Bonus Reines: from The Holloway Series in Poetry
[Ariana begins around minute 16, if you want to skip the intro.]
I ESTABLISH THE CLARITY THEREFORE ALL THIS GOES WITH ME: Ariana Reines Week, Part 5
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.
Ariana Reines Week, Part 4: The Little Black Book of Griselidis Real
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.
Ariana Reines Week, Part 3: The Hot Tub / Glory Hole Part 2
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.
Ariana Reines Week, Part 2: The Hot Tub / Glory Hole Part 1
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.
Ariana Reines Week, Part 1: My Heart Laid Bare
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.
NYT loves “Telephone,” the new play by Ariana Reines
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.
NOW IT’S BUCK-DANCING TIME!
“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.
Uncategorized / 2 Comments
October 2nd, 2008 / 12:44 am
October 2nd, 2008 / 12:44 am