Attention Span – Marcella Durand

Daniel Bouchard | The Filaments | Zasterle | 2006

“Life is art” and vice versa. Great book to read with all the noises of the world (including new baby) next to you.

Tisa Bryant | Unexplained Presence | Leon Works | 2008

Unsettling explorations into various Eurocentric films, artworks, and television shows (Regency House Party being one of the most disturbing) that use black characters, often even as compositional elements (Bryant uses illuminating quotes throughout: Zola says of Manet’s Olympia, “You wanted black patches, and you placed a Negress and a cat in a corner. What does that mean? You hardly know, and neither do I.”).

Cabinet Magazine

I stay “in touch” with worlds artistic in a pleasantly subversive way with this magazine/journal. Content ranges from Peter Lambourn Wilson on concrete and “viewsheds” to the Chadwicks and their land-use dominions.

Tina Darragh | Opposable Dumbs: A Project Report | Self-Distributed | 2007

Darragh’s invitation to plagiarize is also an invitation to a deep creative reading/writing into issues of anonymity, ownership of language, science and language, morality and science, humanism, disintegration of words, disintegration of morals, disintegration of science, of principles.

Beverly Dahlen | A Reading 18-20 | Instance | 2006

Add to your collection of Dahlen’s faboo A Readings.

Andrew Joron | The Cry at Zero | Counterpath | 2007

Very highly recommended collection of intricate essays on poetics, science, philosophy and how they circle back to that “cry” from nothingness.

Miranda Mellis | Talk on “The Vault” | Naropa Summer Writing Program | June 2008

Allow Mellis to be your guide to the world’s largest seed vault, housed in Norway’s permafrost and counting Du Pont as one of its funders. (Look for her talk to be published—somewhere! Hopefully soon.)

Ousmane Sembene  | God’s Bits of Wood | Heinemann | 1960

I suggest replacing all of Hemingway’s books in school curricula with this unrelenting depiction of the 1947-1948 strike on the Dakar-Niger railway. One of the best novels I’ve ever read. (And while we’re at it, his film “La Noire de…” is also amazing.)

Eleni Sikelianos | The California Poem | Coffeehouse | 2004

Word-constellations fracture beautifully on housing projects and fault-shaped coastlines.

Tyrone Williams | On Spec | Omnidawn | 2008

Massively riveting. A linguistic ultrasound into the innards of language.

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More from Marcella Durand’s library on Goodreads.