6 AMAZON REVIEWS OF THE CONTAINER STORE: MORE NEEDED

Here is a sampling of the fine to very fine reviews of The Container Store Vols I & II by Joe Hall & Chad Hardy on Amazon.com.

As a consumer, it is incumbent upon you to articulate how this product did or did not meet your expectations. Please write your own review.

Dirk says: “As someone with serious storage needs (I live in a Dutch metropolis most of the year), I have to say this really is as low on the totem pole as one can get. I showed up around a week ago in search of a container to store some of the excess medical supplies I’ve accrued through various conferences over the past year. The exterior of the store should have been enough of a hint. Half the lights in the sign were out, and someone had graffiti-ed the entry display window.”

Tom raves, “Book gave me magic powers based on almost certainly intentional misinterpretation of wishes. Would not recommend. On plus side, poems pretty good.”

MS notes, “As my wife and I passed it–I don’t, now, remember where we were going, only that we didn’t want to go anywhere–there was a woman standing in front of the Container Store, wearing an ascot and a red blazer affixed with a large pendant of tangled gold, arguing with her husband, a short fist of a man. She spoke English in an accent I’ll guess was Armenian, and he did too, and their conversation went like this:

WIFE: We have to go to the Container Store to purchase some organizational materials.
HUSBAND: What?
WIFE: We have to go to the Container Store to purchase some organizational materials.
HUSBAND: What?

Etc.”

Mr. Ditchhook says about the author, “I tolerate such money-grubbing among my more destitute friends (as is plain to see) but abhor it in ultra-rich strangers. However, at this stage Joe is taxing my patience by selling out to those Arkansas bullies. So, buy this book– or these books– if only to burn them outside your next Occupy Walmart protest.”

And R. St Lawrence from Minneapolis lets the world know, “So then, naturally, I ask if she’ll set one aside for me for an hour til I get there. She says, “Our system is not set up to do that.” I tell her that I’ve never head of a store that wouldn’t hold something for a customer for an hour, and again she says, “We have such high volume, our system just isn’t set up to do that.” Huh? Pottery Barn and pretty much every other store will do that. I told her that it doesn’t even involve “the system,” since all she has to do is take one and stick it behind the counter, and again she says, like some kind of robot, “Our system is not set up to do that.”"

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Reading Tonight + Guys Named Dan Vote Yes For Pigafetta

Hey, you should come out tonight and get drinks at the Black Squirrel before Doug Lang, David Keplinger, Gregory Pardlo, Romala D, and “Joe Hall” read.

Thanks to Barrelhouse for the invitation. Details here.

And if you’ve  heard me read before, tonight will be substantially different. I’ll have a cold.

Also, thanks to Dan Brady for the incredibly kind words RE: Pigafetta.

And woefully belated thanks to Dan Ford for his review over at his blog Sounding Line.

Two Guys Named Dan

CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS & THE DEAD ON OCTOPUS & HTML GIANT

 

I don’t know why anyone cares what I have to say but they are putting up with it at HTML Giant and Octopus (where I get fuzzy about one of my favorite books no one knows about–Paul Blackburn’s The Journals). And hey–whatdya know–while you’re there also check out outstanding by Julie Doxsee, Molly Gaundry, J. Michael Martinez, etc.

Over at HTML Giant Robb St. Lawrence and Danika pitched in on a collaborative review of Chris Tonelli’s The Trees Around (Birds LLC). I was mostly the straight man here but thanks to Robb and Danika  challenging things are said about logopoetics, first books, and sadism.

Here’s a gem from Robb:

Because I’ve been reading Paul Mann’s book Masocriticism, I’ve been interested in the intersection of masochism and cultural production.  We could potentially group most poetry as motivated by either a sadopoetics or a masopoetics.  Of the two, the masopoetics would probably encompass those “complex conceptually…balletic strings of association,” as they submit themselves to structures and patterns that the poet encounters in the World; the sadopoetics of someone like Chris Tonelli, however, attempt the regulation of that World, to become master of it.  In Trees’ case, the thought tends to want to make it clear to us that one is not in control (but in the process, of course, yearning toward its own sort of mastery, and a reflection of the drive toward such).

So…is it possible for a young poet to write logopoetic poetry without gesturing toward how absurd it is to claim to know?  I would say that it is, but that when it does, it happens in the midst of a foregrounding of much larger structures.  This is the masochist in me.

And another from Danika:

Eeyore was always my favorite Winnie the Pooh character. Eeyore has a place in the canon. He acts as foil to the rest of the song-and-dance group and is the only character who internalizes his world and his place in it. He makes the 100 acre woods three-dimensional because he shades shit in. Like Eeyore’s, Tonelli’s poetics struggle with existentialism. “It is odd to be in this world,/so there must be another where we belong” (p. 15). The whole book is about how the brain is always thinking hard and it’s the only way we exist, which makes us separate from the actual WORLD. Oh, bother. That’s how shit is. “What ARE you going to do?” Nothin.

Thanks again to Danika & Robb for their help–and Ryan for plugging me into this. & Birds & Chris T for answering questions about their process.