L☀RNA S☁RE

from an interview with Louis C.K., June 17, 2011:

Of all the comedians working today, who’s funnier than you?
I don’t think you can quantify it that way. It’s like boxing — there are people who are set up according to weight and how big their hands are and stuff. But the best comedian I’ve ever seen live is Bill Cosby, and this was only about a year and a half ago.

Cosby? Really. I thought he’d become a crank in his old age.
No. Go see him. Two-hour-long show, 400 ways to get a laugh. It’s like being a brawler and going to see somebody do jujitsu like a master.

(link)

Also in the interview:

Do you ever think back on jokes and wince?
For 10 years, my opening joke was, “I live in New York, and New York is the only city in the world where you actually have to say things like ‘Hey, that’s mine, don’t pee on that.’ ” It wasn’t funny, but it would get a laugh. Putting those words together even now is like putting a dead guy’s body over the skin of my body.

Feb 18th: Celan Salon
Flying Object in Western Mass
Diane Williams
Lauren Spohrer
Lawrence Giffin
Rachel Glaser

April 19th
NOON 2012 Launch Party
The Center for Fiction, NYC

Winter gettin’ colder, summer gettin’ warmer.
Tidal wave comin’ ‘cross the Mexican border.
Why buy a gallon, it’s cheaper by the barrel.
Just dont get busted singin’ Christmas carols.

Thats us, that’s right
Gotta love this American ride.
Both ends of the ozone burnin.
Funny how the world keeps turnin.
Look ma, no hands.
I love this American ride.
Gotta love this American ride.

Momma gets her rocks off watchin’ Desperate Housewives.
Daddy works his ass off payin’ for the good life.
Kids on the YouTube learnin how to be cool.
Livin in a cruel world, pays to be a mean girl.

Thats us, Thats right
Gotta love this American ride.
Both ends of the ozone burnin.
Funny how the world keeps turnin.
Look ma, no hands.
I love this American ride.
Gotta love this American ride.

Poor little infamous, America’s town.
She gained five pounds and lost her crown.
Quick fix plastic surgical antidote.
Got herself a record deal, cant even sing a note.

Plasma gettin bigger, Jesus gettin smaller.
Spill a cup of coffee, make a million dollars.
Customs caught a thug with an aerosol can.
If the shoe don’t fit, fits gonna hit the shan.

Thats us, Thats right
Gotta love this American ride.
Both ends of the ozone burnin.
Funny how the world keeps turnin.
Hot dog, Hot damn.
I love this American ride.
Gotta love this American ride.
Oh yeah,
na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na……….. nanananananana

I, Vito, promise to treat this game, i-de-al
Honor the code, not bring drama to mama’s peephole
Life’s a bitch but she’s the only love that I know -ow -ow
So la-a-dee, after the “I Do’s” lets do Mercedes
Lets tie the knot, lets grab us a pot, lets make a baby
Looking back, I don’t know who threw this bouquet to me
But I walk down this aisle faithfully, cut that cake for me
I, Jay-Z, take this unlawful lady to have and to hold
And til the task force roll
To hug her every corner til I get ash from the cold
Or until I’ve amassed a fortune, too much cash for me to fold
Fold under pressure I would never, ever, ever, ever
Your secret’s I treasure, for better or worse
You’ll always be my first love til death do us part
Pull a hearse up, my verse up
Nothing’s more attractive than a heavy praying woman
To a him when those and them been defecating on me (ughh)
Her would sense the heaven, and him when Andre omen
Baby I’m hell, save me, don’t bail
Crazy I tell you all of this in the middle of a club
Where words tend to get thrown around lightly like like like like “love”
“Friend,” “rock star” and “So and so’s a genius”
So him vow to never utter him do unless him mean it
Her proud like her mother and ooohh momma’s sweet
So you just know that Juicy fruit ain’t gon’ fall too far from tree
So if we ever woop the woop
I want all that bleepty bleep
On this nasty carpet Bixby fresh on one knee
Say I do I do I do I do I do
So we can float up outta here in this hot air balloon
Lets put a baby butterfly up in your lil’ cocoon
And maybe 2030 our baby, she’ll be nerdy make the whole club swoon
She’ll love books and cook and look just like you
And when she’s done being young, she’ll dress like you
We’ll call her Love 22, she’ll tote a 22, the laser version

John Barth’s “Literature of Exhaustion,” 1967.  (link)

“Whether historically the novel expires or persists seems immaterial to me; if enough writers and critics feel apocalyptical about it, their feeling becomes a considerable cultural fact, like the feeling that Western civilization, or the world, is going to end rather soon. If you took a bunch of people out into the desert and the world didn’t end, you’d come home shamefaced, I imagine; but the persistence of an art form doesn’t invalidate work created in the comparable apocalyptic ambience. That’s one of the fringe benefits of being an artist instead of a prophet. (There are others.) If you happened to be Vladimir Nabokov you might address that felt ultimacy by writing Pale Fire: a fine novel by a learned pedant, in the form of a pedantic commentary on a poem invented for the purpose. If you were Borges you might write Labyrinths: fictions by a learned librarian in the form of footnotes, as he describes them, to imaginary or hypothetical books. And I’ll add, since I believe Borges’s idea is rather more interesting, that if you were the author of this paper, you’d have written something like The Sot-Weed Factor or Giles Goat-Boy: novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author.”

Joseph Epstein on Wolcott Gibbs and The New Yorker at The Weekly Standard:

In a fine formulation, Vinciguerra writes that Gibbs “embodied [the New Yorker’s] archetypal combination of blunt honesty, sly wit, exacting standards, and elegant condescension.” The New Yorker of those days seemed mildly aristocratic, making everything seem easily within the grasp of its writers and, perhaps as important, of its readers. Hilton Kramer, in an essay-review of James Thurber’s The Years with Ross, recounts that a New Yorker fact-checker called him countless times to get straight the positions of various French art critics for a piece the magazine’s own art critic, Robert Coates, was writing about the European art scene. When the piece appeared, Kramer was struck “at the absurdity of the feigned ease” with which it was presented in Coates’s published copy: “I marveled at the discrepancy between the pains taken to get the facts of the matter as accurate as possible, and the quite different effort that had gone into making the subject seem easy and almost inconsequential to the reader.” What was going on? “For myself,” Kramer wrote,

I don’t see how we can avoid concluding that the principal reason for The New Yorker’s method is ignorance: the ignorance of writers first of all, and ultimately the ignorance of readers. In a society which could assume a certain level of education and sophistication in its writers and journalists—which could make the assumption because it shared in that education and sophistication—there would be more of a public faith that writers knew more or less what they are talking about.

But, then, the magazine has never been without its critics. Robert Warshow, in 1947, wrote: “The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”

(link)

In November 1952, Gregory Hemingway wrote to his father:

“When it’s all added up, papa, it will be: he wrote a few good stories, had a novel and fresh approach to reality and he destroyed five persons – Hadley, Pauline, Marty [Gellhorn], Patrick, and possibly myself. Which do you think is the most important, your self-centered shit, the stories or the people?”