Frankenstein vs. the World

My meditation on Dorothea Lasky’s work (”review” has never felt right for the piece), composed for ON: Contemporary Practice while I was living in the wildflower-filled high desert of Nevada a couple summers ago, has just gone online at Jacket2. Lasky remains a luminous source of inspiration for me, and I’m happy the piece now has another life in this form.

Tags: dorothea lasky.

Announcing the third & final issue of WILD ORCHIDS. New writing on William Blake by David Brazil, Lee Ann Brown, Patrick Dunagan, Jesse Glass, Dorothea Lasky, Douglas Manson, & Peter O’Leary. $9, ppd: here.

Tags: david brazil, dorothea lasky, douglas manson, jesse glass, lee ann brown, patrick dunagan, peter o'leary, wild orchids, william blake.

Tags: dorothea lasky.

Tags: caconrad, dorothea lasky, lee ann brown.

. . . Many more here . . .

Tags: bernadette mayer, brenda coultas, caconrad, caitlin newcomer, deborah poe, dorothea lasky, geoffrey gatza, joey yearous-algozin, lee ann brown, liz kotz, myung mi kim, sam truitt, sean reynolds, stephen cope.

poetry reading

Lee Ann Brown
CAConrad
Dorothea Lasky

MY HOUSE
359 Lafayette Ave. / Buffalo, NY
Sat., 2 April
3 p.m.

Tags: caconrad, dorothea lasky, lee ann brown.

Pilgrimage to Buffalo this April Fool’s Day to celebrate the amazing life & work of the one and only Bernadette Mayer. Modes of Love and Reason: A Bernadette Mayer Symposium will feature critical talks by scholars Stephen Cope (Bard College), Lee Ann Brown (St. John’s University), Caitlin Newcomer (Florida State University), Deborah Poe (Pace University), Sam Truitt (Station Hill Press), and Joey Yearous-Algozin (SUNY-Buffalo); a roundtable of contemporary poets CAConrad, Dorothea Lasky, and Brenda Coultas discussing their own elective affinities with Mayer; and a keynote address by art critic Liz Kotz (Words to Be Looked At). Bernadette Mayer herself will take the stage at 8 p.m. for a reading.

Click thru the poster above for the complete schedule and program. Thanks to Chicago illustrator & consummate correspondent Grace Tran for re-lettering the beautiful Joe Brainard drawing from A Golden Book of Words.

Tags: bernadette mayer, brenda coultas, buffalo poetics program, caconrad, caitlin newcomer, deborah poe, dorothea lasky, joey yearous-algozin, lee ann brown, liz kotz, sam truitt, stephen cope.

Two weeks from today I am curating what promises to be a fantastic night at the ACA Galleries in NYC, as Satellite Telephone is hosted by Boog City’s d.a. levy lives series / the Welcome to Boog City Festival. All details and performer bios below.

d.a. levy lives — celebrating the renegade press — presents

 s a t e l l i t e   t e l e p h o n e

 Readings:
 Todd Colby
 Dorothea Lasky
 Eileen Myles
 Rebekah Rutkoff

Music:
Franklin Bruno

Tues., Sept 28, 6 p.m. sharp
ACA Galleries
529 W.20th St., 5th Flr.
NYC

C/E to 23rd St., 1/9 to 18th St.
Venue is bet. 10th and 11th avenues

Todd Colby has published four books of poetry: Ripsnort (1994), Cush (1995), Riot in the Charm Factory: New and Selected Writings (2000), and Tremble & Shine (2004), all published by Soft Skull Press. Todd has performed his poetry on PBS and MTV, and his collaborative books and paintings with artist David Lantow can be seen in the Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art special collections libraries. Todd serves on the Board of Directors for The Poetry Project, where he has also taught several poetry workshops, and he posts new work on gleefarm.blogspot.com.

Todd’s poems appeared in Satellite Telephone #3. Here’s one:

MY THOUGHTS OF BEARS

When bears are depicted as playing poker or smoking cigars, it contributes to people feeling like they could be friends with bears, or that hanging out with a bear in nature might be a funny or entertaining way to pass the time and make a new friend. Most of the bears I know are stupid and selfish and yet bears are rarely held accountable for their actions simply because they’re bears. That’s bullshit.

When stupid and selfish bears slap people on the back and surprise them with outward signs of affection, people often get the wrong idea and get too friendly with bears and like, want to hang out with bears, and play sports with bears, and g-chat with bears, and other stuff like that. That’s not fair to all the people that need real friends. I like pictures of bears better where the bears are doing things that they would normally do in the wild.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, AWE (Wave Books, 2007) and Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and numerous chapbooks. Currently, she researches creativity and education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dorothea’s poems appeared in Satellite Telephone #2. Here’s one:

I HATE YOU

I have thought and thought about it
And I hate you
And what I hate about you most is that
You have no real understanding of the sublime
I hope the white light crushes in on you
And crushes everything about you
And you have to realize it while it is happening
That’s my life—realizing it while it is happening
I am not precious
Or weak
I am not a girl
But a gold tree that you will have to deal with
Because I will never go away
Or with your sweet hands all around me
I will get swallowed by the sea
Great mouth will finally take me back
While you are crushed by your own infinity
And you will have to realize it
That it was greater than you ever gave it credit for
Love
Greater than you ever gave it credit for
But that is what it was meant to be

Eileen Myles has written thousands of poems since she gave her first reading at CBGB’s in 1974. Her books include The Inferno (2010), The Importance of Being Iceland (2009), Sorry, Tree (2007), Skies, (2001), on my way (2001), Cool for You (a novel, 2000), School of Fish (1997), Maxfield Parrish (1995), Not Me (1991), and Chelsea Girls (stories, 1994). In 1995, with Liz Kotz, she edited The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading for Semiotext(e).

A long poem by Eileen appeared in Satellite Telephone #1. Here’s an excerpt:

DON’T GO

I was drinking
my cocoa wondering
am I little bear
or big bear
but this is like sex with everybody
with the raindrops
off the roof
guess why I didn’t
go out
tonight. The drippiness
is so good
thousands of years
ago we came
to
this place
it’s a baby they
said
plucking me
out of the
flames
perhaps you’ve
felt the
tongues
the corolla
you’re
like peaceful
in my
cradle
but a big
job ahead
the man followed
me into
the bathroom
inside I
was shooting
what no man’s
ever seen
the small lock
& the drops
on the floor
drops close
drops large
the whole world
is fiction
he declared
I’m just learning
to use it
I sd

Rebekah Rutkoff is an artist, moving image curator and PhD candidate in the English Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

A story by Rebekah appeared in Satellite Telephone #3. Here is an excerpt:

from THE INCUBATORS

Each evening, two buses brought 150 Temenos pilgrims from Loutra (a tiny spa village known for its therapeutic natural springs where most of the foreign guests stayed) 20 km north to a mountaintop spot just outside Lyssaraia. We walked another kilometer on sweet-smelling, winding monopati down to the screening site as the sun shifted and set.

When projection began, the sky was dark but a handful of clouds still alert; later the sky blackened and stars replaced the clouds. Everything decomposed into a series of steps: in the die-down of an image a few frames long (followed immediately by black leader), I counted eight stages before my eyes registered true black. The falling of night, that fact that ushered in the start-up of projection, revealed its own stages under the auspices of the screen. And from the bus window I counted eight layers of receding mountains: they looked like paper cut-outs.

In the transition from white leader to black, the border of the screen disappeared and a flame chased after the receding light; then the screen reconstituted itself, matching the tone and hue of the sky. At times, following a spell of white light, the edge of the screen shook with paroxysms; it undulated, coronated with a neon halo. And the screen was liable to slide as well; its transparent, superimposed twin accompanied my eyes into fully black regions of the sky. But Eniaios is also literally embedded with a black and white dialogue: Markopoulos encoded titles into the film by giving each of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet a numerical measure, translatable into a corresponding number of frames of leader (alpha is one frame, beta is two, etc.). The title letters alternate in color: the first is white, the second black.

Eniaios offers a kind of primal-scene access, usually denied, to the dynamics between the acrobatics of the screen itself and the image contained within it. The separation between images makes possible glimpses of perceptual overlap and bleeding free from their prescribed presence in the form of cross-dissolves and superimpositions; instead the eyes, screen and sky conspire to create these effects.

Walking to the site on the second evening, I stared at the setting sun for too long, and a constellation of dots with uneven, cartoonish edges flew before my eyes. It looked just like a film I had seen before – Scherzo (1939) by Norman McLaren. I recalled suddenly that I had seen the word scherzo written on the side of a purple and yellow polka-dot box in the window of a closed shop in Megalopolis earlier that day. The box and word had been deposited, but disappeared until the sunspots retrieved them along with McLaren’s tiny film.

Franklin Bruno is a musician and writer based in Queens. He has recorded and toured as chief songwriter for the bands Nothing Painted Blue and (currently) The Human Hearts, and as a solo artist. His most recent release, Local Currency 1991-1998 (Fayettenam) collects four-track/lo-fi recordings from out-of-print vinyl seven-inches and compilations. He is a frequent collaborator with The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle, both as a multi-instrumentalist on the acclaimed 4AD albums The Sunset Tree and Tallahassee, and in the occasional duo The Extra Lens. He is the author of a book on Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, and of the poetry chapbook Policy Instrument (Lame House). His poetry has appeared in Satellite Telephone, The Brooklyn Rail, and Abraham Lincoln; his essays and criticism, in The Nation, Oxford American, and The Believer.

Franklin’s poems appeared in Satellite Telephone #1. Here’s one:

DIRECTION OF FIT

It was the year of the motion-
sensitive towel dispenser, the travel
alarm and the table lamp that doubled
as an extension cord, via an outlet
in its base. That’s all I noticed, really,
that whole autumn, what with my season-
ably debilitating nostalgia for
locally-produced commercials. Time-
zones later came the figure-ground
relationship of lozenges of ice

breaking up in the tributaries

and a hesitant budget of months
that stubbornly resisted resolution
into a corrected image of spring.
In any event, there was motion-
sickness, and a tailbone as numb
as if it had been watching the movie
itself. A noticing machine, I guess
I was, a waking mess. Was it wrong
to point out the notion of rivulets
for an audience that might well never

pass judgment on their symmetry,

sublimity? Was it wrong to teach
a word by pointing to those with no occasion
for its use? I keep screwing up my eyes
at the page with the poem inside it,
beneath it, trying to see what you’ll see.
Most will admit, if only to themselves,
that they’re sliding around too much
of the time and experience reason-
ably distinct anxieties from those
revealed for the sake of appearing

companionably vulnerable.

Franklin’s songs with Nothing Painted Blue, the Extra Glens / Lens, and the Human Hearts are legendary. Here’s one of my favorite, from the Suggestion Box cassette (Shrimper, 1991):

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Tags: dorothea lasky, eileen myles, franklin bruno, rebekah rutkoff, satellite telephone, todd colby, welcome to boog city festival.

I love Dottie’s guided tour through the Stevie Nicks archive on YouTube. As always Dottie’s effortless insight and ability to cut right to the (wild) heart of things is startling and impeccable. My favorite parts are where she talks about the video above, where she compares Stevie’s voice to both Chanel No. 5 & a family of crocodiles, and where she talks about Stevie being OK being stupid in an interview on CBS. I think it’s an important thing, to be OK being stupid (don’t I know it).

Watch this short clip in which Nicks supposedly talks about her songwriting.  It’s hilarious how she suffers the stupidity of Rita Braver in that interview, who seems to have no clue about her music or even what to ask her, so she just lets her ramble on about her permed 80’s hair. I love how unafraid Stevie Nicks is to say nothing of substance at all. She does say something interesting though about her songwriting in the beginning—that she gets inspired a lot by everyday things and she’ll write a line down and start a poem (I think it’s cool how she thinks of her songs as poems). She seemed to indicate also that there are lots of lines that don’t become poems, that are just random lines floating in the ether. I respect this kind of quotidian freedom of hers to create beauty out of seemingly nothing at all.

Tags: dorothea lasky, stevie nicks.