Bishop takes Pawn
'In a bizarre example of Second Life leaking into the real world, a political assembly on Saturday led by chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was disrupted by a flying penis. Kasparov is a leader of the Other Russia movement, a loose coalition of activists opposing Vladamir Putin and the current Russian government. Over 700 people showed up for the event in central Moscow, but Kasparov's speech was interrupted when a large phallus-shaped helicopter started buzzing around the room. The Moscow Times attributed the prank to "a couple of pro-Kremlin Young Russia activists." Warning: Mildly NSFW images and video follow.' Link
It's Alive! It's ALIVE!
'Art is deathless, the poets say. Unless it isn’t. One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.' Link
Writer's block...
...cannot be cured by visiting this site: Link but nonetheless. There is some titillating advertising on the site. It is easily avoided by the eye but perhaps not by the boss.
Abandoned Russ
'Years before, during the Soviet Rule, books were considered to be the greatest treasure. Children in schools were taught to treat the books with care and love. It seems now this doesn’t work. At least at some libraries.' Link
Ta very much
Monsieur Raworth has posted some photos of Charles and Maggie's stay in London, including a few snapshots of pre-crowd-rush Openned. A big thank you to Charles and Maggie for taking the time to come down to read, and also to Justin Katko and Edward Nesbit and all the musicians. A video of the evening will be appearing on the site very soon. Keep those peelers eyed.
RIF/T
'Between 1993 and 1998, the editors had the stimulating and pleasurable experience of publishing six substantial issues of an online literary journal. The initial issue was distributed to subscribers via an email list in a text-only format and archived via Gopher; few people even knew that there was such a thing as the World Wide Web. Soon there were 1000 subscribers to the e-poetry listserv, a seemingly astonishing number in those days before the 'dot.coms'. Early contributors were often curious about the status of poems published on the internet: Were they protected by copyright? Who would read them? Would they vanish or remain permanently? The rapid development of the Web has rendered these questions into quaint reminiscences, but RIF/T holds a place as the groundbreaking venue for innovative or postmodern poetry on the internet.' Link
Omitted Prose
'I've just finished a manuscript called Anti M in what I'm calling 'omitted prose'. Omitted prose is when you write an entire work in continuous prose sequences – filled-up pages with paragraphs, chapters, and the like – then go through it and selectively remove a large portion (in the case of Anti M, most) of the words according to selection principles such as sound and phrasal and lexical significance. The retained words are largely kept in the same location they occupied when the other words were all around them, thus page space is activated in new ways. The prose and/or narrative architecture remains quite strongly in place even after the occlusion of the majority of supporting representational structures.' Link