High Five: justin sirois
(In this issue's High Five, author justin sirois of narrow house print & recordings discusses his five mixed media offerings.)
Cormac McCarthy / Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West (1985)
There's little I can say that Harold Bloom, in his forward in the Modern Library edition, hasn't already fleshed out—there's little support I can add to the Faulkner/Melville comparisons, which seem unavoidable for this Biblical tale of eternal war and inevitable genocide. Only three things happen throughout Blood Meridian, 1) traversing the virgin south western United States/Mexico, its red canyons and molar crag, 2) Judge Holden's metaphysical monologues about geology and death and, of course, 3) death itself.
As the main character, The Kid, follows the Glanton gang on their murderous scalping and pillaging excursions. We slowly realize that the bald albino giant Holden isn't just hypnotically alluring to the members of the pillaging party, but to us, the readers, as well. He is war materialized as man, he is a song of himself, half naked and smashing children, an ancient lullaby of doom. McCarthy has been stoically mum about his novel's intent which leaves the work open to a few interpretations—is Holden not human, but a pale harbinger from another world? Does he represent all "white men," an incarnation of brutality and approaching industrialism?
This novel stands out as McCarthy's most beautifully sparse and lyrically roaming works, closer to The Road (2006) than any of his other books, and The New York Times polled both writers and critics who ranked it number three on the list of most important works of American Fiction written in the past twenty-five years. Gorgeously minimal and honest, it has informed my own writing more than any "modern classic."
Marshall McLuhan / Understanding Media/The Medium is the Massage (book and LP – 1967)
Wired magazine dubbed McLuhan as their patron saint, Woody Allan used him in Annie Hall, he's the father of media studies and a hero for all artists everywhere. The Medium is the Massage is a condensed, image rich version of Understanding Media, a book that made me, at 19, look at all forms of media in an entirely new way. My problem-solving evolved, my biases evaporated, and I fell out of love with painting almost immediately. It's true!
A life-changing and perpetually important work that everyone in the creative class needs to read a few times in this or her life. The Japanese CD import of The Medium is a bit expensive, but worth it—nerdy and cool vibes bring the static text to life.
Rod Smith / The Good House (Spectacular Books 2001)
This chapbook-length piece has everything a great Language poem should have—brevity and wit, sarcasm and charm, generosity, and a little good 'ole vague lines that will take a few scans to understand. You move through many houses and they change as you change and their meaning transforms from one moment to the next—sadness and celebration seep into your house—"...and sometimes the kitty licks the bicycle on the porch."
If you're lucky enough to acquire a copy of this Spectacular Book, the long vertical format will feel natural in your head and hands, but here are four audio selections of the poem that still give me egret pocks each time I click:
1. from The
Good House 1 (6:28)
2. from The
Good House 2 (2:51)
3. from The
Good House 3 (3:03)
4. from The
Good House 4 (3:20)
BoingBoing dot net
My daily fix of tech news and wonderfully disturbing geek trivia. Hot topics include Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Copyright reform (Copyleft), new science fiction, homemade steam punk gadgets, and civil rights in the digital age. Croatian Mickey Mouse liver-paste and cats with 26 toes, is there a better way to start your morning?
This is where I learned Jonathan Lethem (Fortress of Solitude/Motherless Brooklyn, recent MacArthur grant recipient) is canonizing Philip K. Dick for the Modern Library. Outstanding! This is where you'll learn more about Steve Jobs than you'd like to know or what bug-filled iTool will be debuting six months from now. Today a post led me to a blog of "nothing but pictures of cute girls drinking tea." Delightful!
Earl Grey sippin' aside, this is brain biofuel for the information worker and I just can't get enough.
Alice Notley / c. '81
"nobody trusts the poor"
I'm a little embarrassed that I've never seen this poem on the page, CA Conrad turned me onto the MP3 via PennSound (University of Pennsylvania?s Poetry Archive) and I nearly lost my mind after hearing it.
It's a brutal poem that I've listened to dozens of times (really) and can't understand why I love it so much. It's about pills and madness or being mistaken for mad because you're trying to be classless in a late-capitalistic nightmare. I believe she's writing (in '81) in a city called New York, but this is a New York you rarely get to feel, a New York that welcomes creativity with a nail-studded Louisville Slugger and would rather see you fail. Parts of this piece are a little corny and almost capital P poem-ish, but the New York school fervor and cadence win you over fast. She mentions Ted Berrigan and your heart pinches a bit. She is beautiful and you wish you were this beautiful.
Notley bellows c. '81 like it's the last poem she's ever going to read and she's reading it only to you so you'd better have learned something before she's through.
Listen to c. '81
justin sirois is founder and creative director of narrow house print & recordings. His writing has appeared in Drill, The DC Poetry Anthology, Poets Against the War, The Urbanite, and Newtopia Magazine. His new chapbook, Silver Standard (Newlights Press). includes the online projects \'bell and \'quiet colossus which can be viewed
here. He is a recent recipient of the Maryland State Art Council grant for poetry and lives in Baltimore.
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