"Ben Axelrad" <soulfrieda@hotmail.com> wrote:

Curtis White "Requiem". Quite enjoyable, despite the pretentious description on the back. Fragmented stories about famous composers, an English prof surfing the net for porn, a "prophet" inteviewing murderers and madmen, bestiality, but the most exploitative parts are the potshots at NPR and Terry Gross.

Ben, could you please write more about what he's up to re: NPR & Terri Gross?

Lyn Hejinian's "My Life", an (also non-narrative) autobiography which devotes a prose poem to each year of her life, is really quite good. Is Clark Coolidge at all affiliated with this group? He put out a book years ago called "The ROVA Improvisations", which consist of a series of improvised poems to ROVA songs, then more poems based on the improv'd poems (sort of like Ostertag does poetry). I tried CC's "Solution Passage" but couldn't understand a word.

Hejinian's "My Life" IS really really great. I know she was writing more into the 90s and I wish the latest edition had included some of this material. The second edition, from Sun & Moon, added 8 or nine sections and, because of the work's formal structure, 8 or 9 sentences to each of the previously published sections, but the most recent edition is, unfortunately, just a reprint of that text with no further additions. Coolidge isn't related to anyone in ROVA as far as I know, but as a writer he seems to share some interests with Hejinian. He may have gone on one of ROVA's trips to the USSR (back when that was the name of a country); many North American writers and artists joined those travels. Some of Coolidge's writing process is be derived from notating his thought processes in response to things, with very little description of the thing or things being considered. At least he's described several long projects in ways not too far from that.

Is Atelos still functioning? It doesn't look like their website has been updated lately, and I thought years ago they mentioned brining out a new work by Fanny Howe but now now word...

Don't know about the state of their Web site, but Atelos is very much still ongoing. They have a commitment to a series of fifty books with something like 15 books published now, they were doing about 2-3 books a year. Followers of this thread may be interested to know that the series includes books by Clark Coolidge (related to stories of alien abductions) & Jalal Toufic. Atelos books are readily available from Small Press Distribution <http://www.spdbooks.org/>, who distribute a ton of great books and magazines that are often difficult to find elsewhere.

I can't believe that no Marker films have been released on DVD! There's only the English version of La Jetee on one of the "Short" DVD magazines and his work on "Night and Fog."

I think there are a couple of things available on DVD in Europe & I'm sure that eventually a few things will turn up in North America. "Benito Vergara" <bvergara@sfsu.edu> wrote:

Earlier this summer -- every night before I went to sleep, for a month and a half -- I would read one poem from Hejinian's "My Life," and it was one of the more rewarding reading experiences I've had in recent years.

Yeah, I'd recommend that book to any one on the Zorn list for whom the concept of a "non-narrative text" isn't a turn-off.

Bok's "Eunoia" sounds good, though. Is it like that Perec book, then?

It's obviously related to Perec's book La Disparition (translated into English as A Void), which is literally about the disappearance of the letter "E" and is written entirely without using that vowel. But Eunoia is somewhat different in tone as well as formal structure &, for any one on the Zorn list for whom the concept of a "narrative text" isn't a turn-off, the story is quite different. There are excerpts from Eunoia available online from the publisher Coach House Books: <http://www.chbooks.com/> & it's also distributed by SPD. Here's a quick sentence from the book that's even related to music: "Fans clap as a fat-cat jazzman and a bad-ass bassman blab gangsta rap - a gangland fad that attacks what Brahms and Franck call art." -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb@eskimo.com