Dear Folks,
I am very pleased to announce that my book
Dear Reader has just been published by
Ithuriel's Spear of San Francisco. The cover art is a detail from
Amy Trachtenberg's stunning painting "Feelings Are Facts II." You can find the book at
Small Press Distribution.
Here's a peek inside:
Introduction
But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?
--Denis Diderot,
Jacques le fataliste et son maître, 1796
My friend Simone notes there are so many quotes. A sign of
anxiety? The talkers and listeners in the rooms, or out on the highway.
The fatalist and his master narrate, desire, philosophize,
serve, relate, exchange.
Out of master one
might pull a mast, rig a ship, invent
a star to navigate by.
The writing in this book was composed over a number of
years. The three distinct series or projects--"after Oppen &
Howe," "The Melmoth Letters," and "making
mARKs"--begin in reading. "other lands" from the making mARKs
series began with a book serendipitously found on the shelves at the San
Francisco Public Library. It was a history of the bottom--asses, buttocks,
fesse, and fissum. I took notes from the book but not a citation, and for some
reason, I didn't check it out. When I went back to find it on the shelves, it
wasn't there. The catalog contained no trace of it. The missing book: was it
de-accessioned? Taken out of commission, hallucinated?
Google searches turn up "history from the bottom
up," but no history of the bottom. "History from the bottom up"
provides a useful starting point, however. Jacques is a servant, a valet, after
all; he's good at unpacking a peripatetic, self-conscious labyrinth that turns
continually astray. At the same time, history is gendered and sexed.
the nomadic "I" restless restive sometimes resistant, even
extant,
recylces returns.
to the site/sight.
Everyday experience--gendered though not only, marked by
class though not only--of words meaning more than what they say. Thus, words
erupt out of, as if under pressure to be writ large, speak more. They struggle
against autocorrect.
Sometimes for the pleasure of the local--the
"nary" in binary--and other times for commentary as in:
pRimOgeniTure. The rot in such a system.
There is pleasurable
revision askance; the majuscule underscores as it works to unseat gendered
subjectivity from the bottom up. The object--her--wrestles the presumed
subject--he--in a playful revision of a children's song:
tHE subject takes a wife.
Repeat
Or, sometimes a stutter:
organs InTerrupted by
happiness bITter bijoux in the dark bITters.
"Reading NegativIty" emerged out of found (and
then manipulated) language from Jocelyn Saidenberg's Negativity.
In "after Oppen & Howe," I wanted to apply
Susan Howe's history lesson to talk back to George Oppen whose writing seduces,
leaving no marks on the skin. I wanted to mark it up, while acknowledging the
pleasure of its porosity, the sonorous holes gaping. A gap in which feeling
enters. I want to call down and out history's [absent] feeling. Feeling and
counter-claim enter the gaps.
To gape. Agape.
Reading and writing offer a model of transgression--of the
individual subject and all its architecture--gender, class, sex, race. The
subject--ideology's morphine.
The subject provides the tools for the struggle to come--a
wall to chip away at with a spoon or unfolded paper clip. We seek a tunnel to
the outside from at least this side. Guided by the stars of:
A [failed] belief in poetry. nonetheless.
An intervention, intercession.
A record on the cave wall of the present.
Thursday October 22nd I will be reading with Jim Brashear at the Green Arcade in San Francisco. Hope to see you there!
