William Stobb

The Mound Over the Burial Vault by William Stobb

A Review of Miranda July's The Future Miranda July strikes me as the rare truly original thinker, whose creative impulses don’t conform, at crucial moments, to generic conventions.   I enjoyed her 2005 feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know , and her 2007 book of short stories, No One Belongs Here More Than You .   Her new movie, The Future , was recently released on video, and I can’t say I’ve been looking forward to any art event more than I’ve been looking forward to seeing this film.   At first glance, those high expectations may have been an obstacle for me—and, possibly, for many fans of July.   Though the film has a similar feel to July’s other work, it’s darker, less fun, and less hopeful.   Ultimately, I respect the artistry of July’s storytelling, here, and find the movie truly challenging and valuable--an examination of our post-millennial moment.   On the brink of collapse, how are we to behave?   What value do our commit...

MiPOradio is setting up on Soundcloud-- link here --and is featuring archived episodes of my podcast, "Hard to Say."  Right now, you'll find my review of the Norton anthology, American Hybrid , "The Idea of a Hybrid Poetic," my early review of Tao Lin's first book, You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am , a segment called "Live Noise," produced out of audio from a multi-media event in Portland, part of my book tour for Nervous Systems , and one of my favorite episodes, "The Defense of Meaning: Encountering Dada," in which you can hear amazing recordings of early Dada texts by Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters, performed by Anat Pick.  All free and easy, via Soundcloud's fun, accessible web presentation.  Check it out!

Published on Airplane Reading .  Here. This essay, entitled "Stations," honors the work of late poet and professor, Jay Meek, whose 1989 book,  Stations , seems to find its way into my backpack whenever I travel.  The piece also drifts back to my days waiting tables at the Columbia Road Perkins in Grand Forks, ND.  Sunday morning, breakfast rush, slammed.  Been there?  Then you know it gets hairy.

Interview footage plus a reading of the poem, "Absentia."  Words, music, and images written, recorded and produced by William Stobb.  Film shot on my low-res camera at Turtle River State Park, west of Grand Forks, ND.  Music composed and recorded at Larry and Kathy Houser's home in Park River, ND, 10/14 - 10/15, 2011.

“The grief-stricken survivor at the end of the world is not someone I identify with, unless I go to Whole Foods or a party or something.” That’s Colson Whitehead in a recent Harper’s interview, talking about his forthcoming novel, Zone One , the most recent manifestation of our current Zombiegeist.   Another day, another zombie.   Obviously, human fascination with monsters and the undead in particular is an enormous topic, with a rich history, and I’m not pretending to engage that in any thorough way, here.   I just have an intuition about our current zombiphilia.   If it’s bullshit, or so obvious that it’s not worth saying, my bad.   Basically, I think zombies today spark a horrible feeling of correspondence in many of us.   We see mindless creatures of pure appetite, staggering through the apocalypse, and we recognize ourselves.   We can’t turn away.   And I think that this is a slightly different motivation than zombie audie...

I love the  Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.  It's been a semi-religious place for me, since my early twenties, when I had a typical young person's crush on the abstract expressionists, and I saw the Walker as the one place in the world that really got me.  I'm a little less brooding now, but I still make it to the Walker about once a year, and it's always a highlight for me.  I've really enjoyed seeing their collections grow, and seeing them reconfigured, so that familiar works are viewed in a new light.   When I was there last week, I saw the current show, “Absentee Landlord,” which was curated by the radical writer and film-maker John Waters .   I don’t keep close tabs on Walker acquisitions, but it looked like the show was primarily work from the permanent collection, just re-mixed according to Waters’s   sense of what would be cool--like taking all your old songs and making a new mix tape in the hopes that everything will seem ne...

M AN  sits in pizzeria with pizza wrapped around his feet                         WOMAN enters pizzeria PIZZA GUY is behind the counter PIZZA GUY [as WOMAN enters] Welcome to Miraculous Pizza! WOMAN Thanks!   Do you have any specials today?   [notices MAN with pizza slices wrapped around his feet]   Whoa!   Dude!   Why do you have pizza slices on your feet? MAN When my Gout acts up, I just come to Miraculous Pizza.   Their slices have healing properties. WOMAN [to PIZZA GUY] Is that true? PIZZA GUY Of course!   Yeah!   It’s totally true.   [Gestures for WOMAN  to come closer, then whispers]   No, it’s not true.   At least not that I know of.   But what am I gonna do?   He’s my coursin. WOMAN Good point.   Well, I’ll take a classic Chicago slice.   Pepperoni.   M...

From "Doom" Doom is the law book of King Alfred the Great, circa 900 CE.   This book is so awesome that the Ten Commandments are the preface .   That would be my blurb for it: "this book is so awesome that...."  Doom means something like “law” or “judgment” to King Alfred because language evolves over time.   Wikipedia provides the example “Doom very evenly!   Do not doom one doom to the rich and another to the poor!”   King Alfred rated honesty pretty highly: “if he belie himself and be slain, let him lie uncompensated,” and it’s ironic that I get a very doomy image from that of a big red-bearded Viking guy lying in the mud, bleeding out from a sword wound, blinking his last blinks knowing that no one has prayed for him in the way you need to be prayed for if you’re going to heaven.   And the camera pans out up into the sky and into our solar system and our galaxy and our universe, but the heavy string music continues over top of all of it because ...

Roundhouse Productions Presents the World Premiere of Predator: The Musical July 15 - August 13, 2011 New Rock Theater, Chicago, Illinois, USA, Earth Written by David Krump, William Stobb, and Will Bulka Directed by Derek Elstro Music by Will Bulka Tickets at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/ , keyword "Predator the Musical"   July 15 - August 13, 2011 New Rock Theater, Chicago, Illinois, USA, Earth Fridays and Saturdays at 9:30 PM Based on the 1987 Fil m Predator , but re-imagined and re-booted with original words and songs. A special operations team, sent  on a covert mission in the jungle, encounters a seemingly unstoppable force, determined to hunt and kill them all.  The action-packed race for survival features a soundtrack ranging from early punk rock to R & B. Predator: The Musical fl ips both modern musicals and fi lm-to-stage adaptations on their heads making this production one of a kind.    Featuring: Lance Newton (Dillon) Glenese...

Can a poem connect to the expansive sense of time and distance one encounters in the desert?  In composing the poems in my book, Artifact Eleven (Black Rock Press 2011), I sought a new process for engaging desert experience.  I'd always "written" "about" or "from" desert experience, in first-person pieces like "Little Disintegration" or "The Pinky of Great Sugi" ( American Poetry Review 2009 and 2011, respectively).  Much as I value those pieces, I've felt a desire to find a new method that might get the poem beyond the restraint of the singular perceiver standing at the poem's center. In Artifact Eleven , I connect a variety of source texts (Sessions Wheeler's history of the black rock desert, notes from a day trip with naturalists William Fox and Alvin McLane, John McPhee's Basin and Range , Michael Heizer's artworks and writings) with a variety of personal texts drawn from desert experiences, to create asse...

Lights up on interrogation room, dim lighting except spotlight on SUSPECT   SUSPECT is visibly afraid DETECTIVE ONE is slick and intimidating DETECTIVE TWO lurks in the background SUSPECT It was just cheese!   I swear to God!       DET. ONE Just cheese, huh?   Well then how do you explain this ?! DETECTIVE ONE reaches across the table and grabs SUSPECT’s shirt, revealing a big blobby white stain.                         SUSPECT All right.   All right.   It was squeeze cheese.                         DET. ONE Liar!  [sniffs stain]  Think I don't know what yogurt smells like?  DETECTIVE ONE begins to throttle SUSPECT.            ...

In Basin and Range , John McPhee explains that, for the most part, we're capable of living with five generations in our minds--our own, two before us and two in the future.  Meanwhile, the Earth is telling us a story in hundreds of millions of years.  "Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time.  Any number above a couple thousand years--fifty thousand, fifty million--will... awe the imagination to the point of paralysis." Applying the Bible story of creation's seven days to the geological evidence of 4.5 billion years, McPhee concludes that Jesus appeared at one fourth of a second before midnight on Saturday, the seventh day.  McPhee quotes David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club: "at one fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began.  We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing in that one fortieth of  second can go on indefinitely.  They are considered n...

Mojo magazine recently celebrated the 25th Anniversary of The Smiths' fabulous album, The Queen is Dead .  The issue features a calendar of the Smiths' Meat is Murder tours, during which the songs for Queen were written and recorded.  In an insightful essay, Jon Savage explores the album's political / cultural significance.  His take is really interesting, and illustrates the continuing relevance of the album: when the cultural mainstream is uptight and dangerously self-interested, how does one become a true individual?  It's a great issue, and it's satisfying for someone like me (I had the huge Queen is Dead poster on the wall in my dorm room, circa 1990) to see music that meant a lot to me continue to be appreciated.  But that's not why I'm writing this post.  Two moments in the magazine's spread really struck me.  One was Smiths fan Bernard Butler's breathless description of Johnny Marr, Smiths guitarist, during a performance of "Bigm...

Are we dumber?  It's a question we're asking ourselves all the time now.  I encountered the query most recently in an episode of Californication , when struggling novelist Hank Moody (David Duchovny) laments the deterioration of the English language represented by such acronyms as LOL, BRB and even BJ.  I'm not a big fan of language policing, and I tend not to worry about the surface manifestations of linguistic evolution.  But the episode got me thinking about the larger question, again: despite the various acoutrements of "developed" economies, are we actually less advanced than previous generations?  Are "advancements" really regressions?  Are we dumber? Midwestern Americans of my generation arrived just a little too late to have much say in this debate.  By the time we matured, we were reacting.  Corporate farming had overtaken the family farm ideal.  Our parents had moved into town, gotten ...

As Associate Editor of the best literary magazine out there, Conduit , I am frequently met at my front door by a box of poetry and fiction submissions.  It is my job to fairly ruthlessly cut a box of a hundred or so submissions down to the best ten or twenty, and then pass them up the editorial chain of command.  This process is meaningful to me in myriad ways, and I may, on occasion, use this blog as a space to work through observations that arise out of editing for Conduit .   Last week, I worked through a box of submisisons in four work sessions--reading about 25 submissions in each two-to-three-hour sitting.  I try to work quickly but carefully, to remain open to my own interests as I work, and to allow myself to pursue tangential energies as they arise.  For example, I often find people's cover letters interesting, and I might take a moment to look up the website of a writer w...