Joshua Baldwin
Garbage Boyz James Fred. Hit! Press, $12.95 paper (176p) ISBN 000-0-000000-01-6
Brixton sensation Fred, in this peppy novel about a pair of cousins — Hesh, 17, and Marlick, 19 — who spend a weekend throwing a bunch of garbage off “Grammy’s terrace” while their girlfriends are away in another country selling condoms, tells a memorable tale of late teenage angst. The cousins drink cartons of brandy in the bathroom together, take turns with the punching bag while listening to Simon & Garfunkel, and spend several hours sitting on park benches “chewing gum, kicking pigeons, and staring at the female passerby.” The terrace is stocked with a great range of objects suitable for chucking, and all is shaping up to be “an entirely mad” weekend. The only problem is that early Sunday morning they hit an “elderly policeman on the head with a crate of tulips.” This leads to their arrest, and the rest of the novel is set in a “little prison” where the cousins are subject to various “little unpleasantries, mostly involving feathers and mis-prescribed eyeglasses.” Garbage Boyz is a rollicking depiction of stupidity and distress, and a fine addition to the relentless line of paperback originals that Hit! Press is spraying into the marketplace. Readers looking for something to glance at while on the can should turn elsewhere; Fred has cooked up something a little more serious here, which most office workers will enjoy over the course of three or four lunch hours.
Robert P. Baird
A few weeks ago, Ange asked:
Are there ways in which poetry could or does both exploit its own difficulty as well as its pleasures (prosodic, sensual, scenic) to maximize its potential as a unique cultural product—a “super-stimulus”—that can make us smarter and more sympathetic?
Today I came across a week-old article in the Boston Globe that suggests one way to start answering the question. Drake Bennett reports on research in cognitive fluency, “a measure of how easy it is to think about something.” A fair amount of the research sounds like the scientific formalization of common sense, and the primary result of the studies can hardly count as novel or surprising: our brains like to take the easy route whenever possible. “Fluency is an adaptive shortcut,” Bennett writes. “According to psychologists, it helps us apportion limited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our attention and we have to quickly figure out which are worth thinking about.”
More interesting is the way disfluency can be put to productive use, which smacks more than a little of Adorno’s defense of artistic and philosophical difficulty:
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Robert P. Baird
From Jack Shafer’s response to Luke Mitchell’s defense of Scott Horton’s article about the Guantánamo suicides:

Michael Robbins
The predictably yawn-inducing results (by which I mean I predicted the top six in my sleep—check my dream journal if you don’t believe me—& the reason I was asleep is that I had been listening to the top six) are in for the 37th (or, I insist, 38th) Village Voice Pazz & Jop music poll. Here’s my ballot:
Albums
|
| 1 |
Sonic Youth, The Eternal |
Points: 15 |
| 2 |
Mastodon, Crack the Skye |
Points: 15 |
| 3 |
Brad Paisley, American Saturday Night |
Points: 10 |
| 4 |
Raekwon, Only Built for Cuban Linx, pt. 2 |
Points: 10 |
| 5 |
Baroness, Blue Record |
Points: 10 |
| 6 |
The-Dream, Love vs. Money |
Points: 10 |
| 7 |
Converge, Axe to Fall |
Points: 10 |
| 8 |
Fever Ray, Fever Ray |
Points: 10 |
| 9 |
Deer Tick, Born on Flag Day |
Points: 5 |
| 10 |
Grizzly Collective, Veckatimest Post Pavilion |
Points: 5 |
Singles
|
| 1 |
Taylor Swift, “Love Story” |
| 2 |
Girls, “Lust for Life” |
| 3 |
DJ Quik & Kurupt, “9x outta 10″ |
| 4 |
Maxwell, “Pretty Wings” |
| 5 |
Lady GaGa, “Just Dance” |
| 6 |
Shuttle, “Tunnel [High Rankin Remix]“ |
| 7 |
Neko Case, “People Got a Lotta Nerve” |
| 8 |
Mew, “Beach” |
| 9 |
Kelly Clarkson, “I Do Not Hook Up” |
| 10 |
Modest Mouse, “Satellite Skin” |
And some of my comments here (note that I provide the tag line). As usual, this list doesn’t reflect my current thinking about
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