Experiments & Disorders at Dixon Place heads back to where it all
began -the heart of the restaurant supply district-for a spectacular May reading.

Marianne Shaneen + Keith Waldrop + Rosmarie Waldrop
      
Monday, May 3

Experiments & Disorders
@ Dixon Place
258 Bowery
(between Houston and Prince)
7:00pm: $5

Marianne Shaneen is a writer and filmmaker living in
Brooklyn. She is currently finishing a long prose
work, "The Peekaboo Theory," excerpts of which can be
found in Snare, the Beehive Hypertext Literary Journal
online, and Faux/e Press. She has poems forthcoming in
VANITAS and an essay on the architectural poetics of
Arakawa and Gins forthcoming in INTERFACES. Her blog
can be found at www.froth.blogspot.com. She is
co-curator at NYC's Robert Beck Memorial Cinema.

Keith Waldrop's recent books include The House Seen
from Nowhere (Litmus Press), Haunt (Instance Press),
the trilogy: The Locality Principle, The Silhouette of
the Bridge (America Award, 1997) and Semiramis, If I
Remember (Avec Books), Well Well Reality (with
Rosmarie Waldrop, Post-Apollo Press), and the novel,
Light while There Is Light. (Sun & Moon). He has
translated, among others, Anne-Marie Albiach, Claude
Royet-Journoud, Paol Keineg, Dominique Fourcade,
Pascal Quignard, and Jean Grosjean.  He teaches at
Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and is
co-editor of Burning Deck Press.

Rosmarie Waldrop's most recent books of poetry are
Blindsight (New Directions) and Love, Like Pronouns
(Omnidawn). Her memoir, Lavish Absence: Recalling and
Rereading Edmond Jabès was published by Wesleyan
University Press. Northwestern has reprinted her two
novels, The Hanky of Pippin‚s Daughter and A Form/of
Taking/It All in one paperback (2001). She has also
translated Edmond Jabès, Jacques Roubaud, Emmanuel
Hocquard, and, from the German, Friederike Mayröcker,
Elke Erb, Oskar Pastior, Gerhard Rühm. She lives in
Providence, RI, where she co-edits Burning Deck books
with Keith Waldrop.

Sean Serrell writes in with a weird personal superstition:

"When I lived in Westport, CT, from 8-10 years of age, I (and this seems similar to but less exciting than the Binky finger-rays) would pretend as our bus drove home every day that I was firing cruise missiles that could 'follow' the driveways' contours to the gigantic million-dollar houses that they would inevitably find at the end of each. I would press my thumb to my fist (jeopardy or scholars-bowl style) when I fired--left thumb if the driveway was on the left, right-->right. Later, lasers were added to raze the well-manicured shrubbery. I left CT on Feb. 1, 1988, and have continued to do these things whenever riding in a car--and even--reckless--driving--though now it doesn't work like weapons--more like I'm 'conducting' the driveways and bushes I pass--they are the score I drive through? Ack, approximation.

Does anyone else count stairs as you are ascending or descending them?

Also when I lived in Japan I developed this weird habit. When sitting myself on the toilet to pee, I would count to five in Japanese, like this:

ichi
ni
san
shi
go {pee}

I still find myself doing this sometimes.

Another weird thing:

Sometimes I hum the old "Banana Splitz" theme song as I brush my teeth.

WeIRD PeRSOnal SuperSTITIONS


I would like to know people's weird personal superstitions. Gary and I are talking about doing a comic book based on such superstitions. I have a lot of them and worry I may be either obsessive-compulsive or ruled by "primitive mind." Here are five:

When I am deciding which turnstile to walk through at the subway station I look at who is going before me and decide on the basis of "the person in whose footsteps I would most like to follow."

When I am crossing the street I endeavor to get to the curb before the light turns red. I fear that if it does it bodes ill for my relationship.

I hold my breath in most tunnels, while putting my hand to the car ceiling and making a wish. After emerging from the tunnel, I count to eight before I exhale.

I consider eight my lucky number, mainly because it is infinity sideways. It is also a pictogram of a woman. It turns out that eight is a very important number in oriental dance rhythms.

I say "rabbit rabbit" first thing when I wake up on the first day of a month. If I forget to do this, I can be "absolved" by kissing my crossed fingers and holding them up to the sky for the count of eight.

88888888

I do not consider anything having to do with cats unlucky, even if they are black cats that cross my path from left to right.

This is not to deny the overweaning spookiness of a cat, though. They just sit and watch, weird little gargoyles!

Please send me your weird superstitions! If you so indicate, I will post them here.

Thinking just now, doing errands in my unglamourous but startlingly diverse neighborhood of Kensington, Brooklyn, looking around at a thousand cases of not-too-much-privilege-given-the-larger-middle-class-standards-of-the-larger-culture, that maybe identity is not a costume. That it's wrong to say that.

And then I thought again. Yes, identity is a costume. All the other stuff (the givens) is a curse. That's the spirit, right?!

I feel blessed not to be a part of any kind of traditional community.
And lost.

Beauty is truth -- truth, bewilderment.

A giant pile of polished rice.

It's not about the furtherance of the art.
It's not about positioning with or against.
It's not about "good" or "bad" or even "indifferent."

It's about the corkscrew twisting into space.

And if you don't agree with that, well, no one is MAKING you hang around in this hothouse.

Another kind of hothouse:

A metaphor for a poem or a book might be a hothouse.



Enclosed, fecund, allergenic, exotic, artificed, arranged, out of control, otherworldly, dimly lit, musky, inhabitable for a period of time, protected, preserved, gathering together things that would not appear in nature together, organic but formal and deliberate, stuffy, hazy.

Big major peeve:

autohagiography.

I've said it before.

Recently heard that a friend poet had described another friend poet as "the gateway drug to Nada."

Wondering to whom I may be the gateway drug.

Speaking of "flate," why must people conflate irony with harshness?

If you can't be ironic, you can't swing.

Irony is necessary to the potency of a cadence because it is backed up by a furious unreleased laughter.

I should have said "identi-flation." Sounds better.

Talking on the phone with a friend about the "pride" word.

He said he'd experienced a kind of working-class pride when considering the dubious successes of some more privileged peers. I said that he was feeling proud of his own accomplishments despite not being so privileged. And that what he had been feeling in terms of being working class was resentment.

Now, no matter what semantic difficulties I may have with "pride," I am totally down with resentment, whether it be ethnic, national, or just plain quotidian. Long live resentment!

Even though that appears to be the only road to successsssss.

What I earlier termed "group identi-inflation" makes me ill in poetry contexts, too.

More thoughts on pride.

"Pride" seems to me entirely appropriate when applied to accomplishments. That is, I am proud of having learned to speak Japanese.
I am proud of Gary for working hard on his comics.

But I don't think it is right to say I'm proud of something given. That is to say, I'm VAIN about my hair, not PROUD of it.

Vanity is another matter altogether.

It can be annoying but to me it is not abhorrent. It is too clownish.

Thinking lately about how abhorrent is the notion of "ethnic pride", regardless of the ethnicity of the people who exhibit it. "National pride" is equally objectionable. We all need to have a sufficient presence of personal dignity and self-love. But group identi-inflation makes me ill. Is this because I as a Jew am too wholly (by some people's estimations) assimilated? Or because it is very difficult for me to think of identity as other than costume?

At the same time I can't deny that sex and race are more or less givens.
Or that one ought to struggle for justice and fair representation for one's group(s). Just... can we not do it out of "pride"? It's perhaps just a question of semantics -- I think I just don't like the word.

The context I perhaps most like it in is "gay pride" -- because there "pride" sounds like an ellided cockney pronunciation of "parade" -- and I LOVE a parade.

atama ga piiman

I love the Japanese term for "airhead":

"ATAMA GA PIIMAN."

Translation: green pepper head

From an article entitledWomen and Jewelry -- the Spiritual Dimensions of Ornamentation

"The people of India have expended limitless energy and creativity in the invention of ornaments that celebrate the human body. Adorning the visible, material body, they feel, satisfies a universal longing for the embellishment of its intangible counterpart, namely the human spirit."

Lots of pretty pictures.

Rationalization? Maybe, but...

Ornament -- the act of ornamentation -- is supremely meditative.

body without organs

On the phone to Marianne bemoaning my almost total regression to my self of, say, thirty years ago -- to which the colored eggs and cher doll below provide a kind of testament.

Nick tells me it's just because it's April and I'm worn out that the last thing I want to think about (much less do) is writing, and that it's really OK that all I wanna do is wander around looking at stuff and buying Indian jewelry on the net (for a good time check out dmiindia and shopindia for eyefuls of glitter and gorgeousness).

I keep telling myself it's just a coping strategy.

So I says to Marianne, I says, "I should just go read Foucault. Or better yet Deleuze and Guattari. I mean, what is an egg but a body without organs?"

Someone Had to Invent It




The cute little kittens generator

"The marriage of words to music, as of music to numbers by the Pythagoreans, constitutes one of the great philosophical preoccupations of ancient India. Words are the vedic yoga: they unite mind and matter. Pure, ecstatic contemplation of phonetic sound



reverberating on the ether in the sacred chant may be compared to the contemplation of geometrical forms and mathematical laws by the Pythagoreans. The Word is God, Number is God -- both concepts result in a




kind of intoxication. Only the Pythagorean master can hear the music of the spheres: only the perfected Hindu sage can hear the primordial sound -- NADA.



One system exalted numbers, and the other words;



the vital difference is that since words are less pure and abstract than the content-free language of mathematics,



they tend to confine the exxercise of the mental faculties within subjective processes.




....True, Indians became great mathematicians... but it was not numbers which became the key to both power and wisdom, but the Word. One consequence is the widespread tendency of Indians to use language as a form of incantation and exuberant rhetorical flourish on public occasions.



Orators rend the air with verbose declamations more for the pleasure of the sound than for the ideas and facts they may more vaguely desire to express. The audience is swayed by the cadence of sound



as by the music of the classical singer, when the latter uses only phonetic syllables with no significance other than their intrinsic physiological capacity to soothe or exalt the listener."


-- from The Speaking Tree by Richard Lannoy, Oxford Univ. Press, 1971