Oh, if you see something you’d like, click on the artist’s name/title. Consider it my holiday gift to you.

Umlaut – Umlaut

Sack & Blumm – Returns

Why? – Eskimo snow

Gala Drop – Gala Drop

Wolves in the Throne Room – Black Cascade

Tyondai Braxton – Central Market

Sun O))) – Monoliths and Dimensions

Emily Loizeau – Pays Sauvage

Pierre Yves Macé – Passagenweg

Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Owl City – Ocean Eyes

Black Dice – Repo

The Antlers – Hospice

Dan Deacon – Bromst

DM STITH – Heavy Ghost

Bear In Heaven – Beast Rest Forth Mouth

YACHT – See Mystery Lights

Revolver-Music for a While

TwinSisterMoon – The Hollow Mountain

Fanfarlo – Reservoir

I also loved:

Babe, Terror – Weekend
Kreng – l’autopsie phénoménale de dieu
Blackbird Raum – Swidden
Ödland – The Caterpillar
Little Gold – On the Knife
Shugo Tokumaru – Rum Hee
Jackie-O Motherfucker – Ballads of the Revolution
Benedict Drew – A Folding Table

(If you haven’t read it, you’ve got a perfect gift to ask Santa to bring you. Ackerman’s poetry helps transform the otherwise potentially stale material into something magically interesting. Also, if you get hooked, Ackerman has other wonderful books on the natural history of love, and of the brain, which are equally brilliant.)

I also like to share examples of descriptive passages which utilize various of the senses. One of my particularly favorite bits, which focuses our attention on the sense of smell, is from the opening of Patrick Suskind’s unbelievably transplendent novel Perfume:

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and timorous disease.

I would be keen to learn about other examples of passages devoted to one of the five senses, especially: taste, touch, sound. Anything valuable come to mind?

Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations analyzes Jarman’s work—including his famous films Caravaggio, Jubilee, Edward II, Blue, and Sebastiane—in relation to his critiques of the government and his activism in the gay community, from the liberationist movement to the AIDS epidemic. While others have frequently focused on Jarman’s biography, Ellis looks at how his politics and aesthetics are intertwined to comprehend his most radical aspects, particularly in films such as War Requiem and The Last of England.

The qualities of the new sentence:

1) The paragraph organizes the sentences;

2) The paragraph is a unit of quantity, not logic or argument;

3) Sentence length is a unit of measure;

4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity;

5) Syllogistic movement is (a) limited (b) controlled;

6) Primary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work;

7) Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work;

8) The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, the sentence level or below.

(page 91)

I first heard about this book approximately six years ago, in my first semester of graduate school at U Nebraska, when Marjorie Perloff (then president of MLA) came to Lincoln to give a talk that would end up being a formative moment in my education. That was where I first learned about L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, first heard the name Christian Bök, and first experienced a poem by Charles Bernstein — Perloff shared a particularly brilliant one called “Every Lake Has A House” (which you can listen to Bernstein read here).

When Perloff began talking about Ron Silliman’s collection of essays called The New Sentence, I remember writing a full page of notes — it never having dawned on me to think about sentences as anything other than means to clearly convey information.

This was before I knew the name Gordon Lish, before I had read Gary Lutz, Diane Williams, David Ohle, et al.

This was back when I struggled to write because I had no interest in writing “poetry” and deep down I knew I wasn’t interested in writing conventional stories either — I have always preferred composing word arrangements, a serious problem given that all of my instructors denied the validity of any prose writing that didn’t conform to their Aristotelian commandments.

Silliman’s book encouraged me, gave me hope, in effect gave me permission to do what I wanted to do: pursue word construction in spite of orthodoxy.

I know this post doesn’t tell you anything about the collection or about Silliman’s theory — sorry! — I just thought I’d share this bit about how personally important The New Sentence was for me as a writer, with the hopes that it might encourage others to seek it out.

A Brief Encyclopedia of Modern Magic
by Michael Stewart
32 pages. Tape-bound.
$5.00

Every illusion carries a price and no one is more aware of that than the wondrous, tragic magicians detailed here. They know darkness that leaves scars. They know failure that gives birth to terrible life. They know their journey is one of haunting, their competition one that doesn’t end with this world. Did it never occur to us they keep their tricks a secret to protect us?

Plus tricks you can do at home!

(You should never do these tricks at home.)

illustration by Gustave Doré

On the eighteenth day after we had passed the Island of Otaheite, mentioned by Captain Cook as the place from whence they brought Omai, a hurricane blew our ship at least one thousand leagues above the surface of the water, and kept it at the height till a fresh gale arising filled the sails in every part, and onwards we travelled at a prodigious rate; thus we proceeded above the clouds for six weeks. At last we discovered a great land in the sky, like a shining island, round and bright, where, coming into a convenient harbour, we went on shore, and soon found it was inhabited.

Below us we saw another earth, containing cities, trees, mountains, rivers, seas, etc. which we conjectured was this world which we had left. Here we saw huge figures riding upon vultures of a prodigious size, and each of them having three heads. To form some idea of the magnitude of these birds, I must inform you that each of their wings is as wide and six times the length of the main sheet of our vessel, which was about six hundred tons burthen. Thus, instead of riding upon horses, as we do in this world, the inhabitants of the moon (for we now found we were in Madam Luna) fly about on these birds.

–from Chapter XVIII: A Second Trip to the Moon
The Surprising Adventures of Baron Münchhausen
By Rudolph Erich Raspe
(1895 version)

The Münchhausen stories were first collected and published (in German) anonymously in 1781. They were basically the tall tales of this guy who went and fought some Ottomans and came back bragging about how he’d ridden on cannonballs and defeated swaths of Turks with the bat of his eyelashes — stuff like that.

The first English language version was published in London four years later, by Rudolf Erich Raspe — this version included a clutch of additional hyperbole, some of which reportedly pissed off the old Baron — presumably because they were more imaginative than he could muster.

Anyway, a year after that, Gottfried Bürger translated Raspe’s stories back into German and added some stuff to them. Then the Russians translated it and added stuff, then the Italians, the French, you name it — so that by the 19th century there were over 100 various editions!

I think that makes this text pretty freaking interesting. It’s kinda like a multicultural exquisite corpse.

“This dead body,” said the doctor, “from whose carcass you can see old fogies trembling in senility and young men with red hair, equally cretinous in their speech and their silence, giving beaks full of flesh to speckled, handwriting-colored birds, like ichneumon flies boring into flesh to lay their eggs — this dead body is not only an island but a man: he is pleased to call himself Baron Hildebrand of the Squitty Sea.” (pg. 32-33, translated by Simon Watson Taylor)

Behold the brilliant insanity of Exploits & Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician, written by the diminutive alcoholic Frenchman Alfred Jarry between 1893-95, but not published until four years after his death in 1907.

It seems fitting to begin my Recovery Project with this text because so much of my current scholarly research involves theorizing the ‘pataphysical underpinnings of many (if not all) other avant-garde movements. Don’t worry, I won’t get all dissertationy on you — suffice to say: this book is like the butterfly that flapped its wings and caused the elephants of Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, et. al. to stampede across the history books of literature.

‘Pataphysics is defined in this book as “the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, describes by their virtuality, to their lineaments.” (pg. 22) But it is also described as the science of the realm beyond metaphysics, of the particular rather than the general, of laws governing exceptions rather than rules.

The book itself is certifiably unclassifiable. At times it reads like a fantasy adventure a la Gulliver’s Travels, while at other times it reads like a discursive math equation, a catalog of inventions, a philosophical treatise, a cultural critique, a mystery, a dream, a mix between Jules Verne and Lewis Carroll, and at times a slapstick comedy. To say that it encompasses all of these attributes is an understatement: it is even bigger, even more complex and certainly more entertaining.

Forgive me…I don’t yet know what form these Recovery Projects should take…should they be critical?…should they be reviews?…should they simply offer the text and a representative sample? I don’t yet know. I’m learning as I go.

My goal for now is simply to get started — and with this text especially, I hope I have introduced folks to a book that may have slipped under their radar, but which I believe deserves more attention.

Much is being written on the cutting edge publications happening right now, but I’d like to produce a series of posts here that addresses texts from the past that I feel have been either lost or forgotten or ignored. My hope is that by resurrecting them they might inspire the contemporary generation.

Obviously, there will be those of us who are familiar with some of these recovery projects. I anticipate comments like “How is Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) a recovery project? – everybody knows that book” or “Who hasn’t read Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)? My goal is not to uncover unpublished manuscripts; my goal is to bring books from the past back into contemporary conversation.

Those two examples above are from centuries ago, but I also want to revive more recent books that seem to have somehow went under the radar. For instance, I can imagine doing a Recovery Project post on John Hawkes. It always saddens me to hear that so few people have read his work.

Anyway, I’m thinking this might be an interesting addition to Big Other. (I will, of course, contribute other posts on other things, too, but this project seems particularly interesting to me right now.) Any suggestions you might have for potential recovery projects would be greatly appreciated…the more that can be brought back to life the better!