Posts Tagged ‘Vanessa Place’
Attention Span 2011 | Kieran Daly
J. Gordon Faylor | Comments on MGR | self-published | 2010
J. Gordon Faylor | Docking Rust Archon | unpublished manuscript | 2011
Belonging, sharing, having, dying—instant microdeath as character development—, … distribution? Searched (though not ‘for’).
Lanny Jordan Jackson | Dear Swimmer | unpublished manuscript | 2011
F SITE.
Leslie Scalapino | R-hu | Atelos | 2000
Maybe Scalapino’s most radically structured work? Single spacing, double spacing, font size; unilaterally ‘as’ the same line/-break(?). Honorable mention: Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows & The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom.
Eddie Hopely | Cannot Contract | self-published | 2010
Scene hair.
Astrid Lorange | Pussy Pussy Pussy What What | Gauss PDF | 2011
Astrid Lorange | Eating and Speaking | Tea Party Republicans | 2011
Objects objects Objects objects objects objects Objects objects.
Jarrod Fowler | http://jarrodfowler.org/idioticon.html | ongoing
Axiomatics of a non-musicological [theoretical?] antipraxis.
John Paetsch | Crista’s Severance Package xxx | Gauss PDF | 2011
John Paetsch | //only after she mirrored flipt/scripts back into amazing secrets channel did the whole fucking thing become mine// | Gauss PDF | 2011
[Critique of] Poetry unrecognizable to poetics. Crista got laid off and still got paid.
Vanessa Place | Die Dichtkunst | oodpress | 2011
Vanessa Place | black square | oodpress | 2011
The end of rational ‘Conceptual Poetry’.
François Laruelle | The Concept of Non-Photography | Urbanomic/Sequence | 2011
François Laruelle | Dictionary of Non-Philosophy | [unoffical English translation] | 1998
A JUDGMENT OF TASTE EXERCISED NOT SO MUCH BY A ‘SUBJECT’ AS BY THE WORLD ITSELF, THE TRUE AGENT OF A UNIVERSAL FRACTAL PLAY.
Craig Dworkin | The Perverse Library | Information as Material | 2010
Non-conceptual appropriation via architecture, olfaction, and mold?
Chris Sylvester | THE REPUBLIC BY CHRIS SYLVESTER | Troll Thread | 2011
The entire game froze, which was already the playing of the game? Ask the mayor (‘his’ syntax).
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Kieran Daly writes and has published books and other media. Some work and contact information may be found at http://karibaily.tumblr.com.
Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Harold Abramowitz
Amanda Ackerman | The Seasons Cemented | Hex | 2010
Stan Apps | The World as Phone Bill | Combo | 2010
Cara Benson | (made) | Book Thug | 2010
Allison Carter | All Bodies Are The Same and They Have The Same Reactions | Insert | 2010
John Cleary, Kristine Leja, Jason Snyder, eds. | Sidebrow | http://www.sidebrow.net/2005-2011
E. Tracy Grinnell | Leukadia | Trafficker | 2010
Adriano Spatola, trans. Brendan W. Hennessey & Guy Bennett | Toward Total Poetry | Otis / Seismicity | 2008
Myriam Moscona , trans. Jen Hofer | Negro Marfil Ivory Black | Les Figues | 2011
CJ Martin | Two Books | Compline | 2011
Marosa di Giorgio, trans. Jeannine Marie Pitas | The History of Violets | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Vanessa Place | The Discourse of The Slave | Book Thug | 2010
Mathew Timmons | The New Poetics | Les Figues | 2010
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More Harold Abramowitz here.
Abramowitz’s Attention Span for 2010, 2009. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Vanessa Place
Riccardo Boglione | RITMO D feeling the blanks | gegen | 2009
In a work of abstract literature Richard Kostelenatz would surely admire, in Ritmo D. Feeling the Blanks, Riccardo Boglione has stripped away every last bit of text from Giovanni Boccaccio’s contentious 14th-century body of 100 novellas, Decameron. All that remains is the rhythm, spacing and punctuation.
François Fonteneau | L’Ethique du silence. Wittgenstein et Lacan | Seuil | 1999
D’un côté, une éthique indicible (Wittgenstein), de l’autre, une éthique du mi-dire (Lacan). L’expérience éthique serait-elle liée à l’expérience de la limite dont le silence ferait partie ?
Marcel Proust, trans. Mark Treharne | The Guermantes Way | Viking | 2004
After the relative intimacy of the first two volumes of In Search of Lost Time, The Guermantes Way opens up a vast, dazzling landscape of fashionable Parisian life in the late nineteenth century as the narrator enters the brilliant, shallow world of the literary and aristocratic salons.
Edgar Allen Poe | Poetry and Tales (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) | Library of America | 1984
Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym seems to me excellent art criticism and prototype for rigorous “non-site” investigations.
Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin, eds. | Against Expression | Northwestern | 2011
Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing.
Marjorie Perloff | Unoriginal Genius | Chicago | 2011
It is a virtue of Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius that it leaves nothing settled. Rather, it provokes new questions that help to unsettle modernism and its artistic aftermath, and itself performs an important arrière-garde re-animation of neglected or taken-for-granted avant-gardes.
JoAnn Wypijewski | Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art | California | 1998
Wypijewki and Nation art critic Arthur Danto explain well the context of Komar and Melamid’s unique project and chart its odd, zigzag path between comedy and seriousness. . . . An im-portant reference point on the map of late-20th-century taste
Eric Lott | Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class | Oxford | 1995
As readers we come to understand for the first time how blackface performance imagined and addressed a national community and we realize the extent to which we still live with this legacy.
Bruce Fink | The Lacanian Subject | Princeton | 1996
The Lacanian Subject not only provides an excellent introduction into the fundamental coordinates of Jacques Lacan’s conceptual network; it also proposes original solutions to (or at least clarifications of) some of the crucial dilemmas left open by Lacan’s work.
Andrea Fraser | Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser | MIT | 2007
A stunning book—Andrea Fraser turns the art museum inside out, time and again, in her incisive and mercilessly witty deconstructions. A rare combination of committed artistic practice working hand-in-hand with the insights of cultural theory.
Leo Steinberg | The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion | Chicago | 1997
After centuries of repression and censorship, the sexual component in thousands of revered icons of Christ is restored to visibility.
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Kenneth Goldsmith has called Vanessa Place’s work “arguably the most challenging, complex and controversial literature being written today.”
Place’s Attention Span for 2010. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2011 | Laura Carter
In alphabetical order:
Robert Fitterman | Now We Are Friends | Truck | 2010
“The resulting portrait has almost a Cubist diffraction, with some features exaggerated while others go under-emphasized or completely disappear. But such portraits are also over-complete, exceeding the boundaries of momentary self-presentation in a way that can be uncomfortable: high school photos are posted and tagged, those drawings you’d forgotten on DeviantART resurface.”—from editor’s note.
A striking mirror.
Noah Eli Gordon | The Source: an investigation in constrained bibliomancy and ambient research | Futurepoem | 2011
“And now I will show you how it happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing. They were like well managed horses, and could tell when to stop or turn. They said things we felt were true, things like: ‘When I came to you out of all that dust and heat and toil, I positively smelt violets.’ They kept up a constant fire of introducing each other. They thought every instrument would perform its work best if it were made to serve not many purposes but one. It was out of this that they first seized the right to create values and to coin names for those values.”
A striking mirror, with an honest undertone that tells us what the problems are, how they are antithetical to what may go by truth.
Kirsten Kaschock | A Beautiful Name for a Girl | Ahsahta | 2011
“Airplanes are moveable Babels, and I
know not to reach that way for God, up—
that a god
is a small thing and comes by being quiet.”
The truth of what Kirsten says, the unreliability of birdsong, the irony that falls in and becomes something other than a way of seeing the opposite—beautiful, poignant, mature.
Jacques Lacan, trans. Bruce Fink | On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (Book XX: Encore 1972-1973) | Norton | 1998
“‘Usufruct’ means that you can enjoy (jouir de) your means, but must not waste them. When you have the usufruct of an inheritance, you can enjoy the inheritance (en jouir) as long as you don’t use up too much of it. That is clearly the essence of law—to divide, distribute, or reattribute everything that counts as jouissance.”
A necessary text, one I took a course on in graduate school. Also noted is Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose’s commentary on the seminar, among other readings, Bruce Fink’s included.
Sabrina Orah Mark | The Babies | Saturnalia | 2004
“Can you describe for me Walter B. after the desertion?
Too much architecture, not enough rain.
How do you recognize Walter B. in their abandoned homes?
He is the only one, among drifts of white hair, who knows several things at once.
Why, at the end of the Goat Song, does Walter B. stop feeding the babies?
At the end of the Goat Song, it becomes impossible to grow this old.”
A beautiful book, and one can’t help but wonder about Walter B.[enjamin?’s] appearance. Clearly, we are no longer truly modern.
Ange Mlinko | Starred Wire | Coffee House | 2005
“The syrup’s frozen on the north side.
The bear is not just as scared of us.
Insert the cherries in the earth,
read the manual for escapes,
sunscreen under the pillow,
rain scratching glasses.
Between Sir William Harvey and John Dewey the circulation of books.”
This book is one I have continually returned to since its release several years ago.
Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman | Notes on Conceptualisms | Ugly Duckling | 2009
“Radical mimesis is original sin.”
A primer.
Vanessa Place | Only Yahweh | Ood Press | 2011
“if I’m any judge of the Almighty, the Lord God has seen fit in His Infinite to keep a steady supply of bricks and bracks on Hand, so design, goddishly, of bullfights and god-temples, I forgot gods pare only their nails and forced my creations to contort around what should instead of what would, isn’t it that degree of unfathomability which keeps us smacking of the divine, the dew of divine authority, a future conditional, Lord knows”
Poet be like Vanessa Place.
Mathew Timmons | The New Poetics | Les Figues Press | 2010
“Where are we with the New Birds?”
Poets on Twitter—watch out. Where are we, again?
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Laura Carter lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is recommencing studies toward a PhD in English and literary studies. She earned her M.F.A. in 2007, also in Atlanta. Carter’s Attention Span for 2007, 2006, 2005. Back to 2011 directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Tim Conley
Javier Marías, trans. Margaret Jull Costa | Your Face Tomorrow, Volume Three: Poison, Shadow and Farewell | New Directions | 2009
If you’ve read the first two, you’ve read the third; if you’ve not read any, what are you thinking?
Tom McCarthy | Remainder | Alma | 2006
Francis Carco, trans. Gilbert Alter-Gilbert | Streetcorners: Prose Poems of the Demi-Monde | Green Integer | 2004
Irregular moments of flânerie, economically and sharply framed. “It seemed to me as if a new sensibility had penetrated me.”
Lara Glenum | Maximum Gaga | Action | 2009
You know that party you went to, thinking you knew someone there, but it turned out you didn’t know anyone at all and you couldn’t believe what people were saying and wearing? And you were a little scared, sometimes more than a little, and long afterwards you look back on that party as perhaps one of the best parties you ever went to. This book is that party.
Vanessa Place | La Medusa | FC2 | 2008
Normally my interest dampens at the scent of a rewriting of Ulysses, and Place’s novel fits the bill, though with a very American apocalyptic sensibility and conclusion. But it’s the bubbling springs of language that make this book special: this novel is alive in a way that so many are not.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, trans. Joanne Turnbull | Memories of the Future | NYRB Classics | 2009
Svetlana Boym | The Future of Nostalgia | Basic | 2002
A rich investigation of cultural displacement, a redefining of “nostalgia.” Those Moscow girls make me sing and shout.
Richard Overy | The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars | Allen Lane | 2009
Although deserving of a quibble or two, this history of British anti-war sentiment and activism offers a nice counterpoint to the usual Churchillian bluster.
More Tim Conley here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – James Wagner
Tan Lin | Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) | Zasterle | 2009
Tan Lin | Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking [AIRPORT NOVEL MUSICAL POEM PAINTING FILM PHOTO HALLUCINATION LANDSCAPE] | Wesleyan | 2010
My review of Seven here.
Vanessa Place | The Guilt Project | Other | 2010
Vanessa Place | Tragodía 1: Statement of Facts | Blanc | 2010
Vanessa Place | Pussy Codes | Ubu Editions | forthcoming 2010
My interversation with Vanessa here.
Robert Walser | The Microscripts | New Directions | 2010
Anne Boyer | The Two-Thousands, a history of the future in advance of itself | Scribd | 2010
My review here.
Amina Cain | I Go To Some Hollow | Les Figues | 2009
My review here.
K. Silem Mohammad | Sonnagrams 1-20 | Slack Buddha | 2009
My review here.
Steve Timm | Un storia | BlazeVOX | forthcoming 2010
My blurb here.
More James Wagner here. His Attention Span for 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2010 – Allyssa Wolf
Teresa Carmody, Vanessa Place, and Christine Wertheim, eds. | Feminaissance | Les Figues | 2010
everyone has his reason, That’s what’s terrible
Luce Irigaray | Elemental Passions | Routledge | 1992
Boris Groys | The Weak Universalism | online here
Mark Wallace | Felonies Of Illusion | Edge | 2008
Joshua Clover | 1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About | California | 2009
More Allyssa Wolf here. Her Attention Span for 2009, 2008. Back to directory.
Attention Span 2009 – Sawako Nakayasu
Keith Waldrop | Several Gravities | Siglio Press | 2009
Vanessa Place | La Medusa | Fiction Collective 2 | 2008
Janet Sarbanes | Army of One | Otis Books/Seismicity Editions | 2008
Eric Hoyt | The Earth Dwellers: Adventures in the Land of Ants | Simon & Schuster | 1996
George Kubler | The Shape of Time | Yale University Press | 1962
Kurt Schwitters, trans. and ed. Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris | Pppppp: Kurt Schwitters Poems, Performance, Pieces, Proses, Plays, Poetics | Exact Change | 2002
Daniel Heller-Roazen | Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language | Zone Books | 2005
Seiichi Niikuni | Works 1952-1977 | Shichosha | 2008
Piero Heliczer | A purchase in the white botanica | Granary Books | 2001
Viktor Shklovsky | ZOO or Lettersd Not about Love | Dalkey Archive | 2001
Caroline Dubois, trans. Cole Swensen | Caroline Dubois: You Are the Business | Burning Deck | 2008
More Sawako Nakayasu here.
Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 
Attention Span 2011 | Marjorie Perloff
with one comment
Caroline Bergvall | Meddle English | Nightboat | 2011
The title poem is Bergvall’s brilliantly satiric version of Chaucer, anatomizing the current socio-cultural scene, but this rich collection also includes the experimental verse of “Goan Atom,” and (my favorite) “Cropper,” Bergvall’s multilingual exploration of sedimentation—of “borders, rules, boundaries, edges, limbos at historical breaches.”
Craig Dworkin | Motes | Roof | 2011
Minimalist procedural lyrics that uncover the secrets within given words and morphemes. Dworkin’s version of Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise, it’s a totally delightful and pleasurable but also intellectually rigorous book.
Peter Gizzi | Threshold Songs | Wesleyan | 2011
This may be Gizzi’s best book to date: the mood is elegiac (the poet’s brother Michael had just died) but also jaunty: whenever the darkness becomes too hard to bear, a colloquial—even funnynote brings us back to the everyday world: “Don’t back away. Turtle into it / with your little force.”
Christian Hawkey | Ventrakl | Ugly Duckling | 2010
Hawkey’s surreal lyric sequence, prompted by the life and work of Georg Trakl. Using a great variety of verse forms and prose interludes, Hawkey produces a terrifying and moving poem about legacy, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves so as to avoid self-recognition.
Heinrich Heine, trans. into Portuguese and with an introd. by André Vallias | Heine, hein? – Poeta dos contrários | Sao Paulo: Perspectiva | 2011
Heine, one of the great lyric poets of all time, is still very little known in the US and translations have been partial and problematic. But Vallias, himself a fine poet, has produced an amazing book, including all the major poems as well as essays, letters, and bibliographical material. My Portuguese is very rudimentary but I marvel at what can—and is being—done elsewhere to bring one nation’s poetry into the present of another’s.
Christian Marclay, dir. | The Clock | a film | 2010
To my mind, the finest conceptual work ever produced: this 24-hour montage of film clips played in real time (featuring an infinite variety of clocks, watches, and verbal signals indicating that exact time in each shot) is endlessly enchanting—a Waiting for Godot for the 21st Century where we are always waiting—for the event that never happens and which is immediately eclipsed and displaced by another event. Can life be this dramatic? The Clock is nerve-wracking, funny, moving: and when you come out of the gallery (I saw about 8 hours worth at LACMA) you think you’re still in the picture, about to witness the bank robbery or the wake-up call, even as the music bleeds unaccountably from one scene into the next.
Vanessa Place | Tragodía: 1: Statement of Facts | Blanc | 2010
This compendium of court testimonies and police reports—all of them taken from Place’s own files (she is an appellate criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles) has raised enormous controversy: Place has been accused of being soft on rapists. But the fact of this Statement of Facts is that she has simply arranged her material so as to tell it like it is—no sides taken, no points made, and yet an unforgettable image of how events in the contemporary city play themselves out. The book reads like a Henry James novel: what, we ask at every turn, really happened?
Srikanth Reddy | Voyager | California | 2011
Reddy’s writing-through of Kurt Waldheim’s memoir (3 times in 3 different ways) is a devastating exposé of political mendacity and maudlin self-justification. It’s a brilliantly rendered work that literally “speaks for itself.”
Jonathan Stalling | Yingelishi | Counterpath | 2011
Yingelishi (pronounced yeen guh lee shr) sounds like an accented pronunciation of the word “English,” even as, for the Chinese reader, its characters spell out “chanted songs, beautiful poetry.” Spalding combines homophonic translatation, with the dictionary meaning of the different phrases as well as their Chinese characters so as to demonstrate what the new language of some 350 million people looks and feels like. Comes with a website so that we can hear these sounds spoken and chanted. It’s a brilliant tour de force.
Uljana Wolf, trans. Susan Bernofsky | False Friends | Ugly Duckling | 2011
These DICHTionary poems are based on so-called “false friends” in German and English—words that look and/or sound familiar in both languages but differ in meaning. The comedy that results is full of surprises—a lovely sequence for our multilingual moment. And Ugly Duckling’s production is, as always, a pleasure.
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Susan Howe | THAT THIS | New Directions | 2010
I list this last and separately because Howe’s very important book won the Bollingen Prize and I was one of three judges so my comment on it is a part of the award citation.
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Marjorie Perloff‘s most recent book is Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Her Wittgenstein’s Ladder has just been translated into Spanish and is soon coming out in French. She is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
Perloff’s Attention Span for 2006, 2004. Back to 2011 directory.
Written by Steve Evans
October 22, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Posted in Attention Span 2011, Commented List
Tagged with André Vallias, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Hawkey, Christian Marclay, Craig Dworkin, Heinrich Heine, Jonathan Stalling, Marjorie Perloff, Peter Gizzi, Srikanth Reddy, Susan Bernofsky, Susan Howe, Uljana Wolf, Vanessa Place