Last night saw the second installment of Salon. I still gaffe at the name, esp. when I think about the online mag. I am converted now to this media of group discussion, this enacting of poetry-as-social-thinking, a thinking both critical and practical, and attuned towards expanding and redefining awareness.

This morning I've been doing some research off one thread of last night's topic, and that's around Stephanie Young and Juliana Spahr's collaborative panel presentation @ the recent LA Noulipo conference. Even though Stephanie was at Salon last night, we didn't ask her to talk about the performance, or its fall-out, so an opportunity missed there. But one of the greatets things about Salon, and about any on-going engagement with a writing community is how the mind and heart expand/contract/ re-orient upon entering an arena of common concerns (and some others left out - silenced? or uncommon? - as well).

How do we enter the commons? Its often traumatic for me at first, i.e. i enter with anxiety, with a lot of emotion, indeed more than the apparent "coolness" of the discourse can handle. Maybe it was just my rough weekend. But if I stick it out - i adjust - and can bring some of that raw energy to bear on what - surprise surprise - can drifty towards the abstract and heady, a discourse more interested in demonstarting mastery than in encouraging emancipation and intimacy. But this is a writing community where an analysis of that tendency towards headiness (and the body it leaves behind) is very much welcome, if one can articulate it.

Which Juliana and Stephanie can. Together, they presented "Foulipo", a talk processed with traditional Oulipian methods (ommited "r"s, and n+7), and with an overt nod to the 70s feminist body-art performance work (i.e.: they twice undressed during the talk). The talk itself was about the problematic intersection - or lack thereof - between these two practices, their practioners, and their politics. But thats just an obvious teaser for a piece I am at a loss to do quick justice to. Check it out:

You can find general info about the Noulipo conference here.
A review of that day's panel can be found here.
And, the main course, Stephanie has posted in full, with notes, their text here.

Its been fascinating to read their paper, and the work around it, from a personal vantage point - to read it in consideration of the emotions and states i bring to the writing commons - and to compare its analysis with my own experience of writing panels, workshops, texts. It also doesn't hurt that I just saw the Kiki Smith retrospective @ the SFMOMA.

If I was less hungry I could express this differently, but I am getting a little strung out now so ciao. But thanks to both Stephanie and Juliana for once again writing something that helped redefine (re-mind?) what art is all about for me at a time when, once again, I felt I was losing just that grounded sense of what is desired, what is problematic, and what is possible. It went down with a big gulp of "oh yes" that is simultaneously "oh shit": a perfect prescription.

Dear friends,

What else is a blog but a sort of rarefied gossip column? Plenty, but not today. It’s 7:15, and I’m going to get into what’s been exciting in my corner of the ark poetica of late. Its going to entail some sinfully laudatory descriptive language.

Friday nite saw Brandon Brown and Brent Cunningham read @ SPT. SPT is the outgrowth of a 30 plus year old literary-advocacy project, and pretty much the most reliable and wide-ranging series of contemporary readings round here. Have I already said much the same? It’s a reliable place to run into poetry pals and peers, nestled in the Timkin Lecture Hall at the back of CCA’s hanger-esque artspace.

Brandon read from/performed sections of his The Persians by Aeschylus, the latest of his active re-imaginings of Classical texts. Constantly shifting, formally conscious and inventive, dense with word-play (downright Zukofsyian at times), and tensely resonant with an echo-chamber of postcolonial concerns with representation of the Other (the Greeks “fend off” the Persians, the US “pre-empts” Iraq), and wise enough to allow the chorus to get down to business to “Rock the Casbah”, Brandon’s work was invigorating - a real stunner. The type of piece where, after its over, I found it difficult to speak, and certainly difficult to speak about. Which is a measure of its impact and strength, work that can literally fuck you up. I don’t know how well Brandon’s rep extends outside the Bay Area – his bio is disturbingly full of unpublished works (someone will have to do something about that) – but he was warmly received and “welcomed” Friday night by his hometown crowd.

It’s a warmth they returned. Brandon and Brent opened the evening with a performance of a comic dialogue which underlined both performer’s real interest in – and critical consciousness of the limits of – creating a warm, intimate space of “welcome” with their work, of having the audience listen as comfortably as they would in their own home. Timkin - and SPT - both are and aren't that space they were invoking. Their appeals to the heart - worded, performed - both did and didn't evoke such intimacy and warmth: and the constant return to this basic welcoming became increasingly absurd - the record's (or neurotic's) stuck groove. The slide here between pathos and bathos was wonderful, and had at least two of us independently thinking of Beckett’s tramps. Language is such a tricky medium, never stationary, never flat, always beyond our control, even in moments when it seems most transparent and responsive to our intent. Both Brandon and Brent, in their own ways, proceed from a position in which irony and honesty, personal vulnerability and the impermeable mask of the orator, are inseparably coiled. Good f-ing luck picking them apart.

Brent read a smattering from his Bird and Forest (Ugly Duckling), for which this reading served as a belated release party. Brent read a sampling of the title poem, a series which, as he explains it, inverts the traditional mode in which multiple images point towards the same “unnamed” center, which the images serve to enliven. So the single image of the bird, and its forest, iterate outwards off each page, in each instance in a different direction, gesturing towards dozens of possible focii. This approach has a rich conceptual resonance, and is realized in sumptuous, contemplative language full of subtle turns. It’s a fucked thing that work that seems to emanate from a place of quiet, dedicated study – from in short, a study, that sense of the workman’s table, a comfortable armchair, next to it a table on which rest a few well-chosen books, seems such a rare find these days. Brent's work seems at home with itself where much other work seems itchy, bothered, uncomfortable, agitated. There’s a sense of unhurried mastery here I associate more with the past dead than the present living. Rarer still that the work is lively, attentive, that it has heart and grit to it, and a humble/sharp sense of humor. This alertness, not sprung from any sense of danger, but somehow innate to the posture of the work itself, makes for compelling reading, makes the generative intimacy of the study seem a resonant chamber for me.

Brent continued on to read from a new manuscript which got me thinking to such a degree I can’t really say anything on it. Sometimes you leave a reading just wanting to see the damn work on the page. What impressed me most was Brent’s declaration that the process of this new work included a vow to strike out any line which struck him as conventionally poetic. Given Brent’s skill with this “conventionally poetic” that strikes me as a particularly brave thing.

As soon as the applause died down, Sara and I ducked out to pick up Sarah and hit The Goblet of Fire, which temporarily erased the reading with the first blast of Dolby sound. In the second row of the multiplex, feet up on the seat before me, Whizzy Fizz popping on my tongue, I switched from viewing the work of a sole author to a movie made by more than a thousand.

Saturday saw Sara and I sit down for the first of two el pobre submission selection meetings (at Beanbag, a café two sunny blocks from our usual choice). November is the tail-end of the warm season here, and this weekend delivered, with a trio of glorious days. I keep thinking “it’s November” as if that means something on its own – but months only take on specificity in a given place – and no, this isn’t anything like November in New England or Colorado. The selections are making more sense this time round: the third el pobre advances and refines our aesthetic, challenges several of our early limits, and is moving into a more varied, rougher, uneven – and invigorating – read. Its exciting work, and a pleasure to be publishing. The flow is a little wilder, less predictable, the range of work is greater, and the aesthetic preoccupations and concerns come forth more sharply here. The 1998 Robert Creeley interview Brent's brought us is a particularly rare and wicked find.

Today – Sunday – Scott Inguito and I finished the layout and proofing for Lection, Subday’s latest. Lection will initiate Subday’s “mini book” series of small book-art conscious chaps. Each time we meet the design comes a full step or two forward, and each time it’s a surprise. This time, once more, the book came forward in unexpected directions, and carries a liveliness and fully-realized polysemous quality that was only a dream a month back.



On top of being productive, the meeting was delightful – Scott and I have been ideal collaborators, and working on Lection has fulfilled the social criteria of publishing – that the editor and the writer come together in the process, that it generates an intimacy and exchange of ideas, perspectives, poetics. I also see the mini book series as a collaborative venture, a chance for me to step forward with layouts, designs and editing strategies which push the process of book-making to the fore, that catalyze the writers manuscript into a new shape, new form. Bookmaking is always a process of translation, and with the mini books, I hope to showcase the possibilities and test the limits of this trans-ing of the word.doc text into papered three-dimensionality. Lection will be available by December $10th, for $5, and Scott will be releasing it at SPD’s Holiday Open House reading and book sale. These are two facing pages, unfortunately scrambled here. They line up so that "use aries" can be read across the pages.

Now I’m sitting at home, finishing an Oatmeal cookie milkshake, and Sarah’s at my side watching Bono on 60 Minutes. I’ve put my headphones back on to finish track 6 of Sigur Ros’s latest CD. Their must is emotive in a way that turned me off a few years back, but, now, the alternating surges and slides and languid rolls of their music makes sense to me, how to say it – there’s a tidal quality here, and a vulnerability that rises up in crescendos of noise, vivid waves of it that then crash – or evaporate, leaving a droning wake of amplifier hum and piano keys. The same way, 20 seconds after a big six foot breaker, a 1/8” thin sheet of water pours back into the surf with its fine cross-braidings of sand.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. I wanted to end the weekend at the New Yipes, a half-hour away in Oakland, where Norma Cole is reading tonight, but I was too late. So I’ve decided to share and celebrate that too-late-ness, this buoyant comma at the bottom of the heavy week. Next line starts with Monday’s alarm brrrrrng and my first shave in five days.

Now Sarah’s watching about animals left behind by Katrina, and I’m gonna join her.

Today's amazing Wikipedia link

Brazilian modernist poet Mario de Andrade: "he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his Paulicéia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) in 1922. He has had an enormous influence on Brazilian literature in the 20th and 21st centuries, and as a scholar and essayist—he was a pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology—his influence has reached far beyond Brazil."

before heading home

I assembled 25 boxes this afternoon. Some long and thin – for architectural drawings. Some fat oblong cubes for administrative files. Into these boxes went information pertaining to the construction and modification of a variety of courts, hospitals, universities, and secure treatment facilities (department of corrections) throughout California.

Prior to this, I composed a long associative poem, the type often thought of as “a meditation”. This usage is the western version of what might be better termed “a contemplation”. I want to distinguish the mystical sense of meditation – which involves no action beyond letting go, and is an active process of being passive – i.e. of practicing non-attachment – from the object-focused work, often taking a literary form, known as a meditation. From some perspectives, particularly for those not concerned with meditation-as-practice, this distinction might seem unnecessary. Another, softer way to make the distinction is to describe zazen as “meditation” while other forms, whether worded, imagistic, or purely conceptual, could be termed “meditations on”, hence bringing their object into the named fold. St. Augustine’s meditations are surely “meditations on”, in which objects emerge and fade, and each path leads to God, and to His realization in a particular life remembered discursively. Zazen, and other forms of meditation-sans-object, have a different approach. Writing is not possible from this place, just as writing is not possible from a coma, or a dream, or death. Trance-states form a boundary region here, and I am down enough with Herzog’s Herz aus Glas to consider that intriguing. Yet, lit-wise, its wicked old fashion, its Surrealist digs, and folks these days prefer other types of the minor. Fashion is relentless, but Henry Darger and Hannah Wieners show a continued interest in this territory. Once these get too trendy, I am sure the head of the moving column will be found elsewhere.

The poem was concerned with space, with inhabiting space, and the difference between experiencing and fixing that experience. It strayed from and returned to these concerns, to avoid being fixed by them. I’m interested in work that charts desires, work whose liveliness has a slightly uneven, unpredictable quality of attending. I doubt this is news to anyone who has read much of my work (all 12 of you) but its coming clear to me, and, today, its spilling into other areas of my life. Cracks of light on a beautiful fall day turned evening.
Now Sarah is here, and I am a gonna go.

Lacan goes to the Salon.

I've been reading some work on Lacan, AND, we've revivied the salon idea. The second salon is to be around Lacan. And i've fallen in love with how lacan defines jouissance not as bliss, but more generally as (it would appear) any intensity "which is too much to bear" - i am guessing its the Symbolic-Moi complex which must bear it. So if a flow or rupture too great for the (imaged/worded) I to bear comes across a subject, it arouses a state of great excitation which normally we want to rid ourselves of immediately, right? Feeling hot? Bothered? Un-normed? Go back to being cool, rational, under control ASAP. Irony aside, experiences from anxiety atacks to being horny to not understanding a speaker or text appear to fall under this heading. For me too. But I've noticed it doesn't help.

In modern Western societies, it is considered masculine for men to have hair on their faces, arms, chests and legs, but the hair growing from the top of the head is generally kept short, relatively speaking; equally, it is considered feminine for women to have no hair on their bodies, with the exception of knuckle hair, but to have a lot of it on the tops of their heads. This is a fairly recent development. Before the First World War men generally had long hair and beards. The trench warfare between 1914 and 1918 exposed men to lice and flea infestation which caused the order to be given for the routine cutting of hair to a severely short length. The shorter style became the new normality and has never entirely gone away since.

With activities like extreme sports, we also SEEK these states (in a form the I can just so barely control or perhaps pushing into a limnal state where control is a dangling question.) I just flashed on Genet's The Balcony here, a similiar fetishized state at the edge of control as theater, and also as (barely) mediated eruption of the repressed unconscious desires.

Hair is the filamentous outgrowth of the epidermis found in mammals.

Now thinking of this and reading - a text which disrupts too radically the symbolic logic causes jouissance. but this jouissance too will largely /most likely be construed as painful, irritating, annoyance. Won't it be the work of the ego to say that this outbreak is "petty" or "painful" and therefore dismissable/to be avoided, so we can return to biz as normal?

In humans neoteny is manifest in the paedomorphic characteristics exhibited by fertile women. See Sexual attraction

It appears as a threat, and the threat, one way or another, must be extinguished.

See also
cuteness
heterochrony

This seems to me to make enormous sense in interpreteting the response to the various modernisms and po-modernisms of the last 100yrs. A writer fucks with the code, and the general response is one of... defense, of reentrenchment, dismissal, pot-shot, boredom, the same response a client on the couch is likely to have as the analyst pushes the work into the unconscious 'wound' (or i guess Lacan would say the neurotic knot). An artist may do the same so long as the ghetto (i.e. container) of the Object is not compromised - then their disruption is recouped through capital and object fetishism, again as a form of theater. The book is such a marginal site for this theater (not as restricted of entrance as a whorehouse or limited edition object) that only the critic can recoup it for capital/audience in a larger symbolic order. But with nothing to buy, the critic loses the ear of the elite (as well as the privleged site of the gallery space) . And not owning any of it, the privleged classes show far more indifference to its larger cultural promotion, freed as they are from any shareholder's stake in the enterprise. UNLESS the book is a limited edition affair, a "book arts" project, esp. one bridging the art and literary world, providing them an accessible entrance into this new theater. With attendant high cost/restricted access.

Some studies suggest that one source of physical attraction of a human male to a human female is dependent upon a proportion between the width of the hips and the width of the waist (see Golden ratio). (disputed — see talk page)

Writers who engage in this process of focusing on jouissance, on documenting and heightening it - are threatening to unravel just what the normative society is absolutely forbidden itself to unravel. Not that this work is necessarily heroic or particuarly intelligent - just that the general direction of the avant-garde (insofar as it shares this direction to trouble the smooth surface of language-logic) is towards increasing jouissance in texts, contra the broader tendency to extinguish or severely deplete or ghetto-ize it.

One idea of physical beauty regarding the breasts of women is that the best shape approaches the shape of a three dimensional parabola (which is called a Paraboloid of revolution) as opposed to a hyperbola, or a sphere. Conversely, the shape of the buttocks of an attractive person (male or female) tends to resemble the shape of a cardioid, which is the inverse transform of a parabola.

(i actually dont know if you are interested in Lacan. hi there)

Sexual attraction to a man by a woman is determined largely by the height of the man. For the woman, the man should be at least a few percent taller than her in order to be perceived as handsome. In European populations the average height of males is about 175 cm whereas the average height of females is about 165 cm - a 6% difference. It would be preferable if the man is at least a little above the average in height in the given population of males. This implies that women look for signs of social dominance and power as factors that determine male beauty.

It's also worth noting that Lacan saw the process of jouissance as a destructive one - its uncontainable energies provide unbearable suffering unto its conscious subject, who is unable to maintain the symbolic order of meaning under tis "attack" - yet, at the same time, the unconscious drives and energies of the same subject experience jouissance as a satisfaction - its eruption provides the body an aspect of release, a discharging of clogged/trapped energy. Even psychotic episodes ("breaks") are moments where flow is restored. The unconscious mammalian body thus regulates its flows of jouissance on its own, even when the conscious and Symbiolic egos act as its intractable foes. In the end, the "real" body may be dominated, exploited, suppressed, but it can never be extinguished, and its unmediated, non-symbolic power, like any force of nature, will be felt both in the continually escalating degree of control nec. to "maintain order" (response to the current riots in France, and the continual bark of the right wing to unleash the army) and in the pent-up destructive energies which turn, inevitably explode (the riots themselves) when measures of containment and repression themselves threaten a greater disruption than jouissance itself. There is a comedy here, or play of forces, as the Symbolic order and the Real energies of the unconscious do their dance. Its worth noting that neither force has a monopoly on violence.

At various times in history and throughout various cultures and sub-cultures the growth, maintenance and display of facial or body hair produced as a by-product of testosterone activity within male bodies has been considered a primary characteristic of sexual attractiveness, and of a display of masculinity in general. Cultural development seems to oscillate through multi-generational cycles from one pole to another: extreme hair growth, especially of facial hair accompanied by elaborate grooming rituals is often followed within a couple of generations by a widespread antipathy to body hair and the widespread adoption of depilatory practices.
The causal mechanism for this oscillation has not been established but differences in the simultaneous characterisation of body hair attractiveness within a culture between different social classes may indicate that the dynamic force driving the diffusion of differing male body hair social practices is in fact mate selection by females.

The text is a body with as many operative levels of Symbolic order (and hence social demands, with their ever distance from instinctive drives) as the political body of a nation. Language - for Lacan - is the seat of Symbolic power, the source of its energy, the means of its effect. The text operates Symbolically through plot, through diction, through the heirarchies of clause, sentence, paragraph, chapter, through "proper spelling", through dialect and the associated rhetorical tropes. Jouissance, for most writers, is what falls outside (Symbolic) intention, it is seen as inattentive writing, as error - it is swept away. The repressive/winnowing master-author alone decides what goes into his text. Any other autonomy within the book is discarded. What is left of jouissance is the titilation of the romance, the suspense of the who-dunnit, etc., a disruptive tension playd like a string inthe maestro's hands, to its ultimate, and never-in-doubt conclusion. And these are in textual forms geared towards emotive release - legal documents, instruction manuals, newspaper articles, medical and mathematical treatises: what role does jouissance play in these? Aren't the Symbolic reigns even more tightly bound into the unconscious flesh?

The appearance of health also plays a part in physical attraction. Often, women with long hair are thought to appear more beautiful, as the ability to grow long, healthy looking hair is an indication of continuous health of an individual

But the next place i go to is Lacan's sense that the analyst's task is then to regulate jousissance. As flow/current. Which brings me to chinese energetics, to meridians. To hazard some fairly obvious translations: jouissance is a dark, mature yin energetics, the Symbolic a classic yang ordering principle. A rupture comes about when the dark yin unseats the ruler - yang - sowing chaos which is also fruitful release, dependingon perspective. As in the flooding of the Yangtze, or civil unrest, or a wife leaving her husband (classical Chinese thought seeing a direct gendered extension betwene man and woman in the paly of these energies, one the West has also inherited, with all its associated problematics - its in Lacan as well, and has likewise been a fruitful troubling in his inheritance among the French feminists). Neuroses and psychoses are unharmonious (excessively disruptive or short-term emergency measure) pairings of these energies - they create grievious distances and (social/psychic) ruptures even as they allow the subject to carry on against a threatening backdrop of chaos.

Structurally, hair consists of an inner cortex, comprising spindle-shaped cells, and an outer sheath, called the cuticle. Within each cortical cell are many fibrils, running parallel to the fibre axis, and between the fibrils is a softer material called the matrix. It grows from a hair follicle.

But, also, in writing, doesn't this become the work? To explore the edges of the unbearable and find that we can bear them, and to enter intensities without so much habitual baggage? i think this is what i have found of value in my writing and reading practice. I can't pinpoint Lacan in this, but in my practice, the fear of this chaos, of the rupture or break, becomes so unbearably prohibitive, that writing against it - into chaos and trouble - is a welcome release, not the thing to be feared as endangering my sanity. It is also a fear which prohibits bliss - it is the clamp down which tends towards obssesive death-in-life, which I equate with the zombie.

Cross-section shape of human hair is typically round in people of Asian descent, round to oval in European descent, and nearly flat in African peoples; it is that flatness which allows African hair to attain its frizzly form. In contrast, hair that has a round cross-section will be straight. A strand of straight round cross-section hair that has been flattened, for example, with an edge of a coin, will curl up into a micro-afro.

Terror and bliss, as horror movies point out, are intimates. Daring writing does much to explore and document the same links. Likewise all states we habitually avoid - especially ones which cause no obvious physical harm, such as listening to a long, difficult lecture, or watching an unfathomable movie or (so goddamn often) dancing or speaking up - bind us, tie us down, and we attach to ever more narrow zones of comfort and control in which we move, and which, as the American Right has reaped so much capital from claiming, consitutes our "freedom", which, sliver that it is, we are paranoiacally disposed to staunchly defend.

Hair is strong. A single strand can hold 100g (3.5oz) of weight. A head of hair could support 12 tonnes. It is equivalent in strength to aluminium or Kevlar. Wet hair, however, is very fragile.

How can our writing proceed into this territory? It is work against the grain, but there are so many... there is a lifetime of work here, work that is libratory in that its aim is to bring into harmonious relations the Symbolic and the all-too-often repressed Real. So that jouissance's eruption is allowed, engaged in, appreciated, even enjoyed - not because its wild difficulty is wholly contained and regulated, but precisely in experiencing this not being so, in the very real felt tension of a work springing form both camps, a work which proceeds as a Lacanian "sinthome" a modulated creative activity in the place of a eactive situation of violence and repression of violence (itself violent). By attending to it, giving it a place within the city limits (likethe theater, at its edge) we can become more intimate and expert at noting its flows, at discerning real from imaginery dangers, at learnign to relax and repress a little less, widening the current of human possibilities : on the stage, in bed, at work, etc. It is a work of engineering wild flows, with all the attendant contradictions. Humans have been at it since before the Neolithic, no time to stop now, just because Mussolini, Giuliani, New Formalism, your inner version of the same, et al are on the momentary epochal ascension. After all Schwartzenegar lost all his ballot initatives.

People starting out with very pale blond hair usually develop white hair instead of grey hair when aging.

questions for ya

In lieu of the planned post on hair, which is unfinished, we have this, an email from a colleague here at KMD:

Hello everyone.
A buddy of mine has a few extra tickets that he would
like to sell for tomorrow night’s SOLD OUT U2 concert at the Oakland Arena. The
tickets are $190 each and are in section 216.
Concert time is 7:00pm.
Let me know if you or anyone you know may be interested.
Thanks.

In this short email message we have almost everything that is wrong with rock music today. Spun off this, extending its logic, we have even more. How many can you click off? If you can't get at least 3, you aren't even trying.

The fact that it is a more thought-provoking piece of writing than a fair # of the poetry I see out there today means which:

A) I'm in the wrong field.
B) There are a lot of heads up some collective asses.
C) How horrible most poetry is is itself deeply and terribly thought-provoking. (like most other traumas, it leaves interesting marks on the body)

Dear reader, tis a joy to be here again, grumpy and yelping, and thinking about - if not writing on - hair.

Your Man On the Scene

Its on the streets: or near them.

Sara Larsen’s Doubly Circulatory, published by Melissa Benham’s new Artifact Press, with a fine (perfect, really) Stacy Dacheux watercolor cover, was picked up by Meliss & yours truly from a quiet, beat up and clean Daly City copy shop (cheap copies – ask Meliss for directions- I think I will be doing chaps there too) Friday night, about an hour before the three of us launched our month of readings with November’s Poetry+Pizza. (thanks, Glenn, Clyde).

Tip for readers: never let anyone put the amp directly behind you and the mic. Feedback and sonic disorientation anyone? Add high ceilings and an L shaped room, and all is damn near lost.

The reading was wonderful. Doubly Ciruclatory is wonderful. We celebrated it last night at Sara’s, throwing a wonderful (all is full of love this drizzled morn - until I read the latest on the Paris riots) evening-long soiree of song, drink and stage. For Doubly Circulatory, in addition to a short serial (“The Library”) and the longer eponymous work, contains “The Morning War” a short poet’s play that is performable, we proved that. Your werdenfield correspondant was in the thick of it, as “A,” marking my first return to the acting stage (well, the part of her hardowood floor by the bathroom door) in 9 years, unless I am forgetting some Naropan madness.

[The intrusion of art(ifice) into a social situation (an intimate party) is an absolute gift; spillage makes for messiness, and that damn water (wine? – actually, gin & tonic) got all over my pants – praise be for the undam-ed, “wild and scenic” creativity. And this designation outside of all federal, state, or local regulatory agencies. D.I.Y. You’re only young once: yin it up.]

The beautifully written and smartly made Doubly Circulatory is throwing down the gauntlet. It rawks, it rolls, sweet jesus, it swings low. And sails. When Ms. Larsen sezs she loves Shelley and studies with Diane di Prima, grrl ain’t kidding. This is poetry to trouble any remaining new school/old school definitions you might be hiding dry-cleaned and ready-to-wear in your deep dark closet:

what is this quintessence? sleep and sleep and sleep my
body is pyrotechnic – flies, wings of war, this machine makes
our presence a killer, man delights not me – no,
nor words from dreams, though through these poems i seem to say
so.

Sara’s work springs froma ground of ancient, yet interior landscape of dream and vision, samples resonances of specific earlier Englishes (Shelley, Shakespeare, Yeats), and fluently fuses both into the unsettling wi-fi word-worlds of 2005’s cyborg realities. Making a beast of uncanny alien beauty, an unlikely and utterly compelling creature whose aluminum feathers stir restless, wide awake, a soulful and nervy marvel.

[Sara and Meliss – I’m not writing these words just because I love yous – I am writing this post because I love yous though. Yeah?]

Doubly Circulatory is available for $6 plus postage from artifact109@yahoo.com, or by snail at 2921 Folsom St. Apt. B, SF CA 94110. With any luck, we’ll get Melissa on here to spell out that shipping for ya, so we can cut to the chase.

swing low, sweat chair, it...

Would anyone care to buy me 1 of the 1000 copies of Jackson MacLowe's new book of performance pieces, a coffee-table 200 plus page magnum opus covering 50 years of work? Thats about $1/yr of work, not a bad rate of conversion, but I am feeling a lil poor at the moment, as rumors of lawsuits and bankruptcy run through this air.

Just a memo to say that I envision restarting this site next week, after its autumnal slumber. November 7th, a modest return to form. Modest as contra exhaustive over-reach. Hunger is a mean

a) bastard
b) bitch

of a master. What kind of gender-neutral curses could we add for

c)?

fucker works. is motherfucker a little more problematic? it certainly sounded silly coming out of perry farrell's lil LA mouth.

kisses n pisses,

jettison
autochthonic kernel
caustic yaws
klutz lavish
smarten endeavor!
o
nicitate Kultur
a
maximal uninviting
asperity. forlorn
conferee mimetic
loafer an
orison noble
wacky
engulf