November 20, 2008

I am happy to announce the arrival of WORK no. 11, featuring Linda Russo, Dana Teen Lomax, Sean Hill, Lara Durback, and Francis Raven. No. 11 comes complete with a specially designed and pressed cover by Lara Durback.

WORK is available at Issues in Oakland & at Quimby's in Chicago. Copies are available direct from my studio apartment for $3 or trade (preferable) via:

dhh / 230 Wayne Avenue #311 / Oakland CA 94606.

November 19, 2008

Oakland, CA: Watershed Public Art Markers
SF Bay Area

Bay Area artists are invited to apply for the opportunity to design an interpretive public art marker that celebrates and identifies the role of the watershed systems of Oakland, California, including creeks, lakes, and the estuary. The selected artist will create a prototype of the art marker and will fabricate and install the first series of markers based on this prototype at various key locations in the Oakland watershed systems. Project Budget: $92,000. All applications must be submitted through CaFÉ ( www.callforentry.org ). Look under “CaFÉ Listings” to find this opportunity.

Oakland is home to 15 main creeks and over 40 smaller tributaries, all of which play a vital role in the city’s health and well-being. These waterways provide plant and wildlife habitat, stormwater transport, flood management and water cleansing functions as well as valuable recreational and aesthetic benefit for Oakland residents. Although historically contiguous from the Oakland Hills to the San Francisco Bay, all of Oakland’s creeks are now partially or extensively buried or diverted into culverts and storm drains. Their lack of visibility in certain areas of the city reduces overall understanding of their role and value. To enhance the historic, cultural, aesthetic and interpretive potential of the often-overlooked creeks system and the city’s “crown jewel,” Lake Merritt, a total of $92,000 ($72,000 from Creeks Restoration and $20,000 from Lake Merritt capital projects) has been allocated to commission an artist to create a prototype of an interpretive artwork marker that will identify the location of creek nodes and draw attention to the value of the creek habitats that exist throughout the city. A Request for Qualifications can be downloaded at: http://www.oaklandculturalarts.org/main/callforartists.htm
Applications are to be submitted only through www.callforentry.com no paper submissions will be reviewed. The Oakland, CA: Watershed Public Art Markers project is funded through the Oakland Trust for Clean Water & Safe Parks (Measure DD). This $198.25 million dollar bond is funding a comprehensive ten-year plan to clean up and restore Lake Merritt, the Oakland Estuary Waterfront, and Oakland's creeks system by improving land/water quality and expanding recreational facilities and opportunities for Oakland citizens.

Deadline: 02-06-2009
City of Oakland, California
Oakland

Contact: Christin Hablewitz
email: chablewitz@oaklandnet.com
Phone: 510-238-2105

November 19, 2008

Erika Staiti's Issue 2

November 18, 2008

Holy Smokes! David Byrne and Johnny Marr in their 1988 selves certainly seem relevant to 2008. Pause on the texts, and read them. Again, Holy Smokes!

November 18, 2008

In print, in English, I find the word

Beijing

with its three dotted letters in a row somehow aesthetically pleasing.

November 16, 2008

David Harrison Horton, Benjamin Pérez, and Jason Morris
at
Canessa Gallery Reading Series
Nov. 22, 8 PM

What:

Sometimes you just have to shoot from the hip. Bad boy poets Benjamin L. Pérez, David Harrison Horton, and Jason Morris hit us with their best shot in this evening of “(m)ad libs,” the fifth installment of the Canessa Gallery Reading Series.

An artist, curator, and writer, David Harrison Horton edits the zine WORK and co-edits (with Stephanie Young) Deep Oakland. His paintings, sculptures, sound installations, and videos have been exhibited in New York, Berlin, Paris, Caracas, Minneapolis and San Francisco. He curated the Salon Salon Reading and Performance Series in Oakland and is the author of the chaps Pete Hoffman Days and BeiHai, and the limited edition altered book project Stein's Tender Buttons. His creative work has been published in Cricket, Femme Toupee, and Alice Blue among others. He currently lives and writes in a tiny studio apartment that overlooks Lake Merritt in Oakland, California.

Benjamin L. Pérez teaches American History and English at Expression College for Digital Arts. He earned his BA in Religious Studies at UC Berkeley and holds advanced degrees in Native American Studies from UCLA and American History from UC Davis; he received his MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College. Pérez’s poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in various academic and popular print and online publications, including Watchword, Sacramento News and Review (SN&R), Cricket Online Review (COR), the American Indian Culture and Research Journal (AICRJ), and Ishmael Reed’s Konch. In 2005, Spuyten Duyvil published his experimental and transgressive work, The Evil Queen: A Pornolexicology, which made Dennis Cooper’s top-10 list for that year. He is currently putting the final touches on a “bi-textual” work: CUNTIONARY/Repent at Your Leisure (or The Folklore of Hell).

Jason Morris was born in Vermont in 1977. His poems have appeared in Mirage #4 Period(ical), Forklift Ohio, TRY, Salt Hill & elsewhere. He is the editor of Big Bell Magazine.

WHEN:

Saturday, November 22, 8pm

WHERE:

Canessa Gallery, 708 Montgomery Street, SF

Open to the public ($3 suggested). For more information the public may visit www.canessa.org

November 14, 2008

1. Field recorded the 9th Street Farmers' Market. It's technically in "Old Oakland" but is very much the Chinatown Farmers' Market.
2. Went to Goodwill and bought Dylan Thomas' Deaths and Entrances. I see what he's up to & am glad we don't write like that anymore. The shape poems suffer, and the poems before that are stiff, uncomfortable in their shirts.
3. Busride to work on which I learned a fair amount about White supremicist groups, thanks to a pamphlet that the Simon Wiesenthal Center put out: The New Lexicon of Hate. Also bought at Goodwill.
4. WORK itself.
5. Worked on getting Chad Lietz's Canoizonata up on the Deep Oakland. 3 of 5 files are there. Come back soon for the rest.
6. Went to the printer's with the inside text of WORK no. 11. It promises to be stellar.
7. While waiting for the printer to xerox my order, I went back to the Goodwill. I found & bought Ron Padgett & David Shapiro, An Anthology of New York Poets (Vintage, 1970) for $1.29. Maybe the current generation does need more anthologies. Cough. Also bought two short-sleeved shirts. I like one more than the other.
8. Went to De Lauer's. Post-going broke they have minimalized. Except for the new rack of Spartacist revolutionary material. In addition to Cabinet, I bought nearly everything in the new revolutionary lit category to see what they are about.
9. Coversation at JD & Chad's.
10. Chad & I at the Parkway Lounge for their schizophrenic jukebox. Gameplanning next Sunday's Canessa Reading. It'll sure be something.

November 13, 2008

The crowd at the Mixing Bowl reading last night was standing room only; literally, I was standing by the door because it was so packed. It's nice to see the Oakland writing community come out like that for a relatively new reading series.

November 11, 2008

After trading away half the team mid-way through last season, the A's are trying to get some bats, which is good. No word on a bullpen yet, other'n Huston Street is on the block, which seems reasonable given his post All-Star game stats. The owner is still trying to move to Fremont, which is idiotic.

November 10, 2008

This Sunday, November 16th
6:30pm, $3 to $infinity sliding scale
at 21 Grand Gallery on 416 25th Street in Oakland, Calif.

Jaime Cortez and "The Perfume Recordist," by Lisa Robertson and Stacy Doris


JAIME CORTEZ is a cultural worker based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His writing has appeared in a dozen anthologies. Jaime's visual art has been exhibited at numerous California galleries. He was the editor of the anthology Virgins, Guerrillas & Locas. Cortez has worked as a high school teacher in Japan and at the AIDS Memorial Quilt and Galería De La Raza. Jaime has lectured on art and activism at Stanford, Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He is currently preparing a manuscript for The Jesus Donut, his first collection of short stories,slated for publication in 2009 by Suspect Thoughts Press.

THE PERFUME RECORDIST was born from the confused and wildly charged encounter of waves and molecules, a tardive yet opulent (voir peonylike or Venutian) offshoot of early twentieth century Quantum Physics, her roots winnowing back to the great Physic of Avicenna, foundational to Well Being as one would wish to know it, yet in coyest contradiction to the contradiction of Aristotle's Metaphysics. In other words, in a flagrant refutation of what's commonly known as logic, the Perfume Recordist finds it her vocation to be beaten and burned until she demonstrates that to be beaten has indeed much in common with being burned, and to be burned has much in common with beating. These beatings and burnings join in layers of raptures, though the Recordist assiduously attempts to avoid both alchemy and redemption in her ecologies of (re)constitutions. The forging of senses entails forgeries? Ha !

http://newyipes.blogspot.com

November 9. 2008

Books I've been reading this semester:

Ezra Pound, Translations (New Directions, 1963)
Michael Basinski, All My Eggs are Broken (BlazeVox, 2007)
O Sirhan, O Sirhan #2
John Gay, The Beggar's Opera (Harlan Davidson, 1966)
Ron Silliman, Xing (repr. Silliman, 2004)
Ron Silliman, Under Albany (Salt, 2004)
The Holy Bible (RSV)
Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire (Penguin Classics, 1979)
Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping, eds. The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2005)
Herbert Aptheker, ed. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. vol. 3, 1910-1932 (Citadel Press, 1977)
Ron Silliman, Tjanting (Salt, 2002)
Jack Morgan, The Haunting of Ninja Town (ms. which someone should publish soon)
Geof Huth, Longfellow Memoranda (Otoliths, 2008)
Osvald Siren, The Chinese Art of Painting (Hong Kong UP, 1963)
K. Silem Mohammad, Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003).
Sembene Ousmane, Tribal Scars (Heinemann, 1974)
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (Little Brown, 2000).
Hung Lou Meng, The Dream of the Red Chamber (Universal Library, 1971)
Spencer Selby, The Big R (Angle, 1998)
Bradley Lastname, Your Pretty Typeface is Going to Hell (The Press of the Third Mind, 2008)
Geof Huth, ghostlight
Geof Huth & mIEKAL aND, Texistence (Xerox Sutra, 2008)
Geof Huth, Visible Word, Sound (pdqb, 2008)
K. Silem Mohammad, Breathalizer (Edge, 2008)
Spencer Selby, Flush Contours (Otoliths, 2007)
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (McGraw-Hill, 1964)
Sara Mumolo, Brain in a Vat (Stormy Petrel, 2008)
David Bernstein et al., The San Francisco Tape Music Center ( Univ of California P., 2008)
Jason McGrath, Postcolonial Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford UP, 2008)
Judith Goldman, Vocoder (Roof, 2001)
Charles Harrison, Essays on Art & Language (MIT, 2001)
Edgar White, Underground: Four Plays (William Morrow, 1970)
John Ashberyy, Houseboat Days (Viking, 1977)
Isiah Berlin, Karl Marx, 4th ed. (Oxford UP, 1978)
Tony Perniciaro, Tony the Bricklayer (Delacorte, 1972)
Truong Tran, Four Letter Words (Apogee, 2008)
Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies (Persea, 1998)
Mills College Art Museum, The Offering Table (Mills College, 2008)
Paula Cisewski, Upon Arrival (Black Ocean, 2006)
Carolyn Keene, The Message in Hollow Oak (Grosset & Dunlap, repr. 1972)
John Ashberry, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975)
Carl Sandburg, The Complete Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, 1970)
Barrett Watten, Bad History (Atelos, 1998)
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (Perrenial Classics, 1994)
Kenward Elmslie, Routine Disruptions (Coffee House, 1998)
Julia C. Lin, Modern Chinese Poetry: An Introduction (Univ of Washington P, 1973)
Alan Watts, The Book (Vintage, 1972)
Carolyn Keene, Mystery at the Ski Jump (Grosset & Dunlap, repr. 2005)
Herman Hesse, Magister Ludi (Ungar, 1965)
Saint Augustine, Confessions (Penguin, 1984)
Young-Ha Him, I Have a Right to Destroy Myself (Harvest, 2007)
The Song of God Bhagavad-Gita (Vedanta Society; repr. Mentor, 1951?)
Mary Ann Caws, ed., Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Univ. of Nebraska, 2001)
Jasper Bernes, Starsdown (ingurim, 2007)
Kenko. Essays in Idleness, trans. Donald Keene (Columbia Univ., 1998)

November 9, 2008

I think Dillon Westbrook has summed things up quite nicely.

November 4, 2008

Staring at the US map now for hours, I began to become painfully aware of the states I haven't been in: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho (?), Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine. I've not been to 7 states on the mainland & 9 out of 50 in all.

Looking northward to Canada, I haven't been to Yukon, Northwest Territories (homeland of my Uncle Ronny), Nunavut, Newfoundland & Labrador, New Bruinswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island: 7/13 (54%).

These maps make me itch for an extended North American road trip.

November 4, 2008

I find it strange that they called the election at exactly 11:00 EST (8 PST). Were they just waiting for California's polls to close? We use paper ballots and 0% of precints have reported.

At any rate, I hope this marks a radical rupture in the way that the US conducts its business, both domestically and globally.

November 3, 2008

The Oakland Tribune jacked their newsstand price 50% over the weekend from 50¢ to 75¢. I think they are trying to kill their paper edition.

November 3, 2008

Boog Reader # 8 is now online with Bill Luoma's Dear Filesystem Panic and Juliana Spahr's Gender Trouble, which is a shortish auto-biography of her time in grad school at SUNY-Buffalo.

November 1, 2008

C'mon vote no on 8.

This is about equal treatment of folks under the law.

If your church doesn't marry gay couples then fine. That's freedom of religion. That doesn't mean the state shouldn't. To disallow the rights that married couples have (like hospital visitation rights, inheritance, . . . ) to other couples--these don't involve your church or your stance. They simply hurt couples and their families.