Attention Span 2009 – David Buuck

Rodrigo Toscano | Collapsible Poetics Theater | Fence | 2008

Simply put, one of the most important steps-forward (& outward) in embodied politicized poetics & performance in years.

Bhanu Kapil | Humanimal: a project for future children | Kelsey Street | 2009
Bhanu Kapil | Rabbit Butoh, Bunny Butoh | Trafficker | 2009

Liberatory bio-perversity mediated through colonial memory, metabiology, & interspecies tongue-play.

Yedda Morrison | Girl Scout Nation | Displaced | 2008
Yedda Morrison | Darkness (chapter 1) | little red leaves | 2009

Ecopoetics, appropriation, class politics, & conceptual photography, via uncanny excursions through deforested gurl’hoods & art-choked hearts of darkness; field-guides & escape-routes for the yank-yank crises.

Tan Lin | Heath (plagiarism/outsource) | Zaesterle | 2008
Tan Lin | ambience is a novel with a logo | katalanche | 2008

Fan-chatter, reading-as-scanning, disco as method, celebrity-death as product placement; might just out-Warhol Kenny G. I is a cursor—you’ve been list-served.

al-Husayn ibn Ahmad ibn Khálawayh, trans. David Larsen | Names of the Lion | Atticus Finch | 2009

One of the most compelling translation/research projects I’ve seen in years. Philology as performative scholarship, transduced into a heroic list poem ripe for the growling.

Christina Peri Rossi, trans. Marilyn Buck | State of Exile | City Lights | 2008

Condensed lyrics written in 1972 while on the run into exile from Uruguay, torqued by translator Buck’s own forced-exile as a political prisoner in the federal prison in Dublin, CA.

Dennis Lee | yesno | Anansi | 2007
Dennis Lee | un | Anansi | 2003

Neologisms for neologics, composting pre-necro toxiholic bombbalm into ecopoetic anthropox. My thanks to Christian Bök for the turn-on.

The pamphlet is personal is political:

CA Conrad | (Soma)tic Midge | Faux | 2008
Anne Boyer | Art is War | Mitzvah | 2008
Dodie Bellamy | Barf Manifesto | Ugly Duckling | 2008
Dana Teen Lomax | Disclosure | Dusie | 2009

Fervent & fevered missives for those who think that conceptual writing practices somehow must preclude the embodied heat of class politics.

New Zines!

Model Homes (eds. Flis & Buck), President’s Choice (Zultanski), With+Stand (Thomas-Glass), Abraham Lincoln (Mohammad & Boyer), Bad Press Serials (Lindsay, Morris, & Stevenson), Fold (Timmons & Apps), Area Sneaks (Mosconi & Gonzalez), Cannot Exist (Gricevich), Try (Brazil & Larsen), ON (Cross, Donovan & Schlesinger), Plantarchy (Katko)…

A wealth of compelling new mags demonstrating once again that the counter-institutional is where the new(s) really happens.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick | Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity | Duke | 2003

“Paranoia is anticipatory.” RIP, Eve.

—Aug 15 09 : Oakland

More David Buuck here.

Attention Span 2009 – Jennifer Scappettone

Some works that rocked my taxonomies this twelvemonth:

Hélène Cixous | Ex-Cities | Slought Books | 2006

On cities & revenance, the struggle of the year. “I have known for a long time that one does not go anywhere. It is the cities or the countries that come or do not come to you. Cities are fateful letters. They only arrive lost.”

Manfredo Tafuri | The Sphere and the Labyrinth, read for the second time | MIT | 1987

His books keep blowing me away. Once one has clarified the assumptions, nearly every sentence delivers a mordant perception. “The change wrought by Canaletto upon the urban context of Venice attests to the profound reality of this city for the eighteenth century; to the fact…that the most devastating manipulations are legitimate on an urban organism that has become merely an object at the disposal of the fantasy of a tourist elite.”

Roberto Saviano | Gomorrah | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2007

Anyone who wears clothes or deposits trash should read it. Matteo Garrone’s adaptation onto film is equally recommended for the dialect and the architecture. Creepier than neorealism (appropriately, as we’re headed the other way politically).

AES+F (Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, Vladimir Fridkes) | The Feast of Trimalchio | Biennale di Venezia | Video | 2009

Tableaux surrounding the Roman plutocrat from the standpoint of Moscow could have been easy high jinks, like Fellini’s. But assumption of the day’s affect of sacral conversation (of videogames that is) makes them mesmerizing. Best viewed against backdrop of live cruise ships hastening the demise of a sinking cosmopolis: this was perhaps unconsciously the festival’s most site-specific work.

Jia Zhangke | The World | Office Kitano | 2004

Makes fateful cinematic diptych with the above, from Beijing.

George Oppen, ed. Stephen Cope | Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers | University of California | 2007

If only Pound could get the message in heaven: “You should have talked / To women”—& much more. Can’t wait to teach Oppen again.

Rob Halpern | Disaster Suites | Palm Press | 2009

Keeps making lyric gutsy. Timely, down to the afterword which wishes the work’s own ephemerality.

David Larsen, ed. and trans. | Names of the Lion by al-Husayn ibn Ahmad ibn Khalawayh | Atticus/Finch | 2009
David Larsen | neo-benshi performance of the 2004 Wolfgang Petersen film Troy at Flarf Video Festival | May 2009

500 odd epithets for the creature, including “‘Who Destroys Capital’ (?)”⁶⁴ Want all my history like this, as serial translation.

Rob Fitterman & Vanessa Place | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling | 2009

When two wits like these team up for “thinkership” a primer’s bound to be implosive. A pocketbook that begs for more such pocketbooks.

Tan Lin | Reading from | Segue Series |  http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Segue-BPC.html | April 2009

Tons more feed for thought, after filing a piece for boundary 2.

Walter Benjamin & Theodor Adorno | The Complete Correspondence, 1928-1940 | Harvard | 2001

Resisted for a long time, out of loathing for fetishization of biographical being—then torn through in a day, destroyed. The intimate content of research drives its criticality tumultuously home.

Plus several conversation circuits:

Al Filreis, ed. | PoemTalk | Poetry Foundation, PennSound & Kelly Writers House podcast | http://poemtalkatkwh.blogspot.com/ (subscribable through iTunes) | 2008-, monthly

You get the writer uttering and writers that read disagreeing live. Amazing for modeling close reading, & makes even the dreariest commutes curious.

Herman Melville | “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight” & other poems | annotations brought on by Wild Orchids, a new review, Ed. Sean Reynolds

Incredible that only specialists (i.e. “Americanists”) seem to read Melville’s body of verse. The journal, out of Buffalo, will be reintroducing glorious pages to consciousness.

Belladonna | Elders Series | Belladonna | 2008-09

#1: E. Tracy Grinnell/Leslie Scalapino; #2: Rachel Levitsky/Erica Kaufman/Sarah Schulman/Bob Gluck; #3: Tisa Bryant/Chris Kraus; #4: Emma Bee Bernstein/Susan Bee/Marjorie Perloff; #6: Kate Eichorn/M. NourbeSe Philip/Gail Scott; #7: Cara Benson/Jayne Cortez/Anne Waldman; #8: Jane Sprague/Diane Ward/Tina Darragh. I edited the number left out here.

Despite my discomfort with the name (about which see Eichorn’s analysis in the preface to #6); my year’s most delirious cycle of discoveries, revisitations, reflections on the nature of dialogue, calls for more.

More Jennifer Scappettone here.

Attention Span 2009 – Alli Warren

Suzanne Stein | Hole In Space | OMG! | 2009

The poet’s body as a public communication sculpture.

David Larsen, trans. | Names of the Lion | Atticus/Finch | 2009

A pleasure to finally see this text in print after David’s jaw-dropping performance at the Unitarian Center in San Francisco, 2007.

Robert Fitterman | Rob the Plagiarist | Roof Books | 2009

“Why listen to my gut when I could listen to thousands of guts?”

David Brazil & Sara Larsen, eds. | Try | 2008-2009

AKA “Try!” Together with Dodie & Kevin’s “Mirage Periodical,” this little stapled, xeroxed magazine owns the Bay Area. It’s an INDUSTRY.

Lisa Robertson | The Men: A Lyric Book | Book Thug | 2006

“The funny pathos of men – I salute this.” I keep returning to this little lyric book.

Brandon Brown | The Poems Of Gaius Valerius Catullus 1-60 | Unpublished | 2009

Catullus is envious.

Abner Jay | One Man Band | Subliminal Sounds | 2003

Jay traveled around the South in a mobile home and performed as the (self-described) “last working Southern black minstrel.” Hilarious and heartbreaking.

Stephen Rodefer | Four Lectures | The Figures | 1981

News to me. Killed me. Continues to kill me.

Anne Boyer | Art Is War | Mitzvah Chaps | 2008

A new world treatise. Includes the smash hit “Difficult Ways to Publish Poetry.”

Bill Luoma | When the Pathogenic Wind Comes | Unpublished

The looping–“with crooked spring and great pouring”–is trance-making.

John Cassavetes | Films | 1959-1977

Especially “A Woman Under the Influence” and “Faces”—Gena Rowlands is my one true love.

More Alli Warren here.