empty bookshelves.

anneboyer:

1) a theory of the crush, crushes’ discourse, ma vie en crush

2) tableau vivant of extant crushes with possibility of sexual consummation determining centrality

3) tableau vivant of former crushes, all asleep on the floor

4) hidden track of embarrassing crushes on an otherwise…

I might start using this thing again. 

In the meantime you can check me out @davidrankin.

"My quarrel is with the implication in the how-to books market that one can merely read them to find the magic secret for writing well enough to publish. Recently, at a college where I was lecturing, a student told me, with great pride, that he had “over a hundred books” in his library—I could see that I was meant to be impressed by the number, and that he considered himself a vastly well-read type of guy. He went on to say that many in his collection are how-to books. This person wants to be a writer, but he doesn’t want to do the work. Being a writer is a stance he wants to take. He did not come to writing from reading books, good or bad. He came to it from deciding it might be cool to walk around in that role. I meet this kind of “writer” far too often now in my travels around the country—even, occasionally, in the writing programs."

Richard Bausch

Whenever non-literary types ask you what you’re reading, you get the feeling it’s not so much out of curiosity for what you’re reading as it is out of curiosity for why the fuck a person would choose to sit there and read a book.

Random Axe, “Random Call,” from self-titled LP, 2011.

“It Ain’t Hard to Tell”

—off Elzhi’s latest project, Elmatic, a tribute to Nas’s classic 1994 debut album.

More than fifty thousand time-lapse videos have been posted to Vimeo, the online art house to YouTube’s multiplex, and many of them are beautiful. But on Tuesday evening, Josh Owens posted one that struck us as more ambitious and impressive than most. Maybe it’s because much of it was shot from hotel windows in Times Square, where we have our offices: at ground level, in real time, it can be a dispiriting neighborhood, but Owens reminded us that it’s also a glorious one, at least when it’s sped up around seven hundred and twenty times. (The interval between frames as Owens shot them was anywhere from five seconds to a full minute.)

To make the video, Owens spent the first month and a half of spring staying at eleven different Manhattan hotels, shooting from their windows and roofs for around twelve hours every day, weather permitting. (Lodging was free—in return, Owens is letting each hotel use the footage shot from its property.) His only real obstacles, he told us, were wind, snow (in April!), and people on the street. “I would often gather a crowd, mostly other photographers asking what I was doing with this strange-looking nine-foot-long thing on tripods,” he said. The tourists were more of a hazard. “People are so distracted by the lights in Times Square that I would often have to physically keep them from walking into the camera.”

Until recently, Owens shot photographs by day, then worked the night shift in the transportation department of the University of Rochester. Now he mostly makes time-lapse videos for a living. The work, he said, has made him aware of the rhythms of the universe. “Anyone who shoots time lapse can most likely tell you what phase the moon is in, what time to the minute the sun rises and sets.”

It’s also been a way, he said, to recapture with digital photography the suspense and surprise of working with film. “You don’t really know what you shot until you’re able to get home and animate all the stills together,” he said. “It’s a rush when you get to see your shot moving for the first time.”

Little Brother and Elzhi, “Hiding Place,” from The Minstrel Show, 2005.

The exchange between Elzhi and Phonte from 1:21 to 2:54 is still one of my favourite instances of lyrical flaunting.

(via calamityjennnnn)

cosmicvowels:

Isaac Cordal via