Five Things from Octopus

1. Eric Baus's Tuned Droves
2. Shane McCrae's One Neither One
3. Open Reading in April for full-length manuscripts
4. Subscriptions for 2009-2010
5. T-Shirts

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1. Our second full-length poetry book, Tuned Droves by Eric Baus, is now available on our website, at SPD, and on Amazon. In his follow-up to the acclaimed THE TO SOUND (Verse Press/Wave Books 2004), Eric Baus's second full-length poetry book is a continuation of his experimentation with the elongated lyric prose form.

Read advance praise on the Poetry Foundation website and at The Cambridge Book Review.

2. Our latest chapbook, One Neither One by Shane McCrae is now available at our website . McCrae brings a haunting cut-up & surrealistic aesthetic to bear on the mutable thinkings about race.

3. Octopus Books will hold an open reading period for full-length poetry manuscripts in April of 2009. Manuscripts must be submitted between April Fools day and April 30, 2009. We prefer you submit your manuscripts electronically. To submit, purchase the $10 reading fee through paypal from the button on the Octopus Books website on the "Submit" page, then attach your manuscript in an email to octopusbooks@gmail.com. In the subject line of the email write your name and "Manuscript Submission." There is no need to introduce yourself in the body of the email. Your email will be handled anonymously by an intern. Your manuscript will be forwarded in a different file without any identifying markers and read blindly by the editors and other readers. Do not include your name on the manuscript.

If you choose to submit by mail, send manuscript to: Octopus Books; 1031 SE 21st; Portland, OR 97214. Include your email address and a $10 check written to "Octopus Books." We will still notify you by email. Also, include your name on the packaging, but not on the manuscript itself.

4. You may now purchase a two year subscription from Octopus Books and receive everything we publish through 2010. This includes 3-4 full length poetry books including Boris by the Sea by Matvei Yankelevich (Fall 2009), The Difficult Farm by Heather Christle (Fall 2009), and 1-2 other books published from our open reading period in the fall of 2010. This also includes 4 or more chapbooks including Shane McCrae's One Neither One. $56 (includes shipping). Use paypal here. 

5. Octopus T-Shirts are available for purchase through this post only, and not on the website. $12 (includes shipping). You may use this link to paypal to make your purchase. Indicate in your notes which size you would like (S, M, L, XL).

Sincerely,


Zachary Schomburg & Mathias Svalina
Editors
www.octopusbooks.net

New Chaps From Portable Lab at Yo-Yo Press

Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs has three new chapbooks:


Generic Whistle-Stop by Thomas Fink





Shaved Code by Frances Richard

&



Materialisms by Miranda Mellis

The chapbooks are $8 post-paid and can be ordered by emailing Brenda or through PayPal on the Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs website.

Glory at Sea

A group of mourners and a man spat from the depths of Hades build a boat from the debris of New Orleans to rescue their lost loved ones trapped beneath the sea.



Watch the Film Here

It's so good.

The Past

This is my parents & my older brothers & our dog Sheba.

I had not yet been born when this picture was taken.

Change Roll

Octopus is Back Up

Sorry for the crash. Did you read this awesome little poem of Rebbeca Guyon's?

COLD


I like my shadow when I’m in this coat.

I look like a Russian soldier or I’m wearing a dress.

I need to be more friendly. I need to treat Estonians better.

It & many other poems are available to you at no cost, economic or emotional, at Octopus Magazine

Actually, I take that back. The emotional cost will be crippling. Deliciously crippling.

AWP was fun

Thanks to everyone who came by the Octopus Books table, who bought copies of the books & chapbooks & to anyone who said "oooh, free buttons!"

It was nice to meet-in-brief so many peeps I admire.

Thanks to Rope-A-Dope & Cupboard for being wonderful table-mates.

Thanks to Josh Wilkinson's class at Loyola for being wonderful during Jules & Noah's & my visit.

Thanks to Chris Tonelli for being point-man setting up the No Thousands reading at the Bottle & thanks to all the wonderful readers that night.

In a night characterized by ass-kicking, Shane McCrae & Eric Baus both kicked notably serious ass.

I forgot to take pictures at the reading, but here are some of my sketches I drew from memory, which capture the most tender moments of the event.








I might have remembered some of the details wrong.

Probably not.

Exceeded Quota

Octopus Magazine has exceeded its usage quota for the month -- it'll be back up tomorrow.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but thanks to all of you for making this the most widely read issue launch of our history!

See You in Chicago

We'll be sharing a table with Rope-A-Dope Press & The Cupboard.

Stop by & check out our new book & chapbook:

Eric Baus' Tuned Droves, which had a great write up & film on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet Blog,

& Shane McCrae's One Neither One.

Come to the Empty Bottle for our reading with Rope-A-Dope, Black Ocean, Cannibal & Forklift, Ohio on Friday night.

I Was in a Duran Duran Cover Band for One Night

One magical night.

Sasquatch Loves Wonder Woman

Tonight I go to see The Necks, an Aussie kraut-ish band who play 60-min long songs that pulse & modulate. They are the perfect music for any long roadtrip, as their songs both complicate & purify themselves through their extension. We'll see how they sound off Bleecker street. They have a truly terrible choice of fonts on their website.

Thursday J & I head out to Chicago for the AWP shenanigans. We'll be taking the LIRR out to that Long Island airport in order to get a cheap direct flight via SW to chicago. Has anyone done this before? Are we mad?

My Spelt Brownies Are Colder Than Outer Space

I came up with a concept that would have been a great thesis show if I was in art school in the 90s.

You know those painting series of kings wherein crucial moments from the king's life are depicted in glorious style by the artist? Well my concept is that I would paint in the same renaissance style, but it would be a series of important life experiences in the life of a middle class, suburban, while male. Something like:

1. First goal in soccer.
2. First kiss.
3. A in Algebra
4. Drivers License
5. Losing Virginity
6. High School Graduation
7. Learning About Self in College
8. College Graduation
9. Backpacking Across Europe
10. First Job Necessitating Tie Purchasing
11. Marriage
12. Mortgage
13. Heart Attack

See what an insightful deconstruction it would be of the American mythos? If I were 21 & still listening to Pavement I'd have thought that was pretty damn cool.

Now I briefly think it's funny & then think it's a terribly self-congratulatory silliness. And that was an example of how I come up with an idea & then demonstrate to myself how the idea reflects classist white supremacy.

Oh man, firefox's spellcheck just recommended that I change "classist" to "classiest."

Oh man.

I'm going to go out on a sturdy limb here & say that no NPR show should ever be allowed to use Bach cello concertos as the background music or the connecting music ever again.

There was a point in the 90s when god had to step in & decree that no one was allowed to use James Brown's "I Feel Good" in a movie trailer ever again. I think maybe we need god to return. While she's down here she can fix up some of the other bullshit, like the way employees at Kinkos treat customers & the implicit cruelty involved in all capitalistic interactions.

Did you notice I said "she" when talking about god? That's because I think god is a woman. I also enjoy visualizing whirled peas & drinking isopropyl alcohol while paging through my scrapbooks of happier times.

Also, it may not have been god who did the whole James Brown thing. It probably just went away. Maybe god is really just the mysterious workings of the market economy. Though still a woman, i guess.




I'm enjoying the latest Cyne record, even if the album cover is a bit much. He's such a clever double-talker, I can't figure out if he means the cover to be self-consciously equality-kitsch or if he's dedicated to a sincere vision of interracial non-bedroom love. It looks like a stock photography picture.

Cyne still has a kind of cheap computer sound to the production, but he gets way more out of it than on his last record, which always felt like great vocals floating on a puddle of blips.

Remember this Afghan Whigs album cover?


Such a terrible, terrible design concept for a record by a bunch of white guys from Cincy. I actually listened to this record a few weeks ago for the first time since the mid-90s. I was surprised how much I still dig it & surprised further by how much I still think Gentleman is boring. Some bands should just quit when their singer stops screaming.

I promise not to refer to the mid-90s again for at least two months.

Time Poorly Spent on the Subway

For at least 10 minutes today I tried to figure out if particular points in my life would have been described as "nervous breakdowns" when that phrase was fashionable.

I don't think they would have.

Some Things & Some Stuff & A Few Reasons to Continue Bothering to Survive

Anne Boyer gave an awesome reading last night. It made me feel like the world is acceptable.




*****





Word from Jehanne Dubrow

Dear friends,
As you know, I don't usually send out mass emails, but it's my pleasure to announce the release of my first full-length collection, The Hardship Post, winner of the Three Candles Press First Book Prize. The book is now available for purchase from Amazon, or you can buy it directly from Three Candles at http://www.threecandlespress.com. I also have a shiny new website, www.jehannedubrow.com, where you can find news about my latest readings, lectures, and other upcoming events.

Best wishes,
Jehanne

*****




I got this in the mail today. It is awesome.


Here's what The Cupboard says about it (don't trust them, though, they want you to buy it):

A New Map of America
by Louis Streitmatter
edited by James Brubaker
45 pages. Tape Bound.
$5.00
Design by Beth Sullivan.

More than thirty years in the making, renowned cartographer Louis Streitmatter's A New Map of America is at last here for a nation of lost and grateful citizens. In this book—containing the controversial map as well as the cartographer's notes on the many landmarks he's surveyed—Streitmatter unveils a new contour to this country's surfaces and boundaries. The result is a generous guide for any weary traveler. Read it. Use It. Keep it in your pockets.


Advance praise for A New Map of America:
"...an oblique and unforgiving masterpiece..."
–Prof. Johnson P. Jenkins, Southeast Institute of Physiographic Geography

"A daring and inscrutable mess—this is a map for the ages."
–Prof. Anthony Woodward, Director, American Cartographic Institute

"An intricate and poetic mystery—as pretentious as it is lovely."
–Sir Jonathan R. Alpert, British Royal Cartographers' Association

"A seductive train wreck of geography, history and ideology...I dare you to look away."
–Emily K. Mendenhall, International Alliance of Cartographers and Geographers


About the Author
Louis Streitmatter (b. 1940) began surprising map enthusiasts with his exciting work in 1961. Students of cartography still study his work, including the influential An Impressionistic Shaded Relief Map of The Grand Canyon, and A Physiographic Map of Dayton, Ohio. After almost three decades of radio silence, Streitmatter has emerged with the culmination of his life's work, the controversial A New Map of America. He currently resides in Vermont where he spends most of his time alone.


About the Editor
James Brubaker (b. 1947) has worked as an editor at numerous independent and university presses. In his retirement, he collects antique maps and is learning how to cook. He lives in Oklahoma with his wife and three cats.

*****




This is the saddest verse of Tom Waits' oeuvre:

Why cook dinner?
Why make my bed?
Why come home at all?
Out the door and through the woods
There is a world where nothing grows

*****






I went to the Morgan Library & Museum today & saw a great show of bookbindings. Despite the fact that some of the example names sounded like weird german porn varietals, it was fascinating not only in the craftsmanship & the preciousness of the texts but in how much the physical technology of the book remained constant for a millennium. I kept making connection between the work of Agnes Martin, one of my heroes, & the painstakingly minute quality of the leatherwork. Also, there was an embroidered book! It's awesome.

The Morgan's website has a cool shockwave feature that allows you to get all up ons the books with surprisingly fine detail: check it.






*****




Today I was looking for a photo blog that Jon had sent me a while back & I plugged "blog" into my gchat search. The number of hits was humiliating.

But it also reminded me of this:



And also this:







*****


I'm not usually one to complain about such things, but I was surprised by the dunderheadedness of Tim Flannery's review of E. O. Wilson & Bert Hölldobler's The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies. It basically retold a bunch of cool facts from the book & then complained that the book didn't do enough oversimplifying anthropomorphism & the did a bunch of simplistic anthropomorphizing. I'm not sure how sentences like "However, ants clearly are fundamentally different from us" & "You may not believe it, but like the sailors of old the leafcutter ants "sing" as they work" got by the editors. I expect my New York Review of Books articles to be tedious & thoughtful, not simple & pandering.




*****




I'm listening to this right now & it is effectively assuaging the crushing pain of existence.

The Match Array

The Match Array
Heather Green
dancing girl press, 2008
$7.00 (includes S&H)
Here

One of my favorite poets & favorite people has her first chapbook out!

You must read it.

THE BRIDGE

No memory, no myths,

no myths,

few before the forest,

no fixed words for colors.

A red cup looks like blood.

Extract a red dye.

The first year tutored herself,

listening slightly.

The room could be locked.

The second year borrowed a boat

from the river soon before joining him,

the joy beaten to death.

That’s what you do for God.

As a reult of the economic collapse we're going to see a lot more of this

high master show from Paul Overton on Vimeo.

Cynthia Arrieu-King

Cindy has an amazing new poem in the new journal Fogged Clarity. Here's one section:

*

It’s been years since I tired, tiptoeing for light meters.
The fecund night of other people’s feelings
and now I hide,
a black LP played in perpetuity.

I brush the air unseen. Is life disappointing?

Yes.

*

Untitled & the Kenny Goldsmith Show

I attended the first panel of the Untitled conference Saturday (got distracted in the break & never returned, oops!) & have been thinking about the ideas about appropriation & citation brought up by the panel.

Some random things first:

It was oddly Men-Are-From-Mars that both men on the panel had structured arguments with easily discernible theses & arguments, while both women created their presentation via allusion & accretion.

Steve McCaffery seemed scared or annoyed or at least unnerved by Julie Patton breaking into performative mode during the panel.

Julie Patton is awesome.

Vanessa Place’s equating the appropriated text with the lacanian Symptom was a new & exciting way of thinking about the re-use of text to me.

McCaffery’s discussion of the intertextual complexities of medieval texts are nothing new (thank you Dr. Kennedy, thank you Umberto Eco), but I hadn’t read or heard of the Gracian he referred to & I’m excited to find out more about him. Also SM was eloquent in his discussion.

So here's where my thinking has been stuck since then. Everyone seemed to accept the fact that Kenneth Goldsmith is the best example or reference point by which they could talk about appropriation & conceptual poetry in our time. Which was weird that he was on the panel. Weirder still that he seemed to accept his own exemplary status.

Goldsmith’s aggravating charm is in the fact that he has clinically reduced the conceptual issues of his work in such a way that he has one-sentence sell-lines of each of his projects. He is the most easily digestible poet of his ilk. Which makes him an easy reference point for a lecture – one can give one of KG’s projects as an example & people get the gist of it immediately. In this he has created an effective cottage industry of himself—I find myself coming back to thinking about his projects constantly, while rarely wanting to read the actual product of the projects.

What drives me crazy in thinking about his stuff is that his work seems essentially impervious to critique. He both asserts that he is attempting to reduce the subjective work of creativity & then immediately confesses the subjective “creative” process that leads him to his final product. He hawks his work as nutritionless but then emphasizes the painstaking amount of labor that goes into it, as if the commitment to the process is a form of “nutrition” (whatever the hell that metaphor really means in poetry). So he has it both ways – assert that he’s perpetuating the very systems of intellectual control that he manipulates & he’s simply a reflective asubjective poetry-machine. Assert that the work itself has little aesthetic interest & he’s all “I know, right? Isn’t it awesome?” Not that I think all poetry exists in order to be critiqued, but his conceptual poetry asks you ahead of time to not invest aesthetically.

But the urge toward the creative act, the generative act that engenders discussion in this case, is no different on the personal level than the emotional urge to affect a reader’s psychological state. Whatever kept him at work on the computer transcribing the NYT is still the aesthetic-creative event. He cited in his own presentation that a “prominent blogger” said that the work of Kenneth Goldsmith’s poetry is in promoting Kenneth Goldsmith. (I got the wording wording there, but that was the gist, I think)

But what made all of this frustration click (& the frustrations are the pleasure of the text for KG’s work to me – the moebius quality of the entangled ego & attempt away from ego) in an interesting way for me was when Julie Patton mentioned that in her tradition of jazz musicians that talk about arranging more than appropriating, that you get mocked for not knowing songs off the top of your head. That different verb of arranging made so much more sense to me. Immediately I thought of Ellington’s re-arrangement of Debussy alongside blues & New Orleans jazz & how these acts of aesthetic appropriation were progressively generative rather than self-reflective. Goldsmith’s work seems designed to work a clinically reductionist function that keeps the attention on his own process & work/worklessness. It brings all the focus back to him, whereas the ways I think of Ellington, Sun Ra or Art Ensemble arranging is more often cultural emanative.

OK – music functions different than poetry. Different rhetoric & audience. Yeah, duh. But Goldsmith literally re-arranged the NYT into a new form, a book. And in doing so, he created a text that is intentionally a tedious read. And so he cuts off one expanse of the pleasure of the text & in doing so focuses on his act of being an active mirror. It fosters the Kenny Goldsmith show. It’s a good show. But art ain’t only a carnival.

So I’m left wondering what use Goldsmith’s work has, in the sense of relating to other works. Has he created an interesting cul de sac?