March 28, 2008

1. Bill Burroughs at Stellan Holm
2. Jasper Johns' Gray at the Met
3. Triple Canopy #1
4. Watching Scarface with Matt & Adam & Sha
5. John Stezaker is Unmonumental, but may be the most interesting thing in the show

March 25, 2008

I'm visiting Matthew Lusk in Brooklyn this week. Sha arrives tonight on the 5:15 from Minneapolis.

1. Preambulated around Greenpoint where I once extendedly crashed on the fold-out couch --which I never folded out--in Mr. Lusk's TV room. That was the summer of 2003.
2. The wood brick cobblestone paving the sidewalk is still there at Noble & West.
3. Watched a couple of at-bats of stickball with guys who were on a lunch break from whatever warehouse they worked in on West.
4. The Weather Records signage is still on the door of 18 Java St.
5. What the hell happened to Franklin St? It got bougie with the hipster coffee houses and bars that plague Wmsburg. My old breakfast place is now a bar with microbrews & internet access.
6. Manhattan Avenue looks the same though.
7. The shop owners still talk to me in Polish first. If I can I'd just rather smile & nod than speak English.
8. Ugly-ass "modern" apartment buildings are fucking up the scenery around McCarren Park.
9. Zywiec beer.
10. Favorite piece of graffiti today so far: "Brooklyn Ain't Brooklyn No More" (on Eckford).
12. My favorite old tag: "Polish Mob 98." I'm going to check if it's still there later.
13. Matt's new cat George is an attention whore. She is demanding I pay her some attention.

March 23, 2008

Remy Thompson takes a look at Juliana Spahr's poem in WORK 2.

March 23, 2008

Lanny Quarles, "Imperfection's Glass," Abraham Lincoln 2 (2008): 30-1.

From eye-rhyme to true rhymes, the sound play makes this poem absolutely fun to read outloud:

according to
the starry
abor tary,
which fleece
as isle dis-
guised, and what
wan mist can
be surmised golden
by miser's lips
now spread up-
on the branch-
ing diligence, (ll.17-28)

March 23, 2008

At least there's no recession in a gift economy.

March 18, 2008

I love Spring in California. People jogging mid-day around Lake Merritt, mudhens looking happy, playground full of kids, and trees beggining to bud. I makes walking to the 57 bus stop so much more pleasant.

March 17, 2008

from Jessica Hagy's blog Indexed

March 13, 2008

WORK no. 2 is now out, featuring K. Silem Mohammad, Jorge Boehringer, CA Conrad & Juliana Spahr. $3 to the address on the sidebar gets you a copy (trades happily accepted). No. 2 will be available soon at Rock Scissors Paper (Oakland), Quimbys (Chicago) & with any luck Bluestockings (NYC) in the very near future.

March 8, 2008.

Jeremy James Thompson, "I'd Like to be Alone," The Bucky Monkey A (2008): 14.

Thompson manages to question the reader's comfort zones from so many angles it feels like an on-slaught.

The running text in brackets gives directions for date rape, murder & body dumping ("[keep a brick handy]. . . [and when she comes to]. . .[smash her face with it]"). The narrator is a racist paranioac ("Look at all them blacks. I can't let them take anything. I'll stop them"). Even the end faux-remorse ("I don't really like saying it but the thought is okay./I'll eventually go back & be more honest") adds to the discomfort of the poem, because it shifts the ideas from fait-accompli to the realm of possible future acts (St. Paul's take on evil thoughts, anybody?).

Thompson here is inacting a poetics of taboo & it's purposefully disturbing. It's a brick in the face when you thoguht you were getting a poem.

March 7, 2008

Kenneth Goldsmith
to read
March 11, 2008 @ 5:30
Mills Hall Living Room
Mills College
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613

Kenneth Goldsmith's writing has been called some of the most "exhaustive and beautiful collage work yet produced in poetry" by Publishers Weekly. The author of nine books of poetry, Goldsmith’s work is also provocative and conceptually ambitious; in Fidget (Coach House, 2000), he set out “to record every move by body made on June 16, 1997” and for Day (The Figures, 2003) Goldsmith retyped an entire issue of the New York Times, part of his project in “uncreativity as a creative practice.” A founding editor of the online archive UbuWeb (ubu.com), Goldsmith is also the host of a weekly radio show on New York City's WFMU and teaches writing at The University of Pennsylvania, where he is a senior editor of PennSound, an online poetry archive.

reception after reading at Luoma/Spahr/Weigl residence
2127 Blake Street in Berkeley
cross street is Shattuck (walkable from downtown Berkeley BART station)

March 6, 2008

Friday

Belles du Jour w/ MC Kitten, the Scenic Sisters, & the Gommoran Social Aid & Pleasure Club ... More $5. Fri., March 7, 9 p.m. Stork Club, 2330 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, 510-444-6174, StorkClubOakland.com.

Sunday

Sun 3/9 9:00 PM 6-10 1510 8th St Performance Space [1510 8th Street Oakland]
three sets of improvised music:

Weasel Walter/Aurora josephson/William Winant/Jacob Lindsay
ed rodriguez and john dieterich (of deerhoof)
John Ingle and Kjell Nordeson duo

March 5, 2008

Wednesday March 5th, starting at 7.30 pm

come to the storefront

at 4038 Martin Luther King Jr. Way at 41st street in Oakland

to participate as audience in readings / alterations of sound space / visuals / performances

by
Ariel Goldberg
David Harrison Horton with Rebecca van de Voort & Michael Carreira
Matthew Post
Erika Staiti

March 4, 2008

I have some work up now at Zafusy.

March 4, 2008

Chad Lietz, Bher (ERG, 2007). 25 pages. $2.

Lietz's chap takes on the form of legal reference books while exploring & mapping out some of the problems with avant/experimentalism & the contradictions apparent in society at large . Printed on translucent vellum, the difficulty of the act of reading the text itself mirrors the concentration that Lietz demands that readers bring to it.

_____
§1235.120. "Inconstancy Defined"
The intellect conspires with dimensional flux/mutability link, giving power to the revolution. Because of this desire for & the rise of feminine political reflex, Frenchness has become provincial (12).

March 1, 2008

I was abroad or in Brooklyn during the whole New Brutalism thing. But judging from this readers list, I certainly missed out on some Bay Area mischief. The Secret Swan series confirms the fact. Although to my credit, I wheat pasted #13 in Harlem on heavy traffic lamp-posts.

March 1, 2008

Ved Prakash Vatuk, Poems of Unkinship (New Delhi: Usha, 1981).

From the introduction:

America is a nation always at war. It began with a war, it expanded itself by conquering others' territories. It always found new frontiers. It conquers space, nature and everything else.

When it's own frontiers were not enough America went abroad and waged wars. It destroyed cultures it never wanted to understand or respect in the name of saving them. In the name of democracy it established dictatorships.

America is a nation which proclaimed all men are created equal while keeping slaves.

America is there to win, to expand, to be successful. Success means power, and money. The fast buck.

America is a land of experts. But experts never get involved in their subjects, especially if they happen to be human. An entamologist may love ants, but I have yet to find an Anthropologist who truly loved the society he studied. And yet who overnight does not declare to be the all-knowing person about his people.

America is the land of salesmen. America is the nation of propaganda. Everything is for sale here, and every lie is to be proved right.