Tan Lin, ambience is a novel with a logo. One of many chapbooks that I've ordered recently via paypal and been very super glad I did. Beautiful pink color.

"For reasons unknown to me but are probably transparent, I was hired, along with four others, by the Port Authority of Marin County in late October of 1984 to set up a camera surveillance system that would clock in every event on a 384-acre port terminal."

It goes on and then this phrase: "the movement of everything."

Or this phrase "the Ecology of Midwest Corduroy":

"In my family, the collection of memories might be labeled: 'How I Was an American' Or: 'Making Americans (the Future)' Such a work would aspire, though such a work is rarely ever written and that is good of course, to a condition of transitory structures, lounge architecture, and books with photos in them. I guess it should look like a slide show. Or maybe a PowerPoint production. I think the work should probably be called 'The Ecology of Midwest Corduroy' because while everyone at school was wearing denim my parents believed I should war corduroy that after a few washings looked like faded gold Christmas bulbs and that reminded everyone, or so I thought, that I was dressed awkwardly as if every day was a holiday because I was different."



Rachel Zolf, Shoot and Weep. forthcoming. Heard also at New Yipes few weeks ago.

first draft...
Rachel Zolf has realized that one of poetry's potentials is to delve into perilous issues and dwell there, exploring the complications. Shoot and Weep does not leave us with any easy answers of what is to be done about the conflicts between Palestine and Israel. But it does insist that we think about it and that we hold several different points of view at the front of our brain as we do this thinking.

M. Nevin Smith Native Treasures: Gardening with the Plants of California. Chapters on the big showy natives. Really nice language in the part of each chapter called "Common Features." Chapter titles pun: "Toyon on My Mind," etc. Spent day thinking about currants and gooseberries. Ribes sanguineum. Also bigberry manzanita.

Dreamed I was reading Susan Howe's Souls of the Labadie Tract and in the dream it was about Marx and genre and media were popping up in the book as I read it and I was finally understanding in the dream how Marx was connected to the other things I was working on. (The power of books theme keeps showing up in my dreams; I am desperate for reading lately and missing it badly.) Then Souls of the Labadie Tract came in the mail a few days later. It isn't about Marx but about Jonathan Edwards (I am rereading Capital, or maybe trying to read all of it for first time; have memory of reading it as u/g but not sure how much of it, so I think my dream was about essay I am attempting to work on). But these phrases from Labadie Tract held some of the dream power to me: "an inexorable order only chance creates" (p. 14); "I wanted to transplant words onto paper with soil sticking to their roots" (p. 16); "No steady progress of saints into grace saying Peace Peace when there is no peace. Walking is hard labor. Match any twenty-six letters to sounds of birds and squirrels in his mouth. Whatsoever God has provided to clothe him represents Christ in cross cultural clash conscious phonemic cacophony. Because the providence of God is a wheel within wheels, he cannot afford to dishonor any typological item with stark vernaculra. Here is print border warfare in situ." (p.17)