Last post I forgot to add links, both of the upcoming reading from my books Occultations and (the multi-media) Prefab Eulogies at If Not for Kidnap Poetry, as well as the No Tell Motel Best Poetry of 2009 Holiday List (to promote the small presses & poets who have published work this year).  Jen Coleman, who I met for the first time at EconVergence Conference, will be reading at If Not for Kidnap Poetry (when/where/what info in the post below).  Have been a fan of Jen's work since I first ran into it on the web circa 2005, so it'll be a treat for me to hear more from a manuscript she's working on (really cool, how to call them, miniature radicalized allegories?), to talk some more while, or perhaps after, hearing what sounds like what will be some good live music.  The visual artist's pieces are also very interesting, but one only gets so much of the experience of an installation from looking at small photos online.  So, looking forward to it.  

As for the No Tell list, my picks are up now.  I tried to pick works that hadn't yet been picked by others, and, of course, books that are in print (not online).  This was difficult, as the list could have gone on for at least 50 titles, longer if I actually read a lot, or fast, which I don't.  Or if I'd taken the time to get input from other Wheelhouse editors or contributors, which I didn't.  

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In the coming weeks I'll put a schedule of readings (city/venue/date) up here; just getting that stuff together now, so right now the calender reads like a 4am television program listing.

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After being slowed by health issues--not just me this time!--Wheelhouse is getting back on track, working on finishing books by Felino Soriano, Elizabeth Kate Switaj, Uche Nduka, Laura Carter, Stan Apps, as well as Wheelhouse #9, which is beginning to take shape as we begin the process of deciding which pieces sent to us we'll be using.  We plan to release both the new issue and the first two chapbooks--by Soriano & Switaj--in the coming weeks.  That is, in time for an early winter release.  Shortly after that we'll be rolling out chapbooks 1-2 at a time, and prepping for some more PRESS events, including regional performances, and later, a reading/talk by SF poet Eleni Stecopolous and Seattle poet/editor (of Bird Dog Magazine) Sarah Mangold.  Meantime, if you haven't already, head on over to Wheelhouse & read the PRESS Anthology, which comes out of the PRESS Literary Conference, which as part of PRESS, occurs every other year (as long as we can get the funds for it, and given the state of the economy, grants are going to be hard to come by for next year).

Which reminds me to thank David Buuck, on behalf of Wheelhouse AND The Evergreen State College, Slightly West Literary Journal, and other co-sponsors of PRESS, for his incredibly generative performance/reading/discussion/talk.  A great turnout & now several students interested more than ever in poets theater, work that has a real stake, both politically and aesthetically.  

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Also, if you are in the Bay Area, check out Nonsite Collective.  The upcoming talk/performance by Marcus Civin I wish I could go to; the work is right up my alley, it seems.  From the announcement:

...join the Nonsite Collective this Saturday, November 21, at 3:30 PM for work by Marcus Civin (performance and talk) in discussion with Chris Nagler and Real Time Ethics.

935 Natoma Street, San Francisco

between 10th and 11th Streets

and between Mission and Howard

close to the Civic Center BART Station

and the Van Ness MUNI station

From Chris Nagler:

Marcus Civin’s performance work asks questions about bodily politics, and puts together serial kinetic phrases about his own. He reframes that old contested territory, the ordinary, or ‘pedestrian’ body. His teacher, the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, wrote, in 1968, of her own work as “a control that seems geared to the actual time it takes the actual weight of the body to go through the prescribed motions, rather than an adherence to an imposed ordering of time. In other words, the demands made on the body’s (actual) energy resources appear to be commensurate with the task . . .” Does this equation balance in the ordinary body of today, when the ‘prescribed motions’ are often obscure, charged with impossible simultaneities, or shamed with distant, mechanized heroism. And what to do with all that ‘seeming’ ? 

In his words:

My everyday life reveals my cowardice, my normalcy, my difficulty.

Every time I do my ritual, it is slightly different. I think about what

I would do in an extreme situation. I assume, I would know what to do

in an extreme situation, but I need practice.

Some possible issues and questions that may arise:

What kind of athlete or non-athlete is the contemporary American citizen?

The slapstick histories of multitasking

Do the body’s economies (sexual, affective, energetic) reflect/counter/react to/empty into The Economy? How. specifically?

Is ‘survival’ a performance, a fetish, a nostalgia, an ordinary reality? Which for whom?

Is represented labor still labor and is labored representation still representation? Who says so?

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From Marcus Civin:

"I had been so confident and now I had an awful feeling that the war had gotten out of my hands" 

                                    --Gertrude Stein as Alice B. Toklas (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas)

With the Nonsite Collective, Marcus Civin will project, re-build, perform gestures and utterances that riff on themes from his recent performance work — performance work that lands a poor, rough tramp behind enemy lines and forces the poor, rough tramp to decide: am I a killer, OR am I a clown?

Or: "In a series, objects become undefined simulacra one of the other. And so, along with the objects, do the people that produce them." -- Jean Baudrillard (Simulations)

I handle an ax, matches, a deck of cards, a spear, drips of water. I make a bathtub. Am I a bathtub. Or: I make a small black painting.

Or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30&feature=related

Or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcx9BJRadfw

Participants might enjoy watching:

http://www.archive.org/details/busterkeatonfilm (SAMUEL BECKETT, FILM)

and/or

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8727552817849141561# (BUSTER KEATON, HARD TIMES)

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Ritual No. 6, from Occultations:

6. (muted domestic pornography)

 

We must insist upon the idea of culture-in-action, of culture growing within us like a new organ, a sort of second breath: and on civilization as an applied culture controlling even our subtlest actions, a presence of mind  --  Artaud

 

Never so held in held

Suspense  : the long

 

Disease is pornographic

Graphic despite I knowing

 

What will come of this

This narrative as usual

 

As so much desolate

Hunger there is some I

 

Tensing with a perverting here

Here the sheen of a slowly open

 

Curve a depth I’ve seen this before

Before I roamed corporate clinics

 

My holes are a constant testing 

Ground perpetual breaks of strata

 

In continuity becomes continuity : I 

I here cannot see is a here with yet no

 

Name his delivery system holds I up

Up by its penis a story halos above

 

It : degraded as a convergence of aporias 

The strange tremor the unusual poverties

 

Of not knowing what will come of this this