Column069 — November/December 2004
Hydrocodone/APAP
Volume 36, Numbers 11/12, November/December 2004
The Compact Duchamp Amp After Amp.
Guy R. Beining. 70 pp; 2003; Pa;
Chapultepec Press, 111 East University,
Cincinnati OH 45219.
www.tokyoroserecords.com. $23.
Farrago, 2/4, 2001.
Edited by Reed Altemus. 128 pp;
Reed Altemus, Box 52,
Portland ME 04112. $10.
Modern Haiku, Volume 35, Number 3, Autumn 2004.
Edited by Lee Gurga. 128 pp;
Modern Haiku, Box 68, Lincoln IL 62656. $8.
I’ve decided to write this column in one hour or less. A weekend I meant to finish the column in is almost over, and I’ve done nothing on it but list the material to be discussed, so something has to be done. I figure if I can make a game of let’s see how fast I can do it, it’ll be fun to do. More important, I can claim it was just an experiment in speed- writing in case it’s stinko. Its title comes into it because that’s the name of the pain pill I’m on. It was prescribed a little over a week ago for a toothache, but I only needed it for a few days. I felt so good last Sunday after taking it, though, and felt so crappy (psychologically) earlier today that it made sense to take it again. I think the pill must have some kind of barbiturate in it, because it doesn’t just blot out pain, it makes you feel . . . content. (Hey, I did have a bit of a headache, too.)
The pill got me feeling so content just thinking about how fast I’d write this column that I almost never started it. I did, though! Sorta. ***
Aaaarggggghh, I was cruisin’ but all of a sudden I need a bridge and can’t think of one! I want to make a few remarks on Hurricane Jeanne, which hit my neighborhood a few weeks ago. From my last column you will remember that my neighborhood got blasted fairly substantially by Charley. Jeanne was nicer to us, staying a reasonable distance away. But she messed up my mind by lasting hours and hours–during the night when I couldn’t see what she was doing, just hear her, and she sounded a lot like Charley. I now understand shell-shock.
The first exposure wasn’t so bad, but–once sensitized–reminders, even faint, can devastate. Result: I slept very badly the night of Jeanne, and got knocked back out of rhythm–after almost getting back into it, finally, after Charley. Obviously, I’m still not back in it, but– hey–this column is almost half done, and I’ve only been typing twenty minutes or so. Never found a damned bridge, though. I hate that. I also hate the fact that I use “though” so much. Dunno how to avoid it. Well, aside from just not using it.
Okay, first up for review is the mail-art publication, Farrago. An assemblage, which means a bunch of people each sent Editor Altemus a hundred copies of a page and he collated the pages into 100 copies of an anthology. I assume he accepted everything sent. That’s usually the way it works. In any case, Farrago (alas, the last one he’ll do), is very encouraging about the state of vizpo and related art, for its level of yow is surprisingly high. The pieces are mainly collages. Mainly playful Dadaisms. Like Robert Pomerhn’s (yes, that’s spelled correctly) “Mainstream TRENDY Viewing,” to take a random example, which is a mix of texts like “If Britney’s bOObtube goes bust/ say Sayonara Ms. Spears” and fuzzy graphics that look like stills from B-movies. The other side of his page depicts “The Surrealist World Series,” by showing the “bags loaded” with Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud and Philippe Soupault, and Dali coming to bat. Dopey, I know, but . . . Other pages do other things, some of them wonderfully using full color.
I’m reviewing the latest issue of Modern Haiku only because of Charles Trumbull’s review. It’s of Ampersand Squared, Geof Huth’s anthology of “pwoermds” that I recently mentioned in this column, flagrantly breaking all kinds of reviewing proprieties because I published the thing, and have two pwoermds in it. Trumbull lauded Huth’s introduction, and quoted four of the pwoermds, including Nicholas Virgilio’s “fossilence,” which I think a particularly fine specimen of the genre. When I first saw it, I thought of phosphorescence and thought of the glow through the ages of fossils. Only just now did I see “silence.” I’m a visual poet so I shoulda seen that before hearing “phosphorescence!”
Seriously, you ain’t serious about haiku if you don’t subscribe to Modern Haiku. Not just haiku and reviews but in-depth interviews and/or discussions of the state of the art. This issue features a conversation with Hoshinaga Fumio that skillfully reveals not only the mind and personality of a distinguished haijin (maker of haiku) and his haiku, but whispers us intimately into the fascinating otherness of the culture of Japan.
My hour is up. I didn’t finish. Well, I could say I finished, but I was aiming at (about) a thousand words, which is my usual total (including the book data at the top). And I do want to mention Guy Beining’s The Compact Duchamp Amp After Amp again. I don’t feel I did it justice in the earlier column I treated it in. Nor will I now. It’s too visual. But here’s what’s on one page: “nail the mOOn/ spike the sun,/ run harvest thru red vest of money,” in a white rectangle. Grey background. Below the text, a “visimage (“picture,” in Grummanese) of two of the Egyptian pyramids and mostly nothing else. Above, to the right a strange image of a woman whose torso forms a triangle mirrored by a similar triangle formed by the woman’s crossing legs, cropped at the knees; to the left, a photo of a smiling girl looking through what seems the back of a chair. Much else. Hard to pin down but fossilescent, to me. My blog has a copy of it with a few further musings here. (Ooops, no longer true; I’ll try to add what I said here eventually.)
There. Finished in eighty minutes. Not bad. And I still have ten hydrocodone/APAP tablets left!