Contradicta






The more someone makes us laugh, the more we think their jokes are funny. So it is not the jokes we find funny, it is the person.




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Unless someone can make us laugh, they will never be taken seriously.

From Otoliths 10: Tom Beckett interviews Nico Vassilakis

Interview

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Otoliths 10


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Patti Smith: Dream of Life, NY Times Movie Review

Boog City's 5th Annual Small, Small Press Fair

(announcement from David A. Kirschenbaum):

Exhibit at Boog City’s 5th Annual Small, Small Press Fair
(with Indie Records and Crafts, too)

Sat. Sept. 20, 11:00 a.m.-8:00 p.m.

at day 3 of the 2nd annual
Welcome to Boog City poetry and music festival
(complete fest info below)

Cakeshop
152 Ludlow St.
NYC

$15 for a table

The first 2.5 hours, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m. will feature performances by authors from the tabling presses
(exact amount of time per press TBD when the number of exhibiting presses is set)

Door charge for attendees is $5

email editor@boogcity.com or call 212-842-BOOG (2664)
to reserve your table today

Featuring nonstop performances throughout the day

with readings from

Jen Benka
Todd Colby
Ryan Eckes
Elise Ficarra
Eric Gelsinger
Stephanie Gray
David Hadbawnik
Bill Kushner
Douglas Manson
Kristianne Meal
Sharon Mesmer
Carol Mirakove
Kathryn Pringle
Maureen Thorson

and music from

A Brief View of the Hudson
Double Deuce
Heart Parts
Phoebe Kreutz

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And here’s what’s happening the other three days of the festival:


Thurs. 9/18, 6:00 p.m. sharp, free

ACA Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Flr.
NYC

minor/american (Durham, N.C.)

Elise Ficarra and Kathryn Pringle, eds.

With readings from minor/american authors
and a musical performance


Fri. 9/19, 7:00 p.m.-1:00 a.m., free with a two-drink minimum

Sidewalk Café
94 Ave. A
NYC

Readings from

Jim Behrle
Bob Holman
Gillian McCain
Daniel Nester
Arlo Quint


Poets’ Theater performances
curated by Rodrigo Toscano


For its 20th anniversary
Lou Reed’s New York album performed live by

Babs Soft
Liv Carrow
Dead Rabbit
Dibson T. Hoffweiler and Preston Spurlock
Prewar Yardsale
Todd Carlstrom and The Clamour
Wakey Wakey


and solo sets from

Dead Rabbit
Dibson T. Hoffweiler
Todd Carlstrom and The Clamour


Sat. 9/20
Cakeshop

(see above)


Sun. 9/21, 1:00 p.m.-7:30 p.m., free

Unnameable Books
456 Bergen St.
Brooklyn

Ana Božičević
Lee Ann Brown
Julia Cohen
John Coletti
Corrine Fitzpatrick
Edward Foster
Rachel Levitsky
Eileen Myles
Simon Pettet
Nick Piombino
Kyle Schlesinger
Stacy Szymaszek

Edward Foster and Simon Pettet in conversation

with music from

Yoko Kikuchi

and a panel on "Action Poets" curated and moderated by Kristin Prevallet. This will be a forum for people to discuss intervention, performance, conceptual street agitations, and more.

Hosted by Boog City editor David Kirschenbaum
For more info: 212-842-BOOG (2664) * editor@boogcity.com

--
David A. Kirschenbaum, editor and publisher
Boog City
330 W.28th St., Suite 6H
NY, NY 10001-4754
For event and publication information:
http://welcometoboogcity.com/
T: (212) 842-BOOG (2664)
F: (212) 842-2429

Walking In Circles Before Lying Down, by Merrill Markoe

My last few days in Provincetown were sad because...they were my last few days! Yet not too sad to find myself cracking up when reading, while simultaneously admiring Merrill Markoe's hilarious and absorbing Walking in Circles Before Lying Down, which I found while browsing the wonderful shelves of the Provincetown library. The main character of the book Dawn, after fleeing an impossible relationship and various impossible living situations, finds herself thinking she is talking to herself when she is actually talking to her dog. When her true love dies, that is, her dog, she finds a substitute, Chuck, who is jealous of her former dog, and the book continues with Chuck rescuing her from various  weird situations, while she works in a dog day care center (while all the dogs there continuously supply Dawn with advice and barbed comments about what they smell and what they see but mostly what they'd like her to feed them). My description cannot do justice to this wacky, wonderful book, but I recommend it highly. Merrill Markoe has worked as a consultant to Sex And The City, and David Letterman, she has won tons of emmies, but broke free of her comedic tv writing career to write novels, an admirable, though no doubt stressful, while generous decision, especially for readers who love great, funny novels. This book is not only recommended, but prescribed! It is good for what ails you.Goodreads listings

Nicholas Manning Reviews Gary Sullivan's PPL in a Depot (Roof):

Galatea Resurrects #10

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Kristina Marie Darling reviews Catherine Daly's Chantreuse/Cantatrice (Factory School) Galatea Resurrects #10

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Charles Bernstein reviews new book by Al Filreis in

The Boston Review

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Pessoa in the Rain

What a pleasure to have had The Book of Disquietude to read during a summer rain. Now that the rain is over, the words do not seem the same, but as it did, I thought of blogging a few quotes as I read and thought of Pessoa writing them, and listened to the thunder and the rain...The moment passes, always, and Pessoa kept mourning this, yet we still have his words:

"O alcohol of grand words and long phrases that raise the breathing of their rhythm like waves and then crash smiling, with the irony of twisting snakes of foam and the sad magnificence of shadows."

"To realize a dream, it's necessary to forget it, to divert our attention from it. To realize is thus to not realize. Life is full of paradoxes, as a rose is of thorns.
"I'd like to construct the apotheosis of a new incoherence which could stand as the negative synthesis of the new anarchy of soul. I've always felt that to compile a digest of my dreams might be useful to humanity, which is why I've never given up trying. The idea that what I did in the real world might be profitable offended me and left me dry and withered..."

"The rain continued to fall sadly but with less force, as if seized by a cosmic weariness. There was no lightning, and only very occasionally would a distant, short roll of thunder harshly rumble, haltingly at times, as if also weary. Suddenly, or so it seemed, the rain let up further...."

"Rain, rain, rain...
Constant groaning rain (...)"

The thunder and rain have now begun again.


Quotes from The Book of Disquietude
by Fernando Pessoa
The Sheep Meadow Press, 1996
translated by Richard Zenith

Check out Didi Menendez' blog: Men and Women of the Web

and thanks to Didi Menendez for the interview:

Men of the Web

**

OCHO 14 is available online, here: OCHO 14

Contradicta

Do not go gently into that good night. Stay home and call for takeout.

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The most awful argument can be ended by the most awful joke.

Wallace Thinks Again: Poetry About Poetry

                                Groovy

There's a scene in Eugene Eustache's movie The Mother and The Whore (1973) in which Jean-Pierre Leaud sits in his room and listens to an entire record. You see him moving the tone arm onto the disc and quietly enjoying the whole record by himself, nodding his head to the rhythms, smiling, thinking, staring into space. I thought of this scene when reading, recently, Edmund Wilson's autobiographical novel published in 1929, I Thought of Daisy. There are so many good things to be said of this novel, but reading it I couldn't resist the idea of blogging the entire sequence during which the narrator lets himself into his friend Daisy's apartment, and, finding her not there, decides to wait for her, during which time he plays a record on her phonograph:

    "There was a phonograph beside me on the table: it was a small cheap portable one. I regarded it with hebetude. Without Daisy, it seemed as depressing as the glasses, as the garments, as the magazines. But involuntarily grasping at a last resource against despair, I picked up the heap of phonograph records, lying half-shuffled, like a battered pack of cards. Scrupulously I pushed them even and ran through them, reading all the titles: With You in Paradise, from Pretty Kitty, sung by Bee Brewster; Ben Bolt, by John McCormack; Chanson Hindoue, Saxophone Solo; So's Your Old Man, Fox Trot, by Fred Casey and His Burglar-alarm Boys; La Forza del Destino, Red Seal, Duet by Caruso and Scotti; Mamie Rose, Fox Trot, by Jake King and his Eight Kentucky Mocking Birds. I remembered that Mamie Rose was the fox-trot which Daisy had so offended by playing, the night of Ray Coleman's party, when Rita had been reciting her poems. I got up and put it on the machine.
    "The record, I noted, as I wound the crank, had been made by the American Melody Company. It was a pale and unpleasant brown and seemed to have been molded by river mud. Remembering the handsome victrola which I had seen at Ray Coleman's apartment I pitied Daisy a little; yet she had had the right sort of bravery, the bravery to go free when love had passed! The only needles I could find were buried in an ash-tray under cigarette butts and burnt matches, and it was impossible to tell the used from the new. The first I tried began with a blurt, a hideous stuttering blur. Still dominated by Rita's tastes, I felt that turning on the phonograph would be like drilling with a dental engine: Rita had not cared for popular music- had thought lightly of even the Rosenkavalier!
    "The second needle turned out no better, but I let it go; and presently Mamie Rose emerged as a kind of fiendish jig, running itself off at impossible speed; too fast, too nasal, too shrill. I made an effort to regulate it and only effected a harrowing descent of pitch, like the grasping and discordant howl of some demon from inside the machine crying out an intolerable agony at being compressed from one tempo to another. I listened for the first night I had met Daisy, but merely succeeded in having my heart wrung by the first night I had heard Rita's poems. The spring of the little phonograph held only for a single winding, so that the record began too fast and was already running down before it came to the end; but, what was worse, it had no horn, so that the demon inside the box, beating in its cramped black prison like a panic-stricken bat, had to squeeze out, as it were, through a crack- the little aperture at the base of the "arm." No wonder it chittered and squealed so thinly, like an unwinding wire of sound, like a wire, rusted, wry and eaten, worn away so that it seemed almost snapping, or so rough that it would stick and stammer over some echolalic phrase! So completely had the music been robbed of resonance that it seemed a mere memorandum of music, as if some writer in sound had scribbled down the skeleton of an orchestration, with the brasses brief tin-whistle blasts and raspings, the strings a jotted jingle of cicada chirpings, and the tympani scored as tiny explosions and echoless crashes of glass. And the "vocal refrain," when it suddenly began, had as little in common with the human voice as the noises of the instruments had with music: it gave the effect of some mere momentary modulation in the quick mechanical jiggling of a railroad train- it was a sharper shrillness, a more insistent iteration: There she goes- Mamie Rose- She-loves-me! Don't seem to show it!- How do I know it?- It's A.B.C.-She's- a crackle of high-pitched syllables ending with aggravatin'-But when I want a little lovin' she don't keep me waitin!- She's proud and snooty- But she's my cutie- She tells me- a second slip of dulled and driven cogs- That's how I knows- Mamie Rose- She-Loves-me! The jazz departed, with redoubled violence and complexities of deformation, into a last frantic charivari- then, after a brief unpleasing flourish, was bitten off as abruptly as it had begun.
    "I lifted the needle, clicked the little catch and went over to the window..."

New Review of *Forget Reading* by Anthony Hawley

CutBank Reviews

Penn Sound Daily Rss Feed

Penn Sound Daily

Hey, I Was Just Getting Used to Conceptual Poetry and Now We Have Conceptual Invasions

"A Shell spokeswoman hinted at the kind of work the companies might be engaged in. 'We can confirm that we have submitted a conceptual proposal to the Iraqi authorities to minimize current and future gas flaring in the south through gas gathering and utilization,' said the spokeswoman, Marnie Funk. 'The contents of the proposal are confidential.'"

Deals With Iraq Are Set To Bring Oil Giants Back

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Conceptual Poet Lives by Nicholas Manning

My Poem "The Sky Is A Painting in Black and Red (12 Dreams)"

is now available in the latest OCHO (#20) as a PDF
edited by Kemel Zaldivar
and for $8 in printed form from Mipoesias

and on The Annandale Dream Gazette edited by Lynn Behrendt

PRESENT TENSE


a play by Charles Borkhuis
part of the Tiny Theatre Festival (6 one-acts) at The Brick Theater


directed by Gabriel Shanks,

featuring Frank Blocker & Ben Trawick-Smith
Stage Manager: Jeni Shanks
Design: Allen Cutler


May 23 and 24 | 8pm | $15
at The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave, Williamsburg
(L Train, 1/2 block from Lorimer Stop)
RESERVATIONS: 866-811-4111
http://www.theatremania.com

Two characters find themselves slipping in and out of parallel lives through "wormholes" in the space-time of the play. One believes he has dozed off at home with a book on his lap and the play is a curiously lucid dream. The other is convinced that their performances in front of a live audience are desperately real. Panic starts to set in as the play's complications and reversals become increasingly fascinating and frightening.

Rauschenberg's Goat

poemeleon

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Kaz Malanka interviewed by Gregory Vincent St Thomasino on Word for Word on Mathematical Poetry

Bob Grumman on mathmaku and mathematical poetry generally Word for Word (presented by Gregory Vincent St Thomasino)

OCHO 14

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

is now available as a free download at Mipoesias.

"A terrific read from cover to cover." -Ron Silliman's Blog. And Nick Manning wote, in his review in the current issue of Jacket-"The value of Nick Piombino’s vision is that we are invited to accept this volume’s most vital paradoxes: the true fury of its moment."

Published by Didi Menendez, the print edition of OCHO 14, with a cover by Toni Simon, is available for $10.99, exclusively at Lulu

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Rachmaninov- By Andrew Lundwall

Goodreads

The art of reviewing, hey, the fact of book reviewing has taken a lot of hits in recent years. not the least of which is the closing down of poetry reviews at Publisher's Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, and long, long ago, the sad disappearance of Geoffrey O'Brien from the poetry book reviewing scene, the end of Tembor, due to the tragic early death of Leland Hickman, which featured terrfic critical writing from Joseph Simas, Ghino Tenger and many others. Geoffrey, of course, has been busy writing his own books, among others *The Phantom Empire" about the history of film, which I scored recently, complete with review and author photo, at the Strand for $1.

Thankfully, the web, in particular, Jacket, the blogging scene-and even the SUNY poetics list, has brought us some fine critical writng from, of course, Ron Silliman, Amy King,Gary Sullivan, Tim Peterson, Michael Lally, Nada Gordon, Ray Davis, Nicholas Manning, Sharon Mesmer, Mark Wallace, K. Silem Mohammad, Charles Bernstein, Jack Kimball and many others, most notably recently Douglas Messerli and his critically absorbing and autobiographically revelatory Green Integer Blog.

Not that long ago, a new phenomenon emerged on the web, that at first appeared to consist of little more than lists of favorite books on a site that echoed successes by other well known web "friendship" groups. When you join Goodreads, people may nominate themselves as "friends" or you may suggest yourself as a friend to other members, by going through the friend lists on your friends' sites, checking yourself off there for a request to be automatically emailed to someone, who can then accept or reject you. Possibly to distract myself from other work to be done, or perhaps to show off my library, of which I am quite proud (there is, among many other prized items my signed book by Theodore Dreiser), I joined up. One day, in a fit of inspiration I listed over 750 items from my library.

Anyway, lately I haven't been spending that much time on the thing, or on this thing for that matter, having been busy on some other projects, and having fallen in love with reading novels by women which I am now consume addictively like so many delicious, or ordinary boxes of chocolates. I seem to have become a gourmand of this genre, not a true gourmet. But when I got an invitation recently from Marcella Durand to become her "friend" on Goodreads. I noticed that John Ashbery was listed on her site. When he recently agreed to be my friend on Goodreads I thought to myself: wow, this is getting really interesting.

One of the features of Goodreads which you can receive if you choose to (you can also suspend it if you want) is to receive recent book reviews from your friends. I am not ashamed to admit, that while I do tend to read books, even for years, by types, I like to read almost any kind of book review, the same way I will read anything in front of me at the breakfast table, including whatever is on the cereal box, particularly if it happens to appear in front of me and there is nothing else to read. I don't always read the reviews that now pour in daily in my email inbox from Goodreads, but I have been reading every single one, by somebody who has named themselves, interestingly, tENTIVELY, acONVENIENCE. I noticed, and was struck by the sensitivity and generosity of a group of reviews he did about books by Alan Davies. He claims he is going through his library alphabetically, and reviewing books that catch his eye. Today, for example, he reviewed "In Celebration of Ourselves" by Seymour Rosen and said:

"Ah! The front cover gives a pretty good explanation: "All of us have to reveal our inner selves once in a while - Sometimes that just might mean smiling at a stranger for no reason - or whistling - A rarer breed likes to dress up as cabbage leaves or sunflowers - or wear Hawaiian leis or diapers - But there are few authorized times for that - What do you do when you have a full Samurai outfit and no place to go - Or a bird's-eye view of Sydney tattooed above your kidney - How do you say - I am alive - if you are a sixteeen-year-old ghetto kid - That's only the beginning - California has always had more than its share of - grand eccentrics"....A great, GREAT bk. Kinetic sculpture race, 'outsider' architecture, costumes, murals, folk sculpture, graffiti, neon, church fronts, shaped buildings, giant donut signs, art cars, homemade ads, all sorts of fascinating signs of creativity largely done outside of the art world. Oddly, my copy has rubber-stamped inside: 'NOT FOR RESALE DISTRIBUTE THRU BALTIMORE CITY HEALTH DEPARTMENT'".

Even if you know you'll never read even a fraction of the thousands of books you will find out about on Goodreads, it's a fascinating enterprise, not the least of which is the opportunity to list books you think others should know about. There are tons of books, by the way, for which there is only one listing, while there are others, like The Great Gatsby, that has 69, 760 listings, and, "the Curious Incident of A Dog at Nightime" which has over 39,000 listings, Charles Bernstein'a A Poetics has 39 listings as does Ron Silliman's Age of Huts; Elaine Equi's Ripple Effect has 20, Gary Sullivan's Elsewhere 1 has 10, Tim Peterson's When I Moved IN has 11,Brenda IIjima's Around Sea has 9, Nada Gordon's Folly 9, Kim Lyons' Saline has 8 and my fait accompli 7.

Goodreads is easly accessible on Google, of course.

prepublication launch & performance
Monday, May 5, 8pm (New York)

**Blind Witness: Three American Operas -- Charles Bernstein**

Forthcoming from Factory School
Blind Witness brings together in one book Bernstein's libretti for Blind
Witness News, The Subject, and The Lenny Paschen Show written for
composer Ben Yarmolinsky in the early 1990s.
Bernstein & Yarmolinsky will perform sections of the operas along with
Deborah Karpel, soprano; Nathan Resika, bass; Silvie Jensen, mezzo-soprano
Ishmael Wallace and Elizabeth Rodgers, piano
introduced by Joel Kuszai
Medicine Show
549 West 52nd St. (between 10th and 11th Ave.), New York
$5 admission
Reservations requested to ensure seating: 212-262-4216
This program is funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, a
state agency.
*
Advance copies of Blind Witness will be available at the launch at a
special discounted price
Blind Witness can be ordered now prepublication direct from Factory School:
http://factoryschool.org/pubs/blindwitness/

Contradicta




Whatever else it is, thought is a kind of touch, and if it is not felt it is not known.





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We imagine harmony, live in dissonance and think in the whirlpool between the two.





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Spring In This World of Poor Months:-Ange Mlinko in The Nation