https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro9K-QzL3g8

Your thirties are probably the beginning of a cultural sweetspot, where there things you watched/play/read has become something else. Fallon playing Goldeneye is kind of like Belushi as Godzilla interviewed by Gilda Radner as Barbara Walters. Or Berryman and Hass dropping Japanese film references into their poems. Aristotle using popular plays as examples in Poetics, plays that no longer exist only in Aristotle's mind and in his brief synopses. I figure this continues into your sixties. I figure this isn't a great revelation.

What might be more interesting is being part of the product; to be Pierce Brosnan, who is Bond but is no good at it. Or the playwright who no longer exists but wrote a comedy good enough for Aristotle to think of it. Good enough we can't even judge it anymore.

Entropy had a list of 5 films that influence your writing. There are a lot of cool ones. I got a list to:


1. In the Year of 13 Moons
2. Shadows in Paradise
3. Branded to Kill
4. Yojimbo
5. Major League


I got a bunch of others. They've also just put up a list of top 3 video game villains, but why not video games that have influenced your writing? I want to disregard Call of Duty, Halo, etc., games that are all about realism-"realism"games that celebrate the depiction of realistic violence without political repercussions, games that get a lot of "gorgeous" or "brilliant" or "beautiful" tagged to them. Their veneer of prestige is prestige in the classical sense, and their realism somehow makes them more "serious" than older/indie games.


But I've cornered myself. Old games, and current indie games (WiiWare, etc.), the ones with less-representational art and a lot of text were my first poems. They're kind of shambles, right?, with their broken-music box music. I wanted to make games as a kid, but I realized I am less interested in their constructions as games as I was, and am, attracted to their aesthetics, their music, their look. They're lack of narrative logic in particular. There is something about the language of these games: not just the break of language in translation, but its unusualness. Is this formalism? Technological restrictions prevent booming soundtracks, text, and representational art. One has to work within the form, etc.


 Games that have influenced me:


Earthbound
Earthbound Zero
Final Fantasy 3 (Famicom, fan translation)
The Legend of Zelda
Golgo 13
Cave Story
Dragon Warrior 4
Alex Kidd in High Tech World
Phantasy Star

1.

I hope I am all right; sometimes I feel paranoid, but this might be Oklahoma talking to me. Is posting stuff to facebook a real "action"? I am as guilty as anybody, but I tire of myself and the feeds. But I also like it, go figure. I realize I only read Gawker and Deadspin.

2.

It is funny and sad when someone opens a poem with someone better's line; like the poem is way better. Funny in that shitty "you don't know" way and sad because the writer is saying "you don't know me." That can be Jerry Springer or Ingmar Bergmen. Whichever. Still you showed me something new about William Blake. You did not show me something new about Bob Hicok.

3.

You don't have to. I have no more right to newness than anyone else. I just read the packets. 

Children of Reagan

Rabbit Catastrophe published my chapbook Children of Reagan earlier this year and it sold out, but I have a few copies myself. If you'd like a copy, they're $4 shipping included. I am out.

 

Movies, etc.

I saw Anonymous with Lexi; in a very general sense when we think of art--right--we usually identify with the underdog, and even when we're not Marxists or class-conscious-or-whatever, a viewer/reader still identifies with the person facing insurmountable odds, etc. We like Don Draper because he came from nothing and he's smarter than Sterling Cooper. We'd rather be in a frat like Delta Tau Chi than Omega Theta Pi; even the Goldman Sachs employees of the world agree with this when interacting with any art, film in particular. Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, for as nasty as he is, comes from nothing and builds himself into the figure that invests a half-ass amount into cold fusion in Wall Street 2.

Roland Emmerich doesn't get this; Anonymous looks and feels like an intro to lit essay by an Entrepreneurship major. It looks right, the format is all correct, but there's nothing to it, it gets its facts all mixed up, it misses the point. The worst thing about it is that Edward de Vere still isn't as interesting as the Shakespeare character Emmerich presents: a dumb, opportunistic illiterate yes, but a funny one who screws around and knows how to act. I still rather hang out with Will than a gloomy blond rich guy who turns out to have fucked his mother. And I don't like being reminded how brilliant he is by the film and Derek Jacobi, who preforms the prologue and epilogue with the pathos-overload of a Bill O'Rilley.

I understand Emmerich's bravado to piss people off, but at least get your history right--he conflates James I with Charles II, he  has Richard III performed the night before the Essex rebellion when it was actually Richard II. And at least get art right: de Vere has to be more interesting than some lord with a private estate who thinks he's better than Ben Johnson. No one wants to side with the privileged over the underdog and no matter how much de Vere glooms around and lies in his deathbed with his "masterpieces," he's still no underdog--he seems as much a phony: you never see him work on a play. He sits at the an ornamental desk with a stuffed eagle and a bunch of papers and sighs at paupers. That's not art. That's propaganda. 

White Lines at Greying Ghost

Available through Greying Ghost with the purchase of a chapbook.

Scissortail 2012

I will be reading Friday, April 6, as part of the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival.

My fellow OSU buddies are also reading: James Brubaker, Karen Sisk, Andrew Terhune, Haesong Kwon.

I got nothing else.