Category: Uncategorized (Page 399 of 1088)

* (restored)

 

__________________
The World’s Worst Theme Park Guide Maps

‘Theme park maps have to be practical since their primary purpose is navigation. Even beyond just showing pathways, queue entrances, and rides, they have to show and label the locations of restrooms, first aid, guest services, and other necessary structural locations. Even if many park enthusiasts know their favorites like the back of their hand, most visitors actually need the map.

‘So maps are treasure troves of information for the average guest, sure. But they’re best when they’re beautiful. The location of the nearest restroom is important, but tons of visitors collect park maps for their artistic style. Like the parks themselves, they’re idealized and dreamy little miniatures of the wonders within. Maps are like billboards, highlighting key rides and recreating the park’s signature architecture.

‘The best park maps are a balanced blend of style and substance. And when one starts to overcome the other, bad things happen. Here, we’ve got a few examples of maps that either forfeited all practical usefulness to focus on artistic representation, or maps that left any artistic style behind in favor of bland realism.

 

 

‘Problem: Alton Towers is one complex park. Having grown organically over the last century, the park has expanded and re-adjusted its layout many times as it’s changed, leaving it with a sprawling and sometimes chaotic layout that can defy intuition. The whole thing is made a lot worse by the 2011 park map (above). Finding your way from Point A to Point B may be practically impossible with the confusing and cartoony map. A fine collector’s item if you’re into the style, but not exactly practical.

 

 

‘Problem: A wave of visual disaster swept across US parks in the early 2000s during which maps became exaggerated, comic-book style representations of parks. Busch Gardens Tampa in Florida was one of the worst offenders, plunging its park map into an outrageous disaster of a situation that looks more like a child’s seek-and-find book than a guide map. With rides and animals co-mingling along twisting and diverging paths, the park map might just induce nausea if you look too long.

 

 

‘Problem: Contained on an island, Thorpe Park has had a most unusual explosion into the public consciousness. Existing as a simple family park with a petting zoo, 3D theater, and collection of family flat rides for decades, the park got supercharged in 2002 under the guidance of Merlin (owners of Alton Towers). Since 2002, the park has added five massive steel coasters and re-branded itself as the nation’s thrill capitol. Maybe, but the 2013 park map did no favors in guiding guests from thrill to thrill. Click the map to open a much larger version, then tell us: Can you spot the vomiting rider? How about the one with his arm cut off?

 

 

‘Problem: This unfairly overshadowed German park is perhaps one of the most impressive of the parks stuck in Disney’s shadow. Its realistic themed lands and collection of incredible family and thrill rides set it apart and earn it a spot in Europe’s most attended. Problem is that for many years, its park map was practically useless, drawn in a fish-eye orientation that highlighted only a few paths and grouped the park’s many rides into an odd corner.

 

 

‘Problem: Like its Floridian, Africa-themed sister, the European-themed Busch Gardens in Virginia has a storied past archive of park maps trying to make sense of its complex layout. The park is located in the dense forests of Williamsburg with extreme climbs, bridges, and very intense stairs connecting its many country-themed lands. In that same unfortunate style of the early 2000s, the park’s map was more comic book than guiding aid. It was full of exaggerated architecture and mangled paths that resemble a seek-and-find book, with little help on how to actually get anywhere or what landmarks might actually look like.’ — themeparktourist.com

 

_________
Maps of dead parks

The American Adventure, Derbyshire (1987)

 

Busch Gardens, Los Angeles (1972)

 

Sofia Land, Sofia, Bulgaria (2003)

 

Fantasyland, Gettysburg (1979)

 

The Great Escape, Lake George, NY (1984)

 

Boblo Island, Detroit (1987)

 

Worlds of Fun, Kansas City (1989)

 

Story Land, Glen, New Hampshire (1990)

 

Neverland Ranch, Los Olivos (1990)

 

Six Flags New Orleans (2003)

 

The World of Sid and Marty Krofft, Atlanta (1976)

 

MGM Grand Adventures, Las Vegas (1997)

 

Land of Oz, Beech Mountain, NC (1974)

 

Opryland USA, Nashville (1987)

 

__________
A Study into Theme Park Maps: Thorpe Park

 

‘Thorpe Park is an English theme park established in 1979 which has recently undergone a marketing transformation due to its 1998 purchase by Merlin Entertainments. Prior to the park’s Merlin ownership, the attractions within Thorpe Park were predominantly typical family-friendly attractions; including a farm, educational centre, model museum and a varied selection of rides. However, Merlin Entertainments’ purchase of Thorpe Park in 1998 meant that the company now owned two family-based theme parks within extremely close proximity; as they also own Chessington World of Adventures, located merely 16 miles from Thorpe Park. The two parks needed to distinguish themselves from each other and offer unique experiences to their collective pool of visitors to each maintain popularity.

‘While the changes in Thorpe Park have appeared gradual since 1998; in 2009 Thorpe Park began to apply risky strategies to appeal to a specific audience of thrill seeking young adults. It is an unlikely tactic for a theme park to voluntarily depict itself as being unsuitable for families and children; yet Thorpe Park proceeded in this by building horrific looking attractions based on 18-certificate horror films; and harbouring a collection consisting mostly of intense rollercoasters which young children would not match the height requirements to ride. In 2010, their discouraging mode of address towards families was evident in Thorpe Parks reimagining of the theme park map, which was based upon a Where’s Wally style depiction of teenage debauchery.

‘Interestingly, the self imposed limitation upon Thorpe Parks target audience for 16-34 year olds helped the theme park to grow, as visitor numbers rose to 1.87 million in 2010. Through semiotic analysis of the 2010 Thorpe Park map, we can examine how changes in the map reflect changes in the parks audience; and deconstruct the language of the theme park map to uncover its connotatively veiled issues of audience representation and reality construction.

‘In semiotic analysis of the Thorpe Park map we can uncover the evaluative elements within the text – examining the ways in which its signs and codes contain pre-formed judgements on their interpretants; and how they aim to construct a specific audience appeal through signifying ideologies of youth and pleasure.

‘Roland Barthes theory of ‘Mythology’ is also fitting, as the entire theme park experience is built upon the simulacra of worldwide cultures. Thorpe Park for example, has themed areas with synecdochal signs of particular cultural identities, such as the “Canada Creek” area; wherein the visitor is surrounded by wooden buildings, logs, country music and cowboys; and thus gets immersed in the parks construction of an unrealistic, tourist view through the parks’ stereotypical imagining of Canada.

‘The power of Semiological analysis is that it demonstrates how latent ideologies do not exclusively belong within artefacts of high culture; as, when deconstructed, texts of popular culture can prove themselves to be a goldmine of sociological issues and insights. The theme park map can be viewed as a textualisation of Baudrillards ‘hyperreality’ (1988); in the sense that the signifiers in the map; i.e.: depictions of rollercoasters, are also signifiers, not signified things, within the park itself. For example, Thorpe Parks’ rollercoaster entitled ‘Saw The Ride’ signifies a horror film franchise; based upon simulated experience of a blockbuster film, it “appears to be more true than the real experience” (Eco, 1976); yet the film itself is a simulated experience of macabre torture. Through these constructed layers of simulation it is almost impossible to trace our way back to reality.

‘Several psychoanalytic theories were also applicable in analysis of the Thorpe Park map. For instance, it could be said that the maps depiction of wild, young crowds encourages regressive behaviour – reassuring visitors that it’s ok to act like a child for the day within the confined of the group. Or the violence and blood depicted in the map can be explained using Kleins theory of ‘sadistic phantasy’; as it implores visitors unconscious desires to harm. The exaggerated depictions of the ride attractions, coupled with the grimaced faces of those depicted onboard the ride; create a sense of danger in the experience. The appeal of the dangerous experience could be explained as a manifestation of the “death instinct”, a Freudian concept based upon humans desire to self destruct and return back to an inanimate state.

‘Representation of audience in the Thorpe Park map could be viewed as insulting. The behavioural signs depicted include cartoon images of visitors fornicating behind a bush whilst being spied on by an older man, visitors wetting themselves, being sick, digging graves, flashing, throwing themselves out of windows and drinking alcohol. There are also depictions of violence towards visitors; such as a visitor having his arm ripped off on a rollercoaster, a visitor getting eaten by a shark and a visitor with her hair set on fire. While alluding to the typical sense of teenage debauchery, the behavioural codes are based upon a level of fantasy danger. A rebellious behaviour which often does occur within the park, such as smoking drugs in the queue lines, has tellingly not been depicted. And while it appears on the map that a visitor could throw up or have their arm ripped off on one of the rollercoasters; a more realistic danger, such as brake failure on a rollercoaster , has not been included in the map.

‘In the maps representation of audience; there are only two old people depicted. One is a preacher repenting with a cross beneath a group of teens screaming on a thrill ride; the other is an old man spying on a couple in the bushes. Both characters have an air of desperation to their behaviours and appear out of place. The connotations of these images suggest disagreement and exclusion towards those younger or older than the parks target 16-34 age group. In another form of intertextuality, Thorpe Park was used as a setting for teen comedy TV programme “The Inbetweeners”; wherein the crude sixth form characters went accordingly “nuts at the nations thrill capital”; arguably inspiring plenty of its 16-34 year old audience to do the same.

‘The reality constructed by in codes of the map is not grounded in realistic representation. The images which signify the parks thrill rides are disproportionate; depicting the rides as larger, steeper and in a closer proximity to each other than they really are in the park. These exaggerations don’t just shape the visitors sense of significance toward the thrilling attractions; they also hide the less enchanting reality for visitors of walking around all day to get from one ride to the next.

‘Another real experience of Thorpe Park that isn’t depicted in the map is the long, winding queues for the attractions. This deliberate lack of representation of an imminent part of the theme park experience, is due to the maps function as a souvenir. Visitors can look at the map and be reminded of the fun experiences they had, but not be reminded of the 2 hour long queues they stood in all day. The maps mode of address is also unrealistic in its crass informality; the signs are used to play up to ideas of Thorpe Parks’ bad reputation; and therefore discourage families from visiting. It is, however, assumed that target 16-34 year old visitors will be able to distinguish the difference between the inappropriate behaviours depicted in the map and the appropriate behaviours expected of them whilst in the park.

‘The chaotic semantics of the Thorpe Park map; coupled with its lack of depiction of its car park and surrounding roads; demonstrate a narrative where the visitor is in equilibrium before entering the park; which is then disrupted when the visitor is inside Thorpe Park; then the visitor returns to the equilibrium of the outside world upon leaving the park.’ — Serena Cavalera, coasterforce.com

 

_________
Growth Maps

Alton Towers
Alton, England

1986

 

2001

 

Blackpool Pleasure Beach
Blackpool, England

1998

 

2003

 

Busch Gardens, The Old Country
Williamsburg, Virginia

1976

 

1983

 

1987

 

1997

 

2003

 

Cedar Point
Sandusky, Ohio

1980

 

2000

 

2007

 

2010

 

Chessington World of Adventures
Chessington, England

1987

 

1995

 

2003

 

Darien Lake
Darien Center, New York

1988

 

2007

 

Disneyland
Anaheim, California

1964

 

1980

 

1989

 

1993

 

2001

 

2004

 

Six Flags Magic Mountain
Valencia, California

1986

 

2000

 

2002

 

2006

 

Six Flags Over Texas
Arlington, Texas

1961

 

1991

 

2008

 

______________
Thoughts on Theme Park Map Design

‘The majority of theme/amusement park guests explore parks naturally without consulting the map. The majority of guests won’t even pick one up in the first place, unless specifically handed one. Of those who do pick them up, most immediately stuff them in their pocket. The map might make an appearance during a queue when the guest is bored. Some people may open the map up to find food outlets, (in fact, I’d wager the majority of guests seeking out a map later in the day are looking for food options) or a toilet and fewer still for directions to a specific attraction. But the majority of guests will ask a member of staff instead of consulting their map, or rely on signposts, because people want instant answers. Besides, most maps are single, large sheets of paper. They feel less like a guide or souvenir and more like your dinner placemat to be disposed of.

‘I’ve worked at a park and that’s what I’ve observed. I’ve been that member of staff bombarded with direction questions. You will rarely see guests around a park with a map open actually using it to navigate, yes it happens occasionally, but it really is quite rare.

 

 

‘A common problem of theme park maps is representing attractions closely together that may well be in real life, but their entrances are far apart. When guests do use the park map for navigation, they don’t follow pathways like with regular maps, they use them to get an idea of the general direction. Even clear maps suffer in this scenario. But by warping the layout, using heavy stylisation and graphics, or by placing the ride’s logo near the actual entrance, you can partially overcome this issue. What I hate about these styled maps is they are just so void of personality. Looking at them fails to excite. How anyone could make a park so crowded and exciting as Hershey look so lifeless and empty is beyond me. It’s a talent, for sure.

 

 

‘Alton Towers is well known for it’s complex layout. At around 800 acres, it is the largest theme park in the world, and it’s been brewing a sprawling mess of pathways, foliage, architecture and attractions for well over a century. It’s no surprise then that Alton’s guests have trouble navigating the place and so extremes have been explored attempting to solve that “problem.” Cue a unique and highly stylised map style that lasted a a few seasons and reduced Alton to the bare essentials…

 

 

‘The problem with this is that it is so fundamentally out of character. Anyone who’s been to Alton knows how that weird gothic magic feels… It feels like damp, dark woodlands and strange abandoned spaces, not phone Apps for kids. The absolute rejection of Alton’s personality is one thing, but the way in which this map reduces the park to so few attractions is another. It’s reminiscent of faux naive illustration that’s trying to be innovative simply by rejecting a history of of knowledge and understanding. It is my opinion that there was no problem to be solved in the first place and that guests will get “lost” at Alton Towers no matter what map design they’re provided with – firstly because most of them won’t even have a map, secondly because most people are too stubborn and impatient to use one and thirdly because it is a vast space with a maze of paths.

 

 

‘Phantasialand is a park made up of narrow streets and tall themed facades. It is, I would argue, the world’s most intense themed environment. I’ve always wondered how a park like this would cope on a very busy day, because the park itself doesn’t feel very large. A very literal, practical map is kind of required with Phantasialand’s network of streets and quirky attractions. Instead, it has an unusual and beautiful, but completely useless map that resembles conceptual art more than it does a usable map. The peculiar sketch seemingly drawn in real media fails to show much at all.

‘Maps are not necessary, and they are not used by the majority of guests, but what they are is a convention of a theme park visit. An expected – free – souvenir. They can help to define the brands (the rides and their themes) in a park by giving them illustrative content. That’s why ephemera is special – this tactile thing that usually gets thrown away, but represents memories of a fleeting event. The best maps are those that both stylistically match the atmosphere and brand of the park they represent, and successfully provide visual and written information about the many attractions and facilities within. Navigation is not their primary purpose.’ — Theme Park Thoughts

 

______________
Maps to Imaginary Theme Parks

Science Fiction Land

 

Babylon Theme Park

 

Bookworm Gardens

 

Gotham City Batman Park

 

Chichi Jima

 

Danger Zone

 

First Nations Theme Park

 

Garbage Dump Theme Park

 

Itchy and Scratchy Land

 

Super London Theme Park

 

Middle Earth Theme Park

 

Music Land

 

Neverland Kingdom

 

Potential City Theme Park

 

Rik Smits Theme Park

 

Star Wars Experience Park

 

Muppetville

 

Mystica Theme Park

 

The Ruin Theme Park

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, John is the very best! ** Tosh Berman, I agree with your assessment, of course. The French right wing pols are ripe for satire, and they’re constantly parodied, but I think that’s because they act like serious people even when they spout their most hateful rhetoric as opposed to the American variety who tend to be total buffoons even when they’re at their scariest? Thanks, T. ** Misanthrope, Yep, no sign of your missing comments. This blog is like a Vegas magician, and not the David Copperfield type, the type doing their act on the tiny stages in the corners of off-Strip casinos. Yes, for a short period, I had a Gibson Les Paul that was pretty wasted in my rather incompetent hands. But still. Hope you got your (and their) taxes done. ** Steve Erickson, Home so often is. Interesting exercise: ferreting out the ‘hits’ among your bevy of songs. I’ll search out the KLF doc somewhere. No, never saw that parody. Yeah, exactly, as I was just sort typing to Tosh. ** Dominik, Hi!!! You’re, of course, very welcome! I always thought the same thing when I used to get avalanched with inappropriate poems and so on at Little Caesar. I used to submit my poems to ‘little magazines’, as they were popularly known back then, when I was starting out as a writer, but not until I’d seen the little magazine with my own eyes and thought what I did might fit in and have a real chance. Strange. Desperation? Plus laziness? Bad combo. I recently came across a guy in my escort searching who was raving about the taste of the dirt under the fingernails of the escort he’d hired. I’d seen guys whose thing was having the escorts blow their noses in their mouths and assessing the flavor of their snot, but that was a first. Love opening a pop up store where, for a small price, you can have the dirt under your toenails replaced with crumbled falafel, G. ** Bill, Hi. Good choices. That RE Katz book is a real charmer and find. My weekend passed in an acceptable manner. The election: Totally predictably, it’s Macron vs. Le Pen in the finals. Depressing rerun of last time. The really sad thing is that the far left candidate, Melenchon, came within 2 points of beating Le Pen. He’s an arrogant asshole, and the only reason he got that close is because people on the general left, including most everyone I know, voted for him strategically even though they hate him because he was the only left candidate with a realistic shot. And if it hadn’t been Melenchon but some actually cool, interesting candidate who people voted for enthusiastically rather than begrudgingly, he very likely would have passed Le Pen and been in the finals. So that kind of really, really sucks. ** _Black_Acrylic, It’s fun. Oh, jeez, man, I do so hope you get your screen back any second, and not just because I need my PT fix, trust me. Repair vibes, me. ** rafe, Oh, good, I’m so happy you tore through ‘The Book of Lies’. And Gladman is one of my favorites. Barring a complete shock, Macron will win. What extremely sucks is that so many people are going to have to make themselves vote for him only to defeat Le Pen. Again. And, believe me, he is not an easy guy to vote for. But one of the things I admire about the French, to speak (too) generally, is that, in situations like this, they become selfless and do what’s best for everyone without too much whining. A little whining, but mostly quite stoically. Happy Monday! ** Right. I think today’s post is almost certainly the geekiest, least popularly appealing post I ever made in the history of this blog, and that’s the very reason I thought, Bring it back! Weird me. Meet your fates within, and I will see you tomorrow.

_______________

‘Beautiful and tragic, RE Katz’s novel And Then the Gray Heaven embodies “the whole blessed void: a vast field of care” as it recounts the gradual process of laying the dead to rest.

‘Jules, a queer kid who “no one was watching to make sure … survived [their] childhood of humid horrors,” feels that it should have been them who died. But instead they lost B, a brilliant installation artist, revolutionary museum exhibit rehabilitator, and their person, to a steep ladder, a sharp fall, and the garage’s cement floor. Jules spirals out as they narrate, tracking the couple’s mutual descent and ascent in ravishing terms.

‘This near-perfect novel calls “bullshit on romance and beach condos and Florida itself … for people who lived [there] and got heat-stroke and sea lice and picked oranges for fifteen cents an hour” as Jules betrays how a great love and a geographic place can shape the bones of a person.

‘Not just another coming out story, the novel is infused with a lived-in queerness. It captures the dimensional nature of both nonbinary gender and queer sexuality, layering both into Jules’s and B’s relationship, their mutual history, and their found family in a way that’s inescapable, essential, and that captures all the safety that queerness offers and which “straight people don’t have a word for.”

‘Like Florida, novels about grief have “a reputation for being both uninhabitable and too overgrown with life,” but RE Katz’s beautiful novel And Then the Gray Heaven is eviscerating. It proves that “Downpour and decay are a part of life, and in fact, the very things that tell us we’re involved with the world and not just here.”’ — Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers

 

RE Katz Site
RE Katz @ Soundcloud
RE Katz @ Twitter
Critical color theory
Buy ‘And Then the Gray Heaven’

 

RE Katz And Then the Gray Heaven
Dzanc Books

‘When Jules’s partner B passes away suddenly, the harsh neon Florida stripmall swamp of their early years in the foster care system returns to haunt them. Jules is separated from B during the last days of their life in the hospital and then exiled from their family mourning, causing them to reach a breaking point that shimmers into a big idea. As final tribute, Jules takes the small remainder of B’s ashes with them on a cross-country romp to each significant place B worked during their strange and inspired life as a diorama artist. Jules’s burial adventures bring with them a pastiche of new friends, old chosen family, and a golden heap of B’s stories, daisy-chained together in Jules’s own grief fugue.’ — Dzanc Books

‘At once darkly hilarious and surprisingly heartbreaking, RE Katz’s debut novel defies genre expectations just as its protagonists defy the gendered, artistic and relationship constructs that surround them. And Then the Gray Heaven reads like a series of pearls slipping off a necklace—a series of stories, images, moments, songs and poems that at first appear absurd, then shocking, then brilliant, then, finally, divine.’ — Steph Post

Excerpt

Extras

And Then The Gray Heaven – RE Katz and Michelle Dotter

 

 

______________

You put a lot of pressure on the lyric, hoping the story moves by means other than narrative. Why resist narrative? What does the story gain from the lyric?

I wasn’t necessarily trying to resist narrative, rather trying to think through tendencies to narrativize. From my earliest drafts, Felix’s mind and voice have been precariously associative, and with each thought that slips away in the vehicle of its metaphor, the web of associations gets dense and denser. Something dreamily similar to narrative comes alive as the reader counts the recursions. Though, of course, orderly progression is out the window here. And I think something lyric comes out of the resistance to ordering the narrative activities. There’s an instability to any single image, and my own impulse as a reader is usually to make sense of all the sensory noise and nonsense bubbling under any image or word.

We also learn a lot about snails. I will never think the same about the stuff we expectorate from our lungs and how much that expectorant is like snails/slugs. What is the metaphor you’re working on here ?

And we’re in luck (or maybe in denial) because I think that speaks to how metaphors are working in SORCERERERER. There’s a kind of blurry line between vehicle and tenor, and it is a two-way street. Each carries the potential of the other in its buzzing little molecules. Felix is a snail, and he isn’t. His spittle and sputum are always in the process of becoming slugs, accruing those traits—and vice versa [purposeful non-period here]

In Sorcererererer, we are introduced to Felix, a man suffering from the consumption in a unspecified time and place–why leave those two elements unspecified?

JB: And yes, time is fuzzy in this one, but there is at least one specified place (perhaps a small concession toward clarity!): an old sanatorium in Elysian Park / Echo Park in Los Angeles. And that specificity is there as part of a critique running as a more directed stream under the piece against the paranoid instability of historical narrativizing, of the heliotropic myth and the west/rest cures and westward marches and of being entrenched in bogus destinies [purposeful non-period here]

If you’re in the area with a little free time, those old grounds presently include an active respiratory hospital abutting a few scenic paths up in the hills above Dodgers Stadium—take a stroll and put your newly slimy associative mind to the test. [purposeful period here]

 

HOBBY HORSE ANATOMY: BAWDY AND BODY IN THE BINDING OF ISAAC
Poems @ Dream Pop
EXCERPTS FROM PERMEABLE FORTRESS
Doublt
Buy ‘Sorcererer’

 

Jace Brittain Sorcererer
Schism Press

‘O! I loved this feverish yarn set in the cartilaginous environs of the ear and/or the mucilaginous environs of the Menlo Sanitorium, where patient Felix has collapsed on the footpath, attended by a clutch of snails. Part speculative Walser biography, part fan-fic of the Schumann-Brahms-Schumann love triangle, part dime-store mystery about a lost volume in a spooky library, part late-nite documentary on the lives of snails, this batty, brainy book has something for everyone.’ — Joyelle McSweeney

‘Sharp, grimly comic, vertiginous, extraordinary in its myriad misbehavings, Jace Brittain’s Sorcererer celebrates the illegibility of the body, the mind, and language within a librarial architectonics designed by Borges and described by Beckett to Leslie Scalapino on a stroll through Heraclitus’s garden, or, as one of its protagonists proclaims: ‘stay vim stay vigor.’ Brittain’s un-novel announces the arrival of an important new voice in the post-genre wilderness.’ — Lance Olsen

‘Jace Brittain’s thickly spare, indelibly sticky prose spirals at the “final edge of heliotropic civilization,” gooping the horizon line between history and illusion. All across Sorcererer’s pages, the ailing body of western knowledge coughs up its secrets and myths, its fatal false promises. This is an unbecoming book, a book of slime-enciphered messages, language fluxing from the sentences’ cracked shells. Read Sorcererer with the slowness of snails, with your feelers, backwards and forwards. Leave your own oozy traces on the patterns you find.’ — Joanna Ruocco

Excerpts

dreamt as mountain i

The degree to which isolation and seclusion aren’t synonyms. The songbirds of predawn aren’t politically suspect but as some person starts a gramaphone to sing, Felix rushes his eyes to form and drags uphill. The record loses steam before. And soon in silence the same light burns and exposes invisible streams from clinging packets of snow, pathetic thin ice barely covering the absent puddle already slipped from. Cadaverous the piles that hope to be flowers revelling in cold mud Elevation which returns to him something that.

The crackling paper of that thin ice, the foot and the crackle they make among the trees ghastly sentinels So Felix too From here down on the sanatorium as a
dollhouse The others even more diminutive. That whine in the air again Breathes Felix.

 

dreamd as mt ii

Clean, cold, pure, toxic, cursed, stinging. Insufficiently respiratory. Just what I.

A deep breath of evil. Tomorrow crisp, healthy, restorative, lift a piano above my head. Mighty toss the record player into the canyon. Clattering pathetic horn of a downed and false herald. Don’t shoot the is maybe only after. So. Don’t shoot the messenger later. Rotting clarion dissected in equity by this mountain’s scavenger democratic chaos cult, detritivores learning the tune, inheriting the wonders of the moldering folds and reeds. Discords. Unflattering untraceable dissolution We should all be so Even eat so lucky.

 

drempt as mtn iii

Other spring, other mountain, the building coiling long hallways tight, unlike the statics tell her the circle in the dew cold grass and the clapping and song but Os won’t believe in the discovery of kindness. Also Os recalls how easy for some to find kindness out here. Im Wald. Out Under the. Hidden. Deeply A Static she knows to be cruel laughs and claps and shares a spectacular gesture and How easy to lose one’s eyes in that swirl of limbs and free command to some childhood melody.

 

traumed as mountn iiii

Os from a grassy edge lifts gossamer ice so careful or it softly shatters or with fortune wetly drapes a virgin shroud over her hand Melts as a death mask and she lies down out and under. The mist too and everything is gauze Yes To be disembarrassed of life.

 

dremd as mt v

Citing the Fiduciary but what They can’t abide is a joyful disembarkment Let me die Os screams as. Like a hospital the hospital slides discretely from the hills and toward the sea.

All gross abatements begin at the.

Extras

2nd yr MFA Reading of Jace Brittain

1st Year MFA student reading @ The Pool, Jace Brittain

 

 

______________

‘In Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax a Style, she writes:

Prose is linear. It is read and is said to move. It must by nature, therefore, generate a symbolics of spatial or temporal movement widened by its context beyond the limits of the actual sentence read from left to right in so many seconds. In whatever context, the movement may resemble accumulation or attrition, progress or other process, even stasis, or any one of these interrupted, turned, reversed. In space or time or both, it can go in any direction as continuous or repetitive, accelerated or retarded, smooth, halting, or halted.

‘This is the most comprehensive description of what prose does that I’ve thus far encountered. It allows for nearly every kind of prose practice imaginable without a sense of hierarchy or judgment. The only absolute phrase is the first one—Prose is linear—which I will attempt to complicate in the last part of my talk, but for now I will allow its usefulness in describing how language moves across a page: that is to say, how the sentence is a line. Nonetheless, Tufte’s definition offers “enormous variety” in how language can and does behave within the architecture of prose. Yet, as a practitioner and connoisseur of prose, something for me remains unsaid in the above. What I’m missing is perhaps unsayable. It has something to do with the title of my talk: “The Sentence as a Space for Living,” something that wants to get at an emotional or bodily register in relation to prose. In this next part I will try to elucidate this feeling of being in the sentence. When I say, “the sentence as a space for living,” what I hope to conjure is the idea of language as a three-dimensional space, traverse-able by the body; a space one enters, moves through, exits. It is not possible that I mean the physical body, because language is abstract: it does not exist properly in the world. What I mean is something like one’s reading body, the one that stands before a word and gapes at it, marveling over its beauty or mystery. That body of mine that feels excitement when it encounters a semi-colon used perfectly, or when it enters a described space that hovers just above visibility. I suppose an alternative title for this paper could be “The body in prose.” But, this isn’t quite right either, because to say that there is a “body,” however abstract we allow it to be, is to place something between the mind and language that isn’t there. And, it’s this absent thing that becomes as I read.’ — Renee Gladman

 

Renee Gladman Site
RG @ Instagram
Dwelling Places: On Renee Gladman’s Turn to Drawing
The Sentence as a Space for Living: Prose Architecture
Buy ‘Plans for Sentences’

 

Renee Gladman Plans for Sentences
Wave Books

‘”These sentences—they—will begin having already been sentences somewhere else, and this will mark their afterlife, and this will be their debut.” So begins Renee Gladman’s latest interdisciplinary project, Plans for Sentences. A tour de force of dizzying brilliance, Gladman’s book blurs the distinctions between text and image, recognizing that drawing can be a form of writing, and vice versa: a generative act in which the two practices not only inform each other but propel each other into futures. In this radical way, drawing and writing become part of a limitless loop of energy, unearthing fertile possibilities for the ways we think about poetry. If Gladman ascribes to any particular type of poetics, here in Plans for Sentences, we are sure to find that it is robustly grounded in a poetics of infinite language.’ — Wave Books

Excerpts

Extras

Renee Gladman Q&A

Prose Architectures Flipthrough

 

 

________________

‘“People say, ‘Why don’t you retire?’” Waters scoffs. “I’d drop dead if I retired. I jump out of bed every day to go to work.” After six decades of productive perversity, slowing down would pretty much require shutting off his brain. “I have to think up something weird every morning!”

‘Maybe it isn’t so surprising that Waters is more in demand than ever. In some depressing ways, we live in an America his movies anticipated—with charlatans, extremists and malignant narcissists crowding the public square, as constant altercations break out between a repressive far right and a radical-chic far left. The same day I spoke with Waters, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene gave a bizarre interview decrying “Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police” that immediately went viral. (She meant Gestapo.) If you didn’t know better, you might think Greene was a character played by Mink Stole, the Waters lifer who specializes in snippy villains.

‘The difference between his outré work and the hysterical pitch of our current public discourse—besides, of course, that no one’s drafting laws based on his absurdism—is that his intentions are always playful and good-natured. Waters likes to poke fun at what he still calls “political correctness,” not because he’s joined the self-serious war on wokeness or cancel culture or any other term pundits invoke to protest the march of progress, but because he thinks humor is the best route to social change. He wants to see liberals form mock “pronoun police” forces and hand out tickets. So you want to upstage the insurrectionists who relieved themselves in the halls of Congress? “Maybe we should form fecal flash mobs,” he chuckles.

‘Liarmouth is very much in this punkish tradition. A road novel with an outrageously Watersian attraction at every rest stop, the book follows self-styled criminal mastermind Marsha Sprinkle and a doting accomplice as they grift their way up the East Coast. (Scammers may be trendy right now, but they’ve been a staple of Waters’ oeuvre since 1970’s Multiple Maniacs cast his friend and muse, drag queen Divine, as a freak-show impresario who robs audiences at gunpoint.) “I think it’s the most insane thing I’ve ever written,” Waters says.’ — Judy Berman

 

Dreamland
John Waters Page @ Facebook
‘Liarmouth’ @ Goodreads
John Waters Is Ready to Defend the Worst People in the World
Buy ‘Liarmouth’

 

John Waters Liarmouth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

‘Marsha Sprinkle: Suitcase thief. Scammer. Master of disguise. Dogs and children hate her. Her own family wants her dead. She’s smart, she’s desperate, she’s disturbed, and she’s on the run with a big chip on her shoulder. They call her “Liarmouth”—until one insane man makes her tell the truth.

‘John Waters’s first novel, Liarmouth, is a perfectly perverted “feel-bad romance,” and the reader will thrill to hop aboard this delirious road trip of riotous revenge.’ — FSG

Excerpt

Marsha Sprinkle has always been glad she’s self-employed. She’s her own boss and that’s the way it must continue to be. She can’t imagine having regular office hours, punching time clocks, or paying taxes. Fellow employees are impossible for her to picture unless she can dominate their every move. Marsha is better than other people. She knows that. Smarter, too. Maybe not about the needless crap they tried to teach her in school, but about important stuff like how to put things over on other people who think they have the right to speak to her before being spoken to first. The ones who make unashamed eye contact as if it were their God-given right to invade her privacy. Marsha just feels everybody else on earth is … well, too familiar. Common. No one has the right to know her.

She knows she still looks good. Forty years hasn’t dented her sexual magnetism. Not that it matters to her except when she can use her appeal to punish. To trap. To enslave the clueless men who actually believe they will one day penetrate her. Thrust their filthy member into any of her openings above or below the waist. Especially into her own mouth, the oral cavity that refuses to tell the truth unless it is whispered privately for her alone to hear. Marsha won’t even imagine sex. All that moaning and thrusting and humping with another human. Sweating. Drooling. For what? That’s what Marsha wants to know. For what?!

Oh, she knows how to walk the walk, thrust out her natural-born tits and effortlessly swivel that still-well-rounded behind while ignoring men’s panting gazes, just to frustrate them, torture the lamebrain bastards who even for one moment think they could invade her insides. Like the moronic Daryl Hotchkins, her crime partner, her fake “chauffeur,” her sexual slave, who actually agreed to work for her if he could have sex with her just one day a year. That’s right. Once. Every 365 days and not one more, and Marsha made sure Daryl understood this. Divide all that lust time up hourly and you sure as hell get a low minimum wage, yet Marsha feels she is still overpaying Daryl. It has been a long haul to Marsha Sprinkle’s vagina, but today, Tuesday, November 19, 2019, is that day, the end of his one-year journey. He doesn’t know it yet but there’ll be a detour. A dead end. Marsha Sprinkle is no man’s used-up calendar.

But first things first. It’s a workday and she has to concentrate. She has always felt safe in whatever foreclosed McMansion they’ve squatted in. “Squat” is a word she dislikes, so homeless, so housing crisis. Daryl knows how to fool the neighbors, showing them fake leases he’s typed up and jerry-rigging the electricity so these rubes pay for not only their own home’s power but Marsha and Daryl’s, too. They aren’t squatting, they have taken charge of a house no one else could control.

Marsha likes how impersonal the interior design is in this “starter castle,” as she once heard a real estate agent refer to her current unlawful occupancy. She needs empty rooms around the ones she deigns to inhabit, voids she’d never enter but needs to know are there, sadly existing but not benefiting from her presence. And of course, the countless other giant bedrooms with full baths are the perfect dumping grounds for the thirty or so rifled-through, picked-clean suitcases she and Daryl have appropriated from the baggage-claim carousels at Baltimore/Washington International Airport.

The ridiculous cathedral ceilings give Marsha the required headroom respect she needs to feel one with the house’s vacant hauteur. Rich yet possessionless, fancy but hardly to the manor born, a style no one could call their own. The overpriced and oversize furniture left behind had failed to flip this white elephant of a house, and that suits her just fine. It can’t compete with her. She’ll never let the plush sectional sofas, the neoclassical mirrored tables, or the ludicrous Mediterranean chandeliers forget that she’s the boss. Marsha is like a McMansion herself: too big for the land underneath it, defying both nature and the environment, and daring anyone to move inside … her.

Extras

John Waters reads from Lady Chatterley’s Lover at City Lights Books

John Waters reads CARSICK

 

 

_____________

‘In the Temple of Surrealism’s fourth annual bulletin, we bring you news that the human race is in grave peril due to the mutation of a common virus we identify as MASS HYSTERIA. Also known in medicine as Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI), MASS HYSTERIA sweeps through all societies that do not heed the calls of our LEADER, and the messages and attitudes of the SURREALISTS.

‘It may surprise you to learn that until the Temple’s landmark enquiry into the subject, commissioned especially for A Void #4, there were no immutable laws of MASS HYSTERIA. Many “experts” could not even agree on basic principles, such as whether the disease is fundamentally ethereal, psychic, psychosomatic, biological, or if it exists at all.

‘After only a couple of hours researching the current global outbreak, however, our genius managing editor and head of experimental research at the Temple, Chairman Lev Parker, had the mind-blowing revelation that there are common properties that can be observed in all outbreaks of MASS HYSTERIA: The more severe the hysteria, the less willing a sufferer will be to accept a diagnosis of MASS HYSTERIA. (This shall henceforth be known as the Iron Rule of M.H.)

‘MASS HYSTERIA can only be transmitted via the medium of abstract symbols: written and spoken language, and visual signs communicated by other humans. (Our trials with saluting monkeys yielded inconclusive results.)
Since transmission takes place on the symbolic plane of representation, folks who are not sufficiently educated in abstract thought are more vulnerable to MASS HYSTERIA.

‘Babies and the severely mentally impaired are unable to perceive or process language so they are, mercifully, immune to it.

‘Narcissistic personalities are particularly susceptible to MASS HYSTERIA due to their inherent inability to think on a level above the personal. The narcissist is a more likely spreader and intensifier of MASS HYSTERIA, since the narcissist is biologically programmed to draw attention to himself via the contaminated symbols of the hysterical group’s cohesion.
Not all cases of MASS HYSTERIA are symptomatic. It is possible – indeed, common – for passive or ostensibly neutral members of a community to unwittingly infect others with poor thinking habits.

‘When cases of MASS HYSTERIA are reported, those who resist a diagnosis of MASS HYSTERIA are most likely to be infected next, if they are not already contaminated.

‘On the plus side, MASS HYSTERIA is hardly ever fatal in isolation. The symptoms are largely psychological/ behavioural, and include irritability, paranoia, panic attacks, and new superstitions appearing out of nowhere. The more MASS HYSTERIA there is in a society, the stronger this disease becomes. The larger the pool of infected recipients, the more powerful its grip over individual minds. The more hysterics there are in a society, the more they are likely to display symptoms such as uncontrollable shouting, random acts of cruelty when they think nobody is looking, and taking an active role in mob justice.’ — A Void

 

Morbid Books
THE OTHER ZONE
DEAD SEXY
ASK A SHAMANIC COMMUNIST
Buy ‘A VOID 4’

 

Lev Parker & Penny Metal A VOID 4: MAGAZINE OF MASS HYSTERIA
Morbid Books

‘When a population reaches a critical mass of hysteria, it can achieve “herd immunity” to vaccines. By this point, symptoms will include the fetishization of power and authority, and the total subjugation of individual will to the energy of collective passions. The more irrational and cruel a society becomes, the more logical, kind and morally right its population will believe itself to be. The only way to flush out MASS HYSTERIA from such a society is by forcible extermination, psychological warfare, and/or waiting and hoping that future generations are less hysterical than their parents.

‘Given our frightening discoveries, this anthology will educate you about the dangers of the deadly virus before we all go mad. A Void #4 therefore serves as a learning pack that gives you a brief history of the deadly mind plague, presented with deliberate ambiguity, from obscure angles, alongside artworks by the sensible and sane. While there is no definitive test for MASS HYSTERIA at present, we present you with a handy, yet convoluted diagnostic tool to help you determine if you or one of your loved ones is coming down with the “Idiot Flu.”’ — A Void

Excerpts

Extras

Want Your Freedom Back?

A Void magazine issue 3 Orgasmic Literature

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Oh, cool, about your appropriate brother. Bonus. I can only imagine: the annoyance. Well, I can do more than imagine because the same thing happened constantly back when I was editing my lit. zine Little Caesar. I doubt if it still exists, but there used to be this book, a kind of directory you could buy that listed every literary magazine with its address and a very brief description, and it was common for poets to just go through that book and just seemingly randomly pick magazines to send their poems to, and that was a constant drag. Oh, no, I hope your love of yesterday wasn’t an embodiment of you, but I fear it was? Eek. Multiple choice: Love or love or love, G. ** David Ehrenstein, I have the vaguest memory of Les Paul and Mary Ford popping up on my parents’ TV. ** Bill, Hi. Cool that the Brian Weil book hit home. Right, I think I met him back in the days, possible even at an Act Up meeting, I can’t remember. Have a lovely weekend, Mr. Hsu. ** _Black_Acrylic, Me too. I had a Les Paul as a teenager for a brief time when I was in a high school rock band. The same model as Jeff Beck, gold and sparkly, who was my rock guitar god back in the Yardbirds/Jeff Beck Group days before he turned into a fusion dude. Nice that your future home looks liveable and promising. It doesn’t come with mass amounts of built-in book and record shelves?! ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! Good to see you! i’ll do my investigative duties re: Sigmund Snopek III. Nice name, obvs. Things are good, a little too busy, but I’ll take it. Yeah, at the moment we’ll shoot in/around LA in October assuming things remain in place. I wish you were there too. How’s your stuff, man? ** Clayton, Hi, Clayton. Really good to meet you, and thanks for coming in here. I assume you dig being a college radio d.j.? I was one when I was briefly in university, and I loved it, even though they thought my tastes were too weird and stuck me with the dreaded 6 – 9 am slot. Thanks a lot about my novel. What’s going on with you? I mean, obviously, if you want to come back and hang out and talk, etc. anytime, feel more than free, that’d be great. Warmest greetings in any case. ** T. J., Hey, T. J.! Oh, easy for me to say, but of course I love your idea of setting up that film series. If there hadn’t been such things in LA when I was in a formative phase, I would have been cooked. But, yeah, that was LA. I know that the writer and blog.l. Jeff Jackson set up an experimental film series in North Carolina, and I think it was shockingly well attended if I’m remembering right. But, yeah, I hear you. ‘Mike’s Murder’, wow. My cousin is one of the actors in that film. Brooke Anderson. They were shooting it in LA back when I was running the reading series at Beyond Baroque, and one night my cousin, Bridges, Winger, and John Travolta showed up at a poetry reading I was hosting. Caused quite a fuss. Anyway, yeah. I plan to do what it takes to have a non-boring weekend, and I hope yours is like the good aspect of the 4th of July, which, in my head, means the fireworks part. ** Okay. As you have already seen, I’m recommending five recent books to you that I’m hoping you will take a gander at and possibly even find something readable amongst. See you on Monday.