Announcing Dear Reader

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!