Upcoming Readings

Thursday Octopus 14, 2010: Denver, CO 7pm w/ Josiah Hesse, Dan Landes @ Kilgore Books 624 E. 13th Ave
afterparty & DJs at City O City

Sunday October 24 2010: Boise, ID 8pm w/ Joshua Marie Wilkinson @ Pengilly's Saloon / 513 W. Main St.

Tuesday October 26 2010: San Francisco, CA tba w/ Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Claire Becker, Juliana Leslie

Wednesday October 27 2010: Ashland, OR tba w/ Joshua Marie Wilkinson @ Southern Oregon Univ.

Thursday October 28 2010: Portland, OR tba w/ Joshua Marie Wilkinson @ Bad Blood

Friday October 29 2010: Seattle, WA 7pm w/ Joshua Marie Wilkinson @ Pilot Books / 219 Broadway East

Thursday December 2, 2010: Richmond, VA 8pm w/Allison Titus @ Virginia Commonwealth Univ.

Photos of Good Things

Book Proposal for Broadway Books

Title: Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State & Garden State.

For one year I will watch the movie Garden State every day & write about my reactions to it & how my continuing & deepening relationship with the film reflects the depths of my emotional & spiritual being.

I have never seen the movie Garden State. I have only heard bad things about it. Is that dude from Scrubs in it? I think I've seen that show. Maybe not. I can't remember. I know I've seen a lot of ads for it & they have never once made me want to watch the tv show.

My inspiration for this book is Alain De Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life.

Book Proposal for Broadway Books

Title: Never Surrender, Never Swallow

For one year I will refuse to swallow anything, but I will go about my daily life exactly like one who would swallow things. I will teach classes, bike, go out in public, do readings, eat dinner & go out for drinks, all the while never swallowing any of the things I put in my mouth or even my own saliva.

Additionally I will treat this as a highly charged political act, a revolutionary decision that strikes at the heart of the vapid conservatism of the Tea Party just as effectively as at the psuedo-science of the Obama administration. I will explain my position at great length to anyone who asks me why my shirt front is covered with my own saliva & the masticated remains of a sandwich. My position will make no sense whatsoever.

In a time when the current events & politics section of the bookstores are filled with such ridiculous books, I figure this one is bound to be successful.

Book Proposal for Broadway Books

Title: Pomegranate Seeds Lines My Face Orifices for a Year

For one year I will genetically modify the linings of the orifices of facial parts harvested from willing donors so that the facial orifice linings will be able to grow rich, abundant pomegranate seeds. Then I will have those orifice lining pieces grafted onto me, so that when someone looks into my nose or ears she will see delicious, bright red pomegranate seeds lining the orifice. Similarly, the inner lining of my mouth will also be covered in pomegranate seeds, though my eyes & my gums will remain seed-free.

This idea came to me in a dream. In the dream I was at an airport, running late, when I decided I had to log onto one of those weird public computers & check my email from students. Then, in the dream, the perspective shifted & I was in the POV of someone putting a Q-Tip into my ear. The Q-Tip mysteriously was accompanied by a light source that illuminated the ear canal. Inside the ear canal was row upon row of beautiful, delectable pomegranate seeds. The Q-Tip jostled them slightly & they moved just a bit, squeaking slightly like real pomegranate seeds.

This book will trace the recent boom in pomegranates among the health conscious & grocery-elite. In this respect it will be a book that considers the fashion trends of grocery items. This will also be a book about the urges toward aesthetic hybridization. Therefore it will be at both the cutting edge of both economics books & pragmatic art theory.

But this is also a book about following one's dreams. Not in the Lance Armstrong sense, but in the truly deranged sense in which dreams are schizophrenic experiences. By following my dreams in such painful & inconvenient ways, I hope to demonstrate the depths of despair & disgust that can result from faith, especially faith in oneself.

At the end of the year I plan to be a changed man & to have learned many valuable life lessons.

You Need This

Dear Friends,

Feelings Using Wolves, a third poetry chapbook collaboration between Emily Kendal Frey and Zachary Schomburg, is now available for purchase from Small Fires Press.

The chapbook is fully letterpressed and hand bound by Friedrich Kerksieck & currently available in a case bound limited edition of 26 lettered and signed copies. It costs $100, but it can be purchased through September 22 for $75.

A soft bound edition of 74 copies will be available in the coming weeks.

Please visit Small Fires press at http://www.smallfirespress.com.

We hope you'll enjoy it,

Emily Kendal Frey & Zachary Schomburg

If You Are In Toronto You Should Go to This: ENTHUSIASM New works by Abbas Akhavan, Kelly Jazvac, and Ron Tran

A little poem of mine about a stick plays a very, very tiny, tiny part in this show.




ENTHUSIASM
New works by Abbas Akhavan, Kelly Jazvac, and Ron Tran

September 16 - October 9 2010
Opening reception Thursday September 16 6-9pm

Enthusiasm, when controlled by subtle repression, results in either élan, originality, magnetism, charm or “IT”, depending on the manner of its use. Uncontrolled enthusiasm results in blaring jazz, fanaticism and recklessness. A complete lack of enthusiasm produces the obsequious waiter and the uneducated street car conductor.

Addressing white collar workers in the 1920s, self-help writer William Henry Schoenau argued the importance of an enthusiastic comportment. Then, as now, enthusiasm was key to success in business and social realms. Deployed correctly, it could elevate the individual to respect and prestige; unchecked, it could lead to embarrassment and ridicule.

In this exhibition, Abbas Akhavan, Kelly Jazvac and Ron Tran embody enthusiasm at its limits. Their three new bodies of work shuttle between experiences of exuberance, reverence, earnestness, mania and exhaustion. At times, enthusiasm registers more literally, as with Tran, whose work constitutes a fan-obsessed tribute to an unlikely subject, implicating a staggering number of voices. Elsewhere, enthusiasm appears in its formal dimension through Jazvac’s accretions of vinyl, their sagging features embodying the hangover effects of an overly frantic application of the stuff of countless advertising campaigns. Akhavan’s architectural intervention reads more abstractly, overtaking the gallery’s already overzealous design with a subtle, yet pernicious intrusion.

Born in Tehran, Abbas Akhavan is currently a Toronto resident. His practice ranges in medium from site-specific installations to drawing and video, with recent focus on spaces just outside the home – the garden, the backyard, and other domesticated landscapes. His work has been exhibited across Canada in galleries including Vancouver Art Gallery, Artspeak (Vancouver), and the Darling Foundry (Montreal), and abroad, with exhibitions at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Le Printemps de septembre, France; The Third Line, Qatar and Dubai; Belvedere Museum, Austria. Akhavan is represented by The Third Line, Dubai.

Kelly Jazvac works primarily in sculpture and installation. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently including Diaz Contemporary in Toronto, Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga, the Khyber ICA in Halifax, Atelierhof Kreuzberg in Berlin and i8 Gallery in Reykjavik. Upcoming projects include WARP Coup de Ville in Sint Niklaas, Belgium. She is currently based in London where she teaches sculpture at the University of Western Ontario. Jazvac is represented by Diaz Contemporary.

Ron Tran is a Vancouver based artist whose practice explores the ways that chance and coincidence influence daily life. Tran studied at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Canada, United States, Europe, and China. Tran has exhibited in East International 2007 Norwich England, the 6th Berlin Biennale, and is currently working toward a solo show at the Charles H. Scott Gallery Vancouver in 2011.

This exhibition is accompanied by a free publication with an essay by Nicholas Brown

Special event:

Special Event: Weekend Leisure public presentation
Screening of Weekend Leisure Network cable access series and artist talk
Thursday, September 30, 7pm

Hours
Thursday and Friday: 5-9pm
Saturday: 12-5pm

Red Bull 381 Projects
381 Queen St. West, Suite 200
Toronto, ON

redbull381projects.com

Book Proposal for Broadway Books

Title: Crankin' the Year Away

Over the course of one short year I will explore, research or enact every possible usage of the word crank.

I will build & use a portion of an axis bent at right angles to communicate motion, or to change reciprocal into rotary motion, or the converse. I will research how in early times the crank was chiefly used as a handle or treadle to turn a revolving axis by hand or foot. I will be amazed how later, the crank was used as a device for converting circular into reciprocal motion, and now chiefly (as in the steam engine) reciprocal into circular motion. I will kayak past every crook, bend, winding, meandering part of a river. I will find the oldest elbow-shaped device in bell-hanging, whereby the rectilineal motion communicated to a bell-wire is changed in its direction, usually at right angles, as from horizontal to vertical or the reverse. Conversely I will visit a laboratory to watch investigations into the latest elbow-shaped supports or brackets. I will spelunk into many a tortuous or somewhat inaccessible hole or crevice, a cranny, at which point I'll be brisk, merry, lively, & disposed to exult.

I will explore the dark side of cranks, such as the machines for the punishment of criminals sentenced to hard labour, consisting of a revolving disc to which a regulated pressure can be applied, and which the prisoner is required to turn a certain number of times each day. I will explore the lighter side of cranks with the contrivances for stripping the carded cotton from a carding-engine, the driving-axle of an engine or machine, the carriage axle with the ends bent twice at a right angle, so as to lower the carriage-body and yet allow the use of large wheels, the case or covering in which the crank-shaft of a motor engine is enclosed, crank-chambers, crank-hatches, crank-hooks, the rod which connects the treadle and the crank in a foot-lathe, crank-pins, crank-shafts, crank-wheels, & last but not least, a beautiful disc-crank.

I will make many twists or fanciful turns of speech, humorous turns & verbal tricks or conceits, all the while reporting on the hilarity that ensues. I will spend time with a person with a mental twist; one who is apt to take up eccentric notions or impracticable projects; esp. one who is enthusiastically possessed by a particular crotchet or hobby; an eccentric, a monomaniac.

I will sail a ship that was built too deep or narrow, or has not sufficient ballast to carry full sail. As I walk i will zigag, twist and turn about, moving with a sharply winding course. I will countenance my face so that it wrinkles minutely with parallel ridges and furrows. I will shackle a horse.

I will bend things in the shape of a crank, attach a crank to things or furnish things with a crank. I will lift things or draw things up by means of a crank. My writing will be twisted, crooked, tortuous, crinkled & wrinkled. I will crank Cupid lustily, briskly & boldly & then on other days I will crank Cupid irritably, fretfully & crankily. I will display my crank-side to strangers until I am sickly, in weak health, infirm in body, out of order, out of gear, working badly, shaky, crazy, of capricious or wayward temper, difficult to please; cross-tempered, awkward; 'cross,' mentally out of gear, crotchety, 'queer,' subject to whims or 'cranks,' eccentric or peculiar in notions or behavior, full of twists or windings, crooked, & full of corners or crannies.

Then I will spend the rest of the year doing meth.

Book Proposal for Broadway Books

Title: Vaguely History

For a year I will give guided tours of historic landmarks but I will not research any of the actual events of these landmarks prior to becoming a docent. I will, for instance, when leading a tour of Mt Rushmore tell my tour group something like this:

Mt. Rushmore features the presidents Wilson, Roosevelt, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, & Hamilton.

It was built in the 30s or 40s. It took one hundred workers one hundred days to build it. They popped benzedrine & stayed up all night for each of the hundred days, until by the end of it they were total drugged-out zombies. This work crew included Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Jean Dubuffet, Etta James, Joseph McCarthy, Rick Rubin & Margaret Thatcher.

The monument is one mile tall from top to bottom & is impervious to all forms of ruination, even erosion, because Theodore Roosevelt made a deal with the devil at a remote crossroads in Tioga, North Dakota.

Deep inside the mountain a live cat was walled into a room & abandoned to die, so that the monument would never lose its power.

If you touch Mt Rushmore at midnight on the feast of St. Thecla then you will be spared death one time in the coming year.

Mt. Rushmore includes a handful of delightful & affordable apartments that use the eyeholes of the presidents as windows.

I will spend the year setting up tour events at rock bottom prices, certain to fill the buses & then lead them. I will report on the reactions of my tour members as I mutilate history with an air of authority. Like a cross between Borat & a sassy Sarah Vowell book, this book will humiliate people needlessly & smugly present my own deep personal connection to history.

Book Proposal for Broadway Books

Title: Chins for a Years

For one year I will trade in all of my body parts for chins. Instead of arms & legs, I will have chins. Instead of a head with ears, nose, mouth, eyes, hair & chin I'll have a chin with chins, a chin, a chin, chins & a whole head of chin. Instead of genitals, chins. Instead of a thorax, chin.

Throughout this year I will travel America interviewing famous chins, such as Jay Leno's & Sandra Bullock's. I will relate the surprisingly dramatic story of the invention of the chin. I will do a bit of investigative journalism into the black market chin trade in Mozambique & Denmark. A reader should walk away from this book with not only a comprehensive understanding of the make-up & nature of the chin, but not a few delectable anecdotes to drop at the next chin-friendly dinner party.

In addition to the informative nature of this book, my personal struggle living one year as a freakish amalgam of chins will be a consistent undercurrent. The book will out the underlying & insidious prejudices against people who elect to have comprehensive plastic surgery resulting in them becoming & huge glob of chins, in a country that purports to be "post-race." I think my story will, in the vein of Eat, Pray, Love, be an inspiration to a wide swath of the book-buying public.

A Book Proposal for Broadway Books

Title: My Year of Absorption

For one year I will seek out the softest, most absorptive towels in the world. To accomplish this I plan to travel to most remote regions to sample the face-refreshing powers of towels made of Spring lemur fur, Siberian Tiger tail hairs & shredded post-it notes doodled upon by weary children standing on top of imprisoned political prisoners.

While there is an obvious pragmatic use for the book as a shopping guide for the most elite connoisseurs of linens, I also think there is a spiritual quest embedded in this search. According to my people, the spirit makes itself known in the effervescence of the shower water evaporating off the skin. The spirit is therefore containable if one has the finest towels.

If my year goes according to plan, at the end of my year I will have trapped the spirits of so many people that I will be considered a small god. Not a god like God but a god like MIllard Filmore.

Book Proposal for Broadway Books

Title: A Year of Wonders

For a year I will travel the world wondering about things. I will wonder how they get that delicate glue on the end parts of toilet paper without making the whole roll stick together. I will wonder why people play board games. I will wonder whether a root beer float would taste good right about now.

I will keep track of the things I wonder about, but never follow up & find out why things happen the way they do. In fact, I will refrain from asking anyone anything that could answer, illuminate or in any other way quell my wonderings. By the end of the year I presume I will have sewn my mouth shut, soldered my eyes closed & filled my ear canals with the crushed skulls of fetal sparrows, in the interest of not ever stopping wondering.

I think this book will be popular among the poor, the sad & the pathetic, to whom I will also dedicate the book.

Book Proposal for Broadway Books

My Year on a Moving Sidewalk

For one year I will live inside Denver International Airport & ride one pair of moving sidewalks forward the 30 feet or so & then back the same 30 feet. I will survive by living off of previously stored energy & Capri Suns. I will not talk to anyone. I will wear high-quality ear plugs & a thick black blindfold. I will never sleep.

For this memoir, I will describe in exacting detail the feeling of each trip on the moving sidewalks, documenting each ride by date & time. I will show the development & refinement of an aesthetic of moving sidewalk riding, the mental process I go through as I am moved by the moving sidewalk & the Sisyphean feeling of respite in the few steps between one moving sidewalk & its opposing-direction partner.

This book will be popular among readers who enjoyed such books at Mary Roach's Stiff, Mary Roach's Packing for Mars & the City of Portland, Oregon's downloadable pdf "SIDEWALK REPAIR MANUAL: How to Repair and Maintain a Sidewalk."

Book Proposal for Broadway Books

My Year of Asking about Bullwhips

For one year I will travel the country, from big cities to small towns, wearing upper-middle-class-appropriate clothing fitted to each environ, stopping strangers in the middle of the street & asking politely & somewhat timidly "I'm sorry, do you perhaps have a bullwhip I could borrow for a moment?"

Over the course of my year I hope to learn about the current American character & zeitgeist, vis a vis asking to borrow a bullwhip. The book will contain many quirky & memorable characters whom I plan to meet along the way, along with tales of my hardships & self-actualization through my journey.

Additionally, my book will provide a layperson's history of the the process of stopping people int he street for reasons ranging from political campaigning & fundraising to delirium & pain. Similarly it will give the reader a quick & saucy history of the age-old tool the bullwhip & its evolution both in the workplace & human consciousness.