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Poetry Brothels, and Other News

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On the Shelf

Gerrit_van_Honthorst_-_De_koppelaarster

Gerard van Honthorst, De koppelaarster (The Matchmaker), 1625.

  • A new English-language interview with Knausgaard: “I once met a German journalist who compared me to a rock band. He said, the books don’t really have any focus, it’s just loose, it’s like just having some songs about drinking and they don’t have anything else. But it’s in that band photo, that image, where everything comes together. He wondered if I had a certain point in my writing, because it’s all, you know, bits and pieces and nothing. And then he saw pictures of me, he said, ‘You pose like a rock star, you kind of summarize everything there’ … He meant it really, really badly.”
  • Today in the anxiety of influence: the aftereffects of one writer’s childhood obsession with Michael Crichton. “Much of the rhythm and timbre I claimed as my own in fact belonged to Crichton: isolating revelatory sentences on a line break between paragraphs … complex sentences interspersed with short sentence fragments like the dots and dashes in Morse Code. Even in my early twenties, writing bad pseudo-autobiographical short stories, it seems that I had retained, by osmosis, the stylistic habits I’d developed while eating ham-and-cheese sandwiches, drinking Coke, and imagining my name writ large on the shelves of an airport bookstore.”
  • Just when you’d been thinking, Hey, it’s been a while since I heard a quality new acoustic musical instrument, along comes the Yaybahar, recently invented in Turkey; it uses “a combination of two drum-like membranes, long springs, and a tall fretted neck” to produce plaintive, resonant sounds.
  • Must we continue to live in a world where this is happening? “She wears a leather corset and harem pants, like a gypsy girl from a fairytale. She is barefoot. In the dim candlelight, she asks what I’m in the mood for—something sexy? Something dark? I tell her what will please me, and she reads me a poem. She calls herself a poetry whore, and I have paid for her company. For the next ten minutes or so, she will read me her verses, converse with me, entertain me.”
  • Fun facts about mace: it was invented in Pittsburgh in 1964 by a couple who kept an alligator in the basement. “At first they called it TGASI, for ‘Tear Gas Aerosol Spray Instrument,’ but soon they came up with the catchier name of ‘Chemical Mace’ …  the name implied that chemicals could produce the same incapacitating effect as a medieval mace—a chilling design of spiked club—but without causing the same brutal injuries.”