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DECEMBER 2004
60. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, by Ioan Couliano
59. Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice, by Devin Johnston
58. Doom Patrols, by Steven Shaviro
57. The Book, Spiritual Instrument, edited by Jerome Rothenberg
NOVEMBER 2004
56. The Filth by Grant Morrison
55. Bright Turquoise Umbrella by Hermine Meinhard
54. The Soft Machine by William Burroughs
53. Collected Prose by Paul Celan
:: notes
OCTOBER 2004
52. The Companion Species Manifesto : Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness by Donna Haraway
51. Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs
Hellish vaudeville show. A sequence of skits on body horror, bureaucratic control logic, and techniques of ecstasy, delivered in the virulent grammars of porn, pulp sci-fi, and other American vernaculars. Ultimately I prefer the high galactic mayhem of the later cut-up trilogy, but this book is undeniably fantastic. Highly recommended.
50. Beyond Geometry : Experiments in Form, 1940s-70s, edited by Lynn Zelevansky.
As a label, "Experiments in Form" is pretty broad, and Zelevansky stretches it beyond the borders of utility by organizing a bewildering variety of artworks beneath it, from earthworks to concrete poetry, from Oiticica's capes to Xenakis' stochastic music. As a general catalog of interesting art from that time period, the book succeeds, but I'd have enjoyed it more if the organizing principle had felt more salient.
49. The Waves by Virginia Woolf
Not only one of the best explorations of the progression from youth to old age ever written, but also an exhilirating book-length experiment in utilizing omniscience as a mode for representing the irrepresentable experience of gnosis. The resultant book is a masterpiece: a flickering texture of epiphanies. Highly recommended.
48. England's Hidden Reverse : A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground by David Keenan
Detailed overview of the careers of three UK acts: Coil, Nurse With Wound, and Current 93. Throughout their collective histories, these bands have experimented with an impressive battery of drugs, magics, and surrealist techniques, so reading this makes for grade-A vicarious experience.
SEPTEMBER 2004
47. Musca Domestica, by Christine Hume
These elegant, artful poems use a wide variety of formal strategies to generate a peculiarly corrupted logic, a set of obsolete knowledge-systems that define a kind of beautifully-decaying pocket-universe. Highly recommended.
46. Global Frequency, by Warren Ellis & co.
Contemporary cool pitted against contemporary anxieties: parkour-runners vs. weaponized Ebola, black magicians vs. black metal, bisexuals vs. memetic attack from space, etc. Interesting ideas fly fast and loose here, although these micronarratives function more as concentrates of hip zeitgeist than as stories, per se.
45. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
AUGUST 2004
44. The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport
While the backbone of this collection is its defense and decoding of the great modernists (Joyce, Pound) and early postmodernists (Zukofsky, Olson), the book also forays ceaselessly into all sorts of other areas: Dogon myth, Wittgenstein, Shaker aesthetics, hobbitry, the invention of the buttonhole, Stan Brakhage, and Indian arrowheads, to name but a few. Davenport's true genius is his ability to synthesize: he arranges these disparate subjects into a single staggering design so complete that the book seems to contain no digressions, only elaborations. A thrilling collection; highly recommended.
43. Confucius : The Great Learning, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects, translated by Ezra Pound
notes
42. Bad Aboriginal Art, by Eric Michaels
41. Radi Os by Ronald Johnson
Strange long poem carved out of Paradise Lost.
40. As In Every Deafness by Graham Foust
JULY 2004
39. The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna
Collection of interviews, transcribed speeches, and other oddments from our culture's point-man for the psychedelic experience. More of an extended appendix to Invisible Landscape and Food of the Gods than anything else; still worthy reading for anyone who wants to familiarize themselves with McKenna's worldview, which even now, over a decade after its publication, still falls far outside of consensus reality.
38. Continuous / Discontinuous, by Andrew Levy
Volume of four poem-suites by Levy, an arranger of snippets and clippings. The relentless stacatto of the early sections grows exhausting, which makes the masterful final section, "Endfield," which uses longer units of meaning, all the more welcome. Thanks to Judith.
37. Seek!: Selected Nonfiction by Rudy Rucker
Breezy essays on heady topics: cellular automata, fractals, mysticism, SF, Japan, and Peter Breughel among them. Flimsy in spots, a little out of date in others (some of the essays on technology date back to the 1980s), but nevertheless, an OK geek vacation book: mostly pleasant and easy, occasionally thought-provoking.
JUNE 2004
36. The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban
Odd novel about one man's induction into a hallucinatory, mythically-patterned world. Its mixture of black comedy and occult menace/promise occasionally reads like a satisfying novel-analogue to Grant Morrison's comics work.
MAY 2004
35. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery
34. Miserable Miracle, by Henri Michaux
A memoir of mescaline experiences by one of my all-time favorite writers. Engaging, instructive, occasionally terrifying.
33. Instruction Paintings by Yoko Ono
Anthology of Ono's early conceptual art pieces. Important stuff, although I could have done without the photos which show some of the instructions realized as actual canvases; they dilute the point somewhat.
32. The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan
A book-length experiment in form, but perhaps even more fruitfully an experiment in repetition and variation. Phrases occur only to later recur in different contexts, giving any chunk of language at least the potential status of refrain, and giving each sonnet the status of hybrid, of cut-up. These poems are still indebted to O'Hara, but not slavishly: this book successfully distinguishes itself as an important work in its own right.
31. 39 Microlectures : In Proximity of Performance by Matthew Goulish
30. The Little Door Slides Back, by Jeff Clark
Decadent poems—ornate yet vaguely rotten. Crammed with dark characters and disturbing episodes—as an aggregate the book hums with the same occult radiance that charges David Lynch's recent work. Recommended.
APRIL 2004
29. Transmigration Solo by Joseph Ceravolo
28. Precedence by Rae Armantrout
More delicate linguistic probing devices from Armantrout, who is clearly a master at devising such things.
27. EVOBA: The Investigation Meditations by Steve McCaffery
A sort of "disruption machine." In this book-length poem, an oblique response to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, McCaffery switches rapidly between various strategies designed to complicate the relationship between reader and text. The end result of being confronted with this dog's breakfast of disruption strategies is that the book is even more confounding than your average work of experimental poetry, which, by contrast, might be more willing to pause to explore the inlets and outlets of a particularly fruitful disjunctive strategy (or limited set of same).
26. Angels In America, by Tony Kushner
25. Made to Seem by Rae Armantrout
Poems that are dreamlike but which don't rely on the familiar Surrealist conventions for evoking dream logic (sharp juxtapositions, etc). These poems are doing something more elegant, working more carefully with language, using it as a tool with which to probe the intuition.
24. A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History by Manuel DeLanda
Utterly fascinating. Events of the last millennium—including the rise of cities and capitalist "antimarkets," the circulation of organisms and plagues, and the development of languages and Foucaultian institutions—all viewed through the lens of complexity science. Wide-ranging; consistently intriguing.
23. White Noise by Don DeLillo
A re-read—but I could re-read this novel a million times. It's a book that's both full of hilarious one-liners and equipped with tragic heft and sweep. It's essential reading for anyone who lived through the late part of the twentieth century, and it looks like it will continue to be relevant long into the twenty-first.
22. The To Sound, by Eric Baus
Evocative crypticness. Reminiscent of Ben Marcus' fiction, only without the quasi-reference book syntax (it replaces it with a quasi-epistolary syntax). Baus' disordered relationships, like Marcus', give the reader just enough to imagine the mysterious outlines of an entire compelling world. Recommended.
21. The Green Lake Is Awake by Joseph Ceravolo
Exclamations, laments, and inspired nonsense.
20. The Haiku Year by seven authors
Seven friends agree to send each other a haiku a day for a year; this book archives the (edited?) results. Since I'm interested in daily experience, collaborative authorship, and creative exchange, the documentation of this project is fascinating to me—the fact that many of the haiku are good is an added bonus.
MARCH 2004
19. The Lover by Marguerite Duras
A story of a young girl in French Indochina, her Chinese lover, and her family, The Lover collapses barriers and distinctions until love, cruelty, pleasure, and madness all seem like different names for the same emotional concentrate. Sounds melodramatic—but in fact, Duras undertakes this project with eerie, almost morbid detachment. I'd say it's more terrifying than erotic, but I'm no longer sure that there's a meaningful difference between the two.
18. Your Time Has Come, by Joshua Beckman
Beautifully-designed book of minimalist Staten Island poems, strongly reminiscent of an urban sort of haiku. A handful of these evoke the greatness of the haiku masters—but only a very small handful. More commonly, Beckman allows himself to indulge in a certain slackness, an indulgence a minimalist poet cannot readily afford.
17. Selected Poems by Denise Levertov
:: Notes
16. The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano
:: Notes
15. Wittgenstein's Ladder : Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary, by Marjorie Perloff
Opaque writers of the twentieth century (Stein, Beckett, etc) appreciated through the lens of Wittgenstein's linguistic investigations. The parallels are sometimes rather oblique, but lit-geeks who want a primer on Wittgenstein could do far worse.
14. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
13. Radical Artifice : Writing Poetry in the Age of Media by Marjorie Perloff
Spirited and convincing defense of "difficult" schools of poetry (Language poetry, Oulipo, Cage's mesostics, etc.). When I first read this, in 1998, it dramatically broadened my thinking on poetry and put me on an entirely different path as a writer—it's safe to say that this book literally changed my life. Some of the writing on media has dated a bit since its publication in 1994, but otherwise this book is still vital critical reading.
12. Sight by Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino
:: Notes: one | two
FEBRUARY 2004
11. Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, by Winsor McCay
Collection of turn-of-the-century dream comics. Essential for anyone interested in comics, dreamwork, or proto-Surrealism.
10. Twentieth Century Pleasures by Robert Hass
An intelligent man and an important poet writing semi-autobiographical essays about reading the work of other poets (Rilke, Milosz, Transtromer, and others). Immense clarity and insight to be found on every page; especially eye-opening on the topic of poetic meter.
9. Many Happy Returns by Ted Berrigan
Experimental urban poems, many operating in obvious debt to Frank O'Hara. They're lifted out of O'Hara's long shadow primarily by a cracked bohemian radicalism that strikes me as (for better or for worse) very "1969."
8. A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz
7. Hyperarchitecure : Spaces In the Electronic Age by Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi
Slim volume attempting to position the work of innovative architects (Ito, Koolhaas, Eisenman) in the larger contemporary picture. Like many books on avant-garde aesthetics, this book is good at sketching out a recognizable picture of the zeitgeist, but bad at articulating precise correspondences between its various elements: the book
makes no point more cogent than identifying that contemporary architecture is vaguely related to conceptual art, computer technology, media theory, etc.
6. Fray by Joss Whedon, Karl Moline, and Andy Owens
Vampire slayer tales from a dystopian future. Thanks to Chris.
JANUARY 2004
5. Field Guide by Robert Hass
Hass' 1971 debut. What will prove to be his major thematic concerns are already in place: the California landscape, food, the family, human violence. These are strong poems, but there is little in here that can compete with his essential later work.
4. Selected Poems by William Carlos Williams
3. Snow by Maxence Fermine
Minimalist French novel about minimalist Japanese writers. Light and appealing. Thanks to Kat.
2. The Frank Book by Jim Woodring
1. The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead
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