came out in 2017 as possible, and I decided earlier to create a series of blog posts within which I review two that I've seen. So far I have seen 7, so there will be some catching up. I'll be rating them using my own made up system of pluses, minuses, & other marks of punctuation, including but not limited to exclamation points, parentheses, exponents, & more. LADY BIRD (contains spoilers) There is little to dislike about this coming-of-age film set in the early 2000s in California. Lady Bird is well-written, well-acted, and features extremely sympathetic and at times relatable (esp. if you grew up during the birth of the internet and came of age during the heydays of AIM) characters, Lady Bird/Christine herself and her friend Julia being the two I rooted for the most. Lady Bird, however, despite her self-inflicted oddness and ownership of it at the Catholic High School she seemingly happily attends, does have ...

every post would be titled that. here is a poem that i've always loved from Denis Johnson, who's recently passed. HEAT Here in the electric dusk your naked lover tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth. It’s beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin, Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover, streaming with hatred in the heat as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones, and such a last light—full of spheres and zones. August,              you’re just an erotic hallucination, just so much feverishly produced kazoo music, are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night, this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,  the bogus moon of tenderness and magic you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

I made the mistake this semester of taking three classes and auditing one. Even though I didn't have to do the coursework for the one I audited, just the reading/participation, it was still too much. I didn't have time to do things that I normally like to do, that are important to me--let alone things that I do generally because I do them. Such as.... writing about the books I read. HERE are all the books I read from February-April during this semester, excluding re-reads, with brief snippets of thoughts after them... FEBRUARY Caligula by Albert Camus The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt For my drama class, we read these two plays the same week. I preferred the Dürrenmatt because the characters were more interesting to me, particularly Claire, the cruel/eccentric/wealthy woman who returns to her hometown for revenge. Caligula was interesting to me in terms of it as an existential retelling of an old story, but the characters blended more easily. Snow White by Donald Bart...

This concluded my "winter break" reads & dove into the beginning of the semester! These books were a great way to start the year. I feel like I read pretty diversely this past month? What a read spanned over time--most of it in the 20th century, but then some Plato. I read men and women, I read American and non-American writers, I read things in translation as well as things written originally in English. I read plays, novels, poetry, philosophy. I didn't really think, when I was doing this reading, about how wide of a scope I was covering compared to past months, but now that I look at, it's interesting to note. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines This was a book I checked out from the Breaux Bridge Library, but now will, for sure, have to acquire a copy. Ernest J. Gaines is a Louisiana-born writer, and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has a center named after him that houses resources about him and his work. He's UL's writer-in-reside...

I actually read a lot in these two months, despite it being the end of of my first semester as a PhD student and then the holidays, and I'm glad I did so. Here's what I read to finish out 2015: A True History of the Captivation, Transport to Strange Lands, & Deliverance of Hannah Guttentag by Josh Russell This was a text we read for one of my classes since it's "about" a grad student. It was good; it had its flaws, some of which we discussed in class. I liked the characters I was supposed to like; I didn't like the characters I wasn't supposed to like. I was surprised where I was supposed to be surprised. I definitely enjoyed reading it, but I can't help but read "like an editor" at times, and there were things, had I been on the other side of this book, that I would have liked to ask the writer to reconsider. Sometimes I wonder if the things I dislike are things an editor had a hand in moving in the direction that they wound up in--li...

::Hums that "Back, back, back to school again," song from Grease II :: because indeed, indeed I am! And loving it! I have realized an important thing, though, learned only recently--despite the semester nearly at an end--my reading career will have to change. In order to get my PhD, I'm expected to be proficient in a variety of ways, and one of them is to be well-read. This sounds awesome, in a way, but is disappointing in others that can be summed up in this: my reading list is no longer my own. This doesn't mean that I can't read for pleasure or discuss, here, the books I do read for pleasure, but it does mean that I will have to change the way I read. I'm not sure exactly yet my reading schedule will adapt, but I hope to still continue to provide brief notes on the works that I do finish. As for now, I will stick to what I've always done, and that is to only write about books I've read cover-to-cover. I think, though, that this might have to be some...

It's been awhile since an "Exciting Things in the Mail" post, but quite recently, after moving to a new state in a new region, I've gotten some rather exciting mail. I love mail. I probably say that every time I post an update like this... But mail when you have a new address is especially great. It's like, "I am here! I really live here! Look, there's my name!" So all the best mail that I've gotten since I moved to Louisiana has been especially wonderful: Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo & Laura// from Strand Books I ordered this book from Strand Books recently, when I was going through the syllabi and making sure that I had every book my professors had assigned. (See, what I am doing down here in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana is going back to school, to get my PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.) I bought most of the books within the first week of being here, some from school, some...

Wow, I know, I know. It's been awhile since I've posted. But I've been reading! Perhaps not as much to "finish books", though, which is typically what I am broadcasting in posts like these. My goal for total books read this year might not be met. Again, though, this doesn't mean I am not reading! I am just reading differently. Right now, I have my nose in an anthology about English Studies, a book of 16th century poetry by Sor Juana, and the in/famous rhet/comp textbook They Say, I Say. My not-posting is mostly due to recent dislocation-- not of any limb, but just moving. I was living in Philadelphia back in April--by the end of May, Geoff and I packed up our house, moved out of it, couch-surfed for a few weeks, and wound up living in a camping trailer on a hayfarm for the summer, after which I packed up a car and drove down to Louisiana, where I am currently enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. All of my books aren't ...

I know that it's halfway through April, but these are still the books I read in March: The Great Night by Chris Adrian I picked this book up from a thrift store because a friend of mine had mentioned he liked the author a lot. It was a "retelling" of a Midsummer Night's Dream in modern day San Fransisco and it took me forever to get into. I liked the last fourth of it a lot, but it took me the first three quarters to really like the book. I wish the resolution, which was the most intriguing part, made up more of the story. The intersecting storylines weren't as interesting as the one storyline at the end, even if it all kind of circled around meaningfully... Black Aperture by Matt Rasmussen I picked this up when I stayed over a friend's house in New York and needed something to read before I could sleep. (I read a lot right before bed, yet still, somehow, manage to be a decent reader. I, of course, don't only read right before bed... Anyway.) This c...