Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Poetry break or Brought to you by the National Fix-up and Paint Commission
I was goofing off today downtown having paid a visit to the Salt Lake Art Center to see the Motherwell exhibit that is current showing (more on that later, I should think) and wandered over to Sam Weller's afterwards ostensibly just to get a coffee and see if they had any new used Gallway Kinnell (thanks Hightouch for reminding me that I enjoy Gallway Kinnell) and ended up finding the latest McSweeney's (The McSweeney's Store--for those of you who refuse to leave the house). The latest edition is much less fanciful than the previous edition (which was brilliantly packaged as asorted mail you might receive in your very own mailbox, q.v., including an advertisement for something like "togetherness clothes" and various official looking letters which were, in fact, short stories). The latest McSweeney's, however, came bundled with a DVD Wholphin which is a collection of short films and other video oddities such as a Turkish sitcom with subtitles rewritten by 6 different writers and a 50's civil defense film which unironically proclaims "it is the white house in the middle which will survive a nuclear attack!" (or something like that. There was definitely an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, however.) There are many fine pieces on the DVD, but I would say my favorite (I've watched it three times now) is "Death of a Hen" based on a Grimm's fairytale by Brian Dewan. Poor animals. They all end up dead. I laugh each time I see the final slide in which the narrator proclaims "So then they were all dead."Back to poetry. ¶ 6:51 PM
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Comments:
McSweeney's is, like, a publication machine these days. I ran into an anthology at Weller's just yesterday that looked like The Best American Non-Required Reading, but was in fact yet another publication from the McS folks, this one featuring good new writers from writing programs.
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posted by Lisa B. :
7:03 PM
-Oh yeah!-
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