Even when collected, Celan's prose makes for a slim volume—the book contains some speeches, a pair of brief forewords, a letter, a set of epigrammatic fable-ettes, a cryptic short story, and two or three other oddments. That's it. It's enough prose to fill one evening's worth of reading, and given Celan's long committment to minimalism and silence, we should probably feel lucky that we even get that much.

Brevity notwithstanding, the contents here serve as a welcome addendum to Celan's poetry. His entire body of work can be read as an attempt to reconcile two beliefs: a belief in the ability of writing to embody the voice of absolute otherness—original, strange, perhaps ultimately indecipherable—and an equally deeply-held belief in the virtues of communication, of conversation and encounter. This lifelong attempt at reconciliation yields a set of tensions which serve as the animating force behind his poems: the modest stack of writing in this volume, taken collectively, provides additional insight into Celan's attempt to chart these worthy human tensegrities in their full complexity. Recommended.

more books

Labels: book_commentary

Sunday, November 14, 2004
10:05 PM
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1. Nation apologizes, world accepts.

2. The news converted into a spiffy interface of thumbnails and keywords

3. Strangely entertaining article about bugs in old interactive fiction games

4. New York Underground: delicious-looking book of subterranean photographs available this fall

5. Psychedelic Flash thingy by Kimiaki Yaegashi

6. For the game file: Sexy Post Office, a kind of sister game to Eat Poop You Cat

7. Macabre Creation is a gallery of Nakajima Nobuhiro's mind-rapingly intricate beasties and Tarot arcana

8. Scans of a draft chapter of Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte's next book

9. Some MP3s from Bay Area rust-magician Jim Haynes

10. Serialtext, a site devoted to novels-in-progress

Contributors to this week's linkfarm:
As Above, Blanketfort, Boing Boing,
CJO, KCM, and Weather Head

Labels: linkfarms

Saturday, November 13, 2004
8:10 PM
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In the archives of The 20' x 20' Room, an interesting-looking blog dedicated to talking "thoughtfully" about role-playing games, there's an intiguing little game simply called Lexicon, in which all players play lexicographers contributing to an encyclopedia, detailing a (collectively-invented) historical event. The rules of the game govern the creation of entries, but, even more importantly, they govern the creation of a system of cross-reference between entries, establishing networking and collaboration between players. "At the end of it," writes Neel, "you'll have a highly-hyperlinked document that details a nice little piece of collaborative world-building."

Brilliant! I came across this through Kevan Davis, who is in the midst of playing a Wiki-enabled game of Lexicon with a group of about a dozen players here.

Labels: writing

Friday, November 12, 2004
3:17 PM
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Greg Palast on systematic pre-election voter roll purging in Ohio, Florida and New Mexico.

Cuyahoga County Board of Elections posts unusual-looking results for certain districts: Bay Village, for instance, which has 13,710 registered voters, records a total of 18,663 ballots cast; Rocky River, 16,600 voters and 20,070 ballots cast; Beachwood, 9,942 and 13,939, respectively; Woodmere, 558 and 8,854.

While I'm not convinced that this election was definitely tainted by fraud, it certainly does not strike me as beyond the realm of plausibility, and until I hear a satisfactory explanation for these and other strange discrepancies, I will support efforts, such as those being spearheaded by the people at BlackBoxVoting.org, to conduct a formal investigation. It pleases me to see that people are attempting to follow up on these suspicions, rather than just allowing them to simmer at the level of a bitter national joke, becoming a thing we can only talk about with our tongue in our cheek because we're afraid of how we'd look if we talked about it forthrightly.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004
11:11 AM
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le tigre | feminist sweepstakes (on LeTigre Records)

Punky, funky, good-humored and pissed, Le Tigre managed, with this 2001 release, to produce something that I might never have thought to ask for: a didactic party record. Don't let the potential oxymoron lead you into thinking that this might be some grim eat-your-vegetables exercise in lefty righteousness—the record is packed with every manner of guilty pleasure, from skanky Joan Jett riffs to belted-out Lora Logic vocals, from cheap electro beats to piano samples that sound like they might be ripped from A Charlie Brown Christmas. There's no incongruity here: anyone who's ever rallied in the streets knows how fucking fun it is; anyone who's ever shaken their fist in the air to music knows that every anthem is political. Le Tigre are the grad-student cheerleaders rocking the PA system at the lesbian bar of your dreams, and we need them now more than ever.

more audio

Tuesday, November 09, 2004
9:23 PM
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1. "Audia 2," an MP3 of microbeats and electronic noise, from Soft Abuse

2. Poetry Center of Chicago's 11th annual juried poetry competition is coming up

3. Nineteen American Waysides: field recordings of ancient 78s played at highway rest stops. A project of Doug Haire.

4. A selection of epigrams on writing / publishing / academia / etc. from "critifiction" writer Ron Sukenick (1932-2004)

5. Moodstats is an app for people who want to treat their moods as data

6. Single Canadians are standing by to marry an influx of retreating American progressives

7. Looptracks: diverting Flash environment full of noise and angular geometric wreckage

8. America is not blue and red but purple: exhibit A | exhibit B

9. Appreciation of Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men

10. Schedule for the fifth annual Outer Ear Festival

Labels: linkfarms

Thursday, November 04, 2004
5:48 PM
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Today I've been thinking about a page from COLORS magazine, issue 12, the "Heaven" issue, edited by Tibor Kalman, which tells us the following:

This country runs on cheap, renewable, pollution-free energy. Most of its power is geothermic, supplied by the country's 200 volcanoes. Much of the rest is hydroelectric, generated by rivers flowing off the volcanoes. As a result, it has the cleanest environment in the developed world.

Its citizens are among the wealthiest in the world, ranking second only to the Swiss. The country has more VCRs per capita than any other, and the most cars after the USA.

They also have the longest life expectancy in the world (more than 78 years). This is attributed in part to the unpolluted environment and to the pure food this environment offers. Almost all produce is farmed organically, without the use of pesticides or other chemicals.

It spends more money per capita on health care than any other country. The infant mortality rate is the lowest in the world. The health system is renowned for preventive treatment; it boasts the world's highest rate of early detection of breast cancer, for example.

More books per capita are published here than in any other country (1 per every 5,000 people annually). The literacy rate is the highest in the world (virtually 100 percent). One out of every ten inhabitants will publish a book or paper in his or her lifetime. Theatre attendance per capita is also highest in the world.

It's home to more Nobel Prize-winning authors, chess grandmasters, and international beauty queens than any other nation (per capita). In addition, it has produced more winners of the World's Strongest Man competition than any other country.

Everyone (including the president) is addressed by first name. Even the phone book lists people by first name. The country is so small (pop: 260,000) that referring to people by last names—which are based on parents' first names, anyway—is unnecessary.

Its capital is home to the world's northern-most Indian restaurant: Taj Mahal, Hverfisgata Street 56. For reservations, call 354 1 21630.

The whole place is run by women. Three of the country's highest political offices are held by women; President Vigdis Finnbogadottir, a single mother and the world's first democratically elected female head of state, has been re-elected four times since 1980. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the President of the Parliament are women too.

And the weather's not bad, even if the country is called Iceland. Though the country borders the Arctic Circle, the warm Gulf Stream winds keep temperatures mild. The winter average is around 0 degrees Celsius (about the same as Milan's)/ And, while the sun shines only three hours during the northern winter, nighttime lasts only an hour at the height of summer.

Sigh.

Wednesday, November 03, 2004
6:20 PM
0 comments

Audio-related posts are now hand-aggregated in Raccoon Audio: longer reviews on the Audio frontpage, and the complete list of everything coming in (with occasional short reviews) is now here.

A new books section is coming next.

Monday, November 01, 2004
1:02 PM
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