Don't Eat the Baby!

     The message of the flower is the flower. A rose is a rose is a rose. Je est un autre. Etc. etc. etc:

Look at Me Don't Look at Me!

Cioran picking the nits from his eyebrows.

     "Next to the contemporary 'maker' with his sufferings and his sterility, the creators of the past seem embarrassingly healthy. They were not made anemic by philosophy. These days no one escapes this exacerbation of the intellect and its corresponding diminution of instinct. The monumental, the spontaneously grandiose is no longer. The best thing an artist produces now are his ideas on what he might have done. No age has been so self-conscious."
          -E.M. Cioran (1956)

     Ouch. Fortunately for him, I think (though maybe I shouldn't think), he didn't live to see what we've become (I think). I hope that's clear, maybe I should change it. You should've read what I was going to write. Namely mostly that Cioran was a self-professed "Hitlerist" and an overall dickhead. Really. Still, he's right. We are infested with our own we ares. It's become a kind of In Fest, Ed.

Swallow the Yellowbrkrd

Frye just before eating his glasses.

     "The writer is neither a watcher nor a dreamer. Literature does not reflect life, but it doesn't escape or withdraw from life either; it swallows it."
           -Northrop Frye.

     I just found this quote on an old receipt from 1/2 Priced Books. Neither of the books listed on the front of the receipt belong to me, at least I can't find them. The receipt was in a coat pocket. It was half-eaten.
   

Susan Sontag Has Worms

The apple and the worm are more than the apple itself.

     "We have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice."
          -Susan Sontag

     I love this quote very much, and even the fact that Sontag goes on to say that "music, film, dance, architecture, painting, and sculpture" are all worth more critical attention than literary forms. This was true in the 1960s when Sontag wrote it, and possibly even more so today. So it is, so.
     The question then, I guess, is whether poetry is being overthrown or throwing over. Is it a rowing thing, over now, a woven ring or owing then? Is it a throwing up or a winged river?
     Personally, I'm grateful it's fallen away from popular culture, and relegated to a kind of parasitical state, freed from obligations to entertain and even to be 'understood.' The parasite has the host and it has itself.
     Poets have a long, rich tradition of slithering around in the dark. Darkness, after all, is full of possibilities, lightness of limitations.

   

Bunga Bunga!

Virginia Woolf is far left

     On Feb. 7 1910, Virginia Woolf, along with her brother and Horace de Vere Cole dressed as "Abyssinians" to fool the British Navy into showing them their flagship, the HMS Dreadnought. The disguises worked, and the supposed Abyssinian emissaries were allowed on board. 
     The group inspected the fleet. To show their appreciation, they communicated in a kind of porridge of words derived from Latin and Greek, as well as the oft repeated phrase "bunga bunga." They asked to pray on the ship's deck and bestowed fake military honors on the officers.
     The disguise's only limitation was that the "royals" could not eat anything or their make-up would be ruined. At a luncheon served for the Abyssinian delegates, the group's interpreter (Cole) had to explain that Abyssinians never eat "on board a ship or off in this way." When asked what he meant, Cole offered, "things such as this are quite nuanced," at which the matter was dropped.
     When the real Emperor of Ethiopia visited sometime later, British children called out "bunga bunga" as he passed on parade.

Best New Magazine!

Crossing our fingers.

     We are proud to announce that at AWP in Chicago this past weekend, PageBoy Magazine was voted "Best New Magazine! (unable to afford to attend AWP)"
     Of course "new" is a bit misleading, as we've been around for three years now. But we are not ones to quibble over facts, not when receiving awards.
     As part of the award, AWP has offered to fund the magazines' expenses to the 2014 event, which, ironically, takes place in Seattle. As our headquarters are on Capitol Hill in Seattle, this award amounts to five days of bus fare back and forth on the 49, that is, "if the weather requires it." If it rains, we may get up to $25, which though not an exorbitant amount still would put AWP in our "Wow You Really Love Us" category for donors.
     We are very grateful and excited about this award, and hopeful that the weather will be shit in 2014!