Some Words and Sounds

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1. Japanese Traditional Music: Gagaku & Buddhist Chant, Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai (1941)

2. Robert Ashley, In Sara Mencken, Christ and Beethoveen there were men and women (1972)

3. Sharon Hayes, I March in the Parade of Liberty, But As Long As I Love You I'm Not Free (2008)

Atl 3

Via Post

Thanks you guys for all the love and inputs. I'm still not sure what to do, but at least the sun has started shining like crazy here and I'm feeling like whatever I end up doing, interesting and unexpected things will happen. And things will be fine.

Speaking of, two packages arrived recently. One from myself and one from my hero, Dr.C.,MD, you may know her as Cookiesforbreakfast. Totally unexpected (the one from me was ordered from UDP so many eons ago, I'd just assumed it lost), and both totally extravagant and rad! So, as I've no news to report beyond the weather and my continuing indecision, I'll just adopt the brilliant MTBE-style book review format to convey the packages' contents' bounteous awesomeness (and - ahem! - get Navel Gazing off the top of the page). OK, here we go:

1) F.R.David - The "Stuff and Nonsense" Issue (Winter 2008), de Appel, Amsterdam. [This one was from C., how did she know that it was totally what I needed right now?]

first line: "Words, Don't come easy."
last line: "Is GOLDEN!"

2) Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (UDP, 2009)

first line: "In the winter of 2008, at a launch for The noulipian Analects (C. Wertheim and M. Viegener, eds., Les Figues Press, 2007), Vanessa Place, Anna Moschovakis, and I were engaged in a conversation about the poetics of erasure techniques."
last line: "Use them all." [Actually, the last "line" is a page with a dot or period in the center, but that kind of felt like cheating.]

3) Aram Saroyan, Complete Minimal Poems (UDP, 2007)

first line: "a man stands"
last line: "Gailyn is doing the dishes."

4) Vito Acconci & Bernadette Mayer, eds., 0 to 9, The Complete Magazine: 1967-1969 (UDP, 2006)

first line: "Not '0 Through 9,' we said to each other, that would subsume us into Jasper Johns; let's call it '0 To 9' instead."
last line: "The tape is still available from The Malabe Co., Inc. but the price has gone up to 14¢ a yard."

5) Aleksandr Skidan, Red Shifting, Genya Turovskaya [et al], trans. (UDP, 2008)

first line: "In speaking about 'red shifting' I would not start with the Doppler effect, because it has no room for the word 'red,' just as in subsequent definitions of this physical process, be it cosmological, mathematical, or poetic."
last line: "knives {and}"*

*Those should be triangley brackets, but those doesn't show up in web browsers...

Bonus #1: I uploaded the editorial intro from F.R.David, cause it was just so gosh-darned right about everything. (It's about how art is not about communicating things. To which I say, YES!)

Bonus #2: Here are some of the Saroyan poems:

COUPON
Coupons are the brightest yellowest
Reddest headiest delights on the face of the earth!

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PLACID TEAS
The cream

made an "e"

in the tea.

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SONG
My father's my father's,
My mother's my mother's,
My sister's my sister's,
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm.

--

It may
be the
coffee-
maker

Or it
may be
the ra-
diator.

--

I see
this
little

and
even
less.

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JULY
It'll hit you you in July.