Distribution Automatique

Friday, December 28

Ron Silliman Reviews OCHO 14

Silliman's Blog

Sunday, December 23

Monday, December 17

Friday, December 14

From The Ontological Museum


The Spam Poetry Game

In one of my nocturnal wandering of Yahoo, I came across the following group of spam poems, created from a game I participated in in May of this year, the link for the complete selection above.


Department of Linguistic Records



THE SPAM POETRY GAME
Round Two - 27 Entries!
You'll want to have plenty of time to study this wonderful selection of spam poetry most of which used the same cluster of random words and phrases. Each poet brought their own style and sensibility to the words. Some people offered a number of works and some offered works that seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with the directions for this game. But that's poets for you (or possibly people who cannot read instructions).

BELOW THE RESULTS FROM OUR POETS


Mon 5/7/2007 9:57 PM

First half and last line complete the mirrored stochasticative...

storms ~ emote
reputation ~ radarman
wrong ~ toward
only on the ~ alt no Zerbo
hand grasp ~ spurge avow
love more ~ Ham rag
tempests ~ nonprint
end enemies ~ lament lazy
remember ~ adrenal
there no england ~ brogan an craft
lessen days ~ guff vassal
freedom ~ malevo
however ~ several
customer death ~ Wtoeh rewatow
wrong paradise ~ laborat zonalt

but part of the common ~ runner alt or boy tod

Remainder
[Skillful pilots gain their much my political life, but no who mixes the pleasant with the useful. I have had a lot of there is much error. I never forgive, dignity of any but I always forget. He gains shortcut to life. Law everyone's there is glory approval of, life is a learned. Honesty is a question of right or not a matter of policy. Everyone complains of the badness of his memory, but nobody of his judgment. Malt does more than Milton can to justify to man.]

0!Z!^!P P!^VP
Mon 5/7/2007 10:06 PM

Skillful pilots
enemies that I can remember

part of the Common
is
the hand that does not grasp


God's ways of freedom

the pleasant with the useful.
An apology mixes
shortcut to life

of his memory
love the more


Remainder
reputation from storms and your wrong.? Bah! adversaries in alights only on . The greater the difficulty If you tempests. To the end . There is no of England. lesson imperfectly The bird our days Disgusting! wrong, Cowardly! Beneath the gentleman, however be. Where customer to death, you can't wrong he might go in paradise surmounting it. gain their much my political life, but no who I have had a lot of there is much error. I never forgive, dignity of any but I always forget. He gains shortcut to life. Law everyone's there is glory approval of, life is a learned. Honesty is a question of right or not a matter of policy. Everyone complains of the badness , but nobody of his judgment. Malt does more than Milton can to justify to man.

Jim Piat
Mon 5/7/2007 11:29 PM

apology


I have had
a lot of
skillful
political
pilots
grasp
reputation
from
difficulty

and
there is
England
God's
Law
Honesty
reputation
judgment
glory
life

cowardly
enemies
disgusting
storms
badness
death
freedom
memory
love

I
never
justify
error
but
I always
forget
dignity

life is a
wrong
shortcut
where
the
tempests
end
paradise
imperfectly

beneath
the
gentleman
customer


Bah!
bird

[remainder words]
is part of the Common wrong. An in alights only on the hand that does not grasp. The greater If forgive you t more. end that I can remember. There is no of lesson our days ways however be. to, you can't he might go in surmounting it. gain their much my, but no who mixes pleasant with useful there is much. I never of any but always forget. He to everyone's there is approval of, is a learned. is a question of right or not a matter of. Everyone complains of of his, but nobody of his judgment. Malt does more than Milton can to justify to man

Nick Piombino
Tue 5/8/2007 8:40 AM


Malt does more to Milton
than the policy of England.

God’s reputation mixes
skillful approval of
the cowardly customer with
the law of death.

Everyone alights honesty.
The tempest’s political badness
is surmounting dignity.

A gentleman always
gains adversaries.
To the enemies I can
remember, I hand no apology.
I never forgive you and
your wrong judgment.

A common bird complains
of the error of his memory.

If you love nobody, life
is a disgusting matter.

A lesson of my life:
There is no shortcut
to paradise.

Pilots in storms grasp
the difficulty in life.

Beneath glory, there is only
that question of right or wrong.

He can’t imperfectly forget
that much useful freedom.

Everyone’s end is pleasant,
However wrong he might be.
Bah!

But I go to where man
is to justify his ways.

But who have our days
learned from? There is
the greater part of their gain,
but not much more.

Remainder
An, on, it, the had, lot, any can, not, of, that, of, the, does

Kathy Burkett
Tue 5/8/2007 8:41 AM

[reputation]

reputation from
storms and your wrong. An apo
logy? Bah! adver


[only on the hand]

saries in alights
only on the hand that does
not grasp. The greater


[to the end]

the difficulty
If you love the more tempests.
To the end enem


[ies, there is no england]

ies that I can rem
ember. There is no
of England. lesson imper


[the bird]

fectly The bird our
days God's ways of freedom
Disgusting! wrong, Cow


[beneath the gentleman]

ardly! Beneath the
gentleman, however be.
Where customer to


[death, you can't wrong]

death, you can't wrong he
might go in paradise sur
mounting it. Skillful


[pilots gain their life]

pilots gain their much
my political life, but
no who mixes the


[i have had a lot]

pleasant with the use
ful. I have had a lot of
there is much error.


[i never forgive]

I never forgive,
dignity of any but
I always forget.


[law]

He gains shortcut to
life. Law everyone's there is
glory approval


[honesty is a question]

of, life is a learned.
Honesty is a question
of right or not a


[everyone complains]

matter of polic
y. Everyone complains of
the badness of his


[malt does more]

memory, but no
body of his judgment. Malt
does more than


[the common man]

Milton can to just
ify to man. is part of
the Common



(titles have been [added] but are all taken directly from the text of each haiku from which they are sampled)

Allan Revich http://www.digitalsalon.com

Wednesday, December 12

OCHO 14 Now Available on
Kindle
****************
Rod Smith's "Deed" Reviewed in The Nation
A Kind of Waiting Always by Joshua Clover

Monday, December 3

So Young

Mark Young, who is included in OCHO 14 with four beautiful poems (Genji Monogatatari I-IV), now has a video of his poetry up on The Continental Review

Get the whole story on Mark Young's Gamma Ways

********************

We are proud to announce the publication of OCHO 14, available to order now at

LuLu/OCHO 14

guest edited by Nick Piombino, cover art by Toni Simon. With poetry by

Charles Bernstein
Ray DiPalma
Alan Davies
Elaine Equi
Nada Gordon
Mitch Highfill
Brenda Iijima
Kimberly Lyons
Sharon Mesmer
Tim Peterson
Corinne Robins
Jerome Sala
Gary Sullivan
Mark Young
Nico Vassilakis

Publisher: Menendez Publishing
Copyright: © 2007 OCHO Contributors Standard Copyright License

Paperback book $16.94
Printed: 181 pages, 6" x 9", perfect binding, black and white interior ink
Description:
OCHO # 14 guest edited by Nick Piombino. Featuring Charles Bernstein, Alan Davies, Ray DiPalma, Elaine Equi, Nada Gordon, Kimberly Lyons, , Mitch Highfill, Brenda Iijima, Sharon Mesmer, Tim Peterson, Corinne Robins, Jerome Sala, Gary Sullivan, Mark Young and Nico Vassilakis. Cover art by Toni Simon.

Go to the LuLu link above to see the cover art, and a preview that includes an introduction to the issue.

Friday, November 30

The Master's Voice

"Why the work succeeds is because both its discrete as well as its combinatory elements are expressive and not merely 'illustrative'."

Ray DiPalma

*************************************************
Mira Schor

terrific painter and writer, coeditor with Susan Bee of M/E/A/N/I/N/G, author of an excellent book of essays about art titled *Wet* (on painting, feminism and art culture from Duke U), has work in a group show in Williamsburg titled

Air Kissing: An Exhibition Of Contemporary Art About The Art World, curated by Sasha Archibald.

The exhibition is at Momenta Art 359 Bedford Street, between S. 4th and S. 5th, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, through December 17.

Check out Mira Schor's website at:

Mira Schor.com

*

A view of a previous show of MIra Schor's here:

Smack Mellon Studiios
*******************************************************

In January, 2007 someone invited me so I wrote a poem and sent it to Dan Waber a couple of weeks later for his ars poetica website because I liked the idea behind the site. Some time after that I was curious as to why it had not appeared. Dan politely wrote back that he was getting so many submissions that my poem would come out in approximately nine months!

Here is the link for the site (which no doubt most of you have seen, but even if you have, it is certainly worth visiting again): Ars Poetica

and here is the archived link for my poem posted on November 21:
Ars Poetica Archive

Saturday, November 24

Contradicta




Know one thing, say one thing, do one thing well, all goes well, boring as hell.






*************************




A little knowledge is a risky thing, a little chaos is a creative thing, a little chuzpah is everything.

Thursday, November 22

dpqp visualizing poetics- A Little Something About Crag Hill

dbqp-More on Geof and Crag's reading

Although I had met Geof Huth once before, I had never met Crag Hill until hearing him and Geof do this wonderful reading this past Friday evening at the Stain Bar in Williamsburg, Brookyn. Then yesterday I found these terrfic posts by Geof.

****************

The following Sunday, 16 poets read at the EOAGH reading, organized and presented by Tim Peterson at Unnameable Books. Here are some photos Tim Peterson posted on Mappemunde::

Mappemunde- EOAGH reading

Mappemunde-EOAGH reading

Mappemunde

****************

Gregory Vincent St Thomasino did a fine reading for EOAGH at Unnameable Books

Monday, November 19

Contradicta



It is intelligent to despise stupidity yet even more intelligent to comprehend it.



********


The weak respect cunning more than kindness but the cunning know they are more feared than loved. So in time the cunning get weak from loneliness while the kind grow strong with trust.

***************************

On My Desk


Benjamin Friedlander, "The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes", Subpress
"Many a wounded category drawn
from portraits of a gotten life
has disabused me of the contact high
I dreamt across on ruined nights"

Renee Daumal, "You've Always Been Wrong", University of Nebraska
"Thorughout their histories, India and Tibet have experienced more than any other land a tremendous abundance of attempts to think. And more than any other land their priesthood has always found a way to appropriate all those manifestations of thought and turn them into vehicles for theocratic power."

Crag Hill and Geof Huth, *sightings and hearings*, pdqp (for their Stain Bar reading, 11/16/07)
"Driving above Palouse river on River road, I rode into another time, Around a bend, I ran nto the low-flying path of a blue heron. It flew high enough for us both to miss, then veered into time before human time, This bird, this flight, this river." (Crag Hill)

"Whenever he wrote something on a pad of paper, he saved only the blank sheets filled with vague indentations." (Geof Huth)

Geof Huth, "Out of Character", Paper Kite
(visual poems: letters that walk, dance, move, writhe, write and thrive)

Brenda IIjima, "Animate, Inanimate Aims", Litmus
"Reminiscent search parties
Their shoulders rustle festive streets
Nocturne slow merges in spurs
Suspicion branches around rose bushes
Collective cries mobilize a movement
Kick over inert signs
Mad rough lineage tied to swords"

Jonathan Lethem, "The Disapointment Artist", Doubleday
"I don't think I was autistic, but like an autistic child I wanted the volume turned down. Though consciously thrilled by the adult lives around me, and the odd but definite privilages my commuinion with their variety had bestowed, I was unconciously seeking hiding places."

Nico Vassilakis, "Text Loses Time", ManyPenny
"Writing a history for
each thing you own.
A framed photo of two
friends. Perhaps
Pennsylvania. On the cycling
team. Date unknown. The
objects that follow
you from one living
situation to another.
And what house do you
recall having no door."

Dana Ward, "The Wrong Tree", Dusie
"You should tell everyone swimmingly!
So much it hurts!
Every year a new holiday day!
& that party!
sleepy eyed Rilke in spiritous bangles!
Thinking elliptically rote thoughts about a concession stand!"

Sunday, November 18

EOAGH already!

EOAGH #4


SUNDAY NOVEMBER 18
5 PM at Unnameable Books

A Poetry Reading Celebrating the Launch of
EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts
Issue 4

456 Bergen Street
Brooklyn, NY
FREE

Featuring:
Gilbert Adair
Cara Benson
Joel Chace
James Cook
Alan Davies
Thom Donovan
Joanna Fuhrman
Rebecca Gopoian
Dan Hoy
Sara Marcus
Stephen Paul Miller
Nick Piombino
Tim Peterson
Evelyn Reilly
Edwin Rodriguez
Gregory Vincent St Thomasino
Shelly Taylor
Adam Tobin
Lynn Xu

*****************************************************************

Contradicta





It is intelligent to despise stupidity yet even more intelligent to comprehend it.





********




The weak respect cunning more than kindness but the cunning know they are more feared than loved. So in time the cunning get weak from loneliness while the kind grow strong with trust.

Friday, November 16

See You This Friday, In Person or in Spirit: Huth & Hill, Stain Bar Brooklyn, 11-16-07

Poets Crag Hill and Geof Huth will give a reading entitled "Sightings & Hearings" at the Stain Bar in Brooklyn, New York, on November 16th. Combining their interest in visual, sound, and even textual poetry, they will read and perform, together and apart, a wide range of works. This will be the first time Hill and Huth have performed together since their performance in March of this year, so don't miss this east coast appearance. If a reading isn't enough encouragement, Stain Bar has a great selection of New-York-only beer and other drinks.

Crag Hill and Geof Huth
Friday, 16 November 2007
6:30 pm
Stain Bar
766 Grand Street
Brooklyn, New York
718/387-7840
To get to Stain Bar, take the L train to Grand and go one block west to 766 Grand Street by the way of Graham Avenue and Humboldt Street.

Bios of the Performers:

Crag Hill has been exploring the world through the prisms of verbal and visual language since his re-birth in the 1970s. Writer of numerous chapbooks and/or other print interventions, including Dict (Xexoxial Endarchy), Another Switch (Norton Coker Press), and Yes James, Yes Joyce (Loose Gravel Press), he has also once edited two magazines, Score and its successor Spore. His latest book, co-edited with Bob Grumman, is Writing to be Seen, the first major anthology of visual poetry in 30 years. He writes frequently about poetry at his blog, Crg Hill's poetry scorecard .

Geof Huth is a writer of textual and visual poetry who has lived on most of the continents on earth. He writes frequently about visual poetry, especially on his weblog, dbqp: visualizing poetics. His chapbooks include "Analphabet," "The Dreams of the Fishwife," "ghostlight," "Peristyle," "To a Small Stream of Water (or Ditch)," and "wreadings." Huth edited &2: an/thology of Pwoermds, the first-ever anthology of one-word poems. His most recent books are a box of pages entitled water vapour and the chapbook, "Out of Character."

Sunday, November 11

Contradicta




To acknowledge your feelings is to sometimes feel unsure. To not know your feelings is to always feel unsure.




*************




To those who can listen, even the melody of sadness lingers.

Friday, November 9

A Flurry of Furries

Marianne Shaneen's Film-in-Progress on the Furries Featured on

Boing Boing

*******************

Unnameable Secrets/EOAGH Said

Unnameable Books featured in Time Out
Tim Peterson's literary website featured at Adam's Bookshop on November 18

this just in from Adam Tobin

Dear friends of Unnameable Books:

Don't tell anyone, but the editors of Time Out New York have appointed YOUR FAVORITE BOOKSTORE as one of NYC's 50 Essential Secrets. Unnameable Books also made the list. Page 40 of last week's issue features a large and excellent photograph of our secret back wall, in which you can see, too, if your eyes are keen, our secret collection of old issues of Botteghe Oscure (an important international literary journal of the 1940s and 50s). The caption reads, in part, "With a cluttered, top-shelf inventory that could keep you reading great tomes for the next decade, [Unnameable] is a definite
boon to Brooklyn's literati."

The text of the article can be found online at http://www.timeout.com/newyork/article/features/23933/44.html, but the
photograph looks much better on paper. Please find a copy of the magazine, cut out page 40, and wheatpaste it prominently on your front door, or on the side of any major architectural landmark.

There do exist, however, more and larger, more important secrets in the world.

The most immediate of these, concerning our ongoing Sunday afternoon readingseries, regards one SARAH LANG, who has written a book of poetry. The book is called THE WORK OF DAYS, is published by Coach House, and is just out new
now. Here's what Carole Maso says about the book: "With ferocity and tenderness, with and without hope these staggering poems astonish at every turn. One gets up from them changed." But don't trust Carole Maso: come see the poems for yourself, and hear them read aloud, by their very author, THIS SUNDAY at 5 PM, here at Unnameable Books. That's, like, tomorrow. November 11.

THE VERY NEXT SUNDAY -- to wit, the 18th of November -- Unnameable will host a release party for Issue 4 of the internet's premiere unpronouncable literary journal: EOAGH: A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS, edited by the inestimable Tim Peterson, whom we esteem greatly. Various writers will read from their work. This, too, will occur at 5 PM. Previous issues of EOAGH can be found at http://chax.org/eoagh/ , whereat Issue 4 will appear sometime before the release party...

More authors will appear on Sunday afternoons in December at 5 pm: notably, Shelley Jackson on Dec. 9 and the Harp & Altar special on Dec. 2: Lynn Crawford, Johannah Rodgers, and Corey Frost

Yrs.,
Adam


***
***

Please do consider ordering your Christmas gifts through Unnameable Books: we can order any book in print, and ship anywhere in the world. And we give a 20% discount for most special orders. Amazon, schmamazon! Send us an
email ( unnameablebooks@earthlink.net ), or call us on the telephone (718 789 1534).

***
***

THE UNNAMEABLE SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

Please mark your calendars with a very special symbol. All events are free of charge, but not wheelchair accessible:

***
SUNDAY NOVEMBER 11
5 PM at Unnameable Books
Sarah Lang (THE WORK OF DAYS, Coach House Books)

Sarah Lang was born on a Saturday in the winter of 1980, in Northwestern Canada. In the spring of 2004, she completed her MFA at Brown University. She began work on her PhD in Chicago in the fall of 2005. Her work, which incudes poetry, prose, personal, critical and medical essays, ahs been published in Canada, Great Britain and the United States. She has translated work from Latin, Ancient Greek, French, Ukrainian, Japanese and Mandarin. THE WORK OF DAYS is her first book. She now lives in, and writes about, airports. She intends to orbit the earth before her projected death in 2056. www.arimneste.com / www.theworkofdays.com

***

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 18
5 PM at Unnameable Books

A Poetry Reading Celebrating the Launch of EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts Issue 4

456 Bergen Street
Brooklyn, NY
FREE

Featuring:
Gilbert Adair
Cara Benson
Joel Chace
James Cook
Thom Donovan
Joanna Fuhrman
Dan Hoy
Sara Marcus
Stephen Paul Miller
Nick Piombino
Tim Peterson
Evelyn Reilly
Edwin Rodriguez
Shelly Taylor
Adam Tobin (yes, that's me!)
Lynn Xu

EOAGH Issue 4
Edited by Tim Peterson

will be available at
http://chax.org/eoagh
any day now

***

SUNDAY DECEMBER 2
5 PM at Unnameable Books
Harp & Altar Presents:

Johannah Rodgers
&
Corey Frost
&
Lynn Crawford

LYNN CRAWFORD's books include Simply Separate People and Fortification Resort--from Black Square editions--and Solow and Blow--put out by Hard Press. Her work appears in the anthologies, Fetish (Four Walls Eight Windows), and The Oulipo Compendium (Atlas Press, London). She edits the cultural arts journal, published by Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit,
DETROIT:.

JOHANNAH RODGERS is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. Her chapbook Necessary Fictions was published by Sona Books in 2003, and her short stories and essays have appeared in Fiction, CHAIN Arts , The Brooklyn Rail, Pierogi Press, and Fence. Her book sentences, a collection of stories, essays, and artwork, was published this year by Red Dust Press.

COREY FROST's stories have appeared in Matrix , Geist, The Walrus , and other magazines. He was named the Best Spoken Word Artist in 2001 by the Montreal Mirror . He is currently writing a book about spoken word scenes around the world as part of a doctoral dissertation. A CD of his performances, Bits World: Exciting Version, is forthcoming. His books
include The Worthwhile Flux (2004) and My Own Devices: Airport Version (2006), both published by Conundrum Press.

***

SUNDAY DECEMBER 9
5 PM at Unnameable Books
SHELLEY JACKSON (author of Half Life, The Melancholy of Anatomy, Skin, Patchwork Girl, etc.)

***
***

Unnameable Books
456 Bergen St.
Brooklyn, NY 11217
unnameablebooks@earthlink.net
(718) 789-1534
www.unnameablebooks.net

***
***

Friday, November 2

David Abel and Mitch Highfill

gave first rate readings at Unnameable Books this past Sunday.

Mitch, who lives in Park Slope, read, among many other superb works, his stunning prose poem "Lonesome Town."

David Abel, former owner of the Bridge Bookstore in Manhattan, and who now resides in Portland, Oregon, read many moving, excellent poems, among them an ongoing work he calls *Sweepings*. I am paraphrasing here an aphorism I have not stopped thinking about since that memorable evening at one of New York's greatest used bookstores:

"At last I met the girl of my dreams and now all I ever do is sleep."

Saturday, October 27

Contradicta






In a world parched by dessicated words and empty lies, silence tastes sweet.




**




Making something crucial out of what is unimportant is the way of the fool and the cruel.

Saturday, October 20

Contradicta



Look back- it's always the same. One more moment and you would have found it.



*****



If you haven't asked a question, you haven't said anything.





(in celebration of the tiny #3 reading at the St. Mark's Poetry Project 10/19/07)

Friday, October 19

This Friday, October 19th at 10pm the tiny is hosting an event in
celebration of our third issue at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's
Church. We hope you all can make it.

Friday, October 19th, 10PM

Come out and celebrate the recent release of the third issue of the
annual print poetry journal the tiny

With readings by: Nick Piombino, Anthony Hawley, Kristi Maxwell,
Andrea Baker and Will Edmiston

Music TBA

Issues of the tiny will be available for sale at a reduced rate of $10
(regularly $12)

The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church
131 E. 10th Street
New York, NY 10003

http://thetinyjournal.com

Thanks, and best wishes,
Gina & Gabriella




*****************************************


Highly recommended reading at a highly recommended bookstore...

Get ready to hear a great reading and find great books...

Tell all your friends...

Spend your money on great books- free admission...


You are cordially invited to a poetry reading by

David Abel & Mitch Highfill


Sunday, October 28
5:00 pm

free admission


Unnameable Books

456 Bergen Street
(between 5th Avenue and Flatbush)
Brooklyn, NY

718-789-1534
unnameablebooks@earthlink.net
www.unnameablebooks.net

Wednesday, October 3

Fall Segue Reading Series at the Bowery Poetry Club

The Segue Reading Series is made possible by the support of The Segue Foundation. For more information, please visit www.seguefoundation.com Segue Foundation or call the Bowery Poetry Club at (212) 614-0505. Curators: Oct.-Nov. by Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan, Dec.-Jan. by Brenda Iijima & Evelyn Reilly.


OCTOBER 6 JENNIFER MOXLEY and MAGGIE O'SULLIVAN Jennifer Moxley is the author of four books of poetry: The Line (Post-Apollo 2007), Often Capital (Flood 2005), The Sense Record (Edge 2002; Salt 2003) and Imagination Verses (Tender Buttons 1996; Salt 2003). Her memoir The Middle Room was published by Subpress in 2007. Maggie O' Sullivan is a British poet, performer and visual artist. She has been making and performing her work internationally since the late 1970s. Her most recent publication is Body of Work (Reality Street, 2007), which brings together for the first time all of her long out-of-print small-press booklets from the 1980s.
OCTOBER 13 ANDREW LEVY and BARRETT WATTEN Andrew Levy is a contributing writer on President of the United States' The Big Melt (Factory School, 2007), and he is the author of a dozen books of poetry, including Ashoka (Zasterle Books), Paper Head Last Lyrics (Roof Books), Curve 2 (Potes & Poets Press), Values Chauffeur You (O Books), and Democracy Assemblages (Innerer Klang). He is editor, with Roberto Harrison, of the poetry journal Crayon. Barrett Watten founded the Grand Piano reading series in 1976 and edited and published This from 1971. His most recent books are Bad History (Atelos, 1998), Progress/Under Erasure (Green Integer, 2004), and The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2003), which won the 2004 René Wellek Prize.
OCTOBER 20 K. LORRAINE GRAHAM and TAO LINK. Lorraine Graham is the author of three chapbooks, Terminal Humming (Slack Buddha), See it Everywhere (Big Game Books), and Large Waves to Large Obstacles (forthcoming from Take Home Project), and the recently released chapdisk Moving Walkways (Narrowhouse Recordings). She has just completed the extended manuscript of Terminal Humming. Tao Lin is the author of a novel, EEEEE EEE EEEE (Melville House, 2007), a story-collection, Bed (Melville House, 2007), and two poetry collections, You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am (Action Books, 2006), and the forthcoming Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (Melville House, Spring 2008).
OCTOBER 27 ROB FITTERMAN and MEL NICHOLS Sandwiched between Shell and Mobil gas stations, Robert Fitterman grew up in a pre-sprawl St. Louis suburb named Creve Coeur (broken heart). He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Metropolis 1-15 (Sun & Moon), Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Books) and, most recently, War, the musical (Subpress, 2006) with Dirk Rowntree. Mel Nichols lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at George Mason University. Her chapbooks are Day Poems (Edge Books 2005) and The Beginning of Beauty, Part 1: hottest new ringtones, mnichol6 (Edge 2007),
NOVEMBER 3 CHRIS FUNKHOUSER and MADELINE GINS Chris Funkhouser was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 2006 to lecture and conduct research in Malaysia, where his CD-ROM eBook Selections 2.0 was produced at Multimedia University. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, a history of pre-WWW computerized poetry, has just been published by University of Alabama Press. Madeline Gins: B-b-b-b-b-orn and intends never to die. Three of her eleven books: What the President Will Say and Do!; Helen Keller or Arakawa; Making Dying Illegal (co-author Arakawa). Three of five Arakawa + Gins' built works: Bioscleave House–East Hampton; Site of Reversible Destiny–Yoro; Reversible Destiny Lofts–Mitaka.
NOVEMBER 10 SEAN COLE and BRANDON DOWNING Sean Cole is the author of the chapbooks By the Author and Itty City and of a full-length collection of postcard poems called The December Project. He is also a reporter for public radio. In his spare time, he writes bios like this one. Brandon Downing's books of poetry include LAZIO (Blue Books, 2000), The Shirt Weapon (Germ, 2002), and Dark Brandon (Faux, 2005). A new DVD collection, Dark Brandon // The Filmi, was just released, and he's currently completing a monograph of his literary collages under the title Lake Antiquity.
NOVEMBER 17 BENJAMIN FRIEDLANDER and DANA WARD Benjamin Friedlander is the author of several books of poetry, most recently The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (Subpress, 2007). His edition of Robert Creeley's Selected Poems 1945-2005 is forthcoming from the University of California Press. He is currently completing a book on Emily Dickinson and the Civil War. Dana Ward is the author of The Wrong Tree (Dusie, 2007), Goodnight Voice (House Press, 2007) and other chapbooks. OMG recently published an edition of For Paris in Prison with images by the artist Matthew Hughes Boyko. NOVEMBER 24 NO READING–Happy holiday!
DECEMBER 1 TYRONE WILLIAMS and SUEYEUN JULIETTE LEE Tyrone Williams's book, c.c., was published by Krupskaya Books in 2002; the chapbooks AAB and Futures, Elections were published in 2004; and the chapbook Musique Noir was published in 2006. A new book, On Spec, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2008. Sueyeun Juliette Lee currently lives in Philadelphia where she edits Corollary Press, a small chapbook series dedicated to new work by writers of color. Her chapbooks include Perfect Villagers (Octopus Books) and Trespass Slightly in (Coconut Poetry). Her first book, That Gorgeous Feeling, is forthcoming from Coconut Books next spring.
DECEMBER 8 JESS MYNES and ANTHONY HAWLEY Jess Mynes is author of birds for example (CARVE Editions), In(ex)teriors (Anchorite Press) and Full On Jabber (Martian Press), a collaboration with Christopher Rizzo. His If and When (Katalanche Press), Recently Clouds, a collaboration with Aaron Tieger, and Sky Brightly Picked (Skysill Press) are forthcoming this year. Anthony Hawley is the author of The Concerto Form (Shearsman Books, 2006) and four chapbooks of poetry: Vocative (Phylum Press, 2004), Afield (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004), Record-breakers (Ori is the New Apple Press, 2007), and Autobiography/Oughtabiography (Counterpath, 2007). His second book of poems, Paradise Gelatin, will be published in 2008.
DECEMBER 15 BARBARA JANE REYES and BHANU KAPILBarbara Jane Reyes is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She lives with her husband Oscar Bermeo in Oakland. Bhanu Kapil teaches writing at Naropa University and Goddard College. She is the author of three full-length collections: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works), and Humanimal (forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press).
DECEMBER 22 & 29 NO READING–Happy holidays!

JANUARY 5 JENNIFER FIRESTONE and LINDA RUSSOJennifer Firestone is the author of Holiday, forthcoming from Shearsman Books. Her chapbooks include Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), and from Flashes (Sona Books). She is the co-editor of the anthology Letters To Poets: Conversations About Poetics, Politics and Community, forthcoming from Saturnalia Books.Linda Russo is the author of MIRTH (Chax Press, 2007) and o going out (Potes & Poets, 1999), among other books. She has published essays on Bernadette Mayer & Hannah Weiner, ecopoetics, and Joanne Kyger, including the preface to Kyger's About Now: Collected Poems.
JANUARY 12 TISA BRYANT and ROBERT KOCIK isa Bryant's work includes Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), and Tzimmes (A+Bend Press, 2000). She is currently creating [the curator], a meditation on identity, visual culture and the lost films of auteur Justine Cable, and Playing House, an exploration of work, writing and domesticity. Robert Kocik is a poet, essayist, builder, and eleemosynary entrepreneur. His niche, architecturally, is the designing/building of missing civic services. His most recent publications are Overcoming Fitness (Autonomedia, 2000) and Rhrurbarb (Field Books, 2007). He is currently researching the Prosodic Body—an exacting aesthetics based on prosody as the bringing forth of everything.
JANUARY 19 RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS and ANNA MOSCHOVAKIS Rachel Blau DuPlessis's two most recent books are Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2007) and Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (University of Alabama Press, 2006). She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University. Anna Moschovakis is the author of a book of poems, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, and two chapbooks. She volunteers as an editor and designer at Ugly Duckling Presse, for which she recently co-edited The Drug of Art, the selected works of Czech poet Ivan Blatny (in English translation).
JANUARY 26 SUSAN HOWE and JAMES THOMAS STEVENSSusan Howe's most recent books are The Midnight (New Directions) and Kidnapped (Coracle Books). Two CDs, Thiefth and Souls of the Labadie Tract, in collaboration with the musician/ composer David Grubbs were recently released on the Blue Chopsticks label. A new collection of poems, as well as a re-print of her critical study My Emily Dickinson will be published by New Directions. James Thomas Stevens is the author of seven books of poetry, including A Bridge Dead in the Water, Combing the Snakes from His Hair, and Bulle/Chimere. Stevens is a 2000 Whiting Award recipient and a 2005 National Poetry Series Finalist.

James T Sherry
Segue Foundation
(212) 493-5984, 8-340-5984

Sunday, September 30

New Books from Otoliths

Otoliths at LuLu

I'm more and more pleased to have a book on this ever growing, first rate list of publications. I can't wait to read Otolith's new books from Jordan Stempleman, Adam Fieled, Jim Leftwich, Frances Raven and Alex Gildzen.

Saturday, September 29

Peter Straub and Fred Astaire

Fred Astaire's final film role was the 1981 adaptation of Peter Straub's novel Ghost Story. This horror film was also the last for two of his most prominent castmates, Melvyn Douglas and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

**
If you've never read a Peter Straub novel, you've got a treat in store, beginning with *If You Could See Me Now* (1977) of which Stephen King said: "Electrifying...My hands were as good as nailed to the book."

*************************
The Geometry of Hope- on view now at the Grey Art Gallery
100 Washington Square East

September 12- December 8, 2007

Tuesdays/Thursdays/Fridays 11 am to 6 pm
Saturdays 11am - 5 pm

An extensive, superb show of Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection

Friday, September 28

Tom Beckett Interviews Alan Davies

on E-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-V-a-l-u-e-s

*********************

Thanks to poezie pamflet for the link to my Argotist Online interview with Gregory Vincent St Thomasino

********************

Women of The Web: Interviews with Didi Menendez

Women of The Web

Sunday, September 23

Am Bushed/No More War

SEPT 25 / Tuesday:
8:30am / Rally at UN /
47th St & 1st Ave. /
Bush will be addressing the UN


SEPT 28 / Friday: War Resisters League Peace Awards
6:00pm Cocktail Party and Reception / 7:30pm Panel
Discussion
and Awards / 9:30 Dessert and Champagne / Program only
$10 / Receptions sliding scale
New York Society for Ethical Culture /
2 West 64th Street at Central Park West


SEPT 29 / Saturday: National March on Washington
Gather in front of Capitol at 11am
Rally begins 12 noon ?March steps off at 1:30pm

The Troops Out Now Headquarters is at: 55 West 17th
St. Suite #5C, New York, NY, 10011
212-633-6646 www.troopsoutnow.org
Email:info@troopsoutnow.org
**********************************
TEXT LOSES TIME - Don't Waste Another Minute

*fait accompli* recommends TEXT LOSES TIME by Nico Vassilakis

ManyPenny Press is pleased to announce the release of TEXT LOSES TIME by Nico Vassilakis. This necessary work spans roughly 15 years of the author‚s efforts in both textual and visual writing. It is Vassilakis‚ first full-length book.

TEXT LOSES TIME

Afterword by Nick Piombino

188 pp.

ISBN-10: 0-9798478-0-X

ISBN-13: 978-0-9798478-0-6



AUTHOR‚S STATEMENT:



This book intends to present both verbal and visual poetries as equal. Though notions of poetics have shifted and swerved, what has stayed solid throughout is that the alphabet, the word ˆ however arranged ˆ contains, within it, dual significance. First, the proto-historic role of the visual conveyance of represented fact. Second, the overriding desire of human utterance to substantiate existence. In conjoining these two models this book hopes to form a third, blurred value. Thought and experience are factors that accrue, while staring and writing help resolve and conclude. Text itself is an amalgam of units of meaning. As you stare at text you notice the visual aspects of letters. As one stares further, meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, spatial relations and visual associations emerge as one delves further. Alphabetic bits or parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the very text one is reading. One aim, to this end, is to merge and hinge visual and textual writing into workable forms. This book collects some of these experiments.


AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:


Nico Vassilakis was born in New York City in 1963. He has co-written and performed a one-man play about experimental composer Morton Feldman. Vassilakis is co-founder and curator for the Subtext Reading Series and editor of Clear-Cut: Anthology (A Collection of Seattle Writers). He has been a guest-editor of WOS#35: Northwest Concrete and Visual Poetry and his visual poetry videos have been shown worldwide at festivals and exhibitions of innovative language arts. In 1998, Vassilakis co-produced, with Rebecca Brown, a 24-hour „Gertrude Stein-a-thon.‰ His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Ribot, Caliban, Aufgabe, Chain, Talisman, Central Park and Golden Handcuffs Review. He works for Fantagraphic Books and lives in Seattle with his son, Quixote.

Chapbooks:

Askew (bcc press), Stampologue (RASP), Orange: A Manual (Sub Rosa Press), Diptychs: Visual Poems (Otolith), Pond Ring (nine muses books), sequence (Burning Press), Enoch and Aloe (Last Generation Press), The Colander (housepress), Flattened Missive (P.I.S.O.R. Publications), Species Pieces (gong press), KYOO (Burning Press) and others.

DVD:

CONCRETE: Movies (Sub Rosa Press)

CONTACT AND ORDERING INFORMATION:



ManyPenny Press

1111 E. Fifth St.

Moscow, ID 83843



$15.95 + $2 postage

Make checks payable to Crag Hill

(Pre-orders will be sent post-paid)

*********************************

Thanks to Ron Silliman and Nicholas Manning for their links to my recent Argotist Online interview with Gregory Vincent St Thomasino.

I've been anticipating a spirited rebuttal from a poet about my theories of creativity expressed in this interview. Somehow I'm not surprised to have seen this one in the comments section of Ron Silliman's blog from my friend Lanny Quarles:

phaneronoemikon said...
Man, Nick is a nice guy, but he needs to get off the psych-bong..

Creativity is a slippage of parent-idealization?

Whatever El Freudo of the hairy foot
Hobboes! I carry a can of Moustache Jelly so I attract more flies to the corpse circus...

Photon thrusters
are not about the parent jack..

man..
that is a racket

Friday, September 21

Will Every Pro War Senator Please Raise Your Hand And Tell Us That MoveOn Is The Problem and War Is The Solution?

Check This Out

Tuesday, September 18

Free Fall reviewed by Geof Huth

dbqp visualizing poetics

Sunday, September 16

2007

Police Arrest 189 During Anti-War Rally in D.C.< [Huffington Post]


Dozens Arrested in Protest Near Capitol [New York Times]


1967

Protesters Take To The Streets in New York [Rolling Stone]

"Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind".

-Bob Dylan


**

Thanks to the following blogs for the links to, and quotes from, my Argotist online interview with Gregory Vincent St Thomasino

Growing Nation

Listics

the Morning Line

Elsewhere

woods lot
[the following quote from the interview was posted on wood s lot September 9, along with, among other things, a tribute to Cesare Pavese, who was born on that date in 1908]
Nick Piombino interviewed
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
The Argotist Online

The title *fait accompli* is intended as an ironic comment on the conventional viewpoint regarding time. The concept for the blog was to choose and post excerpts from my handwritten journals dating back to the 60's. Each passage was to correspond to ideas, feelings and concerns that I was concerned with that very day, thus creating a journal within a journal in an attempt to create a setting for synchronicities to occur: thus the subtitle of the blog, spellbound speculations, time travel. The blog had grown out of the dialogues I had sought out, mostly on the University of Buffalo listserv, after 9-11. The similarities between the war torn years of the 60's and the post 9-11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were, and are, inescapable. In fact, the phrase, fait accompli, is sometimes employed to characterize wartime events involving violence or political actions that politicians want to see regarded as final. What is done is done and there is no going back; the only choice is to aggressively respond.
For the most part, I do not conceive of time in this way, which probably results from my professional experience in the fields I have been practicing in for most of my life: writing, art and psychoanalysis. For me, time and history are recurrent, as in Freud's return of the repressed and repetition compulsion, the aphorisms of Heraclitus and the timeless insight of tribal shamans. Of course, there are the irreversible finalities of aging and death, utterly indisputable, except for religious believers and mystics, who usually don't completely deny these things but factor in their caveats.... (more)

Nick Piombino's book, fait accompli (Factory School)
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino edits eratio postmodern poetry

Saturday, September 15

Greenspan Rates the Presidents

For pure time travel, this is well worth reading
Newsweek via MSNBC

**
Kill For Oil: Greenspan tells the inside story [from the Huffington Post 9/15]

Greenspan Says Iraq War Was About Oil
Sunday Times Of London | Graham Paterson | September 15, 2007 11:14 PM

America's elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

In his long-awaited memoir, to be published tomorrow, Greenspan, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, will also deliver a stinging critique of President George W Bush's economic policies.

Tuesday, September 11

Ray DiPalma feature on
Poetry Daily

Saturday, September 8

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

has been interviewing me over the past couple of years. I can't begin to express the gratitude I feel for the hard work he has put into this, his patience and generosity. The interview is now up at The Argotist Online. Thanks also to the publisher, Jeffrey Side. The site also has a number of articles by GVST, other interviews conducted by him, including one with Colin Wilson, and some of his poetry. There are interviews on the site with Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Marjorie Perloff, Hank Lazer, Jack Foley, Joanne Kyger in conversation with Simon Pettet and many others and a rich poetry section as well, here:
The Argotist Online
"It Gives No Help..."

"if I am shocked at the undeserved suffering in the world, that shock is not thinking. Here is a little book of verse, the work of one well skilled in his art, but it is simply the shock and nothing more. Much of modern literature is of the same kind and it is worthless. It gives no help."

*Last Pages of a Journal* by Mark Rutherford (Oxford University Press, 1915)

Thursday, September 6

An Actor Compares

Michael Lally (Lally's Alley) posts an insider view of Delpy's excellent *Two Days in Paris*, a movie dumbly panned by a some myopic critics.

*************

TEXT LOSES TIME by Nico Vassilakis

(pre-ordering info)

ManyPenny Press is pleased to announce the release of TEXT LOSES TIME by Nico Vassilakis. This necessary work spans roughly 15 years of the author's efforts in both textual and visual writing. It is Vassilakis' first full-length book.

TEXT LOSES TIME
Afterword by Nick Piombino
188 pp.
ISBN-10: 0-9798478-0-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-9798478-0-6

CONTACT AND ORDERING INFORMATION:

ManyPenny Press
1111 E. Fifth St.
Moscow, ID 83843

$15.95 + $2 postage
(Advance orders will receive the book post-paid.)


AUTHOR'S STATEMENT:

This book intends to present both verbal and visual poetries as equal. Though notions of poetics have shifted and swerved, what has stayed solid throughout is that the alphabet, the word - however arranged - contains, within it, dual significance. First, the proto-historic role of the visual conveyance of represented fact. Second, the overriding desire of human utterance to substantiate existence. In conjoining these two models this book hopes to form a third, blurred value. Thought and experience are factors that accrue, while staring and writing help resolve and conclude. Text itself is an amalgam of units of meaning. As you stare at text you notice the visual aspects of letters. As one stares further, meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, spatial relations and visual associations emerge as one delves further. Alphabetic bits or parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the very text one is reading. One aim, to this end, is to merge and hinge visual and textual writing into workable forms. This book collects some of these experiments.

SAMPLE OF WORK FROM "TEXT LOSES TIME":

FROM "THE SCAFFOLDING"

The Rhymes of Vellum

A boy or girl, Vellum, blows a few papers in the wind It answers noise Hopping, hopped. Tapping, tapped Swim sweet twins swing twig Think of losing, serendipity or the wings of a sentence He will get them, but not tell you where they were I like to drink through my brother's center A finger's rose begins A shadow grows down the sidewalk Clapping, clapped
It helps to rip this box open Sound harbor, sound hole Blind rose is a very shape friend I want a shirt to visit my slacks Moon noose soon loose A good look at the cookbook - lots of o's - ghost epaulets on the shoulders of a paragraph Dishes mixes, buses guesses I sit down to work; I draw with my right hand The response sadly is never Living as wide as it gets Think sift You could fault the long moth, the dog lost in soft fog, but it's the song's cost, its crust I got frogs in my throat, a forehead throat Boris said, "Your throat's red." Timothy hums a nail into the wood I run uphill swimming The test isn't over The floor's hard The new girl at school Can you look at a book without getting caught on a line? Like radio, writing is a broadcast They found people in the mailbox A huge gem in a cage Susan flips back to the glossary Only a certain type of fastener The letter "R" in each corner of a page Unexpectedly the middle is empty Next, write your best trick Most banjo. Odd pretty piece asleep A drum whisking discard into cream In this way we raise our pigs on fire & Kenny is always six yards old The donkey said, "Enough." The donkey said, "English." Dark thoughts won't cure light sickness The ladder moved slightly throws the world in disarray The teacher's a bird and flies out the window They had found their clown center Art will say, "I like to pitch. What is your name?" Art will say, "Hi, I'm Art. I like to pitch. What's your name?" Slowly toward a large bird Paper hats, cats A lot of noise comes to visit Long thin water in a line of people I called you once today to say geese make a village of gold & both of my little friends like to sing. Their secret voices are beautiful Spray Spray Spray

COMMENTS ON TEXT LOSES TIME:

"Part nested Minimalist cubes and part laser light that won't diverge across distance, Nico Vassilakis' poetry seems to ask whether we are primates at play on a baseball diamond of memory and desire beside mural-lined public structures slipping toward infinite regression.

Richly iterative, these pairings and alphabets escape the mirror to thrill us with variation and sting all forms of complacency. Vassilakis extends Oulipian strategies: Perec references, lamellisections, crystalline build-outs and transpositions, a scat of nonrepresentational vocables, lettered whirlwinds giving speed for legibility, -- "extracting the gem through layers of gauze" and, other times, lowering a gem into a fold.

Can an argument between a machine that produces texts and "longhand into tiny notebooks" wake us up? In pain, "the throbbing thumb" makes us "attend to the living."

If Vassilakis revises the rock lyric "meet-the-new-boss, same-as-the-old-boss" to "meet the solipsistic era. same as the old
solipsistic era," is treatment to be had in a bar, a science lab, or will it reach us over the radio? Try a road trip, so "you can't afford to blink, to be blind for even a second" going through a colander out where dust is breeding and "glass traps lighting" like no scene you've seen in quite this way. Through crevices, perforations, punctures, piercings, pinholes, see
neighborhoods as "that place where organized sleeping happens." So, look for a faceted colony that "sometimes congeals.""
--Deborah Meadows

"Nico Vassilakis' Text Loses Time unhinges the folds of the book and the word; as the 'folded loose leafed sheets whiz past your ears' you can hear the echoes of meaning. The words flake off the page like aged paint leaving a patina of colour and meaning on the surface and a growing heap of signification at our feet. Here the means of writing rise up and turn
against our expectation, lurching into new spaces. Letters become tactile, meaning becomes rubbery, and both reading and writing become a new collaboration."
--derek beaulieu

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:

Nico Vassilakis was born in New York City in 1963. He has co-written and performed a one-man play about experimental composer Morton Feldman. Vassilakis is co-founder and curator for the Subtext Reading Series and editor of Clear-Cut: Anthology (A Collection of Seattle Writers). He has been a guest-editor of WOS#35: Northwest Concrete and Visual Poetry and his visual poetry videos have been shown worldwide at festivals and exhibitions of innovative language arts. In 1998, Vassilakis co-produced, with Rebecca Brown, a 24-hour "Gertrude Stein-a-thon." His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Ribot, Caliban, Aufgabe, Chain, Talisman, Central Park and Golden Handcuffs Review. He works for Fantagraphic Books and lives in Seattle with his son, Quixote.

Chapbooks:

Askew (bcc press), Stampologue (RASP), Orange: A Manual (Sub Rosa Press), Diptychs: Visual Poems (Otolith), Pond Ring (nine muses books), sequence (Burning Press), Enoch and Aloe (Last Generation Press), The Colander (housepress), Flattened Missive (P.I.S.O.R. Publications), Species Pieces (gong press), KYOO (Burning Press) and others.

DVD:
CONCRETE: Movies (Sub Rosa Press)

CONTACT AND ORDERING INFORMATION:

ManyPenny Press
1111 E. Fifth St.
Moscow, ID 83843

$15.95 + $2 postage
(Advance orders will receive the book post-paid.)


________________________________________________________________________

Wednesday, September 5

Contradicta






Waiting and thinking are enemies because when you are waiting you can think of nothing except what you are waiting for.




***



Suspense is fascinating - when it concerns what is happening to someone else.

Saturday, September 1

Peter Ciccariello- The Conversation

on his blog, Invisible Notes

Wednesday, August 29

Nicholas Manning reviews Nada Gordon's *Folly* (Roof Books)

Galatea Resurrects

Saturday, August 18

Contradicta




Everyone behaves like an idiot from time to time but only the honest ones ever think about it.


*******************



If compassion won acclaim life would be art.

Friday, August 17

Jerome Sala

interviewed by Vincent Katz in Sibila

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Big Brother Is Paying You

Couple Arrested for Wearing Anti-Bush Shirts Settle for $80,000- via The Huffington Post

Wednesday, August 15

Contradicta





If you do not bumble, you must stumble or life remains one long sleep.





****************




Fools have the wit to agree on one thing: pay no attention to the wise.

Tuesday, August 14

Summer Reading Just In From

Tom Beckett (new interview- Joseph Lease interviewed by Thomas Fink)

Saturday, August 11

On My Desk

John Ashbery, *Chinese Whispers*, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
""If living is a hate crime, so be it.
But, hey- I was around when they invented the Cardiff giant.
I kid you not. God wanted you to know,
so you'd remember to love him..." (LITTLE SICK POEM)

Thomas Alan Brown, *The Aesthetics of Robert Schumann*, Greenwood, 1968
"The power of imagination is the prose of creative power [*Bildungkraft*] or fantasy. It is nothing but a highly intensified, brightly colored memory which animals also possess, since they dream and fear....but fantasy or creative power is something higher; it is the World-Soul of all souls and the elementary spirit of the remaining powers." (Schumann)

Ray DiPalma & Paul Vangelisti, *Uptown Vaunt*, Otis Laboratory Press, March 2007
"Elegaic in name only, there is no signature to accomodate the surcease of whatever future was lost in those years. Mornings there is the winter wren's 2-5 notes, followed by a trill, even when there may be no warning because finally you will blunder into dying as you've done about everything else. Just like the other night with one of those innumerable beautiful young women who approach you, the old master, even in spite of your caution, because she has a boyfriend who's building in his room a model of the Danube- until she will later understand."

Eli Drabman, *Daylight on the Wires* Vigilance Society
"[There was a wild place of limitation]/every kind of beast learned by heart/to fear it, to gallop full-throttle into/houses made/made from infinity's/nearness (because)her hair falls/into mud, becoming hoofprint, her gallop widens out, finding/voice (because) the fantasies/of gender, threnody, loose us /back upon the margins"

Patrick F.Durgin, *Imitation Poems*, ATTICUS/FINCH, 2007
"Is there anything to drink? Who am I speaking/with? Can I come home? Will you have me as I am?/How am I? How are you? Who built this ship? Is it/improper to ask? You're procrastinating, now. So kiss me."

Mitch Highfill, Rebis, Openmouth Press,2007
"Grind the brain with strong/vinegar or the urine of a young/boy until it turns black./Black as the heart consumed by hatred"

Mitch Highfill, United Artists Books, 1995
"COMFORTABLE BOMBING AUTHORIZATION
Civilian media damage crew formats
sagacious long face press return.
Conversation strategy needing public
casualities maimed massive children.
Well-fed suicide orchestrated
short plot provocation jaunty hours
opined death attitude"

Joseph Kanon, *Los Alamos*, Dell, 1997
"Santa Fe, however, was pretty. The adobes, which Connolly had never seen, seemed to draw in the sun, holding its light and color like dull penumbras of a flame."

Michael Lally, *Of*, Quiet Lion, 1999
"so here I am,back in LA
looking forward to reading
Elaine Equi's book & already
wondering why she doesn't
mention *me* in it- oh
wow- what is I'm still so
afraid of-
....& it's good, Elaine's book-
so direct & elusive at once
& the poems look like
poems so narrow & short"

Primo Levi, *The Drowned and the Saved*, Vintage, 1989
"Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment, despite all the logic; and for all that, compassion itself chides logic. There is no proportion between the pity we feel and the extent of the pain by which the pity is aroused: a single Anne Frank excites more emotion than the myriads who suffered as she did but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it be so. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live."

C. J. Martin, *City*, Vigilance
"So CITY was mourning & they missed it,
mourning but not really answering.
A toy, a doll's eyes, for I have
a head now, too, were all manner--
instead they live upon have until now.
Not a dozen mourn on the road to Carna."

K. Silem Mohammad, Anne Boyer eds., *Abraham Lincoln#1* Spring/Summer 2007 (16 poets)
..."other people leave astral imprints, dead or alive in buildings
you can feel the bad energy from that person's thoughts
tasteless to refer too closely to a person's contact with the Reich/
I feel the rising nausea once again, faced with the appropriation of this terrifying muzzle/
bend down & touch lightly with my iips the white face in the coffin/
The Internet puts me in touch with thousands of them who act as my scouts" (Gary Sullivan)

Mode A, The Grand Piano, Part 3, 2007 (10 poets)
"The dilemma of memory, the demand of remembering to fix meaning has always troubled me. This has at times made me reluctant to continue with this project: when I was a child I threw away my diaries after I filled them up." (Carla Harryman)

Peter Ostwald, *Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius", Northeastern University, 1985
"Geniality, getting high, and originality are very closely elated concepts, generally speaking, at least all three are volcanoes, spewing lava, from which one or the other boldly goes forward. Geniality likes to erefct its temples in wine cellars, and getting high is like a handyman, or finally even the left hand itself. Originality is the foot. Besides, a youth wants to understand geniality differently than a man; genial men even hate genial youths for the most part, because both look at each other through reducing lenses. The logical, calcified blockhead would very much like to be genial, but he wheezes away like a fox with sour grapes....In other words, beauty may be (in mimicry of the sisters Grace and Charity), amost essential covering that entices us to geniality. Available for everything but fit for nothing- now like butterflies, flimsy, flitting, fluttering, flying, and fondling- now like elephants, sullen, slow, trampling, and crushing- now soft and gentle like virgins- now strong and wild like a lion woken from its slumber. Female delicacy and frivolity, male brutality and destructiveness- like a chameleon that assumes every color and shading-" (Schumann, June 1828)

Phyllis Rosenzweig, editor, Primary Writing 5/07 (2 poets)
"We can barely see what's out there
Overwhelmed as we are by repetition
Though I depend on it for what sense
Of continuity remains to me when
I see you I know I'm at work....
My skin is made of your decision
We write with paint on old newsprint
There are poets in the debris by the door
What comes in goes out
Hello name we say
What do you want?" (Laura Moriarty)

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, *The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning and Recovery*, Metropolitan, 2001
"The Frondists, who opposed French absolutism and, after their defeat, traded the sword for the pen, were typical "losers" of this reflective sort. The memoirs, and aphorisms of Saint-Simon and La Rochefoucauld were ultimately both a sublimated form of revenge and a social critque that led directly to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. In the twentieth century, Russell Jacoby made a similar point about West European Marxism. Stumbling from one political defeat to the next, it retained a crucial potential- a flexibility, an openness, and a humanity- that Soviet Marxism, its twin brother, lost while triumphantly marching foward."

Mark Young, editor, Otoliths, issue five, part two; Southern Autumn, 2007 (15 poets)
"VANISHED INTO TIME THEORY
HAS MELTED POISONED METAPHOR
& TRANSPLANTED CRANIAL LIGHT" (Andrew Topel)

Contradicta



Envy would not be such a bad thing, except that we always envy the wrong ones.



***********************



To know how to begin things, and mostly see them through, yet still enjoy the suspense between, is a secret shared by few.


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--Nada--


simulated direct from--

ululations

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Invisible Notes

Peter Ciccariello

Tuesday, August 7

YVW, Nada

Monday, August 6

Drew Gardner's Poetics Orchestra

peformed on Sunday with poets Nada Gordon and Kimberly Lyons. There were readings as well by Gary Sullivan, Kimberly Lyons, Mitch Highfill, Brenda IIjima and others before and after sets with the Orchestra. Nada, who was in spectacular form yesterday at the BPC was brought back, not suprisingly, for an encore at the end of the Orchestra's second set.

I am going to try very hard not to sound overly melodramatic- I admit I sometimes have a tendency to exagerrate in favor of work I wish to be noticed- but I've had such an experience of watching a ripening talent like Nada's hit the stratosphere enough times in my life to know what it looks like, and a few of these were: Buddy Holly at the Brooklyn Paramount in 1958, Ted Berrigan at St Mark's in 1966, Blondie at CBGB's in 1975, and Holly Hughes at the Wow Cafe in 1985. If you weren't there, and probably you weren't, you should do everything in your power to watch Nada Gordon perform as soon as possible. Nada read mostly from her new book *Folly*, Her second set involved a section of her new Roof Book in which three girls rap while trying on clothes at Target, who somehow manage to teach each other-and us-more about life and postmodern philosophy than a barrel full of Derridas ever could hope to; she ended the set with a heartbreakingly funny, hypnotically repetitive recital of a part of a song made famous by none other than Dean Martin: "when the moon hits your eye." And I'm here to tell you the audience knew it did. Other awesome performances took place on the BPC stage yesterday as well: Gary Sullivan's grandmother was hilariously portrayed as doing things with her gastrointestinal system that would qualify her for a Barnum and Bailey acrobatic contract, and employed his voice in ways that made me sometimes wonder if he was channeling beings from another dimension and it all starts to remind me of a comic from my chlldhood called Plastic Man; Kimberly Lyons read some of her most deftly charged, nostalgically lyrical works excellently with the Orchestra as well (who were also in top form today, by the way, under Drew's able baton}; Mitch Highfill read with that terrific baritone voice of his from his upcoming "Abraham Lincoln" (from new publisher K. Silem Mohammad) chapbook *Mothlight* as well as one poem from his new chapbook-Rebis- just out from seasoned publisher Christina Strong's Openmouth Press, and Brenda Iijima surprised the audience with handstands, bravely defying ringing cellphones and crying babies with poetry that for moments still somehow transported me back to recent quiet states of reverie in the varied moods of Cape Cod's waves and clouds, partly, it seems, by means of her frequent mentions of sunscreen; Jill Stengel was followed by Sean Cole, whose wit and polished verbal pyrotechnics concluded this day of shining performances with the glittering bright finish it well deserved.

I left sorry that I had only been able to attend only one of the Boog City events, as this one well qualified for one the best sawbucks I've ever spent. And I keep reading that ubiquitous mag in newsprint form published by David Kirschenbaum with pleasure every time I find it..

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Ha-Ha America: Antonioni and the Importance of Being Earnest

New Beauty from the Old World

via wood s lot

Sunday, August 5

Boog City Festival: The Penultimate Event

SUNDAY AUGUST 5, 1:30 P.M., 3:45 P.M.
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
NYC
$5 1:30 p.m.

The Future of Small Press Publishing
curated and moderated by Mitch Highfil
l
featuring David Baratier, editor Pavement Saw Press (Columbus, Ohio)
Bob Hershon, co-editor Hanging Loose Press
Brenda Iijima, editor Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs (Brooklyn)
Jill Stengel, editor a+bend press (Davis, Calif.)

Readings and musical performances
3:45 p.m.-The Poetics Orchestra
4:15 p.m.-Kimberly Lyons
4:30 p.m.-Gary Sullivan
4:45 p.m.-Brenda Iijima

5:00 p.m.- break

5:15 p.m.-The Poetics Orchestra
5:35 p.m.-Jill Stengel
5:55 p.m.-Mitch Highfill
6:10 p.m.-Nada Gordon
6:25 p.m.-Sean Cole

Directions: F/V to 2nd Ave., 6 to BleeckerVenue is at E.1st St.
_________________________________________________________________

Thursday, August 2

Even Newer: Art as Comfort discussion continues onThe Newer Metaphysicals

Nicholas Manning said

"Nick, Suzanne, you'd know more about this than me, but I wonder if it wouldn't be also interesting to introduce someone like Piaget into this type of discussion: the idea of 'play' as a constructive psychic process, which may be another spin on "composition" as Nada sees it (not so much "straightening things out" as testing, trying, embodying).

I know that my mother, in her work with children in developmental psych, encourages them to use dolls, puppets and drawings to construct different images, symbologies, narratives, in ways which often deeply resemble poetic processes..."

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Young at Art

Otoliths 6

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Nada Gordon's *Folly* might be funny but art isn't easy: listen up

Critical Cities

Stan Apps: Jacket MagazineOn Nada Gordon's Tolerance

Wednesday, August 1

Art as Comfort- the discussion continues on
The New Metaphysical (Nicholas Manning)

Nada said:
"Healing as composition" But she was not sure she believed that.

suzanne said;

"I worked with 70 women
diagnosed with borderline personalitiy disorders
(many of them dual diagnosed with substance abuse
or bipolar)

I gave them amulets
from my medicine pouch
in the form of stories
made up specifically for them;
I told them
their "disorder" was really a perceptual one
and then they worked on altering their perceptions

off all meds
seldom calling the crisis line"

Tuesday, July 31

Happy Birthday, Gary Sullivan

Gary shares a birthday with Prino Levi (check out today's wood s lot), which is appropriate, in that Gary is one of the most compassionate people I have ever known.

I am also taking the occasion to proffer Elsewhere fait accompli's fourth Thinking Blogger award.

(Strange coincidence dep't: I was introduced to the writing of Primo Levi just yesterday, by Mira Schor, at Tim's Books, and read the amazing essay The Gray Zone very early this morning).

Monday, July 30

On My Desk

Ross Macdonald: The Galton Case, The Ferguson Affair, The Blue Hammer, The Underground Man, Black Money

Cornell Woolrich, Waltz Into Darkness



Last summer, when I was working away on the book version of *fait accompli* I happened to drop by the local used bookstore, Tim's, in Provincetown, and we got to talking about mysteries. I wanted to read something that was unusual for me, and easy, and as I never in my life read one of those, outside of Sherlock Holmes (which I loved), I thought I would try one. He recommended Raymond Chandler, I also found a Sue Grafton, and I was on my way. Grafton has written a series of easy to read mysteries, that are named according to the alphabet, (A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, C is for Corpse, etc; the latest is S is for Silence). I also read all the Raymond Chandlers I could find. I know I don't have to tell you about those.

I might have read a couple of Ross Macdonald novels last summer, I don't remember; I have my list of about 20 novels I read then. Since I ride a subway to work, one train, I usually read a novel, at least I did up until I started using my Ipod, damn thing. This summer I've been reading Ross Macdonald quite a lot and Joseph Kanon, who I mentioned a few weeks ago - don't miss Alibi!- it's great (that one was a gift from Ray DiPalma, as well as The Good German). My recent interest in postwar Germany dates from my early childhood when I lived in Nurnberg and that amazing Weimar show at the Met last year.

But Ross Macdonald! The more I read him, the more I like him. Macdonald is not only psychologically acute- almost all his plots have to do with family dynamics- but his descriptions are superb, and often poetic to boot. Looking at the page as you read it, you feel like you are watching a movie screen as every sentence jumps out at you whole and transforms itself into a moment in the scene that is taking place. And somehow, the descriptions usually add to the suspense. ("The university had been built on an elevated spur of land that jutted into the sea and was narrowed at its base by a tidal slough. Almost surrounded by water and softened by blue haze, it looked from the distance like a medieval fortress town....Close-up, the buildings shed this romatic aspect. They were half-heartedly modern, cubes and oblongs and slabs that looked as if their architect had spent his life designing business buildings." [The Blue Hammer].

A recent visit to Tim's brought me Cornell Woolrich's great *Waltz into Darkness*- the author was suggested by an acquaintance who is up here, the artist Mira Schor. Waltz into Darkness takes place in the late 19th century in New Orleans and thereabouts. Woolrich is credited, for good reason, for inventing along with Hammett and Chandler, the noir genre. He wrote the story that the film Rear Window was based on. He had a tough life and ended up a recluse. This book is full of plot twists and turns, and is the kind of book I find myself at times exclaiming out loud, as if to the character I am reading about, "Don't do it!"

Great writing: "A vanishing point was bound to be reached eventually. It had been imminent for some time, if he'd only taken the trouble to make inventory. But he hadn't; perhaps he'd been afraid to, afraid in his own mind of the too-exact knowledge that that he would have derived from such a summing-up; the certainty of termination. Afraid of the chill that would have been cast upon their feasting, the shadow that would have dimmed their wine. There was always tomorrow, tomorrow, to make a reckoning. And tomorrow, there was always tomorrow still. And meanwhile the music swelled, and the waltz whirled ever faster, giving no pause for breath."

Anyway, time to go back to Ross Macdonald's *The Underground Man* See you later..."It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and the beach was littered with bodies. It was like a warning vision of the future, when every square foot of the world would be populated. I found a place to sit in the sand beside a youth with a guitar who lay propped against a girl's stomach. I could smell her sun-tan oil, and I felt as if everybody but me was paired off like animals in the dark....I got up and looked around me. Under the stratum of smoke which lay over the city, the air was harshly clear. The low sun was like a spinning yellow frisbee which I could almost reach out and catch..."

Friday, July 27

Nicholas and Nicholas continue their discussion on Manning's essay "Art as Comfort: Some Misgivings on a Therapeutic Poetics"

on The New Metaphysicals (Nicholas Manning)l

Wednesday, July 25

*fait accompli* third Thinking Blogger Award goes to wood s lot

Mark Woods is a blogger living in Canada whose blog I find to be the most valuable resource on the internet. Mallarme in a poem once imagined a newspaper composed of dreams. wood s lot is the ultimate time traveler's newspaper, bringing you news that stays news. It is the true come dream. On wood s lot you will celebrate Debussy's birthday or the latest essay by Kasey S. Mohammad on the crises of poetry or a series of articles on the subject of happiness. And it is a feast for the eye as well as the mind. It is almost unimaginable that someone could, on a daily basis, provide information that not only feeds the mind but feeds the spirit and the imagination, but this is what you will find constantly at wood s lot.

Our first two awards went to Ray Davis and Tom Beckett.
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The Newer Metaphysicals: Art as comfort: some misgivings on a therapeutic poetics. An excellent article by Nicholas Manning with two cents thrown in from Nicholas you-know-who.

Tuesday, July 24

Oh, What A Loverly Bunch of Coconuts

Coconut #9

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Adam Fieled, has guest edited OCHO 11/LuLu, a print poetry magazine produced by Didi Menendez of Mipoesias fame. Adam opens the issue with a sharp and touching introduction, which sets the tone for the entire issue: "This poetry is a tough gig, isn't it? We don't do it to become celebrities, because the machinery is not there to turn us into celebrities. I would like to think that the reasons for pursuing this ancient, contemporary, always relevant art form are spiritual." Read the whole introduction, and some of the poetry, and do consider purchasing it, by clicking on "preview this book" on the LuLu link above. The work in the issue matches the promises and premises of the introduction. There is an overall quality to this charming collection that has entirely its own character: not flip, not pretentious, not "different": merely and wholly pleasurable, considered, insightful, lyrical, imagistic, and, in that sense completely personal, present and absorbing. Check out the lovely cover by Hector Milia on the LuLu page, and click "preview this page" to look at the contents. Again: OCHO 11/LuLu.

Monday, July 23

Meme Corner

Beckett's Best: this just in


Tom Beckett selected Shanna Compton for his Third Thinking Blogger award; his first two were given to Geof Huth and Eileen Tabios.

*fait accompli* will announce our third choice in a few days: our first two were awarded to Ray Davis (who graciously accepted it, though I found out just today he dislikes memes); and our second went to Tom Beckett.

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Another Great 8

Boynton
Contradicta



In the heart of your wound, find your path.



*****************


Suffering shouts, happiness whispers.
There's No Such Thing As Intelligence: A Catchy Tune

Some days back, Ray Davis mentioned the above post by Joseph Kugelmass that I'm still rereading. Even if I don't agree with all of his conclusions, I am still returning to many of his allusions. I enjoyed his defense of psychoanalytically informed critique, which he notices are sometimes today too easily dismissed by weighted, if not weighty arguments. And he refers also to a blog called Sour Duck, which I read today and enjoyed a bit of metablogging, something I haven't seen much of for a while:

Sour Duck admits to some ambivalence about the stylistic limitations of blog writing, but feels that, in this context, content makes it all worth it. Kind of like, say, relationships.

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Perusing Ray Davis' loglist

Acephalous (Scott Eric Kaufman)

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Mark Young's *Lunch Poem*
Gamma Ways

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First New Katie Degentesh Post in Two Months

Bloggedy-Blog Blog

Saturday, July 21

Further comments on *There is No Such Thing as Intelligence* The Kugelmass Episodes

It’s hard to imagine a more passionate defender of “brilliance” than Bloom, so I can see why you you brought him in. But I still think his *The Anxiety of Influence*has a lot to offer.

Some of my thoughts about your essay come out of working as a school social worker in NY for 25 years. I often get the feeling that in schools, and in society in general, the less people recognize the given talents and abilities of others, the more shrewdness is a valued and admired substitute for thinking.What happens when there is no status to be earned by intellectual accomplishments, according to the common sense idea that “if you’re so smart why aren’t you rich?” I just finished reading Gissing’s *New Grub Street.* In part, it seems to me, the book is an indictment of contemporary culture’s inability to benefit from the talents of those who cannot transpose their intellectual abilities into saleable skills. What would Gissing say now? I’ll bet there are not a few poverty stricken bloggers out there; and who can make a living as an adjunct? Edwin Reardon, the main character in *New Grub Street* dies clearly as a result of disease brought on by malnutrition. He had written a couple of brilliant novels and waited too long to take a job as clerk because, if he didn’t work as a brilliant intellectual, how were people to know he was one? In a rational and responsible society, it seems to me, it would be considered unethical to underrate people because the visible results of their talents do not match who they are as persons. People would then appraise others according to what they have to offer, not according to what they have been able to sell in themselves.

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OCHO 11is available from LuLu.

as is our own

Free Fall

The publisher, Mark Young, had this to say about Free Fall:

gamma ways

Friday, July 20

Happy Birthday Tom Beckett!

Tom Beckett video on *The Continental Review*

Beckett's *Unprotected Texts* reviewed in the current Jacket (#33, July 2007)

Tom Beckett/poetry/Otoliths

Allen Bramhall on Tom Beckett

Tom Beckett/Steps/Meritage Press

Tom Beckett, curator/E-X-C-H-A-N-G-E-V-A-L-U-E-S The First XI
Interviews/Otoliths


Tom Beckett's e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e- v-a-l-u-e-s blog

hb t.b. Arroyo Chamisa

Tom Beckett is the recipient of our second Thinking Blogger Award (the first was Ray Davis). Tom's blog, Soluble Census, as well as his earlier blogs, have become mainstays of the literary blogging world. Tom is a true thinking blogger if there ever was one: his openness, knowledgeability and dedication to poetry and poetry blogging are legendary. In the stormy seas of contemporary poetry, Tom Beckett's blog is a lighthouse and it is our pleasure to have proffered this token of appreciation. (fait accompli/ 7/17/07)

Tom Beckett today awarded Soluble Census' second Thinking Blogger Award to Eileen Tabios (the first went to Geof Huth)

Thursday, July 19

By George

I've just finished reading the remarkable novel "New Grub Street* by George Gissing. For the past few years I've been searching out early novels that reveal underlying factors leading to the reality of social life as it is lived today. I've been fascinated by the work of Flaubert. Dickens, Wharton, Dreiser, James, Maugham and Orwell, to name a few, partcularly Flaubert's *Sentimental Education*, Orwell's *Keep the Apidistra Flying*, Wharton's *House of Mirth*, Dickens' *David Copperfield*, Maugham's "Of Human Bondage*, Dreiser's *Sister Carrie.*, and James' "Washington Square*. I've been trying to trace themes and connections in these writers, and have been garnering impressions and ideas about prophetic and predictive qualities in the turn of the century and early 20th century realist novel.Any suggestions? Please write to me at nickpoetique@earthlink.net.

The remarkable influence of George Gissing on George Orwell is discussed in an interesting essay I found today on the George Gissing site.

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E ratio9 edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino is just out.

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Veni, Vidi, Vici

Tom Beckett (Soluble Census) has chosen the pied piper of Vispo as the recipient of his first Thinking Blogger award.

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pseudopodium loglist

The second selection, in our ongoing perusal of Ray Davis' loglist is the wonderfully titled
Languor Management

Wednesday, July 18

Tom Marches On

Tom Beckett kindly responds and accepts our Thinking Blogger Award and promises to continue the meme.

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While The Boss is Out to Lunch

check out The Process of Avant-Garde Practice, a longish essay on William Watkins' Blog

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Rain, Rain Go Away

but until it does, check out Amy King's Links
which include tons of audio interviews she has conducted, including one with Elaine Equi

King of Brooklyn
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Too Warm? Take Off Your

July Jacket and read on...
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If The Truth Be Told

Tracie Morris and Charles Bernstein sing a duet in
The Brooklyn Rail
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Rachel Maddow

our recent Provincetown neighbor interviews Steve Buscemi, our Park Slope neighbor
today on The Rachel Maddow Show | Air America Radio
Steve Buscemi will be in studio talking about his latest film

Tuesday, July 17

Tom Beckett

is the recipient of our second Thinking Blogger Award. Tom's blog, Soluble Census, as well as his earlier blogs, have become mainstays of the literary blogging world. Tom is a true thinking blogger if there ever was one: his openness, knowledgeability and dedication to poetry and poetry blogging are legendary. In the stormy seas of contemporary poetry, Tom Beckett's blog is a lighthouse and it is our pleasure to proffer this token of appreciation.

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pseudopodium loglist bloggers

The very first link we came across on the pseudopodium loglist is a gold nugget. Check outLink Machine

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On My Desk

Our New Orwell?

*Alibi* by Joseph Kanon

Multiple reviews of *Alibi*

*

Toni, an aficianado of 19th century novels loved *New Grub Street* by George Gissing

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Two More Great 8

Jean Vengua

Nicholas Manning

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Jean Vengua, in one of her 8 random facts, mentions she's read all of the stories of H. P. Lovecraft. I was reminded that my friend, the novelist Peter Straub, who has published many terrific novels in the horror genre, is the editor of the Library of America collection of The Tales of H.P. Lovecraft,

Monday, July 16

Anger at the Scale

Just as Katie Degentesh, pointedly critiques psychological tests in her book The Anger Scale, Kugelmass takes aim at the idea, and specifically, the culture of intelligence, in an essay Ray Davis notably mentions and links to it in his latest post, discussed below, possibly making an indirect critique of the notion of the award I had just presented him with! Enjoy, you geniuses: Kugelmass: There is No Such Thing As Intelligence.

I am not very much in agreement with Kugelmass' thesis. There may be no such thing as intelligence, per se, but there is such a thing as intelligent resourcefulness and this can be taught. Lets not drown the baby in the bathos, Mr. Kugelmass!! Also, check out K's arch reference to Harold Bloom's amazing book, *The Anxiety of Influence*. He seems to feel the A of I was written because Bloom could not create literature on his own (has he wanted to?), in the spirit of those who can do, and those who cannot, teach. Anyway, this is a fine and provocative essay, and our thanks to Ray Davis for pointing us to it.

Sunday, July 15

Ray Davis

Whose blog pseudopodium recently celebrated its eighth birthday, and was our first choice for a Thinking Blogger award, has invited us to peruse his loglist in search of blogs worth thinking about. This is a fine recommendation for a veteran blogger to make, as in my own case, there has been a declining propensity to wade into the ever increasing ocean of new blogs. Happily, Ray takes the moment to talk a bit about himself, and in so doing, mentions Miranda Gaw, and Mark Woods. I see in my crystal ball another Thinking Blogger award coming into view. And who would deserve it more?

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Nobly Disheveled

ursprache