March 9, 2012

Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, trans. Max Eastman (1937; repr. Dover, 2004 ).

"They [the youth] have, thus, but three possibilities open to them: participate in the bureaucracy and make a career; submit silently to oppression, retire into economic work, science or their own petty personal affairs; or, finally, go underground and learn to struggle and temper their character for the future" (123).

August 6, 2011

Cyrus Console, Brief Under Water (Burning Deck, 2008).

Terse. Tense. Vigorous writing.

I have a feeling that Cyrus was appropriating Nirvana rather than Leadbelly on page 50: "Don't you lie to me. Tell me where did you sleep last night."

Notwithstanding, very tight.

July 18, 2011

George Orwell, Why I Write (Penguin, 1984).

Orwell posits that there are four simultaneous reasons why someone is given to writing: 1) sheer egotism, 2) aesthetic enthusiasm, 3) historical impulse, and 4) political purpose (pp. 4-5).

I had fun trying how my motivations fall into this rubric.

May 25, 2011

Paul Gellman qtd. in Chris Krause, Where Art Belongs (Semiotext[e], 2011), 36.

"Being a good collage/assemblage artist requires being a good scavenger. As you walk down the filthy streets outside your hovel you are probably feeling depressed because for one you live in a hovel, or you are affecting an air of the disaffected, or you are experiencing a fall out from some drug you've been binging on for the past weekend, week, month ... Use your downward gaze as an opportunity to see the beautiful detritus that our polluted city offers ... Begin to see recurring themes, colors, shapes in the pieces of trash your eye is drawn to. If you are attracted to something, it is because in some way it represents you and the more you learn about yourself the more freedom you have from said hovel."
_______
And she shows you where to look
among the garbage and the flowers
--Leonard Cohen

May 25, 2011

Started reading Chris Kraus', Where Art Belongs (Semiotext[e], 2011) on the train to work today and was thinking that what she did to document the importance of the Tiny Creatures gallery in LA (9-43) really needs to be done for 21 Grand in Oakland.

May 15, 2011

In case you didn't see it on the Harriet blog, the Fluxus Reader is now a free pdf.

February 7, 2011

1. Dan Murphy did a real good job of giving us Hai Zi (海子) in English with Over Autumn Rooftops (Host, 2010). Active in Beijing in the 80s until his suicide at age 25, Hai Zi wrote a lot about wheat, standing in for everything from homesickness to lust. Fluid translation, and an important work for anyone interested in contemporary Chinese poetry and poetics.

2. My company is somehow saying that a bill for my time in hospital isn't enough to excuse me for the days I had off. I have to go back and ask the doctor to write me a doctor's note.

3. I've been reading Popular Science. The near future could really be much better.

4. I've lost all contact with Eric King, an artist I knew in Oakland. I hope to remedy that.

January 23, 2011

Picked up a few things from the Xidan bookstore the other day. They're all books I've read before but haven't read in a while:

Beowulf, trans. Michael Alexander (Penguin Epics, 2006)
Hergé, The Black Island (Little, Brown, 1966)
Albert Camus, The Outsider, trans. Joseph Laredo (Penguin Classics, 2000)
Thomas Mallory, Le Morte D'Arthur (Norton Critical, 2004)
Jean Toomer, Cane (1923; repr. Norton Critical, 1988)

January 19, 2011

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (Hill and Wang, 1975).

"It can't be helped: boredom is not simple. We do not escape boredom (with a work, a text) with a gesture of impatience or rejection. Just as pleasure of the text supposes a whole indirect production, so boredom cannot presume it is entitled to any spontaneity: there is no sincere boredom: if the prattle-text bores me personally, it is because in reality I do not like the demand. But what if I did like it (if I had some maternal appetite)? Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure (25-6)."

December 14, 2010

Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (Lukas & Sternberg, 2009).

The three sections of this book are informed by Bourriaud's reading of three figures: Victor Segalen, Marcel Duchamp and Louis Althusser. Bourriaud critiques the post-modernist period for falling into an identity politics that played more to tokenism and marginalization than creating a system for inclusion and evaluation. His answer draws on the plant world: artists need to root (even if temporarily) in other cultures and translate the new culture into their modus operandi. That he thinks cultural translation is a new idea is odd considering his in depth discussion of Modernism's problems (Pound, for one thought we could draw on just more than European traditions). He even points to Duchamp in New York as an example of the "semionaut" artist he is championing.

October 14, 2010

Danil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing, trans. Matvei Yankelevich (Ardis, 2009). I'm not sure where I came across Kharms' name, but this book arrived in the mail today. This writing is absolutely brutal. Take for instance "Sonnet" (48). A group of people forget which number comes after 6 -- is it 7 or 8? They go to a grocer to ask, but she offers conflicting nonsensical information, so they go to a park to count trees, but begin arguing after they reach the tree after 6. The argument is broken ("luckily") by a child breaking "both" its jawbones.

Kharms (1905-42) helped found the OBERIU (Union of Real Art) movement in the Soviet Union.

October 6, 2010

An interesting piece on Black identity and body image in 1950s-80s Oakland. Nerdy Jennifer, Frankie: An African-American Tragedy (Regent, 2004; link courtesy of Deep Oakland).

October 5, 2010

Killing the time waiting for my landlord to swing by to collect six months' rent by reading Brandon Brown's Camels! (Taxt, 2008; link courtesy of Deep Oakland). Superb writing.

October 4, 2010

Reread Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems on an all night, 13 hour, hard seat train from Beijing to Inner Mongolia. Even with all the references to China that happen here and there, seldom has my reading material been at such a disconnect with my surroundings:

and then in Harbin I knew
how to behave it was glorious that
was love sneaking up on me through the snow
and I felt it was because of all
the postcards and smiles and kisses and the grunts
that was love but I kept on traveling

--"Mary Desti's Ass"

I read Schopenhauer's On the Suffering of the World on the way back. That was more in line with my surroundings, if not my mood.

September 10, 2010

Dongpin Han, The Unkown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village (Monthly Review, 2008).

Mobo Gao, The Battle for China's Past: Mao & the Cultural Revolution (Pluto, 2008).

In both these books, the authors argue that the rural poor's lives were greatly improved during the Cultural Revolution and that a wholesale re-evaluation of that time period is necessary. But what I think makes this new trend in Chinese historical thought interesting is that it comes in an era when the current economic and governmental structure have allowed the wealth gap to go beyond the recognized warning levels on the Gini Coefficient scale. I expect a lot more work in this vein, as direct criticism of Beijing's current policies may result in punishment; whereas, pointing out how many of the Cultural Revolution's policies focused directly, however flawed, on uplifting the rural poor and actually attained some of those goals (education) isn't really going to ruffle too many feathers.

September 22, 2008

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964).

I've been slowly re-reading this, chapter by chapter. I read it as an undergrad, but don't think I got how forward-thinking McLuhan actually was being looking backwards, coming up to the present [1964]:

"The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered. For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed" (64).

If we consider that most of the day-to-day "technological advances" have their roots in the military industrial complex &/or NASA (ie, the military), this plays out to McLuhan's cue: cell phones, the internet, the microwave oven . . . . Military technological advances have completely changed the way that damnear most Americans function in the world, and this is the unintended by-product: workers on call literally 24/7, the invisible labor of checking emails after work hours, the demise of the actual lunch HOUR, near ubiquitous (and for the most part accepted) visual, audio, internet, & telephonic surveillance, et cetera et cetera.

Thanks, I'd rather do without TANG.

September 16, 2008

Deep Oakland Editions is proud to announce the release of Barbara Jane Reyes' West Oakland Sutra for the AK-47 Shooter at 3:00 AM and other Oakland poems.

September 1, 2008

I had planned on biking to the beach in Alameda this Labor Day, but a vague urgent email from Michael Carreira led me to Albany. It was a false emergency, but I did get to see Mr. Carreira, Mr. King, Mr. Manlio & Mr. Prischmann.

Getting to Albany (a terrible & longish bus ride from my digs in Oakland) allowed me to read a good chunk of Geof Huth's Longfellow Memoranda (Otoliths, 2008). Otoliths makes beautiful books. In my pile of things to review is Spencer Selby's exquisite book of full color plated visual poems Flush Contour (2007).

Huth's book began as process by material.

He bought a 1917 diary book that also had a Longfellow snippet for each day of the year. The 1917 days apparently reckoned equal to 2007 days, and he planned on using it as a diary of sort, but the previous owner used it to record births, birthdays etc. . . He even gives us a facsimile page of the original document to the start of each month to see how he boils down or reacts to the Longfellow: the process is laid bare.

But all the entries read through are far from a modern (mis)translation of the text they purport to derive from. Each poem is a minamilist piece that works towards a minimalist whole.

***

When I go downtown on the bus, I always stop at the Goodwill to look through their books:

Osvald Siren, The Chinese Art of Painting (Schocken, 1963).
Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping eds, The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, the Full 3000-Year Tradition (Anchor, 2005).

While it may be a little early to know who are the successors of the Misty Poets, it must be said that the Misty Poets are not the contemporaries of the poets currently working in China.

August 9, 2008

Brion Gysin, Turning into the Multimedia Age, edited by Jose Ferez Kuri (Thames & Hudson, 2003).

I first learned about Brion Gysin via Wm. Burroughs & their cut-up projects they did back in the late 50s (I managed to interlibrary loan a first (only?) edition of Minutes to Go when I was an undergraduate), working my way to his permutation poems which I still find fascinating to hear & to read aloud:

kick that habit man
that kick habit man
kick habit that man
habit kick that man . . .

and once I learned of the Dreamachine, I fruitlessly tried to convince any sculptor I knew with sufficient skills & technology to build one.

This book traces Gysin's art career from his days as a surrealist, cut-up artist, visual poet, minimalist water colorist, etc. . . touching on the many phases of his long career. Beuatilfully illustrated, this does a good job as a restrospective catalogue. The essays are for the most part shortish and surface, more intro than delving.

This coupled with Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader offer a better than good introduction to Gysin's approach to the arts.

July 14, 2008

Chris Stroffolino, Emeryvilification Manifesto, Local Manifesto Series (Art for a Democratic Society, 2007). 7 pages. Free.

I picked this up at Rock Scissors Paper for free. In it, Stroffolino calls for "something sustainable to stand between the frying pan and the fire, Someting between the EXPENSIVE AND DRAB luxury Condos and the SQUALOR of the Ghetto, JUST AS we demand a return to a 'middle class of artists' who are neither 'Mega-stars' nor mere Hobbyists, who can pay their rent from their art!" (2). Stroffolino also calls for more local music played on the radio & in businesses, better relationships between politicians and artists, between the disparate arts communities, and that Oakland artists actually make a commitment to the city, rather than viewing this as a stage before that big move to NYC & a career.

full text available here.