#autonomedia

Feast your eyes and your shelves on August’s

SPD Recommends *Backlist*,

ten titles that continue to rock our world. Maybe they’ll rock yours too…

1. Poems of the Black Object - Ronaldo Wilson

"[A] warning to anyone tempted to believe that in objectification lies freedom. Livid inside an apocalyptic negative capability, these poems are constructed through their maker's deconstruction, and reading, I too, felt unmade."—Claudia Keelan

2. Sherwood Forest - Camille Roy

"In its capacity to stop time, SHERWOOD FOREST opens its reader to a future made ‘suddenly visible.’ A ‘narration’ that's both ‘desire’ and what incubates it: the capacity to ‘float.’ Imagine a forest floating in the air. Camille Roy does this. She is a writer who lets her reader dream, past tree-line. Where the sentences flare and dim, like 'sexy bodies.' Like a memory of touch. Like ‘body parts’ and 'tissue' - a luminous genitalia - above a pond."—Bhanu Kapil

3. Maribor - Demosthenes Agafiotis

"MARIBOR gives us both artifact—of the ephemera of communication, institutions, power—as well as blueprint for imagining an 'alphabet of the future.' A master of the contemporary hermetic, Agrafiotis can bring to light in one stroke both the evanescence and endurance of the writing on the wall."—Eleni Stecopoulos

4. Hurdis Addo - Samantha Giles

"Conceptual poetics + wed to + a dedication to social justice = a book with sharp edges and intriguing reading dynamics. Definitely recommended." — Kevin Killian

5. The Lizard Club - Steve Abbot

"Steve Abbot's THE LIZARD CLUB is funny, angry, suspenseful and totally new. It's like a Xerox of tragedy, Pandora without her box. Read it and feel your tongue growing and growing until you can flick flies out of the air."—Kevin Killian.

6. Inter Arma - Lauren Shufran

"Laura Shufran's meter-making argument stings with ludic blows bent to send the line aquiver. Weaponized with duck soup and chicken rimes (a baker's dozen haptic hexes of heptameter), INTER ARMA is the neoclassical nude formalism that the times demand. With searing wit and virtuosic élan, Shufran's epic lyrics hit homers every time."—Charles Bernstein

7. Haecceities - Michael Cross

"In HAECCEITIES, Michael Cross has made an interim language, his invention a relation between the words—as if this unknown relation or 'noumenon' is 'a hide enthinned' of futuristic Elizabethan single words each at once tactile, optical, aural simultaneously traces and events of reinterpreted future-present spurred in 'the many hundred wing-lit hives'"—Leslie Scalapino.

8. C.C. - Tyrone Williams

"Slanging each other we drift apart. Maybe there is a war outside. Will web sites continue to explode? The poems in C.C. are tense, troubled, intricately terse. In this powerful collection Tyrone Williams explores the boundaries between poetry, politics, and history."—Susan Howe

9. Negativity - Jocelyn Saidenberg

"'Rejecting that which cannot be recaptured' makes negativity prelude to a form of freedom, and the psychosexual progress Saidenberg’s pilgrim traces from 'Destruction as a Cause of Becoming' to the knotty resolve of CARNAL achieves a “music of exhaust and darkening horizons” that’s entirely the poet’s own: 'Figures retie the circle, then release into shape.’” —Rodney Koeneke

10. Democracy Is Not for the People - Josef Kaplan

Recently someone passed-on a photocopied zine version of the anarchist essay « Against the Megamachine » written by David Watson, published in book format in a collection of texts via

Autonomedia. 

Within the text there are some really interesting lines that resonate in a contemporary context, wanted to share a couple short quotes from the essay.

« Technology is not neutral because it brings with it its own rationality and method of being used. » 

« The missile production—which begins at the point where community dissolves and the military phalanx is first organized—is an unlimited, depersonalized, institutional system which now magnifies human destructiveness to the point of omnicide. »

Feel like reading this text in print, not on a screen is important. The text is ominous in a way, but it feels really insightful in the sense that often the inherent social, political, economic framework that composes machines isn’t thought about in the day-to-day, machines are in fact seen as neutral very often, remembering that they are not neutral and that they profoundly shape our perception and behaviour feels really important. 

Also the ways that the internet will be governed in the upcoming years is super important, most certainly there are winds suggesting that net neutrality will be challenged and even erased under the Trump presidency. 

Extending from this point, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which Canada has signed, also will potentially take aim at net neutrality. On this point sharing an interview with Maira Sutton, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, recorded for broadcast on CKUT fm. 

Hope that you get the chance to check-out the  « Against the Megamachine » essay.

X-Texts Derek Pell - ISBN 1570270058

DESCRIPTION

This is another Autonomedia title, part of their New Autonomy Series which featured a lot of unusual and playful literature. Most of the pieces in this book are pastiches of controversial and banned books mixed between writers of different styles, mangled to make terrible puns, or otherwise manipulated--so we have the Kama Sutra of Rabelais, some gender-neutral Henry Miller, Naked Lunch at Tiffany's, My Secret Life With Father, and a story written as a lipogram which eliminates the letters "f", "u", "c", "k", "y", and "o".

EXCERPT

(from Naked Lunch at Tiffany's)

I am always drawn back to neighborhoods where I have lived--for instance Queens Plaza, where I had my first apartment. The date palms have died of meat lack, the well filled with dried shit and mosaic of a thousand newspapers. Johnny dowses Mary with gasoline from an obscene Chimu jar of white jade. Even so my spirits heightened.

It never occurred to me in those days to write about Holly Golightly, a thin wholesome American cunt.

Holly Golightly had been a tenant on the roof of Nedick's. One night it was long past twelve, I woke up at the sound of Doctor Benway calling down the stairs, exasperated and stern. "Miss Golightly! You cheap Factualist bitch!"

The voice that came back, welling up from the bottom of the stairs, was silly-young and self-amused. "Oh, darling, I'm sorry. I'll go wash my ass. So there I was completely out of K.Y. in the headwaters of the Baboon's asshole..."

EPHEMERA/MARGINALIA/ETC

As always the illustrations are fitting:

More Autonomedia/Semiotext(e) titles:

Wiggling Wishbone - Stories of Pata-Sexual Speculation Bart Plantenga - ISBN 1570270090

DESCRIPTION

This is a book published by Autonomedia--part of their New Autonomy Series put together by Jim Fleming and Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey). For awhile I made a habit of trying to grab every Autonomedia title I could get my hands on, at least the "fun" ones like this. Some of them got lost in one of our moves unfortunately and I haven't gotten around to replacing them.

This book is a collection of works by Bart Plantenga, who is now also known as a WFMU host and beer mystic. Some of the works include fanciful cocktail recipes, a story written from the point of view of Hitler's dog, a self-explanatory story called "I Had Sex With Andy Warhol Until His Wig Fell Off", a description of pages from a catalog which repeatedly insists that it is not a short story, and a detailed list of disparaging terms and quotes about the Dutch ("The Dutch seem very happy and comfortable, certainly; but it is the happiness of animals." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge). It also includes a sort of proto-kickstarter campaign which lists various donation levels at which the donor can be included in Bart Plantenga's latest novel. This campaign also has an a la carte options menu in which your character can be given certain desirable features for an extra charge ($50 for an "ample mythic bosom of the Dianne Brill or Jayne Mansfield variety"--men add an extra $25).

There's also a lot of great illustrations throughout by numerous artists you'd expect to see in an Autonomedia title. I've been grabbing these since I first stumbled across Semiotext[e] USA in high school, which we'll meet a bit further down on my bookshelf.

EXCERPT

Page 208: The pet supplies section seemed to display many objects (grommeted, stone-studded pleather) that mirrored products that humans had long ago desired into necessity.

[Disclaimer: This is NOT a short story & should not be judged as one.]

Page 209: This suspicion was amply confirmed by the matching tinted pleather dog collars for both "dog & master." The item was understandably & clearly marked: "gag gift." Human breakfast cereal that resembles Puppy Chow is also clearly marked as "NEW! NUTRITIOUS GAG GIFT!"

EPHEMERA/MARGINALIA/ETC

I really love the illustrations in this book. This one is by Yossarian.

Not sure how these got in here, but there are two microfiche cards in here containing images from some medieval church, obviously belonging to my wife. She thinks they were from a set of stuff she got from her art history advisor before she passed on.

There are also two Northwest ticket stubs from a trip to Montreal I took in 2000 while I was on fellowship to attend a combinatorics conference. Looks like I had a layover in Detroit. I remember taking this book along with me as airplane reading.