Douglas Rushkoff's New Book Reviewed!

Get Back In The Box hits the shelves tomorrow I believe. Any hoping-to-be-business-savvy young eco-preneurs out there should get on the bus and scuttle down to Last Word to order this sure-to-be fantastic title before we run out of hyphens.

"Get Back in the Box is not simply a business book. The structure, theories, and examinations spilling out of its pages are pertinent to any structural endeavor, including occult or countercultural movements. After all, this sequel to Cyberia was still written for the same audience: us - the cyberpunk counterculturalists, hell-bent of usurping the Gnostic archons of corporate society. Rushkoff just realizes that we need to beat them at our game, not their own; and he has given us a solid working point from which to start." Read More...

Thanks Key-23!

Muzak Proven Bad For Mental Clarity

Interesting little article on the effects of noise.

"Piped music on the "London Eye" has been dropped after complaints from customers.

The Good Food Guide 2002 reports that muzak is among diners top ten hates.

The Holyhead-Dublin crossing by Irish Ferries Swift is now muzak-free because of the many complaints about the racket from the many speakers. People said that they wanted to relax on the crossing but were unable to do so because of the noise. A spokesman for Irish Ferries said that they had noticed a level of discontent regarding the background music on board the ship so they had turned it off.

Research at Florida Atlantic University examined how fast 45 students wrote essays with and without music playing in the background. It found that playing music slowed students down by 60 words a minute - a significant reduction.

An Austrian study, and one in the US, showed that noise, even at levels too low to damage hearing, causes stress in children. Children living in relatively noisy areas have raised blood pressure, heart rates, and increased levels of stress hormones." More @ Complain About Muzak

LitBlogs and LitCasting will shake the foundations of the empire of books

R.I.P. Robert Creeley

I know it was way back in April but this post got lost on our computer and I feel bad that it never saw the light of day. I wish it was an April Fool. A fabulous poet bites the big one and mainstream America could care less. Read this solid eulogy to Creeley and kick yourself for not knowing more about this great man while he was still alive. Shame on you for reading all those Goosebumps! Creeley's Home Page has many superb obituaries & memorials right now.

A Separatist Thanksgiving

(i don't know what this has to do with anything)
by Michael A. Hoffman II

by all accounts this man appears to be a whackjob but this is still interesting.

"...Tell someone about a separatist Thanksgiving these days and an excitable citizen might just turn you in as an un-American subversive to the "human rights" thought police at the Justice Department.

...the concept that America was founded on the principles of compulsory integration is also looking ever more threadbare.

This is perhaps most apposite during our national Thanksgiving holiday which, when contemplated beyond the culinary silhouette of "Turkey Day," furnishes us with at least a nodding acquaintance with the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock.

...One aspect of the modern disease is the refusal to name a thing. Weasel words are substituted, neologisms are coined and origins are thereby suppressed. We live in the age of compression and abbreviation. We are in too much of a hurry even to call our states by their actual names, so that Pennsylvania becomes PA, Minnesota is MN and our "zip" decodes the resulting enigma with a string of dull numbers..."

A Thanksgiving Pray(sic - rob yer fired) by William S. Burroughs

Thanksgiving is over.
BoingBoing posted this days ago...
The movie isn't even working right now.
But who really cares?!

It's Burroughs!!!
Viva la blog!

Continental Drift - An Interview with Jean Baudrillard

quicklittlebullshit interview from the New York Times from last week

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

..."All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It's a simulation of freedom.

So you don't think that the U.S. invaded Iraq to spread freedom?

What we want is to put the rest of the world on the same level of masquerade and parody that we are on, to put the rest of the world into simulation, so all the world becomes total artifice and then we are all-powerful. It's a game..."Read More

Here's what Wiki has to say about the old Simulator
and here's a nice list of his works available on the web

Lou Reed and Vaclav Havel in conversation

"They're an odd couple.

The retired Czech politician who once led the Velvet Revolution and the aging rock star who once led the Velvet Underground are in Prague for a press conference and, more importantly, an onstage "conversation" at the Švandovo Divadlo theatre.

A broad spectrum of journalists and photographers, ranging from hardcore hacks to the hip and the hairy, has turned out for the press conference, scheduled for 11am in the Opal and Topaz rooms of Andel's Hotel.

Time drags on, and it's 11:28 before Reed and Havel finally appear - first thing you learn is that you always gotta wait.

There's a clamor of oddly hushed photographers, during which Reed does his obligatory rock star bit - telling one female snapper that she's very beautiful - then the press conference begins.

The topic jumps from Havel's plays and Reed's music to contemporary politics and the Velvet Revolution but the only genuinely interesting revelation is that Reed does two hours of t'ai chi every day.

Most of questions are directed at Reed, whose prickly answers justify his pre-match billing as an awkward interviewee. Havel, meanwhile, says very little. It doesn't bode well.

Answering the press conference's final question, Reed says that, if he'd lived under communism, he'd "probably be Kafka", unaware, perhaps, that Franz Kafka never lived under communism..."Reed More Link courtesy of Bookslut's Blog

Soon we won't even have phones anymore, just little chips hardwired into our ear drums...yippee.

This is just too cool. If yer gonna have a freakin' cell phone you might as well go Edison/Bond on the damn thing and trick that little baby out.


"Made from a reconstituted Bluetooth headset and a gentleman’s driving glove (well it had to be didn’t it?) my phone glove will connect to any mobile phone that has Bluetooth. No wires, no plugs. With your phone stashed out of sight you can make and receive calls with your thumb as the speaker and little finger as mic." Read More @ pasta and vinegar: mind/tech bazar from outer space.

This one's for you Dr. Gabbo

Gross
"Sure, podcasting and videocasting may be all the rage--but look out world, because the newest Web 2.0/blogosphere trend is already upon us--baconcasting.

In a blogosphere that leaves no niche unturned, there are already a heaping helping of blogs dedicated to all things bacon--from recipes and restaurant reviews to bacon-related stories and experiences (not to mention Kevin Bacon/Bacon Brothers sightings), everybody's favorite pork-based breakfast meat is one of the web's hottest tags.

To help you make sense of this grease-soaked world of online food coverage, we've prepared this Friday tour of the bacon blogs." Read More...

P.S. This is what Dr. Gabbo looks like, half of him at least. And these are links to his blogs, Spiritual Recycling Warrior, and Poolcasterz. You're a nutball Dr. Gabbo. We should eat peanuts together soon and scratch ourselves and maybe shoot some pool at the redneck bar down the road from my house. Or can you handle the countryside, pretty, pretty, city boy?

DENVER LEGALIZES UP TO AN OUNCE OF REEFER FOR ADULTS 21+!!

No foolin, investigate fer yerself. Thanks for the tip Raph.

Bucky's 42 Hour Magnum Opus

Wow. Thanks Technoccult. Wow. This will take some time.

Turning the Literary Industry On Its Head

We need more serious debate and critique of these topics and whether we have a free press or a privileged press in this great nation. Kudos to King Wenclas for his shrewd skepticism.

some excerpts:
"...David Berman has been house poet at the trendy trust fund lit-journal Open City as well as The Believer...

...Ben Marcus, in his post at Columbia U, and through his friendships, is immersed in establishment cronyism. This is why he couldn't see anything wrong in last year's National Book Awards fiction and poetry awards, which were dominated by the privileged; the winners and many of the nominees coming from the upper levels of society and centered in the city of New York...

...The kind of experimental writing Marcus advocates isn't the same as the ground-up DIY writing experiments a Mark Sonnenfeld or Jack Saunders practices.

Instead, it's a tops-down institutional approach, created in the literary laboratories of academe. It's funded through the same kind of government-academy synthesis that over the years has funded experiments in genetics, space technology, and weapons systems...

...takeover of Critique magazine by a Washington D.C. entity named Heldref which was controlled by noted neo-conservative figure Jeane Kirkpatrick and her husband...

...The title of the Marcus Harper's essay was the hyperbolic "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It."

I wonder: when will this take place? The experimental movement Marcus advocates has been around for over 40 years and had little influence-- it consists of nothing more than stuffy professors in thick-stoned mothballed universities passing hermetic texts back and forth among themselves; the world outside their shuttered windows an unknown realm..."

Read More!

How often has a man gazed out on this dry abstraction anguish makes of a landscape?

from Journal for an Injured Son by Marc Hudson
published by The Lockhart Press in Port Townsend, 1991

This haunting book of poems details the heartbreak and happiness of the blessing/curse of having a child with autism and how, as a parent, it eclipses whatever life you led before. An excellent read.

Sales Tax To Keep Libraries Running

Salinas, California may have come up with the meme to save libraries all over this country. We can only pray the underground librarian network Michael Moore made us joyously aware of is intact, pissed off, and fully operational. Soon Last Word Books can just write its monthly excise tax check directly to the Olympia Public Library!

By Ken McLaughlin
Mercury News

John Steinbeck is probably smiling today.

Voters in the writer's hometown of Salinas on Tuesday approved a half-cent sales tax increase that will keep the city's three libraries open -- including the one that bears the name of the city's native son.
Read more...

link courtesy of

the warhol: Time Capsule 21

Cool interactive site containing Andy Warhol's junk he could never bother to through away. It just goes to show: in fifteen minutes you can collect a large amount of crap.

Olympia Native Son and Poet Comes to LWB

Mark Sargent, self-described"...carpenter, snake oil salesman, street saxophone & combo honk, bartender..." not to mention poet, will be reading at Last Word Books on Friday December 16th. The link fills the blanks.