Up after 7 and at the email.
From the Muncie Star-Press: Letterman returning to his alma mater for premiere of original documentary
BSU will present, “Clear Reception,” at 7 p.m. May 1 at Emens Auditorium on the Muncie campus. Letterman will conduct a Q&A with the two Ball State graduates, Ameliah Kolp and Faith Denig, who served as director and producer of the piece following the screening.The 25-minute production centers on Letterman’s interest in Ball State’s Glass Art program, the release stated, including his request for a commissioned sculpture created by students studying and working at Ball State's Marilyn K. Glick Center for Glass.
The program is free and open to the public. No tickets are required.
Famous Novels, Last Lines - I missed 3, one because I was not paying attention.
From Epiphany, "My Internal Impression of Mendel Shattered" by Michael J. Galko, your poem for the day.
The Millions newsletter came in, I read one piece, and then I wondered who is Roberto Calasso, so clicked on the link to Against the Anti-Art Literati: On Roberto Calasso’s ‘The Art of the Publisher’:
The Art of the Publisher, Calasso’s most recent work, consists of only 150 smallish and deceptively simple pages containing his speeches, essays, and occasional pieces about publishing. Briefly, he argues that publishing is an art, books are art objects, and the publisher is an artist. The publisher’s art has always been to provide the guiding sensibility for the publishing house and for the works it publishes. This sensibility is the mythos or spirit, if you will, of the publishing house. Today’s publishing houses lack this kind of vision and thus do not produce art. And the every-writer-and-reader-for-himself universe of electronic publishing cannot be art either, because it, too, lacks a guiding vision and the art object, books.
Okay, that intrigued me. So, I read on.
In The Art of the Publisher, Calasso concerns himself with what the good publisher is and argues in favor of the publisher’s critical role in the furtherance of civilization through the expression of his own, highly refined sensibility. Consequently, it seems surprisingly self-evident when he says that the good publishing house is one that publishes “only good books,” i.e., “books of which the publisher tends to feel proud rather than ashamed.” Or that, as in most artistic activities, success in publishing is frequently unremunerative:
…along with roulette and cocottes, founding a publishing house has always been one of the most effective ways for a young man of noble birth to fritter away his fortune.
At this point, Calasso explores some questions in contemporary publishing the answers to which aren’t necessarily obvious.
Thought-provoking, leaving me as a feeling we are getting less than we thought with our Digital Age
5. Why is someone like Calasso better at choosing what to bring to our attention than we are?
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Calasso has been accused of elitism and paternalism. To be fair, however, his argument rests on more subtle grounds than simply that the good publisher is the necessary, singular arbiter of quality. Rather, he sees the publisher as having a responsibility to establish a vision and within that vision to practice his art. In this way, the publisher becomes the custodian and purveyor of what he believes is essential to his culture and time. “The gods are the fugitive guests of literature,” he says, meaning that the publisher’s mission, while secular, has a sacred element: the carrier or custodian of a mythos that guides and is reflected in the collective works he publishes. This “spirit” unites otherwise solitary authors, readers, and books. The sum of his acts as a publisher thus constitutes a form, which is, like sculpture or painting, art.
Another review from The Millions, Tricks and Lies: On Valeria Luiselli’s ‘The Story of My Teeth’, I had serious doubts about, but thought it could be skimmed, only to find it a hoot, and it may help me with my "Chasing Ashes" - that I am not as mad or as alone as I might think.
Valeria Luiselli signed up for a tough project with The Story of My Teeth. It began as a story commissioned for the catalog of an exhibit in the Galería Jumex, a major contemporary art collection attached to a juice factory outside Mexico City. The purpose of the exhibit, and of her contribution, was to “reflect upon the bridges — or the lack thereof — between the featured artwork, the gallery, and the larger context of which the gallery took part.” So: a story about specific pieces of contemporary art, the art world at large, a juice factory, and an industrial neighborhood of which one of Luiselli’s characters says, “If there is a physical materialization of nothingness in this world, it is Ecatepec de Morelos.”
As if this weren’t challenging enough, Luiselli then decided to serialize her story to be read in the Jumex factory so that it would be “not so much about but for the factory workers.” The workers allowed Galería Jumex staff to record their discussions about what they’d read, and Luiselli recycled bits of those conversations in her novel. Oh, and one more thing: she did all this under a male pseudonym. Specifically, she did it as Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, which is her protagonist’s name.
At this point you’re probably laughing. You probably think that this sounds like performance art, which it might be, or like an MFA candidate’s anxiety-induced nightmare. But the thing is, Luiselli pulls it off. The Story of My Teeth is a great read. The writing is equal parts elegant and chatty, with a great sense of humor. It’s full of Big Ideas but never feels like a lecture. It’s episodic, a bit skittery, but has plenty of forward momentum. Luiselli never lingers too long in a section, or in one of Gustavo “Highway” Sánchez Sánchez’s many anecdotes or digressions into the theory of auctioneering.
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Some of the names are jokes, like Highway’s cousin Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre, who “couldn’t hold his drink [and] would inevitably tell us — around the time when the dessert was being served — that we were hell.” Some are shout-outs, like the bonsai store owned by Alejandro Zambra, the Chilean writer who published a novel called Bonsai in 2006 and whose most recent collection, My Documents, includes a story in which Valeria Luiselli is a character. And all of them, as Highway says, are just names of people. Assign them value or don’t. If you do, you might be getting tricked, or ripped off. On the other hand, who cares if you got tricked if you enjoyed the story?
I was never that much of a Byrds fan. Yes, I know they were important, but then I was never all that much into David Crosby. I think you can appreciate, acknowledge, greatness without being enamored of it. Still, I wondered what Pitchfork's review, The Notorious Byrd Brothers,, might have to say.
Upon release in January 1968, The Notorious Byrd Brothers was well-received by critics; Robert Christgau called it “simply the best album the Byrds have ever recorded.” It failed to halt their commercial freefall, however, nor did it provide a measure of clarity about the band’s future. After entering the studio as a four-piece, they exited as the duo of McGuinn and Hillman, having decided to fire Michael Clarke due to his technical and personal inconsistency. (In the end, he’d played on just five of the record’s 11 songs.) They started planning a quick follow-up, one that McGuinn intended to encompass the evolution of American music: folk and bluegrass, psychedelia and jazz, country-western and rock’n’roll, and the nascent electronic sound they’d explored with Gary Usher. Working in an era when rock was not yet an endlessly commodified, billion-dollar industry, McGuinn could never pick just one identity or sound for the Byrds. But while they were recruiting new members, they fell in with a charismatic 21-year-old named Gram Parsons, who shortly convinced the band to go all-in on country.
I did not really hear Gram Parsons until I went to prison in New Jersey (yeah, think about that, having to go to Jersey to hear Parsons, but only knew him as the person discovering Emmylou Harris.) I like Parson way more than I do Crosby. But then the review/essay ends with provocation:
Perhaps that’s a facile and clinical way to think about art—to judge it by the amount of press coverage, tweets, and Spotify monthly listeners—but as culture has continued to cannibalize nostalgia for classic rock bands, it feels notable that the Byrds themselves haven’t benefited from the same wave of retroactive goodwill. You can float your own guesses why, but here are some: They never rocked as hard; they never had a cool logo; they never had one singular frontman who developed a cult of personality; their shifting sound made it difficult for them to become an easily reducible brand to later generations; they lacked one mammoth single to endure across eras of rock radio and pop culture soundtrack placements like “Stairway to Heaven” or “Won’t Get Fooled Again”; their interpersonal drama was too uncontroversial (even Crosby admits he was a giant jerk, and Hillman and McGuinn seem to agree on how everything else went down); the records were too aesthetically indebted to the 1960s, and just don’t sound as good to modern ears.
But the ease with which McGuinn and Hillman appear to have welcomed their trajectories raises another question: Well, who cares? More meaningful than any made-up benchmarks of success is their embrace of change—not only in the way they shuffled through musical styles, but in life itself. Despite all of the adventurous and fascinating work that followed, their defining statement is from the early years, when they were still packing the room at Ciro’s. In 1959, Pete Seeger had taken a verse from the Book of Ecclesiastes and turned it into a ruminative folk song. “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” which got the full-blown folk-rock treatment from the Byrds into something both upbeat and introspective, is still moving in its sincerity and its call for genuine reflection about the passage of time. It’s a message that resonates through the band’s winding, open-hearted catalog and a lesson that came into clear focus on The Notorious Byrd Brothers. There is a season for all things—a time to be born, and a time to die—and accepting this can give you the confidence to move through the world and all its insurmountable realities, open-eyed and unafraid about what comes next.
I am not sure if I have come to terms with a season for all things. I remain disconcerted by the news of my cousin's death. No more of my Uncle John's children live. It leaves me feeling a distinctly hot breath on my neck.
It is almost 9 am. I want to read a story a from the new Adroit Journal, but I need to get some work done and to rest my arm. Also, Issue 3.8 of Cutleaf is live and miniMag 42 is here. I did read Seeking Solace at the Beach from Fictive Dream, a piece of flash fiction that I really liked, if it did leave me wistful. Then, too, languishing in my email inbox was a notice The Momentist has a new issue, and I have to saw its website is beguiling.
Weather warning for today:
Freeze Warning issued April 23 at 3:05AM EDT until April 24 at 9:00AM EDT by NWS Indianapolis
...FREEZE WARNING IN EFFECT FROM 2 AM TO 9 AM EDT MONDAY...
* WHAT...Sub-freezing temperatures as low as 30 expected.
* WHERE...Portions of central, east central, north central and west central Indiana.
* WHEN...From 2 AM to 9 AM EDT Monday.
* IMPACTS...Frost and freeze conditions will kill crops, other sensitive vegetation and possibly damage unprotected outdoor plumbing.
I am taking a break.
I wonder what the men behind the NRA have thought things through:
Back when America was great?
sch
9:37 am
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