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rauan klassnik: as far as writing goes where, if at all, do you draw the line?
penny goring: words or pics, it’s all the same to me, i don’t draw lines. my exes mum, after reading a poem of mine, he told me she sed to him: ‘someone needs to get her to stop. will she ever draw the line?’ but i won’t. because i don’t want to. if something happened to me it is mine. i can do what i like with it.
rk: some people think that all Art comes from the way Male and Female bodies talk to each other, violent, gentle, in shadows, and in light. whatcha think? (and please elaborate)
pg: i’m always deeply cringing at any sweeping statements about what art is or isn’t etc. ugh. i’m not comfortable with the capital A either. being an artist feels more like a curse to me. i ran from it for what felt like a long time. but i got into lots of trouble, nearly died, ended up in rehab. so now i make stuff but i’m doing it compulsively. its like i’m a donkey chasing a carrot. and i put out too much work. i treat tumblr, facebook, twit, like a wall in a studio, not a show. if i’m working on it i’ll post it. that applies to my macros, vids, and written work. but then i’ll go back, within minutes, days, or weeks, and delete most of it.
rk: the movie Ted and Sylvia is, undoubtedly, one of the great movies of our time. but which of the two, if you had to choose, would you take with you on a weekend full of rain? (and please elaborate)
pg: i haven’t seen this movie. i’d have to leave sylvia out. feel like she’d be pretentious as fuk. ted must have been at least charming though, judging by the trouble he caused. i bet he was a sociopath – that could be fun.
rk: do you go for midnight strolls on the moors? and even if you don’t could you please describe what that’s like?
pg: me alone lolloping, cuz i like that word, on spongy shagpile/bare feet, n i’m takin giant strides under a low sky of children’s b&w handprints, forming the face of mata hari, no, myra hindley, starin me out with her one good eye. soundtrack of my moors is the smiths wailing on the wrong speed and i’m carryin a cold baby, we’re running towards a bus stop. where i sit in the shelter with a stranger. he passes me a cigarette. when i say thanks, he sez: ‘go home, you fuckin londoner.’ it’s raining cheap cider. cathy is dead. she didn’t even leave a ghost. on the top deck of the night bus i sit behind kate bush – she’s snogging heathcliffe until he turns to dust in her arms, and by the time we reach clapham she’s wailing that song out the window.
rk: what do your parents think of your writing?
pg: if my dad reads my stuff it makes him cry. my mum is a big janey smith fan, she can’t stand my stuff, finds it ‘weird and depressing’. sed she’d like to gun down every art tutor that helped lead me to this tragic end. if i’m making pics they think i should write. if i’m writing they think i should paint. every time i see my dad he begs me to get real and write a best seller. and i say, but dad, if i stop making the stuff i wanna make, i’d likely end up back in the gutter. and he sez, well, marry a rich man then. so yeah. i’m their costly heartbreaking disappointment.
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Penny Goring hatefuck the reader
5everdankly
"i have less desire to change things than to change the way they are destroyed."
sik nu epic & relentless txt from penny goring. long stewing latest book buy irl.
Édition: 666. Éditeur: 5everdankly. Publié: 28.janvier2016. Langue: Anglais. Pages: 98. Reliure: Couverture souple en dos carré collé. Impressionintérieure: Noir & blanc. Poids: 0,2 kg. Dimensions: (centimètres) 15,24 (largeur) x 22,86 (hauteur)
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Excerpts
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v fast blu x 6
melty doors of yes/no
faster fear
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Chelsea Hodson: A few months ago, I saw a description for your book, and I tweeted, “Do I really have to wait until 2016 to read Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet? Looks so good.” I think it was within a few hours after that you emailed me a PDF of the book. This indicates to me that you possibly have a love/hate relationship with the Internet yourself—perhaps you despise it but perhaps you also see it as a crucial tool. What is your personal relationship to the Internet, and how did that inform the writing of the novel? How do you navigate your life as a writer in a world where most information about literary events arrive in the form of Facebook invitations?
Jarett Kobek: Someone told me about your tweet! I avoid Twitter like a plague pit!
When I was writing the book, the relationship was pure hate. I’d just escaped San Francisco, where I’d watched long-standing communities of people be destroyed, basically, by the people who own the Internet. The city gave me a nervous breakdown. An actual, genuine 20th-century nervous breakdown like a rummy drunkard from a shitty Scott Fitzgerald novel. Nothing separates compos from mentis like rumors of a Twitter IPO. Anyway, I Hate the Internet exploded in about two months of pure bile/recovery from the experience of living at the highwater mark of American hypergentrification. So, yeah, absolutely, I fucking hate the Internet.
And yet. I’m a recovered tech person and much of my life has revolved around this shit. For what seems like a thousand years. And I still like the early ethos of tech, back in the hobbyist days, when computers were not interchangeable and no one had realized that this thing the Internet could be used to trample the gullible with advertisements for car insurance. Or before an even more unsavory lot realized that they could make beaucoup bucks setting up unprofitable companies as money laundering events for war criminals and investment bankers. That’s why I did a prequel of I Hate the Internet for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an old British microcomputer. It felt like there was some virtue counterbalancing all of that disgust with an acknowledgment of a time you using computers did not require you to participate in several overlapping systems of global evil.
How does one navigate being a writer? I whine like a big fucking bald baby and pretend, like everyone else, that I’m not typing morality lectures into devices built by slaves in China. But of course I am.
CH: I’m curious about your subtitle: “A useful novel against men, money, and the filth of Instagram.” I suppose I’m especially curious about the phrase “against men” as well as the phrase “276 pages of mansplaining” which you use in the first page’s hilarious list of “trigger warnings.” In your novel, BTW, the narrator says, “I’m just killing time until the inevitable shift of power away from the patriarchy. The only thing I want is for women to assume their natural and obvious prominence.” What does it mean to be a male writer against men?
JK: There’s no way you can look at the Internet, in terms of the people who built it and in terms of the people who dramatically profit from other people’s intellectual capital via social networks, and argue that anyone but men are pulling the strings. The only major tech CEO who’s not a man is Marissa Mayer and she got stuck with the worst company of them all.
Historically, men have been the shit of the world. Every terrible thing under which we suffer was built by men. Most people receive technology as if it’s sprung from the head of Zeus. Normal people don’t have the time or the inclination to think about all of the engineering choices that went into something like tweeting, and how all of these choices are the prima materia of their suffering and manipulated behaviors. But like every system of government, the Internet should be seen as a thing constructed by men to which women are, alas, very subject.
So that’s what I’m against. Not so much men in general as the terrible choices of the men who have bequeathed us a grotesque world. Which may be the same thing.
As for the 276 pages of mansplaining. It’s difficult to look at the technical device in the novel of defining everything and not feeling like, well, isn’t this just a dude telling everyone what everything else is? How is this any different? So why be bashful? Why not embrace the mansplain? Lean in. Someday all of this will be yours.
(cont.)
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Jarett Kobek I Hate the Internet
We Heard You Like Books
'What if you told the truth and the whole world heard you? What if you lived in a country swamped with Internet outrage? What if you were a woman in a society that hated women?
'Set in the San Francisco of 2013, I Hate the Internet offers a hilarious and obscene portrayal of life amongst the victims of the digital boom. As billions of tweets fuel the city’s gentrification and the human wreckage piles up, a group of friends suffers the consequences of being useless in a new world that despises the pointless and unprofitable.
'In this, his first full-length novel, Jarett Kobek tackles the pressing questions of our moment. Why do we applaud the enrichment of CEOs at the expense of the weak and the powerless? Why are we giving away our intellectual property? Why is activism in the 21st Century nothing more than a series of morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves?
'Here, at last, comes an explanation of the Internet in the crudest possible terms.'-- We Heard You Like Books
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Partial synopsis w/ quotes
from Vol. 1 Brooklyn
I Hate the Internet asks, “Why is activism in the 21st century nothing more than morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves?” A book about gentrification, it’s also about the often overlooked hypocrisy of calling out bad guys using products and platforms made by criminals.
But I Hate the Internet is about a lot of other things, too. Remember, Kobek is the master of the tangent. I think the evocative opening of the book may give you a better understanding of its full scope.
It reads:
trigger warning:
Capitalism, the awful stench of men, historical anachronisms,
death threats, violence, human bondage, faddish
popular culture, despair, unrestrained mockery of the rich,
threats of sexual violation, weak iterations of Epicurean
thought, the comic book industry, the death of intellectualism,
being a woman in a society that hates women, populism,
an appalling double entendre, the sex life of Thomas Jefferson,
genocide, celebrity, the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn
Rand, discussions of race, Science Fiction, anarchism with
a weakness for democracy, the people who go to California
to die, millennial posturing, 276 pages of mansplaining,
Neo-Hellenic Paganism, interracial marriage, elaborately
named hippies practicing animal cruelty on goats, unjust
wars in the Middle East, 9/11, seeing the Facebook profile
of someone you knew when you were young and believed
that everyone would lead rewarding lives.
I told you, Kobek covers a lot of ground.
***
One of the primary plotlines of I Hate the Internet involves a successful comic book illustrator, a woman in her 40s, named Adeline. Adeline finds herself in the middle of an online controversy after giving a talk to the students of poet Kevin Killian (Kobek often weaves real people into his storylines, and real storylines onto his people). During the talk, Adeline is asked by a student if she thinks Facebook and Twitter can serve a role in the pursuit of social progress. It’s her response that causes her so much trouble:
“Social progress might have had meaning twenty years ago when I was but a young thing, but these days it’s become the product of corporations. But what do you people know anyway? You’re a lost generation. Even your drugs are corporate. You spend your lives pretending as if Beyoncé and Rihanna possess some inherent meaning and act as if their every professional success which only occur because of your money and your attention is a strike forward for women everywhere.”
What she says is videotaped by a student, and uploaded to the internet. The internet, in turn, responds in a way that is both ridiculous and realistic.
As Kobek writes:
A wide range of humanity believed that Beyoncé and Rihanna were inspirations rather than vultures. Adeline had spit on their gods.
This wide range of humanity responded by teaching Adeline about one of America’s favored pastimes, a tradition as time-honored as police brutality, baseball, race riots and genocide.
They were teaching Adeline about how powerless people demonstrated their supplication before their masters.
They were tweeting about Adeline.
***
As Adeline tries to adjust to her new role as an online villain and punching bag, her good friend J. Karacehennem (“the author of the recent novel, ZIAD, about 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah,” who readers of Kobek’s other works will recognize as a fictionalized stand-in for the author himself) finds that he and his neighbors being pushed from their homes when an upscale restaurant catering to the clientele of San Francisco’s tech industry makes plans to move in down the street. Once the restaurant (the ironically named “Local’s Corner”) opens, it alienates the community further. As Kobek writes:
Latino people were feeling squeezed by the forces of gentrification. Their neighborhood was being pulled apart by the whims of mega-capitalists, low interest rates, investors from out of town, and corporations located in Silicon Valley. And there was Local’s Corner, the most obvious and tone deaf symbol of the changes wrought on the neighborhood. It had denied a Latino family service. On Cesar Chavez Day.
Book Trailer for Jarett Kobek's I HATE THE INTERNET
FUNKYSPECTRUM PLAYS - I HATE THE INTERNET (EXCLUSIVE !)
Upset White People at City Lights Bookstore - 2/16/16 - I HATE THE INTERNET
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'Weed Monks reveals Chris Dankland to be the red-eyed man of the dank lands. Chris Dankland is the one that Madvillain referred to their award-winning hit “America’s Most Blunted”. Throughout the collection Weed Monks reveals itself to be quite compassionate for its lowly individuals seeking salvation. Many of these monks opt for the silent “All Quiet On the Western Blunt” sort of life, refusing to speak yet possessing a great many followers.
'Humor ties the stories together. A very loose narrative holds the pieces together as these are individuals who have checked out of reality going for the absurd the margins of society freely embracing it. Chris Dankland gives these outcasts religious attributes as they devote themselves to a lifestyle most assume is exclusively for leisure. Nothing in the many stories reveals a sense of leisure. These weed monks ponder the giant questions in life while removing temptation from their lives. As a result they live relatively sparse lives, living on the beach, driving golf carts, forgetting how to go to the bathroom.
'Various insight is given into the mysterious tradition of the weed monks. Chris Dankland does not speak of the original weed monk, the one who began it all. Such a focus would make the collection lose its sort of weird charm. A righteous sense leads these individuals as they sing to themselves and others. Plenty more completely disappear never to come out again. Some try for deep enlightened thought only to come up completely short. Sober people have the same outcome so ultimately it is about perspective more than anything.
'The history of the weed monk comes into view. Lost traditions come into play of people devoting themselves to it. A few try to come up with ways to avoid speaking with simple hand gestures, losing them in the passage of time and forgetfulness. Others still wonder what loneliness means, and whether or not it is a more honest way of living. Belief systems are worked upon to try and figure out what purpose the afterlife might have, all of which are the questions that involve one hand clapping.
'Even Chris Dankland makes a cameo. Adhering to the role of scribe he tries to write down the wisdom that he witnesses across the many weed monks of his world. Not all of the ideas are fully elaborated upon but rather serve as example of how many tangents can grow without flowering.
'Really funny, really bizarre, and strangely sweet Weed Monks is devoted to the weird ones in the world, the ones who fell through the cracks and choose to live there.'-- Beach Sloth
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Chris Dankland Weed Monks
Gumroad
now that i've got yr attention can i interest u in a free ebook called Weed Monks.
LEGALIZE MY EBOOK CALLED WEED MONKS !!
2 MANY AMERICANS HAVE GONE TO JAIL FOR READING MY EBOOK CALLED WEED MONKS.
Excerpts
1.
There was an old weed monk named Tasty Cakes who had lived alone in a bare apartment for thirty years. One day Tasty Cakes left his apartment to get some Doritos at the gas station. When the people saw this legendary and mysterious weed monk walking around outdoors they immediately flocked to his side and surrounded him, saying: Tasty Cakes, tell us some of the wisdom you have learned, that we might improve our lives. At first Tasty Cakes refused to speak, but they persisted in their begging until he eventually relented.
He said: Before weed! My life was full of troubles and desires. After weed! My life is full of funny YouTube videos of llamas attacking people and cats that wear sunglasses. Before weed! I was consumed with fear of death and decay, and all night and all day my heart wept with loneliness. After weed! I watch free movies online!
After he was finished speaking, Tasty Cakes returned to his apartment, which he never left again until the day he died. The people were amazed and awed by Tasty Cake, and they remarked that surely no one else in all of Houston had smoked more weed than he.
2.
Potsy the Great was once asked: What is the reason for why we always pass to the left? He replied: One need not always pass to the left. Marijuana does not care in which direction it is being passed, so why should we? Horizontal direction is meaningless.
The wanderer stands up and walks a great distance. Then she turns around and walks back. Those who remained behind eagerly ask the wanderer: What lies in that direction? But the wanderer can only reply: More and more distance.
If a person walked the entire length of the Earth, they would only end up at the same spot where they began, except older now and more weary. The question we must ask ourselves is not left or right, but low or high? Verily, I say unto you: It matters not which direction you pass the weed, as long as you pass it promptly. Brothers and sisters, do not park on the grass.
3.
Highly Green Sarah Jean used to recite poems aloud while cleaning her weed pipes. This is one of her poems:
OG Kush! The easiest way to do nothing!
OG Kush! The least material plane of being!
OG Kush! It’s like your favorite soft rock band that follows you around and plays you soothing music anytime you want!
OG Kush! It makes the world interesting again!
MCALLEN READING from Chris Dankland
A Half Made Cloud from Chris Dankland
Please Don't Get Your Goddamn Heart Broken from Chris Dankland
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'Angel Dominguez's BLACK LAVENDER MILK is a poignant debut that brilliantly tethers between alchemist's notebook and somnambulist's reflection, where 'water thickens with memory, and begin[s] to pour…' In what Dominguez subtitles 'a failed novel,' are powerful reclamations of family histories, and self evolutions fused through carefully attuned modes of seeing, dreaming and feeling: 'I ran downtown and up a mountain, found him sleeping in my bloodstream still smiling as the sun beamed beyond the reach of the pack of clouds bringing down a soft rain…' Perhaps this fluid notion of failure is bound up in the author's rendering of memory as what must be held onto, even if it cannot be fully grasped. If this novel is 'failed,' then it is necessarily so, delicately captured as '—the trace trapped in a molecule,' Dominguez's 'liquid-watch,' a site of richly widening realization and recognition, where 'colloidal materials…form a constellation.''-- Ronaldo Wilson
'To read Angel Dominguez's debut novel BLACK LAVENDER MILK is to slowdive into a deep cenote of the psyche, where murmuring dreams and vivid memories slide up against the silky, aqueous skin of ancestral unknowns. Each section rises in soft permutations, emerging as a book in perpetual arrival—with suspension, like a series of perfectly timeless clouds. I'm stunned at his intuitive intellect, touched by the quiet reverence expressed in his endless search for Xix—a body, a history, what remains yet always eludes.'-- Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Angel Dominguez is a Los Angeles born writer and performance artist forming Dzonots with notebooks along the California coast. His work can be found in The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Bombay Gin, and online at Open House Poetry and spiralorb(dot)com, with work forthcoming in FENCE. He was the co- founding editor of Tract/Trace: an investigative journal, and presently curates the ongoing series: Bodies/Pages. Along with Hannah Kezema, he co-founded the performance art collaborative: Dream Tigers. BLACK LAVENDER MILK is his first book.
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Angel Dominguez Black Lavender Milk
Timeless, Infinite Light
'Black Lavender Milk is an experimental lyric that dreamt of becoming a novel only to wake up as notebook. Employing and smudging elements of poetry, prose and memoir, Black Lavender Milk offers the space of a “novel” as a site of mourning, inquiry and recuperation. Through a complex, hypnotic blur of language, the lyric-as-novel functions as an extended meditation on Writing in relation to the Body; Time, Loss, Ancestry and Dreaming.'-- T,IL
'Paranormal poetics never sounded more redundant, more welcome and welcoming. Angel Dominguez writes, “I occupy a continent within my body. / I am going there today to bury my grandfather.” He has a continent in his body of the most extraordinary poetry turning the dream over to the soil and water of the dreamer. From orchard to ocean his omnipresent tenderness maps our way to the poet as shaman. I shudder with disbelief at his words and want them to knock on all our closed doors. There’s a home in this book like strategy where we meet to stop the hemorrhaging loss. Please read it NOW!'-- CA Conrad
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Excerpts
Xix: you were a watchmaker with a jewelry store in downtown L.A.; a dealer in time, you tuned quartzite: 32,768 Hz and whistled for me to follow through the subway. A bag of avocados and lemons, 3 oranges kept us quiet while waiting to arrive. I’ve kept every departure: they occupy a small wooden box below blue jars. I want(ed) you to know how I’ve roamed in search of stones, in search of other portals, in hopes of finding you somewhere with(in) a dream; I’m always trying to blur reality, nodding off into the person next to me, running into me running into me running into 4am instability. Breaking into an airport; running for the orchard. I remember things that are (not) happening, say, continuing from where we left off: soft syllables made of mud; water witching up a spell for something like transport, something like continent, something like crystal-memory; I press a tip of quartz to my tongue and run west up mountain, far from the ocean; I still smell salt when there’s a hint of blood—I bit my tongue—caught managing a mongrel timeframe not fit for linearity: somnambulism(s) last(ing) a flock of years; here I find myself failing to write an “orchard,” attempting instead: a continent within a dim body, not yet formed and tired from running:
*
Some notes on forming dzonots:
Step 1: locate the event boundary; rub the soil into your
skin. Begin digging.
Step 2: ________________________________
Step 2a: make black water: the water my grandfather described to me the morning after he had a vision: milky black midnight, thick; something that smells of salt and blood. His vision was standing on a narrow alabaster bridge in a dark space—no moon—bodies everywhere in the
water. I wonder if I too was a body in the void of dream. He didn’t know how to help them; the next day there were reports of a tsunami somewhere on the other side of the pacific. We watered the avocados and lemons. We buried salt beneath the orange tree.
Step 3: stop when you reach your elbow, or shoulder; you’ll know when to stop.
Step 4: equip the hole with a plastic bag membrane: this is not biodegradable and perhaps reminds you of an ocean or airport.
Step 4a: continue to make black water: crush charcoal
from burnt palm trees, add cold coffee and day old wine. Stir. Continue, adding salt to the liquid—watch for colloidal materials to form a constellation. Add lemon juice for avor. When the water thickens with memory, begin to pour.
Step 5: deposit what you remember losing; lower your fingers into the water and retain: rough, yet soft. Hands.
Step 6: go for a run. Continue until you reach a body of water, or become a body of water.
Step 7: return home via aeroplane. Take notes:
A room full of atoms beckons a body across the void; voice a portal with an outline—find the route that requires the least oxygen—language cryogen: Xix, I brought you a pint of old blood under the orange tree, drunk off whiskey and trying to bury notebooks behind me in a time that precedes and haunts me; I want memories to bring (me) back
Language cryogen: find an earth scab; catch a bit a glass from the nearest car crash, press the substance to skin; hints of then, buried in our blood.
Buried in our blood: a body of night, curved across a planet.
Our molecules call across the void and bury sunlight in our sleep; how will I know to meet you when I arrive?
Black Lavender Milk by Angel Dominguez Media Statement 1
Other Dzonots / Other Orchards
Mirror Stage - Angel Dominguez + Joel Gregory
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p.s. Hey. Still screwed up, back-wise. Apologies re: what effects. ** Armando, Hi. I think that between Chris Dankland and Tosh Berman, you hopefully have good answers? I would lobby for publishing the book online --pdf or eBook or something like that. Self-publishing an actual physical book when it's your first, and getting a book distributed, etc. would be a lot of work, I think. Two of the books in the post today are self-published pdfs. A lot of the books I read these days are in that format. It's just so much easier if you can give interested readers a link and a download option. But it's up to you. I hope you do it, one way or another. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Had there been a 'Weekend'-related gif, I'm sure it would have been in there. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, T. Giant thanks for giving Armando that excellent advice. Oh, gosh, thanks about the post. That's wonderful to hear! I know a number of people who studied with Tony Conrad when he was teaching at Buffalo, and none of them ever had anything but the most positive things to say about him. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Yay about how close you are to finishing the pamphlet! Just let me know when it's ready, and we'll set something up. Fantastic! Yeah, my back is being very stubborn with me. Big ugh. My day was pretty good. I forced myself to go out and do some things, albeit as gently as I could. We had a meeting about the new film that was very positive and helpful. Then, in the evening, I kind of pushed it and went to see Oneohtrix Point Never play at a club here. I'm paying for it today, but it was a really incredible show, so I'm not sorry. My today will likely suck for the most part, but hopefully that frees up some of the fun and productivity in the world to attach itself to you. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, C. So very happy to do my little part in pushing the mighty 'Weed Monks' today! And tremendous thanks to you for being so generous with Armando. ** Steevee, Hi. Thanks for that link. I'll will assuredly and quickly read the piece. I can't remember off the top of my head which 'Elm Street' movie is the second one, but I really like those films. ** S., Hey. Don't know the type. I've been 'practed a few times here, and it's always seemed to work better than the US version. It wasn't rough, really, just very precise. It had a much less New Age-y overlay than the dudes I've been handled by in LA. Thanks for the car classics. My internet is barely functioning this morning -- I really need a new carrier; SFR sucks -- but, when it pops back in, I'll go steer my eyes into those accidents. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. Oh, so it does make sense. Huh. Interesting. I think I do the same thing you do when I sit. I have this feeling. Also, my back has been a misbehaving back since I was about, I don't know, 12 years old or so. I grew really tall really suddenly, and my back didn't grow perfectly along with me. I'll look at the Fennesz track/vid in a bit. Thanks! Like I told S., my internet signal is like a dying breath this morning for some reason. Oh, I saw Oneohtrix Point Never last night. Amazing show. If he tours your locale, I highly recommend going. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh. Thanks about the post. Nah, 164 was just the number of cars that ended up getting wrecked in the gifs by pure coincidence. It just sounds like that guy who said that is in a bad mood on his own, and bad probably due to something that has nothing to do with you, and he just leaked it on you. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Oh, man, I hope the Assessment goes really well today, and I hope they recommended an awesome car. What happened? ** Marcus Pyotr Mamourian, Hi Marcus! A warm and hearty welcome back! Mm, I believe I've only read one Sarah Kane play. And it was '4.48 Psychosis', which, like you, I thought was really incredible. I should just get that book of her collected plays. I will. Oh, I really like Andrew Durbin's work, yes, but I haven't read 'Mature Themes'. I get that straight away. And I really love Wonder a lot. I think I've read almost every book they've published. I hope to get to NYC maybe even before the summer. We're trying to set up a screening of LIKE CATTLE TOWARDS GLOW there, which would get me over. Is there a particular reason why this summer would be a good time to get there? I'm always looking for a good excuse. It's very nice to see you! ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. T'would, right? Thanks, bud. ** Okay. Sorry again for any inadvertent fall-out from my back's pain. Those are four truly excellent books up there. And two of them are free downloads, so you've got not a cent or pound or Euro or whatever else to lose. I will see you tomorrow.
rauan klassnik: as far as writing goes where, if at all, do you draw the line?
penny goring: words or pics, it’s all the same to me, i don’t draw lines. my exes mum, after reading a poem of mine, he told me she sed to him: ‘someone needs to get her to stop. will she ever draw the line?’ but i won’t. because i don’t want to. if something happened to me it is mine. i can do what i like with it.
rk: some people think that all Art comes from the way Male and Female bodies talk to each other, violent, gentle, in shadows, and in light. whatcha think? (and please elaborate)
pg: i’m always deeply cringing at any sweeping statements about what art is or isn’t etc. ugh. i’m not comfortable with the capital A either. being an artist feels more like a curse to me. i ran from it for what felt like a long time. but i got into lots of trouble, nearly died, ended up in rehab. so now i make stuff but i’m doing it compulsively. its like i’m a donkey chasing a carrot. and i put out too much work. i treat tumblr, facebook, twit, like a wall in a studio, not a show. if i’m working on it i’ll post it. that applies to my macros, vids, and written work. but then i’ll go back, within minutes, days, or weeks, and delete most of it.
rk: the movie Ted and Sylvia is, undoubtedly, one of the great movies of our time. but which of the two, if you had to choose, would you take with you on a weekend full of rain? (and please elaborate)
pg: i haven’t seen this movie. i’d have to leave sylvia out. feel like she’d be pretentious as fuk. ted must have been at least charming though, judging by the trouble he caused. i bet he was a sociopath – that could be fun.
rk: do you go for midnight strolls on the moors? and even if you don’t could you please describe what that’s like?
pg: me alone lolloping, cuz i like that word, on spongy shagpile/bare feet, n i’m takin giant strides under a low sky of children’s b&w handprints, forming the face of mata hari, no, myra hindley, starin me out with her one good eye. soundtrack of my moors is the smiths wailing on the wrong speed and i’m carryin a cold baby, we’re running towards a bus stop. where i sit in the shelter with a stranger. he passes me a cigarette. when i say thanks, he sez: ‘go home, you fuckin londoner.’ it’s raining cheap cider. cathy is dead. she didn’t even leave a ghost. on the top deck of the night bus i sit behind kate bush – she’s snogging heathcliffe until he turns to dust in her arms, and by the time we reach clapham she’s wailing that song out the window.
rk: what do your parents think of your writing?
pg: if my dad reads my stuff it makes him cry. my mum is a big janey smith fan, she can’t stand my stuff, finds it ‘weird and depressing’. sed she’d like to gun down every art tutor that helped lead me to this tragic end. if i’m making pics they think i should write. if i’m writing they think i should paint. every time i see my dad he begs me to get real and write a best seller. and i say, but dad, if i stop making the stuff i wanna make, i’d likely end up back in the gutter. and he sez, well, marry a rich man then. so yeah. i’m their costly heartbreaking disappointment.
5everdankly
"i have less desire to change things than to change the way they are destroyed."
sik nu epic & relentless txt from penny goring. long stewing latest book buy irl.
Édition: 666. Éditeur: 5everdankly. Publié: 28.janvier2016. Langue: Anglais. Pages: 98. Reliure: Couverture souple en dos carré collé. Impressionintérieure: Noir & blanc. Poids: 0,2 kg. Dimensions: (centimètres) 15,24 (largeur) x 22,86 (hauteur)
____
Excerpts
v fast blu x 6
melty doors of yes/no
faster fear
______________
Chelsea Hodson: A few months ago, I saw a description for your book, and I tweeted, “Do I really have to wait until 2016 to read Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet? Looks so good.” I think it was within a few hours after that you emailed me a PDF of the book. This indicates to me that you possibly have a love/hate relationship with the Internet yourself—perhaps you despise it but perhaps you also see it as a crucial tool. What is your personal relationship to the Internet, and how did that inform the writing of the novel? How do you navigate your life as a writer in a world where most information about literary events arrive in the form of Facebook invitations?
Jarett Kobek: Someone told me about your tweet! I avoid Twitter like a plague pit!
When I was writing the book, the relationship was pure hate. I’d just escaped San Francisco, where I’d watched long-standing communities of people be destroyed, basically, by the people who own the Internet. The city gave me a nervous breakdown. An actual, genuine 20th-century nervous breakdown like a rummy drunkard from a shitty Scott Fitzgerald novel. Nothing separates compos from mentis like rumors of a Twitter IPO. Anyway, I Hate the Internet exploded in about two months of pure bile/recovery from the experience of living at the highwater mark of American hypergentrification. So, yeah, absolutely, I fucking hate the Internet.
And yet. I’m a recovered tech person and much of my life has revolved around this shit. For what seems like a thousand years. And I still like the early ethos of tech, back in the hobbyist days, when computers were not interchangeable and no one had realized that this thing the Internet could be used to trample the gullible with advertisements for car insurance. Or before an even more unsavory lot realized that they could make beaucoup bucks setting up unprofitable companies as money laundering events for war criminals and investment bankers. That’s why I did a prequel of I Hate the Internet for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an old British microcomputer. It felt like there was some virtue counterbalancing all of that disgust with an acknowledgment of a time you using computers did not require you to participate in several overlapping systems of global evil.
How does one navigate being a writer? I whine like a big fucking bald baby and pretend, like everyone else, that I’m not typing morality lectures into devices built by slaves in China. But of course I am.
CH: I’m curious about your subtitle: “A useful novel against men, money, and the filth of Instagram.” I suppose I’m especially curious about the phrase “against men” as well as the phrase “276 pages of mansplaining” which you use in the first page’s hilarious list of “trigger warnings.” In your novel, BTW, the narrator says, “I’m just killing time until the inevitable shift of power away from the patriarchy. The only thing I want is for women to assume their natural and obvious prominence.” What does it mean to be a male writer against men?
JK: There’s no way you can look at the Internet, in terms of the people who built it and in terms of the people who dramatically profit from other people’s intellectual capital via social networks, and argue that anyone but men are pulling the strings. The only major tech CEO who’s not a man is Marissa Mayer and she got stuck with the worst company of them all.
Historically, men have been the shit of the world. Every terrible thing under which we suffer was built by men. Most people receive technology as if it’s sprung from the head of Zeus. Normal people don’t have the time or the inclination to think about all of the engineering choices that went into something like tweeting, and how all of these choices are the prima materia of their suffering and manipulated behaviors. But like every system of government, the Internet should be seen as a thing constructed by men to which women are, alas, very subject.
So that’s what I’m against. Not so much men in general as the terrible choices of the men who have bequeathed us a grotesque world. Which may be the same thing.
As for the 276 pages of mansplaining. It’s difficult to look at the technical device in the novel of defining everything and not feeling like, well, isn’t this just a dude telling everyone what everything else is? How is this any different? So why be bashful? Why not embrace the mansplain? Lean in. Someday all of this will be yours.
(cont.)
We Heard You Like Books
'What if you told the truth and the whole world heard you? What if you lived in a country swamped with Internet outrage? What if you were a woman in a society that hated women?
'Set in the San Francisco of 2013, I Hate the Internet offers a hilarious and obscene portrayal of life amongst the victims of the digital boom. As billions of tweets fuel the city’s gentrification and the human wreckage piles up, a group of friends suffers the consequences of being useless in a new world that despises the pointless and unprofitable.
'In this, his first full-length novel, Jarett Kobek tackles the pressing questions of our moment. Why do we applaud the enrichment of CEOs at the expense of the weak and the powerless? Why are we giving away our intellectual property? Why is activism in the 21st Century nothing more than a series of morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves?
'Here, at last, comes an explanation of the Internet in the crudest possible terms.'-- We Heard You Like Books
_____________
Partial synopsis w/ quotes
from Vol. 1 Brooklyn
I Hate the Internet asks, “Why is activism in the 21st century nothing more than morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves?” A book about gentrification, it’s also about the often overlooked hypocrisy of calling out bad guys using products and platforms made by criminals.
But I Hate the Internet is about a lot of other things, too. Remember, Kobek is the master of the tangent. I think the evocative opening of the book may give you a better understanding of its full scope.
It reads:
trigger warning:
Capitalism, the awful stench of men, historical anachronisms,
death threats, violence, human bondage, faddish
popular culture, despair, unrestrained mockery of the rich,
threats of sexual violation, weak iterations of Epicurean
thought, the comic book industry, the death of intellectualism,
being a woman in a society that hates women, populism,
an appalling double entendre, the sex life of Thomas Jefferson,
genocide, celebrity, the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn
Rand, discussions of race, Science Fiction, anarchism with
a weakness for democracy, the people who go to California
to die, millennial posturing, 276 pages of mansplaining,
Neo-Hellenic Paganism, interracial marriage, elaborately
named hippies practicing animal cruelty on goats, unjust
wars in the Middle East, 9/11, seeing the Facebook profile
of someone you knew when you were young and believed
that everyone would lead rewarding lives.
I told you, Kobek covers a lot of ground.
***
One of the primary plotlines of I Hate the Internet involves a successful comic book illustrator, a woman in her 40s, named Adeline. Adeline finds herself in the middle of an online controversy after giving a talk to the students of poet Kevin Killian (Kobek often weaves real people into his storylines, and real storylines onto his people). During the talk, Adeline is asked by a student if she thinks Facebook and Twitter can serve a role in the pursuit of social progress. It’s her response that causes her so much trouble:
“Social progress might have had meaning twenty years ago when I was but a young thing, but these days it’s become the product of corporations. But what do you people know anyway? You’re a lost generation. Even your drugs are corporate. You spend your lives pretending as if Beyoncé and Rihanna possess some inherent meaning and act as if their every professional success which only occur because of your money and your attention is a strike forward for women everywhere.”
What she says is videotaped by a student, and uploaded to the internet. The internet, in turn, responds in a way that is both ridiculous and realistic.
As Kobek writes:
A wide range of humanity believed that Beyoncé and Rihanna were inspirations rather than vultures. Adeline had spit on their gods.
This wide range of humanity responded by teaching Adeline about one of America’s favored pastimes, a tradition as time-honored as police brutality, baseball, race riots and genocide.
They were teaching Adeline about how powerless people demonstrated their supplication before their masters.
They were tweeting about Adeline.
***
As Adeline tries to adjust to her new role as an online villain and punching bag, her good friend J. Karacehennem (“the author of the recent novel, ZIAD, about 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah,” who readers of Kobek’s other works will recognize as a fictionalized stand-in for the author himself) finds that he and his neighbors being pushed from their homes when an upscale restaurant catering to the clientele of San Francisco’s tech industry makes plans to move in down the street. Once the restaurant (the ironically named “Local’s Corner”) opens, it alienates the community further. As Kobek writes:
Latino people were feeling squeezed by the forces of gentrification. Their neighborhood was being pulled apart by the whims of mega-capitalists, low interest rates, investors from out of town, and corporations located in Silicon Valley. And there was Local’s Corner, the most obvious and tone deaf symbol of the changes wrought on the neighborhood. It had denied a Latino family service. On Cesar Chavez Day.
Book Trailer for Jarett Kobek's I HATE THE INTERNET
FUNKYSPECTRUM PLAYS - I HATE THE INTERNET (EXCLUSIVE !)
Upset White People at City Lights Bookstore - 2/16/16 - I HATE THE INTERNET
_______________
'Weed Monks reveals Chris Dankland to be the red-eyed man of the dank lands. Chris Dankland is the one that Madvillain referred to their award-winning hit “America’s Most Blunted”. Throughout the collection Weed Monks reveals itself to be quite compassionate for its lowly individuals seeking salvation. Many of these monks opt for the silent “All Quiet On the Western Blunt” sort of life, refusing to speak yet possessing a great many followers.
'Humor ties the stories together. A very loose narrative holds the pieces together as these are individuals who have checked out of reality going for the absurd the margins of society freely embracing it. Chris Dankland gives these outcasts religious attributes as they devote themselves to a lifestyle most assume is exclusively for leisure. Nothing in the many stories reveals a sense of leisure. These weed monks ponder the giant questions in life while removing temptation from their lives. As a result they live relatively sparse lives, living on the beach, driving golf carts, forgetting how to go to the bathroom.
'Various insight is given into the mysterious tradition of the weed monks. Chris Dankland does not speak of the original weed monk, the one who began it all. Such a focus would make the collection lose its sort of weird charm. A righteous sense leads these individuals as they sing to themselves and others. Plenty more completely disappear never to come out again. Some try for deep enlightened thought only to come up completely short. Sober people have the same outcome so ultimately it is about perspective more than anything.
'The history of the weed monk comes into view. Lost traditions come into play of people devoting themselves to it. A few try to come up with ways to avoid speaking with simple hand gestures, losing them in the passage of time and forgetfulness. Others still wonder what loneliness means, and whether or not it is a more honest way of living. Belief systems are worked upon to try and figure out what purpose the afterlife might have, all of which are the questions that involve one hand clapping.
'Even Chris Dankland makes a cameo. Adhering to the role of scribe he tries to write down the wisdom that he witnesses across the many weed monks of his world. Not all of the ideas are fully elaborated upon but rather serve as example of how many tangents can grow without flowering.
'Really funny, really bizarre, and strangely sweet Weed Monks is devoted to the weird ones in the world, the ones who fell through the cracks and choose to live there.'-- Beach Sloth
Gumroad
now that i've got yr attention can i interest u in a free ebook called Weed Monks.
LEGALIZE MY EBOOK CALLED WEED MONKS !!
2 MANY AMERICANS HAVE GONE TO JAIL FOR READING MY EBOOK CALLED WEED MONKS.
Excerpts
1.
There was an old weed monk named Tasty Cakes who had lived alone in a bare apartment for thirty years. One day Tasty Cakes left his apartment to get some Doritos at the gas station. When the people saw this legendary and mysterious weed monk walking around outdoors they immediately flocked to his side and surrounded him, saying: Tasty Cakes, tell us some of the wisdom you have learned, that we might improve our lives. At first Tasty Cakes refused to speak, but they persisted in their begging until he eventually relented.
He said: Before weed! My life was full of troubles and desires. After weed! My life is full of funny YouTube videos of llamas attacking people and cats that wear sunglasses. Before weed! I was consumed with fear of death and decay, and all night and all day my heart wept with loneliness. After weed! I watch free movies online!
After he was finished speaking, Tasty Cakes returned to his apartment, which he never left again until the day he died. The people were amazed and awed by Tasty Cake, and they remarked that surely no one else in all of Houston had smoked more weed than he.
2.
Potsy the Great was once asked: What is the reason for why we always pass to the left? He replied: One need not always pass to the left. Marijuana does not care in which direction it is being passed, so why should we? Horizontal direction is meaningless.
The wanderer stands up and walks a great distance. Then she turns around and walks back. Those who remained behind eagerly ask the wanderer: What lies in that direction? But the wanderer can only reply: More and more distance.
If a person walked the entire length of the Earth, they would only end up at the same spot where they began, except older now and more weary. The question we must ask ourselves is not left or right, but low or high? Verily, I say unto you: It matters not which direction you pass the weed, as long as you pass it promptly. Brothers and sisters, do not park on the grass.
3.
Highly Green Sarah Jean used to recite poems aloud while cleaning her weed pipes. This is one of her poems:
OG Kush! The easiest way to do nothing!
OG Kush! The least material plane of being!
OG Kush! It’s like your favorite soft rock band that follows you around and plays you soothing music anytime you want!
OG Kush! It makes the world interesting again!
MCALLEN READING from Chris Dankland
A Half Made Cloud from Chris Dankland
Please Don't Get Your Goddamn Heart Broken from Chris Dankland
________________
'Angel Dominguez's BLACK LAVENDER MILK is a poignant debut that brilliantly tethers between alchemist's notebook and somnambulist's reflection, where 'water thickens with memory, and begin[s] to pour…' In what Dominguez subtitles 'a failed novel,' are powerful reclamations of family histories, and self evolutions fused through carefully attuned modes of seeing, dreaming and feeling: 'I ran downtown and up a mountain, found him sleeping in my bloodstream still smiling as the sun beamed beyond the reach of the pack of clouds bringing down a soft rain…' Perhaps this fluid notion of failure is bound up in the author's rendering of memory as what must be held onto, even if it cannot be fully grasped. If this novel is 'failed,' then it is necessarily so, delicately captured as '—the trace trapped in a molecule,' Dominguez's 'liquid-watch,' a site of richly widening realization and recognition, where 'colloidal materials…form a constellation.''-- Ronaldo Wilson
'To read Angel Dominguez's debut novel BLACK LAVENDER MILK is to slowdive into a deep cenote of the psyche, where murmuring dreams and vivid memories slide up against the silky, aqueous skin of ancestral unknowns. Each section rises in soft permutations, emerging as a book in perpetual arrival—with suspension, like a series of perfectly timeless clouds. I'm stunned at his intuitive intellect, touched by the quiet reverence expressed in his endless search for Xix—a body, a history, what remains yet always eludes.'-- Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Angel Dominguez is a Los Angeles born writer and performance artist forming Dzonots with notebooks along the California coast. His work can be found in The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Bombay Gin, and online at Open House Poetry and spiralorb(dot)com, with work forthcoming in FENCE. He was the co- founding editor of Tract/Trace: an investigative journal, and presently curates the ongoing series: Bodies/Pages. Along with Hannah Kezema, he co-founded the performance art collaborative: Dream Tigers. BLACK LAVENDER MILK is his first book.
Timeless, Infinite Light
'Black Lavender Milk is an experimental lyric that dreamt of becoming a novel only to wake up as notebook. Employing and smudging elements of poetry, prose and memoir, Black Lavender Milk offers the space of a “novel” as a site of mourning, inquiry and recuperation. Through a complex, hypnotic blur of language, the lyric-as-novel functions as an extended meditation on Writing in relation to the Body; Time, Loss, Ancestry and Dreaming.'-- T,IL
'Paranormal poetics never sounded more redundant, more welcome and welcoming. Angel Dominguez writes, “I occupy a continent within my body. / I am going there today to bury my grandfather.” He has a continent in his body of the most extraordinary poetry turning the dream over to the soil and water of the dreamer. From orchard to ocean his omnipresent tenderness maps our way to the poet as shaman. I shudder with disbelief at his words and want them to knock on all our closed doors. There’s a home in this book like strategy where we meet to stop the hemorrhaging loss. Please read it NOW!'-- CA Conrad
_____
Excerpts
Xix: you were a watchmaker with a jewelry store in downtown L.A.; a dealer in time, you tuned quartzite: 32,768 Hz and whistled for me to follow through the subway. A bag of avocados and lemons, 3 oranges kept us quiet while waiting to arrive. I’ve kept every departure: they occupy a small wooden box below blue jars. I want(ed) you to know how I’ve roamed in search of stones, in search of other portals, in hopes of finding you somewhere with(in) a dream; I’m always trying to blur reality, nodding off into the person next to me, running into me running into me running into 4am instability. Breaking into an airport; running for the orchard. I remember things that are (not) happening, say, continuing from where we left off: soft syllables made of mud; water witching up a spell for something like transport, something like continent, something like crystal-memory; I press a tip of quartz to my tongue and run west up mountain, far from the ocean; I still smell salt when there’s a hint of blood—I bit my tongue—caught managing a mongrel timeframe not fit for linearity: somnambulism(s) last(ing) a flock of years; here I find myself failing to write an “orchard,” attempting instead: a continent within a dim body, not yet formed and tired from running:
I only want(ed) to arrive.
*
Some notes on forming dzonots:
Step 1: locate the event boundary; rub the soil into your
skin. Begin digging.
Step 2: ________________________________
Step 2a: make black water: the water my grandfather described to me the morning after he had a vision: milky black midnight, thick; something that smells of salt and blood. His vision was standing on a narrow alabaster bridge in a dark space—no moon—bodies everywhere in the
water. I wonder if I too was a body in the void of dream. He didn’t know how to help them; the next day there were reports of a tsunami somewhere on the other side of the pacific. We watered the avocados and lemons. We buried salt beneath the orange tree.
Step 3: stop when you reach your elbow, or shoulder; you’ll know when to stop.
Step 4: equip the hole with a plastic bag membrane: this is not biodegradable and perhaps reminds you of an ocean or airport.
Step 4a: continue to make black water: crush charcoal
from burnt palm trees, add cold coffee and day old wine. Stir. Continue, adding salt to the liquid—watch for colloidal materials to form a constellation. Add lemon juice for avor. When the water thickens with memory, begin to pour.
Step 5: deposit what you remember losing; lower your fingers into the water and retain: rough, yet soft. Hands.
Step 6: go for a run. Continue until you reach a body of water, or become a body of water.
Step 7: return home via aeroplane. Take notes:
A room full of atoms beckons a body across the void; voice a portal with an outline—find the route that requires the least oxygen—language cryogen: Xix, I brought you a pint of old blood under the orange tree, drunk off whiskey and trying to bury notebooks behind me in a time that precedes and haunts me; I want memories to bring (me) back
Language cryogen: find an earth scab; catch a bit a glass from the nearest car crash, press the substance to skin; hints of then, buried in our blood.
Buried in our blood: a body of night, curved across a planet.
Our molecules call across the void and bury sunlight in our sleep; how will I know to meet you when I arrive?
Black Lavender Milk by Angel Dominguez Media Statement 1
Other Dzonots / Other Orchards
Mirror Stage - Angel Dominguez + Joel Gregory
*
p.s. Hey. Still screwed up, back-wise. Apologies re: what effects. ** Armando, Hi. I think that between Chris Dankland and Tosh Berman, you hopefully have good answers? I would lobby for publishing the book online --pdf or eBook or something like that. Self-publishing an actual physical book when it's your first, and getting a book distributed, etc. would be a lot of work, I think. Two of the books in the post today are self-published pdfs. A lot of the books I read these days are in that format. It's just so much easier if you can give interested readers a link and a download option. But it's up to you. I hope you do it, one way or another. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Had there been a 'Weekend'-related gif, I'm sure it would have been in there. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, T. Giant thanks for giving Armando that excellent advice. Oh, gosh, thanks about the post. That's wonderful to hear! I know a number of people who studied with Tony Conrad when he was teaching at Buffalo, and none of them ever had anything but the most positive things to say about him. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Yay about how close you are to finishing the pamphlet! Just let me know when it's ready, and we'll set something up. Fantastic! Yeah, my back is being very stubborn with me. Big ugh. My day was pretty good. I forced myself to go out and do some things, albeit as gently as I could. We had a meeting about the new film that was very positive and helpful. Then, in the evening, I kind of pushed it and went to see Oneohtrix Point Never play at a club here. I'm paying for it today, but it was a really incredible show, so I'm not sorry. My today will likely suck for the most part, but hopefully that frees up some of the fun and productivity in the world to attach itself to you. ** Chris Dankland, Hi, C. So very happy to do my little part in pushing the mighty 'Weed Monks' today! And tremendous thanks to you for being so generous with Armando. ** Steevee, Hi. Thanks for that link. I'll will assuredly and quickly read the piece. I can't remember off the top of my head which 'Elm Street' movie is the second one, but I really like those films. ** S., Hey. Don't know the type. I've been 'practed a few times here, and it's always seemed to work better than the US version. It wasn't rough, really, just very precise. It had a much less New Age-y overlay than the dudes I've been handled by in LA. Thanks for the car classics. My internet is barely functioning this morning -- I really need a new carrier; SFR sucks -- but, when it pops back in, I'll go steer my eyes into those accidents. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli. Oh, so it does make sense. Huh. Interesting. I think I do the same thing you do when I sit. I have this feeling. Also, my back has been a misbehaving back since I was about, I don't know, 12 years old or so. I grew really tall really suddenly, and my back didn't grow perfectly along with me. I'll look at the Fennesz track/vid in a bit. Thanks! Like I told S., my internet signal is like a dying breath this morning for some reason. Oh, I saw Oneohtrix Point Never last night. Amazing show. If he tours your locale, I highly recommend going. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh. Thanks about the post. Nah, 164 was just the number of cars that ended up getting wrecked in the gifs by pure coincidence. It just sounds like that guy who said that is in a bad mood on his own, and bad probably due to something that has nothing to do with you, and he just leaked it on you. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Oh, man, I hope the Assessment goes really well today, and I hope they recommended an awesome car. What happened? ** Marcus Pyotr Mamourian, Hi Marcus! A warm and hearty welcome back! Mm, I believe I've only read one Sarah Kane play. And it was '4.48 Psychosis', which, like you, I thought was really incredible. I should just get that book of her collected plays. I will. Oh, I really like Andrew Durbin's work, yes, but I haven't read 'Mature Themes'. I get that straight away. And I really love Wonder a lot. I think I've read almost every book they've published. I hope to get to NYC maybe even before the summer. We're trying to set up a screening of LIKE CATTLE TOWARDS GLOW there, which would get me over. Is there a particular reason why this summer would be a good time to get there? I'm always looking for a good excuse. It's very nice to see you! ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. T'would, right? Thanks, bud. ** Okay. Sorry again for any inadvertent fall-out from my back's pain. Those are four truly excellent books up there. And two of them are free downloads, so you've got not a cent or pound or Euro or whatever else to lose. I will see you tomorrow.