Thursday, December 11, 2008



Publishing Genius Press (who will be publishing my chapbook, Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously, in March 2009) has just released another fantastic new chapbook called As I Said, written by Kathryn Regina.




The publisher describes it thusly: "Kathryn Regina's long-format piece starts out as if it might be a normal sort of poem but, with startling imagery, it reverberates into a Cartesian echo."

What I personally enjoyed about it was the lack of center: the decenteredness of it, how it opens like a sad tale of domestic loneliness but soon diverges, gets lost in a din of imagination, explores multiple lines of flight, and never really draws back in on itself. It reminds me of what Deleuze & Guattari call "an open text."



*





"The manuscripts of author Franz Kafka had such a profound impact on Finnish graphic and type designer Julia Sysmäläinen that she decided to convert his handwriting with its unusually strong calligraphic characteristics into a digital script."





*




If you live in NYC and you have a hipster party or go to a hipster party, be on the lookout for Bill Murray. Says here he likes to crash hipster parties.



*



Blake Butler interviews Cooper Renner




*



John Cage on why he wanted to make English less understandable:

"I let it be known to my friends, and even strangers, as I was wandering around the country, ... that what was interesting me was making English less understandable. Because when it's understandable, well, people control one another, and poetry disappears --and as I was talking with my friend Norman O. Brown, and he said, "Syntax [which is what makes things understandable] is the army, is the arrangement of the army."

So what we're doing when we make language un-understandable is we're demilitarizing it, so that we can do our living...."

[from this audio interview about his performance of "Empty Words"]



*








*




Be advised, Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming out next year called Inherent Vice. According to the buzz, it's gonna be a kind of noir detective story set in the psychedelic 1960s.

Excerpts have leaked & the plot has leaked.



*



Artist Fons Schiedon, from his Revolution Deformation exhibition:











*



"Flarf vs. Conceptual Writing"

by

Kenneth Goldsmith




*



"Against Interpretation"

by

Susan Sontag



*




"Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities features new acquisitions, unique documents, and visual and textual curiosities from the collections of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. This ongoing exhibition is curated by Tim Young, Associate Curator of the Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection, and Nancy Kuhl, Associate Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature."