Attention Span 2009 – James Wagner

Art Davidson | Minus 148 Degrees: First Winter Ascent of Mt. McKinley | Mountaineers | 1999

It turns out to be cold on Denali in the middle of the winter.

Laura Sims | Stranger | Fence | 2009

Mysterious, emotional, fragmentary arrangements. Not airy, incomplete friezes but freighted waves.

Rainier Werner Fassbinder | Berlin Alexanderplatz | Bavaria Film | 1980

Slowly watching all of his films. This one makes 30. The Fassbinder Foundation’s website is here.

Various authors and translators | Dichten = No. 10: 16 New (to American readers) German Poets | Burning Deck | 2008

Fantastic.

Sharon Mesmer | Annoying Diabetic Bitch | Combo Books | 2007

Accumulative energy, often created by anaphora, strong sense of line/line-breaks, formal rhetorical argument embedded in meant-to-shock content, with tinless ear.

Dee Molenaar | The Challenge of Rainier: A Record of the Explorations and Ascents, Triumphs and Tragedies | Mountaineers | 1979

The classic text of everything having to do with climbing the mountain. (I’m planning on climbing Rainier in 2010.)

Mike Gauthier | Mount Rainier: A Climbing Guide | Mountaineers | 1999

Among other things, exceptional notational photographs of 39 of the routes.

Michael Burkard | Envelope of Night: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1966-1990 | Nightboat Books | 2008

Where Ashbery, Vallejo, Kafka and Creeley meet.

Jerzy Pilch, translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston | The Mighty Angel | Open Letter | 2009

Just beginning this.

Bree Loewen | Pickets and Dead Men: Seasons on Rainier | Mountaineers | 2009

Rare story of a female climbing ranger on Mt. Rainier, covering the harsh elemental life of hard climbing, rescuing live and dead bodies, and your typical serving of human insensitivity. Self-deprecating, dogged, engaging.

Eleni Sikelianos | Body Clock | Coffee House | 2008

The real deal keeps dealing.

More James Wagner here.

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.

*

More from Marcella Durand’s library on Goodreads.