Interview

One of the first things I posted on this blog was an Interview with Selina Tusitala Marsh, whose first collection of poems I was reviewing at the time. I have only just remembered to put it in the links list over to the right where I keep reviews and essays and other stuff. So it's there now. take a look if you want.

SALT summer sizzler!

Courtesy of John Gallaher at Nothing to say & saying it:

August Summer Sizzler


The JustOneBook campaign continues with a further sensational August deal. In order to keep Salt on track through the wet British summer, we're offering you another special deal throughout August. All Salt books are available from us at 33% discount yet again. That's a third off all Salt titles, and free shipping on orders with a cover price of over £30 or $30.

Offer ends 31 August 2009. Simply enter the coupon code HU693FB2 when in the store to benefit.

As before, all we ask is two things—

1. Buy one book. Or perhaps another one ... go on.
2. Pass it on. Share this offer with everyone who loves gorgeous books and likes a bargain (whilst saving independent literature).

+

http://www.saltpublishing.com/

They've published some very good stuff -
Bruce Andrews - Designated Hearbeat
Caroline Bergvall - Fig

And I think there's some Tom Beckett there.

Addenda: I just remembered they also have Michele Leggott's Milk and Honey, published in NZ by AUP. It's a goodie too.

Eleanor Catton's The Rehersal

Congratulations to my friend from school (oh-so-very long ago) Eleanor Catton, whose debut novel The Rehersal has won the best first book (fiction) catagory of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

Plug!

The incomparable Jack Ross gives my chapbook a plug here.

Nylund the Sarcographer

I just got a copy of this amazing novel by Joyelle McSweeney in the mail today. It's absolutely incredible.

You can get copies from Tarpaulin Sky Press, who, needless to say, publish other great books (and a fantastic journal) as well.

Day's Eye by Alan Loney

I just recieved this from Rubicon Press, and it's very cool. Buy it. More in-depth stuff about it soon.

Alan Blogs here.

The Saint's Notebook by Kate Schapira

I just ordered this beautiful chapbook. You should too. It's beautifully handbound in burlap, in a ltd. edition of 74.

Support the small presses!

Marissan Johnpillai's Hymns for Her

Launching:
Wednesday 22nd July, 5.30pm
Beat Street Cafe
cnr Barbadoes & Armagh Sts

more here.

Jenifer Evans: The Final Narcissistic Works + PAINTLUST PROJECT SPACE NZ CLOSING NIGHT

I just got this in my inbox- please do come down. It should be a good show.

One night only – TUESDAY 14^th July 2009 from 5pm

Paintlust is proud to present the final exhibition at Paintlust Project Space, Christchurch, New Zealand with a solo project by English artist Jenifer Evans. This project has been conceived specifically for the Paintlust space, and marks the final exhibition in the current New Zealand incarnation of Paintlust. The installation includes drawings, books, and two films- ‘On Second Thoughts, Eddie!’ made by Jason Dungan, Jenifer Evans, Claire Hooper, Eddie Peake, Paul Richards, Guy Rusha, Gili Tal and Joseph Walsh, and a short film by Evans called ‘Animation to Avoid Closure’. Evans graduated from the Royal College of Art with a MA in Painting in 2007 and is represented by RITTER/ZAMET in London.

‘The works are the last gasp of a joyfully narcissistic practice. I’m the girl in gold in the film, a boxer and artist in the drawings, while the animated interval documents my studio over a period of 3 months and the Catalogue Raisonne Volume 1: 1985-2007contains work, notes and photographs I made from the age of 3 to 25. The drawings are presented as equally important as the film, and equally dramatically. You can’t be distracted by the moving images while looking at the still ones, and the film is a soundtrack for the drawings, giving these final self-portraits a cinematic air.’ -Jenifer Evans 2009

www.jeniferevans.com/

www.paintlust.co.nz

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Paintlust is an international artist collective with members from NZ, Korea, Taiwan, and Spain. Paintlust Project Space will exist in NZ until mid-July 2009, and during this time will show a mix of international and local artists. Paintlust aims to promote practices that explore new possibilities in contemporary painting, against a time in which location and nationality do not necessarily go hand in hand.

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Location:

Level 1, 129b Manchester Street

Christchurch

New Zealand

Excess - Surreal - Pathological

"The word Surreal has gained incredibly currency as a negative in our culture! In our ridiculously hygienic society, "surreal" seems to mean a lot more than Breton &Co, it seems to mean almost exclusively the excessive and pathological.
[...]
After a while one starts to wonder what the deal is. Why is everybody warning against surreal things. It seems to mean nothing much more than excess itself."

-Courtesy of the always-brilliant Johannes Göransson.

"The project: relax the avant garde"

Tan Lin has a really cool response to Thomas Fink's review of Heath: Plagiarism/Outsource
in the latest (yet to go live/to print) Otoliths. I'm a big fan of Tan's work, and have written on Blipsoak01 (one of the best books I bought last year) and Otoliths is a great mag. I'm in this issue too. Mark young edits it, and blogs here.

In his response Tan states that "the avant garde feels tired in its gestures, feels like it has to plagiarize to "make a statement." Or feels like it has to resort to appropriation as something incendiary, as something neo-avant garde and from an earlier era. But appropriation is no longer avant garde. It’s standard practice in and out of the classroom. Is appropriation in "experimental literature" still "experimental"? I don’t think so".

I think this applies to recent comments I have made elsewhere about the Kenny Goldsmith school of Conceptual Writing which, as Johannes Göransson has said, seems manufactured for Academic consumption and criticism. Compared with his earlier numbered works (which I love) the "appropriative" texts such as Sports etc seem quiet, vacuous, entropic ... And his attitude seems to signal that there is a kind of cultural "slumming it" going on, that the works are "oh-so-clever" and still retain their all important and accademicaly sactioned status as high-art objects. Perhaps the democratic impulse of something like No. 111 was unintentional (and, if Sucking on Words (video/PDF script) is anything to go by, my reading is anything but a reflection of intentionality).

For real social noise rather than an art gallery simulation I might have to go back to Bruce Andrews.

Post what now?

"This is my argument with the post-avant in poetry: the (alleged) “edge” is not singular, nor a platonic form or an oversoul, but that there are many “edges” displacing and reharmonizing, bleeding into each other and tangling, spilling over the very concepts of themselves. “edge,” to those of the post-avant (neo-avant) in poetry, is a new disjunct, a re-territorialization, whereas to my view (which you can call postcolonial or postmodern if it helps you, though I call it “pre-nothing”) is one of deterritorialization, reharmonization, and breaking the edges and linearity."

I'm really sorry for posting nothing but links recently, but have been busy drowning in a sea of various writings and projects. New stuff in the works. Will be here soon.

present?

This sounds awesome. Someone want to buy me a present? My birthday is next month.

Endgame: Spratt's Medium

"“Spratt’s.” Every time I see Endgame I wait in anticipation for it. The way it seems to implode in the play’s taut, heavily silence. [...] the line’s sonic dimension is as important as its grim humor. Spratt’s. The opening sibilant fricative, the bilabial plosive, and the final dying hiss (low hiss – spike – fall: Endgame’s structure in miniature?)."
-Jarred Wells at Begayer La Langue