Attention Span 2011 | Marie Buck

James Baldwin | “Going to Meet the Man” | Going to Meet the Man | Dial 1965

Henry Dumas | Echo Tree | Coffee House | 2003

Shulamith Firestone | The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution  (1970) | Farrar | 2003

Gay Left: A Socialist Journal Produced By Gay Men, 1975-1980 | Gay Left Collective | 1975-1980 | http://www.gayleft1970s.org/issues/issue10.asp

Lawrence Giffin | Sorties | Tea Party Republicans | 2011

Langston Hughes | The Ways of White Folks (1934) | Vintage | 1990

Meridel Le Sueur | The Girl | Women’s Press | 1978

Dusan Makavejev, writer and director | W. R.: Mysteries of the Organism | 1971

Vincenzo Natali, dir. | Splice | 2009

Alli Warren | Acting Out | Louis Wain | 2010

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More Marie Buck here.

Buck’s Attention Span for 2008. Back to 2011 directory.

Attention Span 2009 – Josef Kaplan

Kevin Killian | Action Kylie | ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni | 2008

They said they would never put any photos of cats in Artforum.

Michael Scharf | For Kid Rock/Total Freedom | Spectacular Books | 2007

Re-read this after the post-’08 election euphoria (and my money) had been plowed into corporate handouts. Scharf refracts the claustrophobic political atmosphere of 2002/2003 through an equally stringent pyramid of de rigueur poetics to show that “total freedom” is, of course, totally not. The book’s appulsion of liberal aesthetics and furtive atrocity reads both cogent and anxiously sympathetic, a “bourgeois panic” that is mordant, lucid, the relentlessness of its critique entirely correct.

Gordon Faylor | 5 6 | Self-Published | 2009

The Mechanical Turk meets Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk.

Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter, eds. | Issue 1 | For Godot | 2008

The fall of the house of usher.

Roberto Bolaño | 2666 | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2008

It’s nice how this post-modern novel is almost totally unconcerned with the meta, how it instead just ruthlessly tails the fractal, internal details that spin off from stuff like… ordering a coffee, or a city’s (sub)conscious conspiracy to murder every woman living in it. The Baudelaire epigraph: “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom”; Sonora stretching out its infinite ends.

Anne Boyer | odali$qued | Blogspot | ongoing

Poetry’s Battlestar Galactica: humans create little machines which create other little machines and they all blow each other to pieces, over and over again. Also a response, doing Kafka one better by cutting out the Max Brod-style middleman. An anti-bureaucratic literature that inverts and immolates against pretty much every authoritarian context in sight.

Tan Lin | HEATH (PLAGIARISM/OUTSOURCE) | Zasterle | 2009

Poetry’s The Blob. Less a “book” than an open source platform for critical reimagining. Strikingly handsome for being that, too—like the titular man himself? Or the shrub?

Rachel Loden | Dick of the Dead | Ahsahta Press | 2009

“This machine” / you know / “kills hypocrites”

Marie Buck | Life & Style | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2009

“People! Cool personalities!” These burrowings into consumerism, vanity, gender cultures, celebritydom (both literary and pop-culture-y), social networking, social damage, flagellism and futurity are often as gentle as they are disturbing. Not a small feat. The absence of irony doesn’t come off as pedantic, but instead gives everything a tragic, keen(ing) sheen.

Brad Flis | Peasants | Patrick Lovelace Editions | 2009

The Lottery-esque scratch-and-win cover reveals a severed head, which is kind of how the whole book works. Also worth noting that the severed head looks like a combination CNN image capture/Chuck Close portrait, which, again, is kind of how the whole book works.

David Lau | Virgil and the Mountain Cat | University of California Press | 2009

Stately state mash-ups. Lau redistributes allusion across a field of junked discourses, declares a new decadence based in the reification of history. The tone of this book is just so oddly, wonderfully grandiloquent, like wigs worn to the King’s beheading: “a domed frieze phrased in freedom, / extra moiety signum // as time’s / dipterous nonextension / deemphasized dispatches to come– // incurable, its miserable son.”

More about Josef Kaplan here.

By Terror Armed

Marie Buck – The Beheading Game (0’55”). Broadcast on Kareem Estefan’s Ceptuetics program on WNYU on February 6, 2008 and archived on PennSound. Diana Hamilton’s review of Buck’s chapbook Life & Style (Patrick Lovelace Editions, 2009, available for download at Beard of Bees) at Sustainable Aircraft. Website for the little magazine Buck edits with Brad Fliss, Model Homes. Buck’s contribution to Attention Span 2008.

Featured Title – Deed by Rod Smith

Rod Smith | Deed | Iowa | 2007 |  Goodreads | LibraryThing | 5 mentions in Attention Span 2008

What the small press poetry world has known for years now finally garners national attention: this is a poetry to be reckoned with. (Tom Orange)

“The Good House” is a poem that is never less than itself, continually reinventing the topos of dwelling through the tropos of surprise. (Patrick Pritchett)

There’s a part in 3-D Imax Beowulf where Beowulf jumps out of the eye of a seamonster, presumably killing the beast. How he got into the eye remains unclear. Deed is better than that scene, and Rod Smith is more heroic than Beowulf, by far. (Steven Zultanski)

Also mentioned by Marie Buck and David Dowker.

Featured Title – Hannah Weiner’s Open House

Hannah Weiner, ed. Patrick Durgin | Hannah Weiner’s Open House | Kenning | 2006 | Goodreads | LibraryThing | 5 mentions in Attention Span 2008

If only I had known sooner the ways in which she was engaged in art and performance, with her terrific inventiveness in the events of language in both private and public realms! (Sawako Nakayasu)

Not much to add to what oft’s been thought and mostly already been said about this needed book. A phenomenal display of Weiner’s talent and capability. Surely everyone should have read this by now, or else you’re the most unhip gluon. Major kudos to Durgin and the press. (Brad Flis)

Each room has many mansions. More doors, please, soon. (Rodney Koeneke)

Long-awaited. (Jennifer Scappettone)

Also mentioned by Marie Buck.