The random ass live reading is over. I will probably do it again, maybe once or twice a month when there are new books to talk about.

Here are the books I randomly read pages from this evening on uStream:

Collobert Orbital by Johan Jonson, translated by Johannes Goransson
How They Were Found by Matt Bell
The Black Eye by Brian Foley
Richard Yates by Tao Lin
Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! by Peter Davis
The Cow by Ariana Reines
Pilot by Johannes Goransson

[Regular readers might recall that back in March, Ariana Reines was trying to raise some money to send herself to Haiti as a translator for a group of trauma clinicians. We helped her, and then checked back in a month later. Today we've got something very special- over the approximately five pages that follow, Ariana offers an original piece of nonfiction, two paragraphs of journalism, a reading list, an explanation of WHAT [SHE] DID, an appendix, and some links. You can download THE FROWNING SUN as a .pdf, or click through and read it all here on the site.  – JT ]

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THE FROWNING SUN

One day two years ago I was drunk and angrily fucked my boyfriend while the movie Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti played on ubuweb with the volume turned up loud. Eight months ago, that boyfriend found my subsequent boyfriend in bed with me and beat him severely in the head, screaming “You fucking rapist”. Now the former is married and the latter is far away.

While I was in Haiti, about five weeks ago, the man I referred to above as “my boyfriend,” “that boyfriend,” and “the former” got shot in the stomach by a neighbor in what the internet reported as a “dispute over a dog.” I hope he is alright and can continue to eat spicy foods, which he enjoys, and that his career of violence, like mine, is at an end.

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Tents and makeshift shelters

Greetings, friends, from the great state of Colorado, where I am at the AWP conference, passing long and happy days in the meatspace company of many wonderful people I usually only type at, including Gene “the Machine Levine” Morgan, Blake “Lively” Butler, and Ryan “Last” Call, which in this town is apparently 12:45. For all of you at the conference, I hope you’ll come say hello if you haven’t already. And if you’re in the Denver area but not registered for AWP, know that the bookfair is free and open to the public on Saturday April 10, so the same goes for you, too. But I digress. The true news I bring comes from much further afield.

About a month ago, I posted a call for funds to help send Ariana Reines on a UN Mission to Haiti to serve as a French-English translator for a team of trauma clinicians. Well, she went, and upon her return sent a note of thanks to those who donated, as well as a handful of photographs from her trip. All of these things are reproduced in full below the break.

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So listen to this. Ariana Reines–poet, playwright, translator, publisher and frequent target of this blog’s affection–has been invited to join a UN Mission to Haiti which leaves on Thursday. She will spend March 12-19 traveling with a group of trauma clinicians, serving as the team’s only French-English interpreter. Ariana writes,

the group will be working primarily with traumatized doctors, nurses, and other medical workers, as well as children, orphans in particular. I know you have plenty of places to put your $: into the mouths of your children for example.  i must raise $2500 in order to cover airfare, travel insurance, immunizations, malaria medication, mosquito netting, art supplies (for the children we will work with), and feminine hygeine + contraceptive items (for the grown people)

$2500 is an imminently crowd-sourceable figure, and with such a firm sense of this mission’s purpose and time-table, the impact of your giving can hardly risk being lost in the general abstraction of “charity.”  So what do you say, team? I say let’s send Ariana Reines to Haiti. (UPDATE: NOW WITH LINK THAT ACTUALLY WORKS.) Whatever you can give will help. I’m going to go kick down twenty bucks as soon as I finish writing this post.

For the most part, conservatives do horrible political satire. Ahem. Ahem. Ahem.

Browsing our sales table today, I found a book by a National Review contributing editor named W.H. von Dreele. It’s a book of poems. “Funny” poems. It’s called There’s Something About a Liberal (Arlington House Press, 1970). Here’s one:

Dr. Goldwater, Call Surgery

Although I live in New York State,
I’d cheerfully accept my fate
If Barry sawed the seaboard off
And watched us vanish in a trough.

New York is full of liberals. Hah!

Yeah. Well. How about this:

Repression, Anyone?

Take me back to boola-boola;
Row me to the Raritan
Strum a uke for dear old Duke;
Raccoon it, on rattan.
Tired watching campus cuties
Brawling for their next degree.
Sock ‘em up and lock ‘em up.
Then throw away the key.

Really stuck it to those campus radicals, there. I’m glad those kids got shot at Kent State.

Also in the book? At least two Ted Kennedy Chappaquiddick poems. Which I think we all know is a classy thing to write funny doggerel about, right?

This book calls for a contest, I think.

What say we help ‘em out. We’re writers. Some of us are probably funny. If you are a liberal, drink deep from your well of self-loathing. If you are a conservative, bump your game up a little. Write me a funny, conservative-leaning satire in verse. Best poem gets a copy of There’s Something About a Liberal AND a copy of Ariana Reines book of slaughterhouse poems, The Cow. (Balance.)

Go.

Jeff Parker on Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood at The Rumpus.

Mary Gaitskill’s got some new fiction at New York Magazine.

Carolyn See on a life of Mithradates, “The Poison King,” at the Washington Post Book World.”He wasn’t a very savory person, unless, perhaps, you hated the Roman Empire with all your heart.” Hmm.

New Raleigh Quarterly features poems by Paige Taggart, Mathias Svalina, Claire Donato, Farrah Field, and then some. Also, I guess, the fiction and nonfiction.

Dennis Cooper’s got the Spotlight on Bataille’s Blue of Noon.

Also, over at Jezebel, they’re having a discussion nearly as contentious as our recent ones on racism, over some people in the audience at an Ariana Reines reading who laughed in the wrong place, or in the wrong way, or something. But don’t worry, this debacle seems to have an element of potential racism in it, too. Scroll down to the comments for a particularly vitriolic screed by Eileen Myles. To be honest, I can’t really get a bead on what’s at stake here, to have drawn this much of her ire, but my immense respect for her coupled with the apparent depth of her rage has caught my attention. I’m inclined to believe I’m missing something, maybe since I wasn’t there. Also, at the top of the post, they’ve got actual audio from the event–not the questionable laughing itself, sadly, but about a minute of the Q&A.

[Ariana begins around minute 16, if you want to skip the intro.]

Today we close out Ariana Reines week with a shift from the present to the imminent future, with sneak previews of two forthcoming works by Ariana Reines. The first, Miss St.’s Hieroglyphic Suffering, is based on act two of Reines’s highly regarded play, Telephone, and will be performed at a Works+Process show at the Guggenheim this weekend. (I’m going on Sunday. Maybe see you there?) The second is from a book of poems (or is it one long poem?) called Save the World, that seems to be forthcoming from FENCE Books. Pretty not bad, yeah? Fun starts below.

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We began Ariana Reines week with AR’s original translation of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, published through her own press, Mal-o-Mar Editions. Now, after two days cavorting with Dan Hoy and Jon Leon, whose split book (The Hot Tub / Glory Hole) is also new from MoM, we return to Reines-as-translator, and consider a new book from Semiotext(e), The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore. Here (from the site) is the briefest of introductions to Real:

Hailed as a virtuoso writer and a “revolutionary whore,” Grisélidis Réal (1929–2005) chanced into prostitution at thirty-one after an upper-class upbringing in Switzerland. Serving clients from all walks of life, Réal applied the anarcho-Marxist dictum “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” to her profession, charging sliding-scale fees determined by her client’s incomes and complexity of their sexual tastes. Réal went on to become a militant champion of sexual freedom and prostitutes’ rights. She has described prostitution as “an art, and a humanist science,” noting that “the only authentic prostitution is that mastered by great technical artists … who practice this form of native craft with intelligence, respect, imagination, heart…”

The main action of the Semiotext(e) volume is a series of lengthy interviews between Real and Jean-Luc Hennig (a professor at the University of Cairo) but the final section, a hearty selection of entries from the titular Little Black Book are not to be missed. They are the concise, practical, hilarious, and delightfully NSFW. Click through to read some of my favorites.

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Since the reaction to yesterday’s Hoy-Leon extravaganza, I figured the best–perhaps the only–thing we could do is double down. Here, then, are some more selections from The Hot Tub (Leon) and Glory Hole (Hoy), the new split poetry collection out from Mal-o-Mar Editions.

THE UNIVERSE IS A PIECE OF SOMETHING EVEN WORSE (Hoy)

I feel at home when I forget

life. I phone it in because

this shit is real. My world

is made of systems and worlds. I give up

nothing and make no mistakes.

I try to be awesome because I can.

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Did you follow that headline? New from Mal-o-Mar Editions is a poetry split– Jon Leon’s The Hot Tub and Dan Hoy’s Glory Hole, together in one spine. You might remember Jon from Hit Wave, the wonderful chapbook he did for Kitchen Press, and Dan Hoy is of course the co-editor of Soft Targets, the journal that did one (two?) legendary issue(s) before apparently winking out of existence, though it, like Jesus, may yet one day return. Anyway, to celebrate the Leon-Hoy Pact (it’s like the Glass-Steagall act, kind of) I thought it would be nice to pair some of their poems together, in little flights. We were doing this the other night at my house–me and some friends, getting slowly loaded on asscheap bourbon and reading these proudly defiant poems of obscene opulence and opulent obscenity aloud to one another. Fun starts after you click the button.

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All this week I’ll be posting small chunks of the thousand and one new books translated and/or written and/or published by Ariana Reines. We begin with Reines’s new translation of Charles Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare, published in newspaper format by her own Mal-o-Mar Editions.

In a brief introduction to the work, Reines explains: “The text of My Heart Laid Bare consists of notes toward an autobiographical work that Baudelaire did not live to complete, according to Poe’s dictum ‘If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment the opportunity is his own–the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple–a few plain words–”My Heart Laid Bare.” But–this little book must be true to its title.’ [...] None of these fragments was prepared by Baudelaire for publication, and though they appeared posthumously under various expurgations, their intimacy and ultimate incompleteness will make misprision and outright error, with respect both to interpretation and to translation, more or less inevitable.” What else could you ask for, really? Below the fold, I pick out some favorite fragments.

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Fellow Workers,

We here at limited-edition arts annual The Agriculture Reader know that times are tough. The paper of record says ’09 was the worst back to school season in years! We’re feeling it, too. No, not because we’re under-employed and lack health insurance (though yes, that too) but because we’re trying to unload the last of our stock of AGR 3 in order to fund the production of AGR 4. To that end, from Labor Day till the end of September, we will be selling AGR 3 for a measly TEN DOLLARS. Your sawbuck gets you the current issue of our annual, which features writers such as Dennis Cooper, Heather Christle, Ariana Reines, Diane Williams, Matthew Zapruder, Christian Hawkey, Eileen Myles, Matvei Yankelevich, and many more. Some of the best work is by people you’ve maybe never even heard of, like Jen Hyde. All this plus a special section celebrating the work of the poet Tony Towle—and that’s just the words. The whole issue is custom-illustrated by the artist Joey Parlett, and all the layout and design work is done by Amy Mees and Mark Wagner—a dynamic duo, if there was one—and there was (is). Every cover is cut, stamped, stickered and colored on by hand, so each copy is unique. There are only 600 total in the world, and more than half of them are already gone. (The first two issues both sold out; we expect that this one will too.)

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Agriculture Reader #3, edited by Htmlgiant’s own Justin Taylor and Jeremy Small,  is out and full of amazing work, not to mention that this annual journal of the arts is artfuly made itself by the amazing design firm, X-ing Books. Click here to order your copy. Here’s the full list of mindblowingly great contributors, including Diane Wiliams, Eileen Myles and Matthew Zapruder: READ MORE >

What are those distant, garbled voices on the line? What is the significance of that wavery technological hum that bears an alarming resemblance to heavy breathing? In such moments it feels as if there’s nothing lonelier than being alone on a phone. Reach out and touch someone? Ha.

“Telephone,” the inspired and utterly original new tone poem of a play at the Cherry Lane Theater, probes such feelings with the sensitivity and detachment of a heart surgeon.

The play is an adaptation of Avital Ronnell’s The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, a critical theory text which, according to that same NYT critic, was “created at the height of Derrida-style deconstructionism and laid out (by the graphic designer Richard Eckersley) in the style of a Dadaist phone book… Under the direction of Ken Rus Schmoll, a cast of three and a sharp-eyed design team turn what might have come across as gobbledygook into a stylish and stimulating show.”

So cheers, Ariana, and to everyone in NYC, the show is playing at Cherry Lane Theatre through February 28th (even though there doesn’t seem to be anything written about it on CLT’s website) so catch it while you can.

MORE OF ARIANA REINES

The Cow which won Fence’s Alberta Prize, was published in 2006.

Coeur de Lion was published by mal-o-mar editions in 2008. I wrote about Coeur de Lion (and Katy Lederer’s The Heaven-Sent Leaf) in my FLAUNT magazine column (print only- it appeared in issue #100).

The Agriculture Reader #3, the magazine I co-edit, contains a new piece of prose by Ariana Reines.

Ariana Reines poems at Coconut Poetry.

The real deal. To the real deal's immediate right (photographer's left), wearing his signature green hoodie, basically not in the photograph, is yours truly. - Stain Bar, Brooklyn, 2008.

“Abner Jay, the first of the original black musicians. The only electric six string banjo you’ll ever hear.  Abner says the original thirteen are dead, and he is half dead. For forty two years Abner has been playing banjo, drums, harmonica, and singing all at the same time.”  I don’t know when that was written, but he died sometime in the ’90s. I don’t really know a whole lot about him, except that if you click the link you can listen to a whole LP’s worth of his rad music at the WFMU site. I prefer side one–mostly because of the opener, “The Backbone of America is a Mule and Cotton,” which explains in great detail the advantages of owning a mule rather than a horse, and also because of “Oh Susanna”–but you should really listen to the whole thing.

And PS if you were wondering- This totes counts as literary because I got the link from Ariana Reines whose new poetry collection, Coeur de Lion got some love this morning from Ben Mirov at Coldfront.