Michael Robbins - Alien Vs. Predator (nb this book of poems is not about aliens, predators or their conflicts)

A few people reading him, & a sensibility that seems likely to fascinate/enrage ilxors,so I guess he should get his own thread.

michael robbins is the best-selling poet in the country right now.

― scott seward, Sunday, May 27, 2012 9:43 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/03/27/michael-robbins-on-%E2%80%98alien-vs-predator%E2%80%99/

Where are you working right now?

I’m a visiting poet at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, which is where I’m staying and just waiting until I get out of this city.

You don’t like it?

The people are great at the university, my students are great, but Hattiesburg is … it’s just like if you opened a university in a Taco Bell, basically. It’s just the ugliest place I’ve ever seen in my life.

Is it maybe good for the work though?

I spend a lot of time in my apartment, so I suppose it is in that sense. But there’s no bookstore, there’s like one Books-A-Million, whose Bible section is larger than its poetry section, which anyway has, like, books by Bill Bryson in it and stuff. You can quote me on all that if you want to, I don’t care.

You don’t mind?

No, I want to be on record saying that I hate Hattiesburg.

― scott seward, Sunday, May 27, 2012 9:47 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hard cheese, my lad, you're getting paid to write poetry. Now, who's going to make me want to read New Yorker fiction? Surely something good must have been published since those excellent Edward P. Jones and Mary Gaitskill stories I came across in the NY years ago, but everytime I venture back nowadays (meaning really 2011-12, prob '10 too), it's dogshit with fancy sauce (evoking that Sat Night Live sketch, "White People Problems")

― dow, Sunday, May 27, 2012 11:58 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

see now i liked that paris review interview cuz its not what you expect to hear from a poet in an interview in the paris review!

― scott seward, Monday, May 28, 2012 12:20 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Customers who shopped for the Item that You Added also shopped for:

Sátántango
by László Krasznahorkai
Hardcover
5.0 out of 5 stars (1)
£12.99 £9.09
22 used & new from £6.29
Add to Basket

Aliens Vs. Predator Omnibus Volume 1
by Various
Paperback
5.0 out of 5 stars (1)
£18.99 £16.14
27 used & new from £10.36
Add to Basket

Aliens vs. Predator: Three World War
by Rick Leonardi
Paperback
£14.99 £9.74
32 used & new from £6.85
Add to Basket

― woof, Monday, May 28, 2012 9:02 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sorry you have decided to not like Hattiesburg, but you are certainly in the minority.perhaps you haven’t really tried. It is actually a very beautiful place with outstanding restaurants, landmarks and neighborhoods full of gorgeous homes. The lakes,trees and flowers are outstanding as are the two university campuses and numerous. Golf courses. Most importantly, it has the nicest people you will find anywhere. You sound very lonely and cynical. Perhaps you should join one of our wonderful churches and find someone who will pray for you. As we say in the south, “BLESS YOUR HEART”!!!!!

― woof, Monday, May 28, 2012 9:02 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Enjoyed that interview, had forgotten AvP was out, looking forward to it.

― woof, Monday, May 28, 2012 9:03 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus! He lives wherever hearts are open.

― dow, Monday, May 28, 2012 5:10 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he's a good rock critic too, don. dunno if you've seen any of it.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-11-17/music/the-broken-promises-of-bruce-springsteen/

― scott seward, Monday, May 28, 2012 5:39 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, good read, no beardmumbling, skimming, cheerleading, or autosnark.

― dow, Monday, May 28, 2012 5:51 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Guy sounds unbearable from that Paris Review interview, alas.

― Odd Spice (Eazy), Tuesday, May 29, 2012 5:06 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how is the robbins book? nyer poetry has been so nothing lately. there's just one nice word per poem, that's all i can get from them.

― blossom smulch (schlump), Tuesday, May 29, 2012 9:26 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/books/alien-vs-predator-a-book-of-poetry-by-michael-robbins.html

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 12:18 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and yeah i agree. about the new yorker. don't know what happened. i was really excited by stuff when i started this thread.

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 12:19 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i should probably try and read their 'science fiction issue'

that nyt review makes me sad about the standards that lead robbins to be considered remarkable, maybe: "He knows more than you do about Jay-Z and Lil Wayne ... This collection’s final words — “yes yes y’all” — echo Joyce. "

― thomp, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 12:22 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The Dark Clicks On

The morning slathers its whatever
across the thing. It puts the fucking
lotion in the basket. Can’t smoke
in the confessional anymore.
If you do, you have to confess it.
So have I heard and do in part believe it.

Old pond, frog jumps in, so what.
Dude speaks Chinese laundry.
My mother like her pussy shave.
Tell her I read in Origen
even Satan might be saved.
Or else it gets the hose again.

Michael J. Fox talks Parkinson’s
with the former Miss Arkansas.
The clouds are there for them
to be sick on. Those European
stairwells with the lights on a timer?
You get halfway up and the dark clicks on.

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 12:26 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Appetite for Destruction
—Michael Robbins

You homicidal bitch. I killed the boar
’cause boar’s the game I came here for.
I clear the jungle with the edge of my hand.
I make love to an ATM. I enrich uranium.
Dude, this aggression will not stand.

I want to watch you bleed. My tongue
doesn’t know its right from wrong.
I’m uninsured. I ride the bus,
a loaded gun inside my purse.
My mouth’s a roadside bomb.

The boar’s inside the mosque and then
the RPG has martyred him.
His favorite song was “Crazy Train.”
I pity the Lord, pity the Flash,
I sleep through gynecology class.

They call me Yeti because my carbon footprint
drives the sherpas round the bend
into the village of the whup-ass can.
When I lie on my back in the ashy rain,
pigs drink from my cavernous groin.

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 12:32 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like his poetry crit too:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/237508

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 12:42 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

aw poor J.D. McClatchy!

― go down on you in a thyatrr (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, May 29, 2012 12:47 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Money Bin

I got a tattoo of God. You can’t see it
but it’s everywhere. If I seem out of it,
do the math. I was put on earth.
And then you were, making up your feet
as you went along. New thinspo clanks the spank
bank. New emoticon makes a Holocene.

If you want to get in shape you have to jog
your memory of Euclid. Jesus built
a ship in a ship shape and said
there’s plenty of loaves in the sea.
Some Idaho you turned out to be.

Some money bin I, a rich duck, swim in!
The coins of you in my feathers like water
off my back. I count each red cent of you.
Now the rain with its funny money din.
The rain beats a tattoo of God any day.

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 1:27 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like the way the words go.

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 1:27 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

minds are funny things. they dearly love pattern and meaning. they will see them in spite of everything. i liked that poem, too. for a bit. but it means nothing to me or to anyone so far as i can tell.

― Aimless, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 3:17 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

have you surveyed everyone?

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 3:42 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that would take you a while.

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 3:42 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

O my Luve's like a red, red cent
that's newly in my feathers;
but not the feathers on my back
for there she rolls right off.

― Aimless, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 4:27 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah he's big on easter eggs for poetry fans. try and catch them all!

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 29, 2012 4:45 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I will totes buy that Robbins book as soon as I see it -- shouts-out to ILX for sharing good NYer poems w/ me!

Re: Ashbery: I will totally stan for 'Double Dream' and ESPECIALLY 'As We Know'. Just an incredible, compulsively-readable collection of each-poem-better-than-the-last... one image I can't get out of my head lately (from the conclusion of "Train Rising Out of the Sea"):

Like an island just off the shore, one of many, that no one
Notices, though it has a certain function, though an abstract one
Built to prevent you from being towed to shore.

― Despite all my cheek, I am still just a freak on a leash (bernard snowy), Tuesday, June 5, 2012 5:37 PM (4 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

got the Robbins book a coupla days ago and I'm really enjoying it (though I'm not sure how much of it, if any, will 'stick' with me)

also, in light of the discussion upthread, I quite enjoyed turning the page to find...

Reading Late Ashbery

I feel like a discarded Christmas tree.
Thanks for sharing. I can't hear myself think
about all this racket. As long
as we're discussing "feelings,"
please turn to your information packets.

It took me twelve years just to find this socket,
and if you think I'm throwing in the towel
just because my plugs have too many prongs...
I don't even have a towel. Oh, a towel.
No, I have a couple of those.

― Despite all my cheek, I am still just a freak on a leash (bernard snowy), Saturday, June 9, 2012 3:24 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^ light verse from the edge of the visible spectrum

― Aimless, Saturday, June 9, 2012 3:48 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

invisi-lol

― Despite all my cheek, I am still just a freak on a leash (bernard snowy), Saturday, June 9, 2012 4:00 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There once was a rapping tomato,
That's right, a rapping tomato,
And he rapped all day,
From April til May,
and also, guess what? it was me.

― thomp, Saturday, June 9, 2012 6:50 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In the 1940s, "tomato" was slang for a woman, while implying a certain luscious juicy quality in said female. Is this the sense in which you are using the word? /dork

― Aimless, Saturday, June 9, 2012 8:25 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My impressions:

There's an intensity of reference that's a bit exhausting - its's kind of 'surprise! surprise! surprise! surprise!'. I'm struggling to get over that, tbh; the moments of going 'oh Summer Breeze GnR Larkin Ghostface Adorno GrantMorrison etc etc'. I usually find allusion a p limited tool, but the rate and range(*) here are overwhelming, & give the verse its flavour and substance.

Formally it feels a bit samey, like his music is just a bit too narrow. I'm trying to put my finger on what exactly it is, it's like some fragments of Stevens (Blue Guitar couplets?) or Ashbery maybe, stuck on a loop. He does love the sound of words, but it's a bit too obvious - the light verse charge very nearly sticks, and looks true over the course of single poems.

So I'm saying that it doesn't quite get out of the trap of sounding superficial while trying to represent overstimulated superficiality maybe - but I like it more the more I read - the effect of the volume, a mind spinning pointlessly, trying to grab onto things and slipping off them, entertaining itself in whirlwind or falling apart in front of the mass of manufactured stuff, then asserting 'I' again before losing track of it. (The major sound-syntax signature of the book, all those sentences starting out with 'I…' would be deliberate I guess.) Trying to say something serious but everything turning into a joke.

(*) It's not really the span of the range that locks my attention, it's narcissism: white middle class 30-something male who likes pop culture and canonical poetry (The big gap is us/uk.) Feels like someone is close to locking patterns in my head into a music, which makes it more frustrating that this does feel a bit empty, that it's not quite managing to adhere to the world or to feelings or… i dunno.

Little 'RIP Alex Chilton' in the acknowledgments.

Oh, that huge blockquote was from the New Yorker poetry thread:

I'd Like To Give A Shout-Out To Paul Muldoon For Making Me Want To Read New Yorker Poems!

Re: the first-person pronoun: one of the things that first struck me about (the poem) "Alien vs. Predator" is the playful boastfulness of it, the absurd claims to some sort of demigodlike powers; this is, I suppose, part of the hip-hop influence ("hit the earth like a comet invasion / Nas is like that afrocentric asian / half-man, half-amazing"), with maybe some Whitman too?

Yeah, Appetite for Destruction (pasted upthread) has that same thing going on - distortion of hip-hop leaps out to kick it off, then it spins into war-violence, paranoia, fear, finally bleaker sort of giant-consumer-corpse monster egotism.

sometimes the phrase

"that elk is such a dick"

gets stuck in my head, again and again.

It is hard to work out whether i like him or not, but i'd buy a book of his poems in service of finding out.

as in, his stuff seems worth my expending the energy on it - even though so flash and rapid it doesn't feel instantly dismissable.

tbh on first reading my heart really sank, thought I'd got excited over nonsense jingles + flattery-by-allusion, but now I think he's at least interesting, beyond the sound-and-rhythm fun; worth the effort for me maybe.

Still a bit wary, partly for reasons sketched above, partly because HYPE.

so this guy is, like, the james ferraro of poetry?

will maybe buy this on the strength of this:

The Dark Clicks On

The morning slathers its whatever
across the thing.

i liked 'alien vs predator' the poem a lot but the idea of it as a modus operandi makes me really kind of depressed. i think i have had this in the to-buy section on amazon for a very long time - it was up there months before it was released, i think - but (fittingly?) the idea of buying this makes me feel like one of those people who buy only one hip hop album a year.

there are probably a lot of MFA poets who have worked out similar schticks? maybe? i mean: the glibness about 'poetry', how it comes out. (the morning slathers its whatever, yes.) n.b. i'm not saying "there are probably a lot of MFA poets ..." as a thing i know - i'm speculating! i'm just assuming he can't be the only one!

but his real talent with cadence, assonance, half-rhyme is there. full rhyme even! it just seems to be there in relation to a fairly limited set of targets: like i feel this is pretty low-hanging fruit for someone in his 30s to be going at.

it feels a bit like a vein that should have been tapped in the 90s. it feels a bit like mark leyner. but, then, there was a new mark leyner book this year, and people actually wrote things about it, suggesting people might want to read a new mark leyner book in 2012, as if his uselessness hadn't been recognised and he hadn't been off writing those 'what to ask the doctor after your fourth pina colada' books, so, in conclusion, fml. (incidentally, i hope one of the poems here concludes:

and so, in conclusion, fml.

Might as well put basic resources here too I guess, good housekeeping. Robbins on twitter and tumblr.

this is a bit of gregory sherl from a book called the oregon trail is the oregon trail which i am going to put here for purposes of comparison:

I pause the game but your heart still beats
slowly. I rest the oxen, sing you folk songs
about mining a future west of Fort Kearney.
We hide from typhoid behind trees suffocating
the earth, but it still catches child #2, Wendy,
and your heart drops like a bowling ball down
a sewer. We always ford the river but today the swell
is God’s stomachache, and we lose two oxen.

Christopher, child #1, falls into a ditch
of rattlesnakes. Venom like whoa.
Death eats grass and the weeds wrap around
the wagon’s wheels, cracking the axel.
I can’t fix the axel, so we have to trade
40 bullets to a banker from Boston. Your ankles
are showing and a bulge is showing in the banker
from Boston, so I shoot him and take the bullets back.

On a night too lonely for color, you find blood
in places where blood should not be. Your tears
are a muted computer screen. Your dysentery is my dysentery.
I hold your hand and your eyes are milk. I tell you Soon.
Soon zombies will walk the earth, pouring salt
on open wounds. Today my fever kills my appetite,
and the bear I shot is rotting the end of the world.

i want to know what would happen if ilm's whiney g weingarten were made to read this book

it feels a bit like a vein that should have been tapped in the 90s.

YES.

AvP in the New Yorker did feel belated, like 'how did it take so long for that to happen?'.

I suppose lots of MFA types must have got something similar (speculating too), but his engineering's quite daring in its crudity or flash or something: the frequent half-line sentences + piled-on full-rhyme couplets + simple syntax. (He's not one for following a thought or image over a stanza.)

ikwym too about the one hip-hop album a year thing.

i want to know what would happen if ilm's whiney g weingarten were made to read this book

was going to call the thread 'HIPSTER POET Michael Robbins has written a book of HIPSTER POETRY called Alien vs Predator' to lure in posters who can't resist what-is-hipster clusterfucks, but decided against (felt like dad-joke bid for wider ilx attn).

Sometimes I subscribe to the t.s.eliot school of evaluating poets based on how many of their lines couldn't possibly have come from anyone else, and I think Robbins scores pretty well on that metric. Compared to something like that Oregon Trail poem just posted, he's much less verbose ('punchier'?), which also helps him seem less sentimental even when he touches on 'serious' matters (e.g. the one that ends "I rape the earth. It's not my fault.")

Also I like this book 10x more since I began hearing the title as "alien verse predator", like how a kid might say it

someone subscribe to the london review of books and then cut and paste this review here cuz i want to read the whole thing:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n15/michael-robbins/my-heart-on-a-stick

you can read this other seidel review here though as a pdf:

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/5323_robbins_seidel.pdf

i HAVE to post a link to this again. i just have to. tour de force.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/239972

That Oregon Trail poem… I dunno. It feels to me like it's working imaginatively with the experience of playing a computer game, and a much more conventional poem results. Robbins doesn't seem especially interested in poem-as-artifact crafted from that kind of engagement with experience, but I think I'm okay with that at the moment.

Scott, I won't post it here bcz i sort of know ppl there & feels bad karma to post the mag's stuff publically, but if your webmail works then it's on its way.

thanks!

I reviewed this a while ago: http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/alien-vs-predator.html

Main thought: The way that [his best ]lines work independently of their source poems leads to my main criticism: the fragmentary nature of many of these poems means that one line often doesn’t build on the next, as Robbins jumps manically to the next gag, the next bit of pomposity-bursting—I suspect could randomly rearrange and mix lines from half a dozen poems collected here and they’d be no worse for it. But poems that present a unified argument or the encapsulation of a place or an experience are not the sort of poems Robbins is usually interested in writing, so it’s not necessarily just to have a go at him for not writing them.

Robbins on Hass: "...he thinks that merely intoning the names of things can replace the hard work of description."

You say "the hard work of description", Mr. Robbins?

Description in prose can be spun out at tedious length. What's another dozen sentences when you're pounding away at a comprehensive catalog of piled-up details?

Instead, he may have been thinking of a rather idealized concept of poetic description, where a few words are made to encapsulate masses of detail by a process of deft suggestion, incorporating gesture, rhythm and coloration. Or not. I am not a mind reader.

i would check out that NYT article linked upthread, even though there is a sly winking reference to mcclatchy early on, it is very full of truth, for example

Mr. Robbins’s pop-cultural knife skills, however, may be among the least interesting things about him. Rare is the young poet these days who doesn’t dice our wired world into a baseline mirepoix. What puts his poems over is their sheer joy and dizzy command. He delivers his verses in tight, mostly rhyming quatrains and quintets that march down the page like the work of Frederick Seidel or Mr. Muldoon himself ...

When Mr. Robbins’s poems miss, they miss hideously, veering close to nonsense (“My smoothie/comes with GPS”). Non sequiturs are heaped into tottering piles. In bad young poets, knowingness is to knowledge what truthiness is to truth, as Mr. Robbins’s lesser stuff makes plain.

... But he has a sky-blue originality of utterance.

anyway i agree with aimless on "gesture, rhythm and coloration"

i don't like slam poetry and i already had a beatnik phase but i think sometimes this stuff sounds so nice read aloud

ototh everything i've read by mcclatchy and wheeler otoh has made me wince

i would disagree with Rare is the young poet these days who doesn’t dice our wired world into a baseline mirepoix perhaps but i know what he means

that beatdown on hass was funny

seidel review was great too

thanks scott!

Thar review of Hass was hilarious: "Does ass fucking really require such a high-minded justification? Upon being told someone is fucking someone else in the ass, has anyone ever responded, “What! Why?” I regret to inform the reader that Hass goes on to compare this sex act to the sacking of Troy."

that's probably the most unfair line in it, though!

"sacking" more like "sacking" amirite

Confirmed reports of three people I know reading this. This means obv its popularity is only matched by Fifty Shades of Grey.

One of them reminded me where Rilke being a jerk came from:

3. A stimulant for an old beast

Acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky stings.
—I'm not so young but not so very old,
said screwed-up lovely 23.
A final sense of being right out in the cold,
unkissed.
(—My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under
things.

All these old criminals sooner or later
have had it. I've been reading old journals.
Gottwald & Co., out of business now.
Thick chests quit. Double agent, Joe.
She holds her breath like a seal
and is whiter & smoother.

Rilke was a jerk.
I admit his griefs & music
& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.
A threshold worse than the circles
where the vile settle & lurk,
Rilke's. As I said,—

Rilke consults Dr. Freud

xpost good eye! I had to stop reading Dream Songs last year cuz they were making me too unhappy, but i've been meaning to return to them

Also, can we talk about Robbins' relation to other poets/"the canon"? As mentioned upthread, I like his "Reading Late Ashbery", but the Whitmanny one about the twig (don't have the book at hand right now) seemed a little facile..... Berryman's obviously present as an influence througout, including some explicit invocations of Mr. Bones -- wonder how this ties in to Robbins' own hip-hop influence/blackface anxieties/etc??

apparently we can't

I'd like to but I've been apart from my copy of AvP for a few days & my crippling prac crit anxiety leaves me unwilling to say anything without TEXTUAL SUPPORT.

good interview:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=754

"I'm just an evangelist for Sullivan right now. That man can sing. I haven't felt this way about a writer since I read Michael Herr's Dispatches. Sullivan could write about anything and I'd read it. David Grann, too — I read every word he writes. But Grann’s definitely a reporter, a journalist. Sullivan, to me, is the American writer right now, in any genre. I'd put him up there with Herr, Didion, McPhee, Dillard, DFW. I think he's a horse. He's staring us down."

i really gotta get that sullivan collection. i never go to stores with new books in them. will go to amherst this weekend.

also didn't know about the marilynne robinson review MR wrote. will have to read that now:

http://observer.com/2012/03/keeping-faith-in-when-i-was-a-child-i-read-books-marilynne-robinson-criticizes-american-politics/?show=all

i love books pretty much the only place i can go to hear from robinson fans.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/life/ct-prj-0902-frederick-seidel-20120905,0,7555100,full.story

1

Every book has a beginning, and this is this book's beginning. It starts with a question and then it answers the question. The question is to whom should I dedicate my new little fun book nugget? That's kind of a disclaimer, saying that the book is lepidum, or "fun." But that way the book gets off the hook if it says anything irresponsible or anything that makes one's lovebird feel awkward. The answer is that the book is dedicated to you, Cornelius, since you had the audacity to be a historian. And to write three books and belabor them! Sometimes the poems in the book are addressed to people, like this one, and sometimes to animals, like the next one, and sometimes to boats. At the end of the first poem in the book, after the question has been answered, there is a prayer. The prayer is about amor fati and virgins. It gets heard.

Hymen o Hymenaee!

sorry, that one's too long to type in!

He revs the language like a hypersonic superbike.

can I just—

whoops I meant to—

um, that look-i-have-read-Catullus poem is... what am i supposed to like about it?

or, you know, what is one supposed to like about it. i mean, i went and read a review of it, to work it out, and that didn't seem to tell me very much except that apparently using the word "belabour" must be charming, or something.

and translation studies, and etc.

but this messy, lazy, clever-sixth-former-who-has-slept-through-their-a-level-set-text-classes-and-thinks-catullus-is-a-bit-like-him (and i would know) stuff is just... boring.

ha, i think it looks great

I’ve been really trying
baby
to hold back this feeling
for so long
don’t fight it since dad owns your sex
don’t fight it since Rome owns your sex

EYEROLL

how would we ever know that augustan rome was patriarchal without the clever young men of the early 21st century to remind us

heh

let us say the sloppiness of all this is a rejection of the words arida modo pumice expolitum
that still doesn't make it right

how do u feel about EP's 'homage to sextus propertius'

i quite like it, though it suffers from the same feeling, that it has been written by a bore, but EP at least wants to pretend he has a feel for language.

where BB clearly wants to pretend that he has not

i kind of love this whole "i'm translating ... BUT AM I" sub-genre, so there's that ... maybe if i could actually do latin i would feel differently

and i am inevitably harsher on BB because he lives in a world in which Anne Carson already exists

that was a funny thing about this review here: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/odi-et-amo/

n an ideal world, perhaps it wouldn’t be too much to expect your readers to chuckle knowingly, on the basis of their intimate familiarity with the complete oeuvre of Catullus, but we live in this one.

on the basis of my intimate familiarity with the complete oeuvre of Catullus, if you must put it like that, i find these scraps insufferable

what's carson's catallus thing like? i've never read her, i picked up 'grief lessons' and thought it looked kind of exciting and then i lost my copy

xpost

that was re yr 'if i could actually do latin' (tbh you probably could do latin-enough-for-poetry, with a bilingual edition and a rough guide to pronunciation we all have enough tools to develop opinions on our own)

i know these poems and i have spent a lot of time thinking about these poems and as such i judge that this young man... has not.

oh i don't know if carson has particularly done catullus? I think of her as greek-and-not-latin. (the one time i studied translation studies i did an intense compare and contrast, carson vs catullus, on sappho's phainetai moi)

it was more that she has a method of engagement with classical poetry that is so powerful, and critical, and subtle, and surely just knowing that her work exists would shame a person out of this sort of sloppiness.

oh crap what am i saying, i've even read her catullus thesis thing, i just can't remember what went on in it any more

'enough latin' is something i've been meaning to get around to for a while /: i started working through wheelock's latin last year but gave up after a couple weeks because my girlfriend kept ragging on me for it

(the one i have not read is the one about her brother, which is like the catullus one about the brother)

would it be more fun to have a bilingual edition of some poetry, and a dictionary, and some verb and noun tables (or a shorter latin primer), and do it that way? would you get less ragged on for that?

doing latin poetry is basically doing the crossword

oh we split up. i would probably have been ragged on more for doing that, she was a philologist

i don't know if i'd find that more fun? i get some kind of satisfaction out of working through dull textbooks that i don't or wouldn't from trying to do it as some kind of imaginative pursuit instead

well, the augustan stuff, these mannered young men, anyway. (medieval latin lyric is much more straightforward iirc)

or maybe like a jigsaw, you find the bits that are in the same case but scattered among the line and join them back together into something approaching sense.

cui dono lepidum novum libellum
arida modo pumice expolitum

lepidum and novum and expolitum are all masculine accusatives so they are all referring to the masc acc noun libellum, but arida and pumice are feminine ablatives so they belong together in the modifying clause

to whom do i give my new witty little book
just-now polished with dry pumice

etc

xposts oh fair enough! the dry pursuit of textbook exercises is something i recognise (i sometimes do it with maths, to check i still can)

as I may have said before I starting doing greek to take the place of crosswords. Latin one of these days.

i would probably have better luck if i replaced crosswords with greek: i don't think i have finished a cryptic in my life.

i guess what i want from a poem that makes a big deal of being a translation is that excitement of fitting things together, trying things out, working out what sounds good to you. 'this is a translation and the act of translation feels like this', not 'this is a translation and i am your translator and here is what i know'.

wherever your griping is coming from, i don't think it would stand up against the book, which i think is really fine. i think it pretty much CONSTANTLY trades on the excitement of fitting things together, trying things out, working out what sound good to you. that open letters monthly bit focuses too much on the 'theoretical' intrusions into the text, and it's seriously misleading about them because it doesn't try to capture how naturally brown will shift in and out of different registers from poem to poem or sentence to sentence. it's inventive and playful and compelling. reading it out loud is the best - his ear for speech from specific social / practical contexts is super exact and economical.

I choose to not. And I don’t feel bad about it either.

Where Catullus is losing his poise in his poems (or getting them stolen), here Brown's writing is about pulling back into equilibrium and self-justification. Brown by his own account finds that the work of translation as traditionally understood threatens the integrity of the self -- as well he might, because it always has. But instead of going on into danger, come what may, he pulls back into the safe zone.

how would we ever know that augustan rome was patriarchal without the clever young men of the early 21st century to remind us

Maybe there's something in the poem which remains after the conceit that nobody realized it is gone, but we'd have to see the rest to know.

But to go by other samples, Brown (and the reviewer) have embraced the Scholasticism of our time. Brown even writes the phrase "to cancel the somatic vehicle" in apparent earnestness. He must follow the prime directive: unmask and expose what they didn't realize, but we know. So that conceit is necessary. But what to do when faced with Catullus's

I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you’ll ask.
I don’t know. But I feel it happening and am tortured.

This is like a crystal of pain. Catullus has exposed himself completely. What is left for Brown to do?

I hate. I hate and. I hate “and.” I hate love. I hate questions.
I’m doing it. I hate doing it. I hate “doing.” I hate

I hate forts. I “hate” “forts.” I hate fortitude. I hate perhaps.
Perhaps I hate? No, I hate “perhaps.” Perhaps you’ll ask why hate.

What comes across is not hate but childish frustration. ("I hate forts"?) Brown seems to be at a loss. Then he falls back into ordinary critical prose separated by line breaks. This is what the reviewer finds most compelling, compared to Brown's "coy games" elsewhere. I'll take her word for it.

With theory we know the answers in advance, so any vertigo is that of an amusement park ride, where you get shaken up a bit and then come to rest where you started. Brown seems OK with that. It's the story he wants to tell, and he finds it interesting.

when does catullus ever lose his poise in his poems? they're incredibly carefully crafted.

for all he is "confessional" he is a very painstaking stylist.

Oh agreed. But in the couplet above, the speaking subject has been taken outside himself and is in torment. Whereas Brown isn't going to get into Catullus's mind, and wants you to know that he doesn't feel bad about it. I take that as the opposite motion. It may be pragmatic but what does it leave him with to say? "I hate forts"? In a sense he's made a fort of theory which defends him from Catullus, and from failure (theory can never fail).

I wrote the above after reading Robbins on Seidel, and the contrast between Brown and Seidel was the fuel.

i kind of love this whole "i'm translating ... BUT AM I" sub-genre, so there's that ... maybe if i could actually do latin i would feel differently

― thomp, Saturday, September 8, 2012 10:27 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that is also a book i enjoy! sadly my the-books-of-jack-spicer is in a box, i was about to look for it so i could start typing bits in

wait no

The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy. Mr. Spicer's mixture may please his contemporary audience or may, and this is more probable, lead him to write better poetry of his own

http://samriviere.tumblr.com/post/30660042155

i don't think i understand what's going on there

(Have been reading Riviere's 81 Austerities, incidentally - strongly suspect him of being an ILxor, probably Nakhchivan)

(Could also imagine Patricia Lockwood posting - think ILx has inadvertently divined the voice of 21st century poetry)

I think I see what he's doing there & I enjoy that picture more than the bb Catullus trans. Never thought of that Dream Song as being in that line.

How is his book? Thinking about reading it though I haven't seen much of his work.

i guess if sounds like nakh, then sure, i'll read it.

nakh if you are sam riviere can you introduce me to harry burke why because he look intersting

actually i found a picture and he looks about 16? blimey. i guess i am an adult now, the bright young poets really are younger than me.

His work loses something in person (LOL at the Maria Minerva song)
http://vimeo.com/32034539

his little flat vowels

actually the bit where he reads out a url is pretty good.

best-selling poet starving in garret!

http://michaelrobbinspoet.tumblr.com/post/31385996913/in-which-i-shamefacedly-ask-my-fake-internet-friends#notes-container

he'll pull through. good material for the next book! anti-car poems are very now and very environmentally friendly.

oh never mind looks like he took it down. weird.

first poems since the book came out. in poetry magazine:

Big Country
By Michael Robbins
Fiddle no further, Führer. Rome is built.
It took all day. Now let us so
love the world. I’m just thinking out loud.
My stigmata bring out my eyes.

The smallpox uses every part of  the blanket,
and the forest is a lady’s purse.
The Indian is a pink Chihuahua peeking
his head from the designer zipper.

Out here it’s mostly light from the fifteenth
century slamming into the planet.
I can’t see the forest for the burn unit.
All the planet does is bitch bitch bitch.

I know it’s last minute but could you put
out my eyes? At the subatomic level,
helmeted gods help themselves to gold.
Up here? The body’s an isolation ward.

That’s Incredible!
By Michael Robbins
I will pull an airplane with my teeth
and I will pull an airplane with my hair.
I write about cats. Cats, when you read this,
write about me. Be the change you want to see.

I’ve legally changed my name to Whites Only.
Changed it back, I should say.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME made me
the man I am today.

That, and the University of  Phoenix.
Old man, take a look at my life.
Charles Simic, in the gloaming, with a roach,
take a look at my life. I’m a lot like you.

A man stands up and says I will catch
a bullet in my teeth! That’s incredible!
He eats a sword, hilt first, and spits
up a million people persons.

A dolphin pulls an airplane with its blowhole
and keeps the black box for itself.
Bottleneck dolphins don’t even have bones,
yet here we are, giving them medals ...    

This is my ass. And that is a hole
in ground zero. I know which is which.
It’s the one with the smoke pouring out.
This is my handle; this is my spout.

Be Myself
By Michael Robbins
I took back the night. Wrested it
from the Chinese, many of  whom
were shorter than me.
Two billion outstretched Chinese
hands, give or take a few
thousand amputees.

A cheap knockoff, the night
proved to be — Nokla
not Nokia on the touchscreen.
Well, even Old Peng gotta eat,
Confucius say. Or maybe that
was Cassius Clay.

In me, folks, a movable object
meets a resistible force. I haven’t
worked a day since the accident
of   birth. Born of  woman,
my father the same. Make love
then war. I’ll bring round the car.

These children that I spit on
are immune to my consultations.
I’ll have none myself. It isn’t
(Write it!) a fiasco. I am small,
I contain platitudes.

The Second Sex
By Michael Robbins
After the first sex, there is no other.
I stick my gender in a blender
and click send. Voilà!
Your new ex-girlfriend.

You cuckold me with your husband.
I move a box with Ludacris.
The captain turns on, we begin our descent.
Be gentle with me, I’m new to this.

I say the wrong thing. I have OCD.
My obsessive compulsions are disorderly.
I say the wrong thing, did I already say?
I drive my dominatrix away.

The coyote drives her in a false-bottomed van.
He drops her in the desert. The bluffs are tan.
She’ll get a job at Chili’s picking up butts.
I feel ya, Ophelia, I say to my nuts.
And there is pansies. That’s for thoughts.

i wish i hadn't looked at that paris review interview before trying to read the poems. he comes off as such a dick that it kind of contaminated the 'voice' for me.

i am now eight units into 'teach yourself beginner's latin'.

I usually stall at about unit 10

okay.....nevermind...

no! I was happy to see the poems. They did leave me a little cold on first glance though - sounding a bit samey now. Will read more carefully later.

scott are you following michael robbins on tumblr

"Make love / then war. I’ll bring round the car." = his entire appeal summed up in two sentences

full admission: michael and i are facebook pals and we have emailed each other. he's a fan of my rockcrit. he is most definitely a crank and he trolls his facebook friends on a weekly basis. but i like cranks.

he's got a book of criticism in the works and i will definitely buy it.

that makes sense. i kind of enjoy his voice more when he has his critic hat on than his poet hat, i think.

i like reading what people think of his stuff. i like hi poems cuz they're funny/clever. poetry rarely makes me laugh. but i'm no expert on form and poetry and stuff. so, i'm curious what people think. even if they hate it. i think if i were a poet i would be jealous and hate him just cuzza the attention/reviews he's gotten in the mainstream press. and the whole poetry for people who don't like poetry thing. what makes him unique to me is that i really enjoy reading his poetry reviews and i never read poetry reviews. cuz they make my eyes glaze over. so, you know, accessibility, humor...

*HIS* poems...

scott what do you think of frederick seidel, ilx what do you think of frederick seidel

i like him! that's what started my paul muldoon/new yorker poetry thread on this board. a seidel poem. and that's where i first cut & paste alien -vs- predator poem by MR. maybe the most shared/recopied poem in the internet era.

i mean that poem got him a book deal! only in america...

I first discovered Seidel in the most appropriate way possible: temping as a secretary at an investment firm, seeing one of his poems in The Wall Street Journal without context or explanation. Robbins seems to be copying him in both form and subject.

Robbins seems to be copying him in both form and subject.

That's never going to work.

he really isn't though

they both do rhyme and they both do glib but i think their projects are pretty different! other people seem to disagree though

otm, I do think there are big sonic lifts from bits of Seidel, like when I said upthread:

Formally it feels a bit samey, like his music is just a bit too narrow. I'm trying to put my finger on what exactly it is,

the answer was Seidel I realised, & I felt a bit durr for missing it. But I don't think the subject or technique is the same really.

i'm not a big poetry guy so its all new to me. everyone usually just rips off ashbery, right?

weird, I just recommended robbins to a friend the other day. she follows poetry and hadn't heard of him. I thought this dude was like the enfant terrible jimi hendrix now?

kinda feel like we won't know what robbins is all about until he pulls the next rabbit out of his hat. I like his stuff but the style seems to have its own expiration baked into it, and he could get a lot more mileage out of this voice if he let it run free a little. maybe nothing ever happens to him so he's just gotta write about twizzlers and rappers.

http://www.onthebusesfanclub.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/ARTHUR.jpg

MR always reminds me of Mark Leyner. in a good way though. though i haven't read leyner in years and i don't know if i would go back and re-read his old comic novels. they definitely were OF THEIR TIME and all that. as MR is today.

cough

it feels a bit like a vein that should have been tapped in the 90s. it feels a bit like mark leyner. but, then, there was a new mark leyner book this year, and people actually wrote things about it, suggesting people might want to read a new mark leyner book in 2012, as if his uselessness hadn't been recognised and he hadn't been off writing those 'what to ask the doctor after your fourth pina colada' books, so, in conclusion, fml. (incidentally, i hope one of the poems here concludes:

and so, in conclusion, fml.

― thomp, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 15:29 (9 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well there ya go.

they are both FUNNY. i mean there is no expiration date on funny.

What I wrote upthread was:

Robbins on Hass: "...he thinks that merely intoning the names of things can replace the hard work of description."

You say "the hard work of description", Mr. Robbins?

― alimosina, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 04:58 (9 months ago) Permalink

The quotation is from someone who began his poem:

The morning slathers its whatever
across the thing.

I could accept the criticism or the poetry, but when both are the from same person, at least one project must be a put-on. Other readers will do as they please, but that's where I draw my line. (If something comes along to change my mind about Robbins, well and good. So far nothing has.)

not really a criticism there imo

sorry, 'contradiction'. just woke up.

new New Yorker:

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/602040_10152732892025333_752358017_n.jpg

def leppard reference, i assume

no it's clearly about a german law firm

right isn't that what the def leppard song is about?

def leppard song is about their accountants iirc

we could do with another thread about a contemporary poet maybe, this is kind of depressing that it's the only one, anyway

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2013/mayjune/informal-colloquies.html?paging=off

It would be lovely to have more poems from Wheeler in (her pseudo-archaic) mode, or at least more that exploit her winning facility for rhyme, and perhaps fewer that till the exhausted soil of "experimental" fields:

Anabaptists
field field to
lip on a / in a daisy
pond muck
Curtailing assumptions such that
frog muck
panopticon the hazards
signage escalator mutant tut
After such escalator mutant tut, what forgiveness? I know it's bad form to say so, but fifty years after The Tennis Court Oath, this sort of thing is just possibly beginning to seem a bit rote. Certainly someone as lyrically capable—and as capable of lyrical subversion—as Wheeler needn't clutch so at the au courant. "It was the winter of the Z-pack" is startling in its sabotage of romantic anticipation. The lyric speaker of these poems gets "smashed by a Prius on a wild goose / chase" and still manages to affirm the sight of a "halo against the light."

But her openness to the possibilities of poetry regardless of tribal affiliation is one of Wheeler's virtues. "Such is the state of our poetry caught in my throat on its way / to my mouth, why not do everything," she writes toward the end of the book, before concluding: "but of course we do nothing." When third-hand experimentation is the norm, in life as in poetry, everything can look an awful lot like nothing. In these spring-loaded poems, Wheeler honors the less than everything that gets done in a life by infusing elegy with verve, anachronism with new-minted coin. "Let's make like we're not through," she writes, and it's all any of us can do—go on making things, making likenesses, as if we were not already finished, not already broken up, not already out the other side, like so many people we knew, like all the things they said.

I've seen that Wheeler several times in stores, but never managed to get past the fact that someone decided to put out a volume of poetry entitled Meme

"The book's title refers to a pseudo-concept popularized by intellectual featherweight Richard Dawkins."

I love his poetry reviews. I really do. he makes me excited about poetry and I am 95% not excited about modern poetry. for real, he's one of the only critics I can think of who makes me jealous. like, shit, I wish I could do that. I feel the same way about john jeremiah sullivan. they are the only two people I can think of. and MR feels the same way about JJS. I don't ordinarily think that way about other writers. if I had just said no to all those drugs in high school I might have gotten there...

the bit i quoted really annoyed me actually and then i realised i'd been trolled. also i posted the dawkins line contextless on facebook and three people liked it and one person figured out who the author was, though he may have cheated.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1691&fulltext=1

Yahoo! emails back with bad Yahoo! news. “Queef” actually a pretty big problem for the “standards desk.”

auksdhlh he quotes george monbiot

my poet friends (who are very good and have nothing against pop culture references etc) haaate this dude.

they would almost have to.

for funny, mark leidner's my dude:

http://www.actionyes.org/issue9/leidner/leidner1.html

http://www.thermosmag.com/poetry/leidner.html

that second one i have apparently been linked to already in some other context

yh i remembered 'romantic comedies' too-- seems patricia lockwood tweeted a link to it last year? anyway it is the best

He lied to her and she splattered paint all over his car except she made the paint the exact same color as his car to express the complexity of her anger but he didn’t get it.

i'm not sure how i feel about its massiveness

i heard him read it before i saw it in print, so great (maybe he broke it up into two parts?). not sure if he's an arty stand-up comic or a hilarious poet.

new poem. i don't know what i think. i told him he really blew it by not working "High Tang" into it.

http://thewalrus.ca/seasons-in-the-abyss/

The "Hash-Berryman" reference is to this.

this hash-berryman person seems awful

Robbins' stance depends on everyone else playing the straight man. What will he do when his critics turn just as goofy and juvenile?

if yr referring to this 'hash-berryman' person, i think the answer is "be visibly more talented"

hash-berryman one of the worst pieces of 'criticism' I ever read. 'wah wahhh my own hangups prevent me from writing or appreciating good rhymed verse, so obviously anyone choosing to work in that medium is a "pop-poet" who values style over substance, & also why can't I use social media to harass successful people all day long'

... like, obviously "The bomb bay opens with a queef" isn't gonna un-blow-up anybody's stuff, but I think the questions surrounding political poetry are sufficiently complex that you can't just bang your fist on the table and scream "RHYMING IS REACTIONARY NOSTALGIA!!!" or w/e

it totally fits that robbins is the kind of person who refuses to vote for obama though

Flarf You!

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246092

dinged marjorie perloff w/ a sic, dang

Somehow my Introduction to Poetry class managed to keep their shit together.

"Almost anything can claim to be a poem. It takes a lot of reading to feel confident about evaluating that claim," the taon Aimless vevved flarfingly.

i've read (some of) that izenberg book he exploits, it's really worth a look if you have any interest at all in post-WCW/post-Pound poetry, or in theory-of-poetics

yeah that looks interesting, hard to see on that precis quite where it departs from the silliman/hejinian/bernstein theoretical line i guess

i tried to give away my copy of the last edition of that anthology in january or so. can't recall if i got the guy to take it. also, robbins seems like he'd be an awesome guy to take Introduction to Poetry with, but i did hope "Somehow my Introduction to Poetry class managed to keep their shit together." was going to be a line from one of his

i don't know, tom, i think it may just be more conceptually perspicious/fresh, but i couldn't really say at this point. seems like izenberg's trying to pull off a basic reorientation on the critical side rather than making apologetics from within particular poetics/writerly communities.

haha well that sounds like a recommendation to me!!

oh also it takes up yeats early on (so, trying to establish something outside the objectivist/langpo circle) and one of the chapters on oppen is about crusoe and wittgenstein and 'other minds'.

font is annoying tho.

I once tried to explain my admiration for Paul Muldoon to a young poet I know, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I opened a book to Muldoon’s poem “Yarrow”; she immediately balked: “I don’t like poems that look like that.” She meant poems written in regular stanzas. This isn’t anecdotal evidence; it’s an anecdote. Everyone I know has one.

still, isn't there something accurate in that reaction??

i am still totally undecided as to whether that's an okay opinion to hold

i am curious to see what he does with 'other minds', seeing as i spent my dissertation trying to ignore the fact that that was a thing

i mean i tend to think that a measure of respect to a fellow practitioner would include being open to the idea that there are good and bad poems like that and that it might be a worthwhile test of sympathy to try and see what appeal they hold to other people, and other boring democratic shit like that

hey woah the izenberg book is actually affordable, i guess i will get it come payday

there is that, but i dunno, there's a certain amount of obstruction to be overcome during the process of 'poetic education' and maybe people on the teacherly/pro-democratic-sympathy side are too wishful about how readily the obstruction can be swept away by charitable receptivity when the process really more often involves (a) forced subjection to poems one finds unpleasing, under the influence of credentialing/enculturating authority, (b) years/decades-long sequences of passing things by, just not getting them at all, mutual indifference/misunderstanding.

well partly i'm wistful about it because i have spent time trying to convince myself i can get past those particular blockages myself but yeah

annoyingly i have this nagging feeling i've read 'yarrow' somewhere but i can't find it in any of the muldoon i have

hey after years of distaste for rhymey verse i read some heine and some herrick that made it seem like a thing so there's always a chance

herrick's pretty cool right? at least an 8/10 poet

ratings + c17th poets too obvious me-bait. I'm ignoring it.

7.2/10

haha please rate and rank the top 25 17th-c poets that come to mind

no oh ok then, going to be a bit literal about timeframe, so it's some significant work done 1600-1700 (so no 'Shakespeare/Donne is fundamentally a late Elizabethan sensibility' etc). I should probably exclude dramatists but f it

TEN
Shakespeare (2nd half of career)
Donne
Milton

NINE
Jonson
Dryden
Marvell
Rochester

EIGHT
G. Herbert
Webster
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
Henry Vaughan the Silurist
Herrick
Lovelace

SEVEN
John Oldham
Bishop King
Aphra Behn
Sir John Davies
Thomas Otway
Crashaw
William Drummond of Hawthornden
Katherine Philips

SIX
Chapman, Drayton, Cotton, Traherne, Denham, maybe Garth, Cowley I guess… gets crowded down here, & I suspect some of the dramatic ppl like Fletcher or Dekker or Middleton should be higher if I'm willing to count Webster & Shakespeare but I just don't know/read them much. & there are people who float in and out down here, like I'll read some Flatman or Cleveland or Wroth and decide they're actually pretty good, but then won't remember why I thought that the following week.

I can't believe I just did that, horribly reductive

and what's SIr John Davies doing in there? He really is Elizabethan

Also, Crashaw should be higher

how many of those did you just completely make up on the spot, w/ yr poetic faculty

no oh ok then

this is not the most convincing display of reluctance i have ever seen tbh

j. come on, how can you not want to read someone called Henry Vaughan the Silurist

when i was studying for the lit GRE (god what a waste of time) i found myself thinking i would really enjoy just reading 17th c poetry for a few months. all i managed to do tho was read rochester twice

<3 woof <3

is that a profession or the name of a pernicious tendency or a provincial locality or what

there was a point when i knew the answer to that

It's his sort of antiquarian, sort of made-up word for Welsh. So locality basically.

Herbert i think i'd push up a bit. also <3 woof obv. Marvell's going up to ten not for consistency but for what he does when he does it - tho those nines are p solid and a hard league to escape from imo. Like Herrick but too high imo. Jonson???? walking to Scotland to meet W Drummond is all i remember. (I know f' all about 17th C poetry). lol@ Vaughan twins, obv soft spot for Ths.

Rochester didn't used to get so much love 40 years ago. I'm glad to see he's rising in the world again.

maybe nothing ever happens to him so he's just gotta write about twizzlers and rappers.

― unprepared guitar (Edward III), Friday, April 5, 2013 5:28 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha this gets at it exactly

what if twizzlers and rappers are what happen 2 u hmmmm?

im glad the warning was added to the thread title, i kept accidentally clicking it

Huh, never heard of this guy, but I like the samples reproduced on this thread. I definitely get a Mark Leyner vibe, in that it provokes a similar response to how I felt when I first encountered Leyner back in the day, ie., "You can do that in a poem (novel)!?" and both make me laugh, which is always a plus.

well that was my long-ago (now) response to the seidel and robbins poems that muldoon put in the new yorker. i had forgotten that poetry could be funny. and entertaining. and still be decent poetry. i certainly forgot this reading the new yorker over the years. which is why i started the muldoon/new yorker thread. definitely refreshing. do i want all poetry to be like this? no. i think its cool that people who never buy poetry bought the robbins book though. like me. when was the last example of that? brautigan probably. ginsberg before him. unless you count rod mckuen. actually, maya angelou would be a more recent example. michael robbins and maya angelou should go on a world tour.

Sadly it seems harder to think of poets who are both funny and good than it should be. In addition to Ginsberg and Brautigan, I guess I would include Frank O'Hara, Philip Larkin, hmm... running out of names. I guess I don't find Ashbery very funny. I probably need to read more poetry.

Oh yeah, Charles Simic can be kind of funny.

my kids thought the robbins book was hysterical. i read almost the whole thing to them and maria when i got it.

I guess one question in my mind is how much of Robbins' effect depends on being transgressive or shocking - because that kind of thing tends to have a short shelf-life. Not many people still listen to Lenny Bruce.

you gotta live or die by your words. his poems read really well and are a lot of fun to read aloud. will people want to read them in 50 years? who knows?

Good point. I'm not really worrying about people 50 years hence. More like whether these are poems I'll want to re-read. "Worried" is probably too strong a word. I've read some of them twice now, and so far they are holding up!

missed this one:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/books/ct-prj-0908-poetry-essay-20130906-1,0,7411339,full.story

'take my american poetry, please!'

man septemberrrrr but i wanna read internet excerpts nowwwwwwww

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51MD4Lv8NLL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

oh boy

j., you can! 12 of the poems have been published online (in The New Yorker, Poetry, Commonweal, The Economy, Hazlitt, Lemon Hound, & The Walrus).

well that sounds like a needless hassle, what am i, a poetry hunter-gatherer, this is late late web 2.0 capitalism, where's my commodity (that other people will buy and type from)

boo

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/book-reviews/he-who

you need to work on yr google skillz

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/poem-springtime-chicago-november

also, website w/ links: michaelrobbinspoet.tumblr.com

it's too late now that i know he thinks 'naturalism appears incoherent'

he's me, & he's right. you don't have to be a theist to figure that out. read john mcdowell. also, lol at the usual atheist bigotry. see ya.

murk if you are actually M.R. you should know that Grado headphones are not acceptable in a library environment because they are "open" style headphones and thus leak sound, it's very annoying

you know, you're actually quite right about that. i bought some noise-canceling sennheisers recently & tho they're lower grade than the grados my ipod sounds better on them. also less leakage.

sorry for being cranky, but deciding not to read someone's work because of his philosophical or religious beliefs is just dumb, unless he's a nazi or something, & even then ...

there's no way i'm reading this whole thread

i could care less what kind of -eist anyone is, but apologetics games are just a travesty

and i would recommend some reading for you in turn if you haven't picked up teh ilx house tone yet

i don't think i require any reading recommendations. i'm familiar with the arguments for naturalism. they're woefully unconvincing. i've been writing articles attacking scientism for years. i'll take mcdowell & marilynne robinson & nagel & charles taylor & hart & mark johnston & anyone else from plato on who, theist or not, understands how conceptually thin bald naturalism is. the naivete of the scientistic worldview is astounding—uncannily like that of the most naive theistic construal available to the most benighted peasant in 15th-century europe.

but i also don't think i'll be sticking around. depressing to have my first interaction on here entail a conversation i've had literally hundreds of times.

as for the "house tone," if suggesting you read john mcdowell's "mind and world" violates it, good.

you weren't following my meaning at all. you think we're having a conversation that we're not having. the suggested reading would be ilx itself, for you, so you can pick up OUR tone(s). sheesh. i'm not gonna read your book or not read your book for any special reason having to do with you or anything you believe or don't, except your belief in writing funny poems.

https://www.beloit.edu/reason/images/348601.jpg

it's too late now that i know he thinks 'naturalism appears incoherent'

Yeah, mr, this was a joke. ilx has evolved it's own standards of rhetoric and evidence, although it often seems like knowing how to navigate those doesn't prevent arguments.

murk, can you elaborate on how memes entail intelligent design? I'm not seeing the argument. I think Dawkins would say that there definitely are strictly natural processes by which intentional contents can be selectively replicated. Certain intentional contents have the right features, or the right pragmatic consequences, to compel psychological uptake. This can be voluntary or not - what matters is how they appeal to the brain. Mutations occur because of shifting social and psychological conditions. Some intentional contents lose their appeal. Some are able to mutate enough to stay in circulation.

I'm not saying that it's the most fascinating theory in the world, but the leap to intelligent design makes no sense to me.

murk you should stay a while. & I like your poetry. i mean yes I spend some of this thread umming over it but that is a compliment in my head.

i see. i picked a fine time to be humorless. j., if you give me yr email address, i'll get yr address from you & make sure you receive a bound galley of the book when they're available.

jmm, more tk when i have a moment to spare.

but i also don't think i'll be sticking around. depressing to have my first interaction on here entail a conversation i've had literally hundreds of times

There's lots more interesting things to discuss around here than naturalism vs theism. Judging by the band references in your poems you might enjoy some of the threads on I Love Music (sister board).

yeah, i've lurked on the rolling metal & country threads for years. i know scott seward & chuck eddy a bit.

well then MIX IT UP a little!

i sent you a webmail, you probably want to check your spam filters etc.

i'm leery of mixing it up. see above—i lose my internet cool too easily.

woof, love the title of this thread.

a conversation i've had literally hundreds of times.

It would appear to be a compelling enough topic that each new encounter requires getting it out of the way. Once had, it needn't be repeated.

However, if your intent in participating in ILB is to seek intellectual stimulation of such a high order that you need not run over ground you've covered before elsewhere, or explain cherished ideas that you've developed over a long period of time, then prepare for disappointment. We are only human. Our only claim to intellectualism here is that we do not dismiss it out of hand, but rather we find the world of ideas worthwhile and reading of literature rewarding. We share that.

Once had, it needn't be repeated.

cmon aimless remember where you are

Right. I went for a long walk, thought a bit about this thread. It seems likely to me that MR aka murk may not have much to gain from engaging with ilx. Shocking conclusion, I know. If I'm wrong, then now that he's touched the ilx tarbaby, he'll be sticking around for sure. He won't be able to help it.

In the meantime, I will go to his link and try to find out how he is using 'naturalism'. The only use of this term in regard to lit that I can recall was to describe the Hamlin Garland-Theodore Dreiser-Frank Norris-Stephen Crane school of writing, and that's nowhere in the same neighborhood of how he's using it above, obviously. As a term of art in philosophy, I don't have it in my mental dictionary.

OK. Got it.

naturalism—the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural—is an incorrigibly incoherent concept

I'll just point out the main thing to notice in approaching this quote is that "naturalism" is not interchangeable with "science". Science pragmatically limits itself to natural phenomena and does not pretend to address questions of transcendence. This allows it a remarkable coherence within its own sphere of inquiry. Neither Hart nor MR is calling scientific knowledge incoherent, but rather the attempt to apply that knowledge to questions that science wisely ignores and to dismiss or deny matters of transcendence on the very grounds that scientific knowledge does not shed light on them. Which is simply perverse.

However, this seems like a discussion more fit for I Love Everything more than I Love Books, in that ILE has cornered the market on threads upon this subject matter. We trod that sorry path again a couple of weeks ago on Are you an atheist?. I understand now why murk would want to sidestep that dreary exercise.

Yes, Aimless, this is what I say in the piece, & what Hart says. The problem is not with science but with scientism, an epistemically arrogant presumption to transcendent knowledge (God is a "delusion," &c.) that happens to be ironically faith-based. This is what I (& many others) accuse Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, et al., of practicing. They can't even get the arguments straight (e.g., Dawkins misunderstands Thomas's Aristotelian notion of "first cause"; Hitchens makes innumerable historical errors, &c.).

But Hart's & Eagleton's & Robinson's books exist, so I don't have to have these exactly-the-same-every-time discussions.

Does transcendent knowledge constitute a specific checklist of things or is it just demarcated as things that are currently untestable, or things thought to be never testable?

Things never thought to be testable, in the sense of "experimentally verifiable".

Transcendence does not easily fall into the category of "knowledge", as we are now used to defining that category, iow, in terms of verifiable, repeatable, tangible, shareable, measurable experiences. Generally speaking, it can be approached by two avenues: logical derivation from accepted axioms (much as mathematics can define and employ concepts that have no verifiable, physical counterparts) and direct mystical experience, which is unverifiable. If you'd like some sort of scientifically sound basis for this category, you're not going to get it, except by way of analogy.

Just as an exercise, I'd like you to refresh your acquaintance with Gödel, in case this frank admission of the unverifiability of transcendent knowledge gets you to feeling especially frisky and combative.

btw, as you may find out by reading the "Are you an atheist?" thread, I'm an atheist of the Zen Buddhist variety.

But must we trudge down this road again?

if you're sorting things like godel's incompleteness proof in transcendent knowledge, then that is actually an example of not necessarily science, but mathematical rigor placing limits on things, like it literally cages God, and could be used to directly contradict perceived mystical experiences that state the opposite (though I've never heard of any mystical experiences that weird and specific.)

There could be entire classes of philosophical questions that could arise from this sort of thing ("could God make a burrito so hot He could not eat it?") that could be answered conclusively.

wow yeah let's do this here

nah. take it to the atheist thread on ile and see if anyone nibbles. maybe alice liddell will come and take a bite and we can all fit down this rabbit hole.

"could God make a burrito so hot He could not eat it?"

A question that, once placed in the mind, is hard to remove, I'm finding.

God, like so many Busy Executives, has People who Do these Things for Him.

interventionist god can probably make and eat a burrito (in control of the forces of the world on a level of contemporary human time). could make it so hot that Itself could not eat it, wd pass on to something more in touch with its ain soph aur.

post-interventionist god, possibly not fully in charge of detail that was engendered from its primum mobile. would like to try and eat a burrito, probably couldn't make one. could certainly find one made too hot to eat ("What things have I wrought?" - poss a q of theodicy, tho its status may be unclear: "This burrito is too hot to eat! ergo, It is a production of the evil I allow but do not control. Just one more bit tho, 'sblood it tastes great." makes it more of a neo-platonic entity, not strictly part of xtian theology - not evil, not good - but something assimilated from outside. a communicative and alchemical tool)

conclusion - jaweh makes the burrito too hot to eat, elohim eats it.

or possibly the trinity was devised to solve this potential burrito problem. god proposes, Jesus disposes, Holy Spirit takes the taco.

in the pub fwiw.

^^ would subscribe

i corrupted the original text. sorry
http://underscoopfire.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/homer-simpson.jpg

If Scalia and Thomas have taught us anything, it is to respect the original text.

Zeus knows the proper way to resolve such paradoxes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teumessian_fox

iirc God may create the soul of the burrito but its too-hot corporal form is the fault of Satan, and so the burrito must be reincarnated over and over until it achieves perfection and can be eaten by God.

"But it is precisely because He is omnipotent that there are certain things that He cannot do: just as we say that it is necessary, when we exercise will, that we do so of our own free will. When we say this, it is undoubtedly true, yet we do not thereby make our freedom of will subject to a necessity which takes away our freedom." — Augustine, City of God.

(Many "paradoxes" of this sort have been answered for, like, 1500 years.)

(Thomas Aquinas treats specifically of the hot burrito, but I can't remember where offhand.)

for such heresy he would have been burned at the bistec, from which there is no salsation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCO8qkEe9co

Another perspective:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPekbB4kemg

Well, we've derailed this thread.

http://gdb.voanews.com/362347A9-BBC1-4422-91D2-4F9210E21940_w640_r1_s_cx0_cy9_cw0.jpg

(Sorry Aimless)

It was a group effort.

also I wrote this: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/03/dayal_patterson_s_history_of_black_metal_reviewed.single.html

i enjoyed that. I do not know anything about Black Metal, but I did like the cheerful attempt to chart a course around the book's shit prose.

I've only really begun to think through the implications of your dropping by here. Let's say I read your next book (which I will), and let's say I want to pop into ILX & say 'Yes, but…' and 'This is good, but then maybe…' (& this is how I respond to things I like), it could be awkward. Even if I slope off to another thread, then that's talking behind your back. So maybe I'll just post here, try to believe you both are/aren't present & see what happens.

I had a very similar transilvanian hunger experience.

also: I liked the article about music and character identification. it's probably the reason I liked that much despised Goon Squad novel.

I remain non-committal about AvP - and am determined to remain non-committal for SS to avoid awkwardness woof describes.

have just moved house tho and have just put AvP in the poetry shelf - between the wall and... hang on (am lying on bed upstairs and need to check)... Yeats! twixt a lough and a hard place.

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/2014-03-06233700_zps546714c4.jpg

how do you feel about edward dorn, f.

i feel like i wish i could afford a copy of gunslinger

20 bucks delivered, doesn't seem that far out. also if you buy the new collected dorn brick then by weight you're only paying six, seven bucks for slinger

There have been plenty of years of my life when twenty bucks for a book was at the far edge of the possible. Not now, happily.

I paid 11 for Ashbery's Flow Chart last month, that was a splurge

how do you feel about edward dorn, f.

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 00:21 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really like it - the protean central voice and the presentation of time are done very well I think. it's a precise, clever performance, which it needs to be given the looseness of its environment and form. "Western frontier as appropriate place and set of characters with which to study the soul and it's journeys" is absolutely a premise I buy. it's witty, conversational and fun, and laced with song. i like Burroughs, but you allow a lot for the pleasure of listening to his discursive tone of voice - Gunslinger reminded me of Burroughs, but here the internal philosophy, structure and tale, such as it is, is in its own terms coherent, which gives it that overarching tension that long poems need. there's some brilliant set pieces, like this abstract gunfight between the Horse and a loose-tongued stranger:

The Stoned Horse said Slowly
not looking up
from his rolling and planning
Stranger you got a [i]pliable lip
you might get yourself described
if you stay on.

Come on!
Who's the horse, I mean who's
horse is that, we can't have
No Horse! in here.
It ain't proper
and I think I'm gonna
put a halter on you!

Uh uh, the Gunslinger breathed.
Anybody know the muthafucka
the Stoned Horse inquired
of the general air.
Hey, hear that the strange gasped
that's even a negra horse!

Maybe so, maybe not
the Gunslinger inhaled
but stranger you got an Attitude
a mile long
as his chair dropped forward
all four legs on the floor
and as the disputational .44
occurred in his hand and spun there
in that warp of relativity one sees
in the backward turning spokes
of a buckboard,

then came suddenly
to rest, the barrel utterly justified
with a line pointing
to the neighborhood of infinity.
The room froze harder.

Shit,
Slinger, Lil noticed, You've pointed
your .44 straight
out of town.
I keep tellin you
not to be so goddamn fancy
now that amacher's
got the drop on you!

Not so, Lil!
the Slinger observed.
Your vulgarity is flawless
but you are the slave
of appearances –-
this Stockholder will find
that his gun cannot speak
he'll find
that he has been Described
STRUM
the greenhorn pulled
the trigger and his store-bought iron
coughed out some cheap powder,
and then changed its mind,
muttering about having
been up too late last night.
Its embarrassed handler
looked, one eye wandering,
into the barrel
and then reholstered it and
stood there.

strum

The total .44
recurred in the Slinger's hand
and spun there
then came home like a sharp knock
and the intruder was described -
a plain, unassorted white citizen.

the successful unpunctuated distinction of speech and description is always i think a sign of writer invisibly in charge of their rhythms and tone (like Evelyn Waugh or PG Wodehouse's long pages of brief exchanges where the identity of the speaker remains fixed in the mind. It reminds me of what George Saintsbury in his book on English prose rhythm said about Malory's Morte d'Arthur:

[There are plenty of sentences in Malory beginning with "and"; but it is not the constant go-between and usher-of-all-work that it is in Mandeville.] The abundance of conversation gets him out of this difficulty at once; and he seems to have an instinctive knowledge - hardly shown before him, never reached after him till the time of the great novelists - of weaving conversation and narrative together. [...] His narrative order and his dialogue are so artistically adjusted that they dovetail into one another.

After all, this method and presentation is a 20th/21st C one, but Dorn does it very well. The closest analogue in some ways feels like the Pynchon of Mason & Dixon and Against the Day.

cost me £10, which didn't seem unreasonable - tho like Aimless I'm now in the happy position where I can spend that amount on a book without feeling a bit sick.

"a precise, clever performance, which it needs to be given the looseness of its environment and form" -- yeah, i think at the time i looked at it i wasn't really in the mood to read it charitably: like, my response was Yes I Get It And I Am Bored Of This Riff Now And I Am Only About Two Fifths Convinced Your Line Breaks Are Not Arbitrary. i think it's a lot like other pynchon performances too, like the occasional drops into pulp in GR.

when i read the north atlantic vortex pomes i found myself thinking mb i should have given slinger more of a shot; have forgotten what i liked about those, though. was enthused about the collected but i. the cover is carcanet's worst ever ii. fear of amassing further collective works i will not open, like geo. hill's collected e.g., which has been glaring at me resentfully from various piles and bookshelves, still totally unopened, since december

yeah the North Atlantic Turbine poems definitely show that he knows what he's doing with his linebreaks/form - iirc i liked them because there is a spine of traditional lyric there, he's closer to a posed or precise English voice than I expected - & I think that gave me some of the trust needed to follow Gunslinger (which I liked a lot). I'd like to read more but, yeah, it's stuck in the black hole of being a huge ugly book that I can't or won't carry round with me. I will never learn about big collecteds.

actually maybe I will. I've been buying single volumes of Geo Hill 2nd-hand lately - cheaper since the collected.

interesting. if you should decide any of them are run-don't-walk let me know and i will set up some kind of lever and axle system with which to heave the collected onto some sort of lectern for necessary physical support and prise it open to the relevant section

i just this week ordered a single louise gluck instead of all of the louise gluck under one cover. i feel very glad of that.

we should start a Hill thread. Maybe he'll show up too.

actually, I haven't seen that collected Hill about – does it go full on with the apparatus?

(I don't know why the thought of lots of notes at the back depresses me. Maybe it's because Hill feels a bit too much like a poet born to be annotated)

i literally haven't opened the thing. it feels a little intimidating.

I always used to like that he was a poet with a tiny collected. You could take it anywhere.

I'm reviewing the collected Hill for Poetry. Thing is HUGE. No notes, just nearly 1000 pages of poems—including no fewer than FOUR new books. I love Hill, but I'll stick w/ my nice portable Penguin UK ed. of the Selected.

My being here should in no way preclude anyone's saying anything about my work, to answer something said above. Me. My work. See? Two separate things. Not really, but I wouldn't argue w/ anyone's taste—no one's poetry's for everyone.

Also: I reviewed Glück's collected for the LARB, but rereading it recently I felt I was overgenerous. Meadowlands is the shit.

Been digitally carrying around Jack Gilbert's medium-hefty Collected Poems for the past month.

I am actually kind of tempted to order the smaller Hill, or at least to hope to find it, as a way of delaying opening 'Broken Hierarchies' again. Odd that both of the books I'm most putting off reading right now look like they're written by Santa Clauses gone to seed.

The American ed. is the same, just not as compact & attractive, in my view, but still portable:

http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Geoffrey-Hill/dp/0300164300/ref=sr_1_2_title_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1394382467&sr=8-2&keywords=geoffrey+hill

I just read Colin Burrow's review of Broken Hierarchies in the lrb, and it is not a terrible piece of work but I do find it dismal or circular or something when historically minded eng lit dons claim Hill as a great poet.

Four new volumes. I'm not going near it. going to reread Mercian Hymns instead.

('I liked that,' said Offa, 'sing it again.')

so

https://twitter.com/alienvsrobbins/status/473826291507277824

has 'otm' penetrated wider public consciousness and i hadn't noticed or

hey murk how far from the end of broken hierarchies are you now

have you started it?

no judgement I'm not exactly tearing through that Dorn.

i read mercian hymns and three other pages selected at random

so

https://twitter.com/alienvsrobbins/status/473826291507277824

has 'otm' penetrated wider public consciousness and i hadn't noticed or

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, June 3, 2014 10:08 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=otm

had no idea! thought it was ilx specific.

did click through tho on the money is like 5th down w 4 votes

1 otm
Other Than Mexicans
A term used by US Border Patrol agents when catching illegal aliens.
What a night last night! We caught 250 people 23 of them were OTMs
by abula February 29, 2004

58 34

how ironic

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/07/atheists_the_origin_of_the_species_by_nick_spencer_reviewed.single.html

3,200 comments

enjoyed that but i am not going near those comments

gotta admit i've really come around on this guy and this book

There once was a rapping tomato,
That's right, a rapping tomato,
And he rapped all day,
From April til May,
and also, guess what? it was me.

― thomp, Saturday, June 9, 2012 6:50 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also this is hilarious

Michael Robbins
‏@alienvsrobbins
Anyone interested in buying my 2011 32" LG LCD flat-screen HDTV? Great shape. Will let it go cheap if you transport from Crown Heights.

B-)

http://i.imgur.com/7UlScn2.png

yo did you guys see 'country music' in the nyer last month, i thought it was p fuckin lovely

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/lifeguard-2

God keep Carl Perkins warm
and Jesus Christ erase
my name from all the files in
the county’s database.
The dog that bit my leg
the night I left the state,
Lord won’t you let his
vaccines be up to date.

Thanks, but there's a glitch on the NYer's website. That poem is in quatrains. All stanza breaks have disappeared from poems on their site, which is really annoying. Here's Shannon McArdle's version, icyi:

http://michaelrobbinspoet.tumblr.com/post/94073831275/shannon-mcardle-formerly-of-the-mendoza-line-one

sick! (wont play for me tho)

hm, it don't work. well, here it is on shannon's blog:

http://www.shannonmcardlemusic.com/blog/2014/8/12/god-bless-michael-robbins.html

did anyone else love the mendoza line as much as i did?

i am a fan

lmao i both can can't believe there's an ilx thread about this dude

one of the worst writers and people

i agree since he unfollowed me on twitter

he was an incredible asshole on a message board i was on circa 2010-2011? right around the time "alien v predator" hit the new yorker. that poem is ok, but dude's essays truly reveal the total nothing going on behind his eyes

I think he posted here a few times. He’s a metal fan. I saw his essay collection in the bookstore the other day. Blurbed by Elif Batuman.

He posts upthread a few times.

i'm pretty sure he's aware of how much i hate his work

lol

yeah this dude is like nails on a chalkboard for me